A Southern Girl (40 page)

“What did you tell Edwards?”

“Why, not a thing. I wouldn’t confirm, I wouldn’t deny. That’s why the article doesn’t quote me. I contented myself with one comment that I told him was strictly off the record, and that was to the effect that if we have reached a point in this city where the comings and goings of the
St. Simeon are open to public scrutiny, then Charleston has ceased to be Charleston and his newspaper is to blame. Oh, I don’t remember when I’ve been so irate. And as if it wasn’t humiliating enough to find our soiled linen aired in public, this horrible business about you suing us is just too much.”

“I hope you don’t think—”

“Of course not. I see their game. Divide and conquer, but it won’t work. Who do you suppose gave them their information?”

I sigh, locking my hands behind my head. “My guess is the same person who called Natalie Berman.”

Margarite’s face clouds. “Who is Natalie Berman?”

“The ACLU lawyer I’m supposed to have consulted about suing you, I mean suing us—it’s my organization too.”

“I don’t know her.”

“You wouldn’t. She’s new in town, freshly hatched from some liberal nest.”

“She sounds dreadful. I hate it when I have to agree with them. They’re so … intolerant.”

“I’m not sure what to make of her,” I say. “She says she wants to help, but she comes out swinging a mall hammer.”

“What was Allie’s reaction to the story? I see they quoted her as saying she was disappointed, but not discouraged with the decision. What can that mean?”

I shift uneasily in my chair. “It means she still has hopes of attending. We’re hoping the Board will reconsider.”

Margarite looks away, pursing her lips. “Hmmmm.”

“I asked to see you before I knew the paper was getting involved. I was looking for some crack in the rules through which we might slip just this once.”

“What you lawyers like to call a loophole?”

“Exactly,” I confirm. “You know the Society better than anyone. I was counting on you to help me formulate some strategy that would change the Board’s mind.”

Margarite glances down at her hands, twisting the multiple rings on either side of her wedding band. “Don’t overlook the membership, Coleman. Remember, a number of my voting colleagues think their duty is to represent the majority will of the organization.”

“Perhaps. But there is nothing I or anyone else can do about the general membership. We’ll have to rely on the Board doing what’s right.”

“As I told you when this matter first arose, my sympathies are with you and Allie. I’ll do anything I can to help. I’m not aware of a loophole, but I’ll be glad to look. Surely, somewhere the rules have been stretched.”

“Great,” I say, relieved. “We need to move quickly.”

“By all means,” she agrees. Then she pauses, studying me. “Coleman, what will happen if we can find no loophole?”

“As the expression goes, Margarite, we’ll have to jump off that bridge when we get to it. I don’t have an answer. I’m certainly not inclined to go to court. It’s heresy for a lawyer to say, but I’m not at all sure I believe in litigation. And to sue my friends, the St. Simeon … it’s unthinkable. Still, I have an obligation to Allie, and one person should not be allowed to deprive her of what she’s earned.”

A curious perplexity comes over her. “Why do you say one person?” “Because I think I know that group, and I’d bet the farm that the vote was four to three, meaning one convert turns it around.”

“I see,” she says, in such a way as to throw into foreclosure the farm I have just bet.

“Margarite, why am I getting the nasty impression that one vote did not decide this?”

“Coleman, I’m in such a quandary. I’ve given my word to the Board.”

“I understand. Believe me, I’m not pressing you.”

“I want so much to help.”

“You have helped. I’m grateful.” There is an awkward silence, during which I hang my head, staring down at the sisal rug overlaying the hardwood floor. “You know, if I ever doubted the power of the press, I had my blinders ripped off with this article.”

“Why do you say that?”

“At ten this morning my mother called, asking how in good conscience I could entertain suing a society that my father presided over? This, despite the fact that I denied such a suit and the paper printed my denial.”

Margarite nods knowingly. “Yes, but it also reported the rumor of a suit, and hence people read into the article what they assume the paper cannot tell. I’ve done the same thing myself many times, I’m sorry to say. Plus, there was Edwards’ observation that you refused to rule out a suit in the future, leaving people to draw their own conclusions.”

“Edwards knew what I meant. He took semantic license.” I rise and walk toward the windows opening onto the piazza. Tiny whitecaps dot the river, and Fort Sumter looks like a desolate massing of the gray waters flowing around it. Between these tall windows is displayed one of Margarite’s treasures, the white marble, half-nude sculpture of Pauline Leclerc, sister of Napoleon, sprawled provocatively on a chaise lounge. According to Margarite, when Habitation Leclerc closed its doors to its jet-set clientele, she and John bought the piece at auction. Above it hangs a sequined voodoo flag of Saint Jacques, who seems to be leering downward at Pauline’s exposed breasts.

“Any pointed questions from the Board today?” I ask over my shoulder.

She hesitates. “I was afraid you’d ask that. Yes, three or four have called to see what I know. Two of them, who shall go nameless, hinted that you may have set up the request with a lawsuit in mind. I politely told them I thought they had taken total leave of their faculties; that it was I who suggested you seek the exemption in the first place.”

I shake my head ruefully. “You wonder sometimes. Right after my mother called, Harris walked into my office. He commiserated with me right down the line but it was almost like he was doing it because he had to, and that somewhere in the back of his mind he too is wondering whether I intend to go to court.” Standing before the window, staring out at the cold harbor, I finger Charlotte Hines and Jeanette Wilson as the sources of the “set-up” theory.

Margarite rises behind me and comes forward, placing a comforting hand on my shoulder. “I’m going to make some calls of my own,” she says. “I’m going to tell everyone who’ll listen that you’ve been here, we’ve talked it over, and that you have the Society’s interests at heart, as always.”

I turn. “Thanks. That should help, coming from you. In the meantime, I’ll do some digging on a loophole. I owe it to Allie.”

“We all do,” says Margarite. “Would you like some coffee? I put some on in the den just before you arrived.”

We cross the hallway into the den, memorable to me because when Philip and I talked some girls into playing spin-the-bottle here, I experienced my first kiss. Family photos populate the bookshelves, where Philip stares out from one taken three months before he left for Vietnam. His dress blues mantle him in the iron dignity of a seasoned soldier, but he
does not need a uniform to appear manly to me and I remind myself he was only twenty-two. I smile at the portrait; a fitting greeting to an old buddy after such an extended absence. Margarite hands me coffee as the last trace of my grin fades.

“I spoke with your mother at your party,” she says. “We had some time together before you arrived at the Cooper Club. She looks as though life at Sullivan’s still agrees with her.”

“She’s amazing,” I acknowledge. “I’d kill for half of her energy.” I instantly regret the choice of the word “kill” but she seems to be unfazed.

She picks up the photo of Philip. “Such a waste,” she says. “You read today of U.S. businesses looking for investments over there. One minute we’re bombing them and next we’ll be hiring them. Such a senseless, horrible waste.”

“He was determined to go.”

“Don’t I know it. He could have found a dozen ways out if he had wanted to.” She looks at me with a sadness I haven’t seen in years.

“He was the best man I ever knew,” I say.

She reaches for my arm. “If we’re going to talk about Philip, I’ll need some fortification. I’ve got some Kahlua in the sideboard. Would you like a spot in your coffee?”

“That would be great,” I say.

She leaves and moments later returns with the brown bottle. “Coleman,” she says as she motions me to a leather armchair, “there are many hardships in the death of a son. There is the overwhelming sense of loss, of course, and there is anger and bitterness and remorse and a dozen more. But as time passes, a new hardship comes on that I never knew existed. It is a fear.”

“A fear of what?”

“Your child being forgotten. Take the scholarship at the school in his name. After it happened, your family and dozens of others contributed and everyone on the committee to select the recipient knew Philip and had vivid memories of him and some big or little story to tell about the way he touched their lives. The afternoon of your party—it was a Friday—I went to the school for the annual meeting of the committee and as we reviewed resumes and analyzed needs it dawned on me that not a single other person in the room had ever known or met my son. I can’t say why I just now realized it; it’s been true for a decade or more. Isn’t that strange? Here was
this wonderful boy with his fabulous talents who meant the world to his father and me and it’s as though he never lived.”

I breathe deeply, the cause and effect of her sudden exit from my party now fully formed. “And hard on the heels of your committee meeting you came to a birthday party for me and found a room full of Vietnamese waiters. What awful timing.”

She replenishes her Kahlua and mine, dispensing with more coffee. “I thought so too, at first. ‘Margarite,’ I said to myself, ‘it’s just too much in one day.’ But after I got home, a curious thing happened; I felt much better than I have in a long time. I went up to his room and looked at his things and sat on his bed and had myself a good cry but it wasn’t the sad kind of cry I’m used to but a better kind, like a happy reminder that I really did have a son that gave me almost twenty-three perfect years.”

She is smiling now, and I am taking a rather ironic satisfaction at being the catalyst for her bracing re-visitation when she asks, casually, “When was the last time you were in his room?”

“Me?” I ask stupidly.

“It would have been after college, of course. That summer he went into the army?”

“Probably.”

“Would you like to see it?”

“His room? Sure,” I say, not wanting to.

She collars the Kahlua and leads me to the third floor. Over her shoulder she says, “Now please don’t think this is some kind of shrine. I have a sewing table in there so it’s hardly just as he left it.”

We walk in. I look about, thinking no, it is not exactly as he left it but it is mighty damn close. Her sewing table is near the rear window, the one we crawled out dozens of times to drop onto the roof over the breakfast room, not because of any need for stealth but simply because we liked to climb out windows. She seats herself on the bed as I walk to the dresser. On it rests a small Bible that was certainly not there when Philip was, but there is also an ashtray from the Grand Canyon, the same one he kept his loose change in. And there is the picture of Julie Alexander, his “main squeeze” from college. I have no idea what happened to her, but I am tempted to bend down, open the third drawer, and feel under the sweaters to see if Philip’s condoms are still where they used to be. I wink at Julie, still twenty-one, still lovely.

“Well, does this bring back memories?” she asks.

“No doubt about it,” I acknowledge. There is a chair near the dresser and I sit facing Margarite.

“Tell me a memory you have of him,” she says. “I’ll bet you have stories I’ve never heard. Tell me one.”

“I don’t know …” I say doubtfully. “I’m sure you’ve heard most of the ones that are suitable to tell.”

A droll skepticism steals into her stare. “You mean, all but the really good ones that no one tells their mother.”

I laugh, relieved. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“But what can it hurt?” she asks. “Tell me one even if he might not have wanted me to know it. He was a boy, a man, not a saint. I know he raised his share of hell. Tell me about Mexico. I never heard much about your trip. For years he kept an old Corona bottle in his closet, but that and the picture of you two in those blankets is all I remember him bringing back.”

I hesitate. Philip’s memory is in this room, no doubt, but he is not here and despite the mementoes of his existence all around me I have no tactile sense of his presence. Quite the opposite; he seems a hundred years gone. But Mexico! That is something quite different, and the mere mention of the name evokes Philip’s supercilious grin over our first shared bottle of Tequila on the train headed south.

“You were running out of money in Dallas,” she prompts, rising to pour me more Kahlua. “That much I remember. How did you end up in Mexico?”

“An idle comment in the train station,” I recall. “We had come to purchase our tickets back to Charleston. Neither of us was ready to come home but we were afraid of being stranded in Texas with no money. Standing in line, Philip struck up a conversation with this guy. When we told him how broke we were he laughed and said it was a shame we weren’t in Mexico because we could live for six months on that much money. Philip got this gleam in his eye that I had seen too often. We were headed for Mexico on the next train.”

“Where did you cross the border?” she asks. Already I can see the pleasure she is deriving in anticipation of new details of his life, even something as mundane as Laredo, Texas in the mid-sixties. We had come to Dallas after graduating from high school, drawn by a morbid fascination
with Dealey Plaza, the site of Kennedy’s assassination three years earlier. But everything cost more than we had and we were just hitting a stride, just beginning to savor the subtle leavening of being on our own in a new city so far removed from Charleston when we were forced to “feed the bulldog,” as Philip termed coming to grips with economic reality.

“What was the train ride like?” she wants to know and I want to tell her. I lean back in my chair, take a pull on my Kahlua, and feel again the austral wind rushing through the window of the old train as we pulled out of Laredo and lumbered across the Rio Grande.