The Society of S (28 page)

I left the hotel room exactly as I’d found it, minus one small bottle of lavender bath oil. The old wooden door creaked as it opened. I tiptoed down the corridor and down a flight of stairs. In the lobby I sat at the guests’ computer station. Thanks to the hotel’s Internet access, it took me seconds to search for
Savannah
and
honey
and to find what I needed: the address and phone number of the Tybee Bee Company.

I walked out through the lobby as if indeed I were a paying guest.

The doorman opened the front door for me. “Mornin’, babe,” he said.

“Good morning,” I said. I slid on my dark glasses and strutted down Broughton, feeling, in my London-tailored black trouser suit, very much the babe.

Some days, it seems as if you’re one with the universe. Do you feel that way, too? With every step you take, the ground rises to meet your feet, and the air caresses your skin. My long hair floated in the breeze behind me, smelling of lavender shampoo. Even my backpack felt light.

The Tybee Bee Company was situated on the outskirts of the city in a warehouse — not a pretty place, and not easy to find. Being invisible helped; I didn’t want to hitchhike, but at a gas station I slipped into the backseat of a car with a Tybee Island sticker on its rear window. A teenaged girl was the driver, and she headed out the Island Expressway. When she neared the President Street exit, I began to whine, sounding as much like an ailing engine as I could. She obediently pulled over, and I (and my backpack) slipped out while she was looking under the car’s hood. I mouthed a silent thank-you.

No, I didn’t feel guilty about my pranks at the time; I felt the end would justify the means, whatever the end might be. Only much later would I come to a full moral reckoning with myself.

I made myself visible for the last stretch, and I stopped twice to ask directions before I found the warehouse. Inside, half a dozen young people were working. One was attaching labels to tall bottles of golden honey. Another packed small jars into cartons for shipping, and someone else used a spatula to cut squares of honeycomb. The room had tall windows and a high ceiling, but its air felt thick and sweet.

They all looked up as I came in. “Hi,” I said. “Are you hiring?”

A sleek woman in a suit interviewed me in an upstairs office. She said they had no openings at the moment, but that she’d keep my application on file. When I filled out the paperwork, I said I was eighteen, and I left the address section blank. I explained that I was en route to visit a relative. I asked if she’d known my mother, who had worked here about fifteen years ago.

She said, “I’ve only been here a year. You may want to talk to the owner. He’s out on Oatland Island with the bees.”

One of the packagers lived on the island and was headed home for lunch, so she drove me to the hives. They stood at the edge of a nature preserve, near an old wooden boat that rested on cement blocks. She pointed them out, then turned to head back to her car.

“I’m afraid of bees,” she said, over her shoulder. “Walk slowly, and they should leave you alone.”

Thus warned, I moved across a lawn toward the hives, which looked from a distance like ramshackle wooden filing cabinets. A man in a white suit and hood was pulling what seemed to be a drawer out of one of the files. On the ground next to him was a metal device emitting pine-scented smoke. I came up slowly behind him. A bee buzzed over me, as if checking me out, then flew away. A steady stream of bee traffic came and went from the hives. The sky had clouded over, and the place was utterly still but for the sound of bees.

The beekeeper turned to look at me. He slid the drawer back into the cabinet, then motioned me back toward the boat. When we’d reached it, he pulled off his hood and veil. “That’s better,” he said. “The girls are a little wild today.”

He had a shock of pure white hair and eyes the color of aqua-marines.

Have I mentioned my interest in gemstones? It began with an old encyclopedia at home. I can still see the plates of cabochon-and emerald-cut gems: jade, aquamarine, cat’s-eye, emerald, moon-stone, peridot, ruby, tourmaline, and my favorite: the star sapphire. Diamonds, to me, are boring, unsubtle. But the sapphire’s six-legged ivory star radiated against a Prussian blue background like fireworks or lightning in a night sky. Years later, I saw a real star sapphire, and it proved even more subtle: the star wasn’t visible until you looked at the gem from a particular angle, and then it emerged, like a ghostly sea creature surfacing in deep water, thanks to an optical phenomenon called asterism. I pored over the descriptions of the stones and their mythology, then flipped the page to the next entry:
Genealogy
, which included a “chart of blood relations,” explaining how a great-grandparent ultimately connected to a first cousin once-removed. I never read that entry, but its accompanying chart — a series of small circles, connected by lines — will always be associated for me with the gleam and fire and mystery of gemstones.

“You’re not from around here,” the beekeeper was saying.

I introduced myself, using my real name for the first time in months. “I think my mother worked for you,” I said. “Sara Stephenson?”

His face changed from quizzical to sad. “Sara,” he said. “I haven’t thought of her for years. Whatever happened to her?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” I said.

His name was Roger Winters, and when he heard I’d never met my mother, he shook his head. After a few seconds, he said he’d known her fairly well. “She worked part-time for me when she was in high school, and then later she came back, after she got her divorce. You knew she was married before?”

I said, “Yes.”

“I was glad she left him, and glad to have her back. She was a good worker,” he said. “She got on real well with the bees.”

His voice was soft and slow, with inflections and muted vowels that I’d never heard before. I thought of the harsh way most people talked in Saratoga Springs (my father a notable exception). I could listen to Mr. Winters talk for hours.

“I do see the resemblance now,” he said, looking at me. “You’ve got your mother’s eyes.”

“Thank you!” He’d given me my first physical link to my mother.

He shrugged — an odd twist of his right shoulder, only. “She was a great beauty,” he said. “And funny? That woman could always make me laugh.”

I told Mr. Winters I’d come to Savannah to find my mother, any trace of her, or her relations. “She had a sister, Sophie.”

“Sophie’s nothing like Sara,” he said.

“Is she here?” I could hardly believe my luck.

“Lives a couple miles from here, back toward the city. At least she did. I haven’t heard mention of Sophie for years. Used to see her in the papers with her roses, every time they had a flower show.”

My disappointment must have shown, because he said, “That don’t mean she ain’t still here, now. You might want to give her a call.”

I told him I hadn’t found her name in the telephone directory. He shrugged again. “She’s a spinster. Lives alone. Like to have her number unlisted. Yes, that’s the sort of thing Sophie
would
do.” He bent to pick up his hood and veil, which he’d set next to the smoker device on the grass. “Tell you what. It’s about time for my lunch break anyway. I’ll run you over there after lunch, and we’ll see if she’s still at that house on Screven Street.”

“That’s very kind of you,” I said.

“Seems like I could do that much for Sara’s daughter. How old are you, anyways? Seventeen? Eighteen?”

“More or less.” I didn’t want to have to explain why a thirteen-year-old was traveling alone.

Mr. Winters drove an old blue pickup truck with a yellow honeybee logo on both its doors. The windows were rolled down, and I was glad; the sun had emerged from the clouds, and the air swept into the truck, humid and hot.

He stopped at a restaurant on the way back to town — nothing fancy, a roadside shed — and, sitting at a picnic table outside, overlooking a marsh, I had my first taste of raw oysters.

Mr. Winters carried out a plateful of them, half-shells of various sizes embedded in shaved ice. He went back for a soup plate holding a bowl of crackers and a bottle of red sauce. He removed them and set them strategically, midway between us.

“Never had one?” he said, his face as baffled as if I’d said I never breathed. “Yankees,” he muttered.

He demonstrated the proper oyster-eating technique: he sprinkled two drops of sauce on the round gray oyster, lifted the shell, tipped it toward his mouth, and sucked it down. He set the empty shell in the soup bowl. Then he took a few soda crackers and tossed them back.

I picked up a shell, already planning ways in which to hide my distaste — subtly coughing it out into a paper-towel napkin, for instance. The little ivory and gray bodies looked inedible, and in any case, these days I had no appetite for anything that wasn’t red. I held the shell as he had, so that it didn’t spill any liquid, and I gamely sucked it into my mouth.

How to describe that first taste? Better than blood! The texture was firm, yet creamy, and it yielded a mineral essence that seemed to shoot oxygen right through my veins. Later I found out that oysters — the ones that haven’t been polluted, that is — are full of nutritious minerals, including oxygen, calcium, and phosphorus.

Mr. Winters was watching me — I felt it, even though I’d closed my eyes. I heard his voice say, “Of course some folks can’t abide the things…”

I opened my eyes. “The best thing I ever tasted.”

“That right?” He laughed softly.

“Ever.” We looked at each other with complete understanding.

Then we stopped looking and talking, and settled down to eating. We went through four dozen in no time.

You know, there are some things in life we either love or hate. No middle ground. Oysters are such things. By the way, they taste blue — the muted, salty shade of a London blue topaz.

Back in the truck, thoroughly sated, feeling oxygen moving like elixir through me, I said, “Thank you.”

He made his funny shrug again and started the truck. As we drove off, he said, “I had a daughter, once.”

I looked over at him, but his face in profile didn’t show emotion. “What became of her?”

“She married an idiot,” he said.

We didn’t speak for a minute. Then I found myself asking, “Did you ever meet my father?”

“Oh yes.” He turned the truck off the highway, into a neighborhood of old houses. “Met him three or four times. Liked him the first two.”

I didn’t know what to say.

He drove onto a quiet street of old houses, and pulled up close to a corner, under an enormous magnolia tree. Some of its blossoms weren’t open yet, and they were conical, the color of pale straw. Hard to imagine them opening into saucer-shaped white blooms, but the tree held plenty of evidence that they could, and would.

“So we’re here.” He looked across at me, his blue eyes serious. “Now, your auntie, if she’s home, is someone you’ll need time to get to know. She’s one of them…ladylike women, if you know what I mean.”

I didn’t know.

“She would never in her life eat a raw oyster,” he said. “She’s the kind you see in tearooms, eating little sandwiches on white bread with the crusts cut off.”