Sweetwater Creek (24 page)

“You look like you’re about to head out to shoot grouse,” Lulu said, grinning. “Where in the name of God did you get that outfit?”

“As a matter of fact, I did wear it out to shoot grouse once upon a time,” her grandmother said. “It’s what a lady used to wear on one of the big autumn hunts. You should have seen the getup your grandfather wore. He had shooting knickers, no less. I thought this would be appropriate for an afternoon in the country with the world’s best hunting dogs. Or so Rhett tells me.”

She gestured to Leland, whose arm she had been holding and he unfolded a little camp chair and set it on the blanket, and lowered her into it. She nodded and he went back across the driveway and lawn to sit in a bulbous black car that shone in the sun like ebony.

“I see you came in the Rolls,” Lulu grinned. “I think a simple Mercedes SUV might have sufficed.”

“Why have it if you don’t use it?” her grandmother said. “Nobody else does but me. I love feeling like the old Queen Mum opening a parish fair. Is that gorgeous creature beside Emily one of the Boykins? I hope these babies will grow up to look just like him.”

She gestured at Elvis and the puppies. Elvis cocked his head and looked at her, and then broke into a tongue-lolling grin and came over and laid his head on her knees.

“That’s Elvis,” Emily said, pride surging through her at her dog in the sun. “He’s my own dog. He doesn’t hunt, but he’s out of the same stock as all our Boykins, and they’re a dream to train and hunt with. We think Elvis is smarter than any of the rest of them, though.”

“Well, he sure knows how to butter up an old lady,” Mrs. Foxworth said, stroking Elvis’s curly ears. “Oh, Lord, but Bradley would have loved this dog. He always said spaniels made the best flushing dogs. He always had English water spaniels, but I think he’d have changed his mind if he’d seen these.”

“What on earth are you doing out here?” Lulu said. “Not that I don’t love having you. But it’s been how long since you left Maybud? Ten, fifteen years?”

“Don’t be silly. I go shopping and get my hair done regularly,” Mrs. Foxworth said. “I came to see what’s up with you. You haven’t called in weeks, and when I call you I only get that chirping answering machine.”

Lulu did not reply, and Emily looked at her. Hadn’t she said that she called her mother and grandmother regularly? Why would she lie about it?

“Come on up and see the apartment,” Lulu said, taking her grandmother’s arm. “I’ll make us some tea. I still have some of the Jacksons of Piccadilly stuff Mother brought, and a tin of those English tea biscuits that taste like toilet paper.”

In the afternoon-dim cave of the little apartment Mrs. Foxworth took off the hat and sailed it onto Lulu’s bed and settled herself onto the sofa. The thick silver hair that might have been, in the gloom, Lulu’s hair, was swept back into a chignon this afternoon to accommodate the hat, but the tissue-paper wrinkles of her tanned skin and the lance of the blue eyes and the scarlet gash of lipstick were the same as they had been the night of her birthday party. She looked around the room and nodded in approval.

“It’s very nice,” she said. “Very Mediterranean, very…ascetic. When your father said you were going to live over a barn my heart sank, and when your mother left leading a caravan of chic, I feared the worst. But this is…very like you. I’ll like remembering you here.”

“Well, I hope it’s not the last time you visit,” Lulu said, pouring out tea, with the same grace she had done at the old lady’s party.

“It probably will be,” Mrs. Foxworth said. “You know how I dislike social visits. But as you will not visit me or answer phone calls, I had little choice. Really, Lulu. Your mother says you’re not talking to her, either, nor to your father. She’s driving me crazy with it: ‘What about Thanksgiving? Or Christmas? What about the Season? What will I tell people?’

“Tell them she’s become a novitiate at a convent, I told her. Or that she’s contracted Hansen’s disease and is in need of seclusion. Maybelle has no idea on earth what Hansen’s disease is, but you’d think I’d suggested she tell people you have gonorrhea.”

“What is it?” Emily said, fascinated.

“Leprosy. I can’t think people really get it anymore. But lepers used to hide away because it disfigured them so. Anyway, Lulu, I told her I’d find out if anything was wrong, just to get her out of my hair—and here I am. So you may as well level, toots. I won’t tattle on you, and I won’t nag you anymore, but I do have to know if anything is wrong. Surely you can see that.”

Lulu was silent a long time, stirring her tea but not tasting it. She looked, not at her grandmother, but into middle distance. Finally she sighed and put the teacup down.

“I should have called. I’m sorry,” she said. “There really isn’t anything wrong. Just the opposite, in fact. I’m just so
happy
to be here, Grand. The dogs, and the marshes and the river and the woods, and music, and reading, and Emily—it’s been so long since I could just…
be
. I guess I felt that calling home would be to…I don’t know, invoke that awful chaos I was in when I left school. I couldn’t handle that now, Grand. I couldn’t take the holidays at home; I couldn’t take Mother right now. You know she’d have me out at all those parties before I could say boo, and I just cannot do it. The Season can wait. God knows there’s always another one. Maybe I’ll think about it after New Year’s….”

“I don’t blame you about the accursed Season, or about your mother, either, though to be fair she isn’t trying to be a butt. It just comes naturally. She has lived all her life in the shadow of the goddamned Seasons, and the thought that you might do her out of one—well, I’m being too harsh. She does love you, and your father does, too. They’re terribly proud of you.

“But I’m worried too. It’s almost as if you’re hiding out here. I wish I knew from what. I miss you. I need at least to talk to you every now and then. If something is wrong I can help, you know; don’t forget that. I’ll make you a deal. I’ll keep your mother off your back if you’ll keep in touch. Try to sort yourself out, Lulu. You have to come home sometime.”

After the old lady had kissed them both and been driven away, Lulu and Emily sat silently in the apartment, watching dusk put blue fingers across the lawn.

Lulu spoke first. Emily did not think she had ever heard such desolation in a voice.

“Grand’s right, of course,” she said dully. “I have to go home sometime. I can’t just stay here forever.”

“Maybe you ought to tell her, you know, about all that stuff,” Emily said. “You know she wouldn’t judge you. She probably could help, like she said.”

“No,” Lulu said fiercely. “There’s got to be one person who thinks I’m perfect. I need that. And I’m not sure she’d believe me, anyway. I tried to tell Mother and Daddy that I’m an addict, that I have to stay away from any place there’s drinking. Mother said I was just tired and that I’d be fine as soon as I had some rest. I can’t be in my family, and I sure can’t worm my way into yours.”

“Why not?” Emily said, tasting tears. “You
can
be in our family. You already are.”

“Because it really isn’t my world,” Lulu said. “I’ve just been pretending that it was. I’d give anything to switch, but…I can’t. People can’t. If I stay here very long I’ll end up hurting somebody. I always do. I’ve already hurt Jenny….”

“No, you haven’t! Daddy says she’s happy as a lark, you heard him. Lulu, please at least stay through Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s. I can’t do those by myself anymore. I really can’t. And besides, New Year’s Day is my birthday.”

Lulu looked up at her, and smiled slowly.

“Okay,” she said. “Not until then.”

Emily would always remember the long, honeyed slide of that autumn into winter. If there had been Lowcountry falls as dreaming-perfect as this one, they had not occurred in her lifetime. Even the adults seemed to notice.

“Nicest fall I can remember,” Walter said at dinner on an October night when the moon rode high like a white galleon over the river and the stars bloomed huge and hung low.

Each day was so perfect that it seemed there could never be another one, and then there was. The great seas of spartina sweeping away to the line of dark trees at the horizon, ordinarily the color of an old lion’s hide, were still as green in the beneficent sun as the little emerald lizards of the Lowcountry. They rippled gently in the small tidal winds off the sea, smelling of warm salt and sea grapes and flowers from unknown faraway shores. The skies were a tender, cloudless blue, almost indigo at noon, and the small citizens of the marsh and river and creek lingered, splashing and swishing and chirping and rustling. None seemed in a hurry to winter down. The creek banks and lowlying branches of the live oaks were festooned with big, drowsy snakes and turtles; whitetails whisked in the far-off hummocks, wood ibises and wood storks and ospreys and an occasional eagle circled lazily, riding the warm thermals. Only the dolphins were gone, cleaving more firmly to their internal imperative than the lure of the still-rich creek water.

“What do they know?” Lulu said once, on a lazy afternoon with Emily and Elvis and apples and cheese beside Sweetwater Creek.

“Maybe they’re just dumb,” Emily said, poking a horribly snoring Elvis with her bare toe. He started up and looked reproachfully at her, then settled back down into sleep.

“They’re the smartest things with fins I ever saw,” Lulu said. “They know something we don’t.”

Both Walter and Cleta endorsed this theory.

“Last time I saw weather like this was the fall right after Hugo,” Walter said. “Thank God we’re past the hurricane season.”

“This weather mean a bad winter coming,” Cleta said ominously on one of the few mornings Emily saw her at the big house. “Tricks all the critters and the flowers into staying late and then whups ’em with black ice. I seen it before.”

But to Emily, drunk on sweet air and sun, the autumn was simply magical. Within the moat, Sweetwater seemed to dream under a spell.

Even crossing the moat was easier in this weather, almost heady. To charge across it and out into the green world in the red BMW was to start out on crusades, harness jingling with gold and silver, pennons flying, still untattered. Two or three times a week Lulu took Elvis and her for sweeps across the marsh country, bouncing along pitted hardtop and dirt roads that were often empty of other traffic, going nowhere except where the road led them. They would come home around dusk, and only when they crossed the drawbridge back to Sweetwater did Emily realize that she had, ever so slightly, been clenching her muscles.

Toward the end of October Lulu took Emily into Charleston proper. Emily was only able to do this if Lulu put the top up. They rattled over the cobbles and bricks of the old neighborhoods south of Broad, and Emily could look up at the narrow, beautiful old single houses lining the streets, the colors of soft heat, without the hairs on her arms prickling with danger. Lulu knew all of them. She would tell Emily stories of the family that lived in this house or that, would point out where she had played in walled gardens and gone to kindergarten and gone to her first cotillion, and received her first kiss.

“Boy, did
that
start something,” she said ruefully. “And to think it was only fat, freckled Austin Cavanaugh, when we were playing spin the bottle.”

Sometimes she tapped the horn and waved to people on the street, and they would stare and then wave back. Emily, scrunching down as far as she could into the leather seat, saw surprise and speculation bloom on their faces.

“Why do you honk at every single soul we pass?” she said pettishly. “They stare at us like we’re ghosts or something.”

“Well, I’m kin to most of them,” Lulu said lazily. “And then I like to kind of show the flag every now and then, let everybody know I’m still alive and well. They’ll tell Mother they saw me and I looked well, and that’ll keep her off my back for another week or so.”

“They’ll wonder who I am,” Emily said.

“Not when you’re hunched down there on the floor, they won’t. They can’t see you,” Lulu grinned. “But they’ll wonder whose absolutely gorgeous dog that is with me, and sooner or later they’ll be out at the farm wanting dogs of their own. These are not just idle trips, Emmybelle. They’re PR.”

On one of these excursions Lulu took Emily down King Street. For hours they wandered, Elvis heeling perfectly, staring into one fabled shop after another. All the shops seemed alike to Emily, gold and silver and thin, translucent porcelains gleaming in cavelike gloom. And except for the tourists, with their cameras and guidebooks and fatigue-dulled stares, all the people on the street looked like Lulu. It was a fairy-tale street. Emily thought she would never walk down it again. It intimidated at every turn.

Lulu dragged Emily into one of the small, dark shops, where rich fabrics glowed and fabulous shoes lined the walls and cases of jewelry smote the eye, and introduced her to a tall, thin woman who looked to Emily like an elegant wood stork.

“Helen, this is my friend Emily Parmenter,” Lulu said. “Emily, Helen Mills. She’s been keeping the Foxworth women glamorous for years. Helen, I want to get an evening dress for Emily, something she’ll wear for years and still look elegant.”

The stork’s appraising eyes measured Emily, and she smiled.

“I think we can find something,” she said. “She isn’t very tall, but we can camouflage that. And her coloring is lovely. Let me see.”

She disappeared into the back of the cave and came out with an armful of Arabian Nights formalwear. She hung them in a curtained dressing cubicle and said, “Try them on, dear, and let’s see which works best for you.”

Emily started to back away, but a level stare from Lulu stopped her. Meekly she slunk into the cubicle and wriggled into dress after dress. All were exquisite, as formidable as medieval armor. In the mirror Emily resembled no one she had ever seen in any of them.

Eventually they left the shop with a silky hanging bag holding a moss-green velvet sheath with long sleeves and a low-cut back. It fit Emily almost perfectly except for the length, and transformed her into one of the women she had imagined she would see at old Mrs. Foxworth’s party. She disliked the dress; it had been Lulu’s choice.