Beach Music (36 page)

Lucy nursed Harriet through her bout with pneumonia and did it with grace and good cheer. In those two weeks the Waterford-maligned Miss Cotesworth found the daughter she never bore and in the last two years of Harriet’s lifetime Lucy learned how a daughter is supposed to act when a mother figure lies dying before her. Both brought sufficient wounds from their own pasts to make up for the extraordinary abyss that separated them socially.

Harriet continued the process that Ginny Penn had begun in Charleston and began to teach Lucy some of the traps and perils she would encounter during her life in Waterford. The older woman told Lucy of the secrets and scandals that had disfigured the histories of the old families of Waterford. There was nothing like a scandal to demythologize the sheen and vigor of a grand old South Carolina name. She proved this by telling Lucy about the fall of a dozen distinguished families whose patriarchs and sons could not keep their hands off girls from the lower classes. Though Harriet was telling the same story that had befallen Johnson Hagood, she did not seem to make the connection, for her growing affection for Lucy had blinded her.

On November 5, 1948, I was born in an upstairs bedroom of the Varnadoe Cotesworth house in the four-poster bed where generations of both Varnadoes and Cotesworths had been born. I was christened Johnson Varnadoe Cotesworth McCall at Harriet’s insistent urging, and Lucy was delighted to comply since the name infuriated Ginny Penn. All Waterford laughed when Lucy bestowed this honorable, tongue-twisting name on her firstborn son, but Harriet Varnadoe Cotesworth wept with happiness. It had been her intention to name a son after her beloved father and she’d finally lived to see this wish consummated.

The Varnadoe Cotesworth in the central nervous system of my baptismal name caused me great discomfort during my childhood because the whole town knew that I was no Cotesworth and had
never laid eyes on a natural-born Varnadoe. My passport and driver’s license identified me always as John V. C. McCall and during the Vietnam War I claimed to campus activists at the university that my parents had named me for the Viet Cong. Throughout my life, it was only with a rare friend or deep in the middle of a drunken evening when I would reveal, with shame and apology, the pretentious midlands of my given name.

For six months Waterford laughed at Lucy’s grandiosity until Harriet died suddenly in her sleep. The laughter stopped forever when Harriet’s will was read and everything she owned, including the Varnadoe Cotesworth house, went to Johnson Hagood and Lucy McCall.

Ownership transfigured Lucy. She loved the size and shape and simple grandeur of the house where she would raise her children. The house imparted to my mother a passion for beautiful architecture, an uncanny eye for antiques, the habits of a gardener, the compulsiveness of a birdwatcher, and a love of the sound of rainwater tap-dancing on an oxidized tin roof during a summer storm. Both she and my father restored the rundown overload of antiques they found in the rooms and halls and attics throughout the house. The house brought them together in a way nothing else had done, not even my birth.

The Varnadoe Cotesworth house was a valediction of my parents’ queer union, but the story behind their unexpected inheritance transfigured my mother and made her feel that she might be in the middle of living out a lucky life despite everything. Lucy called it the greatest story ever to come out of the South and told it to those reverential clusters of tourists who would traipse through our house each year in the Spring Tour. My mother would dress up in Southern crinolines, her bare shoulders pretty in the candlelight, and give the visitors a brief history of her house before she blew their socks off and changed the Spring Tours forever by relating the story that Harriet Cotesworth had told her in the days leading up to my birth.

Each year my brothers and I would gather to hear my mother describe the lovely Elizabeth Barnwell Cotesworth, Harriet’s great-aunt, who once walked the wide board pine floors where we played
as rough and tumble boys. She would tell her story with such passionate conviction that we, her worshipful sons, would think she was narrating the tale of her own maidenhood, when we thought she must have appeared as lovely and magical to young men as she did to us.

“Her name was Elizabeth Barnwell Cotesworth,” my mother would begin, “and she was born in the bedroom where my own son Jack was born well over one hundred years later. Her beauty was legendary by the time her parents sent her to a finishing school in Charleston. While attending a dance South of Broad, Elizabeth first met a presentable young lieutenant stationed at Fort Moultrie by the name of William Tecumseh Sherman. One dance with her put this West Point graduate under her spell.”

Whenever Lucy mentioned the name of the Anti-Christ, Sherman, a gasp would go up from the assemblage who were mostly Southern and had grown up with their relatives passing down stories of Sherman’s rape and despoliation of the South. No Southerner, no matter how liberal of spirit, could ever forgive Sherman’s prodigious March to the Sea when he broke the back of the Confederacy forever. My mother played the crowd’s abhorrence of Sherman for all it was worth. We would stand above her, lined along the banisters in our pajamas, and my mother would wink at us and we would wink back as her voice continued to weave the spell of Elizabeth and her suitor. Though the crowd never saw us, we kept in Lucy’s line of sight and her story thrilled us every time we heard her tell it. Each year, we heard the story grow and change as she added details of her own. Because the story of Sherman and Elizabeth belonged to my mother and to her alone, it marked the beginning of her transfiguration in Waterford society. All through my childhood, she met those well-dressed crowds on the Spring Tour who moved from street to street led by guides who carried silver candelabras to light their paths. Since she had been onstage before, Lucy found that playing her part of a Southern lady of breeding and leisure was easy. When she greeted the hushed, shuffling throngs who approached these old houses as though they were private chapels, Lucy could hear the indrawn breath of the entire group as she made her appearance on her
own veranda wearing a dress that Ginny Penn had given her. Through the years, as my mother gained confidence in herself and in her position in the town, she became famous in the neighborhood for her storytelling gift. My mother gave credit where credit was due and claimed she owed it all to General Sherman. My poor brother Tee, who grew up mortified by his given name, Tecumseh, was christened in honor of the soldier, not the great chieftain.

When I was a senior in high school, one of my Christmas gifts was my own ticket to the annual Spring Tour of homes. Many of the parents of my classmates went in together and got a special group rate, thinking it was high time that their graduating seniors learned about the architectural glories of our town. That night, in 1966, I approached the house I grew up in as a tourist for the first time and I shared the crowd’s wonder when my mother stepped out in her Southern plantation dress, her hair done in ringlets, her face aglow in the soft, falling light of candles. I looked upstairs and saw my younger brothers positioning themselves between the spaces of the dowels on the upstairs veranda. In the early years my mother was callow and got many of her facts wrong but she told the story of the house on this night with an air of solid professionalism. Her voice was lovely as she welcomed the group that gathered in a semicircle before her front steps. When she welcomed the ten seniors from Waterford High, we let out a great cheer.

I was holding hands with Ledare Ansley and we were coming to the end of our high school romance. Jordan was dating Shyla and Mike and Capers had brought the sassy McGhee twins whose parents sat on the Board of the Historic Foundation. I had always heard the Sherman story hidden away in shadows, catching snatches of it as my mother led the crowd from room to room.

I cannot tell you how proud I was that night when I listened to my mother’s voice begin to tell the story of Harriet Varnadoe Cotesworth, which led to the story of Harriet’s great-aunt Elizabeth. She had been born in a rare Waterford snowstorm and some of Elizabeth’s extraordinary charm was attributed to the six inches of snow that blanketed the town on the night of her birth. As I heard Lucy list all the delicious details of Elizabeth’s life proclaiming the
former occupant’s specialness and all-absorbing rarity, once again I fell under her spell.

Making a motion for all of us to follow, my mother led the visitors into the living room where she waited patiently for all to settle in before she continued. Shyla held onto Jordan’s arm, saw me watching them, and blew me an exaggerated kiss that I pretended to catch in midair. Mike Hess carried a passion for history even then and he hung on every word my mother spoke. Capers lifted up a serving dish from a secretary in the hallway, turned it over, and read the word “Spode” to himself. Capers knew well my mother was an upstart and a pretender and he hoped to catch her in an error of taste. But Lucy had a seventeen-year head start on him and she long ago had perfected her game plan. What was inauthentic in our house, and there was much, was kept well out of sight during these azalea-rich days of the Spring Tour. In the early years, she had made such missteps, but social humiliation was a fast cure for either oversight or ignorance. She covered her traces well and never made the same mistake twice.

“After that first dance, Lieutenant Sherman wrote to Elizabeth in the raw, honest prose style he would use in his memoirs. He told her that his dance with her had changed his life forever.”

“Do I have that same effect on you, Jordan?” I heard Shyla whisper near me.

“The same,” Jordan whispered in her ear.

“And you, Jack?” she said, winking at me.

“Elizabeth,” I whispered to her. “Oh, Elizabeth.” And Shyla curtsied and an older lady put her finger to her lips.

“Sherman told her that it was the first time in his life that he consciously wished for a band to play on forever and for a waltz to never end,” my mother said. “But he had to join a veritable army of low country gentlemen who knew that Elizabeth was the one exceptional prize of that season. All the Charleston boys were mad for our Elizabeth.

“But it was Sherman who intrigued her, Sherman she wrote home about to her mother and father, who read these letters in this very room. She described the walks that she and her lieutenant took
in the long afternoons. The walks were slow and intimate and they told each other secrets about themselves they had never told anyone else.”

Capers raised his hand and Lucy said, “Yes, Capers, do you have a question?”

“Was Sherman handsome?” he asked. “I always thought he was ugly as homemade sin.”

The members of the group laughed demurely.

“Was Sherman as good-looking as Capers?” Mike said. “That’s all Capers really cares about, Mrs. McCall.”

Again there was good-natured laughing and Lucy said, “He was not considered a handsome man by his contemporaries. But as many of the women in this room could tell you, looks are not always the main thing. There is the matter of character, ambition, and passion. People speak of his intensity. There was even rumor of a Charleston boy from a good family who wanted to challenge Sherman to a duel because of Elizabeth. But it was Sherman’s look that made him think Sherman might be the wrong man to challenge.

“Sherman kissed Elizabeth, at least once, and there is proof of this in a letter that Elizabeth wrote to her young niece, Harriet Cotesworth’s mother. After that kiss, both felt themselves betrothed to each other forever. It was then that Sherman came to this house to meet Elizabeth’s parents. It was in this room that Sherman asked to have a word with Elizabeth’s father alone. He asked Mr. Cotesworth for his daughter’s hand in marriage. When Elizabeth and her mother returned from a nervous walk in the garden, both women broke into tears when they smelled cigar smoke. Let us go into the library and I’ll tell you what happened.”

My mother led the way, slim-waisted and girlish, and I felt myself about to burst with pride for her bravura performance. She had turned herself, through years of dedication and hard work, into a woman worthy to live in this house. A fierce autodidact, she had remade herself into something she had not been born to be. I felt like carrying a sign saying that it was my mother conducting this tour and telling this story. Already, I could feel the group hooked by the unlikely romance of Sherman and Elizabeth.

“What happened?” Mike Hess said as the tour settled about the library with its leatherbound sets of books.

“Whatever it was, it sure wasn’t good for the South,” an elderly man said. “She’s talking about the devil incarnate.”

“The Sherman boy sounds kind of sweet to me,” the man’s wife said, teasing him.

“On May 13, 1846, Congress declared war on Mexico,” my mother said, “and the following week Lieutenant Sherman received orders that his battalion would join the Army of the West before moving out to the territory of New Mexico to defend Santa Fe.”

“What about Elizabeth?” Shyla asked.

“Did she get married, Mrs. McCall?” Jordan asked.

My mother played the crowd perfectly, then said, “William Tecumseh Sherman and Elizabeth Barnwell Cotesworth never laid eyes on each other again.”

There was an audible gasp and Lucy waited a moment before resuming her narrative. But now she had them all in the palm of her hand and I learned much about how to hold the attention of strangers by observing my mother closely that evening. Her voice began again, rising up above the breathless, ingathered group who strained to hear her every word.

After a full year passed, they broke off their engagement with great regret on both sides and six months later Elizabeth married Tanner Prioleau Sams, a merchant from Charleston with an impeccable family line and possessor of all the effortless grace of the Southern manner that Sherman, with his chilly Midwestern reserve, had lacked. Tanner Sams had been the spurned suitor who had talked of challenging the young Sherman to a duel because of his courtship of Elizabeth. Patience and the outbreak of a strange war won the heart of Elizabeth for Tanner Sams, who remained grateful to the armies of Santa Anna until his dying days.