A Southern Girl (63 page)

“I’m sorry,” I say.

Harris shrugs. He returns to the table and closes his notebook with a marked finality. He stares at the book a long time. The conference room is virtually soundproof and the silence permeates to the bone. At last he looks up at me, the faintest trace of a grin in the corners of his mouth.

“I guess,” he says, “if it were my daughter I might feel the same way. You want me to call Sandy?”

“That would be great.”

We stand. I am nearer the door and turn to leave. Harris picks up his notebook and chuckles.

“What’s funny?” I ask.

“I love this business,” he says. “Sure, I wanted this contract. But in something this big a lot of things are bound to go wrong. When you represent the city, you have to turn down work from everyone who wants to sue it. We’ll be okay.”

Harris Deas is my hero. We shake hands. “Thanks,” I say.

“Good luck tonight,” he says. “I’ll call Sandy now.”

I return to my office. I don’t love this business. If I ever did, my zest for it has become ground down, with little more than a powered residue
remaining. In the coming months I’ll reassess my role here. If I stay, Harris will be a big part of the reason.

I have no appointments, my calendar having been blocked off for the aborted meeting at City Hall. I dial Margarite and ask if I can come by to give her an account of my trip. Five minutes later I am out the door.

As I turn onto East Bay Street, I reflect on how often I’ve come here in the past several weeks, almost as though the house is now part of my world again. I am half way up the walk when the door opens and Daniel appears.

The day is mild and he leads me to the side porch, where Margarite sits and iced tea waits in tall glasses. She offers mint, picked moments ago, she says, from a patch in the backyard. “I want to hear all about it,” she says, crushing mint leaves between her thumb and forefinger before depositing the sprig into her glass.

I deliver an account of our trip largely as I repeated it to Natalie and Steven upon my return, omitting Mr. Quan’s trauma on the plane but dwelling on passage through customs, where the Corona bottle had indeed prompted inquiry. At the description of Allie’s meeting with Hana, Margarite’s mouth rounds in a tiny doughnut of disbelief, then flattens and tails into a smile of profound satisfaction as Allie and the nurse embrace in her mind’s eye.

I continue, “We—Mr. Quan and I—went to Cu Chi.”

She tenses at the mention of that long dreaded village, and her hands unconsciously gather the seams of her skirt as if they were the lap bar of some fierce, terrifying roller coaster and she is bracing for the first Niagara-like plunge of the rickety lead car. She looks very old today, and were I not here she would probably be taking a nap.

I describe the tunnels, the bucolic hamlet of Cu Chi, the rutty road to Duc Lap, the cover provided by the roadside fern, the rose in the buried bottle, my silent benediction. She does not blink or move, other than to slowly release her stranglehold on her garment.

“A beautiful service,” she says at last. “I’ll think of it in just that way; an outdoor church service. You did a wonderful thing by going there, Coleman. Philip would be so pleased.”

“I went for me, mostly. And not everything I’ve done has been wonderful. Part of my reason for coming here today is a guilty conscience.”

“Why, what could cause that?”

“I lied to you about Mexico.”

“What on earth for?”

“To protect myself; to keep up an image. I told you Philip and I concluded, very rationally, that we would leave to spare Adriana further trouble with her family.”

“Yes, I remember that very clearly,” she says, her face now a mosaic of curiosity.

“On what turned out to be our last night, I had arranged to spend the night with her. We were both virgins, as odd as that sounds today. She was taking care of a house for some people who were out of the country; watering plants and feeding two dogs. The house was called Casa de la Luna, House of the Moon. I’d helped her a couple of times and as we grew … let’s say, more intimate, we decided that this would be the perfect spot to give ourselves completely.

“That evening, she went early to do her chores and to prepare herself for my arrival later. What I did not know was that Rodrigo, the brother, had been following us closely for days, reporting back to her family. About a block from Casa de la Luna that night, he stepped suddenly from a recessed doorway, directly in my path. Before I could react he pushed me into this doorway and my head struck the brass knocker pretty hard. I was stunned, but not too stunned to realize that he had put a large knife to my throat. He was very powerfully built. The blade of his knife was resting on my Adam’s apple and his breath smelled strongly of
pulque
, a cheap and potent booze. He motioned to the house to let me know he knew where Adriana was, then spit out some Spanish with a little English sprinkled in, but I got the message. He kept saying ‘nunca’—‘never’—over and over and I knew he meant to kill me if I ever saw his sister again.”

“How terrifying,” says Margarite. “What did you do?”

“Returned to the hotel, shaking like a leaf. Philip knew what Adriana and I had planned, so when I started packing he caught me by the arm and asked what I was doing. ‘The guy is crazy,’ I said, ‘and I’m not going to get killed over this.’ Philip glared at me and said, ‘Bullshit.’”

“Yes,” she says with a wan smile, “he loved that word.”

“He couldn’t believe I was going to be bluffed out of my night with Adriana by a bully like her brother. He said we’d go back together and if ‘Roddy-boy’—that’s what Philip called him—if Roddy-boy caused any trouble we’d take him out. Philip had some brass knuckles and he put them in his back pocket and we returned.

“As we neared the house I kept expecting Rodrigo but we reached the door with no sign of him. ‘Piece of cake,’ Philip said as we waited for Adriana to answer the knock. Once inside, I told her what had happened and she got very angry and called her brother loco, but dangerous. And, she warned, he has dangerous friends. Philip told her he would take care of Roddy-boy, that she and I were to have our night and he would make sure we weren’t disturbed. So, while we stayed inside, Philip went out to guard the door.”

Here, Margarite, I must omit some details of those next three hours, not only because revelation would embarrass us both but because they are beyond my feeble powers of description, stored in a mental vault I rarely open even to myself. When I do, I tremble with those images of moonlight and Adriana in the smaller courtyard, the one away from the street. As we kissed longer and deeper she broke away, pulling me toward the house with her giggle and pointing to a mattress we took outside and spread by the fountain in the wall. I lay there waiting for her and after a while the door opened and she called the dogs to come inside and closed the door very softly, then came out from the shadows. The night was so mild and the moon so full I could see every detail of her naked body as she came to me, yet now all of those curves and creases are muted so that what remains is the glimmer of moonlight from the crucifix around her neck and the white of her teeth against the suntanned peach of her skin. The pomegranate tree in the corner near the fountain gave off a sensual musk, the aroma of ripe fruit clinging to the bougainvillea but so heavy it floated down onto the mattress and into her hair as she smiled down on me from her propped elbow and her crucifix lay on my chest, cold, while all else was warm. Later, lying close and staring at the moon, I whispered that life could not hold many moments such as this and she shushed me with a kiss while the fountain murmured pebble-splashed canticles in a language I had never heard but understood completely. And all that time, as the moon moved silently across the courtyard, as it flooded our mattress with beams that played upon the downy folds of her body and cast into the palest shade the clefts and creases I explored to bursting, Philip stood guard.

“Later that night,” I tell her, “we heard a tremendous uproar outside the door. It took a few moments for me to … dress, and by the time I got outside the fight was over. I saw Rodrigo staggering down the street, but
Philip sat on the cobblestones holding his shoulder. He had been stabbed and there was quite a bit of blood.”

“Stabbed!” said Margarite. “He never told us—”

“He was protecting me. Philip didn’t like a fuss made over him and the cut, while deep, turned out to be not as bad as it first appeared. Adriana bandaged him, then went home. The next day she reported to us Rodrigo’s broken jaw and the plans being made by his friends to get even. She begged us to leave before someone was killed.

“So you see, Margarite, Philip fought my battle for me. I owe to him my magical night with Adriana. And later, in Vietnam, he did it again. He was a far braver man than I, and it has taken awhile for me to come to grips with that.”

“Perhaps,” she says a little skeptically. “But Philip could be rash at times. And, there are many forms of bravery.” She leans forward, her tone suddenly confiding. “In the weeks before he left we had some long talks—some of our best. He had great doubts about the war, doubts he didn’t think he could share with his father. He told me that for a time he had considered refusing to go, but he didn’t think he could face people. He was less afraid of being shot than being judged, if you know what I mean.” She pauses, seeming to drift into another room with a distant glaze over her eyes. “Stabbed,” she says softly. “I never knew.”

I stand, newly weary from transcontinental flight, the tension of the meeting with Harris, the weight of confession. She gazes up at me with the skepticism of moments ago. “The part where she kissed you boys at the train … did that happen?”

“Just like I said.”

“Good,” she says with a dimpled smile. “That’s so romantic.”

39

“So this is where the bad guys live,” says Natalie as we arrive in the parking lot of St. Simeon Hall. My lights converge on the stucco wall, where patches of missing mortar resemble giant jigsaw pieces. Then darkness, followed by the dutiful hum of retracting seat belts. She muscles her door, arcs her legs in a sitting pivot, knees together, and alights. With one hand
she grips her slim briefcase and with the other, me, at the crook of my elbow.

I knock on the back door as I did in February. A chorus of cicadas serenade a frog hidden in the low boxwoods flanking us to either side. Again, light beyond the security peephole flickers, the handle rotates, and a trapezoid of light widens with the door. Before us, framed in the doorway, stands Adelle.

Her eyes dart to Natalie, so quickly that the flat “hello” intended for me is delivered to her. Natalie nods in acknowledgement while Adelle turns her gaze on me.

“Christopher tells me that Allie had a good trip,” she says dryly. “I’m glad. Please come in.” She steps aside as we enter. “The Board is waiting.”

I lead down the hall, Natalie beside me and Adelle behind. Through the open door of the library, I see Margarite standing at the head of the table, gesturing to her still-hidden audience. As we enter, she pauses. I walk to her, shake her hand, introduce Natalie as Adelle slides into her seat at the table. Then, turning to them, I rest my hands on the table and lean forward.

“Some of you,” I say, indicating Natalie, “may have met Ms. Berman. She is my guest.” Natalie smiles, not without a twinge of self-consciousness, then sits in the chair Margarite has positioned for me, placing the briefcase before her.

“In five days,” I remind them, “the Society will once more gather at the annual gala. My daughter has not been invited—an embarrassment to her and to us that I hope you will remedy tonight. I’ve met with each of you privately, so I have some feel for your views.”

In the fleeting hiatus between sentences I survey them. At the opposite end of the table sits Charlotte, unmoving, her corpulent arms folded under her breasts and her head rigid, in a pose recalling clay Buddhas I saw in Korea and Vietnam. To her right at the far end, Clarkson tilts his coffee cup in its saucer, appearing intent on the parabola of the liquid against the sides as he swirls it methodically. Seated beside him, closer, is Sandy Charles, her face puckered in a preset affability and her eye contact emphatic.