Adelaide Piper (32 page)

Mrs. Percy tapped all of our shining foreheads and noses with her powder puff, and I grinned at Harriet.

“Now,” the elderly Mrs. Zapes said, removing the silk sash at the doorway and nodding her head at Mrs. Kitteridge, who entreated us to enter the room as the Charleston symphony orchestra played “The Entry of the Guests” from Wagner's
Tannhäuser.

Mrs. Kitteridge sent her flashlight signal, then pushed Jif toward the spotlight as a deep voice announced her full name over the microphone.

“Miss Jennifer Louise Ferguson, daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Theodore Foster Ferguson, presented by her father.”

Jif took her father's hand, then smiled up at him as she gently curtsied down to the floor. When she stood, she took his elbow and walked down the center aisle, taking her place in the figure in front of her escort.

With the advantage of being at the end, I watched each young lady present herself to her father, her mother, the governors of the board, and the audience with a stroll down the aisle and two more curtsies to the ground.

Adjusting my posture as it came my turn to step into the spotlight, I breathed in the fresh Fraser fir–scented air, and I couldn't help smiling wide as I performed a curtsy for my father at one end of the aisle, then two more in the center that would be used as the model on the videos from that day forward and for many years to come.

No, I wasn't land gentry, nor was I an unblemished flower that was ready for the picking. I had been plucked before, and the world had slapped its ugly hand at me. And I had slapped my hand at others too.

But the sprinkling of the Messiah's sacrifice was upon me as I moved up and down the darkened aisle, and it had the power to make all things new again. I would be a fool not to let it cover me.

Smiling earnestly at Mama and the board and the audience, I stopped before Daddy, who stepped back out into the center for the first dance. He took my gloved hand in his and twirled me round and round across the velvet before Randy made the customary tap on his shoulder.

As I spun in the shadows of the tree lights, I made out Shannon in a champagne dress beneath a candelabra, and she was grinning at me. And I spotted Papa Great and Mae Mae, too, clapping their gloves together on my behalf. And Marguerite Hartness and Governor Maves, and even Ruthie, along with Dr. and Mrs. Baxter, who had made the trip all the way from Gastonia.

I shut my eyes as Randy led me in the dance, and I listened to the cupped sound of the white-gloved applause up and down the ballroom. It was the flapping of dove wings over and around me.

17

Out of the Shadows

L
ife moved steadily forward until the end of my junior year at NBU.

Over the fifteen months that followed the debutante ball, I recalled with precision and frequency my dance with the divine across the Magnolia Club ballroom. Despite the sad events that commenced shortly after, that moment was branded on my heart. I often read this passage in Isaiah 49:16: “See, I have written your name on my hand.” And to Professor Dirkas's poetry writing class, I submitted this:

He fought

for me—

lifting me up

out of the miry clay.

He wooed me

from my youth—

waking me

with the dove song

and shading me

at the riverside.

Look into His palm

and you will see

my very name

carved

with the edge

of a rusted nail.

The sadness was this: my parents separated shortly after the debutante ball, and in March 1992, they officially filed for divorce.

Mama had been wholly enraged at Daddy's behavior the night of my debut. After a few glasses of champagne, he'd made quite a scene by calling a number of Williamstown businessmen around the ballroom bar, where he drew circles of the Bizway business plan on cocktail napkins and challenged them all to discard their dead-end careers and join him on the path to untold wealth.

Papa Great had stormed out of the Magnolia Club, and as far as I knew, he hadn't uttered a word to Daddy since.

Dizzy and I had to drive Daddy to a motel room late that night, balancing him up the stairs and into the room where he collapsed with his head between his knees and stared longingly at the pyramid image on the cocktail napkin as if it were his own salvation tract.

We had to help him out of his tux and into his pajamas as he drooled and said, “I've got the plan. Why does Mama doubt it?”

Mama refused to go along with his plan once and for all, and after a few failed attempts at reconciliation, she asked him to leave for good. After their separation, Mae Mae and Papa Great tucked all of Zane Piper's girls, including Mama and me, under their financial wing while Daddy moved in with Uncle Tinka above the automotive shop to scrape and claw his way up the pyramid.

I couldn't pin the full blame on either of them. I knew Daddy had been miserable in his work life from the moment he returned from Vietnam, and so I understood his longing for a change. And as for Mama, who was emotionally distant but devoted in every other manner, I couldn't understand why she so vehemently abhorred the new business venture. Why she simply refused to give him an inch of support in his desire for a fresh start. They were both in the wrong, I supposed— selfish, prideful, and simply unwilling to compromise.

“Why can't you just
try
to step out of the box?” I asked Mama when she called early one morning to warn me about a snowstorm bound for Troutville that she'd spotted on the Weather Channel.

She kept quiet on the other end of the line.

“You've got to meet Daddy halfway. He's been doing what you wanted him to do all of his life; now it's your turn.”

“Don't you think I've tried, Adelaide?” she said in the most forceful voice I could ever remember her mustering. “He's gone and done a 180-degree turn on us all, and he won't even look back to see the damage.”

“Mama—”

“Never you mind,” she said. “Just promise me you'll wear your down jacket, and don't forget about that long underwear in your top drawer.”

Despite the tumult between my folks, the last year had been an extended honeymoon with my Maker. As I began reading the Bible and attempting to pray, I could look back and see how God had been courting me from my earliest days in the form of familial love, natural beauty, and countless acts of mercy that had spared my very life.

Everything had clicked during the last year. When I'd have a question or a thought, what I can only believe was God would confirm it at once either in Scripture, in the classroom, in a conversation, or in Mr. Lewis's books, which I continued to devour, one hearty steak meal after another. God seemed as attentive as a new husband to me that year, and I thought the foundation of my faith was being laid in granite.

One of the astounding acts of mercy that I had been the recipient of was Dr. Shaw and Professor Hirsch's success at convincing the dean of Undergraduate Studies to give me another chance (after failing my calculus exam sophomore year). The dean consented as long as I agreed to work off part of my scholarship as a dorm counselor. So for the second half of my sophomore year, I underwent training, and at the start of my junior year, I became the RA to an eclectic group of freshman girls who were trying to make their own way at NBU.

Not only that, but Whit and some of the other religious studies majors invited me to a study of the book of Acts, and by the end of the year, I declared a double major in English and religion. I was already beginning to research my senior thesis, which would be a study on the religious symbols in the short stories of Flannery O'Connor.

Ruthie Baxter had taken a semester off after the Christmas of 1990 to undergo outpatient psychiatric treatment and take part in a support group at the local crisis pregnancy center. She said she'd had a dream during that time at home of a precocious two-year-old girl peering around a doorway at her before running away, her laughter echoing down a hallway. And after that, she felt that the life connected to the heart on that fuzzy ultrasound screen was now in the care of God. And this brought her an immeasurable kind of relief.

And when NBU led a plant-a-tree campaign for the south side of campus, which had been hit hard by Hurricane Hugo, Ruthie and I combined a few months' spending money to buy and plant a white elm tree on the back quad in memory of the short life that had permanently changed us both. The tree grew and blossomed and provided shade for many a student in the years that followed.

I had spent the summer between my sophomore and junior years backpacking across Europe with Harriet, thanks to Marguerite's generous financial travel aid. (She was still recovering from her stroke, and the doctor had strongly advised her not to spend the summer of 1991 in Nice.) Harriet and I figured out the train system and successfully made our way through Italy, France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and the Czech Republic on fifty dollars a day. In each new city and village that we visited, we lived on wine and bread and sought out the grand cathedrals so we could gander and pray in the massive structures that had taken lifetimes to build.

Dizzy had gotten into the cooking school at Johnson & Wales and seemed to be excelling in the baking department. She was leaning toward a major in pastry making and had FedExed a half dozen of her original almond croissants to me. I ate one with great pride as I sat on the porch facing the front quad and sipped my cappuccino. Who'd have thought that Dizzy, in all her black clothing and makeup, would be the creator of such a sweet and delicate treat?

It was Lou I worried about now. She had been hit hard by Mama and Daddy's separation. Not only did her speech impediment worsen during high school, but a rare learning disorder akin to dyslexia had been identified, and she was forced to enroll in a special-needs academy outside Charleston. Mama dutifully rented an apartment for she and Lou near the academy, and they would spend their weeknights there before heading back to Williamstown for the weekend. You had to give it to Greta—she was one devoted mother.

When Daddy wasn't traveling with Bizway, he'd take Lou in at Uncle Tinka's apartment, and she hated sleeping on the pull-out sofa in the dust-encrusted bachelor pad, listening to two men snore like beasts in their separate rooms.

As for Randy, he moved up to first-string kicker his senior year, and he hit the road with the Gamecocks all fall. What he wanted to show me that winter of 1991 was that he'd put the money he'd inherited from a great-uncle down on a deepwater lot on Pawleys Island. The lot had a rickety cabin on stilts and a crumbling dock that snaked its way out into the marsh.

“I'm going to rebuild it all,” he said to me the day after the debutante ball. He pulled me in beside him. “And I hope you'll be the one sharing a life with me here.”

“I just don't think—,” I said, but my uncertainty about our romantic life never seemed to slow him down. “Let's see how this summer goes, okay? I'll be home, and we can really see where this thing is going.”

“You're on,” he said.

Now, instead of the bad love poetry, he mailed me photos of the island property with his step-by-step restoration plans for the house. He was putting a cupola up on the top, and from it you could see the beach on one side and the creek and marsh on the other.

“Not bad, eh?” he had written on the photo. “A poet could get inspired here. You can test it out come June.”

As for Frankie Wells, he became the assistant editor of the campus paper and joined Harmony. I didn't know if this meant he was gay or just supportive of the gay society, and I was trying to get up the nerve to ask him.

Whenever I saw him, he was smoking a cigarette and scribbling something down in his little notebook. We still had lunch together when the paper had been put to bed and midnight study breaks along the colonnade. But, like many a friendship, we were adept at avoiding certain subjects.

Jif had rallied for a while. She'd gained back the fifteen pounds she needed to look remotely healthy, but after turning Harriet and me down on the European backpacking adventure for a summer internship at
Vanity Fair
in Manhattan (thanks to one of the Northeastern girls' contacts), she slid back into her old habits. The hollowness reappeared in her cheeks, and she was always chewing gum. Ned Crater had finally broken up with her because it killed him to see her wasting away, and she had gone through a string of good-looking frat jerks to satiate her desire for attention.

I continued to call her and invite her to the campus coffeehouse or to Sunday night vespers, but she usually declined. Sometimes I could hear her drunken and flirtatious laugh from my cracked dorm window late at night. I'd smile longingly for my friend and peek out the window to see her flip her cashmere scarf around her neck and lean on a boy's arm.

On these occasions I would picture her at the midnight breakfast following the debutante ball the previous year. How she had devoured the egg-and-sausage casserole, fruit, and muffins as we recounted the grooming mishaps that nearly prevented the presentation from taking place. She ate like there was no tomorrow that night, and she laughed and hung on Ned's arm. He had grinned as though he was the luckiest boy in the whole wide world, and I breathed a sigh of relief, because it seemed that her relationship with food was on the mend.

I never heard from Peter Carpenter, who was locked away in the Virginia State Penitentiary outside Richmond. Frankie said he'd heard he wouldn't be up for parole for another two years. And according to Mama, his mother rarely came out of her Williamstown house.

When I thought of Brother Benton grinning at me on the grass that day at orientation, it still sent a coldness into my bones. Two promising lives had been demolished my freshman year that I knew of. But I imagined there were others whose stories were hidden in shadowy places, covered by the tight-lipped administration, who shielded themselves behind the colonnade on the hill in hopes that no one would shine a light in the crevices.