The Edge of the Gulf (11 page)

“Of course. I appreciate being included.” They had gone back through the upstairs sitting room and down the large curving central staircase. They walked out through the heavy sub-tropical night and Hudson climbed into the Highlander.

Charlie leaned a forearm on the doorframe. “I think, after fifteen years, even though we don’t see each other as often as I’d like, that we probably come close to qualifying as family by now, don’t you? And now, with that fine cottage, I
expect
to be seeing you more.”

He leaned his head back for a moment, looking up into the dark, massed shapes of the trees scattered with moonlight. “I have some things to put in order, and that’s another reason for Chaz’s visit. We talked a little about it in the spring, but I want to go over some things with him.”

“Are you all right?”

“Oh, I’m fine. Really. I’ve made a decision I’ve been weighing for a long time, and that feels terrific.” He paused and smiled. “It’s still private, nothing for publication for awhile yet. But it’s something I want to make official with Chaz and Sydney. Why don’t we plan on dinner here, say, a week from Saturday? A little celebration.”

Chapter 17

Hudson surveyed the early evening scene on the deck of the Blue Bar and sipped a gin and tonic. He had walked over just before six and the timing was well judged. A few afternoon lingerers who had come in from the rain were dispersing, some with the glow of a couple of extra, unanticipated beers, and the dining crowd, which would include everything from middle-aged couples to college students, young singles, and every sort of family grouping, had not yet arrived.

The cocktail hour had materialized slowly but surely throughout the long, ruby and mauve sunset, and was now in full swing in the cool, rain-clean gloaming. The last light was radiant behind a bank of clouds in the west. The temperature had dropped with the storms and hovered in the seventies, and a fresh breeze curled in from the backside of the departing low pressure system, now a charcoal smudge far out to the southeast over the Gulf. Just to the left, due east along the edge of the surf, the moon, pale as a wafer and nearly full, ascended.

Ensconced on the bench in one corner of the deck, Hudson leaned back, one arm stretched along the railing. The bar ran half the length of the deck, in the center, and then L-shaped into a back corner of the restaurant, where a short passageway led into the kitchen. There were stools all around it and, on the side looking out across the beach, a scattering of small tables. The windows of the restaurant looked onto the deck all along the back wall of the large back dining room, and he could see a few early diners taking their seats.

He listened to the pleasant clink of glass for awhile longer, idly observing, and then decided on a walk. He wandered back into the pleasant maze of the Blue Bar. He went along the wide hallway that skirted one end of the back room, the largest of the three, and then, three steps down, into the other bar, a cozy nook. That, in turn, opened through an archway and down another two steps to the front dining room where, in a bay off to one side with an old stone fireplace, the occasional live music group or singer would hold forth. There wasn’t a level floor, step, or wall in the entire place, and that was, of course, exactly the way Charlie had kept it. Unevenly paneled with various eras and grains of dark old wood, lighted at night by shadow-casting sconces and candlelight, the Blue Bar was romantically rough, the sort of fabled old Gulf retreat that no longer existed.

As he made his way across the end of the bar toward the front room, he decided to visit the gents and turned into the little passage to the right. The tight space barely had room for a tall young man encumbered with a backpack, waiting outside the restroom door, and another man talking quietly, but rather excitedly on the pay phone. When the doors to both restrooms opened simultaneously and the occupants excused themselves toward the bar, Hudson stepped back, and the backpacker went in.

“Not
now.
” In one move, the man, of medium height and stocky in a wiry sort of way, hung the phone up and swung around quickly, almost stepping on Hudson’s feet. His eyes rounded in the shape of his wire-rimmed glasses, startled with some surprised, vague recognition.

“Terry? Hudson DeForest. Friend of Charlie’s.” Hudson made room for a handshake.

The man, whose complexion was unmistakably fair and freckled despite the burnish of a light tan, blushed deeply and instantaneously, from his throat up to the receding sandy hair close-cropped around his bald crown.

“Sure, sure! Good to see you! Wow, long time.” He had been breathing heavily and now exhaled slowly and lowered his voice. “I was sure sorry to hear about your wife.” He shook his head slightly, looking earnestly at Hudson.

“Thanks. How’ve you been? The place looks exactly the same. Thank God.”

“That’s for damn sure.” He smiled briefly and laughed, resuming a hearty tone. “Oh, I’m toolin’ along just the same. Same old Laurel same old. I love it.” He paused and looked sternly over his glasses at the phone on the wall. “If I could just get my distributors to
do their jobs.
Oh, well, it’s always something.”

“Terry! Julie needs you out back,” said a young man hurrying past the hall with a tray of beers.

“Duty calls,” said Hudson. “I’ll see you around. I’m here for a few weeks.”

Terry Main seemed distracted. He smiled at Hudson and nodded as he stepped sideways toward the bar, saying, “You bet. I guess Charlie mentioned that awhile back. I forgot—you bought a house, didn’t you?” He seemed to sense that his stab at gregariousness wasn’t quite compensating for a certain anxious preoccupation. He touched Hudson’s elbow. “See you later. Take care.” He turned into the bar and disappeared.

Minutes later, Hudson went down the steps of the small porch outside, making way for two interesting parties. First, a handsome pair of women, in their eighties at least, one with a cane and both of them chatting hell-for-leather, snow white hair and tasteful cotton shirtwaists. Patiently behind them, talking quietly with a pretty blonde in a sleek white halter dress, came a tall young man wearing a University of Virginia ball cap, two large gold hoops in one ear, a chartreuse tie-dyed tee shirt, and, knotted around his waist, some sort of brilliantly colored Polynesian skirt.

Radical chic comes to Old Laurel, thought Hudson, smiling to himself.

Moseying up the road, he breathed the spectacular air, moist and cool. He headed west, toward the darkening twilight of the beach and the rough whisper of the waves, wrestling with his own preoccupation.

***

Behind the houses that fronted the beach and across the end of Yaupon Lane, he trudged through the sugary sand. He passed a few people here and there in the near dark, walking or sitting, but within a half-mile he was alone.

He pulled his shirt over his head and wrapped his keys and money in it, kicked off his Birkenstocks, and ran into the surf before he could talk himself out of it. The water was slightly warmer than the cool air, a summer rarity, and the stiff breeze made his blood race.

Just beyond the breakers, he swam laps for several minutes, until the choppiness wore him out. He then sat at the water’s edge, looking out until the horizon vanished and the infinitely rippling moonlight on the waves became, after quite a long time, less agonizing, and more an indifferent, beautiful monotony.

Chapter 18

On the brief flight from Atlanta, Sydney reread the letter.

Twice.

February 16th

Dear Charlie,

It’s always a joy to hear your voice. And it’s been far too long. What, almost a year? Alas, I have no excuse. I really have retired, except for a couple of dear friends who are convinced through sheer habit that I am the only decent estate lawyer in Atlanta. Other than golf and racquetball, some church work, and my ill-informed but constant commitment to Helen’s roses, I truly don’t know where the time goes. Remember how time seemed so limitless when we were young? When Helen died, time sort of yawned open again for me, and I thought I’d never fill it. Now that I’ve found ways of filling it, it seems once again to have accelerated. But I have no complaint with that. (I don’t want to be too old.)

Thanks for the invite! I can’t think of any place I’d rather be than with you in that incomparable early March sunshine on the coast. I’ll drive down on the fourth, probably arrive around four or five, and will plan on staying until probably the tenth.

We’ll talk more when I’m down, but I just want to say again that I think you are making absolutely the right decision about the land. I know exactly what it means to you. When you made your will fifteen years ago, you were insistent that should you die before me you wanted me to have it because you knew I would honor your wishes and see that it wasn’t badly developed. You gave me the choice of keeping it intact or of ensuring some sort of appropriate, low development. I was deeply honored at your entrusting me both with the inheritance and with the decision about its stewardship.

But, Charlie, I am now nearly sixty-eight years old, and you are a
much
younger man of sixty-six. And while we never know how our days are numbered, I firmly believe that the two-year gap in our ages will continue to “widen” as I have seen it do ever since we both hit middle age and you somehow just seemed to stop while I kept going. No one on the planet can be more pleased than I that you have decided to go on and make a great dream come true in your lifetime (and in mine, too). My only regret is that I suspect you maundered too long over letting me know your decision. That eighty-five acres of paradise east of Seagrove is a part of the enormous love for the Gulf that has defined you. I’m proud of you for seizing the opportunity to help define it, and doing it now!

Although if you were to go first when we’d both made it to ninety, I would have carried out your wishes as planned, I don’t need to point out to you that you are actually saving me some measure of headache. Whether I’d decided to go the route you’ve now settled on, and which is clearly the very best possible—a land preserve or trust in perpetuity—or had decided to oversee some respectfully indigenous, low-density development, I’m afraid my window of opportunity for being a young turk has decidedly closed. My vision has narrowed; my energies are sufficiently absorbed by my duties as treasurer of the board of Peachtree Battle Presbyterian Church and in trying to break seventy on the back nine at the club before I move on. Why in this world would I want suddenly to have to deal with sixty or eighty million dollars or more? I am a comfortably retired attorney and, as you know, Helen had a nice trust from her family as well.

Which brings me, finally, to your question about Chaz. As you saw yourself when you were up a couple of years ago, he really seems to have overcome his problems and found a direction that suits him. It took Helen’s final illness to bring him to, but I truly believe he will cleave to the promise he made her. We had determined long before her death that to set him up as a “trust fund baby” would not only be doing him no favor but could actually undermine his resolution to settle down. He used the money she left him to get started and he has worked hard to make a go of it. As far as I can know, he is a disciplined social drinker and is off the other stuff entirely, he’s in that shop five or six days a week, and, best of all, he seems really to enjoy it. You know how art has always been the one thing that held his focus, even in the rough stretches, and his most important inheritance from Helen was actually her marvelous taste. I think his fiancée, Sydney, is good for him, too. She’s smart and confident and very good-looking. Strong. Purposeful. She’s attentive to Chaz, without hovering, and I like that. I think you’ll like her, too, when you meet her, and I know they’re eager to come down when their busy schedules allow. They’ve been seeing each other for almost two years, she moved into the house a year ago, and he gave her his grandmother’s ring at Thanksgiving.

It is specifically this incremental growth, this integration, that Chaz has needed in order to build a life. And frankly, Charlie, I don’t want anything to cause him to fly off in different directions again. The best thing that has ever happened to him was realizing, in that year before she left us, how much his mother loved him, how he had hurt her, and how desperately he needed to let her know he was serious about changing. He got some help, but primarily he did it by himself, for her. By the time she died, he was a new man. It was miraculous, but it has proven real. He is working for everything he gets, he’s responsible, he has goals and even, I think, ambition.

I am proud of him. For so many years he was a troubled young man in seemingly needless but nonetheless unrelenting escape. Now he seems to be a man who is living fully in the moment and who plans for tomorrow. He’s quite obviously in love and, I pray to God, he’s happy. When I am gone, he (and my
grandchildren
???) will inherit not a great deal but enough to help make their lives a bit more secure and afford them some pleasure in their maturity. If I presume in believing that that is enough for my son, it is the experienced presumption of a loving father.

As I have told you several times over the years, I have never mentioned to him anything at all about your will or its directives for me, and now, I think it just as well, that I need never do so. Neither you nor I have been very much at ease with the implicit fact that on my death that responsibility would pass by default to Chaz, but you, of course, have been too good to bring it up. In many ways, that land is your child just as Chaz is mine. You want to go ahead and see for yourself that it will be safe and be the best that it can be. I want the same for Chaz. He has traveled far these past few years. But my pride and my love would be less than genuine if I were to be less than honest with myself. Chaz is a young man who needs parameters, who needs work even more than most of us, who needs discipline and focus, and only lately has he found the truth of this and begun to benefit from that truth.

I don’t want that sense of purpose to become confused, and I simply cannot believe Chaz’s progress would be best served by overwhelming temptation and limitless norms. For some it might be a kind of freedom; for him I think it would be, if not an invitation to disaster, at least the loss of ground that has been very hard won. This is not, ultimately, my decision, of course. It is yours. But I just wanted to say again how much I support it, and why.

I thought about e-mailing you, but it wouldn’t be appropriate for this communication and, besides, I never have really gotten the hang of it. The last note I sent someone I discovered two weeks later was
unsent
; apparently I’d hit the wrong icon. Even though I’ll see you in a few weeks and we can talk more at length, I wanted to say these things to you now. I am sending this letter by certified mail and no doubt you will want to burn it when you have read it.

In closing just let me say that I think your idea of leaving Chaz your beautiful home seems ideal to me. And sharing your intention with him soon, yourself, rather than letting him hear it read from a sheaf of documents years from now, is characteristic of you. Very warm and very thoughtful. Some of Chaz’s happiest memories are of our times in Laurel.

I am delighted as well that you feel you have the right team now to take on the 26-A and the Blue Bar. I know that for you they are far more than businesses and that you want to place them, too, into caring hands.

Feel wonderful about your decisions! You deserve to. They are not only wise, they are right and good. I know that you’ll work out the details with your attorney there; Dan is a great guy. But, of course, as you suggested, we can go over some options when I’m down if you want. Thank you again for having entrusted me all these years with what you, so characteristically, consider a profound trust of your own. I join you with every fiber of my being in preserving it. If anyone can be nearly as happy as you to see, in his lifetime, that tract of land saved, you know who it is.

And let me say how honored I am to have a man like you as my only brother in this world. What brother could have honored me more, not just for the past fifteen years but for over six decades, with such true intimacy, generosity, and confidence? My life is immeasurably enriched by your integrity and your love.

Always,

Peter

Although Peter Cullen did not get his wish about seeing in his lifetime the eighty-five acres of land just east of Seagrove become a wilderness preserve, he did get his wish about not growing too old. He had been discovered by a friend who had dropped by early on the morning of February seventeenth for coffee and to return a book. Not rousing Peter, the friend had walked around to the back to see him, one hand still clutching a hose, his robe drenched with the spewing water, sprawled close to the long bed of roses to which his wife had been so devoted. His face was free of pain and his physician later said that the coronary had, in all probability, killed him instantaneously.

***

As the plane began its descent, Chaz looked over from his Bloody Mary and crossword at the letter in Sydney’s lap. “Should you have that with you?”

“I don’t think Uncle Charlie’s going to go through my purse or bag. Besides,” she smiled, “it holds a sort of talismanic effect for me.”

She nestled into his chest, and kissed him.