Islands: A Novel Part 11

"It seems like bad luck not to do it this time," he said. "I don't want to hex the company for the next millennium. I'll just stay an hour or so. I can probably be back for dessert."

We all nodded. Some of us smiled. The thought of Simms, stuffed full of goose and champagne and in his khakis and a crew-neck sweater, presiding over the vast, distinctly suburban holiday revels of a medical supply company was an engaging one. As if she could read our thoughts, Lila said, "He has his tuxedo in the car. He says he'll change in the rest room at the plant."

Simms grinned and most of us did, too. Lila did not. Neither did I. Would there be a little-used rest room in some tucked-away corner of the plant? Would a honey-haired, silky-skinned young woman with a flat upstate accent wait there for him?

I hated the thought and looked over, involuntarily, at Lila. She was looking straight ahead. I looked at Camilla. She was staring intently at Lila, as if to hold her upright with the sheer force of her gaze. I did not know if it was still going on, Simms and his women. But I knew that Lila, and the rest of us, were forever changed by it, even if most of us did not know it. Even if the center still held, there was a tiny crack now.

"Oh, Simms, who or what could be worth it?" I whispered just before Creighton Mills, more ma.s.sive and commanding now, but still in his beach clothes, set down his sherry gla.s.s and moved to stand before the fireplace. The firelight leaped on his gla.s.ses and the cross on his chest, and he wore his clerical collar, but despite these he was still simply one of us.

"Church is in session," he said, smiling. "Lila, Simms. Will you stand together before me, Simms on my right hand and Lila on my left?"

They moved into their positions. From behind them I could not see their faces, but I could see the faces of those of us who could. Camilla watched, perfectly still, her beautiful face neutral. Henry smiled in simple happiness; pure Henry. Fairlie, beside him, her face smoothed into girlhood by the firelight, reached for his hand. Camilla's eyes moved briefly to them, and then back to Lila and Simms.

" 'Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of G.o.d, and in the face of this company, to join together this man and this woman in holy matrimony...' "

Creighton Mills's beautiful voice and the flickering firelight were hypnotic. Our days and nights in the place seemed to unroll before me like a strip of film. The Scrubs rushing me into the surf on my first day here, laughing. Fairlie and Henry doing the s.h.a.g ankle deep in the rushing green and white water, to show me how it was done. Henry and Lewis heading out with their surf-casting gear while Fairlie, stretched out in the hammock, said, "Don't even think of bringing those fish in here." Camilla, alone and far down the beach with Boy and Girl. Lewis and me, naked in the phosph.o.r.escent surf, on fire with joy in our every atom. Charlie bellowing with glee as a long flight of pelicans grazed the water just beyond him, "G.o.dd.a.m.n! It's the loan committee!"

Oh, Charlie.

All of us, on my first night, hands on the photo of the Scrubs on the first day they had come into the house as owners, swearing to share our lives forever.

Lila and Simms holding hands as they climbed the stairs from the beach at twilight, their heads bent together, talking earnestly. Talking, talking...

" '...let him now speak or else hereafter for ever hold his peace.' "

There was a silence; even the fire seemed to hush its breathing, and then Creighton said, " 'Wilt thou have this woman to be thy wedded wife, to live together after G.o.d's ordinance in the holy estate of matrimony? Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honour, and keep her in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all others, keep thee only unto her, so long as ye both shall live?' "

"I will," Simms said. I could scarcely hear him.

When it was her turn, Lila's voice rang out as bright and hard as a diamond.

"I will."

" 'Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?' " Creigh said.

Camilla got up from the rocker beside the fire, and stood, bent and fragile.

"I do," she said.

It was an enormously moving moment. Tears glimmered in more than one pair of eyes. In my mind I saw Camilla as she had been on the day I had met her, on the beach under the faded umbrella that we still used, glowing and beautiful, holding out her arms to me, saying to Lewis, "Well, Lewis, you finally got it right."

I did not really hear the rest of the ceremony, nor see it clearly. Tears blinded my eyes and the past in this place roared in my ears. I heard Simms say " '...to love and to cherish, till death do us part, according to G.o.d's holy ordinance, and thereto I plight thee my troth.' "

You'd better, you son of a b.i.t.c.h, I thought fiercely.

When Lila repeated the vow, her voice was nearly inaudible.

Simms slipped a ring onto her finger. It was an enormous sapphire, almost the color of Lila's eyes, and it looked like a great bubble of trapped seawater on her ring finger. She looked at it, and then up at Simms, a perplexed look, as if she had expected to see the small Tiffany solitaire with which he had married her. I wondered how much it had cost. Not enough. Not nearly enough.

" '...Those whom G.o.d hath joined together let no man put asunder,' " Creighton Mills said. Camilla was still in her fireside chair. Her eyes burned into the side of Simms's face. He did not turn. How could he not have felt those eyes?

" '...I p.r.o.nounce that they are man and wife,' " Creigh said. And instead of the traditional benediction, he paused for a moment, and then said, " 'Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.' "

"Amen," we all whispered. We looked around at one another. Creigh Mills caught the looks and grinned and said, "It's the old collect for aid against perils. Part of the traditional evening prayer. Lila asked for it. Come to that, it's not such a bad way to end a marriage ceremony, especially in this new millennium. I think I'll incorporate it in the future. Beats prenuptial counseling by a country mile."

Simms bent his face to Lila's and kissed her. Both their eyes were closed. When they turned to face us, smiling, I saw that both their faces were wet.

A little silence held for a moment, and then Lewis said, "That ought to last you guys for a while. Let the games begin!"

We ate our feast then, murmuring compliments over the oyster-and-pecan dressing, drinking up all of the excellent Chilean wine that Lewis had brought, jibing at Fairlie's gelatinous goose, oozing fat and port and mired in prunes.

"Well, you should have known better," she said lazily. Fairlie was no better a cook now than the day I had met her. "Next year just a.s.sign me the booze. I can't go wrong. You guys will drink anything."

For the first time that I could remember, our beach house Christmas was an edgy and tenuous one. Everyone, not just I, seemed to feel the frisson, though I am not sure most of us could name it. Simms left just after the meal, and his absence seemed to leave a fissure in the skin of the evening that no one was eager to step over. Lila showed her new ring around, smiling at the compliments, but her eyes went every now and then to the door. Henry and Fairlie got up immediately and began to stack dishes in the pitted old white enamel sink, even though, over the years, Fairlie had been known to take long walks in bone-chilling cold or pouring rain to avoid the moment. Henry and I began to gather crumpled paper and ribbon. Camilla sat still, watching us, and then said, "Leave it, please. Everybody just sit down. I'm coming back out in the morning; I'll do it then. Right now I just want my people around me."

"You're coming out here on Christmas Eve?" I said worriedly. We were used to her habit of spending solitary hours and even days here, but surely now, at this season of homing...

"The children and grandchildren aren't getting in until tomorrow afternoon," she said. "I think little Camilla is dancing in the Nutcracker for the four-millionth time tonight. Just as well. My cousin Mary Lee is having one of her unspeakable brunches at noon, and I don't have to go to the airport until four. I'll do scalloped oysters for just us tomorrow night, and Lydia is having everybody for Christmas dinner. Thank G.o.d it's at five. That will give us all time to get drunk. I'd love the time out here alone in the morning...."

Camilla rarely drank, but I knew that her battalion-like extended family harbored a few imbibers. Most Charlestonians's did. Lewis had said that when he was a child he had thought that carrying Uncle Joe Henry Cannon upstairs to sleep off the punch was as much a ritual of Christmas as the tree and the carols.

We laughed.

But still...but still. Tonight had always been our own Christmas ritual. None of us had ever come here on the actual festival days.

Lewis and I took the sacks of trash out to stow them in the big receptacle under the house. Everyone else settled themselves back around the fire and Camilla. The smell of perking coffee followed us out the kitchen door and into the cold. I looked back. It was a Norman Rockwell scene: the whispering fire, and the tree lights on the faces of old friends, drawn close at this season. But it felt like just that, an ill.u.s.tration.

We stood in the cold sand behind the house, holding each other close. I smelled the mothy wool of his sweater and felt his breath warm on my hair. We did not speak for a while, nor did we move to go back in. Overhead, the stars wheeled and burned, and the surf breathed on the beach.

"What's the matter with tonight?" I said into his shoulder. "I feel like when we go back upstairs it will all be different. It won't be us sitting there. Nothing will even look the same."

" 'The times, they are a-changin',' " he said. "Things aren't the same, Anny. They haven't been for a long time. They started changing when Charlie died. You just didn't want to notice."

I felt colder than I should have, there in the circle of his arms. I half-remembered studying entropy in physics in college. What had I remembered of it? That it was the nature of an organism to lose its structure and drift toward chaos? Was that happening to us, so slowly that we did not even comprehend it? That the ent.i.ty that was us and the house and the beach was moving molecularly outward, like a dying star?

But there's a center still, I thought. Just like Camilla said. Maybe it's a little looser now, maybe a little flaccid. After all, we've lost Charlie, lost the sense of Lila-and-Simms, lost other things. But they were within the realm of the normal abrasions of time and life; they might hurt, but were not mortal. I was willing to admit that the whole organism that we were together could alter. That it might implode was more than I could contemplate.

"But here we are still," I said fiercely. My lips chafed against his sweater. "Still here, going into an entirely new millennium together. So many years, for most of you. After so long, after all we've lived through, what could possibly change in any of our lives that would move the...the focus of us anywhere else but to us and the house? I mean us, the Scrubs. I'm not talking about our lives outside."

"I've often wondered just what it was that held us together," Lewis said, hugging me hard. "It's not exactly normal, after all; not many school-day alliances last, not really. Did you know that some folks in Charleston call us the Lost Tribe, and the house Never-Never-Land? By all rights we should be just seeing each other at parties and weddings and funerals, and waving to each other at Sunday lunch at the yacht club. But you're right. Here we are still. I think everybody's feeling a little strange these days, not just us. Like things are beginning to change, to end. It must be millennium fever."

"But we really haven't changed much," I said stubbornly, feeling on the brink of peevish, childish tears.

"Look back, you'll see," he said, and kissed me on the forehead, and we dashed up the steps and back into the warm, dim room.

The strangeness persisted during coffee. People stole surrept.i.tious glances at their watches, and cut their eyes worriedly toward Camilla. But she sat as serene as a Buddha, wrapped in the scurrilous old wedding ring quilt that we used for a picnic blanket, staring into the fire and rocking. She was smiling slightly.

She looked over at me.

"Have you been out of town?" she said. "I haven't seen you for three or four mornings now, and your car hasn't been there. I was afraid you were stuck somewhere awful like Scranton and might miss Christmas."

And I looked quickly at Lewis and blinked, as if I had just been shaken out of a long, deep sleep. There it was, then, the first great change, after Charlie's death, and almost that long ago now. Why had I never thought of it as that? I looked over at Lewis. He smiled and nodded.

Ten years ago, just after New Year's 1990, Camilla had had a late super with Lewis and me at Bull Street. All of us had been drifting into the habit of calling Camilla on the spur of the moment to share meals and short trips with us; we did not do it out of duty and Camilla knew that. She accepted or not, as she pleased. For the last weeks she had seemed more distracted than was normal for Camilla, even given Charlie's death. It was a calm distraction, merely a gentle otherwhereness. But it was noticeable, because Camilla had always been so perfectly there, so in the moment with us all. We did not exactly worry but we noticed it, and talked to each other about it.

"You think we ought to ask if anything's wrong?" I said on a Sunday afternoon at the beach house, just after that Christmas. Lewis and Henry and Fairlie were the only ones there. We were making a kind of bouillabaisse out of the small drums Henry and Lewis had caught that cold afternoon, and a few crabs Fairlie and I had netted off the dock, and some shrimp we'd bought at Simmons's on the way over to the island.

"Maybe we should," Fairlie said, dumping a whole bottle of chardonnay into the stew. She hated both the smell and taste of drum.

"If something was wrong with one of us, she'd have it out of us in a minute."

"Let her be," Lewis said. "She's always done this, kind of gone away somewhere every now and then. I can remember from when we were kids."

"Yeah," Henry agreed. "It usually meant some kind of Camilla bombsh.e.l.l guaranteed to alter the course of our universe."

"She was like that just before she got engaged to Charlie," Lewis said. "It was like she wasn't on the same physical plane as the rest of us."

Henry said nothing, only doused the broth with enough cayenne to lift it right out of the pot.

"Jesus, Henry," Fairlie cried. "That's going to scar our tracheas for life."

It didn't, though. But it did effectively kill the oily taste of the drum.

That night at supper with us on Bull Street, Camilla came out of her reverie just as I set a bowl of she-crab soup on the table, and said, "I just sold the Tradd Street house. A very nice woman named Isabel Bradford Thomas-she uses all three names-bought it for her daughter, Miss Darby York Thomas, for a wedding present. They're from Greenwich, Connecticut, and don't seem the sort who'll put flamingos in the garden. I like them both. We close next Monday. I'm moving Tuesday morning. I'm telling you because you'll probably hear Lydia screaming all the way over here when I tell her."

"Jesus, Camilla, are you sure you want to do that? I always thought of that house as your insurance policy," Lewis said, putting his spoon down and staring at her. Now that she had come out of her reverie, her face and eyes shone.

She's actually happy, I thought. I'm so glad.

Aloud I said nothing.

"I can live very well indeed on what I sold it for," she said, grinning. "And I have a little money in a trust from my grandmother, and Daddy left both us girls a little more. Mother's got the balance of it, and she made another bundle when she sold off that big chunk of land on the Folly River, just across from Wadmalaw. Of course Daddy had promised the Coastal Conservancy to put it into a conservation eas.e.m.e.nt, but if Mother knew that, she didn't let it bother her. It's that awful Folly Plantation development now. A cut-rate Kiawah. I hear it's struggling. I hope so.

"Anyway, I guess that that money and what's left of hers after Bishop Gadsden will come equally to Lydia and me. Though it would be just like her to leave it to the garden club or St. Michael's or somewhere. Whatever, with the sale of the house and this and that, I'm perfectly all right. More than all right."

"You didn't want to live there without Charlie?" I said.

"I really didn't want to live there, period. I'm sick of all the upkeep and the historic-house c.r.a.p and the tours and people sticking their noses through the gate into the piazza. I have been for a long time. But for some reason, Charlie loved it. You wouldn't have thought it, would you?"

"I always thought it was you," I said.

"So where in the name of G.o.d are you going to live?" Lewis said sternly. I knew that he became stern when he was worried.

"Well, I've bought a little three-story house at the foot of Gillon Street. Completely renovated. The top floor is a very chic penthouse overlooking the harbor, with terraces all around. There's over four thousand square feet of living s.p.a.ce on that floor alone, and the kitchen and baths are a dream. It's got three bedrooms, so the children can come when they absolutely have to, and I can have an office, and there's a two-car garage and an elevator from the parking garage. The dogs can run in the waterfront park, and I can practically see the widow's walk on the beach house from the terrace, and, best of all, I can keep it myself, with some help maybe once a week. It's easy to keep. It's essentially a loft, very open. Beautiful brick walls, and beams."

We were both silent. Camilla Curry in a loft? Doing her own housework?

I began to laugh. Camilla joined in, and then, after a moment, Lewis.

"You don't do anything halfway, do you, toots?" he said. "You do know that the historic preservation people are going to take a contract out on you, don't you? I thought they hated all that apartment and condominium development across East Bay like typhoid."

"Well, the building really is old," Camilla said. "And besides, I'm on the board, and I'm writing an interminable history of our good works that n.o.body else wanted to. They'd have to pay a professional a million bucks to tackle it."

"What are you going to do with the rest of it?" I said. "You said you had the top. Weren't there two floors below that?"

"There are," she said. "Already finished for apartments or office s.p.a.ce. Parking and all. Listen, Anny. I'm going to make you an offer you can't refuse."

As it turned out, I couldn't.

In two months I had moved my staff and files and what furniture hadn't been ruined by Hugo into the two floors below Camilla, and Outreach became a downtown concern. The rent Camilla asked was a pittance compared to what she could have gotten, but she said it was worth it to her to have the s.p.a.ce occupied by people she knew and who could keep an eye on her floor when she was away. She would not take a penny more.

"I will impose on you mercilessly," she said, when Lewis and I tried to persuade her to accept at least a little more money. I had gotten a small insurance payment on the ruined office on West Ashley, and my board would probably pony up a bit more. "It will be more than worth any rent you could pay me."

She didn't impose, of course, being Camilla, but it did end up that we spent a good deal of time together. Sometimes she asked me up for a bite of lunch in her sun-dazzled loft, and at other times she brought her sandwich and I brought mine and we ate them together while the dogs snuffled around the waterfront park overlooking the harbor. I often called and asked if she wanted me to pick up anything for her from Harris Teeter when I shopped, and she usually did. Even with the elevator, the advancing osteoporosis made carrying heavy grocery bags difficult for her. I insisted on carrying anything heavy from her car up to her penthouse; she would call me on her car phone, and I, or sometimes Marcy or one of the others, would meet her in the garage and hoist the burdens for her. No one minded doing it, because everybody in my office loved Camilla, who had us all for holiday drop-ins and sent down little treats now and then. But Camilla hated being fetched and carried for.

"It's one reason I moved here, with the elevator and everything on one floor," she grumped. "I don't need a young harem doing my bidding. It embarra.s.ses me."

"Where would you be if you fell and broke a hip?" I said.

"Right up here with a live-in something or other," she replied. "There's room. I made sure of that. And then, of course, we'll all eventually be living together somewhere wonderful on the water; and the rest of you can tote things for me. I've got it all covered."

Since Charlie died we had not spoken of our plan to move in together and care for each other when we reached retirement age, and it gave me a flush of pure comfort to hear her refer to it. Things were still the same. Loss had not altered us. All systems were still go.

In the years since that time, my office had flourished and expanded its services, and I truly believe it was in part because Camilla's extensive network of well-heeled contacts a.s.sociated Outreach with her, and opened their purses accordingly. She had no official connection to us, and I never asked her for one; she did not sit on my board and I would have died before I would have let anyone solicit her on our behalf. But there she sat, a floor above us in this pretty downtown house like a benevolent angel, and I had heard more than one of our supporters say, "How are things doing up at Camilla's?"

Sometimes she would bring a visitor or an a.s.sociate on one of her endless projects-she was literally never idle-down to meet us on their way out, and often ended up holding a fractious child or grabbing a ringing phone.

"You see what they're coping with," she would say to her guest. "You remember Outreach at Christmas."

And many of them did.

I loved my small office on the second floor, with its arched Gothic window that looked into a little courtyard bordered with palmettos and flowering shrubs. There was a small wrought-iron umbrella table and chairs there where clients could wait and we could have a quick meal or a c.o.ke, and a joggling board, which had come from Camilla's Tradd Street house, that enchanted our small charges. Lewis and Henry had built me a little raised brick fishpond and Lila and Simms had gifted me with four gorgeous, flashing koi, who grew sleek and spoiled and enormous from the offerings of the children. When a great blue heron had taken to perching like a gargoyle in the live oak overhead and glaring hungrily at the koi, Lewis fashioned an ornamental screened gazebo over the pool, and the heron soon flapped creakily off elsewhere.

But we did not lack for wildlife. Besides the koi, our garden was home to a tribe of pretty green lizards, and a family of fat squirrels, and once, in our first spring there, a pair of mallards had swooped down and spent two or three days looking us over and scrabbling about in the shrubbery as if they were making a nest. Eventually they left us for a much grander garden and pool, but I had been enchanted with the two wild visitors. They seemed a fortunate omen, part of the magic of the place.

I didn't see as much of it as I would have liked, however. For the previous two years, I had been doing something different, which I loved, that felt as if it might ultimately help change and heal lives. In the years since Outreach had moved into the new s.p.a.ce, I had accompanied Lewis and Henry on more trips to scavenged places withering from lack of medical attention, and I had met many more doctors who gave their time, as Lewis and Henry did. Always it was my mission to try and set up a rudimentary community resource center for whatever village we were in, and I got pretty proficient at it. None of the doctors we worked with knew of anyone else who was doing anything similar.

"It would be a G.o.dsend if somebody like you was available to all the medical teams that go out," a stout, red-faced tropical disease specialist said, one itching, steaming evening in the Guatemalan jungle. He was swatting miserably at mosquitoes and drinking vodka like water. I was itching, too, but at least Lewis and I had a small, bare, clean room with mosquito netting all to ourselves in the tottering little inn on the riverbank, and there was actually a rusty fan, and a coughing shower. I was grateful. Rudimentary as it was, it did not approach the sheer gaudy awfulness of the upstairs of the wh.o.r.ehouse in the mountains of Mexico.

Henry and Lewis looked at him, and then at me.

"Why not Anny herself?" Henry said, and Lewis grinned slowly and nodded.

"Like a consultant, you mean," the red-faced doctor said.

"Like that," Henry said. "Groups could hire her as part of their teams; I think your national organizations would spring for a fee if it wasn't ridiculous. She could go wherever she was needed most, not just with Lewis and me. She's a pro at this now, and she doesn't take up much s.p.a.ce or eat much. She'll sleep anywhere, too."

I glared at Lewis and he leered showily.