A Southern Girl (46 page)

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 imminent 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.

“Nothing in this world,” Margarite says, “is completely consistent, not even the St. Simeon as it turns out. The trouble is that the legacy of secrets leaves very little to go on.”

“It’s quite frustrating,” I agree. My tone is businesslike and removed, appropriate to what is already a strange encounter. Why she has brought me here, having done all she can to undermine me, is the real mystery. I am anticipating revelation of some trivial detail that will allow her to play the role of supporting friend, but get Allie no closer. It is too much, and I am going to call her hand, tonight.

The glass comes down for a healthy swig of her bourbon. “It’s like those oral histories you hear so much about these days; families who don’t write things down but pass the details of their heritage along from one generation to the next by spoken word.”

I will bide my time, I whisper internally. When her “news” confirms my hunch, I will put to her the questions no one in her position will look forward to answering, questions like why she has waited until invitations have gone out to share this news and why, among a committee sworn to secrecy, no one will discuss with me the results of the vote but at least one member has been willing to share its outcome with the press. Margarite squirming is not an easy image to conjure up, but I try. If it weren’t so devastating to have her, of all people, revealed as the culprit, the unveiling might be entertaining. She is earnest and relaxed in front of me, and I will play the foil as adroitly. I relate my research efforts at the paper and the library.

“So you found nothing?” she says.

“Bits and pieces that don’t point anywhere. Clearly you’ve had better luck.”

“That’s exactly how I would categorize it,” she says. “Pure, random luck. Do you know Alger Hart?”

“No.”

“Alger is an old friend, in his eighties now. He served as the librarian at the College of Charleston years ago. I think the term ‘walking encyclopedia’ must have been coined with him in mind.”

I am disgusted to find myself wondering if Alger Hart exists, or if he exists whether he has ever been more intimately associated with the library at the college than a patron paying a fine for an overdue book. My
cynicism grows malignant, where cancerous disbelief in everything she is saying has attacked healthy faith in a matter of days. My eyes stray up to the imposing portrait above her. Was there really was a Blushing Billy? “And what did Alger allow?” I ask, willing my doubt into remission until the right moment.

“He didn’t claim to know much at all about the Society,” she says. “But he’s read countless biographies, certainly more than anyone else I know. He said he had a vague recollection of something read years before, decades probably, in which a biographer recounted his subject’s unexpected invitation to the St. Simeon Ball.”

“Who was it?” I ask.

Margarite sips her drink, then grins mischievously. She is relishing whatever sop she is about to spin out, her cat-with-the-canary look heightened by her eyes alive with intrigue. I grudgingly award her full credit for style points.

“Guess,” she says.

“No idea,” I admit, shrugging.

“I’ll give you a clue. He’s foreign.”

“Is or was?”

“Was.”

“I give up.”

“Well,” Margarite says, lifting her head and feigning the haughtiness to which her ancestry entitles her but of which she seems capable only, as now, by design. “I didn’t give up. Whomever it was had to be important enough to be the subject of a biography that would have come to Alger’s notice. Also, dead long enough to have been written about years ago.”

I nod, unable to fault her logic and, against my wishes, being drawn into the suspense of the anonymous invitee.

“I spent a lot of time,” she continues, “focusing on Civil War personalities.”

“Why them?”

She purses her lips primly. “In hindsight, I’m not certain. I suppose because many of the outstanding leaders came from backgrounds that would not have permitted them legitimate access to St. Simeon. In the rush of war fervor, a war hero could have been invited as a demonstration of esteem and gratitude.”

“Beauregard. He was an aristocrat but not from Charleston.”

She smiles. “My first guess precisely, but wrong. I read his biography cover to cover and did find a reference that will interest you. Beauregard, the savior of Charleston, was very pointedly not invited to the ball, a slight which angered him according to his biographer.”

“A blind alley,” I note. If she indeed read such a work, she has gone to a lot of trouble in perpetuation of this ruse. I decide to test her. “Didn’t Beauregard go to Harvard?” I ask, my quizzical expression forced.

“Lord, no. West Point. His family had some history at Harvard but he was trained as a soldier from the outset.”

The right answer. Either she read the book, knew West Point from another source, or guessed.