In Polite Company Read online

  Dedication

  for

  Momunit

  Babs

  Babulous

  Barbarella

  Glama

  Barbara G. S. Hagerty

  Mom

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1. The Plunge

  2. Toxins

  3. Control Room

  4. Monday, Monday

  5. Surf’s Up

  6. Dress Code

  7. It’s a Trip

  8. Barrier Island

  9. Backpedal

  10. Secret Dances

  11. The Little Death

  12. Breaking News

  13. Prima Ballerina

  14. Crab Crack

  15. The Talk

  16. Fences

  17. Ham Biscuits

  18. The Tonic

  19. News Tip

  20. For the Birds

  21. Crumbs

  22. The Last Dance

  23. Sick as a Dog

  24. If the Dress Fits

  25. Prescriptions

  26. Love Scandal

  27. The Kicker

  28. Redneck Hairdryer

  29. Hot and Steamy

  30. Call Me Cinnamon

  31. The Invitation

  32. Imagine

  33. Swell

  34. Called Back Home

  35. The Wake Up

  36. The Receiving

  37. Cold Front

  38. The Will of God

  39. Weekend Warrior

  40. Under Water

  41. Underground Again

  42. Underdressed

  43. I Spy

  44. Overdressed

  45. Waltzing Away

  46. Resurrection

  47. Over Easy

  48. Cold Brew

  49. Leaving on a Jet Plane

  Acknowledgments

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*

  About the Author

  About the Book

  Praise

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1.

  The Plunge

  Each year, summer seems to arrive earlier in the Lowcountry: it’s only May third, and already the springtime riot of blossoms has budded, bloomed, and shriveled. Brown petals—vestiges of lavender wisteria, butterscotch jasmine, and taffy pink azaleas—litter sidewalks these days, spoiled confetti leftover from a party.

  I bike through the stewing haze to visit my grandparents before my afternoon shift at the news station. Steam travels from the hot, wet asphalt up to the hot, wet clouds. Caught in the middle of this heat transfer, I might as well be pedaling a radiator.

  For generations, we Charlestonians have endured the heat. This is our home, after all. My family, like the others who grew up within the historic district, will never leave. So, we do what we can to keep from dissolving into the thick humidity that weighs down this southern coastal town as much as its complicated history does. We wear linen and guzzle iced tea. We exercise early in the morning, late in the day, or not at all. We put on sun hats and slather on sunscreen. Still, the sun blasts through, emblazoning us with burns, blisters, and sweat stains.

  The sun cooks our doorknobs. It toasts cars, roasting the seat belt buckles until they’re lava-hot across our laps. It sears the crabgrass and gums the blacktop. The Lowcountry sun drains and wilts and simmers the flatlands below. But no matter how much the mercury soars, the zinnias stand tall, their candy-colored petals reaching high toward the sun.

  My grandmother Claudia taught me to love zinnias. My gardening lessons began years ago, on an Easter Sunday after our two o’clock dinner beside her zinnia bed, which still runs out past the swimming pool, a sort of marital DMZ where my grandfather rarely ventures. He thought the flowers too tawdry and common for an English garden noted for its formal Ligustrum hedges and boxwood topiaries. “But I think they’re pretty,” she said, with a wary eye pointed at the back door. She told me to keep quiet about our annual planting project. We’ve kept quiet about many things.

  A chorus of St. Michael’s bells rang around us as she slowly, almost reverently, studied the seed packets labeled Persian Carpet, Queen Red Lime, and Uproar Rose. Some packets were open already from last season, thriftily rolled up and sealed to preserve the extra seeds. Though my grandparents own one of the most handsome houses in the city—and one of the biggest, on nearly half an acre—they were also children of the Depression. They are savers; they practice frugality. She instructed me, “Simons, plant last year’s first.”

  Laudie—as my sisters and I call her—showed me how to poke holes into the dirt in orderly rows, drop a seed in each, cover it with earth. When I was six, two months seemed an eternity to wait for the first blooms. Every time I came by for a swim, I would weed and water and fuss over the seedlings, hoping there was something I could do to hurry them up. “They’ll come, Simons,” she would say. Since that long-ago afternoon, we’ve planted zinnias every Easter in that same flower bed in that same garden. It’s been twenty years.

  I pop my bike up on a curb. The jolt reactivates the throbbing in my head. I was reckless last night, for sure, but I also fear I crossed a line. I’ll have to ask Martha for advice. She’ll tell it to me straight.

  I round the corner from Meeting Street onto South Battery, once the neighborhood of wealthy indigo and cotton planters escaping the malarial summer heat on their plantations. The most architecturally elaborate houses in the city line these three blocks facing White Point Garden, known to us locals simply as “the Battery.” The antebellum park is situated on the tip of the old peninsula, where any native will tell you, grandiosely, the Ashley and Cooper Rivers meet and join to become the Atlantic Ocean.

  Live oaks with long, undulating branches canopy its walking paths and benches. At its center is an old-fashioned bandstand; scattered throughout are statues from the wars: Revolutionary, Confederate, and twentieth-century. Symbols abound here of both war and peace: old cannons aimed at Fort Sumter in the harbor; a bronze angel sculpture, which doubles as a water fountain.

  The most prominent installation lunges from the corner of the park, where the two rivers intersect. Standing on an octagonal pedestal, a naked man raises a sword, his muscles rippling. He defends a woman cloaked in a robe. In one hand, she holds a garland of laurel. With the other, she points to the enemy, the Union Army, out at sea.

  As a child, I climbed around the base of that statue, groping for footholds along the slick granite. I had stared at the naked figure, a fig leaf covering his penis. It wasn’t until some bubba started driving his truck here every Sunday with a Confederate flag mounted on an absurdly large pole that I realized the naked man embodied the battle cry of the Confederacy. And that beautiful woman, her hair lifted by the breeze, cast frozen in time, was an allegory for my city at the time of the Civil War. Had she known better, she would have waved the Northern soldiers in, maybe offered them some tomato sandwiches.

  Across the street from the old park are a seawall and a long promenade, where tourists and townspeople walk or jog or push baby strollers. The clip-clop of horse-drawn carriages, the shriek of herring gulls, and the murmur of pigeons make the Battery sound old-fashioned and out of time. Every day, the waters lick the barrier between the city and the sea. The insidious, salty tongues reach higher and higher and, some days, the water flows over the retaining wall. Drivers take detours. Runners leap over puddles. Tourists take photographs. Those some days come more often these days. Our city is sinking. Maybe the lady statue was warning us about the sea rise all along.

  Laudie’s imposing brick house, capped by a mansard roof, anchors the middle block. Two-story piazzas—the old-fashioned Charleston name
for porches—grace the front of her house. Once almost blindingly white, the piazza columns now collect grime in their flutes, giving them permanent shadows.

  I take a hard left, my wheels crunching the oyster-shell driveway, the high porticos rising to my right. I lean my bike against an old crepe myrtle and push the squeaky wrought iron gate that opens into the deep lot behind the house.

  The grounds are divided into thirds. The section closest to the house is a formal garden, with symmetrical paths bordered by low-growing boxwood and accented by giant topiaries. It’s a miniature version of Versailles.

  Behind the garden is the pool, which is nestled into the brick patio like a gem in an antique ring. Finally, far from view of the house and obscured by a fortress of greenery—aspidistra at the walkway, sago palms at shoulder height, and ancient camellias at the top of this hidden urban canopy—is the wild land left for Laudie.

  In this little outdoor room, fully open to the sun, is a garden of Eden. Fat-leafed hydrangeas grow beneath alligator-green ferns. Butterflies lazily sip from patches of hearty milkweed. A Ficus vine begins its summertime crawl up the back brick wall. Mint and rosemary hover over our prized treasures, collected through years of beachcombing and tucked into the flower beds: whelks, bull’s-eyes, lettered olives, cockles, and blood ark shells. Feathery plumbago leaves shake in the breeze. Lantana petals are scattered over the brick path that leads to the potting shed in the corner.

  Rimmed by the greenery, planted in the exact middle of the garden to soak in the high-noon sun, are the kaleidoscopic zinnias. Cherry, canary, margarine, bubblegum, grape. I’ve always known that these plucky flowers, with their intense colors and firm stalks, are hardworking, but even I am surprised by how they’ve grown so fast. I’ll give my report to Laudie.

  I head back toward the pool, through the tunnel of deep shade. I stop at an Adirondack chair, strip down to my bathing suit. With my toes gripping the warm bricks, heels hovered over the lip of the pool, I lift my face to the unrelenting sun. I close my eyes and fall backward into the pool.

  The water cools my throbbing temples. It hides me from my possible indiscretions. This amniotic space cocoons me from the hot, nagging world. I wish I could stay here all day—away from work, away from Trip, away from the lingering suspicion that I did something idiotic last night. In the pool, I am cleansed. Baptized. In the water, my sins are forgiven. Eventually, though, I have to surface.

  “Simons, is that you?” My grandfather’s spotted, bald head peers out from behind the screen door. He shuffles to the top of the back steps, waves his cane in greeting. This little back porch has practically become the perimeter of his world.

  “Hi, Tito! I’ll be there in a minute.”

  Tito was a tax attorney and worked at his father’s firm, which had been established by his great-grandfather in 1858. Tito ran it until his retirement. He has reaped the benefits of privilege all his life, including memberships in exclusive clubs and friendships with local politicians and bankers.

  He worked, but as a southern white male, most of his day-to-day tasks were done for him. Maids washed his laundry and ironed his shirts. They dusted his dresser and mopped his bathroom floor. Laudie ran his errands, fixed his meals, raised their children. Though Tito hasn’t been to the office in fifteen years, I’ve never seen him make a sandwich, set the table, or clean a dish.

  “Don’t let her cause you any trouble.” That’s what Laudie’s mother warned Tito the day they got married. As family history goes, Laudie was a stubborn girl who didn’t take well to authority. She snuck out of Sunday school to go crabbing. When the boy down the street tried to kiss her, she threw rocks at him; one took a chunk out of his cheek. She hid her stockings under the logs in the fireplace and tossed her dolls up in the magnolia trees. Neighbors whispered about the eerie black smoke wafting from the chimney; the baby-doll-eating trees spooked the kids down the block.

  But the Laudie we know has always been serene. Although they have a cook for the midday meal, Laudie serves breakfast every morning at eight and supper every evening at seven on the dot. She always wears a dress or a skirt, never pants. (Tito doesn’t like women in pants.) When I first became consciously aware of Tito’s chiding her—complaining that the shrimp creole was too salty—I licked my fork to test the tomato sauce, which tasted fine to me. When he said she looked frumpy in a shift dress, I followed her up the stairs to help her pick out a belt. When he asked her for more iced tea the moment she finally got to join us at the table, I found myself digging my nails into my chair cushion.

  By the time I entered high school, I spoke up. If he said the kitchen floor was a mess, I’d say it was my fault for tracking in dirt from the garden. When he complained about the room being too cold, I would say that Laudie probably didn’t notice because she was running around so much. In all those years, Laudie never answered back. She just bowed her head and stared at her folded hands. But sometimes I thought I almost saw her turn inward, as if drawing on some invisible, utterly private reserve of power.

  When I turned sixteen, she asked me to drive her to visit a friend in Beaufort. For the full hour-and-a-half ride, she sat with her trademark perfect posture in the passenger seat, tapping her feet to the songs on the oldies station. She was wearing her customary Capezio shoes—they’re leather with a low block heel and a strap over the ankle; she never went barefoot. We had reached the exit to Adams Run; we still had another hour to go. Maybe it was then, on that boring stretch of the two-lane highway, that I began actively to wonder about Laudie’s past. Why did she always wear Capezios, a noted dance-shoe brand, when a mule or a pump would have suited the occasion better? And why did she not, after all those years, ever think to hurl one of them—no matter what the style—right between Tito’s critical eyes when he picked on her for the littlest of things? What happened to that truant girl with a contrarian heart and good aim? I thought I’d start with a softball question: “Laudie, what did you want to be when you grew up?”

  “A dancer. A ballerina. You know that.”

  Of course. I knew the story. Laudie ran off to Atlanta when she was twenty. She hitched a ride there with a friend returning to Agnes Scott College. For six months, Laudie lived in a boardinghouse and worked as a secretary for a Coca-Cola executive. But her real reason for going was to audition for a spot as a ballerina with the Atlanta Civic Ballet.

  I hated the story, because it was always told by Tito—never by Laudie. He didn’t write it down, but he may as well have because the narrative never varied. He would say he had warned her, that she was being foolish, that she’d never make the cut. She telephoned him in the spring, begged him to pick her up when she wasn’t chosen for the corps de ballet. He always made sure to add “I told her so.” He drove her home to Charleston, and ever since, that wild thoroughbred was tame as an old broodmare.

  “I’m sorry you didn’t make the company. I bet you were better than all of them.” I knew it must be a source of pain for her. She still obsessively practices her ballet moves, as though the audition is next week.

  “Your grandfather doesn’t know the whole story. There’s more to it than that. I have my secrets.”

  “Ooh. Was there a guy involved?” I teased.

  “Yes”—she nodded—“that’s part of it.” I took my eyes from the road, hoping to catch a smile, but she just stared blankly at the flat road ahead. “I’ll tell you when you’re ready.”

  “I am ready! I’m sixteen.”

  She laughed and patted me on my thigh. “I’ll skip to the end. I’ll tell you the moral of the story.”

  “What? That’s not fair.”

  “Life isn’t fair. And you’ve got more than your share of good fortune, so don’t complain.”

  “Okay, fine. What’s the moral of the story?”

  “To be brave.”

  I felt brave in that car, a decade ago. I made the varsity volleyball team, I could legally drive at night on my own, and Martha, my best friend, had taken me to my first house part
y. It was also that year that I first skipped school to go to the Waffle House with a boy in a band named Harry.

  “Simons?”

  I yell back to Tito, this time louder. “Coming!” With another wave of his cane, he retreats indoors; the screen door slams shut behind him. I push myself up and over the lip of the pool and slip my dress over my wet bikini.

  Laudie and Tito are in the kitchen, seated at what was known as the “children’s table.” My sisters and I weren’t allowed to eat in the formal dining room until we were teenagers. To be fair, the dining room is stuffed with fragile, perishable things: a rickety vitrine, stacks of old Limoges too good to use, sherry glasses on spindly stems, two Chippendale chairs no one is allowed to sit on.

  The table is wedged next to the window. Tito sits at the head, as always. Laudie sits to his left, nibbling on half a pimento cheese sandwich. She does a little hop in her chair when she sees me. “Hi, Simons.”

  Tito rises to pull out a chair for me.

  “Our zinnias are looking good. We already have some blooms.” Laudie has lately become more vocal about our secret garden in Tito’s presence. I think she’s testing him, pushing back a bit.

  Tito would never roll his eyes; that would be too tacky, but the muscle at the corner of his jaw visibly tenses.

  I shimmy my chair away from my grandfather and lean across the table to make myself closer to Laudie. “I saw them; they look great. I think it’s all the heat we’ve been having.”

  “We just planted them.”

  “So crazy.”

  “Well, be sure to take some home with you, dear.” Laudie wears her ash-blond hair in her everyday ’do, gathered in a bun at the back of her head. A simple pendant necklace rests at her sternum. Pearl clip-on earrings illumine each side of her oval face. As always, she’s wearing her Capezio shoes, this pair the palest of blush pinks, like the flesh beneath the nail. She holds a glass of iced tea in her right hand, accentuating the delicate curve of her wrist. It has been a lifelong habit of hers to rest in pretty poses.

  She was born with long, willowy arms and legs. Even in her mid eighties, she’s still taller than I am. She has maintained a slender silhouette all her life. Genetics played a big part, but Laudie has also been fastidious and disciplined about her body. She watches her weight, which never fluctuates more than a pound or two. For cocktail hour, she allows herself one glass of Chardonnay, no peanuts or cheese. Her idea of dessert is to eat an apple or orange. She has maintained these disciplines throughout her life.