A Southern Girl (35 page)

“That’s what you meant, and it may be what you said, but what you were thinking is that you’ve strayed into the office of a southern sheriff.”

“I really don’t understand your attitude, Mr. Carter. I came here because I thought we might help you solve a problem.”

“But your very first sentence contained the word ‘lawsuit.’” “Is that significant?”

“It is indicative,” I reply.

“Of … ?”

“Of a mindset that thinks every problem ought to be litigated. Do you really think I’d sue my friends over this?”

“If you’re talking about some kind of compromise or negotiation, it simply doesn’t work. The people excluding your daughter aren’t going to be fazed by logic or fairness.”

“You seem to know them pretty well after … what, two months in Charleston?”

She turns toward the window, her dark hair shifting on her shoulders and her profile sculpturesque against a far wall. “I’ve spent several days sightseeing. This is a lovely city.”

“Thank you,” I say, softening against my will. Compliments to Charleston affect me like a sorbet, cleansing the palate of lingering aftertastes.

She rises, crosses the room to an end table, and picks up a framed photo of Allie. “This must be your daughter.”

“Yes.”

“What a beautiful young woman. Her age?”

“Seventeen; still needing her father’s consent to file a lawsuit, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Or her mother’s,” Natalie Berman counters.

“That’s going to be tough to get. She’s dead.”

“I’m truly sorry.”

As she replaces the picture I sneak a look at my watch. It is past 6:30 and I am feeling the gravity of a ten hour day pulling me downward. “If you’re parked outside, I’ll walk you to your car.”

“No need,” she says pleasantly.

In the elevator, she hands me her card. “If you change your mind, call me,” she urges. “Perhaps there is something short of suing that will help.”

“Maybe,” I say to be polite. “Enjoy your evening.”

From the car I call Adelle. She has not eaten either and I agree to pick her up in thirty minutes.

Mr. Quan’s restaurant is the Red Dragon. Its decor is stark, consisting of aluminum and Formica tables like those found in most kitchens in the 50s and 60s. The lighting is dim, to save utility costs. The walls, bare but for a few scattered Chinese characters, display brass plates, hung randomly and representing, I suppose, yin or yang or happiness or who knows what. There is piped-in music, the Asian equivalent of elevator junk featuring
those high-pitched discordant strings. I don’t appreciate this music; to my western ear it all sounds like a recording of a cat being tortured. I eat here often for one compelling reason: the food is great and not expensive. Adelle and I are shown to my usual table near the back.

Mr. Quan emerges from the kitchen, spots us, and hustles over with two menus. I have never been here when he was not, and I can only guess that the number of hours he works each week exceeds eighty.

“Good evening,” he says in his competent English, smiling broadly. Although I am a perdurable customer and generous tipper, anyone off the street gets the same congenial greeting. He bows faintly from the waist to Adelle. “So nice to see you, Mrs. Roberts.” To me he says, “And may I say how wise you look these days.”

I regard him suspiciously. “Wise sounds like a euphemism for old.” I see his brow knit and guess he is struggling with the language. “Euphemism; it means a less offensive way of saying what you really mean.”

“Ah,” the owner says, mischief in his eyes, “then allow me to say how exceedingly wise you appear this evening.” Adelle laughs with him as I glare at both.

“Adelle, is there still time to stop payment on the check for my party?” I insist that Mr. Quan join us. The room is in its familiar rhythm, with a steady drone of dinner crowd conversation muffling the cat torture. In the kitchen, the clang of dueling woks can be heard each time the double doors swing wide. Pert aromas of ginger and garlic and soy-based oils seduce us, an irresistible foreplay to the meal itself. Adelle compliments him on the food at the party as I nod agreement.

“I am most pleased with the catering,” he says. “When I began, I thought it would be a small part of my enterprise, but it grows stronger each year.” He likes to refer to his business as an “enterprise” for the connotation of something grand and sprawling. When I helped renegotiate his lease three years before, his accountant provided his financial statements. From those, I concluded that not only was enterprise a fair characterization but that he could buy most people I represent.

Mr. Quan has accumulated all he has since his arrival in 1977. One gold nugget, he swears, is all that remained after his grueling exodus from Vietnam. The boat on which he escaped was direly overloaded, and in addition to a constant threat of capsize it faced pirates, who boarded in three separate raids before the boat reached Malaysia. He will not say
where he hid the nugget; only that he started with many and that, after the first raid, he secreted his last one in a “place not easily searched.” Upon arrival in Charleston, he borrowed $10,000 from a network of Vietnamese émigrés already settled here. He repaid it in six months. He lives over the Red Dragon, with no family and no close friends as far as I can tell. He refuses to discuss his life in Vietnam prior to becoming a boat-person, and I know little of his politics with the exception that at the mention of the word “communist,” his face contorts in a grimace of disdain, and watching him I sense the leap to hatred would be very short.

He motions for a waitress and we order. The waitress is American, but all the cooks and waiters are Vietnamese. He inquires about Christopher, and at Adelle’s mention of sore ribs I can only smile inwardly.

“And how is Allie?” he asks. “After your party there was much discussion of her among my boys.” He cants his head toward the back, indicating the kitchen.

“She’s fine,” I reply. “She mentioned the other day that she might apply here for a job this summer.”

Adelle’s face grows quizzical. “Oh? I thought she had a job all lined up with a camp in New England.”

“You mean the riding camp in Vermont she worked at last summer. They’ve invited her back but she isn’t sure she’ll go.”

Mr. Quan says, “She is most welcome here. I would consider it a privilege to employ her.”

“Great,” I say. “I’ll let her know. By the way, what do you hear about travel to the Far East these days?”

He shifts in his chair before answering. “Two of my employees have been to Vietnam recently. They say things are opening up and that U.S. dollars go very far. They lived like royal princes for ten days.”

“In Ho Chi Minh City?” I ask, thoughtlessly flaunting political correctness.

“In Saigon,” Mr. Quan counters. “It will always be Saigon.” After an awkward pause, during which we momentarily avoid eye contact, he says, “Why do you ask?”

“Allie wants me to take her to Korea. For graduation.”

“And will you?”

“Haven’t decided. We don’t know the language, Seoul, anything really.”

“Yes, those are concerns,” he acknowledges, then as an afterthought says, “I have a brother there.”

I whistle softly. “I had no idea.”

“My only brother. He left Vietnam before me. In the refugee camp in Malaysia, he had a chance to go to Seoul. I waited for America. He also owns an enterprise.”

“When did you last see him?”

“He visited me. Almost ten years ago.”

Adelle, until then a passive listener, suddenly becomes animated. “I know,” she says, looking at me, “Mr. Quan should go with you.”

I say, “That’s an idea.”

He smiles wanly. “It is most thoughtful of you to suggest, but I am afraid that would be impossible. I have my enterprise, all these employees depending upon me.”

“But everyone takes a vacation,” Adelle says.

He bobs his head in seeming agreement but all his facial features are at odds with her suggestion. “No, Mrs. Roberts, for me a return to Asia could not be a vacation. I will never go back. And now, if you can excuse me, I will see what is holding up your dinners.”

We watch him retreat through the swinging doors.

“He certainly closed that discussion,” she says.

“Politely but firmly.”

“I wonder what it was like for him there,” she muses.

“Who knows? With the war, the U.S. withdrawal, the communists taking over, it must have been ugly for unrepentant South Vietnamese, and Mr. Quan is clearly one of those.”

Our soup arrives, followed by entrees. My sesame chicken in curry is delectable and Adelle reports her pork the same. I mention my visit from Natalie Berman.

“But how did she know of the vote? We all swore secrecy. That’s why I haven’t been able to discuss it with you, and it’s so frustrating because I want to and I know you’re curious.”

“Someone called her, she wouldn’t say who.”

“Male or female?”

“She didn’t say.”

“I can’t imagine,” Adelle says, perplexed. “If you could have been a fly on the wall of that room; if you could have heard people who masquerade
as your friends. It made me sick, that’s all I can say. I can just imagine that group of old fogies turning thumbs down on Christopher; I’d strangle them, particularly Jeanette Wilson, the bitch. Well, what now?”

I look past her. “I wish I knew.”

22

Sarah, for all her geriatric vivacity, needs help with the yard. At least twice a year we dedicate a Saturday to her place on Sullivan’s. This morning, Allie and I stop at the college, pick up Steven, and the three of us, dressed in the oldest clothes we could find, are on the causeway headed east. We have not seen Steven since the weekend of my party so there is catching up to do.

“Physics is going to kill me, that’s all there is to it,” he is saying from the passenger seat and I flash a look in the rear view mirror to warn Allie against gloating over her grades in science.

“Boy, you and me both,” she says heavily. This is worse, I think disapprovingly. Condescension; how unseemly. “I panicked toward the end of last semester.” She lets us ponder this anomaly in silence before adding, “Yep, toward the end I was afraid I would have to buy a textbook.” Steven, stone-faced, fishes into the glove box, grabs a map, and flings it over his shoulder as she ducks, laughing gleefully.

Watching these two spar is like watching heredity and environment go fifteen rounds for the title. Steven and Josh are both their father’s sons, a fact simultaneously pleasing and terrifying. When Josh was three, running around the yard chasing the neighbor’s dog, I noticed he ran on his heels. Instantly, I knew that run, and I accurately predicted he would be straining, as I did, for middling speed as an athlete, struggling to break twelve seconds in a hundred yard dash on his best day in sports. To a confirmed jock, the run of his teammates is as distinctive as a photograph, and on a football team with seventy guys dressed out but without numerals on their jerseys, I could have named all of them from fifty yards away by watching them run a few strides. Put Josh in my old uniform, slap No. 50 on his back, and you couldn’t get odds from my teammates that it wasn’t me lumbering along under those shoulder pads. The Carter forehead, the
curl of his hair in humidity, the square chin, the green eyes all attest to a biological unity.

But physical likeness pales in fascination on the day you notice a biological child’s character flaw. Like the caveman who bends over the lake for the first glimpse of his own image, you are stunned to see reflected back flaws, unseen until that moment. “Don’t procrastinate,” you instruct as you inventory the projects lying fallow on your own to-do list. “And don’t be a hypocrite.”

But a clear picture of a fuzzy image is fuzzy, and the melding of two genomes is a fuzzy matter indeed, a reality Elizabeth and I remarked upon many times as she also saw herself in them, as though the caveman had glanced down at the precise moment a jet ski roiled the water below. As with most, our boys are identifiable blends of their impassioned architects. So what to make of Allie?

An orphan adopted at birth is not so much a mirror as a prism. Look at her directly and you will not, cannot, see yourself looking back. Instead, you will see refracted in facets cut by her unknown jewelers the pale inks and dyes of your behavior, culture, and station melded among and into the iridescent hues of her genetic weave. Trace the rainbow to its source and behold nothing more varied than a sanctified shaft of light, God’s random sunshine beamed at another’s cradle but diverted by grace to yours.