Islands (17 page)

“It’s one reason I moved here, with the elevator and everything on one floor,” she grumped. “I don’t need a young harem doing my bidding. It embarrasses me.”

“Where would you be if you fell and broke a hip?” I said.

“Right up here with a live-in something or other,” she replied. “There’s room. I made sure of that. And then, of course, we’ll all eventually be living together somewhere wonderful on the water; and the rest of you can tote things for me. I’ve got it all covered.”

Since Charlie died we had not spoken of our plan to move in together and care for each other when we reached retirement age, and it gave me a flush of pure comfort to hear her refer to it. Things were still the same. Loss had not altered us. All systems were still go.

In the years since that time, my office had flourished and expanded its services, and I truly believe it was in part because Camilla’s extensive network of well-heeled contacts associated Outreach with her, and opened their purses accordingly. She had no official connection to us, and I never asked her for one; she did not sit on my board and I would have died before I would have let anyone solicit her on our behalf. But there she sat, a floor above us in this pretty downtown house like a benevolent angel, and I had heard more than one of our supporters say, “How are things doing up at Camilla’s?”

Sometimes she would bring a visitor or an associate on one of her endless projects—she was literally never idle—down to meet us on their way out, and often ended up holding a fractious child or grabbing a ringing phone.

“You see what they’re coping with,” she would say to her guest. “You remember Outreach at Christmas.”

And many of them did.

I loved my small office on the second floor, with its arched Gothic window that looked into a little courtyard bordered with palmettos and flowering shrubs. There was a small wrought-iron umbrella table and chairs there where clients could wait and we could have a quick meal or a Coke, and a joggling board, which had come from Camilla’s Tradd Street house, that enchanted our small charges. Lewis and Henry had built me a little raised brick fishpond and Lila and Simms had gifted me with four gorgeous, flashing koi, who grew sleek and spoiled and enormous from the offerings of the children. When a great blue heron had taken to perching like a gargoyle in the live oak overhead and glaring hungrily at the koi, Lewis fashioned an ornamental screened gazebo over the pool, and the heron soon flapped creakily off elsewhere.

But we did not lack for wildlife. Besides the koi, our garden was home to a tribe of pretty green lizards, and a family of fat squirrels, and once, in our first spring there, a pair of mallards had swooped down and spent two or three days looking us over and scrabbling about in the shrubbery as if they were making a nest. Eventually they left us for a much grander garden and pool, but I had been enchanted with the two wild visitors. They seemed a fortunate omen, part of the magic of the place.

I didn’t see as much of it as I would have liked, however. For the previous two years, I had been doing something different, which I loved, that felt as if it might ultimately help change and heal lives. In the years since Outreach had moved into the new space, I had accompanied Lewis and Henry on more trips to scavenged places withering from lack of medical attention, and I had met many more doctors who gave their time, as Lewis and Henry did. Always it was my mission to try and set up a rudimentary community resource center for whatever village we were in, and I got pretty proficient at it. None of the doctors we worked with knew of anyone else who was doing anything similar.

“It would be a godsend if somebody like you was available to all the medical teams that go out,” a stout, red-faced tropical disease specialist said, one itching, steaming evening in the Guatemalan jungle. He was swatting miserably at mosquitoes and drinking vodka like water. I was itching, too, but at least Lewis and I had a small, bare, clean room with mosquito netting all to ourselves in the tottering little inn on the riverbank, and there was actually a rusty fan, and a coughing shower. I was grateful. Rudimentary as it was, it did not approach the sheer gaudy awfulness of the upstairs of the whorehouse in the mountains of Mexico.

Henry and Lewis looked at him, and then at me.

“Why not Anny herself?” Henry said, and Lewis grinned slowly and nodded.

“Like a consultant, you mean,” the red-faced doctor said.

“Like that,” Henry said. “Groups could hire her as part of their teams; I think your national organizations would spring for a fee if it wasn’t ridiculous. She could go wherever she was needed most, not just with Lewis and me. She’s a pro at this now, and she doesn’t take up much space or eat much. She’ll sleep anywhere, too.”

I glared at Lewis and he leered showily.

“I couldn’t leave Outreach that much,” I protested, seeing the idea form itself in my head even as I demurred. “And I’d be away from home a lot more than I want to be. I’m at the age when I should be slowing down, not taking on a whole new career and routinely slogging around in jungles or deserts or wherever. It’s a good idea, though.”

Lewis leaned back in his dilapidated chair and swigged warm local beer, grimacing.

“Well, how about this?” he said. “How about you fly into one or two cities a month where they have medical volunteer programs like ours, and maybe a couple of times a year to Washington, and have seminars on setting up these programs? Teach the docs how you do it and how to recruit local talent, show them what and who’s needed and how to locate them wherever the teams go. Maybe teach seminars for the nurses, too; they’re probably the ones who’ll end up setting up the programs. Make up brochures and a slide show or film or something showing what you’ve done in other places. Get some testimonials.”

“I…how can I leave the office that long?” I said. “And who would hire me? I’d have to make at least enough money to cover expenses. I could donate my time, but airfare and hotels—”

“
A
,” Lewis said, “Outreach can run itself by now. You know that. That Marcy of yours could head it and you could keep a little office space there if you liked, help out when things were slow for you.
B
, who’d hire you? Anybody sponsoring these groups, in a New York minute.”

“But how would they know about me?”

“Are you kidding? This bunch tells their sponsors. They tell others. And so on. You’ll be launched in a month.”

“Right, by God,” said the tropical specialist, swatting on his neck something large and evil that was not a mosquito, but no longer noticing. “I’m calling my bunch before we leave here.”

I thought perhaps his promise would be washed away with the piss of the next morning’s hangover, but it was not. I had an invitation in Pittsburgh and one in Houston before we left the jungle.

It’s what I have done ever since. I keep a cubicle at the office in Charleston, and pay Outreach a modest rent, and I help out every now and then when they’re abysmally overloaded. But mainly I spend a couple of days almost every week in cities around the country, and the rest of the time I’m on the phone with clients, or in meetings when they come to me. I miss working daily with Outreach, but as Henry had predicted, Marcy is a superb director, and with our enlarged staff and Camilla’s bridge pals’s largesse, the office rolls smoothly on largely without me.

Sometimes I hated that. I would think back to the early days, of scrabbling for funds and holding wet, squirming babies and chasing down empty-headed teenage mothers and trying to coax another summer out of my disreputable old car. I would remember the day I met Lewis, in the steaming rain in his parking lot, clutching a wriggling abandoned child, and my heart would squeeze with love and wistfulness for that wild-haired young woman and outrageous red younger man.

But all in all, I loved what I did, and I knew that it was important work, and I still went home most evenings to the dancing wild man, who was, if less red-thatched on top, still a laughing, freckled dervish. Lewis, in his sixties, had lost little but hair.

We spent a lot more of our time out at Sweetgrass in the latter part of the decade. Lewis had acquired a rangy, dedicated young partner for his practice, and spent a great deal more time in the charity clinic. But except for emergencies, he kept his clinic hours to the first three days of the week, and came home to the Edisto house on Wednesday nights or Thursday mornings. When I came back home to Charleston now, it was in all probability to Edisto that I went. The slow, dreaming spell of the river and marsh, and the sweet whisper of the old oaks and longleaf pines in which Lewis had planted many of his acres for a cash crop to run the plantation, and the grassy hummocks and skeins of drifting gray moss soothed my airline-jangled nerves, and gave me back my young husband.

For Lewis flourished like the proverbial green bay tree at Sweetgrass, and I could see, in his freckle-splotched face and wide, sweet grin, the day that we would sell or rent Bull Street and divide our time between Sweetgrass and the beach house. We only kept the house now for a place to spend the night in town, or to put our feet up during a long, hectic day. I still loved my funny little Gothic cave, but more and more, Sweetgrass was mine and Lewis’s real home.

The beach house was still our collective home, the home for the entity that was the Scrubs. Wherever we strayed, no matter what changes had come to us, we all came homing back to Sullivan’s Island like pigeons, whenever we could manage it. It seemed to me to be even more precious now, with the years spinning faster away from us, than it had been in that golden time when time itself seemed to bubble like a bottomless spring from the sand.

Henry, too, was semiretired by now, and devoted a great deal more time to his trips out of town with the flying doctors. Fairlie, still darting and restless of mind and body, had largely given up her dance classes, and grew bored and snappish in Henry’s absences. She finally surprised us all by taking up riding and then teaching equestrian courses to children and preteens at the big equestrian center on John’s Island. She bloomed again in the long, sunny days on horseback, and even entered a couple of shows on the hunter-jumper she preferred. She won in her class both times.

We were all surprised; Fairlie had never before shown any interest in riding. We did not even know that she rode, or if she had told us, did not remember.

“But I always did at home, until I came to the College of Charleston,” she said. “I was damned good. Ribbons and cups all over the house. It feels wonderful to be back at it, and Henry’s gone so often. I’m thinking of buying my own horse. We always had them at home, though they were mainly flat racers.”

“What does Henry think of all this?” Camilla said in amusement.

“He thinks it’s great. Keeps me off his back.”

“A horse will go great on Bedon’s Alley,” Simms said, grinning. “You can keep him in the kennel with Gladys.”

For old Gladys, thin and patchy in her hide, and limping, was still alive and in relatively good health, and still fiercely and devotedly Henry’s dog.

“The Japanese call it the one-pointed heart,” Camilla said once, observing Gladys’s devotion. “They talk about it in reference to artists who are consumed by their work, but I don’t see why it shouldn’t apply to dogs. I’m reading a book about sixteenth-century Japanese art.”

“I thought you were writing a book,” Lila said, smiling at her lifelong friend.

“That, too,” Camilla said

Our old dogs out at Sweetgrass had long since died, and lay now in the dog cemetery under a live oak behind the house, in the herb garden Linda Cousins kept. There were many of them, the dogs of this place, back to the very first one, Lewis said. He often went to visit them in the cool of the evenings. Robert Cousins, who had been the master of many of their hearts, kept the graves clipped and mowed and the small headstones upright. I thought that he grieved truly for them. He and Lewis talked of them often, as if they had been old friends, lost. Well, of course they had.

Lila’s wild-hearted little Sugar was gone. It seemed to me that she simply and finally wore out her great, joyful heart and went to sleep. Lila cried for days, and I cried, too. I had loved the ridiculous little dog, who had never known her boundaries. Simms had given Lila another Maltese, a puppy, for Christmas that year, and she was a lovely little thing, petite and winsome and so feminine as to make you laugh. Lila swore she batted her long eyelashes at you. Her name was Honey. Lila doted on her. I could never really warm to her, after my love affair with the tiny tiger that had been Sugar. But she went everywhere with Lila, in her large Realtor’s tote, to all appointments and to the office and shopping, to the beach house.

“You spend more time with that dog than you do Simms,” Fairlie said once to Lila. Fairlie was not a fan of Honey. The little dog had bitten her knuckles sharply when Fairlie reached to pet her.

“Well, I wouldn’t stick my hand right in your horse’s face…if you had a horse,” Lila had said, in defense and only half teasing.

“A well-trained horse wouldn’t bite no matter what,” Fairlie had snapped. “Maybe ‘well trained’ is the operative word here. Does she bite Simms? I’ll bet she does.”

“I don’t think she really knows who Simms is,” Lila said sweetly.

We shifted uncomfortably around the dinner table. Simms’s trips away were escalating as he neared retirement age, and his career was not slowing, as the other men’s had. Logically, we all knew why. The medical-supply company was represented on three continents now. Simms would want to see everything in order before he eased off and passed the reins. We all supposed it would be to his daughter Clary’s methodical Rotary Club husband, by whom he had three interchangeable grandchildren. I wondered sometimes if he had not simply had his order for a son-in-law and successor filled early on. Timothy was perfect in both respects. It was difficult to tell how Clary felt about it. She was, as Fairlie said, the uncrowned soccer mom of the Western Hemisphere, totally immersed in her children.

Lila and Simms were very rich now, much more so than any of us were or ever would be. But very little had changed on the surface of their lives. They still lived on East Battery, in the beautiful old house they had always owned. They still came to the beach house, though Simms not so frequently as the rest of us. They had let the place on Wadmalaw go, and mostly Lila worked. Simms sailed often, ferociously and alone. Once in a while they spent some time with their daughter’s family on Kiawah, but the children and grandchildren of Lila and Simms did not come to Sullivan’s Island.