Low Country Page 2

  At first, when I started to spend time over on the island by myself, I used as an excuse the creation of a series of paintings of the marshes in all seasons and at all times of day. It was believable, if barely; I had not, then, painted in twenty years, but I did a lot of it once, and I have two solid years of training in fine arts at Converse. I was good then, good enough so that when I quit school in my junior year to marry Clay Venable, several of my instructors begged me to wait, begged me to get my degree first and then go somewhere specialized, like the Art Institute of Chicago, where two of them had taught, for further serious study. But I did not, and after Carter was born, I did not paint anymore. I never seemed to miss it, not consciously, and yet, when I pulled it out to excuse my flights to the island and began to actually dabble once more in oils and watercolors and pastels, it felt right and easy, supremely satisfying. After a while I was spending a great deal of time there trying to catch the fey, flickering faces and moods of the marshes and estuaries; it became important to me to do it as well as I could, to give the island its full due. After a longer while, even I could tell that the work I was doing was good, and getting better. Now, when I went to the island, it was not only that I was leaving Peacock’s, I was going to something that was important to me on many levels.

  Clay knew that, even if he did not approve. I was good enough so that the handful of small galleries on Peacock’s and a few on some of the larger islands, and even one in Charleston, carried my work. He could not argue that it was self-indulgence alone that drew me back and back to the island. And to be fair, I knew that he was proud of me.

  He had another weapon in his arsenal, though, and I knew now, without his saying so, that he was about to employ it. About five years ago he had asked me, almost casually, if I would involve myself with the young families who came to the Plantation to work for the company, to act as a sort of chatelaine-hostess-troubleshooter-confidante to them, especially the young women, most of whom were wives.

  “You know,” he said, “give dinner parties for them when they get here so they can get to know the others. Show them around, put them in the hands of the right real estate people so they won’t end up spending money they can’t afford for decent housing. Tell them about doctors and dentists and schools and play groups, and such. Maybe take the wives over to Charleston once or twice a month, show them the best shops and galleries and the right hair places, take them to lunch at the Yacht Club or somewhere flossy and fun. Just listen to them. It’s not an easy adjustment for some of them. Some of them have never been closer to the ocean than a couple of weeks in the summers. I’m aware that it can get sort of cliquey and ingrown here; especially if they’re slated to stay here for a long time. You could be a godsend to them.”

  Clay’s company now encompasses properties as far away as Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands; each project has a different management group, and he draws them from businesses and business schools all over the United States, but a preponderance of the young men and their wives come from the Northeast, from Wharton and Harvard Business Schools and others like them. No matter what property they are slated for, they all come here first. Basic corporate training in the Peacock Island Plantation way of life starts here, and the average stay for a young family is two years. Some of them end up spending three, five, and more years. To a man and woman, they know little when they get here but the theory of business. It remains for Clay and the other Peacock executives to put a Peacock shine on them. It is often a hard and daunting process; it has not been all that unusual, in the past, for young marriages to be strained and sometimes broken, for destructive habits to take hold: too much liquor, too many recreational drugs, too much time spent in the attractive company of others than one’s own husband or wife. The active one of the couple, usually the husband, spends long hours away from home, living and breathing the Peacock party line, leaving the young wife adrift on a languid island in a warm sea, cut off from home and family, alone with small children and only the company of other corporate wives, who have wrestled out their own places here and are not eager to take in the newcomer and her brood, lest she be the spouse of the very one who will oust their own husbands from their hard-won places in Clay’s court. Clay argued, when he put his proposition to me, that he could not afford to take the time to arbitrate this sort of thing, and that if left unattended, it could come to wreck the famous Peacock morale. I thought the whole thing tiresome, heartbreaking, and entirely thankless, but I could see that he was right. Somebody needed to take hold of the newly arrived young. I just did not think it should be me.

  But Clay did, and I could hardly refuse. I had not yet found refuge in my painting when he asked, and even I could see that if I did not find something outside myself to occupy me, I was going to be in serious trouble. I have always known that he asked more for my benefit than for the cadet corps of the Peacock Island Plantation.

  I knew now with absolute certainty that he was about to produce a new crop of the needy young. He had that look. “Don’t tell me,” I said. “Let me guess. A new crop of lambs is incoming as we speak.”

  I smiled as I said it, though. He was smiling again, and I would give a lot to keep hold of that smile. After all, I had agreed to this role, and I do what we call the mother-superior bit rather well. The young women who are my charges all seem just young enough so that I don’t threaten them with competition, and I have both the advantage of knowing the territory and the cachet of being the supreme honcho’s wife. And I never drink when I’m on a mother-superior mission. I know that Clay doesn’t worry about that. I don’t do the children, though. Peggy Carmichael, the warm, big-lapped, grandmotherly woman who has been Clay’s director of housekeeping since the beginning, does that. It works out pretty well, all told.

  “Yep,” Clay said, draining his coffee cup and leaning back. There was a sheepish cast to his smile now, which is the second most appealing smile that he has. The first, hands down, is his let’s-go-to-bed smile. I am fairly sure that no one else but me sees that one.

  “So? I didn’t know you had anything new on the books.”

  “I don’t, strictly,” he said. “There’s something on the horizon, a marsh property a ways from here that’s looking real good, but I wasn’t going to start staffing for it yet. But these three coming in are all special, top of their classes at Wharton and anxious to get started somewhere, and I was afraid if I didn’t nail them down somebody else would get them. And some serious money looks like it might open up sooner than I thought. So I’m bringing them and their families on down. Just two couples and a divorced woman. I’m going to need you for this. Your light will hold a few more nights, I think. Will you, Caro?”

  “So when are they coming?”

  “They’ll be here early this afternoon. I’m putting them up in the guest house until we can get two of the villas ready. Don’t worry, they won’t be staying here.”

  “Tonight! Oh, Clay! I can’t get a dinner party ready by tonight; Estelle’s got the afternoon off, and there’s some kind of Thanksgiving pageant or something at school; all the others will be there with their kids.…”

  “No, no. I thought this time we might just take them over to Charleston. They’ll have time to freshen up and rest some, and we can show them a little of the island on the way. Maybe you could call the Yacht Club and see if they can get us in about eight. It’s a pretty impressive place, and I hear one of the wives is not at all happy about leaving Darien and New York. Thinks she’s coming down here to live among the savages. It won’t hurt to throw some vintage Charleston at her. Let her know she can get to civilization in less than an hour.”

  “Ah, yes, the Holy City,” I said, getting up to call the Carolina Yacht Club and make reservations. Clay has belonged for years now; and I still don’t know how he managed it. Few outsiders made it into those hallowed halls on Charleston Harbor at the time he joined. I know that he never tires of taking newcomers there, just as I quail inwardly every time I know that I am going. Clay does n
ot understand why I feel tentative at the Yacht Club.

  “After all, this was your grandfather’s town,” he said. “And your great-great-great’s, for that matter. You’ve got a more valid claim on it than half the people who live here.”

  I rarely answer him. It is a long way from McClellanville, where my grandfather lived for most of his life, to Charleston and the Carolina Yacht Club, and the twain seldom meet. They never did for my grandfather, or my great-great-great, either, truth be known, but Clay has forgotten this, if he ever really knew it.

  “Oh, wait a minute,” he called after me, and I stopped and looked back.

  “There may be a problem. This woman who’s coming. She’s probably the best of this lot, but I don’t know if it’s a good idea to take her to the Yacht Club.…”

  “Why on earth? She’s your guest. She doesn’t have to have an escort of her own,” I said.

  “She’s black,” Clay said. “It might be a little uncomfortable for her.”

  “Uncomfortable is not precisely the term I would have used,” I said, and went to the telephone and called Carolina’s for reservations for a party of seven at eight o’clock that evening.

  When Clay went upstairs to shower, I took my garden shears and a basket and went out into the yard to cut flowers for the guest house. Though it was nearly Thanksgiving, I still had some sweet, sturdy old roses in the beds behind the house, and it had been so warm that a few of the big, ruffled Sasanqua camellias had bloomed. They always do in our soft, wet autumns and winters; glowing like daystars in the grays and duns and silvers of this winter coast, then freezing and blackening to mush in the vicious little icy snaps that follow in January. We are subtropical here, and the Atlantic runs shallow and warm off our tan beaches. We have flowers long after the rest of the South has yielded up theirs to the cold. And there are vast greenhouses and acres of experimental gardens in the sheltered heart of the island, which serve the Plantation’s floral needs as well as supplying its ecologically correct plantings and landscaping. I could have my pick of largesse from any of those. But I like to work in my backyard garden, and it feels right to take flowers from my own house to welcome Clay’s young newcomers. And he likes telling them that I brought them my own flowers. So I usually do this when we have incomings. Augmented with the ubiquitous pansies that the landscaping people blanket the public spaces with in fall and winter, I would have enough for lush bouquets in all the rooms. I would take them down later so they would be fresh.

  The guest house was bought to accommodate our personal guests at Cotton Blossom, the name Clay gave our house when it was built. But we have not had many guests, not for some years, and as the guest house is at some distance from us, it works well for temporary housing for company newcomers.

  Cotton Blossom…the name sets my teeth on edge, and I refuse to use it, or even to use the house stationery that Clay had made up for us. It sounds phony and overblown to me, a parody of every bad ol’ Suthren joke I have ever heard. The rest of the homes in Peacock Island Plantation do not have names, that I know of, and even the named areas—streets, subdivisions, parks—wear the names of indigenous birds or flora. But Cotton Blossom was the name of the mean little cotton plantation my great-great-great-grandfather Aubrey built over on neighboring Edisto, where he raised substandard Sea Island cotton, and Clay thought to keep the name in the family, so to speak. Great-great-great-grandfather Aubrey is my only valid link to Charleston, and a tenuous one it was and is.…Grandpa’s town house was small and cramped and well below the salt, and his presence in the Holy City seems to have left no more permanent impression than his passing. The Aubrey town house is a garage off King Street now. Clay does not find it necessary to point out the garage to prospective investors and residents of Peacock’s, as he does the crumbling ruins of Cotton Blossom over on Edisto, which look, in their vine-and-moss-shrouded decay, far more romantic than the house ever looked in the days of its ascendancy.

  “Caroline’s people go way back in the Lowcountry,” he is fond of saying, and I don’t contradict him, because I suppose, literally speaking, they do, or at least Great-great-great-grandfather Aubrey’s scanty tribe did. It’s just that they didn’t linger. My stake in Charleston and its environs is shallow indeed.

  Clay respects my refusal to use the house’s name, as he does most of my actions and decisions. He even smiles when I say that “Cotton Blossom” sounds like it ought to be wallowing down the Mississippi River, steam whistles squalling, pickaninnies dancing on the dock as it rounds the bluff. But he uses it himself, just the same, and in his soft, deep voice, it somehow manages to sound as dignified as he thinks it is. As I said, he is serious about keeping the few legitimate old Lowcountry names we have in the family. Not even our children escaped; Kylie was baptized Elizabeth Kyle Venable, after that same great-great-great-grandfather, John Kyle Aubrey.

  “It’s pretentious, that’s all,” I said, when she was born, trying to dissuade him. “Nobody in our family was close to the old skinflint, or even remembered him, that I ever heard of. If you want to honor my family, what’s wrong with my mother’s name? Or my grandmother’s?”

  “Olive?” he said mildly, looking at me over the small half-glasses he had just begun to wear. “Lutie Beulie? At least they’ll know who she is in Charleston. They’ll know what the name means.”

  And I gave in, because even then I was too besotted with love and delight toward my daughter to argue about her name. In my deepest heart I knew who she was. I always did.

  I put my flowers into the big, flat sweet-grass basket that I keep in the potting shed for the purpose and started back to the house. I love that basket; I love all the beautiful, intricate, sturdy baskets that the Gullah women braid from the dried sweet grass that flourishes in the marshes of the Lowcountry and sell for formidable sums wherever tourists gather. For once, I think, the tourists get fair value. The baskets are usually works of art and last, with care, for generations. The one I use for flowers we bought for Kylie to keep her toys in when she was a toddler. Carter has a larger one, a hamper, really, in his room, where his dirty clothes have more or less landed ever since he was five. It is traditional with Clay and me to give new families sets of the baskets at Christmastime, and they have always been received with what seems to me honest delight.

  A flicker of red from the front of the house caught my eye as I came up the shallow steps to the veranda. It was a long way away, perhaps at the edge of the dunes, perhaps even down on the beach itself, and I felt my heart drop and pause and then start its old low, slow, cold thumping. I knew it was ridiculous, and I also knew that I was going to have to go down to the edge of the front lawn and see what it was. The sick coldness would last all day if I did not. I put the basket of flowers down on a wicker table on the veranda and went around the side of the house and across the front lawn, kept velvety and green all year by the Plantation groundskeepers, and around the tabby apron to the oval pool, and up to the little gray cypress landing that led to the steps and boardwalk to the beach. Only then did I lift my eyes to the water.

  The sea was still gunmetal gray out at the horizon line, but the cloud rift that had lit the horizon earlier had drifted westward so that the beach shimmered in a wash of pale lemon light and running cloud-shadow. Strange, strange…somehow, even when the temperature is as mild as it usually is in November here, almost blood warm, like the water, the shifting dunes and flat beach and heaving sea seem cold to me, cold to the bone, cold to death. There is the damp, of course; the humidity of the Lowcountry is as much an element as its tepid water and low, sweet sky. The air of the Sea Islands is like a cloud against your skin in all its seasons. But it is more than that: taken in the aggregate, all that flickering, tossing, shivering, whispering pewter and silver seem to chill me to the core, and it always did, even at those infrequent times I came to a Lowcountry beach in autumn as a child. It is in this season, and in the winter that will follow, that I feel queerest, the most alien, here; there should be dark, point
ed firs against the sky, not rattling, brown-tipped palms. Naked branches, wet black tree trunks, the bare bones of the earth, instead of the canopy of living green of the live oaks, the eternal fecund darkness of the sea pines. I looked at the sea and was cold in my heart.

  The red turned out to be an open beach umbrella, bucking against the steady, moaning sea wind. I looked beyond it into the surf line, knowing what I would see, and did: swimmers, plunging in the lace-white edging of the breaking waves. Now that I saw them, I listened for and heard their voices: Canadians. Snowbirds. We get them every fall and winter, and we laugh and shiver when they swim determinedly every day but the very worst ones, and march up and down the empty, howling beach as if dead set on getting their winter vacation money’s worth. If they ever hear the laughter and see the shivers they apparently do not care. I have seen one or two of them plowing mulishly into the ocean when one of our rare, soft, wet snows was falling. Don’t laugh, Clay says. Without them the Inn and the villas and the restaurants would almost close down off season. I don’t laugh. I have always liked and admired them, those tough, foolish migrants. Good sense was never a fault of mine, either.

  My heart picked up its dragging pace and my breath came seeping back, and I took my flowers into the kitchen and arranged them in some of the pottery vases that I collect and keep for flowers, and left them by the door onto the veranda, and went up to take my own shower. I heard Clay moving around overhead in his study and knew that he would be bent over the architect’s drafting table that he keeps there, the working drawings for the newest Peacock Plantation project, whatever it might be, permanently map-tacked in place there. Clay has a design staff second to none when it comes to attractive, ecologically sensitive Lowcountry architecture and interiors, but nothing comes off their boards that does not go directly onto his, and this morning time in his study is sacrosanct to everyone on his staff. Later he would tend to the endless rounds of meetings and conferences that made up his afternoons, and might go on until very late at night, to dinners and conferences and cigars and brandies in restaurants and drawing rooms from Savannah up to Myrtle Beach, according to where the fat new money was. But in the mornings he stayed at home and put his hands directly on his empire. It probably drove his people wild, but it had made the Peacock Island Plantation properties a name that rivaled that of Charles Fraser’s Sea Pines Plantation Company in its halcyon earlier days. I smiled, thinking of him there; he would be fully dressed for his day, in one of his winter-weight tropical suits or perhaps a gray seersucker. Clay almost never wore slacks and a jacket, and I saw him without a tie usually only in bed.