Folly Beach - Dorothea Benton Frank [69]
“Aunt Daisy! Good grief!”
“I’m just telling you, my dear, don’t squander your flowers!”
“What?”
“Oh, stop it Daisy! Let Cate have her fun! See what I mean? O. L. D.”
“What’s squander your flowers supposed to mean?”
“It’s a line from ‘Dusk,’ a poem DuBose Heyward wrote. Read it and see for yourself. Only decent poem he wrote if you ask me. Anyway, you should memorize it if you want to impress Mr. Risley.”
“I’m not worried about impressing Mr. Risley, Aunt Daisy.” I already took care of that, I hoped but did not say. Nonetheless, I wrote the name of the poem on the back of a receipt I found in the black hole of my purse and hoped I’d be able to find it again.
“Well, good. I’m just saying . . .”
“I think I know what you’re saying. But anyway, by coincidence, we had an amazing discussion about Dorothy and DuBose Heyward at dinner last night, so amazing that I’m taking myself downtown to read the Heyward papers at the Historical Society.”
“And then what?” Aunt Daisy said. “You gonna write a book about them?”
“That’s highly doubtful. But I have this nagging question that keeps running around in my head and if I don’t find out the answer it might drive me crazy.”
I told them what John had told me about the huge disparities in Dorothy and DuBose’s educational backgrounds and that I didn’t quite believe that Dorothy didn’t do more than just help with DuBose’s writing. They looked at each other slack-jawed and stunned.
“My stars!” Ella said. “I’ve worked in a library all my life. I’ve read everything there is in print about them. I never thought to wonder about that. If you’re right, Cate . . .”
“It just would be amazing to know, wouldn’t it?” I said. “I’m not sure if it’s true, but maybe I can find out. Anyway, I’m going digging. It will give me something to talk about with John.”
“Women have to do everything,” Aunt Daisy said. “It wouldn’t surprise me one little bit!”
“Me either, but then the larger question is why? Why would she do the lion’s share of the work and let him take all the credit?”
“Who knows?” Aunt Daisy said.
During the drive downtown I kept thinking about the Heywards. From what I understood so far from John, DuBose, his sister, and his mother’s inherited social standing had been almost completely truncated by their financial deprivation. Basically, like they say down here in the Lowcountry, they were po’. It would have been very important for his family’s pride to try to reclaim their position within Charleston’s circle of old families. So then, if that was true, how would Dorothy, a Yankee from Ohio, fit into that plan? And was there a plan? And if there was one, was it openly discussed and was Dorothy aware? Probably not, I decided, because if I had learned anything in all my years growing up in Charleston, even though I was out on Folly Beach, it was that it was poor manners to speak of your losses and certainly money was rarely if ever discussed. I could see the Heywards stiff-upper-lipping it until such time the society hounds caught the scent of improved circumstances to a degree that would welcome them back into the downy bosom of the circuit. That was the scenario that made the most sense to me. Well, I would see what I would find.
I located the South Carolina Historical Society’s imposing but compact building with ease. It was right across the street from the Mills House Hotel on the corner of Meeting and Chalmers Street. I parked in the hotel’s parking garage and made my way there, enchanted in the moment by the ancient cobblestones that paved Chalmers Street. How lovely! Cobblestoned streets made me sentimental. Once all the streets of Charleston were probably paved with the ballast of old ships, or oyster shells or just packed dirt. But cobblestones, pretty as they were, were the devil to deal with. They had to have wreaked havoc on the ankles of humans and beasts. I was pretty certain they still sent more than one high-heeled tourist, out for an innocent night on the town, right to her