Islands (13 page)

“Are we all insane?” Fairlie said that first day, watching Tyrell and a crew of men from Simms’s factory begin to unload supplies and clear rubble.

“Probably,” Henry said. “But don’t you want it fixed up?”

“Of course, it’s just that we never have anything worse than a few floods and muddy racetracks in Kentucky.”

“It costs a good bit to live in paradise,” Camilla said, smiling at the battle-scarred old house that had been her family’s. “Daddy would have been tickled to death to see that the widow’s walk is still standing, when St. Michael’s steeple and those others took a hit. He was quite proud of being a practicing pagan.”

The warm, still autumns of the Low Country linger long, sometimes until nearly Christmas. Simms’s crew worked steadily through October and into November, and we worked along with them on weekends. Back in downtown Charleston our houses were pretty much in order, and the plantations on Edisto and Wadmalaw were whole and functioning, if still sodden. Our offices were being healed, though slowly. I eventually got used to seeing downtown as it was in those first months; you can get used to anything, or at least fit it into the grid of your experience, so that it does not shock and pierce you anew every time you see it. Of all the sad wreckage around me, only the decimated old live oaks in White Point Gardens had the power to stab my heart and bring brine to my throat each time I saw them. Generally, I think, we knew that we were as okay as we could be at the moment, though in other parts of the city desolation was still unrelieved. All our attention went, that fall, to the beach house.

On the last weekend before Thanksgiving, we packed food and brought wine and a bunch of late zinnias from Lila’s garden and prepared to finish the roof and the porch painting, and then to celebrate. Lewis brought champagne, and Simms brought a sack of oysters he had dug the day before from his creek bank on Wadmalaw. Henry and Fairlie had saved driftwood from their long walks on the beach that fall, and it was silvery dry and ready to go into the fireplace. Camilla had taken the bedding and quilts home and cleaned and dried them, and brought them back, sweet smelling and fluffed, and put them on all the beds in the house.

“Just in case somebody wants to spend the night,” she said.

“I know who that somebody will be,” Charlie said, smiling at her. She shrugged and wryly smiled back. It was fitting, I thought. Their bedroom had been hers as a girl. Let them be the first of us to fall asleep to the wash of the waves and wake to the clean, fresh smell of salt and seaweed.

It was a nearly perfect day, one of those gilded ones you remember at odd moments for the rest of your life. I see it most often just before I fall asleep. The sun was lower now, of course, but at midday it was warm enough to discard sweaters and jackets. Indeed, Lewis was in shorts and a T-shirt, and Fairlie changed into a bathing suit from the drawer upstairs and swam, defiantly, for about five minutes. The rest of us cheered her on, but made no move to follow. The low angle of the light turned the calm sea to a sheet of glittering pewter, and she came dashing out of it like some sort of gangling goddess. I saw Henry grin, secretly, and Camilla, watching them both, smiled, too.

We took the dogs out for the first time. It had simply been too hectic to watch over them before, and I thought that they would be nervous and agitated by the alteration of their world. I need not have worried about Boy and Girl; they were off for the water, noses to the sand, before the car door had closed behind them. Sugar followed, bounding up and down like a little rabbit, the better to see over these new dunes. Only Gladys was not happy. She had shivered and whined when we drove up to the house, and in the end Henry had had to carry her in his arms and settle her on the newly screened-in porch. She stopped crying, but she did not move from her spot under the hammock, and I sat in it and swung gently and patted her.

“She needs to get back on her horse,” Henry said. “She can’t be afraid of the island for the rest of her life.”

“If you’d sat out a class-four hurricane under this hammock, you’d be afraid, too,” I told him.

Lewis and I and Simms and Lila finished painting the walkway and steps early in the afternoon, and Henry and Fairlie raked up debris and stray nails and scraps of screening and dried palm fronds, and dumped them into a huge lawn basket they had brought. Camilla and Charlie finished the last of the shingling. I remember sitting on the top step of the walkway, with the warm, tan sand and the blue sea stretching away beyond me and a sweet, light breeze on my face, watching them. Charlie was on the roof of the porch, tearing off damaged shingles and tossing them down to Camilla. He had taken off his shirt, and his big shoulders and barrel chest had pinked in the sun, and his nearly bald head gleamed red. Every time he loosed a shingle he called, “Heads up!” and Camilla, her chestnut hair loose and blowing around her face, her slender arms and hands flashing, would try and catch the shingle, or retrieve it from the sand, and toss it onto the mounting pile on the big tarp. She caught a good many of them, moving as lithely as the tomboy she had been when she was a child here. She was laughing up at Charlie, and he grinned back. It struck me that I had never seen them doing anything physical together. Even when we danced, Camilla danced with someone else. Charlie, as he protested over and over, did not dance. But in this coordinated ballet of toss and catch, you could see how good they might have been together, if they had danced.

Later that afternoon the air grew cool and the low sun set, and Henry laid the driftwood fire and lit it. It sputtered a moment and then flared and settled to a soft, hissing roar. We all applauded. The heart of the house had come alive.

We sat for a long time after roasted oysters and shrimp gumbo, reluctant to let the evening go. I felt as though I had slipped into a secure berth after a long, wild sea journey. I think we all did. No one spoke very much. But we smiled a lot.

Lewis opened the champagne and poured it, and I passed it around. He lifted his glass, standing before the fireplace.

“To the Scrubs,” he said. “One for all and all for one. And to the house.”

We all lifted our glasses and said, “To the house,” and drank. I put my glass down and smiled over at Camilla, who was sitting on the hearth with her arms wrapped around her knees. But she did not look at me. She was watching Charlie, who sat opposite her in the old wicker rocker, with a faint line of puzzlement between her eyes. I looked, too.

Charlie sat very still, glass in hand, staring straight ahead into the fire, a look of mild amazement on his face. And then, as slowly as a melting snowman, he leaned forward, out of his chair, and slid gently to the floor. The champagne glass crashed and tinkled, and a small lake of fizzing foam spread around it.

Lewis and Henry were kneeling over him in a second, and I found myself gripping Camilla’s icy hands as we stood staring.

“Help me get him to the Navigator,” Henry said sharply. “It’s the biggest. I’ll get in back with him. Lewis, you drive.”

“Wait…,” Camilla began in a voice with no breath behind it.

“No time,” Henry barked. “Anny, bring Camilla in the Rover. Fairlie, go with them.”

“Where?” I said stupidly.

“Queens. Emergency entrance. Leave the Rover out front. I’ll square it with security. Come on, Lewis, let’s
go
!”

The Navigator squealed out of the driveway and was out of sight down Middle Street before Simms and Lila and Fairlie and I got Camilla into the Range Rover. As they pulled out, I saw Henry in the backseat, pounding Charlie’s chest with his fist. I could not see Charlie’s face. Henry’s was fierce, focused.

On the careening drive back across the two looming bridges, I said nothing, but Simms, in the front seat, turned to Camilla in the back and spoke softly and steadily, in an even, everyday voice. I did not hear what he said. I could hear Lila murmuring to Camilla, too, but not her words. When I looked in the rearview mirror, I saw that she and Fairlie had their arms around Camilla, and Camilla was sitting very straight and still and white, her eyes fixed on the road ahead. In all the maddening time that it took before we screeched up to the emergency entrance at Queens Hospital, I never heard Camilla make a sound.

It only occurred to me after I had braked to a stop that I had driven over the two horrifying bridges with no more thought to them than a four-way stop sign.

When we reached the coronary intensive care unit, Henry and Lewis were sitting on a plastic-covered couch in the waiting room. They were silent, slumped, heads back against the couch. Both wore green scrubs, with masks dangling around their necks. I could see from the doorway that Henry was soaked to the waist with sweat. Their eyes were closed, and their faces were gray with fatigue.

Henry seemed to sense us before we made a sound. He stood up. Camilla stood stock-still, staring at him, and he held his arms out to her, silently. Like a sleepwalker she walked into them, and he folded her against him, close and hard. Lewis went over and hugged them both. No one spoke.

The original Sullivan’s Island three, I thought, and began to cry. Behind me, Fairlie and Lila did, too. Simms made no sound but a small, strangled choke.

Late that night, as we led Camilla out of the coronary care unit and toward the Range Rover, she stopped and looked around at all of us. It was, Lewis told me later, virtually the only time they had heard her speak.

“We finished the house, didn’t we?” she said, in a child’s wondering voice.

“We by God 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

O
N 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 anchored off her face with a band or her sunglasses, 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 God 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 God’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 clustered 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 shore 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 space 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 hassle 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 goddamned 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 space around the back stairs. Fairlie had been dispatched to be the lookout for them.

“Holy shit,” 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, God, 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 goddamned ‘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.