Low Country (13 page)

than Clay.

Almost everyone does it better than me. The young

women who clicked along on their sensible heels beside

me in the soft, wet night, stumbling every now and

then on a cobblestone, knew very well they were sacri-

ficial lambs in an alien land, knew that they were here

almost on suffer

106 / Anne Rivers Siddons

ance, to be petted and cajoled while their husbands

were courted; knew that sooner rather than later they

would be on their own in this wilderness, while their

men received the keys to the kingdom. They had a

keen, if terrible, sense of Charleston; I thought they

might never alter it. I felt an unwilling stab of sym-

pathy. I suppose all the new company wives go

through something like this unwanted epiphany, but

some seem to relish it, and others at least to try to put

a gallant face on it. These two did neither. Sally

Bowdon-Kirkland looked straight ahead, neither smil-

ing nor responding to anything Hayes or I said, simply

gone away behind her long, narrow New England

features.

Barbara Costigan cried.

When we picked up her and her husband, Buddy,

at the guest house, her blue eyes were swollen almost

shut and her little porcine nose was pink and raw. Al-

lergies, she said; something in the air down here that

they didn’t have at home in Old Greenwich. But I

know the stigmata of tears when I see them. Later, on

the way to Charleston, I would hear an occasional

rattling sniff from the backseat, where the young

Costigans sat, and a murmur of concern from the

stolid Buddy. In the restaurant Barbara’s slitted eyes

leaked almost continually.

“Wow,” she said over and over. “I hope you’ve got

some good allergists down here.”

Low Country / 107

“Oh, yes,” I said. “Some of them, I think, from

Connecticut.”

She and Buddy were a pair: both square and short

and tanklike, though I rather thought that Barbara’s

flesh was newly acquired. Her short-skirted silk dress

fit her like the casing of a sausage and was obviously

a size or two too small. It was also a delicate shell pink,

which might have suited her fair skin and flaxen hair

if the former had not been splotched vermilion and the

latter sprayed into a helmet against our all pervasive

humidity. Buddy was blond, too, but a lighter shade,

near-white. His skin was red. His smallish features sat

in the middle of a large face as if someone had drawn

them on a balloon, and radiated self-confidence and

benignity. I’d have thought him the archetype of the

young German burgher but for the last name. Clay

had said that his IQ was off the charts. They looked,

all told, like a little couple on the top of a wedding

cake. I winced, thinking of the twin sunburns they

would sport from April to October.

The Bowdon-Kirklands were of a piece, too, though

I thought that it was a spiritual twinship instead of a

physical one. She was tall and very thin, almost six

feet in her Ferragamos, and he was perhaps a half-inch

shorter, and wiry. Tennis, I thought, for her and golf

for him. It was obvious both of them were sports

people. Their smooth tans spoke of good private grass

courts and deep

108 / Anne Rivers Siddons

water sailing and golf somewhere like the Maidstone

Club, where both had been members since birth. Both

were lank-haired, long-featured, and awesomely collec-

ted. Both were polite. Both were as distant as Uranus.

He spoke pleasantly in a New England honk but sel-

dom to me. She spoke hardly at all. There was no sign

of tears in her slightly protuberant gray eyes. I ima-

gined that she probably wept only when her favorite

hunter had to be put down, and then a good grade of

English toilet water, the kind with a number instead

of a name.

Peter Kirkland had been first in his class at Wharton.

Sally, I remembered, had done something at a museum

in Boston.

I tried at first.

“Do you have children?” I asked the young Costigans

on the way over.

A great sniff from Barbara, a hearty “Yes, we do, a

daughter,” from Buddy, followed by more whispering

and sniffling. I wondered what was wrong there.

Postpartum depression, perhaps? A child somehow

flawed?

“She’s only a month old,” Buddy said. “Our parents

thought it would be better if she stayed behind with

her granny and a nurse until we know where we’ll be

living. She’s a little beauty; her name is Elizabeth

Sloan, but she’s already Sissy, just like her mama was.

We miss her a lot, don’t we, Barbs?”

Low Country / 109

A sob, disguised as a little cough.

No wonder, I thought. Dragging that poor child all

the way down here and leaving her new baby behind.

What could he have been thinking of?

Turning around, I said, “Well, there are wonderful

things for children to do in the Plantation. The chil-

dren’s program is famous, and of course the weather

is almost always nice, and the beach is perfect for small

children almost all year round. Sissy will love it. Sum-

mer is paradise for kids.”

“We’ll be spending our summers on Fire Island,”

Barbara Costigan said in her little-girl whisper. “My

parents have had a house in Point o’ Woods forever.

We always go there. I went there every summer of my

life. I met Buddy there. The house was my grandpar-

ents’.”

“Now, Barbs,” Buddy said heartily. “I bring you

down to one of the most famous beach resorts in the

world and you go on about Fire Island. Just wait till

you see the beach in the Plantation; you’ll change your

mind in a minute.”

Barbara was silent. There would be, I knew, no

mind-changing there, about beaches or anything else.

I could almost see the fine, tensile steel filaments that

bound her to her family back up North.

Still, she tried, too.

“Do you have children, Mrs. Venable?” she asked

politely.

110 / Anne Rivers Siddons

“My son is twenty-two,” I said. “He’s in graduate

school.”

It is what I always say, when I am asked.

“Well, that’s nice. I always thought boys must be so

much easier to raise,” Barbara said, in the tone of one

who thought no such thing. “You’re lucky you never

had to put up with the wiles and the flirtiness of a little

girl. Even one as little as mine—ours. They’re just

shameless. Sissy has Buddy wrapped around her little

finger, and my father—”

She made a small noise and fell silent, and I knew

that Buddy had heard about Kylie and pinched or

poked her.

Another sob. I sighed.

“She’ll have a lot of company,” I said cheerfully.

“There are several new babies in the staff family this

year, and it seems to me that most of them are girls.”

“That’s nice, isn’t it, Barbs?” Buddy said. She did

not reply. I felt real joy when we saw in the distance

the spires of the bridge over the river into Charleston.

Toward the end of the evening, when neither young

woman had spoken for long minutes and I was consid-

ering asking Hayes to order another bottle of Merlot,

he suddenly roused himself from the contemplation of

his wineglass and said, “You’ll have to go and see

Caro’s paintings sometime, Sally, you being in the art

game yourself.

Low Country / 111

She’s really good. She shows all over the place:

Charleston, the island, you name it.”

Sally Bowdon-Kirkland turned her fine mare’s face

to me.

“You paint?” she said, as if she thought I might

perhaps have an example of my work with me, and

she would be required to examine it.

“A little. Nothing special. It was my major at school.

Tell me about your museum work; I’ve been meaning

to ask you. Are you a docent?”

“Actually, I own the museum,” she said, smiling a

little for the first time and revealing long teeth. I felt

as if I should offer her a sugar cube.

“Well, goodness…”

“It’s a very small museum, really. We show mainly

American minimalists who worked after 1980. I’m

hoping to make it one of the tops in its field, though;

and I’m having some luck with acquisitions. Or

rather…I did have. I turned it over to my cousin when

we…knew we were coming here.”

I thought, not for the first time, how hard the life of

a Plantation corporate wife is. They are not permitted

by policy to work for the company, and the families

are required by policy to live where the husbands work.

That limits career opportunities to primarily resort

areas. There is not a real estate position left in the

Lowcountry, I don’t think. Commuting to Charleston

is almost out of the question, in drive time. Some of

the

112 / Anne Rivers Siddons

young marriages do not survive it; some wives with

esoteric degrees and formidable skills find that, after

all, they cannot live in such air. Those who do not

leave adjust, I suppose, make their separate peaces,

but it seems to me that there is a good bit of drinking

around the club pool in the afternoons. I know that

human resources is kept busy with references for

counselors, of one sort or another. There is a list of

them posted in the corporate office, alongside the baby-

sitters.

“Well, it’s no substitute, but some of our galleries

are really good, and there are about a million museums

in Charleston proper. I should think any of them would

carpet your path with palm branches, if you’d like to

keep busy,” I said.

It was not the right thing to say.

“Keeping busy is really not my first priority,” she

said. “Finding a new American idiom to nurture is. My

family has been instrumental in that for a long time.

A distant kinswoman of ours founded one of the great

American museums. It’s in Boston. The Gardner. Per-

haps you know it.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know it.”

I did not think that Sally Bowdon-Kirkland would

be one of the ones who made a separate peace. Look-

ing at Peter Kirkland, oblivious, as he had been all

evening, to anyone but Clay, I wondered if he would

notice.

A moment later Barbara Costigan suddenly

Low Country / 113

jumped to her feet, clutching her napkin to her chest,

and fled, knocking over her water glass. We watched,

open-mouthed, as she floundered around the corner

toward the ladies’ room.

“Oh, no,” Buddy said. “I’m sorry, folks. She’s…it’s

been hard on her, leaving the baby. I think she’s got

all kinds of hormonal things going on.…”

I looked over at Sally Bowdon-Kirkland. She was

studying her newly arrived crème brûlée judiciously.

She looked up at me.

“Do you think you ought to…?” I began.

She lifted her shoulders.

“We just met this evening. I’m sure she’d rather have

you,” she said.

I got up and went into the ladies’ room. It seemed

empty, but I could hear alternating sobbing and

flushing coming from one of the stalls.

“Honey, it’s Caro Venable,” I said. “Please don’t cry.

Come on out and let’s talk about it. There’s nothing

so bad that we can’t fix it, I promise.…”

She sobbed steadily for a time, but gradually she

stopped. There was another flush and then she came

out, rubbing her eyes like a child and scrubbing at the

front of her dress. It was stained almost to her chubby

waist.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “They leak; almost

every time it’s time to feed the baby, they leak awfully,

even though she’s not here, and I…

114 / Anne Rivers Siddons

I thought I had enough Kleenex in there but I don’t.…”

I looked at her in the harsh fluorescent light and felt

an actual pain in my heart. I also felt a sharp, cold

pang of anger at her husband and Clay and the com-

pany. Poor, bereft, sodden, frightened little soul.

“I remember that,” I said. “It’s awful, isn’t it? But it

stops. Before you know it it will have stopped, and

then you’ll have your baby with you and everything

will be better. This is a hard time. I know it is. Come

on, let’s get your face washed and some fresh lipstick

on you, and I’ll just drape my cardigan around

you…like this…and nobody will ever know. We’ll say

you spilled your wine.”

“She’ll know.” Barbara Costigan hiccupped. “She’ll

know I was sitting there leaking like a cow and crying

like a fool. You can just bet she’s never leaked anything

in her life, or even cried…”

I knew that she meant Sally Bowdon-Kirkland, and

did something I virtually never do. I ridiculed one

corporate wife to another. I did not feel one iota of

guilt about it, either.

“If she leaked anything, it would be ice water,” I said.

“Come on. You won’t have to see much of her at all,

once this night is over. Being friends with every woman

down here is not in the company policy manual. You’ll