I turned up the air conditioner on the pickup truck and glanced anxiously at the temperature gauge. The needle hovered below “simmer.”
“Just let me get to Beaulieu and then you can go on the fritz again,” I said, giving the dashboard a pat for encouragement.
Before I was divorced, I never talked to inanimate objects. Not out loud. Now I talk to my truck, the toaster, and my bank statement, anything that promises not to talk back or to act snotty. I’ve had a lifetime of snotty.
Jethro’s tail thumped on the vinyl seat. One thing about Jethro, he loves the sound of my voice. “Good boy,” I told him. Thump. Thump. “Sweet, precious boy,” I said. Thump, thump, thump. He was really getting hot and bothered now.
One of Jethro’s best qualities is that he is the least critical dog I have ever known. He loves everybody, hasn’t got a mean bone in his body. I found him one morning right after Tal left, when I was taking my usual predawn curb cruise.
There was a huge mountain of junk in front of a stick-style Victorian somebody was renovating on Habersham. I was poking around, pulling out bits of wooden porch rails, chunks of wrought-iron fencing, even a gorgeous stained-glass window transom, when I heard a faint squeal. I backed away from the pile fast. The squealing continued, too loud even for Savannah’s brashest wharf rats.
I edged closer, kicked aside a length of rusted-out gutter, and saw a little black-and-white wriggling hairball. He had a pink nose with black spots and he was no bigger than a one-pound sack of flour. At first he looked like he was covered with flour. It turned out it was just plaster dust from the junk pile. It was also instant love. I left the stained glass, tucked the puppy and the porch rails under each arm, and ran like a thief back to my carriage house.
As for the puppy, the vet said he was part beagle, part German shepherd, and mostly mutt. It cost me two hundred dollars for all the shots and the deworming medicine. He’s the only dog I’ve ever owned. Daddy would never hear of a dog, him being a mailman and everything. I named him Jethro, for Jethro Tull, the rock group, and Jethro Bodine, the Beverly Hillbillies hunk.
Tal called his lawyer and then my lawyer the first time he glanced out the back window and saw Jethro lift a leg on a camellia bush in his half of the walled garden.
“That crazy bitch is keeping animals,” Tal yelled. (James played the message-machine tape for me.)
“Weezie’s not a tenant,” James reminded him when he returned Tal’s call. I was sitting right there listening in, of course.
“Look at the property settlement papers,” James told Tal. “The judge awarded Weezie the carriage house. She can keep elephants and giraffes if she wants to. So if I were you, I’d keep quiet about the dog. No telling what she’ll come home with otherwise.”
We were almost at the gates to Beaulieu. I could feel my dress wilting like week-old lettuce. The temperature inside the truck was at least ninety. I pulled the truck off right where the crushed-oyster-shell driveway began, directly under the open Beaulieu gate, leaned over, and rolled the window down. Jethro is just tall enough to see out the passenger-side window. He stuck his head out, sniffed, and gave one short, appreciative bark. I believe that dog can smell an antique.
I gave myself a quick glance in the truck’s rearview mirror. My short, dark red hair was plastered to my head and my face was almost as red as my hair from the heat. My brown eyeliner had started to run in the corners, like Pagliacci.
I was dabbing at my melted makeup when a white Mercedes pulled up beside me and tooted the horn.
James. The electric window on the passenger side glided down. “You better ride the rest of the way with me,” he called.
“Jethro too?” I asked.
He looked over at Jethro, who had jumped into my lap and was trying to stick his head out my window to say hello to his old buddy James.
“Will he stay in the car and not chew up the upholstery?” The Mercedes had been a retirement gift from James’s parish in Florida. I call it the pimpmobile, but James says he gave up his vow of poverty and intends to start making up for all those years of driving Chevys.
“He’ll be good,” I promised.
James’s car was divinely cool. It smelled like new leather and Beech-Nut chewing gum. I held my damp head in front of the air-conditioning vent and pulled my fingers through my hair to try to get it dry.
“I didn’t know you knew Anna Ruby Mullinax,” James said, one eyebrow raised, the way he does.
“I didn’t,” I said. “But this may be the only chance I ever get to go inside Beaulieu. Mama says that’s sacrilege.”
“Your mother’s an expert on sacrilege,” James said.
“But you knew Miss Anna Ruby,” I said. “Janet told me.”
“Did she tell you how we met?”
“Don’t think so,” I said.
“It was a long time ago,” James recalled. “The year I helped start that little church in Metter, Christ Our Hope. Must have been 1978, something like that. Miss Mullinax called me, said she’d heard through some of ‘her people’ that we were building a new church.”
“I thought the Mullinaxes were Episcopalian,” I said, interrupting.
“They were. By ‘her people’ she meant the black folks who’d been family servants. Slaves, originally. But people like the Mullinaxes didn’t like to call it slavery after civil rights got fashionable. A whole crowd of those black folks were living up there in Metter. Most of them Catholic, most of them in my new parish.”
“What did she want?” I asked.
James smiled. He has the Foley family jaw, long and squared off, and when he smiles, which is frequently, it makes creases all the way up to his eye sockets.
“She wanted to give us something for the new church. In memory of a woman named Clydie. Clydie Jeffers. She’d been Miss Anna Ruby’s housekeeper until she died at the age of eighty-eight. So I came out here, to Beaulieu, and we talked, and Miss Anna Ruby ended up donating the pews for Christ Our Hope. Had them made out of cypress trees they cut out here on the property. And a little brass plaque said they were placed there ‘In loving memory of Clydie Jeffers.’ No mention of the donor. Miss Anna Ruby strictly required anonymity.”
A slight breeze stirred the moss from the trees overhanging the shell drive. The live oaks were spaced sentinel style, ten yards apart on both sides, their bases covered with a creeping carpet of ivy, their canopy nearly blotting out the blazing blue sky overhead.
I squinted, and up ahead, at the end of the tree tunnel, I could see the shape of the house, rising over the treetops. I sat up and waited for the house to come fully into view. I’d waited a long time to see Beaulieu.
“She was nice?” I murmured, keeping my eyes on the house.
“Different,” James said. “She was dressed in pants, I remember that. I’d never seen such an old lady wearing pants. And barefoot! Your grandmother Foley never went barefoot outside her own bedroom, let alone walked around in front of a stranger, and a priest, at that. Miss Anna Ruby was her own person, and careful with her money.”
By then I wasn’t listening. We were there.
Three-story-tall Doric columns, twelve in all, stretched across the front of the house, supporting a carved balustrade, and above that were three gables, and beside that, there was a one-story wing on each side. The house was raised up, on a foundation made of tabby, the crushed-oyster-shell masonry you find on old houses along the coast in South Carolina and Georgia.
There was a double stairway winding from the entry porch to the portico. Not white, like the Hollywood version of a Southern plantation house, Beaulieu was painted a pale golden pink, with black-green shutters on the wide six-over-six windows. It was imposing and breathtaking—and it was crumbling.
Paint hung in shreds from the columns, whose bases were chipped and rotted, like a bag lady’s teeth. A fine sheen of green mold had worked its way from the foundations up the front of the house, and the wooden slats of the window shutters had rotted and fallen away. One of the gable roofs had collapsed, the portico sagged, and the only windows not gray and cobweb-streaked had missing panes of glass.
“Oh,” I said, feeling the wind go out of my sails. I blinked. “How sad.”
“Yes,” James said quietly. “Very sad.”
Jethro pressed his nose against the window, and I gently pushed it aside.
“It wasn’t this decrepit when I came out here in the seventies,” James said.
He followed the driveway around the side of the house, to an unpaved area used as the car park. There were ten or twelve other cars parked around. One of them was a buttercup yellow Triumph Spitfire that was carefully parked in the shade of a sweet gum tree.
My stomach lurched, as it does every time I see the Spitfire.
“What’s she doing here?” I said, grabbing James’s arm. “She doesn’t even like old stuff.”
He’d left the air-conditioning on, but he was fumbling with his necktie.
“She who?”
I pointed at the Triumph. I knew the car well. After all, it was parked under the carport beside the carriage house in the space that used to be mine. James had won me the carriage house and half the walled garden behind the big house on Troup Square, but the judge, inexplicably, had given Tal my parking slot.
Every night I heard the vroom of the Triumph as it jetted up the alley and slid neatly into the slot—my slot—while I now had to take my chances parking the truck out in front on Charlton Street—if I could find a space at all.
“Caroline,” I said. “She’s here.”
James shot me a look of concern. “Do you want to leave?”
“I’ll be fine,” I assured him. “As long as she doesn’t start anything.”
James got a little pale. I patted his hand reassuringly, then turned around and scratched Jethro’s muzzle.
“Be a good boy and don’t eat Uncle James’s nice pimpmobile.” I rolled down the windows and gathered my resolve. “Let’s go,” I said.
The front door had been covered with an ugly 1950s aluminum screen door. Attached to it was a wilted wreath of ferns and daisies. Beneath it was a small handwritten card. “Please come in,” it said.
We stepped across the rotted threshold and into another era. Not the antebellum South, unfortunately. More like the late years of the Eisenhower administration.
The wide hallway was dark and cool. A fake colonial chandelier with only one lightbulb still burning hung from a dropped ceiling. The beautiful old plaster walls were painted pale pink; the elaborate egg-and-dart plaster cornice boards and moldings were a dull gray. Venetian blinds covered the tall floor-to-ceiling windows. I looked down at the floor. Thank God. They were coated with grime, but the original heart-pine floorboards had been left intact.
James took my elbow and guided me gently inside. Twin parlors opened off either side of the hallway. The room to the right was piled high with furniture, three long folding card tables were pushed together, every inch of tabletop covered with crystal, china, silver, and pieces of bric-abrac. Naturally, I started toward the room. But James pulled me back. “Other side,” he whispered.
The parlor to the left had been cleared of furniture. A cheap box fan hummed in one of the open windows, pushing more hot, damp air into the already saunalike room.
The gathering was small, no more than twenty people. Most of Anna Ruby Mullinax’s friends looked to be candidates for their own memorial service. They were white haired, stoop shouldered, frail. The men mopped at their glistening faces with handkerchiefs, the ladies fanned themselves with the memorial booklets that had been stacked on a table by the front door.
A tall, thin woman wearing white minister’s robes stood at a wooden lectern in front of the fireplace. Her shoulder-length white hair stood in a frizzy halo around her head.
But I wasn’t really looking at the minister. I was looking around for Caroline.
She saw me first and gave a little wave. I nodded politely and felt my insides curl up and my scalp start to tingle.
Caroline was dressed in a pale gray linen suit with a short, tight skirt that hit four inches above her fabulously knobby knees. As always, she radiated cool elegance while the rest of us were drowning in a puddle of our own perspiration.
An older man stood beside Caroline, his hand resting lightly on her shoulder. He had dark wavy hair styled in a bad comb-over, bushy graying eyebrows, and a tennis tan. I’d met his type at Tal’s parents’ parties. Christ Church. Oglethorpe Club. He was wearing a college class ring. Probably Duke or University of Virginia. Definitely Kappa Alpha.
“Who’s that with her?” I hissed into James’s ear.
He glanced over, nodded solemnly at Caroline’s friend, who was watching the two of us watch the two of them.
“That’s Gerry Blankenship. The Mullinax family lawyer. Shh.”
Anna Ruby Mullinax died at the age of ninety-seven, but her going-away speech took less than ten minutes. “A quickie,” my father would have called it.
Within another five minutes, a blond-headed young man gussied up in a white dress shirt, black slacks, and black bow tie was passing around a tray with thimble-sized glasses of sherry. A black teenaged boy in the same outfit offered a silver tray heaped with cheese straws, the traditional Savannah cocktail/funeral offering.
The guests stood and chatted quietly, as though they were outside a church instead of inside the last vestiges of a nearly vanished way of life.
I edged over toward the parlor doorway, heading for the room where all the goodies were stashed. James grabbed my arm just before I reached the hallway. “Eloise!” he said, a little too heartily.
Caroline DeSantos and Gerry Blankenship stood beside James. I couldn’t tell who had cornered whom.
James nodded toward the lawyer and then toward me. “Gerry Blankenship, meet my niece, Eloise Foley. Gerry is Miss Mullinax’s attorney, Weezie. He was just telling me about the plans for Beaulieu. And of course, you already know Caroline DeSantos.”
The faintest tinge of pink flushed across Caroline’s lovely olive face. She brushed a strand of glossy black hair away from her forehead.
“This is awkward, isn’t it?” she asked, looking from me to Gerry to Uncle James. “Ex-wife and wife to be. Living practically on top of each other. Did you know that, Gerry? Weezie lives in the carriage house behind our house. But that’s Savannah. We’ll just all have to be very grown-up about this kind of thing, won’t we, Weezie?”
Blankenship coughed. I heard James inhale sharply, waiting to see if I’d keep my promise about nonviolence. I felt my fists tightening. Caroline was taller, but I had at least twenty pounds to my advantage. I could beat the stuffing out of her right now, I thought. Slap her into another time zone. Pinch off her head with my bare hands.
“We’re all adults,” I said, shrugging. Of course I wouldn’t attack Caroline in public. Private revenge is so much sweeter.