Folly Beach by Dorothea Benton Frank Read Free Book Online Page B

he was a founding member of the Poetry Society of South Carolina. And a celebrated poet. Descended from la-dee-da aristocracy. And I? I was only the Belmont Prize winner of Professor Baker’s playwriting class from Harvard, thank you, which had been performed on Broadway, but I was from, alas, Ohio. In the world my husband grew up in, you were either a Charlestonian or you were not. You were literary or you were not. I pouted and waited for him to speak again but he was buried in that past Sunday’s edition of the New York Times, which usually took us the whole week to finish.
    “DuBose? I thought that story had a delicious air of mystery to it.”
    Not anxious to take on the task of self-defense first thing in the morning, DuBose avoided my eyes, put the newspaper down, and poured himself another cup of coffee from the pink-and-green flowered breakfast set that I treasured so. It had been a birthday gift from his formidable mother, which is the nicest way to describe her personality.
    “Mysteries are fine for those who can abide them, I suppose. More coffee?”
    Again, DuBose had stepped on my pride.
    “What? No. Thank you.” I took a deep breath and sighed hard, exasperated. “You know, DuBose, sometimes you are an insufferable snob. Many highly educated people happen to adore mysteries, myself among them. I’m just asking you this. What do you think? Why did she haunt the tenant with all that weeping?” What I really wanted to know was why was a weeping woman haunting us ? Well, me, actually. And who was she?
    He knew I was growing touchy and quickly working myself into a foul humor. DuBose, who obviously could not recall the finer points of “The Young Ghost,” decided to take a benign position and let me talk it out.
    “I have no idea, sweetheart. My memory isn’t as sharp as yours. You tell me.” There, that’s better, I could see him thinking, compliment her a little without seeming disingenuous.
    “Very well, I will! It was an accident. But here’s the rub. People were blabbing all over town that she was having an affair with that simp Keene Everett when she most definitely was not. The rumors were terrible! So now that she was dead, how could she ever make her husband know that she loved only him?”
    “Right, I remember now.”
    “She was robbed of her reputation and of her very life by an accident. But the crying? She was very worried that she would become nothing more than a bad memory. So she haunted their tenant, hoping he would help her straighten things out with Bobbel. Don’t you remember she says, ‘I’d rather be forgotten than be something you try to forget and can’t.’ She didn’t want her husband to spend the rest of his life thinking she was unfaithful. And I’m telling you that all last night I heard a woman crying her heart out just like Suzo. Not some silly cat down the street. That’s all.”
    At that point, DuBose had stopped and stared across the table at me. I could read his mind. Did I feel robbed? Had I ever thought of loving someone else? He dismissed the thought almost immediately with a shudder. No, if DuBose Heyward was certain of anything in his life it was my devoted love. Women were such complicated creatures, he thought loudly enough to be heard, but deliciously so.
    “Perhaps I will have that egg,” he said. “And maybe a slice of toast?”
    “I’m ravenous this morning,” I had said, “I am going to the kitchen. I’ll be right back in two shakes.”
    I came around to his side of the table, smiled wide, kissed my fingertips, and touched his cheek with them. Harmony was restored. I knew that man and every cell of his brain. For the life of him, he could not even begin to comprehend why asking for an egg and a slice of toast would shake me from my truculent mood, but it seemed as though it had. At least I let him think so. I had made my point, and if I gave him a thousand dollars and all the tea in China, he couldn’t tell me what that point was.