Islands: A Novel Part 5

"You can do that now," Charlie honked, and we all laughed.

The idea hung just over our heads for the rest of the evening, like ripe fruit dangling. One by one we lapsed back into silence. Then Camilla said, "Let's do it. Let's just agree to do it. If it doesn't work out, n.o.body's bound to it, but consider the alternative. Between us, we've got just about all the resources to make it work."

"And a new member who's a good fifteen years younger than the rest of us. What about it, Camilla? Haven't you always wanted a maid?" Fairlie said.

This silence was not contemplative, not peaceful. My ears rang. I heard Lewis draw a breath to say something in reply. I knew that it would be destroyingly angry.

"I have a maid," Camilla said. "But I would love to have a daughter." And she smiled at me, her archaic, V-shaped smile that so suited her medieval beauty.

My eyes stung and I smiled back, and the moment was averted.

"Call for a vote," Henry said, staring at Fairlie, who had the grace to look ashamed. "All in favor of the Scrubs fading into the sunset together, say aye."

And we all cried, "Aye!"

"Done and done," Henry said. "Now let's swear on...what? What's our most sacred thing?"

"The wine closet!" "The key to the big upstairs bathroom!" "The fishing tackle!" Each offering was met with a chorus of jeers.

"What about the photograph in the hall, over the coat rack?" I said hesitantly. The photo was of them all, much younger and less worn, but recognizable, grinning by the front door of the house while Camilla held up a big, old-fashioned key. It had the look of beginnings to it.

"Perfect!" Camilla cried. "That was the first time we all came out together. Remember? How it rained, and the toilet backed up, and Lila got stung by a jellyfish?"

A chorus of approval rose, and I felt a ridiculous swell of pride, and Henry got the photo off the wall and held it out to each of us in turn.

"Swear," he said, and "I swear" we all said.

"What if some of us...aren't around when the time comes?" Camilla said. "Does the one left get to come, or what?"

"One for all and all for one," Lewis said. "If only two of us are left, or three, or whatever, we still do it. This is not about couples. It's about the Scrubs."

We gathered our things and filed out into the night. The last ones out-Lewis and I-locked the door. Lewis put the key into his pocket. They all had keys.

Fairlie hung back. When I came abreast of her, she said, "Good choice. I wish I'd thought of it."

"Thanks," I said, but she was already gone, with her dancer's flat-footed stride, and she did not hear me.

"Well done, Anny Butler," Lewis said, and kissed me on the back steps down to the dunes.

Lewis and I were married that September in the tiny white slaves' chapel at Sweetgra.s.s. There were not many people: the Scrubs; his daughters, looking pleasant and closed into themselves; my sisters and brother; Marcy from my office; Linda and Robert and little Tommy, beaming. Linda made her she-crab soup for the wedding party. Everyone stayed late and drank a great deal of champagne.

When we were planning the wedding, Lewis had asked me where I would like to go on our honeymoon.

"Anywhere but Sea Island," he said, and I gathered that was where his marriage to Sissy began.

"The beach house," I said. "I want to spend it at the beach house."

And he laughed at me, but that's exactly what we did. The rest of the Scrubs came out for the weekend, bearing food and wine and tawdry, wonderful gifts, never for one moment considering that they might be intruding. I did not consider it, either. I was a Scrub. We were a unit.

Lewis had said that he thought perhaps we might want to open the big house on the Battery and live there, but on the last night of our honeymoon before the others came, I said, "Do you really want to?" and he said no.

"Me either," I said, weak with grat.i.tude that I would never have to try and live up to that house. "I've been so scared of it."

"I've been so tired of it," he said. "We'll just live on Bull Street and Edisto and here, for the time being. You can take your time deciding where in Charleston you want to live permanently. Or even if."

"We've got to have some kind of reception or party for all your people-and that's half of Charleston," I said.

"Well, we will. After we're settled in. We'll use the Battery house for that. Its last hurrah."

But somehow we never did it.

I have always heard that marriage changes you, and, of course it does, but not always in the way the conventional wisdom would have it. With Lewis, the shape of my life did not change appreciably. The little house on Bull Street, though graceful and beautifully detailed, was not all that much larger than my apartment, so that from the very beginning I had no sense of rattling and creeping around in great s.p.a.ces. I did not bring much with me to Lewis's house, so it did not bulge with furniture. What there was, he had brought out of the Battery house after the divorce, and it was old and beautiful and l.u.s.trous with care, but he had no great baroque pieces, no hivelike crystal chandeliers hanging over the small English dining table, not a fringe, not a ta.s.sel.

"Go over to the Battery anytime and pick out what you want," he said. "The hysterical society won't ha.s.sle you. Camilla's on the board."

But as lovely as the old house was, I did not want to go into it. I did not even like to pa.s.s it on my sporadic jogs. The Battery stank of Sissy to me, if not to anyone else.

"I don't want anything except what I have," I said, meaning it in all respects.

"Me, either," he said.

Our external lives did not change. I continued to work early and late at the agency, ferrying around the Shawna Sperrys of my world and attempting to corral their f.e.c.kless mothers; begging discreetly and sometimes not so on the telephone for funds, services, homes, treatments for my flock, making speeches, attending grindingly tedious meetings with my board, accounting for paper clips and paper diapers instead of young lives anch.o.r.ed. As I always had, I fretted about it at home.

"Why don't you just quit?" Lewis said. "You don't have to work, you know. You could volunteer, or start a business of your own. We could have a baby."

I looked at him.

"I have about twenty of them right now," I said. "And you have two. Lewis, even if we started now, you'd be close to seventy when our first graduated from college. But you know, if you want to think about it..."

"I don't," he said, grinning. "I don't want anybody but you. I just don't want you to go all broody on me down the line."

"I've been taking care of children since I was eight years old," I said. "I don't want to go back to the diaper phase of it."

And so we did not have children of our own. Until very recently, I did not miss them.

Lewis continued to keep his hideous hours at the clinic. Dinner, if we could manage it together, was often at nine or ten o'clock. On weekends we usually left on Friday for Sweetgra.s.s and stayed over Sat.u.r.day night. On Sunday we went to the beach house. That seldom changed.

No, the armature of our lives was not altered appreciably. But at least for me, the interior changes were profound. I learned to laugh. I learned to play. I learned to lose my temper, yell, sulk, behave irrationally. I learned to cry. When we had our first fight, over Lewis accusing me, unfairly, of neglecting to pay Corinne, our cleaning lady, I shouted at him and burst into tears and ran upstairs. I lay on our bed, heart hammering with the enormity of my outburst, waiting for him to come coldly up and end our marriage. Of course he didn't; when I crept back downstairs hours later he was reading the Post and Courier and eating cold pizza.

"Did you take a nap?" he said.

"After all that stuff about Corinne?" I asked, incredulous.

"Oh," he said. "I found her check in the pocket of my lab coat. Want some of this?"

I realized then, for the first time, that marriage is about all of you, not just the best parts. Nothing in my child's or grown-up's world had taught me that. The liberation was like learning to fly.

We went to a lot of parties in our honor that first year, and I went to King Street and bought a few things that I thought would serve, though I never attained the elegance and brio that marks a downtown Charleston party, and when the first of the charity ball invitations came, I cried.

"Lewis, I can't," I snuffled. "I just can't. I can maybe do the smaller stuff but I can't do a ball."

"You don't have to. I gave them up when Sissy left. n.o.body expects me anymore. We just won't."

"But we'll have to reciprocate for all the parties this year, sooner or later," I said.

"Why?" he said.

And so we became the Eccentric Aikens, who did not give parties, who did not do b.a.l.l.s.

"I shudder to think what your mother would have to say about all this, Lewis," an old lady said to him once, at brunch at the Carolina Yacht Club. Those I could manage.

"Everybody's saying you're just turning your back on your whole heritage."

Her gaze skimmed me and bounced off.

"Come on, Tatty," Lewis said to the old lady, who was undoubtedly an aunt or a second cousin or a something-in-law. "You know I never went to parties much."

"Well, you did for a while," she said. "And it was lovely to see you out and about."

I knew she was referring to the Sissy era, and my face burned, but where once it would have been embarra.s.sment, now it was anger.

The old lady tottered away on her Ferragamos, and Lewis said, under his breath, " 'But that was in another country, and besides, the b.i.t.c.h is dead!' "

Every head in the dining room turned at our adolescent snicker.

We never moved out of the Bull Street house. Year after year, we went to Sweetgra.s.s, and we went to the house on Sullivan's Island. We had occasional trips, some abroad, but somehow, wherever we went, I felt like a bird perched on a wire, ready for flight. I often had the feeling that the beach house was where my real life was, and that the rest was a sort of rich, endlessly fascinating half-life. I enjoyed, even loved, downtown Charleston, but it was where I went to wait to go to Sullivan's Island.

I did not see how the others could possibly feel the same way; it was the mind-set of the pilgrim, not the clan dweller. And yet, looking at us all on the beach or in the sea or before the fire, listening to us walking and laughing, listening even harder to what we did not say, I thought that perhaps they felt it, too, a little; that this place and its dwellers might truly be the reality, and all the rest its shadow. That in some atavistic way it was home, and we were family. I know that I felt that way all the years that we were together.

We few were a mult.i.tude.

When I think of the second summer I went to the beach house, I think of dogs and light.

There seemed to be dogs everywhere that year: on the beach; in the surf; b.u.mping along with their owners in golf carts toward the little cl.u.s.ter of shops at the foot of the bridge; lolling in patches of shade under porches and cars; trotting in amiable phalanxes along Middle Street, noses searching the weedy roadsides for who knows what. They ran heavily to pointers and setters, working dogs for the many hunters who summered on the island, and small, scruffy, happy-looking mutts. The days of the glut of labs and goldens was still in the future.

We had our own tribe at the beach house. Charlie's two Boykin spaniels, Boy and Girl, came almost every time the Currys did, and spent a great deal of time sleeping on the porch and eating whatever they could beg. They got plenty. All of us spoiled the dogs.

"Best hunting dogs in the world," Charlie said fondly. "They're legendary. Mouths as soft as velvet. They've never messed up a single duck."

"That's because they've never retrieved a single duck," Lewis said lazily, from the hammock. "Charlie hates hunting. These are two of the most expensive lap dogs in Charleston."

"Well, if I hunted them they'd be the best," Charlie said, grinning. It was almost impossible to annoy or anger him. He remains one of the most amiable men I ever knew.

"They are sweet, but they p.o.o.p more than any other dogs I've ever seen," Camilla said. "I never go anywhere without my scoop and my Baggies."

And that was true. It was Camilla who took the dogs on long daily walks down the beach. Her tall, slightly stooped figure and the manic dogs became a fixed thread in the tapestry of that summer. The dogs would careen crazily from the dunes to the surf and back, sniffing for crabs and turtle-egg holes. Camilla's chestnut hair blew back in the wind, and sometimes you could see her lips moving, talking to the dogs. She bent frequently to scoop the prodigious p.o.o.p. Often she went out of sight past where the beach curved, far to the east. Occasionally she stayed gone for hours. We did not worry about her. She would come back eventually, still serene, her hair tangled, fresh pink glowing on her wonderful cheekbones. The panting dogs would collapse on the porch.

"You don't want to run them too far," Charlie said once, earnestly, and the rest of us burst into laughter. The idea of Camilla Curry running a couple of legendary hunting dogs to exhaustion was ludicrous. Sometimes she walked the beach without the dogs, and came back much later carrying sh.e.l.ls in her cupped hands. She never seemed to want company, and we did not ask to go along. Camilla moved in a bubble of privacy.

Henry's springer spaniel, Gladys, came, too. Gladys lived summers at the old McKenzie island house, over on the inland waterway. Fairlie and Henry's daughter, Nancy, often brought her brood out to the house for the summer, and when she did not, Henry's handyman lived on the place and took care of Gladys. Gladys, Fairlie said, loved Leroy far more than she did Henry, but when she was with us at the beach house, Gladys stuck to Henry in an ecstasy of love. She was a pretty thing, and Simms said she was one of the best dove dogs he'd ever seen.

"I've been trying to get Henry to breed her so I can have a pup, but he wants her to stay a virgin. He sure knows how to show a girl a good time."

"Gladys is above matters of the flesh," Henry said from under the brim of his hideous fishing hat. He was sprawled in a folding chair, his long legs, golden furred, stretched out before him. He wore no shoes, and I noticed that even the hair on his long toes was blond. Henry, the golden one of us. Somehow, I was surprised that Henry hunted.

Simms's hunting dogs were kept in a kennel on his plantation on Waccamaw Island, but Lila's ridiculous toy of a Maltese came with them to the beach. Sugar was yappy and erratic and winsome, and she had the heart of a lion. It was wonderful to see her dashing into the surf after the big dogs, her little legs beginning to pump and her chin held above water before the others were ankle deep. The men groused about stuffed toys, but Sugar spent a great deal of time in everybody's lap, especially mine. I loved the silly, great-hearted creature.

Lewis's hunting dogs, Sneezy, Dopey, and Sleepy, had a luxurious kennel and run out at Sweetgra.s.s, shaded from the sun and larger than my old apartment. Lewis no longer hunted, saying that one day he just decided not to blow birds out of the air anymore. But he adored the dogs, and when we were at Sweetgra.s.s, they lay before the fire with us, swam off the dock in the river with us, and slept with us on Lewis's grandmother's beautiful old rice bed. I loved the dogs, too, but they snored horribly, and I often gave up in despair and crept into the guest room when the whistling honks grew too loud. Lewis would find me there in the morning, and would shake his head and promise to banish the dogs to their kennel at night, but he never did. They did not come to the beach house.

"Enough is enough," Lewis said. "I don't want to spend my Sundays scooping setter s.h.i.t."

So Sneezy, Dopey, and Sleepy stayed home, where Robert spoiled them with duck breast and lamb and hunted them in the woods and marshes of Edisto. It was as good a dog's life as I could imagine.

That was the first year I ever saw Sullivan's Island's celebrated Fourth of July parade. It was a ragtag, joyous, seat-of-the-pants affair, with decorated golf carts and a motorcycle or two from the Isle of Palms, and the island fire trucks and ambulance, sirens wailing, and many children. All with dogs. The island dogs, most of whom knew each other from their nocturnal garbage-can scoutings, pranced along beside their young owners, decked out in flowers and tiny flags and ribbons. There was every kind of dog imaginable, and they were all unified by the pride of the day and the joy of belonging to Sullivan's Island. Our dogs did not march, but when the fireworks display arced and spat into the blue night sky, they howled in uniform accompaniment, their anthem to our country's birthday. Some of them lived in Charleston homes older by years than that.

So, the summer of the dogs. And the summer of the light.

The island light that year was simply magical, at least to me, who had never seen it so before. It was honey gold and soft, and so clear that everything-Charleston in the distance, Fort Sumter nearer by, the great tankers and freighters that pa.s.sed, the navy's eerie, death-silent black nuclear submarines that occasionally broke the water off the beach-seemed to be outlined in crisp, deep blue. I remember no heat shimmering from the beach, no mist, no fog at night. At least when Lewis and I were there, the moon and stars were as distinct as a night-sky chart in a child's cla.s.sroom, and the black, white-creamed water often danced with phosphorus. Lewis and I went into it late one night, naked and shivering a little, and felt the silken water alive with the soft hiss of sea fire. Afterward, we made love behind the first dune line. There was nothing else for it.

"This is pure heaven," I said on the porch, after a long August lunch. "I've never seen such weather, not that lasted so long. No wonder everybody comes to Sullivan's."

"It's not like this often, not by a long shot," Henry said. "August is usually just as miserable out here as it is in Charleston. You can just get wet quicker. This is unusual. I don't remember a summer just like it, do you, Lewis? Camilla?"

"I mainly remember mosquitoes and sandburs," Lewis said.

"I remember Daddy saying that the old-timers said a summer like this was a weather breeder," Camilla said, not looking up from her knitting. "But I never saw much weather bred out here except thunderstorms and heat waves."

"You'll know something's coming if you see the Gray Man," Simms said, grinning.

"What's that?" I said. Somehow I did not like the sound of the words.

"n.o.body quite knows," Simms said. "A man in a long gray cloak is supposed to appear on the beach if there's a bad storm coming. When they see him, people know to prepare."

"If I saw him, I'd prepare to get out of here," I said, shivering.

"Simms, you know that's only on Pawley's Island," Lila chided. "n.o.body's ever seen him anywhere else."

I looked at her. I had expected her to dismiss the Gray Man as a child's ghost story, but her face was serious.

"Do you believe in him, Lila?" I said.

"Well, I don't not believe in him," she said slowly. "Daddy has a friend on Pawley's who claims to have seen him, and two days later there was a tornado there. Lots of people have seen him. I don't know if there have always been storms, though."

Driving home that night, with the silver pepper of the stars fading out as the lights of Charleston rolled up over the bridge, I said to Lewis, "Do you believe in him? The Gray Man?"

"Not really, but I don't want to give him up, either. I can't think of anywhere else but the Low Country that has a Gray Man."

We were all at the beach house that Labor Day, and while we were there, Henry finally persuaded me to go with him on one of his missions of mercy, this time to the mountains of central Mexico.