I don’t remember much about the chemistry I learned in school. I do remember there were certain things they called precipitates that miraculously sent all solids to the bottom of the test tube, leaving nothing but clear water on top. And that’s precisely what Phyllis Lattimer’s name thrown into the emotional cauldron did for me. Only it wasn’t clear water on the top. It was pure concentrated venom. I glanced through the wide doors at Jennifer Reid’s slim staunch little figure and the proud dark curly head being glad about somebody else’s husband, knowing as she must that her mother was getting in a few well-timed licks while her back was turned. I knew instantly that the solids precipitated in the bottom of the cauldron were on her side, and that if Phyllis Lattimer was going to be circumvented I was the person who could do it. I knew too that whether Jennifer liked it or not, I had to go to Strawberry Hill. I turned to Mrs. Reid.
“Of course, if you really would like me to . . . I’d be delighted.”
Mrs. Reid smiled charmingly, not with relief at all, which surprised me somehow, but with the poised satisfaction of a woman who’d finally got her way. She held out her gloved hand.
“Thank you, my dear. Jennifer will come for you at half past four. It’s been such a pleasure!”
I looked up. Jennifer had come back into the side doorway. Her face was pale, her blue eyes were liquid black. She wasn’t far from tears, but they were tears of anger and defeat. She shook hands with me briefly and followed her mother out. I stepped back to the long open French windows and watched them from behind the gold curtains crossing the empty piazza. I heard Jennifer’s voice, low and hot, say, “Mother! You don’t know what you’ve done!” and saw her mother raise her brows without answering audibly. In another moment she’d stopped to talk to an old colored woman with a basket of jonquils and white narcissi (butter and eggs, they call them) balanced gracefully on her turbaned head, an old pipe in her mouth.
I picked up the four cards Mrs. Reid had left on the table. The first two were:
MISS CAROLINE COLLETON REID
MISS JENNIFER CAROLINE REID
Each of them had “Strawberry Hill Plantation” engraved on the lower left-hand corner. The other two were:
MRS. ATWELL COLLETON REID
MR. ATWELL COLLETON REID
Each of them had “24 Landgrave Street” in its corner.
I put them in my pocket. If the number of Reids was confusing, it was no more confusing, I thought, than the names like it in Charleston. One thing they did was to indicate the clear and definite cleavage of the two households—mother and son, great-aunt and daughter. I hadn’t, somehow, realized they were so clearly divided before.
I heard the fountain playing in the pool, knew thereby that lunch was being served, and strolled out. I had the uneasy conviction that Phyllis Lattimer was being less than frank with me . . . and that she was playing with a stacked deck. Just why I hadn’t thought of that before I don’t know. Life had stacked the cards for Phyllis the day her grandfather discovered it was more profitable to make and sell guns at home than go and be killed by them on the battlefield.
Nevertheless, I waited for her to call me up, and was a little uneasy when she didn’t. I was more than uneasy when I went out after lunch to have a look about the town and passed her maroon mustard-yellow-leather upholstered sports car standing in front of Mrs. Atwell Reid’s white house in Landgrave Street.
I didn’t really expect Jennifer would come for me, but I had a pretty good idea that if she didn’t Phyllis Latimer would, and that I would be got out to Strawberry Hill some way or other. But Jennifer came. Promptly at four-thirty she drove up in a coupé that looked even dingier and sandier and older than it was in the line of elaborate limousines with Northern licenses and uniformed chauffeurs in front of the Villa. I came down the stairs between the white columns with their painted urns full of spring flowers to meet her. She gave me a perfunctory smile with her facial muscles. Her eyes were wary and resentful, and her face a little pale still. She just missed being rude, but it was taking an effort, even with three hundred years of Charleston breeding behind her to make being gracious as automatic as breathing.
I got in her car. Her hand on the gear shift and her foot on the clutch were sure and smooth. That somehow always makes me feel better about people, and I didn’t particularly mind that she never bothered about the stop signs at intersections as we went along the South Battery and turned into Ashley Street. We passed Colonial Lake—Rutledge Pond, the natives call it—and went through the blinking yellow light by the Art Gallery without either of us saying a word. As we turned at Cannon Street and took the short cut across the marsh through the line of palmettos to the Ashley River Bridge she said,
“I don’t want my aunt to sell Strawberry Hill.”
She said it as if she’d been trying to get it out, but also as if it had popped out suddenly when she hadn’t expected it to.
“I’m not trying to buy Strawberry Hill,” I said evenly.
“I know you’re not,” she retorted. “Phyllis Lattimer is—and you’re the opening wedge.”
At the end of the palmetto row she slowed down, glanced around at the main road and shot across in front of an oncoming oil truck onto the bridge. The slanting afternoon sun painted the marsh grass along the blue river toward the Citadel mauve and yellow and brown.
“You don’t think she’s offering to publish Aunt Caroline’s memoirs for nothing, do you?”
I’ve learned over a period of years that if you can’t think of anything to say, it’s best to say nothing. In this instance that’s what I did.
“I know it means a lot to my aunt. She’s been writing them for years. Maybe they ought to be published . . . but it’s not fair, it’s just not fair!”
Just what the connection between selling the plantation and publishing the memoirs was, I didn’t know and I didn’t care to ask. That the two were connected in Jennifer’s mind was enough. The idea that it was the furniture in Strawberry Hill that Phyllis was after apparently hadn’t occurred to her.
“Is that why you won’t let her in the house?” I asked. “—Phyllis, I mean?”
She turned right on the Ashley River road where the signs on the left point to the road to Folly and on the right to the great gardens along the Ashley.
“That’s one reason,” she said shortly. “There are plenty of others.”
We went along through the sparse sub-suburban dwellings, past the scattered blue-shuttered Negro cabins with their chicken yards and gay pink flowering peach trees, until we came to that lovely stretch of great live oaks with their long smoky festoons of Spanish moss, this side of St. Swithin’s Creek.
“Oh, can’t you see, Diane Baker!” Jennifer cried, with a sudden almost fierce poignancy. “Can’t you see? We’ve owned Strawberry Hill for three hundred years. It’s the land, and it belongs to us, and we belong to it! My family raised indigo and rice on it . . . the people on it were theirs . . . they were using it to make life, not just to spend a few months in the winter playing on it. It’s just twelve hundred more acres to shoot over to Phyllis Lattimer—it’s everything, everything, I tell you, to me! I won’t let them sell it to her!”
I heard myself saying, smugly, “But if it means comfort for your aunt, and your mother . . .”
“Comfort!” she cried hotly. “Is comfort the only thing left in the universe? Did the people who saved it from the Spaniards and built it up and fought three wars to keep it . . . did they go around bleating about comfort? If they had, the Indians would still be shooting wild turkeys with bows and arrows and there wouldn’t be any Strawberry Hill!”
There was so much in what she said, and she said it with so much youth and so much passion, that I was ashamed of myself.
“I’d