Plantation (2 page)
20. Should Be Getting Better, but It Keeps Getting Worse
23. I Knew It Would Come to This
C o n t e n t s
x v
41. Through Thick and Through Thin
44. Lavinia Says, Y’all Deal with It
46. Rolling! Rolling! Rolling Down the River!
History of ownership of Tall Pines Plantation
Located on the Edisto River in the ACE Basin of South Carolina:
Original home built on 5,000 acres as a gift by William Oliver Kent on the occasion of his daughter Elizabeth Bootle Kent’s marriage to Henry Wright Heyward IV in the year of 1855.
Elizabeth Bootle Kent
wife of
Henry Wright Heyward IV
(1838–1911)
(1830–1914)
Tall Pines then passed into the hands of their only daughter:
Olivia Kent Heyward
wife of
David Patrick Logan
(1860–1935)
(1855–1935)
With whom she gave birth to three children:
Male child
(1880), died in childbirth
Cassandra Anne
(1881–1956), married and moved to Philadelphia
Amelia Heyward Logan
(1885–1962), wife of Thomas Payne Reardon (1860–1947) Whose hands then inherited the Plantation and with whom she had three children:
Isabelle Marie
(1915–1990),
never married, became a foreign missionary
Thomas Payne Reardon Jr.
(1921–1994), who practiced medicine in Savannah, GA
Lavinia Ann Boswell
(1/29/28),
wife of James Nevil Wimbley II (deceased) Who then inherited the Plantation and with whom she had two children:
Caroline Boswell Wimbley
James Nevil Wimbley III
(3/22/61)
(7/28/63)
wife of
husband of
Richard Case Levine, M.D.
—
Frances Mae Litchfield
—
parents of:
parents of:
Eric Boswell Levine (b. 1988)
Amelia
(b. 1987)
Isabelle
(b. 1989)
Caroline
(b. 1991)
Chloe
(b. 2000)
(Dr. Levine’s first marriage, to Lois Baum, produced a son, Harry, and ended in divorce.)
Plantation
}
A Lowcountry Tale
As seen in the Charleston
Post and Courier,
Obituaries column, August 10, 2000.
Lavinia Boswell Wimbley, widow
of James Nevil Wimbley Sr., died
at her home yesterday. She was
seventy-two years old. “Miss
Lavinia,” as she was known, was
educated at Ashley Hall and The
College of Charleston. She later
Rob Novit
earned a Master’s Degree at the
University of South Carolina.
“Miss Lavinia” was an accom-
plished sportswoman in bird hunt-
ing and the shooting of trap and
sporting clays. She spoke frequent-
ly on the subjects of American
Photo of Miss Lavinia in full hunt-
painting, the history of rice culti-
ing regalia.
vation, gardens in America, and
bourbon whiskey.
A renowned hostess and an
avid card player, she is survived by
her companions, Raoul Estevez,
31, Peter Greer, 75, a son, James
Nevil Wimbley III, 37, a daughter,
Caroline Wimbley Levine, 39, and
five grandchildren. Visitors may
call at the Bagnal Funeral home in
Walterboro tonight from six to
nine. The funeral is scheduled for
11 a.m. Thursday at Tall Pines
Rob Novit
Plantation. In lieu of flowers,
Photo of Miss Lavinia in evening
donations may be made to the
dress entering a party down her
Gibbs Art Museum, the Nature
staircase wearing “The Pearls.”
Conservancy, or the Betty Ford
Center.
Prologue
Don’t Leave Me Now!
}
2000
HIS story I have to tell you has to be true because even I couldn’t make up this whopper. And Mother’s T wake—packed to the rafters with the well-dressed curious and the well-heeled sorrowful—may seem an insensitive place to begin, but here we are and it’s all I can think about—that is, the progression of events that led up to this moment. I’m obsessing and entitled to it too. So would you.
Think about this. You know those pivotal moments in your life that you don’t see coming? The ones you wished arrived with a timer going off so you’d know
this is it!
Well, when the phone rang in February, you couldn’t have convinced me that six months later, Mother would be in “the box” and I’d be wearing her pearls, twisting them around my finger exactly like she used to do.
Oh, God, here comes Raoul. Excuse me for a moment.
“Mees Caroline, I want to express my deep sympathy to you in thees torrible time of you troubles.”
2
D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k He took my hands in his. His hands were callused but manicured.
“Thank you, Raoul, thank you for coming,” I said, thinking that he was actually rather handsome. He exuded something, I don’t know, some masculine whatever.
“She was very beautiful, your mother, and I will hold her een my heart forever.”
“Thank you,” I said, “I know she was very fond of you.”
“Sí,”
he said, a smile spreading across his face, “ees true.”
He released my hands and walked away, back into the crowd.
Mother slept with
him?
Well, why
not?
Where were we? Ah! Pivotal moment! Pivotal moment, indeed. You see, Trip—he’s my only brother—called me in New York, in the middle of a cocktail party my husband, Richard, and I were giving, to announce that Mother had flipped her wig and tried to kill him with her daddy’s Parker Old Reliable. (That’s a shotgun.) He said she was crazy and that he had her power of attorney and was putting her away somewhere where she couldn’t hurt anyone.
I knew that was some bodacious bull because my brother was generally accepted as the Second Coming, that is, if Mother’s lifelong drooling all over him was an indication of her religious devotion. I guess that sounds like a classic sibling rivalry remark, but you have to know certain things and then you would agree.
First, Trip was the spitting image of Daddy and Daddy was dead—dead and canonized by Mother decades ago. Mother, bereft with her loss, then did a textbook transference of her enormous love for Daddy and heaped it on Trip. Yes, my husband, Richard, is a psychologist and a psychiatrist. We, Richard and I, are . . . well, we’ll get to that.
Second, Trip, dweeb that he is, returned her blind-eyed affection with boundless ingratitude. My brother has always been the archetypal rationalization of why I had declined the possibilities of marriage with southern men. It was their relationships with their P l a n t a t i o n
3
mothers that always did me in. That, and the archaic sexism. But of course, with the birth of my own son, I quickly realized, and then denied, that I was wrong about that too.
Poor Trip!
Mother would say over and over, sighing with the weight of all the problems of the world.
Well, I didn’t completely disagree there. Trip was carrying a cross the size of the Brooklyn Bridge with that tacky, low-rent wife of his. Frances Mae and her horrible children! Dear God! What a disaster she was! Gives new definition to the old ball and chain!
We’ll dissect Frances Mae later, don’t you worry about that for a minute.
So, back to Mother and Trip and their Freudian Oedipus
thaing
.
I wonder how much Mother would have seen of Trip if our plantation didn’t have a dock and a landing so Trip could spend half his life on the Edisto River.
Trip was your basic southern good old boy. Lawyer, fisherman, hunter. Clean-shaven, a good dancer, manly, and with flawless manners. He never came to the supper table without a tiny cloud of aftershave in his aura. He always held Mother’s chair for her and found a compliment for her as well. Mother was smug in her reign as the matriarch and that she was well in control of her son’s attention.
They shared many things in common. Great regard of weekly family dinners, love of land, sense of place, and the importance of a stiff drink or two at the end of the day. Frances Mae was never going to get in the way of Mother’s love for Trip. She didn’t stand a chance. Sometimes I would think that he had married Frances Mae just to show Mother that she was irreplaceable. That Frances Mae was some kind of a surrogate who could have his body but would never know his heart.
Unfortunately for Mother, as Trip’s family grew, his attentions became less frequent and more disingenuous. When he began to drink a lot, Mother began to whip it on the masses. The gardener, Raoul. The UPS man. Mother spread it around, to say the least.
4
D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k She had a ball—no pun intended. I used to think she did these things to make Trip jealous, but later I decided she was just determined to enjoy every minute of her life.
Mother’s affairs pretty well horrified Trip and Frances Mae and helped them build their case that Mother had a loose screw.
Well, in the amour sense, she was a loose screw—hell, she left a string of bodies behind her too numerous to count. But crazy? Not even for a second. Our mother, Lavinia Boswell Wimbley, finally laid out in lavender (and blue paisley), was as sane as they came. She offered no apologies.
My heart was completely broken. You see, six months ago I was living in New York and I thought I was very happily married.
Richard and I had a great apartment on Park Avenue, our son, Eric, was growing up beautifully, I had a small but successful decorating business, and life was pretty darn good. Sure, we had our issues now and then, but there was no pressing reason for complaints.
No, I never dreamed this could happen. I had spent the last fifteen, sixteen years, or maybe more, building a case for living in New York and against anything remotely connected with the ACE
Basin of South Carolina and plantation life. It was horrible to me!
Boring!
The unending repetition of tradition, day after year after generation after generation!
Suffocating!
The ACE was my demon to reckon with and mine alone. And anyone would have thought that at this stage in my life, I was old and wise enough to take it on.
So I came home to
see about Mother
for a short visit. I wanted to assess things with my own eyes.
My relationship with Mother and with Trip had been strained for years. The geographic distance between us didn’t help things either. But I wasn’t going to let Trip move Mother out of Tall Pines and into a retirement community without knowing if it was truly necessary. And that Mother
wanted
to go. I remember thinking, shoot, even though Mother and I had zero in common, she was my mother and I owed her at least that much.
What I found on arrival was exactly what I expected. Mother P l a n t a t i o n
5
was playing cards with her girlfriends and talking about men. Millie, Mother’s estate manager and friend of a zillion years, was still up to her same old voodoo. Trip was drunk as usual, Frances Mae was pregnant as usual and still turning over the silver looking for hallmarks with her green eyes. And their girls were still full of all the antics of every devil in hell. Everything seemed normal. It was.