South of Broad (23 page)

“Vive la différence,” I say. “Should I call Sonia back up here to translate that?”

“But I’m not being fair to you, Leo. I’m not telling the whole story. I know perfectly well that the women who’ll be at dinner tomorrow night love your fanny. And they’re the ones who love you best—my darling wife, my homely sister, Man-o’-War, and the cutest Negress ever to carry a gun for the highway patrol. You’ve been nice to all of them, Leo, I give you that. For a long time over a period of many years, and I’m even starting to think it’s sincere. You’re nice to their husbands and you remember their kids’ birthdays, you bring bones to their dogs and chocolates to their maids. You’ve got a way of making your friends feel special. It’s a gift. One that I truly envy, Leo.”

“What about you? How do I make you feel, Chad?”

“Special. I include myself in that illustrious category. Not many people like me. That caused me some pain and has taken some adjusting to. I’ve learned to live with it because I have no choice.”

“Have you ever thought about being nicer to people? Friendlier?”

“No, I leave that to the superiors of the world, like you. The grovelers. The bootlickers. That’s not part of my makeup. But I’m more successful than almost all my contemporaries. Most men who have loathed and underestimated me have come to fear me. I take great satisfaction in that. I breathe their fear, Leo. It’s pure oxygen to me. But you seem to have taken joy in my success. This puzzles me. I’ve always wanted to see you fall flat on your ass. I waited for you to fizzle out, to reach the burned-out end of a very slender talent. Yet I’ve got to admit you’ve helped me out in my own career. You brag about me in your column. People ask me about our friendship all the time. How it started, what kept it up—what they’re really asking is how a good guy like Leo King could like an asshole like Chad Rutledge.”

“A noble and fair question,” I say. “And a question I’ve been asking myself with more and more frequency. What’s your answer?”

“Silence,” he replies. “I answer them with pure silence.”

“Got some advice for you. Call up Molly and surprise her. Take her out to dinner tonight. Then come to the cookout at your sister’s tomorrow.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Here’s some more advice,” I say. “If you come, try to put on a happy face.”

O
n Sunday morning, I walk my mother up the steps of the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, in a bright sunlight that makes the red sandstone building look as though it is bleeding in tones of irregular gold. As we enter the vestibule, the inside of the cathedral shimmers with the overripe beauty of a European church. Our trek through the believers passes the sightless eyes and tongueless faces of the saints who preside over the side altars in unnoticed postures of religious ecstasy.

When Mother and I take our seats, I hear a disconcerting murmuring of the congregation behind me. I turn and almost laugh out loud when I spot Sheba Poe, wearing sunglasses and the most shapeless and demure suit in her repertoire. That shameless queen of entrances tries to catwalk her way into the cathedral without being noticed, to slip unobtrusively down the side aisle to the confessional.

With perfect timing and a sense of theater that matches Sheba’s own, Monsignor Max bolts out of a rarely used doorway in the rear of the cathedral, magnificent in the gold and ivory finery of his Sunday vestments. He moves like a bird of paradise beneath the towering altar candles, arriving at the confessional booth at the precise moment that Sheba disappears behind the burgundy curtain as a gasp of incredulity explodes from the parishioners. Because of Sheba’s notoriety among the tabloids, the churchgoers of St. John’s can be forgiven their response to the electrifying sight of one of the most brazen sinners of our time entering a confessional with the humility of an Augustinian hermit.

“If she’s honest, she’ll be in there a week,” Mother says, loudly enough to get a muffled laugh around us until I elbow her into silence.

“I could face the Lord today at the judgment seat, look him in the eye, and tell him that his humble servant did her best. What’re you going to say on Judgment Day, Leo?”

“That my mother was a pain in the ass,” I whisper.

“How dare you speak profanity in this sacred sanctuary?”

“The good Lord would understand. He was once flesh and blood like me. But he picked the Virgin Mary to raise him. I got you.”

Mother notices a commotion to her left and says, “My Lord, she’s coming out after only five minutes. Who does she think she’s fooling?”

“That is between her and God and her confessor.”

“Oh, Lord,” Mother gasps, “she’s coming straight this way. I’ll leave if she tries to sit with us, and that’s no idle threat, son.”

A simple black veil covers Sheba’s hair, and she appears beatific as an usher leads her to our pew. I move over to make room for her, meeting stiff resistance from my mother, whose body goes rigid. But I put my shoulder into it and make room for Sheba, who shoots me a collusive wink as she kneels to say her considerable penance.

In her own uncontrollable outrage, my mother rises up, as obvious as a humpback whale breeching near a cruise ship, demanding that I allow her to sit elsewhere and to humiliate Sheba in front of a goodly percentage of Catholic Charleston. I hold her wrist in a grip and I whisper, “Sit down and pray, Mother. We should rejoice. Sheba’s come home to her faith. Look at her. She’s kneeling at the foot of the cross, looking up to the crucified Jesus.”

“Bad acting,” Mother spits out as she resumes her seat. “Her career’s tanking fast. She’s had two face-lifts already.”

“Three,” Sheba says, but she does not open her eyes.

As Monsignor Max follows his altar boys onto center stage, the congregation rises as one. I listen with admiration as he glitters his way through the opening prayers of the Common of the Mass. Even back when I served as his altar boy I was a passionate fan of the showmanship he brought to the task of worship. There is a lot wrong with the Roman Catholic Church, but I have to admit that my people sure know how to put on a show. Though my faith has suffered a watering-down over the years, I still cherish the imperishability of its rituals, and I will always find myself a prisoner to the divine sublimity of the Eucharist itself.

I begin a prayer that dismays and frightens me because it issues out of a black place inside me, unbidden and surprising in its forcefulness. But it comes, and I can do nothing but listen to its urgent message. “Let me help my friends, Lord. But I need something else, and I need it from you: Let those same friends help me. Grant me the humility to let them do it. Let them save me from my darkness, my terror, and my sadness. I’ve held them inside me for too long. I ask for your help—all the help you can give me. I need something to hold on to, to anchor on, to save myself with. I ask you for a sign. A simple one, but something clear. I ask for a sign.”

When I open my eyes again, a terrible fear consumes me because the prayer felt like a nervous breakdown instead of a conversation with God. So I try to control my breathing as I await the usher’s call to the Communion rail. To my surprise, Sheba stands up before that call comes, and the usher is at her side as she leans over and kisses me on the cheek, whispering, “See you later, handsome.”

With perfect timing, she takes the usher’s waiting arm, and he leads her to the far right side of the Communion rail as Monsignor Max sweeps down to meet them. Sheba kneels and he places a Communion wafer on her tongue. She takes it, prays, makes the sign of the cross, then lets the usher lead her out a side door as the entire congregation watches the drama unfold before their eyes. Then the platoon of overstarched ushers begins to invite the front rows to partake of Communion as a flock of sparrow priests enters, their chalices overflowing with the ivory-white wafers.

Mother presses her mouth against my ear and whispers, “Our monsignor is an egomaniac. That was disgraceful and unnecessary.”

“Great theater,” I whisper back.

“This is a temple to praise God, not Sheba Poe’s plastic tits,” Mother says. We walk to the altar and receive the host from the priest who married my parents and baptized me. Then we follow the crowd out to Broad Street. My mother still cannot let the subject of Sheba go. “That girl’s the whore of Babylon. Her birthplace is at Sodom or Gomorrah.”

“She sure is cute, though, isn’t she?” I cannot help teasing my mother, who is always volatile when aroused.

“I find interior beauty far more attractive. Spiritual beauty, I’m talking about, like Saint Theresa, Saint Rose of Lima, or Saint Francis of Assisi.”

“Not me,” I say. “I like plastic tits.”

When she punches me on the arm, we both break down laughing on the steps of the cathedral. Though it is nice to see my mother laugh, I am positive it is for all the wrong reasons.

CHAPTER 12
Niles and Fraser

T
he 1974 marriage of the mountain boy Niles Whitehead to the Charleston debutante Fraser Rutledge, with her lineage unimpeachable and her bona fides in order, shook Charleston society with the force of an earthquake that went off the charts on the city’s inflexible Richter scale. The shock waves that rippled through the drawing rooms of my mannerly city lent proof that the tumultuous era of the sixties had managed to breach the city limits of Charleston: when a penniless orphan born in anonymity could win the heart of a bride whose ancestors included one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and whose grandfathers on both sides served as presidents of the St. Cecilia Society, the rules of order and civility had taken a direct hit. Though there was nothing in Fraser’s background to suggest either a revolutionary or a contrary leaning, she recognized the incomparable nature of Niles’s character on the night they met. As one of the best female basketball players in the state, Fraser knew all she needed to about establishing a strong position and holding on to it for dear life. Her decency and fineness of spirit had floored Niles, who had never been to a dance when I introduced them the summer before my senior year.

Worth and Hess Rutledge mounted a fruitless campaign to break up the couple, but the clumsiness and meanness of their attempts only strengthened their daughter’s resolve and Niles’s ardor. Even Charleston families began to discover that when a young man and young woman fall in love, and that love proves rugged and fire-tested, all the social rules and laws of heraldry are flung aside. Niles and Fraser needed only the laws of their own uncommon passion. Fraser took his hand and together they crossed that line of distinction called South of Broad. He carried his bride across the threshold of the Thomaston-Verdier house, which her mother and father had presented to them as a bridal gift. In their hearts, both parents hoped that the marriage would be brief and childless. It would be years before Fraser’s mother, Hess, could admit that her daughter’s love affair with Niles was the kind that could not be washed out or towed away with the morning trash.

From my house on Tradd Street, I walk west to Church Street as the Charleston heat hits me with a body blow that is part humidity and part horse latitude. The houses along Church are set like gemstones against the sidewalk; the honeybees are working overtime in the flower boxes overflowing with lantana; the scents of jasmine and lilies of the valley catch me off guard, but the lush fragrance of a mock orange makes me happy to be alive.

I arrive early at the Thomaston-Verdier house to help with the preparation of the meal and to try to find out if Fraser has heard the rumors about her brother. I find her deveining shrimp in her spacious kitchen, which looks out into a garden perfectly composed and tended.

“Hey, Fraser, you look scrumptious in lavender. Can I make love to you before the others arrive?” I ask, kissing her on the cheek.

“Talk, talk, talk.” Fraser smiles. “All you ever do. Never any action behind your words.”

“It’ll have to be a quickie.”

She says, “Then a quickie it will be.”

“I heard that, woman,” Niles says, coming in from the den, where I can hear a baseball game playing on the television. He lifts me off the ground in his strong embrace, spins me around once, then lets me down gently to the floor. It is Niles’s way of saying hello, and he performs the gesture with both men and women.

“Hey, kid,” I say. “Did you catch any fish last night?”

“Enough red drum to feed everybody. Also, the kids pulled up a couple dozen crab.”

“What’s my role?” I ask the hostess.

“If you’d make your she-crab soup, that would be lovely.”

“Let me go clean the crabs now,” I say.

“I already did that, and gutted the fish while I was at it,” Niles says.

“We sent the kids over to their grandparents’ pool, Leo,” Fraser says. “Did you talk to Chad? Ike said you would.”

I look over at Niles, unsure of how much Fraser knows. He says, “It’s all over town, good buddy. Fraser was the one who told me about it. I was not surprised that both you and Ike had gotten wind of it.”

“I think Chad and Molly are coming today,” I say. “Have they called?”

“They haven’t canceled,” Fraser says. “Chad must have listened to you.”

“I didn’t say that,” I say. “He sure as hell wasn’t pleased that I knew so much.”

“We’re sick about it,” Fraser says. “I think Molly’s gone if she hears about it. I don’t think she’s going to take it sitting down this time.”

Niles says, “I’m thinking about cutting his pecker off and using it as bait for a billfish or a mako.”

Fraser, still working at the shrimp, says, “I didn’t tell you this, Niles, but I went to Chad’s office and had a talk with him last week.”

“I bet he wasn’t thrilled by that sisterly visit,” Niles snorts.

Fraser laughs. “I thought he was going to throw me out his window onto Broad Street. He denied everything, of course. He was working hard for the good of his family. The same old shit he always says.”

“How’d Chad react to your visit, Leo?” Niles asks.

“Like I was a horse turd someone had shoveled into his room. But, to give Chad his due, no one would like to have such a conversation.”

W
hen the guests begin to arrive at five, all we have to do is grill the fillets and serve the meal. Ike and Betty bring a salad large enough to feed the Citadel football team, which Ike carries in, pretending to stagger under its weight. Sheba dances in wearing tight shorts, a yellow blouse with the top three buttons undone, a jade-colored belt, and ballet shoes. Un able to enter a room without some degree of showmanship, she whirls through the kitchen doing an impromptu and improvised ballet. When she kneels in homage to our small crowd, we play our part and cheer her performance.

We walk to the second-story piazza as a group. A delicious, unexpected breeze springs up from the harbor as we watch a cruise ship moving through the channel, riding low on the incoming tide. Niles and I serve gin and tonics all around, and we clink glasses and make toasts, all of us aware that each toast pays some commission of reverence for Sheba’s return to our midst. Under our lavish attention she grows animated and tells us privileged insider gossip about the fey and nutty world she inhabits in Hollywood. She tells us which actor has the largest penis in the world of cinema, and the macho action star with by far the smallest. Though all of us find ourselves riveted, we all lack the guts to ask how she was sure of the accuracy of those measurements.

A horn sounds in the driveway, two gentle taps that denote familiarity. We rise up and see Chad and Molly, both nattily dressed, getting out of the blue Porsche with its top down. Both wear rakish hats and fashionable sunglasses—they are well groomed, combed over, and oiled down as they make their way through the wrought-iron garden gate. They enhance each other’s good looks by the refinement each brings to the other, the rightness of their union, as though they are a matching pair of candelabra.

When Molly appears at the top of the stairs, she is regal yet self-effacing in her carriage. She is soft-spoken and reserved, so her loud infectious laughter always comes as a surprise. Molly possesses a lush head of hair, close to the hue of an Irish setter. Chad appears beside her, and I think they look more like brother and sister than husband and wife. But it is not unusual to think that in the rarefied, inbred corridors of Charleston.

“Chad!” Sheba cries out. “I haven’t seen a hair on your head for over twenty-four hours. You’ve been hiding from your one true love.”

“The damn law’s my one true love these days, Sheba,” Chad says as Sheba runs into his arms. “You can ask Molly about that.”

“Amen,” Molly agrees.

From a large purse, Sheba then pulls out a director’s beret and a pair of sunglasses and throws a showy ascot around her neck. “The show has just begun,” she says in a peremptory voice. “Everybody down to the lawn. Move double-time, extras. If we have to pay you union fees, you can sure as hell double-time to your next marks.”

“C’mon, Sheba. Just let us get drunk,” Ike sighs.

“Silence the Senegalese prince,” Sheba barks.

Grumbling, we make our way down to a small swatch of lawn the size of an average putting green. Sheba claps her hands in a commanding manner and orders us to line up, women in front and boys bringing up the rear, saying, “Now, with brio and gusto and great savoir faire, we are going to perform the great ‘Renegade Love Call.’”

There is a moaning in the choir, but Sheba halts it by bringing up an imaginary baton, then force-marches the women to the far side of the lawn. She separates them in intervals of three feet, then poses them all in the provocative stance we recognize from the beginning of football games when an unseen announcer named our starting lineup. With a brush of her hand, Sheba sweeps a wing of hair over the right eye of each woman and then she positions them in the sexiest cheerleader stance of all—the love call of the Renegade girls for the Renegade boys of Peninsula High. Sheba invented the choreography and the words of the cheer as one of the gifts she brought to our school life when she appeared out of nowhere for our senior year. The packed stadium always went into a zone of scriptural silence when those pretty girls brought the players out onto the field. Sheba starts things by slinging out her hip and pointing her finger directly at me. She flicks her head, tossing the wing of hair behind her, then begins her loud, passionate chant: “I champion Leo, can all of you hear—I call him forth for the victory cheer!”

Hearing my cue, I jog toward Sheba. In high school, she would peck my cheek, and I would run over to my place, facing the home crowd. But, of course, on this occasion Sheba surprises me with a French kiss that puts her tongue somewhere in the vicinity of my tonsils. So completely has she caught me unaware that I begin gagging and choking, to the high hilarity of my assembled friends. I shoot them all the bird as I stagger to my place.

Then Betty steps forward, also tossing her hair. No one can do sexy like Betty Jefferson as she points downfield to her man and cries out: “I champion Ike, and I feel him draw near—he’ll stand by Leo in this victory cheer.”

Ike jogs to his wife, they share a nice kiss, then Ike comes slowly toward me. After our foreheads touch, he turns to the crowd that disappeared from our lives nineteen years ago. We lock arms together as Fraser steps out, unsure of herself, a better athlete than any of us boys were, but a newcomer to the cheerleaders’ art. She says: “I stand by Niles and I see my man clear; if he’s not worthy, there’ll be no victory cheer.”

Niles runs up and kisses his wife, and they hold the kiss until the rest of us begin wolf whistling and catcalling. Then Niles runs over, and he and I touch foreheads, then he and Ike touch foreheads, and we lock arms together.

Molly begins her chant, “But I champion Chad, and I’ll do it all year—if he will stand with us, then all Renegades cheer. We’re right in the middle of a championship year.”

As I listen to Molly’s voice, I am moved by this collision of events that brings back so many memories—some that I embrace with a tenderness that surprises; others that can bring me to a boiling point of the spirit, the very threshold of agony. In high school, the cheer seemed endless and pointless when I was nervous and chafing for the game to start. Now, at this moment, I wish the cheer could last forever so I can have an excuse to lock arms with these essential men in my life and to watch the sensuous movements of those hair-tossing, pretty women for all time. Their voices seem to call out to me in the lostness of all my days; the nostalgia is close to overwhelming.

I watch Chad jog toward Molly when her cheer ends. It is easy to remember that Chad was all style then and is all style now: he seems to make his way across the yard in slow motion, all comfort in every inch of his aristocratic bones. As he approaches Molly, he puckers his lips in exaggerated fashion and throws the guys a conspiratorial wink at the same time. The mood is good and jocular.

All of us are caught by surprise when Molly Rutledge makes a fist and busts her husband’s nose with a punch that is astonishing in its ferocity and effect. Drops of blood fly through the air, spattering Molly’s face and blouse. The astonished group stands in a frozen, airless tableau. No one speaks until Sheba says, “I guess that’s the end of the pep rally.”

Then Molly explodes with a rage she has long held in quarantine. “You rotten son of a low-life bitch! You dare humiliate me in front of my best friends, my family, the town we grew up in! You conduct an open affair with a nineteen-year-old girl and flaunt it by inviting her to our parties, paying her rent, keeping a room at the Mills-Hyatt house for when you feel like a quickie. I thought I’d married one of the finest men to ever come out of Charleston society, and I find out I married the worst piece of shit instead.”

“This is all a mistake,” Chad says, but he directs his voice at us, not at Molly. “This can all be explained.”

“They all know about it,” Molly screams. “You’ve been so goddamn indiscreet, I bet the seagulls are talking about it. It’s everywhere. Four lawyers in your firm have called, three of their wives. But my best friends—these fine, fine people—haven’t said a word to me. And I’ve been able to tell for a month that they knew something terrible was happening in my life. Real friends would’ve said something. All of you owed me that much … at least.”

Molly turns and runs out of the garden. She takes a right toward East Bay, and disappears from sight.

“She’s imagining things,” Chad says to us. “It’s something mental. I’m going to have her tested next week.”

“Start telling the truth, Chad,” Betty says. “After doing that, you can quit humping that broad in your office.”

“Molly’s having a breakdown,” Chad insists, but it is difficult to take him seriously with his nose bleeding. “I guarantee she’ll call all of you next week to apologize. She’s been having these symptoms for a long time now. I’m going to need the help of all of you.”