Road to Folly. Leslie Ford
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don’t have to go if you don’t want to . . . but even if you won’t help me, you’ll come out to Darien for a while, won’t you?”
“I’ll see,” I said. “I ought to get back home.”
She took an impulsive step toward me and pecked me on the cheek. “You’ve never really understood me, Diane,” she said lightly. “Maybe I’m not really as bad as you think I am.”
“Or maybe worse,” I said.
“That’s probably nearer the truth,” she laughed. And I’ve wondered since whether she meant that, and if she hadn’t even then seen further into what she would do, and even why she would do it, than I in my innocence did.
She ran down the broad steps of the Villa, and waved at me from her open car. I stood there a moment. Suddenly I shivered. It seemed quite cold. Maybe it was that the sun had dropped its red disc lower into the islands beyond the bay, so that the palmettos were almost purple and the shafts of light were golden arrows through the live oaks. Or it may have been the sudden eerie strum of a guitar that came to my ear. I looked along the street to where an old blind Negro was sitting under the oak tree in the parking strip, rolling his sightless eyes up to the sky.—Or it may have been the rich monotonous cadence of the line he was singing:
“When the moon goes down in blood . . .”
which was all I understood before I opened the door and went quickly into the Villa.
2
When I told Phyllis I wouldn’t join them at the theatre that night I’d meant it. I’d seen about enough of her to last me a good week, for one thing. I’d also heard the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals sing a number of times, both here and in New York. I hadn’t, however, counted on meeting an old friend of my mother’s dining in solitary grandeur, just waiting to pounce on the first likely person to use her other ticket.
I’m sure now it was Fate itself, lurking in the clear green waters of the Villa pool. If I hadn’t gone that night, I’d never have seen, in the kind of blinding clarity that a streak of lightning illuminates a countryside with, so that it sticks in your retina long after it’s dark again, the situation that made an awful lot of things Phyllis had said, or not said, dreadfully clear and dreadfully important. Nor should I have had the exclusive—assuming that everybody within a mile of us was deaf—services of a super-commentator on the Charleston scene who by a dozen winters and a lot of relatives had picked up enough local gossip to make the recent tornado look like a summer zephyr.
She was leaving the next day, and I suppose it was that fact among others that unlocked the flood gates. Though in some ways there’s an appalling lack of ordinary reticence about other people’s affairs in Charleston, just as on the other hand there’s also an even stronger code of “That’s the sort of thing one doesn’t discuss.” It depends, I suppose, on which clan is discussing what . . . though again—and this really did amaze me—there was the most total silence, on the part of a very considerable and very dissimilar group of people, on a couple of points that would have seemed to an ordinary observer very legitimate subjects of gossip, that any one could imagine.
The odd thing about both of those points was that they weren’t actually that important to anybody, and a lot of unhappiness and the lives of at least two people and perhaps a third would have been saved if the discussion had been nearly as free . . . well, as in another quite famous Charleston cause celèbre. But that’s the sort of thing—its reticence and its lack of it, depending on the occasion—that seems to me part of the charm, and certainly part of the enigma, of Charleston.—How, for instance, a dozen people could sit Sunday after Sunday in St. Michael’s and watch two of their friends, their eyes fastened on the letters “Thou Shalt Do No Murder” burned in letters of gold on the cypress altar panel, and never breathe a word of it, still astonished me, a mere tourist.
It was a little late when we hurried through the reddish stone pillars of the first theatre in America. The jaunty little painted figures of the be-turbanned eighteenth century Negro pageboys, with their brocaded coats and lace jabots, holding the yellow cords in the foyer, were startlingly real for a moment. It was the first time I’d seen the restoration of the Dock Street Theatre, and I Was delighted. The Society for the Preservation of Spirituals was singing “Eberybody Libin’ Goin’ to Die.” It was very nice. The ladies in their full-skirted off-the-shoulder gowns didn’t look the least ante-bellum, what with the present styles, but the gentlemen in their ruffled shirt fronts and black ribband ties did, very. And when the lights went up at the interval it seemed to me that all of Charleston not on the stage was on the floor.
I looked around.
“Look, my dear.” My mother’s friend nudged me violently. “That’s Mrs. Atwell Reid . . . that lovely woman with the white hair.”
We’d got up and were following a fair part of the audience out into the moonlit courtyard, with its high brick walls and the massed azaleas from Middleton Gardens just coming into bloom. It was quite all right to stop and stare around at people, because the Dock Street Theatre manages someway to combine the intimate quality of a neighborhood country club and an almost continental sophistication. I don’t suppose any theatre that hadn’t a genteel tradition stretching back to 1736, or that hadn’t been restored as a community enterprise in the best sense, could possibly have quite the friendly feel of noblesse oblige that this one has.
“See . . . the woman with the tall young man.”
My mother’s friend nudged me again. It was the tall young man I was looking at. I remembered perfectly the tight lean jaw and the dark haunted eyes with shaggy brows making them seem more deeply set than they really were. And I wondered then, as I’ve wondered a good many times since, if murder doesn’t take its own bitter toll when society doesn’t. It had certainly set Colleton Reid apart. Phyllis’s “No one ever asks him to shoot with them” flashed through my mind.
But it wasn’t Colleton Reid, really, that I was interested in. It was the big blond-haired man following Phyllis Lattimer up the crowded aisle, head and shoulders above most of the people around him. Rusty Lattimer’s face had lost the defeated, almost sullen look it had had when I saw him last in Palm Beach in a chromium and white leather chair under a yellow beach umbrella, a fifth or sixth whisky and soda in his hand. His grey eyes were clear and hard, his face lean and brown and determined. He didn’t, God knows, look happy, but he did look like a man who was captain of his soul.
My mother’s friend touched my elbow. “That’s her son, Colleton Reid.—Oh, how do you do, Mrs. Reid? This child is Diane Baker from Philadelphia.—And Mr. Reid.”
Colleton and his mother gave me oblique greetings in the crowded aisle. Phyllis Lattimer, moving out into the courtyard, spotted me and nodded brightly. I had the uneasy feeling that her sharp little mind was busy every moment. And we’d no sooner crossed the foyer into the white moonlight than she was beside me, one hand on my wrist and the other on Mrs. Atwell Reid’s.
“Diane—this is marvellous! How did you happen to turn up in Charleston? My dear, why didn’t you wire me you were coming?”
She was turning on her full radiance, knowing I couldn’t possibly do anything about it.
“This is Diane Baker, Mrs. Reid. We were talking about her yesterday . . . it was her grandmother Miss Caroline stayed with in Philadelphia.”
Mrs. Reid, firmly pinioned by Phyllis’s right hand, held out hers. She was tail, with snowy-white hair and clear fine skin, blue eyes and dark brows. She was over fifty, I suppose, and still gracefully slender in a grey lace dress with long sleeves, high neckline, and pearls around her throat. She was a stunning woman still, but I knew she must have been unbelievably lovely when she was young.
“You’ve been in Charleston before, haven’t you?” she asked. “I’ve heard of you from time to time. I want you to meet my son.”
She glanced around. Colleton Reid had moved away and was over by the fountain in the wall, talking to a blonde girl I recognized as Rusty Lattimer’s sister