Road to Folly

CHAPTER 1-2

She smiled, tapping her foot. “But I’ve got Brad working on her. I’ll show Rusty he’s not as smart as he thinks.”

There’s no reason, these days, I suppose, why an ex-husband shouldn’t be on tap, but I was surprised nevertheless.

“Brad?” I said. “Is he around?”

“Off and on,” she said shortly. Then after a moment she added, “He’s kept us in quail this winter. Rusty’s gone native.”

Going native in the Carolina Low Country would seem to have so many possibilities that I didn’t attempt to figure it out. I just waited. Phyllis had put one foot up on the edge of her chair seat and was sitting with her strong brown hands clasped around her knee, staring out between the white fluted columns above the palmetto trees into the blue cloudless space.

“Rusty, my pet, has returned to agriculture,” she said, after a long silence. “I thought I’d got it out of his system, but back it’s cropped like a rash.—It’s unsocial, or something, to have a lot of land and not do something with it. I’d think it was Jennifer’s influence, but he never goes over there.”

She yawned.

“It’s too tiresome. I’d got him practically civilized…now I’ve got to begin all over again. But I’ve really got him stymied now. It costs money to farm—and fortunately it’s my money.”

The little creases in the corners of her mouth hardened. If it hadn’t been for them she wouldn’t have looked twenty-five. With them she looked more thirty-five than thirty.

“I thought you didn’t think the people who held the purse strings had a right to dictate to other people,” I said.

“This is different. I’m not going to stay down here till the middle of July and get malaria just for the sake of having Rusty spend all day in the barn bringing up Guernsey cows, or sitting up all night worrying whether the frost is killing the young cabbages. My God.”

“I thought you married him because you were tired of men who did nothing all day,” I observed.

She shrugged. “I thought it would be amusing to be a gentleman farmer. I didn’t know it was twenty-four hours a day twelve months a year. Anyway, I’m sick of it, and I’m sick of Rusty. What the hell do I care about his cows and his cabbages, and whether a lot of n***o farm hands have a pig and chickens or not? I’m bored stiff with the whole business. I’m not going to let Rusty disrupt my whole life.”

I started to say, “Then why don’t you go to Reno again?” but I didn’t.

All the airy gaiety had gone out of her face. The grim determination of a gal who’d always had her own way had hardened in it.

“Let’s skip it, shall we?”

She glanced at me, trying to recapture the earlier mood. I nodded.

“Okay. Let’s go back to Strawberry Hill,” I said. “Where do I come in the picture? That’s what I can’t make out.”

“It’s very simple. More than that, it’s a natural, really. You will do it, won’t you?”

“It depends,” I said. It wouldn’t be the first scheme of Phyllis Lattimer’s that I’d been uneasy about, nor would it be the only one I’d walked out on.

“I mean, Diane, it isn’t just that you’ll be doing me a favor. It’ll be an act of kindness to everybody. It really will. Wait till you see Jennifer and Colleton. You’ll see exactly what I mean. And their mother too. It’s a rotten shame—they really need the money.”

I looked at her. It doesn’t do to be too cold-blooded about one’s friends, but I couldn’t help it here.

“I know exactly what you’re thinking,” she said, with a shrug. “I admit I want the furniture. And if I don’t get it before old Miss Caroline dies, I’ll never get it. Because Jennifer will get it—every stick of it. That’s why she guards the old woman like a watch dog.—And I want it, I tell you.”

“Which obviously settles it,” I said.

“It does as far as I’m concerned,” she retorted curtly.

“Then why don’t you go to Miss Caroline and explain it to her? She seems to be a rugged individualist too. She might understand you perfectly.”

“Because she doesn’t receive visitors, that’s why,” she answered, still more curtly. “That’s the only reason in the world I don’t. I’ve tried a thousand times. She doesn’t allow anybody but about three blue-blooded octogenarian cousins from below Broad Street in the presence.”

“What about Jennifer and Colleton and their mother?”

“They’d sell in a minute—Colleton and his mother, not Jennifer. She knows the old lady will die pretty soon, and she’s in on the ground floor. I’m sure she’s the stumbling block in the whole thing.”

“Have you tried working on them?”

“—Have I.”

She fished in her tweed jacket pocket and pulled out a cigarette.

“If I could only see old Miss Caroline,” she said slowly. “That’s all I need.—That’s what I want you for.”

I gasped at that. “Me?”

She nodded. “I just found out yesterday from Colleton’s mother, and rushed out and wired you. You can do it—on two counts.”

“You’ve got a touch of fever already, darling,” I said patiently. “But do go on.”

She glanced over her shoulder at the empty verandah. The brilliant afternoon sun going down beyond the Battery stencilled a moving arabesque of long palmetto leaves on the white columns and filtered across the closed door with its great polished brass knocker. She put her feet up on the gleaming balustrade again and leaned her head nearer my chair.

“Old Miss Caroline visited your grandmother two winters in Philadelphia, in the Eighties. She was introduced to society with her, and they were presented at the Monday Germans in Baltimore together. Her mother had known your great-grandfather before the War—that’s the Civil War, down here, you know. There’s some connection there that explains why Strawberry Hill wasn’t burned when Darien was, during the march to the sea. I haven’t got it quite clear, but that’s it. Anyway, the point is—she’ll receive you.”

“Oh,” I said…rather stiffly.

Phyllis wouldn’t notice that. She went blandly and blindly on.

“But wait. That’s not all.”

She took her feet down again and leaned forward, her pointed chin cupped in her brown palm.

“Miss Caroline, like everybody else down here, has written her memoirs…and also like everybody else, thinks that if she could find an honest publisher, she’d make a fortune. I heard Jennifer talking to a man about them the other day. And that’s where both you and I come in.”

I looked at her. There was a shrewd concentrated intentness in her face that was new to me, well as I knew her. I was a little angry, but I was interested. I couldn’t help being. I knew of course that Phyllis could read; I never had known that she cared enough about people generally to know that they liked to write.

“Your brother is a publisher. I’ll pay for a ghost to sort out the memoirs and have them published…as de luxe as hell. She’ll love it.”

A sardonic little smile crossed her eyes. “The rest will be pie. You know about people being motivated by vanity and cupidity. This is Miss Caroline’s vanity against Mrs. Reid’s cupidity. It’s very simple.”

“I’d skip it, Phyllis,” I said.

She shook her head.

I shook mine.

“It stinks,” I said coarsely.

She settled back in her chair, her brown face a little pale, her dark eyes smoldering.

“I always thought you were the one person in the world I could count on, Diane,” she said. Her foot at the end of her crossed jodhpurred leg beat a tattoo on the white fat-bellied balustrade stretchers, the way an angry cat’s tail moves against a chair leg.

“Be your age, Phyllis,” I retorted, rather angry too. “It’s just not the sort of thing people do.”

We sat in silence—not, I may say, a particularly comfortable one—for several moments. The blue, almost Mediterranean sky above the palmettos and live oaks with their thin wisps of grey moss, the bluer water beyond and the low mauve line of the islands beyond it, the cool brilliant sun going down to meet them…these were Charleston, and another world. And not, moreover, a world in which one chiselled a great old lady out of the gods she clung to…not if one had any faith to keep.

“I’d be willing to pay almost anything, within reason,” Phyllis said, after a long time. “More than any New York dealer would.”

I don’t know why that annoyed me more than anything she’d said.

“Maybe there are a few things your money can’t buy, Phyllis,” I said shortly.

She shrugged. “I’ve never seen one of them.”

I realized that it was I who was being the stupider of the two. She never had, of course…because of the values she lived by. The things money didn’t buy had never been the ones she’d happened to want before.

“I only said ‘Maybe,’ ” I answered.

She 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 n***o 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.