Outer Banks (3 page)

He let the sentence trail off, and behind his gray eyes I could see that he had followed the thought back to those gilded long-ago cinder ovals.

“Was he in your fraternity?” I said politely. I knew that would bring him back. The little plain gold Kappa Alpha shield he kept in a velvet box on his dresser was the totem he cherished most. He wore it to church and to parties, but it never left its nest except on those occasions. Often, when he had had two or three martinis, he would tell rambling, sentimental tales of the brothers and he used to say, “Kate, May, remember this: when I die I want to be
buried in the Shield. I don't want anybody to forget that. That's a brotherhood that transcends the grave.”

I felt something near reverence for the shield. He never let me wear it, but he told me over and over that perhaps I could aspire to it, when I was old enough, for very special occasions.

“It's an honor not given many women, Katie Stuart,” he would say in the silken tenor the gin called out. “The girls who walked into the house at Virginia with the Shield on their breasts were princesses, the fairest flower of the South. You have to earn the Shield.”

And I would be silent, knowing that of course I had not, and probably never would. I thought of the Kappa Alpha house at the University of Virginia often in those days; my father had described it so often that I could see every polished floorboard and shining stair rail and soaring crown molding, smell lemon wax and Cape Jessamine. In my mind, it was a white-columned palace inhabited by tall, lazy, blond princes, all of whom looked like my father. All wore Confederate gray with gold epaulets.

When he did die, two springs later, he lay in a closed casket because of the damage the bullet had done to his beautiful head. Its lid had already been lowered when I arrived home from school. So I did not know that he had not, after all, been buried wearing the Shield until I found it in the top drawer of his bureau days later. I was cleaning it out, stunned and slowed with emptiness, because my mother asked me to do it. Since the funeral she had sat silently in the dim, near-empty drawing room, having her hands chafed by round-the-clock squadrons of ladies from St. Rhoda's Altar Guild. They must have known the iced tea she kept constantly beside her was half Kentucky Gentleman, but of course, no one remarked upon it.

I taxed her with it that afternoon before the evening shift from St. Rhoda's arrived.

“I can't believe you forgot,” I snuffled fiercely. “You know he asked to be buried in it; you know what the Shield meant to him.”

She lifted her head, and I saw the face of Lonnie Mae Coolidge, of Slattery, Mississippi, for the first time in my life.

“No, I don't guess I do know what it meant to him,” she said in a flat voice that came through her nose. I had never heard that, either. “The only time your daddy ever went into the famous KA house at the famous University of Virginia was to wash their famous dishes on weekends, and then he went in the back door,” she said. “I don't know where he got the pin.”

It might have wrecked me, that ugly and resonant little revelation, but by that time I knew about the abyss.

I had no name for it then, but I already knew the awful hollowness under my feet that meant bottomless emptiness, and I knew the smell of it. It was like the cold wet air that coils up from a dead black well. I could smell the breath from my own private pit and I could even smell it about others. There is a fraternity of us, the abyss walkers. In our eyes, the world is divided by it, made up of those who walk frail, careening rope bridges over the abysses and those who do not. We know each other. I do not think it is a conscious thing with us, this knowing, at least not most of the time, or we would flee from each other as from monsters. It is an animal thing. It is only on that wild old neck-prickling level that we meet. It is only in our eyes that we acknowledge that our twin exhalations have touched and mingled. Sometimes, though not often, one of the others, the non-abyss-people, will know us, too. You may even know the feeling yourself; you may have met someone about whom otherness clings like a miasma; you can feel it on your skin though you can't name it. When that happens, you have met one of us. You may even be one of us, down deep and in secret. As the old women in Kenmore say, it takes one to know one. Being able to feel it is not a good sign. The other half of the world, the solid, golden half, the non-abyssers…they feel nothing under their feet but solidity. They inherit the earth. We inherit the wind.

Vladimir Nabokov began
Speak, Memory
with the words,
“The cradle rocks above an abyss.” When I read it, years later, safe for the time being in a secret garden by the sea on Long Island, I cried. The man who had brought me there looked at me over his own book and smiled.

“Already?” he said. “You just opened it.”

They were tears of kinship, and of vindication. It was like hearing the doctor say, “You were right all along, and we were wrong. It isn't in your head. It's a real sickness. We apologize.” This Russian, himself an exile, had named the emptiness and shown me it was vividly and certainly there, under all our feet, and always had been. This Russian was a man who knew his way around an abyss. I might walk the abyss again, but from now on this Russian would walk with me, and had given me an entire company of fellow abyss walkers. I wish that I had met him when I first looked down and noticed that beneath me lay…nothing.

I did that eight days into my tenure at Harbour House. It's a wonder I made it until the middle of my sixteenth year, given the foundation and fabric of my parents' lives, but I had never been anywhere but Kenmore until then, and Kenmore was, and is, an invincible keeper of dreams. There was nothing in Kenmore to let the light of reality in on me, and conversely, there was nothing on all of Cape Cod to keep it out. I went from dreamwalker to shipwrecked in the space of five minutes.

Up until then it had gone almost as well as my father had said it would. I arrived in a paralysis of self-consciousness and terror and went through my first evening there almost immobile, but no one seemed to notice. The orientation session was full of young women who looked so unlike the girls my age in Kenmore as to be exotic, but since no one seemed to stare unduly at me, it soon dawned on me that maybe my father had been right about this, at least: maybe my plain, pale, blade-thin features and the hated height and thinness were, after all, somehow Eastern and therefore desirable, and here I would, at least on the surface, fit in. Certainly no one else in the dining room listening to the hard-voiced wife
of the hotel's owner enumerate our duties looked anything at all like the belles of Kenmore. No one was ripe, no one was vivacious, no one was overtly or consciously cute, or even perky. Everyone was almost determinedly plain. I met a small sea of scrubbed, sun-touched faces and straight, clean hair and cool translucent eyes like mine, over ranks of plain cotton oxford-cloth shirts and faded Bermuda shorts, or shirtwaists unadorned save for circle pins. Weejuns and sneakers underscored everything.

All of them looked, from the neck up, anyway…like me. I looked like them. For the first time since the letter of acceptance came, a constricting band around my chest seemed to loosen just a little, and I took a slow, tentative breath.

That night I met the boys at a lobster roast for the staff, and for the first time encountered the careless, lithe-moving, assured young Ivy Leaguers my father had sent me East to meet, and felt the band tighten again. There was not a swagger, a preen, a duck's-ass haircut, a pair of tight jeans, a sneer, or a frogged bicep in the lot of them. No Brylcream. No motorcycle boots. They wore wrinkled khakis and runover topsiders and ancient, shabby school sweatshirts, and brush cuts, and moved as if on balconies before cheering throngs. As little as I had had ken of the young men of Kenmore, I had less of these. But then, after I had introduced myself in my turn, hating my Southern accent, one of them detached himself from a group of his peers and shambled over to me and draped an arm around my shoulders and said, “Hey, theah, Miss Scahlett. Wheah you all from, honey chile?” And some sly taint of my father's in my blood surged to the fore, and I said, “My family is from Virginia, but we live in Alabama now.”

“FFV, huh?” he said, and at my blank look, laughed and said, “You know, sweet thang, you jus' bein' modest. FFV as in Fust Fam'ly of Vuhginny. Ah thank I'll call you Effie.”

And so Effie I became, that summer, to the boys and girls alike, and though I pretended to hate it, I loved it; it saved me. I kept it, for years. He had given me, in that moment, an identity,
a history, and the keys to the kingdom. And a nickname. No one had ever given me a nickname before.

“Oh, okay,” I said to my father, when he called that weekend to see how I was getting on. “The work is ghastly, and the food is awful, and the weather has been just horrible, but the other kids are okay. They call me Effie, for FFV; this boy nicknamed me that. We sort of go around together…”

“What's his name?” my father asked.

“Uh…well, they call him Stick. He's tall and skinny. I'm not sure I remember…oh. Peter. Peter Chapin. He goes to Amherst, but I forget where he lives…”

“It doesn't matter where he lives,” my father said, and there was a hard triumph in his voice. “The Chapin and the Amherst are enough for now. Way to go, Katie. Effie. Effie Lee. You're doing great. You even sound different. Now listen, Kate. Remember what I said about not smiling too often? Don't do that, and for God's sake, don't giggle. And watch the drinking, I know what goes on on those beaches, and I know what they say about the girls who do too much of it. Smoke if you have to, and nurse one or two beers, but no more. And Katie…no necking. There'll be a lot of that, and a lot of the other things, too, and you'll get a lot of pressure to do it…but don't. You be the one who doesn't. In the first place, you're too young. In the second, you'll be the one they remember next winter when the prom and house party invitations go out. Effie Lee, the cool little gal from Virginia who wouldn't. It's much safer, and it's very provocative. You have a look about you, like a snow queen. Keep the mystery for now. This summer is for learning. Now. Do you need anything? Clothes? Mad money?”

“I could use a little money for clothes,” I said. “I don't need much, but nothing I brought is right. I don't have any Bermudas, and I need a couple of oxford-cloth shirts, and some Weejuns. You know. Loafers.”

“I know,” he said. “Do they still wear pennies in them?”

“God, no,” I said, and heard the change in my voice as well as the words. He laughed.

“Doin' good, Punkin,” he said. “I'm proud of you. Didn't I tell you that girl didn't belong in Kenmore?”

 

On the eighth day, there was a new family at my station for breakfast, and their card read Childs, B. and family, Richmond, Va., and I knew that my benefactor had arrived.

When they came into the dining room and had seated themselves, I straightened my apron and went up to the table, smiling.

“Welcome to Harbour House,” I said, my heart bucking against my ribs. “I'm Katherine Lee.”

They looked at me, a tall gray-blond man in a seersucker jacket and gray flannel pants who did, indeed, look rather like my father, with the eyes of a peregrine falcon; a small woman in a peach linen sundress, skin tanned to leather; an adolescent boy in white shirt and chinos; and a sulky girl a few years older than me, who might have been one of my dormitory mates. This must be the famous Sydney Childs. They looked at me pleasantly, except for Sydney, who pouted, and said nothing. And then the woman said, “Well, hello, Katherine Lee. You're new, aren't you? I'd remember that pretty face if you'd been here before. And is that by any chance a Southern accent I hear?”

She held out her hand to take a menu from me. I thrust one into it. There was another silence. Perhaps they had not gotten my name.

“Katherine Lee, Kate,” I said again. “Charles Lee's daughter.”

The man and woman looked at each other.

“Charles Lee,” the woman murmured. “I'm not sure which Lee…”

“He was a KA at Virginia with you, Mr. Childs, and on the relay team,” I said, my ears ringing, heat beginning to creep up from the collar of my blouse. “He…you…I believe you were kind enough to get me my job here this summer. I know he wrote
you. I just wanted to thank you for that, we all appreciate it so much…”

My voice died. These people did not know who I was. They did not know who my father was.

“I'm sorry, I've been out of the office practically all spring and summer,” Beauchamp Childs said, looking at his wife and then at me, and then down at his menu. “My secretary must have…”

“Lord, Champ, you'd forget your head if it wasn't glued on,” Mrs. Childs chirped, and to me, “Forgive him, sweetie, he means well, but half the time he doesn't remember his own children. You're very welcome, and you tell your daddy we were happy to be able to help. You'll love Harbour House; Sydney worked here one summer when we told her we were throwing her out of the family if she didn't do some honest work, but I'm afraid it didn't take…”

The unrepentant Sydney rolled her eyes at her mother. Her perfect skin and nails told me she hadn't worked here or anywhere else one instant longer than she had to.

“…so she's back to staying out all night and sleeping all day. Your daddy should be proud of you. You give him our regards, will you? I think we'll start with the fresh pineapple. We always do…”

I wrote their orders carefully on my pad and walked away, ears roaring, feet seeming to sink spongily into the floor. The surface felt suddenly treacherous, as if it were going to disintegrate. Behind me I heard Beauchamp Childs' slow voice saying querulously, “…have the foggiest idea. Helen must have written the letter. I don't remember him around the house or on the relay team, either…”