South of Broad (51 page)

A silence descends on the drive through the mob to the burial until Molly, always the nurturer, attempts to break up our grief and silence with small talk. Even though I know what she’s doing, it almost irritates me that she is trying to divert our attention to a report from the evening news.

“Did you know there was a storm in the Caribbean?”

“Haven’t had much time to watch the news,” Ike says, distracted.

“They name it yet?” Niles asks.

“A couple days ago,” Fraser says. “Starts with an
H
, and it’s a boy’s name. Herbert or Henry? Something like that.”

“Hugo,” Molly tells us. “They named it Hugo.”

Like Sheba, it is a name we will carry with us for the rest of our lives.

CHAPTER 27
Guernica

I
t is the morning of September 21, 1989. The dogs of Charleston have begun to whimper in collective terror while the cats of the city are languorous and unconcerned. The windows of the great houses wear plywood eyeglasses as folks gird their homes against a storm still four hundred miles away. The air in the city is ominous and strange and illuminated from the outside in. A pretty lady plays the harp in the window of a mansion on East Bay. When she finishes, she rises and curtsies to a gathering of swells that have gathered for a hurricane party. Hugo will crash this party with his terrible dark fist. By tomorrow, the people of South Carolina will know all there is to know about the rules of the storm. The rules are biased and hard.

The great storm Hugo acts of its own lethargic, devastating volition. In an emergency meeting at the
News and Courier
, the journalists receive a briefing from a grim-faced meteorologist who has tracked the storm for days. He refers to Hugo as “monstrous, lunatic, and unpredictable.” This is the worst news he offers us—and that the combined wisdom of all the weathermen on earth cannot guarantee what path the storm will take. It depends, he says, on the temperature shifts, fronts moving in the storm’s path, the attraction of the Gulf Stream, and a thousand other things that fall outside the precincts of available data. It can still hit Savannah or Wilmington, or it could be swept northward and out to sea.

“Where do you think it will hit? What’s your best guess?” a reporter asks.

“Sir, I think it’s going to hit Charleston,” he replies. “It’s coming right at us.”

Since I live south of Broad, my assignment is to cover any damage to that distinguished but vulnerable part of the city. Molly and Fraser have already packed their kids off with Chad to their summer house in Highlands, North Carolina. But both women have decided to ride out the storm at Fraser and Niles’s house on Water Street, near the bend in Church Street. The parents of both Chad and Fraser have adamantly refused to abandon their city during its hour of greatest need. Neither of their children can talk them out of the decision. According to the parents, these houses had weathered storms from the Atlantic for centuries, and it was pusillanimous at best to ask them to hightail it to the mountains. Fraser has a furious argument with her parents that leaves them both outraged and helpless, and their daughter in tears. It has become a city of frayed nerves and temperamental exchanges.

I am writing a prestorm column when I receive a phone call from my mother, who is in the middle of one her patented dithers. Molly has arrived at her house and is insisting that my mother accompany her back to the house on Water Street. She demands to know that I acknowledge her to be of sound mind and body, fully capable of making decisions on her own accord, and that she is not about to abandon her home and garden to a storm named after an overrated and melodramatic French novelist. Echoing conversations that are taking place all over the city, I remind her that she lives next to a saltwater lake. If Hugo strikes the city, he will come in at night, at dead high tide, with a storm surge as high as twelve feet, and that will put her house, her garden, and herself underwater. As her only son, I order her to accompany Molly, and promise to meet her at Niles’s house later. Advising her softly, I tell her to pack up her most precious possessions and all the food and water she can carry. When she asks if I think she is some beast of burden, I can hear in her voice the early warning signals of a madness that will soon possess the whole city.

All the roads and avenues of escape are clogged up with a manic traffic too eager by half to escape. By early afternoon, the wind is up and the river stutters with whitecaps as they merge in fury. Small craft warnings are posted everywhere, but are completely unnecessary. I drive out to where the surfers have clustered on Folly Beach, riding the greatest waves of the century. While eating the last oysters served at Bowens Island before the owners close shop and head for Columbia, I write down my impression of a routed, battened-down city. The radio and television have reduced our world to a single, malignant name: Hugo. I make my way into a trafficless downtown at four in the afternoon. One thing I can report with certainty—there is no one driving into the city, but a whole army of folks is fleeing it. I cannot imagine a more apocalyptic scenario.

Driving down an emptied-out East Bay Street, I notice that the birds have stopped singing and the seagulls have taken cover; that the koi in my garden pond have sunk to the bottom, their gold-flecked backs hunkered down as the air begins to gust and sweat at the same time. I park my car in Mr. Canon’s old garage in the alley behind Tradd Street; I give neither the car nor the garage much chance of survival if the storm hits. Inside my house, I drift from room to room trying to select items that elicit notes of ecstasy or nostalgia, but I discover I love the whole house and everything contained within its comforting walls. This house has represented something precious to me, a solid reminder that life could hurl good luck at you as easily as it could devastation or ruin. I have no rights or claims on this house, yet it has reached out to possess me; it has turned itself into a bright, lush hermitage of spirit. I cannot bear the thought of it being hurt or damaged. I place duct tape over all of its beautiful windows. I lock its sweet doors, and in her time of greatest peril, I abandon her, that love of my life, and walk over to the Whitehead house. I say a prayer for my house and ask the ghost of Harrington Canon to inhabit it in my absence.

“I have no children,” I whisper to myself as I walk down Church Street, whose palmetto trees are rattling and whose oaks shake with the ancient grief of storm. “My life is half-gone. How did I get here, at this moment?”

The light is unearthly, surreal, almost an antilight; the city gives off a scent of resignation from its stones. About a quarter of my neighbors are riding out the hurricane in their homes, and there is a party atmosphere emanating from many of the houses I pass. The music of Vivaldi rides the growing winds out of one house; Emmylou Harris sings about the “Queen of the Silver Dollar” from another. Television sets blaze in the sonic lights of dens, where Hugo is the only subject under discussion. I have never before seen Charleston hunkered down or fearful, not once in my life. The city must have felt something like this during the Civil War when the Union navy was bombarding it relentlessly. I can feel the approach of the storm in every cell in my body, as though my body has transformed itself into some dark gauge of the planet’s mischief.

A window shatters in a second-story piazza, and I look up to see a middle-aged man, his faced tied with a bandanna, breaking into an abandoned mansion. He may be the first looter sighted in the city, but he will not be the last. I flag down a police car and give the cops the necessary information, but the two policemen offer no proof that my fingering a burglary in progress is of any particular interest to them. Their radio cackles with directives streaming from headquarters. I hear an ambulance crossing the city in fingerpaintings of sound. For a brief instant, I wonder where Starla is, and I pray she is far away. Then I shut her out of my mind completely, the one thing I have learned to do best.

I turn the latch to the gate on Water Street, then open the door to a maelstrom, in whose creation I had played a part. The wind slams it shut behind me. I enter a formal parlor where the inhabitants of my own endangered ark cluster around a television. The satellite images of Hugo are breathtaking. It looks bigger than the entire state of South Carolina.

“It will never hit Charleston,” Worth Rutledge announces to the room at large. I had forgotten that quality of know-it-all certainty in his cultivated voice. “It’ll turn north when it hits the Gulf Stream.”

Worth recently broke his hip while playing golf at the Charleston Country Club, and is still clumsy with his wheelchair. His irascibility is innate, but the accident has made it worse. Instinctively, I have always kept away from Chadworth Rutledge the ninth, and I do not look forward to spending what could turn out to be a memorable night in close quarters with the blue-blooded jerk. In the kitchen, Molly is busy preparing supper while Fraser passes around appetizers to the worried listeners as the Channel 5 news team keeps issuing disconcerting updates. Several wind-blown reporters, with their carefully coiffed locks a-flying, shout information about the wind velocity with a nation of whitecaps boiling behind them. It is 7 P.M., and our eyes are turned toward the terrible eye of Hugo as it moves its malignant powers and its prodigious vortex toward Charleston at its own dark leisure.

“Mark my words,” Worth repeats. “The Gulf Stream will turn it.”

“Darling,” his wife says, “could you please hush your mouth? Only God knows if this storm’s going to hit us or not.”

“Don’t be afraid, Mama,” Fraser says, leading her mother to a chair and settling her, as she is trembling with terror.

“I always thought I’d die in one of these,” Hess Rutledge says.

“Nonsense. Only sharecroppers in shacks and poor whites in trailers ever die in hurricanes. More people have been killed hunting deer in this state than have been killed by hurricanes.” Worth holds his glass up for a refill, and I walk over to take it from him.

“What’s your pleasure?” I ask.

“My pleasure is that my daughter make my drink and not you, Leo. I didn’t realize the village gossip had arrived.”

“I’ll get it, Leo,” Fraser says, hurrying to the elaborate wet bar in the corner of the room.

Molly peeks her head out of the kitchen, and calls, “Worth, behave yourself. Fraser and I already talked to you about being nice.”

“I should have stayed home,” he grouses. “My house is built like a castle, of heart pine. It is hard as granite. It would survive a nuclear attack.”

“It’s beside the harbor,” I say. “The surge could cause waves higher than your house.”

“The Rutledge-Bennet mansion has survived two hundred years without listening to the advice of a Roman Catholic,” Worth replies, bringing my mother into the fray, a woman well able to defend herself.

“Worth,” she tells him with great frosty languor, “I know that Christ died on the cross to save the souls of all men, but I can’t believe he’d do it to save a bastard like you.”

“Lindsay,” Hess Rutledge murmurs in a tone of wounded dignity. “That was unnecessary. Worth lashes out when he’s worried or scared.”

“Scared?” he scoffs. “Of what? A little rain? I tell you, the damn hurricane will turn. How many times do I have to say it?”

“Tell Leo that you’re sorry,” Fraser insists.

“Sorry, Papist,” he says, but laughs when he says it, and I know he is trying to make a joke to save face. The gesture is insincere, but I accept it in the spirit of a night’s distorted reality.

Niles joins us after finishing the job of X-ing all the windows with duct tape. Then Fraser says, “Trevor, will you play the piano? The most beautiful music you know. Nerves are on edge here.”

“Is AIDS an airborne disease?” Worth asks his wife, not bothering to lower his voice.

While Trevor plays, Molly serves us plates of oxtail soup, pork and steamed asparagus, boiled potatoes, and salads. We form a line and pass things hand over hand until everything is on the table. As we sit down to dinner, Fraser asks me to say grace, and we all take one another’s hands around the mahogany dining room table that had once belonged to Mrs. Rutledge’s great-grandmother. Trevor halts his rendition of Mozart in the middle of a piano concerto, but isn’t ready to join us at the table. Four candelabra ignite the charged air with pearly, comforting light as I pray.

“O God of wind, O God of storm, we place ourselves in your hands on this night of mystery. This night of fear. There is a reason you brought this group of people together, and that is a mystery we will understand at daybreak. We ask that you be kind to this city, and this home, and these people. Because of our worship of you, we understand the calamities that can befall the world, the nature of whirlwinds, the power of words, and the glory of the Last Supper. We trust in your mercy, and tonight we hope you will justify that trust. I am sorry Worth Rutledge doesn’t like Roman Catholics, and I trust you will torture him in everlasting hellfire for that grievous sin. Amen.”

“Amen,” the others say, and even Worth utters a stiff laugh.

“I hate showy, overelaborate prayers,” my mother comments pointedly as she picks up her spoon.

“We need one tonight, Dr. King,” Molly says as she prepares a plate for her father-in-law. “Leo, roll Trevor to the table.”

“I’m not hungry, dear heart,” Trevor tells her. “Just let me waste away over here while I tickle the ivories and trip the light fantastic.”

“The music comforts me,” Mrs. Rutledge tells him, with a wan smile. “I feel like Noah’s wife. Before the flood.”

“It’s a hurricane,” her husband says. “Rain and wind. It’s not a flood.” “How are the children?” I ask Molly.

“Safe in Highlands. Chad says every inn is packed, as is everything else there. If things get bad, we may have to go to your place, darling,” she tells Niles. And to the rest of us, “Ike’s parents are already there; so are the kids.”

“If I went north, I’d stay at Grove Park Inn,” Worth says, concentrating on his meal. “A plush luxury hotel in Asheville. Know what I call camping now? A Ritz-Carlton.”

My mother clears her throat and throws her napkin to the table. “I cannot spend a hurricane with this vulgar man.”

“Be quiet, Mother,” I command.

“We’ll always have Paris, Dr. King,” Trevor says, and begins to play “As Time Goes By” from
Casablanca
. He knows my mother reveres it.

He finishes with a flourish, and in the moment of silence, Molly murmurs, “My God, listen to that wind!”

“We should have stayed home,” Worth Rutledge repeats. “If we die here, we won’t even be dying in an important house.”

“Shut up, Worth,” his wife answers, standing up suddenly and heading for the guest room in the back of the house. She is followed quickly by Fraser, who spends ten minutes calming her down.