Downtown (31 page)

On our left, the elegant old dowager Cloister slept in its garden of flowers, under its arching canopy of ancient oaks.

Only a few people were about in this hot noon, ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 246

walking their bicycles over the paths that bisected the hotel’s deep green lawns, or ambling in spotless whites back toward the tennis courts or toward the ocean and the beach club, off to our right. I saw two or three black, white-coated waiters on bicycles, trays of snowy, covered food balanced in one hand, pedaling toward the lushly planted cottage clusters that fringed the blue Atlantic. Down the long, straight, moss-curtained main road that ran alongside the cottages and the beach club, a few more people strolled or rode bikes. they were, without exception, much older couples or young women with children in tow.

“Where are all the men?” I said.

“Most of them come down on weekends,” Brad said, raising a languid hand at one young mother and her tow-headed brood. The young woman waved and smiled at him and stared at me.

“The people you see around on weekdays are mainly retirees or out-of-staters on vacation, or women and kids who have houses down here. Some people stay here year-round; when you say ‘cottage’ down here you don’t exactly mean like Hansel and Gretel had. But it’s fullest in summer, when school’s out. Everybody will be having lunch at the beach club about now, or maybe taking naps. In the mornings they play golf and tennis, and in the afternoon they hit the pool and the beach. Drinks start about five, and dinner around eight. There’s probably a cocktail party at every other cottage on the island on any given night, during the season.”

“Sounds like a lot of drinking,” I said. I could think of nothing else to say. We were passing the first of the big private cottages now, and I had not been prepared for the sheer size and splendor of them, or the lushness of their grounds. And I knew that the ones over on the beach, down the short cross streets, were even more 247 / DOWNTOWN

splendid still. Teddy had told me that. It did not seem possible to me that normal people leading normal lives would lead them from these houses.

“Probably no more than you all drink on an average day at the magazine,” Brad said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen many drunks down here.”

“You’ve come here every summer?” I said. I knew that he had, but the implications of that were stronger now.

“That I can remember,” he said. “Except for a year or two in the navy. Until I finished school and went to work, I spent most of every summer down here with Mama Hunt. It sounds grim, and it’ll seem even grimmer when you meet her, but I was almost never in the house. It seemed like everybody I knew back in Atlanta was down here. We had enough to do to keep us out from dawn to way past dark every night.”

“Like what?”

“Oh,” he said, “You know. Island things.”

I did not know, but did not say so, for we were turning off the main road onto a short, private street and then pulling in between the gateposts of a great, pale-pink brick fence overgrown with tumbling bougainvillea, and stopping in a cobbled courtyard before a pink stucco house as lovely and graceful as a tall ship under full sail, and, “Here we are,”

Brad said.

A dignified black woman in a gray uniform and white apron met us at the great door. She wore horn-rimmed glasses and had her wiry graying hair back in a bun, and, with the glasses and her handsome, aquiline face, looked altogether like a college professor.

“Hi, Sarelle,” Brad said, and hugged her, and she gave him a smack on the bottom and said, “Hi, yourself, Mr. Brad.

We been waitin’ for you.”

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Brad introduced me and Sarelle smiled and said, “We’re gon’ put Miss Smoky in the yellow room upstairs, the one on the end. You have your old room. You take them things on up and then come down to the sun porch. Your grandmama and Miss Isobel out there. You hurry up, though; she didn’t sleep good last night and it’s past her nap time.

she’s all stirred up over this party; you might find her a little grumpy.”

“Christ, that means she’s loaded for bear,” Brad said, and I followed him through a vast, two-story entrance hall paved in black and white marble, up a circular staircase carpeted in faded, sour-smelling green wool and railed with beautiful wrought iron. The railings were rusted and dim, and I had noticed that the marble tiles were dim and pitted, too. the lower part of the house was in gloom, floor-length drapes drawn against the blinding white noon, but I could see that the drapes were faded too, as well as the upholstery and pillows on the rattan couches and chairs in the downstairs rooms. The house was done in what I thought of as Palm Beach traditional, an impression garnered solely from old movies on television: wicker and rattan, green and pink floral chintzes, white mouldings and woodwork. I knew that it must have been very chic and grand once, but the miasma of forlorn decay was as thick as fog in the high-ceilinged rooms, and age and illness and disuse clung in corners and bobbed at the pierced tin tray ceilings. There was dust everywhere. Whatever Sarelle did did not, apparently, run to housekeeping. Melancholy settled heavily on my shoulders.

I wished that we did not have to spend two nights under this beautiful, desolate roof.

I trudged down a long, dim upstairs hall after Brad, seeing only more faded carpet and closed, carved doors, the line of them broken only by an occasional massive Spanish table holding an old iron lamp, and by a floor 249 / DOWNTOWN

vase full of dusty pampas grass. The odor of mold and dust was stronger here. I counted six doors before Brad pushed open the last one on the left. I followed him in, and gasped with pleasure.

It was a large, airy room, with a white-beamed ceiling and white stucco walls, and butter-yellow shag carpets laid down over gleaming dark hardwood floors. A narrow, tall tester bed with a yellow chintz canopy sat against the wall, piled with pillows in yellow and green and coral, and there was a huge mahogany wardrobe and a dressing table, and a tall chest of drawers. The old wood shone, and the smell of lemon polish blew lightly on the wind from the sea. The wall opposite the bed was a length of French windows and doors, open onto a balcony over-looking a long, parched front lawn and the fabled Spanish tile pool and poolhouse, and beyond that, the gray-blue Atlantic, glittering in the high, hard sun as if a handful of diamond dust had been thrown down on it. The tan beach was empty, and the tall, half-dead palm trees on the lawn rustled and clattered in the wind. The smell of the sea was glorious, and I rushed out onto the balcony and threw my arms wide as if to embrace everything I saw.

“Sarelle’s fixed it up nice for you,” Brad said behind me.

“Polish, and fresh flowers, and a good airing. I’ve always loved this room. It was Mama Hunt’s when I first started coming down here; Papa Hunt had the one just like it at the other end of the hall. She closed them both after he died, though, and moved to the one she has now, in the other wing. It overlooks the courtyard in back. I always thought this was the best room in the house, but she finally admitted that the ocean made her nervous, so she moved to the other one. You should thank your stars for that. She’s a whole wing away from you. I, on the other hand, am just across the hall from her and the lovely and talented Miss Davison.

I guess she

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figures she needs to keep an eye on where we sleep, and she can do it easier to me than to you.”

“It’s glorious,” I said. “I can’t wait to lie in bed and look at the stars over the ocean. What do you mean, keep an eye on us? Does she think that we’re going to—you know—in her own house?”

“Stranger things have happened,” Brad said gravely, and I felt a sudden stab. It stood to reason that he had brought other women here, to this house that was his summer home; he was, after all, thirty-one years old. I wondered who, before me, had lain in the tester bed and waited for the old carved door to open and let him in.

“I would never abuse her hospitality like that,” I said primly.

“I would never ask you to…abuse her hospitality,” he said, and I caught the laughter in his voice, and grinned unwillingly.

He left me to take his bag to his room in the other wing, and I went into the bathroom across the hall to freshen up.

It was as dim and musty as a cave, with a floor of tiny black and white tiles and a huge, bulbous, claw-footed bathtub, and outsized wash basin and toilet. Nothing here had been modernized, and the full-length mirror on the back of the door was wavery and speckled. My own image shimmered in it, flesh glowing whitely, like a drowned woman at the bottom of a pool. The air in the room was still and hot, and the overhead light was dim, but there was a pile of thick, fresh white towels laid out on the counter, and Sarelle or someone had put a small bouquet of zinnias on the dressing table. I peered at my image in the mirror, leaning close, and thought of the night, scarcely eight months ago, when I had stood peering into another mirror, in the Church’s Home for Girls, feeling almost exactly as I did now: expectant, a little frightened, more than a little lost.

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“What a long way you’ve come,” I whispered to the girl in the mirror, and she swam to the surface and grimaced back at me. I washed my face and hands and brushed my hair and straightened Teddy’s madras wrap skirt and blouse and ran lightly and in dread down the stairs where Brad waited to take me to his grandmother.

The two old women waited for us on a narrow, glassed-in porch that ran alongside the house, facing the courtyard on one end and the lawn and sea on the other. They sat on opposite ends of a flowered rattan sofa, both so bent and small that their feet scarcely touched the floor. I thought of children sitting gingerly on grown-up furniture. A glass and rattan table before them held a pitcher of what looked to be orange juice and a tray of glasses, and Sarelle was just uncovering a plate of tiny sandwiches skewered with frilled toothpicks. From the litter of frilly toothpicks on the tabletop, I judged that the two old ladies had not been able to wait for us. Two empty glasses sat there, too.

I had no trouble telling which of the ladies was Brad’s grandmother. Teddy had been right; the smaller of the two looked precisely as his father might look in thirty years or so, wearing one of the ghastly, frowsy Beatles wigs that sold briskly at novelty stores. She was bent almost double, and propped up with pillows and bolsters, and she sat with chin on liver-spotted bosom, eyes closed and mouth agape.

I had the idiot thought that she had died, but Sarelle smiled and made pantomimed snoring motions, and the other old lady giggled and whispered, “She’s asleep again. She’s fallen asleep three times since we got up this morning.”

She was vastly fat, and short, with thin white hair cut in a Dutch bob through which her pink scalp showed, and had a big, powdered face in the middle of which all ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 252

her little features sat. I thought of Humpty Dumpty, or a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. But so old, so frail—how could this desiccated dumpling of a woman be an effective companion to the other? And then I understood the shabby state of the house and grounds: Sarelle, hired to be a housekeeper, was instead a nurse and attendant to not one but two very elderly women. I sent Sarelle a smile of what I hoped she would recognize as sympathy and understanding. Her answering smile was polite and bland.

“I am not asleep. You’re a hopeless fool, Isobel,” said the other old woman, in a midge’s whine, and her eyes opened, and I thought of a malicious old bird of prey. They were filmed with cataracts and pouched in crepey, wrinkled flesh, but wicked living coals burned in their depths.

“I probably am,” the hapless Isobel simpered, and speared another sandwich. “Hey, Braddy. Let us meet this pretty girl.”

Brad kissed his grandmother and whispered something in her ear, and she cackled, witchlike, and peered at me. I smiled as prettily as I knew how, feeling every inch of rebellious breast and hip as if they were naked and jiggling. This ruined, elegant house called for height and slouching slenderness, and cool composure. But then, Marylou Hunt had those things in abundance, and she was not welcome here.

Sarelle vanished into the dark house and Brad sat on a hassock drawn up to his grandmother’s side. I sat on a facing sofa, so overstuffed that my own feet barely brushed the floor, and smiled and smiled. Miss Isobel Davison kept up a barrage of birdlike chatter, and ate and drank steadily, and the glitter in her eyes told me that there was more than orange juice in the pitcher, but Mama Hunt did not say another word. She simply sat on

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her sofa on the stifling hot sun porch, her bird’s legs agape so far that one averted one’s eyes from her lap, and drank Mimosas and stared at me. For perhaps thirty minutes, while Brad talked lazily of home and the coming party and Miss Isobel giggled and I smiled, she said nothing at all.

Finally she put down her glass and said to me, “What kind of a name is Smoky?”

“It’s a nickname,” I said. “I got it when I was a little girl.

My real name is Maureen.”

“O’Malley, or some such,” she said.

“O’Donnell.”

“From where?”

“Savannah,” I said, waiting. I did not wait long.

“Ah,” she said. “Your folks are on the docks, then.” It was not a question.

“Yes.”

“And you’re aiming to marry my grandson, am I right?”

Brad started to speak, but I overrode him.

“No,” I said. “I absolutely am not aiming to marry your grandson.”

“Don’t tell me you’re not. All of them are. Every one of them he brings down here takes one look at this house and sets their cap for him. It’s going to be his, you know. They all know that. Don’t try to tell me you’re any different. Except for being shanty Irish, I mean. The others have been a little better bred.”

“That’s enough, Mama Hunt,” Brad said, making as if to rise.

“I won’t try to tell you anything, Mrs. Hunt,” I said, anger making my voice shake. “Except that I love Atlanta and I love my job and I wouldn’t trade either one for a million houses like yours.”