Part 15 (1/2)

We looked at each other and then at Camilla. She was smiling faintly, but there was a pleading, almost painful to see, in her brown eyes. I wondered if I was the only one to have noticed that Camilla looked as though she had been starved and beaten. She seemed to have aged years in a scant week. Her candle glow was gone. I think we would have agreed to anything to ignite it again.

Within five minutes it was agreed that we would begin to look for a place on the water where we could weekend and summer, not too far from Charleston, but well away from the road and bridges that crossed the Cooper River, toward Sullivan's Island. In truth, I don't think that most of us cared much at that point where this place might be, or even what it would be like. But even if we did not want it, we needed it. That seemed enough for now.

”I might know a place,” Simms said. ”It could work very well. Let me take a look and let y'all know.”

”Oh,” Lila said. ”If it's where I think it is, you'll love it.”

”I doubt that,” I said to Lewis on the way back to Edisto. ”But I'd hate to see us just drift apart. And Camilla really needs us to be together.”

”We'll at least take a look,” Lewis said. ”You know it can't be Sullivan's, Anny, but that doesn't mean it can't be good.”

And, standing in the cold, fast-falling twilight on Booter's hummock, I looked at the s.h.i.+ning lighted windows and smelled the sweet smoke of driftwood and cedar and heard the little slap of the river against the dock pilings, so like what I heard at Sweetgra.s.s, and thought that perhaps, just perhaps, this might be good. Or at least, not bad.

Camilla threw the door open to Lewis's knock and we walked into a large, beamed room finished in washed cypress, with exposed cypress beams and a great river-stone fireplace, and a wall of bookshelves on either side of it. There was little furniture, but a fat denim sofa sat before the fire, and two flowered chintz easy chairs that I recognized from Camilla's Tradd Street house, and the flokati rug that Lila had given Camilla after Hugo lay before the fire on the wide, sage-painted boards of the floor. The windows were small and deep set and mullioned, but there were a great many of them on the wall facing the marsh and the river, and the last embers of the sunset flamed in the panes. The light here would be glorious, except perhaps in late afternoon, when it would swallow the room. But then you could draw the drapes. They were heavy and lined, made of rough linen in a green just a breath deeper than the floors.

Well done, I thought, swiveling my head around the room while Camilla stood smiling and with her hands folded in front of her, waiting. Whatever else it is, it's a nicely done house. Not a cottage. A house. I can't imagine sand on these floors, or oars and crab nets stacked in the corner, or old beach clogs from fifteen years back under the kitchen table. But maybe this is what and where we're meant to be now.

Camilla went out of the room to fetch drinks, and I said to Lewis, ”It's nice, isn't it? But it looks like a house for grown-ups. The beach house was always for kids, even if it was for old kids.”

”They didn't call it Never-Never-Land for nothing,” Lewis said. ”Would it be so bad, growing up?”

”Not if I don't have to dress for dinner and put on shoes.”

”You don't have to dress at all,” he said. ”There are two other houses exactly like this, plus a guest house. We'd have one of them. You could go naked as a jaybird all day for all anybody would know. Good plan, as a matter of fact.”

Camilla handed around drinks and said, ”Do you think you could cut it here, Anny? There are other places we can look, of course, maybe something big enough for all of us together, like the old house. But you know, we always said we'd do this. Live like this. Maybe we should try it on for size for a year or so.”

”It seems...oh, I don't know. Sort of big,” I said. ”Do you think we'd rattle around?”

”There has to be a place for Henry,” Camilla said.

”Do you think he'll come back?”

”He'll come.”

For we had lost Henry, and it felt to me like a fatal wound.

I had hardly seen him since before the fire, although I knew that Lewis and Simms had seen him on the day after that terrible night. But after that he seemed to vanish; he did not answer the Bedon's Alley telephone or the one at his office, nor could we raise him at Nancy's house. She did not seem to know where he was, and her voice was so bleared with grief that I did not have the heart to pursue it with her.

”We'll surely see him at the memorial service,” Lila said, still white with shock. And Camilla, bowed by more than the osteoporosis, agreed.

”Let's let him be for a while,” she said. ”He always did go off by himself when something was wrong.”

I could imagine nothing wronger than what Henry was facing, and agreed not to try to hover over him with offers of help and comfort. Obviously, there was neither for him, and would not be, for a very long time.

Henry was having Fairlie's remains-and none of us could bear even to speculate about what that term meant-sent to the farm in Kentucky after the service, and he would follow, and see her buried in her own earth.

”I don't know any more than that,” Lewis said dully two days after the fire. He had not spoken directly with Henry since then, either, but had found a note from him under the winds.h.i.+eld of the Range Rover in the courtyard on Bull Street. We were staying there until after the memorial service, which would be held, heartbreakingly, at Henry and Fairlie's house on Bedon's Alley. I could no more imagine it empty of Fairlie's darting, hummingbird presence than I could imagine Henry staying on in it alone. Like the others of us, my mind could cast itself no farther forward than the memorial service.

The night before the service Henry appeared at our Bull Street door with Gladys on her leash, at his heel. Both man and dog looked as if they had been boiled down to sheer bone and sinew. Henry was gray all over-face, hair, lips. Beside him, Gladys whimpered and s.h.i.+vered. She did not know where she was, but she surely knew that nothing good was going to come of this outing.

No, he would not come in, Henry said almost formally, or rather, oddly shyly. He did not look at us directly.

”I have an awful lot to see to, and I badly need for you all to do something for me,” he said.

”Anything,” Lewis and I said together.

”I want you to take Gladys, if you possibly can. I can't...look after her anymore. I've got her bed and blanket and food and medicine out in the car, and if you agree, I'll get Tommy and Gregory to take the golf cart out to Sweetgra.s.s in the morning in Tommy's truck. I'd appreciate it more than I can say if you'd stay close to her, and take her around in the cart every so often. She'll love Sweetgra.s.s, and she's used to being in the cart around water. I thought if you all, you know, found another place...”

”You know we'll take her. I love her,” I said, starting to cry. He hugged me, briefly and hard. I could feel his heart behind his sharp breastbone, beating in great, dragging thuds. He bent and laid his chin on the top of my head, and then lifted it and looked at Lewis and me squarely for the first time.

”She's an old lady,” he said. ”I may not get back in time. I always thought I'd like her to live until her life gets to be a burden to her. You all know her almost as well as I do; you'll be able to tell if that happens. I hope you'll feel you can honor it.”

I nodded, past words, and Lewis put his hand out and Henry gripped it hard with both his own. His knuckles were blue white.

”I'll call you,” he said. ”It may be a while, but I will call. I need...to be away until I can...well. I hope you'll honor that, too.”

He bent and put his arms around Gladys and simply held her for a long time. He said something into her once-glossy ear, and then he was gone. Gladys began to whimper in earnest, and by the time I could see through my tears to kneel and take her in my arms, she was s.h.i.+vering hard.

We took her into our bed that night, and she lay between us, in my arms, until the s.h.i.+vering finally slowed and stopped. I could feel all her bones, and her faltering heart. She could not have spent many nights in her old life without the scent of Henry and Fairlie in her nostrils.

Just before dawn I could feel her begin the twitching that means deep doggy dreams, and I whispered to her: ”I hope they're the best dreams in the world, and I hope I can make them all come true.”

All over Charleston people were asking, ”What happened? How could such a thing happen? Why was she out there by herself? Where was he?”

It's odd, I thought. It's entirely proper and natural downtown to die of illness or old age, but an accident, especially a spectacular one like this, is alarming, almost taboo. Maybe it's so in any tight-knit community. People know each other so well that what happens to the one resonates profoundly with the rest. Donne had it right. No man is an island. Each man is a part of the main. When the bell tolls south of Broad, it tolls for us.

”We don't really know,” I said over and over in the days after the fire. I could not count the people who asked. I knew that the others were getting the questions, too. In the four days afterward, until the memorial service, I stopped going out except for essentials. I canceled a trip to St. Louis, and handled my office work from Bull Street. Lila showed no houses, and Camilla ordered her groceries from Burbage's. Our answering machines worked overtime.

For the truth was, we really did not know, absolutely and without question, what had happened that night on the beach, and likely never would. It seemed quite certain, though, that it happened exactly like Duck Portis, the fire chief on the island, and Bobby Sargent, the chief of police, thought it had. Fairlie had been curled up on the downstairs sofa before the dying fire, and had lit the kerosene heater because the night had turned bitter cold. Somehow, later, probably from a gust of the wild, booming wind that had come up off the ocean and in through the flimsy, uncaulked gla.s.s doors from the porch, the old heater had overturned. The smell of kerosene was still powerful in the charred living room, even after the water from the fire truck had saturated it. It wouldn't have taken long. The house had been a firetrap for years; we knew that. Duck and Bobby thought that Fairlie must have been deeply asleep, and died of smoke inhalation before the flames reached her. But I could tell from Lewis's haunted eyes that he did not think so. He had, after all, seen Fairlie before she was taken away. Bobby had reached him first.

Duck and Bobby and Lewis and Henry had grown up summers together on Sullivan's Island, and had auth.o.r.ed all manner of mischief before sober manhood overtook them. When they could not find Henry, they had called Lewis at Edisto. He had gone immediately to the beach house. After p.r.o.nouncing Fairlie he had tracked Henry down in West Virginia, with a team of doctors who had gone into the mountainous coal-mining country. I remembered later that I had trained the nurses who accompanied them. Lewis did not remember much of that phone conversation. He never did. We protect ourselves as best we can. Henry had wanted Fairlie to go to Stuhr's Funeral Home, so Lewis called, and rode there with her. Then he went home to Bull Street, to wait for me.

As far as Duck and Bobby could tell, the fire had started about eleven. The holidays were over and the black, blasting wind had driven most of the vacationing cottage owners home. The beach house was far down, on a jog that curved sharply right, out of sight of most of the permanent residents. It was a motorist coming home late over the great, humping bridge from Charleston who had sighted the flames and called 911.

”Why on earth was she downstairs wrapped up in an old quilt?” people asked. ”There must have been five bedrooms in that old heap. Why did she light a kerosene stove as old as Methuselah when there was an electric s.p.a.ce heater right across the room? Could she have been, you know, drinking?”

But to us, it all seemed perfectly understandable. Fairlie loved to sleep in front of the fire. She did it often when we all stayed over. Usually she built the fire up enough so that it would last her the night, but in that bone-rattling cold it would not have been enough. I could just see her dragging the old kerosene stove out of the jumbled kitchen closet, lighting it, and rolling up in the dusty quilt that covered the sofa. Fairlie had always hated the electric heater. She had thought that it was dangerous.

”They all are,” she said once. ”Why else do you always read about them burning down tenements and housing projects? It's never a kerosene stove.”

”It's probably because even our indigent have electricity now,” Lewis had teased her. ”Would you willingly smell kerosene if you didn't have to?”

”I like it,” Fairlie said stubbornly. ”It reminds me of the bunkhouses at home. My father used to pour it on all our sc.r.a.pes and punctures, too; we were always stepping on horseshoe nails.”

Oh, Fairlie, I thought. If I could think that you just drifted away on a tide of warmth with the smell of home all around you, I could start to get past this. Maybe.