Chapter Five

Ida

 

The Tuesday afternoon bridge game is one of the few places where I rub elbows with old Charleston society. The truth is, not even my elbows would be invited if Ted Junior wasn’t mayor. With the exception of Madison Chambers, who was an old friend of Ted Senior’s, I have nothing in common with this haughty gaggle of gossipers. I am only here because it gets me out of Abigail’s hair for a few hours—and her out of mine.

We gather in the foyer of an elegant mansion along the South Battery. “You look lovely today,” Madison says to me.

Madison is a retired attorney and known advocate for the marginalized. When I extend my hand, he kisses it, his mustache tickling my age-spotted skin. We do this with each other, making a play of old manners and bygone days. Like me, he has a head of solid white hair, but all resemblance ends there. Madison is much more formal in his attire—he is one of the few men alive who still wears spats on his polished shoes—and his tickling mustache rises up at the ends in a smile. To be honest, he looks a bit like the photographs of Mark Twain in his old age.

Dapper would be the word to describe him, but it is his eyes that draw me in. Eyes that are quick to wink or twinkle and reveal that he is not who he seems.

“Is your granddaughter all right?” he asks. “I saw the story in the newspaper.”

“She’s fine,” I say. “None the worse for wear. Not a scratch on her.”

“Thanks to her rescuer, no doubt.” He pets his mustache.

“Yes, he was very brave,” I say.

I like being reminded that I am not only a grandmother, but also someone who enjoys spending time with a person my own age. Though I adore Trudy and even look up to her in some ways, she is busy with her own life. As for her brother, Teddy, he is an altogether different breed of grandchild. Someone who is often called a handful. A handful of what, I am not sure, but a grandmother isn’t to judge.

Card tables are set up in the sunroom, a room resplendent with marble floors and large plants that reach their arms toward the domed ceiling. We are invited to take our places by the mistress of the house, a Ravenel, one of the old Charleston families.

“I wonder who we’ll skewer today,” I whisper to Madison, who sits to my left.

He leans in to whisper back. “To hear them tell it, Charleston is worse than Peyton Place.”

“Oh my,” I say, whispering again. “How scandalous.”

“Indeed,” he says with another wink.

Madison’s wife died two summers ago, and since then the Charleston widows have circled like scavengers, to use his word. According to him, he is invited to so many social events he has to turn down half of them. Since Ted Senior’s passing, there certainly haven’t been any old men in line to court me.

As bridge begins, the gossip grows as thick as the Charleston humidity. Madison and I exchange periodic looks and the occasional grin, the closest I have come to flirting in the last forty years. Servants fill our iced tea glasses, and after the first game we are all given a small slice of peach pie. Pie I recognize as coming from Callie’s Diner and baked by none other than my daughter-in-law, Abigail, who I can’t seem to get away from. I thank the older black woman who slips in and out between tables, a substantial woman who goes unnoticed by most everyone here. And a woman who has probably waited on this same Ravenel family her entire life, as did her mother, and perhaps her grandmother.

Charleston is a grand stage on which history has played. The actors may change with every generation, but the same lines are read and the same stage directions followed. Our only hope is that behind the scenes, white and black children are rewriting the script and becoming friends this very minute.

“What are you thinking about?” Madison discards a six of clubs.

“I am thinking about change,” I say.

He raises an eyebrow. “That’s an odd statement to make in the midst of one of Old Charleston’s finest homes,” he says. “I doubt this place has changed in a century.”

“To change.” I raise my crystal iced tea glass.

We clink glasses as the others at our table exchange glances. I take a sip of iced tea and silently toast my granddaughter. The thought of Trudy on the side of change gives me more optimism than I have felt in a long time. Nonetheless, the dangers that surround changing times are nothing to celebrate.