I was wrong about that. I think my father-in-law might have been a formidable ally, if things had been different; I know I had his sympathy and liking. I had sensed that from the beginning. But I did not, then, know about the darkness inside him, the black place where he went for long periods of time and shut the door behind him. When he was there, in that place, there was no reaching him, and he did not reach out to anyone. Within days of our arrival he had slipped away into his dark room. Peter told me then that he spent most of his time in Retreat withdrawn from the world around him. I remember that for a long time I used to wonder why he came, when the place drove him into darkness.
“Well,” Peter said once, much later, “it’s just where we go in the summer.”
And by that time, it was explanation enough.
We got to the old white-painted dining hall a little late, so that most of the assembled colony was seated, and perhaps a hundred eyes followed me as I moved along the aisle behind Hannah, feeling overdressed and gaudily corrupt and sleazily seductive and rank as spoiled fruit in my flowered silk dress.
All around me pale linens and earth-colored tweeds and white coats and severe neutrals lay like old snow. All around me sandy eyebrows lifted over long noses and sharp, high cheekbones, and quiet murmurs swelled like well-bred bees.
But there were smiles on every face, and thin fingers pressed mine in welcome. And for the first and only time, on that first night in Maine, I walked under the aegis of two powerful amulets: Hannah Stuart Chambliss and the great plantation that was my provenance. I knew most of the people present would have heard about that; Augusta Stallings was still at her appointed rounds, plying from table to table like a wallowing old tugboat.
Of everyone in the big hall that night, only Peter and I knew that the plantation was a myth.
I met him on the night of my first Saint Cecilia Ball. People always think it a romantic story, and in a way it is. I certainly thought so at the time; I nearly drowned, on that silver-forged November night, in the pure romance of it. Only Darcy caught the truth, all those years later. Darcy, with her entire ardent nature made for soaring and her wounded heart scarred shut against it.
“Oh, God, how awful,” she said. “How unfair to you both.
How could anything else ever measure up, after that?”
How indeed? But we tried. Our whole life together, Peter’s and mine, was spent trying to live up to one enchanted night in the Carolina Low Country that began with a great armful of white hothouse lilacs—rarer in that place and season than diamonds—and ended with a kiss in the dark on the banks of a creek gauzed with gray moss and burning with moonlight.
On the main, we succeeded pretty well, I think. Sporadically, and at what cost only he and I knew, but there was magic in the marriage of Maude Brundage Gascoigne and Peter Williams Chambliss. There always was. Love and magic; I don’t think the austere people in New Hampshire and Maine that I went to live among ever quite forgave us that.
Or, rather, forgave me. In those dark hills they once burned women who made magic. Failing that, they tried other methods of immolation. But I kept the love, and some of the magic too; oh, yes, I did.
Decades later, when the musical
A Chorus Line
became thunderously popular, I was captivated with a bittersweet little ballad from it, “What I Did for Love.” I hummed and sang it, and asked Darcy to buy me the album, and played it all that summer in the cottage at Retreat.
“Really, Grammaude, that’s a harlot’s song,” she teased.
“Well, maybe not a harlot, but a lady who’s definitely been around the block a few times. Not suitable at all for a doyenne. What scandalous thing did you ever do for love? Tell.”
I looked at her, blazing, that summer, in the fire and sun of her own first love. I had no doubt at all about the things she was doing for love, and knew she regretted none of them.
“I
will
tell you, I think,” I said. “Only you. But not yet.
You’re a long way from ready to hear it.”
“Oh, come on. Why not?”
“Because you’re not woman enough yet,” I said.
“And you are?”
“Oh, yes.”
“I will wait,” my red-haired granddaughter said, “with bated breath.” She was laughing at me.
No matter. I would tell her one day, if she turned into the woman I thought she might. There were never any guarantees about that, but she had the raw material for it. If she used what life had dealt her already, I would tell her what I did for love. Of all the women I had ever known in that beautiful place on Penobscot Bay, my granddaughter Darcy Chambliss O’Ryan might, with luck, understand. And understand, too, the power of that love that was born on the banks of Wappoo Creek outside Charleston on a November night in 1922….
The first time I heard his name was when my brother, Kemble, wrote to say he was bringing a Princeton friend home for the Saint Cecilia Ball, and I was to leave the sixteenth dance blank for him.
“Well, he’s got his nerve,” I said to Aurelia, who had brought me the letter at breakfast. I was eating it alone in the kitchen of the old house. My father had already vanished into the autumn swamp with his camera and field notebook, and the dining room had long since been closed off as unheatable and apt to collapse in mid-meal under the centuries-long kiss of dry rot.
“Who got his nerve?” Aurelia said.
“Kemble. He’s bringing some total stranger home for the Saint Cecilia and ordering me to save the sixteenth dance for him. Fat chance.”
Aurelia, gaunt and yellow and gold-toothed and loving, had been born and raised herself in Charleston. She knew as well as any Legaré Street matron or debutante that the sixteenth dance of a Saint Cecilia Ball was reserved by iron tradition for husbands or sweethearts. She also knew Kemble and me as no other living soul did, not even our father, having raised him from toddlerhood and me from infancy after our mother died.
“Like to be a fly on the wall at that dance when you all butt heads,” she said. “That stranger gon’ run all the way back up north, and you ain’t gon’ have nobody to dance that dance with. Prob’ly never will; prob’ly ain’t never gon’ get no husband. Prob’ly live out yo’ life in the swamp.”
Aurelia made no secret of her disapproval at the way my father had raised me, virtually alone in a ramshackle two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old house on a long-barren rice plantation on Wappoo Creek, that connected the Stono River to Charleston Harbor just where the Ashley River ran into it.
It was a lonely place for a child, though I never minded that.
When the first Auguste Gascoigne had cleared the land and planted the rice and built the big house and outbuildings and slave quarters, the swamp forests teemed with wild things that whistled and sang and slithered and screamed and bellowed and splashed; in 1923, when I was seventeen, they still did. But the house had slid gradually into disrepair, and the rice fields that had spawned a great fortune had long since grown over, and the fortune itself had dwindled over the years to barely enough to allow my father, Gus, the last of a long line of Auguste Gascoignes, to feed and clothe and educate Kem and me and pay Aurelia and her husband, Duke, while he immersed himself in the study of the flora and wa-terfowl of the Low Country like a creature with fins and gills himself. From the time I could toddle I followed him into the swamp. It became, for a long time, my passion too.
Our mother, a small, exquisite girl from a great old Charleston family, had died at my birth, thus fulfilling the proph-ecy of her grim-faced father that no good would come of her marriage to the last of the ragtaggle band of Gascoignes, and after that Kemble and I saw
little of our Brundage relatives. I know they sent money for our schooling, and my father dutifully sent Kemble to McCallie and Princeton and me, miserably, to Ashley Hall for what proved to be an extremely short stay. I ran away so many times he eventually gave up and let me stay home with Aurelia and Duke and spend my days in the swamp forest with a net and a notebook or a sketch pad, or in my battered canoe with a waxed paper packet of sandwiches and a warm Coca-Cola, drifting along the secret black surface of Wappoo Creek reading a book. I had learned to read, early and prodigiously, and I absorbed as by osmosis the classical music he listened to in the evenings on the big Capehart, his one major purchase that I can recall, and when he remembered he tutored me in the long summer evenings and the thick, dark winter ones. By the time I was twelve I had read my way through the library at Belleau, which was substantial and ran to whatever had been popular in the succeed-ing ages of the Gascoignes; they could never have been accused of being intellectuals. Going into my teens I knew more of Life with a capital L than virtually any other girl child between the Ashley and Cooper rivers, albeit Life with a decidedly treacly, romantic French accent; no one ever thought to take Balzac and De Maupassant away from me. My father taught me some geography when he remembered, and a great deal of natural history and botany and marine biology, and it never bothered anyone, including me, that until I married I could do no sums at all. Aurelia, who had grown up in the great Brundage town house on Tradd Street until her marriage to Duke, at which time the Brundages sent her with their daughter to Belleau, instructed me in the delicate, vicious catechism of Charleston manners and mores with less mercy than any mother would
have. Kemble taught me to dance. It was not, on the main, a bad education for that time and place.
But Aurelia considered me headed for a cold swamp-bound spinsterhood and my father culpable of virtual child abuse.
I knew few of the chattering flock of Charleston girls who were my peers, and those I did, Ashley Hall classmates and a gaggle of Brundage and Gascoigne cousins, thought I was artless, remote, boring, and tacky in the extreme. Of the boys of Charleston, I knew only my cousins and a few of Kemble’s McCallie friends. They obviously thought the same thing. At seventeen, I had never been out with a boy. I can’t recall minding.
From his first taste of life beyond the river swamp, Kemble knew the twentieth century was his natural habitat. He had dozens of wellborn friends from Mobile to Boston and visited them regularly, learned to play tennis and sail and do the new dances, acquired a taste for gin and cigarettes and politics, and, by the time he was in his third year at Princeton, owned two custom-made suits of evening clothes and several pairs of handmade shoes and a Dunhill cigarette case and lighter. He came home dutifully but briefly a few times a year, had one dinner with our father and me, and spent the other evenings in town with the Brundage young and their flock, looked thoughtfully at me a few times, and left again. Until the autumn I was seventeen, he never brought anyone home with him to Wappoo Creek.
“He got a name?” Aurelia said that morning in the kitchen.
I looked at the letter again. “Peter Chambliss,” I said. “Peter
Williams
Chambliss. Of the Boston, Massachusetts, Chamblisses. Which means less than nothing to me and will no doubt remain so. Who
does Kemble think he is? First he makes Daddy promise to take me to the stupid Saint Cecilia—I don’t think Pa even remembered he belonged to the Society until old Kemble jumped in with his big feet and stirred everything up—and then he sends me a dress. Without even asking. Just assuming it would fit and I’d love it and that I’d go in the first place.”
“Well,” Aurelia said, pushing pancakes at me, “it do fit.
An’ it the prettiest Saint Cecilia dress I ever seen, an’ I seen a lot of ’em, an’ I spec’ you do too love it, if you ain’t too stubborn to say so. An’ you
is
goin’ to the ball. Yo’ daddy know what’s right, even if he do have to be poked up sometimes. I was fixin’ to get on him about it if Kemble hadn’t.
Miss Caroline’s girl goin’ to the Saint Cecilia when the time come, ain’t no two ways about that. Yo’ granma and granpa come out here and git you and take you themselfs, if yo’
daddy don’t. You know that so. Look like you ought to be grateful to Kemble for gittin’ you a dress like that an’ gittin’
you some boy to dance with. If he don’t take care of you, what you think gon’ become of you?”
“Why does anything have to become of me?” I said, cramming pancakes into my mouth. “Nothing’s become of me so far, and I’ve been perfectly happy. If you mean I won’t get married, or whatever, who cares? What’s wrong with staying out here with you and Daddy and…all this? I love this place. I’d rather be here than anywhere else on earth. If you think I want to leave and go live with stupid Buddy L’Engle on Legaré Street, or stupid Tommy Laurence in his stupid
town house
on stupid Church Street, or with stupid Wenty Sterling in Bedon’s Alley…and go to stupid teas and musicales and join the Historic Preservation Society…and have stupid little Charleston children who are cousins to everybody in town—”
“What else you gon’ do?” she said, and her eyes were worried and angry. “You gon’ stay out here with the coons and the gators after me and yo’ daddy is gone, run wild out in them woods till you eighty? Starve to death, fall and break yo’ bones, lie in the swamp alone till you rot?
Who you think gon’ take care of you if you don’t go to them balls and parties and git yo’self a husband?”
“Well, it’s not going to be any stupid Peter
Williams
Chambliss of the Boston Chamblisses,” I snapped. “I’ll wear the dress and I’ll go to the ball, because Daddy says I have to. But I’m not going to dance with any old Yankee Kemble drags home just to save his own face. Don’t think I don’t know why he’s doing it. I won’t dance the sixteenth dance with him or any other boy. I’ll sit on the side and frown at everybody all night. But I will not dance with that damn Yankee.”
“You sounds just like yo’ mama,” Aurelia said, grinning.
“Stubbornest gal I ever did know. Ain’t gon’ go out with no Charleston town boy. Gon’ go out with that boy from out to Wappoo Creek, and she don’t care who say she cain’t.”
“And look where it got her,” I said. I was having no succor from Aurelia or anybody else. Least of all my beautiful, unre-membered, never-forgiven mother.