A window shatters in a second-story piazza, and I look up to see a middle-aged man, his faced tied with a bandanna, breaking into an abandoned mansion. He may be the first looter sighted in the city, but he will not be the last. I flag down a police car and give the cops the necessary information, but the two policemen offer no proof that my fingering a burglary in progress is of any particular interest to them. Their radio cackles with directives streaming from headquarters. I hear an ambulance crossing the city in fingerpaintings of sound. For a brief instant, I wonder where Starla is, and I pray she is far away. Then I shut her out of my mind completely, the one thing I have learned to do best.
I turn the latch to the gate on Water Street, then open the door to a maelstrom, in whose creation I had played a part. The wind slams it shut behind me. I enter a formal parlor where the inhabitants of my own endangered ark cluster around a television. The satellite images of Hugo are breathtaking. It looks bigger than the entire state of South Carolina.
“It will never hit Charleston,” Worth Rutledge announces to the room at large. I had forgotten that quality of know-it-all certainty in his cultivated voice. “It’ll turn north when it hits the Gulf Stream.”
Worth recently broke his hip while playing golf at the Charleston Country Club, and is still clumsy with his wheelchair. His irascibility is innate, but the accident has made it worse. Instinctively, I have always kept away from Chadworth Rutledge the ninth, and I do not look forward to spending what could turn out to be a memorable night in close quarters with the blue-blooded jerk. In the kitchen, Molly is busy preparing supper while Fraser passes around appetizers to the worried listeners as the Channel 5 news team keeps issuing disconcerting updates. Several wind-blown reporters, with their carefully coiffed locks a-flying, shout information about the wind velocity with a nation of whitecaps boiling behind them. It is 7 P.M., and our eyes are turned toward the terrible eye of Hugo as it moves its malignant powers and its prodigious vortex toward Charleston at its own dark leisure.
“Mark my words,” Worth repeats. “The Gulf Stream will turn it.”
“Darling,” his wife says, “could you please hush your mouth? Only God knows if this storm’s going to hit us or not.”
“Don’t be afraid, Mama,” Fraser says, leading her mother to a chair and settling her, as she is trembling with terror.
“I always thought I’d die in one of these,” Hess Rutledge says.
“Nonsense. Only sharecroppers in shacks and poor whites in trailers ever die in hurricanes. More people have been killed hunting deer in this state than have been killed by hurricanes.” Worth holds his glass up for a refill, and I walk over to take it from him.
“What’s your pleasure?” I ask.
“My pleasure is that my daughter make my drink and not you, Leo. I didn’t realize the village gossip had arrived.”
“I’ll get it, Leo,” Fraser says, hurrying to the elaborate wet bar in the corner of the room.
Molly peeks her head out of the kitchen, and calls, “Worth, behave yourself. Fraser and I already talked to you about being nice.”
“I should have stayed home,” he grouses. “My house is built like a castle, of heart pine. It is hard as granite. It would survive a nuclear attack.”
“It’s beside the harbor,” I say. “The surge could cause waves higher than your house.”
“The Rutledge-Bennet mansion has survived two hundred years without listening to the advice of a Roman Catholic,” Worth replies, bringing my mother into the fray, a woman well able to defend herself.
“Worth,” she tells him with great frosty languor, “I know that Christ died on the cross to save the souls of all men, but I can’t believe he’d do it to save a bastard like you.”
“Lindsay,” Hess Rutledge murmurs in a tone of wounded dignity. “That was unnecessary. Worth lashes out when he’s worried or scared.”
“Scared?” he scoffs. “Of what? A little rain? I tell you, the damn hurricane will turn. How many times do I have to say it?”
“Tell Leo that you’re sorry,” Fraser insists.
“Sorry, Papist,” he says, but laughs when he says it, and I know he is trying to make a joke to save face. The gesture is insincere, but I accept it in the spirit of a night’s distorted reality.
Niles joins us after finishing the job of X-ing all the windows with duct tape. Then Fraser says, “Trevor, will you play the piano? The most beautiful music you know. Nerves are on edge here.”
“Is AIDS an airborne disease?” Worth asks his wife, not bothering to lower his voice.
While Trevor plays, Molly serves us plates of oxtail soup, pork and steamed asparagus, boiled potatoes, and salads. We form a line and pass things hand over hand until everything is on the table. As we sit down to dinner, Fraser asks me to say grace, and we all take one another’s hands around the mahogany dining room table that had once belonged to Mrs. Rutledge’s great-grandmother. Trevor halts his rendition of Mozart in the middle of a piano concerto, but isn’t ready to join us at the table. Four candelabra ignite the charged air with pearly, comforting light as I pray.
“O God of wind, O God of storm, we place ourselves in your hands on this night of mystery. This night of fear. There is a reason you brought this group of people together, and that is a mystery we will understand at daybreak. We ask that you be kind to this city, and this home, and these people. Because of our worship of you, we understand the calamities that can befall the world, the nature of whirlwinds, the power of words, and the glory of the Last Supper. We trust in your mercy, and tonight we hope you will justify that trust. I am sorry Worth Rutledge doesn’t like Roman Catholics, and I trust you will torture him in everlasting hellfire for that grievous sin. Amen.”
“Amen,” the others say, and even Worth utters a stiff laugh.
“I hate showy, overelaborate prayers,” my mother comments pointedly as she picks up her spoon.
“We need one tonight, Dr. King,” Molly says as she prepares a plate for her father-in-law. “Leo, roll Trevor to the table.”
“I’m not hungry, dear heart,” Trevor tells her. “Just let me waste away over here while I tickle the ivories and trip the light fantastic.”
“The music comforts me,” Mrs. Rutledge tells him, with a wan smile. “I feel like Noah’s wife. Before the flood.”
“It’s a hurricane,” her husband says. “Rain and wind. It’s not a flood.” “How are the children?” I ask Molly.
“Safe in Highlands. Chad says every inn is packed, as is everything else there. If things get bad, we may have to go to your place, darling,” she tells Niles. And to the rest of us, “Ike’s parents are already there; so are the kids.”
“If I went north, I’d stay at Grove Park Inn,” Worth says, concentrating on his meal. “A plush luxury hotel in Asheville. Know what I call camping now? A Ritz-Carlton.”
My mother clears her throat and throws her napkin to the table. “I cannot spend a hurricane with this vulgar man.”
“Be quiet, Mother,” I command.
“We’ll always have Paris, Dr. King,” Trevor says, and begins to play “As Time Goes By” from Casablanca. He knows my mother reveres it.
He finishes with a flourish, and in the moment of silence, Molly murmurs, “My God, listen to that wind!”
“We should have stayed home,” Worth Rutledge repeats. “If we die here, we won’t even be dying in an important house.”
“Shut up, Worth,” his wife answers, standing up suddenly and heading for the guest room in the back of the house. She is followed quickly by Fraser, who spends ten minutes calming her down.
When Trevor finally tires at the piano, I carry him to the couch and tell him I won’t rest till he drinks a milk shake, at least, before he falls asleep. The one great illogical result of AIDS is that Trevor keeps losing weight, no matter how many calories I manage to stuff down his gullet. He constantly accuses me of overloading him, like a French farmwife in the Dordogne force-feeding a goose. I try a hundred sneaky
ways to get him to eat the most fattening foods I can conjure from a lifetime of cooking, but the food is not nourishing him.
I bring the milk shake to Trevor, then stand over my mother, who can’t break away from the television, with its lifeline of information and advice. Hugo now looks like a gunsight with its crosshairs trained on our city. I pull on a rain slicker to go outside and take a look, and tell my protesting mother, “I’m covering the hurricane for the paper, and South of Broad is my beat. I’ve got to see what the water looks like,” I insist.
“I’ll come with you,” Molly says.
“You most certainly will not,” Fraser tells her. “Think about your children.”
“Okay,” she says as she pulls on her slicker, “I thought about them. Let’s go, Toad. Before it blows any harder.”
It takes our combined strength to force the front door of the beleaguered house open, then it slams shut with a fierce bang when the wind gains control of it. Debi Chard just reported wind gusts up to eighty miles per hour as Molly and I make our wind-blinded sprint to the Battery wall. A strange emerald light unnerves us both as we hold hands and struggle to stay upright while we run toward the hurricane. Climbing the steps leading to the seawall, we both grip the steel bars where tourists usually look out toward Fort Sumter and admire the mansions of East Bay. The rain stings my eyes and a sudden wave, crashing over the seawall, comes close to washing us into the street behind us.
“I get the idea,” Molly shouts over the wind. We straighten ourselves up and watch Charleston Harbor turn insane and deadly. The water frightens me. I thought I had seen it in every shade of green and brown and gray. But now I watch the Cooper River leap out of the channel in a pure, undone white.
Hand in hand, we make our way back to the house with the wind behind us, making us feel like world-class sprinters. We are laughing hysterically as we are met by Niles at the front gate. “Go to the back door, kids,” he shouts. “Front won’t open. Went out to lock the shed and a crepe myrtle flew by my head—scared the shit out of me.”
“You risked your life for a tool shed?” Molly says, the idea tickling her.
“Name a more embarrassing death,” I shout as we round the corner of the house.
“There is none,” Molly says.
Our laughter continues as we go inside, shaking off the rain and describing the harbor. It is extinguished in an instant when an explosion erupts nearby, somewhere on the street. The flame of a burning transformer flares the sky briefly, and the house is plunged into total darkness.
We make our way inside by feel, to the living room, where Trevor calls, “It’s as dark as God’s pocket in here.”
“Storm lanterns?” Molly asks Fraser, who is feeling on the sideboard for matches.
“Light the candelabra,” she tells her, “and get out the flashlights.”
She speaks in a slightly raised voice, as Hugo has begun roaring into the city with its demonic winds, snapping pine trees as though they are chopsticks, sending them hurling through the illuminated darkness, crashing through windows. A water oak is blown over next door and more electric transformers explode like bombs up and down the street. Niles and I peel back a corner of a storm shutter to stare out of a small corner of a window on the leeward side of the house, amazed by the shine of the turquoise-green light that allows us to watch cars and yachts fly by, airborne and seemingly weightless. A dachshund flies by the window, screaming. More transformers blow in the next block and wires come down, coiled like spaghetti. A stop sign razors into the trunk of a palmetto. Giant gusts of wind almost lift the house from its foundation, but the old house holds firm, like a barnacle against a rock.
When Molly finds us by the window, she screams, “Are you nuts? If the magnolia falls, it’ll take off your heads.”
“Good point,” I say. Niles and I retreat to the living room. Our ears begin popping and our mouths are dry as the air pressure plummets. Soon we are gasping for breath as we pass around iced-down bottles of water and beer.
“The house is holding,” Niles offers in a cautious optimism that my mother quickly squashes.
“Beware of unwarranted optimism,” my mother warns.
“Goddammit, Lindsay,” Worth snaps. “You always talk like an English teacher.”
“Not true, Worth,” she answers acidly. “Sometimes I’m seized by idiocy. Then I talk like a Broad Street lawyer.”
Worth can’t answer, as the extraordinary noise of the hurricane is rising, the house shaking so hard the light from the candelabra shakes. “We shouldn’t have stayed!” Molly calls over the roar. “The house is giving.”
“This house is two hundred years old!” Worth shouts back. “Our ancestors built these houses to last. They’ll withstand any disaster.”
“Your ancestors didn’t build anything,” Mother says. “Their slaves did.”
Worth is readying himself for a rejoinder when Mother’s voice rises another notch. “Water,” she cries. “My God, Leo—it’s the surge.”
As we’d sat there, water had begun to leak into the house from every doorway and window. At first it was slow-moving and methodical. Then the wind ripped the plywood off the windows and glass began popping all over the first floor as the pressure of a high tide and a thirteen-foot surge of ocean water leaned against the house with the full force of its unbearable weight. I was ankle-deep in water before I moved a single muscle.
“Can rain do this?” Fraser shouts, her face incredulous.
“It’s the ocean paying us a visit,” Niles shouts back in reply. “I always wondered why they called this Water Street. Let’s move it!”
I get my mother to her feet and direct her toward the stairs, while Fraser picks up all eighty pounds of Trevor and meets me at the bottom of the stairs, where the water is swiftly rising. I shout at her, “Can the best basketball player in the history of Ashley Hall get my friend up these stairs?”
“You’re goddamn right I can,” she shouts back. “Can you get my parents up?”
“You’re goddamn right I can. Niles? You got Mrs. Rutledge?”
“Coming out with her,” Niles calls, all darkness and hallucination as he passes with her in his arms. I fight my way through the water to get to Worth Rutledge in his wheelchair.
“Where are you, Mr. Rutledge?” I shout at the room.
“Here, Leo,” he answers in a quavering, hopeless voice.
When I reach him, groping through the rising, turbulent water, I find him up to his neck in seawater and completely unhinged. He grabs me, and in his desperation, pulls my head under the black, unquelled surge. I lift both of us into the air and shout in his ear, “Worth! I’m going to float us over to the stairs. Don’t fight me! We’ve got to keep our heads above the water.”
I hear Niles splash into the water behind me, then two lines of light from two flashlights catch our heads as I struggle to keep both my head and Worth’s in the air. I realize that there are actual waves, wind- and tide-driven, rolling through the antique-strewn drawing room. Niles reaches me, and it is his strength, not mine, that gets us to the stairway. Worth screams in agony as we lift him into the stairway, his broken hip almost broken a second time—and get him to the landing. There, we put his arms on both of our shoulders, and carry him up to his grandson’s bedroom. He is delirious with pain, groaning loudly when Mrs. Rutledge comes into the room, her unpinned hair streaming down her face. By flashlight, she searches through her soggy handbag and finds a vial of pain medicine.
“Mrs. Rutledge,” I say in admiration, “in all this mess, you remembered to save your handbag?”
“A lady never goes anywhere without her lipstick,” she raises her voice to answer. She taps out a few pills and tells her husband, “Eat them, Worth. There’s no water.” He promptly obeys.
The second story appears to be holding, and we towel off and clean up as best as we can. Niles and I sit on top of the stairs with flashlights and candelabra and monitor the rising water in case we have to make an emergency evacuati
on to the attic. A depletion of body and soul overwhelms me as Niles and I sit there in astonishment, watching the water rising stair by stair. Around three, we notice that the water has stopped its radical ascent. It stands still for half an hour, two stairs away from the second story. Then visibly, it begins to recede.
Outside, the winds have slowed, as Hugo begins to muscle his way out of town. The candles are nearly extinguished in the candelabra when Niles says, “It’s over.”
He surprises me by reaching over and grabbing my hand. In the eerie darkness and beauty of returning water, he simply takes my hand. I think it is just something he needs to do. As we sit there watching the water recede, I think about Niles in the orphanage on the day I met him, and guess he had wanted someone, anyone, to hold his hand during the long, dreadful forced march of his childhood. It was the least I could do, as he had long ago taught me a lesson about the great inner strength sometimes granted to the most wounded of men. And how those men can sometimes grow up to be heroes.
We fall asleep on the top of that stairway, and when I wake just after dawn, it is to a stillness that is more than still, a calmness that is more than calm. I go to a window and look over the stricken city: roofs have been blown completely off, piazzas felled, trees decapitated and uprooted. My city looks firebombed and unsalvageable, as if Hugo had taken it with a perverse sense of artistry, and turned Charleston into Guernica.
Niles wakes not long after me, and we descend the mud-blackened stairs. The ruin of the first floor is complete and unimaginable. Every piece of furniture, every antique, every Oriental rug, two chandeliers, portraits of the Rutledge ancestors, every Spode plate—all of it violated, or gone. A foot of mud covers everything. The food that was in the refrigerator and freezer is scattered, hidden by the ubiquitous mud, already beginning to rot. For the next few days, the city will reek like a cesspool.
I make my way to the window where Niles and I had watched the storm. It is now open, the double panes shattered. A 1968 yellow Volkswagen convertible sits in the middle of Niles’s front yard, crumpled like a tuna fish can. Beside it lies the bloated corpse of a golden Labrador retriever. Fish are everywhere. The smells of sewage pervade the unrecognizable, un-Charleston city.