Folly Beach - Dorothea Benton Frank [17]
DuBose and I were comfortably settled at the old weather-beaten table on our side porch, enjoying our morning coffee and reading the newspaper. Jenifer was in school, fully ensconced in a kindergarten on James Island just a few miles away. It was a gorgeous day, crisp and clear, and although it was chilly, the sun warmed us as it danced on the countless ripples of the Atlantic Ocean right across the street. The world was alive and open for business. I brought up the previous night to DuBose in what I hoped was a nonchalant manner.
“DuBose? Did you hear all that crying last night?”
“Crying? No. I didn’t. You know, darling, I sleep like the proverbial stone. It was probably some feral thing—a bobcat or a stray.”
“Well, I don’t think it was an animal. Golly, I was up half the night! Would you like an egg or some toast? Maybe food will wake me up.”
“No, no breakfast for me thanks. Don’t trouble yourself. You’ve always suffered so terribly with insomnia. Maybe we should stop the madness and just ask the doctor to give you something?”
“Maybe. I’ll think about that. But DuBose? This is serious. I’m sure I heard a woman crying all night long, weeping! It was absolutely pitiful. She sounded just like that woman in my short story, ‘The Young Ghost.’ Remember her?”
DuBose folded his section of the newspaper back neatly to scan the obituaries.
“My, my. Look at this, will you? Old August Busch, the beer magnate, is gone to Glory! Looks like it was a suicide, it says here. Now why would someone with all that money do himself in?”
“DuBose! Have you heard a word I’ve said?”
“Yes, yes, of course I have. ‘The Young Ghost’! That’s the one about the accidental death or the suicide—another suicide!—of that young woman, isn’t it?”
“Yes! Remember? Suzo, the very young bride, dies in the bathtub and Bobbel, her husband . . .”
“What kind of quirky names are those, dear? Russian?”
“They had nicknames for each other like we do. Well, like you do.”
“Little Dorothy.”
“Precious.” I was not always so fond of being called little Dorothy. Dorothy wasn’t really my name. “But remember how her husband struggles so hard? He’s tortured really, trying to understand how and why his wife died. Was it an accident or not?”
“Right! And then the cad of the story . . . what was his name?”
“Keene Everett.”
“Yes! Ah, Everett the Scoundrel, Connoisseur of the Wives of Others! As I recall, Everett let it slip that he and Suzo were an item and he implies that our little Suzo kills herself because her husband, Bobbel, the widower with the unfortunate name, said they had to stop riding around the town in his car with each other. Or some such nonsense.”
“Nonsense? That story ran in McCall’s magazine!”
“There, there! I meant no offense. It’s just that . . .”
Too late. I was indeed offended, reminded for the umpteenth time that DuBose considered my writing to run along popular veins and that he was a more literary writer, more serious. After all, 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.