Why was it always about money with him?
“No, it’s not, but they say they can show that people who go through rehab in a residential environment instead of a hospital have a higher chance of staying clean and sober. And to be honest, what’s money for anyway?”
“I’d just like to see a return on my investment this time. She is still the mother of my children.”
“Yes, that she is.”
“I keep telling myself that.” He was quiet again. “Can I just say something terrible and you won’t hold it against me?”
I could see that Trip was getting worked up because now he was standing up straight and had jammed his hands deep into his pockets.
“Of course!”
“Why didn’t Mother stop me from marrying her? Why couldn’t she have done that one thing for me?”
“Frances Mae was as pregnant as a Christmas tree, you might recall, and you were hell-bent and determined to make her your wife.”
“Yeah, but couldn’t Millie have mixed up some potion and slipped it in her tea to, you know . . .”
“Cause her to lose the baby? You’re kidding, right?”
“No, I’m not kidding.”
“You’ve heard the expression ‘water over the dam’? I mean, I do remember Mother considering killing Frances Mae with her bare hands now and then, but none of us would ever do anything to harm an unborn child. Not even Mother, and especially not Millie. Anyway, what’s the point of thinking about that now, four children and twenty years later?”
“Because that one decision, that one lousy decision to marry her and bring Amelia into the world, led to this moment.”
“I happen to be a fan of Amelia,” I said.
“Oh, no! So am I! Aw, hell! Maybe I was never the right person for Frances Mae.”
“Back then, you thought you were in love with her, but now? You have to wonder who would be the right person for Frances Mae.”
“Truly. But I thought I loved her. You’re right about that.”
As it turned out, Trip had actually done all the things we talked about, down to the last letter. At least he made a noble attempt. He informed Frances Mae that she had to go to Promises immediately. He also told her that she must accept the separation agreement he was offering her and give him full custody of the girls, and that she would be well advised not to drive her car. Trip told her the highway patrol of the entire state of South Carolina was on the lookout for her Expedition, which he had paid to repair to the tune of five thousand dollars.
He said, “And oh, by the way, you don’t sign the papers and give me the girls? No more money. You can go get a job.”
She called him every name in the book and slammed the phone in his ear. He called her back a million times, and each time, his hearing was compromised by more screaming and another slam.
“So you want to know what really kills me? I mean, this is the great-granddaddy booger of ’em all.”
“Let’s hear it!”
“So the phone was quiet for about ten minutes and then she called me back. She said, ‘Trip? Whether you like it or not we are still a family. I’m signing nothing! The girls can go stay with you and your whore and I’ll consider going to rehab and if I go I’ll try. Really try. But when I come home I want you to come back to me or I will come to you and I want that whore out of our house!’ I was like, you’re kidding, right? Our house? This is some bullshit, right? And guess what?”
“What?”
“She’s not kidding.”
“Holy God, and that’s a prayer. She’s delusional. She’s completely crazy.”
“Crazy like a fox. She just wants to ruin my life. She can’t stand to see me happy.”
“Who knows what goes on in some people’s heads, you know? Maybe she does still love you, Trip. Maybe she does.”
“Hard to fathom.”
“Listen, girls are much harder to raise than boys. But you have me, you have Rusty, and guess what? You have Eric, too. Trip, engage all the children. You know what I mean? This is a family problem and we should all take a part in the process.”
“Well, at least summer is almost here and we do have the pool. That should appeal to them.”
“Exactly! Go hire a housekeeper who can drive! She can take the girls back and forth to classes for the next few weeks and then school will be out. We’ll get Chloe organized with a summer camp that picks her up and drops her off every day. And I’ll help Rusty figure out what to do with Belle and Linnie. Amelia’s probably going to work. Don’t worry! In the end I think you’ll see that it was worth all the effort. I really do, Trip. And it’s the right thing to do.”
“So you think that if I just throw money and more money at this, it will solve the problem?”
“No, I think that if you involve yourself in their lives a little more during this unfortunate time, they will love you for it.”
Trip looked at me finally with his lopsided grin and said, “Okay, Miss Lavinia, got it!”
Maybe truth had soaked through the granite of his thick skull.
The next morning before eight, I was greeted by Matthew Strickland, not off duty and looking very stern.
“Matthew! What a surprise to see you so early in the morning. Come in, come in. Would you like coffee? Is everything all right?”
“Coffee would be great,” he said, and stepped into the kitchen. “I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for your family and especially for your brother.”
“What? Are the girls okay?”
“Oh, yeah, they’re fine. But I’m gonna have to lock up Frances Mae this time for sure.”
“Oh, dear God! What has she done?”
“Well, you’re not going to believe this and I’m not rightly sure how she managed it, but she got herself a ladder and some spray paint and went about defacing private property. You know that spot up on 17 South where you make the left to go on down to Savannah?”
“Come on, Matthew. I’m aging here! Give me the details. And how are you sure it’s her?”
“Because she wrote all over the billboards at the 17 cutoff. Right up there as pretty as can be she wrote, ‘Tell Trip Wimbley to go home to his family!’ And on another one about one hundred feet down the road she wrote, ‘Rusty is a f-ing whore!’ Big red letters . . .”
I stood there holding his mug, trying to suppress some massive giggles and thinking as fast as I could.
“Wow. And that’s it, I hope? Do you take cream?”
“Yeah, just a little. That’s it so far. Who knows what the day will bring? Listen, Caroline, you know how I feel about you and your family, but we just can’t let this woman go running wild all over the countryside.”
“Don’t worry!” I said. “She’s all done.”
I told Matthew that we actually had a plan in place and that if Frances Mae went to the pokey at this point, it would throw a considerable wrench in the works. He listened carefully and then he smiled at me.
“Caroline? It seems to me that y’all could take care of this unfortunate incident if Trip will pay for the cleanup and if y’all get her out of town in the next couple of days. I don’t like the idea of locking up Frances Mae. It’s ugly and it’s embarrassing.”
“You darling man! Are you hungry?”
“I’m always hungry when I’m around you.”
“Jeez, Matthew! I meant, would you like some toast? I was going to make some for myself.”
“That would be good, too.”
So Matthew consumed four pieces of lightly browned toast with a mighty gusto, spread with butter and a new mixed-berry jam that Miss Sweetie was thinking we should produce.
“I like this,” he said. “It reminds me of something my grandmother used to make.”
“Ah, Matthew! Why can’t all men be like you?”
The minute Matthew was out of the door I dialed Trip’s cell and told him what Frances Mae had done.
“That’s it! That’s the final straw!”
Five minutes later he called me bac
k.
“Okay, are you playing bridge this afternoon? What I mean is this: Is it okay for me to have a meeting with Frances Mae and my lawyer in the living room around four? I’ll have the papers.”
“Of course. I’ll bake a cake.”
“Very funny.”
Millie arrived to find me doubled over in laughter. She closed the door behind her and said, “All right now. Tell me what’s so funny.”
“Oh, my! Guess what my sister-in-law did now?”
I told her and Millie’s eyes grew wide. She began to laugh with such abandon that she bent over and slapped her thighs.
“She did what now?”
“Oh! Can’t you see her up on a ladder with her big fat butt hanging out of some tacky little dress?”
“Oh, Lawsamercy! This ain’t funny! This is terrible!”
“I know!”
And then we laughed all over again until tears spilled down our cheeks.
“I told Trip I’d bake a cake.”
“Shoot! I’ll make that cake. This might be your house, but this is my kitchen!”
I knew at once that Millie was going to reach into her bag of tricks and throw a little voodoo in the pans.
“Millie? What are you planning on?”
“Let’s just say that my pound cake will make Frances Mae agreeable. Look, I want that woman on a plane to California today! Don’t you?”
“I’ll say!”
“And I had a little session with Oya last night.”
Oya was her favorite goddess.
“And?”
“And I think our Eric got himself a woman.”
“Is this a good thing?”
“He ain’t gone marry her.”
“Then I shouldn’t be concerned about somebody stealing my baby’s heart?”
“Nope. Not unless you think you got some other cause for worry.”
That satisfied me for the time being. I would simply ask Eric and I would see what he said. He’d had lots of girlfriends before and they were uniformly benign. But he was my only child and I wanted to know what kind of company he was keeping.
“Well, thanks, Millie. I feel much better. I gotta go see Miss Sweetie for a couple of hours. I’ll be on my cell.”
“Humph. Go do what you have to do. I’ll call you if I need you.”
“Okay.”
I took my purse and left. Then I took ten steps, turned around, came back, and opened the door. Millie was standing there.
“What?”
“I still can’t believe Frances Mae really did that!”
Millie was shaking her head and grinning as wide as she could. “Gone out of here, girl! I got work to do!”
Miss Sweetie’s plantation wasn’t too far from ours, just up the road near Green Pond. Her house was even older than ours and her land had been in her deceased husband’s family since the mideighteenth century. Unlike our family, who bequeathed Tall Pines to women in the family, hers was passed down through the male line. I often wondered if other members of her family would want it when Miss Sweetie went home to heaven, but a thousand acres wasn’t something you just took on without a lot of thought. The maintenance alone required very deep pockets and an excellent sense of humor. The bad news was that like Tall Pines, Magnolia Point was a money pit. The good news was that Magnolia Point smelled like heaven when the strawberries were in bloom. As you might guess, instead of an avenue of oaks, Miss Sweetie had an avenue of one hundred or more enormous magnolias that led up to the front of her astoundingly beautiful and historic Georgian home, whose scale was nothing if not grand.
Black-lacquered shutters were hung all across the front portico, ready to close and latch in case of a hurricane. The massive ancient walls were constructed of small handmade bricks and ranged in color from the palest pink to deep maroon, flecked from time and moss. The large thick panes of glass were warped with age, filled with tiny bubbles and halos. While I suspected they were not original, they looked as old as anything I had ever seen in downtown Charleston. Glass had always been interesting to me, the way it continued to shift and reshape as it aged. Richard and I had owned a small collection of handblown vases and objects. I always loved the idea that they might be alive in some way because they literally held the breath of the artist and because they were always moving and changing. I had left them all with him, and looking at Miss Sweetie’s windows reminded me that I missed them. And then it hit me. Life had become a continuum of leaving people, innocence, and belongings behind and moving on to something new that wasn’t always necessarily better. First, it was my father, then it was my childhood, a childhood shrouded in grief, propped up in the company of strangers in a boarding school. Then I left Charleston, Mother, and Trip to find New York and Richard and to bring Eric to the world stage, only to renounce Richard and the life we had there to come back to find Mother and Trip and to stand by him while we said good-bye to Mother, and then Frances Mae began her wretched downward spiral. And here I stood at Miss Sweetie’s door, reaching out for the door handle, feeling suddenly blue, wondering how many more exits were in my future.
“Snap out of it, Caroline!” I said to myself out loud, and decided instead of just walking in, I would ring the doorbell.
6
Miss Sweetie
CHILD? LOOK AT YOU! COME on in and let me fix you something cool to drink!”
After a prolonged wait, to my great surprise, Miss Sweetie answered her own door. This was unusual. She had a houseman, Clyde, who had worked for her from the days before she had married Mr. Moultrie, who had long since gone to that great big strawberry field forever. Clyde was almost completely deaf, as old as Methuselah, crooked with age, and, more often than not, could be found somewhere nodding off in a chair.
“Thanks! Where’s Clyde?”
“Law! He’s gonna have his ninety-sixth birthday this weekend! Isn’t that just marvelous?”
“Wow. Ninety-six. How do you celebrate that?”
“All his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren are coming to see him from all over the country. They’re going to have a big family reunion.”
“Is he working today? I’d like to wish him a happy birthday.”
“Is he working? Well, he’s working but not with the same fervor he had even last week,” Miss Sweetie said, and then whispered, “I’m glad his family’s coming. He’s really slowing down. You know . . .”
“This could be the last live performance?”
“Hush! Slow or not slow, he’s been a part of this place for so long, I don’t know what I’d do without him! Follow me. He’s in the butler’s pantry polishing silver. That’s about all he can do these days besides answer the door, and that’s only when he can hear it, poor thing.”
Mr. Clyde’s length of employment was not unusual. All across the South, old plantations and large properties were peppered with an ancient population tending the gardens, feeding the animals, ironing flat linens like napkins and pillowcases, and, like Mr. Clyde, polishing silver. Historically, these small armies of men and women had worked for cash, so that when retirement age rolled around, the Social Security money they could collect was not enough to sustain even a marginal lifestyle. So they continued to work as long as life and limb cooperated, insisting that work guaranteed their longevity. Families like ours and like Miss Sweetie’s never downsized and moved to condos in Boca. Sell the blood-soaked land our ancestors had died to protect? Never in a million years! We stayed where we were born until we drew our last breath, making sure that our heirs swore the same fealty to the cause.
Mr. Clyde looked up from the sink when I entered the pantry and he smiled to see me. Amazingly, he still had a full head of white curly hair, which he wore cut close to his scalp. Because silver polish was deadly to remove from clothing, he wore old-fashioned, blue cotton sleeve protectors that covered his arms from his biceps to his wrists. A black canvas apron covered the front of his shirt, tie, and trousers. His wing tips shone like melting licorice and his black-striped ne
cktie was knotted in a full Windsor. I had never seen him without a tie in all my entire life. Mr. Clyde was buffing a small silver tray with an unhurried vengeance and a chamois cloth.
“Well, good morning, Miss Caroline! How are you this fine day?”
“Mr. Clyde? I just had to come in here and wish you all the best for your birthday! Miss Sweetie told me you had a big one coming up this weekend!”
“Well, at my age they all big ones. But I’m still on the right side of the grass and thanking God every day. My daddy? He live to see one hundred and seven years!”
“My goodness!” I said. “What’s the secret to such a long life?”
“What’s the secret? Well, I reckon it’s staying busy so you don’t lose your beans, eatin’ right—always have my daily dose of greens, you know—and being happy. Yes, ma’am! Stay happy ’cause it makes your heart want to keep ticking!”
“I’ll bet you’re right! And that’s it?”
“Well, before bed I always take me a little nip of Oh Be Joyful to ease my aching bones, but that’s more medicinal than recreational.”
“And just how many doses does it take to ease your bones?” I giggled and so did Miss Sweetie.
“Well, now that depends on the ache! Yes, ma’am! That depends on the ache.”
Mr. Clyde, pleased that his clever remark had amused us, returned his attention to his work and we went on into the kitchen after I wished him well again.
“He is the dearest man on earth,” Miss Sweetie said, peering into the refrigerator. “Oh, me. Sometimes I stare inside this thing half expecting something to talk to me! Drink me!”
“I know just what you mean. Iced water is fine for me. Really.”
“All right, but I can make us some tea in five minutes.”
“No. Don’t trouble yourself. Water’s fine. You know, I think all that caffeine can’t be good for me.”
“Oh, pish! These darned doctors and all their advice! They’d like us all to weigh one hundred pounds and never eat a blessed thing except unsalted oatmeal with no butter. They like to scare us into going to them every time you turn around.”
“Yeah. If you’re sick, they make money. If you’re not, they don’t.”