Plantation (50 page)

“Can you have her at Dr. Thompson’s around four tomorrow?”

I lost it and tears spilled over my lids. I got up and leaned over his desk. “Are you saying this might be fatal?”

He reached his hand out and covered mine. Then, he squeezed my hand with a kindness and sympathy for which I was completely unprepared. Trip got up and put his arm around my shoulder.

“What can we do?” Trip said.

“First, we get the facts, then we decide,” Dr. Taylor said. “It may be that there is a course of action which would at least put her into remission. How old is your mother?”

“She’d shoot me if I told,” I said, wiping my eyes with a tissue P l a n t a t i o n

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and cracking a halfhearted grin. I blew my nose with a frightening sound. “Sorry.”

Jack Taylor and Trip smiled, all of us at once having a moment to honor Mother’s feminine mystique and my emotions.

“She’s young enough to fight,” Trip said.

“I thought so. She’s quite a lady,” Dr. Taylor said.

“What did she do to you?” I said and knew it was none of my business to accuse her of anything, but I knew her.

“Oh, the usual personal questions. Was I married? I said, no, I was a widower. Did I have children? I said, yes, one boy at the Citadel. Did I want to remarry, and I said, I was too busy to think about it. And, finally, did I know she was single.”

“Oh, my God! When will she stop?” I said, but had to giggle.

Mother was an impossible flirt.

“Yeah, boy, she’s something, yanh?” Trip said. “There’s only one of her.”

“What should we tell her?” I said.

“That you’re taking her for some blood work. No reason to alarm her. Even if the news is as grave as I suspect, even then, you should wait for her to ask you. She will.”

The office was suddenly filled with a weight that made my ears pound. It was my blood pressure. I was going to lose Mother. Not today, but soon. I knew that was what he was saying. I couldn’t fathom it in a million years. I didn’t want to acknowledge the depth of his diagnosis, what it meant in the end. That there would be an end. Soon. It was too horrible to accept. It was the same for Trip. When I looked at him, I could see he was having an even more difficult time digesting the news. We did the cowardly thing.

We thanked him, met Mother in the waiting room, and left.

Mother knew. Don’t ask me how, but she knew. She didn’t bring it up; neither did we.

“After the vampire takes a snack from my arm, why don’t we drive over to Shem Creek and have lunch on the water?” Mother said.

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D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k It was a suggestion she would have made on any ordinary day.

Not on the morning of the first peal of her death knell. We were entitled to our denial. We would face the inevitable if and when we had to face it. Not a moment before.

Later, at our waterside table at the Shem Creek Bar and Grill, our favorite spot for seafood, we watched the seagulls swooping down and around as the shrimp boats came in from a night’s work and docked. The air was filled with the healing smells of salt suffused with an undertone of slightly decomposing marine life. Sunlight playing on the silver ripples of Shem Creek had a hypnotic effect on us. We watched the waters, picking at our platters of deviled crabs, fried shrimp, and flounder, silently dreaming. Mother hardly ate at all.

I didn’t know what rattled around in their heads, but I was remembering summers with Daddy, waterskiing on the Edisto, picnics on Otter Island, laughing in the blistering glare of summer’s midday light, sunburned and sticky and adoring my daddy. He was my world when I was a little girl. Good things, fun, loving moments of praise and encouragement flowed from him as easily as instructions and corrections rolled from Mother’s tongue. Never again had I loved anyone like I had loved him. Except Eric. I had locked it all away and saved it for my son.

For her own reasons, probably to ensure our permanent prox-imity, Mother had made us afraid of living, of taking chances. She had railed against New York. I realized now that Richard had been like Mother—that somehow I always came up short in their eyes.

Over time, that had become familiar for me—to be short something that would have made me whole, by their standards. What were my standards?

Trip drove us back to Tall Pines. I pretended to nap in the backseat, but all the while, I worked to make sense of our personalities, the qualities and deficits that drove us.

It had appeared to me that Mother had no fear of risk for herself, only for us, second-guessing every choice we had made. After P l a n t a t i o n

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Daddy’s death, we accepted her authority without question. We knew too that she wanted us gone then. Without Daddy, she didn’t want to be a parent. It was too much. So she became Attila the Hun, and we yessed her to death, all of us keeping an emotional distance from each other that ultimately served no one well.

True, Mother had her moments of being a wild woman, classic parental defiance after Daddy was gone, but only within the confines of Tall Pines. On closer examination, I could see she had been practically agoraphobic, refusing to fly after Daddy’s death.

She had become her mother, who had beaten a disdain for the outside world into her, creating an environment of postures, propriety, and gentility which was a self-selecting process of elimina-tion for most things life offered, such as risk and adventure.

Daddy had taken her everywhere, but once he was gone she lived in a warp of sorrow, reverting almost to the life her parents had lived. Had it been necessary for her to have shunned the world to preserve the past? To keep Daddy alive? Did Trip and I owe her that kind of blind obedience? Was I to take up where she left off ?

Indeed, over the years, her world had dwindled to only a few locales—her friends’ homes, King Street to shop, downtown Charleston and Shem Creek for restaurants. Her garden shows, her work in conservation of the ACE. She was comfortable in that narrow alley of places and trusted faces. They threatened nothing.

There had been a time when she lectured on American paintings at the Gibbes Art Museum in Charleston and at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. I couldn’t remember the last instance of her calling me to tell me of her successes and acclaim.

It had been years.

And, most onerous of all to consider, if she had been closed-lipped about sharing her sorrow and phobias because of some locked-away fears, would she be afraid to die, if that was what we were facing? I felt blindsided by her illness, alleged or true. I wasn’t ready to let her go. I wasn’t ready to face my own needs. Something told me I had no choice.

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D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k It was nearly six o’clock when we turned into the driveway at Tall Pines. As we passed under the umbrella of live oak shade, I reminded myself to put my anxiety aside for Eric’s sake. I would tell Millie; although, Millie had probably already seen it in her mind. I was right. As our car pulled around the circular drive, the front door opened. Out stepped Millie.

Forty

Stardust

}

ILLIE had iced tea, a platter of carrot cake squares, a wedge of Jarlsberg, and water crackers Mwaiting for us in the dining room. She called Eric in and we stood, eating and drinking, making light talk about Mother’s doctor visits and inquiries about Eric’s first day of homeschooling.

“I’ll tell you, Millie, that Dr. Taylor was a very manly man!”

“Lord, please, no,” Millie said.

“What?” Mother said. “If I were twenty years younger? Ooh-hoo! Yes, sir! What musk!” Her voice twinkled but her eyes were clouded. She wasn’t fooling Millie or me.

I stuffed a square of cake in my mouth. “Mmmm. Millie! This is tho gud!” I garbled, then swallowed and said to Eric, “So, sweetheart? Which one of your tutors did you like the best?”

“Rusty,” he said, licking the cream cheese icing from his fingers,

“she’s so cool. Everybody else gave me homework except her!”

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D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k

“Please use a napkin, son, okay?” I really didn’t blame him. It was so delicious I wished I’d been home to lick the bowl myself.

“Well, you have a snack now and I’ll help you with it in a little bit, okay?”

“Sure,” Eric said and turned to Mother. “Grandmother? Are you sure you’re all right?”

“As sure as I am of my own name! Wait here! I brought you a little sursy!”

“What’s a sursy?” Eric said, his voice cracking slightly—

puberty already?—and looked at me for translation.

Mother slipped out to the hall for her purse.

“A little surprise,” I said, wondering what she had for him.

“I reckon I’d better get a move on,” Trip said to no one in particular and didn’t make a move to move on anything.

Mother returned with her hands behind her back.

“Guess which hand?” she said.

“That one!” Eric said.

To Eric’s delight, Mother produced a huge Hershey bar.

“Don’t eat it all at once; you’ll spoil your supper!” she said. “I picked it up at the cashier counter at the restaurant!”

It was an old custom of ours, but it was Daddy’s, not Mother’s.

Like the hand reaching from the grave, Mother gave Eric what Daddy had always given Trip and me when he was in a good mood.

A plain Hershey bar. It was a small symbol of his large indulgence of us.

Trip’s eyes met mine and I imagined we both had the same thought—that Daddy was calling through Mother, and telling us it would all be all right, not to worry. Sure.

“Supper’s gonna be around eight o’clock,” Millie said. “I made collard greens and fried chicken.”

“Collard greens?” Eric looked at me with a gag, rolling his eyes. Under his breath, he began to mumble. “Well, I’m not that hungry anyway.”

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“You’re gonna eat ’em and like ’em,” I said. “It’s food of the Gods.”

“Jeesch,” Eric said, “this morning I ate brain food. Tonight I gotta eat God’s food. Can’t I just get some regular food? Like Chinese?”

“Come on, boy, help me carry all this mess to the kitchen,”

Millie said, ruffling his hair. “Iffin you don’t like my collards, I’ll make you some kale!”

“Kale? Augh!” Eric said, grabbing his throat. “Mom?”

“Help Millie,” I said. “Nobody ever died from Millie’s greens.

Folic acid. Good for you!”

Eric continued groaning, alleviating some of the tension we tried in vain to disguise. Arms filled with glasses and napkins, he followed Millie to the kitchen.

Trip didn’t know whether to stay or go. He hemmed and hawed around for a period of time until Mother finally excused herself to freshen up, walking him to the door. After some small talk and promises to call each other right away when the doctor called, Trip left to go home to Frances Mae and his children. His reluctance to leave Mother and me hung in the air like so much humidity. Even big old Trip felt the need to sit with her until the phone rang.

Millie returned and we stood in the hallway together, watching Mother ascend the stairs. She moved slowly with resignation; even from her back—the way she held the rail and the position of her shoulders—we could sense her weariness and disappointed resignation. Disappointed that her time on earth was to be truncated by what she had loved about life most—to feel the sun, to garden, to be on the river. The very things that had made her feel alive would in fact, cost her this life. Betrayal of the worst sort.

She knew. We knew. None of us were talking.

After dinner and long after I had tucked Eric in, I decided to call Richard. It was after eleven. I dialed him on the pretense of asking him to seek another opinion from some of his colleagues, 4 1 0

D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k but the truth was that I was worried and yes, afraid. Something in me, that asinine inner child who was never quite silent, wanted someone to assure me it was all going to be all right. He answered on the fifth ring, his groggy voice filled with sleep.

“Hello?” he said, and cleared his throat. It was a habit of his to clear his throat when he was ready to reprimand someone. I could hear the lecture before it came.
Do you know what hour of the night it
is?
“Hello?” he said again.

When I knew he was about to hang up, I spoke. “Richard? It’s me. I’m sorry to call at this ungodly hour . . .”

“Not at all,” he said, “I’m so relieved to hear from you, Caroline.

I thought you’d never call. Is something wrong? Is Eric okay?”

I could visualize him rolling over, reaching for his glasses, turning on the lamp by the bed—that had been our bed. Since when did he worry about Eric?

“Eric’s fine.” And then the story rolled out as the tears came, choking, sobbing, nasty, tears of female weakness. I was looking for his strength, something I thought I lacked and my gulping tears were proof of it to me. “I’m just not ready to lose her, Richard!

I’m just not ready! I’m sorry to be such a baby!”

“Hush, now, Caroline. Dry your tears. I don’t blame you for crying. She’s your mother! I feel like crying myself! I adore Lavinia! Damnation. There must be
something
that can be done. Let me get on it in the morning, all right? First thing! I promise!”

“All right. Thank you, Richard. I mean it.”

“Now let’s get some rest, shall we? I’ll call you before ten.”

I pressed the End button and rolled over into my pillow, allowing myself an episode of the most sorrowful scenario. Mother would grow weaker and weaker. The vile indignities of terminal cancer would descend like Satan’s punishments for having lived too happy a life. She would become Job, her skin torn open with ooz-ing sores while every earthly pleasure was taken from her. I would witness it all, having my heart broken with each new pronounce-P l a n t a t i o n

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ment of her doom. I would see her suffer until she died from it.

Unless something could be done to save her.

I rolled over again and opened my eyes. Hell, I didn’t even know these things for sure. We didn’t have the results of her blood work! I was paying the toll before I crossed the bridge! Stupid!