Low Country (3 page)

project has a different management group, and he

draws them from businesses and business schools all

over the United States, but a preponderance of the

young men and their wives come from the Northeast,

from Wharton and Harvard Business Schools and

others like them. No matter what property they are

slated for, they all come here first. Basic corporate

training in the Peacock

16 / Anne Rivers Siddons

Island Plantation way of life starts here, and the aver-

age stay for a young family is two years. Some of them

end up spending three, five, and more years. To a man

and woman, they know little when they get here but

the theory of business. It remains for Clay and the

other Peacock executives to put a Peacock shine on

them. It is often a hard and daunting process; it has

not been all that unusual, in the past, for young mar-

riages to be strained and sometimes broken, for de-

structive habits to take hold: too much liquor, too

many recreational drugs, too much time spent in the

attractive company of others than one’s own husband

or wife. The active one of the couple, usually the hus-

band, spends long hours away from home, living and

breathing the Peacock party line, leaving the young

wife adrift on a languid island in a warm sea, cut off

from home and family, alone with small children and

only the company of other corporate wives, who have

wrestled out their own places here and are not eager

to take in the newcomer and her brood, lest she be the

spouse of the very one who will oust their own hus-

bands from their hard-won places in Clay’s court. Clay

argued, when he put his proposition to me, that he

could not afford to take the time to arbitrate this sort

of thing, and that if left unattended, it could come to

wreck the famous Peacock morale. I thought the whole

thing tiresome, heartbreaking, and entirely thankless,

but I could

Low Country / 17

see that he was right. Somebody needed to take hold

of the newly arrived young. I just did not think it

should be me.

But Clay did, and I could hardly refuse. I had not

yet found refuge in my painting when he asked, and

even I could see that if I did not find something outside

myself to occupy me, I was going to be in serious

trouble. I have always known that he asked more for

my benefit than for the cadet corps of the Peacock Is-

land Plantation.

I knew now with absolute certainty that he was

about to produce a new crop of the needy young. He

had that look. “Don’t tell me,” I said. “Let me guess.

A new crop of lambs is incoming as we speak.”

I smiled as I said it, though. He was smiling again,

and I would give a lot to keep hold of that smile. After

all, I had agreed to this role, and I do what we call the

mother-superior bit rather well. The young women

who are my charges all seem just young enough so

that I don’t threaten them with competition, and I have

both the advantage of knowing the territory and the

cachet of being the supreme honcho’s wife. And I

never drink when I’m on a mother-superior mission.

I know that Clay doesn’t worry about that. I don’t do

the children, though. Peggy Carmichael, the warm,

big-lapped, grandmotherly woman who has been

Clay’s director of housekeeping since the begin

18 / Anne Rivers Siddons

ning, does that. It works out pretty well, all told.

“Yep,” Clay said, draining his coffee cup and leaning

back. There was a sheepish cast to his smile now,

which is the second most appealing smile that he has.

The first, hands down, is his let’s-go-to-bed smile. I

am fairly sure that no one else but me sees that one.

“So? I didn’t know you had anything new on the

books.”

“I don’t, strictly,” he said. “There’s something on the

horizon, a marsh property a ways from here that’s

looking real good, but I wasn’t going to start staffing

for it yet. But these three coming in are all special, top

of their classes at Wharton and anxious to get started

somewhere, and I was afraid if I didn’t nail them down

somebody else would get them. And some serious

money looks like it might open up sooner than I

thought. So I’m bringing them and their families on

down. Just two couples and a divorced woman. I’m

going to need you for this. Your light will hold a few

more nights, I think. Will you, Caro?”

“So when are they coming?”

“They’ll be here early this afternoon. I’m putting

them up in the guest house until we can get two of the

villas ready. Don’t worry, they won’t be staying here.”

“Tonight! Oh, Clay! I can’t get a dinner party ready

by tonight; Estelle’s got the afternoon off,

Low Country / 19

and there’s some kind of Thanksgiving pageant or

something at school; all the others will be there with

their kids.…”

“No, no. I thought this time we might just take them

over to Charleston. They’ll have time to freshen up

and rest some, and we can show them a little of the

island on the way. Maybe you could call the Yacht

Club and see if they can get us in about eight. It’s a

pretty impressive place, and I hear one of the wives is

not at all happy about leaving Darien and New York.

Thinks she’s coming down here to live among the

savages. It won’t hurt to throw some vintage Charles-

ton at her. Let her know she can get to civilization in

less than an hour.”

“Ah, yes, the Holy City,” I said, getting up to call

the Carolina Yacht Club and make reservations. Clay

has belonged for years now; and I still don’t know

how he managed it. Few outsiders made it into those

hallowed halls on Charleston Harbor at the time he

joined. I know that he never tires of taking newcomers

there, just as I quail inwardly every time I know that

I am going. Clay does not understand why I feel tent-

ative at the Yacht Club.

“After all, this was your grandfather’s town,” he said.

“And your great-great-great’s, for that matter. You’ve

got a more valid claim on it than half the people who

live here.”

I rarely answer him. It is a long way from

20 / Anne Rivers Siddons

McClellanville, where my grandfather lived for most

of his life, to Charleston and the Carolina Yacht Club,

and the twain seldom meet. They never did for my

grandfather, or my great-great-great, either, truth be

known, but Clay has forgotten this, if he ever really

knew it.

“Oh, wait a minute,” he called after me, and I

stopped and looked back.

“There may be a problem. This woman who’s com-

ing. She’s probably the best of this lot, but I don’t

know if it’s a good idea to take her to the Yacht

Club.…”

“Why on earth? She’s your guest. She doesn’t have

to have an escort of her own,” I said.

“She’s black,” Clay said. “It might be a little uncom-

fortable for her.”

“Uncomfortable is not precisely the term I would

have used,” I said, and went to the telephone and called

Carolina’s for reservations for a party of seven at eight

o’clock that evening.

When Clay went upstairs to shower, I took my garden

shears and a basket and went out into the yard to cut

flowers for the guest house. Though it was nearly

Thanksgiving, I still had some sweet, sturdy old roses

in the beds behind the house, and it had been so warm

that a few of the big, ruffled Sasanqua camellias had

bloomed. They always do in our soft, wet autumns

and winters; glowing like daystars in the grays and

duns and silvers of

Low Country / 21

this winter coast, then freezing and blackening to mush

in the vicious little icy snaps that follow in January.

We are subtropical here, and the Atlantic runs shallow

and warm off our tan beaches. We have flowers long

after the rest of the South has yielded up theirs to the

cold. And there are vast greenhouses and acres of ex-

perimental gardens in the sheltered heart of the island,

which serve the Plantation’s floral needs as well as

supplying its ecologically correct plantings and land-

scaping. I could have my pick of largesse from any of

those. But I like to work in my backyard garden, and

it feels right to take flowers from my own house to

welcome Clay’s young newcomers. And he likes telling

them that I brought them my own flowers. So I usually

do this when we have incomings. Augmented with the

ubiquitous pansies that the landscaping people blanket

the public spaces with in fall and winter, I would have

enough for lush bouquets in all the rooms. I would

take them down later so they would be fresh.

The guest house was bought to accommodate our

personal guests at Cotton Blossom, the name Clay

gave our house when it was built. But we have not had

many guests, not for some years, and as the guest

house is at some distance from us, it works well for

temporary housing for company newcomers.

Cotton Blossom…the name sets my teeth

22 / Anne Rivers Siddons

on edge, and I refuse to use it, or even to use the house

stationery that Clay had made up for us. It sounds

phony and overblown to me, a parody of every bad

ol’ Suthren joke I have ever heard. The rest of the

homes in Peacock Island Plantation do not have names,

that I know of, and even the named areas—streets,

subdivisions, parks—wear the names of indigenous

birds or flora. But Cotton Blossom was the name of

the mean little cotton plantation my great-great-great-

grandfather Aubrey built over on neighboring Edisto,

where he raised substandard Sea Island cotton, and

Clay thought to keep the name in the family, so to

speak. Great-great-great-grandfather Aubrey is my only

valid link to Charleston, and a tenuous one it was and

is.…Grandpa’s town house was small and cramped

and well below the salt, and his presence in the Holy

City seems to have left no more permanent impression

than his passing. The Aubrey town house is a garage

off King Street now. Clay does not find it necessary to

point out the garage to prospective investors and res-

idents of Peacock’s, as he does the crumbling ruins of

Cotton Blossom over on Edisto, which look, in their

vine-and-moss-shrouded decay, far more romantic than

the house ever looked in the days of its ascendancy.

“Caroline’s people go way back in the Lowcountry,”

he is fond of saying, and I don’t contradict him, be-

cause I suppose, literally speaking,

Low Country / 23

they do, or at least Great-great-great-grandfather Au-

brey’s scanty tribe did. It’s just that they didn’t linger.

My stake in Charleston and its environs is shallow in-

deed.

Clay respects my refusal to use the house’s name,

as he does most of my actions and decisions. He even

smiles when I say that “Cotton Blossom” sounds like

it ought to be wallowing down the Mississippi River,

steam whistles squalling, pickaninnies dancing on the

dock as it rounds the bluff. But he uses it himself, just

the same, and in his soft, deep voice, it somehow

manages to sound as dignified as he thinks it is. As I

said, he is serious about keeping the few legitimate old

Lowcountry names we have in the family. Not even

our children escaped; Kylie was baptized Elizabeth

Kyle Venable, after that same great-great-great-grand-

father, John Kyle Aubrey.

“It’s pretentious, that’s all,” I said, when she was

born, trying to dissuade him. “Nobody in our family

was close to the old skinflint, or even remembered him,

that I ever heard of. If you want to honor my family,

what’s wrong with my mother’s name? Or my grand-

mother’s?”

“Olive?” he said mildly, looking at me over the small

half-glasses he had just begun to wear. “Lutie Beulie?

At least they’ll know who she is in Charleston. They’ll

know what the name means.”

And I gave in, because even then I was too

24 / Anne Rivers Siddons

besotted with love and delight toward my daughter to

argue about her name. In my deepest heart I knew who

she was. I always did.

I put my flowers into the big, flat sweet-grass basket

that I keep in the potting shed for the purpose and

started back to the house. I love that basket; I love all

the beautiful, intricate, sturdy baskets that the Gullah

women braid from the dried sweet grass that flourishes

in the marshes of the Lowcountry and sell for formida-

ble sums wherever tourists gather. For once, I think,

the tourists get fair value. The baskets are usually works

of art and last, with care, for generations. The one I

use for flowers we bought for Kylie to keep her toys

in when she was a toddler. Carter has a larger one, a

hamper, really, in his room, where his dirty clothes

have more or less landed ever since he was five. It is

traditional with Clay and me to give new families sets