A Southern Girl: A Novel

by John Warley

  For the second time today I shower. The mirror is fogged over, which is why I had intended to shave before showering but I suppose my mind wandered and I forgot. At face level I wipe away enough condensation to apply lather and press the blade first to the base of the left, always the left, sideburn. I shave, dry my face and pause a moment to inspect Dad’s mole on my eyelid. I’ve been noticing my eyebrows lately. An occasional gray one weaves itself among the dark, and their ordered pattern is becoming disrupted by rogue, undisciplined hairs. The creases at the corners of my eyes are deepening a bit; I need to remember to wear a hat on the boat. The Carter forehead is still smooth and my hair is starting to fleck with what everyone assures me is a most becoming gray. Gray always becomes someone else.

  The doorbell. Adelle must be early. I exchange my towel for a robe and look around for my slippers. Passing barefoot through my room on my way to the front door, I notice the clock by the bed: Adelle is actually ten minutes late. I reach the foyer, open the door and in she walks.

  Adelle is tall, brunette, erect, with an immediate air that often signals a businesswoman or professional, of which she is neither. She must have great peripheral vision because she seems to keep track of things without having to turn directly to them. Her hips roll gently when she walks and she has a way of measuring every step, the way an equestrian calculates strides between jumps. I did not know her growing up, but I reckon her an unadorned teen, a sparrow of a young woman who, upon finding herself in the same woods with cardinal beauties like Elizabeth, became a consummate preener.

  She is, for example, compulsively fashionable, to a degree that even her most casual weekend attire is no doubt an ensemble among the pages of some catalog’s glossy spread featuring New York models in outdoor chic; snug jeans complementing tartan plaid shirts against backdrops of russet Vermont maples, covered bridges, and blinkered draft horses.

  Her knowledge of makeup is encyclopedic. Shopping with her for Christmas last month, I circled a department store in a holding pattern while she selected eyeliner with the studied precision of a pro franchise naming its top draft choice. Nor is her hair neglected. Weekly appointments with Justin, accent on the last syllable, are sacrosanct.

  I kiss her lightly on the cheek, suggest she fix herself a drink, and take the stairs two-at-a-time back to my room. Ten minutes later I am back, in gray slacks, a navy double-breasted blazer, a white sea-island cotton shirt and the tie Allie gave me for Christmas. The tie is a montage of blacks, reds, silvers, and whites; a little bold for my taste but it will please Allie to see me wear it. And what the hell, I’m forty-seven.

  “What a gorgeous tie,” says Adelle as I enter. I fix a Scotch and we catch up on our respective weeks.

  “Where are you taking me?” I ask from the passenger seat as she drives down Tradd Street toward East Bay.

  “I thought the Cooper Club might be nice,” she says, her eyes fixed on the road.

  I nod, but find her choice puzzling; we eat there often and so familiarity deprives it of the select ambiance I anticipated.

  The parking lot is jammed. A smooth, saline breeze off the river tousles my hair as I open my door. Skipjacks and catamarans, tied up in slips, clink and jangle in the wind as rigging strikes metal masts and booms; the music of the marina. My own boat, a Hinkley, thirty-one feet, is down there, rocking gently on the ebb tide. I must have drifted with thoughts of sailing because Adelle has come to my side of the car and is looking at me expectantly.

  “Coleman? Shall we go in?” We join arms and stroll toward the brightly lit portico of the Cooper Club.

  Ronald, the mâitre d’ at the Club for as long as anyone remembers, greets us warmly and signals for help with our coats. The dining room is virtually deserted; odd, given the crush of cars in the lot. As we navigate among sparsely occupied tables in the cavernous room, I am seized by the certainty that I am about to be “surprised.”

  “Surprise!” shouts a hoard of perhaps a hundred people as Adelle leads me into the private dining room. I have just enough time to shoot her a quick you-sneaky-devil look before being engulfed in a flood of well-wishers. My law partners, their wives, my mother, neighbors on Church Street, two college classmates, my tennis doubles partner, even an ex-girlfriend now happily married to a dentist in Columbia. Amid the hand-wringing and back-slapping someone puts a drink in my hand and I am swept along toward a dais at the far end of the room. Already seated there, but standing as Adelle and I approach, are Josh and his date, Steven, Allie, and Christopher. I hug my children, shake Christopher’s hand and turn to face the throng of friends now clapping and cheering.

  The room is high-ceiling, and from two prominent chandeliers are festooned crepe paper streamers of blue and white. On each table, fresh arrangements of camellias, blush reds mingled among pale pinks, radiate against the starched white tablecloths.

  “All right, heathens,” intones Rev. Kent from St. Philip’s Episcopal into the microphone mounted on one of those Rotary Club podiums. Ignored, he taps his water glass with a fork and the crowd gradually falls silent.

  “Lord God,” begins Frank Kent, “we gather together within Your sight to honor our friend Coleman. You have seen meet to keep him amongst us forty-seven years today, and we thank You for that. Keep him and all of us for many more, we ask in Your name, Amen.”

  Harris Deas, my partner and co-founder of the firm of Carter & Deas, approaches the mic. “First we’ll eat, then we’ll talk,” he announces to cheers of approval. Waiters stream in from all sides, trays high over their heads among the tightly packed tables and chairs. As ginger salad is placed before me, I turn to Adelle.

  “Confession time, Roberts. Who are your co-conspirators?”

  She places her palm, fingertips splayed, against her modest chest and assumes a look of profound hurt. “Are you accusing ME of a hand in this affair?” She grins and bats her eyes, fluttering that carefully selected eyeliner.

  “I was thinking of pledging eternal servitude to whoever would go to this much trouble.”

  “In that case,” she replies, “I take full responsibility.” She turns and casts a gravid look my way. “Is servitude the same as marriage?” I feel my eyes widening against all effort to remain composed and she gives a short laugh. “A little humor,” she says hastily. “Really, I was kidding.”

  Recovering, I ask about Mr. Quan, the caterer now giving silent hand signals to the six Asian waiters bustling around the room. Vietnamese caterers are the rage, and in Charleston, Mr. Quan is the best. He is a slight man, short, with limbs and waist of rice-diet slimness that fifteen years in Charleston have not altered. I gauge him to be in his early fifties, but it is impossible to be certain.

  “Do you like that touch?” asks Adelle, and I sense it is important to her that I do.

  “Terrific. I love their food. What did Allie say when she found out?” My daughter has never been particularly comfortable around other Asians.

  “She was all for it. Have you seen the waiters staring at her?”

  Mother is seated among her town friends whom she sees less frequently now. Adelle is on my left and to her left, Allie. I lean back to make eye contact behind Adelle’s back. “Psst! I suspect you as well.”

  She smiles. “Dad, you’re wearing my tie. I was afraid you didn’t like it.”

  “I’m crazy about it, and I’ve never seen you at a loss to change the subject.”

  “A lady’s privilege is a man’s delight.”

  “Who said that?” I ask.

  “I did.”

  “Not bad,” I allow.

  Steven is talking to Christopher. They have known each other for years, having played soccer together for Porter-Gaud. Steven, a senior at The Citadel, is in uniform, his dress grays, and watching him fills me with pride. Elizabeth would swoon at the handsome sons she produced.

  The next course arrives. Over crab soup I make a point of identifying every person seated before me, satisfied that I have matched each name and face.

 
Adelle’s voice intrudes. “Margarite doesn’t look herself tonight. Have you noticed?”

  Margarite Huger is something of a grande dame and I have known her all my life. I spent almost as much time in her house as I did my own. Her blood is blue, tinged with the royal purple she can trace to Thirteenth Century England. She married well, has lived well, and takes it all in stride with a couple of jiggers of Old Granddad each night. Hers is the endearing ability to value what and who she is without being absorbed by it. Though a stalwart of St. Philip’s, annually giving much of her support anonymously so as not to belittle the offerings of her fellow vestrymen, I have often wondered if she is not a closet Hindu. The trappings of her current world engage her fully enough, but there is always a hint of psychic distance, perceivable in her genteel chuckle at those same trappings, as though her innermost fascination is the dramatic difference between this life and the one she just left or will soon enter. She is one of my favorite people. Her son, Philip, my best friend growing up, died in Vietnam.

  “I’ve rarely seen her so dejected,” I say.

  Adelle’s peripheral vision serves her well. She can appraise Margarite without discernibly breaking eye contact. “Nor have I. Look, she’s leaving.”

  I glance toward the rear just in time to see Margarite slip through the double doors, her sense of urgency obvious. I rise, excuse myself, and hasten to catch up, taking with me in my half-walk, half-run the stares of many of my guests. I overtake her at the coat check. She does not see me approach. I lean over and whisper, “How wonderful of you to come.”

  “Coleman,” she says turning, her eyes brightening for a moment as she reaches for my hands. “I hope you’ll forgive me. It was so sweet of Allie and Adelle to include me.”

  “They didn’t think about the caterer. Honest.”

  “Oh, of course they didn’t. I’m just being a silly old woman who’ll spoil your evening if I’m not careful. Allie and the boys look wonderful, and so do you. Happy Birthday. I’m not sure what came over me in there. So many years have passed now, but every now and again I find myself in this awful funk.”

  “You miss Philip. So do I.”

  “I still see you boys as children. There you are, sitting in your sandbox playing with your trucks and I turn my back for two minutes and you grow to be forty-seven. How did this happen?”

  “Beats me, Margarite. I just get up each morning, put both feet on the floor, and do it all over again.”

  “Well, your family is lovely and Adelle is stunning in that outfit.”

  “Yes,” I acknowledge with a token glance back at the room. “Margarite, I have a problem and you’re the perfect person to advise me.”

  “By all means,” she answers, and sensing a change of subjects she brightens.

  “There’s no time to go into it fully tonight, but be thinking over how I can get Allie invited to the St. Simeon.” I study her reaction.

  Her eyes hold mine for an instant before darting upward in a sort of regal contemplation, as if she is debating whether to invade the Netherlands. Looking back again, she says, “You do know that I’m the president this year.” I feign surprise and we laugh simultaneously before she turns very serious.

  “This matter of Allie has already come up in the Board. I’m embarrassed to say I’m not optimistic. Adelle missed the meeting at which it was discussed or else I’m sure she would have told you.”

  “You think it’s hopeless?”

  “I think it’s … remote, and damn closed-minded if you want my judgment. Does she wish to go?”

  “She hasn’t said. I’m looking into it on my own.”

  “You’ll have to hurry; invitations go out soon.”

  “I know. Any ideas?”

  Margarite purses her lips thoughtfully. “One. Why not make a formal request for an exception? We meet next Thursday. You’ll have to do it then. I can put you on the agenda if you’d like.”

  “Have exceptions been requested?”

  “Twice in my twenty years on the Board. Neither granted, I’m forced to tell you.”

  I bob my head to assure her I understand what we’re dealing with. “I’ll let you know,” I say, kissing her cheek. The toasts, or roasts, are about to begin and I must return to mount the sacrificial altar.

  The room drones with a score of conversations as I re-enter, sobered by the remembrance of Philip. I will not dwell on him now. Adelle is engaged in chatter with Allie and all seems upbeat.

  I stop along my way, greeting those whom I missed in the press of the reception.

  Mr. Quan’s entre is beef swimming in a sauce deliciously French. In 1954, when the Vietnamese raised one hand to wave farewell to their unwanted guests, they had the good sense to clutch tightly in the other the recipes they have since perfected. Adelle is right, I think as the meal progresses and I mop up the remaining sauce with a crust of bread; the waiters are buzzing around the room with one collective eye on my daughter, who seems oblivious but is not.

  If you cored the 322 years-old tree which is Charleston, Spanish moss languishing from its limbs, the crowd assembled tonight would comprise a fair cross section. Who you were still matters here almost as much as who you are. I have traveled some and in newer communities the social register tends to be somewhat analogous to a suburban Forbes Four Hundred, with fewer zeroes. There, financial statements dictate access; to clubs, societies, and neighborhoods. Every year a few are added to the list, a few suffer precipitous nose dives and fall off, a few move out, some move in, and over time I suppose a continuity of sorts emerges. In California, I once heard a businessman remark that his friend so-and-so was reliable and had been an anchor in the town “for years,” which, according to this same soand-so with whom I dealt several days later, was precisely three.

  Charleston is not the same closed city of the last century, and newcomers are welcomed with what we still like to think of as exceptional hospitality. You won’t fall off “the list” here when your stock portfolio takes a tumble. Losing your job doesn’t mean losing your club, your friends and those things which matter most at the time you need them most. Money counts, but not overly much. And, there is something intangible here that is beyond the reach of even the wealthiest wannabes.

  As much as I value that intangible, others don’t. Take Adelle’s exhusband, for example. Legare Roberts wore his family’s crest like an old T-shirt, tossed into a corner after a two day bender. He roared through money like he roared through liquor and women. He found Charleston, in a word, “preposterous,” and he now lives with a ski bunny somewhere in Colorado. Legare could devise a cure for cancer and all the royalties off the patent couldn’t get him back into the clubs he snickered at.

  On the dais I am greeted by knowing smirks that signal fun at my expense. Harris beckons a waiter to refill my wine glass and the rub begins. My mother delivers a piquant little tale of a seven-year-old me, the doctor, caught in flagrante medico with a Victoria Pettit, the patient. Laughter. More wine.

  Josh is next. Looking a bit nervous and gesturing liberally, he relates an instance in his early teens when Elizabeth commanded me to discipline him for some egregious offense and I responded by sneaking him out of the house for ice cream. More laughter. More wine.

  Next comes Harris. We’ve been partners for years. A massive guy, he works too hard, eats too much, and hunts ducks with a passion which surpasses comprehension. His hands are the meatiest I have ever seen on a human, yet when he raises his fingers, bulging like cooked franks, to adjust the glasses on the bridge of his nose, he does so with dexterity unmatched by most eye surgeons. He brings that same quality to litigation. Lawyers intimidated by his bulk brace against being run over while he subtly goes around to pick their pockets, figuratively speaking. As he regales them with anecdotes, then exaggerates my virtues as a partner, my mind inexplicably returns to Philip Huger. My friend Philip, dead now for twenty-eight years. “And do you know what?” I ask myself in one of those wine-induced reveries in which the mind seems focused
with laser-like precision on the great truths even as the eyes are struggling to distinguish a neighbor from a lamp post, “Philip’s going to be dead a long time. He’s going to be dead forever and nobody is going to say nice things about him on his forty-seventh birthday because he isn’t going to have one.” A melancholy comes over me that I attribute mostly to the wine, and I re-double my concentration on Harris at the podium least my guests perceive my mood.

  “But seriously, folks,” Harris is saying, “Coleman is known in legal circles as the Great Conciliator. Nobody has his ability to go into a room with two snarling adversaries and come out with everyone smiling and shaking hands. Show me a man who has practiced law in one place for any length of time and has so few enemies and I’ll show you a special man indeed. Coleman, we love you, boy. Happy Birthday.”

  I rise, embrace Harris in the manly, ursine hug we both enjoy, and am about to disengage when he half-whispers, half-yells, “See me after—great news!” As I flash a quick thumbs-up, I turn to find the crowd on its feet, clapping and shouting echoes of Harris’s praise. I am quite moved. I thank them for coming, thank Adelle and Allie and Mother and Harris and Mr. Quan and everyone who had a hand in planning it. With a wave of farewell, it is over.

  Standing down now, in front of the rostrum, I mingle informally with those who come forward to press the flesh. There is gaiety in their manner, heartfelt good will in the clasps of hands, thumps of shoulders, Platonic kisses and it comes to me what has given this celebration its added zest: the last time we—all of us here tonight—congregated was at Elizabeth’s funeral. Then, we groped for words because words are demanded even when they are useless. They are relieved; yes, that is the essence of it, as I am relieved, that we gather in the sunshine of food and jokes and reunion and that the long, dark shadow of that magnolia tree in St. Philip’s churchyard is part of our past.