The barrowfields, p.20
The Barrowfields, page 20
“Buller—you know one thing I bloody well hate about Chopin? It’s that he puts the most extraordinary music right in the middle of pieces whose beginnings and endings are virtually impossible to play!” Buller watched a book of mazurkas and polonaises slide by him on the hardwood floor. “The worst part about this,” I told him, “is that we basically have to wait all day to see if she’s going to come over, and she’s probably not even going to come. You and I are going to be just waiting here, tortured like rabbits on a spit, and at one o’clock in the morning in all likelihood we’re going to be alone and wallowing in a slough of despond. What’s that, Buller? You say that women are like streetcars? That if you miss one, another one will come along ten minutes later? Well, you may be right about that in general terms, but you’re wrong in this case. Or maybe you’re right. Who the hell knows. What the hell am I doing here?”
Buller sounded a high-pitched bark. “I feel the same way, buddy. This is awful.”
We toiled the hours away like defendants awaiting a criminal sentencing. I may have gotten a little drunk and Buller wanted to wrestle, so we did that for a while until he swung his head around and almost put one of his Great White Shark–size canine teeth through my temple. I heard the skin puncture and my head gushed little spurts of blood. Buller brought me a kitchen towel to press against the wound, or I might’ve gotten the towel, I can’t remember.
“If I die from this, Buller, please tell whoever comes to take my body that I want my epitaph to read I Should Have Adopted a Smaller Dog.”
Story called me at 11:13 P.M. and said she’d just gotten out of her party. It was late, she said, so she was just going to head home and we’d talk in the morning. She had a long run scheduled for 6:00 A.M. and needed a good night’s sleep. I told her I understood and then burned inside with disappointment.
All I could muster was, “Thank you for calling me.”
There was silence on her end of the line and I thought she might have hung up. I asked if she was still there and another empty silence followed. Then: “Yes, I’m here. What are you doing?”
“I was playing the piano.”
“You’re not in bed?”
“No, I’m not in bed.”
…
“What are you doing?” I said.
“I’m sad to report that I have no self-control. I’m sitting in my car—outside your house.”
Buller and I charged to the front door and looked out. Story was indeed sitting in her car in the driveway with the phone still to her ear. I composed myself and walked outside to meet her. Before I could open my mouth, she said, “I can’t stay.” She didn’t even get out of the car.
She asked me what happened to my head. I had affixed a surgical bandage just beside my eye and the medical tape had been awkwardly applied. All I needed was a strip of bloody gauze around the circumference of my cranium and a piccolo to complete the image. “Buller tried to kill me,” I said. “Fortunately for him I’ve decided not to press charges.”
“Oh, well—I have to get home. I was just driving by—I thought I’d say hello. I shouldn’t have just stopped by without asking. I’m really sorry. It’s late.”
I looked into the car. She was wearing an old-south drawstring dress, white and pale blue, and her white-blond hair was curled up on her shoulders. There was never a girl as sweetly beautiful as Story. I was melting, and she allowed her eyes to meet mine for just a moment and sharply drew in a breath, and I lost my breath and could easily have picked up her entire automobile and twirled it above my head if she had asked.
“Okay—I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Sorry to bother you. Take care of your head.”
“Okay.”
She moved the gearshift to R.
“Story.”
“Yes?”
“Will you look at me for a second?” Back to P.
“I’m kind of afraid to.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“This is insane,” I said. “I don’t know what we’re doing or why I feel this way. It’s like I’ve known you for years and one of us is moving to a different continent, but that’s ridiculous because I hardly know you at all.”
She wiped away a tear with the back of her hand and laughed to explain it away.
I said, “Story—wait.” She turned and looked fully into my eyes. I said, “I think I’m losing my mind.”
“That’s not true.”
“I can’t stop thinking about you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“And you feel nothing for me.”
“I don’t know how I feel.”
Buller barked and knocked at the door to get out, causing the shutters to swing away from the front of the house. I signaled to him to wait.
“I need to go.”
“I so wish you would stay.”
“I know, but I need to go.”
“It’s a beautiful night. Can you ever remember a more beautiful night?”
To humor me, she smiled and looked out the car window at the live oaks above us and the starry sky beyond.
“Feel how warm it is,” I said. “Ten years from now we’ll think back on this and wish we had taken advantage of it. You know we will.”
Story said, “I’ll call you tomorrow,” but I could tell she was wavering. I ran up on the porch to let Buller out before he took out the door completely. He shot past me straight to Story’s car and tried to jump in the driver’s side window, which if he had been successful probably would have ended her life. Once he calmed down, he just stood there like a bear with his head and front feet in the car and she rubbed his head as he purred mightily. He looked at me like I should go inside and leave the two of them alone.
“He loves you,” I said.
“I love him, too.”
“Let’s go sit on the back porch and look at the stars. I won’t keep you long.”
“You do know something about stars, don’t you.”
“You might have to get out the passenger-side door.”
The three of us paraded into the house, thoroughly cleaned since her last visit. She strolled along slowly, looking at everything with great curiosity in the candlelight, examining the books I’d strewn here and there and inspecting the few family photographs on the mantel.
She picked up a framed picture of Threnody—one from years before when she was no older than five. The picture catches a braided and very serious little Bird at the height of an exemplary grand jeté with a hundred miles of improbable scenery behind her, as though she were performing on a painted landscape. I remember the day; I had taken the picture. We had stopped at an overlook on the parkway just past Raven Rocks on our way to Asheville. A pilgrimage, said Father. Threnody was bounding about gracefully as only children can in the days before they become gravitationally significant, and I was snapping pretentious long-distance views with Father’s ten-pound analog Nikon. I remember Mother walking through the field next to the road calling out the names of the flowers for everyone. In my memory she is turned away from me and is carrying something burdensome in her arms.
“That’s my sister,” I said.
“She’s adorable,” said Story. “That’s quite a little jump.”
I walked over to look at the photograph and felt my insides cleave in two as I remembered how long it had been since I’d gone to Charlotte; how long it had been since I’d talked to the little Bird.
“Are you guys close?”
“Not as close as we should be,” I said.
Story made a sad face and turned her attention to another photograph, this one of my father sitting at his desk writing, with me as a child on the floor at his feet reading a book. “That’s my father,” I said. “And there’s me when I was about three years old.”
“You were pretty cute. What’s that on the wall?”
“It’s a bird of some kind. I think it’s a crow, but it’s supposed to be a raven. He had a thing for Edgar Allan Poe.”
“Your dad sounds like an interesting guy.”
“He was at one time,” I said, taking the photograph and setting it back on the mantel.
“Are he and your mom still together?”
“No,” I said. “They separated several years ago.”
“I’m sorry,” said Story. “Are they both still in the mountains?”
“My mother and sister are in Charlotte these days. They moved out of Old Buckram a few years ago.”
“What about your dad? Where is he now?”
I told her I had no idea where he was. I said, “I was sixteen the last time I saw him.” She thought about this a long time and chewed on her lip like she wanted to say something more, but I changed the subject as I always did and started time going again. She wandered then into the next room, where she stopped at the piano and touched the books of music stacked there in disarray.
“I always wanted to play,” she said. “One day I will.” And then she asked, “Will you play something for me?”
The room was small and the uneven floor held only the piano, a couch, and an old chair. The piano stood against an inside wall. I sat down to play and Story stood behind me, next to me, watching. I could hear her breathing. I opened the book of music and then closed it again. I could read it without seeing it. I played the Fantasie-Impromptu, Chopin’s posthumous opus 66, the one I always played thinking she might happen to come by my door and hear the music and know it was for her. Allegro agitato. Begin: an octave in the left hand struck like a bell; a foreshadowing. Then—dark arpeggios, again in the left hand, an approaching cannonade; fiercely ascending runs in the right—intricate, delicate, unrelenting. A sense of acceleration tempered by a cascading retreat, and we begin again. Breathe. Surge. Dissipate. Surge. Pedal. Pedal. Pedal. This cut-time rhythm pushes you along. After only a minute we are brought up short by a crashing left-hand cadence—and it is here that a sweet, simple melody ensues pianissimo that has no parallel in modern music to my knowledge. This perfect melody was, in my bursting heart, the song of Story. With exquisite, fleeting variations, it lingers, frolics, demurely relents—and is gone. The light of a single day. At once the surging, silver cannonade returns, and the melody, now hidden and faint to the ear’s remembrance, becomes almost forgotten. At the end of this magnificent tumult, when the piece is drawing to a close and fading into silence, the sweet, perfect melody appears once more—this time in the left hand alone—this time only once.
As the last of the music passed through the walls and into the night, Story touched my shoulder and then withdrew her hand as though the contact had been accidental. I turned to see her walk into the kitchen, where she found an open bottle of wine on the counter, poured herself a glass, and returned to stand in the corner of the room. She said, “I’ve never heard anything like that before.” Something was wrong; she seemed upset.
I stood to walk toward her and reflexively her lean figure became concave as she turned away. She would have retreated farther into the corner if there had been room.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “What happened?”
She said, “I’m sorry. I can’t. Please play me something else.”
“I just want to talk,” I said. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“I know you do—but I’m not there yet.”
I sat back down on the piano bench facing her. “I wish you’d talk to me.”
She said, “I know. And I will. Just not now, though. I’m sorry, it’s nothing you did. I just learned a long time ago that when you share too much, people try to fix you.”
I didn’t know what to say. I sensed for reasons beyond articulation that there was a part of her I could never reach—that she’d never let me reach, or anyone else. She’d never let me in completely.
Brightly, she said, “Please play for me. Will you play something else?”
I retrieved the bottle of wine and she settled in under a blanket on the couch with her head on a pillow. It was enough for me that she was there. I drank my wine and played into the night until I could no longer play well and the house and the world were quiet and Story was asleep.
As I came to know her, I saw time and again the eloquent sadness in her eyes that arose in quiet moments when she was sure neither I nor the world was looking. I learned from a series of minute clues and then finally her exasperated confession that she regarded the circumstances of her birth and adoption as strange and highly mysterious. These unresolved questions and all the various and discomfiting implications from the night she was born until now had come to trouble her greatly. The crux was this: She had never known the identity of her biological father—she was convinced beyond reason that it had been purposely withheld from her—and had spent the last six years looking for him without success over the vehement and senseless objections of her adoptive parents. She was no closer to finding him when I met her than when she had undertaken to discover him several years before, and what had begun as a mild preoccupation had grown into something approaching an obsession.
Story was born in Charleston, South Carolina, to a young mother who, for the year or so prior to Story’s birth, lived in a ramshackle house next door to a sprawling cemetery in Lot’s Folly, an affluent peninsula jutting west and south into the waters of Lake Conroy, a large man-made lake fed by the Edisto River just to the west of Summerville. The house, when I saw it, was abandoned and had been for some time. The roof was a carpet of green moss and only a few windows had survived. The entire lot was overgrown with trees—southern live oaks and tall longleaf pines—the former covered with nearly impenetrable Spanish moss that concealed the house from the road. The front yard was carpeted in a soft blanket of pine needles, and Queen Anne’s lace grew in sparse patches along a simple stone walkway that ran to the front door.
The title to the house was acquired by the Versirecto Methodist Church in 1889 by the bequest of a long-time donor who had given away nearly all of her land for the church cemetery in several different gifts over many years, much to the grave disappointment of her heirs. The donor—a Mrs. Willa Jean Gullege—had lived there alone and aging in forced isolation from her grown children until such time that she had given the church her entire estate save the old house.
Because of its location on the peninsula, the property she gave to the church must have been worth a fortune. In the days before her death, in a final act of defiance, she asked a local lawyer to prepare a codicil to her will in which she conveyed the house and its small wooded lot in the following manner: “To the Father, Son & Holy Ghost, c/o the Versirecto Methodist Church, so long as the above-described estate is used for purposes of the Church, then to the Town of Lot’s Folly to be used as a park.”
Naturally, upon her death and the reading of her will, litigation immediately ensued. Her furious heirs argued—despite their unconfided concerns that they were committing some horrible greed-born heresy for which they would be well repaid in the afterlife—that under the laws of the state of South Carolina, it was legally impossible to convey property to God, and therefore that title to the house and lot should fall directly to them. The judge who heard the case disagreed, finding with an appropriate level of judicial humor and wisdom that conveyances to the almighty creator of heaven and earth, while possibly redundant, were not otherwise invalid.
The church was pleased to get the property, and it made a practice of letting out the modest little house to a family in the community most in need of the church’s benevolence. For years the old house was let to an immense black man named LeArtis Moon who the locals called Clem. Clem promised to care for the cemetery if allowed to reside in the house, and care for the cemetery he did. No one knew at the time that this giant of a man had an uncommon love of landscaping. Within two seasons the entire extent of the rambling cemetery had taken on the look of a Roman sculpture garden, and it didn’t take long before everyone in the county wanted to be buried there.
Yet time passed, and Clem died, and entropy and weeds reclaimed the cemetery gardens. Meanwhile, the church continued its practice of leasing out the little house to needy families, and eventually it became occupied by Frances Louise Dudevant, a French-speaking woman who everyone seems to agree was Story’s maternal grandmother. She had one daughter out of wedlock—Lelia—who, a child herself, became pregnant at fifteen.
And that is where the holes in the story begin.
What I eventually put together was that Story was born on a rainy September morning to Lelia and a much-older father who was either married or engaged to be married at the time of conception. Further details about Story’s father were unknown and seemed to be the subject of a town-wide conspiracy of silence. His personal details had been tantalizingly redacted from her birth certificate. No one could recall his name or where he was from. It appeared that the only person who had actual knowledge of his identity was Story’s biological mother, and she wasn’t telling.
Story had deduced from dubious sources that perhaps her father had attended the Citadel and had spent some time in the military as a high-ranking officer. At least, that was one rumor she had heard. Another was that he was a wealthy landowner from Charleston who went broke and jumped to his death from the rusted and aging Cooper River Bridge. It was to remain a mystery.
In what appeared to be a remarkable act of human decency, a married couple who lived down the street from the cemetery and attended Versirecto Methodist Church agreed to adopt the newborn from fifteen-year-old Lelia, who handed over the child from her hospital bed and did not see her again until Story was grown and in her first year of law school in Chapel Hill. The couple who adopted Story initially had no children of their own, but a child was born to them one month prior Story’s adoption. They had two more children in the years shortly thereafter, for a total of four. The three children to follow Story grew up spoiled and viewed her as an intermeddler who didn’t belong.
