“Some day he’ll break away from it,” I thought, “and do something with his life besides this. He’s much too swell, he’s got more guts than the people he’s with.”
That’s why I’d thought, as I flew down from Philadelphia, that it was just to be one more marital deathbed. Phyllis I knew would never change. Rusty I hoped would have found his star again, and not still count his life by the number of turkeys he’d bagged on the land his forefathers had sweated to reclaim from virgin wilderness. But I was wrong. Phyllis was apparently top of the world, just being her spoiled little predatory self, wanting a new version of the moon—new for her—and willing, apparently, to use fair means or foul to get it. And moreover expecting me, apparently, to get it for her. Because from everything I knew about Charleston, and Strawberry Hill Plantation, and the people who owned it, I knew she had—as my colored houseman says—taken more on her fork than she could eat.
“—The old South isn’t weakening your moral fiber, by any chance, is it, darling?” I asked.
She laughed shortly and shook her head.
“No,” she said. “But they’re sort of funny, down here. You think everything’s dandy, and you find yourself smack up against a stone wall. I think Pride is what it’s called, or Honor maybe. It doesn’t make sense either, and a lot of it’s a sort of crumbly façade. But with the Reids it isn’t crumbly at all.—It was Colleton that killed his father, you know.”
I started in spite of myself. I wasn’t even sure I’d heard correctly.
“That what?”
She looked at me as if I was the one who was being surprising.
“You remember, Diane. I told you. You met him with us in Newport. The tall awfully dark chap with black eyes that shot his father when he was fifteen.”
I shook my head. “It was somebody else.”
“No, no! The one that’s mad about Rusty’s sister—Anne Lattimer. Only he won’t ask her to marry him because of the stigma.”
She shrugged. “Although since when murder’s stigmatic in Charleston is something I wouldn’t know.”
“Meaning?”
“All I know is what I read in the papers. There was an editorial in the paper just a little while ago asking when murder had been considered a capital crime in South Carolina . . . no white man of property had been executed for something like forty-six years, and that was a departure from the norm or something. I’m rather vague about it.”
“It’s the sea air, probably,” I said. “Vague is the one thing I’d have sworn you never were—about anything.”
“Perhaps not. Anyway, that’s what we’ll call it. And that’s the way it is—I mean about Colleton Reid. He shot and killed his papa, who apparently was something, even for down here. It was out at Strawberry Hill.”
Then the memory of the day in Newport two years before came back to me . . . of a dark young man whose eyes kept following Anne Lattimer, Phyllis’s quite lovely but I thought definitely unhappy sister-in-law, around the room with such naked living hell in them that I finally asked Rusty what was wrong; And I got a polite but potent rebuff that I didn’t forget for days. Phyllis, however, had been communicative enough.
“But you said he’d lost his father, he’d been accidentally killed when he was cleaning his gun after a neighborhood deer hunt.”
“That’s what Rusty told me. That was before I knew how euphemistic people here are about such episodes.”
“Oh,” I said.
“It’s natural enough, I suppose, in a community as tight as this.”
Phyllis shrugged her slim tweed shoulders again.
“Of course, Rusty could get the stuff for me if he wanted to, but he won’t. He’s absolutely forbidden me to even try to get it, or try to get the old woman off Strawberry Hill. He seems to think it doesn’t matter how poor they are, they ought to keep what they’ve got.—Jennifer, she’s old Miss Caroline’s great-niece, has got the same crazy idée fixe about the land Rusty has. She’s the one really that won’t sell the furniture.”
She smiled, tapping her foot. “But I’ve got Brad working on her. I’ll show Rusty he’s not as smart as he thinks.”
There’s no reason, these days, I suppose, why an ex-husband shouldn’t be on tap, but I was surprised nevertheless.
“Brad?” I said. “Is he around?”
“Off and on,” she said shortly. Then after a moment she added, “He’s kept us in quail this winter. Rusty’s gone native.”
Going native in the Carolina Low Country would seem to have so many possibilities that I didn’t attempt to figure it out. I just waited. Phyllis had put one foot up on the edge of her chair seat and was sitting with her strong brown hands clasped around her knee, staring out between the white fluted columns above the palmetto trees into the blue cloudless space.
“Rusty, my pet, has returned to agriculture,” she said, after a long silence. “I thought I’d got it out of his system, but back it’s cropped like a rash.—It’s unsocial, or something, to have a lot of land and not do something with it. I’d think it was Jennifer’s influence, but he never goes over there.”
She yawned.
“It’s too tiresome. I’d got him practically civilized . . . now I’ve got to begin all over again. But I’ve really got him stymied now. It costs money to farm—and fortunately it’s my money.”
The little creases in the corners of her mouth hardened. If it hadn’t been for them she wouldn’t have looked twenty-five. With them she looked more thirty-five than thirty.
“I thought you didn’t think the people who held the purse strings had a right to dictate to other people,” I said.
“This is different. I’m not going to stay down here till the middle of July and get malaria just for the sake of having Rusty spend all day in the barn bringing up Guernsey cows, or sitting up all night worrying whether the frost is killing the young cabbages. My God.”
“I thought you married him because you were tired of men who did nothing all day,” I observed.
She shrugged. “I thought it would be amusing to be a gentleman farmer. I didn’t know it was twenty-four hours a day twelve months a year. Anyway, I’m sick of it, and I’m sick of Rusty. What the hell do I care about his cows and his cabbages, and whether a lot of Negro farm hands have a pig and chickens or not? I’m bored stiff with the whole business. I’m not going to let Rusty disrupt my whole life.”
I started to say, “Then why don’t you go to Reno again?” but I didn’t.
All the airy gaiety had gone out of her face. The grim determination of a gal who’d always had her own way had hardened in it.
“Let’s skip it, shall we?”
She glanced at me, trying to recapture the earlier mood. I nodded.
“Okay. Let’s go back to Strawberry Hill,” I said. “Where do I come in the picture? That’s what I can’t make out.”
“It’s very simple. More than that, it’s a natural, really. You will do it, won’t you?”
“It depends,” I said. It wouldn’t be the first scheme of Phyllis Lattimer’s that I’d been uneasy about, nor would it be the only one I’d walked out on.
“I mean, Diane, it isn’t just that you’ll be doing me a favor. It’ll be an act of kindness to everybody. It really will. Wait till you see Jennifer and Colleton. You’ll see exactly what I mean. And their mother too. It’s a rotten shame—they really need the money.”
I