Folly Beach (30 page)

“Because we were stupid knuckleheads, that’s why. And we thought Nirvana was out there over the causeway, just waiting for us.”

“You can say that again,” she said. “Meanwhile, Nirvana was right here.”

“It’s the truth.”

The door opened again and Ella came out to join us.

“You girls want hot chocolate or are y’all too old for that?”

“Not too old,” I said. “Too fat.”

“Oh pish!” Ella said. “Remember when I used to make it for you when you were little?”

“Yep,” I said, throwing my arm around her shoulder. “I sure do. Your hot chocolate mended plenty of disappointments and broken hearts.”

“Remember you used to put candy canes in it at Christmas?” Patti said.

“Only if you were
good,
” Ella said, smiling.

“We were
always
good around Christmas,” I said.

“That’s why you only got candy canes in
December
!” Ella said with a chuckle.

“I
knew
there was a reason,” Patti said.

“Come on, let’s go back inside,” I said, yawning. “It’s late and I’m
completely
exhausted from last night.”

“Me too,” Ella said. “Sleep sounds like a good idea.”

“Well, Ella, it’s so good to see you,” Patti said, giving her a hug. “I missed you.”

“I missed you, too, girl. You are a sight for sore eyes.”

I gave Ella a parting hug, picked up the Diet Cokes, and held the elevator for Patti.

Back at the Porgy House it was as dark as pitch and maneuvering the uneven ground with Patti’s luggage was a bit of a minefield.

“Don’t you have a porch light?” Patti said.

“Right? You’re not the first person to make that remark. John said he was going to get me one and then we never got around to it. Well, so far.”

I opened the door and flipped on the light switch, illuminating the exhibition room and my piano. Patti stepped inside, put her bags down, and looked around. I went back to the kitchen and turned on the light there, too, and in the back bedroom.

“Holy cow,” Patti said. “This is a little weird. All this stuff?”

“It grows on you. You want a Diet Coke?” I said. “Come see the kitchen.”

“Coming!” Patti walked right in and the first thing she did was open the oven door to inspect the insides. “Cate?”

“Wild, isn’t it?”

“Totally. Ain’t no way I’m leaving here without baking something in
this
baby.”

“Be my guest,” I said. I held a Diet Coke can in one hand and a cold bottle of white wine in the other. “Your call.”

“Just gimme all the grapes and nobody gets hurt,” she said.

I giggled and began the process of twisting out the cork.

“I’m good for about twenty minutes and then I am going to pass out facedown like a starfish.” The cork came out with a loud
pop!
“Love that sound!”

“Me too,” she said. “You have to be dead on your feet.”

“Pretty much,” I said, handing her a glass. “Here. Cheers!”

“Yeah, here’s to Aunt Daisy getting the hell out of that place in one piece pronto.”

“I’ll drink to that,” I said and we hoisted our glasses again. “Pretty scary, right?”

“Scary as hell,” she said.

“And here’s what’s worrying me . . .”

I told Patti that besides the small concerns I had about Aunt Daisy’s business, which she agreed to help me look into the next day, I was becoming more and more worried about her estate. Did she have a will, an executor, a plan? What would become of Ella if she went first and how did Aunt Daisy want her own eventual demise to be handled?

“I mean, those two operate like they’re thirty-five,” I said.

“True but I can’t imagine this world without Aunt Daisy in it,” Patti said.

“Me too,” I said. “But either we’re going to bury her or she’s going to bury us.”

“Look, she’s a very smart woman. I’ll bet she’s got a will and an executor and she probably has even picked out the outfit, including a hat and gloves.”

“Maybe. I hope you’re right.”

“I want everyone to have cake and champagne at my funeral,” she said. “Lots of lovely cake!”

“Does Mark know this? I mean, I’ll try to remember it but I don’t plan on going anywhere until I’m two hundred years old and I don’t know how good my memory will be then.”

“Probably best if I write it down somewhere, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, we’re hilarious. So give me the short version of what’s happening with lover boy.”

“He’s wonderful.”

“Not that short. Elaborate, please?”

“He’s trying to turn me into a playwright.”

“Now
there’s
a practical career. Is he nuts?”

“Right? Well, look, I’m also getting more involved with Aunt Daisy’s business so I can pay the rent when I rent something. When she decides to pay me, that is. Anyway, writing a play is just an old dream of mine. And I came up with this idea.”

“Let’s hear,” Patti said and sat down at the kitchen table.

“So, I’m living here in Dorothy Heyward’s house . . .”

“Why don’t you refer to it as Dorothy and DuBose’s house?”

“I’ll get to that. Anyway, John says
you know, you really should go down to the historical society and read all her papers.
So I did.”

“And you found what? Are you falling asleep?”

“No, actually, I’m getting a second wind here. Probably the sugar in the wine. Who knows? Anyway, what I found in all those boxes and files were lots and lots of contradictions.”

She refilled my glass and hers. I pulled a box of white cheddar Cheez-Its from the pantry closet, opening it and dumping a pile of them on a paper towel.

“God, I love these things,” she said, eating a handful.

“Me too. In my old life we would’ve been picking these out of a Steuben bowl.”

“And they wouldn’t taste as good, either. Okay, gimme some contradictions.”

“Well, there are all these recipes for soups and stews for a nickel a serving and two cents a serving.”

“So they were broke? Writers starve. Everybody knows that.”

“Yeah, but wait. When they got married, DuBose was living with his
mother
. And she was
quite
the force to deal with, too.”

“That couldn’t have been any fun for Dorothy. I mean, a married woman needs her own house.”

“Exactly. One too many hens in the henhouse. So, listen to this. The first thing they do is build the mother a house on St. Michael’s Alley and then they build themselves this gorgeous Federal-style house in North Carolina on ten acres or more—I can’t remember exactly—but they had a writer’s cabin in the yard and a little bridge over a stream and these huge fieldstone fireplaces. It was really something.”

“So where’d they get the money for all that? We go from two-cent soup to St. Michael’s Alley and the glam life?”

“Exactly! My theory is that Dorothy was loaded. Look, her parents were dead so she inherited whatever they had.
And
she went to boarding school in Washington, not cheap, and later she studied at Columbia University and Radcliffe College, which were also no bargains.”

“Well, somebody had to pay for all of that.”

“Right? So she came from money. He dropped out of school and worked some pretty low-rent jobs to try and help his mother put food on the table. I mean, DuBose and his mother and sister were so poor that his mother took in sewing and rented rooms but she also did some other pretty demeaning things, too.”

“Oh, please tell me that she shook her tail feathers in one of those seedy bars up by the navy base?”

“You’re terrible. No, she stood in the lobby of the Francis Marion Hotel and recited little rhymes in Gullah, hoping the tourists would give her a dime or a quarter.”

“Wow. That’s like being a beggar.”

“No. That
is
being a beggar. Anyway, DuBose had all these lofty ideas about living his life as a poet . . .”

“While his mother is killing herself to pay for the gruel.”

“Yep! So, he’s going to make a living as a poet . . .”

“Now we’re really talking two-cent soups.”

“Exactly. I mean, DuBose knew how to be a little snob but he
really
didn’t want to be poor. So, he struggled with the idea of a literary career, which he considered appropriate for a gentleman of his highfalutin background, versus what he considered selling out and writing something more commercial. Dorothy was the perfect solution.”

“Because she arrived on the scene with deep pockets?”

“Yes. And she was already a commercial success as a playwright when they met. DuBose Heyward didn’t have the first clue about how to adapt
Porgy
the book to the stage. Dorothy did it.”

“You know, it’s so funny, you never even hear her name. I always thought DuBose was the creative genius.”

“Well, to give the devil his due, he
was
the one who had the very original point of view about the whole Gullah world that shaped the story of
Porgy and Bess
. I mean, DuBose took the accepted view at the time, which was that the African Americans were shiftless and lazy and sat around all day just waiting to please Massah, you know, Al Jolson in blackface, the whole minstrel thing?”

“I’m with you. Heck, Cate, it was almost that bad when
we
were growing up.”

“Not with everyone. I mean, look at Ella and Aunt Daisy.”

“What? You don’t remember because you were really little but I remember that Daddy was more upset about Ella’s complexion than he was with what went on between them.”

“Come on.”

“True.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. How stupid.”

“That’s right.”

“That old skunk! All right, well anyway, DuBose turned the stuffy old Charlestonians on their ears when he described the black world as highly desirable, even enviable. He was completely enthralled by their passion for living, for religion, for love . . .”

“I’ll bet that caused some talk around the old Yacht Club.”

“Don’t you know it? Well, from what I can gather, people from other places like Boston and New York thought he was avant-garde, but people here didn’t understand what he saw in Gullah life that was worth writing about. So, it’s safe to say that he was controversial.”

“You got a picture of him?”

“Yeah, a bunch. In fact, there’s one in the front room. Come on, I’ll show you and then let’s call it a night. I’ll help you take your stuff upstairs.”

We put our glasses in the sink and rinsed them.

“What’s this room?” Patti said.

“That bedroom? Oh, that’s where their help slept and supposedly that’s the desk he used to write
Mamba’s Daughters
.”

“Humph.”

“Yeah, that’s what I say, too. Come in here and look at this.”

I turned on the extra lights in the front room and turned out the lights behind us and pointed to a picture of DuBose with George and Ira Gershwin.

“That’s him,” I said.

“He looks like a total wimp,” Patti said.

“Well, there
was
talk . . .”

“That what? He was gay?”

“There was that rumor but I don’t think so. I think he was just a gold-digging, self-promoting, opportunistic, arrogant ass and also a total wimp.”

“Oh! That’s it? But not gay.”

“I don’t think so. But who knows?”

“Who cares?” Patti said.

“Not me.”

“But you have to wonder what she
saw
in him?”

“That’s easy. He had a name. And he
belonged
somewhere. She was as smart as a whip, an orphaned vagabond, and she wanted a life in the theater on the other side of the footlights.”

“Like you?”

“No, she was totally amazing. I’m just a sniveling novice. But you see, DuBose could give her all of that. But here’s the part I’ll never understand.”

“What?”

“She adored him. She absolutely adored him.”

“She must have. Aunt Daisy always said there was a lid for every pot. Gershwin died young, didn’t he?”

“Yeah, very. Thirty-eight. So did DuBose.”

“Really? How old?”

“Fifty-five. Massive heart attack.”