Adelaide Piper

by Beth Webb Hart

  As an owl hooted from the top of the magnolia tree, Harriet asked, “So what’s been going on at NBU?”

  “Quite a bit,” Jif said, looking at me. “None of it has been good unless you count Adelaide becoming a Jesus freak and me losing five pounds.”

  “Five pounds?” I said, sizing Jif up and down. “I think you weigh less than I did in third grade.”

  We all laughed.

  Then Harriet turned to me. “So you found religion up there? That’s what’s changed. I knew it was something.”

  “You could say that,” I said. “I got in a tough spot, and it became my hope.”

  “Mmm,” Harriet said, raising her dark eyebrows so that three clear lines stretched across her forehead. “You’re talking stranger than the vegans in Bronxville, my friend.”

  She sucked down her coffee with soy milk and licked the bottom of the sorbet bowl as we inquired about her fall at Sarah Lawrence.

  “I saw the Grateful Dead in Central Park,” she said, lifting her sweatshirt to reveal a silver loop that was piercing her belly button. “That’s where I got this,” she whispered, then brought her finger to her lips and looked toward the kitchen, where we could hear Marguerite stirring her coffee. “She doesn’t need to know. It’s not exactly deblike.”

  Jif and I grinned at each other. Harriet was so out there, and we loved every refreshing minute we were with her.

  “And I took a Flannery O’Connor story and turned it into a play for my theater class,” Harriet said.

  “Which one?” I asked.

  “‘The Life You Save May Be Your Own.’ And there’s a chance the theater club will perform it in the spring. You’ll have to take the train up if they do.”

  “Cool,” we said, and I could see Jif was already imagining what a trip to New York would be like.

  “Could we go into the city to shop?” she asked.

  “Why not?” Harriet said. “I mean, I personally loathe Fifth Avenue, but I’d go along if you guys made the trip.”

  “I’m turning in,” Marguerite said as her head bobbed behind the screen door.

  “Bonsoir, Grandmama,” Harriet said in a French accent, and we all blew her a kiss from the porch swing after thanking her for the delicious dinner.

  On my way home, I parked at the boat landing along the Waccamaw River and walked down to the bank to watch the moonlight on the water. What a long way I’d come in the few days since my conversion. No way would I have ventured to the river by myself just a few months earlier. My anxiety would have convinced me that someone might be hiding in the woods, planning an attack, or that I would somehow slip down the bank and into the current, where an alligator would seek me out.

  The kudzulike fear had been burned back through the prayer I said with Shannon, and I imagined its black vines smoldering in a vacant field as I slid off my loafers and let the water rush over my toes toward the harbor.

  15

  Broken Loaf

  Early the next morning, I received a hysterical call from Harriet.

  “Marguerite didn’t get out of bed when I called to her. An ambulance is here and taking her to Charleston.”

  I rushed over to pick Harriet up, and we followed closely behind the flashing lights as she bit her nails and pushed back the tears with the backs of her hands.

  It was a beautiful winter day. The white morning light was blinding as it burned through the cloud covering above the rickety, rust-encrusted Cooper River Bridge. One bump from a barge below, and it would surely collapse into the harbor.

  We took our seats in the emergency waiting room of the Medical University amid a crying child who had stapled his fingers together, a homeless lady with three Piggly Wiggly bags of clothes, and a cheesy green-tinseled Christmas tree with plastic candy canes, as a jazzed-up rendition of “Walking in a Winter Wonderland” played over the intercom system. It was seventy degrees outside, and Charleston wouldn’t see a flake of snow for another ten years.

  After three hours, the doctor came out to confirm that Marguerite had suffered a stroke, a fairly severe one, and her condition was uncertain. She was unconscious and had a week to regain consciousness before the likelihood of her coming around again became extremely slim.

  Harriet called her mama at Betty Ford and her mama’s brother, Uncle Fin, who lived on a commune in Arizona. They were both indisposed, so they left the details in Harriet’s hands. She really was all alone.

  I sat on a chair, thinking, God, give her strength.

  The next thing I knew, Governor Maves, Marguerite’s cousin, walked in with his entourage and told Harriet he would put his assistant, Lester Hayes, in charge of the details.

  “Don’t you worry,” he said to her. “Marguerite’s tough, and I’d bet the state she’ll pull through.”

  Sure enough, Marguerite regained consciousness the next morning, Christmas Eve, and insisted with great vehemence that Harriet continue with the deb engagements and stop blubbering at her bedside.

  I agreed to stay with Harriet in Marguerite’s house for the rest of the Christmas break. Harriet didn’t drive, so on Christmas Day I drove her in Marguerite’s silver-blue Cadillac to the hospital, where Father Simmons from St. Anne’s gave us Holy Communion at her bedside and we sang terrible a cappella renditions of “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing” and “Joy to the World!”

  By day Harriet and I would suck in our bellies for our final fittings, smile in front of the portrait taker, and practice our curtsies in front of the president of the Camellia Club, and at night we would sit on the porch, eat vegan pasta, and talk.

  “You’re giving me the Heisman,” Randy said when he called to ask me out for the third time. “I really have something I want to show you.”

  “We’ll have plenty of time together come January,” I assured him.

  He knew about my failing grades, and he had put me in touch with a football player’s girlfriend who was looking for a roommate at USC.

  Harriet and I conversed about literature, life, and God. She was open to the whole religion thing, and I read her the journal entries that I’d written to Mr. Lewis last semester, before giving her my copy of Mere Christianity. Harriet finished the book in less than twenty-four hours; then she made me drive her to the Williamstown Public Library, where she checked out The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters.

  Harriet and I both had these overwhelming bursts of energy in the evenings that led up to the deb ball. We would drink wine from Marguerite’s cellar and cook casseroles and soups into the wee hours of the night, carefully packing them in the freezer for Marguerite upon her return from the Medical University (which wouldn’t be until after the New Year).

  One night I wrote a letter to Peter Carpenter in which I told him that I missed him and hoped he was all right. Cringing, I even called his mama to ask for the penitentiary address.

  “Marguerite is my little piece of mercy,” Harriet said suddenly, looking up from one of her Lewis books as I fumbled through the drawers for a stamp. “My undeserved gift from God.”

  She put the book down and said, “I can’t do this, Adelaide. There’s too much water under my bridge.”

  “Not true,” I said before opening the contemporary Bible Shannon had given me for Christmas to read aloud a passage from Hebrews I’d just stumbled upon: “‘Let us go right into the presence of God, with true hearts fully trusting him. For our evil consciences have been sprinkled with Christ’s blood to make us clean, and our bodies have been washed with pure water.’”

  “Sprinkling? Full-fledged immersion wouldn’t get me clean!”

  As two moths gathered around the porch light, Harriet spewed, “You know I’ve done drugs. Not just pot, but heavy stuff. And every now and then, I get this funny feeling in my gut and go to Hardee’s and get a big, juicy cheeseburger. Plus I’ve slept around.”

  As Harriet watched the moths dance around the heat, she took a deep breath and kept going. “One time when I didn’t have a ride home from a show, I shacked up with a
forty-year-old deadhead who ran the falafel stand, and I wound up with genital warts.” Then she raised her eyebrows as if she had trumped me and this sprinkling notion with just the beginning of her list.

  She turned away from the light to look me head-on as she made her way farther down her list. “My oldest stepbrother—the one who ignores me—I even slept with him once. We were on a family ski trip in Austria, and we’d had too much to drink. I mean, that’s pretty bad, isn’t it?”

  The moths were buzzing now, singeing their wings as they touched the bright light.

  I didn’t know what to say, but that had never stopped me before.

  “Well, it’s definitely not in the ‘all things bright and beautiful’ category, Harriet, but from all I can figure, there’s nothing that can’t be forgiven.”

  “Oh, come on. Do you really buy that?”

  As much as I could figure, with the exception of her relationship with Marguerite, Harriet had concluded that she wasn’t worth a thing, and it would take more than me to persuade her otherwise.

  “Yeah, I do,” I said. “And a sin list as long as the Great Wall of China can’t nullify the sacrifice made on mankind’s behalf.”

  Harriet crinkled her face. She inhaled several breaths of the winter air before shooting an arrow.

  “Did you forgive that law student who raped you last spring?”

  My face reddened. I didn’t know that Harriet knew about that, and I wondered if it was common knowledge. My throat burned with anger.

  “Jif told me one night when I asked her why you always freaked out when someone came up behind you. It took me awhile to get it out of her, too, so don’t think that she’s spilling the beans around town.”

  I thought for a moment about Harriet’s question. Had I forgiven Devon Hunt? No. And I wasn’t sure that I should. That sly predator.

  “I haven’t gone that far,” I said to Harriet as I pulled a porch blanket tight around my shoulders. “Don’t know if I will.”

  “Hey, I understand. I mean, I don’t know if I can forgive my mother for not being a mother. Truthfully, the worst thing I’ve ever done, if I had to name it, is wishing that she would die. I mean, I have fantasies about her drinking herself to death.”

  My heart ached for Harriet. “I’m sorry” was all I knew to say.

  “Yeah,” Harriet said as she flicked out the porch light. The two moths thumped their bodies against the hot bulb even after the glow had disappeared.

  After we made our way up the grand staircase and to our separate rooms, I heard Harriet’s muffled cries from across the hall.

  When I closed my eyes, I could still see Devon Hunt pinning my neck down with his forearm.

  I had my own fantasy. The details weren’t clear, but I pictured him trapped in one of the old wooden coffins they buried Nathaniel Buxton in on the cemetery hill. A group of men had lowered him into the ground, and they were lifting their spades up and down as they covered the wooden case.

  I was the only one who knew he was alive in there, but I didn’t tell a soul.

  16

  First Love

  At our morning hospital visit the day before the ball, Marguerite announced that her doctor had approved her request to attend the presentation the next evening and that the governor and his entourage would pick her up and see to it that she had a front-row seat for Harriet’s debut.

  “Get going,” she said as she pointed toward the door of her room with her elegant arm jutting out of the hospital gown, a thick antique gold bracelet dangling from her wrist. She sent Harriet and me scrambling out of the Medical University parking lot to run her errands before our rehearsal that afternoon. We had to pick up Marguerite’s royal-blue gown from the Santee Cleaners and her raw silk shoes that she’d ordered from Bob Ellis Shoes. Then we made a mercy call to her hairdresser, Nadine Bugbee, who agreed to cancel her customers’ appointments for the next day so that she could go over to the hospital and get Marguerite’s hair and face into shape.

  Life was buzzing all over Williamstown as the out-of-town kin and escorts arrived with their floor-length gowns, kid gloves, and white-tie tuxes with tails. I hardly had time to say “boo” to Randy before we were walking down the aisle of the ornate Magnolia Club ballroom during the rehearsal—Randy stepping back as I practiced the curtsy toward the mothers on one side of the aisle before turning to the other side to the board and the would-be guests and onlookers.

  The ballroom was absolutely stunning with thirty ten-foot Fraser fir trees entwined with thousands of small white lights and enormous urns strategically placed down the red velvet runway, with an explosion of white roses and Queen Anne’s lace bursting out of their tops. The stately Queen Anne chairs were lined up perfectly on each side, and the red silk sashes on the doorways and the gold rope marking off the aisles were already in place. The marshals were marking off the parade course with black tape that would not be noticed in the darkened room the next night when the only light would come from the bulbs on the trees, the small lamps on the orchestra’s music stands, and the spotlight trained on the debutantes as we marched up and down the aisle.

  But the perfect decor couldn’t subdue the undercurrent of nervousness that flowed through the setting as we debs rehearsed our individual presentations, our group parade, our curtsies, and then the meticulously executed first dance with our fathers before the escorts cut in. This would all take place as the who’s who of Williamstown lined the other side of the aisle in observance of this rite of passage—the next generation of well-bred young ladies who had officially come of age.

  I was sort of looking forward to the pomp and circumstance of it all. Of wearing Adelaide Rutledge Graydon’s lace gown from 1899. But ultimately, it was a charade. A ritual passed down from our plantation forefathers, who sought to protect the bloodlines by setting the land gentry apart.

  Poor Winkie Pride never mastered the curtsy, and at the rehearsal, her back foot slipped and she actually landed with her backside on the red velvet carpet. The escorts tried to muffle their chuckles, but I wondered if she would actually be able to make it through tomorrow evening without keeling over. She scurried back to her place with her head to the floor before Mrs. Kitteridge, the president of the club, asked her to try it again.

  The next morning Harriet and I raced out to the hospital to deliver Marguerite’s precious ball duds. She thanked us both, and before we left, she called us over to her bedside, where she presented each of us with a white box in the shape of a heart; we opened them to find a perfect strand of pearls. Harriet’s clasp was a bumblebee with two emeralds for eyes and a body of sapphires between gold spread wings, and mine was an open flower with four little rubies of nectar in the center.

  “Bitsy Stillwell picked these up for me in Japan last spring. I thought the second strand could be for your daughter someday, Harriet, but when Bitsy told me she was going back this summer, I told her to get me a third strand so that Adelaide could have one too. She’s been a good friend to you in all of this. And I know you two will be the most beautiful debs Williamstown has ever seen.”

  “Merci, Grandmama,” Harriet said, and she squeezed her grandmother until Marguerite announced, “I can’t breathe, child. Now, get going.”

  “Thank you so much, Mrs. Hartness,” I said, completely stunned by the generous gift.

  “Don’t look so surprised, dear. It makes an old woman happy to give a nice gift.”

  The rest of the day of the ball was a complete blur as Mama spouted orders at my siblings and sent Daddy to pick up the debutante gown at the seamstress. As if it were the Queen of England’s inaugural gown, Mama had taken the Country Squire to the car wash so that no piece of dirt could possibly smudge the long white dress. Then she lined the trunk with two layers of sheets. She gave Daddy stern instructions about how to load and unload it. She even went out to the garage with him and asked him to practice using an old prom dress. Daddy rolled his eyes and reminded Mama that he had only one working arm, and if she needed more
than that, she’d best do the job herself.

  By lunchtime Juliabelle and Mae Mae had set up Randy and all of the out-of-town family with a lunch in the backyard that included chicken casserole, fruit salad, and lemon squares, while Mama, Harriet, and I excused ourselves for our afternoon grooming appointments.

  “Adelaide,” Randy said, racing to catch up with me as I bolted toward the car.

  A little piece of biscuit was caught in the right corner of his lip, and he had cut his chin shaving, but he was still as handsome as ever.

  “We need to talk.”

  “After the ball,” I said, smiling at him. “I’m sorry I’ve been out of the loop. I promise you the whole day tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” he said; then he lifted a piece of folded notebook paper out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me.

  Oh heavens, another poem, I thought.

  “I’ll read it while my hair is setting.”

  “Okay.” He grinned. “I’ll see you tonight on the red velvet.”

  “It’s a date.”

  Harriet, Mama, and I each had a manicure, a makeover, and a hair-setting appointment with Felix Idlewine, the owner of the elegant Felix’s Hair and Beauty Salon, who had recently taken up residence in a lovely Victorian home on the National Historic Registry. His assistant, Tanya, pushed down my cuticles as Harriet selected her makeup colors and Mama was over getting her shampoo. When my nails were dry, Felix led me over to a big leather chair, dipped my feet in a little whirlpool, and handed me a thick magazine that had all sorts of buns and French twists to choose from.

  “Up,” he said, pulling my hair on top of my head. “Pick the style, and I’ll make sure that beauty mark of yours can be seen. It makes you.”

  “Thanks,” I said, rubbing my index finger over my jewel.

  After I picked a French twist with subtle wisps framing the model’s face, I pulled the note from Randy out of my pocket.