The Last Original Wife (10 page)

“What? Did she say that? You listen to me, you little weasel, you put my wife on the phone with me this very instant! Do you hear me?”

“Or what? There's no reason to resort to vulgarity and threats, Wesley. Sticks and stones, you know. Hold on.”

There was another muffled pause, and then I heard Les say, “I said I don't want to talk to you now, Wesley.” And then she hung up.

She disconnected the call! Was she
insane
? I am her husband of almost thirty years and she hangs up on me? Just what the hell was going on here? What did
I
do? Did I walk out on her? No! I was the abandoned one and
this
is how she treats me? I sat there looking at the phone, feeling my blood pressure rise until my ears were pounding.

My phone rang again and it was my secretary.

“Your daughter's on line two.”

“Thanks,” I said and pressed the flashing light. “Charlotte?”

“Yep. Did you find Mom?”

“Yeah, it seems that your mother decided to take a little trip to visit your uncle and decided not to tell anyone.”

“Wow. That's not like her at all. Did you talk to her?”

“Nooooo. It seems she doesn't want to talk to me right now.”

There was silence from my daughter's end of the phone. Then she spoke.

“Dad? Did you two have a fight?”

“We don't fight, Charlotte. But sometimes we don't agree on everything.”

“Yeah, that's sort of how it is with me and Mom too.” There was a pause and then she said, “Do you want me to call her and talk to her?”

“Right now? I don't really care. I'm plenty pissed, if you must know.”

“Oh, great. Maybe you should go to Charleston and see what's going on, Dad. Don't you want to know?”

“Are you kidding? Right now I'm thinking about cutting off all her credit cards and closing her bank accounts. And you think I should go see what's wrong with her?”

“Oh! Dad! That's terrible! Look, we both know that ever since the Edinburgh fiasco she ain't been the same.”

“Like that was my fault? I waited all my life to play St. Andrews and she almost ruined the whole thing!”

“Yeah, well, I think Mom has a different point of view on that one.”

“It seems like all of a sudden she's got an opinion about everything! Since when did I ask for all these opinions?”

“Daddy. You know I love you, right?”

“Of course. You're my daughter.” What kind of a question was that?

“Look, sometimes? Well, you can be a little rough, you know?”

“No, I
don't
know. In this particular instance, your mother is dead wrong. Just because we disagree about a couple of things doesn't give her the right to spend money to waltz herself down to Charleston without telling anybody where she's going. It's not nice. She could've been dead in a ditch for all I know.”

“Yeah, and you, Harold, and Cornelia would already be back at the hotel.”

“What's that got to do with this?” Oh, she was a smarty-pants today, this one.

“Nothing, Daddy, just that you aren't exactly Mr. Sensitive all the time.”

“Maybe. But being all gooey inside didn't get me where I am today either. I've worked hard all my life to give your mother and me and you kids everything I never had. This is how she thanks me? With this kind of disrespect?”

“All I'm saying, Daddy, is that she must've felt pushed pretty far for her to break out and do something like this.”

“Pushed? Your mother? You gotta be kidding me! You can't push that woman one inch!”

“Really? Okay, you're a cupcake and I'm the Queen of England. I love you, Daddy, but sometimes . . . ?”

“Sometimes what?”

“Sometimes you just don't get it.”

CHAPTER 9

Les Steps Out

T
he morning after his party, as he promised he would, Harlan tried to make sense of Wes's bank statement. A lot of low whistles and
Holy Mother
s came out of his mouth as he read and reread what was in front of him. Finally, he turned on his computer and went to the bank's website and this was all before we even had breakfast. I rewarmed his coffee several times and asked him if there was anything I could get for him and he shook his head, shooing me away.

“Give me ten more minutes,” he said three times. “What's Wes's birthday?”

“Why?”

“I need a password.”

“March sixteenth.”

Click! Click! Click! Click!

“And his social security number?”

I recited it to him.

Click! Click! Click! Click!

“That was too easy. I'm in! Wish me luck!”

“Happy hacking!” I said.

I busied myself with the
Post and Courier,
browsing my horoscope, the obituaries, and the arts section. I opened the French doors to the garden and stepped outside, thinking I'd work the crossword puzzle in the fresh air. The old Kennedy rocker looked like the perfect place to ponder the name of the northernmost tributary of the Ohio River—six letters—so I rocked back and forth on the uneven ancient bricks, clacking in a broken rhythm. The tiny Carolina wrens were chirping their morning song and I was completely charmed by them as they darted in and around the branches of Harlan's beautiful pink crape myrtles. But I was not fooled into believing that this slice of paradise would last for very long. The weather was getting warmer by the moment and soon Charleston's sweltering summer would be here. I hated to think about it. Finally, after the paper was read, I went back inside and exhausted every morning talk show. At last Harlan appeared at the kitchen table, collapsed in a chair, folded his hands in front of himself, and smiled as though he had discovered the true meaning of life.

“More coffee?” I asked.

“No, I think it might just be time for a little something stronger. Is there any champagne left over from last night?”

“Really? I can look.”

“No. I'm kidding. I'm already caffeinated up to my ears. You'd better put that paper down for a moment.”

“Oh, God, Harlan. Is Wes going to jail?”

“No. He might go to hell but he's not going to jail.”

“So what's the deal?”

“The deal is that it all looks perfectly legitimate to me, but here's what baffles me. This statement is in your name too. Didn't you realize that?”

“What? How could that be? I mean, am I liable too?”

“You need to get all that criminal stuff out of your pretty head right this minute. It's very frustrating to me. You do not comprehend what this means.”

“Give me that,” I said and took the papers from him. “Okay, it's legitimate, you say?”

“Yes, I found a website that says one share of Coca-Cola stock bought in 1920 would be worth almost five million dollars today.”

“No kidding? Wow. Five million dollars? That's
ridiculous
!”

“Isn't it? Now, he inherited that, so there might be some legal quibble about whether half should be yours or not.”

“But half of the rest of it is actually mine? For sure? Definitely?”

“Yes, ma'am. I'm no lawyer but I can tell you, should you decide to make a new life for yourself without Wes, you are worth either eleven million dollars or eight and one-half million dollars. And then there's the value of your home and its contents and whatever else he might have stashed in the Cayman Islands that you'd have to discover, of course.”

“Holy smoke, Harlan. Either way, it's a darn fortune.”

“And either way, cupcake, it's a fortune that you had no idea even existed.”

“Yeah, that's pretty screwed up, isn't it?”

“Screwed up in a
very
major way, if you ask me and you did.
You,
my dear, are a very wealthy woman.”

I started getting angry. “A wealthy woman who has never owned a new car. Who cleans her own house. Who rarely buys anything at regular price. Even chicken. I mean, I've been clipping coupons for ages. Well, now I get them on the Internet.”

“It makes me like him even less,” Harlan said. “
If
that's humanly possible. Not that there's anything wrong with getting a bargain.”

“Agreed. Harlan, can you help me think of any reason in the world he's been keeping our bank statements behind a locked cabinet door?”

“Well, in my experience, when people lock things up, it's because they don't want anyone to see them.”

“Of course. That's the logical answer. It's so strange.”

“And because they have control issues. I think it's always been important to Wes to believe he's in charge of the world. You know, the
Atlanta Mastah of the Universe
? To me? It's tiresome, really, because if you decided to pull the plug on him, it wouldn't take the worst lawyer in Atlanta five seconds to figure out you are entitled to half. Almost thirty years of marriage? Two children? No, baby, you're entitled to half of everything.”

“Jeezaree.”

“And right about now? He's got that fact in his very odd meerschaum pipe, the one that's an old dude's head, and he's smoking it. Does he really still smoke that thing?”

“Not really. Harlan, my head is just spinning.”

“I'll bet. Tell me what you're thinking.”

“I'm thinking that for the last three decades I've scrimped and saved for everything I wanted outside the puny household allowance he gives me. And about how demoralizing it was to ask him to give me a little more now and then. I mean, if I needed an extra two hundred dollars, he'd practically have a breakdown.”

“Sugar, I mean this in the most respectful way, you could've gone to work. Even Momma went out and got a job.”

“Oh, please! Doing the most inappropriate thing she could find. She embarrassed me all my life.”

“You should really let that go, Les. Sure, it was embarrassing sometimes, but she had chutzpah!”

“Well, you know perfectly well Wesley wouldn't allow me to work! He wouldn't even hear of it! My chutzpah would make him look bad, like he wasn't man enough to support his wife and family. You know he was always very old school. I had to stay home with the children—which didn't go so well now that I look at them. I really was a terrible failure at motherhood.”

“Don't say that!”

“The truth cannot be denied. I wasn't cut out for motherhood. And by the time they were in college, I was already in my forties! Who hires a woman in her forties who didn't even finish undergraduate school? If Wes ever heard about Momma and Willie, he'd flat lie down and die.”

“Maybe you should tell him. Then the entire enchilada would be yours.”

“Harlan? You are a devil! But how we kept all that from him and his Bible-beating parents is still a miracle. I thought then that it was probably because they lived in rural Pennsylvania and didn't ever travel.”

“Maybe that's true, but it's also true that sometimes perfectly reasonable parents just give birth to knuckleheads. Look, I'd be the last person on this planet to criticize you or your choices. That said, I have to say that I think living with Wes must be the most frustrating and unsatisfying arrangement I can imagine. I'd kill myself.”

“Unsatisfying? Whoo-hoo! That's a good one! Who thinks about
that
?”

“Wait a minute. Are you going to tell me you don't think you're entitled to some kind of satisfaction in your marriage? Emotional or otherwise?”

“Harlan, maybe it's just that I know there is no water in that well. So why bother? I could pump Wes for satisfaction until I'm blue in the face, but you can't make someone into something they're not. So I take my satisfaction where I can find it.”

“Like where?”

“Well, there's my granddaughter . . .”

“Oh, please. She's barely out of diapers.” I scowled at him and he said, “Look, I know you adore Holly.
I
adore the pictures of her and just the sound of her voice . . . well, it sounds like music, doesn't it? Maybe
someday
I'll get to meet her. But, shugah, I want more for my sister than that. Momma would too! And you haven't been happy for so long. You don't even know it! I can't bear it.”

“Oh, Harlan. You and I know each other too well, and it's pretty obvious that you're running a campaign for me to dump Wesley.”

“Not really. I just want you to be happy.”

“Thanks, sweetheart. Look, I meant it when I said I don't want to spend every weekend for the rest of my life with a bunch of home-wrecking whores disguised as nice young women who make me feel like an old frump. I want to have fun and be happy!”

“Well, thank goodness for that!”

“And what happened in Edinburgh was terrible, but it wasn't really grounds for a divorce, either. I guess I have a lot of thinking to do. It's not like Wesley has given me a concrete reason to divorce him.”

“And it's not like he's given you one to stay, either, has he?”

“Except that it might have been nice to know we had twenty-two million dollars to our name.”

“Again, you didn't know it because he didn't want you to know it. You need to think about that. How many other secrets does he have?”

“Other than that? I think he's pretty transparent. Maybe he's hiding new golf clubs or something, but he's not a womanizer—at least not in the past ten years. Well, not that I know of.”

Except maybe for a possible escapade in Atlantic City, but I kept that to myself. This fire didn't need any more fat.

“I rest my case,” he said. I looked up at him and he added, “Temporarily. Now there's one other matter of business we have not discussed.”

“Which is?”

“Did you love seeing Jonathan Ray ogle you to death last night?”

“Oh, come on. You know it's always wonderful to discover an old friend again, isn't it?”

“Don't be coy with me, honey bunny. I saw you two eyeballing each other. Hmmmm?”

“He's just an old dear friend, Harlan, who said he'd be happy to take care of my arm for me while I'm here.”

“I'll bet he wants what's attached to that arm as well!”

“Harlan! What a scandalous thing to say!”

“You know what, Leslie? Maybe a good scandal is exactly what you need! And a pair of diamond stud earrings. Why don't you take yourself over to Croghan's Jewel Box and get a big old sparkly pair? Let Wes see
that
on the Visa card. That might wake him up.”

“You're a devil, sweet brother.” It wasn't a bad idea.

“Hmmm. Maybe sometimes, but I'm gonna tell you something.”

“What?”

“You only have one life, Leslie. I think you've sacrificed too much for too little in return. Charleston is our birthplace, our heritage. As they like to say around here, it's the blood-soaked land of our ancestors, people who gave everything they had for freedom. There's a lot to be learned from it, especially when things don't seem so clear.”

“Oh, Harlan, I know you mean well but . . .”

“Hush, Sister, and let me finish. Why don't you take some time and just look at the women who have gone before you in this town? The Pinckney girls, for example—Eliza Lucas Pinckney, for sure, but Miss Josephine Pinckney most especially. You're walking the same floors she walked, for heaven's sake. You know?”

“Okay. I'll do that.”

“Promise? They both faced worse horrors than Wesley.”

“Such as?”

“Redcoats! Yankees! Seriously, Eliza Lucas practically put the indigo crop on the map. She was an absolutely amazing woman. Really. Read her letters. She ran three plantations simultaneously.” He stepped out to the sitting room and took a volume from his shelves, handing it to me with a flourish. “This is a treasure.”

“I will treat it like one,” I said. “Thanks. I need a diversion.”

Then we laughed in some kind of relief, and I hugged him with all my might. Maybe he was right. Maybe I needed a deeper understanding of my real feelings so I could make better decisions about my future. At that moment I couldn't even imagine a future. And I didn't have emotions that incited me to real anger or raging grief—just something that felt like utter frustration. Maybe the Pinckney girls could shed a little light. Coming to Harlan was the smartest thing I could've done. Ever since we were kids we went to each other over every problem we had. He was my rock.

“But Josephine is still a mystery to me,” he said.

“Why's that?”

“Well, her novel
Three O'Clock Dinner
sold almost a million copies. Maybe more. I mean, that was a
huge
number in the 1940s! Think about it—no Barnes & Noble, no Books-A-Million, no e-readers. Did you ever read it?”

I shook my head.

“To be honest, Harlan, you've been throwing her name around for years, but I've never even heard a single thing about her. I mean, I hate to sound like a dimwit. I know we've got Pinckney
this
and Pinckney
that
all over Charleston, but I've never heard a peep about Josephine. Besides your dog, that is.”

“That's my point exactly! She sold millions of books. She got the highest advance ever paid back in the day for a book-to-film deal. MGM gave her something like a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. And we're all saying Josephine who? How does a woman with this drop-dead historic pedigree and platinum résumé just vanish into obscurity?”

“Good question.”

“Well, sweetie, we don't want it to happen to us, either. She should've written a book about a Gullah-speaking vampire dog that's into erotica. There'd be a statue of her in Marion Square right next to John C. Calhoun!”