Ran dropped off his prescription at the CVS, and when he returned, Claire and the children—who’d picked up T-bones and instant mac and cheese next door—were working out to Marvin Gaye. When Ran heard Charlie belting out the Hooked on Phonics version of “Sexual Healing,” he laughed aloud.
“In fifteen years, they’ll be telling this one on the couch for sure,” he said, slipping behind the wheel.
“You don’t end up on the couch for that.” Claire nodded to the rearview, and, together, as they hadn’t been in quite a while, they contemplated their offspring cutting loose. Ran picked up the jewel case.
“So, Marvin G…I guess you’ve been warming up for my arrival.”
“I’ve been warming up,” Claire said. “But who says for you?” She poked her tongue into her cheek, and her eyes flashed, toying with him now.
Ran’s gaze narrowed a degree. “What’s this new je ne sais quoi, DeLay? You seem different.”
She flushed at the acknowledgment and looked away. “Not different so much as…”
“As?”
“Getting back to who I used to be.”
“Hey, seems to me, I remember her.” He smiled and put the key in the ignition. “That chick.”
Claire’s gaze, limpid now and bright, rested on his; then she reached out and straightened his collar, allowed her knuckles to graze his cheek. Something in Ransom soared, and, turning off the highway, he joined them on the chorus.
…when I get that feeling
I want sexual healing—sexual healing
The words flowed back into the slipstream, and for twenty minutes, as they shot through the blue Carolina afternoon, happiness was with them, like a fifth, completing presence in the car, a familiar stranger Ran had lately doubted he would ever see again.
They took 701 twelve miles inland toward Planterville, a tunnel, ribbon-straight and flat, through walls of pine and cypress forest, broken occasionally by marsh and estuary, gold-and-silver-spangled black this time of day.
It was coming on to dusk by the time he turned into the allée of ancient water oaks. Three-quarters of a mile long, there were over a hundred trees on either side, like deposed gods from some old pantheon, brooding wrongs the wider world had moved on from.
A cool exhalation from the river, not quite mist, further softened the soft light as the car moved up the potholed, sandy drive under heavy branches draped with Spanish moss where cicadas whirred. The whole scene possessed a riverine lushness composed of countless shades of green, and at the end of the tunnel of great trees, the house sat like a sepia-toned visitation from an old daguerreotype set down in the middle of a modern color photograph.
Wando Passo was none of the things Ransom had expected on his first visit, when Clive DeLay—Claire’s vindictive, jolly, aquiline-nosed uncle—was still alive. “The true old Carolina style,” Clive jeeringly explained—after ascertaining, in a quarter of a minute, everything he cared to know about Claire’s rock star husband—“wasn’t Tara, wasn’t Greek Revival, wasn’t elegant and white. What it was was this.” And his eyes—his bright, narrow, happy, entitled, avian old eyes—seemed to Ran to gloat: “And it belonged to us, not you, you ill-bred North Carolina cracker.” Clive was in the backyard now, taking his dirt nap beneath the cypress tree by the black pond with all the other dead DeLays, but Ran still sometimes felt he was here on sufferance, at the master’s—now the mistress’s—whim.
Under a tin hipped roof with six crumbling chimneys sticking out, what Wando Passo really was was a giant unpainted saltbox, a saltbox of seven thousand square feet and fifteen rooms. Massive and faintly carious, with the occasional window missing where symmetry demanded it, others where no Crayola-toting five-year-old with an ounce of self-respect would have placed them, the house was like a great ambition marred by insufficient planning and excess afterthought. At ground level, a wide porch elled around two sides under a shed roof. Its exposed rafters were supported not by columns, but by simple posts whose sole detail was a chamfered edge, irregularly cut with foot-adzes by the old slave carpenters who hewed them out of native cypress logs hauled up by mule team from the swamp.
Inside, though, despite a half century’s neglect, the house revealed its charms. The foyer cut up through two stories. Hung on fifty pounds of sterling links, the massive crystal chandelier was framed by a horseshoe staircase. Along its two curved walls, the paneling was faux-painted to resemble verde marble, and stepped above the rails were portraits of Claire’s ancestors, old planters of rice and, before that, of indigo, in crimson British uniforms, powdered wigs, silk hose, with silver buckles on their shoes.
A spacious center hall with three large rooms on either side led to the kitchen. Claire took the kids out back as Ran unwrapped the steaks in one of the deep bays of the old rust-spotted enamel sink that dated—like the pearl-tone Formica and the Frigidaire, with its heavy nickel latch and hinges and the top compartment made to hold a block of ice—from Clive’s renovation in the thirties. Overhead, the dusty chandelier harked back to a still more distant era, when the room had been a parlor and the kitchen house had been somewhere out there in the yard where Ransom headed now.
On his way, he left the check at Claire’s place on the table, smoothing it over the rough old heart pine planks.
“Look at this a minute, Ran, would you?” Claire said as he poured charcoal in the grill.
Brushing his hands, he joined her where she stood, arms akimbo, frowning at a boil of rot that had erupted in a foundation timber on the river side. Ran squatted on his hams and palpated a discolored patch of paint. The wood around the sore was punky and unsolid. When he poked, his index finger sank fist-knuckle deep.
He looked
