“Dear girl.”
As the women press each other’s hands, Addie looks at Blanche’s face, at what is circumscribed and fearful there, put out by last night’s events and the disruption of routine this trip upriver represents—at what is afraid, essentially, of life—and it strikes her how narrowly she has escaped this fate. And that she has escaped it is due, in no small part, to Blanche herself.
Both the birds and the oarsmen have disappeared now, and Addie’s face, in contemplation, as she stares after them into the wake, takes on a melancholy cast.
When she first came out in society, she was courted by Paul Hayne, a poet who has now achieved a minor fame, yet when he proposed, she turned him down. Andwhy? Because when Addie searched her heart at seventeen, she couldn’t say she loved Paul in the way Evangeline loved Gabriel Lajeunesse in Longfellow’s poem, which she first read at Mme. Togno’s school, in the dear old double house on Tradd Street two doors east of Meeting, where Addie walked each morning from her aunt’s. She felt certain then that such love—love like Evangeline’s, that would be proof against the power of distance, time, and even Death—would come to her; it seemed impossible that it should not. And as Addie waited for her Gabriel—like Sleeping Beauty for the prince—one season became two; two turned, suddenly, to ten, and she had passed, without perceiving any inward change, from debutante to the succeeding stage in the female life cycle that in Charleston is euphemized as “chaperone.” Instead of dancing at cotillions, to her bemusement and surprise, it became expected that Miss Huger would take the piano bench and play for the enjoyment of the younger crowd, who suddenly threw themselves into the round dances, the mazurka and the waltz that in her day were just the other side of proper, practiced only in the fastest set.
And there came a point—where was it?—when Addie learned to smile at the girl she’d been, who had believed that love like Evangeline’s exists outside the imaginations of poets and the pages of their books. She swallowed down her disappointment and reconciled herself to the fact that she would never marry, that she would have her morning walks in White Point Garden and spend her afternoons with books and visits to the sick, and take the family pew at St. Michael’s every Sunday and fold her spotted hands and listen, nodding, to the sermon and die an old maid like her aunt and be buried in the churchyard there, with Great Michael, the deep bell in the carillon, to mourn for her and count the hours into years. There were worse fates, after all. Far worse. And then, just when this future seemed assured, when Addie had accepted it, one night Harlan DeLay, who was rich but from a family that was not quite proper—not proper by a stretch—came to supper. He made her a compliment about her gown and laughed at a remark she made. Their eyes met over it, and something passed. Even now, Addie cannot say what. But she does not deceive herself that it was love, not even the sort she felt for Paul. Yet she liked Harlan’s jollity and size. In his slightly hazy ginger eyes there was a spark of play, something eager, childlike, reckless, that sought confirmation of its effect in her and did not appear to entertain the possibility of disappointment. And, too, there was the sympathy of one motherless child for another. She quickly saw the effects the lack of female governance had had in him, the way he laughed too loudly and sought to draw too much attention to himself, but these were things she felt that she could help to temper and correct. He seemed to want correction in that way, and even said so.
And so she took the gloves and sugarplums he sent her during Race Week in the mad runup to Sumter and felt eighteen again. But what moved Addie more thanthese was a simple gift of flowers. In a time when Charleston’s gallants relied upon the florists, who made up trite bouquets of pinks and bud roses wired stiffly to a stick, with geranium leaves and silver paper frills beneath, Harlan had the wit to pick a quart of white musk roses from Wando Passo’s hothouse. The morning after the Jockey Club Ball—where, in the carriage riding home, she first allowed a kiss—he sent them to her in a little wicker creel. Somehow those flowers, hinting at a sensitivity, an original turn of mind she hadn’t clearly seen before, set Addie irreversibly upon her course.
And so, when Harlan asked her for her hand, she said yes, and did so gratefully despite the tales she’d heard about his father. Percival DeLay’s alliance with Paloma—the Cuban Negress he brought back from Matanzas years ago—is infamous throughout the Lowcountry. (Some say he won her in a game of cards!) Paloma’s children serve in privileged roles on the estate. Due to these peculiarities, no few wedding invitations were declined, a slight that not even the Huger name could prevent. Harlan tried to speak to her about the situation once, but he grew flustered, and Addie, having accepted him already, felt that it would be indelicate to press. “When I’m master, things will be different,” is all he really said. “I mean Wando Passo to be a proper home for us and for our children, Addie, the way it never was for me. With you as mistress, it can be a great house again.”
Actually, in the moment, he seemed rather fine, and his dream was one that she could share. The truth is, when he asked her, Addie fairly leapt. And it was not for land or money or any of the things that social Charleston understands and cares about. Part of it was the chance for
