Downtown (32 page)

“And what is your job, missy?” she said.

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 254

“I write stories about Negroes for an Atlanta magazine,” I said.

She stared at me for a long moment, and then began to shake all over silently. A terrible wheezing sound came from her lips. I thought she was having some sort of attack, but then I realized that she was laughing.

“I’ll bet Marylou absolutely despises you, doesn’t she?”

she wheezed.

“Absolutely,” I said.

“Well, I like you,” she said, and poked Brad in the ribs. “I like her,” she said. “I think she’ll do just fine. You sleeping with her, Brad?”

I thought that he colored under his tan, but his blue eyes were mild and amused.

“No, ma’am,” he said. “She won’t have me.”

“Well, let’s let your mother think you are. I’m sure she already thinks that. It’s all she understands. Meanwhile, Smoky, or whatever your name is, don’t you be so prissy with this boy. I can name you a dozen girls prettier than you who’d be glad to—”

“Okay, Mama Hunt,” Brad said, getting to his feet. “You’re snockered and you’re out of bounds. We’re on our way to lunch with Mother and Dad at the beach club, but we’ll be back to change before we go to dinner. If you’re still up we’ll look in on you. You ought to get a good night’s sleep, though. Big doings tomorrow.”

“I hate these damned parties,” the old lady said. “Marylou only gives them to show off. You bring this girl back to have a drink with us before supper, you hear?”

“I will,” Brad said, and I took the withered, dry old hands and said, “It was nice meeting you, Mrs. Hunt.”

“You know you’re lying,” she said. “I’m a mean little old thing, and I can be meaner still. You ask that trashy daughter-in-law of mine how mean I can be.”

She cut her eyes at Brad and he rolled his and held 255 / DOWNTOWN

out his hand and I took it, and we started back upstairs to change into our bathing suits.

I had gotten to the door of the sun porch when she shrilled at me, “You’ve got a good bosom, girl, and a good, wide bottom. You Irish are good breeders. I’ll bet there are five more like you at home. You could fill Brad’s house up with little Irish brats. Marylou would love that.”

“Actually, there are six more of us at home,” I said, my cheeks burning. I had never been one of those who thought viper-tongued old ladies were cute. “But you’re right about the breeding. We Irish pop ’em out like champagne corks.”

Behind us, like an evil benediction, I heard her terrible old laugh.

“I guess there’s no use asking you what you thought about all that,” Brad said wryly. “I’m sorry. It was awful.”

We were walking hand in hand down the beach, just at the surf line. When we had started out the air and water were almost alike, so still and thick and warm that it was like wading in warm blood, but we had not gone far over the scorching sand before a strong little wind had sprung up, and everything changed. The air cooled and the gentle surf creaming in around our ankles was charged with bubbles, and the sun that poured down over our bare heads and shoulders mellowed. His hair burned on his head like a gilt helmet, and drops of sweat glistened on his shoulders. I could not see his eyes for the sheltering dark glasses. I could read the amusement and consternation in his voice, though.

“I thought Tennessee Williams did it better,” I said, and he laughed.

“She is kind of like a Tennessee Williams gargoyle, isn’t she? I forget just how terrible she can be sometimes.”

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 256

But I could tell he did not really think she was terrible.

People possessed of monstrous relatives often succeed in telling themselves they are merely quaint and eccentric.

“The whole thing is Tennessee Williams,” I said. “That beautiful old wreck of a house, and the heat, and the booze, and the strange old companion, and the enigmatic servant—what about Sarelle, anyway? Who helps her out?

What kind of life does she have down here?”

“I don’t know,” he said, sounding faintly surprised. “She’s been with Mama Hunt a long time. She has a house in Atlanta, in Vine City, I think, but she comes down here when Mama Hunt does, and lives in. That’s most of the year. I guess nobody helps her out now, from the looks of the house.

There used to be a couple that cooked and drove for Mama Hunt, and a gardener who came in from the island, but the couple left and Mama Hunt got mad and fired the gardener, and she won’t let Mother and Daddy hire anybody else. Says they’re trying to bleed her dry of her money. She has enough to last several lifetimes, of course, but try telling her that—”

“I can’t imagine what sort of life a middle-aged Negro woman from Atlanta would have on Sea Island,” I said.

“Especially if she’s left her own family behind. Who could her friends be down here? Where could she go on her days off? Not, I’m sure, the beach club or the tennis court.”

“I guess I’ve never thought about it,” Brad said.

“I guess not,” I said, feeling contentious and holy. The sheer decadence and waste of the big, decaying house and the spoiled old women in it; the oiled and bejeweled bodies I fancied were waiting for us at the beach club, lying in the sun; the whole sybaritic island, all conspired to make me cross. It was too soon after Pumphouse Hill, too soon after Andre.

“I’ll try to talk Grandma into hiring some extra help, 257 / DOWNTOWN

and ask Sarelle what she needs,” Brad said. “You’re right, it can’t be much of a life. Meanwhile, try to enjoy it as much as you can. It would please me if it pleased you. Let’s get wet, shall we?”

“Let’s,” I said, feeling like a spoiled child myself, and followed him into the surf.

It was wonderful, cool and dark green in its depths, sun-hot and dancing on the surface. We went all the way under the small waves and rode them into the beach, and ducked each other, and shouted and laughed and tumbled like puppies at the water line. When finally we came out, shaking the salt water from our bodies, I was sodden and seal-haired and red-eyed and breathless, and realized that I had neither comb nor cover-up with me. Far down the beach I could see people in deck chairs on the sand outside the beach club, and sitting under umbrellas on the terrace and around the pool, and crowding around a line of small beached sailboats, red sails luffing slightly in the freshening wind. All the people seemed, from this distance, tanned and beautiful and gotten up in smart sun hats and cover-ups.

“I’ve got to go back,” I said. “I look like a drowned rat, and I don’t even have a jacket.”

“You don’t need one,” he said. “We’ll eat outside on the terrace. I think you look sexy as hell, dripping like that.

Here.”

And he dashed up to the lawn of one of the big houses and twisted a hibiscus blossom from a bush, and brought it to me, and thrust it behind my ear.

“Now you look like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle,” he said, giving me a hug. His wet body felt warm against mine. And so it was with salt-stiffened hair and Teddy’s bathing suit clinging wetly to my body and a sun-pinked nose and a red hibiscus behind one ear that I went to meet Marylou Hunt on her own turf.

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 258

We sat late at dinner that night. There is only one long sitting in the Cloister’s graceful old dining room, and guests keep the same table throughout their stay. The one at which we sat was, Marylou Hunt said, the one the Hunt family had had for many years. It overlooked a dramatically lit little walled garden, but commanded a premier view of the room, too. From it, Marylou could both see and be seen.

Looking back, I remember it as a pleasant evening, even an exhilarating one, though at the start of it, I could not have said why. It should have been excruciating; I was in a virtual holy of holies from which my entire family had once been barred, and all of Marylou’s exquisite little sharp knives were out. They had been since we sat down at the terrace table with her for lunch, at the beach club. I was outclassed on every side the entire day, and knew it, and she knew it, and Brad did too, probably, though he never indicated by so much as a raised eyebrow that he did.

But somehow, on that strange golden day, nothing that Brad’s mother did seemed to touch me. I ate lunch, lay in the sun, made polite conversation, swam, went home and changed and came back to meet the senior Hunts in the Cloister’s lounge, went down the elegant little shop-lined hallway and in to dinner, nodded to a great many people and spoke with some, ate wonderfully well, and drank a great deal of wine in a hermetically sealed, impenetrable bubble of power and well-being.

It was not until we were walking out of the dining room and down another long corridor to the lounge for a nightcap that I saw our reflections in an ornate mirror over a little mahogany side table, Marylou Hunt’s and mine, and realized why.

I was not looking in the mirror, merely looking idly about while Marylou and I waited for Brad and his 259 / DOWNTOWN

father to catch up with us. But I raised my head and saw in its depths a woman so beautiful, so starkly and powerfully commanding, that I gave a small, silent gasp. Only after I had stared at the image for a long second did I realize that I was looking at the image of Marylou Hunt, who stood behind me, and that she was staring, not at herself, but at the image of me in the mirror, and on her unguarded face was not the barely concealed contempt that I had fancied I had seen all afternoon, but naked, hungry envy. It was a primitive expression; powerful, somehow pure. It was more than the animosity of a mother toward a younger rival for her son’s affections. It was somehow murderous, all-consuming, and yet so nakedly vulnerable that I shut my eyes involuntarily.

When I opened them she had looked away, and her face was back in the chiseled ivory mask that it always wore, overlaid now with a careful wash of sheer gold from her morning’s perfectly calibrated sunning. Her eyelids were shaded a delicate pewter, and her wonderful, deep blue eyes were fringed with long, silky lashes, and her deep red lipstick had burnished gold overtones that echoed the serene gilt of her hair. She was as whole and perfect as a Fabergé egg, or a Chinese porcelain, and as incomparably beautiful. She wore wide-legged white silk palazzo pants cinched with a gold mesh belt, and the sheer artifice of her at that moment was breathtaking.

But I had seen that other face, and everything changed in that moment. I saw myself in front of her, juxtaposed against her, flushed with wine and red-cheeked with sun and wind, black hair an unruly tangle of curls from the humid night wind, red linen slightly rumpled, shoulders and neck and bosom glowing with heat and sunburn, eyes sparkling from alcohol and a kind of reckless triumph. I was raw and unfinished beside her, but totally and unconquerably young.

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 260

That was my power. Only that, but it was for that moment enough. I could run nearly naked on a hot, windy beach and plunge without care into a running diamond sea; roll on the sand and fling my arms wide to the sun and still be what I was, that she could never again be: young. Her beauty was a triumph of wonderful bone and great art and much, much money, but it was a fragile triumph, needing to be tended and lacquered and shaded and guarded. My beauty was nothing next to hers, but I had the vitality and spontaneity and the supple flesh and the sheen of youth, and it was, to her, a terrible weapon.

I stood still, staring into the mirror, my head ringing with the realization of it. And then joy flooded in, swift and exult-ant. I would use it, then; she could not touch me. I had won everything, I saw in that moment, everything that she wanted: her son, the big old house down the beach, the right of succession to the life she led in her big Buckhead house. I knew that I had won them. I did not stop to think whether I wanted them. I simply stood in the dim hallway of that consummately elegant old hotel and rejoiced in the power I had that night. That it was fleeting; that I would as surely lose it as she had lost it; that it was a small and cruel power, did not occur to me in that moment. All that did was that I had come into enemy territory feeling helpless and vulnerable and had found, after all, that I had come armed.

When Brad and his father reached us, I took his arm and said, “I don’t think I want a drink, after all. I’d really like to just go back and go to bed. We were up awfully early, and tomorrow’s big day.”

I laid my head lightly on Brad’s shoulder when I said

“bed,” and smiled at Marylou and his father.

She flushed.

“I told the Thorntons we’d see them in the bar after dinner, Brad,” she said, looking narrowly at her son.

261 / DOWNTOWN

“Lucy’s with them. Her divorce was final last week, and they thought a little rest would be good for her. She’s awfully anxious to see you.”

“Not tonight, Ma,” he said, ruffling my hair. “Smoky’s right. She’s had a long, hard day.”

“Well, then, I’ll tell her you’ll see her for tennis in the morning,” his mother said. In the dimness her blue eyes flashed. “She said she hoped you’d give her a game. Remember how you two used to play tennis all day long down here?”

“Ma,” Brad said, smiling, “In the morning I’m going to sleep until noon at the very least, and then I’m taking Smoky sailing. Tell Lucy I’ll see her at Mama Hunt’s party. Or if not there, I’ll catch up with her back home.”

Marylou Hunt lifted her carved chin.

“I thought at the very least you might give me a hand with the party arrangements in the morning,” she said. “I’ve got that whole lounge to get into shape, and the flowers to be brought—”

“Since when have I ever helped you with that party?” he grinned. “What has the Cloister got a florist and a staff for?

Let up, Ma. Smoky’s going to think you’re a nag, and she’s already gotten a broadside from Mama Hunt.”

Marylou smiled silkily.

“I do hope she wasn’t too awful, Smoky,” she said. “She has a terrible tongue. I tried to get Brad to put you up in one of the cottages, but oh, no, it had to be that old wreck—”

“The old wreck is looking pretty good,” Brad said. “And Grandma was positively taken with Smoky. They hit it off like gangbusters, didn’t you, Smokes?”