Sis’s phone rings early before the doves have made their first coo on the branch outside of her window. Her clock radio reads 5:07 a.m.
“We’re sunk,” Sis hears as she groggily presses the receiver to her ear.
“Ray?”
“Pink Point is under water, Sis! Go look outside.”
It takes Sis two rolls to get across her bed as she groans, “The weather channel said we were in the clear last night except for a few outer bands.”
“Well, the storm surge rippled back at high tide, and we’re under a couple of inches of water right now. I just swept two flapping shrimp off of my porch steps, okay?”
“Can’t you call the pump man?”
“I’ve tried him, but I can’t get him to answer. Willy is banging on his door as I speak. That’s how desperate we are.”
Sis peers out of her blinds at the dark morning as the wet branches of her crepe myrtles bob back and forth, casting off their little white flowers like confetti. “All I can say is that I hope to God we’ve got power in the church so Ina can blow her pipes.”
Ina’s the name of the forty-stop organ that was sent back to London to be restored the year after the church hired Sis. A Mrs. Ina Louise Barrett Gardner, a descendant of the church’s first priest, The Rev. T. Henry Barrett IV, who took his post here at the chapel of ease in 1794, paid for the organ’s trip and restoration. They’d put a little brass plaque over the rows of keyboards with the woman’s name on it.
Ina is like Sis’s child in a way. For one thing it took nine months for her to be made over and until then Sis had to play Pee Wee, a whiny-sounding electric number that Fox Music House loaned her. She’d accompanied their former priest, Old Stained Glass, to greet Ina at the airport, where five strong men rolled her packaged body off a large metal ramp. Once she was hoisted up into the balcony, Sis wedged open the boxes of pipes with a wrench from the rectory and rubbed her hand across them as Stained Glass sprinkled holy water on each piece of Ina and dedicated her to the church’s music ministry. Sis has spent more time with Ina than she has with most of the people in her life.
Now Sis sits in her car with one arm on the door handle trying to get up her nerve to make a break for the chapel in her new high heels. Little Hilda’s wedding takes place in just two hours, and it’s the darkest, most waterlogged wedding day Sis can remember. And that’s saying something. She’s played in 377 weddings over the last nineteen years as the organist and choirmaster at All Saints Episcopal Church. More than once, she’s played three weddings on a Saturday, and it is typical to play two in a day now that The Lone Star of the Lowcountry and the like are parting the salt marsh grass on the quaint little chapel of ease and their whole town, for that matter. Seems like it won’t be long before Jasper will be swallowed whole by the resorts and retirement communities that are spreading out like a disease from Charleston to Savannah.
Sis’s daddy used to say time stands still in Jasper. From where she sits in the car she can see his gravestone rising to the left of the chapel, a long marble slat with his name and date in block letters and a quote from Psalm 31:15 that reads, “My times are in your hands.”
There’s a space right next to him where Sis’s mama will go, and she has her choice of the one next to her mama or the one next to Fitz in the Hungerford family plot under the live oak tree toward the back of the crumbling brick wall. An ornate wrought iron gate surrounds the Hungerford plot. It’s about the size of a bedroom, and Fitz’s parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents lie in rest together there.
When Sis sits at the organ in the center balcony just opposite the stained glass portrait of the angel greeting the Marys in the empty tomb, she has a good view of Fitz’s headstone between the black iron rods that enclose the family plot. It’s awfully nice of his family to offer her a place there, even though they were never actually married. And you know, she thought for sure she’d find someone else somewhere along the way, but it just never seemed to happen.
Once she read that trees sense a hurricane before it hits. That they drop ten times more seeds than usual before one strikes—one of nature’s remarkable attempts at self-preservation—and she wonders if the cabbage palmettos dropped their shiny black fruit around the graveyard yesterday.
Well, she hopes Little Hilda’s not too upset about the weather. Ray says the backside of Eleanor must have scraped the ACE Basin at high tide, because half the town appears submerged in a few inches of the Atlantic Ocean. Sis can see Cousin Willy and Justin and Ray, black eye and all, in her rearview mirror. They’re across the road at Pink Point Gardens in their rubber waders, pumping water out of the park by the seawall.
Out of the corner of her eye, Sis sees the rector, Capers Campbell, making a run for it from his car to the chapel. He has this funny habit when he runs of swinging his left arm fast and furious and keeping his right stationary and tight by his side.
He’s never married, and the gals think it’s about time he noticed Sis. Hilda helped Sis pick out this flowy little sky blue dress with a creamy silk sash for today. It reminds Sis of the one that Julie Andrews wore in the Sound of Music as she strolled around the moonlit grounds of the manor on the night of the ball, longing for the captain, who eventually met her there. And Hilda insisted she buy these fashionable beige sandals from Copper Penny. They have high heels and a thin strap that circles her ankles, and Sis really likes them.
Of course, she feels ridiculous wearing the heels and the dress on this gray and soaking wet morning, but she went ahead and put them on to avoid the chiding and to let Little Hilda know that despite the flooded town, they are going to pull off this grand event. At least right now she’s wearing her choir robe over it so she doesn’t feel quite so out of place.
But back to Capers. The gals have hosted him and Sis for dinner and for boat rides and even a trip to Edisto for the weekend, but he never seems to make a solid move in her direction. Maybe he’s not interested. Sometimes they tell Sis to make some sort of advance. Life’s too short and all of that. Pollinate before the hurricane. Drop your seeds, so to speak, but she feels kind of funny about cornering a man in a stiff white priest’s collar and reaching out for his hand.
If you want to know the truth, when she gets right up close to him, he smells like her Uncle Bugby from Bamberg, kind of old mannish and mothballish. Kitty B. says she needs a nose pincher like the kind that swimmers wear, but Sis thinks you have to like the way someone smells. What do they call that, she thinks . . . pheromones?
Sis isn’t sure she puts out any pheromones now, what with her female organs scraped out. After the hysterectomy last year she felt like a gutted watermelon. Nothing more than the knobby green strips of the rind that Kitty B. would take home and pickle.
Her hysterectomy hit her hard. There were no more watermelon seeds and no more anything, and she just sat down before Ina for several days and wept. There was this kind of darkness around the edges of her vision, and she had weeks where she just sat on the couch and stared into the blank space between her television and her kitchen as CNN spat out the news while the days slid by like the ticker at the bottom of the screen.
That’s why the doctor at the Medical University prescribed the Zoloft. Of course, Sis jokes and calls them her happy pills, but she is a real believer in them because they stood her up and got her moving again. She takes one every morning with her cereal and coffee, and just before she pops one in the center of her tongue she says, “Thank you, Lord!”
Well, I probably don’t have pheromones anymore. But maybe I put out happy vibes, which is worth something, right?
~ MAY 24, 1978 ~
“Put out a good vibe,” Roger Rosenthal, the cellist, said at their first Spoleto Chamber Music rehearsal at the Dock Street Theater. He was a virtuoso and a hippie from New Hampshire, and Sis fell in love with him in a matter of days.
She was living in Charleston at the time and had been invited to serve as a stand-in pianist for the chamber music series featuring Roger’s up-and-coming string quartet.
Sis dated him for the summer, and she loved the way he smelled, sort of like sweat and marijuana and candle wax. They listened to the Shostakovich cello concertos. They attended the opera and the modern dance performances and the end-of-festival concert on the rim of the butterfly ponds at Middleton Plantation.
Once, after a few glasses of wine in the carriage house apartment where the festival was housing him, he unbuttoned her blouse and tenderly kissed her chest until she had to pull away.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
Sis’s heart was pounding in her throat and as much as she wanted to say, Nothing, nothing is wrong, and pull him close, she couldn’t ignore the war between her mind and her body, and all she’d been taught about love and sex and marriage and God.
“Look, I didn’t even have sex with my fiancé until the night before he went to Paris Island, Roger,” she said. “I can’t just whoop it up with some guy who breezes into Charleston for the summer.”
Then he took her shoulders in his hands and looked at her head-on. “You’re a grown-up, Sis, my sweet southern belle. Isn’t it time?”
Just behind him she eyed his cello in its case decorated with stickers from the wide array of countries to which he’d carried it. Roger’d been letting go and enjoying all over the world, and she had to admit she envied him. Next week he was off to Buenos Aires and Montevideo for a concert series, and in September he was headed to Vienna to teach a semester of master classes.
“Sure, I want to,” she said as she pulled at a strand of his long wavy hair. “But love needs to be part of it, I think. And maybe even commitment too. That’s what I’ve grown up believing.”
She felt shame as the words came out of her mouth. She felt unsophisticated and unenlightened, and yet she couldn’t let the notion go any more than she could have cursed God or her parents or the brutal war that snatched away her fiancé’s life and her very future.
Roger smiled and nuzzled her cheek with his unshaven chin before closing her shirt back up and taking her in his arms like a child. “You’re a dear,” he said. “And I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
At the next lull in the rainfall, she dashes out of her car. As she’s bolting toward the church steps, out of the corner of her eye she sees a limb fall on what looks like her daddy’s grave. In the split second she takes to pause and see where it landed, her new, expensive and extremely high heels sink down into the thick grass, and the muddy water pours into their arches.
Squealing, she steps from side to side hoping to get a foot free, but she sinks deeper until she’s almost up to her ankles in mud and she can feel the suction of the soft ground pulling her in. Just as she’s about to fall forward in her choir robe, Giuseppe’s cousin Rupert and some other tall, olive skinned man, who she’s assuming is Mr. Dentist, grab her by the elbow and pull her out. They hoist her up in their arms and carry her toward the church porch, her choir robe brushing across the wet and muddy ground.
“Thank you, Doctor and Mr. Rupert,” she says, flustered as she takes off her shoes and bangs them against a church column to get the pluff mud out.
Rupert laughs and rubs his hands together, “You’re welcome, Elizabeth.” He can’t quite get with the southern nicknames.
“This is not the dentist. This is my brother, Salvatore, the trumpeter, mmm?”
“Oh yes, of course.” She’d practically forgotten about the Giornelli family trumpeter. He was supposed to arrive yesterday evening, but his flight was cancelled due to the storm. “It is a pleasure to meet you.” He is kind of this older version of Giuseppe with a curly thatch of salt and pepper hair and deeply set blue eyes.
“How in the world did you get here?” she asks as she turns to knock on the door in hopes that Capers or LeMar will hear them and let them in.
“Hertz rent-a-car.” He grins as she turns back around. “I drove right through Eleanor all night and lived to tell about it, Elizabeth.” “Well, I know Giuseppe and Hilda will be so pleased. Now, let’s hope the sheet music hasn’t turned to mush.” She picks up the garden hose on the side of the steps and sprays out the last bit of mud from her heels.
Her choir gown is drenched, and she slips it off and drapes it over her bag. When she looks up, she sees the trumpeter marveling at her wet silk dress in a way that Rupert and the Mr. Dentist wouldn’t, and she can feel her face redden. Before she knows it Capers is standing at the doorway watching her and in the background she can hear LeMar practicing his scales.
“Y’all okay?” Capers says, and he seems to be admiring Sis too. Heck, I should have poured some water over my clothes long before this if I’d known it would get his attention.
“Yes,” she says, patting her rosy cheeks, “these nice Italian boys rescued me from being sucked into an early grave.”
Capers chuckles and shakes his head. “All I can say is thank the good Lord for generators because the power’s been out since late last night.”
Sis races up the back stairs to see about Ina and the sheet music for the wedding. She thinks she put them all in the drawer beside the organ, but she might have left them out on the stand, and she can guess the leaky spot in the ceiling to the right of her is brown with water drip, drip, dripping down on the “Ave Maria” and the “Laudate Dominum.”
Ina and her two hundred and fifty pipes are located in the west gallery at the rear of the nave. She’s pretty intimidating with the three manuals—keyboards—and the pedals to play the lower notes. Talk about multitasking. You can’t see all of the pipes from the outside, but they’re packed in behind the wooden case built by a British company in 1795.
All Saints was merely a chapel of ease between Charleston and Savannah three hundred years ago. In 1714 it became the second church outside the city limits of Charleston, but one of the great revolutionary generals became so fond of worshiping here that he paid for the creation of the organ himself in 1762.
The organist before Sis, Mr. Enoch Kershaw, was a serious and well-respected musician who seemed to take command of Ina and much of the church for that matter. He was tall and broad around the middle and even Old Stained Glass yielded to him when pushed. When he retired, Sis was shocked to death that they asked her to take over the position.
An organist is supposed to have confidence and chutzpah, so why does she shudder when it comes time to take her post? Most days she feels like she’s still a kid. Like something might happen today that will forever change the course of her life. She feels most like a kid right here in front of Ina in the balcony where she sits every Sunday morning and where she will sit today for Little Hilda’s wedding.
Sis’s mama rides thirty minutes every Sunday in her retirement community’s bus to worship in her church and listen to her daughter play. She’s always in the group of five or six who stay until the church is emptied and Sis finally finishes the last note of the postlude. Sis can see them gathering as she peers into the round, rearview mirror she hooked onto Ina’s right side. It’s usually Ray and Cousin Willy and the last remnants of her mama’s friends who haven’t passed on. They applaud like mad for a few seconds, and Sis turns around and waves like a child at a piano recital.
Truth is, Sis always feels small and unworthy when she sits down at the grand instrument. But pretty soon the church fills with people, and Capers looks at her and she straightens the music sheets, nods to the choir, and there is nothing left to do but play the keys and work the pedals with the balls of her feet so that Ina can blow her pipes. And once Ina blows, once the air pushes through the brass cylinders and the fan flushes the sound up and out into the very air around the altar and the pews where the colorful hats and balding heads bobble above the open hymnals, a kind of calm strength envelops Sis, and she thinks, All things come from you, O Lord, and of Thine own have I given Thee.
Today is no exception and now that the sheet music is intact at the top of the music rack, she gathers the musical men around Ina and they rehearse their parts. As usual, she stumbles here and there as she directs them.
Halfway through the rehearsal she sees Cricket and Kitty B. roll up in the McFortson hearse with the wedding dress. Cricket sports a strapless floral dress, and Kitty B. has poured herself into her mama’s beautiful beaded satin gown. Sis hopes to heaven it won’t pop open when she sits down. They both have on their knee-high rubber boots.
Ray runs over and helps them as they slowly lift the wedding dress out of the hearse. It is covered in layers of plastic from Lafayette Cleaners, and they hold it high above their heads as they head toward the parish hall.
Kitty B. comes back to get the boxes of shrimp salad sandwiches and grapes and Co-Colas that Ray insists the wedding party partake of before they get dressed. Once when a bride fainted at a wedding, Ray said, “These girls need a little pick-me-up before the ceremony. Otherwise their blood sugar will drop and their nerves will get the best of them.”
It seems like no time at all before the groomsmen arrive in their white dinner jackets, a white orchid boutonniere on each of their left lapels. They wait at the church doors at Ray’s direction, take each guest by their left arm and lead them to their seats. Bride’s guests on the left, the groom’s on the right.
Through the balcony window Sis spots Hilda in the graveyard with the bridesmaids, getting her photo taken with her daughter. Poor thing. She seemed so unbearably pitiful last night crawling into bed next to that wall of pillows as if Angus had never left, and it broke Sis’s heart to catch a glimpse of her secret despair. Sis won’t tell the other gals. It was not something she was supposed to see, and she’ll just try to forget about it. But she has half a mind to drop some happy pills off at Hilda’s with a little note that says, “Just give them a try.”
Well, Hilda looks gorgeous today as usual. She’s in this ornate lace top with capped sleeves and a straight full-length cream skirt with an ivory sash at her waist. She’s fancier than the bride in her simple silk strapless dress, but Little Hilda is radiant beyond words, and no gown in the world could dim that glow. She’s wearing the handmade veil that Giuseppe’s mother purchased from a dressmaker in Florence thirty years ago for her own wedding. Its scalloped edges frame her head like petals, and she has a girlish shine on the tops of her smooth cheeks as she leans toward her mother and flashes her soft smile.
Both Senator Warren and Senator Hollingsworth are here. One on the groom’s side and the other on the bride’s. They each have an aide accompanying them. Little Hilda has the funniest stories about working as Senator Hollingsworth’s scheduler. She has to water the tree outside of his Georgetown townhouse and scout out the meetings and engagements he attends outside of Capitol Hill. He’s so bad about finding his way into unfamiliar buildings that he makes her write in-depth descriptions about what doors to open and what elevators to take and what turns to make at what point down the hall to make it to the correct meeting destination.
Ray is at the back with Kitty B. and Vangie, lining up the groomsmen one by one for their entrance. She must have run home in a hurry to change, and Sis can see through the window across the road that she left R.L. and his florist crew in charge of putting the final touches on the tables beneath the tent.
LeMar sings the final notes of the “Ave Maria,” and Hilda kisses Little Hilda as they move into the narthex. Hilda gives Angus the cold shoulder as Cousin Willy holds out his arm, and Ray directs the mother of the bride to the back of the aisle and Sis begins to play “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” by Bach.
Hilda looks stiff as a board as she walks in on the arm of Cousin Willy. I’m kind of relieved that her parents aren’t here to walk in before her, Sis thinks. Hilda’s father always gave Sis the creeps—so upright and uptight like he might just be a machine himself, as efficient as the ones in his mill that crushed the pine tree trunks and smashed the wood into a mushy pulp. Her mama was so glamorous but somehow in another world. She had a nervous breakdown before they graduated from college, and Sis wishes she could have gotten her hands on some happy pills before they committed her for good.
Sis looks back to Ray in her eye patch and teal silk dress. Ray straightens one of the groomsmen’s boutonnieres and picks a fleck of lint from another’s white dinner jacket. The best man, Giuseppe’s father, must be nervous because he’s gnawing on a piece of gum. Ray opens her beaded purse and holds out a napkin. He looks at her curiously then spits the gum inside of it. She pats his back and sends him to the front of the line, where he will lead his son’s friends down the aisle after the seating of the mothers.
Ray discreetly points out the young man Little Hilda wants to set up with Priscilla. He’s handsome as can be with his broad shoulders and blond hair and wide grin. He’s got teeth as straight and white as Vangie Dreggs. He ought to be on a toothpaste commercial.
Then Giuseppe comes out from the sacristy with Capers and takes his place at the altar. He bites his lip, concealing the grin he eventually lets spread across his face as the groomsmen walk in one by one and take their place beside him while Sis accompanies his uncle, who gives a glorious trumpet performance of the “Te Deum” by Charpentier.
The bridesmaids are lovely in their pink Kentucky eyelet dresses from Lilly Pulitzer that Ray and Hilda picked out, since Little Hilda was too busy with work to take the time. There are two girls from Sweet Briar College where she attended and two from Capitol Hill and of course, Priscilla, her childhood companion, is her maid of honor—dreadlocks and all. Ray pats her own daughter’s shoulder, gives her a kiss, and instructs her down the aisle.
Now Sis vamps for a few minutes because she can see from her side mirror that the bride is not in place for the procession. She’s done the fanfare three times now, and she replays portions of the “Prince of Denmark’s March.”
She watches as Little Hilda converses with her father to the side of the sanctuary threshold. He must be giving her some parting words and he wipes his eyes as he speaks, sweet Angus Prescott. It’s the same thing he did at his own wedding to Hilda, where Sis stood beside her at the altar three decades ago. As Sis sees Little Hilda’s gown alight on the threshold along with Angus’s shiny black shoes, Ray gives her the thumbs-up and she plays the heck out of Wagner’s “Entry of the Guests” from Tannhauser as Salvatore plays the trumpet with a passionate virtuosity, and the guests stand and watch the bride enter on the arm of her father.
“The Celebration and Blessing of a Marriage” begins on page 423 of the Book of Common Prayer, and though Sis has heard it hundreds of times, she still shudders when Capers says to Giuseppe and Little Hilda, “Now I charge you both in the presence of God that if you know of any reason why you may not be united in marriage lawfully and in accordance with God’s Word, you do now request it.”
Neither of them utters a word, and when Capers asks the couple to turn toward each other for the vows, the whole congregation seems to exhale.
Hilda and Giuseppe beam at each other as Capers reads the Gospel and gives a heartfelt homily about servanthood in marriage. Sis is so enamored with his sentiment that she’s sure she can overlook the way he smells if he asks her to dance tonight. She hopes he asks her, this dear unwed man of the cloth. Why didn’t he ever marry?
Now she can’t help but let her emotions get the best of her, and before she knows it, she’s as soggy as the ground outside as she witnesses Little Hilda and Giuseppe recite their vows. When they exchange the rings, Salvatore hands Sis a linen handkerchief out of his pocket, and she presses it to her eyes as she turns around on her bench to watch Giuseppe at the center of the altar say, “Hilda, I give you this ring as a symbol of my vow, and with all that I am, and all that I have, I honor you in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
And Sis believes that it is true. That this young man does honor her, and she’s so thankful that the daughter of her dear friend has found someone to partner with her in life, to adore her and look after her.
Capers closes with a glorious prayer from the red prayer book that says, “Let their love for each other be a seal upon their hearts, a mantle about their shoulders, and a crown upon their foreheads. Bless them in their life and in their death. Finally, in your mercy, bring them to that table where your saints feast for ever in your heavenly home; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God for ever and ever. Amen.”
“Amen!” Sis can’t help but shout as Giuseppe embraces Hilda. Then LeMar pats Sis on the shoulder to remind her that it’s time to begin the recessional.