CHAPTER THREE
Almost Right
The Hall has a wall I want to tell you about, because for ten years it told me everything and I declined to listen.
The stair gallery: four portraits in oils, four generations of Calhoun wives, each one painted in her first year of marriage.
They go up the staircase in order like a sentence being finished — high collar, drop waist, New Look, Diane-von-Furstenberg-but-make-it-Episcopalian — and each one was done by whoever was the painter of her particular decade, because the Hall does not hire almost.
There is room on that wall for a fifth. The plaster’s even patched where a sconce came out. Year two, I asked Whit about it — lightly, the way you ask about things you want enormously — and he kissed my hair and said, “Mother’s particular about that wall. We’re waiting for the right painter.”
Year ten, we were still waiting. Charleston, I promise you, did not run out of painters.
I’d have settled for being done by a wrong one.
I’d have settled — and this is the part I couldn’t say out loud for a decade because of how it sounds — for being painted by me.
I offered once, year four, as a joke, which is the voice I’d learned to put things in so they could be refused without anyone having refused anything.
Dot laughed her real laugh, touched my wrist, and said, “Oh, that’s charming.
A self-portrait. Like sitting as your own character witness.
” And everyone laughed, including me, especially me, because I’d learned the house style: you laugh at the verdict so nobody has to read it to you.
Here is the decade, since I finally have it framed.
The carriage house, year one: I painted the back room — my studio — a deep harbor blue I mixed myself.
Dot saw it at Christmas and said only, “Bold.” By March it had been repainted oyster, while we were in Beaufort for a weekend, as a surprise, because the painters were already doing the main rooms and it would have been silly, dear, not to do them all to match.
Whit agreed it was high-handed and also agreed it did look bigger, didn’t it, and the blue went the way of everything: into the inventory of things that were technically improvements.
Holidays, years one through ten: my mother got us the day after.
Every year. Not by rule — the Hall would never legislate; the Hall schedules — and the schedule simply always filled from the top, the way water fills from the bottom, and my mother, who would have died before complaining, learned to keep the camellias cut on the twenty-sixth.
My job, the whole decade: at the Hall it was called “Posey’s school,” said in the tone you’d use for a child’s lemonade stand.
I teach. I am, if you’ll allow me one sentence of immodesty, the reason two hundred-some adults in this state can walk into a museum and feel owed something.
At Calhoun Hall, what I do for nine months a year was a story told at dinner about how I once got glitter on a senator’s wife.
Whit told it. It killed. He told it the way he told the auction story — proudly, lovingly, and at a scale that fit the table’s frame.
The frame was the whole crime. Nothing was ever left out of the picture except the size of me.
And every overruling, every single one, arrived in the same packaging: reasonable, affectionate, already done.
The eyebrow went up; my husband’s shoulders came down; the difference got split somewhere that was never, ever the middle.
I’d watch him do it — this man who could talk a hailstorm out of a harvest, who negotiated with growers and bankers and once, memorably, a bull — fold like a deck chair at one lifted finger of his mother’s, and then turn to me with that warm, sane, reasonable face and offer me the consolation prize of his company in defeat.
You know how Mother is. He said it the way other men say traffic.
A fixed condition. Nobody’s fault. Certainly not his — he was stuck in it right beside me, wasn’t he? What more could a husband do.
I want to be honest about my part, because the sketchbook doesn’t flatter me either: I let every one of those Sundays close on time.
I was sunny. Sunny was armor and I’d ground the pigment myself.
The bright girl from Mount Pleasant decided early that she would not be the wife who made things difficult — I’d seen what the Hall did with difficult; difficult got seated further out every year until it was eating in town — and so I became pleasant the way some women become thin: deliberately, expensively, and to compliments from exactly the people I should have worried about.
Bitsy diagnosed it in one lunch.
Whit’s sister came back to Charleston in our third year — divorced, unbothered, running a decorating business out of a Tradd Street town house at what she called “half speed, full margin.” The family said Bitsy’s visiting for the first six months, the way you’d say it about weather you hoped would pass.
She came to Sunday lunch exactly twice a year, sat wherever she wanted — I watched her, once, pick up her place card, walk it three seats down, and set it next to mine like she was moving a pawn — and left when she was done eating, not when lunch was over.
The second time we ever spoke alone, she watched me across her kitchen island while I told some funny, sunny, varnished story about the holiday schedule, and when I finished she said:
“How long did it take you to learn the dialect?”
“What dialect?”
“The one where everything’s a little bit funny so none of it can be a little bit true.” She poured more wine, not unkindly. “I grew up speaking it. Wrote poems in it. You’ve got the accent better than I ever did — Mother must love you. You know there are only two ways out of that house, don’t you?”
I said something light. She didn’t laugh.
“Run, or learn the eyebrow,” Bitsy said.
“I ran. Mother and I fight to a draw twice a year now, because I won’t sit down, and a draw is the best anyone’s ever gotten off her.
The ones who stay learn the eyebrow.” She looked at me over the glass, with what I would understand much later was not judgment but grief running ahead of schedule.
“You’re the third option. You’re the one who thinks if she’s good enough, long enough, they’ll repaint the room blue. ”
I drove home furious. It took me a long time to locate the fury’s address — it wasn’t Bitsy. You’re never angry at the person who reads the picture right. You’re angry that you painted it.
That was year three. I stayed seven more.
Because here’s the thing nobody puts in the brochures about a man like Whit: the rest of it was good.
Not good in the way you say to be fair to a man you’ve left — good in the way that ruins you for leaving, the kind of good you have to take apart one ordinary night at a time, because no single night will ever hand you grounds.
I’ve spent this whole chapter handing you the indictment. A fair trial hears the other side, so let me enter one night into the record. I have it dated; I have the sketch I made at the end of it. I can be exact.
An ordinary cold snap, our sixth winter — cold for Charleston, the kind that finds every gap a carriage house has.
I’d come home from school scraped down to the wire: a board meeting that went sideways, a kiln that died in the middle of a firing and took a week of the children’s work with it, and a tote bag of thirty paper kites that had come unglued in the damp and would all have to be rebuilt before morning, or thirty seven-year-olds would arrive to find their flying gone flightless.
I came up the carriage-house steps already narrating the evening to myself as a thing to be gotten through, alone, in a cold back room.
The room was warm.
He’d lit the bad woodstove — the one that never drew right, that we’d both given up on by year two — and he’d gotten it to draw, which I learned later took him the better part of an hour and the clearing of a dead bird’s nest out of the flue, a thing he never mentioned, then or ever, because to mention it would have turned a warm room into a favor, and Whit at his best does not collect on warmth.
He’d made the one meal he can make, which is breakfast: eggs, the good bacon, the biscuits from the tube he is convinced I don’t know come from a tube.
Breakfast at six in the evening, because that morning, half-asleep with my face in the pillow, I’d said I wished it were already the weekend.
He did not fix my day. I need that in the record beside everything else, because it is the whole of the man in one evening.
He didn’t ask about the board or the kiln; he has never once, in eleven years, known what to do with my bad day except refuse to let me carry it alone in a cold room.
So he warmed the room and fed me breakfast at the wrong hour and put on the record we have both loved since before the Hall had an opinion about us, and he didn’t make me talk.
He cleared the table. He sat down across from me with the tote of ruined kites between us, and without being asked, with no idea he was doing the most married thing he would do all year, he picked up the glue and started in.
We rebuilt thirty kites at that table until past eleven.
His hands are vineyard hands, enormous and careful, and they are not built for construction paper; he crushed the struts on maybe a third of them, glued one wing on backward and held it up so pleased with himself that I didn’t have the heart, and after he went to bed I fixed every one of his without telling him — the way I fixed so much in that marriage without telling him, except that this once the fixing felt like love instead of erasure, because it was mine to do and no one had assigned it.
The stove drew. The record played through twice.
Outside the cold did whatever it wanted and could not get in.
At ten, looking at a kite that had survived him, he said — to the kite, not to me, which is how the truest things come out of Whit — “You’re the best thing that ever came up that auction table.
” That was all. He didn’t look up. And I believed it all the way down, because it was true, and because a woman can heat a whole winter on one true sentence said over a glue stick by a man with paste on his thumb.
I drew his hands before I slept. I still have it.
It is one of the few drawings of him from those years where the figure isn’t standing at the edge of the frame — because that night, in that room, he wasn’t at the edge of anything.
He was the center of the only composition I ever made that came out even.
Here is what I would not let myself see, warming my hands at it: he had given me everything that night.
The whole undivided golden unguarded man — the woodstove, the bird’s nest, the truest sentence of my marriage — and he had given it in the one place it cost him nothing.
The carriage house. After dark. Where no one was seated and nothing was being decided and his mother’s eyebrow could not reach across the hedge to a kitchen table over a bag of kites.
He loved me without ceiling or condition in every room that didn’t count.
He had simply never once carried that man up the river to a room that did.
So, yes — he was funny and warm and faithful and he came home every night smelling like the rows, and he loved me; he loves me.
I’ve never once doubted it, and I’m not going to pretend I did, because the truth is so much worse than doubt.
He loved me the whole time. He loved me at every single Sunday lunch at which I lost. A decade, call it five hundred votes, every one cast against me by a man who would have told you, with his whole honest heart, that I was the love of his life.
Almost right. That was my decade — the Hall’s highest grade, as it turns out. The dress was almost right, the paint was almost right, the wife was almost, almost right.
At Calhoun Hall, almost is not a distance. It’s a leash.