Islands: A Novel Part 15

We looked at each other and then at Camilla. She was smiling faintly, but there was a pleading, almost painful to see, in her brown eyes. I wondered if I was the only one to have noticed that Camilla looked as though she had been starved and beaten. She seemed to have aged years in a scant week. Her candle glow was gone. I think we would have agreed to anything to ignite it again.

Within five minutes it was agreed that we would begin to look for a place on the water where we could weekend and summer, not too far from Charleston, but well away from the road and bridges that crossed the Cooper River, toward Sullivan's Island. In truth, I don't think that most of us cared much at that point where this place might be, or even what it would be like. But even if we did not want it, we needed it. That seemed enough for now.

"I might know a place," Simms said. "It could work very well. Let me take a look and let y'all know."

"Oh," Lila said. "If it's where I think it is, you'll love it."

"I doubt that," I said to Lewis on the way back to Edisto. "But I'd hate to see us just drift apart. And Camilla really needs us to be together."

"We'll at least take a look," Lewis said. "You know it can't be Sullivan's, Anny, but that doesn't mean it can't be good."

And, standing in the cold, fast-falling twilight on Booter's hummock, I looked at the shining lighted windows and smelled the sweet smoke of driftwood and cedar and heard the little slap of the river against the dock pilings, so like what I heard at Sweetgra.s.s, and thought that perhaps, just perhaps, this might be good. Or at least, not bad.

Camilla threw the door open to Lewis's knock and we walked into a large, beamed room finished in washed cypress, with exposed cypress beams and a great river-stone fireplace, and a wall of bookshelves on either side of it. There was little furniture, but a fat denim sofa sat before the fire, and two flowered chintz easy chairs that I recognized from Camilla's Tradd Street house, and the flokati rug that Lila had given Camilla after Hugo lay before the fire on the wide, sage-painted boards of the floor. The windows were small and deep set and mullioned, but there were a great many of them on the wall facing the marsh and the river, and the last embers of the sunset flamed in the panes. The light here would be glorious, except perhaps in late afternoon, when it would swallow the room. But then you could draw the drapes. They were heavy and lined, made of rough linen in a green just a breath deeper than the floors.

Well done, I thought, swiveling my head around the room while Camilla stood smiling and with her hands folded in front of her, waiting. Whatever else it is, it's a nicely done house. Not a cottage. A house. I can't imagine sand on these floors, or oars and crab nets stacked in the corner, or old beach clogs from fifteen years back under the kitchen table. But maybe this is what and where we're meant to be now.

Camilla went out of the room to fetch drinks, and I said to Lewis, "It's nice, isn't it? But it looks like a house for grown-ups. The beach house was always for kids, even if it was for old kids."

"They didn't call it Never-Never-Land for nothing," Lewis said. "Would it be so bad, growing up?"

"Not if I don't have to dress for dinner and put on shoes."

"You don't have to dress at all," he said. "There are two other houses exactly like this, plus a guest house. We'd have one of them. You could go naked as a jaybird all day for all anybody would know. Good plan, as a matter of fact."

Camilla handed around drinks and said, "Do you think you could cut it here, Anny? There are other places we can look, of course, maybe something big enough for all of us together, like the old house. But you know, we always said we'd do this. Live like this. Maybe we should try it on for size for a year or so."

"It seems...oh, I don't know. Sort of big," I said. "Do you think we'd rattle around?"

"There has to be a place for Henry," Camilla said.

"Do you think he'll come back?"

"He'll come."

For we had lost Henry, and it felt to me like a fatal wound.

I had hardly seen him since before the fire, although I knew that Lewis and Simms had seen him on the day after that terrible night. But after that he seemed to vanish; he did not answer the Bedon's Alley telephone or the one at his office, nor could we raise him at Nancy's house. She did not seem to know where he was, and her voice was so bleared with grief that I did not have the heart to pursue it with her.

"We'll surely see him at the memorial service," Lila said, still white with shock. And Camilla, bowed by more than the osteoporosis, agreed.

"Let's let him be for a while," she said. "He always did go off by himself when something was wrong."

I could imagine nothing wronger than what Henry was facing, and agreed not to try to hover over him with offers of help and comfort. Obviously, there was neither for him, and would not be, for a very long time.

Henry was having Fairlie's remains-and none of us could bear even to speculate about what that term meant-sent to the farm in Kentucky after the service, and he would follow, and see her buried in her own earth.

"I don't know any more than that," Lewis said dully two days after the fire. He had not spoken directly with Henry since then, either, but had found a note from him under the windshield of the Range Rover in the courtyard on Bull Street. We were staying there until after the memorial service, which would be held, heartbreakingly, at Henry and Fairlie's house on Bedon's Alley. I could no more imagine it empty of Fairlie's darting, hummingbird presence than I could imagine Henry staying on in it alone. Like the others of us, my mind could cast itself no farther forward than the memorial service.

The night before the service Henry appeared at our Bull Street door with Gladys on her leash, at his heel. Both man and dog looked as if they had been boiled down to sheer bone and sinew. Henry was gray all over-face, hair, lips. Beside him, Gladys whimpered and shivered. She did not know where she was, but she surely knew that nothing good was going to come of this outing.

No, he would not come in, Henry said almost formally, or rather, oddly shyly. He did not look at us directly.

"I have an awful lot to see to, and I badly need for you all to do something for me," he said.

"Anything," Lewis and I said together.

"I want you to take Gladys, if you possibly can. I can't...look after her anymore. I've got her bed and blanket and food and medicine out in the car, and if you agree, I'll get Tommy and Gregory to take the golf cart out to Sweetgra.s.s in the morning in Tommy's truck. I'd appreciate it more than I can say if you'd stay close to her, and take her around in the cart every so often. She'll love Sweetgra.s.s, and she's used to being in the cart around water. I thought if you all, you know, found another place..."

"You know we'll take her. I love her," I said, starting to cry. He hugged me, briefly and hard. I could feel his heart behind his sharp breastbone, beating in great, dragging thuds. He bent and laid his chin on the top of my head, and then lifted it and looked at Lewis and me squarely for the first time.

"She's an old lady," he said. "I may not get back in time. I always thought I'd like her to live until her life gets to be a burden to her. You all know her almost as well as I do; you'll be able to tell if that happens. I hope you'll feel you can honor it."

I nodded, past words, and Lewis put his hand out and Henry gripped it hard with both his own. His knuckles were blue white.

"I'll call you," he said. "It may be a while, but I will call. I need...to be away until I can...well. I hope you'll honor that, too."

He bent and put his arms around Gladys and simply held her for a long time. He said something into her once-glossy ear, and then he was gone. Gladys began to whimper in earnest, and by the time I could see through my tears to kneel and take her in my arms, she was shivering hard.

We took her into our bed that night, and she lay between us, in my arms, until the shivering finally slowed and stopped. I could feel all her bones, and her faltering heart. She could not have spent many nights in her old life without the scent of Henry and Fairlie in her nostrils.

Just before dawn I could feel her begin the twitching that means deep doggy dreams, and I whispered to her: "I hope they're the best dreams in the world, and I hope I can make them all come true."

All over Charleston people were asking, "What happened? How could such a thing happen? Why was she out there by herself? Where was he?"

It's odd, I thought. It's entirely proper and natural downtown to die of illness or old age, but an accident, especially a spectacular one like this, is alarming, almost taboo. Maybe it's so in any tight-knit community. People know each other so well that what happens to the one resonates profoundly with the rest. Donne had it right. No man is an island. Each man is a part of the main. When the bell tolls south of Broad, it tolls for us.

"We don't really know," I said over and over in the days after the fire. I could not count the people who asked. I knew that the others were getting the questions, too. In the four days afterward, until the memorial service, I stopped going out except for essentials. I canceled a trip to St. Louis, and handled my office work from Bull Street. Lila showed no houses, and Camilla ordered her groceries from Burbage's. Our answering machines worked overtime.

For the truth was, we really did not know, absolutely and without question, what had happened that night on the beach, and likely never would. It seemed quite certain, though, that it happened exactly like Duck Portis, the fire chief on the island, and Bobby Sargent, the chief of police, thought it had. Fairlie had been curled up on the downstairs sofa before the dying fire, and had lit the kerosene heater because the night had turned bitter cold. Somehow, later, probably from a gust of the wild, booming wind that had come up off the ocean and in through the flimsy, uncaulked gla.s.s doors from the porch, the old heater had overturned. The smell of kerosene was still powerful in the charred living room, even after the water from the fire truck had saturated it. It wouldn't have taken long. The house had been a firetrap for years; we knew that. Duck and Bobby thought that Fairlie must have been deeply asleep, and died of smoke inhalation before the flames reached her. But I could tell from Lewis's haunted eyes that he did not think so. He had, after all, seen Fairlie before she was taken away. Bobby had reached him first.

Duck and Bobby and Lewis and Henry had grown up summers together on Sullivan's Island, and had auth.o.r.ed all manner of mischief before sober manhood overtook them. When they could not find Henry, they had called Lewis at Edisto. He had gone immediately to the beach house. After p.r.o.nouncing Fairlie he had tracked Henry down in West Virginia, with a team of doctors who had gone into the mountainous coal-mining country. I remembered later that I had trained the nurses who accompanied them. Lewis did not remember much of that phone conversation. He never did. We protect ourselves as best we can. Henry had wanted Fairlie to go to Stuhr's Funeral Home, so Lewis called, and rode there with her. Then he went home to Bull Street, to wait for me.

As far as Duck and Bobby could tell, the fire had started about eleven. The holidays were over and the black, blasting wind had driven most of the vacationing cottage owners home. The beach house was far down, on a jog that curved sharply right, out of sight of most of the permanent residents. It was a motorist coming home late over the great, humping bridge from Charleston who had sighted the flames and called 911.

"Why on earth was she downstairs wrapped up in an old quilt?" people asked. "There must have been five bedrooms in that old heap. Why did she light a kerosene stove as old as Methuselah when there was an electric s.p.a.ce heater right across the room? Could she have been, you know, drinking?"

But to us, it all seemed perfectly understandable. Fairlie loved to sleep in front of the fire. She did it often when we all stayed over. Usually she built the fire up enough so that it would last her the night, but in that bone-rattling cold it would not have been enough. I could just see her dragging the old kerosene stove out of the jumbled kitchen closet, lighting it, and rolling up in the dusty quilt that covered the sofa. Fairlie had always hated the electric heater. She had thought that it was dangerous.

"They all are," she said once. "Why else do you always read about them burning down tenements and housing projects? It's never a kerosene stove."

"It's probably because even our indigent have electricity now," Lewis had teased her. "Would you willingly smell kerosene if you didn't have to?"

"I like it," Fairlie said stubbornly. "It reminds me of the bunkhouses at home. My father used to pour it on all our sc.r.a.pes and punctures, too; we were always stepping on horseshoe nails."

Oh, Fairlie, I thought. If I could think that you just drifted away on a tide of warmth with the smell of home all around you, I could start to get past this. Maybe.

But I could not think that. Lewis's eyes and his silence would not let me.

"Did Henry see her?" I asked, on the evening of the day that Henry had flown in from West Virginia. He had gone directly to the funeral home. Lewis and Simms had met him there. They would not let Lila and Camilla and me go. Lewis had not even called Camilla until the middle of the morning after the fire.

"Let her sleep," he had said. "There won't be much for her for a long time."

"No. He didn't even ask to see her. I had told him on the phone pretty much how things were. She was cremated; she'd asked for that long before, after Charlie's ceremony. Henry and Nancy and the kids are going to take the urn to Kentucky. There'll be a very simple, private interment there. I don't think she's got much family left."

"She wanted to go home. He was going to go with her," I sobbed. "But, oh, Lewis, not like this."

"No, baby. Not like this."

"How was he? What did he say?"

I could not imagine what there was to be said after your wife had died by fire. I could not imagine how Henry was.

"He didn't say much at all," Lewis said, "except that if he hadn't forgotten about the opera at the Gaillard and gone out with the doctors, it wouldn't have happened. I never saw anybody in such pain. He thinks it's his fault."

"Oh, Lewis, n.o.body made her go out to the island," I said, weeping. "She would have been just as mad at him in Bedon's Alley. It was her choice."

But I knew Henry, and I knew that he would wear Fairlie's death like a shirt of nails until the day that he, too, died.

9.

I DID NOT GO TO FAIRLIE'S memorial service. I woke up the day before in our bed on Bull Street, coughing and aching and so desperately tired that for a long while I could not get out of bed.

"Flu, maybe, or that other thing that's going around," Lewis said, dressing for the clinic in the dim, shuttered room. "Stay in bed and drink lots of water. Take aspirin. Call me in the morning."

I turned back over and burrowed under the covers. Gladys groaned in her sleep and moved up against me. She had slept with us for the past two nights, and had begun to whine anxiously when I left her sight. In truth, she was the real reason I was not going to the house on Bedon's Alley to see Fairlie off. I did indeed feel awful, but I knew it was a malaise of the heart and spirit, not the body. I simply was not going to leave Gladys.

"Oh, for goodness' sake," Camilla said briskly when I called to tell her. "She'll have to get used to being by herself sometime. You can't take her with you out of town. Why don't you bring her? She can stay in the kitchen. Or she can come stay with Boy and Girl. What will Henry think?"

But I knew that for old Gladys to be in her lifelong home without her people would be cruel past imagining. And she had never been particularly connected to the two Boykins. Henry was her polestar. Henry and now, perhaps, just a bit, me. It was, of course, a desperation allegiance, but I was not going to break it.

"It's what Henry would do," I said, sure of it. "I'll stay here and put together a little lunch for us. I know that Henry and Nancy are going straight to the airport after the service. n.o.body's expecting a gathering of any kind."

"I'm going to do that," Camilla said. "I've already ordered the stuff from Ginger Breslin's. All I've got to do is pick it up this afternoon. You stay in and take care of yourself."

I felt an obscure flare of anger.

"I'm going to do this, Camilla," I said firmly. "This one time, I'm going to take care of us. I know you do it better than anybody else, but I'm doing it this time."

There was a small silence, and then she said lightly, "Well, of course you must, if you feel so strongly about it. What can I bring?"

"Nothing. Just give Henry and Nancy my dearest love."

"You know I will."

I made a pot of chili that afternoon, and cornbread. That and a salad of iceberg lettuce and Rusian dressing just felt right. It was still cold, though fair, and the wind still battered the harbor and the downtown streets. No herbed and sauced and layered things on that day. No champagne. No mesclun. Just the walloping, comforting chili and some grocery-store red and white wine, and what Lewis called the "dreaded iceberg." It was a childish meal. I ached for childhood, even the one I had had. I thought that we all would.

They trooped in just past one the next day, looking whipped and diminished, old. For the first time, at least to me, old. I hugged them as you would children who had come shivering home from school, and set them before the fire, and poured mugs of a lovely hot thing Fairlie had taught me to make long ago, saying it was an old Kentucky bluegra.s.s recipe. Claret cup, she called it: red wine and beef consomme, lemon and cinnamon and nutmeg and a pinch of sugar. It should not have been good but it was. It warmed you down to your metatarsals. We drank a lot of it. And we talked. Gladys snuffled each of us in turn and then flung herself down at my feet.

Lewis and Henry and Camilla had spoken briefly about Fairlie at the small service with more laughter and remembrance, all told, than tears. Others had joined in; everyone had a Fairlie story. Nancy had gotten up and started to speak about her mother, and then sat back down, trembling. Camilla had put her arm around her shoulders, and for the rest of the service, Nancy wept quietly. When the young minister from Holy Cross on Sullivan's Island asked if anyone else would like to say anything, Fairlie's youngest grandchild, Maggie, only four, piped up and said, "Granny taught me how to pee in a conch sh.e.l.l so I wouldn't mess up the beach."

The laughter from the small group gathered on Fairlie's gilt dining room chairs, placed in curved rows around the fireplace in the big old cave of a drawing room, was instantaneous, a surf of love and delight for Fairlie. It was, Lila said, the only time Henry's expression changed. He had winced as though someone had plunged a dagger in his heart.

"But, oh, that minister," Lila said, shaking her gilt head so that her hair fanned out from beneath the black velvet band. Lila had always kept her hair a silvery ash blond; it was difficult to tell where, or if, she was graying. "Well, he didn't know," Camilla said. "n.o.body but the family and we knew that he was taking her ashes back to Kentucky. For that matter, n.o.body but us knew that they were planning to retire there. You can't blame him. It was a lovely thought."

"What?" I said, dreading the answer. I had wanted Fairlie's memorial to be flawless.

Just after Christmas, Creighton Mills had astounded, and, in some cases, shocked, everyone who knew him by leaving the Episcopal church and becoming a Catholic. He had since then been in semi-reclusion at the the Franciscan order out at Mepkin Abbey. Downtown buzzed; an ecclesiastical scandal was a morsel of choice.

It was widely put about that Creigh had had some sort of awful secret on his conscience, and finally left the world and took the weight of it with him.

"Atonement, that's what it is," some of his elderly congregation said. But Lewis disagreed.

"I think he just got tired of being downtown's perpetual preppy priest. That habit must be pretty comfortable after all those crew-neck sweaters. Still, I wish he'd been there for Fairlie. I know that silliness from the Book of Ruth must have hurt Henry like h.e.l.l."

"What?" I cried.

"He talked about how Fairlie came to us in her youth and cast her lot with us," Camilla said, "and how enriched we all were that she had chosen ours and Henry's home as her own. Then he read from that pa.s.sage that starts out 'Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee. For whither thou goest I will go, and wherever thou lodgest I will lodge; thy people will be my people...' oh, you know. Everybody was nodding and whispering about how sweet it was, and I know Henry was simply dying. He still thinks it's because of him that she's going home in a bronze urn. This whole thing is going to kill him if he can't get past that."

There was a small silence, and then Lewis said, "You know, at least one of us is going to have to end up at Magnolia, or we'll all be put outside the city walls for the vultures to eat. Charlie in the ocean and now Fairlie in Kentucky. I don't know which is considered worse. We can draw straws."

"I probably shouldn't tell you this, Anny, but you might want to give Nancy a call before they get away," Camilla said. "I think they'll still be in Bedon's Alley. Nancy is absolutely furious with you for not being at the memorial, and nothing any of us could say changed her mind. It's shock and grief, of course, but I think it probably hurts Henry to hear it, and I'm sure you can straighten it out with no trouble."

I was as shocked and hurt as if I had been slapped across the face. Nancy had always been her sunny, easygoing self around me; she was very like Henry in that way. That she could be angry with me was as ungraspable as it would be to learn she thought I was a child abuser, or worse.

"Of course I'll call," I said, getting up and going to the telephone in the kitchen. There was one on the table in the sitting room, but this one was out of earshot. I had no idea what I was going to say.

The telephone in Bedon's Alley rang a long time before being answered. I was just beginning to think, gratefully, that they had left for the airport after all, and then the receiver was lifted and Nancy's voice came on the line. It was flat and dull, without affect.

"Sweetie, this is Anny," I began. "I hear you're upset with me for not being with you all today, and wanted to say how sorry I am if I caused you any more pain-"

"Lewis said you weren't feeling well," her voice cut in. It had hardened into steel. "Couldn't you just have sucked it up for an hour? Everybody was talking about it. Mother always said she felt closer to you than any other woman in the G.o.dd.a.m.ned Scrubs; I guess she was a fool to think you felt the same way about her."

I heard Henry's voice in the background, but hers overrode it.

"Lewis also said that you wanted to stay with the dog. Well, isn't that just wonderful? By all means, let's keep the dog happy...."

I heard Henry's voice again, this time nearer, and nearly as hard as his daughter's.

"Hush, Nancy," he said. "It was just the right thing to do. Nothing could have pleased me more. Gladys was a part of your mother's heart, just like she's a part of mine. I'd appreciate it if you'd apologize to Anny."