Against the Ruins Read online

  I return to my mother’s orderly bedroom, which is inundated with pictures of her parents, her brothers, me, my father as a child. I peek inside her jewelry box at her most prized possession—the Victorian cameo set in delicate gold filigree that belonged to my painter grandmother. I hold it over my heart for a moment. Prowling back into the living room—I’ve not been alone in this house since my twenties, I feel like I’m trespassing—I sit down and stare at the glass-front oak bookcase, its old-fashioned finish ebony, and at the ornate 1820s tarnished-black silver coffeepot atop it. All that’s left of my paternal ancestry, buried in the well when Sherman came to call. I don’t know which South I belong to, the dead old one or the tacky new version; I was raised in the latter by parents groomed in the former. Often it’s felt as though their lives, and this house, most properly belong to the 1940s and to world war, like all our clocks stopped then.

  Suddenly I hate how beaten-up and tired the furniture looks. The 1950s coffee table was bought with Green Stamps, cheap wood with a plastic shine, incongruously juxtaposed to my grandmother’s 1920s Empire rocker, whose cracked leg is crudely repaired with duct tape. My father has always controlled my parents’ lives. Did my mother ever buy anything simply because it was beautiful and she wanted it? Did she love this house she’s lived in for forty years?

  Finally, like a good modern girl, I take a Xanax and go to bed.

  Morning after morning in the ICU waiting room turns into softer evening, and I often stand at the metal-frame window to look out over the city of my youth. Absently I run a hand along the slick marble ledge—a modern window, no history, even less myth. Once upon a time I wanted to be an architect but soon discovered I only love old buildings. Perhaps I should have been a conservator. Several years after art school, I spent a year on studies of windows and doors; I was in love with O’Keeffe and Diebenkorn at the time. Some doors and windows were partially open, many closed tight, means of egress from my travels in Europe, the historic South, the Southwest. I still prefer making love beside a window and can’t sleep in a room without one.

  From this characterless opening—no, being hermetically sealed, it isn’t an opening at all—I can just make out the distant dome of the State Capitol. In an old photo, an eleven-year-old me hangs onto Washington’s statue on the front steps, his presidential cane snapped off by Union soldiers, repaired and rewelded, then broken again by locals so no one would forget who originally broke it. And we wonder why people still think Southerners are weird. This is, after all, the state where a lieutenant governor murdered a well-known newspaper editor on the capitol grounds. Doesn’t pay to disagree politically in South Carolina, though I guess everyone knows that by now.

  It’s also my vein of madness, this place is. Can’t stay, can’t ever really leave. Home is a word in a language I apparently don’t speak. Yet part of me is always here. Literally. My very proper schoolteacher mother, she was about thirty then, her silky black hair parted in the middle, and … what does she have it in? What does afterbirth look like days later? She and the Gullah woman must have gone somewhere after dark—surely not a cemetery, maybe a remote spot in the swamps along the Charleston road—and I guess they dug a hole and put the “stuff” in it. My mother the Matriarch of Reason out in the dark burying the slimy placenta? When she told me she’d done this—I was twenty-seven and indifferent to folk myths, I certainly didn’t believe this would bring a child good luck—she said she did it because having a child come out of her body felt like a miracle and she wanted us to stay connected for always. Even now, lodged deep in Carolina mud, is the decayed tissue she and I once shared.

  Across the room my father sits in an upholstered beige armchair; occasionally he reminds me to use the wall hand sanitizer before going into ICU. The man who was once completely silent around strangers chats amiably with the woman nearest him, makes jokes about being eighty-one. I don’t think I ever saw him smile until I was forty; even at Christmas dinner he could be dour and mute until my mother desperately asked him inane questions. To pass the time, I thumb through the Columbia newspaper, abruptly pull it nearer. The massive state mental hospital, about ten blocks from where I grew up and closed for years, is for sale. The city hopes a developer will turn it into condos: “a perfect spot for downtown living.” Jesus—I try to imagine kicking back in rooms once used for electric shock and lobotomy. And I think I sleep poorly now. At thirteen, to earn a Girl Scout badge, I did volunteer work in the hospital’s arts and crafts center. Without telling my parents. I can barely remember being there. My recall of my childhood is often facts devoid of context. Sometimes I long for emotional memory.

  My father jumps up as my mother’s doctor walks in. Dr. Dumaine—big and burly and gray, rumpled suit, tired eyes, a distant cousin—has been my mother’s doctor for decades. He sits down and says that my mother seems a little better today but full recovery isn’t likely.

  I stare at the man I’ve met only twice. “Is there any chance she’ll wake up, be able to speak or open her eyes?”

  “There’s no way to know. I’m sorry. Your mother is a favorite patient. I’ve known her for a long time. She’s—very special.”

  His voice is melodic, sorrowful. My mother adores him, has vowed to die before he retires. I’ve often had the feeling he knows more about us than I know about him.

  After he leaves, I go and tell my mother she’s doing better. She mumbles and winces. I lean close and ask if she’s in pain; she seems to shake her head no. Or that may be involuntary movement. Hearing is the last sense to go, the nurses say, so I talk about Easters in Brantley when I was a child, azaleas ten feet tall and the sunny Easter dresses she always made us. All the women in big hats—“Remember Grandmother’s hat with the silk daylilies on it? How they flopped when she walked?”

  I laugh to keep from weeping. I feel cheated that I can’t say good-bye properly. I yearn to hear my mother’s lyrical Low Country voice one last time. Perhaps I even hope, absurdly, that she’ll finally talk to me.

  I belong to a much older house than my parents’ rancher. Families are architecture—home is a place, a structure. A stage of rooms and walls against which live theater takes place. Often my family feels like the abandoned shack in remote Southern woodlands—creepy with kudzu, doors left open, bedstead still in place, razor-lonely, redolent with disillusioned expectation. Or we could be the once-venerable two-story sitting beside small-town railroad tracks, leaning and deserted, flint gray from years bereft of paint, which the relatives—who wouldn’t be caught dead living there and won’t pay to tear it down—allow to slowly fall to its knees, brick by brick, board by board. The houses I understand best are empty.

  As I always do when in Columbia, I need to see the actual house of my childhood. I read old houses like tea leaves—in a way, I’ve had to. Even if I can’t remember what was done and said inside them, I can recall the look of certain rooms down to a protruding nail in a floorboard. Architectural memory. I believe that old houses have souls—not ghosts, souls. So at dusk one evening I drive into the city. Soon I’m across the Broad River and passing the city cemetery where I once counted Confederate graves, as the interstate dumps me onto the wide boulevard of Elmwood Avenue. The Elmwood mansions I remember are gone, defeated by the squatty huts and incomparable cuisine of The Lizard’s Thicket and Piggie Park Barbeque. I’m sure people go there for the salads. A huge red dome, inflamed by the coral sunset, looms in the distance. This beacon of the South Carolina State Mental Hospital, a city-state of ancient buildings with barred windows, always guides me home.

  I turn onto Lincoln Street. In my old neighborhood the clapboard houses saved by the National Historic Register have been dipped in exuberant pastels. I pass several rambling Craftsman bungalows, a Queen Anne or two, mostly rows of two-story foursquare houses with balconies shaded by old oak trees. I hesitate beside a yellow bungalow with a wraparound porch and steeply pitched roof; a girl who lived there was a f
avorite friend until her mother would no longer allow her to play with me. These houses are as elegant now as when they were built a hundred years ago, mythically Southern, where on companion front porches black families sit in the twilight talking to their white neighbors about last night’s ball game. A way of life reinvented by these newly entwined, sibilant voices.

  Uta’s stone house, on the other hand, looks exactly as it did in my childhood, solid, impressive. I park at our old house, a 1913 clapboard foursquare. In the 1970s this neighborhood was a slum, a victim of white flight. Several houses were razed but someone saved ours at the eleventh hour. I’m thankful it’s still here. The house is now French blue with white shutters; a bay window has been added to the kitchen and the open-air porch sports carved balustrades, a wooden swing, and hanging baskets of red geraniums. But as I sit there staring, the gentrification fades. I see the house as I knew it—sagging on a weakened foundation, dirty white walls, torn window screens, broken shingles, crumbling concrete steps. Ditto the nearby houses: one sheltered a group of people whose relationship to each other was as questionable as their housekeeping—the city inspector routinely condemned part of their house, and they closed those rooms off and kept living in the rest. In those days our porch was a screened-in square of rotting gray-painted floorboards, its furniture two metal nylon-strap beach loungers, one with bent legs. In the backyard the ramshackle garage leaned to the left, and two towering pecan trees framed my rusted swing set. I can still hear nuts kerplunking onto the ground like wooden rain.

  How many times have I come here like a lost dog who finds his way home only to discover his family has moved?

  I get out of the car and lean against it, gazing at the renovated house canopied by luxuriant leaves that glisten in the twilight. The humid air knocks me breathless—I’ve barely been outside since arriving in Columbia. The evening air is soft as only air in the South can be—gentle yet heavy, full of texture, presence. From some backyard wafts the musk of ripening tomatoes, a nascent trill of gardenia, the day’s heat lifting from the cement sidewalks and floating away. All around me the loamy aroma that is old and decayed, organic, full of melancholy portent. Full of the past.

  Our first day here—I think I was five, maybe wearing a ruffled sundress my mother made, running through the large square kitchen of torn blue-flowered linoleum, past the scarred refrigerator and the pitted ceramic sink with a cracked mirror tacked to the plaster wall above it. The kitchen leads into a central bedroom, a tall brown oil stove fronting its blocked fireplace. In my small bedroom four windows overlook the backyard. My closet is a makeshift plywood cube covered by a curtain; the plank floor, unsupported by the main foundation, slopes downward. Children who grow up in added-on rooms lack balance. My dropped marbles always rolled toward the windows leading outside.

  I dash into the rectangular bathroom: white pedestal sink, toilet, squatty iron bathtub on claw feet. The side of the tub is plastered with a decal of blonde women—creamy white skin, flawless blue eyes, slender tapered legs. Perfect women, bright yellow curls bouncing as they prance about on dainty feet, strategically placed bubbles barely covering the full breasts and each abdomen below the belly button. I drop down beside the tub and study them, and then pop up and twirl around. They’ll be my friends in this new place. Good-luck fairies.

  Just then my mother—she has black hair that shines like it has stars in it—appears and I ask, “Are the ladies so happy because they’re wearing bubbles, not clothes?”

  “Sweetie, I’m not sure. Maybe.”

  Hand in hand, we walk back through the empty rooms and down the front steps. She turns to look back at the house. “The screen porch will be nice in summer,” she says. “All the old trees, hardwoods, they’ll give beautiful autumn color, and I’ll plant hydrangeas beside the steps, and azaleas too.”

  My daddy—all the relatives said he was good to look at, all that thick blond hair and robin’s-egg eyes, a war hero to boot, they said it was still hard to believe shy Louise snagged such a good-looking younger man—is in the driveway staring at the roof, checking the condition of the chimney. Everybody says we’re charmed, no money but my parents have college degrees and “opportunity.” Watching my father, my mother whispers, “Sometimes I close my eyes and remember your daddy taking the stairs two at a time at the Summerville Teachery—that’s where the single schoolteachers lived—with flowers in his hands, or a beautiful bird feather he’d found. He seemed to discover life anew every day.”

  She points to a dogwood tree in the side yard. “Look—my favorite tree.” We skip over and she reaches up to caress the brown scars on the petals. “Tree of rebirth,” she says. “Can you believe I once tried to press dogwood blooms to preserve them like we do rose petals? I wanted to have them all year. Guess what: dogwood petals turn brown and ugly.” She gazes down at me. “Sometimes, Lyra, you just have to trust. Yes sir, I’ll sweep the dust out of this old house and everything will be wonderful.”

  The past fades as I gaze again at the reinvented Lincoln Street house. Like people, buildings either recover from their wounds or they disintegrate. History’s been remade here. My mother’s blue hydrangeas are still there, almost ready to bloom. There it all is, a lovely old house and flowers and love. All that should have come to pass—it happened, but only for the house.

  Part II: Louise

  1957

  Chapter Two

  It’s Friday and I’m walking down Park Street, 4 p.m. The air snaps and crackles, unusually cold but just right for December. Small patches of white remain on the grass from the amazing snowfall of a few days ago. I love this neighborhood of clapboard houses with sprawling front porches, wise old houses, ancestral texts filled with secrets. Life is amazing—there are occasional glitches, of course. I know I’m a Pollyanna but I don’t care. Really, when you think about it, what’s a Cold War compared to the awful world war we lived through? I feel like skipping. I’m not thirty-six today, more like ten, and Christmas is two weeks away, and my stepmother and brothers and their families will soon be here. It won’t matter that we don’t have much room. We’ll rent roll-away beds, and it’ll be like the old days when on hot summer nights the whole family slept on the sleeping porch. I can still hear insects buzzing against the metallic screens and my father’s gentle snoring.

  Sometimes—it sounds silly—I feel as though, when no one was looking, I sneaked in the back door of the life I always dreamed of.

  As I turn onto Aiken Street, I see a child on a bicycle, peddling with her arms crossed across her chest. My child. It scares me when Lyra rides like this, and thrills me too, I who never learned to ride a bike. Suddenly she grabs the handlebars as the front wheel jackknifes. She sees me and waves—can she really be six already? My dream come true, this child, this clay pot I’m hand-building to be as sturdy as possible. She peddles over and rides along beside me, silky blonde hair escaping a tortoiseshell barrette, pants dirty at the knees. I ask about her day at school and while she babbles, I walk in sync with her sidewalk shadow. I don’t want her slipping away.

  We turn onto Lincoln Street. Down the block I see our car in the driveway. “Your daddy’s home early. That’s nice, isn’t it?”

  As we go inside, I make a mental note to wash the living-room curtains before Christmas. I step over Fluffy sprawled on the hall carpet runner—that cat lies everywhere except out of the way. As usual, I almost trip over the torn edge of the kitchen’s blue-flowered linoleum.

  “Darling?” I call toward the closed bedroom door as I set my things down on the marbled-yellow table. Formica may be easy to keep up, but give me a wood table any day. I call again, “How was your day, sweetheart?”

  No answer. Maybe he’s taking a nap, though that’s odd at this hour.

  Fluffy wanders in and makes inquiries about dinner while Lyra sits at the table with a coloring book; then Lyra crawls down and buries her face in cat fur and of course starts
sneezing. I open the scarred refrigerator door—there isn’t much for supper. A can of salmon and grits will have to do.

  A sudden slam from the bedroom. William’s voice.

  I push the swinging bedroom door open, Lyra behind me. William’s lying on our lumpy bed, his eyes closed, saying something I can’t make out.

  He doesn’t usually talk in his sleep. “Darling, are you awake?”

  He doesn’t open his eyes. He must really be sleeping. I walk over to the bed and run my hand through the wild wavy hair I love. Lyra’s hair.

  Dark stains on my good white sheets. Where did they come from? It almost looks like blood.

  William jumps up—eyes unnaturally white, he’s wearing only his pajama bottoms, they’re stained red too. He whispers in a harsh rasp, “Get down here.” He drops to his knees beside the bed. “We’ve blasphemed God,” he shouts. “We must beg for forgiveness. Hell is coming.”

  “William, what’s wrong?”

  He yells, “Get down here, I said.” His eyes are unfocused, wobbly. His voice booms, “Get down here so we can pray.”

  He grabs my arm and forces me onto the floor as Lyra scurries backward.

  “William, please. Please let me up. Tell me what’s wrong.” I turn slightly, cry out, “There’s blood on your arm—you’re bleeding.”