“But you said that was the first dead end, so there must have been a second one.”
“Well, here’s what came next. I just couldn’t accept that there was nothing more to me than who I am in relation to others. What about this consciousness that inhabits my body and nobody else’s, the unrepeatable part of me who experiences everything in the world from its one-of-a-kind viewpoint? After all, every tree in the forest has its one-of-a-kind experience of its own tree-ness. And then I thought about Billy, how he said ‘I want you to know the Washington me,’ and that’s when I came to my second dead end, which was not exactly a dead end but a cause for sorrow. I realized that below all our mes that become known to others is a self that nobody else can ever fully know. No self can ever share its entire being with another self, no matter how much love there is between them. And that made me cry. I had a really good long cry. And after I dried my eyes, I thought, well, what have I got left? And all I had left at the bottom of my digging was love.”
I was debating whether or not to tell her that love wasn’t such a bad thing to find at the bottom, which might have evoked the same bitterness Aunt Charlotte had shown when I had assured her that her wrist would regain its full range of motion. Roberta’s solid footsteps ascending the outdoor stairs beside the “unsightly ramp” deplored by Charlie Coggins saved me from making the choice.
“Here it is.” Roberta slid the fragrant cake from its plate onto the waiting stand. “Four generations of prune cake. That’s right, isn’t it, four?”
“Four indeed. The recipe came down from Archie’s great-grandmother. At first it was baked in ordinary cake pans, then Archie’s mother received a Bundt mold as a wedding gift and ever since it’s been baked as a Bundt cake. The icing was always made with rum until one day they didn’t have any rum in the house so she substituted bourbon, and so this is the cake Archie and Billy grew up on. Roberta, did the tea roses arrive?”
“They’re in the kitchen. I just have to cut the stems and shake in those little packets and we’re good to go.”
“Marcus, I’m going to show you Billy’s room before you leave. You’ll remember, won’t you, Roberta, it’s the apple-green vase.”
“I’ll remember, Miss Coral.”
“She does that ‘Miss Coral’ thing to punish me,” the old lady said once we were alone again. “I shouldn’t have reminded her about the green vase. Of course she remembered. Marcus, help us both to that cake. Don’t be shy. Just pick up that cake server and take the plunge. Make mine a thin slice, make yours a double.”
“Why is it a punishment?”
“I was being lady of the manor, so she backtracked into the bad old days of disparity. We Southerners have a different history, Marcus. It will take a while for us to blend in with the rest of the country. I won’t see it in my lifetime, but Roberta Dumas and I have made our little start.”
She had said “I am going to show you Billy’s room before you leave,” and with that deadline impressed on my mind I brought out the pictures as soon as she lit up her first cigarette in my company, explaining about Charlie Coggins showing me the inside of Grief Cottage.
“The distance shots are best,” I said. “They’re for Aunt Charlotte when she starts to paint again. They show its up-to-date damage and she can choose how much of it to put in her pictures.”
“I see what you mean. The shots with the other houses in them are nice. Oh, poor Archie, I can’t see these pictures without thinking how upset he got when he walked up there every summer and saw that thing still standing. He finally shamed them into putting the fence around it—or did I already tell you that?”
“You may have.”
“At my age the short-term memory betrays you more than the long-term one does.”
“The indoor shots are terrible,” I said, spreading them out. “Too dark, and the colors don’t show.”
“I’m surprised Charlie Coggins allowed you to go inside. It can’t be safe at all.”
“Did you—were you ever inside?” My preplanned takeoff question.
“No, Archie and I were not great socializers. His island time in this house was too precious to him. The Barbours were more the rental type of owner than those who kept their houses strictly for their own families. They rented out right through the season, sometimes through October. Those unfortunate Daces were the exception, which of course the Barbours came to regret.”
Bingo!
“I think I told you already,” she went on, “the Barbours got sued by some cousin who said Mr. Dace was the only kin she had left, and they paid up.”
“Did Billy ever go inside the house with … his friend?”
“I expect he must have. Because he reported things the parents said and did. It may have been while he and Johnny were spying from their hiding place.”
“Was it in the house?”
“As I recall, you got there from the outside, but the people inside didn’t know you were so close. Mind you, Billy told me some things he didn’t tell Archie, and that was probably one of them. The parents were out of their element at the beach. The family was from Kentucky, and they’d had some bad luck, which I think I told you before. They were afraid of the ocean and huddled together in one of the Creekside rooms. The father went fishing every morning with the folks who fish from the creek, and the family ate fish and cornbread and some rice and beans they’d brought with them. Billy said Johnny hated his parents. They were too old and wouldn’t let him do anything. He got so hard to manage they put him in this delinquent home several times. Then they would all cry and reunite and try again. Before they came to the beach, Johnny had been suspended from school. Billy told me—this was later, after the hurricane, when everyone had heard about the family’s disappearance—that he had been going to send Johnny the bus fare so he could run away to Columbia. They had it all planned. Johnny would go to public high school with Billy. Lord knows where they thought Johnny was going to live! Funny, I had forgotten about those plans till you stirred up my memories with all your questions.”