Simms bent his face to Lila’s and kissed her. Both their eyes were closed. When they turned to face us, smiling, I saw that both their faces were wet.
A little silence held for a moment, and then Lewis said, “That ought to last you guys for a while. Let the games begin!”
We ate our feast then, murmuring compliments over the oyster-and-pecan dressing, drinking up all of the excellent Chilean wine that Lewis had brought, jibing at Fairlie’s gelatinous goose, oozing fat and port and mired in prunes.
“Well, you should have known better,” she said lazily. Fairlie was no better a cook now than the day I had met her. “Next year just assign me the booze. I can’t go wrong. You guys will drink anything.”
For the first time that I could remember, our beach house Christmas was an edgy and tenuous one. Everyone, not just I, seemed to feel the frisson, though I am not sure most of us could name it. Simms left just after the meal, and his absence seemed to leave a fissure in the skin of the evening that no one was eager to step over. Lila showed her new ring around, smiling at the compliments, but her eyes went every now and then to the door. Henry and Fairlie got up immediately and began to stack dishes in the pitted old white enamel sink, even though, over the years, Fairlie had been known to take long walks in bone-chilling cold or pouring rain to avoid the moment. Henry and I began to gather crumpled paper and ribbon. Camilla sat still, watching us, and then said, “Leave it, please. Everybody just sit down. I’m coming back out in the morning; I’ll do it then. Right now I just want my people around me.”
“You’re coming out here on Christmas Eve?” I said worriedly. We were used to her habit of spending solitary hours and even days here, but surely now, at this season of homing…
“The children and grandchildren aren’t getting in until tomorrow afternoon,” she said. “I think little Camilla is dancing in the
Nutcracker
for the four-millionth time tonight. Just as well. My cousin Mary Lee is having one of her unspeakable brunches at noon, and I don’t have to go to the airport until four. I’ll do scalloped oysters for just us tomorrow night, and Lydia is having everybody for Christmas dinner. Thank God it’s at five. That will give us all time to get drunk. I’d love the time out here alone in the morning….”
Camilla rarely drank, but I knew that her battalion-like extended family harbored a few imbibers. Most Charlestonians’s did. Lewis had said that when he was a child he had thought that carrying Uncle Joe Henry Cannon upstairs to sleep off the punch was as much a ritual of Christmas as the tree and the carols.
We laughed.
But still…but still. Tonight had always been our own Christmas ritual. None of us had ever come here on the actual festival days.
Lewis and I took the sacks of trash out to stow them in the big receptacle under the house. Everyone else settled themselves back around the fire and Camilla. The smell of perking coffee followed us out the kitchen door and into the cold. I looked back. It was a Norman Rockwell scene: the whispering fire, and the tree lights on the faces of old friends, drawn close at this season. But it felt like just that, an illustration.
We stood in the cold sand behind the house, holding each other close. I smelled the mothy wool of his sweater and felt his breath warm on my hair. We did not speak for a while, nor did we move to go back in. Overhead, the stars wheeled and burned, and the surf breathed on the beach.
“What’s the matter with tonight?” I said into his shoulder. “I feel like when we go back upstairs it will all be different. It won’t be us sitting there. Nothing will even look the same.”
“ ‘The times, they are a-changin’,’ ” he said. “Things aren’t the same, Anny. They haven’t been for a long time. They started changing when Charlie died. You just didn’t want to notice.”
I felt colder than I should have, there in the circle of his arms. I half-remembered studying entropy in physics in college. What had I remembered of it? That it was the nature of an organism to lose its structure and drift toward chaos? Was that happening to us, so slowly that we did not even comprehend it? That the entity that was us and the house and the beach was moving molecularly outward, like a dying star?
But there’s a center still, I thought. Just like Camilla said. Maybe it’s a little looser now, maybe a little flaccid. After all, we’ve lost Charlie, lost the sense of Lila-and-Simms, lost other things. But they were within the realm of the normal abrasions of time and life; they might hurt, but were not mortal. I was willing to admit that the whole organism that we were together could alter. That it might implode was more than I could contemplate.
“But here we are still,” I said fiercely. My lips chafed against his sweater. “Still here, going into an entirely new millennium together. So many years, for most of you. After so long, after all we’ve lived through, what could possibly change in any of our lives that would move the…the focus of us anywhere else but to us and the house? I mean us, the Scrubs. I’m not talking about our lives outside.”
“I’ve often wondered just what it was that held us together,” Lewis said, hugging me hard. “It’s not exactly normal, after all; not many school-day alliances last, not really. Did you know that some folks in Charleston call us the Lost Tribe, and the house Never-Never-Land? By all rights we should be just seeing each other at parties and weddings and funerals, and waving to each other at Sunday lunch at the yacht club. But you’re right. Here we are still. I think everybody’s feeling a little strange these days, not just us. Like things are beginning to change, to end. It must be millennium fever.”
“But
we
really haven’t changed much,” I said stubbornly, feeling on the brink of peevish, childish tears.
“Look back, you’ll see,” he said, and kissed me on the forehead, and we dashed up the steps and back into the warm, dim room.
The strangeness persisted during coffee. People stole surreptitious glances at their watches, and cut their eyes worriedly toward Camilla. But she sat as serene as a Buddha, wrapped in the scurrilous old wedding ring quilt that we used for a picnic blanket, staring into the fire and rocking. She was smiling slightly.
She looked over at me.
“Have you been out of town?” she said. “I haven’t seen you for three or four mornings now, and your car hasn’t been there. I was afraid you were stuck somewhere awful like Scranton and might miss Christmas.”
And I looked quickly at Lewis and blinked, as if I had just been shaken out of a long, deep sleep. There it was, then, the first great change, after Charlie’s death, and almost that long ago now. Why had I never thought of it as that? I looked over at Lewis. He smiled and nodded.
Ten years ago, just after New Year’s 1990, Camilla had had a late super with Lewis and me at Bull Street. All of us had been drifting into the habit of calling Camilla on the spur of the moment to share meals and short trips with us; we did not do it out of duty and Camilla knew that. She accepted or not, as she pleased. For the last weeks she had seemed more distracted than was normal for Camilla, even given Charlie’s death. It was a calm distraction, merely a gentle otherwhereness. But it was noticeable, because Camilla had always been so perfectly there, so in the moment with us all. We did not exactly worry but we noticed it, and talked to each other about it.
“You think we ought to ask if anything’s wrong?” I said on a Sunday afternoon at the beach house, just after that Christmas. Lewis and Henry and Fairlie were the only ones there. We were making a kind of bouillabaisse out of the small drums Henry and Lewis had caught that cold afternoon, and a few crabs Fairlie and I had netted off the dock, and some shrimp we’d bought at Simmons’s on the way over to the island.
“Maybe we should,” Fairlie said, dumping a whole bottle of chardonnay into the stew. She hated both the smell and taste of drum.
“If something was wrong with one of us, she’d have it out of us in a minute.”
“Let her be,” Lewis said. “She’s always done this, kind of gone away somewhere every now and then. I can remember from when we were kids.”
“Yeah,” Henry agreed. “It usually meant some kind of Camilla bombshell guaranteed to alter the course of our universe.”
“She was like that just before she got engaged to Charlie,” Lewis said. “It was like she wasn’t on the same physical plane as the rest of us.”
Henry said nothing, only doused the broth with enough cayenne to lift it right out of the pot.
“Jesus, Henry,” Fairlie cried. “That’s going to scar our tracheas for life.”
It didn’t, though. But it did effectively kill the oily taste of the drum.
That night at supper with us on Bull Street, Camilla came out of her reverie just as I set a bowl of she-crab soup on the table, and said, “I just sold the Tradd Street house. A very nice woman named Isabel Bradford Thomas—she uses all three names—bought it for her daughter, Miss Darby York Thomas, for a wedding present. They’re from Greenwich, Connecticut, and don’t seem the sort who’ll put flamingos in the garden. I like them both. We close next Monday. I’m moving Tuesday morning. I’m telling you because you’ll probably hear Lydia screaming all the way over here when I tell her.”
“Jesus, Camilla, are you sure you want to do that? I always thought of that house as your insurance policy,” Lewis said, putting his spoon down and staring at her. Now that she had come out of her reverie, her face and eyes shone.
She’s actually happy, I thought. I’m so glad.
Aloud I said nothing.
“I can live very well indeed on what I sold it for,” she said, grinning. “And I have a little money in a trust from my grandmother, and Daddy left both us girls a little more. Mother’s got the balance of it, and she made another bundle when she sold off that big chunk of land on the Folly River, just across from Wadmalaw. Of course Daddy had promised the Coastal Conservancy to put it into a conservation easement, but if Mother knew that, she didn’t let it bother her. It’s that awful Folly Plantation development now. A cut-rate Kiawah. I hear it’s struggling. I hope so.
“Anyway, I guess that that money and what’s left of hers after Bishop Gadsden will come equally to Lydia and me. Though it would be just like her to leave it to the garden club or St. Michael’s or somewhere. Whatever, with the sale of the house and this and that, I’m perfectly all right. More than all right.”
“You didn’t want to live there without Charlie?” I said.
“I really didn’t want to live there, period. I’m sick of all the upkeep and the historic-house crap and the tours and people sticking their noses through the gate into the piazza. I have been for a long time. But for some reason, Charlie loved it. You wouldn’t have thought it, would you?”
“I always thought it was you,” I said.
“So where in the name of God are you going to live?” Lewis said sternly. I knew that he became stern when he was worried.
“Well, I’ve bought a little three-story house at the foot of Gillon Street. Completely renovated. The top floor is a very chic penthouse overlooking the harbor, with terraces all around. There’s over four thousand square feet of living space on that floor alone, and the kitchen and baths are a dream. It’s got three bedrooms, so the children can come when they absolutely have to, and I can have an office, and there’s a two-car garage and an elevator from the parking garage. The dogs can run in the waterfront park, and I can practically see the widow’s walk on the beach house from the terrace, and, best of all, I can keep it myself, with some help maybe once a week. It’s easy to keep. It’s essentially a loft, very open. Beautiful brick walls, and beams.”
We were both silent. Camilla Curry in a loft? Doing her own housework?
I began to laugh. Camilla joined in, and then, after a moment, Lewis.
“You don’t do anything halfway, do you, toots?” he said. “You do know that the historic preservation people are going to take a contract out on you, don’t you? I thought they hated all that apartment and condominium development across East Bay like typhoid.”
“Well, the building really
is
old,” Camilla said. “And besides, I’m on the board, and I’m writing an interminable history of our good works that nobody else wanted to. They’d have to pay a professional a million bucks to tackle it.”
“What are you going to do with the rest of it?” I said. “You said you had the top. Weren’t there two floors below that?”
“There are,” she said. “Already finished for apartments or office space. Parking and all. Listen, Anny. I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse.”
As it turned out, I couldn’t.
In two months I had moved my staff and files and what furniture hadn’t been ruined by Hugo into the two floors below Camilla, and Outreach became a downtown concern. The rent Camilla asked was a pittance compared to what she could have gotten, but she said it was worth it to her to have the space occupied by people she knew and who could keep an eye on her floor when she was away. She would not take a penny more.
“I will impose on you mercilessly,” she said, when Lewis and I tried to persuade her to accept at least a little more money. I had gotten a small insurance payment on the ruined office on West Ashley, and my board would probably pony up a bit more. “It will be more than worth any rent you could pay me.”
She didn’t impose, of course, being Camilla, but it did end up that we spent a good deal of time together. Sometimes she asked me up for a bite of lunch in her sun-dazzled loft, and at other times she brought her sandwich and I brought mine and we ate them together while the dogs snuffled around the waterfront park overlooking the harbor. I often called and asked if she wanted me to pick up anything for her from Harris Teeter when I shopped, and she usually did. Even with the elevator, the advancing osteoporosis made carrying heavy grocery bags difficult for her. I insisted on carrying anything heavy from her car up to her penthouse; she would call me on her car phone, and I, or sometimes Marcy or one of the others, would meet her in the garage and hoist the burdens for her. No one minded doing it, because everybody in my office loved Camilla, who had us all for holiday drop-ins and sent down little treats now and then. But Camilla hated being fetched and carried for.