Authors: Dorothea Benton Frank
I thought that was a pretty witty line for the old girls to chew on but they were definitely chewing on something else.
“Okay,” I said, “let’s have it. He’s an ax murderer?”
“Oh, no, darling,” Aunt Daisy said with the most curious smile. “Yes, he’s married but not exactly. Anyway, we know John really well. He brings students out to the Porgy House all the time. We’ll move you over there tomorrow morning. I’m afraid you’ll be seeing a lot of him.”
“Oh, okay, so that’s not the worst news. But what do you mean he’s not
exactly
married? I saw the ring on his hand.”
“He married a kook!” Aunt Daisy said.
“Hush your mouth! She’s not a kook, she’s sick. She’s in an institution for the criminally insane, Cate. Been there for years. And she’s probably not coming out.”
“Why? What did she do?”
“He won’t talk about it,” Ella said.
“But maybe you can find out!” Aunt Daisy said.
“Good grief!”
“Would you like some more soup?” Ella said.
“Is there anything left in that shaker?” I said. “And maybe I’ll have a piece of that pie.”
Setting:
The Porgy House, the Heyward bedroom.
Director’s Note:
Photos of the Porgy House fireplace, the poker, and wood floors. At the end of this scene, the kitchen table with peanut butter and milk. Dorothy in a nightgown and robe.
Act I
Scene 5
Dorothy:
It was so quiet and remote that living on Folly Beach could be lonely and even frightening sometimes—one night I was convinced there was an intruder in our house.
I said, “DuBose? Are you asleep, DuBose?” I whispered as quietly as I could. Nothing. I poked his shoulder until he stirred.
“Yes. No, not now. I’m awake. What is it?”
“Shhh! There’s someone in the house!”
I guess he decided to humor me because he rolled over, stood up, put on his slippers and his robe and went to see. I heard him padding across the upstairs living room, and Jenifer’s room, and I could hear him on the steps, going downstairs making all the noise he pleased! Was he crazy? He was not even tiptoeing! And then I realized what he was doing. He didn’t want to surprise the robber. If this criminal who sneaked in our house heard him coming, he’d have a chance to run out of the back door. Then no one would get hurt! Brilliant!
I could hear him opening closet doors and closing them shut again. He was going to wake up the whole island! I was holding my breath, listening for any other sounds beside the noisy commotion he was making. I thought I heard breathing but then I realized it was me doing the breathing and I thought well, thank God, because this whole business was enough to give me a darned fatal heart attack.
I heard something else from the kitchen, something muffled. Then there was a slam. The back door. Then it got quiet. I thought, oh no! Now DuBose is dead, bleeding from the head, lying in a pool of his own blood. There was blood everywhere! I knew it!
Now I
had
to hurry downstairs and save my husband. Oh, dear God! Jenifer was upstairs! What if the thug was still in the house? After weighing both sides, I decided to go it alone. There was no reason to wake her up and hide her in the closet, was there? Wouldn’t this monster see her unmade bed and figure out there was someone else in the house?
Wait!
What if he had come to kill us and kidnap her like that Lindbergh baby? Oh, sweet Mother of God! Please pray for us!
I didn’t even stop for my slippers, but I picked up the poker from the upstairs fireplace and sneaked across the floor. It creaked. I cringed, stopping and waiting for a second to see if I could hear anything downstairs. Silence. So I continued toward the steps and made my way down them, as quietly as a palmetto bug.
I could see the warm yellow glow of the overhead light in the kitchen as it cast itself in geometric shards across the floor and out into the room where I stood. My heart was in my throat. I tried to slide along the wall, not breathing, and peeked in the room from the corner of my eye. There was my darling DuBose, sitting at the table eating a sandwich.
“What on earth are you doing?” I said with my hand across my racing heart.
“Eating a peanut butter sandwich and drinking a glass of milk. Can I make something for you?”
“Since when do you eat peanut butter?”
“Since now, I guess. It just seemed appetizing.”
“So, there’s no robber, no killer here to murder us all?”
“Nope. Just a raccoon in the garbage bin outside. We can clean it up in the morning.”
“I’m going back to bed.”
“Are you sure? This is awfully good.”
Men.
Fade to Darkness
The Porgy House
I
t was seven in the morning. I was in the kitchen getting fatter by the minute, bingeing on the sweet mysteries of leftover pecan pie, nearly euphoric from its healing properties. Pecan pies, especially the ones that Ella made, lifted my spirits to such spiraling heights I decided that if I could, I would have a slice every breakfast for the rest of my life. But, my confessor would be glad to know, I was sipping hot coffee with skim milk to compensate for my sins.
The house was dead quiet and I moved around like a little mouse in socks, gliding silently on the lemon wax of Aunt Daisy’s highly polished heart pine floors. To the outside observer it might seem odd for a newly widowed middle-aged woman to sock-skate across her auntie’s floor but it was what I had done as a child on these very same floors and I was home again. Besides, you should never pass up an opportunity to dance.
I put my plate in the dishwasher, careful not to rattle the racks, refilled my mug, and walked gingerly out toward the living-room doors that led to the enormous front deck suspended high over the dunes. From that vantage point, the sweeping water view was so pretty it took my breath away as it always had every single time. Aunt Daisy’s simple deck ranked high among my favorite places anywhere in the world. It filled me with such peace to watch the ocean, dimples glistening and currents moving, demanding my undivided attention, and my undivided attention it would have. This was where I would park myself until Aunt Daisy and Ella were awake.
I had the doorknob firmly in the clasp of my hand. Just then, right before I could turn that doorknob, I swear to you that in that very split
second,
I heard rushing, clomping footsteps overhead, a triple beep, and then Aunt Daisy’s voice.
“Alarm’s off!” she called out.
The woman had eyes in the back of her head. How else could she know that I was about to trip the alarm? Maybe she heard a floorboard make a familiar creak, but could her hearing be
that
good at her age? No. I was more inclined to go with the eyes-in-the-back-of-the-head that she had grown specifically for the difficult and challenging job of raising Patti and me. She was omniscient, like women can be, innately knowing all and seeing all.
“Thanks!” I called back to her. It occurred to me that our world today was pretty darned precarious if my aunt felt she needed an alarm on Folly Beach but that’s how the world had changed. Everyone everywhere was at risk all the time. If it wasn’t Al Qaeda scaring the liver out of you to take a plane to some benign place like Omaha, it was teenagers who’d rob you blind in your own house so they could get high on meth or whatever it was our young druggies of today ingested for sport.
I opened one of the French doors, let myself outside, and stood there, some twenty feet above the Atlantic. I looked around for a moment and then made a beeline to the railing, leaning on it, scanning the beach. It was empty except for a few dog-walkers and runners. The morning fog was disappearing by the minute, giving way to blue skies, and there was no doubt, it was going to be a beautiful day. I counted three container ships out near the horizon. They were fully loaded with heavy cargo and riding low in the water, probably on their way to Germany to deliver BMWs or to parts unknown with whatever we were exporting these days. Gorgeous. South Carolina had certainly come a long way from the days of tall sailing ships carrying cotton, rice, and indigo back to the mother country. Yes, she had. Yet, though those days were centuries ago, the historic images of tall ships were very easy to visualize, highly polished wooden vessels, gleaming brass fittings, stark white sails unfurled, taut, their cheeks filled with easterly wind, keeling and moving briskly across the water . . . there was something romantic about living in a port city. Ports were not stagnant. They were always in motion, engaged in their own particular endless rhythms. Movement was the soul of their very nature and I loved it. I loved the waters of Charleston’s song most especially because she had saved me from despair so many times.
When I was a little girl I spent hours wandering along the edges of this very shore, my sneakers sinking in the soft sand, my footprints filling quickly with the rising tide. It was hypnotic, watching tides roll in to wash the shore with their swirl and froth. The water chased the flocks of tiny sandpipers away, back into the salty air and they landed some twenty feet down the shoreline. Then the water pulled back only to slide in again, over and over, in its own measured time, covering the beach inch by inch, until it reached its high-water mark.
Low tides, most especially after storms, revealed treasures sprinkled along the shore—shells, bits of seaweed, driftwood, and so on. These were the things Patti and I gathered and saved. We held conch shells, whelks really, to the sides of our heads to hear their secrets. We decorated our elaborate sandcastles with moon shells and cockles. With the tips of our fingers, we carefully pried sand dollars from the mud they suckled for nourishment and safety, strung them across the deck railings, and before long the merciless sun bleached them to chalk-white. During the years of a good haul, we suspended our sand dollars from thin satin ribbons and hung them on our Christmas trees. Other times we broke them apart to find the five doves of peace that Aunt Daisy told us were in there. For us, for all of us, Folly Beach was filled with a kind of sacred majesty and in return for our homage she gave us endless rewards.
After our parents died, Patti and I would sit on this very same beach, usually on an old palmetto log that had washed up from another island. Those were terrible days. We’d damn our lives, and try to find a dream for our futures. Dreams eluded us. Blinded by salty tears and wiping runny noses on our sleeves, we would tell each other that there had to be more to life than grief. We would argue with each other, swearing that if there was a god somewhere who actually loved us, then surely he wanted us to be happy, at least some of the time. Where was this god anyway? Strangely absent. So we came to the beach to hide from the world and cry our hearts out or sometimes just to kick the sand or to run like maniacs until we were gasping for breath and our sides ached so badly we doubled over in pain. You might say it was our adolescent version of primal scream therapy. It worked, somewhat, but now I think whatever relief we found, we found only because we had each other to which our fractured hearts could cling. Sometimes we would sit there until it was dark. And Aunt Daisy and Ella would coax us with the sweetest words they knew to please come back inside the house for supper. On occasion, and especially in the early days when our wounds were still fresh, we’d be greeted by the parish priest, sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and having a piece of Ella’s pie. He’d try his best through diplomacy and guilt to talk us into becoming more active in the church, to join CYO—the Catholic Youth Organization—or the Regina Mundi Club. Aunt Daisy would stand behind him, rolling her eyes, and at some point she would say that, well, it all sounded fine but for now seeing us on Sunday was probably all he should expect, but he was welcome to stop by any time he was in the neighborhood. We were so grateful for her understanding that we couldn’t stand one more thing.
I know that all sounds depressing but getting through those first birthdays and Christmases or holidays of any kind without our mom and dad was unbelievably painful. We couldn’t show them our Halloween costumes or share our candy with them. Ever again. We couldn’t make them cards on their birthdays or bring them school projects to admire or pick black-eyed Susans for them in the summer. Ever. We didn’t know how to live without them. We belonged to them. And try as we may have tried to transfer all that longing and need to Aunt Daisy and even Ella, who was around more and more, we were inclined to hide our feelings from them and to make them think we were getting along all right.
We’re just fine!
After all, Aunt Daisy took us in. And we loved her for it.
Besides, Folly Beach wasn’t exactly crawling with therapists who specialized in the treatment of children in those days. Even if it had been, we weren’t the kind of people who paid other people our hard-earned money to listen to our problems and help us understand tragedies that could not be reversed. We were far too pragmatic for that sort of self-indulgence, having been cut from suck-it-up cloth. We learned that you never got used to losing your parents. You just got used to the pain.
I was six and Patti was twelve when our mother died from breast cancer. She was robbed of her life when she was only forty years old. Lila. Beautiful Lila. She always put off going to the doctor for check-ups and so forth, saying she felt perfectly fine. She played tennis all the time and even belonged to a waltz society, which caused Patti and me endless giggling to see her twirling in the wacky dresses she wore. Skirt, skirt, and more skirt! But other than that one embarrassing deviation from our ironclad definition of what normal mothers were supposed to do for a hobby, she was tanned, toned, and fit from head to toe, defying her actual age from every angle. By the time her cancer was discovered it had metastasized to her lymph nodes, liver, and brain.
Patti said our mother’s illness lasted only eight weeks. I don’t remember the timeline. I just know that right after she died, I began to dance, saying I was dancing for her. Dance became the prism through which I looked at my world and the only way I could find it bearable.
It made Patti cry every time I said I was dancing for Momma, but Aunt Daisy and Ella said it was good for me and they wished Patti would dance, too. But Patti preferred to bake. It all started with the Easy-Bake Oven, moved to Toll House cookies, and led to zillion-dollar mega wedding cakes. No one who knew our family in those days would have laid a nickel on the table to bet that how we coped with the deaths of our parents would shape our careers.
When Momma was diagnosed, we began spending more and more time with Aunt Daisy, because Dad had to work.
Our father traveled for a living, so we spent more and more time at Aunt Daisy’s house. He was a pilot for Pan American World Airways and flew all over the world. One night, just two years after we lost our mother, our father died in his sleep of a heart attack. He was in Singapore. I still remember the hullabaloo it was to have his body returned to us and how hysterical Aunt Daisy was with the American embassy and the airlines. They say it took weeks to bring him home. Red tape. So! That’s the short version of what happened to our parents. I still have no memories of either funeral and it’s probably just as well.
I don’t like to think about those days. What’s the point? But Patti and I get mammograms religiously every year and we try to do a lot of cardio and eat heart-healthy meals. Well, most of the time when we’re not eating cake and pecan pie. Or sausage. Or waffles.
Anyway, all that said, from a very early age, we came to the beach to unburden our young souls, to find some kind of comfort in nature and from each other. We were too young to fully comprehend that life goes on and the world doesn’t really care about your personal sorrow. It just kept turning. There was always someone to consider who had less, some poor soul in a worse situation to pray for, and we were constantly told that we should be grateful for what we had. And we
were
grateful, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a struggle to hold ourselves together, keep our grades up, and lopsided smiles on our faces.
I remembered then how the kids in school pitied us and how I hated their pity because it was false. Children are so cruel and when we were labeled as unfair game for the usual bullying, sarcasm, and backstabbing that went on among girls, they ostracized us as weird. They called us The Bummer Sisters behind our backs but we knew it. Who knows? Maybe they thought our situation was contagious or that we could use our loss to some advantage over them. All their mean-spirited childish quarantine really accomplished was to drive Patti and me closer together. Those were the days that Patti became elevated to the status of the ultimate big sister and that poor Aunt Daisy learned what it was like to raise long-eared mules.
Today it was nearly impossible to remember our parents beyond their faces frozen in time in the scrapbooks Aunt Daisy kept and the few pictures we had. It wasn’t like Aunt Daisy didn’t do everything she could to give us a stable and loving home. And when Ella was there, she was an angel to us, helping with homework, listening to us, or cooking something delicious to eat. But it wasn’t the same thing as having our own two healthy parents in our life and we all knew it.
Funny, I didn’t seem to need to dance like crazy to rid myself of the hangover of Addison’s death. An unconscious sock-slide across the floor had seemed perfectly appropriate. The only thing I felt for Addison was seriously pissed off. Maybe I’d simply had enough of death for one lifetime and by the time he took the leap into the next world, I’d certainly had enough of him. The crazy selfish son of a bitch.
Even though it was just forty degrees, I shivered a few times and moved back from the railing to a chair at the table in the sun. Forty degrees in February in New Jersey would be considered a sign of early spring and here it made me have chills if I was in the shade. I took a few more sips of my coffee and thought about Patti up there in the frozen tundra of Alpine and all the misery that came with winter. Black ice. Furnaces that sputtered and failed. Slippery roads. And being so damn cold your teeth clattered if you had to walk across a parking lot. I should call her, I thought, and let her know I’m thinking about her, tell her I love her and rehash my drive down here once more. I wished then that she was here. Last night we had spoken briefly, briefly because I drank two of Ella’s martinis and there was no point in trying to have a real conversation with anyone after that. She knew I was alive and here safely and she was relieved and satisfied. I would call her later. I wasn’t getting up then. I was too comfortable sitting there, my head thrown back in the warmth of the sun, like a lizard. Later on I would retrieve my cell phone from its recharger, plugged in somewhere in the house, somewhere between the vermouth and the olives. Ahem. I would call her later.