Islands Read online

  “Of course not. I just can’t stand the thought of it…rotting away.”

  “It’s always been rotting away,” Camilla said comfortably. “Even when I was little, something was always wrong with it. If it was all fixed up and decorated, I don’t think I could stay in it.”

  “Well, it’s surely not that,” Fairlie said, and we smiled complacently.

  It surely was not. The house wore the same shingling and sported the same lumpen, damp-smelling upholstered and peeling wicker pieces that it had when Camilla inherited it. Lila had brought out a smart new flokati rug to replace the paper-thin old oriental that had been soaked when Hugo’s rain came flooding down the chimney. It was thick and creamy and invited lolling, but no one lolled. Its very whiteness, in all that musty dimness, kept catching the corners of our eyes. Finally Lila gave up and dug the sour old oriental out of her attic and dried it in the sweet air and sun, and put it back down in front of the fireplace. We and the house all sighed together with pleasure, and Lila gave the new rug to Camilla for in town. Outside, the dune lines were not the original ones, and crepe myrtles had replaced the slain oleanders and palms that clustered around the porch, but that was outside. Inside was still us.

  From the very beginning, I was surprised by how small a hole Charlie left in the fabric of the beach house. It was not that we did not miss him; one or another of us would tear up regularly when somebody spoke of Charlie, and Boy and Girl, gray muzzled and lame these ten years later, still looked eagerly for him when they got out of the car and struggled up the steps and into the house. That alone moved us regularly to tears. When it happened Camilla would pet the dogs fiercely and then look away, out at the ocean. She hated for anyone to see her cry. Few people did.

  No, it was rather that the sense of us as a unit was somehow unbroken, and the knowledge that somehow Camilla contained Charlie so completely that, even absent, he was comfortably here. I felt joy that the integrity of the group was not compromised, even when a loved member was gone, and once said so to Camilla.

  “The center will hold,” she said.

  “It feels like he’s still here, “I said to Lewis shortly after Charlie’s death.

  “He’s probably down around Cape Horn by now,” Lewis said. For when Charlie died, Camilla had had him cremated, as he had wished, and we had scattered his ashes in the sea in front of the beach house.

  Nearly everybody but us was furious with Camilla. All the older women in her life—and there were many, because, like Lewis, she was related to half of Charleston—were aghast.

  “Your people have always been in Magnolia Cemetery,” one of a bridge-playing flock of them said to Camilla when she had me to lunch at the yacht club, two days after Charlie died. “What on earth can you be thinking of? Cremation? Throwing him in the ocean like bait shrimp? What would your mother say?”

  “Probably ‘Is it lunchtime yet?’ ” Camilla said under her breath.

  Her sister, Lydia, did not speak to her for days, and her mother, still living, if not sentient, at Bishop Gadsden roused herself from her succoring torpor long enough to spit out, “There is no place but Magnolia. Your father will be appalled. Who was it again you said you wanted to dump in the ocean?”

  Her two sons and their strange California families came to stand silently on this unprepossessing eastern shore and watch their mother, in shorts and T-shirt, wade into the ocean with the Episcopal minister from Holy Cross, a family friend, and consign their feathery gray father to the white-laced water.

  “Don’t we have a plot at Magnolia?” the oldest said. “I thought we had enough space for everybody. We’ve always counted on it.”

  His tan surfer daughter and thin wife rolled their eyes. I could not imagine they gave a lot of thought to Magnolia Cemetery.

  “I know Daddy by rights didn’t really belong at Magnolia, but you sure do, and we do. Didn’t anybody hassle you about it?” the younger son, who did something with food irradiation in a Silicon Valley town known only to technicians, said. I knew that he had left Charleston to go to MIT and had since not spent more than two weeks at a time at home.

  Camilla lifted her head and smiled at her cuckoo child.

  “You can take the boy out of Charleston, but you can’t take Charleston out of the boy,” she said. Her face was damp, whether with tears or seawater I could not tell.

  “It’s what he wanted,” she went on gently. “Your dad always said he thought Magnolia Cemetery looked like the set for a grade-B vampire movie. He asked for the ocean. Come to that, I think I will, too.”

  “I may have to have you cremated,” the son said grimly, “but I will not scatter you in this goddamned ocean.”

  “Dump me in an ashtray then,” Camilla snapped, tiring of it all. “I’m surely not going to care.”

  We were all surprised, and I, for one, wanted to cheer. I had seldom heard Camilla raise her voice. It was good to know that she could get angry, and even better to know that she could be a very funny woman. I wanted to hug her.

  The day of Charlie’s ceremony was as clear and gentle as late summer, though it was the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Hugo had left an ironic legacy of sweet, luminous weather. The sky was a tender blue, and the sea, without rancor, creamed and hushed on the beach. Most of us had spent the night before at the beach house, and Lewis and I and Fairlie had gone swimming in the morning. The water was still as warm as blood, as amniotic fluid. At noon, while we were still sitting on the porch surrounded by bottles of flat champagne, with which we had toasted Charlie’s handsome bronze urn, the first of the cars from Charleston came lurching and grinding into the sandy space around the back stairs. Fairlie had been dispatched to be the lookout for them.

  “Holy shit,” she called back from the kitchen, where she had been peering out the window. “It’s a big old Lincoln town car with a chauffeur and about a million old ladies, and they’re all wearing hats! What do I do with them?”

  “Oh, God, it’s Mother’s garden club,” Camilla gasped. “I didn’t ask them; I sort of put the word out that it would be just us and some of Charlie’s people from the hospital, but I should have known they’d come. That’s Margaret Pingree’s car and it must be Jasper driving. I thought he was dead. Maybe he is dead, and just doesn’t know it. Listen, you guys, you’ll have to go down and get them around to the boardwalk somehow. Two of them that I know of have bad hips, and Margaret is on a walker. We can’t possibly get them up the back steps and then back down again. Fairlie, you and Lila and Anny help me get some chairs down there. We can put them along the top dune line and they can watch from there. Be careful, Henry, Lewis. They’ll all have on their goddamned ‘little heels.’ ”

  I began to laugh helplessly, and after a moment all the women joined in. We were still laughing as we lugged chairs down the steps to the boardwalk, clad in shorts and T-shirts, barefoot because we were all going into the water with Camilla and Charlie. Camilla brought up the rear bearing Charlie’s urn; she was shaking so with silent laughter that I feared we would end up anointing the dunes and sandburs with Charlie, instead of the eternal sea.

  Charlie’s service was a stupefying mixture of Episcopal and Gullah and rock and roll, and should have been ludicrous, but was deeply moving, at least to us. I could not see the garden club ladies or the sons of Charlie and Camilla; they stood on the first dune line, and we were at the edge of the surf, letting it lap our ankles. But I could hear an occasional hiss of outrage among the sniffs, and thought that whatever it might mean to us, this moment by the sea could not compete with St. Michael’s. Fortunately for everyone, Camilla mostly, there would be a memorial service at St. Michael’s on the next Wednesday, followed by a proper reception at Lila and Simms’s Battery house, which had been hastily and thoroughly cleaned and repaired by Tyrell and crew from Simms’s plant. Even Lila’s grandmother’s cherished orientals had been restored and were back in place on the newly varnished wide pine floors in the double drawing rooms. There was no more sign of Hugo there except
glaring sunlight where palms and live oaks had once stood. The Howard name got a lot done quickly.

  But this was Charlie’s day, and Camilla’s, and in a very real way ours, and we took Charlie down to the sea he loved in our own way.

  The tanned, balding minister from Holy Cross, where Charlie had gone if he went to church at all, stood knee-deep in the water, waiting for us, the Book of Common Prayer in his folded hands, his brown legs bare below his swimming trunks. He wore, instead of a clerical collar, a faded Grand Strand T-shirt. A plain metal crucifix hung around his neck. I supposed it was to identify him as clergy in case anyone of an official status caught him flinging ashes into the ocean and asked for an explanation. The clergy would not, of course, lie, but could claim certain ecclesiastical immunities. But we were not worried. No official had ever been seen on the beach this far to the west. All the action was around the crossroads, and east toward the Isle of Palms.

  Creighton Mills had been a childhood friend of Camilla and Lewis and Henry’s, and he smiled when we walked into the surf and stopped in a ragged line. Camilla stood in the center, and Creighton gave her a little salute.

  “I still can’t get used to the idea that Creigh Mills can save my soul,” Lewis whispered to me.

  “Better one of our own,” Henry said under his voice.

  Creighton looked at Camilla for a long moment, and then read in a quiet voice, from the Book of Common Prayer, “ ‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.

  “ ‘I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: and though this body be destroyed, yet shall I see God: whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger.’ ”

  There was a pause, and I heard an old lady say in the loud, flat voice of the nearly deaf, “Well, at least it’s the 1928 one, and not that dreadful hippie thing they’re doing everywhere now.”

  Beside me, I heard Lewis snort.

  “Shut up,” I hissed.

  Creighton Mills gave a barely perceptible nod and Henry clicked on the small cassette player he carried. I had not seen it before. Over the soft hush of the surf, Bobby Darin’s voice lifted up: “Somewhere, beyond the sea…”

  I knew that Charlie had loved the song, and felt my eyes sting. Lewis squeezed my hand. Then the music segued into “Long Tall Sally,” “Little Darlin’,” “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Goin’ On,” the Shirelles’s “Foolish Little Girl,” Charlie’s personal favorite, and finally, “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay,” to which we had all danced on the sand and the rough planks over the water, and the beach house’s tired grass matting.

  It was just right. Even as I felt tears start down my cheeks, laughter rose in my throat. I looked over at Camilla, who, with Lewis and Henry, I learned later, picked the songs, and nodded. She nodded back, smiling, her eyes wet.

  Creighton Mills looked at Camilla again, and she inclined her head, and from behind us we heard the scuffle and scrabble of paws, and the chink of chains. We turned to see Simms leading Boy and Girl, exuberant and stretching their leashes taut, down to the surf’s edge. They strained to get into the water, and looked up at Camilla in bewilderment when they were not allowed to run free.

  “Stay, sweeties,” she said softly. “Stay and say good-bye to Daddy.”

  I did begin to cry then, and so did Lila. Fairlie stared fiercely out to sea, her throat working. I did not dare look at Henry and Lewis. Gladys did not come down to the beach; she stayed on the porch, from which she never strayed now, along with Sugar, whose muffled yips rose over the sound of the waves and the seabirds. But they were with us. Our whole family was here.

  Then down the steps from the boardwalk four women came, black women in long skirts and bright blouses and jewelry and feathers, women who walked like queens and sang as they walked. As they sang, they shook small tambourines and one carried a curious little drum with a voice like faraway thunder. I recognized Linda Cousins, Lewis’s housekeeper, at the head of the procession. As she passed, she grinned over at us. Lewis gave her a great, leering wink.

  Around Charleston and the Low Country, there are groups, mainly black women, who preserve and perform the old songs and shouts of the Gullah slaves who brought them from Africa long ago. They are magnificent; people travel many miles to hear them. I remembered that Charlie had been entranced by them, and often dragged whoever he could corral out to the old Moving Star Hall on John’s Island, where, he said, the best of the Gullah praise singing could be heard. He was right. To hear them is to fly back on a dark wind to a time when fires burn in forests and drums speak, and magic walks. I did not know that Linda Cousins was a member of one of the groups, but I knew without being told that Lewis had arranged this for Charlie, and pressed his hand hard. He squeezed back.

  At the water’s edge the women sang, “Oh, hallelujah, hallelujah, glory hallelujah, you know the storm passing over, hallelu. The tallest tree in paradise Christians call the tree of life, you know the storm is passing over, hallelu.”

  And they sang, swaying and clapping, “Reborn again, reborn again, oh, reborn again. Can’t get to heaven less you reborn again. Oh, Satan is mad, and I’m so glad, oh, reborn again. Lost the soul he thought he had, oh, reborn again.”

  After several more shouts and songs, some exuberant, some solemn and poignant, they slid sweetly into “Deep River.” When the last notes faded away, the silence rang like a bell. It seemed to me that even the sea paused, and the wind that marked the turn of the tide.

  Creighton held his hands out to Camilla, and she waded into the water, her eyes fastened on his face, bearing Charlie’s urn, until she stood beside him. The slow, heaving green water broke around their legs, hers pearl white, his tanned. He took her free hand in his, and closed his eyes, and said something so softly that only Camilla could hear him. Her lips moved with his. I still do not know what Charlie’s final prayer was.

  He lifted his voice and said, “ ‘Unto Almighty God we commend the soul of our brother, Charles Curry, departed, and we commit his body to the deep; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection unto eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ; at whose coming in glorious majesty to judge the world, the sea shall give up her dead; and the corruptible bodies of those who sleep in him shall be changed, and made like unto his glorious body; according to the mighty working whereby he is able to subdue all things unto himself.’ ”

  He nodded to Camilla. She lifted the urn slowly to chin level, and pressed it against her cheek, and then she cast Charlie’s ashes into the ocean. A band of jagged, running shadows flew over us just at the moment the ashes settled, before they were whirled away, and we looked up to see a flock of pelicans, perfect pterodactyls, flying so closely over the surface of the sea that we might have reached up and touched them. They were not afraid of us; the pelicans of Sullivan’s Island have been here far longer than we have, and with far less intrusion. Charlie had loved pelicans. Camilla turned around to us, her face running with tears, and smiled.

  “ ‘The Lord be with you,’ ” Creighton Mills said.

  “ ‘And with thy spirit,’ ” we all murmured. Most of us were crying openly now.

  Simms let Boy and Girl go then, and they dashed into the still-warm, creaming surf and raised their doggy voices into the sky in praise of water.

  That evening I went up to the widow’s walk atop the house. I don’t really know why; somehow we had never gone there very often. From that height you could see the entire island, and over to the Isle of Palms, and back to Charleston, and the port docks and gas tanks, and the inland waterway. It was a remarkable view, but I think that we did not often want to be reminded that the beach house was part of a teeming, sprawling whole. Up here, that fact was inescapable.

  But there was almost always a spectacular sunset, especially in the late autumn, and the post-Hugo ones had been breathtaking. The men often sailed
at sunset, coming in out of the sinking sun to the dock on the inland waterway, and I think, looking back, that I went up to see if they, with Charlie, would come gliding in. The sun was a great dying conflagration, vermilion and purple, shot through with gold, and empty of humanity. No sails broke its skin, no Scrubs, no Charlie. The wind picked up, with, finally, late November hidden in it. I turned to go back down, but then Camilla’s head appeared at the top of the spiral staircase and I waited.

  She came out onto the little railed space and put her arm around my waist and laid her head on my shoulder. She had to lean down to do it. She wore a thick Fair Isle sweater of Charlie’s, and had brought one for me. It was tattered and pilled and smelled of salt and smoke and Charlie. I put it on gratefully.

  “Did you come up to see him off?” she said, smiling a little. I nodded. To try and speak just then would have been a disaster. She squeezed my waist.

  “I guess they don’t call it a widow’s walk for nothing,” she said.

  Very clearly, and for the first time, I thought, Charlie isn’t coming back. He died and I’m never going to see him again.

  A great void opened inside me, and I felt myself sliding into it. My knees buckled and I sat down abruptly on the rough boards of the widow’s walk. I cried; I cried so hard that for a space of time I could not get my breath, and thought that I would choke. Through the great salt tide of grief, I thought, stupidly, This has got to stop. I never cry. Not like this. What will Camilla think?

  “I want him back,” I gasped. “I want him back.”

  “So do I,” Camilla said.

  She sat down beside me and pulled my head down to her shoulder, and rocked me gently back and forth. After a while I could catch my breath, and the tears slowed and then stopped. Still, Camilla held me.

  “I’ve never seen you really cry,” she said, and her voice was serene. “Charlie would be honored, I think, but he’d hate to think he caused you such grief. It’s right to mourn him now, but I hope you’ll come to think of laughter and foolishness when you think of him. I hope we all will. It’s a better legacy than tears.”