Low Country (14 page)

find your own, and so will your little girl. I did.”

Low Country / 115

She managed a watery smile, and we got her fairly

presentable again, swathed in my scarlet cashmere

sweater, and went back to the table. Clay was holding

up his hand for the check. All of a sudden I did not

think I could bear the drive back to Peacock’s Island

in the company of this forlorn child and her little

Prussian husband. I simply could not bear it. Riding

with the Bowdon-Kirklands seemed even worse.

“I think I’ll stay over at the town house,” I said cas-

ually, not meeting Clay’s eyes. “There are some things

for the garden I want to pick up in the morning, and

I want to bring the summer linens back with me and

pack them in mothballs. Clay, you can get everybody

in the Jaguar, can’t you?”

He looked at me. I knew that he thought I was going

to go back to the town house and drink alone. Or

perhaps stay and drink wine with Hayes Howland; I

did not know which he would think more unseemly.

I realized, too, that I was on my way to being quite

drunk. There was a shimmery distance in the air

around me, and though I did not and hardly ever do

stagger, still, I was walking carefully in my unaccus-

tomed high heels and talking very properly. Poor Clay.

Twice now tonight I had broken our bargain. If we

talked about it, I could have told him that I did not

want to drink, did not even feel like it. I simply did not

want to be with these awful, doomed

116 / Anne Rivers Siddons

children anymore. I did not want to be with anyone.

But we do not talk about it, and I did not tell him.

“Suit yourself,” he said neutrally. “Be careful of your

car, though. Lot of traffic tonight.”

I knew that he realized that I was not sober. For

some reason, that made me angry.

“I’ll drive her back to the town house and walk on

home,” Hayes said. “The air will do me good.”

We stood on the cobbles outside Carolina’s, Hayes

and I, and watched Clay drive away in the Jaguar with

the two captive couples. No one spoke for a moment

and then Hayes said, “You want to go back in and

have a nightcap? That was pretty awful.”

“No, I really don’t. Thanks, though,” I said wearily.

“I think I’ll just go on back to the house and turn in.

You’re right. It was awful. I feel very bad about it. I

really didn’t do much to keep things going.”

“Wasn’t your fault,” Hayes said. “You tried. We both

did. There wasn’t any way those two were going to let

you draw them out. You were doomed before the night

even started.”

“Why?” I said, surprised.

“Christ, Caro, look at them,” he said. “And look at

you. One of them looks like a fat little brewer’s wife

in a too-tight Sunday dress and the

Low Country / 117

other one looks like Seabiscuit, and there you sit

looking like…I don’t know, a Persian princess or

something in that red silk, with all that black hair down

your back, and you twenty years older at least than

either one of them, and a million times richer…What

do you think?”

“I never thought about it that way, Hayes,” I said

honestly. “I really never did.”

“Well, it’s true. You’re something special, Caro.

Time you knew that, if you don’t already. Clay ought

to tell you.”

“Well…thank you,” I said.

The car came, and we got in and drove the short

distance to the town house in silence.

“Would you give me a nightcap if I came in for a

minute?” he said, not looking at me.

What is this? I thought. This is Hayes. I don’t know

what this means.

“Lucy would kill me,” I said lightly, and then, “And

I’m really tired. Why don’t we make it one night soon

when Clay and Lucy can join us?”

“You got it,” he said affably, and saw me to the door.

I shut it behind me, but then I went to the front bay

window and watched as he walked away down Eliott

Street toward Bedon’s Alley, where he would cut over

to Church Street and home. In the light of the corner

streetlight he stopped and looked back at the window,

and I stepped back involuntarily, as if he could see me.

But, of course, he could not.

118 / Anne Rivers Siddons

For an instant, it was as if I had never seen him, was

seeing him now for the first time. Only then did I

realize that, whenever I looked at Hayes Howland, I

had been seeing the young man who had been Clay’s

friend when I first met him, the irrepressible roommate

from the University of Virginia, broad of shoulder and

flaming red of hair, freckled of snub face and irreverent

of tongue, a kind of sprite, an elf, an Ariel of sorts.

But now I saw that Hayes was middle-aged. It was

funny; I did not see that in Clay, nor really, even, in

myself, when I looked into my mirror. But it was true

of Hayes Howland. He seemed older by far than any

of us, older than he should by rights be. I saw that the

broad shoulders were a little stooped now, with the

beginning of a roundness to the back, and the red hair

dulled and streaked with iron gray and worn away on

top so that it was almost like a monk’s tonsure. It made

his pale face seem longer, and the glossy mustache he

cultivated, which made him look, as Clay once said,

like he was eating a chipmunk, was thinner and

gingery. Even from my window I could see that the

freckles on his face had run together in places, and the

ones on the top of his head, so that he seemed

splotched with darkness here and there. His raincoat

had a rip in the lining, and part of it hung down below

the hem. That meant nothing; Hayes wore wonderful

Low Country / 119

clothes, but they invariably looked as though he had

slept in them. But somehow tonight, the draggled hem

and the bleaching lamplight and the rounded shoulders

all added up to something else. Hayes looked…de-

feated. Seedy. I thought of Willy Loman.

I went upstairs and undressed and crawled into one

of the pretty rice beds in the master bedroom. The

sheets smelled a little musty but were smooth and cool.

I turned off the bedside lamp and lay in the darkness,

thinking about Hayes. The thought came, unbidden

and as whole and complete as an egg: What does he

get out of all this? What’s in it for him?

He had been with Clay now almost since college.

Day by day, closer than any brother, he had cast his

lot with Clay at the very beginning of the Peacock Is-

land Plantation Company, leaving without apparent

regret the job with the Charleston law firm and coming

on board as Clay’s legal adviser, assistant, and general

factotum. Hayes did everything. He advised, he

traveled for the company, he ran errands, he oversaw

personnel, he haunted building sites and construction

crews, he sat in on marketing and advertising meetings,

he scouted universities and graduate schools for the

kind of young man or woman Clay wanted, those with

the invisible but unmistakable stamp of the company

upon them. Most of all he was Clay’s link to the Low-

country.

120 / Anne Rivers Siddons

There was not an old family or a cache of old money

from Litchfield to Savannah that Hayes did not know,

or his family did not. Hayes brought Charleston to

Clay. In turn, Clay took Hayes with him on his traject-

ory straight into the sun.

And yet…and yet. Somehow it did not seem that

Hayes was a terribly successful man, much less a con-

tented one. I could not have said precisely what I

meant by that. It was just that Hayes had a restlessness,

a kind of chronic discontent that his general affability

and foolishness sometimes did not hide. He was court

jester and confidant, but sometimes he was moody and

bitter, too, and then Clay wisely let him alone. The

moods rarely lasted more than a day, but they were

real.

For one thing, I don’t think Hayes and Lucy ever

had quite enough money. He had married Lucy Burton

the year after Clay and I had married; they had known

each other since infancy, and were out of the same

tiny, dense gene pool. Lucy’s parents, like Hayes’s,

were an old Lowcountry family, though, as Hayes

himself said cheerfully, poor as a cracker’s pisspot.

Hayes did not marry money, but he did marry

Charleston, and that, from what I could see, was what

always mattered to him.

But I thought now that it must have been a struggle

at times for them. Hayes was officially

Low Country / 121

listed as number two man in the company after Clay,

but he had no financial interest in it, for all the joint

venture money he sniffed out for Clay, and I knew that

his salary, while better than any other in the company,

even the one Clay allowed himself, was not spectacular.

Clay puts most of the Plantation’s money back into

the company. Hayes and Lucy must have stretched his

salary very thin to maintain her family’s beautiful old

Federal house on Church Street and give the parties

that they did, and educate two daughters in the bar-

gain, much less keep them in Laura Ashleys. I could

not think there was much at all left over.

Once, I remembered, I asked Clay when he was go-

ing to give Hayes some sort of property of his own, a

partnership or something.

“I guess when the right one comes along,” he said.

“Though if you think about it, can you imagine Hayes

running one of the Plantations?”

“Why not?” I said.

“Well, for one thing, it would probably mean leaving

the Lowcountry, and he’d let you cut his throat before

he’d do that. And then, frankly, I think he gets off on

being my sidekick. Who else thinks he’s as funny as I

do? Who else would let him fool around and goof off

as much as I do? Hayes is a born second banana, and

I think on some level he knows it. He’s never asked

me to let him have a crack at anything else.”

122 / Anne Rivers Siddons

I thought about that conversation now, as the night

stilled and quieted outside my drawn curtains. Some-

thing was missing; something did not equate. Hayes

was more than he seemed, had to be more.…

But the thought eddied away on the spiral of thick

wine-sleep that took me under, and when I woke, only

short hours later, with a cottony mouth and the begin-

ning of a dull headache, it was gone from my mind. I

sat up abruptly, as if summoned by an alarm clock,

slid out of bed, splashed my face and scrubbed my

teeth, ferreted out some old jeans and a sweatshirt of

Clay’s from the bureau, and was in the Cherokee and

on the road south within an hour.

By the time dawn broke, red as the apocalypse to

the east, I was on the bridge from Peacock’s over to

the island, and by the time the sun touched the tops

of the live oaks that leaned over the marsh house, I

was fast asleep again in the small iron bed that had

been my first in the Lowcountry.

4

T
he five rules of sleep according to Kylie Ven
able:

1.

Don’t draw the curtains. God can’t look

after you if He can’t see you.

2.

Face the door. You need to be able to see

what’s coming.

3.

Pull your knees up to your chin. It’ll get your

feet first that way.

4.

Keep your ears covered up. You won’t hear

it calling you.

5.

Never let your hands hang over the side of

the bed. There’s no telling what might take

hold of them.

She made those rules for herself when she was about

five, after a series of screaming nightmares that dragged

us out of sleep night after

124 / Anne Rivers Siddons

night, hearts hammering. We wrote them down for

her and pinned them on her bulletin board. If she fol-

lowed them scrupulously, she dropped right off to

sleep. If she omitted one, or fell asleep before she could

complete her ritual, she would have the dreams. We

were never sure why it worked. A child psychologist

who was visiting on the island later told us that it was

the instructive power of ritual, and that Kylie had, in

effect, healed herself.

“But should we just let it go?” I said. “I don’t want

her getting the feeling that there’s nothing between her

and danger but some kind of magic ritual she thinks

up. On the other hand, I don’t want her to think she

can prevent all kinds of harm just by doing the same

thing.”

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” the shrink said. “It was

about time for the nightmares, and it’s about time for

them to go away. Kylie has a good sense of her own

needs, I’d say.”

And she did. The nightmares faded, and she was

never so afraid of anything incorporeal again. Or if

she was, I never knew it. And I think I would have.

But all of her life, she put herself to sleep at night by

following her Five Rules of Sleep, and I often do it,