The shrimp were very small and fried in batter and I ate three helpings. There were also these sweet fried bread balls called hush puppies. Aunt Charlotte picked at her salad and had two glasses of red wine. The waitress kept urging me to go back and refill my plate. Her name was Donna, which was stitched on her uniform, and she smiled a lot. Her teasing-affectionate tone with me reminded me a little of Mom and I went back for the third mostly to make her smile some more. Aunt Charlotte had not smiled once. Looking back on that first day, I realize she must have been as apprehensive as I was. I doubt if I smiled that day, either.
When I threw up in my aunt’s car, she pulled over. “No problem, the seats are leather and most of it’s on the rubber mat.” She set me up with an eight-ounce bottle of spritzer water, a roll of paper towels, and gallon of windshield wiper fluid from her trunk. It rained a lot during this season, she said, so she always carried reserves of wiper fluid. “I’d use the spritzer water for the front of your shirt and the wiper fluid for the rest.” Then she withdrew to the grassy embankment and appeared to be studying the traffic. Heat waves rose from the asphalt and made wavery squiggles around her thin white form. The good thing about the heat was that my shirt was dry before I even finished cleaning the car. When we were on the road again I apologized for the smell. “All I smell is wiper fluid,” she said.
After we crossed the causeway to the island, she stopped by a store with gas pumps in front and we bought some things for supper. The man at the counter told her the day’s shrimp catch had just come in, but she said, “My nephew has already had his fill of shrimp for the day.”
II.
Whenever I try to crawl back into the skin of that boy Aunt Charlotte suddenly found invading her precious solitude, a boy who was neither a charming child nor a promising young man, I am surprised that after living alone by choice for so long she was able to tolerate my company as well as she did. She spoke like someone who wasn’t used to social talk. She said what needed to be conveyed and stopped. (“Are you hungry? Spray yourself with sunblock even if it’s overcast. If it’s anything urgent, Marcus, you can always knock on my studio door.”)
Mom had guessed right about the Lee surname: Aunt Charlotte had made it up. (“It was the obvious choice to take the surname of their hallowed Confederate general, Robert E. Lee. In these parts people still refer to the American Civil War as ‘the great unpleasantness’ or ‘the war of northern aggression.’ If I was a ‘Lee,’ I had a better chance of blending in.”)
Aunt Charlotte and Mom had grown up in West Virginia, known to Southerners as the “turncoat state” because it separated from Virginia and joined the Union in the Civil War. Neither of them had any accent other than a mid-Atlantic one, if there was such a thing. Aunt Charlotte’s voice was dispassionate and flat compared to my mother’s emotional range. Mom could please, tease, or appease, whatever the situation called for, whereas Aunt Charlotte, even when she was in one of her rare good moods or making fun of somebody, stuck to a gruff and matter-of-fact monotone.
After we had established a routine for ourselves that consisted mainly of each mapping thoughtful routes around the other’s privacy, she had a serious talk with me about money and my “trust.” She invited me into her studio for this. She removed some books and papers from a chair and asked me to sit down. There was the smell of turpentine and oil pigment, a smell that connects me even today with the pleasant idea of someone making something alone. Her studio faced the north end of the beach and had a milky, regulated light, less yellow and warm than the other rooms in the cottage. She also slept in the studio behind a curtain.
It took me longer than it should have to realize she had given up her bedroom to me.
“I have always worked,” she began. “Ever since I left home at sixteen, I have held a job. When I married, I supported the first of my no-good husbands and I worked twice as hard as the next two slackers. I will never be rich, but this fluke of a talent has made me safe for the time being. People want paintings of the beach. My style is on the primitive side, but that’s an asset, too, don’t ask me why. For a large part of my life now I have lived alone and supported myself by my painting and it has suited me.” She was perched on a high stool in front of a gigantic paint-spattered easel on wheels. Its large canvas was covered with a cloth. She was looking at me, but actually she was looking through me as she carefully picked her words. “When they contacted me back in February about your mother, they said I was the only living relative. I asked about your father’s people, but I was the only name listed on the policy. Did you know she had taken out an insurance policy on her life?”
“It was in case anything happened to her.” Mom and I had imagined some fatal illness that would take her away and leave me all alone. We didn’t foresee that something as ordinary as driving two miles on a winter night to pick up a pizza could accomplish the same ending.
“I met your mother only once. She was a girl, still in high school. Your grandmother brought her to visit me here. I liked her and I felt she liked me. But it was not a successful visit. Did she ever mention it?”
“She talked about your beach house and how nice it was to lie in bed and hear the ocean so close. She said maybe one day we would go back and visit you. I mean, not stay with you, but in a hotel.”
“You would have been welcome to stay here. It was my sister Brenda who spoiled that visit. Always putting everyone down. She couldn’t stand my lifestyle. I think that was her reason for bringing your mother to see me; I was to be a warning. But I must remember that Brenda was your grandmother, so you probably loved her. Funny how the same person can be an entirely different entity to various people. Where do you think you’d like to go to school? There’s the public school across the causeway and a few of those so-called ‘academies.’ Or you could go to boarding school. There’s enough money. You know that, don’t you?”
“It was supposed to be enough to get me through college,” I said.
“Then it will be, we’ll see to it. Meanwhile, it will pay your expenses until you’re old enough to live on your own. And as your guardian I get a nice monthly stipend from the trust. You understand about that, don’t you? I want everything to be aboveboard between us.”
I said I understood. But her insistence on aboveboard-ness, which would turn out to be one of her sterling qualities, had a bitter effect on me that day. So it was the money, I thought, she only took me because of the money. Without that nice stipend she would never have forfeited the solitary life that suited her so well. She went on to explain the trust and how it was set up with a law firm in Charleston that specialized in that sort of thing. There would be monthly statements about how the money was invested and how well it was doing. It seemed that if you had a certain amount of money, you should expect it to make more money out of itself. “And you are welcome to examine these statements anytime you want, Marcus.”