Islands (31 page)

Lila and Simms simply stared at her. Camilla smiled her most enigmatic smile. Henry and I grinned widely. This genial emu of a woman had hatched herself a swan.

“So you knew Booter,” I said, thinking of the gap-toothed, red-faced man who had danced like a lightning strike to beach music on a summer night long ago.

“All my life. My mama says she thinks she got me on the end of Booter’s dock one night. There used to be some good parties out here.”

“And so you’re looking for some work,” Lila said in her best garden club voice. Simms still had not spoken.

“Yes, ma’am. I was working at the Rural Center library, but to tell you the truth, I can make better money doing cleaning and cooking, and I enjoy it.”

“What did you do at the library?” Camilla said.

“I was the librarian. I have a degree in library science.”

“My dear, you don’t need to be cleaning houses,” Camilla said warmly. “Never waste your education.”

“I don’t,” Gaynelle Toomer said. “I read all the time. I taught Britney—that’s my daughter—to read when she was four. And I have a little night class for the other pageant children, and some of their mothers, too. But I do need the work. My no-good husband took off two years ago, and I’m raising Britney by myself. You wouldn’t be sorry. I’m really good at what I do.”

She looked at Camilla. “You’re the lady who needs a little help, aren’t you? I’ve done some work in a nursing home back in Myrtle Beach. You’d be easy to take care of, as little as you are. And fun, because you’re so pretty.”

“Oh, yes, goddamnit, I’ll vote for you,” Simms said under his breath, but I did not think Gaynelle was buttering Camilla up. Camilla
was
thin; emaciated, almost. And she was pretty. She smiled again, her lit-candle smile.

“It would be two houses and a cottage, just a light once-over,” I said. “We’ll get somebody else to do the heavy cleaning. And being a companion to Mrs. Curry when we’re away. We both work, but at different times. I work mornings and he works afternoons. It would be nice if you could do whatever she needs until about four. I can take over then. Maybe you could come and fix her breakfast, and give her some lunch. I usually do dinner.”

“I can do that,” she said. “I’d like that. I can leave you all some dinner every now and then, if you like. I’m a real good cook. And who wouldn’t want to straighten up with all these books around? It must be like heaven.”

“Three houses is a lot, but Mr. and Mrs. Howard aren’t here except weekends. We don’t want to overburden you.”

“I can do these houses with one hand tied behind me,” she said. “It would be a pleasure. My rates are pretty competitive. Mrs. Aiken, I’m going to do yours free.”

“Of course you’re not!” I protested.

“I am. I won’t take your money if you give it to me. Dr. Aiken gave my baby and me a life.”

My throat tightened. You left a long shadow, Lewis, I thought.

“Do you always ride the motorcycle?” Henry said. “It’s a beauty. I had an old Indian, once. I loved it.”

“I never knew that,” Camilla exclaimed. “Henry, when on earth did you have a motorcycle?”

“In med school,” he said. “I had to sell it when I started my internship. But for those few years, there wasn’t anywhere I didn’t go on that Indian.”

“It’s a grand old bike,” Gaynelle said. “One of my club has one, restored. You’ll have to come ride with the club sometime. Somebody’s always got a spare bike around.”

“You have a club?” Henry said. His eyes glowed.

“Oh, yeah, they’re all over the place. There must be twenty around Charleston alone. At the big rally in Myrtle Beach, there’s usually around five hundred thousand bikers. Now that’s a sight. Our is the Bohicket club; there are twenty-something of us. You’d like us. We’ve got doctors and lawyers and a judge and several insurance guys. My boyfriend owns a Honda dealership. And some of the women make more than the guys. Biking isn’t the Hell’s Angels anymore.”

“I never knew all that was around here,” Henry said.

“Oh, yeah. I mean it. Come ride with us. I’ll find out what the next big ride is; I think it’s for the Low Country Law Officer’s Family Fund. January, maybe. Meanwhile, I’ll take you for a spin on the Harley whenever you like. It’s custom-built for me, but I’m not much shorter than you. Next time it’s sunny, I’ll ride her over.”

“I’d really like that,” Henry said, with more color in his voice than I had heard in a long time.

“You better check with your wife first,” Gaynelle said, smiling over at Camilla. “Not all wives are real fond of bikers.”

“He’s not my husband,” Camilla said gently. “My husband died years ago. Dr. McKenzie lost his wife last winter. We sort of look after each other.”

Gaynelle made a small sound of sympathy, but did not gush or hover.

“It’s real nice that you have each other,” she said. “More people ought to do that, instead of living alone and dying of loneliness.”

We settled on a price, and when she was gone, we sat looking at each other in the firelight. Camilla and Henry and I were grinning.

“A Harley-riding librarian with boobs like the front of a ’53 Studebaker and a Little Miss Tomato Princess for a daughter. What hath God wrought?” Henry said, laughing softly.

“Who can cook,” I added.

“Who worked in a nursing home,” Camilla said, smiling at Henry. She was obviously delighting in his delight.

“I don’t know about this,” Lila said. “I just don’t know. How do we know she won’t run off back to the library? And that motorcycle…Lord!
And
one of those awful little mini-women who strut around shining their behinds and singing Britney Spears. That’s even her name, Britney. Why can’t we just get some nice black woman who’d be grateful for the work and keep her mouth shut? This one’s way too familiar. Mark my words, this woman and her child are going to end up moving in with us.”

“Oh, Lila, really,” I said. “She’s one of a kind. I think she’s fascinating. What a life to have lived, as young as she is. And she can do everything we need—”

“Let’s give her a try,” Simms said. It was the first time he had spoken. “And require that she wear T-shirts at all times.”

Henry and Camilla and I laughed, but Lila was not amused. She glared at Simms.

“Okay, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“We’d never say that.” Henry grinned.

Gaynelle was as good as her word. If it was fair, she roared up on the Harley at eight in the morning, or in the truck if the weather was bad. She made a small hot breakfast for Camilla and Henry, and for me if I was still around. She tidied up my and Camilla’s houses and Henry’s cottage, singing in a surprisingly pleasant alto voice with a tremolo in it that reminded me of Patsy Cline. She seemed to favor Billy Gilman; Camilla said she was learning every one of his songs by heart.

For lunch she made a salad or a light soufflé, and they waited until I got home to eat. Sometimes Henry put off going in to the clinic until after lunch. I had to admit that it was pleasant. Gaynelle was, as she had said, a very good cook. She took to making dinners that could be reheated, and we gratefully let her, conscious that we had eaten only each other’s cooking for a very long time.

Mornings and afternoons she helped Camilla bathe and dress and do her therapy exercises, and at about four tucked her into bed with a book and the CD player. Camilla usually napped. Gaynelle could have gone home after that, since I was almost always there, but she asked one day if she might stay awhile to read some books from our libraries, and I said of course.

In truth, I was glad of the company. Gaynelle’s matter-of-fact recountings of her hardscrabble days—sitting for hours in Medicaid clinics waiting for this test or that doctor, always foraging for money for the truck or the bike, fretting over paying the day care center where she left Britney until five, pursuing her ex-husband through the courts for the child support that was now three years overdue—were for me a window on a world that I had hardly known existed. Well, to be honest, I did know; I remembered the tattered lives of the mothers of my small clients at the agency, but it had been a very long time since that had been real to me. Gaynelle was totally without self-pity, although often full of anger at some uncaring social agency, or “that sorry son of a bitch.” I came to admire her enormously. She lived constantly on the edge, and managed in spite of the rigors and strictures to live rather well. Her casual courage sometimes shamed me. Camilla was utterly fascinated by her. To her, Gaynelle led an exotic sort of gypsy life that had little to do with reality.

“I’m going to put her in a book of some sort,” she said, scribbling away one afternoon after Gaynelle left. She was writing in her notebooks more than ever now, and seemed more alive and engaged than I had seen her for some time.

I overheard Gaynelle ask her one morning, “Are you writing a book? You’re never without that notebook.”

“I might, at that,” Camilla said, smiling.

“Put me in it?”

“I wouldn’t dream of leaving you out.”

At the end of November, Gaynelle came roaring up on the pink Harley on a Friday afternoon after she should have been off, accompanied by a man on a monstrous black bike with an inordinate amount of silver piping and tubing showing. It was covered with dust from the road into the creek, but you could tell it was a new bike. The man himself was small—shorter than Gaynelle—and completely bald, with a great blond beard spilling over his leather jacket and a kerchief tied around his head. He wore black goggles; it was impossible to tell how old he was. Behind him, riding pillion, a little girl in full black child-sized leather regalia waved and squealed. I could see carrot red curls spilling out of her miniature helmet and saw that her small boots were sequined. Without a doubt the boyfriend and the daughter of Gaynelle Toomer.

Gaynelle brought them up to the front door, and I opened it to let them in. The last of the low winter sun was glinting on the creek, and there was a lurid smear in the west that promised a spectacular sunset. Gaynelle prodded them before her into the living room like a teacher with recalcitrant children on a field trip. They removed their goggles, and then I could tell that the boyfriend was years older than Gaynelle, maybe forty. He had mild blue eyes and a nice smile through all the hair. The little girl was so precociously beautiful and so aware of it that she almost made you grimace.

“This is my boyfriend, T. C. Bentley,” Gaynelle said. “Bentley Honda? And this is my little princess, Britney, who is just as sweet and talented as she is pretty. Britney, what do you say to Mrs. Aiken?”

The child, the mass of her red hair flaming much as Fairlie’s had done, made a stiff little curtsy, nearly toppling over, and said, “Nicetomeetcha.”

She tossed her head, causing her hair to fall over one eye, and gave me a smile that was clearly meant to be seductive. I thought she had on lipstick.

She was the sort of child who always made me wince inwardly with distaste, but something about her tickled me.

“Pleased to meet you, too, Britney,” I said. “What’s your talent?”

“I play the juice harp,” she piped.

“Britney, I keep telling you, it’s a harmonica. I don’t want to hear Jew’s harp again,” Gaynelle said. Britney rolled her eyes at me, and I laughed.

“Will you play for me sometime?”

“I could play now. My juice…my harmonica is in Mama’s purse.”

“Not today,” Gaynelle said, smoothing the red curls. “T. C.’s gon’ take us to Gilligan’s tonight for fried shrimp, and you’ve got to get a bath and change your clothes. T. C., Mrs. Aiken is—was—married to the doctor that fixed Britney’s foot.”

“It’s an honor to meet you, ma’am,” T. C. Bentley said. “That was one fine thing he did for that little girl.”

He was soft-spoken, and looked down as he spoke. A shy biker?

They were turning to leave when Henry drove up in his truck. He did not come in, and I looked past them on the porch to see what kept him. He was squatting on his haunches, running his thin surgeon’s fingers over the black bike with the reverence a pilgrim would accord the grail. T. C. Bentley walked out and squatted beside him. I could see that they shook hands, and were talking, but I could not hear what they said.

“That’s T. C.’s Rubbertail,” Gaynelle said. “He just got it last month. It’s completely restored. He loves it better than he ever will me. Looks like Dr. McKenzie kind of likes it, too.”

Presently she and the child and T. C. Bentley roared away into the falling dark, and Henry came slowly into the house, looking back at their retreating dust. His cheeks were pink with cold or pleasure or both, and his silver hair fell over one eye.

“He’s going to bring a bike for me and let me ride with them one day soon,” he said. “God, I wonder if I remember how? He seems like a nice guy. The kid’s a little minx, though, isn’t she?”

“Did she put the moves on you?”

“Yep. Or what passes for moves to a seven-year-old. She’s going to be a handful, if she isn’t already.”

“I kind of liked her,” I said. “She’s a tough little cookie. Takes after her mama.”

Henry brought Camilla over for dinner. We were having one of Gaynelle’s elegant chicken potpies, and the smell of it warming in the oven curled out into the living room as we sat before the fire. Henry told Camilla about T. C. Bentley and his wondrous motorcycle, and about riding with the club.

Camilla’s serene face blanched.

“Oh, Henry, no,” she said. “I can’t bear to think of you tearing all over John’s Island on one of those things. I’d die of heart failure if you were late coming home. You hear so much about wrecks—”

“Camilla, I rode that Indian of mine like a banshee all over three states. I was pretty good. I think it’s like a bicycle; you don’t really forget how.”

“Henry, promise me—”

“No promises, Camilla,” he said gently. “I promise to be careful, but I won’t promise not to ride it.”

She looked at him silently and inclined her head in assent, and then it was time to take the potpie out of the oven.

Around the end of the first week in December we found that we could no longer ignore the blitzkrieg that was Christmas. Trees were for sale at every rural crossroads. Used-car lots on James Island were forested with them. Jaycees begged for toys for tots. When I drove to work on Gillon Street, the palm trees on Broad Street blazed with Christmas lights, and in the old downtown, magnolia wreaths were blooming on every door. At the Rural Center, the Bi-Lo aisles were perilous with stacked displays of lights and balls and hideous plush toys and banners proclaiming Butterball turkeys and canned yams. Henry did not mention it, but I knew that he saw the same things. We did not talk about Christmas in Charleston proper. Camilla did not ask about it.