Part 5 (1/2)

”You can do that now,” Charlie honked, and we all laughed.

The idea hung just over our heads for the rest of the evening, like ripe fruit dangling. One by one we lapsed back into silence. Then Camilla said, ”Let's do it. Let's just agree to do it. If it doesn't work out, n.o.body's bound to it, but consider the alternative. Between us, we've got just about all the resources to make it work.”

”And a new member who's a good fifteen years younger than the rest of us. What about it, Camilla? Haven't you always wanted a maid?” Fairlie said.

This silence was not contemplative, not peaceful. My ears rang. I heard Lewis draw a breath to say something in reply. I knew that it would be destroyingly angry.

”I have a maid,” Camilla said. ”But I would love to have a daughter.” And she smiled at me, her archaic, V-shaped smile that so suited her medieval beauty.

My eyes stung and I smiled back, and the moment was averted.

”Call for a vote,” Henry said, staring at Fairlie, who had the grace to look ashamed. ”All in favor of the Scrubs fading into the sunset together, say aye.”

And we all cried, ”Aye!”

”Done and done,” Henry said. ”Now let's swear on...what? What's our most sacred thing?”

”The wine closet!” ”The key to the big upstairs bathroom!” ”The fis.h.i.+ng tackle!” Each offering was met with a chorus of jeers.

”What about the photograph in the hall, over the coat rack?” I said hesitantly. The photo was of them all, much younger and less worn, but recognizable, grinning by the front door of the house while Camilla held up a big, old-fas.h.i.+oned key. It had the look of beginnings to it.

”Perfect!” Camilla cried. ”That was the first time we all came out together. Remember? How it rained, and the toilet backed up, and Lila got stung by a jellyfish?”

A chorus of approval rose, and I felt a ridiculous swell of pride, and Henry got the photo off the wall and held it out to each of us in turn.

”Swear,” he said, and ”I swear” we all said.

”What if some of us...aren't around when the time comes?” Camilla said. ”Does the one left get to come, or what?”

”One for all and all for one,” Lewis said. ”If only two of us are left, or three, or whatever, we still do it. This is not about couples. It's about the Scrubs.”

We gathered our things and filed out into the night. The last ones out-Lewis and I-locked the door. Lewis put the key into his pocket. They all had keys.

Fairlie hung back. When I came abreast of her, she said, ”Good choice. I wish I'd thought of it.”

”Thanks,” I said, but she was already gone, with her dancer's flat-footed stride, and she did not hear me.

”Well done, Anny Butler,” Lewis said, and kissed me on the back steps down to the dunes.

Lewis and I were married that September in the tiny white slaves' chapel at Sweetgra.s.s. There were not many people: the Scrubs; his daughters, looking pleasant and closed into themselves; my sisters and brother; Marcy from my office; Linda and Robert and little Tommy, beaming. Linda made her she-crab soup for the wedding party. Everyone stayed late and drank a great deal of champagne.

When we were planning the wedding, Lewis had asked me where I would like to go on our honeymoon.

”Anywhere but Sea Island,” he said, and I gathered that was where his marriage to Sissy began.

”The beach house,” I said. ”I want to spend it at the beach house.”

And he laughed at me, but that's exactly what we did. The rest of the Scrubs came out for the weekend, bearing food and wine and tawdry, wonderful gifts, never for one moment considering that they might be intruding. I did not consider it, either. I was a Scrub. We were a unit.

Lewis had said that he thought perhaps we might want to open the big house on the Battery and live there, but on the last night of our honeymoon before the others came, I said, ”Do you really want to?” and he said no.

”Me either,” I said, weak with grat.i.tude that I would never have to try and live up to that house. ”I've been so scared of it.”

”I've been so tired of it,” he said. ”We'll just live on Bull Street and Edisto and here, for the time being. You can take your time deciding where in Charleston you want to live permanently. Or even if.”

”We've got to have some kind of reception or party for all your people-and that's half of Charleston,” I said.

”Well, we will. After we're settled in. We'll use the Battery house for that. Its last hurrah.”

But somehow we never did it.

I have always heard that marriage changes you, and, of course it does, but not always in the way the conventional wisdom would have it. With Lewis, the shape of my life did not change appreciably. The little house on Bull Street, though graceful and beautifully detailed, was not all that much larger than my apartment, so that from the very beginning I had no sense of rattling and creeping around in great s.p.a.ces. I did not bring much with me to Lewis's house, so it did not bulge with furniture. What there was, he had brought out of the Battery house after the divorce, and it was old and beautiful and l.u.s.trous with care, but he had no great baroque pieces, no hivelike crystal chandeliers hanging over the small English dining table, not a fringe, not a ta.s.sel.

”Go over to the Battery anytime and pick out what you want,” he said. ”The hysterical society won't ha.s.sle you. Camilla's on the board.”

But as lovely as the old house was, I did not want to go into it. I did not even like to pa.s.s it on my sporadic jogs. The Battery stank of Sissy to me, if not to anyone else.

”I don't want anything except what I have,” I said, meaning it in all respects.

”Me, either,” he said.

Our external lives did not change. I continued to work early and late at the agency, ferrying around the Shawna Sperrys of my world and attempting to corral their f.e.c.kless mothers; begging discreetly and sometimes not so on the telephone for funds, services, homes, treatments for my flock, making speeches, attending grindingly tedious meetings with my board, accounting for paper clips and paper diapers instead of young lives anch.o.r.ed. As I always had, I fretted about it at home.

”Why don't you just quit?” Lewis said. ”You don't have to work, you know. You could volunteer, or start a business of your own. We could have a baby.”

I looked at him.

”I have about twenty of them right now,” I said. ”And you have two. Lewis, even if we started now, you'd be close to seventy when our first graduated from college. But you know, if you want to think about it...”

”I don't,” he said, grinning. ”I don't want anybody but you. I just don't want you to go all broody on me down the line.”

”I've been taking care of children since I was eight years old,” I said. ”I don't want to go back to the diaper phase of it.”

And so we did not have children of our own. Until very recently, I did not miss them.

Lewis continued to keep his hideous hours at the clinic. Dinner, if we could manage it together, was often at nine or ten o'clock. On weekends we usually left on Friday for Sweetgra.s.s and stayed over Sat.u.r.day night. On Sunday we went to the beach house. That seldom changed.

No, the armature of our lives was not altered appreciably. But at least for me, the interior changes were profound. I learned to laugh. I learned to play. I learned to lose my temper, yell, sulk, behave irrationally. I learned to cry. When we had our first fight, over Lewis accusing me, unfairly, of neglecting to pay Corinne, our cleaning lady, I shouted at him and burst into tears and ran upstairs. I lay on our bed, heart hammering with the enormity of my outburst, waiting for him to come coldly up and end our marriage. Of course he didn't; when I crept back downstairs hours later he was reading the Post and Courier and eating cold pizza.

”Did you take a nap?” he said.

”After all that stuff about Corinne?” I asked, incredulous.

”Oh,” he said. ”I found her check in the pocket of my lab coat. Want some of this?”

I realized then, for the first time, that marriage is about all of you, not just the best parts. Nothing in my child's or grown-up's world had taught me that. The liberation was like learning to fly.

We went to a lot of parties in our honor that first year, and I went to King Street and bought a few things that I thought would serve, though I never attained the elegance and brio that marks a downtown Charleston party, and when the first of the charity ball invitations came, I cried.

”Lewis, I can't,” I snuffled. ”I just can't. I can maybe do the smaller stuff but I can't do a ball.”