Isle of Palms

by Dorothea Benton Frank

  “Oh, my God! That’s horrible! And, it might explain why she was so heartless.”

  “She wasn’t really, Anna. I think there’s only so much a person can take and then something in them can’t feel anything anymore. You know? I can tell you that if I lost one of mine, I’d lose my mind! But, you ask your daddy. He’ll tell you if you ask him.”

  “Are you kidding? Daddy has always avoided talking about those years other than to say they were awful. Life began for him when Grandfather bought the peach farm in Estill. I knew they had lived in Warsaw and Grandmother’s family was from there. But I could never figure out how they wound up in Germany.”

  “What?”

  “I said, How did they wind up in Germany anyway?”

  “I’m sorry, Anna, I don’t hear so well anymore.”

  “Humph,” Miss Angel said, dropping cubes of ice in our glasses, “You can say that again.”

  Miss Mavis narrowed her eyes at Miss Angel, I smiled at both of them, and Miss Mavis said, “To work to get money to live, for heaven’s sake. Besides, Warsaw was all blown up and there wasn’t even electricity all the time. Food was scarce. There was no work and they never knew when a Russian soldier might put a bullet through their heads.”

  “It must have been terrible.”

  “Yes, I imagine so. After the Russians occupied Warsaw during the war, and the Germans were forced out, your grandparents went to Augsburg, where they lived in housing for displaced persons. They were crammed on a train with all kinds of people for one week, in a cattle car. Your grandfather’s socks dissolved in his shoes! I can’t even fathom such a thing! When they finally arrived, your grandfather worked in the munitions plant and your grandmother had a small job as a bookkeeper. Would you believe she used an abacus? She showed it to me once and she told me all sorts of things.”

  “That’s why she kept it! My God! Wait! Were they, could they have been Nazis?”

  “Great God! No! They were Prussian! Didn’t anyone ever tell you about your family’s history?”

  “No, I guess not. I mean, I know they immigrated and all that. What—I mean, how do you know all this?”

  “Your mother told me, of course. And your grandmother. How else would I know? Did you know that your father and his family can trace their roots back to the time of Charlemagne? Their ancestors were buried in full armor! Warriors for centuries!”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, they can. I can see you don’t know your European history very well.”

  “Probably not.”

  “You see, Poland has belonged to everybody under the sun at one time or another. The Germans, Austrians, and Russians haggled over it for centuries. But, hell’s bells, they’re all crazy anyhow. I don’t know what’s the matter with people, always fighting.”

  “You want some tea, Mavis?”

  “What?”

  “Tea?”

  Miss Angel, annoyed each time she had to repeat herself but resigned to it also, passed the biscuits around again.

  “Your grandparents worked for their government the same way all these people in Charleston worked at our Navy Yard for years. War or no war. Some people were civilians but they were employed by the government. When the front of the war got pushed back from Warsaw by the Russians, they wound up in Germany. Let me tell you something, Anna. Your grandparents didn’t give one fig about politics. It was war! They were just trying to stay alive.”

  “Good grief,” I said, “I can’t imagine . . .”

  “Well, think about this. They were young, had just been married, and the war broke out. One day in September, I think she said September. Wait! Yes, September 1939. Well, your grandmother was a young girl still and she walked outside her house and there was a huge blasting noise. Sirens started to wail and, oh, Lord! She said she was almost frightened to death. I would have been, I can tell you that.”

  Miss Mavis seemed to drift away. She began eating again as though she had said everything there was to say. Miss Angel looked at me, tightened up the side of her mouth, and shook her head.

  “Mavis!” she said. “Go on and finish up your story!”

  “Oh!” Miss Mavis said. “Where was I?”

  “You were telling us about the bombs in Warsaw, Miss Mavis,” I said, “and how my grandparents went on the train to Germany.”

  “Do you want some more red rice?” Miss Angel said, holding the covered dish. “Or another biscuit?”

  “No, thanks, but it’s delicious,” I said. “Miss Mavis? Were they terrified of the Nazis?”

  “Of course! I mean, I’m sure they must have been! Your grandmother never said that directly that I remember, but gracious! Who wouldn’t be?”

  “Daddy would know.”

  “Yes, and you should ask him about all the war business. You know, the point, Anna, of me telling you all of this is that war changes people. It really does. Sometimes it’s for the better and sometimes you are wounded so badly in your mind that you stay afraid for the rest of your life. Every little thing is a potential catastrophe.”

  “And you think that’s why my grandmother was such a witch?”

  She just stared at me.

  “She all but drove your mother out of her mind. And whatever was left of her got chewed up by Douglas. Let me tell you, anyone who really, really knew your mother and father never blamed your mother for what happened. Let’s help Angel clear the table. I want some ice cream. And one of your cookies. You know, I always have one cookie with my ice cream.” She pushed back from the table and followed Miss Angel to the kitchen with her plate.

  Just like that. I sat there with all the wind knocked out of me. I needed a fuller picture and to understand a lot more before I was willing to even consider forgiving my mother. What did she mean? How could she say what she said? I could believe that my grandmother made my mother a wreck, but Daddy? Never! I remembered! Daddy loved Momma completely! She was wrong and that was all there was to it!

  I made myself get up and join them. I felt weak all over and my hands were clammy. I picked up my dinner plate, the biscuit basket, and the butter plate and went to the kitchen. They were bickering again and suddenly stopped when they saw me.

  “What did I miss?” I said to them.

  “Miss Anna?” Miss Angel said. “I just say to Mavis that she don’t have all the facts straight. I can see why you never understood. You was just a little girl, knee high to a grasshopper, when your momma pass. And, your grandmother? She didn’t have a single thing in common with your momma. Not one little speck of nothing.”

  “Anna,” Miss Mavis said, “honey, your daddy was their only child after losing their other son. Can’t you imagine how that must have been? They worked so hard and suffered so much to get here. Then they had to learn a new language. They had almost no money, no friends, no family. It took years for them to grow roots here. When your daddy upped and married a beauty queen with no education, they liked to have just died!”

  I put the dishes on the counter and leaned on it to listen. “I want to know everything. Please. Tell me.”

  “I can do the dishes later,” Miss Angel said. “Let’s have us some dessert.”

  “What?”

  “I said, I will do the dishes later, Mavis!” She brushed by me to reach the freezer. “Some days I want to strangle her.”

  “Hush!” Miss Mavis said to Miss Angel under her breath. “And I could throttle you!”

  “Hears what she likes and nothing else,” Miss Angel said.

  “Oh, fine!” Miss Mavis took the plate of cookies I had brought and passed us on her way back out to the living room. “Let’s sit on the porch. There’s a nice breeze out there and too much hot air in here!”

  We settled ourselves in rockers and Miss Mavis began to talk.

  “Your mother was a head turner, Anna. You are more like her than you think.”

  “Yeah, she was beautiful, but I think she was a little overdone, you know? Too much makeup.”

  “Hmmm. But you be
the one in the beauty business. Ain’t it so?”

  My face flushed red, the heat traveling down my back, and I didn’t know what to say.

  “I hate it when she’s right too,” Miss Mavis said. “Such a prickly thing she is!”

  “I only say what’s fuh true, Mavis, and you know it! Lawd! She had a pretty garden, just like you. Your momma could have been a lot of things.”

  “If your daddy would’ve let her! Wouldn’t even let her drive a car until Percy and I pleaded with him.”

  “Spend a nickel? Humph. He make her write it all down and show it to him on Friday. Yes, he did.”

  “And he called her every five minutes. If she went out, she had to call him and report in. She cried in my kitchen on many a day. Yes, she did. That poor child cried a river.”

  Miss Mavis’s watery and red-rimmed eyes, faded with age, met mine. I knew what they had said was true.

  I’d had an uncle I’d never heard of, a grandmother whose behavior could almost be understood—some of it anyway—and a father who was a paranoid zookeeper for my misunderstood dead mother.

  I was drowning in the connections, the story I had heard and the prospects of the truth yet to come. It was absolutely horrible how truth could be rearranged to justify one’s own behavior.

  Eleven

  I’ve Had Sufficient, Thank You

  IF I’d made the mistake of banging my way through the oleanders to Miss Mavis and Miss Angel’s house like a moody teenager, I knew I shouldn’t charge across to Lucy’s yard for dinner like Cardinal Fang of the Spanish Inquisition either. It was one of those days where nothing was turning out as I expected it would. Something was telling me to pull in my claws. Yes, it was that freaking little inner voice again.

  After I came home from the Snoop Sisters, I took a long shower and stared at the television for a while like someone in a mental hospital. The words and implications of Miss Mavis and Miss Angel were running around in my head. I was so deeply upset and so utterly perplexed that I didn’t know where to start with Daddy. It was inevitable that it would surface at Lucy’s. Or was it? I needed to think about everything. After all, it was highly possible that Miss Mavis’s recollections of my mother were skewed by an elderly lady’s romantic vision of the past. But Miss Angel had agreed with her and she wasn’t given to drama. How could I ask my father if he and Grandmother had painted a counterfeit childhood for me? All the lies! All those years of saying how bad Momma was!

  I would just ask him and that was all there was to it.

  No. No, I couldn’t. I was a weak and sniveling coward.

  What lousy timing to be carrying the worst scars of your childhood heart over to your friend’s house to serve up to your father as an hors d’oeuvre. For the first time ever, I had seen my daddy not merely enjoying, but reveling in the company of another woman. Crazy Lucy, no less. Daddy had dated scores of age-appropriate, well-meaning widows and divorcées over the years. They were a flesh trail of conservative, Talbots-attired, sensible ladies who blushed. Here he was with good old Lucy. The only blush she knew about came in a compact with a brush.

  But what could you say? The fact was that Lucy, discombobulated as she was, had been nothing but a pussycat to me and a bracelet of shining silver charms to Daddy. I had no right to blow away their evening with my anger.

  Still! What the hell had really happened in those years? Was my mother the flighty, insincere, unloving, total and complete whore I had always been led to believe she was? Or was my father some overbearing, second-guessing lover of a younger woman he had no business marrying in the first place? Had he really driven her to the arms of other men with a legitimate cause? Was there a legitimate cause for infidelity?

  I was wildly fearful of knowing this truth. I loved my father more than anyone except my daughter. Was the reason I never had a healthy or affectionate relationship with my mother because Daddy worked her into such a knot that she had to somehow punish him by withholding her love from us?

  I waited until Daddy’s car was in Lucy’s driveway for at least thirty minutes. The time passed so slowly I could hardly bear it. I wanted to know! I was entitled to know but I realized the truth may be the kind that stung deep and ached forever.

  I tried to calm down and think and at last came to a temporary conclusion that I would find a truth I could live with somewhere in the middle space of Miss Mavis’s version of the past and what Daddy believed had truly happened.

  I needed to be polite and show up with something in my hands to add to the dinner table in the same way I had brought something to Miss Mavis. What did I have? I dug around my kitchen and a quick inventory revealed a choice between a cheap bottle of wine and a half pound of undistinguished cheese. I decided on the block of sharp cheddar.

  I sliced it and added crackers down the sides of the platter, with a tiny bunch of frilly multicolored toothpicks stuck in half an apple, and decided it looked pretty much like a Mardi Gras porcupine positioned to tromp over an orange rubber road. It would do. At least I was composed.

  I would be civil and look for an opening after Daddy had had a few drinks. I would strike Daddy with the tiniest of all blow darts to the neck when Lucy wasn’t watching. Okay, it wasn’t fair. I knew that. And to think I had almost told Lucy about what Miss Mavis had said! I didn’t care. It was so far beyond the time for setting the record straight that it wasn’t funny.

  There was more to consider. What about my grandmother? I wanted to know why my father had allowed my grandmother to perpetuate that kind of horrible history about my mother, if it was indeed a lie. And why he’d never made any attempt to change the record after my grandmother died. And why had he let her run my life the way she did? It was all pretty miserable.

  “Hey! Come on in! We were just about to go watch the sun set.”

  “Here,” I said, unconsciously pushing the platter toward Lucy, “I brought this for cocktails.”

  “Cwanky? Do we need a dwinky?”

  Lucy tottered away on her hypodermic-heeled mules, which, for my fashionista diary of all things notable, were black patent leather, painted with stylized hot pink flamingos wearing sunglasses. Where did this woman shop? A catalog monster. Had to be.

  Daddy and I greeted each other as we always did—a slight hug and the requisite peck on my cheek. I listened to him describe how Lucy had brilliantly marinated chicken and tuna in teriyaki sauce with garlic and scallions and his only lowly contribution had been to flip the Ziploc bag and to preheat the oven for the frozen garlic bread. He was bragging on Lucy’s commandeering of the meal. It was ridiculous to see him behave that way; at least at that moment it seemed so to me. I was scowling at them.

  Daddy and Lucy knew right away that I was out of sorts and made the kind of dance-around-you small talk that doesn’t invite you in, but is hopeful that their good humor will change yours. I took the glass of white wine Lucy offered and drank most of it while I listened to them jabber on. Jabber. Jabber. For the love of God, why didn’t one of them just ask me what was wrong?

  It was because they didn’t want to know. Sure. I was in the mood for World War III and all they wanted to do was have a nice evening. I hadn’t felt more like a third wheel in a long time. The stink around my mood was probably unbearable. But they were so happy they did everything except to whistle Dixie.

  It wasn’t until we climbed up to the widow’s walk to see the night sky present herself that my disposition began to shift. The blue light turned rose and then purple, giving me the time I needed to quiet my mind.

  I looked over at them. Daddy’s eyes, deeply lined, shouting from their dusty, spent riverbeds, the decades of self-inflicted denial of all but the smallest pleasures, those eyes followed Lucy’s every gesture with a kind of gratitude for her appreciation of him. No, it was less—her very notice of him was sufficient.

  To be only seen as viable by a woman of such vigor was an all-powerful youth serum. And, moreover, whatever affection she had for him was enough to elevate his endorphins, spray
his pheromones with abandon and needless to say, pump the stash of testosterone that had so long ached to be called to task.

  Who could blame him? Not me. No, I couldn’t. Not for this, anyway. I couldn’t recall ever having seen my father this excited. For all his conservatism, he may as well have said his name was Tarzan and that he would now take over the navigation of the jungle for this little lost Miss. Daddy had effectively, and with certain glee, fallen off the cliff.

  Can I refill your glass, Miss Lucy?

  Oh, Douglas! Why, honey, you are such a gentleman! Isn’t your daddy a gentleman, Anna?

  “He’s the best.”

  And I saw Lucy differently too. She wasn’t nearly as young as I had thought. There were surgical lines in the crease above her eyes. As the breeze took her hair back in a blast, I saw them behind her ears as well. Well, if Lucy had lifted her face, so what? That explained her lips. Collagen. The first day I met her, I had recognized her breasts as implausible and her cheekbones as suspect. You had to wonder. How much of her was authentic? But! What did it matter anyway? She was the kind of woman who needed something to feel better. My daddy was her drug of choice.

  The cruel side of me, the one that had brought an angry woman to Lucy’s house with the platter of second-rate cheese, would have said that Daddy appeared to be Lucy’s dog. Fetch! All she had to do was toss the stick and he would bring it back to her, dropping it at her feet, happy with a mere scratch behind his ears, ready to leap and run for the stick all night long. Get it, boy! Good dog! But the irony was that Lucy was Daddy’s dog just as well. These two middle-aged orphaned dogs, transformed by the sight of each other into Blue Ribbon champions, were strutting their stuff for me, the judge.

  This was not the right moment to take Daddy into the boxing ring. There was something of great value here to be learned. Something, maybe some small something, was in evidence that would eventually be worthy of clinking glasses and offering a toast. And why eventually? Why not let them just be happy now?