Don’t ask for rhyme or reason. You might ask why the sky is blue. It’s blue. Maybe it was genetic or learned or both. We were busy and bored, stifled and gasping for a change of mind that could not muster its own volition without the golden elixir. Just as a lamp needs a rub to free the genie, so were we freed by cocktails, part and parcel to rise and shine, how do you do, lovely, lovely, yes, fine, yes; don’t mind if I do. The lawyer’s optional supplement to significant cocktails was politics, where you might could find an occasional pulse in the electorate or a volunteer willing to spend time away from the family or the law library.
It doesn’t matter, because you get to a point in life where the mirror wobbles with amplitude, and ramification crowds the background. You sense the danger of staring too long but take a good look anyway, because that’s what it is, what it’s come to and most likely what you’re fixing to get a heap more of. I saw myself a young man searching deeds and statutes, middle age me rummaging the same fine print and me again blowing forth through the same paper. I felt like a kid who got it wrong and says, Wait a minute; lemme try that one more time. Life is a game but you only get one go. I charged a decent fee and, goddamn it, I wanted more, but didn’t need more money and couldn’t tell what more of I wanted, till it looked like no way in hell I’d get one snitch of what I knew was better than what I got.
Don’t worry. I wasn’t suicidal. I suffered severe regret. Then I got drunk, until that daily reprieve went away too, unexpectedly and in its prime, as if my very best friend dropped dead. Oh, but the maudlin recollection comes so easily. It was hell. My specialty was maritime law, here in the grandest, formerly greatest port of the Old South. I didn’t choose maritime law but followed the prescribed path of practical success, which is more jargon for incredibly unearned wealth befalling those who get along by going along and inherit what’s waiting for them. In my case the legacy aligned with the fortunes of Waties Waring, a most prominent maritime lawyer in town. Appointment to the federal bench seemed likely for him, though you could never know till it happened. He actually reckoned it to come along much sooner than it did, and once it did he sat only three years before his fatal distraction. Tommy Holcombe said the old man got his mind stuck on pussy, and that’s all there was to it, plain and simple, no matter how many times and how many angles you viewed it from, because once he’s stuck, a man won’t come up for air till he gets his fill or ruins himself one or the other. Though bumpkin brutal, that assessment proved accurate. I was odds-on favorite for that same judgeship, given a Democrat for President, but not after Waties got stuck in the mud or the watermelon either one.
I don’t even care anymore and likely would have run for office just to get out of the office, state senator maybe, spend a few days a week in Columbia, give a nod here and there, get everyone calling me Senator Covingdale, except in town where they’d call me Senator Art. I swear, if I reviewed one ship’s document I reviewed a thousand. Chandler disputes, dockage fees, lading shorts; sometimes I’d go aboard, just to get out of the office, to see what the real crews of the real world saw and felt. I spent my time out in the channel too and got offshore now and then, trolling for the big boys. But head out over the horizon to Timbuktu or some such like I dreamed I would as a boy? Not once. And I’m here to tell you I’d have cried like the child I was if you’d told me back then that I’d hit fifty-eight in a seersucker suit with a nasty addiction to liquor and nothing for it but small talk.
Like my first maritime case that went to the U.S. Court of Appeals, a mundane litigation over a low-speed collision at the dock. Judge Waring called a recess and asked me back to his private chambers for a brandy, and then asked what I thought would be fair in this one. He shouldn’t have done that, and we both knew it. But we also knew why he did it, which was to show me how things operate among reasonable men, that the law is to serve, not to rule. That we have a society of manners deferential to a greater law, whatever that was. I don’t know who can extemporize on that greater law, except to say it was life the way we lived it. For all I know, and I’m fairly certain of it, my answer did not affect his decision, in which case the question was permissible, but that was incidental. He paid me a compliment of the highest stature. Few attorneys are so flattered, and the only thing higher that night than the stature of the compliment was me, way past cocktails to knee-walking nigger drunk; pardon the indelicacy, but I’m trying to tell a story here about how it was and came to be and what happened after that. I’m still making sense of it myself; so if I stub a toe here and there cut me some slack.
I don’t mean he was warm. He wasn’t. From the beginning of the fifty-five years I knew the man he was known as a tough sonofabitch among the kids. He never begrudged me his half grapefruit, but the knuckle rub wasn’t playful; it was corporal punishment, hurt like the devil. Last time I saw him up in New York he looked older than Methuselah, his face drawn worse than taffy at the end of the pull, hardly a spark left and his eyes too tired to rise. I suppose they couldn’t do much to make him look different for the picture in the Times, page two, with the caption telling how he was “cast out by lifelong friends and colleagues who could not accept his liberal views on segregation.”
They didn’t run a single quote from him, but the blithering bitch he married gave them what for. “You can’t keep a good man down. The crusade will go on until we have freedom and justice for all.” You look at those two old dried out olives hanging out his eye sockets and the jaw hanging slack as a gate with no hinge nor springs neither one; you know damn good and well who’s running the show and pulling the strings, and who got cast out by whom.
I don’t just say these things conjecturally, though that’s all it was before I went up there to New York for a visit. The place smelled like flesh no longer restoring itself. The new wife greeted me with a toothy cavern she must have thought looked like a smile though it seemed shopworn and past its useful life. Her overbearing joviality may have been the New York, New York version of what’s imagined to take place in the hustle bustle capital of the cultural world as seen from way down yonder in Beulah Land, but it made my teeth itch. We had our tea and grapefruit for old times’ sake, she ranting all the while on justice, freedom and courage on the one hand, and sloth, ignorance and malice on the other. He gazed my way out his tired eyes, trying his best to keep breathing. She was very old. He was ancient. Their sense of vindication was fresh, if not young. So how in hell, I asked myself then and ask it to this day, could these two account for my fortunes?
Her teapot whistled. On her way to calm that noise she said, “I know which way the wind blows.”
“Of course you do,” I said.
“I was wronged,” he said. “It grieves me still. That may not surprise you. You still enjoy the benefits of polite society in Charleston.”
“Some of those benefits left with you,” I assured him.
He laughed, maybe gratified that misery had some company. She called from the kitchen that the judge was a champion of social justice. He and I shared an eye roll. Or maybe I only imagined that; his were so droopy. Maybe they only looked like they rolled because I wanted them to. He insisted that I hear the whole story, that I be the judge, reminding me of the time he asked what I thought was fair in this situation, as if a little slack cut once merits a little slack cut again.
Back with hot tea, she poured over her passion for the truth and told me to move so the judge could see me better. She called him the judge, then blushed, or something like it, excusing herself so we men could talk.
The white walls, white ceiling, white rugs and white drapes made for a glaring light that would have been called tacky then in Charleston and served no purpose but to complement his ashen pallor. Or maybe the white on white was to simulate the white tunnel you see when you die, like a practice room or something. He stood crookedly as a time-lapse weed, leaned precipitously and poured another cup. My own was still scalding hot, and I realized he’d gone ahead and drank his down, maybe trying to feel something. Ma
ybe old people lose their nerve endings, I thought at the time, knowing now that nothing of the sort goes away. He only wanted a more immediate pain to distract him from the one inside, which I also learned since. Then he wilted back down to the imprint on his leather chair, even into the lightened spots under his drumming fingers—tea sloshed over the arm to moisten the tracks of former spills. He downed the second cup and wrung his hands like a wizard conjuring a spell. I waited.
“Separate but equal is not equal. Open primaries … How long do they think a man can live on that island?”
“Well. Which island is that?”
His color rose dangerously red. “The island no man can live unto alone by himself!”
“Oh. That island. I’m sure I don’t know.”
He waved a hand, knocking the empty cup onto the carpet, over old tracks to a familiar resting spot. “No!” he finally sputtered. “You can’t …” He stopped trembling by grasping his chin. Turning toward Central Park, he whispered, “The place …”
“I beg your pardon.”
“The place. You know the place as well as any of them. People don’t affect history, which a place … a place they know … in them, a place that is them. Mark my words: they can see its shortcoming. You try to change it, if you love it, or else …” His breathing became labored.
“Or else?”
Eyes rolling as if scanning the room for an imminent arrival, he said, “People in hell want ice water.” His eyes fell on the empty cup. “They learn to drink it hot.”
“I see.”
He shivered slightly. “Do you?”
Well, of course I didn’t, or couldn’t, or wouldn’t. The only thing I could or would do was sit and listen to him drag eighty years through an hour and a half and only get to 1892 after shuffling through so many births, marriages, deaths and more profound departures from the Lowcountry. He blended into the street noise below, dates and names intermixing with brakes, horns and, good Lord Almighty, the sirens. What the hell use is a siren if you got more sirens in your ear than silence? I mean, goddamn, they might ought to have figured that one out. He didn’t even hear the sirens, as I suppose you don’t after a while, a long while.
In 1892 he was twelve and fought with his brother on his birthday on a beach outing. “Rice pudding,” his voice congealed, tiring beyond the mortal pale. “And my ma’s cornbread,” and so on, listing the historic niceties on which Charleston thrives, as if he were back there recollecting with the best of them, thriving.
He remembered prep school as a waste of time, and I don’t think a case could be made otherwise. The College of Charleston was marginally better, though it “treated young fools as young men for growing hair on their faces and paying tuition, and the only requirement for admission was a ride to town on registration day.” No matter what kind of sonofabitch you thought he was, or which side of the battle you saw him from, you had to admire his wit and incisive assessment of a situation.
After college he got inured to stories about antebellum times and reverent fantasies harking back to Virginia or the old London days, didn’t even care that the world of exotic, far-away places would not likely be part of his personal itinerary. Why should he, when the world came to Charleston by way of the ships? His first advent in dockside law was learning the rules of the road as a boy, when he hauled fresh fish and oysters by the bushel down to the ships to trade for trinkets. Like when he and his chums traded oysters to Chinee, a cook, for flowered vases, and everyone bowed, and Chinee had the boys sit on a galley bench so they could watch him spread grain over the counter with one hand while wielding a swayback cleaver with the other.
The old man leaned forward tensely, holding up a shaky finger as Chinee had done and mimicked the chicken walking from its wood box to peck across the counter, his old head pecking like one tired chicken’s, till he stopped, his hand slashing the air, his little chicken coo-cooing to an abrupt choke and gurgle, going dead as his head fell limp, severed by Chinee’s cleaver. Opening one eye and the other, like chicken never would again, he stretched the flesh on either side of his bridgework in warm recollection. A carefree bloodletting of a chicken and youth made him laugh and cough and swear to God, “like to scare the daylights out of us …”
Now I wonder if he got those oysters from Jim Cohen, but no; Jim wasn’t even born till ’00 or ’01, and it mattered no more than anything else. He colored with the retelling, then eased on back in the chair to recall Chinee making the boys drink whiskey in honor of Chicken. He looked up, smoothing a temple. “It’s an easy place to miss, some of it.” In ’94 he nearly killed his brother Ned Jr. and vice versa. For years after, knives flew out of nowhere, and anyone standing under a second storey window was subject to a flowerpot on the head. Ned Jr. died in ’36. “You were just out of school. Ned Jr. moved down to Florida for a company that sent its salesmen around by car. We were friends then, when he died.”
He never admired his father but liked him a great deal. “How can you admire a man who stays with a losing business year after year?” His father and brother both worked for the South Carolina Railway till it went bankrupt and got bought by Southern Railway. Ned quit working then but Ned Jr. got on with the School Board of Charleston, “which never went bankrupt, except for the young minds it left insolvent.” After working on the school board, Ned Jr. got on as a traveling salesman, but apparently failed to share any jokes with his brother. The old man stared glumly.
“Entire archives are given over to basic existence in Charleston. Whatever happens between birth and death is largely unrecorded, I believe, because it’s largely insignificant, unless you count the decades of easy living with the bubbas.” The Waring genealogy does note Ned’s time at Tulifinny, drawing the entire family across an unspoken but highly revered line of demarcation. They served, installing them forever on the exalted plateau of those who served. Unrecorded is Ned’s work with Daniel Chamberlain on the railway merger. Dan Chamberlain was the last reconstruction governor of South Carolina and lived up in Connecticut all those years in exile after Wade Hampton beat him in ’79. “Heroes everywhere. I suppose Wade Hampton was a gentleman. For all I know he humped his horse.” He smiled again, perhaps at imagery soothing to his grief. “Dan Chamberlain was a Republican scalawag but he came home to Charleston in ’94 and stepped off the train to a waiting crowd and said he’d been homesick for fifteen years and was mighty glad to be back. So everybody said welcome home and called him Governor Dan to the day he died. Fifteen years.” The old judge smiled grimly and said he’d go home some day too, horizontally.
Wavering from historic dates and events, he went reflective, as if to show what could be gained with proper perspective, watching the gray rain out the window for days on end in New York. His father Ned said expectation was the downfall of the South. Ned the father accepted his menial station in life with aplomb and assurance for anyone who cared to ask, that yes, he had no expectation, which is easy living of a different nature. Ned claimed it was recorded lineage that gave rise to expectation; otherwise folks in Charleston wouldn’t have started The War. Everyone has lineage. Hound dogs and geldings have it, but Lowcountry lineage made for expectation. Ben Waring was buried outside Summerville in a swamp near Givhans Ferry. “Pa called it a mush hole in the pluff mud out between the Ashley and the Edisto, but folks had expectation, so they called it the Old Waring Burial Ground, but you can’t go gawk and sigh, because Ben’s the only one knows where, and he ain’t talking. Ben died a hundred fifty years before Ned was born, but Ned spoke of his forebear like a brother, like a century and a half didn’t mean squat where blood was shared. He said they shared a like-minded temperament too, he and Ben, and he always claimed to feel a part of Ben in himself. I believe we did too, me and Pa.”
The judge leaned over much as an old tree in a gusty breeze, creaking up next to toppling but then easing back with the bottle in hand. He poured us each an inch and pushed mine across the end table. I don’t drink, or wasn’t drinking at the time, bu
t took the glass to finish the exchange and let him proceed with the load off his chest so as to avoid the load on my chest, with the drinking issue.
Declining a drink in town doesn’t require an explanation but warrants pleasant diversion at the least. On that wet, gray day in New York it seemed best to keep moving back down the bumpy road to where we went our separate ways.
His diversion was plain to see. He stared at that little snort of courage that could be his last and lifted it for a pass under his nose for the fumes and associative memories. Setting it down, he topped us off to an inch and a half like a reformed smoker who misses the ritual as much as the drug, tamping the pack, knocking a fag out, taking it to the lips but not lighting up. Neither one of us ever smoked, because that was filthy, expensive, unhealthy and stupid, unlike us, hugely successful men of the New South sorting out our path to greatness.
Jumping from his father’s military service to the future once more, scanning a few decades in the next breath, his boyhood gang was known for jumping horse cars and then street cars and leaping off without telling the driver to slow down. “It was quite an adventure.”
I must have nodded off. He took it for agreement and backed up thirty years to The War as thunder rolled outside on cue as backdrop for the Battle of Tulifinny, where his father fought for The Cause. At the end of the skirmish he belched. “I don’t sleep anymore.”
Lightning popped through his mumbles over the free and open life so available in New York. He choked, hocked and convulsed briefly, then whispered, “We’re memory as we speak. Then nothing.” He slept.
The downpour cushioned the silence. I sat a few minutes more and was getting up to leave, when he opened his eyes and asked, “Later?” I stopped. “Later. We’ll walk. My wife and I …” She slid in smiling. He said she was a beautiful woman once and still is. “My critics call her my weakness. I call her truth. Truth and beauty. My Grecian urn. She let me see. You might could too …” With four eyes on me I fidgeted into a weak smile of my own. He drifted. “My critics and their children take tea at three and sniff flowers in March. I watch the rain and wait. Sit down.” The wife backed out.
In a Sweet Magnolia Time Page 8