EPILOGUE
Thursday, Ten Past One
POSEY
The table at Verbena is round, which I have come to believe is the entire point of it. You cannot seat a round table. There is no head, no foot, no below the salt — only the circle and whoever is in it, and the one standing rule, the only one, is that the newest woman is poured first.
They poured me first.
I reached for the glass with the hand that now wears the only ring I have ever chosen — and I mean chosen: walked into Forsythe’s with my own money and my own eye and said that one, the one I want.
It is not the Calhoun ring. That one rests in the family ledger where it always belonged, logged and sealed, Whit’s name signed off it for good.
Mine is plain — a single stone the exact harbor-blue of the water I have painted forty times, set low so it won’t catch on a brush.
I designed it across Etta’s counter over three afternoons, and when it was finished she held it to the lamp a moment and said, “First piece in my cases anybody ever chose her.” She set it in my palm. “It appraises accordingly.”
I won’t pretend they’re a soft group. Della had my opening written into her calendar in ink before the paint was dry, and she’ll tell you a thing kept in pencil is a thing somebody is already planning to cancel.
June, who I’m told could not let a crooked picture hang for the first forty years of her life, sat through the whole of my closing night and straightened nothing, and called that her gift, and it was.
Mara — who keeps her own name on her own door down on lower Broad now, and audits the sort of men who used to audit her — read my settlement and said only, “He paid in the right currency. Most of them try to pay in the cheap one,” and went back to her coffee.
Calla brought a cutting, because Calla always brings a cutting; there is a harbor-blue something rooting in a jar on my windowsill that she swears will flower by spring.
And Wren fed us, because feeding people is the whole of Wren’s theology, and sent me home with the leftovers in a way that was not a question.
They are not oracles, whatever all that makes them sound like.
June spent the better part of one Thursday insisting, with total confidence, that I ought to have kept the dower house purely to spite the family — which was bad advice, and Mara told her so, flatly, and June waved it off and reached for the bread, and nobody corrected the record after that.
The wine just went around again. That is the thing about a round table I had not expected and have come to need: it lets a woman be wrong out loud and stay seated.
The Hall never once did. There, wrong was a thing you got moved for.
Sundays happen at our house now — the one with my name on the deed beside his, the one I picked.
The table seats eight, and the two head chairs sit side by side, close enough that the rungs touch, and every week Whit takes his and holds still while I make another study of him, and the marriage cures one Sunday at a time, no varnish until I say.
It is not a dramatic thing to watch, and I have come to love that about it.
A grovel is a single night — the kneel, the speech, the red dot — and the city ate ours whole and moved on to the next lit door.
But a sitting is not a night. A sitting is fifty-two Sundays a year of a man learning to hold a position long enough to be seen in it, of small corrections taken without a flinch, of a likeness built the only honest way there is, in thin layers, each one given time to dry before the next goes on.
He gets it wrong some weeks. He reaches, still, now and then, for the grand gesture, the expensive nothing — and I set down my pencil and wait, and he hears the waiting, and puts the gesture away, and holds still again.
That is the whole of it. Not the kneel. The holding still, every week, for as long as it takes the paint to set.
Dot comes. Not every week — she is a guest now, and a guest is invited, and an invitation can be declined, and we have all had to learn the new grammar of it together.
She behaves. She has not once raised her voice or her eyebrow at my table, because it is not her table and she knows precisely the difference; if surviving the Hall taught her anything, it taught her to read who truly owns a room.
And once — once — she arrived with a dessert nobody had asked her to bring, a lemon thing of her grandmother’s, and set it down without a word, and the whole table understood exactly what it was.
It was the eyebrow, lowering. One inch. She will never say so, and I will never make her, because some records you correct out loud at a table and some you simply let a person set down on it, in a dish, and accept.
The committee called again in the spring. I took the seat this time — on my own name, the one three hundred children had been calling me all along. Miss Hadley votes her own card now.
The show sold out. Ten years of harbor gone to walls all over a city that had never once asked to see them — every canvas but the single wall with the red dot that doesn’t mean sold. The dress stays. Some things you paint in order to keep.
The Palmetto Whisper had the last word, the way it always does, in a column the whole city read in bed one Sunday that fall:
“The city’s best portrait of the year has been re-hung, we are pleased to report, in a better house. The composition is unchanged. Only the provenance has been corrected.”
There is a new woman at the edge of our circle lately — a friend of Della’s, quiet, lovely, who writes her husband long letters when he travels and has lately stopped getting her answers back in his own hand.
Iris, her name is. She laughed at something Wren said and didn’t quite finish the laugh.
I have learned to read a composition; I know that look.
But that is her book. The table will pour her first when it’s time.
For now there were six of us at a round table with no head and no foot, a glass poured for the newest, and I sat in a chair nobody had assigned me — wearing a stone I chose, in a city that finally knew exactly what I looked like.
Which is to say: like a woman, alone in the frame, who turned out to be the whole composition.