There were a few vivid descriptions—winds snapping trees like chicken bones and a family hunkered down in a truck bed with salt water filling their noses, but the eyewitnesses of those scenes had lived into safe old age and gotten interviewed by this shiny magazine fifty years later.
I left everything in a neat pile for Mrs. Daniels. She was not around, so I returned the user’s key for the fiche machine to the woman behind the front desk. Involved in her own work, she barely looked up from her computer to acknowledge me, so I was able to study the painting that hung over her desk in peace. I recognized it from one of those postcard reproductions Aunt Charlotte had sent to Mom. It was a long, wide painting of the island’s shoreline at dusk, just the sand patterns and shallows at low tide, not a single breaking wave, not a living thing in sight, not even a single shore bird, everything glowing and peaceful in a soft orange end-of-day light. It made you feel glad you lived close to such beauty. I made a mental note to tell Aunt Charlotte how well I thought the painting graced the library wall, setting the tone for the whole place.
Then I went to find Lachicotte, who was in the pre-K room, sitting at a table beside a gray-haired lady, their backs to the open door. Below them on the floor, the children were finger-painting on sheets of paper. I had never seen children wearing kid-size latex gloves to finger-paint, but it seemed like a very practical idea. Moving closer I saw that Lachicotte and the gray-haired lady, who must be his niece, were making small finger-paintings of their own at their table. They, too, wore latex gloves, and were so wrapped up in what they were doing that I hung back in the doorway, not wanting to disturb the scene. The gray-haired niece was painting a still life of the jar of yellow roses placed in front of her on the table. Aunt Charlotte would have judged it “a competent little painting.” Lachicotte, hunched forward raptly, swirled vigorous circles of dark blue paint behind what looked like either a lopsided mountain or a crouching white beast. I would have stood there longer if a watchful little girl hadn’t broken the spell. “Why is that man over there spying on us?” she cried.
XVIII.
Lachicotte’s painting of the lopsided mountain or crouching white beast turned out to be his “farewell portrait” of his 1954 Bentley R-Type Continental. “Even while I was painting her—or trying to, I’m no artist—I knew our time together was over” (togethah, ovah). He told me this as we ambled around downtown Charleston while Aunt Charlotte underwent her wrist surgery at the medical center.
Her “sprain” had been a misdiagnosis. The first x-ray taken weeks ago at the local hospital had missed the lesion and now everything had to be done all over again, with a projected twelve more weeks in a new cast. What she had was an “occult fracture of the scaphoid bone”—I tried not to read any messages into the occult word beyond its medical meaning of a hidden injury. The break was found in her follow-up x-ray, which also revealed a loose piece of bone fragment that had to be excised. So now the ligament and the scaphoid bone were being properly reconnected and “fixated” with a metal screw. The surgery was being done under general anesthesia, after which she would spend a further hour in the recovery room before we could take her back to the island. Lachicotte was driving her car now, the old Mercedes sedan, while the mandatory seat belts were being installed in the Silver Cloud Rolls-Royce, which the buyer hadn’t wanted after he laid eyes on Lachicotte’s beloved Bentley.
“Were you sad when you saw your Bentley driving away?”
“You might say I felt an elegiac pang. But then I turned my mind to all I could do with the proceeds.”
“Was it a lot of money, or is that rude to ask?”
“It was a fair amount because it’s a rarity and he had to have it. I can buy my niece a waterfront condo and donate a much-needed new roof to my church.”
“You must really like your niece.”
“Althea has gone through some rough passages, but she’s kept her humanity intact. Which is admirable in itself.”
“What kind of rough passages?”
“Well, she was fifteen when she lost both parents. Her mother was my sister. They were flying up to see Althea at her school and my brother-in-law’s Cessna crashed in a fog.”
“That was your sister who loved her boarding school in Virginia?”
“You remembered that. Yes, I had only the one sibling. When Althea was in her late teens she hit some turbulence. She blamed herself for her parents’ death because they had been coming to see her—but we got her through that, Mother and I. But then as soon as she turned twenty-one, she eloped with a deep-dyed scoundrel who had been waiting in the wings. After he’d run through her money, he decamped and left her with all his debts and a broken heart.”
“Did she have any children?” I wondered whether Althea’s story would meet Aunt Charlotte’s standards for a shrink-wrapped tale of family woe.
“One daughter. Unfortunately their temperaments clash. But Althea adores her little granddaughter, who I’m afraid was that child at the library who accused you of being a spy.”
We went to the art supply store because Lachicotte wanted to buy Althea a paint set. “When we were finger-painting with the kids while you were busy at the fiche machine, my niece said to me, ‘You know, Uncle Buddy, I haven’t had so much fun in years. Isn’t it a shame that grown-ups forget how to play?’ ”
While Lachicotte consulted with the saleslady about what kind of paint set to buy for his niece, I wandered around inspecting the lavish displays of paints and crafts. This was the temple of Aunt Charlotte’s vocation, and not only was she not here with us to inhale the smells of her art and be tempted by new brushes and pigments, but she was lying anesthetized on a table while an orthopedic surgeon cut and clamped and probed and “fixated” her painting hand. He would do his best, he told Lachicotte, but he couldn’t guarantee total return of flexibility. We would just have to wait and see. There would be months of physical therapy to help, of course. The new x-rays had shown some arthritis, and we had to remember Mrs. Lee wasn’t a ten-year-old skateboarder with miraculously supple bones. No, Lachicotte had told him, she’s only a gifted and successful painter at the peak of her talent and her earning ability, and you are the head of wrists and hands over here, so we’re counting on you to do your utmost. They knew each other, of course. Lachicotte seemed to know everybody.
There was something I needed to consult with Lachicotte about. I had been preparing how to ask it in the art store and as we were walking back to the medical center I took the plunge.
“Don’t you think it would be a good idea if I went off to boarding school?”
Lachicotte came to a full stop on the sidewalk, clasping his gift-parcel to his breast. “What has given you this idea?”
“I’d be out of the way. Aunt Charlotte could have her solitude back, except for when I came home for holidays.”
“Wait a minute. Help me think this through, Marcus. What would be the advantages for her?”