“Which obviously settles it,” I said.
“It does as far as I’m concerned,” she retorted curtly.
“Then why don’t you go to Miss Caroline and explain it to her? She seems to be a rugged individualist too. She might understand you perfectly.”
“Because she doesn’t receive visitors, that’s why,” she answered, still more curtly. “That’s the only reason in the world I don’t. I’ve tried a thousand times. She doesn’t allow anybody but about three blue-blooded octogenarian cousins from below Broad Street in the presence.”
“What about Jennifer and Colleton and their mother?”
“They’d sell in a minute—Colleton and his mother, not Jennifer. She knows the old lady will die pretty soon, and she’s in on the ground floor. I’m sure she’s the stumbling block in the whole thing.”
“Have you tried working on them?”
“—Have I.”
She fished in her tweed jacket pocket and pulled out a cigarette.
“If I could only see old Miss Caroline,” she said slowly. “That’s all I need.—That’s what I want you for.”
I gasped at that. “Me?”
She nodded. “I just found out yesterday from Colleton’s mother, and rushed out and wired you. You can do it—on two counts.”
“You’ve got a touch of fever already, darling,” I said patiently. “But do go on.”
She glanced over her shoulder at the empty verandah. The brilliant afternoon sun going down beyond the Battery stencilled a moving arabesque of long palmetto leaves on the white columns and filtered across the closed door with its great polished brass knocker. She put her feet up on the gleaming balustrade again and leaned her head nearer my chair.
“Old Miss Caroline visited your grandmother two winters in Philadelphia, in the Eighties. She was introduced to society with her, and they were presented at the Monday Germans in Baltimore together. Her mother had known your great-grandfather before the War—that’s the Civil War, down here, you know. There’s some connection there that explains why Strawberry Hill wasn’t burned when Darien was, during the march to the sea. I haven’t got it quite clear, but that’s it. Anyway, the point is—she’ll receive you.”
“Oh,” I said . . . rather stiffly.
Phyllis wouldn’t notice that. She went blandly and blindly on.
“But wait. That’s not all.”
She took her feet down again and leaned forward, her pointed chin cupped in her brown palm.
“Miss Caroline, like everybody else down here, has written her memoirs . . . and also like everybody else, thinks that if she could find an honest publisher, she’d make a fortune. I heard Jennifer talking to a man about them the other day. And that’s where both you and I come in.”
I looked at her. There was a shrewd concentrated intentness in her face that was new to me, well as I knew her. I was a little angry, but I was interested. I couldn’t help being. I knew of course that Phyllis could read; I never had known that she cared enough about people generally to know that they liked to write.
“Your brother is a publisher. I’ll pay for a ghost to sort out the memoirs and have them published . . . as de luxe as hell. She’ll love it.”
A sardonic little smile crossed her eyes. “The rest will be pie. You know about people being motivated by vanity and cupidity. This is Miss Caroline’s vanity against Mrs. Reid’s cupidity. It’s very simple.”
“I’d skip it, Phyllis,” I said.
She shook her head.
I shook mine.
“It stinks,” I said coarsely.
She settled back in her chair, her brown face a little pale, her dark eyes smoldering.
“I always thought you were the one person in the world I could count on, Diane,” she said. Her foot at the end of her crossed jodhpurred leg beat a tattoo on the white fat-bellied balustrade stretchers, the way an angry cat’s tail moves against a chair leg.
“Be your age, Phyllis,” I retorted, rather angry too. “It’s just not the sort of thing people do.”
We sat in silence—not, I may say, a particularly comfortable one—for several moments. The blue, almost Mediterranean sky above the palmettos and live oaks with their thin wisps of grey moss, the bluer water beyond and the low mauve line of the islands beyond it, the cool brilliant sun going down to meet them . . . these were Charleston, and another world. And not, moreover, a world in which one chiselled a great old lady out of the gods she clung to . . . not if one had any faith to keep.
“I’d be willing to pay almost anything, within reason,” Phyllis said, after a long time. “More than any New York dealer would.”
I don’t know why that annoyed me more than anything she’d said.
“Maybe there are a few things your money can’t buy, Phyllis,” I said shortly.
She shrugged. “I’ve never seen one of them.”
I realized that it was I who was being the stupider of the two. She never had, of course . . . because of the values she lived by. The things money didn’t buy had never been the ones she’d happened to want before.
“I only said ‘Maybe,’ ” I answered.
She put out her brown hand suddenly and took hold of my Northern-winter-white one.
“Oh, please, Diane, let’s not quarrel,” she said quickly. “It’s just that I do so much want that stuff! I can’t tell you why. Maybe I don’t know myself.”
“I do,” I said. “It’s because you’re spoiled, and you can’t bear not to have your own way. You don’t actually give a damn about whether a piece of furniture is Chippendale or Grand Rapids, or was made in Charleston or in Timbuctoo—and you can’t put your muddy riding boots up on a ribband back settee. You just want to prove your old saw about vanity and cupidity . . . and show your own superiority.”
The tiny lines around her eyes tightened. I don’t think Phyllis, however, had ever even tried to deceive herself—no matter how thoroughly she deceived anybody else. She sat silently a few moments. Then she said, “You know, I don’t know why I let people like Rusty or Anne Lattimer, or even the Reids, make me feel . . . well, frustrated—but they do, some way. You can be as superior as you like about them. They haven’t any money, they’re sterile in lots of ways, and they’re decadent. A lot of this pride and ancestor stuff is pride strained pretty thin. But they’ve got something the Northerners who come down and buy their plantations and become a lot of absentee landlords haven’t got . . . and never do get. If they had it they’d stay at home. It’s all an escape, and you don’t try to escape if you’re not frustrated, do you?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Oh, well, what the hell.”
She got up and stood, her fingers stuffed into her jodhpur pockets. Then she turned around.
“Just remember—I’ll pay for publishing the memoirs. Tell her that when you see her.”
“I’m not seeing her, darling. Get that out of your head permanently.”
Phyllis shrugged her tweed shoulders in their perfectly tailored brown-checked jacket.
“You’re missing the chance of a lifetime, is all I can say.”
She picked her hat up off the floor and put it on the back of her head.
“We’re going