Islands (9 page)

“Why?” he said.

And so we became the Eccentric Aikens, who did not give parties, who did not do balls.

“I shudder to think what your mother would have to say about all this, Lewis,” an old lady said to him once, at brunch at the Carolina Yacht Club. Those I could manage.

“Everybody’s saying you’re just turning your back on your whole heritage.”

Her gaze skimmed me and bounced off.

“Come on, Tatty,” Lewis said to the old lady, who was undoubtedly an aunt or a second cousin or a something-in-law. “You know I never went to parties much.”

“Well, you did for a while,” she said. “And it was lovely to see you out and about.”

I knew she was referring to the Sissy era, and my face burned, but where once it would have been embarrassment, now it was anger.

The old lady tottered away on her Ferragamos, and Lewis said, under his breath, “ ‘But that was in another country, and besides, the bitch is dead!’ ”

Every head in the dining room turned at our adolescent snicker.

We never moved out of the Bull Street house. Year after year, we went to Sweetgrass, and we went to the house on Sullivan’s Island. We had occasional trips, some abroad, but somehow, wherever we went, I felt like a bird perched on a wire, ready for flight. I often had the feeling that the beach house was where my real life was, and that the rest was a sort of rich, endlessly fascinating half-life. I enjoyed, even loved, downtown Charleston, but it was where I went to wait to go to Sullivan’s Island.

I did not see how the others could possibly feel the same way; it was the mind-set of the pilgrim, not the clan dweller. And yet, looking at us all on the beach or in the sea or before the fire, listening to us walking and laughing, listening even harder to what we did not say, I thought that perhaps they felt it, too, a little; that this place and its dwellers might truly be the reality, and all the rest its shadow. That in some atavistic way it was home, and we were family. I know that I felt that way all the years that we were together.

We few were a multitude.

When I think of the second summer I went to the beach house, I think of dogs and light.

There seemed to be dogs everywhere that year: on the beach; in the surf; bumping along with their owners in golf carts toward the little cluster of shops at the foot of the bridge; lolling in patches of shade under porches and cars; trotting in amiable phalanxes along Middle Street, noses searching the weedy roadsides for who knows what. They ran heavily to pointers and setters, working dogs for the many hunters who summered on the island, and small, scruffy, happy-looking mutts. The days of the glut of labs and goldens was still in the future.

We had our own tribe at the beach house. Charlie’s two Boykin spaniels, Boy and Girl, came almost every time the Currys did, and spent a great deal of time sleeping on the porch and eating whatever they could beg. They got plenty. All of us spoiled the dogs.

“Best hunting dogs in the world,” Charlie said fondly. “They’re legendary. Mouths as soft as velvet. They’ve never messed up a single duck.”

“That’s because they’ve never retrieved a single duck,” Lewis said lazily, from the hammock. “Charlie hates hunting. These are two of the most expensive lap dogs in Charleston.”

“Well, if I hunted them they’d be the best,” Charlie said, grinning. It was almost impossible to annoy or anger him. He remains one of the most amiable men I ever knew.

“They
are
sweet, but they poop more than any other dogs I’ve ever seen,” Camilla said. “I never go anywhere without my scoop and my Baggies.”

And that was true. It was Camilla who took the dogs on long daily walks down the beach. Her tall, slightly stooped figure and the manic dogs became a fixed thread in the tapestry of that summer. The dogs would careen crazily from the dunes to the surf and back, sniffing for crabs and turtle-egg holes. Camilla’s chestnut hair blew back in the wind, and sometimes you could see her lips moving, talking to the dogs. She bent frequently to scoop the prodigious poop. Often she went out of sight past where the beach curved, far to the east. Occasionally she stayed gone for hours. We did not worry about her. She would come back eventually, still serene, her hair tangled, fresh pink glowing on her wonderful cheekbones. The panting dogs would collapse on the porch.

“You don’t want to run them too far,” Charlie said once, earnestly, and the rest of us burst into laughter. The idea of Camilla Curry running a couple of legendary hunting dogs to exhaustion was ludicrous. Sometimes she walked the beach without the dogs, and came back much later carrying shells in her cupped hands. She never seemed to want company, and we did not ask to go along. Camilla moved in a bubble of privacy.

Henry’s springer spaniel, Gladys, came, too. Gladys lived summers at the old McKenzie island house, over on the inland waterway. Fairlie and Henry’s daughter, Nancy, often brought her brood out to the house for the summer, and when she did not, Henry’s handyman lived on the place and took care of Gladys. Gladys, Fairlie said, loved Leroy far more than she did Henry, but when she was with us at the beach house, Gladys stuck to Henry in an ecstasy of love. She was a pretty thing, and Simms said she was one of the best dove dogs he’d ever seen.

“I’ve been trying to get Henry to breed her so I can have a pup, but he wants her to stay a virgin. He sure knows how to show a girl a good time.”

“Gladys is above matters of the flesh,” Henry said from under the brim of his hideous fishing hat. He was sprawled in a folding chair, his long legs, golden furred, stretched out before him. He wore no shoes, and I noticed that even the hair on his long toes was blond. Henry, the golden one of us. Somehow, I was surprised that Henry hunted.

Simms’s hunting dogs were kept in a kennel on his plantation on Waccamaw Island, but Lila’s ridiculous toy of a Maltese came with them to the beach. Sugar was yappy and erratic and winsome, and she had the heart of a lion. It was wonderful to see her dashing into the surf after the big dogs, her little legs beginning to pump and her chin held above water before the others were ankle deep. The men groused about stuffed toys, but Sugar spent a great deal of time in everybody’s lap, especially mine. I loved the silly, great-hearted creature.

Lewis’s hunting dogs, Sneezy, Dopey, and Sleepy, had a luxurious kennel and run out at Sweetgrass, shaded from the sun and larger than my old apartment. Lewis no longer hunted, saying that one day he just decided not to blow birds out of the air anymore. But he adored the dogs, and when we were at Sweetgrass, they lay before the fire with us, swam off the dock in the river with us, and slept with us on Lewis’s grandmother’s beautiful old rice bed. I loved the dogs, too, but they snored horribly, and I often gave up in despair and crept into the guest room when the whistling honks grew too loud. Lewis would find me there in the morning, and would shake his head and promise to banish the dogs to their kennel at night, but he never did. They did not come to the beach house.

“Enough is enough,” Lewis said. “I don’t want to spend my Sundays scooping setter shit.”

So Sneezy, Dopey, and Sleepy stayed home, where Robert spoiled them with duck breast and lamb and hunted them in the woods and marshes of Edisto. It was as good a dog’s life as I could imagine.

That was the first year I ever saw Sullivan’s Island’s celebrated Fourth of July parade. It was a ragtag, joyous, seat-of-the-pants affair, with decorated golf carts and a motorcycle or two from the Isle of Palms, and the island fire trucks and ambulance, sirens wailing, and many children. All with dogs. The island dogs, most of whom knew each other from their nocturnal garbage-can scoutings, pranced along beside their young owners, decked out in flowers and tiny flags and ribbons. There was every kind of dog imaginable, and they were all unified by the pride of the day and the joy of belonging to Sullivan’s Island. Our dogs did not march, but when the fireworks display arced and spat into the blue night sky, they howled in uniform accompaniment, their anthem to our country’s birthday. Some of them lived in Charleston homes older by years than that.

So, the summer of the dogs. And the summer of the light.

The island light that year was simply magical, at least to me, who had never seen it so before. It was honey gold and soft, and so clear that everything—Charleston in the distance, Fort Sumter nearer by, the great tankers and freighters that passed, the navy’s eerie, death-silent black nuclear submarines that occasionally broke the water off the beach—seemed to be outlined in crisp, deep blue. I remember no heat shimmering from the beach, no mist, no fog at night. At least when Lewis and I were there, the moon and stars were as distinct as a night-sky chart in a child’s classroom, and the black, white-creamed water often danced with phosphorus. Lewis and I went into it late one night, naked and shivering a little, and felt the silken water alive with the soft hiss of sea fire. Afterward, we made love behind the first dune line. There was nothing else for it.

“This is pure heaven,” I said on the porch, after a long August lunch. “I’ve never seen such weather, not that lasted so long. No wonder everybody comes to Sullivan’s.”

“It’s not like this often, not by a long shot,” Henry said. “August is usually just as miserable out here as it is in Charleston. You can just get wet quicker. This is unusual. I don’t remember a summer just like it, do you, Lewis? Camilla?”

“I mainly remember mosquitoes and sandburs,” Lewis said.

“I remember Daddy saying that the old-timers said a summer like this was a weather breeder,” Camilla said, not looking up from her knitting. “But I never saw much weather bred out here except thunderstorms and heat waves.”

“You’ll know something’s coming if you see the Gray Man,” Simms said, grinning.

“What’s that?” I said. Somehow I did not like the sound of the words.

“Nobody quite knows,” Simms said. “A man in a long gray cloak is supposed to appear on the beach if there’s a bad storm coming. When they see him, people know to prepare.”

“If I saw him, I’d prepare to get out of here,” I said, shivering.

“Simms, you know that’s only on Pawley’s Island,” Lila chided. “Nobody’s ever seen him anywhere else.”

I looked at her. I had expected her to dismiss the Gray Man as a child’s ghost story, but her face was serious.

“Do you believe in him, Lila?” I said.

“Well, I don’t
not
believe in him,” she said slowly. “Daddy has a friend on Pawley’s who claims to have seen him, and two days later there was a tornado there. Lots of people have seen him. I don’t know if there have always been storms, though.”

Driving home that night, with the silver pepper of the stars fading out as the lights of Charleston rolled up over the bridge, I said to Lewis, “Do you believe in him? The Gray Man?”

“Not really, but I don’t want to give him up, either. I can’t think of anywhere else but the Low Country that has a Gray Man.”

We were all at the beach house that Labor Day, and while we were there, Henry finally persuaded me to go with him on one of his missions of mercy, this time to the mountains of central Mexico.

“It’s not close to anywhere,” he said. “It’s a terribly poor and backward region, and for years the only health care has been a bankrupt government clinic in a town fifty miles away, with only a burro path connecting the two, and that covered by rock slides and cave-ins half the year. But there’s a new road now, just opened, and it puts the village within range of a bigger national highway that leads to several larger towns. A Dr. Mendoza has established a little hospital there, or hopes to, and found a couple of nurses and some funding for equipment. He got in touch with our folks in Washington, and asked for help from whoever could come. I was up, so said I’d be there. Now that there’s some access to other, more populated areas, a setup on the order of Outreach—not nearly so sophisticated, of course, but a start—would be salvation for the village. Anny, please come. I can’t pay you, but I can guarantee you a clean bed and three squares a day, and all the backup I can give you. There’ll be some other docs there; I don’t know who, or what their specialties are. But we’ll have company, and you might enjoy the native people. I always have. There’s an interpreter along, too. How about it? You like burritos?”

I thought of my last board meeting, which had been consumed entirely by a discussion of our PR effort to acquire gifts and services. I had nearly drifted into sleep during the excruciating minutiae of our current fund-raising confection, a dinner dance at the Kiawah Island home of a board member who had just redecorated and built a large pavilion out over the dunes, facing the sea. The gala’s working title was the “Outreach Beach Ball.”

“I have some vacation time coming,” I said to Henry. “I think I’ll go. I’m being Kiawahed to death right now.”

Only then did I look at Lewis, questioningly.

“I love burritos,” he said. “You got space for an old bone man?”

Henry laughed and hugged me and pounded Lewis on the bicep.

“Did you know that the mountains of Mexico have more poisonous scorpions than any other region in the world?” Fairlie said, swirling wine around in her glass. She was smiling, though. Through some alchemy, she and I had become friends, to the point where we could tease each other without wondering if there was a barb embedded.

“No wonder they need doctors,” I said. “Why don’t you come, Fairlie? I could use somebody to go to the ladies’ room with.”

“They got no ladies’ rooms,” Fairlie said, grinning. “Besides, what would I do? Teach them to dance?”

We all laughed, and Camilla smiled at me.

“Good for you, Anny,” she said. “I’ve always worried about Henry on these little sorties. I keep thinking he might run off with a fiery señorita or something, and we’ll never see him again. You can keep watch.”

“He’s already got a fiery señorita,” Fairlie said, baring her teeth ferociously at Camilla, who laughed outright.

“So he does,” she said.

That evening, just after sunset, I walked down the beach with only Gladys for company. The day had been blisteringly hot, but there was fog coming in over the dunes from the waterway, which meant, I knew, a change of weather. All of a sudden the empty beach and the warm water swirling around my ankles felt poignant, elegiac. This summer was ending. It made me sad.