A Southern Girl (38 page)

On Monday morning, while dressing, I fixate on a one-item agenda: verbal dissection of Natalie Berman. Her covert solicitation of Allie, her effrontery in the school parking lot, her eel-like stealth in slithering behind my back have me in the blackest of moods.

In the parlance of modern psycho-babble, I am among the anger disadvantaged. Coping tools available to others—flailing, screaming, fuming, ranting, raving, throwing, breaking, stomping, cursing, spitting, snorting, biting—I employ only by means of imitation since, as with any handicap, I have developed certain compensations. Acting out a missing reflex is not easy, no easier than suppressing a functioning one, such as sitting behind home plate and not blinking when a foul ball hits the screen directly in front. I suppose this malfunction should itself make me furious, but … ?
It is with nervous envy that I observe others throw tantrums, instinctively reverting to the pacific calm which is my nature, retreating into something akin to a temporary hibernation in which my body temperature drops, my breathing shallows, and my pulse slows. It drove Elizabeth, whose anger reflex remained a well-oiled, finely tuned precision instrument, crazy.

But when angered myself, either by a pricking of my pride, a calculated slight, or a direct insult, rare as those are, I feel acid in the stomach, the muscular stirring of rebellion, a taunting of nerve endings so that I am positive I possess the gene for anger, but this gene is unschooled in what comes next. It flounders, sending out its neural messages in a signing my brain does not read.

I suppose this all adds up to some variety of psychological deficiency in that everyone seems to feel that anger is healthy. Certainly there is no shortage of anger in America today so we should be healthier than we have ever been. Places like Detroit and Miami, New York and L.A., should be downright rapturous.

So though I know I am angry at Natalie Berman, that a logical, finite, and well-placed reason exists for that ire, and although I can feel within me the rising flood and surge of emotions I recognize as anger, I am very unsure of what I will do about it. The tongue lashing I am rehearsing as I abuse my necktie will not be delivered. That, my experience makes clear. In private, I can feign prickly, vitriolic, even animated, but in confrontation, sarcasm remains the outer reach of my left jab or right hook. Words snarled into my mirror this morning guarantee only that Natalie Berman will not hear them later.

As soon as I arrive at the office I dial the number on her business card. Her address is listed as King Street, far to the north of Calhoun Street, an area in transition; what some might and do call slum. On the second ring a female answers.

“ACLU.”

“Natalie Berman, please.”

“Ms. Berman is at the courthouse this morning. Is there something I can help you with?”

“This is Coleman Carter. Are you her secretary?”

“A paralegal. She doesn’t have a secretary. I’m Susan Shiflet.”

“Susan, I’m an attorney here in town and I need to speak with Ms. Berman. Which court is she in?”

“She’s not in court per se. She went to watch the Swilling trial.”

Roland Swilling is a black drug dealer who claims two white policemen maimed him in a holding cell after an arrest. He is suing for damages in a trial that will receive lots of attention in the press. Jury selection is scheduled to begin this morning in the courthouse near my office.

I am determined to see her today so I don the trench coat I have just taken off and start out. A cold, misty rain is falling, slanted toward me by a brisk headwind. I point my umbrella forward, thrusting my free hand deep into a side pocket. Fronds atop the palmettoes along Broad whip and sway while their trunks give the illusion of leaning with me toward the courthouse. Iron gray sky, unbroken to the horizon, promises a daylong drizzle. Though dreary, the weather is not nearly harsh enough to drive the flower ladies off their corner and I see them bundled up against the wrought iron fence, adverse possession forever in bloom.

The U.S. Courthouse, on the southwest corner of Broad and Meeting, dates from the turn of this century. To its Renaissance Revival architecture has been appended a quite modern glass and steel wing in today’s ubiquitous style that makes a building in Portland indistinguishable from one in Plymouth. The elevator lifts me two floors, to the courtroom of Judge Lydia Tyler, whose duty it will be to give that drug dealing, glue sniffing, Mercedes driving Roland Swilling a fair and impartial trial on his claim of police brutality. Personally, I’m pulling for the cops.

Prospective jurors are already seated, so the courtroom is crowded. Up front, on my side of the railing separating the attorneys from spectators, I see what I am certain is the back of Natalie Berman’s well-formed head. There is space next to her and I walk forward, nodding imperceptibly to Lydia as I slide into Natalie’s row. The judge and I go back a ways.

Natalie cuts her eyes at me but shows no emotion as I settle in next to her. After a moment, she leans my way.

“Pardon me,” she says, “but this is the bride’s side. Aren’t you here for the groom’s, or should I say goons?”

This unexpected japery takes me off guard. Serious, crusading Natalie plays the Improv. I grin involuntarily, not wishing her to be the least bit personable or witty. At this moment I would prefer her a two-hundred-seventy pound lesbian with a harelip and an ill fitting toupee to the shapely, tightly harnessed, and attractive young woman beside me. To the
overweight ogre I might, with divine intervention, deliver something passably close to the diatribe to which I treated my mirror this morning. To a convivial Natalie, all bets are off.

“I should have guessed you’d be here,” I say through the side of my mouth. “Did the Bat-signal for a possible constitutional rights violation appear in your sky this morning?”

She turns her head, whispering aggressively. “Possible? These two Black Shirts beat this man to a pulp.”

“For which the mayor should give them both medals and promotions. Look, we need to talk outside. Lydia’s going to hold us both in contempt.”

She shakes her head. “I can’t miss the voir dire. Besides, I know what you’re going to say.”

“I’ll bet you do,” I mutter. “When?”

“She announced a lunch break at noon.”

“The café in the basement?”

“See you there,” she says.

I am waiting when she arrives, having trudged back to the office in time to bill an hour and a half and then back to the courthouse in rain falling harder. My dripping coat hangs on the chair beside me, puddling the floor beneath. Several colleagues stop to chat, ribbing me gently about being out of my element.

When she approaches I must decide whether to stand. My visceral southernness is pulling me up, but I resist and stay seated, thinking that this gesture of defiance, if anything, should signal just how sober this meeting will be. She appears not to notice and extends her hand as she sits opposite.

“I know why you’re here and I know you’re upset,” she says bluntly. “I had a choice to make in seeing your daughter or not. She is a few months from eighteen.”

“And I am her father. Why didn’t you tell me when you came to see me that you planned to visit her?”

A waitress approaches. Natalie orders a toasted tuna fish sandwich on whole wheat and mineral water. I order the soup and sandwich special and more coffee.

“I hadn’t decided then,” she says. “It was an inspiration that came to me after you and I met.”

“How did you know where she goes to school?”

“Easy. I followed her.” She stares blankly, as if relating the barometric pressure.

“Hold it. You staked out my house?”

“For about twenty minutes. I drove past the day before and saw her car—her name is on the license plate—and guessed she would leave for school between 7:30 and 8:30.”

I am a bit dumbfounded. “Don’t I have some constitutional protection against that?”

Natalie smiles, drawing me again to her even, snowy teeth. “You might. I’ll have Susan research it.”

“You seem mighty casual about something I consider very serious.”

“What escapes me, Mr. Carter,” and here, her smile has vanished, “is why you are not taking her exclusion more seriously. I’m only trying to help.”

“I’m doing what can reasonably be done.”

“Which is?”

Which is none of your business. Her tone and demeanor today are non-threatening. To fall back upon my privilege of privacy is to appear defensive. “I have a meeting scheduled with the president of the Society. I intend to let her know that the Board’s decision is not acceptable.”

“Really?” Natalie seems mildly surprised, and interested.

“Absolutely,” I say with conviction.

“So what kind of ultimatum will you give her?”

“I’ve known this woman all my life. I don’t think ultimatums will get me very far with Margarite Huger.”

Natalie shakes her head as though clearing it. “Let me understand. You intend to let her know that the Board’s decision is unacceptable—”

“Positively.”

“Yet there are no consequences for its failure to change its mind?”

“Not exactly,” I say, scrambling. “The consequences are understood. People dig in their heels at ultimatums.”

“That’s true,” she acknowledges. “What are the consequences that are understood, therefore can go unmentioned?”

“Margarite will know.”

She nods, but it is a skeptical nod so full of doubt and hesitation that she could have as easily laughed.

“Look, Ms. Berman,” I say, guilty of the very defensiveness I wish to avoid, “this is a very delicate situation. It is delicate for the Society and for us, my family. Everyone is taking steps to insure that no lasting scars are inflicted. It’s called civility.”

“Call it what you will, Mr. Carter, I predict that your friends will not change their minds and that your daughter will not be granted an exemption from their stupid rule. If you accept that judgment and go peacefully, then you will minimize the lasting scars to one: your daughter. If that’s acceptable—”

“I told you it wasn’t.”

Our food arrives, and for a few minutes we turn to it as a device for turning away from each other. Jury selection is going as expected, she reports, with Swilling’s attorneys trying to impanel a black jury and the city’s attorneys seeking whites.

“I don’t know,” I muse. “This Swilling is such a slimeball that it wouldn’t shock me to see the blacks string him up. His customers are their kids.”

She cants her head to one side, squinting as though concentrating. “On the drug charges themselves, perhaps. But this is a civil claim against the police. They’ll have more empathy.”

“What would you do?” I ask. “If you were me, what would you say to Margarite tomorrow afternoon?”

“Honestly? I’d tell her that unless my daughter got an invitation, I’d sue not only her sacred society but her personally along with every other member of that Board, that I’d seek punitive damages under the Civil Rights Act, that I’d demand attorneys fees, and that I would spend every cent I had, and all I could borrow, to make sure that unless my daughter attended the ball there wouldn’t be any more.”

I stare at her. “That’s what I thought. Your opening bid would be scorched earth, kind of like our mutually assured destruction policy with the Ruskies a few years back.”

“It worked. They never attacked.”

“Yes, but JFK and Khrushchev didn’t live next door to each other and borrow sugar over the back fence.”

“You have to be prepared to give that up,” she says. “I know from personal experience.”

“Oh, did you nuke someone?”

She laughs, but with a hint of sadness and irony. “In a way, yes. When I was young, my parents filed suit against a country club that didn’t admit Jews.”

I sense she is about to elaborate when Scott Edwards, the court reporter from the
Sentinel,
approaches our table. Scott is a good reporter, but frustrated. He came here from Ohio in his mid-twenties expecting to be in Charleston only long enough to establish himself as a thoroughbred, to be wooed into the stables of a major daily with a fat contract for serious money. Ten years later he is still prowling the halls of the courts, waiting for his summons to the big time. He is tall, lanky, affable, with radish hair and the kind of cynical grin that rides well on the lips of reporters, who, with their questions, always seem to be mentally checking your answers against some invisible collateral source, even when they have only asked for the time.

“Hi, Natalie,” he says. “Coleman,” he acknowledges. I suggest he join us and he pirates a chair from the next table.

“Saw you upstairs,” he says to her. “What do you think?”

“By the script so far,” she says and he nods. The waitress approaches but he waves her off.

“Where’s your story?” she asks.

He shrugs laconically, his arms distending from the sleeves of his old tweed sport coat. “You read the background pieces we ran last week. Not too much sex appeal to jury selection. We’ll probably focus on the healthy percentage of whites who raised their hands when the judge asked if anyone had formed an opinion about the case from the news accounts.”

“Think they’re just dodging jury duty?” Natalie wants to know.

He nods. “Some of them, for sure. I got a couple to talk to me after they were excused. Swilling sure doesn’t want them on his jury anytime soon.”

Scott does not seem himself; more reticent than usual, occasionally looking at me with a cryptic glance that is somehow accusatorial and makes me nervous. He is pleasant enough, but his mind is not on the Swilling matter in spite of the discussion he and Natalie are holding. Perhaps it is merely professional boredom. He excuses himself with the need to phone in for messages.

“Nice man,” I say as he walks off. “You were about to tell me of a suit your parents brought.” I want to engage her on something other than my problem with the St. Simeon.

“I was twelve,” she says. “My father was teaching at the local university and a colleague there, a well-intentioned but obviously unaware Gentile, invited him to join the country club not realizing that there was an unwritten rule against Jews. He was blackballed in the membership committee so he sued.”