A Southern Girl: A Novel

by John Warley

  Her pleas are genuine. I have to work at holding my composure. All too strange that Margarite would stoop to treachery over such a matter. Does her self-image as a conscience-compelled egalitarian mean so much? If Adelle’s implications about the debate are true, my gut feel of a narrow win, so strong with me the night I addressed them at the Hall, was on target after all. Once more I find myself a victim of my inability to attribute bad motives to good people.

  I have been told that among the qualities contributing to my reputation as the Great Conciliator is the respect I habitually accord the opinions and desires of warring factions. Those generous souls assume this trait to be, in me, the perfection of a practice fundamental to my art, like putting to golf. They imagine me sitting in protracted negotiations reigning in my prejudices with the strength and skill of a consummate teamster, whose arms have been flexed and muscled by the repeated weight of raising his judgments above his biases. “Of course Coleman knows who’s right,” these admirers tell themselves. “He’s just allowing the other side to have its say.”

  Yes and no. Certainly a mediator who wears his bias on his lapel will shortly be looking for other work. Undeniably, an aura of impartiality is oxygen to the beast. But such an aura need not be the product of a rigid discipline nor iron practice; it can, as with me, be sincere. This much I have learned: a bad person is sometimes right on the facts. I grudgingly acknowledge this truth, and when I happen upon such instances, either professionally or in private life, I remind myself that some higher justice, if it exists, will sort it out later.

  In a good person is found, whether right or wrong on the facts but at all times, a pulse of compassion and the willingness to be ruled by it, though his or her worldly interests lie elsewhere. My asset is my most glaring liability: I assume all people to be good. It is as primal in me as a salmon swimming to spawn. It is not a judgment; to persist in demonstrable illusion is the rankest naivety. But instinctively, in negotiations or my personal affairs, I feel for the pulse, at times probing beyond prudence in the expectation of its beat and often, particularly with someone close, willing to ascribe its absence to my own feeble powers of detection. What others credit to equanimity can be my stubborn refusal to give up on the corpse.

  Elizabeth, on the other hand, was sprinkled with the salt of cynicism. In her, a latent mistrust lingered, predisposing her to guard her valuables and lock her doors against those untested souls she knew only casually. She was right more often than not, and when wrong took it less to heart, so that when someone she had initially been leery of proved worthy, she accepted it as gift, a pelf of unexpected pleasure. I miss the balance she brought to our collective assessments. Had she been in my place the night of the vote, she would have viewed that Board through her peculiar telescope, one hand firmly on her purse.

  Margarite is a good person. I have known her too long and too well to believe otherwise. It will be a struggle against my nature to find in her character the infidelity suggested by Adelle, brought to view by a motive so impelled as to arrest the pulse I have felt often. I also lack Elizabeth’s charity when proved wrong. I am devastated.

  25

  Today has been one of those marathons, beginning at 7:00 A.M. with a breakfast meeting at the Marriott. Some doctors are putting together a limited partnership to construct a medical complex in Mt. Pleasant and have hired me to build the paper fortress assuring them maximum return, minimum risk, and tax liability $1.00 above the IRS’s profile triggering audits.

  Doctors are a strange breed where money is concerned. They have it, of course, despite in many of them business judgment so erratic that were the same discretion to color their practices they would kill more people a year than lightning, floods, and drunk drivers combined. Several of the younger ones are “struggling” on three hundred grand a year. Over orange juice, one confides that his malpractice premium fell due last month, causing him to miss the payment on his Porsche. “Actually, my wife’s Porsche; the payment on mine is current.”

  After the docs break up I rush to a meeting of Junior Executives, an organization doing some good work among the minority youths of our city. Some business acquaintances got me involved two years ago. The kids organize and run their own businesses as tyro capitalism, while my senior friends and I look over their shoulders. I do this as part of my pro bono work. I like it. One of our kids, Anthell, started a T-shirt operation two years ago and it will be a close call as to whether he will be able to afford college—not the tuition, he already has that banked, but whether he can afford the opportunity cost college for him represents.

  I break away from the Juniors early to make a 10:30 meeting at the office. Russell Evans, a long time client, is three months in arrears on his mortgage and about to lose his home. We review his finances, I make some calls and we buy another month, during which he will attempt to accelerate or borrow against an expected tax refund. At 12:00, Russell departs and so do I, for a Rotary meeting I would joyfully skip were I not today’s program. My twenty minute talk on the strengths of the Junior Executives program is received well. My afternoon is no lighter, with appointments beginning at 1:00 and ending at 4:30.

  With a cup of coffee and my feet propped on my desk, I at last have a moment to read the morning paper. The Soviet Union continues its plummet, sheering off states as it falls. The Swilling jury has been impaneled; four blacks and two whites. His lawyers have called him, the perjuring little pervert, as their first witness. Scott Edwards reports that his lies are expected to take two days to relate. The Chicago Bulls are still flying high in the NBA, leading their division by a mile. I am about to turn to the classifieds when Harris’s voice comes over the intercom.

  “Coleman, we have a problem. Can you come to my office … now.”

  Harris’s office is decorated in early Audubon. There are stuffed ducks mounted on the walls, numbered prints of geese in flight purchased, I should say ransomed, at inebriated Ducks Unlimited auctions, decoys of mallards, widgeons, and woods, photographs of hunting trips in which he and his fellow assassins display their limits, enough ducks to denude Nebraska. The only paper weight on his desk is a lead crystal swan.

  As I enter, Harris is sitting behind his desk in a serious frame of mind. Because his client chairs are high-backed, I am not immediately conscious of another presence. His eyes dart to the chair before him and I now see Carlton Middleton, the city attorney, seated with his frail legs crossed effeminately and his delicate hands folded in his lap.

  “Hi, Carlton, don’t get up,” I say, bending slightly to shake his hand. He greets me only with a smile that is too broad. I take the companion client chair beside him.

  Harris, nodding toward him, says “Carlton has come here as a friend. Tell him, Carlton.”

  “Council meets tomorrow night,” he says in his sibilant lisp. “You may have seen the agenda in the paper.”

  “I read it not fifteen minutes ago,” I reply.

  “Then you know that they were scheduled to approve you fellows on the Arts Center legal work.”

  “Were?” I say, catching a whiff of the ill wind Harris has been inhaling.

  “In their work session last week I detected some wobble in a couple of councilmen who have been solidly with us. I did some checking and because I’m no longer confident we would win a showdown vote I thought it best to delay. I recommended to the mayor that they table it. I told him my office needed more time.”

  “Harris told me that Cathcart hasn’t given up lobbying on this. Do you think he got to them?”

  There is an awkward stillness as he and Harris exchange glances. Harris drops his gaze, fidgeting with the edge of his desk blotter.

  “I don’t think Cathcart has made headway,” says Carlton softly.

  “Then what?” I ask. Harris isn’t looking at me.

  “Let’s put it this way,” Carlton continues. “There is some concern in City Hall that you may be contemplating litigation against the city.”

  “I am?”

  �
�Coleman, are you aware of the fact that the city chartered the St. Simeon Society? Granted, it was in 1766, but it happened.”

  “I was not aware of that,” I admit.

  Carlton steeples his fingertips near his chin, his elbows resting on the padded arms of his chair. “Nor was I,” he says. “But it’s my job to be on the lookout for things that could involve the city in court and after I read Scott Edwards’s column about your troubles with the Society, I checked it out. Sure enough …”

  “I’m sorry, Carlton,” I say. “I’m at the tail end of a very long day and none of this is fitting together.”

  “Very simple,” says Harris, suddenly glancing up. “The city chartered the Society. Any suit against the St. Simeon will inevitably bring the city in as an additional defendant. The city is reluctant to have as its attorneys on the Arts Center project a law firm, one of whose senior partners is suing it.” He looks to Carlton. “Does that pretty well sum it up?”

  Carlton nods, and now both his and Harris’s eyes are riveted on me.

  “Ridiculous,” I say. “I denied any intent to sue anyone and Edwards printed it.”

  “But you left the door open, or he did.”

  “He did,” I say flatly.

  “Also,” says Carlton, “you’ve been seen around the courthouse with that ACLU woman. That hasn’t done much to reassure anyone.”

  “The most expensive lunch I’ve ever eaten,” I say weakly. “So what do you want me to do?”

  Harris speaks. “Why not call Scott Edwards, tell him that as a result of his article there seems to be some lingering confusion as to your position, and that you categorically deny any intent to sue the St. Simeon now or at any time in the future. Tell him you’ll sign an affidavit. Hell, make it as strong as you can.”

  “That would do it,” says Carlton. “That would dispel the rumors, which I don’t mind saying are rampant.”

  “Are you sure this isn’t some smoke being blown by Cathcart in hopes of starting a fire?” I ask.

  “Well,” says Harris, “if it is, it’s working. By tomorrow night we would have had the contract and now we won’t.”

  Carlton interjects. “Cathcart has been beating it like a drum, I’ll admit. To be totally upfront with you, it was he who suggested I research the relationship between the Society and the city. He wants this contract in the worst way.”

  “So do we,” says Harris. “And too much work has gone into it to let it slip through our fingers now. Right, Coleman?”

  I nod but remain silent.

  “Any chance of council awarding this tomorrow night?” Harris wants to know. Carlton shakes his head, a quick flutter. “Then we have some time. We’ll get right on it.”

  We rise and shake hands. Harris walks Carlton to his door, his meaty arm slung around Carlton’s slender shoulder, stressing how appreciative Carter & Deas is for the continued support of the city attorney’s office. As Carlton retreats down the hall, Harris closes the door and turns to me.

  “Well, counselor, why don’t we get Scott Edwards on the phone right now?” Harris is not a procrastinator.

  “Let me think about it,” I say.

  “What’s to think about? We’ve got to clear this up.”

  “I’ve got to clear it up,” I correct, “and I need to think when I’m not so tired.” A half truth. Although fatigued, I am thinking fine. I am also thinking delay.

  “Old buddy,” he says, “you can stew on this next week, next month and next year but it isn’t going to change the outcome. Let’s call Edwards.”

  “No,” I say firmly.

  “Now Coleman, listen to reason, for Chrissake. I’ve wined and dined those councilmen until I’ve committed damn near every menu in Charleston to memory. The firm’s future is on the line here.”

  “What about Allie’s future?”

  He looks at me, stunned, like I’ve just changed the shape of my nose in his presence. “It’s a fucking dance!” he exclaims.

  “You’re going,” I say, my voice diminishing as his rises.

  “Yes, I’m going,” he rasps.

  “Carolyn’s going?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m going, Steven’s going, Adelle, Christopher—they’re going.”

  Harris shakes his head, exasperated. “It’s still a dance against a multimillion dollar contract. I’ll give her my invitation.”

  “You’re only saying that because you can go.”

  “Maybe so,” he says. “Look, I’m sorry for losing my temper. Take it home, sleep on it. We’ll figure something out.”

  “Yeah,” I say meekly, “I’ll sleep on it.”

  “In the meantime I’m going to find out for myself what’s going on in City Hall.” Harris sets his jaw in a way I recognize. He will stalk those councilmen like he stalks ducks; patiently, and early in the morning.

  I drift back to my office, my weariness unrelieved and my spirits lower than they have been since the night of the vote. On my desk rests a folder labeled “St. Simeon Loophole,” a puny folio indeed. Recent nights and a complete Saturday devoted to research have yielded scant information. When great-ancestor Alston and his cohorts decided to take it underground, they buried it.

  My probe began at the offices of the Sentinel, in its archives room. The room is not the same one I visited, many years ago now, to find the photograph of my irate grandfather giving F.D.R. hell. I examined microfiche until the room spun around me. As in most cities, Charleston’s daily paper has survived a forced march through rugged terrain littered with the corporate corpses of its predecessors. In the journalism thicket of the 1800s, competing publications waged a war of attrition where survival demanded, as with the Sentinel in 1896, one straggler to climb upon the back of another.

  The records dating from that merger are complete, but virtually silent as to the Society. Indexed references to “St. Simeon Society, The” revealed decade-long gaps during which, if indexed accurately, there was no mention at all. The sole exception to this remarkable lacunae were posthumous acknowledgments of membership, as predictable as a mortality table, found in the obituaries of Charleston’s elite. So faithful were these recitations that I soon developed, during frivolous moments of flagging concentration, a mental image of these dead members greeting one another in the great beyond, escorting newcomers from the Pearly Gates through a divergent canopy, hunter green in color, to the waterfront corner of heaven restricted to St. Simeons.

  But the Sentinel search was not wholly fruitless. In 1923, the paper’s endorsed candidate for mayor was attacked by his opponent as an aristocrat out of touch with the people. Exhibit A in the opponent’s indictment? The mayor-elect’s alleged membership in St. Simeon. In 1934, a fire broke out in the kitchen when the caterer for the Ball placed a cardboard crate too near a flaming gas jet on the stove. Two fire trucks reported, one fireman quickly subdued the blaze, and the guests, who had crowded into the parking lot, returned to the building without missing, as the tongue-in-cheek report stated, “two foxtrots and a tango.” In keeping with the treasured conspiracy of silence, the paper divulged no names of attendees.

  The years prior to 1896 were tough sledding. No indexes exist for fallen standards like the Charleston Mercury, the American, or the City Gazette. Where old copies survive, there is no alternative to reading them cover to cover, an impossible task given my time. No book or treatise on the Society has been published, so I cannot go to school on the labors of some historian. The St. Simeon is like a giant luxury liner, regal and imposing and drawing volumes of water in displacement, but wake-less minutes after passing, so that no one not on her decks can prove she exists.

  The library of the Historical Society abounds with genealogies, the kind which fascinated Allie as a girl. Their authors, driven from the first recorded sentence toward the foregone conclusion that they indeed hail from a long and storied line, are eager to recount any brushing their ancestors had with the St. Simeon. I examined eight or ten of these during an inclement Saturday
but found nothing to aid my quest for a loophole. In the Lesesne tome, I learned of a claim for the record in consecutive attendance: fifty-four years by one Dr. Rawlston Lesesne between 1871 and 1924, but in that no attendance records are kept I would not be surprised to find the same boast in several others had I the time to read them. I left the library tired, discouraged, and with my nose firmly pressed to the marmoreal surface of an impenetrable wall.

  Today, the day following Carlton’s visit, has been less frenetic. I have had time to read the paper and eat lunch. It is mid-afternoon when I return to the office. Dottie hands me a message to call Leslie McKeller, who reports on City Hall for the Sentinel.

  “That’s got to be about the council meeting tonight,” I say, handing the message back. “Harris is handling it.”

  “That’s what I told her,” says Dottie. “She insisted she needed to talk with you.”

  “Is Harris in?”

  “I saw him twenty minutes ago.”

  I walk the hall to Harris’s end. He is just completing a call from an insurance adjuster, politely declining another low-ball offer to settle a serious personal injury. They’ll end up giving Harris his demand. He knows it, they know it, and I know it. His approach is simplicity itself: set a reasonable figure and don’t budge. I once saw him turn down a $50,000 offer because it was a thousand short of the minimum he told them he had to have. That case was twelve years ago and sent a strong message to the insurers, underlined and capitalized when the jury brought in a verdict for $178,000. I stop in front of his desk, feeling the stare of every waterfowl in the room.

  “What do you make of this?” I ask, dropping the message on his desk.

  He rubs his chin as he thinks. “I better return this one.”

  “That was my reaction, but Dottie says she asked specifically for me.”

  He reaches for the phone, jabbing the numbers with his meaty fingers. “Leslie McKeller, please … Leslie? Harris Deas. You all ready for the council meeting tonight? … Yeah, I’ll be there. Listen, I’ve just been handed a message for Coleman to call you and I was wondering if there is anything I can do to help. I’m our point man on the Arts Center; I’m assuming it has something to do with that.”