by John Warley
“My suggestion. Take her to the land of her birth,” he urges me by way of farewell. “I could call my brother. He knows the city now. And the language. He would be veddy kind to my customers.”
“Yes, Dad, the land of my birth,” she echoes as we wave good-bye and walk out onto the sidewalk.
Daylight is failing among the buildings as the sun begins its descent. Headlights are coming on among the few cars plying King Street and the neon signs of merchants are humming in the twilight calm, the sidewalks strangely deserted and the street lamps softening encroaching shadows.
“Can we stop by Mom’s grave?” she asks as if seized by a sudden inspiration, and before I can respond she turns.
“We’ll have to hurry,” I say, picking up my pace to catch her.
We walk north on King Street, turn east at Queen, then north again on Church to the cemetery across from St. Philip’s. They will lock the gates soon. We hustle past the tomb and monument to John C. Calhoun toward the back wall and the Carter family plot. The carpet of brown grass shows no sign of spring. We are the only visitors.
Elizabeth’s headstone is modest, engraved with her name and the dates of her birth and death as she instructed. Nearing, we slow our pace. I am comfortable here now, although in the weeks following the funeral I left church by a side door in order to avoid looking at the mournful magnolia tree that stands near the wall. When I visit with the children, we seldom say much, each preferring the solitude of thoughts commingled with the reinforcing presence of each other. But this afternoon, Allie is talkative.
“The job looks like it will work out,” she says. “My leaving for Princeton on the fifteenth will leave him a little short for a couple of weeks but I guess that’s a slow period anyway.”
The cemetery is well groomed, but several brown magnolia leaves have fallen onto the plot and I stoop to collect them.
“I’ve got an idea,” I say, stretching for a leaf near the headstone. “For graduation, how about a trip to San Francisco? You’ve told me how much you want to see it.”
“That would be nice,” she concedes, “but it’s not my first choice.”
Allie is standing at the foot of the plot, her arms folded and her head inclined toward the marker. From the corner of my eye I see her staring at the engraved name, but whether her thoughts are of me, of Elizabeth, or of herself, I cannot tell. Nearby, a sapling stands naked of a single leaf, its stark branches adorned only by a sparrow perched forlornly near the top. The church bells toll a reminder that the caretaker will soon come to lock the gates. The sparrow flees.
“Dad, if I died could I be buried here, in St. Philip’s?”
“Of course,” I say, not positive but unaware of anything that would prevent it. “What an odd question.”
“Not really,” she says. “Think about it.” The morning’s distance has returned, and she seems unconcerned whether I think about it or not.
“Sweetheart, the St. Simeon isn’t directing this at you personally. The fact that it never makes exceptions shows that this has nothing to do with who you are and everything to do with clinging to who they are.”
“I don’t think,” she says, her eyes still focused on the name, “Mom would want us to take this lying down.”
“Is that what we’re doing?” I ask, my voice betraying my own doubts.
“Aren’t we?” The royal “we,” but the message unmistakable.
“No. I’m still looking for an answer. Margarite is looking as well. Something may turn up.”
I cannot bring myself to discuss Margarite. From the moment of Allie’s arrival, she has gone out of her way to indulge her in the unique displays of affection usually bestowed by adoring aunts. At her Christening, she gave a sterling silver cross Allie still wears. When Allie had the measles, Margarite came by daily with ice cream and to read stories. Allie played T-ball, and Margarite rarely missed a single chaotic inning. After her confirmation at St. Philip’s, Margarite threw an elaborate reception for all the communicants, but in that she had never previously given one, and has not since, I feel certain that it was a gesture of generosity directed exclusively at my daughter. No, I must preserve Margarite’s image as a beneficent godmother; anything less would hurt Allie beyond measure.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about Natalie Berman,” she says. “The paper says you’ve given up the idea of suing, although I know you never thought seriously about it anyway.”
It occurs to me in the diminishing twilight that all day she has been choosing her time and her words; that this trip to Elizabeth’s grave is not spontaneous but meant to dramatize, in a macabre but effective way, the contrast between our approaches to the St. Simeon. I circle my wagons, relating the story of Natalie’s parents and the country club. “So her victory,” I say, “if you want to call it that, was hollow, like a lot of litigation ends up being. She won admittance to a club that didn’t want her, where she wasn’t accepted and couldn’t comfortably go. So what did she win? Is that what you want? Once the well is poisoned, you can’t drink from it.”
“There was obviously a principle at stake,” she says. “She won that.”
“I wonder,” I respond. In the deep dusk between us now I cannot make out her face but only the contour of her body, standing very still with her head yet inclined toward the marker. “I have a theory that she’s a very lonely woman. Besides, at the risk of playing the devil’s advocate, there is a principle at stake for the St. Simeons too.”
“What is that?” she wants to know.
“Sweetheart, everywhere you look there is change. It frightens people. It always has, but now it seems to be accelerating. At a time when the entire country is losing its culture, these people want to celebrate something that is nailed down, something they can count on being like it was last year and forever before that. They have to adapt to so much that is out of their control that they value even more highly those few things that remain permanent. The St. Simeon is one of those things.”
“You sound as though you agree with them.” Her voice is even.
“No, but I understand them. After all, I’m one of them.”
“I can understand how change frightens people,” she says. Then, as if changing the subject, she says, “Dad, the Arts Center project?”
“Yes?”
“Your firm is working pretty hard to get that contract.”
“We’ve put a lot into it, that’s true.”
“But won’t they have to tear down a lot of old homes to make room for it?” In the dimness she turns her head to me. “But I guess that’s different.” She turns and walks briskly toward the gate, leaving me as alone as I have ever been.
I discard the leaves and follow, but she quickens her stride to maintain the gap between us. I break into a trot, but keys and change jangle in my pocket and she can monitor my approach without looking back. She accelerates, jogging now. I speed up and look for shortcuts to intercept her. There are none, and her conditioning begins to tell as we near the house. I am reluctant to call out, advertising this unseemly chase, but near the house I yell her name and, panting heavily, ask her to stop. She breaks into a full sprint, reaching the door and slamming it behind. As I slump into the foyer, her door upstairs closes with a telltale snap of the lock.
I bend over, hands on my knees, my breath coming in gulps and gasps and my pulse racing beyond any rate achieved by tennis, even strenuous singles. Slowly, the wind returns and I grow calm.
An hour later, I tap timidly on her door. Silence. I knock again, harder. More silence. I press my ear to the panel and hear no sound within.
“Allie, open up. I have more to say.”
“Leave me alone.”
“Please, sweetheart.”
“I’ve heard it. Go away, I’m tired.”
The St. Simeon, I now realize, has become for her a mere skirmish in a wider war, having far less to do with Charleston’s stubbornness than my own. Her allusion to “taking it lying down” is a lethally directed indictment o
f my failure to force the issue, to assault in her name and stead the consanguineous fortress. Elizabeth would have done it, and her ghost hovers over this battle ground like a skirted Napoleon. I knock again, impatiently.
“I’m not leaving here until we talk,” I say. “If it takes all night.”
There is only silence, but then something in the room stirs and moments later the lock retracts. The door swings wide, exposing her back as she strides to her bed, flopping down without a glance in my direction. She wears her flannel pajamas and a robe.
“That was quite a pace you set,” I say. “Have you considered your guilt if I drop dead of a heart attack tonight?” She does not smile. A long silence ensues, lengthening painfully as I search for an approach. In the vacuum, I resolve on the method she most prefers: direct.
“You’re disappointed in me,” I say.
“I’m confused. I thought you’d be on my side.” She is visibly upset, but her eyes are dry and her gaze at the wall hard.
“Does that mean I have to come out swinging?”
“We’re getting punched, or at least I am.”
“We, and yes it seems that way.”
“You should have warned me. If you had come to me and said, ‘Look, this is something that I can’t control and that’s the way it is so get over it,’ I’d have probably forgotten about it by now.”
“I gave you false encouragement. I regret that.”
“And now it’s in the papers, a public humiliation and my own father saying he won’t lift a finger.”
“I didn’t say that. I said I wouldn’t sue.”
“What else is there, wring your hands?”
“I deserve your sarcasm but it hurts.”
“Well, join the crowd.” She has picked up a throw pillow and kneads it aggressively.
I commandeer the chair from her study desk, bring it over by the bed, and straddle it in reverse, my arms folded atop the back. “I don’t blame you for being upset. But regardless of what you’re thinking, I have a stake in this too.”
“Not any more. That Arts Center deal is in the bag from what I’ve read.”
“Sweetheart, I don’t give hoot or holler about the Arts Center. My stake in this is much more personal. Of course I’m on your side, and of course I want to see you go. But I want it done in a way that allows us both to feel like we’ve won a point, not forced one.”
“I don’t get what you mean.”
“I’m not sure I can explain it because I don’t fully understand it myself. I’ve had a lot of … turmoil lately. Within. I’m not asking for your sympathy, only your awareness.” She pulls her knees up, sets the pillow on them and rests her chin as she stares at me blankly. “The Society represents tradition; one that I value and enjoy, or at least have up until now. There are all kinds of clubs and organizations I’m not eligible for: foreign war veterans, skydivers, survivors of disasters, alumni of colleges, left handers, IQ gifted—the list goes on. They each represent a niche of some kind, many exceedingly narrow. The St. Simeon’s niche happens to be blood or marital descent from the original members. Call it retarded, call it regressive, but that’s its niche. You with me?”
She nods faintly, her mouth flattening in an exaggerated boredom.
“Now, things change, and perhaps it’s time for this tradition to pass the way of many others. Someone could make a good case for that and I, were I on the Board, might be persuaded. But until then, we’re left with the rules we have, and those rules appear on the surface to exclude adopted children.”
“But that’s so—”
“Let me finish, and what I’m about to say has everything to do with me and little directly to do with you. Suppose this issue involved someone else’s daughter. In all fairness, I should support an exemption for him or her if I’m prepared to argue for yours, as I’ve done. Shouldn’t I?”
“I suppose so. You don’t want to look like a hypocrite.”
“I don’t want to be a hypocrite. It all comes down to power.”
“Power?”
“Yes, more of my world spilling over into yours. Every day I see things done by people because they have the power, not necessarily the right. In my business, for example, big people run over little people because they can afford the fees at Carter & Deas. They don’t give a damn if they’re right or wrong; if they hire the smartest and meanest lawyers available they win, which is all they care about. Or the punk in the streets. He doesn’t resort to high-priced legal talent, he takes his with a gun. A part of me is jaded enough not to want to play that power game.”
“In other words, you don’t want to get me in just because you can.”
“I want to win, want you to win, by the rules because it’s the only way to have anything worth winning when the dust settles.”
Her nod is rote, and if I have made a dent in her disillusion it is a small one. She yawns.
In the days following, we speak as always, but it is the perfunctory language of living within the same walls. Without so much as a scintilla of disrespect, she has put an unbridgeable distance between us. She is courteous, but not overly so; businesslike without being gloomy; responsive, but only so far as necessary. She goes about her day with her usual efficiency, seldom idle and with no wasted motions like her kiss on the top of my head as she leaves for school. She is disengaging from me at the most precious level, subtracting out her true self from my formula for existence, and it is unbearable.
On Sunday, I go to church alone. I sit in the family pew removed from the service and those around me. To the sermon I bring the same concentration I have brought to my work these past few days, and as Rev. Frank Kent puts a final emphatic flourish on his message, I am unable to recall a word he has said. The view out of the stained glass windows seems every bit my view of the world; fractured, distorted, turbid. In the center of my ancestral Mecca, where I was baptized, where my parents were married, where such spirituality as I harbor has been nourished and redeemed, where I greet those who enter with a warmth that embraces all this means to me, I am alone. The service ends with a Lenten dirge, sad and funereal. As the crucifix passes, I nod mechanically. The choir’s lament seems directed at me, and I stand with no book open, none of its woeful tune on my lips but every note and chord a ballast threatening to take me deeper. Rev. Kent booms out his benediction. The congregation around me rises. I remain motionless, unable to face them or make conversation. Waiting for the church to clear, I feel a bangled hand on my shoulder from behind. Margarite leans over and whispers, “Come see me, dear. I have news.”
27
Monday’s mail brings engraved invitations addressed to Josh, Steven and me.
ST. SIMEON SOCIETY
THE HONOR OF YOUR COMPANY IS REQUESTED AT THE SOCIETY HALL …
Date and time follow; the nature of the function does not. No one eligible has to ask. The kitchen trash can receives all three.
Margarite refused elaboration in church, pleading a social engagement in Beaufort, to which she was already running late. “Come see me tomorrow night,” she instructed. She must have sensed my hesitation because she added quickly, looking down where I remained seated, half turned to her, “It’s not an answer but it may lead to one.” She rushed off before I could utter the skepticism lodged in my throat.
At the office today replays of her overture, all of thirty seconds in duration, shredded my already tattered concentration as I tried to regain a sense of the moment, studying her in flashback for signs she knows I know. Perhaps some sixth sense has triggered in her a need for damage control. If so, she will need every potion and spell available in her Haiti habitat and beyond. But I will listen.
Daniel answers my ring as before, this evening steering me to the library. I enter through double oak doors, highly finished. The room is empty. A roaring fire blazes beneath a shoulder-high mantel of grained white Italian marble. Near it, I sink into the cloud-like comfort of an overstuffed wing chair covered in oxblood leather. Daniel announces Margarite’s immi
nent appearance and brings coffee.
Margarite enters, dressed as casually as before, now in a navy blue running suit trimmed in pink, and sneakers. If she feels the least uneasiness about confronting me, it does not show. She extends both hands, greeting me warmly.
“I’m excited,” she says, approaching the fire. “It’s like working on a murder mystery.”
Daniel brings a clear glass of amber liquid, her Old Granddad, which she sets neatly on the mantel near an ancient clock displaying both time and phases of the moon. Above her hangs a portrait of General William Rhett Barnwell, her ancestor from the Revolutionary era. “Blushing Billy,” Margarite calls him. The source of his name is local legend.
In the months preceding the Declaration of Independence, British Admirals Parker and Clinton arrived off the coast with a substantial force of regulars assumed to have orders to occupy the restless city. General Barnwell, then a captain serving under Major General Charles Lee, the American commander, was delegated by General Lee the odious task of razing some buildings along the Cooper so as to widen the effective angle of fire for new cannons mounted to resist the British. Ironically, among the buildings ordered sacrificed was the home of Captain Barnwell’s aunt, Annie.
Aunt Annie was a high-strung spinster whose loyalties were entirely with her royal ancestors. She held British occupation a singular honor. “After all, His Majesty’s forces don’t occupy just anywhere.” For the entire war Aunt Annie fumed over her lost home, holding her nephew responsible not only for the desecration but for Tory demise as well. Several days after news of the British defeat at Yorktown reached Charleston, Barnwell, recently promoted to general, toured the site of the demolished buildings accompanied by a ranking delegation surveying war reparations. Aunt Annie, forced by public sentiment to muzzle her support for her gallant men in red for the entire duration of the war, boiled over. Hearing of the tour, she carried from her substitute residence a rocking chair, which she placed squarely amidst the ruins of her former residence. She knitted and rocked, surrounded by rubble, as the perplexed delegation approached. When they reached what had once been her door, she rose, hailed her mortified nephew gaily, introduced herself to each member as “General Barnwell’s favorite aunt,” and invited them in for tea and “a cake I just this minute took out of the oven.” Blushing Billy’s explanations to his entourage have not survived.