What She Wore (Charleston Reckonings #6)

CHAPTER ONE

The Seating Chart

The seating chart for Sunday lunch at Calhoun Hall was drawn up every Thursday, in pencil, and finalized Friday in ink, and in ten years of marriage I had appeared on it eleven different ways and never once beside my husband.

I knew this because I am a person who notices where things are placed.

It’s the whole job. Three hundred children a year stand in front of my whiteboard while I teach them that nothing in a picture is an accident — that the painter put the church steeple on the left and the dog in the corner on purpose, and if you want to know what a picture really says, you don’t look at what’s in the middle. You look at what got put at the edge.

For ten years, I had declined to apply this lesson to my own life. Professionals make the worst patients.

“Posey, dear.” Dot lifted one finger an inch off the tablecloth, which at Calhoun Hall is how the head of the table requests the salt, silence, or a change of subject. This time it was the salt. “You’re nearest.”

I was nearest. I was always nearest to whatever was wanted and furthest from whoever I’d arrived with.

Whit sat at the other end beside his great-aunt, doing the thing he does at family tables, which is to be delightful at whoever needs delighting so that nothing anywhere can begin to become a disagreement.

He caught my eye down the length of eighteen place settings and gave me the smile — the real one, the auction one — and I passed the salt and decided, the way I had decided approximately five hundred and twenty Sundays in a row, that this was a kind man and a good marriage and that the geography was just how the Hall did things.

“We were thinking,” Whit said to the table at large, when the ham had gone around, “of Savannah, for the anniversary. The little hotel on the square. Posey found it.”

“Tenth,” I said. “The big one.”

His cousin made the appropriate noise. The great-aunt asked which square, because in her day there was only one worth sleeping on.

For four entire sentences it was a plan, our plan, out loud in front of the family, and I sat there with my hands in my lap feeling something I can only describe the way I’d describe it to my students: for once, the composition had put us in the same part of the picture.

“The second weekend of June,” Dot said, to her plate. Not an objection. An observation, set down quietly, the way you set down a trump card.

“Mother?”

“The vine blessing.” She looked up, mild as milk.

“Reverend Sessions is coming out for it. The whole congregation, the choir. Your father started it the year you were born, Whitman — I’d hate for the rows to stand there being blessed at an empty house.

But of course, you two must go to Savannah.

” She smiled at me. Dot’s smiles are perfectly genuine, which is a thing I’d given up explaining to people who haven’t sat at this table.

“It’s only a vine blessing. It only happens once a year. ”

The silence that followed lasted maybe a second and a half.

I want to be precise about that, because nothing about what happened in it was visible.

No voice was raised — voices never are; I had been informed early that we don’t raise our voices, dear, we raise our eyebrows.

The eyebrow didn’t even go up. It didn’t need to. It had a standing reservation.

“We could go the weekend after,” Whit said, to me, warmly, already relieved, already congratulating the table on how well everything had worked out. “Savannah’s not going anywhere, Pose. You know how Mother is about the blessing.”

You know how Mother is. If the Calhoun family had a coat of arms, it would be that sentence, in Latin, over a field of folded napkins.

“The weekend after is graduation week,” I said. “I have three hundred children graduating out of construction paper.”

“Then the weekend after that.”

“That’s the eighteenth. We were married on the eleventh.”

“It’s all June, isn’t it?” He said it so gently, so reasonably, with so much affection, that the table laughed in the easy way you laugh when a thing is over.

And it was over. That’s what I would explain later — to Bitsy, to a woman on Broad Street with rye on her desk, to myself at two in the morning in a garage apartment with my paintings stacked against the wall like deportees.

Nobody at Calhoun Hall was ever defeated. Things were simply, pleasantly, over.

The vote was called and cast and certified in under a minute, and my husband never knew there’d been a ballot.

After lunch the family did what it does: drifted to the porch in twos and threes, by rank.

I carried dishes, because the bright girl from Mount Pleasant who married up had decided ten years ago that being useful was a place to put her hands, and the housekeeper and I had long since worked out a wordless assembly line at the sink that I privately considered the only honest partnership on the property.

Through the kitchen window I could see the rows running down toward the Ashley, green going gold-green in the late April light, and Whit walking the nearest one with his mother. He’d taken his jacket off. She had her hand in the crook of his arm. From this distance you’d paint them as one shape.

“You’ll want the cake plates, Miss Posey,” the housekeeper said, “before Mrs. Calhoun rings for them.”

She has called me Miss Posey for ten years.

The children call me Miss Hadley, because that’s the name on my classroom door, the name I painted on it myself in letters the principal said were unnecessarily beautiful.

Nobody at the Hall had ever once corrected anyone who left the Calhoun off me, and I’d decided long ago that this was a small thing, the way I’d decided the chart was a small thing, and Savannah was a small thing, the way you can stand in front of a wall going dark with mildew and keep calling it a small thing because each individual spot is, technically, small.

I dried the cake plates. I am very good at the part of the picture I’d been given.

Driving home — we kept the carriage house behind the Hall’s east hedge those years, close enough that Dot called it “having you at the house,” far enough that she didn’t have to — Whit reached over and squeezed my knee at the exact bend in the drive where he always did.

“Good lunch,” he said. “Mother was on her best behavior.”

“She was,” I said, and meant it, which was the trouble.

She had been. There was never anything to point to.

You cannot frame an eyebrow. You cannot hang a pause.

I had ten years of it, none of which would survive being said out loud — he moved our anniversary for a vine blessing sounds, said out loud, like a woman complaining about flowers.

“June eighteenth, then,” he said. “I’ll have Charlotte book the hotel Monday, I promise. The good room. The one with the balcony you liked.”

“The eleventh,” I said. “The anniversary is the eleventh.”

“Right,” my husband said, and turned us in at the hedge, genuinely happy, planning to be wonderful to me three weekends from now, having no idea anything anywhere had been decided. “That’s what I meant.”

That night I couldn’t sleep, so I did what I always did instead of whatever it is wives are supposed to do instead of sleeping.

I went out to the studio end of the carriage house, where the harbor paintings lean face-to-the-wall in their stacks because Dot once described them, kindly, to a luncheon guest, as Posey’s little hobby, very vivid — and I took out the sketchbook I keep for myself, the one with ten years of Sundays in it.

I don’t remember deciding, years ago, to start drawing the table.

It’s just what a hand like mine does in a long afternoon: you draw what you’re looking at.

Eighteen settings, the finger lifted an inch, the shape of two people in a vineyard row.

Sunday after Sunday after Sunday, dated, like anybody’s diary.

I turned the pages backward for a long time, April to Christmas to April, and somewhere in the middle of the third year-before-last I stopped, because I had finally noticed what I had been drawing the whole time, what every dated page had in common, sitting right there at the edge where I’d put it.

Eleven different chairs in ten years. I could draw that table with my eyes closed. I had. Over and over, all those Sundays — the silver, the napkins, the finger, the eyebrow, my husband glowing at the far end like a lamp I’d been promised and never once been seated under.

I was in none of the drawings. There was no chair in that composition I had ever drawn as mine.