A Southern Girl (57 page)

“Well,” I say standing, my legs a bit shaky and my arm throbbing from the shots, “I guess that’s that.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

I pause, my head down and my gaze focused on the fresh cracks in the table top. “Yes. Please call the Board together as soon as you can.”

“But for what purpose?”

“To reconsider its decision. And if it won’t reconsider, to discuss a response to the lawsuit I plan to file when I return from Vietnam.”

Margarite recoils. “You’re suing us?”

I lean over and kiss her gently on the cheek, and she, frozen in her surprise, does not move. “I’m suing the Society and I’ll have to see about my grounds to sue individual members. I will not, I give you my word, sue you personally, no matter what my lawyer advises.”

She takes a rather long pull on her bourbon as she turns her head away. “I don’t blame you. I think we deserve it. Perhaps John and I should accompany you to Vietnam and boycott the whole ugly mess.”

“As much as I would enjoy your company, you would have gone before now if you intended to go.”

“You’re right. I just can’t face it. Even now.” After a pause, she asks, “What should I … tell people?”

“Board members? Tell them the Board has some urgent business. That will be true, I promise. And Margarite, I will keep quiet about what you’ve told me with one exception. I’d like your permission to use this information to confront Adelle. If I can do so without exposing you I will.”

“Feel free,” she says. “She brought it on herself.”

Turning to leave, I say, “And send me a bill for the broken glass.”

She smiles. “I’m leaving it just as it is. It adds character and you can never have too much of that.”

As Daniel shows me out, I sense my anger toward Adelle will follow the well-worn, indirect path that I recognize from past confrontations. My fuse is long and meanders. Walking down Margarite’s slate walk to my car, I reflect on the wisdom of confronting Adelle later, after I have refined my approach to a razor precision. Besides, I need to pack.

But at the first traffic light I turn right when left would take me home and amaze myself by speeding toward her home at close to sixty miles an hour through a residential district, my hands gripping the wheel like it is her throat. I slow the car a house or two away to avoid the melodrama of squealing tires.

By the time I reach for the doorbell, I am fully cognizant that my anger has broken loose from a pit of lifelong restraint. It roams wild, unchecked and vengeful. Treachery has nourished it with a potent fuel, injected it with strength I do not recognize, empowered it with a white-hot energy that will do great damage whether targeted or abandoned to random gyration. I am shaking with rage, and the interval between ringing the bell and
Adelle’s prolonged response is just long enough for me to arrest my sore arm’s visceral desire to punch her face in.

“Coleman! Come in. I just heard about your trip. How sudden.” “Yes, very,” I say walking in and turning from her to disguise my impulse.

“You seem in a hurry,” she says. “Would you like a drink?”

“Yes, I would.”

“Follow me to the kitchen while I fix it. Then you can tell me how this came about.”

“Is Chris home?”

“No. He called from the club. He’s playing doubles under the lights.”

I cannot predict what my new monster will do. It is on its own, roaming and sniffing. In a real sense I will be as surprised as Adelle when it pounces.

“So,” I hear myself say, almost casually, “how are the kids doing these days? Still going strong?” Evidently my monster has a gift for stealth.

“I assume so,” she says, stirring my drink. “Chris tells me nothing but as you know they still see a lot of each other. He’s beside himself about her leaving on this trip.”

I accept the proffered drink and lean philosophically on the counter. “You know, I’m beginning to think there may be more to their relationship than I originally thought.”

“Oh?” Her faces pinches in alarm before she can check it. “Why do you say that?”

“Allie talks to me. Some things she said recently made me realize that they have progressed beyond high school sweethearts.”

“How far beyond?” she demands.

“Well,” I say flippantly, “if you mean have they crossed over the big line I couldn’t say. I was speaking of their future. She’s planning trips to USC and he’s going up to Princeton—”

“Chris has said nothing about that to me. He’s not the student Allie is and I would worry about his grades if he’s spending his first college semester on the road.”

“Sure,” I agree. “But tennis takes time too.”

“He has no choice there. He’s on a scholarship.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right. Did he mention them working together in Alaska next summer?” Allie had expressed interest in this but had not included Chris in her plan. Apparently my monster is not without cunning.

“What! That’s absurd. Chris … can’t possibly stay on top of his game in Alaska. He’ll be here on the summer circuit.”

“Maybe it’s not his game he wants to be on top of.”

“Coleman, what a grotesque thing to say about your own daughter. And you insult my son.”

“Why? I would consider Chris a lucky guy if Allie thought enough of him to let him that close.” Her scoff is sickening and my arm renews its jabbing twitch.

“Allie is a … special girl, for sure. But there’s just no future for her with Chris. They’re too … different.”

“Gosh, I don’t know about that. They both love the outdoors, they each have a nice sense of humor, both smart—”

“Oh, you know what I mean.”

“No. Tell me, Adelle, exactly what you’re talking about. Because I think I’m finally beginning to figure it out.” I am off the counter now, advancing toward her as she retreats, startled, until the fridge blocks her. “Spit it out, Adelle,” I shout. “She’s not white, is she? She’s not the kind of woman you’ve got your heart set on for Chris, is she? She’s not really, bottom line, good enough for him, is she?”

She eyes me coldly, unmasked. “No, if you must know, she’s not. That may sound harsh—”

“What it sounds is ignorant and small-minded, like its source.”

“I don’t have to take abuse from you.” She moves to escape her corner but I block her passage.

“Yes, you do. In the thirty seconds between now and the last time I walk out your door you’ll have to listen. I know now why I’ve never felt comfortable with you. You are one of those rare people who can lie with impunity and go on about your business. How far would you have gone to prevent an Asian daughter-in-law? Any Charleston know-nothing, lily white from south of Broad, would be better, wouldn’t she? You disgust me. You’re not enough woman to carry Allie’s riding gear. Have a nice life.”

My monster carries me to the door. I am just about to congratulate him on our restraint when he grasps the knob and violently slams it behind us as, for the second time in an hour, I shatter glass.

35

We leave today at 1:41
P.M.
My morning is spent at Natalie’s office, niched in a drab walk-up on King Street north of Calhoun. In the reception area, a framed print of Matisse’s Joy hangs above a small, efficient couch, and beyond this cubicle is her office, furnished in an essentials-only austerity befitting the limited budgets of both the attorney and her clients.

“I want you to sue them for me,” I tell her before relating the events of the night before. She sits behind her desk, her head propped against her hand, scribbling notes on a legal pad. Her strokes in ballpoint are abbreviated, not shorthand but a personal hieroglyphic that concentrates a paragraph of my speech to a line or two on her page. Twice she raises her head to ask a detail, a clarification. When I reach the meltdown with Adelle, I watch for signs that she is celebrating the demise of her rival but she is unflinching. “And don’t,” I conclude, “tell me I told you so.”

She looks up, unsmiling. “I can’t possibly draft this before you leave. It will require at least a couple of days for research, maybe more.”

“I assumed so. Do you think we have time to do this?”

“There are two ways to view it. One is to automatically assume time limits us and the other is to hand that liability off to them.”

“How?”

“By waiting until the last possible moment to file and putting all our chips on the District Court judge. We ask for an injunction against them barring her from attending the Ball. The Society will have to hire counsel and they will have to bring themselves up to speed, which as you know takes time. They won’t have much. If we get a favorable ruling, the burden of appeal shifts to them and we just might sneak in before they get organized. But if we lose locally, clearly the time liability hurts us. I’ll have Susan research all this and draft a brief in advance so that if that happens we can shoot it to the Fourth Circuit without delay.”

“I’ll come straight here as soon as we get back,” I assure. “If you draft it, I’ll sign it.”

“What does Allie say about this?”

“That newspaper coverage a few weeks back gave her a taste of what is now to come and she didn’t care for it. But she says she’ll go through with it. I think you’ve been a strong influence on her.”

“I’m flattered, but I hope you won’t hold that against me.”

“I feel at peace with all but one thing.”

“Which is?”

“That first evening at your apartment, you mentioned legal ethics. Now that I’m your client, will it prevent us from sleeping together?”

“Is that what you want?”

“You know it is.”

“Me too.” She stares in mock reproach. “We have some time to decide.”

“Are you going to get Susan to research that as well?” I grin at her.

“I think I’ll handle that one myself.”

I lean over the desk and kiss her. “I wish you were going,” I say.

“I wish you weren’t.”

I leave her still seated at her desk, her pen in hand and a legal pad full of notes before her. At the house, Allie is pacing, her luggage assembled on the side piazza next to the driveway.

“You’re going to change, right?” she asks as I step from the car.

“I’ll be down and ready in ten minutes,” I say, breezing by her.

“Dad, don’t forget to wipe the lipstick off.”

Our flight from Charleston to Chicago is packed but smooth. Mr. Quan, already waiting at the Charleston Airport when Allie and I arrived, is glued to the window as we approach O’Hare. He has never been here, he tells us. Our collective mood is the brightly lit spirit of friends on holiday. Allie has brought along a new novel but is too excited to focus. We change planes, then head for Hawaii, a refueling stop. The sun has chased us all day, finally overtaking us in the Pacific, so that as we make our final approach in Honolulu, my watch indicates midnight in the east but the sun’s fireball is just extinguishing itself in the luxuriant isles of Polynesia and beyond.

I glance at Allie, asleep now against her pillow and the edge of her blanket tucked child-like beneath her chin. I am reminded of her when
she was young, perhaps five. Although we had disclosed her adoption from her earliest cognition, for a while she had no more grasp of its import than she would our telling her she was an Episcopalian or a Virgo. The mirror gradually informed her of what needed to be learned.

It was in those days that she advanced her first theory about how she came to be with us. She had had a dream, she said, in which a mother held her hand as they walked through a busy market, her mother pointing to things she could never afford to buy. At each stall in this fabricated and impossible image, the toddler would point to some object that drew her interest and the mother would shake her head. At the last stall, the child eyed a large doll. She turned to her mother hopefully, but the mother had released her hand and was gone.

Allie understood this dream as chronologically impossible, yet she clung to the imagery. As a reason to give her up, poverty proved the necessity of choice, the easiest to rationalize and accept. If she dwelled on the darker motivations, she didn’t mention them to us. What she did mention later—and this surprised us—was the need to earn money to send her birth parents. In that she had never expressed interest in finding them, we puzzled at her logic: sending support to people she had no interest in meeting, and who conceivably may have forgotten she existed. She proposed this only once, but it did not strike me as whimsical, and her work ethic, always strong, seemed to find fuel from a source beyond my vision.