Outer Banks (2 page)

“Shhhh,” Cecie would gasp through her laughter. “She'll hear you. She's got her bed jammed right up against the wall opposite yours.”

“How can she hear me through a bathroom and two walls?” I would scoff. “And so what if she does?”

“I wouldn't get on her bad side,” Cecie said. “She's not what she seems.”

“Lord, Cecie, she's just Fig. What is she, if she's not that?”

“I don't know. But whatever, it's not what you think,” Cecie said. “Where's your famous intuition?”

“You're nuts,” I said, and went on being polite to the lurking, adoring Fig in her presence, and laughing helplessly at her in the nights.

And Cecie went on bearing her in silence, going away inside her head when Fig was around. It was an astonishing talent; I have seen her do it many times. You would be looking at Cecie, perhaps talking to her, and all of a sudden you realized you were looking at the diminutive, kitten-faced, redhaired outside of Cecelia Rushton Hart from the Virginia tidewater, but that the essential Cecie was simply not in residence at the moment. She could even converse while she was doing it, nodding and murmuring the right things. After a while she would slip back in behind her eyes and Cecie would be there again; I often wondered what inner world she had made for herself that so seduced and comforted her, and what she did there, and with whom. For all our bone-closeness, there was a door very deep inside Cecie through which I could not follow, and I knew it was there she went when Fig stumped too intrusively into her consciousness.

“Who would it be?” Fig insisted with that terrible, lumpen playfulness, on the day I discovered Eliot. “Who would the mermaids sing to? I think it would be you, Kate. You'll be the one who hears the mermaids. I bet you already do.”

Cecie snorted.

“Maybe it'll be you, Fig,” I said, thinking it would please her. And it did. She blushed an unbecoming magenta and said, “Do you really think so? I'd love that. But I'm sure it would be you. You look like you hear mermaids sometimes…”

“No,” Ginger said, surprising us. We looked at her.

“It'll be Cecie,” she said. “Don't you see? It has to be Cecie.”

And I smiled, involuntarily, because of course she was right. It would be Cecie to whom they sang. Behind her horn-rimmed
glasses and dry Virginia drawl, Cecie was smoke and will-o'-the-wisp light, sea spray and flame. It would be Cecie who heard the mermaids singing.

And maybe she did. Maybe they all did, for all I know.

But I know that they never again, after that year, sang to me.

I
F
I had had a different name and a different nose, I undoubtedly would have had a different life, but I did not realize that until I was very nearly at the end of it. My father, who was the architect of both, was as pleased with his handiwork as if he had plucked both out of a Scott Fitzgerald novel…which, in a sense, he did…but I spent most of my childhood and adolescence trying to live up to those two icons, and the rest of it trying to live them down.

My nose was and is thin and high-bridged, the type sometimes called aristocratic, a twin to my father's. The Lee nose, as I often heard him say in his careless Virginia drawl when an adult admired mine. Which Lee it was hung, vivid and indisputable, in the very air; I can't remember anyone asking. My name is Katherine Stuart Lee, also the moniker of the aristocrat in the airless Southern society in which my father sought to live, move, and
have his being (as it is writ in the
Book of Common Prayer
), that other icon he espoused early on in his life. My father would have shot himself upon hearing that I had added “Abrams” to that distinguished triad when I married Alan, if he had not done so already. By that time he had long and truly forgotten that our Lee name was, if not exactly counterfeit, not precisely real, either.

Daddy was indeed a Lee, and did, indeed, attend the University of Virginia, but he was Charles Horace Lee of Canton, Indiana (pop. 2,456), not Virginia. At the University on a Rotary scholarship in business administration; and the hunt country plantation that was his patrimony existed only in the pages of the florid Southern fiction he perused from childhood, and in his hungry heart. The Stuart he bestowed on his only child did not, in either his or my mother's family, exist at all. Some infatuated idiot from Sweet Briar told my father in his freshman year that he looked just like General Jeb Stuart. And so another branch of my family tree sprouted whole and living.

My mother was not the Mississippi belle Charles Lee represented her to be (and later came to believe she was), but the daughter of a rural grocery store proprietor in Slattery, Mississippi, of such murderous hookworm temper that Lonnie Mae Coolidge ran away from home when she was fifteen with a railroad brakeman, who abruptly detrained her in Lynchburg, Virginia. Charles Lee met her when he took a summer job washing dishes in the cafe where she worked as a waitress. Later he was fond of saying, in that beguiling drawl he had long since perfected, “Well, she hung around Lynchburg so long that I finally married her,” and everyone simply assumed that it was Randolph Macon Women's College where she hovered, and not the Virginia Belle Cafe. If asked her class there, pretty May Lee had only to wrinkle her
retrousse
nose, obtained from God knew what long-ago wandering Frenchman who made his way upriver from New Orleans, and murmur, “Well, I never graduated. Charles married me and
brought me to Alabama when I was just eighteen. My daddy almost had a fit.”

And her audience would smile and nod. In those days few Southern girls made it through college, especially the pretty ones. And tall, slender, slouching Charles Lee did have, in his long gray eyes and wide, sensuous mouth, the kind of banked passion capable of whirling up his love and marrying her and sweeping her away. It was widely agreed in the small society of Kenmore, sixty miles south of Montgomery in the heart of the Black Belt, where he prudently settled as far away from the upper South as possible, that there was a lot of his great-grandfather Robert E. in young Charles Lee. A few older women, who read, also thought there was a real similarity to the dashing young officer named Fitzgerald who had carried off Judge Sayre's oldest girl up in Montgomery, though it was agreed that May Lee must be much prettier and sweeter than the wild, erratic Zelda.

My father did nothing to discourage either similarity. Indeed, his whole life was dedicated to furthering both. The precarious living he earned from his desultory and inept insurance career went for the renting and meager furnishing of a dilapidated white-columned antebellum mansion on the Santee River west of Kenmore, that stayed, throughout my girlhood, as dilapidated as the day I was born into it. My mother had no bridge or ladies' circle meetings in its splintered, haunted drawing room, my parents had no candelit dinners in the vast, mote-dancing dining room, and in my entire girlhood I never asked a friend home after school to play. The abiding impression I have of it now is dust, dimness, and echoing silence broken by my own tentative footfalls.

“When we get it all fixed up, we'll have a grand housewarming and invite everybody in town. Knock their eyes out,” my father would say, as we sat in the thick, wet dusk on the crumbling back porch, which was held together and shielded from prying eyes by vicious, fecund wisteria vines. He and my mother would be fanning and drinking martinis, I would be reading. Or as we
huddled around the coal fire in the cracked iron grate in a back room off the kitchen we had adopted as a winter retreat. It was the only room in the house that did not have sixteen-foot ceilings, the only one that could be heated by lump coal bought by the scuttle. I think it had probably been a butler's pantry once. There, too, they drank martinis, and there, too, I read. I read everything, everywhere, whenever I could, making thrice-weekly sorties to the Kenmore Library and coming home tottering under rich piles of spilling books. The reading consumed and saved me; I do not remember, in those early days of my childhood, being unhappy or lonely. That came later, when the world leaked in on me. I am surprised now, when I look back on it, to think that I wondered at the inner world Cecie Hart had fashioned for herself. Mine then was just as total, just as sustaining.

When I was not reading, or in school, my father tutored me. Not from books, but in what he called “the ways of the world.” How to speak, and converse, and meet people; how to eat and walk and make small talk; how to correspond properly and promptly; how to order from an elaborate menu, how to choose and serve wine. How to behave with the president of Kenmore Bank and Trust and with the black woman who came to clean, and why the minute differences were important. “You pay Mr. McClure a compliment when you say you saw his cute daughter in the drugstore, but when you say it to Essie, it's familiar. A lady wouldn't,” he would say.

“I'm not a lady,” I would say.

“Yes, you are,” he would reply. “A born lady, in the bone and blood. I'm not going to let you forget that. It'll serve you well in the world.”

And because I was young and loved my handsome mountebank father, I did not ask what world he meant, or see that it existed largely inside his head. He taught. I learned.

Daddy gave it about that all his money was going to buying back his family place in Virginia, which a brother's perfidy had sold
to a Yankee businessman. When he was able, he intimated softly, he would take my mother and me back there, rightfully at home at last. All of Kenmore applauded his fineness of spirit, and his patience and gumption, and no one mentioned it when he fell behind in his dues at the country club, or his chit at the grocery, or his tithe to St. Luke's Episcopal Church. Exceptions were quietly made, help quietly given and gracefully accepted. No one remarked upon it when my mother found herself a discreet job as secretary to the principal of the Atwater County High School; no one thought it anything but admirable when, at thirteen, I took modest summer and weekend and after-school jobs clerking about town to help pay for the drifts of clothes and crinolines that saw me through early high school.

“Your little Katie is a sweet girl, and a smart one,” the matrons of Kenmore would say to my parents. “All A's at school, and working like a bee after, and never missing a day of Sunday School and Church. And looking like a princess to boot. We're going to hear from her, yes, sir. She'll make a college teacher, no doubt about it.”

“I wouldn't be surprised,” my father would grin charmingly, modestly, but after a few of the comments about teaching he called me out of my deep Edith Wharton spell one evening, in April of my sophomore year in high school, and set out a new battle plan for me.

“No more drugstore and ten-cent stores for you this summer,” he said, swirling the martini glass so that the olive bumped at its sides like a fish in an aquarium. “You're going to work on the Cape, or Nantucket.” He studied me with his narrow head cocked to one side, appraising. “And I think we're going to let your hair grow, and put it back and up. We used to call it a French twist. Not one woman in a thousand can really wear it, but you can. It looks like money.”

I put a hand up to feel the short, lacquered flip that I and every other teenager in the Deep South wore that year.

“Do they pay you for wearing it?” I said smartly. “Because if they do, I'm all for it. Then I wouldn't have to work on the Cape or anywhere else. I don't want to go away by myself this summer; I'm barely sixteen.”

“Eastern girls from the best families fight to be waitresses at the Cape and the Vineyard and Nantucket,” my father said. “I've known multimillionaires' daughters who did it every summer. They meet all the Ivy League boys and all the girls from the good schools, from the Seven Sisters. They make contacts that are useful the rest of their lives. A lot of them get into Vassar and Wellesley and Smith because of those summers. They learn the ways of the world they're going to live in. You're a little young for it, but I don't see any point in making you hang around here summers anymore. You'll get to thinking like Kenmore. And you'll have the time of your life. Trust me, you will. You'll have more dates and boyfriends than any girl from Bar Harbor to Rehoboth Beach.”

“Why would I there when I don't here?” I said sullenly. “I haven't had a real date ever, except in a bunch, and that was Carolyn Crenshaw's drippy little brother. I look funny, you know I do. I look like an ostrich. And I'm going to look like an ostrich on Cape Cod.”

He smiled.

“You're not, you know,” he said. “Down here they're all afraid of the way you look; you outclass them by a mile. But up there you're going to look…like they do, only better. You have very distinctive looks, Kate. You haven't quite grown into them, that's all. Very Eastern. Very wellborn. Tall, thin, well-shaped head and hands and feet, fine straight features, not too flashy; good teeth…and you have a smile that can light a room, when you choose to use it. You want to watch that you don't use it too often; it's the contrast of that smile against all that coolness that's so effective. You have faultless manners, and a nice reserve. I'm glad we started early on that. I want you to watch very carefully and see what the other girls are wearing this summer and that's what
we'll invest your money in. You'll see pretty quick that it isn't crinolines and ruffles and all those clanking bracelets.”

The weight of his expectations seemed suddenly as heavy on me as the world. I felt the dreary certainty of dropping them fill me up like water.

“Papa,” I said, “I don't belong up there. I don't know anything about that place and those people. I don't know anything about anything but Kenmore and you all…I wouldn't fit up there. Please don't make me go.”

He pulled me to my feet and led me to the vast, dim downstairs bathroom, that always seemed to be bathed in wavering green light, an underwater place, and stood me in front of the speckled old mirror on the back of the door. He stood behind me, hands on my shoulders.

“Look,” he said.

And in the green lake light I saw two tall, misted people with straight, small Renaissance features and nimbuses of ashen hair thick around long oval faces as pale and smooth as Vermeers, and with the attenuated bodies of Modiglianis. Two people with a kind of medieval, monochromatic tawniness about them, like chiaroscuro. I stared; this was not the face that met mine in my mirror every morning, or the body. This was somebody else, wearing the fussy fake Ann Fogarties and Capezios I had bought with the money made at the drugstore and the Fashion Den. I did not know this person. I realized only later that I was seeing myself for the first time through the eyes of my father, and that to him, I had always looked that way, and always would.

“That girl doesn't belong in this town,” he said.

And in that instant I understood that I would be leaving Kenmore that summer and, in some essential sense, never coming back.

My father's net of alumni contacts may have been woven of spiderwebs and lies, but it floated far. By late May he had secured
for me a position as a waitress in a small summer hotel on Cape Cod.

“It's just right,” he said, when the accepting letter came. “Fifty rooms right on the water, all meals, separate dormitories for boys and girls in back, pretty good pay. You'll work from five
A.M.
to two. It won't kill you and you'll have your nights free. That's when everybody meets everybody else. Beach bonfires, wienie roasts, you know. And Sunday off, for sailing. You need to learn to sail. No kitchen work; they'd probably make you cut your hair, or at least keep it up in a net. I don't want you running around up there with your hair smelling like clam chowder. Harbour House is quiet, but it's old money. Beauchamp Childs takes his family there every summer. His girl Sydney used to work there summers. I think she's at Sweet Briar now. Be sure and look him up. He's the one that got you in there on short notice. I wrote him last month. You need to cultivate the Childs.”

“Are they old money?” I said, not sure what that meant. In Kenmore, if anyone had any money at all, it was apt to be old.

“Old enough,” my father said. “Champ's family had a string of granite quarries. His father turned it into Southern Cyanamid, and Champ has taken it international. I thought of going in with him once, right after graduation. But I wanted my own business. I don't think he ever forgave me. We used to run relay together at Virginia. He was always the flashiest, but I was better…”