Folly Beach - Dorothea Benton Frank [135]
“I’ll call my good friend, Susan Rosen. Big family attorney. Fabulous woman! She’ll write her a letter that will give this Heather a religious conversion. Just give me her contact information.”
I did and a letter went out the next week. Of course, I got the address from Patti, who got it from Mark. According to Patti, Mark wouldn’t ever keep a secret like that from her again. Wish I’d been a fly on the wall for that conversation!
Having attended to yet another stinky detail of Addison’s legacy, I knew I had to say something to Aunt Daisy.
So over supper one night that week I said, “Oh by the way, Aunt Daisy. I had a lawyer write a letter to Heather Parke telling her she wasn’t entitled to a dime and that if she harassed you ever again we’d have her locked up.”
There was a pregnant pause in the conversation.
“Good! Thank you!”
“That’s my girl,” Ella said.
“I don’t know why I ever worried about you, Cate. You seem to be managing life very well.”
“Thank you! I’m just putting one foot in front of the other the way you taught me to.”
Sara and Russ were thrilled to hear about Aunt Daisy’s recovery and that I was taking over her business. And Sara was especially excited that I was attempting to write a play. We had talked last night for more than an hour.
She said, “I remember when I was a little girl you used to say that all the time, that you wanted to write.”
“It’s still true,” I said.
“Remember all those silly plays we used to make up?”
“I sure do. There was a lot of laughing around the house in those days.”
“Well, if making up stories makes you happy, maybe that’s what you ought to be doing?”
Out of the mouths of babes, like they say.
So there I was, with my morning coffee, sitting on the chair at the desk allegedly used by the Heywards to write Mamba’s Daughters, writing about the Heywards themselves. I decided to call my play Folly Beach. The subtitle would be A One-Woman Show with Images. The story Dorothy Heyward wanted me to tell, or so I thought, was about the deep love she felt for DuBose, which bloomed the first moment she met him and then became all-consuming. Okay, I thought, where to begin? Well, she’s dead, I thought, so we have to bring her back to life so why not start in the cemetery? If anyone had a sense of humor, it was Dorothy Heyward and she would think it was a riot to rise from her grave, dust herself off, and set the record straight on a few things. Wait! Would she? Crap! Well, my lack of conviction was going to be a huge problem so I knew I’d better decide what it was I really thought and go with it. Scene: St. Philips Cemetery, Charleston, South Carolina . . .
I was on my way. The floodgates were officially open.
I wrote and wrote, the story gushing out of me in twists and turns like the white water of the Chattahoochee River. I laughed, loving the fact that I was helping Dorothy tell the world so many things they did not know about her, about DuBose, his mother, George Gershwin, and on and on. I was having the most exhilarating time of my life! I stopped for a moment and thought, people made money like this? Incredible!
I did not hear the knock on the door so when I looked up to see John in the doorway of my room I nearly screamed.
“Oh!” I jumped in surprise.
“Sorry. Oh, gosh, I’m so sorry. I’ve been knocking on the door for five minutes. Then you didn’t answer your cell and I thought, oh please, don’t let anything have happened to you so I just walked in.”
“No! It’s fine. I was just . . .”
“In the zone, Cate. That’s what they call it when you’re writing and you tune out the whole world. Let me see what you’ve got.”
“What? Oh, no! I can’t. It’s just a draft!”
“I read drafts for a living. Remember?”
“Yeah, but