Come to the Edge: A Memoir (15 page)

I sat on the edge of the single bed. The dress hung in front of the small window, backlit by a streetlamp on Irving. When I was little, I hadn’t always played at being a bride—it was more harems and intrigue, more ballerinas and Indian princesses, torch singers and Mata Hari. But that night was different. Under a thin coverlet, I tried to sleep, but the dress, consuming and fragile, moved in and out of my dreams, like a beautiful ghost.

In the years that I was with him, and the many nights I was a guest in his mother’s homes, this was the only time I was shown to a separate bedroom. I asked him once if his mother was all right with us sleeping together under her roof. I knew there were rules to be followed with her, and I didn’t want to misstep, but he assured me that this was not one of them. His girlfriends had always stayed over. “She’s cool with it,” he said with a measure of pride. “Since high school.” I thought of my parents and the byzantine double standards of those years that never seemed to include my brothers. Even at the age of twenty-six, having a boyfriend sleep over was an iffy prospect. “No, she’s not like that. Not at all.” His mother had a theory, he went on, that his grandmother Rose’s attitude toward sex had created problems for his father, and she didn’t want that for him. I didn’t ask about the problems. I nodded.

The day after the wedding, before I left to begin the trip back to Connecticut and the long push of rehearsals before opening, John took me to meet his grandmother. She would be ninety-six that Tuesday. Two years before, she’d suffered a major stroke and couldn’t attend the wedding ceremony, but after morning Mass in her living room, the house was alive with children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, who’d gathered to say hello.

Two of the Lawford girls stepped aside, and it was our turn.

“Happy Birthday, Grandma. It’s me, John.” She didn’t speak and kept nodding her head.

“It’s John, Grandma.”

The nurse told him to speak louder.

“There’s someone I want you to meet.”

I knelt down by her wheelchair. She was so frail, so small, it surprised me. And I remember pink all around her. A dress, a blanket maybe. Her hair was done just so, and she wore lipstick. The desire to look pretty had not left her. I took one of her soft blue-veined hands, and she smiled. Her grasp was strong. John held her other hand. He spoke about me, how we had met and the play I was doing, and that he would start law school in the fall. With a gleam in her clouded eyes, she motioned as if she wanted to tell him something. He leaned in. “Why, yes, Grandma,” he said with a wary smile. “You’re right—that’s true.”

As we walked back across the lawn, I asked him what she had said.

“Nothing,” he answered. “I just pretend I understand her. She likes that.”

“Really …”

He thought for a moment. “She said it’s time I settle down and you seem like a lovely girl.” He squeezed my hand hard and kept walking. “I’m glad you came. I’m glad you were here for all this.”

I would see him in a week, after the play opened, but I began missing him right then.

We reached the corner of Scudder and Irving, and as he loaded my bags into the waiting Town Car, I asked if he wouldn’t mind taking my dress and dropping it at the designer’s showroom when he returned to New York in a few days. I wouldn’t be back in the city for weeks. “No problem,” he said. I learned never to do that again. He would leave it on a wire hanger, out of the hanging bag, in the back of his Honda with the window down at LaGuardia short-term parking. The dress wasn’t stolen, but a rainstorm bled the dye of the fragile silk. No dry cleaner would touch it. My boyfriend, I learned that weekend, was the man of the hour in a striped sarong, a toastmaster par excellence, and a dancer who made my knees weak. He was not, however, one to trust with prosaic errands involving couture.

He’d been lukewarm about the dress to begin with, I could tell. He was always complimentary about what I wore, always noticing small details, but this dress, he said, was “fine.” Maybe it was the bone and black pattern or the sheer organza ruffle at the neck, but I suspected it wasn’t sexy enough for him. It was a dress other women liked. At the reception, even his aunt Lee, a frequent fixture on the best-dressed lists, had asked who the designer was. Ever politic, he did say, “Mummy loved your dress. She thought you looked very pretty.” Any praise from his mother I took in tenfold; I wanted to please him, but I wanted to be accepted by her.

As the plane lifted off the runway in Hyannis, I pulled out my script to run lines. I glanced down for a moment, then turned it on its spine. The last two days had been exciting. I was glad I had come, glad I had danced into the small hours, glad I had seen his sister get married. Mostly, I was happy to have been a part of something that meant so much to him.

In time the Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble, / They’re only made of clay
. The lyric from the night before wouldn’t leave my head, and I turned to look out over the arm of the Cape, the territory that was his. I tried to make out the white tent or the flagpole or the many-gabled house, but there was only a puzzle of shoreline. Just then, the plane banked, and the sun bounced off the silver wing and blinded me.

I lowered the shade. I felt lucky. And my dress, I decided, had been right. It had been just right.

Holding

Come quickly—as soon as
these blossoms open,
they fall.
This world exists
as a sheen of dew on flowers.

—
IZUMI SHIKIBU

W
hen you fly over the coast of Georgia, press your face to the glass. The land below is flat, emerald green, and cut with water. Creeks and rivers meander in tight switchbacks, snaking their way through mudflats to the sea. Above the trees, smokestacks of paper mills rise like watchful gods. Before you land, you’re already in a different world. There is something in the air, something ancient that makes you move more slowly. You turn a corner, you catch your breath, and the pale color of the sky reflects back the sheer measure of your soul.

In the dead of summer, three weeks after Caroline’s wedding, we flew to Jacksonville, Florida, and after a side trip to Disney World and a VIP tour of rockets at Cape Canaveral, we caught the last boat of the day, the
R.W. Ferguson
from Fernandina Beach, and set off for a nearby barrier island. It would be our first real vacation together.

“You want to take a trip, madam?”

His asking had been both shy and nonchalant. We were sitting by a cornfield in Connecticut, and he was fiddling with the laces of his red Converse high-tops. The field was near the Sharon Playhouse, where I was doing
Isn’t It Romantic
. The day before, he’d looked at me quizzically and said he’d never been with someone whose career was so important. My eyes opened wide. Was that bad? “No,” he said. “It’s attractive. I think that’s what makes us work, that we’re equals.”

He had driven up the Taconic the night before to surprise me, announcing himself in lipstick on my dressing room mirror. I’d dashed off the stage, changed quickly, and found him in the July night, smoking a cigarette near the parked cars with one of the crew.

We’d had long weekends alone or with friends at the Cape, Martha’s Vineyard, my parents’ country house on Long Island, and his mother’s in New Jersey. And there had been a rafting trip with his cousins that June in Maine, where we’d spied a moose up close. This would be different. Ten days in close quarters, testing mystery, the mainstay of romance—with no possibility of retreat for a night or an hour.

“Someplace neither of us has been. Someplace we can discover together.”

It touched me that he thought of it like that, as a way for us to grow closer. A place that would be ours. It felt grown-up.

I knew at once where we should go.

“How about Alaska? Or Taos!” he said. “I’ve always wanted to go there, and you’d look sweet on a horse.”

“Too hot,” I countered. And I told him about a place I’d known about for years—Cumberland Island, off the coast of Georgia.

I’d first heard of Cumberland in college, when friends camped there over spring break and brought back tales of an island as large as Manhattan, with ruined mansions and feral horses roaming on white sand beaches. I was hooked, then promptly forgot about it. In 1983, I read an article in
The New York Times
travel section, a paean to the island by Lucinda Franks. I clipped it, and for three years, it had followed me, dog-eared, from sublet to sublet. Without having set foot on Cumberland, I was already in its thrall.

There are places one falls for as deeply and as devotedly as for a lover. For reasons you can’t quantify, the alchemy of air, light, and smell call to the most primal part of you and conspire to make you theirs. I’ve been moved by Santa Fe, Paris, and Seville. I’ve reveled in Rome, Telluride, and Guadalajara. I’ve been awed by the deserts of Morocco, the spires of Wyoming’s Wind River Range, and the painted depths of the Grand Canyon. But it wasn’t love I felt.

Sometimes it’s the place where you grew up that says,
You belong to me
. No matter how long I’ve been away, when I come back to New York City in a taxi over the Triborough Bridge and the afternoon sun shifts off the steel skyline and blinds me, I feel it. In the heavy July of privet tinged with sea salt on the East End of Long Island, where I spent nearly every summer until I was twenty and many since, I know it. And in an empty theater, with the ghost light on and the darkness, warm and velvet like a dinner jacket my father once wore, it’s mine.

But it can also be without history—sudden, violent, a
coup de foudre
. I’ve felt the sharp jolt of recognition in my throat, the pull in my chest, standing at the humble stone huts in Dingle, walking up the winding path to the Cave of the Apocalypse in Patmos, and, most profoundly, in Big Sur, where I’m reminded that I’m not all human, not just heart and flesh but soil, sea, and sky. Big Sur is a place that lives in me, a place that does not let me go. Another is an island off the coast of Georgia.

Cumberland, the largest and most southerly of the Sea Islands, stretches north from St. Marys Inlet to St. Andrew Sound. It is eighteen miles long and three miles across at its widest. There are no paved roads, no bridges, no stores. The double dunes of the barrier beach, the mudflats and maritime forest of oak, pine, and palmetto, are home to loggerhead sea turtles, armadillos, white-tailed deer, bobcats, feral horses and hogs, and more than 277 species of land and sea birds whose bones litter the sand.

Arrowheads and oyster middens attest to the presence of the Timucua people, who called the island Missoe. French corsairs landed there, British and Spanish flags flew over forts on the north and south ends of the island, and James Oglethorpe, founder of the new colony of Georgia, established a hunting lodge he called Dungeness near the Indian burial grounds at the south end. In 1803, the widow of Revolutionary War hero Nathanael Greene built another Dungeness close by. Within its thick walls, Light-Horse Harry Lee died, and legend has it that Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin there. In antebellum times, Cumberland, with its temperate climate and marsh-fed soil, thrived. The harvest of timber, indigo, figs, cotton, and sugarcane made the plantation owners rich. After the Civil War, the island’s mansions were burned and abandoned, and the freed slaves who remained built a community on the north end near Half Moon Bluff called the Settlement.

But it is the Carnegie legacy that looms largest. Through a stone and iron gate at the end of a wide sandy road, you can still see the crumbling façade of the Gilded Age mansion. In 1959, after years of neglect, it was set on fire by a poacher after a hunting dispute. Wild turkeys scurry about the rubble, and crows gather on the spire of a skeletal brick wall. But it was not always so.

In 1882, at the site of the old Greene mansion, steel magnate Thomas M. Carnegie began construction of a winter retreat for his family. In its heyday, this Dungeness—visited by Astors, Vanderbilts, and Rockefellers—rivaled the fabled mansions of Newport and Southampton. A turreted Victorian affair, it boasted fifty-nine rooms, a carriage house, an indoor swimming pool, squash courts, manicured gardens, a golf course, a working farm, and accommodations for a staff of two hundred. After Thomas’s death, his wife, Lucy, went on to acquire 90 percent of the island and built homes for her children, notably the Cottage, Plum Orchard, Stafford House, and Greyfield, now an inn run by her descendants.

In the 1960s, in an effort to protect the island from development, family members began selling tracts to the U.S. government, and in 1972 Cumberland became part of the National Seashore, with parts of the north end later designated as a Wilderness Area. So unless you know someone who lives there or come with tent in hand, Greyfield Inn is where you stay.

The air was thick and salted when we landed. Someone from the inn met us at the dock. Bearded, he had a smile like Bacchus, deeply tanned feet in worn sandals, and black curls that fell over a wide, seaworthy face. “Hey, I’m Pat,” he greeted us in a Coastal drawl, then threw our bags in the back of a jeep.

“Where’s the inn?” John asked. “Can we walk?” After an hour and twenty minutes on the slow ferry, he was itching to move.

Pat cocked his head to the right. Amid looping dirt paths and horses nibbling at the scrub of what was once a grand lawn, Greyfield rose like Tara through a stand of live oak trees shrouded in silver moss.

Built in 1900 as a wedding gift for Margaret Ricketson by her mother, Lucy Coleman Carnegie, Greyfield has white columns, a red tin roof, gabled attic windows, and a large front veranda with potted ferns and a cushioned porch swing on each end. The steps that lead up to the main entrance are low and wide—“for long skirts,” we were told later. In the style of many old southern houses, the kitchen and dining room are situated on the ground floor because of the summer heat. On the main floor, there is a library, a drawing room, and a small self-service bar. A ledge near the ceiling in the bar is lined with every size and color of sea bottle, and a sign above the mixers reads,
HONEST JOHN SYSTEM
. In the dark-paneled drawing room, a chesterfield sofa done in velvet, wingback chairs, and a red leather bench are arranged by the stone fireplace. On two of the walls, portraits of women who lived here long ago face each other—one a waif in white, the other a warrior in a head scarf and dagger, both sad-eyed and beguiling. There are tattered globes and Audubon prints, a child’s rocker, whale bones and sea turtle shells, and a tiny pair of wedding slippers, as thin as parchment, enshrined in a tall china cabinet. Nearby is a black-and-white photograph of a dashing man in a loincloth—part Errol Flynn, part Ernest Hemingway—his rifle gracefully poised to shoot into the surf. It is a house filled with stories.

We left our bags in the hall by the grandfather clock with a moon sailing by on its face, and took off on bikes to find the beach before dinner. The fat tires of the rusted cruisers were slow on the main road, a sandy lane that stretches from Dungeness to the north end, but when we turned east by the sign
TO GREYFIELD BEACH
, they rolled faster. The branches of the live oaks on either side bent toward one another, canopying the narrow path of dirt, leaves, and crushed shells. All around was the hum of cicadas. Then we saw it—the rise where the dune began. And at the end of the tunnel of trees, a patch of blue appeared. John got there first and hollered to me. I dropped my bike and sprinted up the embankment. When I ran past him, he caught me, wrapping me in his arms and rocking me side to side.

Spread out before us was a beach unbroken for miles, as white and bleached as bone. In the distance, by the low-tide mark, stood a spotted stallion and his herd.

We fell easily into the rhythm of the island. Morning bike rides to the ruins or hiking the trails. Afternoons on the veranda with our books and pink lemonade. Cocktails before dinner. The days too hot, we swam at night, with the moon heavy on us—and searched the sand for the tracks of giant sea turtles, which pulled themselves ashore to lay their eggs in the dunes. We also spent time in the large, pine-paneled kitchen, scavenging for cookies and SunChips and hanging out with the inn staff rather than the other guests. There was an inviting camaraderie among those who lived on the island full-time, and you wanted to be around it. John had deemed Pat “especially cool.”

One morning after breakfast, we stopped by the kitchen to pick up tall, plaid thermoses of sweet tea and lunches packed in wicker hampers—supplies for our tour of the north end that day. Through the screen door, white sheets billowed on a line, and a man in Wayfarers and a faded pink button-down propped himself against a rusted jeep. The naturalist was on vacation, and Andy Ferguson, a great-great-grandson of Thomas Carnegie, would be our guide for the day. A few years older than us, he had a sly smile and a shock of white-blond hair that fell in his face. He didn’t look directly at you; he observed, as if there were a story he might or might not tell depending on his mood, as if there were a secret that hung on his lips. I liked him. He also had a great love and knowledge of the island, and he shared it with us that day. The next year, in the bloom of his youth, Andy would shoot himself with a rifle and be buried in the Carnegie plot near Dungeness.

We climbed into the open jeep and took off down the main road. I sat next to Andy, and John rode in back. We were going on a picnic, and I’d worn my picnic dress, or at least my idea of what that would be in the wilds of southern Georgia when you’re in love. The fiercer the sun got and the farther we went, the more I wished I’d worn long pants and a long-sleeved shirt, like Andy, and a wide-billed cap instead of the braided straw hat that rested on my knees.

We were quiet for a stretch as the jeep lumbered along the rutted road. On either side was a forest of loblolly pine, wax myrtle, red bay, and oak trees draped in the trailing vines of muscadine. Below the trees, thickets of skunk cabbage and fan palmetto grew low and sturdy.

“You sure picked the hottest time of the year to come,” Andy announced.

“Well, one of us wanted to go to Taos, but the other someone thought it wouldn’t be as hot here, and that somebody won out, didn’t they?” John reached around the seat and gave me a sharp pinch.

“Oh yeah?” Andy looked over to me, then back to the sandy road, slowing for a fawn that happened to cross in front of the jeep. “Next time, you might want to skip August.”

“Can we see an alligator?” John wanted to know. He’d been talking about it all morning.

“We’ll try. It might even be too hot for them.” He pointed to some frizzled brown growth in the crevice of an oak. “That’s resurrection fern. It’s an epiphyte. It looks dead now, but when it rains—and it will—that fern will burst into green.”

“What’s an epiphyte?” I asked.

“It lives off the air.”

At Stafford, after the road split and then joined again, the forest cleared and there was sky. On the right, across from where the plantation house once stood, was a field that served as an airstrip. “You have to buzz the horses a couple of times before you land,” Andy confided. “Even then they’re stubborn. They think it’s theirs.”

The forest grew denser the farther north we went. Andy took us to the Chimneys, the charred ruins of the slave quarters at Stafford; to Plum Orchard, a Georgian revival mansion, where we peered into huge windows at the wide, vacant rooms; and to an old hunting lodge, the wood grayed and overcome by giant sand dunes. We waited without luck by a marshy creek for alligators, but spotted ospreys and ibises near Lake Whitney. We rambled over trails with names like Roller Coaster, Duck House, and North Cut. And when we reached the tip of the island near Christmas Creek, we saw the giant shell mounds where, a thousand years before, the Timucua had held their banquets. Then, through a tangle of trees and winding paths, we came to the Settlement—the abandoned homes of ex-slaves near Half Moon Bluff. There was an old church there that Andy wanted to show us after we had our picnic in the graveyard nearby.