by John Warley
“You look stunning, my dear,” Coleman said to me as he parked the car and I checked my makeup in the mirror behind the visor.
“I don’t feel stunning, but thank you anyway. Well, here goes,” I said as I reached for the door handle.
He reached for my near arm and held it lightly by the wrist. “Look, I know your heart isn’t completely in this, but let’s just have fun.”
“Let’s do,” I agreed, but without much conviction.
Coleman checked our coats while I greeted Ross and Carol Vernon, two of only a handful of people who knew of our adoption plans. Coleman joined us. Carol and I enjoy how he and Ross love to taunt each other, and they wasted no time tonight.
“Counselor,” Ross said, “let me be the first to tell you how positively ridiculous you look in that tuxedo.”
“Why, thank you very much, doctor. But you have a regrettably short memory for a fat man. I borrowed this from you last year and had it taken in by a tailor who sews about as well as you do.”
“Hard to imagine,” said Ross. “Why don’t we get a drink and talk it over.”
They left for the bar, which was perfect as I couldn’t wait to show Carol Soo Yun’s photograph. She smiled the way you do at pictures of babies, but I saw a certain hesitation too, as if she was expecting someone who looked like me. She tried to hide it, but it was there; the faintest … shock. I guess that is something I’ll have to get used to, and it is understandable in a place like New Hampton, where families tend toward the traditional, to say the least. She asked me about a name and I said Allie, looking back at the photo to make sure Allie fit Soo Yun, and it seemed a perfect fit to me. Just about then Coleman and Ross came back with our wine.
On the dance floor, Coleman and I danced before switching partners with Ross and Carol. I wish I’d stayed with them, but eventually we all separated in the press of the crowd and the “good-to-see-you’s” so that I was alone and defenseless when the inevitable happened: Sandra Hallet approached. I replenished my wine from the tray of a passing waiter and readied myself for the boredom it would be my fate to endure. We all have a look that feigns interest, and I put on mine. Some people notice when you’re really just listening to be nice, but Sandra was not that type. I could have been filing my nails and she would still have gone on about her “exhaustive” afternoon in New York, shopping for a prom dress for her daughter, Megan. I nodded and gushed at the appropriate spots, but this monologue bored me senseless, and the cad in me wondered why, with all her money, she couldn’t dress more stylishly. Her husband had made a fortune in a chain of convenience stores, and she rarely let anyone forget it. As Sandra took me from one store—“Expensive, but not much more selection than you find at Minor & Renns”—across Fifth Avenue to the “cutest little boutique you have ever laid your eyes on,” I saw Coleman coming to rescue me. By then I’d had another glass of wine and was feeling it. Sandra’s face was beginning to fuzz over and her words starting to slur, or maybe those were my words. At any rate, I was terribly glad to see my husband and needed no urging when he slipped his arm through mine and reminded me of his promise to have the sitter home at a reasonable hour, a lie but one I was delighted to benefit from. “Thank you,” I whispered as we crossed the floor toward the cloakroom.
We left by the south entrance, facing the river. On a circuitous walkway leading to the parking lot, we paused. A chilly breeze off the James swept over us, clearing our eyes of accumulated smoke. We breathed deeply, drawing the bracing air into our encrusted lungs before exhaling the closeness of the evening. I leaned into him, pulling the collar of my coat around my chin and ears. Overhead, the moon hung in marmoreal isolation, its land beams silhouetting the ghostly limbs of barren trees and its river beams refracting, pale and cold, into a shimmering mosaic among the whitecaps on the river. Coleman turned me, drew me in, and kissed my ear. My face inclined, the moonlight in my eyes. He kissed my lips, then whispered, “I signed you up for the club’s public relations committee. You don’t mind, do you?”
I grinned and kissed him back. “Nope. We can ride over together when you come for meetings of the Greens Committee.” We laughed together as we turned toward our car.
The following morning, Coleman left early with the boys for a soccer game while I slept late. When they returned at noon, I’m certain he could tell I’d just gotten up, and with a hangover. I was in the breakfast room, a cup of coffee and an aspirin bottle beside my newspaper.
“A little too much sherry last night, my dear?” he asked, grinning. I hate it that Coleman enjoyed total immunity from hangovers.
I glared at him over the local section. “Oh, shut up,” I said with pseudo anger. “It’s not fair. You feel great and I suffer.”
“It’s totally fair,” he said. “I drank modestly while you guzzled grain alcohol from a boot.”
“Sandra Hallet does that to me. Every time she starts in on another one of her trips to New York, which is every time I see her, I run for the bar. I guess I should be more assertive and just leave, but she follows until she inflicts her quota of pain. How did the game turn out?”
“We won, three to nothing.”
“Congratulations, coach. How did Josh play?”
“Very well for the five minutes I let him in the game.”
“Your own son. How could you?”
“He’s only seven, and he still gets our goal mixed up with theirs. I know coaches who consider that a handicap. Any coffee left?”
“A fresh pot.”
“Good. I’ll get a cup and then we’ll talk.” He returned moments later, set his cup on the table, and looked at me expectantly, until my gaze shifted from the newspaper.
“Something on your mind?” I asked. He said something about some conversation he’d overheard at the party last night, but even with my hangover it didn’t take me long to realize where this was headed so I can’t say I listened with much attention. I had felt this coming, and here it was. He opposed the adoption. He didn’t want to go through with it. He had decided to check the “no” box on Soo Yun’s dossier.
“Fuck you,” I said, or words to that effect. I don’t remember exactly. My head hurt.
10
Coleman
When my secretary told me I’d had an urgent call from Elizabeth to come home, I feared something had happened to her or one of the boys. So her joy when I walked in was a relief. I’d rarely seen her so excited. To see the photo I had to take it from her. That old bromide that all babies look alike? Well, not if they are Asian and you are not.
I drove back toward my office in the Pratt Building, a ten story building a dozen blocks from the main gate of the shipyard. Idling at a traffic light on Tyler Avenue, I tried to recall the face in the picture but could summon only a turbid montage of infant features, vaguely universal but for the crescent eyes, so preternatural. But Elizabeth had gazed at the photo with the precise maternal intensity with which she had peered over the bars of cribs, watching her sleeping sons. Dissuading her from this adoption was going to be doubly difficult now that a name and face melded with her instincts, and if it could be done at all, I needed to do it. How to tell her?
In the weeks following our visit to Charleston, I spent some time trying to assemble pieces of a puzzle that simply didn’t fit. In the beginning, I assumed it was this child who did not fit. An orphan of unknown origin imported to a family with whom she could be expected to have not a material thing in common, biologically, culturally, or historically. A stranger to be presented to my family and relatives, most of whom shared atavistic foreheads and jaw lines and musical tastes and self-deprecating humor and slow tempers and high blood pressures and conservative politics and a taste for bourbon and a devotion to the Episcopal Church; who could be expected to stare at her, nonplussed, from a safe distance as though she were an exotic bird of untested temperament and rare, endangered plumage. But more recently, I began to see myself as the misfit, and this child as a mere agent of revelation. I had loved my share of sout
hern girls but married a woman as far from that breed as a woman could be. That did not fit.
I would do anything for parents I had just wounded deeply for reasons less comprehensible to me with each passing day. That also did not fit. I measured my family by a yardstick graduated into the most traditional increments, yet here I was, about to introduce into that family, or suffer its introduction, a component beyond measurement or assessment. I grew up in Charleston, a timeless city which I believed had imbued me with every truth it offered, only to settle in New Hampton, a city of profound enigma. Nothing fit. How did I get here?
Through my passenger window, the huge industrial expanse of the shipyard sprawled out toward the river. I opted for this blue-collar environment during my last year in The Marshall Wythe School of Law at William & Mary, and in recent days had tried to reconstruct the logic that led me from the Old World charms of Charleston to New Hampton. The beginning salary here had been attractive, I remembered. Also, remaining in Virginia maximized my contacts from the University of Virginia, where I sang “the Good Old Song” in the rain at Scott Stadium, arm in drunken arm with many of the same guys I regularly see now at meetings of the bar association. I recall liking the lawyers at Mahoney, Cauthen; recall being flattered by the deference they gave my resume and the lengths to which they went to lure Elizabeth and me to their city. And, I remember acknowledging at the time to Elizabeth during our discussions over coffee, New Hampton exerted an indefinable pull; a pull somehow grounded in ambiance remotely related to pioneering or exploration, although of what, I could not say. Maybe Charleston was too easy. Maybe the frontier was the place to test myself.
The shipyard defines New Hampton, but the essence of the city continued to elude me. A “beer and hamburger town” was a typical tag. But beyond this obvious and irrefutable trait lurked an obscure soul. The city has a trading post feel about it, as if everyone here expects to be somewhere else this time next year. Yet we had settled here, our sons were born here, and we had made a home and life with good friends. Perhaps it was not the city’s soul but my own that was obscure. Did I plan to be somewhere else next year?
At the turn of the century, when the shipyard was a raw-boned pup of an enterprise and three-masted schooners still plied the river, it reared up as promising and pugnacious as any port in the South. From the brawling, fecund tenements of “Hell’s Half Acre” came whores and knife fights and shot houses and voodoo, but with them came legends worth retelling.
World War I saw brave troops embark for the death trenches of Flanders in ships built at the yard. Later, those same ships returned the glorious survivors to New Hampton. The Depression tested the town’s character, but Pearl Harbor assured a job for any man willing to do a man’s work. The yard bought more land, built more ships, and put meat and potatoes on the plates of virtually everyone in New Hampton. During the wars, and for a few boom years following them, the stout heartiness of honest work at common purpose, spiced by dashes of hot, urban tawdriness, produced a rich hunter’s gumbo of a city, gamy and pungent and memorable.
But the dramatic expansion of the yard to meet the demands of a postwar defense made what happened next inevitable, and in the 1950s the town lost much of its savor. The original municipality annexed Wainwright County, a bucolic assemblage of Mennonite farms systematically waffled by developers into track subdivisions larded with embellished names like “Oaks” and “Glens” and “Meadows” and “Chases”; names brimming with a romance no longer to be found in New Hampton. With the suburbs came numbing regularity, nerve-testing traffic, and crabgrass. The rugged stew which had once been New Hampton diluted into a bland gruel utterly indistinguishable from a dozen industrial centers. To me, what began as an intriguing alternative to the inevitability of Charleston had come to represent little more than a place to live and work. I had begun to sense the anonymity of the city defining me, and a growing awareness that my magnetic pull toward New Hampton may have been nothing more than an antipolar repulsion from the city of my birth.
I arrived at my office just as the shipyard’s 4:00 whistle blew. Two of my partners, exiting the elevator, spoke to me as I entered, but I merely nodded absently, causing them to stare momentarily, as did my secretary as I passed without acknowledgment. My mind was back at the house, on that photograph.
At my desk, I turned my chair toward the window and looked out onto the city. Cars making their daily exodus from the yard jammed Tyler Avenue as hard-hatted workers dodged among them. I had witnessed this tableau a hundred times from above, but today I felt part of it, as though I was locked in the congestion below, leaning impatiently on my horn and cursing the men whose last-second dash in front of me caused me to idle through another stoplight cycle. I wanted to move. I wanted things to fit.
A day or two later, at the midwinter ball, I was privy to a conversation that crystallized something that had been on my mind since our Charleston trip. Ross and I had pushed through the crowd toward the bar, a long, cherry wood affair accommodating four bartenders. Drinks in hand, we returned to Elizabeth and Carol. I knew Elizabeth brought the photo. She carried it everywhere. I got to them too late to see Carol’s reaction, but in time to hear, “She’s so adorable. Congratulations,” which honestly sounded forced to me.
Elizabeth and I separated to circulate, as we often do at these things, but met up to dance later in the evening. That was when I overheard the conversation. Don Mahoney, my senior partner and our host for the evening, stood talking with a plump, balding man whom I recognized as Richard Coughter, a local attorney recently endorsed by the bar association for a judgeship. Mahoney, seeing me in his peripheral vision, beckoned me over. The three of us exchanged handshakes accompanied by “good to see you’s.”
Don continued speaking to Coughter as though I was not present. He does that sometimes at the office as well, when I sit in on meetings with his clients. Don’s an able lawyer. His voice, by its very weight and depth, commands jurors’ attention. His reputation as a trial attorney had been made by that voice; an ominous, sepulchral resonance that seemed to emanate from a volcanic oracle, like the slow grinding of faults at the earth’s core. The rare jury returning an adverse verdict left the courthouse shadowed by guilt, having defied the wishes of what sounded, for all the world, like a rumbling deity. At five-ten he stood eye level with Coughter, tapping lightly with his free hand the other man’s lapel. Coughter’s concentration bordered on entrancement, produced not only by the speaker’s mesmerizing voice but by the subject matter: Coughter’s impending confirmation hearing before the Courts of Justice Committee in the General Assembly, a legislative body wherein Mahoney enjoyed considerable influence both as sage advisor and campaign financial contributor.
“It’ll all blow over,” Don assured Coughter. “Nobody with any influence on that committee makes decisions based on a newspaper editorial by some snotty-nosed do-gooder. Bill and Ed are both looking out for you in the Committee, and the full House will bring out the rubber stamp. It’s not a done deal, but you’ll get through. You have my word on it.”
Coughter’s face, until now cloudy with concern, brightened visibly. “That’s mighty good to hear, coming from you.” Then doubt again tightened its grip. “It just don’t seem fair,” he said. “If they disqualified every judge in this state who belongs to a segregated private club, there would be one hell of a lot of empty benches.”
With the hand holding his drink, Mahoney gave a dismissive wave, almost spilling his bourbon onto Coughter. “I’m telling you, it’s all hot air. You think those good old boys in Richmond give a damn about your membership here? They’ve got a political problem and you’re going to have to sit there at the big long table and nod understandingly and assure them that you are sensitive to all their minority concerns and that you’ve put us on notice back here in the boondocks that unless we change our membership policies, why, you just might have to consider resigning. Then you’ll have to listen to them talk about how it’s incumbent on judges in the Commonwealth
to be free from discrimination and all the rest of it. It’s a game. Just play along.”
Coughter took a pull on his drink. “I’ll sure be glad when it’s over,” he said, taking a handkerchief from his pocket and mopping his forehead. “Yes, sir. Mighty glad.”
“Well, hell, Richard,” scoffed Mahoney in his rich bass. “For what amounts to a lifetime appointment, you can take a few minutes on the hot seat, can’t you? The worst that can happen, the absolute worst, is that someone gunning for statewide office next year will demand you resign as a condition of appointment.”
“But I like this club. My wife likes it. All our friends are here.”
“So Susan keeps her membership and you become her permanent guest. Or do what that fellow in Staunton did last year—resign and rejoin after you’re appointed. They can’t touch you after you’re in. You worry too much.”
“Susan tells me the same thing. I guess I do. Still, it means financial security and you can’t beat the pension, so I would hate to see something go wrong.”
Don turned to me. “What do you think, counselor? Think ‘Judge Coughter’ has a ring to it?”
“By all means,” I answered, raising my glass in an informal toast.
“You’re very kind,” said Coughter. “I hope you’re right. Both of you. Still, I doubt this flap is going to disappear. Wouldn’t it be easier on everyone to recruit some minority so we could say we have one?”