I think I’ll go over to the island for a few days,” I said to my husband at breakfast, and then, when he did not respond, I said, “The light’s beautiful. It can’t last. I hate to waste it. We won’t get this pure gold again until this time next year.”
Clay smiled, but he did not put down his newspaper, and he did not speak. The smile made my stomach dip and rise again, as it has for the past twenty-five years. Clay’s smile is wonderful, slow and unstinting and a bit crooked, and gains much of its power from the surrounding austerity of his sharp, thin face. Over the years I have seen it disarm a legion of people, from two-year-olds in mid-tantrum to Arab sheiks in same. Even though I knew that this smile was little more than a twitch, and with no more perception behind it, I felt my own mouth smiling back. I wondered, as I often do, how he could do that, smile as though you had absolutely delighted him when he had not heard a word you said.
“There is a rabid armadillo approaching you from behind,” I said. “It’s so close I can see the froth. It’s not a pretty sight.”
“I heard you,” he said. “You want to go over to the island because the light’s good. It can’t last.”
I waited, but he did not speak again, or raise his eyes.
Finally I said, “So? Is that okay with you?”
This time he did look up.
“Why do you ask? You don’t need my permission to go over to the island. When did I ever stop you?”
His voice was level and reasonable; it is seldom anything else. I knew that he did not like me to go over to the island alone, though, for a number of reasons that we had discussed and one that we had not, yet.
The island is wild and largely undeveloped now, except for a tiny settlement on its southwestern tip, and there are wild animals living on it that are hostile to humans, and sometimes dangerous. It is home to a formidable colony of alligators, some more than twelve feet long, and a handful of wild boar that make up in ferocity what they lack in numbers. Rattlesnakes and water moccasins are a given. Even the band of sullen wild ponies that have lived there on the grassy hummocks between the creeks and inlets since time out of mind are not the amiable toys they seem. A small child from the settlement was badly kicked only last year, when he got too close to a mare nursing her foal. Clay knows that I have been handling myself easily and well on the island since I was a child, but he mistrusts what he calls my impetuosity more than he trusts my long experience and exemplary safety record.
Then there is the settlement itself, Dayclear. That beautiful word is Gullah, part of the strange and lyrical amalgam of West African and Colonial English once spoken by the handful of Gullah blacks still living in pockets of the South Carolina Lowcountry. They are the descendants of the slaves brought here by the first white settlers of these archipelagos and marshes, and some of the elders still speak the old patois among themselves. When I was a child I knew some of it myself, a few words taught me by various Gullah nurses and cooks, a few snatches of songs sung by gardeners and handymen on my grandfather’s place. I know that Dayclear means “dawn.” I have always loved the word, and I have always been aware of the settlement, even if I did not often visit it when I was growing up and have no occasion to do so now. I do know that it is made up now largely of the old, with a preponderance of frail old women, and that some of them must be the kin of those workers of my childhood, if not the actual people themselves. I know that there are virtually no young men and women living there, since the young leave the island as soon as they are physically able to do so, to seek whatever fortunes they might find elsewhere. There is nothing for them in Dayclear. There are children, small ones, left behind with the old women by daughters and granddaughters who have taken flight, and there are sometimes silent, empty-faced young men about, who have come home because they are in trouble and have, temporarily, nowhere else to go, but they do not stay long.
I have not been to the settlement for many years, as my route across the island lies in the dry, hummocky heart of it, and the house to which I go is at the opposite end, looking northwest toward the shore of Edisto. But when I think of it, I feel nothing but a kind of mindless, nostalgic sense of safety and benevolence. Dayclear has never given me anything but nurturing and love.
Clay fears it, though. He has never said so, but I know that he does. I can tell; I always know when Clay is afraid, because he so seldom is, and of almost nothing.
“There’s nothing there that can hurt me; nobody who would,” I have said to him. “They’re just poor old women and babies and children.”
“You don’t know who’s back in there,” he said. “You don’t see who comes and goes. Anybody could come across. There are places you could wade across. Anybody could drop anchor in the Inland Waterway and come ashore. You think everybody in that little place doesn’t know when you’re at the house, and that you’re by yourself? I don’t like it when you go, Caro. But you know that.”
I did know, and do. But he does not forbid me to go to the island. For one thing, Clay is not a forbidder; he would find it distasteful, unseemly, to forbid his wife anything, the operative word being distasteful. Clay is a fastidious man, both physically and emotionally.
For another thing, I own part of the island. And if there is anything Clay respects, it is the right of eminent domain.
But the main reason he does not want me on the island alone is that he is afraid that I will drink there. I do drink sometimes, though by no means often, but when I do I tend to do it rather excessively. When I am with him, at this house or the club or the town house in Charleston, he feels that he can at least control the consequences of my drinking, if not the act itself. The consequences are not heinous, I don’t think; I do not stumble and fall, or weep, or grow belligerent. But I do tend to hug necks and kiss cheeks, and sometimes to sit on laps, and sometimes to dance and sing, and I imagine that to Clay these are worse than staggering or tears. They might imply, to some who don’t know us, that I do not receive enough affection at home. And they tend to dismay visiting Arab sheiks. So Clay, while he says nothing to me then or later and never has, stays close enough to initiate damage control when he thinks it is necessary. Perhaps if we talked about it, I could tell him that when I am slightly drunk I feel so much better than I normally do, that I am happy, exuberant, giddy, and wish to share the largesse with whomever is close. But we do not talk about it. To name a demon is to make it yours. Clay does not wish to own this particular demon, and I do not wish, yet, to give it up. So we do not speak of my drinking, though the time may come when we have to do so. Or maybe not. I do fairly well with it, as long as I have the island for refuge.
This is something Clay does not understand, and will not unless I tell him: that the island is the one place where I do not want to drink, or need to. I know that I could probably ease his mind considerably about my time over there if I told him so, but again, that would mean naming the demon, and we both know that we do not want its disruptive presence in our lives. It would be like having to acknowledge and live with an erratic, malicious relative who was apt to break the china, fart in public, insult our guests, change the very fabric and structure of our graceful lives.
So Clay goes on hating and dreading my trips to the island but refusing to discuss them, and I go on going. It is a devilish seesaw, but it provides a sort of balance.
I looked away from him and out the French windows to the lawn and the seawall, and the beach and sea beyond. When Clay first began to develop Peacock’s Island as a resort and permanent home community, he decided that we must certainly live there if anyone else could be hoped to, and so he chose the best lot on the island and had this house built for us. It is beautiful; even now, when I cannot look at the ocean without darkness and sickness starting in my stomach, I have to admit that it is a lovely house and an even lovelier situation, a perfect marriage of shore and sea. It was the first of the famous Peacock Island Plantation houses to be built, the model for that rambling, unobtrusive, graceful style of architecture that has become rather standard for beach and marsh houses in the various Lowcountry resort developments now. The architect who began it all is credited with our house, but it was Clay, all those years ago, who leaned over his shoulder for long hours at the drafting table, seeing in his mind’s eye what the future homes of Peacock Island Plantation should be, and prodding until Dudley found the proper architectural metaphor for his vision. They dot the Lowcountry like beautiful fungi now, lying close along the shoreline under the twisted old live oaks and among the dark, cool thickets fringing the marshes on the landward sides of the barrier islands. They vary, of course; there is room for individual taste and interpretation, but no house is built in Peacock Island Plantation that does not meet the company’s rigid design codes and so there is nothing intrusive here, nothing raw or ragged or incongruous, like you might see in other, newer and less carefully provenanced developments. Clay was adamant about that when he was young and new to the business and stood to lose a lot of money with his lofty design standards, and he has never loosened or amended them in this or any other of his projects. He likes to say that his family has loved and lived the Peacock’s Island life ever since its beginning. And so we have, or at least lived it, for the past twenty years, when he moved us here from the cheerful suburb full of new ranch houses and young professional families where we started out, in Columbia.
Our son, Carter, was only a year old when we came to the island. Kylie was born here. They were children of the sea and beach and marshes; it was, to them, a known world, taken entirely for granted. It was, to me, like living permanently on a kind of extended vacation. I was born in Greenville and grew up in a succession of small South Carolina towns, all long hours from the coast, and came to the Lowcountry only during the summers, to visit my Aubrey grandparents. I still feel that way about living here. Sometimes I wake up before dawn, when it is too early to see that peculiar nacreous gray morning light that the beach and sea send backward to the land, when the wind is down and the surf is so sluggish that you cannot hear it past the dune line, and I think, Have I overslept? I didn’t hear the garbage trucks. I’m going to be late for school.…
My lucky children, I have often thought, to gauge the rhythm of their days by surf and wind and the dawn chorus of a hundred different shorebirds, not ever to have known anything else. It seems exotic to me, foreign somehow. I used to say this to them, when they were very small, to try to explain this strange, suspended feeling that sometimes woke me in the earliest hours of the day, but I could never do so, at least not to Carter.
“That’s dumb,” he would say. “I don’t see how you can still feel that way when you’ve been living here so long. This is better than garbage trucks and traffic any day. This is better than anything.”
Carter, my pragmatist, so like Clay. To this day, I do not think anything out of his earliest childhood stalks him in the dark.
Ah, but Kylie…Kylie always knew. How, I don’t know, but she did. She would ask endlessly for the story: “Tell about what you heard in the morning when you were little, Mama. Tell about the garbage trucks and the lawn mowers and the carpool horns…”
My small towns did not have noise ordinances like the island does; I realized early on that to Kylie, my childhood morning cacophony of manmade hubbub was as exotic as this profound, mystical sea-silence still is to me.
“Why do you want to hear that?” I would say. “This is much nicer. This is nature pure and simple; very few people are lucky enough just to hear natural sounds when they wake up.”
But she was unpersuaded.
“Will you take me to see the garbagemen sometimes?” she would say, over and over. “Will you take me where I can hear a carpool horn?”
Kylie and Carter went to the island country day school, and were picked up at the head of our lane by a smart, quiet little school bus painted in the muted Peacock’s Island tan and green.
Finally I gave in: “All right,” I said. “Okay. We’ll go spend a weekend in Columbia sometime soon, and you can see the garbagemen and hear the carpool horns.”
We never did that, though. Somehow, we just never did.…
The sea at the horizon line was banked solid with angry purple clouds this morning, as it often is in autumn, but as I sat staring at it, the clouds fissured and broke and a spear of cold, silvery sunlight streaked through, stabbing down at the sea and lighting the tossing gray to the strange, stormy pewter of November. At the same moment the ocean wind freshened, lifting the fine, dun-colored sand from the tops of the primary dunes and swirling it spectrally into the air, rattling the drying palm fronds at the far edge of the lawn where the boardwalk down through the dunes to the sea began, stirring the moss on the live oaks that sheltered the house. It seemed for a moment that everything was in swirling, shimmering motion: air, sea, land, swimming in diffused light, drowning in silver. I looked away, back to the breakfast table and then up at Clay. On such a day, I knew, my stomach would roil queasily with the shifting light and wind, and my heart would beat queerly and thickly with it, until the wind dropped at sunset and the benevolent golden light of sunset spilled in from the west.
It was days like these that I most needed to be over on the island.
I speak of it as if it were a different island; we all do, though it is not, really. Technically, the island is the back third of Peacock’s Island, the westward third, the marsh third. It is separated from the larger bulk of Peacock’s Island proper by a tidal estuary that is full only twice a day; during the other times you could wade through the ankle-deep muck in the empty, corrugated rivulet that cuts the island like a snake, though no one wants to. The mud is deep, and stinks of ancient livings and dyings. You can better cross it, as I do, on a sturdy if raffish wooden bridge just wide and stout enough to hold a truck or a Jeep; the island is never truly cut off from the larger bulk of Peacock’s.
It might as well be, though. It is another place entirely, eons older, wilder by millennia. I don’t think it ever had a name, since it is of course a part of the larger mass. In my lifetime, in my time here, it has always been known simply as “the island,” just as the larger, more hospitable two-thirds of it has been known as Peacock’s Island, usually shortened to Peacock’s. I think the inept old pirate for whom it is named would have agreed with the practice. If legend is true, he had no truck with the marsh-bound back third of the island, either, except to leave some of his hapless live captives there staked out for the alligators and the wild pigs and the savage, swarming insects and to dispose of the dead ones in the black, silent tidal creeks and rivers for the nourishment of who knows what. It is shifting, unquiet land, and it is no wonder to me that the unhappy victims of Jonathan Peacock are said to be unquiet, too, stumping about and murmuring querulously in the close, still nights. The Gullahs of Dayclear are said to be as familiar with them as they are with the terrible duppies and other assorted haunts who came with them in their chains to these shores, and on the whole, perhaps, prefer them. An unhappy ghost can be cajoled, soothed, propitiated, but there is no reasoning with a duppy.
Clay was still looking at me, studying my face as calmly and gravely as he had been studying the Wall Street Journal. Waiting, I knew.
“I’m almost through with the studies for the new painting,” I said. “I’ve got everything but the light on the Inland Waterway at sunset. It’s different from anywhere else; it’s deeper there, and the water moves a lot more. That changes the light entirely. I really want to get that. I think a night or two would do it. I’ll take the camcorder and see if I can get enough of the change from sunset to full night so I can finish it back here, if you need me. Is there something special?”
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 not 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, pointed 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.
I went up the central stairs, a freestanding iron staircase made for Clay by an old black ironmonger on James Island when the house was built, and whose designs now brought hundreds of thousands of dollars, and paused at the landing. The house is open on both the seaward and the landward sides, so that standing on the landing is like standing suspended in a great cage of glass. It always makes me dizzy, as if nothing lies between me and the close-pressing darkness of the old oaks and the shrouding oleanders in back, and the great, sucking, light-breathing, always-waiting sea in front. I shook my head and went quickly up to the second floor, where the bedrooms were. They are open to the sea, too, the best ones, but you can close it away with heavy curtains if you choose, and the others, at the back of the house, overlook the dark-canopied backyard and feel to me like sheltering caves. I have moved my daytime retreat there, in the back corner, away from the beach and sea, though I still sleep in the big master suite hung in the air over the lawn and sea, with Clay. But when he is away I sleep on the daybed in my den.
Instead of turning to the right, toward our bedroom and mine and Clay’s dens, as I almost always did, I turned left and walked down the hall toward the children’s rooms. I think I had known all day that I was going to do so. I did not hesitate, and I did not think. I walked past Carter’s closed door—closed because he had left it in such a disgraceful state when he left in September for his first year at graduate school at Yale that I had refused to go into it, and told Estelle not to touch it but to let him come back and find it just as he had left it—and stopped at the big ocean-facing room on the end, its door also closed. Kylie’s room.
Unlike Carter, Kylie was neat to a fault; she hated it if anyone disturbed the strict order of her things, and had insisted from her earliest childhood that no one enter her closed room when she was not in it. I had always respected that; I felt somewhat the same way about my things, though long years of sharing a room with Clay had loosened my scruples about order a bit. He is not untidy, only abstracted. I think he does not notice either order or disorder. I could still hear small Kylie, frustrated nearly to tears in her attempt to explain why she did not want me to come into her room when she was not in it: “But it’s mine! It’s not yours! You have a room of your own. Why do you need to go in mine?”
“What are you hiding in there, a pack of wolves?” I said. “Kevin Costner, maybe?”
She had fallen in love with the movie Dances with Wolves, and was so besotted with wolves that she was planning to be a wildlife veterinarian when she grew up, and work with the wild wolf packs of the Far West. It was a mature and considered ambition, and I would not have been at all surprised if she made it happen.
“I’m not hiding anything,” she said, looking seriously at me, and I knew that she was not. Kylie hid nothing, ever. She was as open as air, as clear as water. Then she saw that I was teasing her, and she began to giggle, the silvery, silly giggle that, I am told, is very like mine, and then she laughed, the deep, froggy belly laugh that is mine also. In a moment we were both laughing, laughing until the tears rolled down our so-alike small, brown faces, laughing and laughing until Clay came in to see what was so funny, and said, grinning himself, “Ladies and gentlemen, for your enjoyment tonight…Venable and Venable! Let’s give them a great big hand!”
And we rolled over on our backs on the floor of her room, Kylie and I, in helpless laughter and simple joy, because it was true. We were Venable and Venable. We simply delighted each other. There was nothing in either of us that did not understand and admire the other. Even when she was a baby, there was nothing childish, nothing condescending, nothing mother-to-child about it. We were companions on every level, confidantes, comrades, friends, lovers in the deepest and most nonsexual sense of the word. My daughter and I had fallen in love and delight with each other at the moment of her birth, and it was often all I could do to keep Clay and Carter from coming off second best. Because they are so ludicrously alike, and because Clay’s mind is almost absurdly full of riches and Carter is a sunny, confident young man with a full and empowering sense of himself, I do not think that either of them has suffered. Rather, they, like most other people in our orbit, simply enjoyed and often laughed at Venable and Venable.
I opened Kylie’s door and went into her room. At first the great surf of brightness off the noon beach blinded me, and I stood blinking, my hand shading my eyes. Then they adjusted and I looked around and saw it plain, this place that was, of all her places, most distinctly hers.
It was not a frilly room and never had been. Like me, Kylie was born with a need for space and order and a dislike of cluttering frills and fuss. She had always been a small, wiry child, almost simian in her build, narrow-hipped and broad-shouldered, slightly long of arm and short of leg, never tall, always thin to the bone. Ruffles would have been as ludicrous on and around her as on me. She was, instead, sleeked down for action; pared to sinew and long, slender muscle; meant for sun and sand and wind and water, and that was what her room reflected. I do not think she ever drew her curtains, even at night. Kylie fell asleep with her face turned to the moon and the comets and the wheeling constellations, seeing when she woke in the night the dance of phosphorus on the warm, thick, black summer ocean, or sometimes the lightning of storms over the horizon that looked, she said, like naval battles far out to sea. Waking to the cool pearl of dawn on tidal slicks, to the pink and silver foil of a newly warming spring ocean, perhaps to the Radio City Music Hall dance of porpoises in the silky summer shallows. Kylie went as far as any human I have ever known, when she was small, toward simply using up the sea.
Her walls were painted the milky green of the sea on a cloudy day, and on them hung her posters of animals and birds and sea creatures and the big, luminous painting of Richard Hagerty’s that was the official Spoleto Festival poster one year, of Hurricane Hugo striding big-footed and terrible down on a crouching Charleston. I had not wanted to buy it for her because I had thought it would come to haunt her, but she was adamant.
“Yeah, but see, Hugo didn’t win,” she said. “Big as a thousand houses, big as a booger, and he still didn’t win.”
And I had laughed and bought it for her, because I wanted her to remember that: the boogers don’t always win.
On the low bookshelves were the models she had made of animal skeletons, from kits I had ordered for her from marine biological laboratories and supply houses, and three or four real skeletons we had found over on the island when she went with me to the house there: the papery carapace of an eight-foot rattler; a wild boar’s skull with great, bleached, Jurassic tusks; the elegant, polished small skull of a raccoon. Estelle would not dust these herself but made Kylie do it. Clay was distinctly not amused by the skeletons, and even Carter only said, “Yuck. You’re weird, Kylie.” But I knew. It is important to know what the inside of things looks like. Otherwise, almost anything can fool you.
Her books were there, in a military order known only to Kylie. The old ones that I had loved: Wind in the Willows (“Mother! Listen! ‘There is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about on boats.’ Oh, he knew, Ratty knew, didn’t he?”); the Waterbabies; the Nancy Drew series; the Bobbsey Twins; the Lawrenceville Stories. For some reason they fascinated her. Black Beauty. Silver Birch. Midnight Moon. And alongside them, the handbooks and textbooks and charts and maps of the Carolina Lowcountry marshes and islands that we got for her from the Corps of Engineers and various coastal conservation and natural resources organizations.
On her desk, a small voodoo drum that Estelle’s Gullah grandmother, who adored Kylie, had given her; we never knew where it had come from originally, but Estelle seemed to think it was the real thing. And the big osprey we had found newly dead on the bank of the tidal creek that cut through the undulating green marsh over on the island one summer day, still perfect except for the forever mysterious fact of its death. Clay had taken it to a taxidermist for her, and the great bird, wings spread, had kept yellow-eyed watch over Kylie and her room ever since. Of all her things, I think she loved that bird the best.
And that was all. Except for her neat, beigespread bed and the matching armchairs, nothing else of her showed. Her clothes were shut away in the closet; she almost never left anything lying out. Her outgrown toys were in a hamper in her closet. The room did not look lonely, though. The space and order spoke of Kylie as clearly as strewn possessions would have of another child.
I walked over to the French doors that opened onto her balcony and leaned against them and looked back into the room. Something caught my eye, the edge of something blue, almost hidden under the dust ruffle of her bed. I leaned over and picked it up. A T-shirt, a small one, faded, that read PEACOCK ISLAND PLANTATION SUMMER RECREATION PROGRAM. You saw shirts like it all over the island; they were issued to children who joined the summer program, mostly the children of guests who wanted to enjoy the island’s adult pursuits while their children went about their own, supervised activities. I remembered that Kylie liked the shirts but hated the program and absolutely refused to join, even when her father pointed out that it would be a real treat for the visiting little boys and girls to meet the daughter of the owner of the Plantation.
“Big deal,” Kylie said. “You think I want to go on a nature walk with some kid who’s gon’ yell his head off if we see a snake?”
We did not make her attend the program. It would indeed have been ludicrous. Kylie was dealing calmly with bull alligators and rattlesnakes when the offspring of the Plantation visitors were shying at horseshoe crabs. She deigned to wear the T-shirts, though.
“That way the kids will all think I go,” she said reasonably to Clay, and that was that.
I held the shirt to my face and sniffed. It smelled fresh and particular, like summer and sun and salt and Kylie herself, not at all like dust. But it should have smelled of dust; it must have been there, just under the fringe of the dust ruffle, for a long time. A little over five years; Kylie had been dead that long. I had not been this far into her room since the day we closed it, not long after her funeral, after Estelle, tears running silently down her long brown face, had cleaned it for the last time and closed the door. Sometimes I opened her door and looked in, and I knew that Clay did, too, but I did not think that anyone came all the way into it. I would ask Estelle. She must have simply missed the little T-shirt the last day that she cleaned.
I looked out at the ocean then. Kylie had died in sight of her room, in sight of our house, when her small Sunfish with the red sail had flipped in heavy surf after an August thunderstorm and the stout little boom had hit her a stunning blow to the temple, and she had gone down and not come up again, at least not until long after. None of the children she was with had seen it happen, or none would ever admit to seeing it, but then they were only ten or so, as she was, and all had been forbidden to take their boats into that stormy water, as she had been. They had been playing in a neighbor’s yard after a birthday party, only three houses up the beach, and had slipped off and taken their little Sunfishes out while the adults were having their own lunch on the patio, behind heavy plantings. I was off the island that day, at the dentist in Charleston. I never blamed Marjorie Bell or her housekeeper; Kylie had never disobeyed us before in regard to the Sunfish, nor had the other children disobeyed their parents. Island children have water safety drilled into their heads almost before they can toddle. We will never know what started it all, what child dared the others, who first leaped to the dare. Kylie, in all likelihood. It doesn’t matter. The children were so traumatized by it that more than one of them gave away their Sunfish, or let their parents sell them, and one family moved away from the island.
I have always wondered if she looked up just before the boom hit and saw the dazzle of summer light on her window, saw the roof and trees of home.
I wondered now what she would be wearing if she had lived, what I would be picking up from her floor. What color it would be, what size. What its smell would be, the smell of Kylie Venable at nearly sixteen.
I used to have the fancy that I wore Kylie inside me, just under my skin, that I was a suit that fit exactly the being who was my child, and that she was the structure that filled out the skin that was me. Since that day there has been a terrible, frail lightness, a cold hollowness, a sort of whistling chill inside me where Kylie used to be. It makes me feel terribly vulnerable, as if a high wind could simply whirl me away. As if there is not enough substance inside me to anchor me to earth. Usually the pain of her loss is dulled enough now so that it is more a profound heaviness, a leaden darkness, a wearable miasma that is as much a part of me as the joy of her used to be. But sometimes that first agony comes spiking back, as it did now. I sank to the floor, the T-shirt still pressed to my face, feeling the killing fire flare and spring and rage, feeling the great shriek, the scream of outrage and anguish, start in my throat, feeling the scalding tears gather and press at my eyes. I opened my mouth to let it out, but nothing happened, nothing came. It never did. I screamed silently into her T-shirt, my face contorted, my throat corded and choked with the need for her, but no sound would come. I could not cry for my child. I never had, not even when they came to tell me, not even when I watched her go down into the earth of the Lowcountry, riding in a fine carriage of mahogany and bronze.
I felt a hand on my shoulder and heard Clay’s voice.
“Caro, don’t. You promised you wouldn’t. Come on with me now, and take a shower and get dressed, and we’ll have some coffee on the veranda before we go. I’ll take you by the guest house; we’ll put the flowers around together. They’re beautiful, by the way. Those old roses, they really have lasted, haven’t they?”
I did not move to get up, and after a moment I felt his hands under my elbows, and he lifted me up.
“You need to work, baby,” he said. “That’s the thing that will help; that’s what’s helped me most. Real work. This is your job now, helping with the new families, you need to come and do your job.”
I looked at him then.
“She was my job,” I said.
But I did not say it aloud.