A Southern Girl (28 page)

“Is something wrong, Dad?”

“Nope. Thought I heard something, that’s all.”

I continue down, faster now because she is watching me though she cannot see. I feel the concrete floor and exhale, surprised to find I have been holding my breath. I am thinking of this—my withheld breath and my boa constrictor grip on the railing and the eerie mood of disquiet that has come over me since turning that stubborn knob—my mind is wandering from one strangeness to another when I realize I have strayed into what must be the center of the room. Now I am disoriented, without
bearings. A mild but distinct panic seizes me and for the first time I can actually sense another presence in the basement.

“Allie?”

“Yes?”

“I need to find the stairs again. Talk.”

“What about?”

“Anything … never mind, here they are.”

This silliness has gone on long enough. I fumble for the shelf that abuts the wall forming the left side of the staircase and, touching it, make my way hand to hand along the wooden supports spaced every four feet or so. I am aggressive now, impatient with myself but mindful of the small clearance for my head. In seconds I am on the other side of the room, having stumbled only once over some old valances.

The tent is where I remembered and the lamp beside it. A fine veneer of dust coats my fingertips as I probe. Hanging on a peg just beyond is my pack, and this I have felt in the dark often enough for its pockets and compartments to become a familiar Braille. I locate the matches at once.

At the first strike Allie is on the stairs coming down. I raise the lantern’s chimney, touch match to wick, and the room brightens as she nears, her elongated shadow gliding down the steps and hulking behind her.

“Much better,” she says, relief in her smile. “I wonder if I’ll ever get over it.”

I thought I had. “You will. It’s natural.” Beyond her, my noisy apparitions of moments ago linger among stored furniture, invisible and now silent. As I turn to lead, Allie hangs back. Having been reluctant to enter the basement she now seems reluctant to leave.

“Dad, I need to ask you something.”

“Here?”

“Somewhere, it doesn’t matter. Graduation is only five months away. Have you thought about my present?”

“Who said I’m going to give you a present?” My poker face crumbles and she laughs. In the radiance of the lamp between us I see her crescent eyes dance and a glint of light from the black orbs within. She knows I would give her Saturn and its rings.

“Be serious,” she admonishes. “My request is going to surprise you.”

“Anything but a wedding,” I say.

“I want to go back to Korea.”

I suck in a little. “You’re right, I’m surprised. You’ve never mentioned the slightest interest in returning.”

Her head drops faintly and the lantern lends her forehead a copper glow. “I know. It’s just that lately I’ve been thinking about it. Not missing it, of course, because I have no memory of it at all.”

“Recall is pretty limited at four months.”

“But here I am, getting ready to go off to college and I’ve never been exposed to … you know.”

“Your people? Your homeland?”

“I feel like a Charlestonian. I’m an American. Still, I wonder about it.”

“I would wonder if you didn’t.”

“So, can we go? You and me. We’ll have fun.”

“Sweetheart, I don’t know the first thing about Korea. I’d be lost over there. Neither of us knows a single word of Korean.”

“So? We’ll hire an interpreter and a guide.”

I shake my head. This plea has caught me totally off guard and, for some reason, troubles me.

She presses. “Mom would have taken me. She told me so lots of times.” “She told me, too. She really wanted to see the place.”

“But she’s gone, so it’s up to you.” Her stare penetrates. “What’s the matter?”

I sigh. “I guess this is something all adoptive parents have to deal with. It’s selfish, frankly. You said a moment ago you feel like a Charlestonian. And I feel like you’re my daughter. Maybe it’s just the thought that somewhere over there are a man and woman who could claim you, in the biological sense.” I hesitate. “You know, I think I’m jealous.”

I must also be a bit embarrassed, so I complain about my arm being tired from holding the lamp. She drags over the camp stove, unwilling to leave this plea in the basement unanswered. I rest the lantern, waist high and flickering.

“Now father,” she says, looking as firm as her congenitally pleasant features will allow, “surely you don’t suspect I’d go searching for people who abandoned me. You’re my father, my only father, and that’s that. I just want to see the country and now that I’m old enough it seems a shame not to go. Please.”

“Let me think about it,” I reply, wondering if the gloom of the basement accounts for my dark reaction.

On the following morning, power restored, I sit hunched over my coffee and the morning paper when she breezes through the kitchen, kisses me on top of my head, and flies out the door to school. She targets that same spot each morning because, she says, when I start to lose my hair I’ll find comfort in a spot worn bald by kisses.

After Dad’s death, Sarah moved to Sullivan’s Island, into the beach house that had always been our summer place, giving me the house in town where I grew up and now call home again. I visit her often, and on this morning, the morning after the power failed, I have something on my mind.

My Range Rover eases from the driveway into the path of Jason Collins, a neighbor’s son who rides his ten speed to Bishop England High. More alert, the boy swerves neatly around me without upshifting, downshifting or braking, waving to boot. I weave my way through early morning traffic, past the offices of Carter & Deas on Broad Street, and soon cross the Cooper River Bridge.

It is a fine winter morning. The air is crisp and a fresh sun is rising out of the Atlantic undistorted by the humidity which those of us in the South tolerate like a dependent cousin. On my left, far below, the shadow of the bridge shades the bright blue water. Mt. Pleasant comes and goes, and I reach the causeway leading to the island. On either side, winter marsh stretches north and south along the Intracoastal Waterway. A redtailed hawk circles silently, its wings fully extended but motionless like the brown marsh grass below. Grating of the Ben Sawyer Bridge rumbles beneath as I squint into the sun, framed directly in my path by the superstructure of the bridge. Sunglasses would help, but mine are misplaced. The sign welcoming me to Sullivan’s Island could use some fresh paint.

Mother is just returning from her morning walk on the beach. I spot her on the path as I pull into the driveway. She looks up, waves, then renews her downward gaze. Getting older, she is more cautious where she steps.

We arrive inside at the same time, she by the side door and me via the front. In the living room we hug. The scarf in which she has wreathed her head as protection against the cold ocean air brushes against my chin.

“Good morning, dear,” she greets. “Such a treat to see you in the middle of the week. Coffee?”

On a hook near the side door she drapes her jacket, then naps her thinning white hair to counter the matting produced by the scarf. She is a sturdy woman in the face of incipient frailty. A tomboy as a child, she retains at age eighty-four an aura of robustness, a vitality only mildly arrested by advancing years. She will no longer climb a tree, as I saw her do when she was in her late fifties, but she wouldn’t hesitate to ride her old Raleigh around the island. We gravitate to the kitchen table, where she pours each of us a cup.

“I read in the
Sentinel
that you lost electricity in town,” she notes, steam rising as she sips. “Did Church Street go dark?”

“As a tomb,” I reply. “It was still off when I went to bed.”

“We’ve become so dependent on electricity,” she laments. “Must have been a boring evening.”

I pause momentarily, thinking back. “Not at all. Allie and I ended up in the basement having one of our father-daughter chats over the camping lantern.”

“In that depressing basement? How unusual. I suppose she is still on cloud nine over her acceptance at Princeton.”

“She is, but Princeton didn’t come up last night. She wants to visit Korea.”

Mother freezes in what I have come to think of as her bad news paralysis, as though she is going through some internal inventory, consulting each element in her psyche to make sure nothing has broken, the way a computer goes through a RAM check. “Oh, my,” she says at last. “Oh, dear.”

“It shocked me,” I admit.

“I hope you told her it’s out of the question.”

“No, I told her I’d think about it.”

“Coleman, you know I don’t meddle but everything you hear and read about orphans searching for their parents proves it spells trouble. Allie is happy here.”

I replace my cup firmly in the saucer. “The point is she’s almost on her own and mature enough to make this call. Besides, she could go see her native land without trying to find her parents. One doesn’t have to follow from the other.”

“You sound as though you’ve made up your mind to let her go.”

“She wants me to take her. I haven’t decided.”

She rises and walks to the counter, speaking with her back to me. “For what it’s worth, I think it’s a bad idea.”

“As I say, I haven’t decided. Actually, another dilemma with Allie brings me here.”

She turns, her face brightening with the prospect of changing subjects. “Oh?”

“Invitations to the St. Simeon go out in a few weeks.”

“Yes, it’s that time, isn’t it. The same week every year for what … two hundred something years now?”

“Only this year is different.”

She cocks her head to one side, a mannerism while thinking. “How so?”

“This is Allie’s senior year, remember?” In her eyes, still clear and bright with none of the rheum I have come to associate with older people, I see dawn, but clouded.

“Surely Allie has no interest in going to the St. Simeon.”

“Why not? Most of her friends will be there. It’s her year.”

“But Coleman, you know adopted children aren’t eligible. Allie knows it, too.”

I doodle on the tablecloth with the blunt end of my spoon. I have put this confrontation off to the last possible moment. But the St. Simeon and Korea in the same morning may tax even her strength. “Actually, Allie hasn’t mentioned it.”

She nods decisively. “And she won’t. She has great respect for tradition, even when that tradition excludes her.”

I maintain my stare at the tablecloth, engraving concentric circles. The kitchen is quite still, silent but for the incessant hum of a fluorescent light above. At length, she sits down in the chair nearest. Her hand encircles my forearm.

“This is about Elizabeth, isn’t it?” she says gently. “Elizabeth was always pushing the limits.”

I smile weakly in remembrance. “I suppose she was.”

“And you feel,” she continues, “that she might want you to push this limit for her, in her place so to speak.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s possible.”

“Son, you don’t owe her this one. She knew from the day you two adopted that child that there were going to be certain realities no one could change. Why do you think your father and I were so opposed to the whole idea?”

I turn to her, full face. “I always assumed it was just a matter of bringing an Asian into the family.”

Her cheeks, still roseate from her walk on the beach, flush as her palms come down squarely on the table. “Well, of course! That was part of it. Plus we didn’t think it fair to the child. But Elizabeth was determined—”

“We both adopted her, Mother.”

“Yes, but it was Elizabeth’s idea. She pushed you into it. Don’t deny that.”

I shrug. “I admit I was reluctant.”

“So accept consequences like the St. Simeon. The oldest, most prestigious social society in the South is not going to change its policy. Why, look at Peter Devereux; so blonde and blue-eyed he could pass for a native Charlestonian and so much like Kate you’d never know he was adopted. Do you think he got an invitation? Even if your father were still president of the thing, the answer would be no. Besides, Allie understands, I can assure you. It won’t trouble her for an instant.”

“Maybe you’re right. It just seems strange. We took Josh and Steven and now Elizabeth’s gone and Allie can’t go. It makes me … sad.”

She stands beside me, then reaches out and enfolds my head in her arms, pulling me to her. I don’t resist. Perhaps we need this, each of us.

“Oh, son, I know you’re still hurting. You don’t seem yourself these days. But, ‘This too will pass.’ Have faith in God and do everything you can to get on with life. That’s the formula for success.” She releases me, holding me by the shoulders at arms length, and tries to smile. “How is Adelle Roberts? You’re still seeing her?”

“Adelle’s fine. I took her to Allie’s horse show last weekend. She enjoyed it.”

“Good. She’s such a charming girl.”

“Yes, she is.” I check my watch. “I have a 10:00 appointment so I’d better go.”

She walks me to the front door and waves good-bye. As I clear the driveway and start back toward town, I think back to the weekend we broke the news about Allie’s impending arrival. Over the years, Sarah has
come around; she is much closer to Allie than she acknowledges. Would Dad have come around? We’ll never know.

18