Folly Beach Read online

  Folly Beach

  Dorothea Benton Frank

  Dedication

  In memory of Dorothy Kuhns Heyward

  Epigraph

  DUSK

  From Carolina Chansons

  They tell me she is beautiful, my City,

  That she is colorful and quaint, alone

  Among the cities. But I, I who have known

  Her tenderness, her courage, and her pity,

  Have felt her forces mould me, mind and bone,

  Life after life, up from her first beginning.

  How can I think of her in wood and stone!

  To others she has given of her beauty,

  Her gardens, and her dim, old, faded ways,

  Her laughter, and her happy, drifting hours,

  Glad, spendthrift April, squandering her flowers,

  The sharp, still wonder of her Autumn days;

  Her chimes that shimmer from St. Michael’s steeple

  Across the deep maturity of June,

  Like sunlight slanting over open water

  Under a high, blue, listless afternoon.

  But when the dusk is deep upon the harbor,

  She finds me where her rivers meet and speak,

  And while the constellations ride the silence

  High overhead, her cheek is on my cheek.

  I know her in the thrill behind the dark

  When sleep brims all her silent thoroughfares.

  She is the glamor in the quiet park

  That kindles simple things like grass and trees.

  Wistful and wanton as her sea-born airs,

  Bringer of dim, rich, age-old memories.

  Out on the gloom-deep water, when the nights

  Are choked with fog, and perilous, and blind,

  She is the faith that tends the calling lights.

  Hers is the stifled voice of harbor bells

  Muffled and broken by the mist and wind.

  Hers are the eyes through which I look on life

  And find it brave and splendid. And the stir

  Of hidden music shaping all my songs,

  And these my songs, my all, belong to her.

  DUBOSE HEYWARD

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  One • Act I / Scene 1

  Two • Cate / At the Cemetery

  Three • Act I / Scene 2

  Four • Cate / Needs a Plan

  Five • Act I / Scene 3

  Six • Cate / Packing

  Seven • Act I / Scene 4

  Eight • Cate / Road Trip

  Nine • Act I / Scene 5

  Ten • Cate / The Porgy House

  Eleven • Act II / Scene 1

  Twelve • Cate / The Piano

  Thirteen • Act II / Scene 2

  Fourteen • Cate / About Dorothy

  Fifteen • Act II / Scene 3

  Sixteen • Cate / Grandma

  Seventeen • Act II / Scene 4

  Eighteen • Cate / The Moon

  Nineteen • Act II / Scene 5

  Twenty • Cate / The Piano

  Twenty-one • Act III / Scene 1

  Twenty-two • Cate / The Hospital

  Twenty-three • Act III / Scene 2

  Twenty-four • Cate / The Sisters

  Twenty-five • Act III / Scene 3

  Twenty-six • Cate / Aunt Daisy

  Twenty-seven • Act III / Scene 4

  Twenty-eight • Cate / In Control

  Twenty-nine • Act III / Scene 5

  Thirty • Cate / The Playwright

  Epilogue • September 2010

  Author's Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Dorothea Benton Frank

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  Folly Beach

  A One-Woman Show with Images

  By Cathryn Mahon Cooper

  Setting: St. Philip’s Cemetery in Charleston, South Carolina. Dorothy Kuhns Heyward rises from her grave and dusts herself off. She kisses her fingertips and touches the tombstone of DuBose Heyward, which is next to hers. She walks to center stage near the footlights and speaks.

  Director’s Note: Images to run on back wall scrim: photo of Folly Beach, the beach itself including the Morris Island Lighthouse, photo of Murray Boulevard with an enormous full moon, map of Ohio and Dorothy in evening dress, and DuBose in smoking jacket. Dorothy has a serious side but she’s also very funny.

  Act I

  Scene 1

  Dorothy: I married an actual renaissance man. Yes, I really did! The story I have to tell you is about the deep and abiding love we shared. Not the carnal details, please, but some of its other aspects such as the sacrifices we were willing to make and the lengths to which we would go for each other. DuBose Heyward was the real and only true love of my life.

  It was the summer of 1921 and when we met for the first time, we were both guests at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. Mrs. MacDowell was a wonderful woman who had a very large estate but a very small family. But she loved the arts! So every summer she invited certain writers and artists of every genre and we packed our gear and took ourselves there to work. The minute I laid eyes on DuBose Heyward I knew he was going to be mine. We sized each other up and, without so much as a nod, we knew our feelings were mutual. When the summer had ended, he returned to Charleston and I returned to New York. We wrote to each other each week and sometimes more often and saw each other when we could. Finally, after our third summer together at MacDowell we were married on September 23, 1923, at the Little Church Around the Corner in New York City.

  DuBose returned to Charleston without me because my play Nancy Ann was about to open in New York. That set the Lowcountry jungle drums thumping like mad! Where was his wife? And who was she anyway? From Ohio? She writes plays? A lady in the theater? Well, I had to do the work I was being paid to do! But I knew enough about Charleston to know I’d better watch my step, so early on I adopted the zippered lip posture and took my lead from DuBose. It was his reputation we had to protect and he was so much smarter about those things than I was.

  Oh! There is so much I want you to know. This was a crazy time in the world. The economy was going down and hemlines were going up. Women were bobbing their hair, throwing away their corsets, and kicking up their heels, doing the Charleston, especially in Charleston! And in the arts? In Charleston? Well, DuBose and his friends decided that big nasty misunderstanding with the Yankees was behind them and they had to look to the future. I mean, please! Charleston was spared a visit from Sherman but sentiments still ran so strong sixty years after the war ended? Honey, the way people whined and carried on, you’d think old Sherman barged into every lady’s house on the Peninsula, broke all her china, stole her daughters, and punched her husband in the nose! Just ridiculous. I mean, people moaned and moaned about how much better things were before . . . wait, do you know the story about Oscar Wilde? No? Well then, listen to this. Oscar Wilde came to Charleston sometime around 1885, the exact year is a little fuzzy to me, but anyway, there’s Oscar standing on the High Battery with a Charleston gentleman admiring the full moon. Oscar says, My word, would you look at that extraordinary moon! The Charleston gentleman says, Ah, you should have seen it before the war! So now you see, Charleston was reluctant to embrace the future if it meant deemphasizing the past one tiny iota. DuBose and his cohorts wanted to hold on to all the glories of the past but have their work reflect their observances of their present day and their hopes for the future.

  God, I loved that man. We’re not talking about moonlight and magnolias here. This is about the magic of a spectac
ular marriage and how it fueled our creative life and shaped our worldview.

  There have been so many stories about DuBose and me and all of them are wrong. Not diabolically wrong, but just skewed at an off angle, enough to make our lives seem like something other than what they were. In public we were both extremely quiet, especially DuBose. In private we laughed about everything and argued loudly over every issue of the day. Well, maybe I was the one who provided the volume. The point is, very few people really knew us.

  Maybe my words will be kind of a memoir of the Charleston Renaissance. I don’t know. But someone has to paint the mood of the time and set the record straight. I guess that will have to be me, the spitfire from Ohio who was never afraid of the truth. Or passion. Not that DuBose was afraid of passion or of the truth. He was never a coward. It’s just that his heart pumped the holy blood of old Charleston. Let me tell you this, old Charlestonians would just as soon be caught in their birthday suit walking down Murray Boulevard as reveal their hearts to outsiders. But in Canton, Ohio, we ladies were perhaps more inclined to gently speak our minds.

  DuBose and I may not ever have earned a lot of money at one time, but ah well, such is a writer’s lot in life. After he published Porgy with Doubleday in 1925, we had a few more cookies in our cookie jar and were able to acquire a little house in the wilds on Folly. We adored the island and every peculiarity about it. Yes, we did. In fact, the happiest days of my life all happened on Folly Beach. We were young then, our heads spinning with creativity, and we thought we had plenty, because we were rich in so many other ways. Who needed a telephone anyway?

  And we had daily rituals that brought order and all the dignity of a Park Avenue parlor to our lives. For example, to celebrate civility, my darling DuBose and I enjoyed our own private happy hour every afternoon around dusk. Right before the sun turned deep red and began its slow descent into the horizon, we dressed for dinner. We both loved Hollywood glamour and sometimes referred to Folly Island as Follywood for the fun of it. And why not have a little glamour in our lives? No, I didn’t put on a long satin frock and call for Jeeves to make highballs. Oh, no. Our life was substantially more modest! I simply reapplied my makeup and cologne, put on a fresh dress, and brushed my hair. DuBose slipped on his velvet smoking jacket and carefully slicked his hair back, so that in the rose-hued early evening he resembled a very dapper Fred Astaire, but younger and with more hair. And he always smelled like something delicious.

  Fade to Darkness

  Chapter Two

  At the Cemetery

  Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . .

  The minister’s voice was a booming gothic drone. Pastor Edwin Anderson, our pastor with the movie-star looks, suffered from the unfortunate delusion that he was Richard Burton. He really did. Today of all days, it seemed he was brushing up to deliver the soliloquy from Hamlet. It was ridiculous. On any other occasion I would have been chewing on the insides of my cheeks until I tasted blood. I didn’t dare look at my sister Patti or I’d surely blow my composure. What was the matter with that portion of my brain? Gallows humor? Wait! Did I really say gallows humor? Honey, that is the last term in the world I should use and that’s for sure. But there it was. Some small twisted secret pocket of my mind, with no permission from me, plucked out the most insensitive detail of this somber and terrible event, made a joke of it, which would surely and extremely inappropriately reduce me to a snickering idiot if I didn’t pay attention to myself. I cleared my throat, hoping it would send a signal to Pastor Anderson to bring it down a notch. He shot me a look and continued channeling Burton. God, he was unbelievably good-looking. Another inappropriate thought. It was true; I was verging on hysteria but who wouldn’t?

  The miserable weather just added icing to the unholy dramatic cake of a day. One minute, the skies above New Jersey were dumping snow and in the next, sleet fell like tiny ice picks. I was amazed that the governor had not closed the turnpike and the Garden State Parkway. Everything was a sheet of ice, the temperature around twenty. It was only by God’s holy grace that we had all made it to the cemetery without flying off the highway and into a ditch. I was pretty sure the ditches were filled with mangled bodies.

  There were probably only twenty of us huddled under the tent at the gravesite, standing, because the seats of the folding chairs were soaking-wet. We all attributed the sparse turnout to Mother Nature, but to tell you the truth I was in such a fog I barely knew what was going on around me. I could not have cared much less who showed up and who didn’t. Over the last eighteen months, my life had become so isolated and my circle of friends had narrowed to almost no one. And now this.

  We had skipped the traditional wake, deciding on a simple graveside service with the most accommodating pastor from our church. I didn’t feel like talking to a lot of people, especially given the circumstances, and Addison was not particularly devout.

  “Are you all right, Cate?”

  Patti spoke in her normal tone for the hearing-impaired right over the minister, the sleet, the rain, and the wind. Considerations like when to say what and how loud did not occur to Patti. At all or ever. Sometimes that could be humorous, but other times it was unnerving. I was definitely startled by the pitch of her voice. Was I all right? Was I? No. I wasn’t all right and we both knew it. Sisters can read each other’s minds. I just looked at her. Answer this, Patti, I asked her telepathically, how could I possibly be all right? We were gathered in the most inclement conditions February in New Jersey could offer to bury Addison, my husband of way too many years.

  “I’m okay,” I lied, pushing aside my stupor and trying to gather my thoughts. I stepped forward and put my gloved hand on Addison’s polished casket.

  In the last two days, I had relived our entire twenty-six-year marriage, looking for clues for how Addison’s zeal for life had deteriorated and how all the love we had shared over the years had completely and totally become unraveled. In the early days, we were insane over each other. I had never met a man like Addison. There I was, playing Cassie in a revival of A Chorus Line, when I caught his grin in the footlights. Sure, he was much older (twelve years) than I was, but he swept me right off my feet and then the stage forever, which, oddly enough, I never missed.

  I was crazy about him. All I wanted to do was make him happy, and even now I believe that for a long time he had felt the same way. Our eyes were filled with each other and everything we did together seemed so perfect. A simple meal was a royal feast because we shared it. A country club waltz in a crowded room belonged only to us. He was ambitious, funny, charming, and so, so smart. The almost manic exuberance we felt was clear in every single photograph of us, and there were dozens of them from our early years all over our house. But as the children came along, demanding most of my time, he became consumed with business and slowly, slowly my diamond of a marriage began to lose its sparkle. I guess no honeymoon can last forever.

  Oh Addison, I thought, how could you do it and why did you do it? Other men his age died from heart disease or cancer. But not my Addison. As he did most things, he leaped into projects full-strength and was a mad dog gnawing and growling until his battle was won. He leaped alright, but this time it was from the top of my piano with the extra-heavy-duty extension cord from our Christmas decorations tied around the rafters and his neck. I was the one who found him. I’d never get that vision of him out of my mind if I lived to be one hundred and ten years old.

  I was white-hot furious with him for doing this to himself and to us. Who’s going to walk your daughter down the aisle, Addison? I strummed my fingers on the top of the casket and began pulling flowers from the blanket of white roses until I had six or eight clenched in my fist. I just needed to pull something apart. I dropped them on the ground and began pounding the casket with my fist. That was when I felt the strong hand of Mark, Patti’s husband, on my arm.

  “Come on now, Cate. Come stand by me.”

  I backed away from the remains of my husband and let
Mark put his arm around my shoulder. Mark was a great human being, even though he could be very cheap, which to my way of thinking was a really terrible and unattractive trait. Still, I considered myself lucky to have him as a brother-in-law, because he was the one who would step forward in a situation like this and take any potential problems in hand. Following his uncle’s lead, my beautiful son Russ moved away from his contentious wife, Alice, and took my hand.

  “It’s gonna be okay, Mom. You’ll see.”

  “I know,” I said and thought I should be the one reassuring him.

  But I had reassured him and Sara, my daughter. I had told them at least one hundred times in the last forty-eight hours that we would get through this together and everything would be all right. Talk about self-delusion? I didn’t believe that any more than they did. Together was over. We would get through the funeral together. But then they would go back to their lives and resume them, maimed a bit, sad for a while, but they had lives and careers that waited for them. Well, to be honest, Russ had a satisfying job teaching and coaching high school basketball. But my daughter, Sara, did not. Sara was my soufflé, soft in the center but always in danger of falling if the temperature wasn’t perfect. Even though we resembled each other—petite, dark-haired, blue-eyed—I was much stronger than she was. Still, she was on her own in California and reasonably solvent.

  Anyway, at that moment, I had lost my rudder, because life without Addison wasn’t a life I could simply pick up and navigate without missing a beat. You see, I lived in a world of his making, not mine. Everything, every single material thing we owned was a product of Addison’s image of himself, how he thought he should live and how he wanted to be perceived by the outside world. The wine cellar, the cars, the art collection, the antiques—he had scoured auction houses and galleries, collecting and amassing that which was worthy of a financial czar. And the house? It was one of the largest homes in Alpine, located in the fourth most expensive zip code in America, roughly ten times the house that would have satisfied me but Addison wanted it all. He wanted just a mere glimpse of our home to make his investors, partners, and his enemies weak in the knees. And it did.