Part 9 (1/2)

”We by G.o.d did,” Henry said. She was clinging to his arm as if she was an old woman. He took her weight.

”You're coming home with us tonight, no questions asked,” Fairlie said. ”In the morning we'll deal with...everything. Tonight you need to rest.”

”No,” Camilla said. ”Just drop me by Tradd Street to get the car. I'm going to spend the night at the beach house.”

”Well, then, we're coming with you,” Lila and I said together.

She looked around at all of us.

”No,” she said, and her voice was low and rasping, as if she had been screaming. ”It was my house first and it will always be my house, and that's where I'm going. Do you think I could spend one night on Tradd Street without him? That was our house. The beach house is mine. And if any of you try to come with me, or come checking up on me, I'll...call the police. I swear I will. Let me be, now. I have a lot to rearrange.”

We stared, stunned.

She took hold of Henry's arm again, and he just nodded at us, and together they walked down the long white hall and into whatever would be the rest of Camilla's life.

Part Two.

5.

ON A SMOKE-GRAY AFTERNOON in late October 1998, we sat on the porch of the beach house, wrapped in sweaters and towels against the stiff little wind out of the east. Soon it would bring rain; you could smell it coming, and there would be a big wind, because it was born in the east where all the big changes get started. It would be the end of the lingering, muted colors of the few hardwoods, and probably the end of the long, sweet fall. Already we lit the fire earlier, and came in out of the purpling twilights ready for heat and drinks and hot food. But on this afternoon the sense of endings was powerful, and we s.h.i.+vered on the porch longer than we might have otherwise.

Something was gnawing at the back of my mind, something out of memory. I could almost see it glimmering in the depths there, like a goldfish. But I could not catch it in my hands. It seemed important, but I did not know why. It wore a sheen of unrest like scales.

I heard the wind pick up, and across the windows the spatter of sand from off the top of the dunes. We all lifted our heads.

”Summer's over,” Henry and Lila said together, and we all laughed. I got it then.

”Do you all remember that time that I was down on the beach, and I thought I saw Camilla on the dunes? It was an afternoon like this, when you knew the weather was changing for good. And everybody laughed at me, and said I'd seen the Gray Man, and that a storm would be coming...”

And then I stopped. Not three weeks later Hugo had come. And Charlie had been one of those who teased me about the Gray Man. I looked over at Camilla.

She smiled from her rocker beside the fire. It had become her place since Charlie had been gone. Before, it was his.

”It's okay,” she said. ”It's been a long time. We talked about that, Charlie and I. He thought it was funny, even after Hugo. He said he was surprised it had been you who saw the Gray Man; he would have thought Fairlie, maybe. I don't think he thought you were given to...fancies. After Hugo I remembered it from time to time, but I never laughed at it.”

I studied her in the firelight. I thought that of us all, the past ten years had changed her least. Of course, by now the osteoporosis had bowed her considerably, and there were streaks of silver in the thick chestnut hair. But her medieval face was unlined, and her brown eyes still glowed in their hedge of lashes. She still wore her hair tied back at the nape of her neck, and sometimes still let it blow free. She was still slender, still fine boned, still as serene as a white candle. She still walked the old dogs on the beach, albeit much more slowly, and she still laughed with Lewis and Henry about their early days on the island.

She spent a great deal of time at the beach house now. At first we all worried about it, about her being alone and lonely for Charlie, but we came to see that in some primal way it nourished her. There was color in her face now that had not been there for a long time, and she laughed more often than I could remember her doing. I thought that she was truly beautiful now, as a few women become when they reach their early sixties.

The rest of us had not fared so well. Henry was totally white haired, though still lanky and brown as a stork. Lewis had lost all but a tonsure of his red hair, and now his head was as freckled as the rest of him. Fairlie was still as slim and supple as a girl, and her red hair still flamed in the sun, but the skin of her face had wrinkled all over, very finely, like loved old organza. From a distance you did not notice it; Fairlie now was very nearly Fairlie then. But only nearly.

Lila had grayed and somehow shrunk a bit-Charleston women did not let themselves get fat-but she still wore her chin-length bob anch.o.r.ed off her face with a band or her sungla.s.ses, and her long, flowered skirts, and her voice was still true and piping and sweet. It was hard to think of Lila as the coolly competent real estate magnate that she had become, but she owned her own firm now, and made, literally, millions. The old houses south of Broad were being bought up by the dozens by affluent newcomers, and renovated, and Lila sold a good number of them.

Simms was totally gray and had grown a mustache, also gray, that should have looked ridiculous on his round downtown face, but somehow did not. He had stopped, I thought, looking like the youngest one in the men's grill at the yacht club. When had that happened?

I had threads of white in my explosive black mop and a bottom that cried out for the panty girdle I would not wear. Thank G.o.d Lewis proclaimed it merely ”cuppable.” And there was a little more chin now. Forty-five was not thirty-five.

I felt a great flush of love for us all that afternoon. We were still the Scrubs. When I looked at us, my brain registered the changes, but my eyes still saw us all as we had been in those first summers. Our then-faces were imprinted on my retinas. The heart sees what it needs to see.

The house truly had not changed in any essential way. Even the porch railings and the stairway to the boardwalk that we had built in the weeks after Hugo were a little shabby now, and teetery. And the then-new roof s.h.i.+ngles had weathered to the no-color of the old. There were a couple of formidable leaks on the stair landing and in the kitchen, and there was a lot of talk about getting them fixed, but somehow no one made the call. We set out pots when it rained and enjoyed the tinkle and plink of raindrops into them. I don't think that anyone wanted any more change.

”We'll have to do it sometime,” Lila said worriedly, the real estate doyenne in her coming out. ”It's going to depreciate a good bit if we don't.”

”For G.o.d's sake, have you listed it?” Lewis said, and she flushed and laughed.

”Of course not. I just can't stand the thought of it...rotting away.”

”It's always been rotting away,” Camilla said comfortably. ”Even when I was little, something was always wrong with it. If it was all fixed up and decorated, I don't think I could stay in it.”

”Well, it's surely not that,” Fairlie said, and we smiled complacently.

It surely was not. The house wore the same s.h.i.+ngling and sported the same lumpen, damp-smelling upholstered and peeling wicker pieces that it had when Camilla inherited it. Lila had brought out a smart new flokati rug to replace the paper-thin old oriental that had been soaked when Hugo's rain came flooding down the chimney. It was thick and creamy and invited lolling, but no one lolled. Its very whiteness, in all that musty dimness, kept catching the corners of our eyes. Finally Lila gave up and dug the sour old oriental out of her attic and dried it in the sweet air and sun, and put it back down in front of the fireplace. We and the house all sighed together with pleasure, and Lila gave the new rug to Camilla for in town. Outside, the dune lines were not the original ones, and crepe myrtles had replaced the slain oleanders and palms that cl.u.s.tered around the porch, but that was outside. Inside was still us.

From the very beginning, I was surprised by how small a hole Charlie left in the fabric of the beach house. It was not that we did not miss him; one or another of us would tear up regularly when somebody spoke of Charlie, and Boy and Girl, gray muzzled and lame these ten years later, still looked eagerly for him when they got out of the car and struggled up the steps and into the house. That alone moved us regularly to tears. When it happened Camilla would pet the dogs fiercely and then look away, out at the ocean. She hated for anyone to see her cry. Few people did.

No, it was rather that the sense of us as a unit was somehow unbroken, and the knowledge that somehow Camilla contained Charlie so completely that, even absent, he was comfortably here. I felt joy that the integrity of the group was not compromised, even when a loved member was gone, and once said so to Camilla.

”The center will hold,” she said.

”It feels like he's still here, ”I said to Lewis shortly after Charlie's death.

”He's probably down around Cape Horn by now,” Lewis said. For when Charlie died, Camilla had had him cremated, as he had wished, and we had scattered his ashes in the sea in front of the beach house.

Nearly everybody but us was furious with Camilla. All the older women in her life-and there were many, because, like Lewis, she was related to half of Charleston-were aghast.

”Your people have always been in Magnolia Cemetery,” one of a bridge-playing flock of them said to Camilla when she had me to lunch at the yacht club, two days after Charlie died. ”What on earth can you be thinking of? Cremation? Throwing him in the ocean like bait shrimp? What would your mother say?”

”Probably 'Is it lunchtime yet?' ” Camilla said under her breath.

Her sister, Lydia, did not speak to her for days, and her mother, still living, if not sentient, at Bishop Gadsden roused herself from her succoring torpor long enough to spit out, ”There is no place but Magnolia. Your father will be appalled. Who was it again you said you wanted to dump in the ocean?”

Her two sons and their strange California families came to stand silently on this unprepossessing eastern sh.o.r.e and watch their mother, in shorts and T-s.h.i.+rt, wade into the ocean with the Episcopal minister from Holy Cross, a family friend, and consign their feathery gray father to the white-laced water.

”Don't we have a plot at Magnolia?” the oldest said. ”I thought we had enough s.p.a.ce for everybody. We've always counted on it.”

His tan surfer daughter and thin wife rolled their eyes. I could not imagine they gave a lot of thought to Magnolia Cemetery.

”I know Daddy by rights didn't really belong at Magnolia, but you sure do, and we do. Didn't anybody ha.s.sle you about it?” the younger son, who did something with food irradiation in a Silicon Valley town known only to technicians, said. I knew that he had left Charleston to go to MIT and had since not spent more than two weeks at a time at home.

Camilla lifted her head and smiled at her cuckoo child.

”You can take the boy out of Charleston, but you can't take Charleston out of the boy,” she said. Her face was damp, whether with tears or seawater I could not tell.

”It's what he wanted,” she went on gently. ”Your dad always said he thought Magnolia Cemetery looked like the set for a grade-B vampire movie. He asked for the ocean. Come to that, I think I will, too.”