A Southern Girl (15 page)

I was still pacing when I heard Coleman’s car in the driveway. By then I knew her face as well as I knew his, and while it might sound like an exaggeration—okay, it does sound like that, even to me—I thought I could have picked her out from thousands of others. Something in the way she stared up at me, a connection that wouldn’t dissolve no matter how many times I looked away. I danced with excitement as he entered the foyer and I threw my arms around his neck.

“Yes,” I said. “We need to check yes.” I showed him the photo, still clutched in my hand. “Meet our daughter, Soo Yun,” I said.

He stared at her for a few seconds. “She looks like your Uncle Mort.”

I slapped him playfully on the arm. “You idiot. Tell the truth. She’s beautiful.”

His eyes grazed over the printed page to which the photograph was affixed. “Soo Yun … healthy … presumed to be of full Korean parentage …” He flipped the page, then looked lamely at me. “Is that it?”

“I guess so.”

“Open Arms didn’t exactly bog us down in detail.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, staring at the picture. “She’s perfect. I want to call Open Arms today.”

“No. When you call, if you call, we’re going to do it together. This is a huge decision.”

“But what are we waiting for?”

“For me,” he said. “I haven’t heard a word from my folks. I need to go down there to talk with them. Alone.”

“I see,” I said, sliding the papers back into the envelope and feeling the wind escaping from my balloon. I turned, but he caught my arm and pulled me back.

“Elizabeth, have you noticed that I take being a father very seriously?”

“Of course.”

“I’m a good father. Admit it.”

“You’re a excellent father.”

“And I want to be that to all our children. I want to want this child. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I answered, nodding. “Just please don’t take too long.”

I suppose it was naïve of me to think he would dance up and down as I had done, but I did a lousy job of hiding my disappointment. When he returned to work, I braced the photograph against a perfume bottle on my dressing table, where I could glance at it as I went about my afternoon routine, pausing periodically to stare at features pleasantly symmetrical, the eyes lively (which could have been a startled reaction to the flashbulb), the face ovoid, the chin recessed, the mouth rounded as if caught in midword. Her wrists and hands showed the delicate bloat of recent birth. At one angle I thought I saw in her arms, extended slightly toward the camera, a reaching motion, but the same view moments later failed to reproduce the effect, suggesting I had seen only what I wished to see. I glanced down to the envelope, aware that in the distance that separated our house from the mailbox by the road, in the span of time required to boil an egg, I had taken in this infant, enfolded her in arms which, once locked, would defend her. And though I trusted my instincts at moments when my reason occasionally lapsed, in the minutes after opening the envelope those two competitors teetered in a precarious equilibrium more characteristic of Coleman, and for the first time I asked myself how the maternal love
which flowed out to Josh and Steven in a profuse current from within me—how love like that could attach itself to a one-dimensional object delivered by the postman. Could a black and white image not much larger than a business card vault the years I had spent diapering, bathing, pampering, feeding, training, nourishing, disciplining my sons, to magically arrive on an emotional plateau on which rested all I had within to give? Coleman had a point. I would have lavished the same devotion on the picture of any child Open Arms sent, and for the good of all perhaps I should slow down. Conserve my heart’s capital.

I telephoned Betsy. “I took your advice.”

“Of course you did,” Betsy replied. “But what did I advise?”

“You said to get a face to go with the idea, and today it arrived. Wait until you see her, Betsy. I can already picture her in the nursery.”

“Can’t wait. I’ll be right over.”

The evening after the arrival of Soo Yun’s dossier, we drove to the club’s midwinter ball, through the club’s wide wrought iron gates and up the serpentine lane leading to the clubhouse. As seen from the parking lot, the club is not imposing; a contemporary, one story facade, too elongated to be a residence. The river bank on which the building had been sited drops precipitously so that the majority of the building lies submerged beneath the first level, as clearly seen by those approaching from the James River or from the gentle slope at the river’s edge up to the clubhouse. From the river, as opposed to the road, the buildings and surrounding grounds match in grandeur and grace the magnificence of their setting.

“You look stunning, my dear,” Coleman said to me as he parked the car and I checked my makeup in the mirror behind the visor.

“I don’t feel stunning, but thank you anyway. Well, here goes,” I said as I reached for the door handle.

He reached for my near arm and held it lightly by the wrist. “Look, I know your heart isn’t completely in this, but let’s just have fun.”

“Let’s do,” I agreed, but without much conviction.

Coleman checked our coats while I greeted Ross and Carol Vernon, two of only a handful of people who knew of our adoption plans. Coleman joined us. Carol and I enjoy how he and Ross love to taunt each other, and they wasted no time tonight.

“Counselor,” Ross said, “let me be the first to tell you how positively ridiculous you look in that tuxedo.”

“Why, thank you very much, doctor. But you have a regrettably short memory for a fat man. I borrowed this from you last year and had it taken in by a tailor who sews about as well as you do.”

“Hard to imagine,” said Ross. “Why don’t we get a drink and talk it over.”

They left for the bar, which was perfect as I couldn’t wait to show Carol Soo Yun’s photograph. She smiled the way you do at pictures of babies, but I saw a certain hesitation too, as if she was expecting someone who looked like me. She tried to hide it, but it was there; the faintest … shock. I guess that is something I’ll have to get used to, and it is understandable in a place like New Hampton, where families tend toward the traditional, to say the least. She asked me about a name and I said Allie, looking back at the photo to make sure Allie fit Soo Yun, and it seemed a perfect fit to me. Just about then Coleman and Ross came back with our wine.

On the dance floor, Coleman and I danced before switching partners with Ross and Carol. I wish I’d stayed with them, but eventually we all separated in the press of the crowd and the “good-to-see-you’s” so that I was alone and defenseless when the inevitable happened: Sandra Hallet approached. I replenished my wine from the tray of a passing waiter and readied myself for the boredom it would be my fate to endure. We all have a look that feigns interest, and I put on mine. Some people notice when you’re really just listening to be nice, but Sandra was not that type. I could have been filing my nails and she would still have gone on about her “exhaustive” afternoon in New York, shopping for a prom dress for her daughter, Megan. I nodded and gushed at the appropriate spots, but this monologue bored me senseless, and the cad in me wondered why, with all her money, she couldn’t dress more stylishly. Her husband had made a fortune in a chain of convenience stores, and she rarely let anyone forget it. As Sandra took me from one store—“Expensive, but not much more selection than you find at Minor & Renns”—across Fifth Avenue to the “cutest little boutique you have ever laid your eyes on,” I saw Coleman coming to rescue me. By then I’d had another glass of wine and was feeling it. Sandra’s face was beginning to fuzz over and her words starting to slur, or maybe those were my words. At any rate, I was terribly glad to see my husband and needed no urging when he slipped his arm through mine and reminded me of his promise to have the sitter home at a reasonable
hour, a lie but one I was delighted to benefit from. “Thank you,” I whispered as we crossed the floor toward the cloakroom.

We left by the south entrance, facing the river. On a circuitous walkway leading to the parking lot, we paused. A chilly breeze off the James swept over us, clearing our eyes of accumulated smoke. We breathed deeply, drawing the bracing air into our encrusted lungs before exhaling the closeness of the evening. I leaned into him, pulling the collar of my coat around my chin and ears. Overhead, the moon hung in marmoreal isolation, its land beams silhouetting the ghostly limbs of barren trees and its river beams refracting, pale and cold, into a shimmering mosaic among the whitecaps on the river. Coleman turned me, drew me in, and kissed my ear. My face inclined, the moonlight in my eyes. He kissed my lips, then whispered, “I signed you up for the club’s public relations committee. You don’t mind, do you?”

I grinned and kissed him back. “Nope. We can ride over together when you come for meetings of the Greens Committee.” We laughed together as we turned toward our car.

The following morning, Coleman left early with the boys for a soccer game while I slept late. When they returned at noon, I’m certain he could tell I’d just gotten up, and with a hangover. I was in the breakfast room, a cup of coffee and an aspirin bottle beside my newspaper.

“A little too much sherry last night, my dear?” he asked, grinning. I hate it that Coleman enjoyed total immunity from hangovers.

I glared at him over the local section. “Oh, shut up,” I said with pseudo anger. “It’s not fair. You feel great and I suffer.”

“It’s totally fair,” he said. “I drank modestly while you guzzled grain alcohol from a boot.”

“Sandra Hallet does that to me. Every time she starts in on another one of her trips to New York, which is every time I see her, I run for the bar. I guess I should be more assertive and just leave, but she follows until she inflicts her quota of pain. How did the game turn out?”

“We won, three to nothing.”

“Congratulations, coach. How did Josh play?”

“Very well for the five minutes I let him in the game.”

“Your own son. How could you?”

“He’s only seven, and he still gets our goal mixed up with theirs. I know coaches who consider that a handicap. Any coffee left?”

“A fresh pot.”

“Good. I’ll get a cup and then we’ll talk.” He returned moments later, set his cup on the table, and looked at me expectantly, until my gaze shifted from the newspaper.

“Something on your mind?” I asked. He said something about some conversation he’d overheard at the party last night, but even with my hangover it didn’t take me long to realize where this was headed so I can’t say I listened with much attention. I had felt this coming, and here it was. He opposed the adoption. He didn’t want to go through with it. He had decided to check the “no” box on Soo Yun’s dossier.

“Fuck you,” I said, or words to that effect. I don’t remember exactly. My head hurt.

10

Coleman

When my secretary told me I’d had an urgent call from Elizabeth to come home, I feared something had happened to her or one of the boys. So her joy when I walked in was a relief. I’d rarely seen her so excited. To see the photo I had to take it from her. That old bromide that all babies look alike? Well, not if they are Asian and you are not.

I drove back toward my office in the Pratt Building, a ten story building a dozen blocks from the main gate of the shipyard. Idling at a traffic light on Tyler Avenue, I tried to recall the face in the picture but could summon only a turbid montage of infant features, vaguely universal but for the crescent eyes, so preternatural. But Elizabeth had gazed at the photo with the precise maternal intensity with which she had peered over the bars of cribs, watching her sleeping sons. Dissuading her from this adoption was going to be doubly difficult now that a name and face melded with her instincts, and if it could be done at all, I needed to do it. How to tell her?

In the weeks following our visit to Charleston, I spent some time trying to assemble pieces of a puzzle that simply didn’t fit. In the beginning,
I assumed it was this child who did not fit. An orphan of unknown origin imported to a family with whom she could be expected to have not a material thing in common, biologically, culturally, or historically. A stranger to be presented to my family and relatives, most of whom shared atavistic foreheads and jaw lines and musical tastes and self-deprecating humor and slow tempers and high blood pressures and conservative politics and a taste for bourbon and a devotion to the Episcopal Church; who could be expected to stare at her, nonplussed, from a safe distance as though she were an exotic bird of untested temperament and rare, endangered plumage. But more recently, I began to see myself as the misfit, and this child as a mere agent of revelation. I had loved my share of southern girls but married a woman as far from that breed as a woman could be. That did not fit.