A Southern Girl: A Novel

by John Warley

  “Thank you, Margarite,” I say as she takes her place at the table with the others. “Let me begin by telling you all how much I appreciate your accommodating what I know is an unusual request.” With the exception of Doc Francis, they return imperceptible smiles with a collective nod that says, “Yes, we’re very busy and yes, this is not our normal procedure but we’re all nice people.” Doc Francis stares at me, stone-faced.

  “I think you all know or have met my daughter Allie. She is in her senior year of high school, off to Princeton in the fall. Obviously, she is adopted.” The room is in total silence. The absence of windows insulates us from whatever street noise may be generated outside.

  “Allie came to us when she was four months old. We know very little about her background, other than that she was placed in a Korean orphanage before being brought to the States.” I glance toward Adelle for support. I am determined to keep this request on a plane above paternal sentimentality.

  “Allie’s record is an outstanding one. She is salutatorian of her class, a cheerleader, an excellent soccer and basketball player, and a gifted equestrian who has won many honors throughout the state.” Margarite nods emphatically.

  “Beyond her accomplishments, she is very much a child of this community. She has lived here most of her life and knows no other. We instilled in her what we believe to be the best values reflected by our city, and she has learned those lessons well. She considers herself a Charlestonian and we, or I, consider her one too.” Doc Francis has turned his head toward a bookcase, lost in thought and still unsmiling.

  “Of course, I know the rules. Margarite alluded to my family’s involvement in the Society and we like to think we have contributed to what it is today. I would not want to do, nor ask you to do, anything that undermined what St. Simeon stands for. As we all know, the Ball is a rite of passage. For most of us, it marked our entry into the social fellowship we value so much. It is badge of belonging, and I think, as Elizabeth thought while she was with us, that this child belongs as much as anyone who has attended the Ball. For that reason, I am asking you to grant her an exemption from the usual requirement and extend her an invitation.”

  My eyes sweep over their faces, searching for clues. Adelle flashes a “well-done” grin that gives me heart. Sandy Charles has been following every word with rapt attention, and I think I detect in her the subtle communion of spirits. She seems with me.

  Charlotte, on the other hand, is firmly opposed if her pursed lips and general scowl mean anything, and I think they mean all. She has not opened her mind a fraction of an inch, and the opinion she walked in with is the one she’ll rain upon them when I leave.

  Clarkson Mills, my client, gives me a manly wink of encouragement with the eye closest to Ohio. Doc Francis maintains an inscrutable sullenness, his head now inclined toward the table. Jeanette Wilson seems as intent on the others as I am, her eyes darting furtively around to gauge reactions. She is a pretty woman, but with a refined sleaze I cannot read.

  Margarite stands and resumes her place beside me, turning toward her committee. “Are there any questions of Coleman before we let him go?” No one moves. Stillness merges with the silence to produce an uncomfortable hiatus that Margarite adroitly hastens to fill. “Fine,” she says, again facing me, “then we’ll leave it at that. Let us talk this over and I’ll call you in the morning.”

  I leave with a curious indecisiveness. No rookie at counting noses, I know this is probably going to be four-to-three, one way or the other. I usually win when it’s close; perhaps some kind of favorable mathematical probability follows the ability to negotiate well. But in the parking lot, I remind myself of the very real possibility that it will go the other way.

  I return home. Allie is in her room studying.

  “How’d it go?” she asks as I enter and flop down on the bed.

  “Just fine,” I say. “I left so they could talk but I think we’ll come out on top.” She smiles and waits, expectantly. “Of course, it could go against us,” I continue. “And sweetheart, if it does, I don’t want you to take it personally.”

  “I won’t,” she says, then quickly turns back to her work on the desk.

  “Margarite said she would let me know tomorrow, but I have a sneaky hunch Adelle will call tonight. It never hurts to have a spy in the enemy camp.”

  “I guess not,” she says indifferently, not looking up.

  At eleven the phone rings. I have just turned out the downstairs lights and locked the doors. I answer in the kitchen, expecting to hear Adelle’s voice. But it is Margarite.

  “Coleman, I’m ever so sorry for calling you at this hour. I hope you weren’t in bed.”

  “Getting ready to go. You aren’t just getting out of your meeting?”

  “Actually, I just got home, but I’m very upset and thought it best to call tonight.” A pause.

  “Then I take it the Board voted no.”

  “I’m so sorry, embarrassed, and mad all at once. I hoped we could prevail. You made a splendid appeal. I wish I had a recording of it.”

  “But obviously not strong enough.”

  “It’s a tough bunch,” she says.

  “I figured it would be close; one vote either way.”

  “One reason the meeting lasted so long was because there is little protocol for handling a request like this. We had to discuss ground rules, voting procedures, all those things, and then the merits, of course.”

  “What can you tell me?”

  After an audible hitch in her voice, she says, “Hardly anything. As you can imagine, this whole thing is quite sensitive. Everyone likes you and admires Allie so no one wanted to step on any toes. You can understand.”

  “Sure,” I say, trying to sound philosophical.

  “We voted by secret ballot and agreed to keep the deliberations confidential.”

  “I guess that explains why Adelle hasn’t called.”

  “She’s in a difficult spot.”

  “She needn’t worry,” I say. “I’ll respect the confidence.”

  “I knew you would. Oh, I just feel terrible about this whole thing. I’ve half a mind to resign from the Society in protest.”

  “Don’t be rash, Margarite. And thanks for everything. I know you did your best.”

  Allie is asleep. I’ll tell her in the morning. I go to bed, but not to sleep until past 2 A.M., when a vision of the Board floats in with Philip, still alive, still youthful, inexplicably seated among them. Doc Francis sits defiantly, arms crossed. Charlotte Hines shakes her head with fat, imperial firmness, an arrogant twist to her lips. The image wakes me. Not one vote from among the four possibilities; so much for my golden tongue. As little as I prepared Allie for rejection, I prepared myself even less and here, in the hush of the bedroom, my disappointment takes hold.

  Things always look bleak in the dark, I remind myself. In months during Elizabeth’s illness and following her death, I spent literally hundreds of hours staring at this ceiling in the quietest times of the night, when the city sounded the same with the windows opened or closed. I grieved. I worried, first for her, and then mostly for the kids. I’ve lived long enough to know that the world is not necessarily a fair place to all people at all times, and that if in the global, overarching sense some rough justice is at work, it is very rough indeed. My anger at Elizabeth’s fate has been tempered by statistics. A certain number of women suffer severe illness every year. Of those, a predictable if growing number recover, fully or partially, and an equally predictable number with the most egregious diseases do not. Who am I, who was she, to insist that such math work only to our advantage? Even my tempered anger lacked focus. Precisely who was I to blame? But tonight has been different. This vote wasn’t a disease and it wasn’t death, and no matter how bleak things look in the dark my rejection by the Board is but a library fine when compared to Elizabeth’s ordeal. Still, I feel anger beginning to build, perhaps because this result, unlike hers, was entirely preventable. Maybe that explains it. Cancer is
such an anonymous, impersonal enemy, while here sat at least four people I know. I drift off just before daylight, with one thought that I suspect will be with me when I awake: my daughter is going to that Ball.

  21

  Charleston has been the New World incubator of Carters from the day the boat landed in 1670. My mental movie of that landing has been spliced together frame by frame from genealogies, family lore and later, in the second half of the nineteenth century, grainy photographs depicting an unblinking succession of grim-jawed, mustachioed men flanked by cautious women and children in sailor suits. Early in that imagined film, Thomas Carter, the original émigré, walks to the head of the gangway after seven months at sea, surveys the April splendor sprawled before him and his ninety-two fellow passengers, then, turning to Captain Brayne, asks if the brandy that has been under lock and key for the last six weeks can now be liberated.

  I forgive Thomas’s initial indifference to the uncut gem which was to become Charleston, set exquisitely in its raw state between the tines of the soon-to-be-named Ashley and Cooper Rivers. Evidently, such indifference had evaporated shortly after his boots bogged in the marshes of shrimp-stuffed Old Town Creek, where the party came ashore. Thomas became a successful merchant, grim-jawed and mustachioed, and never left, as few who followed him have left. And, his atavistic love of brandy has endured to the current year, 1996.

  From earliest memory, Charleston has beckoned me like a porch light, friendly and nurturing and visible from anywhere. Returning from summer camp in western North Carolina after two weeks that seemed like two years in the rock-kicking amble of prepubescent time, I scanned the tops of loblolly pines for a first reassuring glimpse of the Cooper River Bridge, its silver spans arching down like a pair of maternal arms poised to scoop me up. From the bridge looking left I saw the steeples of St. Michael’s and St. Philip’s, to the right the main turret of The Citadel, and like the baseball cards and 45 rpm records in my room, they were right where I had left them.

  At the University of Virginia I pledged Sigma Nu, and for weeks at a time I could deceive myself that I no longer lived in Charleston, that I had a new life and a new home and a fresh family of fraternity brothers. But even from Charlottesville I’d see the porch light, the aureole of the Holy City. During the years in New Hampton the light dimmed, flickered, but never died, and when I returned it brightened in its welcoming arc, within which I could be certain of my place, my history.

  But in the week following the Board vote, I feel for the first time the slightest distancing from people and things once as close to me and as comfortable as an old bathrobe. The city looks the same; the palmettoes along Broad Street still exude an air of stately serenity, the church bells toll the hour more or less on schedule, the black women make and sell their sweetgrass baskets in the same spot near the courthouse. But at my office, in shops or around the neighborhood, I meet people I have known for years with a reserve more characteristic of a visitor.

  I must be imagining this estrangement. Lifelong relationships are not altered by a handful of people taking a vote on what, in the great scheme of things, can be counted a trivial matter by most. Even at the St. Simeon, a Ball is merely a ball. And yet, as I greet innocent old friends, untainted employees at Carter & Deas, and even waiters in restaurants who have never heard of the Society, I sense alienation, as though the Board’s decision embodied an ecumenical verdict by the city as a whole that I have failed a fundamental fidelity. By loyally asserting Allie’s claim to go, I have breached a living code of consideration owed to members of my circle: I put them on the spot. The case Sarah mentioned, that of adopted Peter Devereux, who looked so much like Kate, presented the Devereuxs with the same dilemma. In deciding not to request exemption, they surrendered to the communal abhorrence, strong in these genteel parts, against forcing embarrassing confrontations. As a devout St. Simeon, I am expected to know the rules of eligibility, and to challenge them, as I have done, is to spread across several dutiful backs the load I should, in their view, shoulder alone. No one has said that to me, but it echoes with a crystal chime of certainty.

  Over the weekend following the vote I bump, literally, into Sandy Charles in the drugstore, the only Board member I have seen since my rejection. Predictably awkward, Sandy makes overly gracious gestures, yielding more awkwardness as I try to shuttle between a pale nonchalance I do not feel and nods of polite understanding, summoned hurriedly to avert a confrontation beside foot hygiene aids.

  “We all realize,” she says as I idly finger a talc, “how much this meant to Elizabeth.”

  That comment offers insight into the social contract in this city. Having declined to take one for the team by foisting upon the Board members a decision they do not wish to make, I must now be inoculated against my own (forgivable) rashness by a face-saving attribution to Elizabeth, whom neither Sandy Charles nor any other member fears confronting in the pharmacy, at the theater, on the cocktail circuit, or at any of two dozen other flash points.

  And, contradicting Sandy will be difficult. Allie’s attending the St. Simeon did mean a lot to Elizabeth. She viewed the Society as one of a handful, a generous handful, of Charleston heirlooms. The Nathaniel Russell House, Rainbow Row, and the old market were others. Not being a native of the city, she brought with her an outsider’s detached appreciation for that which makes Charleston unique. For her, indignation evoked by Allie’s exclusion from the St. Simeon would have been no less, but no more profound, had she been barred at the threshold of a venerable residence on the candlelight tour of historic homes. Her bench mark reckoning, that of, “My daughter will go anywhere,” sighted along an arcing emotional azimuth bent by maternal zeal, and that zeal overran and subsumed the identity of the particular barricade. It is fortunate for Sandy Charles that it is not Elizabeth to whom she makes her stuttering explanations in the drug store.

  Which sounds, I must confess, as though I am less outraged than I should be. Why hasn’t the incipient anger felt in my bedroom on the night of the vote erupted into wrath? Why haven’t I heaved a can of Pedisooth at Sandy?

  The answer is grounded in my nature. I am decidedly non-confrontational, odd for a lawyer but true for me. Had Sandy blown up my mailbox and arrogantly mailed me the debris, I would not go to war in the drugstore.

  Also, I am only so surprised by the answer I got from the Board. The point Sarah made is not without validity; we knew the rules seventeen years before when we adopted. To some members of the Society, my situation is analogous to another with which we are all familiar. A club to which a number of us belong has a long-standing rule requiring gentlemen to wear jackets and ties after 6:00 P.M. in the main dining room. The penchant for golfers to arrive for dinner in their casual knits and spiked shoes after several soggy hours at the nineteenth hole brought about this rule many years before. A friend of mine, Lawrence Hess, brought as a frequent guest a cousin from France who, being quite European, habitually wore a turtleneck under his coat to dinner. The management politely explained the rule, which seemed to affront Lawrence on behalf of his cousin. He became indignant, causing a scene one evening at the reservations desk by insisting that Cousin Marcel wore imported cashmere turtlenecks, that they were quite acceptable among the bishops and barons with whom he mingled on the Continent, and that the club’s insistence on a tie was “provincial,” all of which the manager acknowledged while apologetically pointing out that the rule required a tie. I remember a conversation with Hess shortly thereafter in which I hinted with impatience that Hess was undermining the standards of the club. For all her empathy, I sense the same impatience in Sandy Charles.

  At Carter & Deas, Harris comes into my office and flops down on the couch. Although himself a St. Simeon, Harris is unaware of the Board’s action. He has no court appearances today, so pinstripes are replaced by dark wool slacks, a gray herringbone jacket, and a tie resplendent with maroon ducks. In all our years together, he has maintained the unflappable amiability that makes him so easy to be around. He c
rosses his legs and looks at me soberly.

  “Counselor,” he says, “I have just come from lunch with the city attorney, your friend and mine, Carlton Middleton III.”

  “How was the food?” I ask dryly, knowing that despite his normally healthy appetite, Harris’s mind is on business.

  “The city has revised its estimate of the legal fees it will have to fork out on the Performing Arts Center.”

  “Oh, no,” I say.

  “Upward.” An impish grin flashes. “It just makes me sick to think of all those tax dollars, yours and mine, flooding into the account of Carter & Deas once we’re awarded this contract.”

  “What’s the revised figure?”

  He raises his swollen fingers, adjusting his glasses leisurely for dramatic pause. “Three mil, up from two point five.”

  “Why the increase?”

  “Balking landowners with visions of retirement. The condemnation work is going to require some quick-takes that will keep us in court for months.”

  “Did Carlton have a time frame?”

  “He checked with the mayor’s office this morning. It’s on Council’s agenda for the February meeting.”

  “Great. The votes are still there?”

  “You betcha,” he says, nodding. “Only, Cathcart has not given up. He’s been wining and dining councilmen almost as much as I have.”

  “With three million on the table, I can’t say I blame him. Plus, with only two firms in the running, he figures the odds are no worse than fifty-fifty.”

  “Oh, but they are,” Harris assures. “We have something they don’t have.”

  “Of course. We have a two vote margin on council and the backing of the city attorney from the moment he realized this project would swamp his staff.”

  “Aside from those,” he says with a smirk, “we have me.”

  I clear my throat. “Indeed we do.”