My photos were ready. Before I did the shopping I went back outside to the bench and looked through them. The ones taken from the beach were okay. Aunt Charlotte would see the cottage at a distance in its early morning light, and then in gradual stages approach its present day wreckage. She could pick and choose her level of disintegration: picturesque abandonment or hazardous finale, or somewhere in the middle. The ones I had taken on the porch were poorly lit but distinct enough to remind me if I came across these photos in my future that I really had seen the ghost-boy braced in that doorless doorway.
The interior shots were a huge disappointment. Every picture I had taken inside the house was murky. You couldn’t even make out the original fireplace whose mantel had been stolen, and Charlie Coggins’s sky-blue paint to ward off Ole Plat-eye showed up gray. The picture I took of the upstairs room he wouldn’t let me go into seemed to have suffered a double exposure. It was also on the murky side, except for a slash of light cutting right through the center of the boarded-up south wall. I was glad I hadn’t ordered duplicates: the realtor wouldn’t show these to anybody.
I looked for a little present to take to Coral Upchurch later today. There was a souvenir section in the market, but the only thing that caught my eye was a plastic ashtray with a picture of a pelican sitting on a pier. But who wanted to extinguish their cigarette in the middle of a pelican?
***
“You look very nice,” I told Coral. She really did. She wore a white dress with a white lace shawl that matched her freshly-styled white feathery hair. Her nail polish matched her coral necklace. A fragrance that I guessed was her perfume floated subtly in the air.
“Thank you, Marcus. It’s a special day.”
“Yes, ma’am, Roberta told me. What time did he usually get here?” I had thought this up in advance.
“If he was flying, he arrived in the late afternoon, because that was the best flight from D.C. He landed at the Myrtle Beach airport and had a rental car waiting. If he was driving down, it all depended on where he stopped the night before and whether he took the direct or the scenic route. One time he arrived before daylight and waked me with a breakfast tray.”
“That was nice of him.”
“It was, though I prefer to be groomed when he first sees me. But he was so pleased with himself that morning he probably overlooked what a fright I was.”
“What did you two do while he was here?” In the deep pocket of my cargo shorts the Grief Cottage photos awaited the right moment to nudge us onto the Johnny Dace subject, but it was way too early in the visit to bring them out. Today a lace cloth covered the porch table and our china and silver were more elaborate. Even the ashtray had undergone an upgrade to a light-green cut-glass crystal, one that matched the crystal pitcher holding our iced tea. The pelican ashtray would have been out of place. In the center of the table was a porcelain cake stand painted with little cupids playing their flutes to branches full of birds. The cake, Billy’s favorite prune-and-bourbon cake, was still in the oven below.
“Well, when I was still on foot, we always went to Brookgreen Gardens. Billy never could get enough of Brookgreen Gardens, even as an adult. You must get someone to take you, Marcus. There are gorgeous flowers and sculptures and boat cruises and a zoo and walkways through woods with rare birds and two-hundred-year-old trees and even alligators. They issue passes that last a week because there is too much to do in one day. As a child, Billy had to be dragged away, and even when he was in his fifties we had to go back and refresh his memories of it. And let’s see. We ate out a lot, even after my wheelchair confinement. Billy liked the local cuisine. And when I took my afternoon nap, he would drive across the bridge to Charleston and shop for antique furniture for his place in Washington.”
“What was it like, his place?”
“Oh, Marcus, I never got to see it! We had been planning my visit year after year and something always interfered. And then finally we got everything right. Billy made all the arrangements, I had a first class ticket, and I was waiting in line at the airport to check my bag when I collapsed on the floor. From then on I was in a wheelchair. My spine had given out. I won’t bore you with details. It’s the great disappointment of my life. For years and years, Billy had been saying, ‘Mama, when are you going to come up here and see how I live and meet my friends? I want you to get to know the Washington me.’ Now I will never know the Washington Billy.”
“What did he do in Washington?”
“He had a highly responsible job with an insurance company that takes care of armed service personnel and their families. He loved his job. This isn’t always true of artistic people like Billy. They feel somehow thwarted if they’re not directly connected to the arts. But he never did. He went right on taking voice lessons and collecting old furniture and going on his little jaunts to France and Italy. He had a beautiful rich tenor voice. People were always asking him to sing at their weddings.”
“Lachicotte’s mother has been gone ten years and he said he knows her better now than when he saw her every day. He said when all the human noise and stuff are out of the way the absent one can spread out and be themselves in your heart. Maybe that will happen with Billy and you.”
“Oh, Marcus, I can’t think of anything I’d like more. How I would love for Billy to spread out and be his whole self in my heart! We know so very little about the people we are closest to. We know so little about ourselves.”
“How is your archaeology on yourself coming along?”
“Oh, you remembered that. What was I saying when we last discussed it?”
“You wanted to get rid of family names and social stuff and strip down to what was below Coral. Or no, you said beyond.”
“I think I like your below better. Well, I’ve hit one or two cul-de-sacs since then and now I am coming to terms with my findings.”
“What are cul-de-sacs?”
“Just a fancy French way of saying dead ends. What am I when I get past being a particular daughter, wife, mother, neighbor, friend? What would be left of the essential me without any of my roles? That was the first dead end I reached. Maybe nothing will be left, I thought; I am my roles. Even when I’m dead I’ll be in the role of ‘Mrs. Upchurch’s remains’ to my undertaker. When people remember me, it will always be in one of my roles. I must say, that took the wind out of my sails.”
“Why?”
“Well, you’ve gone on your archaeology dig and you’ve found some nice coins and jewelry and pottery and you think, oh, if I’ve dug up all this already, the best of all is going to be at the bottom! But then when you get to bottom there’s nothing there but dirt.”