The News and Courier produces the photograph taken of her father when he entered Sing Sing to serve his prison sentence. A staff artist also creates a macabre version of that weeping smiley face that has made a guest appearance in all my nightmares.
Because Sheba Poe was famous, my column goes out over the wire services and is printed in newspapers around the world. On the day it comes out, the switchboard at the paper is overwhelmed by a deluge of phone calls. Readers call with leads, tips, hunches, coincidences, sightings of the father, and every other kind of minutia. We write down the name and phone number of each informant, carefully notated and checked for accuracy. Blossom Limestone at the front desk becomes unsettled by the onslaught of men and women who appear with handwritten notes or typewritten letters to me, describing the effect my column had exerted on them. A cop from the bomb squad has to intercept and check these letters before they can be sent up. After Kitty Mahoney vets them, she brings them into my office by the armload.
Ike rides over to see me when he can’t get through the overburdened switchboard and takes the back stairs to my office. He wears an alarmed, impatient expression as he looks through the mounting stack of letters on my desk.
“We think we got something,” Ike says. “An old lady who lives in the Sergeant Jasper Apartments read your article. She lives on one of the top floors. Can’t sleep. Likes looking over the rooftops of Charleston. Saw a middle-aged man running out of a backyard and getting into a car in the parking lot. Says she thinks it was three in the morning, the night Sheba was killed.”
“She give a description?”
“No. Too dark.”
“The car?”
“She wouldn’t know a Pinto from a Maserati,” he says. “We need a bigger break.”
“We’ll get one.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Ego,” I say. “This guy’s going to get off on the publicity.”
The letter comes in the next day, and Kitty lets out a scream loud enough to bring reporters sprinting from their desks. When she hands me the letter, I read it over twice before I put in a call to Ike. I check my watch and it says Friday, September 8. Time rushes by me without leaving footprints or any signs of its passage, and I am lost in the days. I hear Ike’s voice on the phone.
“Something came in,” I say.
“Whatcha got?”
“A letter. No handwriting. The words are all cutouts from magazines and newspapers. There’s a picture of a toad at the top right of the page.”
“A love letter.”
“It says, ‘One down. The cops are idiots. You’re an idiot. I’ve never been a child molester. My kids love me. Next week hunting toads.’”
“That’s it? Did he sign it?”
“Oh, yeah. His best yet, the most elaborate. He took his time with this one. The smiley face, the single tear.”
“Red ink or fingernail polish?”
“Neither,” I say. “I think this one is drawn in blood.”
And indeed, tests are done that very day to prove that Sheba Poe’s blood had provided the paint for her father’s latest work of art.
On Monday, September 11, the funeral of Sheba Poe is held in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist on Broad Street. Monsignor Max is pale and pained by the loss, but can’t quite resist enjoying his finest hour as a man of the cloth. Resist as he might, he clearly revels in the attention he receives from the national news media. He sponsors a dinner held at the bishop’s quarters for the many Hollywood producers and directors and stars who fly in on a fleet of private jets. The News and Courier presents a roster of headshots listing the celebrities who are swarming into the city to honor the slain actress. Meryl Streep is tearful in her news interview with Bill Sharpe and Debi Chard on Channel 5. Clint Eastwood is manly, Paul Newman shaken, Jane Fonda emotional, Al Pacino testy, and Francis Ford Coppola affectionate.
Living as I do in the backwaters of South Carolina, I had not fully appreciated the corroding effect of the celebrity obsession that has taken hold in America, leading to a maggoty and fly-spotted culture. But I catch my first glimpse of it at Sheba Poe’s funeral when five thousand people surround the cathedral and violently press in for their right of entry. These are Sheba’s fans, not her friends, and they have come from as far away as Seattle and Mexico City to sign the guest registry: the funeral home goes through seven guest books, and her fans stand in line till two the next morning so that they can record their fulsome, sentimental praise of their “favorite actress.” Outside, the cathedral is a mob scene and Ike’s police force has its hands full controlling this combustible crowd. Trevor has chosen the pallbearers—Ike and Betty, Niles and Fraser, Molly and me—and has asked my mother to push his wheelchair and sit with him at the front of the church. Devastated by his sister’s death and the role his lost mother played in it, he is as frail as a wraith. As the pallbearers bear Sheba’s body up the cathedral steps, I fear the crowd will overwhelm us.
“Let us touch the casket,” a girl screams.
“We have a right to see her!” another cries as the crowd surges forward dangerously, nearly blocking the aisle.
“Oh, yeah, that’s a great idea,” I whisper to Molly wearily.
A fire marshal has cut the crowd to a lucky thousand people, but the place is overflowing as we make our way down the center aisle. The six of us are weeping openly by the time we take our seats in the first row. The search for Trevor in San Francisco has transformed our friendship into something deeper and finer than anything I’ve ever let myself feel before. The covenants between us are now unbreakable, writ in stone, and will be part of our self-definition for the rest of our lives. Sheba came back to us and asked us to accompany her on a quest, and all of us responded with an unhesitating answer of yes. But now, because of dark forces set loose on that journey, we are readying ourselves to bury the woman who bid us to travel west with her. During the funeral, all of us fall apart, and hold on to one another like lifelines.
Monsignor Max conducts a solemn and majestic ceremony, hovering over the Mass of death with an actor’s natural attraction for center stage. His voice is spellbinding and I can tell he is well aware that most of the dignitaries of Hollywood are watching. I can almost hear my mother saying, “Max should’ve been the first American Pope,” and I have to admit that there is something royal about his carriage.
The pallbearers have their first surprise when Wormy Ledbetter rises and walks toward the altar, where the monsignor leads him to a huge, embroidered Bible. Wormy reads the epistle in a Southern accent strong enough to have won him a minor part in the movie Deliverance. Trevor told me how Wormy had come undone when he learned the news of Sheba’s death. He moaned that he and his men should have worked all night long to install a security system in her house. Wormy thought they could have saved her life. Trevor assured him that nothing could have saved his sister’s life.
After the epistle, the six pallbearers give Wormy a round of silent applause as he returns to his seat, tears streaming. Chad rises up next and reads from the Gospel according to Luke. In his noble bearing and mellifluous reading, one could understand how breeding and aristocracy have played such a central role in the formation of the city’s gentry. Chad’s voice is silken and polished, and he reads the Gospel as though he’d written it. When he returns to his seat, he nods his head as he too receives a round of silent applause from the pallbearers.
When it comes time to receive Holy Communion, Molly grabs my arm and whispers, “Am I allowed to receive Communion? I’m Anglican.”
I realize that I am the only practicing Roman Catholic among the pallbearers. I look up at Monsignor Max and he motions for all of us to come.
“The monsignor is saying everyone is welcome to the Lord’s feast,” I say. And I lead the pallbearers to the Communion rail, though Ike and Betty are reluctant, as only the best Southern Baptists can be. Letting me lead them through the ceremony, Ike and Betty make their First Communion at Sheba’s funeral. It seems fittin
g to me that my mother, the purist, hits me with one of her most scabrous stares.
Outside the cathedral, the monsignor has enlisted six other priests of the diocese to serve the Eucharist to the boisterous crowd. With their chalices gleaming and loaded to the brim with hundreds of sanctified wafers, they plunge into the crowd. It mollifies and tames the mob as they are tended to by the priests. For the rest of their lives, they will be able to say: “I received Communion when I attended Sheba Poe’s funeral in Charleston.”
Then the wizardry of Monsignor Max flies into high, imaginative gear. After the Eucharist has returned to its tented lockup in the tabernacle, he lifts his head to give a special signal to the projectionist in the choir loft. At the dinner for the Hollywood guests the evening before, Max met and charmed Sheba’s Hollywood agent, Sidney Taub, who had discovered her at eighteen and had proven faithful and honest to Sheba her entire career. I always thought Sidney was half in love with Sheba, but this caused me no concern; so was I. Sidney dug up all the glamour shots, modeling gigs, and movie stills that he could find. He arranged them as a slide show for the evening before, but the monsignor had an inspired idea. He suggested the slides be shown at the end of Sheba’s funeral.
The first slide, of Sheba Poe in the full flower of her radiant youth, takes the crowd’s breath away. How could a woman be more beautiful, I think, as I look at her green glittering eyes and golden hair, her perfect oval face, her full ripe lips, and a figure formed by the love of God for the shapes of women. In the second slide, Sheba is posing for the camera, petulant, sexy, and brand-new to town. And the third, a lost angel in a big city. Soon, with each slide, a gasp of pleasure bursts from the crowd. A muffled cheer goes up when she makes her first cameo appearance with Clint Eastwood. She is fresh-faced, joyous, Madonna-like, vixen, streetwalker—and the funeral crowd falls into a rapture as we witness the slow, inevitable changes as her face matures. We watch in astonishment as she ages from girl to ingenue to young woman, her beauty deepening, her countenance more knowledgeable, more severe. Until finally, there she is in a Los Angeles restaurant dancing with Al Pacino. Again, she is dazzling, lit up from the inside, still possessing that unnameable something. That flawless look that only a cameraman can discover, a face and a body the whole world wants to make love to—to see and watch and adore again, again, and again. When the last slide is played and the camera snaps off, the crowd waits for the pallbearers to move the casket to the hearse.
As we take our positions, Molly says in an aside to the rest of us: “You boys will never know how hard it was to be in the same high school as Sheba Poe.”
Niles replies, straight-faced, “Molly? We know everything about what it was like to be hard in a high school with Sheba Poe.”
It was the sole bit of conversation we were allowed before starting down the aisle, and I know Sheba would have loved it.
A silence descends on the drive through the mob to the burial until Molly, always the nurturer, attempts to break up our grief and silence with small talk. Even though I know what she’s doing, it almost irritates me that she is trying to divert our attention to a report from the evening news.
“Did you know there was a storm in the Caribbean?”
“Haven’t had much time to watch the news,” Ike says, distracted.
“They name it yet?” Niles asks.
“A couple days ago,” Fraser says. “Starts with an H, and it’s a boy’s name. Herbert or Henry? Something like that.”
“Hugo,” Molly tells us. “They named it Hugo.”
Like Sheba, it is a name we will carry with us for the rest of our lives.
CHAPTER 27 Guernica
It is the morning of September 21, 1989. The dogs of Charleston have begun to whimper in collective terror while the cats of the city are languorous and unconcerned. The windows of the great houses wear plywood eyeglasses as folks gird their homes against a storm still four hundred miles away. The air in the city is ominous and strange and illuminated from the outside in. A pretty lady plays the harp in the window of a mansion on East Bay. When she finishes, she rises and curtsies to a gathering of swells that have gathered for a hurricane party. Hugo will crash this party with his terrible dark fist. By tomorrow, the people of South Carolina will know all there is to know about the rules of the storm. The rules are biased and hard.
The great storm Hugo acts of its own lethargic, devastating volition. In an emergency meeting at the News and Courier, the journalists receive a briefing from a grim-faced meteorologist who has tracked the storm for days. He refers to Hugo as “monstrous, lunatic, and unpredictable.” This is the worst news he offers us—and that the combined wisdom of all the weathermen on earth cannot guarantee what path the storm will take. It depends, he says, on the temperature shifts, fronts moving in the storm’s path, the attraction of the Gulf Stream, and a thousand other things that fall outside the precincts of available data. It can still hit Savannah or Wilmington, or it could be swept northward and out to sea.
“Where do you think it will hit? What’s your best guess?” a reporter asks.
“Sir, I think it’s going to hit Charleston,” he replies. “It’s coming right at us.”
Since I live south of Broad, my assignment is to cover any damage to that distinguished but vulnerable part of the city. Molly and Fraser have already packed their kids off with Chad to their summer house in Highlands, North Carolina. But both women have decided to ride out the storm at Fraser and Niles’s house on Water Street, near the bend in Church Street. The parents of both Chad and Fraser have adamantly refused to abandon their city during its hour of greatest need. Neither of their children can talk them out of the decision. According to the parents, these houses had weathered storms from the Atlantic for centuries, and it was pusillanimous at best to ask them to hightail it to the mountains. Fraser has a furious argument with her parents that leaves them both outraged and helpless, and their daughter in tears. It has become a city of frayed nerves and temperamental exchanges.
I am writing a prestorm column when I receive a phone call from my mother, who is in the middle of one her patented dithers. Molly has arrived at her house and is insisting that my mother accompany her back to the house on Water Street. She demands to know that I acknowledge her to be of sound mind and body, fully capable of making decisions on her own accord, and that she is not about to abandon her home and garden to a storm named after an overrated and melodramatic French novelist. Echoing conversations that are taking place all over the city, I remind her that she lives next to a saltwater lake. If Hugo strikes the city, he will come in at night, at dead high tide, with a storm surge as high as twelve feet, and that will put her house, her garden, and herself underwater. As her only son, I order her to accompany Molly, and promise to meet her at Niles’s house later. Advising her softly, I tell her to pack up her most precious possessions and all the food and water she can carry. When she asks if I think she is some beast of burden, I can hear in her voice the early warning signals of a madness that will soon possess the whole city.
All the roads and avenues of escape are clogged up with a manic traffic too eager by half to escape. By early afternoon, the wind is up and the river stutters with whitecaps as they merge in fury. Small craft warnings are posted everywhere, but are completely unnecessary. I drive out to where the surfers have clustered on Folly Beach, riding the greatest waves of the century. While eating the last oysters served at Bowens Island before the owners close shop and head for Columbia, I write down my impression of a routed, battened-down city. The radio and television have reduced our world to a single, malignant name: Hugo. I make my way into a trafficless downtown at four in the afternoon. One thing I can report with certainty—there is no one driving into the city, but a whole army of folks is fleeing it. I cannot imagine a more apocalyptic scenario.
Driving down an emptied-out East Bay Street, I notice that the birds have stopped singing and the seagulls have taken cover; that the koi in my garden pond have sunk to the botto
m, their gold-flecked backs hunkered down as the air begins to gust and sweat at the same time. I park my car in Mr. Canon’s old garage in the alley behind Tradd Street; I give neither the car nor the garage much chance of survival if the storm hits. Inside my house, I drift from room to room trying to select items that elicit notes of ecstasy or nostalgia, but I discover I love the whole house and everything contained within its comforting walls. This house has represented something precious to me, a solid reminder that life could hurl good luck at you as easily as it could devastation or ruin. I have no rights or claims on this house, yet it has reached out to possess me; it has turned itself into a bright, lush hermitage of spirit. I cannot bear the thought of it being hurt or damaged. I place duct tape over all of its beautiful windows. I lock its sweet doors, and in her time of greatest peril, I abandon her, that love of my life, and walk over to the Whitehead house. I say a prayer for my house and ask the ghost of Harrington Canon to inhabit it in my absence.
“I have no children,” I whisper to myself as I walk down Church Street, whose palmetto trees are rattling and whose oaks shake with the ancient grief of storm. “My life is half-gone. How did I get here, at this moment?”
The light is unearthly, surreal, almost an antilight; the city gives off a scent of resignation from its stones. About a quarter of my neighbors are riding out the hurricane in their homes, and there is a party atmosphere emanating from many of the houses I pass. The music of Vivaldi rides the growing winds out of one house; Emmylou Harris sings about the “Queen of the Silver Dollar” from another. Television sets blaze in the sonic lights of dens, where Hugo is the only subject under discussion. I have never before seen Charleston hunkered down or fearful, not once in my life. The city must have felt something like this during the Civil War when the Union navy was bombarding it relentlessly. I can feel the approach of the storm in every cell in my body, as though my body has transformed itself into some dark gauge of the planet’s mischief.