Islands Read online

  “Poor Henry.”

  “Yeah, well, by that time Fairlie had come along, and before long Henry was a goner. Man, she was something else. Well, you’ll see.”

  “Where did she come from?”

  “She came down from Kentucky to study dance at the College of Charleston. Henry met her at a party that his mother gave for the troupe. She was a good bit younger than we were, but Henry couldn’t have cared less. Only his mother cared; she’d had her sights set on Camilla all along. Two of the great old Charleston families and all that shit. But even she bowed to the inevitable. Fairlie was gorgeous. Still is, but when she was that young…God, she was like a lit candle.”

  My mouth was dry. I was not like a lit anything, except maybe a squat emergency candle.

  “Tell me about the rest of them,” I said. “Tell me about the Scrubs.”

  “I have. A hundred times.”

  “Tell me again. Tell me why you call yourselves the Scrubs. Tell me how they look. Tell me what makes them laugh. Tell me what they love.”

  He stopped the car to let a small procession cross the road, toward the beach. A youngish woman in a man’s shirt and sunglasses came first, followed by two towheaded, brown children in swimsuits and flip-flops. Bringing up the rear was a young girl in a modest bikini, her arms piled high with towels, a cooler, an umbrella, and beach toys. She was barefoot, and pranced skittishly across the hot pavement.

  “They look like a family of ducklings,” I said.

  “Typical Sullivan’s Island nuclear family,” Lewis said, grinning. “Mama out from Charleston for the summer, while Daddy stays home on Tradd Street and works at the bank and comes out on weekends. The kids. And the nanny. You know the nannies by the number of things they carry, and the fact that they always bring up the rear. There weren’t any in our time. I don’t know if kids have gotten much worse since then, or mothers have gotten less able to cope. If Henry and I had had a teenager in a bikini in residence, we’d never have left the front porch.”

  “You sound like you were a juvenile sex fiend,” I said.

  “And never grew out of it,” he said, putting his hand on my bare knee. I could feel the heat of it all over me. I thought of the weekend just past, and felt my arms and legs go slack and heavy. We had seen each other every night since then, but we had not made love again. I had waited for it, first in an embarrassed shyness, then in puzzlement, and finally with an impatience that I could feel in the pit of my stomach. Did he regret the night on the dock, then? But if he did, why did he continue to see me? Why did he bring me to this place that was, I knew, deep in one of the central chambers of his heart?

  As if he had read my mind, he said, “I can’t wait to get you on a sand dune. It’s an unforgettable experience. The moon, the stars, the sandspurs, the ghost crabs…”

  “You’ll be waiting a long time,” I said, but something in me relaxed and stretched itself. There would be another time, then, even if it wasn’t on a sand dune. And then I thought, What’s the matter with me? Can you turn into a hot number at age thirty-five?

  And I knew I could.

  He started the car again, driving slowly west. On each side of Middle Street there were modest cottages and bungalows, many on stilts. They were well kept and many had flourishing gardens, but they were a long way from grand.

  “Where are the big old cottages?” I said. “I know they must be along the beach, but I’ve never seen any.”

  “They are. They’re on what we call the first row. That’s the first row from the beach. There’s a second row, and a third, and a fourth, and so on. The little streets that cut through them to this one are called stations, because they used to be stops on a trolley line that ran along the island. Things get a little rattier as they get farther from the beach.”

  “Not very democratic.”

  “We never thought it was.”

  “All right, the Scrubs.”

  “That’s simply because all of us are, in one way or another, connected to medicine. Henry and I went to Duke and Hopkins together. Charlie’s always been in hospital administration. Simms’s father owned a medical supply business that served the whole South, and Simms has built it up into a national concern. Second or third largest in the country, I think. Simms and Henry and I were born here, and grew up together, along with Camilla and Lila. We had the start of a core group, and then Charlie and Fairlie came, and somehow we just…clicked. Over the years we got close, closer than with some of our families. In a way, you’re right. They are my family.”

  “Your wife…,” I said tentatively. “Was she part of it?”

  “No.” He looked straight ahead. “Sissy was never part of it. She thought Sullivan’s was sticky and sandy and shabby and she didn’t like any of the women. Oh, maybe Camilla, a little…at least she liked her family tree, and it’s hard not to like Camilla no matter what. But she really disliked Fairlie and Lila. Too good looking, I think.”

  “She didn’t have any worries on that score,” I said, thinking of the radiant young woman in her wedding dress.

  “Sissy always hated having sand in her shoes and wind in her hair. And the accommodations at the house are less than palatial, to say the least. Mostly she stayed in Charleston and went to parties, and took the girls shopping and to their own parties.”

  “And they didn’t like the beach?” I said, wondering what sort of children wouldn’t love surf and sand and endless blue.

  “Well, we all came out once in a while when they were very young, but Sissy didn’t care for the other kids, thought they were rowdy little hoodlums who simply ran wild. And they were, just like their parents had been. And the girls got so sunburned one summer that we had to take them to the hospital, and that was that. She loved Sweetgrass, though, and we spent a lot of time out there. She liked being able to ask her friends to the family plantation, and later to the Battery house. When I came out here, I came alone.”

  “I think that’s terribly sad,” I said, dipping my head to his shoulder briefly. He reached over and touched my hair.

  “Well, anyway, the rest of us finally worked out a sort of system with the beach house. Camilla’s mother wasn’t interested in it after her husband died, so we all got together and pooled our pennies and bought it. It belongs to all of us. Whoever wants to come out every weekend, or spend longer here, can do it. And they can bring anybody they want to. Some of us have other places to go, like I have Edisto, and don’t get here as often as the others. But once a month, we all meet here for a day and sometimes two. Nobody misses it. Children used to come, but now it’s mostly just us again, like in the beginning. You asked what we laugh at? Everything. And what we love? Many things, of course, but high on the list is the ocean, and that house, and…us. It’s odd, but the beach has always been the thing that held us together. The water is like blood to us, I guess.”

  I was silent. I thought that there was no way they were going to enfold me in that complex web of loves and laughter, no matter what Lewis said. I had never even known such friendship existed. Suddenly I wanted, more than anything in the world, to tell Lewis to turn the car around and take me home.

  “We’re here,” he said, turning the car off onto a rough, sandy track that led through a forest of scrub pines and palmettos and an occasional stunted live oak, flanked by dunes. It seemed to me that we drove for a long time. There was nothing on either side of us but sand and scrub.

  “This is definitely the inelegant end of the island,” Lewis said. “Most of the fancy cottages are up toward the east end. But I’ve always been glad of that because we have relatively few neighbors. The beach along here is sort of skimpy, and the dunes are high and shifty. It’s kept the property pretty wild.”

  And then we were through the undergrowth and out into a glaring, sandy space beyond which the dunes rose high, fringed with waving sea oats, and the sound of the hidden ocean boomed in my ears, and I saw the house for the first time.

  It was a hybrid of a house, to put it kindly. It sto
od unshaded in the middle of the blinding-white clearing, and its peeling gray shingles threw off heat like a hot pavement; you could see the shimmering waves of it. The central portion was square and two storied, with many small windows where I could see curtains blowing in the sea wind, and startlingly, a widow’s walk atop it, like a church hat on a dowager. Various shingled wings and ells had been added, obviously later, and a screened-in porch surrounded it. The house sat high on its pilings, and there was a pool of dense, dark shade underneath, where I could see a couple of cars and a lawn mower and what looked to be a volleyball net draped over a Ping-Pong table. Down in the yard, or whatever they called the scorching-white area surrounding it, the noonday heat must surely be close to unbearable. But I had seen the flutter of the curtains, and heard the snap of what must be a flag in the wind. All the living in this house would be done in the air.

  “I need to be here,” I said stupidly to Lewis, hardly aware that I spoke. The house sang to me as my mother never had.

  “I know,” he smiled. “And here you are.”

  A long flight of wooden steps led up from the sand to the porch in back. They were railed and stout looking, but needed paint badly. The rest of the house did, too. I loved every chip and gouge. This beautiful house was nevertheless a hoyden in torn clothes, and would demand nothing from you except allegiance. It had mine before we got out of the car.

  “It’s wonderful,” I said to Lewis, trudging across the sand to the steps. Sandspurs pricked at my legs, and small, vicious insects homed in on me.

  “Yes, it is,” he said. “There’s nothing about it aesthetically right; it started life as a New England saltbox because Camilla’s father had visited Nantucket and fell in love with the old seafarers’ houses there. Most of the other houses are low, behind the dunes, but he said that if he had a house on the beach, he, by God, wanted to see the beach. This house is on one of the highest points on the island, and it’s raised another story by the stilts. He bought up all the land down to the primary dune line, because he said he didn’t want to be looking into anybody else’s bathroom window. Once you’re in the house, it’s like being on a ship at sea. You look straight over the dunes to the beach and the ocean; the tops of the palms are about level with the porch. Whoever added the wings and the porch didn’t require anything but bedroom space and a place to sit outside. None of it’s ever going to make Architectural Digest. But somehow it works. Even if the bedrooms are the size of a Legare Street closet and the walls are so thin you can hear your neighbors…snore.”

  He leered at me.

  “Well, there’s always the dunes,” I said, and he laughed and took my hand and we ran up the steps and onto the porch and into the wind.

  It hit us squarely when we reached the back door of the house, which was open. The front door was, too. A river of salt-sweet air rushed through it and I could see the entire big room and the front porch beyond it, and beyond that the lines of the dunes retreating down to the beach and the sea. The tide was coming in full, and white surf laced the blue-and-green water. I had a jumbled impression of old wicker and frayed grass rugs and a litter of newspapers and books, and coffee cups and crumpled napkins, and a huge, dead stone fireplace at one end. At the other, narrow stairs climbed up into the gloom of the second floor. A clutter of fishing rods stood propped beside the front screen door, and for some reason, a battered yellow sea kayak rested on the porch beside a rope hammock. There was no one in the house.

  There was a note, though, pinned to the battered trestle table with a bottle of insect repellent.

  “On beach,” it said. “Bring more towels and some ice from the freezer and another umbrella. Welcome, Anny!”

  It was signed simply “C.” Camilla, I thought. My throat tightened.

  “I don’t have a bathing suit,” I said in a small voice.

  “There’s bound to be one around here that’ll fit you,” Lewis said. “Go upstairs and look in the first bedroom on the right. That’s Camilla and Charlie’s. She’s the keeper of the spare bathing suits. People keep leaving them; there must be twenty of them by now.”

  “I can’t just go into their room—”

  “Oh, go on. Nobody cares about that. Sometimes you’ll wake up and somebody will be rooting through your dresser drawer or your suitcase, looking for a stamp or your car keys, or most likely an Alka-Seltzer. This is a pretty socialist house.”

  I crept up the dark old stairs and into the tiny bedroom overlooking the porch roof. There was a big old mahogany bed, a rice bed I thought, piled high with yellowed lace pillows and covered with an ivory cotton coverlet. Except for end tables and a couple of lopsided lamps and a massive old chest of drawers, there was little else in the room. It smelled of salt and camphor and generations. And then I saw a small alcove that held a slender writing desk and a lamp and piles and piles of papers and clippings and stamps and stationery, its envelopes undoubtedly stuck together with damp, and a beautiful green silk–covered book that I assumed was a journal or a diary of some sort. Beach roses wilted in a little bisque vase. Camilla’s corner, the place where she truly lived.

  In the bottom drawer of the chest I found the bathing suits, neatly folded in tissue paper and smelling of lavender. There must indeed have been twenty of them, and from the look of them, they spanned at least thirty years. I finally found a pink-flowered cotton suit with a little skirt that shouted Lilly Pulitzer, and put it on in the dimness, and crept back downstairs holding my shorts and shirt before me.

  “It’s perfect,” Lewis said, grinning, pulling my folded clothes away from me to look. “It’s you. If you’d put on a bikini, I’d have taken you straight home.”

  “The latest thing up there is one of those Rose Marie Reid things with the puffy legs and the fronts so boned that they stand a foot away from your boobs. I had one in high school. I looked like the front end of a fifty-three Studebaker.”

  He laughed and kissed me on the forehead, and we took the towels and ice and the big, skewed umbrella and went down the front steps and across the long board walkway over the dune and onto the beach.

  The tide was full in, and the sun stood directly overhead, so the whole beach and sea were a sheet of blinding glitter. The light swallowed the world; it was as if I had been stricken sightless by light. It even sucked in sound. I could see groups of people down the beach, under umbrellas, and children whooping and splashing in the surf, and gulls wheeling overhead. But I could not hear them, nor the soft hush of the surf as it ran far up the beach to lose itself in a smear of glass, edged with foam. I could smell, though: the primal, amniotic smell of the sea; the scent of hot sun on the sea grass, somehow like hay; even the ghost of someone’s coconut sunscreen. And something else: under it all, the sick-sweet, acrid smell of the pluff mud from the marshes along the inland waterway, Charleston’s official smell.

  Beside me, Lewis said something, but I could not hear him. He began to laugh. He pointed to the beach, but I could not see what he was indicating. I might as well have been smitten by Apollo.

  I turned to look at him and he took off his sunglasses and put them on my nose, and the world snapped back again, clear and sharp shadowed.

  In the damp sand along the beach, the words “Hi, Anny” had been incised, in letters three or four feet high. Behind the message, side by side like a chorus line, stood the Scrubs, waving and laughing.

  I felt the wind lift the limp skirt of my ghastly bathing suit and explode my hair. If I could have turned and run, I would have. But Lewis’s hand was firmly on my back, pushing me forward, and the Rockette line of the people who would be my friends, or not, came swarming up the dunes to greet us.

  They were, I knew, all except Fairlie, about Lewis’s age, brushing fifty and maybe edging beyond it. But they looked to me like those clever kids who came spilling out of a thousand movie barns, shouting, “Hey, gang, I know! Let’s put on a show!” I got a confused montage of red-silk hair burning in the sun, white-blond hair over a narrow deeply tanned face, fade
d, utilitarian swimsuits, long brown limbs, and white teeth. Everybody was thin. How could so many middle-aged people look so gawkily, gracefully adolescent? There was one male shape that was thick barreled and broad shouldered, but he was so tall that he seemed a part of that thicket of slender trees. Lewis and I, standing there on the dune above them, were the only low-slung, earth-footed people in the group.

  “I feel like a garden gnome,” I whispered to him miserably, and he hugged me hard around the shoulders before they swallowed us up.

  I was hugged and kissed on the cheek and borne down the beach to where a couple of sun-whitened umbrellas stood. Underneath them was a tangle of damp towels and rubber flip-flops and paper cups and a sweating cooler. Lewis dumped the ice and towels and the extra umbrella.

  “Okay,” he said. “Here she is. One at a time or she’s going to run like a rabbit. Your fame has preceded you.”

  I sat down on a damp towel, feeling the chilly sand under it seep into the tights under the swimsuit’s skirt. One by one, like supplicants to a queen, they came and sat or knelt beside me. Lewis presented and explained them. I knew that I would remember little of it, but I smiled and nodded like an idiot, thinking I must look like a black-thatched jack-o’-lantern in a too-small Lilly Pulitzer swimsuit.

  Camilla Curry was tall and very slender, already stooped a little with the osteoporosis that would claim her body before too long. But her long legs and arms and her slender hands and feet were youthful, and her narrow, fine-boned face was as serene and beautiful as an effigy on a medieval tomb. She had thick chestnut hair that she wore in a loose chignon and brown eyes that glowed deep in a thicket of lashes. Her smile was a benediction.

  “Well, Lewis,” she said, “you finally got it right.” And to me, “You must be something special. You’re the only one Lewis has ever brought out here.”

  I felt a rush of love. In all the time I knew Camilla, that never changed.