Plantation Read Free

her
    Gibbs Art Museum, the Nature
    staircase wearing “The Pearls.”
    Conservancy, or the Betty Ford
    Center.

    Prologue
    Don’t Leave Me Now!
    }
    2000
    HIS story I have to tell you has to be true because even I couldn’t make up this whopper. And Mother’s T wake—packed to the rafters with the well-dressed curious and the well-heeled sorrowful—may seem an insensitive place to begin, but here we are and it’s all I can think about—that is, the progression of events that led up to this moment. I’m obsessing and entitled to it too. So would you.
    Think about this. You know those pivotal moments in your life that you don’t see coming? The ones you wished arrived with a timer going off so you’d know this is it! Well, when the phone rang in February, you couldn’t have convinced me that six months later, Mother would be in “the box” and I’d be wearing her pearls, twisting them around my finger exactly like she used to do.
    Oh, God, here comes Raoul. Excuse me for a moment.
    “Mees Caroline, I want to express my deep sympathy to you in thees torrible time of you troubles.”

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    D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k He took my hands in his. His hands were callused but manicured.
    “Thank you, Raoul, thank you for coming,” I said, thinking that he was actually rather handsome. He exuded something, I don’t know, some masculine whatever.
    “She was very beautiful, your mother, and I will hold her een my heart forever.”
    “Thank you,” I said, “I know she was very fond of you.”
    “Sí,” he said, a smile spreading across his face, “ees true.”
    He released my hands and walked away, back into the crowd.
    Mother slept with him? Well, why not?
    Where were we? Ah! Pivotal moment! Pivotal moment, indeed. You see, Trip—he’s my only brother—called me in New York, in the middle of a cocktail party my husband, Richard, and I were giving, to announce that Mother had flipped her wig and tried to kill him with her daddy’s Parker Old Reliable. (That’s a shotgun.) He said she was crazy and that he had her power of attorney and was putting her away somewhere where she couldn’t hurt anyone.
    I knew that was some bodacious bull because my brother was generally accepted as the Second Coming, that is, if Mother’s lifelong drooling all over him was an indication of her religious devotion. I guess that sounds like a classic sibling rivalry remark, but you have to know certain things and then you would agree.
    First, Trip was the spitting image of Daddy and Daddy was dead—dead and canonized by Mother decades ago. Mother, bereft with her loss, then did a textbook transference of her enormous love for Daddy and heaped it on Trip. Yes, my husband, Richard, is a psychologist and a psychiatrist. We, Richard and I, are . . . well, we’ll get to that.
    Second, Trip, dweeb that he is, returned her blind-eyed affection with boundless ingratitude. My brother has always been the archetypal rationalization of why I had declined the possibilities of marriage with southern men. It was their relationships with their P l a n t a t i o n
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    mothers that always did me in. That, and the archaic sexism. But of course, with the birth of my own son, I quickly realized, and then denied, that I was wrong about that too.
    Poor Trip! Mother would say over and over, sighing with the weight of all the problems of the world.
    Well, I didn’t completely disagree there. Trip was carrying a cross the size of the Brooklyn Bridge with that tacky, low-rent wife of his. Frances Mae and her horrible children! Dear God! What a disaster she was! Gives new definition to the old ball and chain!
    We’ll dissect Frances Mae later, don’t you worry about that for a minute.
    So, back to Mother and Trip and their Freudian Oedipus thaing .
    I wonder how much Mother would have seen of Trip if our plantation didn’t have a dock and a landing so Trip could spend half his life on the Edisto River.
    Trip was your basic southern good old boy.