A Southern Girl: A Novel

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Flow 197 Still, I feel anger beginning to build, perhaps because this result, unlike hers, was entirely preventable. Maybe that explains it. Cancer is such an anonymous, impersonal enemy, while here sat at least four people I know. I drift off just before daylight, with one thought that I suspect will be with me when I awake: my daughter is going to that Ball. j 21 i Charleston has been the New World incubator of Carters from the day the boat landed in 1670. My mental movie of that landing has been spliced together frame by frame from genealogies, family lore and later, in the second half of the nineteenth century, grainy photographs depicting an unblinking succession of grim-jawed, mustachioed men flanked by cautious women and children in sailor suits. Early in that imagined film, Thomas Carter, the original émigré, walks to the head of the gangway after seven months at sea, surveys the April splendor sprawled before him and his ninety-two fellow passengers, then, turning to Captain Brayne, asks if the brandy that has been under lock and key for the last six weeks can now be liberated. I forgive Thomas’s initial indifference to the uncut gem which was to become Charleston, set exquisitely in its raw state between the tines of the soon-to-be-named Ashley and Cooper Rivers. Evidently, such indifference had evaporated shortly after his boots bogged in the marshes of shrimpstuffed Old Town Creek, where the party came ashore. Thomas became a successful merchant, grim-jawed and mustachioed, and never left, as few who followed him have left. And, his atavistic love of brandy has endured to the current year, 1996. From earliest memory, Charleston has beckoned me like a porch light, friendly and nurturing and visible from anywhere. Returning from summer camp in western North Carolina after two weeks that seemed like two years in the rock-kicking amble of prepubescent time, I scanned the tops of loblolly pines for a first reassuring glimpse of the Cooper River Bridge, its silver spans arching down like a pair of maternal arms poised to scoop me up. From the bridge looking left I saw the steeples of St. Michael’s and St. Philip’s, to the right the main turret of The Citadel, and like the A Southern Girl 198 baseball cards and 45 rpm records in my room, they were right where I had left them. At the University of Virginia I pledged Sigma Nu, and for weeks at a time I could deceive myself that I no longer lived in Charleston, that I had a new life and a new home and a fresh family of fraternity brothers. But even from Charlottesville I’d see the porch light, the aureole of the Holy City. During the years in New Hampton the light dimmed, flickered, but never died, and when I returned it brightened in its welcoming arc, within which I could be certain of my place, my history. But in the week following the Board vote, I feel for the first time the slightest distancing from people and things once as close to me and as comfortable as an old bathrobe. The city looks the same; the palmettoes along Broad Street still exude an air of stately serenity, the church bells toll the hour more or less on schedule, the black women make and sell their sweetgrass baskets in the same spot near the courthouse. But at my office, in shops or around the neighborhood, I meet people I have known for years with a reserve more characteristic of a visitor. I must be imagining this estrangement. Lifelong relationships are not altered by a handful of people taking a vote on what, in the great scheme of things, can be counted a trivial matter by most. Even at the St. Simeon, a Ball is merely a ball. And yet, as I greet innocent old friends, untainted employees at Carter & Deas, and even waiters in restaurants who have never heard of the Society, I sense alienation, as though the Board’s decision embodied an ecumenical verdict by the city as a whole that I have failed a fundamental fidelity. By loyally asserting Allie’s claim to go, I have breached a living code of consideration owed to members of my circle: I put them on the spot. The case Sarah mentioned, that of adopted Peter Devereux, who looked so much like Kate, presented the Devereuxs with the same dilemma. In deciding not...