Girl From the South (v5) Page 3

  ‘Martha,’ she said deliberately without raising her voice, ‘don’t go against me this way. Don’t break my heart and go north.’

  But Martha went to New York.

  ‘Too much Charleston,’ she said to her parents. She never said anything of importance to either of them without the other present. ‘I just need to see something else.’

  ‘Sure,’ Teddy said. He had one eye on the American Open golf, on TV. ‘You go see what life is like outside the gilded cage.’

  ‘Is it really that?’ Sarah said to Teddy later in their bedroom.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Life here is life in a gilded cage.’

  He unlaced a shoe and pulled it off.

  ‘I’d say so.’

  She looked at him. He’d put on weight, and suffered from angina, and he was losing his hair. The Alton men never lost their hair.

  ‘Does that mean it isn’t real?’

  He yawned.

  ‘Oh, it’s real all right. For the people who live here. Martha just needs to see other realities.’

  Sarah went into the bathroom and sat on the loveseat that had been in Mama’s bathroom on the East Battery. She did not want to be reminded of reality. Reality-dissatisfaction, anguish, humiliation – was something she thought she had dealt with, most effectively, and somehow put aside. She didn’t want Martha – for all her longing for Martha to have personal fulfilment – opening the windows too wide and allowing too much painful, alien reality back in. The risks were just too great.

  But Martha had still gone to New York. She did a first clinical year, and then announced she was switching to psychiatry. The mention of psychiatry in itself made Sarah anxious, apprehensive of any science that had to be inexact by its very nature, by the nature, too, of its patients. Martha made no mention of men, while she was in New York, or at least, of any specific man. She seemed to be going to the theatre occasionally, to have Long Island weekends in summer, to be going to a Hallowe’en party one year dressed as a siren witch in green eyeshadow and fishnet stockings, but there were no names, no details. And then she came home her final spring vacation and showed her parents an emerald ring set in platinum.

  ‘He wanted to ask you first, Daddy, but I said he didn’t have to. After all, it’s me he’s marrying so it’s me who decides.’

  Sarah was speechless. Teddy said, sounding more easygoing than he could possibly have been feeling, ‘Who’s he, then, sugar?’

  ‘Boone Stokes,’ Martha said.

  ‘Boone Stokes,’ Sarah whispered.

  ‘Sure—’

  Boone Stokes. Boone Stokes, born and raised in Charleston, growing up in a house on Tradd Street in the days when he could walk all the way to his grandmother’s house on Greenhill Street, never leaving the tops of the garden walls to cross a street but the once. Boone Stokes, son of Boone Senior, whom Sarah had danced with-pink chiffon, this time, with pearl bugle beads – at the very first St Cecilia’s Ball she’d been allowed to attend.

  ‘We’ve been dating for years,’ Martha said. ‘He came up to New York every other weekend.’

  Sarah burst into tears. Her husband and daughter looked at her.

  ‘Mother,’ Martha said. ‘Who on earth did you think it would be?’

  Boone, like his father before him, was an attorney. He’d studied law at the Southern Methodist University in Texas where he’d been briefly engaged to a girl from Greenville, Mississippi. The girl had thought she was pregnant but Martha wasn’t telling her parents that. She told them instead that she, Martha, had known him from high-school prom days and then, just before she went to New York, they’d ended up side by side on the bleachers at some football game and it had gone on from there. He was going to join his uncle’s firm on Broad Street: his uncle was a realtor, specializing in historic properties on the Charleston peninsula. He was also buying a house right down on the western end of Gibbes Street and he wanted her to keep working after they were married. He was proud of her, he said. He might not want a confrontational partner – what man would? – but he certainly didn’t want a wife who only knew how to lay a fancy table. Martha spread the fingers of her left hand and regarded her emerald. It was square-cut, flanked by diamonds and it had belonged to Boone’s Clayborne grandmother.

  ‘Clayborne?’ Sarah said, suddenly alert. She was patting under her wet eyes with a lawn handkerchief.

  ‘Yes, Mother,’ Martha said. She caught her father’s eye.

  ‘The cotton Claybornes?’ Sarah said. ‘Or the commerce Claybornes?’

  Martha and her father looked at the ceiling.

  ‘You kill me, Sarah,’ Teddy said.

  That conversation, of course, had taken place thirty-two years ago, a year before Martha had married Boone, two years before Martha had given birth to Gillon. It hadn’t just happened in a different time, either, it had happened in a different house, in a different bedroom from the one Sarah was in now and in which Teddy had always looked so displaced, somehow, among the rose chintz drapes and flounces. She had to hand it to Teddy, really, in the matter of décor. He had always been, for a man of such masculine and conservative tastes, infinitely accommodating about drapes and flounces.

  ‘You want for me to call Mr Seton for a taxi?’ Miss Minda said from Sarah’s bedroom doorway.

  Sarah was at her dressing table, putting in the triple pearl earrings that Teddy had given her after Martha’s birth.

  ‘I’ll walk.’

  ‘In them shoes?’ Miss Minda said.

  Sarah didn’t glance down. Instead, she pushed her feet further under the dressing table’s valance.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They’s new,’ Miss Minda said. ‘And they’s high. And you are seventy-six years old.’

  ‘Not eighty-six,’ Sarah said. ‘Nor ninety-six. It will take me fifteen minutes to walk to Miss Martha’s, and Mr Boone or Mr Cooper will drive me home.’

  ‘In stubbornness,’ Miss Minda said, moving away from the doorway, ‘you surely do favour your daddy.’

  ‘Some people would call it strong-minded. Independent.’

  Miss Minda’s voice came from the stairwell.

  ‘Some people don’ have to live with it.’

  Since Teddy’s death – four years previously, of a mercifully conclusive heart attack – Miss Minda had increasingly treated Sarah as a fretful child. It was as if the status of wifehood and domestic queen conferred by the presence of a husband had been a veneer, which vanished with him, leaving no more than the indulged child in a blue-sashed white frock whom Miss Minda had first seen all those years ago, sitting with her father on the joggling board. Sarah stood up. She smoothed her cream jacket down over her hips and adjusted the front so that the jet buttons – blackly gleaming like the new despised patent-leather shoes – fell in a precise line over the curve of her still impressive bosom. Poor Martha had no bosom to speak of, nor did that difficult child, Gillon, but Ashley had inherited the Alton bosom. Ashley, her grandmother knew with satisfaction, took great trouble over the cut and fit of her underwear. Ashley understood, as Sarah had always felt she understood herself, where you were a lady – and where you were a woman. If Sarah had any regrets – and she didn’t care to look at those too often – it was that, in the course of her seventy-six years, the lady had had more of a say in things than the woman.

  She picked up her pocket book – cream leather – and scarf – black chiffon – and the recipe she had clipped from Southern Living Magazine for Jalapeno-Cheese Grits. It promised that the preparation time was only ten minutes. It was no good giving Martha any recipe that took more than ten minutes. Even tonight – a rare family occasion – Martha might broil some chicken breasts but the salads would be store-bought and there’d be some Sara Lee concoction for dessert. Sarah had tried to offer Miss Minda’s famous Mocha Pecan Mud Pie and been turned down flat.

  ‘It’s sweet of you, Mother,’ Martha had said, in that absent voice of hers that usually meant she was reading some patient’s case
notes at the same time. ‘But I’ll manage just fine.’

  Sarah went carefully down the polished staircase to the hallway. The kitchen door was shut. Behind it Miss Minda would be knitting violently coloured blankets for an orphanage in Lima, Peru, which her church had adopted as its annual charity, and watching some evangelical channel – Full Gospel was what she really liked – on TV. It would be enough to signal her departure if Sarah gave the street door a distinct, if ladylike, slam on the way out.

  From the street end of the second-floor piazza of her parents’ house, Gillon watched her grandmother approaching. Her head was swathed in black chiffon through which her carefully coiffed pale hair gleamed faintly, and she was taking little, tentative, pecking steps down the brick sidewalk in plainly new shoes. Grandmama had almost as much of a fetish about shoes as she did about Charleston – no flat shoes, ever, no white shoes after Labor Day, no red shoes under any circumstances (they indicated a propensity for promiscuity), no gold or silver, unless it was in the evening. Gillon looked down at her own feet. She’d found a pair of slides she’d bought on sale on the optimistic whim, some months ago, that she might get asked to a party. They were made of green brocade and had tiny curved heels painted scarlet. Grandmama would think them odd, even bohemian (a dubious quality), but they would at least be an acceptable alternative to the sneakers Gillon had worn until she was ten yards away from her parents’ front door.

  She leaned over the piazza rail.

  ‘Grandmama—’

  Sarah halted, paused and looked up.

  ‘Is that you, Gillon?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll come down and let you in.’

  Sarah nodded. She had views about loud conversations carried on in the street, especially in these quiet streets south of Broad Street where a marital row of any satisfactory proportions would have had to be conducted in the basement in order not to broadcast itself to a square half-mile of neighbours. She paused below the front doorstep and noticed, with approval, that the door itself, below its graceful fanlight, had been painted black (her suggestion) as an elegant contrast to the white and pale avocado of the rest of the house. Boone had an eye for these things, luckily; Martha had none. Sarah had had to take over the redecoration of that first house on Gibbes Street because Martha could see nothing the matter with its yellow stucco walls and tan-varnished window frames.

  The door opened. Gillon leaned down to take her grandmother’s arm.

  ‘I was sent to wait for you.’

  ‘Well, dear—’

  ‘Ashley’s more use in the kitchen than me.’

  Sarah gave her granddaughter a kiss.

  ‘You could be, if you tried.’

  ‘I make a mean omelette,’ Gillon said.

  Sarah surveyed her. She was wearing a very small cardigan – could it have shrunk? – and a strange little skirt with a dipping hem edged in fringe.

  ‘I found a skirt for you, see, Grandmama.’

  ‘I suppose you did,’ Sarah said.

  ‘The hem is intended to be like this.’

  Sarah unwound her scarf and patted her hair.

  ‘I had an evening dress copied from a Worth model in Paris once. It was off one shoulder.’ She glanced again at Gillon’s hemline. ‘It was truly, truly elegant.’

  Gillon put a hand under her grandmother’s elbow.

  ‘Daddy’s not home yet. But Mother and Ashley are in the kitchen and Cooper is, of course, on the telephone. I’ll get him to fix you a drink.’

  ‘Just iced tea, dear,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Mama’s opened some wine—’

  From an open doorway at the far end of the piazza, Martha emerged wearing a scarlet pinafore over her sober pantsuit. Boone had given her the pinafore. It had ‘I’d rather be reading Jane Austen’ printed across the bib. Boone’s early admiration of Martha’s indifference to domestic accomplishment had gone through several stages over the years, including exasperation and something close to despair, but had now settled into a kind of facetious tolerance which he could indulge loudly over double shots of Dewar’s at the Yacht Club.

  ‘Mother,’ Martha said. She stepped forward, put her hands on Sarah’s upper arms and kissed her briefly on her cheek. ‘You look so chic.’

  ‘I have had this’, Sarah said, ‘these hundred years. Good clothes don’t let you down.’

  Martha smiled at her. She gestured at herself.

  ‘Nor dull clothes.’

  ‘Professional clothes are different—’

  ‘Guess what I work in, Grandmama,’ Gillon said.

  ‘I’d prefer not, dear.’

  ‘I’ve opened some wine,’ Martha said to Sarah. ‘Will you have some?’

  ‘I’d have a little bourbon,’ Sarah said, ‘if Boone were here to fix it for me. But as it is, I’ll just have iced tea.’

  ‘Cooper’s here—’

  ‘I sure am,’ Cooper said.

  He emerged from the door of his father’s office, cellphone in hand. He stooped to kiss his grandmother. She put a ringed hand on his shoulder.

  ‘My,’ she said. ‘Don’t you look just fine?’

  He grinned down at her.

  ‘I know how you like your bourbon.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘One measure, on the rocks, with a twist.’

  Sarah moved her hand from his shoulder to his arm.

  ‘Then I think I may trust you to make it?’

  Gillon went past her brother and grandmother and into the kitchen. Ashley was standing at the central island making an elaborate chicken salad. Her hair was scooped up smoothly in combs either side of her head, and she was wearing a pink tailored shirt down which she had spilled nothing.

  ‘Grandmother’s flirting with Cooper.’

  Ashley picked up strips of red pepper and began to lay them in a neat lattice over the cubed chicken.

  ‘So what’s new?’

  Gillon looked at the big salad platter. It seemed to have every vegetable on it known to man, including broccoli. Gillon had never quite come to terms with broccoli. It was the texture, really, of the half-seedy, half-flowery heads in her mouth that was the problem. When she thought about her childhood meals, broccoli seemed to have dominated well over half of them, broccoli lurk-ing under condensed mushroom soup, broccoli hiding under mayonnaise, broccoli lying in wait under melted Velveeta cheese.

  ‘I hope there’s no dark meat in there,’ Gillon said. ‘You know what Grandmama—’

  ‘Would I forget such a thing?’ Ashley said. She shook her head slightly and her hair slid obediently behind her shoulders. ‘Merrill won’t eat dark meat either. Not even turkey.’

  ‘Where’s Merrill?’

  ‘He’s missed a plane. He said I was just to go ahead with you all.’

  ‘Go ahead with what?’

  ‘You’ll see,’ Ashley said.

  There was the sound of the street door opening and thudding shut. Then a small pleased clamour of voices.

  ‘Daddy,’ Ashley said. She began to put half-olives in the squares of her pepper lattice.

  ‘Weird,’ Gillon said.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Us being in here, in the kitchen, picking at dinner, and hearing Daddy come home. Like we were kids still.’

  ‘We’ll always be his kids.’

  ‘Yes, I know, but not like little kids. Not like it was when we were in sixth grade.’

  Boone’s tread came down the piazza.

  ‘Hey, you guys,’ he said. His bulk filled the open doorway briefly and then he stepped inside and put an arm round each of his daughters.

  ‘Hey, Gill. Hey, princess.’

  ‘Hey, Daddy.’

  He leaned over the salad.

  ‘That looks amazing.’

  ‘All Ashley’s work,’ Gillon said.

  Boone kissed Ashley’s smooth head.

  ‘You certainly do not take after your mother, sugar.’

  Ashley gave him a quick, pretty glance.

  ‘I do every ways I’d care t
o, Daddy’.

  ‘Boone laughed. He gave them both a quick squeeze and let them go.

  ‘Boy,’ he said. ‘Does a man need a drink? Or what?’

  ‘That was superb,’ Sarah said to Ashley. She blotted her mouth with a napkin. ‘Quite delicious.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Ashley said. She looked down at her own plate. She had had a tiny helping and had eaten almost none of it. Gillon thought she was probably dieting. Ever since she could remember, three pounds extra on Ashley was the cue for a major hissy fit and weeks of spinach and V-8 juice.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Gillon said, her voice making a tiny challenge.

  ‘Sure,’ Ashley said.

  Martha leaned forward.

  ‘Do you want to wait for Merrill, dear?’

  Ashley shook her hair slightly.

  ‘I don’t think so. He missed the connection in Atlanta so he won’t be in until around ten. He told me just to go ahead.’

  Boone said, ‘You know what they say – even if you’re sent to hell, you’ll have to change planes in Atlanta to get there.’ He winked at Ashley. ‘Go ahead, honey.’

  Ashley looked down at her plate.

  ‘I told Daddy and Mama something about two weeks ago. Now I want to tell all of you. Thing is – I’m pregnant. Me and Merrill, we’re going to have a baby.’

  ‘Dear!’ Sarah cried. She got up and went round the table to her granddaughter, bending to put her arms round her shoulders. ‘That’s just wonderful! My first great-grandchild! You’ve made me so very, very happy.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Ashley said again. She had flushed a little. ‘I’d be pretty happy too, if I didn’t feel so nauseous.’

  ‘Phenomenal,’ Cooper said. He leaned sideways and took his sister’s hand. ‘Amazing. I am really, really pleased for you.’

  Martha looked across the table at Gillon.

  ‘Lovely,’ Gillon said. ‘Brilliant. I—’ She stopped and picked up her water glass. ‘I’m so glad for you. Really—’

  Cooper guffawed suddenly. He pointed his free hand at Gillon.

  ‘Ways to go!’ he said. ‘Who’s being overtaken by their kid sister, then?’