Low Country by Anne Rivers Siddons Page B

sometimes
    does that for us when I cannot get over ahead of time,
    and often stays to serve drinks and pass around al-
    monds and benné seed biscuits. Clay likes that. Mattie
    has a sure, unobtrusive dignity I cannot muster. Many
    guests think she is our employee, and neither Clay nor
    Hayes disabuses them.
    The town house is on Eliott Street, a short, shady
    cobbled alley off Bay Street lined with dollhouse
    Charleston single houses. Clay bought the house years
    ago, when it became obvious that Plantation business
    was going to keep him in Charleston a great deal of
    the time. I know that even if it hadn’t, he would have
    found an excuse to own a Charleston house. He has
    never stopped loving Charleston, as much, I think, for
    what it will not give him as for what it will. Clay has
    made a great deal of money, but there is a small core
    of old Charleston that does not care about that and
    will not admit him into its inmost bosom no matter
    what civic endeavor he underwrites. He will never, for
    instance, belong to the St. Cecelia Society, for the
    simple reason that membership is inherited, and he
    has come to ridicule it, but he never gave up on the
    notion that Kylie might come out there.
    “You could cultivate Charleston,” he said.

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    “You’ve probably still got kin around here you don’t
    know you have.”
    “You remind me of Groucho Marx when he said he
    wouldn’t belong to any club that would have him as
    a member,” I said once. “You scorn it, but you want
    your daughter to make her damned debut there. What
    kind of message do you think that gives Kylie?”
    “That there are some things worth having that aren’t
    easy to get,” he said. “That real quality is rare.”
    “And that exclusion by policy is the Amurrican way,”
    I said. “I’m no more going to ‘cultivate’ Charleston
    than I’m going to let her go to St. Margaret’s. She
    doesn’t live over there, Clay. I’m not going to have
    her in a car for two hours every day of her life just so
    she can go to a silly dance. Country Day is as good a
    school as there is in the Lowcountry. You’ve seen to
    that. What’s it going to say to these newcomers you
    hire if your child goes to school in Charleston while
    theirs are expected to go on the island?”
    “That rank hath its privileges,” he said, but he did
    not push it, and of course, as it turned out, it did not
    come up.
    But Clay still loves Charleston with the single-
    minded passion of a man for a lost first love, and when
    Hayes found out that the little house was being put up
    for sale by the old couple who were moving to the
    carriage house of a child’s home,

    104 / Anne Rivers Siddons
    he called Clay immediately. This was just before the
    first of the wealthy Northerners discovered Charleston
    and began buying up historic properties at prices the
    natives could not afford; Hayes, though never much
    of a lawyer in many respects, has the native’s nose for
    real estate and knew that such properties would soon
    triple and quadruple in value. It was still early days in
    the Plantation, but Clay got the money together and
    bought the house sight unseen, as much for its street
    address as for its attractiveness or livability. It lies in
    the heart of the hallowed area “South of Broad,” which
    in Charleston means more than the words might imply,
    and fortunately it is a prettily proportioned house that
    had been well cared for, needing only cosmetic atten-
    tion. I have to admit that I am charmed by the little
    house and its walled garden, too, though I do not
    spend much time there. It never seems quite real to
    me, never seems to be our house at all, and when Clay
    refers to it as our pied-à-terre, as he often does, I can
    only look at him.
    Charleston is as lovely in this soft, misted pre-
    Christmas dusk as it ever is, with gas carriage lights lit
    in the old district and warm lamplight shining from
    the shuttered windows of the old pastel houses