Authors: Anne Rivers Siddons
Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Married Women, #Real Estate Developers, #South Carolina, #Low Country (S.C.), #ISBN-13: 9780061093326, #Large Print Books, #Large Type Books, #Islands, #HarperTorch, #Domestic Fiction
project has a different management group, and he
draws them from businesses and business schools all
over the United States, but a preponderance of the
young men and their wives come from the Northeast,
from Wharton and Harvard Business Schools and
others like them. No matter what property they are
slated for, they all come here first. Basic corporate
training in the Peacock
16 / Anne Rivers Siddons
Island Plantation way of life starts here, and the aver-
age stay for a young family is two years. Some of them
end up spending three, five, and more years. To a man
and woman, they know little when they get here but
the theory of business. It remains for Clay and the
other Peacock executives to put a Peacock shine on
them. It is often a hard and daunting process; it has
not been all that unusual, in the past, for young mar-
riages to be strained and sometimes broken, for de-
structive habits to take hold: too much liquor, too
many recreational drugs, too much time spent in the
attractive company of others than one’s own husband
or wife. The active one of the couple, usually the hus-
band, spends long hours away from home, living and
breathing the Peacock party line, leaving the young
wife adrift on a languid island in a warm sea, cut off
from home and family, alone with small children and
only the company of other corporate wives, who have
wrestled out their own places here and are not eager
to take in the newcomer and her brood, lest she be the
spouse of the very one who will oust their own hus-
bands from their hard-won places in Clay’s court. Clay
argued, when he put his proposition to me, that he
could not afford to take the time to arbitrate this sort
of thing, and that if left unattended, it could come to
wreck the famous Peacock morale. I thought the whole
thing tiresome, heartbreaking, and entirely thankless,
but I could
Low Country / 17
see that he was right. Somebody needed to take hold
of the newly arrived young. I just did not think it
should be me.
But Clay did, and I could hardly refuse. I had not
yet found refuge in my painting when he asked, and
even I could see that if I did not find something outside
myself to occupy me, I was going to be in serious
trouble. I have always known that he asked more for
my benefit than for the cadet corps of the Peacock Is-
land Plantation.
I knew now with absolute certainty that he was
about to produce a new crop of the needy young. He
had that look. “Don’t tell me,” I said. “Let me guess.
A new crop of lambs is incoming as we speak.”
I smiled as I said it, though. He was smiling again,
and I would give a lot to keep hold of that smile. After
all, I had agreed to this role, and I do what we call the
mother-superior bit rather well. The young women
who are my charges all seem just young enough so
that I don’t threaten them with competition, and I have
both the advantage of knowing the territory and the
cachet of being the supreme honcho’s wife. And I
never drink when I’m on a mother-superior mission.
I know that Clay doesn’t worry about that. I don’t do
the children, though. Peggy Carmichael, the warm,
big-lapped, grandmotherly woman who has been
Clay’s director of housekeeping since the begin
18 / Anne Rivers Siddons
ning, does that. It works out pretty well, all told.
“Yep,” Clay said, draining his coffee cup and leaning
back. There was a sheepish cast to his smile now,
which is the second most appealing smile that he has.
The first, hands down, is his let’s-go-to-bed smile. I
am fairly sure that no one else but me sees that one.
“So? I didn’t know you had anything new on the
books.”
“I don’t, strictly,” he said. “There’s something on the
horizon, a marsh property a ways from here that’s
looking real good, but I wasn’t going to start staffing
for it yet. But these three coming in are all special, top
of their classes at Wharton and anxious to get started
somewhere, and I was afraid if I didn’t nail them down
somebody else would get them. And some serious
money looks like it might open up sooner than I
thought. So I’m bringing them and their families on
down. Just two couples and a divorced woman. I’m
going to need you for this. Your light will hold a few
more nights, I think. Will you, Caro?”
“So when are they coming?”
“They’ll be here early this afternoon. I’m putting
them up in the guest house until we can get two of the
villas ready. Don’t worry, they won’t be staying here.”
“Tonight! Oh, Clay! I can’t get a dinner party ready
by tonight; Estelle’s got the afternoon off,
Low Country / 19
and there’s some kind of Thanksgiving pageant or
something at school; all the others will be there with
their kids.…”
“No, no. I thought this time we might just take them
over to Charleston. They’ll have time to freshen up
and rest some, and we can show them a little of the
island on the way. Maybe you could call the Yacht
Club and see if they can get us in about eight. It’s a
pretty impressive place, and I hear one of the wives is
not at all happy about leaving Darien and New York.
Thinks she’s coming down here to live among the
savages. It won’t hurt to throw some vintage Charles-
ton at her. Let her know she can get to civilization in
less than an hour.”
“Ah, yes, the Holy City,” I said, getting up to call
the Carolina Yacht Club and make reservations. Clay
has belonged for years now; and I still don’t know
how he managed it. Few outsiders made it into those
hallowed halls on Charleston Harbor at the time he
joined. I know that he never tires of taking newcomers
there, just as I quail inwardly every time I know that
I am going. Clay does not understand why I feel tent-
ative at the Yacht Club.
“After all, this was your grandfather’s town,” he said.
“And your great-great-great’s, for that matter. You’ve
got a more valid claim on it than half the people who
live here.”
I rarely answer him. It is a long way from
20 / Anne Rivers Siddons
McClellanville, where my grandfather lived for most
of his life, to Charleston and the Carolina Yacht Club,
and the twain seldom meet. They never did for my
grandfather, or my great-great-great, either, truth be
known, but Clay has forgotten this, if he ever really
knew it.
“Oh, wait a minute,” he called after me, and I
stopped and looked back.
“There may be a problem. This woman who’s com-
ing. She’s probably the best of this lot, but I don’t
know if it’s a good idea to take her to the Yacht
Club.…”
“Why on earth? She’s your guest. She doesn’t have
to have an escort of her own,” I said.
“She’s black,” Clay said. “It might be a little uncom-
fortable for her.”
“Uncomfortable is not precisely the term I would
have used,” I said, and went to the telephone and called
Carolina’s for reservations for a party of seven at eight
o’clock that evening.
When Clay went upstairs to shower, I took my garden
shears and a basket and went out into the yard to cut
flowers for the guest house. Though it was nearly
Thanksgiving, I still had some sweet, sturdy old roses
in the beds behind the house, and it had been so warm
that a few of the big, ruffled Sasanqua camellias had
bloomed. They always do in our soft, wet autumns
and winters; glowing like daystars in the grays and
duns and silvers of
Low Country / 21
this winter coast, then freezing and blackening to mush
in the vicious little icy snaps that follow in January.
We are subtropical here, and the Atlantic runs shallow
and warm off our tan beaches. We have flowers long
after the rest of the South has yielded up theirs to the
cold. And there are vast greenhouses and acres of ex-
perimental gardens in the sheltered heart of the island,
which serve the Plantation’s floral needs as well as
supplying its ecologically correct plantings and land-
scaping. I could have my pick of largesse from any of
those. But I like to work in my backyard garden, and
it feels right to take flowers from my own house to
welcome Clay’s young newcomers. And he likes telling
them that I brought them my own flowers. So I usually
do this when we have incomings. Augmented with the
ubiquitous pansies that the landscaping people blanket
the public spaces with in fall and winter, I would have
enough for lush bouquets in all the rooms. I would
take them down later so they would be fresh.
The guest house was bought to accommodate our
personal guests at Cotton Blossom, the name Clay
gave our house when it was built. But we have not had
many guests, not for some years, and as the guest
house is at some distance from us, it works well for
temporary housing for company newcomers.
Cotton Blossom…the name sets my teeth
22 / Anne Rivers Siddons
on edge, and I refuse to use it, or even to use the house
stationery that Clay had made up for us. It sounds
phony and overblown to me, a parody of every bad
ol’ Suthren joke I have ever heard. The rest of the
homes in Peacock Island Plantation do not have names,
that I know of, and even the named areas—streets,
subdivisions, parks—wear the names of indigenous
birds or flora. But Cotton Blossom was the name of
the mean little cotton plantation my great-great-great-
grandfather Aubrey built over on neighboring Edisto,
where he raised substandard Sea Island cotton, and
Clay thought to keep the name in the family, so to
speak. Great-great-great-grandfather Aubrey is my only
valid link to Charleston, and a tenuous one it was and
is.…Grandpa’s town house was small and cramped
and well below the salt, and his presence in the Holy
City seems to have left no more permanent impression
than his passing. The Aubrey town house is a garage
off King Street now. Clay does not find it necessary to
point out the garage to prospective investors and res-
idents of Peacock’s, as he does the crumbling ruins of
Cotton Blossom over on Edisto, which look, in their
vine-and-moss-shrouded decay, far more romantic than
the house ever looked in the days of its ascendancy.
“Caroline’s people go way back in the Lowcountry,”
he is fond of saying, and I don’t contradict him, be-
cause I suppose, literally speaking,
Low Country / 23
they do, or at least Great-great-great-grandfather Au-
brey’s scanty tribe did. It’s just that they didn’t linger.
My stake in Charleston and its environs is shallow in-
deed.
Clay respects my refusal to use the house’s name,
as he does most of my actions and decisions. He even
smiles when I say that “Cotton Blossom” sounds like
it ought to be wallowing down the Mississippi River,
steam whistles squalling, pickaninnies dancing on the
dock as it rounds the bluff. But he uses it himself, just
the same, and in his soft, deep voice, it somehow
manages to sound as dignified as he thinks it is. As I
said, he is serious about keeping the few legitimate old
Lowcountry names we have in the family. Not even
our children escaped; Kylie was baptized Elizabeth
Kyle Venable, after that same great-great-great-grand-
father, John Kyle Aubrey.
“It’s pretentious, that’s all,” I said, when she was
born, trying to dissuade him. “Nobody in our family
was close to the old skinflint, or even remembered him,
that I ever heard of. If you want to honor my family,
what’s wrong with my mother’s name? Or my grand-
mother’s?”
“Olive?” he said mildly, looking at me over the small
half-glasses he had just begun to wear. “Lutie Beulie?
At least they’ll know who she is in Charleston. They’ll
know what the name means.”
And I gave in, because even then I was too
24 / Anne Rivers Siddons
besotted with love and delight toward my daughter to
argue about her name. In my deepest heart I knew who
she was. I always did.
I put my flowers into the big, flat sweet-grass basket
that I keep in the potting shed for the purpose and
started back to the house. I love that basket; I love all
the beautiful, intricate, sturdy baskets that the Gullah
women braid from the dried sweet grass that flourishes
in the marshes of the Lowcountry and sell for formida-
ble sums wherever tourists gather. For once, I think,
the tourists get fair value. The baskets are usually works
of art and last, with care, for generations. The one I
use for flowers we bought for Kylie to keep her toys
in when she was a toddler. Carter has a larger one, a
hamper, really, in his room, where his dirty clothes
have more or less landed ever since he was five. It is
traditional with Clay and me to give new families sets