by John Warley
Harris and Carolyn, his wife, are among the last to leave. He has that glassy-eyed wobble that tells me she will be driving home, not that I myself have any plans to get behind a wheel. I grin sophomorically at them and Carolyn, a petite blonde toy of a woman, sighs with her boys-will-be-boys patience.
“Ok, Deas,” I say, “what have you done?”
“What have we done, ma’ boy. The Performing Arts Center?” “Yeah?” I reply, anticipating what is coming.
“Met with Middleton late this afternoon, and unless he’s lying through his dentures we’ve got the votes.”
“Good work, son,” I commend him. “Should make for a banner year around Carter & Deas.” City council is preparing to contract out the legal work on the new Arts Center. Because of our expertise in municipal bonds and condemnation, we are one of only two firms in the city that can handle it. Harris has been working over councilmen, counting votes.
I am unconscious of the time these farewells consume. Adelle is in the kitchen squaring up with the club and the staff. Josh and Steven shook my hand some time back and Allie bolted, hand in hand with Christopher. The last guest is waiting at the coat check when Adelle joins me. I give her a look that I hope conveys the appreciation I feel and together we go in search of our coats. As we exit, a freshet of chilly air cuts through the fog of the last few hours and my lungs drink it in. I pull Adelle closer as we walk to the car.
She starts the engine, shivering as the various warning lights and signals run their course.
“Great party,” I say, giving her a gentle chuck on the shoulder. “Thanks.”
“Coleman,” she says abruptly, as if she hasn’t heard me, “you’ll never guess what I saw tonight.”
“You’re right, I can’t guess.”
“You’ll be more serious when you hear,” she says.
“Then tell me. I can take it.” I have no clue as to what is coming.
“I came out to the car to get my checkbook—I left it in my other handbag—and I passed by Christopher’s car.”
“And?”
“The windows were a bit fogged but I could clearly see them kissing, and I don’t mean a peck on the cheek.”
“Allie and Chris?”
“Your daughter, my son.”
“Does that shock you? They are dating.”
Adelle winces in a controlled fret. “Yes, but they’ve always been such buddies. Just good friends for so long.”
I shrug philosophically. “Look at us. We were friends for years before Elizabeth died and Legare left. We’ve done more than kiss. Things change.”
“Yes, but we’re adults; they’re just children.”
“Adelle, ease up. They’re kissing, not screwing, and they’re both mature kids in an age when kids grow up mighty damn fast.”
She attempts a confessional grin. “I guess I’m being overly protective.”
I lean over, put my arm around her shoulders, and bring my lips to her ear. “If I were you, I’d stop worrying about your son’s virtue and worry a little more about your own. You’re in danger here, if you haven’t noticed.” I nibble on her lobe to underscore the obvious. She giggles and yields simultaneously.
She says, “At the risk of a cliché, your place or mine?”
“I feel particularly wicked tonight. How about a hotel?”
“Oh, Coleman,” she says, turning impatient, “you don’t feel wicked. You just don’t want to risk Allie finding us in bed.”
I release her and turn toward my window. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I just need to work this out so I’ll be comfortable.”
Now she leans to me, as far as the bucket seat will permit. “You seem tense no matter where we are. Look, it’s late and we’ve both had long days. Why don’t I drop you at home and we can talk it over tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” I say sheepishly, “that’s a good idea.”
At the curb back on Church Street I lean in, kiss Adelle, and thank her again for the party. By the time I reach the door, her tail lights are out of sight. The kids are not at home, and I am tired but not yet sleepy. At the bar I pour a short brandy and step out onto the piazza, flopping into a wicker chair that takes a minute to settle itself. The air is cold and thin and so still that I could easily converse with Brad across the street without raising my voice.
I think back over the evening and blush anew at my bungled come-on to Adelle. Sex; what a pain in the shorts. By the time you weigh the ethics, the moralities, the logistics, the public fronts and private realities, the explanations given or denied, the contraceptives, the lab reports, and all the rest it’s hardly worth it. Still, my relationship with Adelle is something I need to address. I keep reminding myself not to press, that sorting things out after Elizabeth will take some time.
Of course, some time has passed.
“Forty-seven,” I murmur. On balance, good years. I was blessed with parents who loved each other. After an expensive education, I married a lovely woman with whom I had a good, but far from perfect, relationship, and whom I miss terribly. Three fine kids, a good career, great friends. Lots of laughs and some tears dropped in for seasoning. That’s what life is, right? I’ve made it. I won my race.
“So explain to me,” I instruct myself between sips of brandy, “this nagging malaise of recent weeks. Tell me why a concentration as reliable as dawn has suddenly scattered like its first rays over the Atlantic. Why, when friends engage me earnestly, do I find myself contemplating their noses, or their ears, or neglected dental work? Why do I yawn at receptions, turn off football games in the fourth quarter when the score is tied, or sit in church and dream of sailing but while sailing think of the cocktail waitress at the country club who pressed against me serving drinks?”
Two weeks ago, I left the house as Allie left for school. An appointment with a client scheduled for 9:00 dictated a brisk walk around the block; twenty minutes max. Instead, in sweat clothes I ambled along the sea wall we call the Battery. There, in one of those absent-minded reveries that seem to transport me regularly these days, I mentally unspiked the massive mortars and calculated the trajectory necessary to hit Ft. Sumter. Around me, hundreds of soldiers and civilians in antebellum dress shouted angry defiance at the harbor, fists raised to underscore their outrage. “Yeah,” I yelled with them, “goddamn Yankees.” The ground shook beneath us with each successive salvo and an acrid mist mingled among us. Suddenly, a roar erupted and the soldier next to me pointed to the fort and I saw through the smoke the first distant tongues of flame scar the air above.
I stood there a long time, until half past nine, when I jogged back home and called the office. My client wasn’t pleased but then too often clients aren’t. I dressed leisurely and drove unhurriedly to work.
I see headlights turn onto Church Street and think Allie is returning but the car drives past. It is the Smathers’ Buick. Moments later I hear their gate opening and soon all is quiet again. That morning on the Battery—what does it mean when you stand up a client to daydream over a long lost battle? For the first time in memory I feel myself shadowed, but by a person or event or mood I cannot say. In the basement the other night, looking for the lamp, I almost touched it so palpable was its presence. Whatever its nature or substance, it is brooding, insistent, and, I sense with a quick shudder that could be just a chill, disturbing.
19
A steady drumming in my temples rouses me the following morning. Bathrobe on inside out, my slippers still missing, I descend to the kitchen. Two aspirin and sixteen ounces of industrial strength coffee prepare me to charge into my forty-eighth year, more or less. I am reading the Post and Sentinel in the den when Allie enters in jodhpurs, her feet in socks.
“Morning, Dad,” she says sweetly as she passes on her way to the kitchen. “How is the old bod feeling?”
I lift my eyes from an editorial on the soaring cost of medical care in time to see her disappear through the swinging door. After some kitchen noise, she emerges with orange juice and a banana, sits in an o
verstuffed chair opposite me and pulls her feet up under her.
“So, what are your plans today?” she wants to know.
“Idleness followed by some relaxation hard on the heels of some serious lying around. My day is packed.”
“I guess at your age you need time to recover from staying out so late.” She grins around a bite of banana.
“Speaking of late hours …”
“I was home by two; if you don’t believe me ask Chris.”
“Did he enjoy himself last night?” My question seems innocent enough.
“You mean at your party or after?”
My mind flashes to Adelle’s account of the fog-filled car. “The party, of course. What happened after is none of my business, is it?”
“Only if you care about your daughter’s reputation.”
I deposit the paper into my lap and stare. “Oh?” I am not at all sure I want to hear what’s coming. Allie has always been too candid about these things.
“Yeah, we must have broken a record for sucking face last night. My lips are chapped.”
“I see.”
“Want to hear the rest?”
“No. It usually only gets messier.”
“Not much,” she says casually, as if she doubts it will rain. “I let him get by with a cheap thrill but when he started maneuvering for a big thrill I had to fall back on my elbow-in-the-ribs defense. He took it well. I like that about Chris. I’ll bet his ribs are sore this morning.”
“Sweetheart, how do you expect me to act casually around Chris when you tell me this stuff?”
“Relax, Dad, nothing happened. He was just giving it his best shot. We’ve been out four times now. He has expectations.”
Why is God forcing me to listen to this? Most of my contemporaries can’t get a word out of their teenagers and when they do, black lies follow white ones. Just my fate to have acquired “Miss Open Book of the Orient.” I had fair warning she would be this way a few weeks after Elizabeth died. Allie came to me and said, “Dad, it seems like a rubber-based thing like a condom would irritate a woman’s sensitive skin. Does it?” At that instant I was ready to trade places with Elizabeth. Allie says she is still a virgin; that she plans to wait until college.
I should be grateful, I am grateful, for her candor, a tool of indispensable utility to a generation confronting AIDs, violence, and drug abuse on a scale worthy of Richter. To the crowd that matriculated with “Just say no” and is graduating with Beavis and Butt-head, her habit of calling a spade by its name is a serum against the ruthless modern epidemic. Whether she inherited it or has adapted to the demands of her era, she is the high priestess of blunt disclosure.
It comes with a price, however; the same one paid by my parents and theirs as each generation drives a few splinters under the social fingernails of its predecessors. For Sarah and her contemporaries, it was bathing suits. Beach wear in her day left everything to the imagination, and she still clucks her disapproval on the beach at Sullivan’s at the promenade of virtual nudity. For me it is language, the double edge on Allie’s frankness. I have not easily accustomed myself to the female use of the word “fuck,” despite Elizabeth’s facile repetition. My abhorrence is part chauvinism, part southern, and part recollection of the stigma acquired by the few members of the sisterhood who, in my college years, dared experiment with purple prose. Now, as she reminds me, it has acquired the acceptance of damn or hell, and for me to take issue relegates me, she warns, to sitting on the dunes with Mother, lamenting the demise of western civilization. I have overheard her on the phone or with friends often enough to absorb its use as a benign banality, but after a futile effort to discourage it I gave up. “Dad, I say it, I don’t do it. Would you rather have it reversed?”
I want this subject to suffer a merciful death of silence so I resume reading the paper. She sips her juice. In time she asks if I would like to accompany her to the stables.
Frost is uncommon in Charleston and what little remained from last night is gone by the time the car leaves the city limits headed south toward Edisto. She is driving, in high spirits as she talks about a new mare that Kenny, her trainer, has brought over from Aiken. Allie’s slender strength is perfect for horses.
We ease up to the barn and park. She immediately goes for the tack room while I take my time.
“Kenny, you old horse thief,” I call to him from across some rail fencing.
“Shhhh!” he says, looking around. “When you find out what I paid for this here mare you’re gonna think you ain’t far wrong.”
Kenny is about fifty and “good ole boy” from hat to boot. And he knows his nags. He also knows riders, and has told me often that she, Allie, is the best he’s ever trained. His facial features ebb and flow, rise and fall like the tidal creeks he was raised on; open, honest features that you need to win over open, honest creatures like horses. But once in awhile, when he tries to communicate something he needs very much for you to hear and understand, like a significant blood line or aberrant scores from judges, he turns gravely serious by freezing his face in a calcified countenance so that you feel as though you’re looking at Abraham Lincoln sitting in his memorial.
“Coleman,” he’ll say, not moving a muscle in his jaw and barely moving his lips, “the girl has no fear. None. Gimme ten thousand riders and I’ll give you one outta the whole lot’s got no fear of a thousand pound animal. That girl’s the one. Damnedest thing I ever seen.”
“Me too,” I could tell him, but I don’t. Like a photo in your wallet, it’s a private memory stored close, the memory of the first time I saw her ride. Not long after the birthday with the pony, we were enjoying a long weekend in the Blue Ridge Mountains. At a weathered sign for “Trail Rides,” we stopped. The owner, a dour woman who looked as though she had been sucking on a persimmon for the hour before we arrived, refused to rent us a horse for Allie. “No experience, too young, ain’t gonna happen.” But Harris doesn’t call me Great Conciliator for nothing, so after urging Elizabeth and the boys to start, I went to work on the persimmon (“Nice place you’ve got here. So well maintained. I can’t imagine trying to manage something like this …” etc.). I never convinced her to let Allie on the trail, but she finally agreed to let me lead a horse along the corral railing and after planting Allie firmly in the saddle, I trooped up and down, reins in hand, to give her a feel for the horse’s movement. Looking over my shoulder, I saw an expression of cautious pleasure mixed with a childish awe that she could be so far off the ground on something that moved. After ten minutes, I heard, “Faster.” I cast around for the persimmon, then broke into a slow trot which forced the horse to do the same. Almost instantly there came a high-pitched giggle and, glancing back, I saw the difference between pleasure and glee. With each pass, her entire face animated in the purest joy. “Faster,” she said. Back and forth I went, heedless of the persimmon, running the horse into a trot so brisk it approached a canter, and she could not get enough. At last, panting wildly and exhausted, I stopped, nearly collapsing beside the rail. Elizabeth and the boys returned, and I paid the tab. I have wondered in the intervening years if perhaps the persimmon witnessed the whole thing from a secluded spot without the heart to intervene. If not, she surely must have pondered how a horse walking a rail came to be lathered.
Today, I lean on the fence as she warms up the new mare. Kenny, in the center of the ring, calls instructions. “More leg,” and she makes what to me but not to Kenny is some invisible adjustment. “Shorten the reins and give her some inside pressure.” For an hour they work and if, as Allie and Kenny agree at the end, there has been progress I do not see it. As she dismounts, patting the mare respectfully, Kenny joins me at the fence.
“Green as new corn but she’ll be a good ’un,” he says. “Got some big shows comin’ up this spring.” He takes a plain sheet of dog-eared paper from his shirt pocket. “Camden on March 14th, Greenville the weekend after.”
“What about April 17th?” I ask.
He consults t
he paper. “Yep. Big ’un. State fair in Columbia. Why, she gonna have a problem?”
“Possibly,” I say. “The St. Simeon is that weekend, but I don’t know if she’ll be going.”
“The Saint who?”
“Simeon. It’s a big dance.”
“Sheet,” drawls Kenny. “You can’t tell me she’s gonna pass up a show for a dance.”
“Things change, Kenny. She’s growing up.”
“Lemme tell you something,” and here his face assumes its frozen stillness, his country intellectual mood. “There’s a couple things women never outgrow, and one’s horses.”
“Yeah?” I say. “What’s the other?”
He looks away, but a trace of a grin is on his lips. “The need to be held,” he says softly.
I smile and raise my eyebrows. “I rest my case.”
In the car returning to Charleston, she asks if I have given more thought to her graduation present. “I read in the paper,” she says, “that United is advertising some deals to Seoul. So, are we going?”
“We have a more immediate concern. The St. Simeon is around the corner.”
She downshifts as we approach the main highway. “There’s not much to talk about, is there? The rules say I can’t go so that’s that.”
“Let’s forget the rules for a moment. Do you want to go?”
“Well, sure. The biologicals went, even though Steven took that slut Ashley Porter. You went when you were young. Granddaddy went. My best friends from school are going and the guy I’m dating will be there so why wouldn’t I want to go?”
“Suppose I could get the Society to grant an exception. How would you feel?”
“Do you mean, ‘Will I feel like a second class citizen?’ Yeah, I guess I might.” There is a pause as we both stare ahead. After several reflective moments, she says, “On second thought, Dad, it’s only a dance and it could cause trouble.”
“How so?”
“Charleston is still so conservative. Even if you get the exception a lot of people will resent my being there. Let’s just leave it alone.”