A Southern Girl (11 page)

His parents live in a beautiful old home in the Battery area, on Church Street. In Charleston it is fashionable to live “south of Broad,” the street that separates the elite from the rest of the world. You can’t get much further south of Broad than Church Street without finding yourself in Charleston Harbor. I waited until the third day of what had been a pleasant enough visit to approach Coleman after breakfast. “Let’s take a walk,” I suggested. He agreed, but I think he knew what was coming.

“Why should I tell them?” he asked when we were safely distant from the house. “It’s your idea. Why are you afraid to take responsibility for something you feel so strongly about?”

My pace increased, no doubt from nerves. “I’m not afraid. But they think I influence you. Coming from you, it will sound like our idea.”

He said, “I hate to disillusion you, my darling, but they could read this news in skywriting over Charleston and know it was your idea.”

“Oh, Coleman! You’d think I had suggested we make a porn video. It’s just a child who needs parents.”

“Have you ever heard my father discuss his time in the Philippines during World War II?”

“Yes, and it’s narrow-minded and disgusting.”

“I’m not defending it. I’m only pointing out what we’re dealing with.”

“I
know
what we’re dealing with. That’s why I think you should tell them. You’re the golden boy. They won’t attack you like they do me.”

“Come on. When do they attack you?”

“If you only knew.”

“Tell me.”

“No. One crisis at a time. Trust my instincts. This is news you need to break.”

“Yeah? Well, trust mine that we better be prepared to duck no matter who tells them.”

By the time we returned, Coleman had resigned himself to being the messenger although clearly he wasn’t happy about it. You can count on one hand the number of times he has disappointed them in his life. One time was when he married me, and another was when we decided to live in Virginia rather than Charleston. Of course, neither of them ever said they were disappointed in either me or Virginia—things don’t work that way in their world. What isn’t said is what I’ve learned to listen for.

In the hour before lunch, as his mother, Sarah, sliced a ham and his father read the paper and the boys played on swings in the back yard, I looked at him expectantly, but he bore deeper into the novel I had given him for Christmas. When his father rose to get the mail, I walked to his chair and whispered, “What are you waiting for?”

“The right moment,” he replied, as if this delay was part of some grand psychology.

“That’s another way of putting it off,” I said.

“Later,” he countered, but lunch came and went with no mention of “it.”

Immediately after Walter Cronkite’s broadcast, his father, Coleman Sr., who everyone calls Coles, announced cocktails. “Supper” followed, served, as always, by his mother. Sarah Carter must have been a beauty in her day. I associate her with the same grace that pervades Charleston in springtime. My first visit here took place in April, before Coleman and I became engaged, and I remember how seductive I found the azaleas, the magnolias, the trumpet honeysuckle, the lush lawns and gardens afforded by the heat and humidity that is so much a part of lowcountry life and that Sarah Carter seemed equally to be part of, as if she had been raised in the rich loam of a mulched flower bed. I found she possessed a simple charm without being a simple person. She seemed to wear her personal virtue on her sleeve, not out of pride but because she lacked the guile to do otherwise, and had she any shameful failings she would have been equally incapable of concealing them. I learned with experience of her tendency to color things black or white, but I always sensed this sprang from an intuitive, rather than analytical, sense of how things were and ought to be. She told me she lived by her trinity: God, family and the sovereign state of South Carolina, in that order. I noted that Kansas didn’t make that list, but it was impossible to take its omission personally since no state other than her own was included. A part of me admires anyone who, like Sarah, can divide the world and its challenges into black and white, yes or no, right and wrong, but I’ve always found things to be a bit more complicated.

At the other end of the table sat his father, a man I hardly knew at all, and I’m not certain Coleman knew him much better. He was shy, introverted to the point of enigma. Sarah said that stemmed from lack of social confidence, and I guess she should know. I’ve tried to engage him in conversation dozens of time, and the only time I succeeded was after he had a cocktail or two, as alcohol seemed to help him overcome his reticence. Given tonight’s inevitable discussion, I was tempted to fix him a double in hopes he would embrace his fellow man a little more; maybe even throw his arms around the plan soon to be unveiled. It had to be tonight, as we were leaving in the morning. I will never forget the conversation which followed.

By supper’s end, a scotch and water and a glass of wine had steeled Coleman to his task, so that when I cleared my throat, fidgeted in my
chair, and urged him forward with eyes darting over the rim of my wine glass, he leveled his eyes at his mother.

“Mom, Dad, Elizabeth and I have decided to buy a gook.”

I exclaimed, “Coleman!” but found myself smiling nonetheless. Anything to vent the pressure.

Sarah looked first at Coleman, then me, before laughing pleasantly. “You’ve decided to buy a what?” As the last to get any joke, she often bought time with repetition while searching for the punch line.

“A gook. That’s a slang word for an Oriental.”

“But I don’t understand. How can you buy an Oriental?”

“Not buy one, exactly. Adopt one.”

“Adopt an Oriental?” Sarah grew quizzical. “Why would you do that?”

Coleman avoided looking at me, then pushed some untouched peach cobbler around on his dessert plate. “We want a girl. We may never have one the old-fashioned way.”

Sarah Carter stared at her husband as she might have sought the aid of an interpreter in a foreign land. “You’re not being serious. Elizabeth, what is he talking about?”

Coleman took a pull on his wine, then looked directly at me. “Yes, Elizabeth, what am I talking about?”

I deliberately placed my dessert fork down beside my plate. I’m sure my face flushed. “
We
are talking about adopting an international child; a girl. Your son will fill in the details.”

His father spoke, businesslike. “Coleman, have you lost your mind?”

Coleman shrugged. “It makes more sense than you think, because—”

“I hope so, because at this moment it makes none.”

Sarah, shaking her head as if to clear it, said, “Back up, Coleman. Let me understand. You intend to adopt what child?”

“We don’t know, Mother,” he said. “We are going through an agency called Open Arms. They haven’t identified a child yet. But there is no shortage of them in Korea.”

“Korea! Why, I can’t even imagine it.”

His father spoke next. “They tried to kill me in World War II.”

“Dad, be fair. Those were Japanese. Korea was our ally a few years back.”

Coles Carter sniffed his contempt. “The Oriental mind is all the same. They come from a common genetic cesspool. They are vicious and merciless and heathen.” At that moment, he pushed away from the table, the flair in his cheeks like rouge against his pale, sedentary skin. He turned and walked toward the stairs, which he climbed with an aggression audible through the carpet. Coleman looked toward me, staring down at my plate. He turned to his mother.

“I had a feeling this might upset you.”

She lifted her plate and with her head down broke for the kitchen, from which no sound issued for several minutes. Coleman and I sat there. To avoid staring at me, he made circular impressions on the linen tablecloth with his fork while the clock above the sideboard ticked with what sounded like small explosions in the stillness. At length, we heard Sarah leave the kitchen and mount the stairs.

“Like I told you. A piece of cake,” he said.

“They need some time to get used to the idea.”

“Elizabeth, you’re speaking of people who are still trying to reconcile losing the Civil War. I wouldn’t look for any sudden conversions.”

“I know they’re conservative. They reacted about like you predicted.”

Coleman shook his head. “Not really. I’ve never seen my father like that. Never.”

“He’s got to come around. Adopting a child is not something that tears a family apart.”

He propped his chin on his fist to gaze at me directly. “You know that coffee table book written on Mother’s family? The one that traces her people back to the boat? Have you ever looked through it?” I nodded. “How many Orientals did you see? That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. They’re southern, and family means something here that it doesn’t mean anywhere else.”

“We’re not going to back out.”

“I wasn’t suggesting that. Just be patient with them. They’re getting older, and changes frighten them. Changes like this terrify them.”

“Just promise me one thing.”

“What?”

“You’ll be firm.”

“I promise,” he said, although I sensed doubt as he said it.

The next day, Coleman arose early to pack the car. His father retrieved the newspaper from the driveway and read it over coffee. He turned the pages with more crispness than usual. The boys slept in, then wolfed down bowls of cereal before dashing off for a final bike ride. In the kitchen, over breakfast dishes, Sarah asked me to accompany her on a walk.

“We won’t be gone fifteen minutes,” she said, doing her best to sound lighthearted. I was not fooled, but saw no exit.

We left the house and walked down Church Street to the Battery. “I brought this heavy sweater but I certainly won’t need it today,” Sarah said as we sought a bench in the sunlight. I just waited.

“What I’m about to say,” Sarah began, “will sound like I’m injecting myself into your personal business; yours and Coleman’s. We’ve always tried to avoid that. I think we’ve been successful there, don’t you?” I nodded, and I meant it. “It’s hard, I don’t mind telling you. It’s hard when you see your children making mistakes you think they could avoid; making mistakes which your experience tells you they’ll regret. Still, you have to respect their right to make them, hard as it is to keep quiet. You’ll see this clearly as your boys grow up.”

At that moment, her voice softened. Her tone turned reverential. “My parents, especially my father, were so strict with me. Why, I couldn’t even choose my clothes or hairstyle until I got to college. I rebelled, I can tell you. I fought hard against restrictions I felt were totally unreasonable, although looking back, I can see I dug in my heels on the minor issues and did what they wanted on the major ones. But they were determined to ‘bring me up southern,’ as my father termed it. For so long, I had no concept of what that meant. I mean, every girl in Darlington grew up southern as far as I could see. It was only after I was married and moved around during the war that I began to understand a bit. By then I was in my late twenties, about your age, actually.

“The people out west and in New England, where we were stationed while Coles was teaching at OCS, were friendly, most of them, and very nice to us. But those people didn’t have the sense of identity I felt with the South. You could tell it right away. Whenever I met someone I liked, I wanted them to come to Darlington, to meet my parents and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins, to have a big Sunday dinner and cut the fool with everyone around the table. I actually invited some
of them; they thought I was crazy, I’m sure, driving fifteen hundred miles to meet someone’s relatives. The point is, those people were my identity. I belonged to them and they belonged to me. Are you getting warm? I can’t believe this is December.”

“It is heating up,” I acknowledged. As much as I wanted this conversation behind me, I knew my mother-in-law would have her say and I had resolved to hear her out. More from obligation than desire, I said, “Why don’t we sit under a tree?”

“I was thinking of just that,” Sarah said. We crossed the park, stopping at a bench shaded by a mammoth, gnarled oak, surely old enough to have witnessed the firing on Ft. Sumter. Along the promenade railing, a couple passed a set of binoculars between them while nearby a man with a telephoto lens trained his camera on the island fortress in the harbor. Pigeons flapped about, indifferent to tourists.

“I was talking about identity,” Sarah continued. “This child you are considering. I wonder what identity she’ll feel in a strange land surrounded by people who are so obviously different.”

“But what is her alternative?” I resolved to be patient. “The Koreans don’t adopt girls. I would think it would be worse to be in a country where you look the same but are treated like an alien.”

Sarah cocked her head slightly and stared ahead. “Well, I suppose you have a point. But dear, you can’t save the world. What will she do to your family’s sense of identity? You’ve your children to consider.”

“Of course. We wouldn’t do anything that would hurt the boys.”

“Naturally you wouldn’t, which is my point. You don’t think it will hurt. You probably think it will be an interesting experience for them. But in time you will come to see what I have seen; that family is the most important thing on earth, and bringing a stranger into yours will be a disservice to you and to her. You’ll see.”

“Maybe,” I said, turning away.

“Let’s take a stroll around the square,” Sarah suggested. We walked west, to the Ft. Sumter Hotel, then turned north. “You see these grand old homes?” she asked. “Some of the finest families in the world live here. People think they’re snobbish, and I suppose they are. But their clannishness is an effort to protect what so many people in this country seem to want to tear down or dilute. I admire them for it. Coles grew up here, and
he can walk into any house on the South Battery and be the equal of anyone inside. That’s a valuable heritage that Coleman enjoys and your sons will too. But this child will never be a part of that world.”

“Which may be a loss for them.”