Adelaide Piper

by Beth Webb Hart

He was 100 points away from going platinum, and he was pumped. It was all a great adrenaline rush for him, and he was completely sold out to it. However, Mama (who had agreed to attend a few more meetings for the sake of her marriage) continued to disdain the business. She hated traveling. It was not at all a part of the small-town life she had always wanted and managed to have until now. She hated speaking and wearing sequined dresses and learning about how many cars someone owned.

  Worst of all, she hated the fact that her husband was no longer a workingman in the traditional sense. She hated that he didn’t wear a coat and tie each day and play the role of Ward Cleaver that he’d happily obliged her before. Not to mention the fact that he was at home all day, in the domestic domain that was hers to control.

  Papa Great was still livid about the whole thing. He’d never wanted his black sheep of an offspring, Tinka, to go into the seemingly crooked networking business, and he certainly didn’t want his war-hero son, Zane, to follow the same path.

  “Daddy doesn’t give a hoot about what anybody thinks,” Dizzy said as Lou nodded in agreement while slurping down her second Co-Cola.

  I guessed that he’d been doing what other people wanted for twenty-five years—and doing it with a good attitude, one might add.

  But this was his moment to shine, and he would not be denied.

  “Papa asked Randy to take Daddy’s place,” Dizzy said.

  “I had a feeling that was coming,” I said. “But he’ll have to cool his jets till Randy graduates.”

  When we returned home, Dizzy and Lou led me to a little shrine on the dining room table that Mama had created for my return. Next to a bouquet of fresh white roses and a pair of long kid gloves with pearl buttons, I saw first the framed invitation to the upcoming ball. The crest of the Camellia Club decorated the top line of the invitation, and below, in black engraving, it read:

  The Governors of the Camellia Club

  request the pleasure of your company

  at their annual debutante ball

  Saturday, the twenty-seventh of December

  One thousand nine hundred and ninety

  at eight o’clock

  The Magnolia Club

  Williamstown, South Carolina

  And there was a thick linen insert with our names:

  Miss Jennifer Louise Ferguson

  Miss Harriet von Hasselson Hartness

  Miss Nancy Whitmire McCant

  Miss Adelaide Rutledge Graydon Piper

  Miss Winifred Powell Pride

  Also, there were less-formal invitations on little wooden picture holders to events that would take place over the next seven days before the ball: the curtsy tea, the final luncheon, a rehearsal dinner.

  Gifts had arrived and were stacked behind the mounted invitations in polished white wrapping with white satin bows as if I were a virgin bride. I had to chuckle at the irony. I guessed the adults in my life didn’t know that when a girl grows up in the postmodern, post–sexual revolution world, coming out often happens well before the ripe old age of twenty. Talk about a chasm.

  Mama had even typed out my schedule for the next several days:

  Wednesday: Dress fitting, 9:00 a.m.

  Shoe fitting, 11:00 a.m.

  Curtsy tea, 4:00 p.m.

  Thursday: Haircut, 10:00 a.m.

  Luncheon, noon

  Friday: Christmas Saturday: Portrait sitting, 10:00 a.m.

  Monday: Final fitting, 9:00 a.m.

  Rehearsal, 4:00 p.m.

  Rehearsal dinner, 6:00 p.m.

  Tuesday: Manicure, 2:00 p.m. Makeup and hair, 3:00 p.m.

  Debutante ball, 8:00 p.m.

  (must arrive by 5:30 p.m. for group and family

  photo session)

  Breakfast, midnight

  And she had laid out more of that white monogrammed stationery I would use to write thank-you notes to my hostesses and gift givers.

  There was also a typed list of the family and friends who had responded to the ball invitation. My aunt Anna was actually traveling from Germany to make the event. And Daddy’s kin from west Georgia too. Randy would be my escort, and I was relieved not to have to worry about him the way the other girls would about their out-of-town boyfriends coming in. I was looking forward to seeing him.

  As I fingered the ball invitation and breathed in the thick perfume of the roses, I wondered what God thought about debutante balls and the formality and etiquette that went along with such social events.

  God, I thought. I hope You don’t mind my being a debutante, because I think Mama would truly flip if I refused to go through with this.

  Late that evening, Randy called.

  “I can’t wait to see you!” he said. “When can you come with me out to the duck blind? You’re going to love watching the birds come in to roost in the swamp.”

  “Sounds buggy,” I said.

  “No, they’re gone for the winter. There’s something I want to show you there. I can’t wait to see you! When can I pick you up?”

  I heard my parents pull up in the driveway, and I told Randy I’d call him tomorrow; then I ran down the stairs to greet them. There was nothing as comforting as the smell of Daddy’s Aqua Velva aftershave and his prosthetic rubbing my back in a tight squeeze or Mama kissing my jewel as if I were the most precious treasure in the world.

  I had much to tell them about my new faith and the likelihood of my transfer to USC, but they were so weary that they seemed relieved when I asked if they would rather catch up in the morning.

  As I made my way back up the stairs and opened the confirmation Bible Juliabelle had given me, I heard my parents’ angry words ricochet off the ceiling below. I couldn’t make out what they were saying to each other, but I detected the harshness in Mama’s voice, and when I woke early in the morning, I found Daddy, again, on the sofa, still wearing his travel clothes from the night before. I wondered what could make Mama so angry that she wouldn’t help him unbutton his shirt and get into his pajamas.

  In between my fitting and my curtsy tea, I made the rounds to my odd assortment of local buddies. I went first to Harvest Time to tell Dale and Darla about my newfound faith. They cheered and hugged me and called in Charlie Farley, who was in the receptionist area, answering the phone, and we all knelt down in the sanctuary to say a prayer of thanksgiving.

  Dale and Darla sent me home with one of the hand-carved wooden crosses one of the migrant workers was making as a contribution to the church. I nailed it right over my bed beneath the print of Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World that Mama had framed for me a few years back. Christina looked paralyzed with fear as she sprawled across a field, looking at a drab farmhouse with dark windows in the distance. I imagined crawling into the painting and handing Christina the wooden cross. (Would I come down from this spiritual high?)

  Next I went by Kmart to pick up a book of children’s nursery rhymes and drove right out to the suburbs to visit Georgianne and Baby Peach.

  “Let’s get him started early on his poetry,” I said as Georgianne opened the screen door with Baby Peach cocked on her hip. “If I have anything to say about it, he’s going to be the next James Dickey. Minus the alcohol, of course.”

  Then I strolled with them over to their neighborhood park, where I marveled at how well the toddler boy could climb up the stairs and zoom down the slide and rock himself back and forth on the tire swing.

  As he plopped down his pail and shovel to dig in the sandbox, Georgianne invited me to sit down on a park bench, where I promptly grabbed her arm and said, “Forgive me for freaking out when you got married a few summers ago.”

  Georgianne grinned, recalling the scene in the bathroom of the country club. “So where is this coming from?” she asked as she held a rubber band between her teeth and pulled her hair back.

  “It’s just . . . a lot of crazy things happened to me at college. And let’s just say I learned the nobleness of your decision to carry Peach and raise him up even though it wasn’t what you had planned.”
/>   Georgianne’s eyes settled on me.

  “Thanks,” she said, and then she looked away to check on Peach.

  “That means a lot to me. I mean, it’s no cakewalk raising a kid and going to college at the same time. But it’s what happened, and I’m going to see it through.”

  “I’m not trying to romanticize it or anything, but I just want you to know I think you made the right decision.”

  “Me too,” she said before making a visor with her hand to get a better look at Peach. “I’ve missed a lot, Ad. But I wouldn’t take the world for him.”

  We both looked on as he patted the full pail of sand with the back side of his shovel and blended a medley of toddler songs that started with “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and ended with “The Farmer in the Dell.”

  “Oh, and just in case you are curious, you aren’t missing a thing when it comes to the Camellia Debutante Club. It’s just a bunch of old ladies and chicken salad.”

  “I figured,” Georgianne said as Baby Peach brought a fistful of sand to his mouth. When she scurried toward him screaming, “No!” he looked up at her with a Cheshire grin and opened his chubby fingers to let the grains spill out and onto his knees.

  “So how’s school going?” I asked Georgianne when she returned.

  “Pretty well, actually. I got into the honors program, and I’m going to double-major in math and biology. Peach wants me to go premed, but I think I’d rather teach.”

  “Boy, I could have used you a few weeks ago when I took my calculus exam.”

  “Bad?”

  “Lost my scholarship over it. I’m coming back here for school.”

  “Hey, that’ll make Randy’s day.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “But if they let you retake, come see me. I aced calculus.”

  When we looked up, Baby Peach had decided that the sand looked too delectable not to sample, and we both ran over to him and tried to teach him how to spit, which he took to surprisingly well, and he spit just for fun much of the way home in his stroller.

  That afternoon, I threw on a tweed suit and raced over to the curtsy tea with Jif. We were delighted to see Harriet and even the socially awkward Winkie and the obnoxiously preppy Nan.

  “What’s different about you?” Harriet asked as I bit into a cinnamon scone. She squinted her eyes as if to singe my veneer, then handed me a linen napkin to wipe away the clotted cream on the corner of my mouth. “You look better,” she said, tapping her hand on my cheek. “Come over to dinner at Marguerite’s tonight and spill the beans.”

  “Okay,” I said as Mrs. Percy got our attention by tapping her silver spoon on her delicate china teacup. Her gardener and housekeeper rolled an ancient television set, complete with tinfoiled rabbit ears, into the parlor and propped it on her ottoman.

  Jif took a place beside us as Marguerite, Harriet’s grandmother, instructed us in the dos and don’ts of curtsying, first toward our fathers as they held our white-gloved hands in the spotlight, then toward our mothers and the Camellia Club board, who would be seated in Queen Anne chairs in front of the guests on both sides of the red velvet carpet in the center of the ballroom. We watched successful curtsies as well as several faulty attempts from videotapes of past balls; then Marguerite modeled it for us gracefully a few times before asking each of us to stand up and give it a try.

  I got as much of a kick out of Mrs. Marguerite Hartness as Harriet did. She had to be pushing eighty, but she’d been giving this curtsy lesson for fifty years. She was as spry and physically capable of bending down to the floor as any twenty-year-old deb in the room. She reminded me of Katharine Hepburn in her final films: elegantly sturdy even as her head trembled with Parkinson’s.

  Harriet was proud of her vivacious grandmother, who sported an up-to-date sarong and DKNY pumps, and she had every right to be. Marguerite brought the class level in Williamstown up several notches, and she even had a way of making the place seem livable.

  “My cousin, the governor, has just accepted the invitation to the ball, and so has his dashing son, Paul, who is a senior at USC,” Marguerite announced after winking in Jif ’s and my direction before dipping down to the ground again.

  Yes, she had to be the most poised woman in all of South Carolina.

  Rumor had it that Strom Thurmond had proposed to her once and she’d said, “I don’t think I can put up with you, Senator.”

  “Let’s see y’all do it,” she said as we all stood up to attempt the curtsy. We chuckled clumsily through the remainder of the afternoon as we each attempted to place the ball of our right foot just so behind our left and bend gracefully down to the Oriental rug without showing our cleavage or toppling over headfirst.

  “I figured this might be a tasteless vegan meal,” Jif said when Harriet opened Marguerite’s garland-draped door in ratty blue jeans and a hooded sweatshirt a few hours later. Jif lifted up two chocolate Slim-Fast bars and said, “So I brought my own food.”

  “What food?” Harriet said, looking her up and down. “By the looks of you, you haven’t eaten in months.”

  Jif grinned with pride as the scent of freshly cut pine and toasted pecans wafted through the doorway. That was just what she wanted to hear.

  Harriet rolled her eyes. She hadn’t wanted to encourage her.

  “Gaunt must be in,” she said, snatching the bars out of Jif ’s hands.

  “We’re having Marguerite’s homemade spaghetti with marinara sauce and a Greek salad sans the feta, all right? If I weren’t a Yankee, I’d be offended by your bringing a prepackaged meal when you’d been invited to dinner.”

  “No kidding,” I said, nudging Jif into the grand home, which was the picture of a Southern Christmas, with a fresh balsam-and-pine garland winding its way up the grand stairway and a wall of poinsettias lining the entrance hall.

  “Besides,” Harriet said, “the menu is entirely vegan and low-fat, so everybody should be happy.”

  “Welcome, girls,” Marguerite said as she brought out a tray of freshly poured Co-Colas in crystal tumblers with a handful of salted peanuts, which she dropped into each glass before inviting us into her living room. We took a seat on the velvet Martha Washington chairs and watched the angel-abra carousel on the coffee table propel the brass angels around and around the gold star as the bells chimed.

  “This is the way your mama used to drink them when she was a teenager,” Marguerite said to Harriet as we sipped the sweet and salty froth.

  “Why didn’t she stick with these?” Harriet whispered with a momentary forlorn expression as Marguerite left the room to stir the sauce. She informed us, “Mom checked into the Betty Ford Center in October. Seems my stepfather found her passed out in the hot tub one afternoon when he came home early from work. She’s always tipped the bottle, but it had gotten a lot worse in the last few years—what with my stepfather taking a little trip to the Bahamas with his personal assistant, and his perfect offspring turning into little devils. The one at Andover was kicked out for cheating on his finals, and the one at Yale was arrested for possession of cocaine. I don’t care if I ever go home again.”

  The steam from the pasta curled out the kitchen window and into the night air.

  “Thank goodness for Marguerite,” Harriet said, and we all agreed.

  “She’s like your true mother,” I said.

  “You said it,” Harriet agreed. “We’re as thick as thieves, and we’re going to spend this coming summer in Nice. Might even try Tuscany after that.”

  Marguerite’s dining room was inviting. Magnolia limbs lined the fireplace, where a porcelain crèche decorated the mantel, and in the center of the dining table was a Williamsburg apple tree with a pineapple on the top, its spiky leaves fanning out and leaving pointed shadows on the linen place mats and china.

  “Where’s baby Jesus?” Jif asked as she peered into the empty manger.

  Marguerite answered after passing the pasta. “Oh, my family had a tradition of hiding Him away from the children until C
hristmas morning. We’d all try to guess where He was throughout December, but we never could find Him. I think my mother kept Him in her underwear drawer.”

  “Why did they hide Him?” I asked. I had been a Christian for less than a week, and Christmas was becoming real to me.

  “Oh, for a sense of expectation, dear,” the beautiful lady said, her head wobbling on her neck. “When we woke up on Christmas morning, instead of racing down to check our stockings, we would gather around the crèche to see if He was there. How I remember picking Him up and cupping Him in my hands as a young girl on those mornings. I had been waiting and waiting on Him, and now He had arrived, and there was nothing so satisfying as His perfect little body in the palm of my hand.”

  I nestled myself beneath the blanket of Marguerite’s memory and the earthy scent of freshly cut pine and pasta, and I pictured the Christ child on my own family’s mantel. Yes, the dog had chewed up one of His legs, and there was a waxy mark from a purple crayon across His shoulder, as well as a seam down the side, evidence of the machine that had pressed him together. But His newborn eyes were like two perfectly formed pearls, and His arms were open and reaching out for an embrace that I had not returned until now.

  “That’s my mother,” Harriet said, pointing up to a portrait above the fireplace of a pale young woman in a beaded gown, holding a single pink camellia in her lap. Her head was tilted slightly toward the ground, forbidding anyone a look into her eyes.

  “That was when she made her debut at the Magnolia Club,”

  Marguerite said, “some twenty-five years ago.”

  “And there is Marguerite,” Harriet said, pointing to a smaller painting that hung between two windows on the opposite side of the room. “She made hers in 1930.”

  “You’re stunning,” Jif said.

  And I stared into the painting at Marguerite, who was looking the portrait artist straight in the face with her black eyes. Her shoulders were draped with scalloped white lace, and her gloved hands were empty and resting, palms up, on her knee as though she were waiting for the world’s gift, the baby Redeemer, to appear in her hands.

  After a delicious dinner, we went back onto the porch to drink decaf coffee and eat vegan raspberry sorbet, compliments of the health-food store in Charleston.