Folly Beach - Dorothea Benton Frank [112]
“I mean, those two operate like they’re thirty-five,” I said.
“True but I can’t imagine this world without Aunt Daisy in it,” Patti said.
“Me too,” I said. “But either we’re going to bury her or she’s going to bury us.”
“Look, she’s a very smart woman. I’ll bet she’s got a will and an executor and she probably has even picked out the outfit, including a hat and gloves.”
“Maybe. I hope you’re right.”
“I want everyone to have cake and champagne at my funeral,” she said. “Lots of lovely cake!”
“Does Mark know this? I mean, I’ll try to remember it but I don’t plan on going anywhere until I’m two hundred years old and I don’t know how good my memory will be then.”
“Probably best if I write it down somewhere, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, we’re hilarious. So give me the short version of what’s happening with lover boy.”
“He’s wonderful.”
“Not that short. Elaborate, please?”
“He’s trying to turn me into a playwright.”
“Now there’s a practical career. Is he nuts?”
“Right? Well, look, I’m also getting more involved with Aunt Daisy’s business so I can pay the rent when I rent something. When she decides to pay me, that is. Anyway, writing a play is just an old dream of mine. And I came up with this idea.”
“Let’s hear,” Patti said and sat down at the kitchen table.
“So, I’m living here in Dorothy Heyward’s house . . .”
“Why don’t you refer to it as Dorothy and DuBose’s house?”
“I’ll get to that. Anyway, John says you know, you really should go down to the historical society and read all her papers. So I did.”
“And you found what? Are you falling asleep?”
“No, actually, I’m getting a second wind here. Probably the sugar in the wine. Who knows? Anyway, what I found in all those boxes and files were lots and lots of contradictions.”
She refilled my glass and hers. I pulled a box of white cheddar Cheez-Its from the pantry closet, opening it and dumping a pile of them on a paper towel.
“God, I love these things,” she said, eating a handful.
“Me too. In my old life we would’ve been picking these out of a Steuben bowl.”
“And they wouldn’t taste as good, either. Okay, gimme some contradictions.”
“Well, there are all these recipes for soups and stews for a nickel a serving and two cents a serving.”
“So they were broke? Writers starve. Everybody knows that.”
“Yeah, but wait. When they got married, DuBose was living with his mother. And she was quite the force to deal with, too.”
“That couldn’t have been any fun for Dorothy. I mean, a married woman needs her own house.”
“Exactly. One too many hens in the henhouse. So, listen to this. The first thing they do is build the mother a house on St. Michael’s Alley and then they build themselves this gorgeous Federal-style house in North Carolina on ten acres or more—I can’t remember exactly—but they had a writer’s cabin in the yard and a little bridge over a stream and these huge fieldstone fireplaces. It was really something.”
“So where’d they get the money for all that? We go from two-cent soup to St. Michael’s Alley and the glam life?”
“Exactly! My theory is that Dorothy was loaded. Look, her parents were dead so she inherited whatever they had. And she went to boarding school in Washington, not cheap, and later she studied at Columbia University and Radcliffe College, which were also no bargains.”
“Well, somebody had to pay for all of that.”
“Right? So she came from money. He dropped out of school and worked some pretty low-rent jobs to try and help his mother put food on the table. I mean, DuBose and his mother and sister were so poor that his mother took in sewing and rented rooms but she also did some other pretty demeaning things, too.”
“Oh, please tell me that she shook her tail feathers in one of those seedy bars up by the navy base?”
“You’re terrible. No, she stood in the lobby of the Francis Marion Hotel and recited little rhymes in Gullah, hoping the tourists would give her a dime or a quarter.”
“Wow. That’s like being a beggar.”
“No. That is being a beggar. Anyway, DuBose had all these lofty ideas about living his