Up Island (10 page)

Ken Rawlings came next. He came two days later, at noon, on his way to a business meeting downtown. I was working in the patio garden and Lilly, thunderous and silent since she had come back to work and found her family in shards, directed him through the house and back to where I was attack-ing witch grass in the flower borders.

He was immaculate in summer-weight Coca-Cola navy blue; I was sweaty and dirt-smeared in torn shorts and the old Black Dog T-shirt. He sat gingerly UP ISLAND / 79

on a wrought-iron lawn chair and I went on jerking weeds.

“I’m here to try again, baby,” he said gravely. “I’m really worried about you. The company is, too. This…stonewalling is hurting everybody. I want to see you get the best possible deal out of this sorry mess, and so does Coke. You’d be surprised how many good friends you’ve got there. So I thought I’d see if you’d feel like talking some now. Believe me, it’ll go better for you if you can manage it soon.”

“Did the company send you, Ken?” I said, staring down into the tangle of dreadful, pale tendrils that were strangling my delphiniums. I could almost feel the airless gasping of throttled roots beneath the earth.

“No,” he said. “They didn’t. I came as the friend I am. But it’s no secret that the company is worried about Tee as well as you. He’s not in real good shape, won’t be until things are settled between you.”

“And…this Sheri person? Are they worried about her, too?

Is she in bad shape? It would be a shame if two of your star players are out of the game,” I said.

“They’re worried about her, sure,” he said neutrally. “She’s a good lawyer, Molly, no matter what else you say about her.”

I was silent, and then I said, my ears ringing with the words, “Ken, if I…if I should ever consent to a divorce or something…not to say that I will, but if I did…would you be my lawyer? I don’t know any other lawyers, not as well as I do you…”

He was silent, too. Then he said, “I’ll be handling things for Tee, Molly. I thought you realized that. I couldn’t represent you, too, though I’d like to. But I can give you a very good referral—”

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“So this is official, then, huh?” I said. I was beginning to get quite angry.

“I guess it is, yes,” he said unwillingly. “But I’m here because I love you, too. Believe me when I say that you need to get on with this, for your sake even more than for Tee’s.”

I stood up, dusting my hands on the rump of my shorts.

My knees cracked audibly.

“I appreciate your concern, Ken,” I said. “But I don’t want any more solicitous little visits on my behalf, and I don’t want a referral. Divorce is not an option.”

He got up and turned to go, then looked back at me. His face was grave with what looked to be real worry, though with Ken you never knew.

“You don’t want to underestimate this woman, Molly,” he said. “You really don’t. I know I wouldn’t.”

“Well, I guess that’s Tee’s problem now, isn’t it?” I said, and he nodded and said good-bye and left. I shoved the anger deep down where all the rest of it simmered, and fell to battling witch grass again. By late that afternoon I had gotten it all.

The next week, on a Wednesday, Charlotte Redwine invited me to lunch at the Driving Club. She had, she said, just gotten back from Italy the night before, and she thought the first thing we should do was sit down over a good lunch and talk this mess out. I did not want to go; Charlotte and I have never had much to say to each other, but I’d have to talk to her sometime. Better to go on and get it over with.

I spent the night before trying to repair the gardening damage to my nails and fiddling with my hair. It was wild; there was nothing for it now but to call Karl at the salon in the morning and see what he could

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do with it. I hated the thought of that, too; all my friends went to Karl, and he would know as much as they did about Tee and me. Maybe I would try a new salon, a whole new look. But in the end I just telephoned the number that I could, now, dial in my sleep, and asked for an appointment.

“Come by at ten,” Karl said. “I work you in. You going on to lunch? Good. We do something special for you.”

I met Charlotte in the lobby of the club at twelve-thirty in a new linen shift from the Snappy Turtle—one of the few places left in Atlanta where you could get Old Atlanta clothes—and with an astonishing head of shining, jet black hair that swooped around my forehead and fell over one cheekbone, and felt silky and heavy as it swung against my neck and face. I didn’t know yet if I liked the look of it, but I loved the feeling. I kept tossing my head just to feel that silken surge.

“Don’t you look scrumptious?” Charlotte said, kissing my cheek and smiling her little cat’s smile. She had colonized the choice umbrella table on the terrace by the pool, shaded by old trees and a wisteria vine. Her Tuscan tan made her teeth look very white, and her biscuit-colored shirtwaist fit her like her supple skin. Charlotte took exquisite care of herself. She always had. I must have been a sore trial to her at times.

It was very hot and still by the pool. Noon to one is reserved for adult swims only, and so no sleek, brown children splashed and shrieked their inevitable “Marco Polo.” Only a lone swimmer cut the water lazily, swimming so skillfully that hardly a ripple broke the turquoise surface. I watched admiringly;

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whoever it was had superb form. His dark head barely broke the water, nor did the pistonlike brown arms.

We ordered drinks from Carlton himself, the club’s longtime maître d’, as formal and beautiful as a carved ebony statue and as hallowed at the club as the old orientals and the original horse brasses in the men’s grill. Carlton rarely served individual tables, but he hovered over us, nodding and smiling as if we were visiting royalty. I knew that he would have heard about Tee and me; Carlton knew everything. His attention, even though it was undoubtedly directed at Charlotte, warmed me. Our daiquiris—“Let’s have something fun,” Charlotte had said—were at our table in record time, and Carlton had added a single anemone to each, plucked from the huge summer bouquet in the foyer.

“For the Redwine ladies,” he said and smiled, bowing himself away.

“Thank God for Carlton,” Charlotte said, taking a deep swallow. “At least somebody still knows how to behave.

Listen, darling, we’re going to go over some things today that you need to hear, about the trust fund and a few of my little investments and this and that. I’ve made some changes, and I want you to know about them. But we’re not going to talk about them until after lunch, and we’re certainly not going to talk about Theron’s behavior with that unspeakable little doxy until then. So drink your drink, and maybe we’ll have another and I’ll tell you about Italy, then we’ll have something wonderful for lunch. I think we both deserve it, don’t you?”

“We do indeed,” I said, liking her more at that moment than I ever had. Charlotte had quite obviously never thought me suitable for her only son and

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heir, but the advent of the Eel Woman must have improved me considerably in her eyes.

We sat and sipped, chatting about her trip and looking about us at the flowered terrace. The tables were filling with the lunch crowd, most of whom she knew and some of whom I did, and for once I felt languid and lulled at the club, shaded by flowers and warmed in the sun of Charlotte Redwine’s presence. They all had it, the Redwines, that almost palpable aura of rightness and immutability. Tee had his share, and his father had had his, but I thought it was Charlotte from whom the aura emanated. I waved and smiled at the people I knew, feeling as secure as a tender in the lee of a great ship.

Charlotte followed my eyes to the lone swimmer in the pool.

“He’s very good, isn’t he?” she said. “He swims like you used to. Or maybe you still do?”

“Some,” I said. “I haven’t much this summer. I need to get back to it.”

And I realized then how much I had missed it, that rhythmic, dreamlike gliding, that suspension in an element as pure and simple as air. Missed the effortless pumping of the arms, the kick of the legs that started high in the hips, the slow, ritualized breathing when the head turned in the water…

The swimmer reached the end of the pool and pulled himself out with one smooth motion, and I saw that it was not a man after all, but a woman, long and slim and brown, with seal-dark wet hair plaited into a rope that was coiled around her small head. She wore a plain black tank suit cut high on her hips and to her waist in back, and for a moment, as she walked away from us toward an empty table at the edge of the patio,

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I thought she was Caroline. And then I knew who she was.

Charlotte saw my face and turned to look, and knew, too.

“That’s her,” she said in a small, brittle voice. “Isn’t that her?”

“Yes,” I said. The swimmer could, of course, have been anyone else at all, but I knew that she wasn’t. I heard my breath whistling in my nostrils. It seemed very important not to look away from the woman in the black bathing suit, to take in that bright noon, the full and exact measure of her.

“How dare she come here?” Charlotte said in simple amazement. “Can she possibly not know this is a private club?”

I did not speak, because I could not. We watched as Sheri Scroggins held up a hand to Carlton, who was standing at the entrance to the patio, smiling benignly at his people taking their ease. He did not acknowledge her signal. No one had signaled to Carlton for service in decades.

Sheri’s dark brows knit in annoyance. She snapped her fingers and called, “Waiter!” Heads turned all over the patio.

Slowly and with immense dignity, Carlton moved to her table. She said something indistinguishable, studying a menu, not looking at him. He bowed slightly and turned and glided away; he might have been on wheels. Before the soft buzz of amazement and outrage could start, he was back with a frothy pink concoction thickly forested with fruit and flowers.

Sheri did look at him then.

“Did I say frozen? I did not. I said a plain daiquiri and that’s what I meant. You can take this back right now and bring me another, and this time, get it right.”

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She did not raise her voice, but the flat twang reverberated around the quiet patio. I could hear indrawn breaths.

Carlton’s face went dead and still, and he turned and took the offending drink away. She went back to studying the menu, seemingly unaware of the hostility washing over her like surf.

“I will have her barred from this club,” Charlotte said in a voice an octave higher than I had ever heard. “I will attend to it on the way out. This is outrageous. Carlton is one of us.”

Despite my shock, I almost laughed. By now, I supposed, he almost was, and I wondered what that might mean to Carlton in his life outside the club, providing, of course, that he had one. Then the laughter died. Tee came on to the patio and walked over to Sheri’s table, kissed her on the cheek, and sat down opposite her. His back was to us. I was glad, at least, for that.

His mother drew in her breath to speak, then let it out in a long, ragged sigh. I did not look around the patio, but I knew that a good fifty pairs of eyes were fixed, first on Tee and Sheri Scroggins, and then on Charlotte and me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw two figures, women, get up and drift languidly toward the ladies’ lounge. The club phones, I figured, would be tied up until two o’clock.

The two of them leaned their heads together, one dark and one fair, over the menu, and all of a sudden I was looking at Tee and myself. Tee and me, when we were young and first in love and all things seemed possible. He looked, in the dappled shade, hardly older than he had then, his snub face lit by his slow smile. And she…she was, in her tallness, the width of her shoulders, the sleek, wet, dark hair, the flash of
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blue across the pool that was her eyes, the way she tipped her head to his…she was me. A much younger me, so full of vitality and the nearness of him that I hummed with it. Oh, her features were different…there was, somehow, a sort of Toltec cast to her face, a remote, sensuous, faintly cruel bluntness. But the surface resemblance was astonishing. No wonder Charlie had thought she was Caroline. Caroline looked remarkably like I had at that age. Now, of course, few people remarked on the similarity.

“She looks like me. Like I used to, I mean,” I said stupidly, as if I were remarking on the weather.

“She looks nothing at all like you,” Charlotte said. There were two hectic red spots on her cheeks, and she was breathing audibly. “She looks just like what she is, a South Georgia shantytown whore. Theron is out of his mind. I can put a stop to this, and I will. I imagine she thinks she’s hooked herself a rich man; I can disabuse her of that, and him, too, with one phone call to our attorney. Which I shall make the instant I get home. Whatever happens, my dear, you and Teddy will never lack for anything. I promise you that. Are you finished? I think we’ve both had enough of this spectacle.”

She rose, gathered up her little Chanel bag, and walked with her long, graceful, athlete’s stride across the patio ahead of me, not looking to see if I followed. I did, of course. Followed blindly along in her wake with my chin held as high as I could manage, looking neither to the right or the left, conscious on every inch of me of eyes fastened on both of us like leeches. My heart was pounding so hard I could hear it.

We had to pass their table to leave the patio. I thought I would die rather than do it.

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I did not see him notice us, but I felt it.

“Mother,” he said in a voice I did not know, a silly voice, high-pitched. “Molly…”

Sheri Scroggins was in front of us suddenly, barring our way. She looked like a panther who had just come out of a dark jungle river. The black suit was still damp, as was the lightless black hair, which was unplaited now and flowed over her shoulders like a cape. She smiled. She seemed to have too many teeth, all bone white in the tawny gold of her face. The eyes burned as blue as methane.