Islands Page 2

“Yuck,” said Shawna, and we all laughed. There was nothing else for it.

  The office he took us into was small and clean and white and untidy. He sat Shawna down on the table and began to unlatch her brace and remove her buckle-up shoe.

  “Let’s see what we’ve got here, sweetheart,” he said. I stood awkwardly in the corner, because there was no chair, and busied myself with studying the diplomas and photographs on the walls. Duke, Johns Hopkins, certified by several boards, licensed to practice medicine in the state of South Carolina, fellow of several colleges of this and that. I assumed from the dates on the diplomas that he would be about fifty, though he looked a Mickey-Rooneyish thirty or so, with the turned-up nose and the blur of freckles on his face and arms.

  One of the photographs was of a stunningly beautiful dark-haired woman and two equally beautiful young girls, daughters almost certainly, from the resemblance, on a beach that could be any beach anywhere. They wore sun hats and smiled into the camera. Teeth flashed. A movie family. Another photo was of the woman, in white pants and a striped T-shirt, and a much younger Lewis Aiken, on the deck of a sleek, low sailboat. I recognized the low pile of Fort Sumter behind it; the Charleston harbor, then. A third photo was of a tall, narrow, pink stucco house, with round white columns and sheltering palm trees. It was placed end to end on its walled lot, with matching up- and downstairs verandas and an iridescent tin roof. A Charleston single house, it was called, because it would be a single room wide and no telling how many rooms deep. I had heard that the earliest denizens of the city turned their houses with their ends to the street to catch the stray breezes from the harbor, and also that they did it because the early houses were taxed on the number of windows visible from the street. I supposed that, Charleston being Charleston, either or both explanations were correct. From its air of floating in space, I thought that the house was almost certainly on the sea-fronted Battery.

  Lewis Aiken got the child’s massive shoe off, and her sock, and began gently to rotate her foot. Shawna frowned and jerked her foot back, and then screwed up her face preparatory to more weeping, and reached out for me. I moved to go to her, but he said, “It’s maybe better that you’re not in the room. I’ve found that they settle down quicker if the parent or guardian or whatever isn’t here. Would you mind too much waiting in the office out there? This shouldn’t take long.”

  Feeling ridiculously rejected, I went back into the silent outer office. He shut the door between us, so that I could not hear them. Sudden visions of child molestation bloomed in my mind, but they did not last long. Somehow it was impossible that this smiling, tousled man would harm a child. And we’d worked with him so often before….

  I wandered restlessly around the little anteroom. More photographs hung on the walls, and I bent to examine them in the purpling cloud-light.

  A big studio portrait of the dark woman, in her wedding dress, dominated the wall behind the receptionist’s desk. Close up, she was even more stunning than in the smaller photos: there was spirit and a sort of imperious pride in the tilt of her head, and her smile teased. Her groom had apparently not made it into the photo.

  “We did it! Love, Sissy,” a sloping backhand said across the bottom corner of the photograph. It was dated twenty years before. So, the girls were teenagers, probably. He did not look old enough for teenage daughters, but there was no doubt that they were his and the dark woman’s; they flanked the big portrait, and there were photos of them at all ages, from grave, beautiful toddlers through graceful preadolescents on horseback to the ones I took to be the most recent, clustered about. Always they smiled identical white smiles; always they were photographed together.

  Twins, I thought. They’re twins. This is a magical family. Dr. Lewis Aiken and his beautiful wife, Sissy, and his twin daughters—I leaned closer—Lila and Phoebe. I’ll bet they’ve been in every magazine and Sunday supplement in the Low Country. Why does the man who has everything spend his Saturdays struggling with leg braces and crying children, not to mention mothers like Tiffany Sperry?

  But I knew the answer. “Lewis Aiken is an absolute saint,” I had heard other foundation workers say. I had snorted, because so few people really are, but perhaps this square red man was, or something close to it. There was assuredly nothing of the holy martyr about him, but I knew that meant nothing. St. Francis was profoundly ugly. Josef Mengele was an elegant man.

  Thunder cracked outside, and the hot, straight-down rain of the Low Country sizzled onto sidewalks and sluiced off car roofs. From the looks of the dense sheet of water, this was no passing shower. I had, of course, no umbrella, mine having been sent home a week or so before with a tired black woman carrying her grandson. Cerebral palsy, I remembered. In all probability, not so much could be done for him as for this child. Some of the cruelest and most random-seeming afflictions had no cure. We could find, at best, palliative care. I sighed, hoping that the grandmother and her charge had made it home safe and dry. Shawna Sperry and I would not.

  “Shit,” I said under my breath. “No good deed goes unpunished.”

  Presently Lewis Aiken came out of his office holding the hand of little Shawna, who stumped happily along beside him, a lollipop stick protruding from her mouth.

  “It’s a little linty, but it was the best I could do,” he said. “I feel pretty optimistic about Shawna. This is fairly straightforward. I want her to see another pediatric orthopedic man…Clive Sutton; I’ll write it down for you, and call him. I don’t do the surgeries on the children I see. Conflict of interest, and all that shit. But Clive’s done them for me before, and he’ll adjust his fees according to your budget and the mother’s ability to pay. Probably do it for nothing, but don’t tell him I told you that. Will you call me after he’s seen her?”

  “Of course,” I said, taking Shawna into my arms. No way was I going to let her slog through that downpour. “Thank you for waiting for us.”

  “No problem. God. Look at that rain. When did that start? You want to wait here until it slows up a little? I’m not going to close up quite yet.”

  “No, they’re expecting her back at the foster home. And I’ve still got to track down her mother before tonight, if I can. Our budget doesn’t run to too many nights on the town.”

  “Well, at least let me give you the office umbrella. We used to have several, but they’re not like coat hangers; they don’t screw in the closet and breed more. They disappear.”

  “I’ll bring it back,” I said gratefully.

  “Don’t bother. My receptionist will love the chance to bitch at me for letting our last one get away, and I’ll love sending her out for new ones. We have a sort of complicated arrangement, but it suits us.”

  I laughed. “Thanks,” I said, and opened the umbrella and held it awkwardly over the heavy child, and ducked out into the storm.

  The umbrella provided a little shelter for Shawna, but virtually none for me. Just as we reached the Toyota, the umbrella died a violent death by turning itself inside out, and before I could get Shawna into her car seat and get back around to my side, I was as wet as if I had dived into a pool.

  “Shit, shit, shit!” I muttered, wringing my skirt and twisting the water out of my sopping hair. It was stifling in the car, but I knew that if I turned on the air conditioner, the child and I would both soon be shivering violently. The foster mother was the belligerent sort who delighted in finding errors and outrages in our handling of her charges so that she could report them to social services. I was already in her book for failing to find the child’s mother. A soaked and shivering Shawna would provide her with fuel for months.

  I cracked the window to let in some of the rain-freshened air, and dabbed at Shawna’s face and hands with the towel I kept in the car after one of my children threw up her Happy Meal.

  “We’ll get cool when the car starts,” I said.

  “Bath,” Shawna said happily, taking in my wet clothes and hair and face.

  “Bath is right,” I told her. “Let’s get you a
nd me both home and into some dry clothes.”

  I hoped fervently that the aggrieved foster mother had some spare children’s clothes on hand—most did—because Shawna had nothing but what she’d had on when her mother had faded into the bush. Otherwise, if she had not returned—and I had no hope that she had—I would have to find clothes for Shawna, and toothpaste and such. I cursed Tiffany Sperry, not for the first time. What on earth could matter more to her than her handicapped child? But it was a useless curse, and I knew it. To the Tiffanys of the world, almost anything could matter more.

  “Here we go,” I said, and turned the key in the ignition. Nothing happened. I turned it again, and again. Nothing but a kind of ominous metallic burring. Outside, the rain racheted up its intensity a notch.

  “I’m hungry,” Shawna whined. “I want to go to the bathroom.”

  I put my head down on the steering wheel and closed my eyes. Lightning forked, and thunder boomed. Shawna began to howl.

  There was a rapping on my window, and I looked up to see Lewis Aiken standing there, scrubs and hair plastered down with water, still barefoot.

  “What’s the matter?” he mouthed.

  “Car won’t start,” I yelled back. I felt ridiculously guilty, as though he had caught me in some monstrous ineptitude, or even worse, thought me engaged in a ruse to get his attention.

  “Come on,” he said, opening my door and letting fresh rain gust in. “I’m parked right behind you. I’ll run you both home, and we can get your car taken care of later.”

  “There’s no need,” I began, and then stopped and blushed. Of course there was a need. If he did not take us home, we would plainly sit in his parking lot all night.

  “Thanks,” I muttered ungraciously.

  He plucked Shawna out of her car seat with a deftness born of practice and covered her face and head with the towel I handed him. He ran with her to a big, mud-spattered green Range Rover and popped her into the backseat and opened the door for me. I climbed in and sat there, shivering and puddling water on his upholstery. From the looks of it, it had been dampened with far worse.

  He ducked into the driver’s side and sat shaking the water from his head, and then grinned at me.

  “This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” he said.

  “ ‘Of all the gin joints in all the world, I had to walk into yours,’ ” I said, and we both laughed. Suddenly things felt okay. All right. This situation, which a moment before had been a catastrophe, was…not.

  Later, after the rain had abated to a sullen drizzle and Shawna had been settled for the night under the righteous roof of the foster couple, he took me home to my apartment. I rented a small one in a redbrick building on the corner of East Bay and Wentworth, with nothing of the charm of surrounding Anson-borough to recommend it. But it was cheap and close to my office, and I had gradually made it into home. I had, I realized every so often with a slight shock, been living there for nine years. The building had changed owners four times in that space of time, and I really did not know the current ones, a youngish couple who lived in the bottom apartment and kept an eye on things. The former owner had been a thin, heavily made-up woman whose sole passion seemed to be attempting to catch me and the fussy old retired College of Charleston professor across the hall in riotous living. That she never succeeded did not lessen her efforts. I had been glad to see the new owners. They seemed pleasant enough, in an anonymous sort of way, and we nodded amiably on the stairs. I did not plan to change my habits, which were as abstemious as ever, but I was grateful that the landlordly perception of them seemed to have changed.

  “I can’t thank you enough,” I said as Lewis Aiken brought the Range Rover to a stop. “I’ll call the garage about my car, and they can take it from there. You’ve done enough for me and Shawna.”

  He stretched and pulled his wet shirt away from his body.

  “Will you make me a cup of tea?” he said.

  I stiffened. What was this? Not, surely, what was euphemistically called in my mother’s day a pass—“Did he make a pass at you? You tell me the truth—” but if not that, what? Surely he knew that I had seen the photographs of his beautiful family and house. Obscure disappointment rose in my throat.

  “Isn’t your family expecting you at home?” I said. “You’ve spent the entire afternoon on Shawna and me. For goodness sake, go home and get dry and have a glass of wine or something. It’ll be better than my tea, I can promise you that.”

  “My family is in California,” he said. “My wife and I divorced several years ago, and she and the girls live in Santa Barbara now. Her family is there. And I’m cold and I’ve got a fifty-mile drive ahead of me. I really wish you’d give me something hot to drink. I promise that your virtue is safe with me.”

  And I believed him. For one thing, he was the sort of man you simply believed. Period. For another, what man in his right mind would put the moves on a woman who looked like a drowned marsupial?

  “It’s a long way from the Battery, but I’ll be happy to make you some tea,” I said. “I don’t have anything dry you can put on, though.”

  And I blushed furiously. He grinned.

  “I’ll sit on a towel and be fine,” he said. “I really do just want a shot of something hot. I’ve got to get back to the country before long.”

  “Where’s the country?” I said, getting out of the Range Rover and slogging up the steps to the veranda of my apartment house.

  “Edisto Island,” he said. “My family has always had a place out there on the river. It’s too big and too empty, and I rattle around in it, but it’s one of my favorite places on earth. I stay there part of every weekend.”

  He came around the car and put his hand under my elbow and we went up onto the veranda. I thought, with laughter rising hysterically in my throat, of how we must look, a short, wet, red-haired, barefoot man and a short, wet, round, spaniel-eyed woman. I wished the former owner could see us. She would finally be vindicated.

  “I’ll bet you came in just to see Shawna,” I said, fumbling with the big old key in my lock.

  “No, I spent the night in town last night. I’ve got a little carriage house behind a big house on Bull Street. I’d have been here anyway.”

  “You don’t use the big house in the photo?” I said, blushing again at my own effrontery. It was total.

  “My wife wanted it and I didn’t want her to have it, so I deeded it to someone else,” he said matter-of-factly. “It was in my family, not hers. That’s when she lit out for Santa Barbara. Mama and Daddy sprang for an adjoining casita.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I was. He had, it seemed, lost almost everything.

  “Me, too,” he said. I could hear nothing of pain in his voice, but it must be there, under everything.

  “Tea coming up,” I said, and opened my door.

  “This is nice,” Lewis said, looking around my minute living room, and I saw that in his fresh eyes, it was. It is easy, in Charleston, to think of rooms being beautiful only if they are centuries old and rich with moldings and mahogany and portraits and silver; it is the curse of living downtown, where such rooms are the norm. But there are other ways of pleasing the mind and eye, and I had to aspire to them, because the first was forever beyond my reach.

  I had painted the small, high-ceilinged room a soft butter yellow—“Tuscan Gold,” the paint swatch said—and done the high moldings and windowsills in white. I had bought the two wing chairs from a secondhand shop in West Ashley and the beautiful, gut-spilling camelback sofa at an estate sale on Tradd Street. I had laid over them soft throws and shawls and pieces of old fabric I had found over the years in the shops on King Street. King Street was the provenance of my favorite things; in its antiques shops, as fabled as Aladdin’s cave, I had found small oriental rugs so thin and fine that they rippled like silk; mismatched pieces of porcelain, bits of old silver, prints and lamps and mirrors with their ornate frames all gone to tarnish. Over my tiny white fireplace mantel I had one or
iginal painting, one of Richard Hagerty’s surrealistic tropical scenes, with a wonderful primitive leopard peering through such foliage as had never bloomed in an earthly jungle. I had saved for a year to buy the big painting, afraid each day that someone else would snatch it, and when I brought it home and hung it, the room swam into a kind of focus and sophistication that saved it absolutely from being the fusty lair of a spinster. The painting anchored and lit the room. I added ficus and palm trees and a few treasured orchids. The result was part Cotswold cottage, part family parlor, part seraglio. I never came into it without feeling its arms come around me.

  I got towels from the bathroom and gave them to Lewis, put on the kettle, and went in to change into dry jeans and one of my brother’s old shirts. I toweled my hair and combed it with my fingers and turned on the thumping window air conditioner whose stale, powerful breath would soon turn my three rooms into an igloo, and went, as barefoot as he, back into the living room. Outside, the rain had started again.

  “It’s a wonderful nest,” he said, wandering around the room and looking at my clutter of things. “I hate spare, cold, ‘modern’ rooms. They look like the furniture should have price tags on it. Are these mainly family things?”

  He had taken off his wet shirt and hung it on the back of a kitchen chair and had a towel draped capelike around his shoulders. It struck me that there was no capacity for embarrassment in him. He would say and do whatever he wished with no thought for decorum. I wondered how Charleston had produced such a man.

  “Yes, but they’re other people’s families,” I said. “We always rented, and my mother didn’t leave much but some clothes and photographs and a set of Melamine dinnerware. My sister has that. But I always wanted a place like this, that looked as if it had been a part of my family for ages. So I borrowed other people’s.”

  I had not meant to sound pathetic; I was proud of my room and thought myself lucky and clever to have it. But he turned and looked at me soberly.

  “You’re pretty much alone, aren’t you?” he said.