Low Country (4 page)

of the baskets at Christmastime, and they have always

been received with what seems to me honest delight.

A flicker of red from the front of the house caught

my eye as I came up the shallow steps to the veranda.

It was a long way away, perhaps at the edge of the

dunes, perhaps even down on the beach itself, and I

felt my heart drop and pause and then start its old low,

slow, cold thumping. I knew it was ridiculous, and I

also knew that I was going to have to go down to the

edge of the front lawn and see what it was. The sick

coldness

Low Country / 25

would last all day if I did not. I put the basket of

flowers down on a wicker table on the veranda and

went around the side of the house and across the front

lawn, kept velvety and green all year by the Plantation

groundskeepers, and around the tabby apron to the

oval pool, and up to the little gray cypress landing that

led to the steps and boardwalk to the beach. Only then

did I lift my eyes to the water.

The sea was still gunmetal gray out at the horizon

line, but the cloud rift that had lit the horizon earlier

had drifted westward so that the beach shimmered in

a wash of pale lemon light and running cloud-shadow.

Strange, strange…somehow, even when the temperat-

ure is as mild as it usually is in November here, almost

blood warm, like the water, the shifting dunes and flat

beach and heaving sea seem cold to me, cold to the

bone, cold to death. There is the damp, of course; the

humidity of the Lowcountry is as much an element as

its tepid water and low, sweet sky. The air of the Sea

Islands is like a cloud against your skin in all its sea-

sons. But it is more than that: taken in the aggregate,

all that flickering, tossing, shivering, whispering pewter

and silver seem to chill me to the core, and it always

did, even at those infrequent times I came to a Low-

country beach in autumn as a child. It is in this season,

and in the winter that will follow, that I feel queerest,

the most alien, here; there should be dark, pointed firs

26 / Anne Rivers Siddons

against the sky, not rattling, brown-tipped palms. Na-

ked branches, wet black tree trunks, the bare bones of

the earth, instead of the canopy of living green of the

live oaks, the eternal fecund darkness of the sea pines.

I looked at the sea and was cold in my heart.

The red turned out to be an open beach umbrella,

bucking against the steady, moaning sea wind. I looked

beyond it into the surf line, knowing what I would see,

and did: swimmers, plunging in the lace-white edging

of the breaking waves. Now that I saw them, I listened

for and heard their voices: Canadians. Snowbirds. We

get them every fall and winter, and we laugh and shiver

when they swim determinedly every day but the very

worst ones, and march up and down the empty,

howling beach as if dead set on getting their winter

vacation money’s worth. If they ever hear the laughter

and see the shivers they apparently do not care. I have

seen one or two of them plowing mulishly into the

ocean when one of our rare, soft, wet snows was fall-

ing. Don’t laugh, Clay says. Without them the Inn and

the villas and the restaurants would almost close down

off season. I don’t laugh. I have always liked and ad-

mired them, those tough, foolish migrants. Good sense

was never a fault of mine, either.

My heart picked up its dragging pace and my breath

came seeping back, and I took my flowers into the

kitchen and arranged them in

Low Country / 27

some of the pottery vases that I collect and keep for

flowers, and left them by the door onto the veranda,

and went up to take my own shower. I heard Clay

moving around overhead in his study and knew that

he would be bent over the architect’s drafting table

that he keeps there, the working drawings for the

newest Peacock Plantation project, whatever it might

be, permanently map-tacked in place there. Clay has

a design staff second to none when it comes to attract-

ive, ecologically sensitive Lowcountry architecture and

interiors, but nothing comes off their boards that does

not go directly onto his, and this morning time in his

study is sacrosanct to everyone on his staff. Later he

would tend to the endless rounds of meetings and

conferences that made up his afternoons, and might

go on until very late at night, to dinners and confer-

ences and cigars and brandies in restaurants and

drawing rooms from Savannah up to Myrtle Beach,

according to where the fat new money was. But in the

mornings he stayed at home and put his hands directly

on his empire. It probably drove his people wild, but

it had made the Peacock Island Plantation properties

a name that rivaled that of Charles Fraser’s Sea Pines

Plantation Company in its halcyon earlier days. I

smiled, thinking of him there; he would be fully dressed

for his day, in one of his winter-weight tropical suits

or perhaps a gray seersucker. Clay

28 / Anne Rivers Siddons

almost never wore slacks and a jacket, and I saw him

without a tie usually only in bed.

I went up the central stairs, a freestanding iron

staircase made for Clay by an old black ironmonger

on James Island when the house was built, and whose

designs now brought hundreds of thousands of dollars,

and paused at the landing. The house is open on both

the seaward and the landward sides, so that standing

on the landing is like standing suspended in a great

cage of glass. It always makes me dizzy, as if nothing

lies between me and the close-pressing darkness of the

old oaks and the shrouding oleanders in back, and the

great, sucking, light-breathing, always-waiting sea in

front. I shook my head and went quickly up to the

second floor, where the bedrooms were. They are open

to the sea, too, the best ones, but you can close it away

with heavy curtains if you choose, and the others, at

the back of the house, overlook the dark-canopied

backyard and feel to me like sheltering caves. I have

moved my daytime retreat there, in the back corner,

away from the beach and sea, though I still sleep in

the big master suite hung in the air over the lawn and

sea, with Clay. But when he is away I sleep on the

daybed in my den.

Instead of turning to the right, toward our bedroom

and mine and Clay’s dens, as I almost always did, I

turned left and walked down the hall toward the chil-

dren’s rooms. I think I had

Low Country / 29

known all day that I was going to do so. I did not

hesitate, and I did not think. I walked past Carter’s

closed door—closed because he had left it in such a

disgraceful state when he left in September for his first

year at graduate school at Yale that I had refused to

go into it, and told Estelle not to touch it but to let

him come back and find it just as he had left it—and

stopped at the big ocean-facing room on the end, its

door also closed. Kylie’s room.

Unlike Carter, Kylie was neat to a fault; she hated

it if anyone disturbed the strict order of her things, and

had insisted from her earliest childhood that no one

enter her closed room when she was not in it. I had

always respected that; I felt somewhat the same way

about my things, though long years of sharing a room

with Clay had loosened my scruples about order a bit.

He is not untidy, only abstracted. I think he does not

notice either order or disorder. I could still hear small

Kylie, frustrated nearly to tears in her attempt to ex-

plain why she did not want me to come into her room

when she was not in it: “But it’s
mine
! It’s not yours!

You have a room of your own. Why do you need to

go in mine?”

“What are you hiding in there, a pack of wolves?” I

said. “Kevin Costner, maybe?”

She had fallen in love with the movie
Dances with

Wolves
, and was so besotted with wolves that she was

planning to be a wildlife veterinarian

30 / Anne Rivers Siddons

when she grew up, and work with the wild wolf packs

of the Far West. It was a mature and considered ambi-

tion, and I would not have been at all surprised if she

made it happen.

“I’m not hiding anything,” she said, looking seriously

at me, and I knew that she was not. Kylie hid nothing,

ever. She was as open as air, as clear as water. Then

she saw that I was teasing her, and she began to giggle,

the silvery, silly giggle that, I am told, is very like mine,

and then she laughed, the deep, froggy belly laugh that

is mine also. In a moment we were both laughing,

laughing until the tears rolled down our so-alike small,

brown faces, laughing and laughing until Clay came

in to see what was so funny, and said, grinning himself,

“Ladies and gentlemen, for your enjoyment to-

night…Venable and Venable! Let’s give them a great

big hand!”

And we rolled over on our backs on the floor of her

room, Kylie and I, in helpless laughter and simple joy,

because it was true. We were Venable and Venable.

We simply delighted each other. There was nothing

in either of us that did not understand and admire the

other. Even when she was a baby, there was nothing

childish, nothing condescending, nothing mother-to-

child about it. We were companions on every level,

confidantes, comrades, friends, lovers in the deepest

and most nonsexual sense of the word. My daughter

and I had fallen in love and delight with each other at

Low Country / 31

the moment of her birth, and it was often all I could

do to keep Clay and Carter from coming off second

best. Because they are so ludicrously alike, and because

Clay’s mind is almost absurdly full of riches and Carter

is a sunny, confident young man with a full and em-

powering sense of himself, I do not think that either

of them has suffered. Rather, they, like most other

people in our orbit, simply enjoyed and often laughed

at Venable and Venable.

I opened Kylie’s door and went into her room. At

first the great surf of brightness off the noon beach

blinded me, and I stood blinking, my hand shading

my eyes. Then they adjusted and I looked around and

saw it plain, this place that was, of all her places, most

distinctly hers.

It was not a frilly room and never had been. Like

me, Kylie was born with a need for space and order

and a dislike of cluttering frills and fuss. She had al-

ways been a small, wiry child, almost simian in her

build, narrow-hipped and broad-shouldered, slightly

long of arm and short of leg, never tall, always thin to

the bone. Ruffles would have been as ludicrous on and

around her as on me. She was, instead, sleeked down

for action; pared to sinew and long, slender muscle;

meant for sun and sand and wind and water, and that

was what her room reflected. I do not think she ever

drew her curtains, even at night. Kylie fell asleep with

her face turned to the moon and

32 / Anne Rivers Siddons

the comets and the wheeling constellations, seeing

when she woke in the night the dance of phosphorus

on the warm, thick, black summer ocean, or sometimes

the lightning of storms over the horizon that looked,

she said, like naval battles far out to sea. Waking to

the cool pearl of dawn on tidal slicks, to the pink and

silver foil of a newly warming spring ocean, perhaps

to the Radio City Music Hall dance of porpoises in the

silky summer shallows. Kylie went as far as any human

I have ever known, when she was small, toward simply

using up the sea.

Her walls were painted the milky green of the sea

on a cloudy day, and on them hung her posters of an-

imals and birds and sea creatures and the big, luminous

painting of Richard Hagerty’s that was the official

Spoleto Festival poster one year, of Hurricane Hugo

striding big-footed and terrible down on a crouching

Charleston. I had not wanted to buy it for her because

I had thought it would come to haunt her, but she was

adamant.

“Yeah, but see, Hugo didn’t win,” she said. “Big as

a thousand houses, big as a booger, and he still didn’t

win.”

And I had laughed and bought it for her, because I

wanted her to remember that: the boogers don’t always

win.

On the low bookshelves were the models she had

made of animal skeletons, from kits I had ordered for

her from marine biological laborato

Low Country / 33

ries and supply houses, and three or four real skeletons

we had found over on the island when she went with

me to the house there: the papery carapace of an eight-

foot rattler; a wild boar’s skull with great, bleached,

Jurassic tusks; the elegant, polished small skull of a

raccoon. Estelle would not dust these herself but made