A Southern Girl: A Novel

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A Southern Girl 232 “I don’t give a damn who she’s with,” I hear myself saying. Maybe I’m getting the anger thing down after all. “Put me through. It’s an emergency.” After a minute on hold, Natalie’s voice wants to know what’s wrong. “Don’t play coy,” I order. “Scott Edwards is running a story tomorrow and I have a strong suspicion where he got the material.” “You’re wrong,” she says, firmly and controlled. “He called to ask if we had discussed a lawsuit and I was honest. I told him yes, we had discussed it but that you had not engaged me to file a suit on either your behalf or your daughter’s. That’s true, isn’t it?” “You aren’t the source of his information about the Board’s vote?” “Absolutely not,” she says, still in control. “Then where . . . ?” “I got the impression he’d been sitting on the exclusion story for a while. Maybe when he saw us having lunch together he made certain assumptions.” I concede plausibility of this, but it brings me no comfort. I don’t trust Natalie. She’s lying to cover a treachery born of her single-minded determination to inject herself into this battle. “Maybe,” I say, hanging up abruptly and thinking ahead to morning, when the Carter family’s rebuff will be spread on doorsteps and breakfast tables all over Charleston. j 24 i Margarite’s house is among the finest in Charleston. Sited on South Battery , grandly fronting the panorama of harbor beyond the seawall, its two large piazzas run east to west the length of the house, so wide and deep that the shuttered windows opening onto them are in shadow most of the day. I picture them always as I saw them first. My parents took me to a party at the Hugers’ in midsummer. This was before Philip and I became friends, so I must have been eight or nine, walking between them with the trepidation common to children at adult affairs. As we approached, the sounds of a string quartet lilted among the throng of brightly clad guests on both upper and lower piazzas, and a benevolent evening breeze off the water fluttered the women’s skirts like Flow 233 multicolored flags. Black waiters with silver trays, held shoulder level, circulated with champagne. Men in white dinner jackets clustered here and there, smoke from cigarettes blown straight up in skyward exhale before the breeze took it the way of the skirts. The women seemed as fragile as hummingbirds, with pallid summer silks and chiffon glorious against pecan tans. Even now, in the dank dreariness of February, I think of this house as a monument to gaiety, and as I ring the front doorbell on the lower deserted piazza, I can still feel festive ghosts brushing past on their way to greet new arrivals or for one more pass at the shrimp. Of course, not all the ghosts are festive. Philip’s lurks here as well. On days when I came over here to hang out with him, which was almost every day, I used the back door, never knocking. Daniel, a black man of seventy years and heroic bearing, answers the bell. He has run Margarite’s household staff for almost forty years. He beams when he sees who has come to call. We shake hands, both hands, but my urge to hug him is restrained by the formality he insisted on, even when I was a boy. He is dark, with a closely trimmed wreath of silver hair and, as I notice when he takes my coat and turns to lead me in, an ebony carapace of smooth, unspoiled pate. “So glad to see you, Mister Coleman. Miz Huger upstairs, in the Haiti room,” he says in his resonant Gullah. As I pass the formal living room, I eye Philip’s portrait above the mantel. I mount the wide stairway. At the first landing is a Thomas Elfe table, in burnished mahogany and intricately fretted, on top of which is set an enormous Ming vase holding the largest poinsettias I have ever seen outside Mexico. Such appointments, so dramatic in appeal, are characteristic of Margarite’s elegant but unadorned style. Rather than packing her house with antiques, so cluttered that a single misstep occasions a call to her insurance carrier, she has selected over the years only the crown jewels, but these she displays in...