by John Warley
“How did you know where she goes to school?”
“Easy. I followed her.” She stares blankly, as if relating the barometric pressure.
“Hold it. You staked out my house?”
“For about twenty minutes. I drove past the day before and saw her car—her name is on the license plate—and guessed she would leave for school between 7:30 and 8:30.”
I am a bit dumbfounded. “Don’t I have some constitutional protection against that?”
Natalie smiles, drawing me again to her even, snowy teeth. “You might. I’ll have Susan research it.”
“You seem mighty casual about something I consider very serious.”
“What escapes me, Mr. Carter,” and here, her smile has vanished, “is why you are not taking her exclusion more seriously. I’m only trying to help.”
“I’m doing what can reasonably be done.”
“Which is?”
Which is none of your business. Her tone and demeanor today are non-threatening. To fall back upon my privilege of privacy is to appear defensive. “I have a meeting scheduled with the president of the Society. I intend to let her know that the Board’s decision is not acceptable.”
“Really?” Natalie seems mildly surprised, and interested.
“Absolutely,” I say with conviction.
“So what kind of ultimatum will you give her?”
“I’ve known this woman all my life. I don’t think ultimatums will get me very far with Margarite Huger.”
Natalie shakes her head as though clearing it. “Let me understand. You intend to let her know that the Board’s decision is unacceptable—”
“Positively.”
“Yet there are no consequences for its failure to change its mind?”
“Not exactly,” I say, scrambling. “The consequences are understood. People dig in their heels at ultimatums.”
“That’s true,” she acknowledges. “What are the consequences that are understood, therefore can go unmentioned?”
“Margarite will know.”
She nods, but it is a skeptical nod so full of doubt and hesitation that she could have as easily laughed.
“Look, Ms. Berman,” I say, guilty of the very defensiveness I wish to avoid, “this is a very delicate situation. It is delicate for the Society and for us, my family. Everyone is taking steps to insure that no lasting scars are inflicted. It’s called civility.”
“Call it what you will, Mr. Carter, I predict that your friends will not change their minds and that your daughter will not be granted an exemption from their stupid rule. If you accept that judgment and go peacefully, then you will minimize the lasting scars to one: your daughter. If that’s acceptable—”
“I told you it wasn’t.”
Our food arrives, and for a few minutes we turn to it as a device for turning away from each other. Jury selection is going as expected, she reports, with Swilling’s attorneys trying to impanel a black jury and the city’s attorneys seeking whites.
“I don’t know,” I muse. “This Swilling is such a slimeball that it wouldn’t shock me to see the blacks string him up. His customers are their kids.”
She cants her head to one side, squinting as though concentrating. “On the drug charges themselves, perhaps. But this is a civil claim against the police. They’ll have more empathy.”
“What would you do?” I ask. “If you were me, what would you say to Margarite tomorrow afternoon?”
“Honestly? I’d tell her that unless my daughter got an invitation, I’d sue not only her sacred society but her personally along with every other member of that Board, that I’d seek punitive damages under the Civil Rights Act, that I’d demand attorneys fees, and that I would spend every cent I had, and all I could borrow, to make sure that unless my daughter attended the ball there wouldn’t be any more.”
I stare at her. “That’s what I thought. Your opening bid would be scorched earth, kind of like our mutually assured destruction policy with the Ruskies a few years back.”
“It worked. They never attacked.”
“Yes, but JFK and Khrushchev didn’t live next door to each other and borrow sugar over the back fence.”
“You have to be prepared to give that up,” she says. “I know from personal experience.”
“Oh, did you nuke someone?”
She laughs, but with a hint of sadness and irony. “In a way, yes. When I was young, my parents filed suit against a country club that didn’t admit Jews.”
I sense she is about to elaborate when Scott Edwards, the court reporter from the Sentinel, approaches our table. Scott is a good reporter, but frustrated. He came here from Ohio in his mid-twenties expecting to be in Charleston only long enough to establish himself as a thoroughbred, to be wooed into the stables of a major daily with a fat contract for serious money. Ten years later he is still prowling the halls of the courts, waiting for his summons to the big time. He is tall, lanky, affable, with radish hair and the kind of cynical grin that rides well on the lips of reporters, who, with their questions, always seem to be mentally checking your answers against some invisible collateral source, even when they have only asked for the time.
“Hi, Natalie,” he says. “Coleman,” he acknowledges. I suggest he join us and he pirates a chair from the next table.
“Saw you upstairs,” he says to her. “What do you think?”
“By the script so far,” she says and he nods. The waitress approaches but he waves her off.
“Where’s your story?” she asks.
He shrugs laconically, his arms distending from the sleeves of his old tweed sport coat. “You read the background pieces we ran last week. Not too much sex appeal to jury selection. We’ll probably focus on the healthy percentage of whites who raised their hands when the judge asked if anyone had formed an opinion about the case from the news accounts.”
“Think they’re just dodging jury duty?” Natalie wants to know.
He nods. “Some of them, for sure. I got a couple to talk to me after they were excused. Swilling sure doesn’t want them on his jury anytime soon.”
Scott does not seem himself; more reticent than usual, occasionally looking at me with a cryptic glance that is somehow accusatorial and makes me nervous. He is pleasant enough, but his mind is not on the Swilling matter in spite of the discussion he and Natalie are holding. Perhaps it is merely professional boredom. He excuses himself with the need to phone in for messages.
“Nice man,” I say as he walks off. “You were about to tell me of a suit your parents brought.” I want to engage her on something other than my problem with the St. Simeon.
“I was twelve,” she says. “My father was teaching at the local university and a colleague there, a well-intentioned but obviously unaware Gentile, invited him to join the country club not realizing that there was an unwritten rule against Jews. He was blackballed in the membership committee so he sued.”
“What happened?”
“The club was very embarrassed, or said as much publicly. There were a number of prominent members, including some politicians and judges. None wanted the discrimination highlighted in the media, so a reasonably quick, quiet settlement was put together. The club admitted us and paid my father’s legal fees in exchange for his agreement not to publicize the terms of the deal.”
“A victory for scorched earth,” I say. She wears a distant look, remembering this episode, and her gaze is not altogether one of triumph and vindication. “Was the club nice?” I ask. “You’re going to tell me you led the swim team to victory that summer.”
“I only went once,” she admits. “Our reception was not what you would call warm.”
“Did your parents go often?”
“My father went once also. My mother never set foot in the place. The point is, when you’re right, you have to push regardless of the consequences. My parents believed that very strongly and instilled it in me.”
I am softening, in dismay. My awkward, unmarshaled, and directionl
ess anger at her is dissolving into an image of a swimming pool in which pink-skinned Christians disported playfully while a darker, slender young girl—a girl perhaps not unlike Allie—stood away from the crowd, immured in her isolation by her crusading parents as much as by the narrow-minded parents of those in the pool. No doubt I am dramatizing under the spell of the moment; after all, I have no idea if she ever went near the pool, or if they had a pool, but I swear I can see something not so far removed in Natalie’s melancholy. If her family’s admission was for her parents a moment of triumph, it was for her a vicarious loss as much as a win, and for the first time I intuit that the tough righter-of-wrongs sitting before me, finishing the last of her tuna fish sandwich, is underneath a very lonely person. It is only a theory, but has in me the heft and tactile feel of truth.
“May I call you Natalie?” I ask.
“Sure,” she says.
“Call me Coleman. In spite of my opinion of your tactics and your attempt to recruit my daughter, I do appreciate your interest in her.”
“Thank you. I can see I haven’t persuaded you, but I’ll be interested in the outcome of your meeting with the Huger woman. Will you let me know what happens?”
“Sure,” I say.
We each pay our checks and shake hands. She returns to the courtroom for the afternoon session and I walk back to my office thinking that my radar of first impressions, normally unerring, failed me where Natalie Berman was concerned. This nascent warmth is to last all of three-and-a-half hours, until the phone rings and my secretary puts through a call from Scott Edwards.
“Hi, Scott, what’s new since lunch?”
“Nothing on Swilling. I’m calling about the St. Simeon. We’re getting ready to run a story about your daughter’s exclusion and I wanted your comments.”
“Scott, you’re not serious,” I say, knowing full well from his tone that he is and thinking back to his peculiar demeanor at lunch, when he seemed to study me like a lab specimen.
“Yeah, there’s a lot of human interest in it; the lily-white St. Simeon, your family’s heritage, the Board’s refusal to grant a waiver. Good stuff.”
“Good, personal stuff,” I say. “I hope Julian will reconsider. It’s a bit awkward and my daughter doesn’t want to be spotlighted, nor do I want it for her.”
“She hasn’t done anything wrong. Julian brought it up in the editorial meeting last week and the people here think it’s news. Naturally, we don’t want to upset you—”
“But news is news.”
“Pretty much.”
“How did you learn of the vote?” I want to know.
“Sources,” Scott says.
“Sources I know you’re anxious to name.”
“Sources I am ready, willing and able to disclose were it not against the policy of my employer, as you well know.”
“Yeah,” I confess, seeing the brick wall form in front of him as we speak. “But Scott, I’m confused. Your beat is the courts.”
“True. That’s where it gets touchy. Frankly, the purpose of this call is twofold. First, I wanted to let you know we were running the article tomorrow morning …”
“I appreciate that.”
“… And secondly, to get your comments on a rumor that you’re about to file suit against the St. Simeon.”
“What! Who told you that?” I demand, forgetting we have just waltzed this box step moments before.
“As I said—”
“I know, I know.”
“I need a comment. Can you confirm?”
I take a breath. “I can deny, and if you print otherwise I’ll sue the Sentinel.” I am startled at my own assertiveness, marveling that my indignation has managed, of it’s own accord and with no conscious consultation in the council of my reason, to find its voice.
Scott seems startled as well, lost for words. After gravid silence, he says, “You’re denying you talked about the possibility of a suit?”
Natalie Berman. The forlorn image by the country club pool returns, but now she is demonic, fire in her eyes as she points and laughs.
“Scott, that’s like the old, ‘Are you still beating your wife?’ question; either answer is damning. Yes, I have discussed it but not in the context of actually doing it.”
“So the answer is yes.”
“No, I mean the answer is that I have no present intent to sue the Society.”
“So you’re not ruling it out,” he says significantly.
“Scott, listen to me. I’m not suing the Society. That’s all I have to say.”
“Fair enough. We’ll print it.”
“You do that,” I say, kicking myself as we hang up because I let him goad me into fluster. I immediately dial Natalie.
“She’s with a client, Mr. Carter.”
“I don’t give a damn who she’s with,” I hear myself saying. Maybe I’m getting the anger thing down after all. “Put me through. It’s an emergency.” After a minute on hold, Natalie’s voice wants to know what’s wrong.
“Don’t play coy,” I order. “Scott Edwards is running a story tomorrow and I have a strong suspicion where he got the material.”
“You’re wrong,” she says, firmly and controlled. “He called to ask if we had discussed a lawsuit and I was honest. I told him yes, we had discussed it but that you had not engaged me to file a suit on either your behalf or your daughter’s. That’s true, isn’t it?”
“You aren’t the source of his information about the Board’s vote?”
“Absolutely not,” she says, still in control.
“Then where … ?”
“I got the impression he’d been sitting on the exclusion story for a while. Maybe when he saw us having lunch together he made certain assumptions.”
I concede plausibility of this, but it brings me no comfort. I don’t trust Natalie. She’s lying to cover a treachery born of her single-minded determination to inject herself into this battle.
“Maybe,” I say, hanging up abruptly and thinking ahead to morning, when the Carter family’s rebuff will be spread on doorsteps and breakfast tables all over Charleston.
24
Margarite’s house is among the finest in Charleston. Sited on South Battery, grandly fronting the panorama of harbor beyond the seawall, its two large piazzas run east to west the length of the house, so wide and deep that the shuttered windows opening onto them are in shadow most of the day. I picture them always as I saw them first.
My parents took me to a party at the Hugers’ in midsummer. This was before Philip and I became friends, so I must have been eight or nine, walking between them with the trepidation common to children at adult affairs. As we approached, the sounds of a string quartet lilted among the throng of brightly clad guests on both upper and lower piazzas, and a benevolent evening breeze off the water fluttered the women’s skirts like multicolored flags. Black waiters with silver trays, held shoulder level, circulated with champagne. Men in white dinner jackets clustered here and there, smoke from cigarettes blown straight up in skyward exhale before the breeze took it the way of the skirts. The women seemed as fragile as hummingbirds, with pallid summer silks and chiffon glorious against pecan tans. Even now, in the dank dreariness of February, I think of this house as a monument to gaiety, and as I ring the front doorbell on the lower deserted piazza, I can still feel festive ghosts brushing past on their way to greet new arrivals or for one more pass at the shrimp. Of course, not all the ghosts are festive. Philip’s lurks here as well. On days when I came over here to hang out with him, which was almost every day, I used the back door, never knocking.
Daniel, a black man of seventy years and heroic bearing, answers the bell. He has run Margarite’s household staff for almost forty years. He beams when he sees who has come to call. We shake hands, both hands, but my urge to hug him is restrained by the formality he insisted on, even when I was a boy. He is dark, with a closely trimmed wreath of silver hair and, as I notice when he takes my coat and turns to lead me in, an ebony carapace of
smooth, unspoiled pate.
“So glad to see you, Mister Coleman. Miz Huger upstairs, in the Haiti room,” he says in his resonant Gullah. As I pass the formal living room, I eye Philip’s portrait above the mantel.
I mount the wide stairway. At the first landing is a Thomas Elfe table, in burnished mahogany and intricately fretted, on top of which is set an enormous Ming vase holding the largest poinsettias I have ever seen outside Mexico. Such appointments, so dramatic in appeal, are characteristic of Margarite’s elegant but unadorned style. Rather than packing her house with antiques, so cluttered that a single misstep occasions a call to her insurance carrier, she has selected over the years only the crown jewels, but these she displays in royal, spacious settings, allowing the elegance of each piece a throne to which homage can be properly paid.
The Haiti room remains the lone exception to this rule of restraint, and it is also her favorite. Years ago she and John purchased a villa in Port-au-Prince, and from frequent visits she has assembled a Caribbean oasis on the second floor. As I reach the top of the stairs she calls out to me.
She is seated on a divan in the French sleigh-bed style, surrounded by cumulus pillows. Dressed casually in jeans and a flannel shirt, she reaches up to clasp my hand. I take a wicker chair and the tropical ambiance of the room infects me at once. Every space is filled with an artifact or memento of what she calls, with proprietary pride, “My island.” Between us is a cocktail table of cedar, not actually a table but a box painted on five sides with animals lurking in dense flora. A glass top protects the oils, and on this rests Gingerbread Houses, Haiti’s Endangered Species. Two of the intricate original line drawings, featured in the book and done by the famous Anghelen, hang framed on the wall behind her.
To my right along another wall is a long sideboard, on which stands out from the collective clutter an iron sculpture by Brierre, “The Expulsion from Eden,” and three progressively smaller antique olive jars, originally used as storage vessels aboard ships bound from Europe. There is a photograph of Margarite and John, smiling and relaxed, toasting each other in the bar of the Oloffson Hotel.