Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger (41 page)

“I can’t see that,” Ginny said.

“Of course you can’t, you’re twenty-seven years old,” Trixie snapped. Sometimes she felt as though Ginny were her daughter instead of her sister.

“Still, she did show some interest in coming down here,” Maria pointed out. “Surely that’s something.”

“Interest but no initiative,” Trixie said. “I suggested it, I picked her up.”

“Aren’t you something?” Ginny said.

“Ginny, I realize that you’re going through a difficult period of adjustment yourself, but that is no excuse, no excuse at all for childish behavior. I think we have to start thinking in terms of a nursing home, is what I think. Caswell agrees, incidentally. Of course that would involve selling the Raleigh house: it would all be quite complicated. But I do see that as a distinct possibility.”

“There’s Margaret, why don’t you ask her what she thinks?” Maria said. “She came over to see Mama this morning.”

“When?” Trixie asked sharply.

“Oh, about ten o’clock. You were at the Hammock Shop, I think.”

“Gotcha!” Ginny said.

M
ARGARET
D
ALE
W
HITTED
, who had divorced one husband and buried two, made her slow majestic way across the sand. A white caftan billowed about her and she carried a martini balanced carefully in one hand. “Cheers!” Margaret said when she reached them, steadying herself with a hand on Trixie’s shoulder. “My God, dears, it’s not worth it, is it? Nature, I mean.” Margaret’s voice was raspy and decisive, the voice of someone who has always had money. She had known their mother for forty summers more or less, since the time when Lolly and Pop had built their house, the Lollipop, next to Margaret’s Sand Castle. There had been nothing, almost nothing, on the south end of the island then. They had been pioneers.

“Margaret, how are you?” Ginny asked. Ginny had always liked Margaret.

“Oh, there’s some life in the old girl yet.” Margaret gave her
famous wink. “I’m having some trouble, though, just between us girls, with this shoulder. I fell, you know, in March.”

They didn’t know.

Margaret sipped her martini and stared out to sea, breathing heavily. Ginny stood up and dusted the sand off her jeans. Margaret’s gold medallion winked in the fitful sun.

“We wanted to ask you about Mama. What you think, I mean,” Trixie said. Trixie noticed how her own daughters had seated themselves just far enough away so that no one could connect them with her at all.

“Mama, Mama, it’s all tangled up,” wailed Christy, Maria’s six-year-old daughter.

“Take it to Daddy,” Maria said. “He’ll have to cut some string.”

Trixie and Maria stood up.

“Well,” Margaret rasped. “I’ll tell you what, girls. It’s hell to get old.” Margaret laughed and steadied herself on Trixie’s elbow. The wind blew Margaret’s huge white skirt about their legs, entwining them. Suddenly Ginny dashed off after a Frisbee, got it, and threw it back to Bill, Trixie’s son. Maria picked up the quilt, shook it, and walked back up toward the Lollipop, the deck, her husband. Through the binoculars, he stared toward the ocean, his red beard curled around his pipe. The screen door of the Lollipop opened and Mrs. Darcy came slowly out, blinking in the sun.

Down on the beach, Margaret raised her silver cup aloft, “Cheers, honey,” she said to Trixie.

“Look, Mama, look!” Christy and Andrew started up a howl. “Look, Mama, a rainbow, a rainbow!”

Maria nodded to them, with exaggerated gestures, from the deck.

“How’s it going, honey?” Mark asked without lowering the binoculars. “Getting everything worked out?”

“Oh, it’s just so difficult.” Maria put the quilt over the rail and sat down in a chair. “Ginny is so difficult, for one thing. I hate these whole-family things, I always have. There are so many things to work through. So many layers of meaning to sort out.”

“Actually, there’s a great deal to be said for the nuclear family structure,” said Mark, focusing his binoculars on the sight he had been viewing for some time now, Ginny’s breasts moving beneath her pink T-shirt as she played Frisbee with his nephew.

But Ginny stopped playing Frisbee then and turned to stare out at the ocean and Bill did too, as all movement stopped along the beach.

“Mama, Mama, Mama!” Christy screamed.

“I’ll be damned,” Mark said, putting the binoculars down. “A double rainbow.” Mark put an arm around his wife and they stood together on the deck, nuclear and whole, like a piece of architecture against the wind.

“All the summers we’ve been here, I’ve never seen one of those,” Trixie remarked to Margaret.

A giant rainbow shimmered above the horizon, pink and blue and yellow and blue again, above the mass of clouds, and as they all watched, the clouds parted and a second rainbow — almost iridescent at first, the merest hint of color — arced across the sky beneath the first, spreading color until the rainbows seemed to fill the sky. The children on the beach, caught in motion as definitely as if they had been playing Statues, broke up with a whoop and began to cavort madly, whirling around and around in all directions. Sand and Frisbees flew. Up on the porch, behind Maria and her son-in-law, Mrs. Darcy moved hesitantly at first, in an oddly
sidewise, crablike fashion, farther out into the afternoon. Mrs. Darcy wore her flip-flops and a flowered housecoat. She raised her arms suddenly, stretching them up and out toward the rainbows. “Ai-yi-yi!” she wailed loudly. “Yi-yi-yi!” Mrs. Darcy stood trans-fixed then fell forward into the sandy deck in a dead faint.

T
HE NEXT MORNING DAWNED
clear and beautiful. The joggers were at it early, pounding the road from one end of the island to the other. Fishermen lined the bridge over the sound to the mainland, dropping their lines straight down into the outgoing tide. Marsh grass waved in the wind and strange South Carolina birds flew overhead. Somebody caught a blowfish. Along the road beside the biggest houses, white-uniformed maids came out to dump the bottles and trash from the night before, getting their houses ready for the next day, lingering to gossip in the sun. Children ran out onto the piers that protruded far into the marsh, checking crab traps, squealing at the catch.

At the far south end of the island, Ginny prowled the beach for sand dollars, watching the shifting tide pools as the tide rushed out to sea. She remembered getting on her raft in the sound at about the middle of the island, drifting lazily through the marsh grass past all the piers, gaining speed as the tide picked up, rocketing around the south end of the island finally, right here, jetting out to sea to be knocked back at last by the waves. Ginny remembered the final, absolute panic each time in the rush to the sea, how strong the current was. In this memory she seemed to be always alone. Maria never wanted to do it, Trixie had been too old, off at school or something. But there had been friends every summer. Ginny remembered the Mitchells from Columbia, whose house had been sold five years ago. Johnny Bridgely,
her first beau. The Padgetts who always had birthday parties with piñatas. Ginny sat in a tide pool and played with the hermit crabs. The water was so clear you couldn’t tell it was there sometimes. She could feel the sun, already hot on her shoulders, and nothing seemed worth the effort it took.

At the Lollipop, Mrs. Darcy lay back on a daybed in the big rustic living room, surrounded by children and friends who urged her back each time she attempted to rise.

“I still think, Mama, that it would be very silly — I repeat, very silly — for you not to let us take you right up to the doctor in Myrtle Beach. Or down to Georgetown if you prefer. But you cannot just ignore an attack like this,” Trixie said.

“I wonder if this might not be some sort of ploy,” Maria whispered to Mark in the kitchen. “An attention-getting thing. Unconscious, of course.”

“It’s possible,” Mark said. “Or she might have had a slight stroke.”

“A stroke!” Maria said. “Do you think so?”

“No, but it’s possible,” Mark said. Mark got a cup of coffee and went out onto the beach. His nieces, already oiled, lay on their stomachs reading books from their summer book list. His own children were making a castle in the wet sand, farther out.

“I think I’ll scramble some eggs,” Mrs. Darcy said, but the lady from across the street, Susie Reynolds, jumped up and began doing it for her.

There was something new about Mrs. Darcy, something ethereal, this morning. Had she had a brush with death? A simple fall? Or what? Why did she refuse to see the doctor? Mrs. Darcy looked absurdly small lying there on the rather large daybed, surrounded by pillows. She still wore the flowered housecoat. Her
small fat ankles stuck out at the bottom, the bare feet plump and blue veined, with a splotch or two of old red nail polish on the yellowed toenails. Her arms were folded over her stomach, the hands clasped. Her hair curled white and blonde in all directions, but beneath the wild hair, her wrinkled face had taken on a new, luminous quality, so that it appeared to shine.

Trixie, looking at her mother, grew more and more annoyed. Trixie remembered her mother’s careful makeup, her conservative dress. Why couldn’t she be reasonable, dress up a little, like the other old ladies out on the beach? Even Margaret, with her martinis and her bossiness, was better than this.
Life does go on,
Trixie thought.

Mrs. Darcy smiled suddenly, a beatific smile that traveled the room like a searchlight, directed at no one in particular.

“She seems a little better, don’t you think?” Mrs. Reynolds said to Trixie from the kitchen door. Mrs. Reynolds brought in the plate of scrambled eggs and toast.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Trixie said. “I’ve been so worried, I just can’t tell.”

“Well, I think she looks just fine,” Mrs. Reynolds said. “I’ll go on back now. Call me if you need me, honey.”

Mrs. Darcy sat up and began to eat. Maria, book in hand, watched her silently from the wicker armchair. Morning sun came in the glass doors, and a cross breeze ruffled the pages of the magazines on the table. Bill came back for his flippers and mask. The volume of the children rose from the beach. “How do you feel now?” Maria asked carefully.

Mrs. Darcy’s watery blue eyes seemed to darken in color as she looked at her middle daughter. “When I saw the rainbow,” she said in her soft southern voice, “why, it was the strangest thing!
All of a sudden I felt this, this
presence,
I can’t tell you what it was like, it just filled me up until I was floating. Then I saw him.”

“Saw
who
?” Maria put down the book and leaned forward in her chair. In the kitchen, Trixie dropped a coffee cup with a clatter and came to sit at the end of the daybed.

“Why, I don’t know!” Mrs. Darcy said in a wondering sort of way. “I just don’t know!” She began to eat heartily.

“Mother, I don’t believe I quite understand,” Maria said calmly. “Do you mean that you saw a stranger, some strange man, on the deck? Or did he come into the house from the front?”

“Oh, no,” Mrs. Darcy said airily, waving her fork. “Oh, no, nothing like that. I went out on the porch, I was looking at the rainbow, I felt this overwhelming presence everywhere, oh, I just can’t tell you what it was like! Then I saw him.” She beamed at them. “Trixie, honey, could you bring me some salt?” she asked.

Trixie rose automatically, but was stopped by the sight of her son Bill standing in the kitchen door, flippers and mask in hand, staring at his grandmother. “Go on down to the beach,” Trixie said to him. “Go!” He went. Trixie got the salt, came back and gave it to her mother who sat placidly munching toast and dropping crumbs all down the front of her housecoat.

“Could you be a little clearer, Mother?” Maria asked. “I’m still not sure who this man was.”

“But I don’t
know
!” Mrs. Darcy said. “Thank you, dear,” she said to Trixie, and sprinkled salt liberally on her eggs. “He had long hair, he wore a long white thing, sort of like Margaret’s dress as a matter of fact, you know the one I mean, and he had the most beautiful blue eyes. He looked at me and stretched out his arms and said, ‘Lolly.’ Just like that, just my name.”

“Then what?” Maria said.

“Then I went to him, of course.” Mrs. Darcy finished her breakfast and stood up. “I may have a swim,” she said.

“Oh, I wouldn’t,” Trixie said quickly.

Mrs. Darcy seemed not to hear. Training her new smile upon each of them in turn, she went into her bedroom and softly closed the door. The sisters stared at each other.

“That beats everything I’ve ever heard!” Trixie said. “You see why I brought up the nursing home?” Under the brown thatch of hair, Trixie’s face looked nearly triumphant, causing Maria to reflect fleetingly upon the strange accident of birth, the fact that if the woman facing her had not happened to be her sister, they would have had nothing in common at all.
Nothing!
Maria thought.

“I think we have to proceed very carefully here,” she told Trixie. “Let me go and discuss this with Mark.”

Trixie went upstairs to lie down, thinking, as she climbed the stairs, that Caswell had been right after all. They should have gone to Sea Island by themselves.

Ginny had joined the others on the beach, standing with Mark at the water’s edge to watch the children swim.

“Let me put some of this on your back,” Mark said, holding up a bottle of suntan oil.

“No, thanks,” Ginny said. “Please. Not any more.”

Mark put the top back on the bottle. “Well, what happened with Don, then?” he asked. “You want to talk about it?”

“No,” Ginny said. “I don’t.”

“Mark, Mark!” Maria came running toward them. She arrived; she told them everything. Ginny began to laugh.

Bill came dripping up out of the water, followed by the girls. “There’s a real strong undertow,” he yelled to everybody. When they
didn’t answer he came closer, pushing the face mask up. “Grandma’s going batty, isn’t she?” he said to his uncle and aunts.

“Is that true?” the girls demanded. “Is she going to go in a nuthouse?”

“Of course not,” Ginny said.

“What’s a nuthouse?” Christy asked.

Ginny was laughing and laughing.