A Southern Girl (13 page)

“Elizabeth Hetzel. Hollins?”

Then I remembered. As she faced me, testing my memory and squinting into the morning coming up behind me, I mentally sheared off the tangle of curls framing her lovely face to summon her image as it must have appeared to me on that blind date our freshman year. “Sure,” I said. “We went to Tony’s. You ordered pizza with pineapple on it. I didn’t know they put pineapple on pizza.”

“Not bad,” she said, grinning. Then, turning back to her friends, she urged them to go on; she would catch up. We talked for two and a half hours. I learned things I must have learned on our blind date but forgotten. And, I learned she had arresting eyes I did not remember. Bands of welcoming brown were set off by harder bronze flecks seemingly
embedded, like mica glinting in the light. By the time we had made a date for later in the week the sun was well up and I craved sleep at any price.

I glanced at the rear view mirror at my sons, our sons, their heads canted inward on a common pillow. Josh favored his mother in appearance, but had my mellow disposition. Steven seemed the reverse. Their births mirrored their development; Josh, long and labored and Steven, shorter and to the point. Heredity’s irrefutable markings at the chins, the noses, incipient eyebrows. With shallow breaths, nostrils flaring faintly, and their brows unfurrowed by a single care they slept, their trust in me complete.

By the time I turned onto the interstate they were awake, playing a car game that awarded points for cows counted and deducting them for cemeteries passed. A mileage sign, confirming progress south, renewed my dread of the impending announcement. I tried to recall if the subject of adoption had ever come up with my parents. Did they ever consider adopting a sibling for me, their only child? I doubted it. The lone reference to adoption I could remember involved a cousin, orphaned by a house fire and taken in by a cousin more distant. While I had no basis to believe my parents disliked or disapproved of the concept, I knew it would strike them as a strange, even bizarre commitment for parents who were neither childless nor forced by circumstances to assume other parents’ responsibilities. The very idea would be as foreign to them as an announcement that I was leaving Elizabeth and our sons to join the priesthood–noble enough, but under the circumstances a form of mental imbalance.

Elizabeth, on the other hand, always traveled with certain angst on visits to family, hers or mine. Holidays, in particular, depressed her, for reasons I never fully understood and she articulated vaguely, with adumbrated explanations like “not happy times.” When I pressed, she withdrew, a morose distancing. In days preceding them, I watched her steel herself against whatever demons preyed upon her, and for a day or two into the visit she held up, bright-eyed and spirited. But it didn’t last, and her moods became cloudy, overcast. If she felt heightened angst at this trip’s agenda, it didn’t show.

We stopped for fast food. The boys fought over french fries while Elizabeth doctored her coffee with her standard three sugars and two creams.
Entering South Carolina, we drove through rural towns, where shoppers walked Main Streets in search of sales and overhanging strings of red and green Christmas lights swayed in the wind.

Sixty miles from Charleston, we entered the Francis Marion National Forest, a thirty-mile stretch of unbroken isolation. A two lane road divided pines tall enough to throw the roadway into deep shadow by mid-afternoon. Here, the boys always wanted to sing, and I agreed. I grew up with the Kingston Trio and Brothers Four and remembered four or five of their ballads I intended to pass down. In full voice and errant pitch we sang, “This is the story ’bout Eddie-cochin-catchinarin-tosanearin-tosanokinsamma-kamma-whacky Brown.” When we reached the last line, “Took so long to say his name that Eddie-cochin-catchinarin-tosanearin-tosanokinsamma-kamma-whacky Brown … drowned,” we burst into laughter, always. Then it was on to
MTA
and
Blue Water Line
and the rest. One day our grandchildren will be learning those words from an off-key driver and I hope to live long enough to hear them.

Thirty miles beyond the forest, the air turned identifiably coastal, hinting of salt marsh and dried oyster banks. We crossed the high twin humps of the Cooper River Bridge, then turned down East Bay. Elizabeth gathered her things before pivoting for a quick visual inspection of the boys, crowded against the rear doors in anticipation. One last turn and I felt the familiar rumble of the cobblestones on Church Street, then saw my home, an antebellum, piazza-lined house a block from the Battery. Mom and Dad met us in the driveway.

Dad was a willowy man two inches taller than me. Even now, at age seventy, black hair predominated his head and eyebrows, and only with the onset of his illness had flecks of gray appeared. At the cheekbones, a network of blood vessels near the surface gave his skin an artificial robustness, belied by the sallow hollows in the cheeks themselves and the absence of color from his lips. A downy film of gray whiskers told me he had not shaved that morning. He had lost weight since my last visit, but his movements were sturdy, his handshake firm.

I hugged Mother and stretched my legs as the others exchanged greetings.

“That drive doesn’t get any shorter,” I said as Josh hugged his grandmother.

“How did you come?” asked my father, and I, who always came the same way, related it again to him, who put the same question to me after every trip.

That evening, as Elizabeth talked in the kitchen with Mother and the boys rediscovered the magic hidden inside the games drawer of the old sideboard, I retreated to the piazza off the upstairs den, leaving the French doors open. The wooden swing at the far end groaned under my weight. I pushed back, raised my feet, and felt a puff of salt air brush past me as the swing commenced its pendulum. Above, the “s” hooks at the end of their supporting chains creaked against the eye bolts augured into the ceiling as the harbor, faintly visible through the palmetto tree at the opposite end, appeared, then disappeared, with my line of sight. Winter stillness pervaded the yard below, so that while the unseasonably balmy temperatures suggested the monotone serenade of cicadas, no sound competed with the metronomic clicking from above. I breathed in, filling my lungs with the saline humidity that was as much a part of my boyhood as the maple bed in my room or the Little League trophy on my bookcase.

Out of the silence came footsteps in the hall. Looking right, I saw through the window beside the swing the outline of my father in the hallway leading to the den. “Dad! On the piazza.” Moments later Dad’s silhouette appeared in the doorway.

“Peaceful tonight,” he offered, paused as though uncertain of whether to cross the threshold.

“Can’t beat it,” I said from the recessed darkness of the swing. “You would think that with us being near the same water a few hundred miles north the air would be the same, but it isn’t.”

My father made no reply. The overhead clicking seemed amplified in the lull.

“It’s good to be home,” I said.

“I saw Barron Morris a few days ago at a Christmas party. He asked about you. Wanted to know how you liked your practice and whether you had ever given any thought to coming back here. He said to call him next time you’re in town.”

“I’ll do that,” I said, mildly intrigued by this overture from one of Charleston’s premier attorneys. An inspiration seized me to tell my father the answers to Morris’s questions, but before I could begin Dad turned and walked away, so that light from the den again filled the unobstructed
doorway. Perhaps Dad sensed what was coming; sensed that I was about to embark upon the kind of personal disclosure that, in the rare occurrences of the past, left my father silent, unable to respond and embarrassed by it. I gave the floor a forceful thrust and continued swinging.

On the day before we were scheduled to return to Virginia, Elizabeth pressed me to broach the issue at lunch, but lunch came and went as I grew steadily more impatient with my own apprehension. I had felt more relaxed in front of juries in death penalty cases. To kill time, I read a novel and then wandered aimlessly about the house. I grew up here, and all about me were the remembered relics of my youth: furniture, photographs, lamps, baseball and football pennants. I lingered at a photograph framed above my dresser. There was my childhood friend, Philip, grinning from the seat of a new bicycle. Philip died in Vietnam, while I was in law school. I took a nap. The afternoon waned.

I know my “buy a gook” comment at supper took Elizabeth by surprise, but we share a dark sense of humor and I needed something to counter the tension I felt building. Mother set such a nice table in honor of our last night. She shuffled in and out of the kitchen, mumbling to herself as she brought rice and cauliflower, snap beans and coleslaw, ham and artichoke pickle. Her disorganization was legendary, but she possessed the gentlest soul I had ever encountered. It was not unusual to find, in the kitchen after a sumptuous meal, a prepared dish on which she might have invested an hour’s labor, only to forget to place it on the table. On such occasions, she laughed at herself along with everyone else, proffering explanations for her absent-mindedness which provoked ever more laughter. People sensed, with the barest exposure to her, that anything said to her in anger or pique would hurt her beyond rejoinder, leaving the tormentor wounded by his own sword. I prized her congenital tenderness and testing it, as I would momentarily, disturbed me deeply.

I knew generally Dad’s attitude about Asians. Over the years, and especially during Vietnam, he made comments that evidenced a finely honed racism. His hawkish support for what we were doing there had nothing to do with the rights of South Vietnamese to live free from Communism. He didn’t much care what system they lived under or, truth be told, whether they lived at all. His rationale for putting men and money over there, and possibly his only son, found its footing in the need to stand up to the Chinese, who he was convinced aspired to world domination. A classic
domino theorist. But his expression at supper of disdain for all Asians shocked me. Voicing his most heartfelt feelings, on that or anything else, shocked me. Maybe he felt ambushed. Neither he nor Mom had a clue this was coming, so I was prepared to allow them some latitude in their response. The extent of Elizabeth’s charity I would learn later.

Mother, on the other hand, followed the unwritten script to the final line. Ladies do not vent in public. They pick up dishes with dignity and adjourn to another room. She could not have cared less about the domino theory. For her, millions of slant-eyed yellow people in the Pacific, all dedicated to making her a war widow three years into her marriage, said all she needed to know. Her particular xenophobia ran to anyone living outside the South, and the emotion was not hatred or even dislike. She followed the Christian mandate to love thy neighbor—she just loved her southern neighbors more. For her, southerners were a breed chosen by God to represent all that was good and true and decent in the human race, and non-southerners, “some very nice people,” she would allow, simply fell short of that standard. When I became engaged to Elizabeth, she took solace in Elizabeth’s southern college education, but deep down she was asking the question that always obsessed her: “Who are your people, dear?” I once asked Mother if she had been disappointed I had not married a woman from the South. She hesitated, weighing her words, before telling me in a tone close to professorial that the choice of a mate involved a host of considerations, geographic origin being but one of many. I knew she didn’t really mean that, and she knew it too. But by then Josh and Steven had come along, and grandchildren will bridge more divides than any force on earth. Then, as an afterthought, she said, “Your father and I never insisted on a girl from Charleston. There were charming girls in Columbia, too.”

As if the adoption discussion were not crisis enough for one trip, Steven fell off his bike and cut his head on the morning we were to leave. Elizabeth arrived at the hospital as they were sewing him up. He’ll be fine, the doctor assured me. The small scar will fade in time.

Dad and I drove home in silence. Steven rested his temple against the back seat, seemingly spent from his adventure. Before the station wagon came to a stop, Elizabeth emerged from the house to escort the patient inside. Clinging to her arm, he walked slowly and with his head down
toward the house. I would have been with him but for Dad’s comment as I turned off the engine. “Let’s talk a minute.”

I did not move because I could not move, so totally arrested by what would have passed, between others, as a routine overture. Unlike Elizabeth, who had anticipated the lecture she had received from Sarah that morning, I expected silence. But I saw now, in my father’s grip on the door handle, his rigid body braced as if expecting some jarring impact, and his refusal to look at me directly, the very anguish which would render this moment, for me, indelible. For the first time, Dad’s mask of anonymity slipped an inch, just enough for me to glimpse the pain behind the four simple words he had just uttered. Small wonder he hadn’t spoken them more often or, to my memory, ever. His discomfort spread immediately across the space separating us physically, so that without consciousness I gripped my door handle, as if bracing.

I had seen, in the faces of witnesses at trial or deposition, an insecurity that bore some of the markings now exhibited by Dad’s awkward stiffness and his effort to modulate his voice, and I had assigned that discomfiture to the intimidation which looms over one in stressful, defensive surroundings when confronted by another for whom that same environment is as relaxed as an overstuffed chair in the den at home. Growing up, we discussed politics with informal ground rules more appropriate to a confessional. No interrupting, no raised voices, considered regard for the other’s opinion. But even these “arguments” occurred when Dad had armored himself in the mail of alcohol. He was not an alcoholic when measured on scales of frequency of use or quantities of consumption. By only one such measure could he have been, arguably, addicted, and that was his helpless dependency in the face of personal interaction or confrontation. Alone, he needed no anesthesia of the spirit, but venturing beyond his mental and emotional borders required the courage found in a cocktail and without it he stood at the edge of crowds, covered by a carapace of introversion, as hard and impenetrable as an oyster.