Shem Creek (46 page)

I pushed open the door and spotted him right away by the framing table in the rear of the gallery. Huey was the Rosetta Stone for body language. His hands were in midair, whirling with excitement and he shifted from one foot to the other. He turned at the unobtrusive musical sound of the automatic doorbell, saw me and rushed to my side.

“There you are! Come! Say hello! Let me help you with that!” He took the bag and cardboard tray of iced tea from me, delivered two air kisses to my cheeks, stood back and smiled. “Did they have decent tuna?”

“Huey baby? The tuna is life altering. I watched them make it, which is what took me so long.” The tiny brunette was waiting patiently with her portfolio opened and what I guessed to be her work was spread all over the counter. “You must be Rebecca.”

She extended her hand to shake mine. “And you must be Abigail. But please call me Becca. My friends call me Becca.”

“No! No! No!” Huey said, researching the contents of the sack of food. “You must be
Re
-becca! We cannot defile the great name of Rebecca. I’ll get plates.”

“Didn’t anyone ever call you Abby?” she said to me, looking for some support.

“Over their dead body,” I said. “My parents named me for Abigail Adams.”

Huey placed three plates on the counter and began unpacking lunch. “Abigail Adams was one of America’s first feminists, you know. She was always giving John the business about the inequality of education between men and women.”

“Oh,” Rebecca said.

“Well, it makes sense today too,” I said. “People used to think that education was wasted on women because they wound up staying home with children. Of course, I’m not sure how an education could ever be
wasted
.” What an inane thing for me to say, I thought.

“You can say that again,” Rebecca said.

“Anyway, this generation of women
works
. And not necessarily because they want to.” Another pearl of genius from me, but people said vapid things to each other just to put the other at ease.

“You can say that again too!” Rebecca said.

I took the plate from Huey and eyeballed the diminutive Rebecca, thinking that if she agreed to agree with every word I spoke, then surely there was an exalted position available for her in our little tribe.

If that sounds egotistical, let’s get something straight right now. The last thing I needed in my life or even in the periphery of my life was someone telling me I was wrong, what was wrong with my politics, what was wrong with the world. I knew what was wrong with the world. Everything. I had seen enough of what people did to each other and I just didn’t want to deal with it for the foreseeable future.

“So where are you from?” I said.

“Charleston,” she said. “I came up here to see if I could sell some of my work.”

“Abigail. Look at this.”

Huey had closed her portfolio so that a flying crumb of tuna or a splotch of mayonnaise wouldn’t ruin anything, but he reached down and pulled up one of her paintings. He flipped back the parchment paper cover and there it was— the classic watercolor of two children, a boy and a girl, playing by the edge of the shore on a beach. I had seen hundreds of them and all of them were cures for insomnia.

But this one was profoundly different. The sky and the water looked as radiantly alive as the sandpipers pecking the wet sand and then running from the waves. But the children, their backs to the viewer, seemed to be a thousand miles away. And you got the sense that while they were probably siblings, that they didn’t want to play together or that they were tremendously unhappy for some inexplicable reason and preferred to live in their misery alone. The scene was haunting and bothersome but I couldn’t stop looking at them. I wanted to rush inside the painting and save them. I turned and looked at Rebecca.

“It’s very powerful,” I said.

“Children aren’t always happy, are they?” she said.

“No, they are not.”

“Rebecca, darling? We have a show opening tomorrow and I was just thinking . . .”

“Huey!” I said. “Her work isn’t framed, and besides . . .”

“Oh! Gosh!” Rebecca said. “I can make frames if you have the material . . .”

“Rebecca? Sweetheart? You make frames?”

“Yes, in fact, I am told that, well, I’m rather good at it. I mean, well, I don’t mean to brag . . .”

“Stop! Humility is unflattering especially for an artist of your talent! You need some
attitude,
girl! Seriously!”

We all had a giggle at that, but Huey was right. The mouse had to stop squeaking.

“Huey, I . . .”

I was trying to speak but when Huey got his engine in gear, there was no stopping him.

“Sweetheart. You finish up your sandwich and then I want you to have a look around in the storage room. There’s enough material back there to hang a frame around Georgetown County, including the new waterslide at Myrtle Beach.”

Huey sniffed and I knew it was because of the waterslides, putt putt courses and all manner of NASCAR contraptions that had been erected under the guise of entertainment but reeked of crass commercialism. And that, my friends, was the scathing difference between genteel plantation living, the arrogant shabby of Pawleys Island and the wild consumerism of Myrtle Beach. All that said for the anti-elitist dart throwers in the crowd, Huey the King Snob liked nothing better than a round of putt putt followed by a Sno-Cone dripping in tutti-frutti syrup.

“The former framer was recently relieved of his duties,” I said, thinking I would speak to Huey when Rebecca was out of earshot.

“I fired the nitwit,” Huey said. “What a pathetic simpleton! He drove me crazy. Didn’t he ever hear of
measure twice, cut once
?”

“Apparently not,” I said.

Inside of a minute, Rebecca, who was slightly confused as to why she should inspect the inventory of framing materials when she had come to Huey’s gallery to sell her work, balled up the remains of her turkey sandwich and went to the storage room to sniff around like a good dog.

“So what do you think?” Huey said in a conspiratorial whisper.

“Huey Flagg Valentine! I think that Sallie Anne Wood will definitely scratch your eyes out! I know I would! You can’t promise someone a one-woman show and then just sort of casually have another show going on at the same time! It’s unethical!”

The opening which was the following evening was a one-woman show for Sallie Anne Wood, an established egomaniacal diva artist from Charleston.

“Listen to me, Abigail Thurmond. Sallie Anne Wood has had a thousand shows. She’ll sell
enough
to make her happy tomorrow night. Right? Look. I cannot resist Rebecca’s work! I don’t know why but I sense an urgency in Rebecca and I think she needs us. I mean, you must agree, Rebecca’s work is rather astounding.”

“It
is
that.”

“God! I wonder what she could do in oil! She’d be biblical! Rebecca at the Well! Great thundering Zeus! I remember that from the show at the Chagall Museum in Nice.
Women of the Old Testament
!
Matriarchs in Search of Motherhood
! I wish you had been with me then. . . .”

“Me too. Huey? This is still a problem, you know. You cannot possibly expect Sallie Anne to walk in here and be happy to see Rebecca’s work hanging in the same gallery on the same night as her opening! And, Huey, I know you would not enjoy the cognizi of Litchfield and Pawleys calling you an opportunist, now would you?”

“I can sell everything Rebecca can paint. Every blessed last piece. And you know it.”

“Framed or unframed. But, Huey? Darlin’, we hardly know this child! Are you hiring her to be our new framer? She’s an artist, for heaven’s sake! Don’t you think she will be insulted?”

“I’m going to ask her if she’ll be the assistant manager of my gallery.”

“And who is the manager?
You
?”

“Okay! I’ll make her the
manager
! Happy?”

“Oh, Huey, Huey, Huey. If you really want this puppy, then I know you’ll have this puppy one way or another. Lord help Rebecca! She’s falling down the rabbit hole and doesn’t even know it.”

Dorothea Benton Frank
was born and raised on Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina. She is a nationally recognized volunteer fund-raiser for the arts and education, and an advocate of literacy programs and women’s issues. She resides in the New York area with her husband and two children. Visit her website at
www.dotfrank.com
.

PAWLEYS ISLAND
SHEM CREEK
ISLE OF PALMS
PLANTATION
SULLIVAN’S ISLAND