Islands: A Novel Part 9

"We by G.o.d did," Henry said. She was clinging to his arm as if she was an old woman. He took her weight.

"You're coming home with us tonight, no questions asked," Fairlie said. "In the morning we'll deal with...everything. Tonight you need to rest."

"No," Camilla said. "Just drop me by Tradd Street to get the car. I'm going to spend the night at the beach house."

"Well, then, we're coming with you," Lila and I said together.

She looked around at all of us.

"No," she said, and her voice was low and rasping, as if she had been screaming. "It was my house first and it will always be my house, and that's where I'm going. Do you think I could spend one night on Tradd Street without him? That was our house. The beach house is mine. And if any of you try to come with me, or come checking up on me, I'll...call the police. I swear I will. Let me be, now. I have a lot to rearrange."

We stared, stunned.

She took hold of Henry's arm again, and he just nodded at us, and together they walked down the long white hall and into whatever would be the rest of Camilla's life.

Part Two.

5.

ON A SMOKE-GRAY AFTERNOON in late October 1998, we sat on the porch of the beach house, wrapped in sweaters and towels against the stiff little wind out of the east. Soon it would bring rain; you could smell it coming, and there would be a big wind, because it was born in the east where all the big changes get started. It would be the end of the lingering, muted colors of the few hardwoods, and probably the end of the long, sweet fall. Already we lit the fire earlier, and came in out of the purpling twilights ready for heat and drinks and hot food. But on this afternoon the sense of endings was powerful, and we shivered on the porch longer than we might have otherwise.

Something was gnawing at the back of my mind, something out of memory. I could almost see it glimmering in the depths there, like a goldfish. But I could not catch it in my hands. It seemed important, but I did not know why. It wore a sheen of unrest like scales.

I heard the wind pick up, and across the windows the spatter of sand from off the top of the dunes. We all lifted our heads.

"Summer's over," Henry and Lila said together, and we all laughed. I got it then.

"Do you all remember that time that I was down on the beach, and I thought I saw Camilla on the dunes? It was an afternoon like this, when you knew the weather was changing for good. And everybody laughed at me, and said I'd seen the Gray Man, and that a storm would be coming..."

And then I stopped. Not three weeks later Hugo had come. And Charlie had been one of those who teased me about the Gray Man. I looked over at Camilla.

She smiled from her rocker beside the fire. It had become her place since Charlie had been gone. Before, it was his.

"It's okay," she said. "It's been a long time. We talked about that, Charlie and I. He thought it was funny, even after Hugo. He said he was surprised it had been you who saw the Gray Man; he would have thought Fairlie, maybe. I don't think he thought you were given to...fancies. After Hugo I remembered it from time to time, but I never laughed at it."

I studied her in the firelight. I thought that of us all, the past ten years had changed her least. Of course, by now the osteoporosis had bowed her considerably, and there were streaks of silver in the thick chestnut hair. But her medieval face was unlined, and her brown eyes still glowed in their hedge of lashes. She still wore her hair tied back at the nape of her neck, and sometimes still let it blow free. She was still slender, still fine boned, still as serene as a white candle. She still walked the old dogs on the beach, albeit much more slowly, and she still laughed with Lewis and Henry about their early days on the island.

She spent a great deal of time at the beach house now. At first we all worried about it, about her being alone and lonely for Charlie, but we came to see that in some primal way it nourished her. There was color in her face now that had not been there for a long time, and she laughed more often than I could remember her doing. I thought that she was truly beautiful now, as a few women become when they reach their early sixties.

The rest of us had not fared so well. Henry was totally white haired, though still lanky and brown as a stork. Lewis had lost all but a tonsure of his red hair, and now his head was as freckled as the rest of him. Fairlie was still as slim and supple as a girl, and her red hair still flamed in the sun, but the skin of her face had wrinkled all over, very finely, like loved old organza. From a distance you did not notice it; Fairlie now was very nearly Fairlie then. But only nearly.

Lila had grayed and somehow shrunk a bit-Charleston women did not let themselves get fat-but she still wore her chin-length bob anch.o.r.ed off her face with a band or her sungla.s.ses, and her long, flowered skirts, and her voice was still true and piping and sweet. It was hard to think of Lila as the coolly competent real estate magnate that she had become, but she owned her own firm now, and made, literally, millions. The old houses south of Broad were being bought up by the dozens by affluent newcomers, and renovated, and Lila sold a good number of them.

Simms was totally gray and had grown a mustache, also gray, that should have looked ridiculous on his round downtown face, but somehow did not. He had stopped, I thought, looking like the youngest one in the men's grill at the yacht club. When had that happened?

I had threads of white in my explosive black mop and a bottom that cried out for the panty girdle I would not wear. Thank G.o.d Lewis proclaimed it merely "cuppable." And there was a little more chin now. Forty-five was not thirty-five.

I felt a great flush of love for us all that afternoon. We were still the Scrubs. When I looked at us, my brain registered the changes, but my eyes still saw us all as we had been in those first summers. Our then-faces were imprinted on my retinas. The heart sees what it needs to see.

The house truly had not changed in any essential way. Even the porch railings and the stairway to the boardwalk that we had built in the weeks after Hugo were a little shabby now, and teetery. And the then-new roof shingles had weathered to the no-color of the old. There were a couple of formidable leaks on the stair landing and in the kitchen, and there was a lot of talk about getting them fixed, but somehow no one made the call. We set out pots when it rained and enjoyed the tinkle and plink of raindrops into them. I don't think that anyone wanted any more change.

"We'll have to do it sometime," Lila said worriedly, the real estate doyenne in her coming out. "It's going to depreciate a good bit if we don't."

"For G.o.d's sake, have you listed it?" Lewis said, and she flushed and laughed.

"Of course not. I just can't stand the thought of it...rotting away."

"It's always been rotting away," Camilla said comfortably. "Even when I was little, something was always wrong with it. If it was all fixed up and decorated, I don't think I could stay in it."

"Well, it's surely not that," Fairlie said, and we smiled complacently.

It surely was not. The house wore the same shingling and sported the same lumpen, damp-smelling upholstered and peeling wicker pieces that it had when Camilla inherited it. Lila had brought out a smart new flokati rug to replace the paper-thin old oriental that had been soaked when Hugo's rain came flooding down the chimney. It was thick and creamy and invited lolling, but no one lolled. Its very whiteness, in all that musty dimness, kept catching the corners of our eyes. Finally Lila gave up and dug the sour old oriental out of her attic and dried it in the sweet air and sun, and put it back down in front of the fireplace. We and the house all sighed together with pleasure, and Lila gave the new rug to Camilla for in town. Outside, the dune lines were not the original ones, and crepe myrtles had replaced the slain oleanders and palms that cl.u.s.tered around the porch, but that was outside. Inside was still us.

From the very beginning, I was surprised by how small a hole Charlie left in the fabric of the beach house. It was not that we did not miss him; one or another of us would tear up regularly when somebody spoke of Charlie, and Boy and Girl, gray muzzled and lame these ten years later, still looked eagerly for him when they got out of the car and struggled up the steps and into the house. That alone moved us regularly to tears. When it happened Camilla would pet the dogs fiercely and then look away, out at the ocean. She hated for anyone to see her cry. Few people did.

No, it was rather that the sense of us as a unit was somehow unbroken, and the knowledge that somehow Camilla contained Charlie so completely that, even absent, he was comfortably here. I felt joy that the integrity of the group was not compromised, even when a loved member was gone, and once said so to Camilla.

"The center will hold," she said.

"It feels like he's still here, "I said to Lewis shortly after Charlie's death.

"He's probably down around Cape Horn by now," Lewis said. For when Charlie died, Camilla had had him cremated, as he had wished, and we had scattered his ashes in the sea in front of the beach house.

Nearly everybody but us was furious with Camilla. All the older women in her life-and there were many, because, like Lewis, she was related to half of Charleston-were aghast.

"Your people have always been in Magnolia Cemetery," one of a bridge-playing flock of them said to Camilla when she had me to lunch at the yacht club, two days after Charlie died. "What on earth can you be thinking of? Cremation? Throwing him in the ocean like bait shrimp? What would your mother say?"

"Probably 'Is it lunchtime yet?' " Camilla said under her breath.

Her sister, Lydia, did not speak to her for days, and her mother, still living, if not sentient, at Bishop Gadsden roused herself from her succoring torpor long enough to spit out, "There is no place but Magnolia. Your father will be appalled. Who was it again you said you wanted to dump in the ocean?"

Her two sons and their strange California families came to stand silently on this unprepossessing eastern sh.o.r.e and watch their mother, in shorts and T-shirt, wade into the ocean with the Episcopal minister from Holy Cross, a family friend, and consign their feathery gray father to the white-laced water.

"Don't we have a plot at Magnolia?" the oldest said. "I thought we had enough s.p.a.ce for everybody. We've always counted on it."

His tan surfer daughter and thin wife rolled their eyes. I could not imagine they gave a lot of thought to Magnolia Cemetery.

"I know Daddy by rights didn't really belong at Magnolia, but you sure do, and we do. Didn't anybody ha.s.sle you about it?" the younger son, who did something with food irradiation in a Silicon Valley town known only to technicians, said. I knew that he had left Charleston to go to MIT and had since not spent more than two weeks at a time at home.

Camilla lifted her head and smiled at her cuckoo child.

"You can take the boy out of Charleston, but you can't take Charleston out of the boy," she said. Her face was damp, whether with tears or seawater I could not tell.

"It's what he wanted," she went on gently. "Your dad always said he thought Magnolia Cemetery looked like the set for a grade-B vampire movie. He asked for the ocean. Come to that, I think I will, too."

"I may have to have you cremated," the son said grimly, "but I will not scatter you in this G.o.dd.a.m.ned ocean."

"Dump me in an ashtray then," Camilla snapped, tiring of it all. "I'm surely not going to care."

We were all surprised, and I, for one, wanted to cheer. I had seldom heard Camilla raise her voice. It was good to know that she could get angry, and even better to know that she could be a very funny woman. I wanted to hug her.

The day of Charlie's ceremony was as clear and gentle as late summer, though it was the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Hugo had left an ironic legacy of sweet, luminous weather. The sky was a tender blue, and the sea, without rancor, creamed and hushed on the beach. Most of us had spent the night before at the beach house, and Lewis and I and Fairlie had gone swimming in the morning. The water was still as warm as blood, as amniotic fluid. At noon, while we were still sitting on the porch surrounded by bottles of flat champagne, with which we had toasted Charlie's handsome bronze urn, the first of the cars from Charleston came lurching and grinding into the sandy s.p.a.ce around the back stairs. Fairlie had been dispatched to be the lookout for them.

"Holy s.h.i.t," she called back from the kitchen, where she had been peering out the window. "It's a big old Lincoln town car with a chauffeur and about a million old ladies, and they're all wearing hats! What do I do with them?"

"Oh, G.o.d, it's Mother's garden club," Camilla gasped. "I didn't ask them; I sort of put the word out that it would be just us and some of Charlie's people from the hospital, but I should have known they'd come. That's Margaret Pingree's car and it must be Jasper driving. I thought he was dead. Maybe he is dead, and just doesn't know it. Listen, you guys, you'll have to go down and get them around to the boardwalk somehow. Two of them that I know of have bad hips, and Margaret is on a walker. We can't possibly get them up the back steps and then back down again. Fairlie, you and Lila and Anny help me get some chairs down there. We can put them along the top dune line and they can watch from there. Be careful, Henry, Lewis. They'll all have on their G.o.dd.a.m.ned 'little heels.' "

I began to laugh helplessly, and after a moment all the women joined in. We were still laughing as we lugged chairs down the steps to the boardwalk, clad in shorts and T-shirts, barefoot because we were all going into the water with Camilla and Charlie. Camilla brought up the rear bearing Charlie's urn; she was shaking so with silent laughter that I feared we would end up anointing the dunes and sandburs with Charlie, instead of the eternal sea.

Charlie's service was a stupefying mixture of Episcopal and Gullah and rock and roll, and should have been ludicrous, but was deeply moving, at least to us. I could not see the garden club ladies or the sons of Charlie and Camilla; they stood on the first dune line, and we were at the edge of the surf, letting it lap our ankles. But I could hear an occasional hiss of outrage among the sniffs, and thought that whatever it might mean to us, this moment by the sea could not compete with St. Michael's. Fortunately for everyone, Camilla mostly, there would be a memorial service at St. Michael's on the next Wednesday, followed by a proper reception at Lila and Simms's Battery house, which had been hastily and thoroughly cleaned and repaired by Tyrell and crew from Simms's plant. Even Lila's grandmother's cherished orientals had been restored and were back in place on the newly varnished wide pine floors in the double drawing rooms. There was no more sign of Hugo there except glaring sunlight where palms and live oaks had once stood. The Howard name got a lot done quickly.

But this was Charlie's day, and Camilla's, and in a very real way ours, and we took Charlie down to the sea he loved in our own way.

The tanned, balding minister from Holy Cross, where Charlie had gone if he went to church at all, stood knee-deep in the water, waiting for us, the Book of Common Prayer in his folded hands, his brown legs bare below his swimming trunks. He wore, instead of a clerical collar, a faded Grand Strand T-shirt. A plain metal crucifix hung around his neck. I supposed it was to identify him as clergy in case anyone of an official status caught him flinging ashes into the ocean and asked for an explanation. The clergy would not, of course, lie, but could claim certain ecclesiastical immunities. But we were not worried. No official had ever been seen on the beach this far to the west. All the action was around the crossroads, and east toward the Isle of Palms.

Creighton Mills had been a childhood friend of Camilla and Lewis and Henry's, and he smiled when we walked into the surf and stopped in a ragged line. Camilla stood in the center, and Creighton gave her a little salute.

"I still can't get used to the idea that Creigh Mills can save my soul," Lewis whispered to me.

"Better one of our own," Henry said under his voice.

Creighton looked at Camilla for a long moment, and then read in a quiet voice, from the Book of Common Prayer, " 'I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.

" 'I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: and though this body be destroyed, yet shall I see G.o.d: whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger.' "

There was a pause, and I heard an old lady say in the loud, flat voice of the nearly deaf, "Well, at least it's the 1928 one, and not that dreadful hippie thing they're doing everywhere now."

Beside me, I heard Lewis snort.

"Shut up," I hissed.

Creighton Mills gave a barely perceptible nod and Henry clicked on the small ca.s.sette player he carried. I had not seen it before. Over the soft hush of the surf, Bobby Darin's voice lifted up: "Somewhere, beyond the sea..."

I knew that Charlie had loved the song, and felt my eyes sting. Lewis squeezed my hand. Then the music segued into "Long Tall Sally," "Little Darlin'," "Whole Lot of Shakin' Goin' On," the Shirelles's "Foolish Little Girl," Charlie's personal favorite, and finally, "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay," to which we had all danced on the sand and the rough planks over the water, and the beach house's tired gra.s.s matting.

It was just right. Even as I felt tears start down my cheeks, laughter rose in my throat. I looked over at Camilla, who, with Lewis and Henry, I learned later, picked the songs, and nodded. She nodded back, smiling, her eyes wet.

Creighton Mills looked at Camilla again, and she inclined her head, and from behind us we heard the scuffle and scrabble of paws, and the c.h.i.n.k of chains. We turned to see Simms leading Boy and Girl, exuberant and stretching their leashes taut, down to the surf's edge. They strained to get into the water, and looked up at Camilla in bewilderment when they were not allowed to run free.

"Stay, sweeties," she said softly. "Stay and say good-bye to Daddy."

I did begin to cry then, and so did Lila. Fairlie stared fiercely out to sea, her throat working. I did not dare look at Henry and Lewis. Gladys did not come down to the beach; she stayed on the porch, from which she never strayed now, along with Sugar, whose m.u.f.fled yips rose over the sound of the waves and the seabirds. But they were with us. Our whole family was here.

Then down the steps from the boardwalk four women came, black women in long skirts and bright blouses and jewelry and feathers, women who walked like queens and sang as they walked. As they sang, they shook small tambourines and one carried a curious little drum with a voice like faraway thunder. I recognized Linda Cousins, Lewis's housekeeper, at the head of the procession. As she pa.s.sed, she grinned over at us. Lewis gave her a great, leering wink.

Around Charleston and the Low Country, there are groups, mainly black women, who preserve and perform the old songs and shouts of the Gullah slaves who brought them from Africa long ago. They are magnificent; people travel many miles to hear them. I remembered that Charlie had been entranced by them, and often dragged whoever he could corral out to the old Moving Star Hall on John's Island, where, he said, the best of the Gullah praise singing could be heard. He was right. To hear them is to fly back on a dark wind to a time when fires burn in forests and drums speak, and magic walks. I did not know that Linda Cousins was a member of one of the groups, but I knew without being told that Lewis had arranged this for Charlie, and pressed his hand hard. He squeezed back.

At the water's edge the women sang, "Oh, hallelujah, hallelujah, glory hallelujah, you know the storm pa.s.sing over, hallelu. The tallest tree in paradise Christians call the tree of life, you know the storm is pa.s.sing over, hallelu."

And they sang, swaying and clapping, "Reborn again, reborn again, oh, reborn again. Can't get to heaven less you reborn again. Oh, Satan is mad, and I'm so glad, oh, reborn again. Lost the soul he thought he had, oh, reborn again."

After several more shouts and songs, some exuberant, some solemn and poignant, they slid sweetly into "Deep River." When the last notes faded away, the silence rang like a bell. It seemed to me that even the sea paused, and the wind that marked the turn of the tide.

Creighton held his hands out to Camilla, and she waded into the water, her eyes fastened on his face, bearing Charlie's urn, until she stood beside him. The slow, heaving green water broke around their legs, hers pearl white, his tanned. He took her free hand in his, and closed his eyes, and said something so softly that only Camilla could hear him. Her lips moved with his. I still do not know what Charlie's final prayer was.

He lifted his voice and said, " 'Unto Almighty G.o.d we commend the soul of our brother, Charles Curry, departed, and we commit his body to the deep; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection unto eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ; at whose coming in glorious majesty to judge the world, the sea shall give up her dead; and the corruptible bodies of those who sleep in him shall be changed, and made like unto his glorious body; according to the mighty working whereby he is able to subdue all things unto himself.' "

He nodded to Camilla. She lifted the urn slowly to chin level, and pressed it against her cheek, and then she cast Charlie's ashes into the ocean. A band of jagged, running shadows flew over us just at the moment the ashes settled, before they were whirled away, and we looked up to see a flock of pelicans, perfect pterodactyls, flying so closely over the surface of the sea that we might have reached up and touched them. They were not afraid of us; the pelicans of Sullivan's Island have been here far longer than we have, and with far less intrusion. Charlie had loved pelicans. Camilla turned around to us, her face running with tears, and smiled.

" 'The Lord be with you,' " Creighton Mills said.

" 'And with thy spirit,' " we all murmured. Most of us were crying openly now.

Simms let Boy and Girl go then, and they dashed into the still-warm, creaming surf and raised their doggy voices into the sky in praise of water.

That evening I went up to the widow's walk atop the house. I don't really know why; somehow we had never gone there very often. From that height you could see the entire island, and over to the Isle of Palms, and back to Charleston, and the port docks and gas tanks, and the inland waterway. It was a remarkable view, but I think that we did not often want to be reminded that the beach house was part of a teeming, sprawling whole. Up here, that fact was inescapable.

But there was almost always a spectacular sunset, especially in the late autumn, and the post-Hugo ones had been breathtaking. The men often sailed at sunset, coming in out of the sinking sun to the dock on the inland waterway, and I think, looking back, that I went up to see if they, with Charlie, would come gliding in. The sun was a great dying conflagration, vermilion and purple, shot through with gold, and empty of humanity. No sails broke its skin, no Scrubs, no Charlie. The wind picked up, with, finally, late November hidden in it. I turned to go back down, but then Camilla's head appeared at the top of the spiral staircase and I waited.

She came out onto the little railed s.p.a.ce and put her arm around my waist and laid her head on my shoulder. She had to lean down to do it. She wore a thick Fair Isle sweater of Charlie's, and had brought one for me. It was tattered and pilled and smelled of salt and smoke and Charlie. I put it on gratefully.

"Did you come up to see him off?" she said, smiling a little. I nodded. To try and speak just then would have been a disaster. She squeezed my waist.

"I guess they don't call it a widow's walk for nothing," she said.

Very clearly, and for the first time, I thought, Charlie isn't coming back. He died and I'm never going to see him again.

A great void opened inside me, and I felt myself sliding into it. My knees buckled and I sat down abruptly on the rough boards of the widow's walk. I cried; I cried so hard that for a s.p.a.ce of time I could not get my breath, and thought that I would choke. Through the great salt tide of grief, I thought, stupidly, This has got to stop. I never cry. Not like this. What will Camilla think?

"I want him back," I gasped. "I want him back."

"So do I," Camilla said.

She sat down beside me and pulled my head down to her shoulder, and rocked me gently back and forth. After a while I could catch my breath, and the tears slowed and then stopped. Still, Camilla held me.

"I've never seen you really cry," she said, and her voice was serene. "Charlie would be honored, I think, but he'd hate to think he caused you such grief. It's right to mourn him now, but I hope you'll come to think of laughter and foolishness when you think of him. I hope we all will. It's a better legacy than tears."

She kissed me on the cheek and straightened up.