South of Broad (14 page)

“Speak for yourself,” I said. “Hey, Chad, this is only the second time I’ve met you, but
smart’s
not the first word I think of when I think of you.”

Chad bristled. “What’s the first word you think of, loser? Aren’t we having this niggered-up party because you’re coming off probation? Poor Molly and I got caught snorting a little coke, but they found enough in your cheap sports coat to get half the city high.”

“I screwed up, Chad. So far, it’s been the story of my life.”

“So what’s the first word you think of when you think of me?”

“My mother taught me not to talk in clichés. It offends the English teacher part of her.”

“Give me a try. I don’t mind clichés,” he said.

“The first word that comes to mind is this:
asshole
. Yep, that’s it, all right. The second is
flaming asshole
. The third is
flaming, fucking asshole
. That about sums it up, Chad. Need anything else?”

“One thing. Why did you set my sister up with a fucking orphan?”

“Well, you teased her about not having any dates at the yacht club. You made fun of the way she looked. I thought she was pretty, and very nice. I’d just met Niles, and he looked like he could use a friend or two. They seem to like being with each other tonight.”

“I’ll guarantee you it’ll be the last time you see them together,” Chad said. “My parents’ll go nuts when they hear about Little Orphan Annie.”

“I imagine so,” I said. “But I’ll bet Fraser and Niles’ll have something to say to that.”

“You don’t know a thing about how the Charleston aristocracy thinks or works.”

“But I’ve watched people a lot. They look pretty easy to predict.”

“I’m leaving this party,” Chad said. “And I’m taking Fraser and Molly with me.”

“God, it was such a pleasure getting to know you, Chad,” I said, not bothering to hide the mockery in my voice. “Don’t go out for football, pal. A warning.”

“You think I’m afraid of you?”

“You should be,” I said, “because I plan to knock you on your pussy Charleston aristocratic South of Broad ass.”

“You and your niggers?”

“Yep, me and all the rest.”

“Keep your mountain nigger away from my sister,” Chad warned.

“Who?”

“The orphan. He’s out of the mountains of North Carolina, so he’s a mountain nigger. Pure white trash, which is lower than a nigger.”

“Bye-bye, Chad,” I said. “What a swell guy. You make me even hate white people.”

Chad stormed away, and I wandered through the yard, offering more helpings of barbecue and fried fish and calming myself down. Chad seemed both venomous and insecure, a flammable combination. I pulled a chair up to Judge Alexander to hear him ending a tall tale to laughter and applause because it seemed mannerly, what a good host should do. But my peripheral vision caught a serious argument being conducted in a whispered fever at the side of the house where my mother’s prized camellias grew to unseemly heights. Chad and Fraser Rutledge were locked like dissonant enemies in one of those battles that often spring most violently between people who are supposed to love each other. One fact I was sure of was that Fraser was giving no quarter nor taking a foot-long hot dog’s ration of shit from her brother. From a distance of twenty feet, I watched Niles and Starla witnessing the dispute, and I was sure they knew where the heart of the argument lay. I wondered how long these orphans had felt humiliation at the hands of the native-born citizens of towns where they would always be dishonored visitors. Fraser broke away from her brother’s grip, and when he tried to prevent her from going back to Niles, I saw the exact moment when the leading rebounder among South Carolina high school women basketball players shot a well-placed elbow into her brother’s ribs and sent him flying into a ten-foot camellia bush.

Chad and Molly left the party without any farewells. When Fraser joined Niles, she took his hand, and he gave her one of the most radiant smiles I have ever seen. It struck me speechless that I was instrumental in the coming together of this teenaged couple who instantly seemed to be completions of each other. Betty Roberts and Ike seemed to be getting along well too. What had Starla called me? For the first time in my life I could call myself a matchmaker. I now felt I possessed an innate power I had never realized existed. Looking around the yard, I saw that it was a good party.

I was surprised to see Molly, having remembered her manners, return to the party through the garden, flustered and red-faced. I arrived to back up Niles and Fraser, but recognized immediately that neither of them needed reinforcement. Molly still carried the markings and insignias of the Charleston society girl, an inoculation against the anarchy that had managed to break through her impregnable lines of defense. She was a Southern girl born to please rather than to think, to charm rather than to issue calls to arms. I loved girls like Molly Huger and always had. But she had returned to fight a battle her boyfriend had just lost. Instantly, you could tell that Molly loathed conflict in all its contentious forms. Also, I saw a flanking movement take place on my right, and noticed that my mother’s wolflike attention to mayhem was guiding her to the scene of discord in her yard. I hurried over to cut her off. Although I could explain many things to Molly about what the gloss of unfamiliarity my Southern home represented, I lacked the time or energy to explain that she had entered the spectral garden of James Joyce.

I intercepted my mother before she could enter the fray. “Let me take care of this, Mother.”

“What did that Rutledge boy say to you out there by the oak?” she asked.

“We were just getting to know each other.”

“You’re lying. He was attacking you.”

“I fought back, Mother. I held my ground.”

“Now you’re not lying, so go stop the fight that’s about to break out between Miss Fraser and Miss Molly.” There was a sibilance that meant a mocking irony when she used the word
Miss
.

When I reached the group at the fringes of the party, I heard Molly saying to Fraser, “If you won’t let me talk to you alone, then I’ll say it in front of everyone. Chad’s not leaving until you’re in the car with us, Fraser. I wouldn’t embarrass you in front of strangers for anything, you know that about me.”

“I’m having fun, Molly,” Fraser said. “I’m having a good time, maybe the best of my life. Why does that make you and Chad so unhappy?”

“Because it’s not right. It’s not who we are, or what we were raised to be. We shouldn’t have come here tonight. Leo was wrong to ask us. He knew very well what he was doing.”

Her tone irritated me. “Just what was I doing, Molly?”

“This party,” she said, “is like a can of mixed nuts. It’s all wrong. Everything about it. You know what Chad’s father is going to say when he finds out Fraser was set up with a boy from the orphanage.”

Someone came up beside me, and I turned to see Sheba. “If you don’t like it, then leave the goddamn party. And don’t you dare say one thing to my friend Leo King. He may be the nicest boy I’ve ever met.”

But Niles intervened. “Go with Molly, Fraser. She’s right; I’d only spell trouble for you. Starla and I don’t have much to offer anyone. Heck, we had to borrow these clothes to come to this party. Guess we better get back to the orphanage.”

“You’ve got a twelve o’clock curfew,” I told him. “My mother called Sister Pollywog and arranged it.”

“So you can kiss my ass, Molly,” Starla said with all the sultry darkness and mystery of the Blue Ridge in her low-pitched voice.

Trevor Poe came up from behind. “Molly, you are such a vision of loveliness and spirit. Come into the house and I’ll play love songs to you until my fingers fall off. Now, Sheba, Starla, you girls go easy on Miss Molly.”

“Trevor, don’t you see?” Molly said, pleading now. “We weren’t raised like this. There’s nothing here for people like us, nothing of value. Our values, I’m talking about.”

“What about compromise?” I suggested. “I’ll drive Fraser home before midnight. The orphans have to go back to St. Jude’s in the bus with Mr. Lafayette.”

“My family and I can leave right now too,” Ike said.

“You are my guests, Ike,” I said. “I hope me and my family have made you feel welcome tonight.”

“I’m talking about Molly and Chad,” he said. “They don’t seem happy that we’re here pretending that we’re something else besides niggers.”

“I didn’t say that,” Molly said, and now her body language suggested she had come up against an entire army of invasion she was not born to understand. “And I don’t think that. I promise, that hasn’t entered my mind. It’s hard to explain to outsiders. We were raised with great privilege, but also with great expectations. Family is everything, the one holy word. The glue that holds our whole society together.”

“So the orphanage and the Negro Marching Band got to you tonight?” Starla asked, her dark eyes glittering dangerously. She turned to Betty and Ike and told them: “Got to thank you two. Me and Niles’ve never got to feel like high cotton until tonight. I think Molly actually rates us higher than she does you. Shee-it, this girl’s making me feel like high society.”

“Put a lid on it, Starla,” Niles snapped. “Chad’s the idiot here, not Molly. He’s put her in a bad situation.” To Fraser, he said, “Go on, Fraser. A lot of stuff happened tonight. A lot can still happen.”

“I’d consider it a personal favor, Fraser,” Molly said. “I’d love you to death if you’d do it. Just this once. I’ll never ask it again.”

Fraser considered it a moment, then surprised us all by saying, “Is it okay with you, Starla? I’d rather be with you and your brother than with my brother. Ike and Betty, I’ve been made to feel like a freak by this phony Charleston society since I was born. But tonight, I felt good, and I like it. Y’all made me feel good.”

Betty hugged Fraser and said, “It was great to meet you,” and Ike added, “I got a feeling we’ll be seeing each other again.”

Then Fraser turned to me and kissed me lightly on the cheek. “You throw the best party of anyone in Charleston, Leo King. And I’ve been to all of them.”

When Fraser and Molly had said their good-byes to my parents and to the other adults they knew at the party, I walked them to the front, where Chad sat in his car. He was not fuming and distracted, as I expected him to be, but coolly confident to the point of boredom. After they left, the party moved inside. Most of the older folks also made their farewells. But many stayed on, surprising me, and that’s when Sheba and Trevor Poe took over. They made the memory of that evening belong to them, their spectacular debut in a very oddball demimonde of Charleston nonsociety. Trevor started out by getting all the adults slow dancing as he played the favorite songs of my parents’ generation—songs that suggested the unknowable fears of the men and women separated by oceans during World War II. It was the first time we found that Sheba sang like a fallen angel remembering paradise, her voice rich and golden-toned and throaty. Because music is an inexplicable awakener of the dark engines of our immortal souls, I remember every song that we danced to during that magical night. When Sheba noticed that most of the party could not dance well, she turned the living room, the den, and part of the kitchen into an elaborate dance studio. Then she arrayed us in long, undulating lines as we learned to shag and twist and do the fish and the mashed potato. At center stage, Sheba and Trevor Poe found themselves exactly where they belonged. If Salome had danced half as sensuously as Sheba, I understood the severance of John the Baptist’s head.

Sheba frequently ordered us to change partners. I would spin around and find myself dancing with Starla in her dark eyeglasses, then my shrink, Jacqueline Criddle, then once with my mother, then once, hilariously, with Ike, and we performed the dirty shag to the sounds of Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel.” It was a joyous, miraculous, unrepeatable night.

A
fter the orphans’ bus disappeared behind the imposing iron gate of St. Jude’s, my father asked me if I would take a short ride with him. He drove me to the Battery. We walked up the cement stairs, then moved to the point where the Ashley and the Cooper meet to form the beautiful immensity of Charleston Harbor. As always, you could feel the force and power of the collision of the two rivers. That fusion meant the extension of each river, yet neither seemed happy about it.

“My father took me to this exact spot when I was eighteen, Leo. His father had taken him here for the same ceremony. My grandfather’s father had done the same thing. We don’t know how far back the tradition goes. I’d planned to take Steve here when he was eighteen, but that didn’t work out. When Steve died, I decided to let this tradition die with him. But I changed my mind tonight.”

Father took two silver cups and a pint of Jack Daniel’s from a pouch he was carrying. He poured a finger of bourbon for himself, then he poured a finger for me. “My father wanted to share my first drink. He told me how much I meant to him as a son, and that he hoped he had proven to be a worthy father. At the joining of these two rivers, he welcomed me to manhood. He asked me to be a fine man, the best man I was capable of being. I promised him I would. I ask the same of you, Leo.”

“I’ll never be able to be as fine a man as you,” I said as I raised my cup and touched his. “But I’ll give it a run for its money. That’s a promise.”

“No, I’ve put a study on you in the last couple of years,” he said. The moon caught us in a sluice of its magical light. “You’re not just going to be a fine man, son. You’ve got potential. You might even become a hell of a man.”

“If I do, it will be because I’ve worshipped you,” I said. “I want to grow up to be just like you.”

We drank and the moment felt transformational. All I could do was hope that Father would prove right.

S
o began the time that would alter my vision of things forever. Many years later, the past is calling out to me in a canny, undermining voice, but the starting point was always on Bloomsday, the summer before my senior year. By the time I had my party of celebration on July Fourth, the cast of major characters had all made their entrances. The forces that brought us all together would take their good time in both tearing us to pieces and teaching us the subtleties and indiscretions and high-water marks that bring such pleasure to friendships. I thought I had discovered some friends who could not love one another more, and I was almost right. The following May, we left our graduation stage positive that we would live fascinating, self-actualizing, and amazing lives. We promised we would make a difference in the world we were about to storm. As a group, we did well; as friends, our love sustained us for a while. Then it began to lose some of its lustrous sparkle. But all of us came roaring back to one another in the middle of our lives, by something as simple as a knock on the door.