Folly Beach Part 32

"I think we should stay until they take that thing off of her face, don't you?" I said.

"Patti? How does my future sister-in-law take her decaf coffee?"

"Any way my future brother-in-law thinks I would like it," she said and actually smiled.

So did I.

"I'll be right back," he said and disappeared down the hall.

"What a graceful, elegant man, Cate. I think you've found the real love of your life."

"Me too."

"And you know what's funny?"

"What?"

"Well, if I understood everything you were telling me about Dorothy and DuBose, you know, how she gave him all the credit for her work and was always promoting him and never herself? And she was the woman behind the man?"

"Yeah?"

"He's going to do that for you, Cate. He's going to help you become a playwright. You're going to have a whole new career. And even though he pointed you to where all the clues are about the Heywards' private life and even though he will probably help you through the whole, entire process, I'll bet you anything that he won't take one ounce of credit. He loves you, Cate. It makes me so happy to see you with someone like him."

"Thanks, Patti. I am really in love. It's a little scary."

"Honey, it can't be any scarier than Addison, okay?"

"Yeah, he was pretty much the benchmark for scary husband."

"But I have to ask you something."

"What's that?"

"What race is John?"

"His grandmother was an Inuit. Canadian. So he's part Inuit, I guess. But he sure is beautiful, isn't he?"

"Yes, he's gorgeous. Whatever he is, his DNA is the perfect genetic c.o.c.ktail."

"You have no idea, sister, you have no idea." Patti shot me a look of oh ho! And what secrets have you not told your only sister? and I added, "That's all I have to say!"

The night flew by. We drank coffee and the medical staff came and went. Aunt Daisy slept, they removed the mask, and when we were comfortable that she was out of danger, we left the hospital to drive home.

It was pouring rain in torrents and the wind was gusting, swinging the traffic lights and bending the palmettos. I was glad that John was driving. I couldn't see the road five feet ahead of us. But it was late and there wasn't much traffic so we just drove a little slower. When we got home I told him not to get out, that we'd be fine and he didn't need to get soaked to the skin. I was exhausted, and despite the fact that I was not looking forward to telling Ella what we had witnessed, I felt so lucky and so very blessed. I could say that my life was coming back together with at least some shred of confidence. Patti reminded him about dinner the next night, thanked him, and we said good night. We'd talk in the morning.

Patti and I held our jackets over our heads and hurried to the door.

"Hey, Cate?" she said, shaking out her jacket over the kitchen sink.

"Yeah?"

"I gotta tell you, this guy John is a prince."

"I'm going to spend the rest of my life with him, Patti. I mean, it's almost like the hand of G.o.d is in on this one, you know?"

Patti shook her head at me and laughed.

"I think we'd better start going to church."

Chapter Twenty-seven.

Setting: St. Philips Cemetery.

Director's Note: Photos of New York's theater district, cover of Mamba's Daughters, Folly Beach, Christmas in Florida, Janie, and St. Philips Cemetery in the backstage scrim.

Act III.

Scene 4.

Dorothy: DuBose and I knocked around the New York theater scene for a while after Mamba's Daughters had its run, and we suffered with the ridiculous relationship we had with our director Guthrie McClintic and his wife. We were in rehearsals and I really thought we should cut a scene. It was just too melodramatic. But Guthrie's wife was there, weeping at its perfection, and I just stood my ground. Don't you know he accused me of calling his silly wife a nitwit, which of course I thought she was one but I would never have said it. Anyway, he threw a chair at me, careful to miss me but I thought, that's it. I can go home to Charleston now and all you crazy people can have New York City. The only thing that saved Mamba's Daughters was Ethel Waters who sang the lead. Lord, that woman could sing!

And DuBose was feeling the same way that I was, so we decided it was time to go home. It was 1937 and he was offered and accepted a seat on the Carolina Art a.s.sociation, which managed this very theater. A little later on, with money from a Rockefeller grant, the Dock Street was able to hire DuBose as the resident dramatist. Well, we worked together really. Our mission was to develop local talent, so twice a week, we'd gather up ten local aspiring playwrights and read what they had, critique it, and they'd go home and rewrite it. I loved the work and for DuBose it felt like the old days. We were supremely happy.

Of course there was nothing to prepare us for his mother's death. On June 10, 1939, Janie died from a heart attack. DuBose was devastated and the depth of his shock was a little frightening to me. He didn't want to work, he said he was too tired and didn't feel creative anymore. He started writing to his old friend Hervey Allen, who had moved to Florida, and during the Christmas holidays of 1939, DuBose, Jenifer, and I decided to visit them. Well, we had a wonderful time! Robert Frost was in town and we had the chance to catch up with him and everyone was so happy then. I thought, well maybe DuBose is going to come around. But when we returned to Charleston, DuBose became depressed again. He was worried about money. Janie had not left him very much, but she didn't have very much to leave anyway. We decided to sell Dawn Hill and we did. To be free of that burden should have cheered him but it seemed there was nothing that could. He was sluggish and blue and I was at my wits' end.

We were up in North Carolina, staying with our friends, the Matthews. I thought he should see a doctor before we went to MacDowell for the season but he refused. Finally, he agreed to see a doctor who was a cousin of his, Allen Jervey. Allen suspected a heart ailment but didn't think there was an imminent danger. But on the way home from the doctor's, DuBose had terrible chest pain. Margaret Matthew, my dear friend, drove him back to Allen at the hospital in Tryon and DuBose died there. Just like that. It was Sunday, June 16, one year and one week after his mother died. I was a widow and my daughter was fatherless, the same way I was when I was her age. Jenifer never spoke her father's name again.

We laid him to rest beneath the venerable oaks in St. Philips cemetery. You know, DuBose was not a regular churchgoer. So it didn't seem appropriate to have a big funeral in the church with music and hymns. But there was a poem he had written that I thought perhaps he might have written with himself in mind. It's called "Epitaph for a Poet."

Here lies a spendthrift who believed That only those who spend may keep; Who scattered seeds, yet never grieved Because a stranger came to reap; A failure who might well have risen; Yet, ragged sang exultantly, That all success is but a prison, And only those who fail are free.

Fade to Darkness.

Chapter Twenty-eight.

In Control.

The weather was not as violent in the morning as it had been the night before but the skies were still pouring plenty of rain. There was no sign of it clearing anywhere on the horizon no matter in which direction I looked. I got up with the birds, because since before the first ray of morning light crossed my floor at dawn, I had been worried sick that Aunt Daisy was down at MUSC all alone having another attack. Of course she had not, or the hospital would have called me. But as I lay there having all manner of paranoid fantasies, I couldn't get my mind to slow down long enough to go back to sleep. So I got up, dressed, put on a pot of coffee, and started rereading some of the notes I had on Dorothy Heyward.

Patti must've smelled the coffee in her sleep, because when the pot finished dripping here she came, barefooted, crossing the floor in her flannel pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, scratching her stomach and yawning like a teenager.

"Hey!" she said and gave me a hug. "You're up early."

"Yeah, I was thinking about Aunt Daisy. Respiratory arrest. Screw that! It scared me to death. Coffee's ready."

"Still raining. Wow." She ambled over to the windows and looked out. "The yard's a mess. I'm definitely not washing my hair for this weather. You want a refill?"

"No, I'm good, thanks. Listen. As long as we're up we may as well try to get Ella to Aunt Daisy's bedside as early as we can. When we tell her what happened last night, she's going to want to teleport herself there."

"You are right about that," she said and pointed her finger at me for emphasis. "Let me just guzzle a couple of mugs and wash my face."

"Take your time. It's just seven."

"Cool," she said and disappeared to the kitchen downstairs.

Dorothy, Dorothy, Dorothy, I thought, how would you like your story to be told?

And as if she was whispering in my ear I heard her say, I was never as happy anywhere as I was with DuBose. And in this house. And on this island. Life without a great love is no life at all.

I thought, well, sugar? If we can just keep the dialogue going, I'll have your story on paper in no time. I'd just be channeling Dorothy as soon as I got my laptop plugged in and when Patti went home, which would only be another day or two.

I went downstairs to get another blast of caffeine and continued thinking about Dorothy. We did seem to have an uncanny amount of things in common. Beyond the obvious similarities such as being orphaned and raised by our aunts, and having theatrical backgrounds and being widowed at a pretty young age, I'd been happy here, too. And, with Addison's horrible legacy, I'd learned I could be happy with a lot less, which was kind of marvelous to know, although I'd still say that having pots of money was better than not. But Dorothy knew that, too, didn't she?

So many nice things had happened in such a short time. I'd reconnected with the island and Aunt Daisy and Ella at a very important moment and I'd even made some headway with my wacky daughter-in-law, Alice. But perhaps most important, I might have found my great love right here, too. Yeah, for the foreseeable future, Dorothy Heyward and I had a lot to talk about. And I had hundreds of questions for her.

I called Ella at seven thirty, which, knowing her habits, seemed like a reasonable hour. She said she was just taking an apple-cinnamon coffee cake out of the oven for the nurses but that she had made one for us, too. We'd be there on the double, I told her.

In the car I said to Patti, "You know, lately, I feel like The Thing That Must Be Fed."

"Well, sorry for you, tootsie wootsie, but who could say no to anything coming out of Ella's kitchen? Count your blessings. You could be eating your own cooking all the time."

"You're right." I pulled in the driveway and said, "I think we'd better go in and tell her here, don't you? Better than in the car, don't you think?"

"Yeah, so we can stuff our faces while we do," Patti said and laughed.

So, we hurried through the rain, went up the stairs, and I let us in. Ella was predictably in the kitchen and as we all know, there is nothing on this earth to eclipse the smell of b.u.t.ter and sugar baking with apples and cinnamon.

"Morning!" she said and gave us a hug.

"This is what paradise smells like," I said. "I'm sure of it."

"I'm starving," Patti said. "Well, I'm not exactly starving but if I don't get a piece of that cake in my mouth tout suite I'm gonna start crying."

"Well, sit yourself down, chile, and let me cut you some. You want eggs?"

Soon the whole story had tumbled out across the table. Ella was unnerved by how quickly Aunt Daisy had been overcome by the respiratory arrest, and what the medical team had to do to get her breathing normally was just as upsetting.

"What if it happens again? I mean, what if we bring her home and it happens right here?"

"It won't happen here, Ella," I said. "She's on ma.s.sive antibiotics that are flushing all the possibilities of that out of her system."

"Cate's right. Even the nurse said they wouldn't release her unless they were certain she was completely okay to come home."

Ella got up, wrapped the second cake for the nurses in foil, and said, "Let's move. I can clean this up later."

We got up immediately, put our dishes in the sink, and turned on the spigot. We knew that for Ella to leave a crumb on her countertops, she was gravely concerned about Aunt Daisy, and probably furious with herself for not having been there with her. I checked to see that the oven was off and Patti flipped the switch on the coffeepot.

The ride from the beach to Charleston was something of a challenge. The marshes were so swollen with rainwater and the tide was so high that the waters threatened to wash over the causeway and carry us away to Kiawah Island or Hilton Head. Driving took all of my concentration and focus, and Ella and Patti didn't say much as they knew I was working hard to keep us safe. But after a while my reflexes seemed to revert to autopilot and my mind started to wander. My new life, which was in so many ways the mature version of my childhood, seemed so natural to me. My re-immersion into Folly Beach and all its irresistible charms had been almost seamless. Watching the lone egret standing in low water and then lifting into flight like an angel, the twitter of a thousand birds in the early morning, the mango sunsets, the glisten of phosphorus on the ocean at night under a full moon that changed colors on its rise-these events, so specific to the Lowcountry-made me feel rich. But more, they reclaimed my weakened spirit that had so desperately needed a.s.surance and gave me enough hope and strength to go on to try again. The stress of Addison, of pleasing him, impressing his colleagues, trying to live up to some impossible standard that in the end was completely frivolous and shallow-all of that was gone forever. There was nothing I'd left behind that I missed or felt I needed. I was perfectly happy, no, honored in many ways, to give some oversight to Aunt Daisy and Alice's health, more than thrilled to have John in my life and wherever it all led-the play, managing real estate, whatever curveball came my way-I was ready to take it all on. Relaxed and ready. And there was something else, too. I couldn't wait to hold my son and daughter-in-law's baby in my arms. I could not wait for that.

When we arrived at Aunt Daisy's room, we all filed in even though we were supposed to go in two at a time. She was sitting up in bed wearing a beret covered in flowers and working the New York Times crossword puzzle in ink. Her eyes twinkled with restored health and the kind of joy that comes when you realize just how very happy you are to be alive.

"Good morning!" she said, still slightly hoa.r.s.e. "Do y'all know a four-letter word for a two-toed sloth?"

"Unau," Ella said. "She asks me this about once a month. I can't remember the Rhine tributaries or the Asian mountain ranges, but that sloth devil? I got him! So, Old Cabbage, I heard y'all had a party without me last night."

"Humph!" Daisy said. "Some party."

"But how are you feeling this morning?" I asked.

"Right as rain!" she said.

"Well, that's appropriate," Patti said, "because it hasn't stopped pouring for the last twelve hours."

"Yeah, there are palmetto fronds all over the roads and some live oak branches, too. All the gutters are flooded and, of course, Lockwood Boulevard is a swimming pool."

"I'm so glad you're all right," Ella said and took Aunt Daisy's hand. "I was worried sick."

We stayed for about an hour and then Patti and I left on the pretext of finding the right laptop and printer for me.

"So, our Mr. Risley is going to help you find a new career?" Aunt Daisy said.

"I doubt that much will come of this but I want to try. I mean, why not?"

"Why not indeed? You girls run along but bring me a surprise when you come back to pick up Ella, all right?"

"Time she start asking for sursies? Time she went home," Ella said. "Let's take this coffee cake to the nurses."

So we did and Nurse Rosol was glad to have it.

"Y'all are too sweet!" she said.

"Not them," Ella said, feeling full of beans after seeing that Aunt Daisy was going to walk out of there. "That's my coffee cake."

"Oh fine!" Patti said.

"When's Aunt Daisy going to be released? Any clue?" I said.