put out her brown hand suddenly and took hold of my Northern-winter-white one.
“Oh, please, Diane, let’s not quarrel,” she said quickly. “It’s just that I do so much want that stuff! I can’t tell you why. Maybe I don’t know myself.”
“I do,” I said. “It’s because you’re spoiled, and you can’t bear not to have your own way. You don’t actually give a damn about whether a piece of furniture is Chippendale or Grand Rapids, or was made in Charleston or in Timbuctoo—and you can’t put your muddy riding boots up on a ribband back settee. You just want to prove your old saw about vanity and cupidity . . . and show your own superiority.”
The tiny lines around her eyes tightened. I don’t think Phyllis, however, had ever even tried to deceive herself—no matter how thoroughly she deceived anybody else. She sat silently a few moments. Then she said, “You know, I don’t know why I let people like Rusty or Anne Lattimer, or even the Reids, make me feel . . . well, frustrated—but they do, some way. You can be as superior as you like about them. They haven’t any money, they’re sterile in lots of ways, and they’re decadent. A lot of this pride and ancestor stuff is pride strained pretty thin. But they’ve got something the Northerners who come down and buy their plantations and become a lot of absentee landlords haven’t got . . . and never do get. If they had it they’d stay at home. It’s all an escape, and you don’t try to escape if you’re not frustrated, do you?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Oh, well, what the hell.”
She got up and stood, her fingers stuffed into her jodhpur pockets. Then she turned around.
“Just remember—I’ll pay for publishing the memoirs. Tell her that when you see her.”
“I’m not seeing her, darling. Get that out of your head permanently.”
Phyllis shrugged her tweed shoulders in their perfectly tailored brown-checked jacket.
“You’re missing the chance of a lifetime, is all I can say.”
She picked her hat up off the floor and put it on the back of her head.
“We’re going out to dinner before the theatre tonight. Will you join us there?”
I shook my head.
“Then I’ll send in for you tomorrow. You don’t have to go if you don’t want to . . . but even if you won’t help me, you’ll come out to Darien for a while, won’t you?”
“I’ll see,” I said. “I ought to get back home.”
She took an impulsive step toward me and pecked me on the cheek. “You’ve never really understood me, Diane,” she said lightly. “Maybe I’m not really as bad as you think I am.”
“Or maybe worse,” I said.
“That’s probably nearer the truth,” she laughed. And I’ve wondered since whether she meant that, and if she hadn’t even then seen further into what she would do, and even why she would do it, than I in my innocence did.
She ran down the broad steps of the Villa, and waved at me from her open car. I stood there a moment. Suddenly I shivered. It seemed quite cold. Maybe it was that the sun had dropped its red disc lower into the islands beyond the bay, so that the palmettos were almost purple and the shafts of light were golden arrows through the live oaks. Or it may have been the sudden eerie strum of a guitar that came to my ear. I looked along the street to where an old blind Negro was sitting under the oak tree in the parking strip, rolling his sightless eyes up to the sky.—Or it may have been the rich monotonous cadence of the line he was singing:
“When the moon goes down in blood . . .”
which was all I understood before I opened the door and went quickly into the Villa.
2
When I told Phyllis I wouldn’t join them at the theatre that night I’d meant it. I’d seen about enough of her to last me a good week, for one thing. I’d also heard the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals sing a number of times, both here and in New York. I hadn’t, however, counted on meeting an old friend of my mother’s dining in solitary grandeur, just waiting to pounce on the first likely person to use her other ticket.
I’m sure now it was Fate itself, lurking in the clear green waters of the Villa pool. If I hadn’t gone that night, I’d never have seen, in the kind of blinding clarity that a streak of lightning illuminates a countryside with, so that it sticks in your retina long after it’s dark again, the situation that made an awful lot of things Phyllis had said, or not said, dreadfully clear and dreadfully important. Nor should I have had the exclusive—assuming that everybody within a mile of us was deaf—services of a super-commentator on the Charleston scene who by a dozen winters and a lot of relatives had picked up enough local gossip to make the recent tornado look like a summer zephyr.
She was leaving the next day, and I suppose it was that fact among others that unlocked the flood gates. Though in some ways there’s an appalling lack of ordinary reticence about other people’s affairs in Charleston, just as on the other hand there’s also an even stronger code of “That’s the sort of thing one doesn’t discuss.” It depends, I suppose, on which clan is discussing what . . . though again—and this really did amaze me—there was the most total silence, on the part of a very considerable and very dissimilar group of people, on a couple of points that would have seemed to an ordinary observer very legitimate subjects of gossip, that any one could imagine.
The odd thing about both of those points was that they weren’t actually that important to anybody, and a lot of unhappiness and the lives of at least two people and perhaps a third would have been saved if the discussion had been nearly as free . . . well, as in another quite famous Charleston cause celèbre. But that’s the sort of thing—its reticence and its lack of it, depending on the occasion—that seems to me part of the charm, and certainly part of the enigma, of Charleston.—How, for instance, a dozen people could sit Sunday after Sunday in St. Michael’s and watch two of their friends, their eyes fastened on the letters “Thou Shalt Do No Murder” burned in letters of gold on the cypress altar panel, and never breathe a word of it, still astonished me, a mere tourist.
It was a little late when we hurried through the reddish stone pillars of the first theatre in America. The jaunty little painted figures of the be-turbanned eighteenth century Negro pageboys, with their brocaded coats and lace jabots, holding the yellow cords in the foyer, were startlingly real for a moment. It was the first time I’d seen the restoration of the Dock Street Theatre, and I Was delighted. The Society for the Preservation of Spirituals was singing “Eberybody Libin’ Goin’ to Die.” It was very nice. The ladies in their full-skirted off-the-shoulder gowns didn’t look the least ante-bellum, what with the present styles, but the gentlemen in their ruffled shirt fronts and black ribband ties did, very. And when the lights went up at the interval it seemed to me that all of Charleston not on the stage was on the floor.
I looked around.
“Look, my dear.” My mother’s friend nudged me violently. “That’s Mrs. Atwell Reid . . . that lovely woman with the white hair.”
We’d got up and were following a fair part of the audience out into the moonlit courtyard, with its high brick walls and the massed azaleas from Middleton Gardens just coming into bloom. It was quite all right to stop and stare around at people, because the Dock Street
