South of Broad (21 page)

“That’s not fair,” Ike says. “If Leo likes ‘em, Dr. King hates ’em. And that includes all of us.”

“My mother doesn’t hate y’all.” But I realize that Ike is uttering a truth he has carried inside him for a long time. “At least, not always.”

“She loves us when she’s asleep. Or unconscious. Or when we’re asleep or unconscious. But she loathes Starla and has never made a secret out of it,” Ike says.

“Yep. She hates your sister, Niles; she hates my wife,” I admit.

“Starla’s no wife. Never has been. Things happened to her when she was a little girl. To both of us. Things that shouldn’t happen to anyone. Yet it started to seem natural to us. Our daily bread, Toad. We grew up thinking the world was the worst place a kid could be. Then we stumbled into the Toad’s world. You took us in. You were just a kid yourself—an ugly kid. But you opened your heart to us. Did the same thing for Ike. You did enough. You didn’t have to marry my screwed-up sister. No one can save her but herself.”

In the silence that follows, the three of us sit around the table as I pour the last of the coffee. We avoid one another’s eyes, and I watch two ruby-throated hummingbirds skirmish over a feeder hanging from the Japanese maple.

“Ike?” I finally ask.

“I agree with everything Niles just said. If Betty were here, she’d second the notion,” Ike says. He reaches over and presses my shoulder with the tenderness a large man can show in a delicate touch.

At last I ask: “I was that ugly?”

“As homemade diarrhea,” Ike replies.

“Those glasses you wore,” Niles explains. “They looked like two see-through hubcaps.”

“Your hair stuck straight up in the back,” Ike says.

Niles says, “That was hair?”

Ike looks at his watch. “Gentlemen, we’ve got fifteen minutes. I say we get a move on.”

“My turn to play quarterback,” Niles says.

“My turn, mountain boy,” Ike says. “You were quarterback last week.”

“Why don’t I ever get to play quarterback?” I ask.

“Because you’re the Toad,” Niles says.

Ike adds, “Toads never get to play quarterback. That’s just a fact of life.”

Every Saturday at ten, Ike, Niles, and I gather at The Citadel practice field for a fierce game of touch football. Whoever shows up can play, but the numbers vary each week. Usually, we can depend on rounding up a group of cadets or a ragtag squad of assistant coaches from the various athletic teams who guide the Bulldogs’ sportsmen during the academic year. But today, the three of us end up alone and left to our own devices.

This morning, we all get to be quarterback, even the Toad.

CHAPTER 11
Evangeline

I
try to pay a visit to Evangeline Poe’s house at least once a week to make an amateur’s judgment on the state of her health and the relative order or anarchy of her household. When I knock on her door that Saturday afternoon, I realize I have not visited her in almost a month. Always when I come to this door I can imagine the ghostly presence of the Atlas moving van that brought the twins cartwheeling into the dead center of our history, changing the directions of all the lives they touched. Across the street I can see the house my father built, the one where I grew up—such a haphazard, unsuccessful mess of a boy. I admire the two towering magnolia trees that were my parents’ symbol of their love for each other, or had been until my father’s fatal heart attack. I know my mother will hear that I’ve visited her enemy across the street and will hold that against me. She considered Evangeline Poe far less than a horse’s ass the day she met her, and nothing my mother has witnessed in the intervening years has done anything to heighten her opinion.

When Mrs. Poe opens the door, she stares out into the harsh light through a series of four chained locks that would make a Greenwich Village apartment proud.

“It’s me, snookums,” I say. “The favorite.”

“I could sue you for dereliction of duty.” She unlocks the door in slow motion. “I thought you might be dead.”

“You read my column,” I remind her. “You disagree with almost everything I say.”

“They never print my letters to the editor.” She opens the door, and I kiss her on the cheek as I pass on the way to the kitchen.

“I bought you some groceries at Burbage’s,” I tell her.

“You need to help me find my reading glasses while you’re here, Leo,” she says as she enters the kitchen behind me.

“They’re on top of your head, sweetie.” I see her surprise as she reaches up into her abundant gray curls.

“I’m getting so forgetful lately,” she says. “I lost my car keys again.”

“You haven’t driven a car for two years. They revoked your license, remember?”

“Those bastards. I do now. I called that Negro all of you are so crazy about, and he was of no help at all.”

“You hit or scraped over twenty cars parked on King Street, ran a couple of red lights, then crashed into the front door of an antique store—George C. Birlant and Company, if memory serves me right. And you didn’t exactly ace the sobriety test.” I put up Burbage’s homemade soup. “Let me get some of these dishes into the dishwasher before Sheba arrives.” I begin collecting random glasses and plates spread haphazardly throughout the rooms on the main floor. “Did Miss Simmons come this week?”

“She quit on me a couple of weeks ago,” she replied. “I’ve given up on the Negro race. I’m looking for a Serbian woman to cook and clean for me. I read that Serbians are all the rage among the finer households in New York City café society.”

“Café society? I don’t think I’ve ever met a Serbian.”

“I prefer them because they’re white people. I’ve discovered that I get more and more knee-jerk white as I grow older, if you know what I mean.”

“Were you mean to Miss Simmons?” I ask her. “That’s her story. If you value her opinion over mine.”

“She claims you hurled racist epithets her way.”

“None that she hasn’t heard before.” Mrs. Poe snorts. “Look, I was very polite to her. She got irritated when I referred to her as a Negress, which as you know is a term of great respect. When she snapped at me, I flipped. I admit it.”

“I’ll keep my eyes open for a Serbian housekeeper.”

“I hear good things about Mexicans too,” Mrs. Poe says. “Except I’m too old to learn a new language.”

“Do you mind if I run the vacuum cleaner in the living room?” I ask.

“Be my guest. I saw Sheba yesterday. Did she tell you we had a fight?”

“I knew you saw her,” I say, but Mrs. Poe doesn’t hear me over the drone of the Hoover.

“Both my children always made me want to take a long walk,” she says.

“Really? Where to?” I yell over the noise.

“To the liquor cabinet. I talk to Sheba, and I want to get drunk. I talk to Trevor, and I
need
to get drunk.”

She walks to her liquor cabinet, which she keeps fully stocked, and pours from a cut-glass Waterford decanter. I haul the vacuum cleaner into the hall closet, grab a dish towel, and try to wipe layers of dust from all the side tables and cabinets. Then I hear Sheba entering through the back door. After the hijinks of last night, I thought she would look the worse for wear, but she walks in looking refreshed and stylish. For her mother’s sake she is dressed like the daughter of a Charleston matron of the old school. She is taking her mother to dinner at the yacht club, courtesy of her hostess, Molly.

“You look positively radiant, Mama,” Sheba says. I note she has toned down her whole persona in her mother’s presence. Gone is the starlet of the night before, vamping for her high school friends. She and Trevor have always gone to extremes to try to please their hypercritical mother, and neither has ever succeeded, as far as I know. Evangeline is one of those oddball mothers who stop raising their children once the kids reach the exact age at which they can begin the thankless task of taking care of their mothers. Drinking vodka straight from a glass, Evangeline studies her famous daughter and says, “You appeared naked as a jaybird in your last movie. I couldn’t show my face in Charleston for a month.” Then she adds meanly, “Your tits are starting to sag.”

“They looked mighty good to me, Sheba,” I say.

Sheba curtsies. “I’ve always depended on the kindness of the best friend I’ve ever had.”

“I hate that Tennessee Williams crap,” Evangeline says. “Speaking of faggots, when did Trevor drop off the face of the earth?”

“I talked to him about six months ago, Mama,” Sheba tells her, and I catch an off-key note of insincerity that makes me realize she is lying. “Trevor finally got a lucky break in his music career. Some fat cat commissioned him to write a concerto for the Omaha Symphony. A friend lent him a house up in Mendocino, California, and he promised not to come back to the city until he has produced a work he’s proud of. He told me his working conditions were austere. A Steinway piano, a stone fireplace, and a melody that’s haunted him since childhood. It’s the break he’s been waiting for, Mama.”

“I knew he was a pervert when he was a year old. A mother’s got a sixth sense about those kind of things. I prayed that it wouldn’t be so, but you can’t make apples out of applesauce or …” In midsentence, Evangeline loses one of those lines of thought that have always distinguished her ruthless dismissal of her children’s careers, but I see a panic invade her eyes that I have not seen before. I wonder if the years of abusing vodka are finally catching up with her. She takes another hard swallow from her glass and tries to cover up that she has lost the demoniacal fury of her attack.

“Leo, I was in the middle of saying something of vital importance. Do you remember my subject or predicate?”

“You were discussing tits,” Sheba says.

“I could see baring them in your twenties—when they were perfect,” her mother says. “But now that they’re sagging like circus tents …”

In another gulp, Evangeline finishes her first vodka of the day, a drink without ice or tonic or lemon peel or vermouth or accompaniment of any kind; just the pure firewater that is her reason for living. I can read Sheba’s face and transcribe the full horror as she witnesses what all the rest of us have known for more than a year: the drinking has begun to kill Evangeline Poe and has taken a deadly serious turn. Despite her heavy makeup, a slight yellow pallor has taken up residence in a complexion that was once her most noticeable feature. That is her liver barking with displeasure at an eighty-proof bloodstream. When I last talked to Sheba, I warned her of a darker premonition of mine—something, and I didn’t know if it was the liquor, the depression, or the despair of Evangeline’s unlucky life, but something had begun to play havoc with those soft tissues that control the wiring of the brain itself.

“I have a lot more to say, and I won’t be condescended to …” Again, she stops in midsentence. Evangeline gets up and walks with great strength of will, but not much steadiness, and pours herself another drink. “Leo? Be a gentleman and help a lady back to her divan.”

“Will you cancel our reservations at the yacht club, Leo?” Sheba asks quietly.

“Molly never made them,” I tell her. “We all check in on your mother. We know the scene.”

“You should’ve called me earlier,” Sheba says. “At the first sign of trouble.”

“I called as soon as I heard your last movie wrapped. And the first sign of trouble happened on the day you moved into this house. Do you have Trevor’s number in Mendocino?”

“Ah! Trevor. Yes, the concerto. Tomorrow night, we meet at Fraser and Niles’s house. Will you be taking your mother to church in the morning?”

“Of course. My mother’s still my mother. I’m still her chicken-hearted son.”

“Just checking, Leo dear. There’s always the chance you could do the unexpected thing and grow up.” As she walks me to the door, she says, “I didn’t like the way that sounded.”

“It’s okay, Sheba. Take care of Evangeline. She’s about to become a big problem for everyone. Especially herself.”

I
have taken the most pleasure in my lifelong study of the Broad Street lawyer, among all the opalescent inhabitants of Charleston. I first became enamored of the group as a whole during my days as a paperboy, when I would witness their languorous drift from their houses to their offices, a seersuckered tribe who make their living sweet-talking judges, always approachable when a settlement offer comes across the table. A radical among them might sport a bow tie or wear a Panama hat or believe in mixed marriages (a union between an Anglican and a Unitarian), but generally they attend the same law school, marry the same kind of woman, sire identical children, raise the same breed of dog, attend the same church, drive the same car, belong to the same clubs, and golf in the low nineties (they all cheat in golf), and all of them subscribe to the
News and Courier
.

Once a year I parody the Broad Street lawyer in a Sunday column. My editors prepare for a firestorm of hot-tempered letters denouncing me for my buffoonery and naïveté in disseminating the stereotype. Some of their responses are brilliant and disputatious, and I publish the best and funniest of them the following weekend. I admire their tribe, but with some caution. The caution comes from my deep friendship with and intimate knowledge of Chad Rutledge, and the portion of darkness he carries inside, like a rumor of bad weather.

It is a quarter of six when I try the front door of the sumptuous offices of Darcy, Rutledge, and Sinkler in one of the prettiest buildings on King Street. A guard comes to the door to tell me the firm will not be open until Monday. I give him my card and a five-dollar bill and ask him to ring Chad’s office. The guard makes the call, keeping a close watch on me, then he points me in the direction of a small elevator that I take to the top floor. I emerge into a realm of thick law books, Tiffany lamps, and comfortable leather chairs that lend a faintly liturgical smell to the offices. I walk to his office and knock at the door. Chad has spread out five books of case law and is writing with painstaking concentration on a legal pad. His reputation for hard work is well deserved, and I hear other lawyers speak in awestruck terms about his fastidious preparation for any case he tries. When he finishes recording his thoughts, he looks up and studies me in the doorway.

“Sorry about the phone call this morning, Leo,” Chad says. “I was worried about Molly. It turns out she had driven out to her grandmother’s house on Sullivan’s Island.”

“Hey, what’re friends for?” I ask. “I like being awakened by my friends at five A.M. Especially when they accuse me of adultery with their wives.”

“I was worried. I panicked.”

“You shouldn’t’ve left the party.”

“I’d seen enough of the party,” he says. “I had work to do. Still do.”

“You’ve been working here all day?”

“I’m an ambitious guy, Leo. And a successful one. I got that way by outworking everybody in my profession. Nothing ever surprises me in court. But your appearance in my office does. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Chad leans back in his swivel chair, puts his hands behind his neck, and appraises me through his green-flecked eyes. He means for the gesture to be disarming, but it reminds me of a copperhead poised to strike from a nest of leaves. “Since I’m working hard on a case that is damn important, tell me your business and then get your ass back down on Broad Street as fast as you can. I bill my clients at fifteen-minute intervals, and I’m granting you fifteen valuable minutes.”

“But, our friendship, Chad? You don’t seem interested in
me
. In what
I’m
thinking or feeling, or in my ideas and concepts and the direction I think the world is heading.”

“What do you want, Leo? We’re going to see each other at the picnic tomorrow. Couldn’t this wait?”

“There’s some whispering around town that you’re screwing around again, Chad,” I say. “Hey, nice hunting print. Very rare and unusual to find in a Charleston law office.”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” Chad says, “but the rumor is false. Now, be a good boy and run along. Go say a rosary, or do a novena. Whatever you Catholic boys do.”

“I get around, Chad. Goes with the territory. I’m not hearing this from a single source. And this has been going on for a while.”

“What sent you today?”

“Ike made the request.”

“My favorite cop.” A twitch in Chad’s right eyebrow is the only outward sign of discomfort he reveals. He seems bored by my allegations. “Niles brought it up a week ago. He’s a coach, I believe. Didn’t he and his white-trash sister grow up in a Negro orphanage somewhere? You knew his sister, I believe. Didn’t you marry the little bitch?”

“Aw, shucks, Chad,” I say. “You’re just trying to get my goat, you old rascal, you.”

“What I do is none of your concern,” he says with an air of finality. “Nor anyone else’s.”