Читать книгу Road to Folly - Leslie Ford - Страница 5

I’d forgot that people still make formal calls, in Charleston, and also that they do it in the morning. That’s why I was a little surprised, and with my carry-over from the night before, a little dismayed, coming into the gold drawing room and finding Mrs. Atwell Reid and her daughter Jennifer sitting there. Mrs. Reid held out her hand cordially. Jennifer Reid’s blue eyes met mine so coolly that I wondered why she’d bothered to come at all. Moreover, she didn’t open her mouth while her mother and I went through the elaborate ritual of Charleston.—It was a beautiful city. The gardens were lovely, the food divine. It was snowing in New York, and rather colder in Charleston than it normally was at this time of year. How long was I staying, and had I been to the antique show at St. Philip’s Rectory?

That over, Mrs. Atwell Reid glanced a little anxiously at her daughter, who sat in a gold-brocaded chair, her motionless face even lovelier in the brilliant daylight than it had been in the moonlight the night before. She had on a blue checked jacket and powder blue sweater and a little blue felt hat worn back from her high camellia-textured forehead, and if I hadn’t known she was twenty-two I’d have thought she was about sixteen.

She didn’t move now, but I knew she’d caught her mother’s glance. The shuttered look in her eyes as she glanced down at her hands, folded primly in her lap, showed that plainly. And showed further that she was being forced into something definitely against her will. There was an awkward silence. I saw the corners of her red lips tremble. She looked up at me.

“I told Aunt Caroline you were here,” she said quietly. There was still the warm soft note in her voice that Southern women have if their voices aren’t high-pitched the way most of them are. “She would like you to come out to see her.”

For a moment our eyes met . . . hers clear and young, and . . . not so much resentful, I thought, as challenging. Then her mother broke in.

“My aunt doesn’t receive many people. She’s quite old . . . she was eighty in December. She’s almost blind on account of a cataract she stubbornly refuses to have operated on. But her mind is as clear as it ever was.”

She said it rapidly, almost like a cataract herself.

“And that’s very clear,” Jennifer said coolly, still looking at me.

“Of course it is, Jennifer,” her mother said hastily. “I didn’t mean to imply it wasn’t. I’m sure Mrs. Baker didn’t think I did.”

I looked at Jennifer. I had the uneasy feeling that I knew perfectly what she meant, even if her mother didn’t. Had what Brad Porter said about my being Phyllis’s front when there was dirty work at the crossroad meant more to her than any one had thought the night before?

“You will go out and see her, won’t you, my dear?” Mrs. Atwell Reid said nervously.

I saw the shutters go down in Jennifer’s eyes again, and I made up my mind permanently this time. This was one of Phyllis Lattimer’s chestnuts that I was going to let religiously alone. I turned to Mrs. Atwell Reid.

“I’m so sorry! I’d have loved to.” I said. “I’m awfully afraid I’m taking the afternoon plane home. I really just flew down to have a look at the Antique Show at St. Philip’s, and I have to be back almost immediately.”

The very mention of antiques was an awful mistake. Jennifer’s face shut like a steel trap. She didn’t look at her mother. So, I thought; she knows exactly what Phyllis Lattimer wants, and probably why she sent for me to come down. Knowing Phyllis, and hearing Brad the night before, even if he hadn’t said anything to her later, she could easily have put two and two together. She obviously had, I thought . . . and had got a lot more than the traditional four.

She got up quickly. Her manner had changed abruptly to an easy rather than uneasy aloofness.

“Perhaps when you come again . . .”

But her mother hadn’t risen. She was sitting erect and graceful, her face suddenly worn and tired as her daughter’s freshened. She got up then, slowly, not looking—oh, definitely not looking—at Jennifer.

“Couldn’t you take the late plane, Mrs. Baker? My aunt is really very anxious indeed to see you,” she said, with a kind of gentle persistence that was very embarrassing. “You see, some one told her you might be down this winter. She’s set her heart on seeing you.”

“But, mother! If Mrs. Baker has to go home, it’s unkind of you to put her in this position.”

Jennifer Reid’s voice was still warm velvet, but under it was something else. It wasn’t just determination, either. It was fear, just plain paralyzing fear. I sensed it with the kind of intuitive clarity that makes rational processes slow and plodding. And I didn’t look at her. I didn’t want to. It was her mother I was concerned with. Why was she so insistent that I go to see old Miss Caroline at Strawberry Hill . . . so insistent in the face of her daughter’s desperate—it seemed to me now—determination that I should not that she was allowing a formal morning call on a complete stranger to become practically an emotional scene?

Just then a girl I didn’t know wandered into the card room.

“Jennifer Reid! How perfectly swell! I was going to look you up . . . I’ve got a husband, I want you to see him! Jim!!—Where has he got to?”

And in the gay confusion I felt Mrs. Atwell Reid’s hand on my arm, and heard her voice entreating me hurriedly:

“My dear . . . please go out to see my aunt! It will mean so much to her! Phyllis Lattimer said you were just the person we needed. It would be an act of great kindness. You will, won’t you?”

I don’t remember much about the chemistry I learned in school. I do remember there were certain things they called precipitates that miraculously sent all solids to the bottom of the test tube, leaving nothing but clear water on top. And that’s precisely what Phyllis Lattimer’s name thrown into the emotional cauldron did for me. Only it wasn’t clear water on the top. It was pure concentrated venom. I glanced through the wide doors at Jennifer Reid’s slim staunch little figure and the proud dark curly head being glad about somebody else’s husband, knowing as she must that her mother was getting in a few well-timed licks while her back was turned. I knew instantly that the solids precipitated in the bottom of the cauldron were on her side, and that if Phyllis Lattimer was going to be circumvented I was the person who could do it. I knew too that whether Jennifer liked it or not, I had to go to Strawberry Hill. I turned to Mrs. Reid.

“Of course, if you really would like me to . . . I’d be delighted.”

Mrs. Reid smiled charmingly, not with relief at all, which surprised me somehow, but with the poised satisfaction of a woman who’d finally got her way. She held out her gloved hand.

“Thank you, my dear. Jennifer will come for you at half past four. It’s been such a pleasure!”

I looked up. Jennifer had come back into the side doorway. Her face was pale, her blue eyes were liquid black. She wasn’t far from tears, but they were tears of anger and defeat. She shook hands with me briefly and followed her mother out. I stepped back to the long open French windows and watched them from behind the gold curtains crossing the empty piazza. I heard Jennifer’s voice, low and hot, say, “Mother! You don’t know what you’ve done!” and saw her mother raise her brows without answering audibly. In another moment she’d stopped to talk to an old colored woman with a basket of jonquils and white narcissi (butter and eggs, they call them) balanced gracefully on her turbaned head, an old pipe in her mouth.

I picked up the four cards Mrs. Reid had left on the table. The first two were:

MISS CAROLINE COLLETON REID

MISS JENNIFER CAROLINE REID

Each of them had “Strawberry Hill Plantation” engraved on the lower left-hand corner. The other two were:

MRS. ATWELL COLLETON REID

MR. ATWELL COLLETON REID

Each of them had “24 Landgrave Street” in its corner.

I put them in my pocket. If the number of Reids was confusing, it was no more confusing, I thought, than the names like it in Charleston. One thing they did was to indicate the clear and definite cleavage of the two households—mother and son, great-aunt and daughter. I hadn’t, somehow, realized they were so clearly divided before.

I heard the fountain playing in the pool, knew thereby that lunch was being served, and strolled out. I had the uneasy conviction that Phyllis Lattimer was being less than frank with me . . . and that she was playing with a stacked deck. Just why I hadn’t thought of that before I don’t know. Life had stacked the cards for Phyllis the day her grandfather discovered it was more profitable to make and sell guns at home than go and be killed by them on the battlefield.

Nevertheless, I waited for her to call me up, and was a little uneasy when she didn’t. I was more than uneasy when I went out after lunch to have a look about the town and passed her maroon mustard-yellow-leather upholstered sports car standing in front of Mrs. Atwell Reid’s white house in Landgrave Street.

I didn’t really expect Jennifer would come for me, but I had a pretty good idea that if she didn’t Phyllis Latimer would, and that I would be got out to Strawberry Hill some way or other. But Jennifer came. Promptly at four-thirty she drove up in a coupé that looked even dingier and sandier and older than it was in the line of elaborate limousines with Northern licenses and uniformed chauffeurs in front of the Villa. I came down the stairs between the white columns with their painted urns full of spring flowers to meet her. She gave me a perfunctory smile with her facial muscles. Her eyes were wary and resentful, and her face a little pale still. She just missed being rude, but it was taking an effort, even with three hundred years of Charleston breeding behind her to make being gracious as automatic as breathing.

I got in her car. Her hand on the gear shift and her foot on the clutch were sure and smooth. That somehow always makes me feel better about people, and I didn’t particularly mind that she never bothered about the stop signs at intersections as we went along the South Battery and turned into Ashley Street. We passed Colonial Lake—Rutledge Pond, the natives call it—and went through the blinking yellow light by the Art Gallery without either of us saying a word. As we turned at Cannon Street and took the short cut across the marsh through the line of palmettos to the Ashley River Bridge she said,

“I don’t want my aunt to sell Strawberry Hill.”

She said it as if she’d been trying to get it out, but also as if it had popped out suddenly when she hadn’t expected it to.

“I’m not trying to buy Strawberry Hill,” I said evenly.

“I know you’re not,” she retorted. “Phyllis Lattimer is—and you’re the opening wedge.”

At the end of the palmetto row she slowed down, glanced around at the main road and shot across in front of an oncoming oil truck onto the bridge. The slanting afternoon sun painted the marsh grass along the blue river toward the Citadel mauve and yellow and brown.

“You don’t think she’s offering to publish Aunt Caroline’s memoirs for nothing, do you?”

I’ve learned over a period of years that if you can’t think of anything to say, it’s best to say nothing. In this instance that’s what I did.

“I know it means a lot to my aunt. She’s been writing them for years. Maybe they ought to be published . . . but it’s not fair, it’s just not fair!”

Just what the connection between selling the plantation and publishing the memoirs was, I didn’t know and I didn’t care to ask. That the two were connected in Jennifer’s mind was enough. The idea that it was the furniture in Strawberry Hill that Phyllis was after apparently hadn’t occurred to her.

“Is that why you won’t let her in the house?” I asked. “—Phyllis, I mean?”

She turned right on the Ashley River road where the signs on the left point to the road to Folly and on the right to the great gardens along the Ashley.

“That’s one reason,” she said shortly. “There are plenty of others.”

We went along through the sparse sub-suburban dwellings, past the scattered blue-shuttered Negro cabins with their chicken yards and gay pink flowering peach trees, until we came to that lovely stretch of great live oaks with their long smoky festoons of Spanish moss, this side of St. Swithin’s Creek.

“Oh, can’t you see, Diane Baker!” Jennifer cried, with a sudden almost fierce poignancy. “Can’t you see? We’ve owned Strawberry Hill for three hundred years. It’s the land, and it belongs to us, and we belong to it! My family raised indigo and rice on it . . . the people on it were theirs . . . they were using it to make life, not just to spend a few months in the winter playing on it. It’s just twelve hundred more acres to shoot over to Phyllis Lattimer—it’s everything, everything, I tell you, to me! I won’t let them sell it to her!”

I heard myself saying, smugly, “But if it means comfort for your aunt, and your mother . . .”

“Comfort!” she cried hotly. “Is comfort the only thing left in the universe? Did the people who saved it from the Spaniards and built it up and fought three wars to keep it . . . did they go around bleating about comfort? If they had, the Indians would still be shooting wild turkeys with bows and arrows and there wouldn’t be any Strawberry Hill!”

There was so much in what she said, and she said it with so much youth and so much passion, that I was ashamed of myself.

“I’d rather die in poverty,” she cried, “than sell out year after year, just because we’re too supine to work and make the land work when anything will grow on it. Just look at it!”

She waved her hand at the teeming sub-tropical growth on both sides of us, stretching forward and back as far as we could see.

“Other people are doing it. It’s just because we’re too lazy and too spoiled and unintelligent! It’s wrong, I tell you, to waste it. If it were barren and poor, it wouldn’t be . . . but it isn’t, it’s marvellous!”

She stopped abruptly. We’d come to the narrow stone bridge on St. Swithin’s Creek that divides the broad tract of land that comprises the two plantations, Darien and Strawberry Hill, on the Ashley in St. Swithin’s Parish, before you come to Church Creek and St. Andrew’s in St. Andrew’s Parish. The whole grant had originally been Darien, but it had been divided, Phyllis had told me once, by Miss Caroline’s great-grandfather in 1760 and the smaller plantation given to a widowed daughter who called it Strawberry Hill. It had descended with Darien itself to Miss Caroline’s father, who’d left them both to her, his eldest unmarried daughter. As they’d always been in the same family, they’d always kept the single entrance through a fifty-yard double lane of old moss-draped magnolias until it crossed a narrow inlet. It divided then into a wide “V” down two long avenues of live oaks to Darien on the left and Strawberry Hill on the right. We turned in, Jennifer and I, through the old mauve brick pillars, newly painted, with their great carved stone acorn capitals painted fresh clean white, and the elaborate iron gates new shining black, and crossed the bridge.

The avenue to the left was swept sandy-smooth and leafless, its wide grass borders under the moss-hung oaks trimmed and immaculate. A small white shield at its entrance said “DARIEN.” The avenue on the right was blocked with a weather-beaten rail gate in the old crumbling brick wall overgrown with yellow jasmine and tangled creeper. I’d seen it many times, of course, from this end, but I’d forgotten about it. And what a wilderness it was—all overhung with moss and flowers so sweet the sense faints picturing them. Was it Shelley who said that? It was true of all this.

Jennifer unlocked the padlock and opened the gate. I drove the car in and stopped while she closed the gate again and came back and took the wheel. Her firm little jaw set. The contrast of Phyllis’s avenue into Darien and this one into Strawberry Hill made her struggle to keep it so hopelessly tragic. She said nothing however. It wasn’t the traditional Southern lady acting as if the fried fatback were the turkey stuffed with capon stuffed with duck stuffed with doves sort of thing. It was much more human . . . I’d asked for it, and I was getting it, and I could take it and like it.