“You and Mother make a handsome couple,” I say. “Come on in. I’ll make you some drinks. The guest of honor is planning a grand entrance.”
“The only kind she knows,” Mother murmurs as she leads the way to the library.
As I pour drinks for the two of them—red wine for my mother, a dry vodka martini with two olives for the monsignor—I say, “This martini is Saharan or Gobi-like.”
“It is the martini’s job to bring me closer to God,” the monsignor says, then sips with satisfaction. “It brings me halfway to God, then I must rely on the awesome power of prayer to take me to the summit.”
“Then you must teach me how to pray in the proper manner, Monsignor.” A man’s voice comes from the doorway, and I look up to see Chad Rutledge putting his briefcase on a bench. “The Anglicans teach that drinking is the fastest way to approach God. Charlestonians think it’s the only way. What’s wrong with our theology?”
“Join us in a drink and we’ll talk about it, Chad,” the monsignor says.
“Let me do the honor,” I say. “I’ll even bring it to your chair.”
“I like it when you’re sycophantic, Leo,” Chad says. “It’s so rare these days.”
“I try not to make it a habit, Chad. You like it too much.”
“I think it’s the natural order of things.” He winks at my mother.
I pull down the sterling silver cup, part of a set that Chad received the night he stepped down from his position as the youngest president in the history of the South Carolina bar. I pile the cup with shaved ice, then half-fill it with Wild Turkey.
“Where are your children, Chad?” Mother asks.
“Banished to their grandparents’ house,” Chad answers. “It still amazes me that my father—the guy who Fraser and I barely saw in our childhood—has gone bonkers over his grandkids.”
Monsignor Max says, “I’ve seen it happen dozens of times. He probably realized he was a bad father, and this is his way of making it up to you and your sister.”
I wait for Mother’s onslaught, and don’t have to wait very long: “Every night I pray for a grandchild.”
“Can’t have everything,” I say as I carry a tray full of appetizers around the room.
“Look around you tonight, Leo,” Mother says. We can hear the rest of our group coming up the back stairs. “It doesn’t seem that hard to attract a real wife. One who lives with you, shares your bed, and devotes her life to your happiness. On the way over, the monsignor confided that he could get you a papal annulment with no trouble whatsoever.”
“It’d take three phone calls,” Monsignor Max says.
“Now is not a good time to talk about it,” I say.
“Name a good time, son, and I’ll be there,” Mother says. “A tribe of cannibals couldn’t keep me away.”
“Drop it, Mother. My brother-in-law approaches from the west.”
Molly enters first, and comes up short when she sees her husband, relaxed and sitting in his leather chair. She goes over to kiss him. “Dar ling! So good of you to come. How on earth did you find your way to our house?”
“Someone at the office lent me a compass and a street map,” he responds good-naturedly. “Now, behave yourself, darling. I think this could be a famous Charleston evening, if we just let ourselves enjoy it.”
“A night to remember,” Fraser Whitehead says, moving in behind Molly. “Wasn’t that the name of a movie?”
“Certainly was, sis.” Chad’s voice is as smooth and soft as a dropped silk handkerchief. “It was about the Titanic.”
My mother whispers to me, but loud enough for most people in the room to hear, “It’s funny talking about your marriage, then the Titanic. A perfect segue, don’t you think?”
“Mother, I don’t think this event’s about you.” My voice is strident.
“I disagree,” Chad says. “This evening is about anything we decide to make of it. Don’t let your son inhibit you, Dr. King. I’ll always be grateful for how you helped me and Molly during our senior year in high school.”
“You and Molly proved a gamble well worth taking,” Mother responds.
“I told her at the time,” Monsignor Max says, “if you can’t trust a Rutledge or a Huger in Charleston, then we might as well all move to Myrtle Beach.”
“Mother’s always enjoyed helping millionaires out of tight situations, Chad,” I say. “It’s a hobby of hers.”
“When did you notice that Leo was like this, Dr. King?” Chad asks.
“At a very early age, I’m afraid,” she replies.
Again, a door opens and shuts in the rear of the house. Niles and Ike file into the den, Niles holding a bottle of frosted beer and Ike still working on his martini, bringing with them the smell of burning charcoal from the garden. They greet my mother and the monsignor. Niles then walks over to the television, turns it on, inserts a videotape into the VCR, and directs everyone’s attention to the screen.
Ike says, “As you can imagine, Sheba is not just going to walk up here to have dinner. Since the day we met her, Sheba’s been in the middle of a performance that had no beginning, and it certainly ain’t going to end tonight.”
When we see the movie flash onto the screen, all of us recognize the opening credits of Sheba’s first big Hollywood break, The Roar of the Girl Next Door, starring Dustin Hoffman and Jane Fonda. As the credits roll, the camera establishes the setting as Manhattan, with a score by Thelonious Monk that sounds like sex being performed in three-quarter time. At the entrance to a posh women’s boutique, the camera lingers. The door opens. A nineteen-year-old Sheba Poe, luscious, desirable, yet innocent and dewy in her own way, bursts out of that shop like an orchid opening up to sunlight. The same camera registers the almost heartless pleasure she takes in the effect of her own beauty on the men she passes on the street. She is wearing a low-cut white summer dress that clings to her body like a new layer of skin. The camera veers in front of her, capturing her dazzling walk down Madison Avenue, the ripeness of her figure strutting toward the lens like a force of nature as powerful as a tidal surge. There is a shot of her long, coltish legs and her sandaled feet and the dark red of her toenail polish, which had been enough to make me consider a minor-league career in foot fetishism when I saw the movie for the first time. The eye of the camera turns to the people on Madison Avenue watching her languorous passage, the wolf-whistling cabdrivers, the lunchtime construction workers yelling from high beams, teenage boys blushing, fashionable dowagers torn between envy and admiration. She stops suddenly and checks her makeup in the reflection of a plate-glass window that is decorated with shining tiers of diamond rings, brooches of ruby, amethyst necklaces, and watches that look like fancy collars for Chihuahuas.
A shot of her magnificent behind is captured from the point of view of a Middle Eastern cabdriver. Cars honk in appreciation as she moves away from the window toward the traffic jam that she has created. She smiles and winks at the cabdriver. He adjusts his rearview mirror, and she freshens up her lipstick as he counts his worry beads at a higher rate to match both his rapid heartbeat and the haunting music. She continues her walk down the runway that is Manhattan isle. There have been very few walks in Hollywood history that have achieved such attention or acclaim.
When the set designer’s name appears on the credits, we hear someone entering the back door of the library, an entrance designed to not go unnoticed. We turn to see her in the flesh: the actress Sheba Poe, wearing the same dress and the same sandals and the same pearls, the same shade of lipstick and nail polish, and the same hairdo she wore in the movie we are watching. Synchronizing her moves to the action on the screen, Sheba walks through the center of us, and we applaud the pure imagination of this homecoming. A natural ham, Sheba plays to her hometown crowd by adding bumps and grinds as she struts to that throbbing sound track, which sounds like it was written for some banned fertility rite. As our eyes flicker from the screen to the live woman, it is not just a good figure on a woman we praise but a bod
y that helped define feminine shapeliness for a generation.
As the young Sheba crosses Madison through the traffic that has backed up to honor her beauty, the real woman weaves through the couches and chairs in that paneled library. In the film, horses rear up with cops trying to bring their mounts under control; a distinguished-looking man emerging from a florist watches her approach, then bows and hands her a dozen white roses. Sheba curtsies to the gentleman, puts one of the roses between her teeth, then begins passing out the others to a homeless man, a young mother pushing a stroller with twins, and two sewer workers who have popped out of a manhole to observe her passage.
Molly cut white roses from her own garden that day, and Ike seizes the moment by stealing them from their Oriental vase and handing them to Sheba with their stems dripping water on the rugs. Sheba puts one rose between her lips, then passes out the others to everyone in the room, saving the last for the monsignor, who beams.
As the assistant producers are named in a passing trilogy, a crane operator high above studies Sheba’s walk through a pair of binoculars. We turn from the screen toward the real woman, who has now walked to the end of the room and is coming back toward us. I watch her approach, the lyricism of her promenade toward the friends who honored her before she made this walk famous on movie screens around the world. Not a single critic reviewed that movie without mentioning Sheba’s concupiscent walk in which she seemed to define sex itself as something brand-new, some interior fire she had stolen and reincarnated in her own image. In that opening sequence, Sheba Poe walked into the cold heart of her complicated history by displaying an allure dangerous in both its carnality and its innocence.
The opening score is slowing down, and Sheba’s celebrated walk is ending. She vamps her way over to the screen as her younger self enters a high-end restaurant and spots Dustin Hoffman at a table, impatient and fidgety. Looking down at the younger incarnation of herself, Sheba waits as he stares at his Rolex over an empty wineglass, and says, “You’re late … again.”
Sheba the younger is joined by Sheba the older in the library on East Bay Street, with her high school friends around her, as she speaks her first line of dialogue in a film: “No one else seemed to mind, darling,” the two Shebas say in unison. “’Cept you.”
The room explodes into applause, and Sheba curtsies demurely. After her ovation, she poses in front of the monsignor as though his delighted face were a mirror. For as long as I have known Max, he has been as comfortable with center stage as Sheba has, and he obviously loves that her last act is in his honor. It would have provided a perfect ending to her performance if Sheba had not repulsed my mother with the shamelessness of her performance.
“Oh, stop it, Sheba,” Mother says. “You’ve made enough of a display out of yourself for one evening.”
With wicked timing, Sheba says, “No one else seemed to mind, darling. ’Cept you.” My mother’s disapproval seems to both delight and disturb her, but the jawlines on both women are wired tight.
“You have a God-given talent,” Mother says. “Yet you glory in playing the role of a tramp.”
“That was the part I was hired to play,” Sheba responds. “Would you like the scene better if they had dressed me in a garbage bag and combat boots?”
“I’ve read the stories about you in Hollywood,” my mother continues. “I know the choices you’ve made and I know you were born with free will like the rest of us.”
I try to think of a way to change the subject and the razorlike tension in the room. “Mother,” I begin, but my voice is weak, “I’m trying to think of a nice way of saying shut up.”
“Your mother is a guest in my house, Leo,” Chad says. “Any of my guests has the right to free speech.”
“Isn’t that sweet?” I say. “Go fuck yourself, Chad.”
“Easy, Leo,” Niles warns.
“Why don’t we get those steaks on the fire?” Ike adds.
But neither Sheba nor my mother is finished with the other. Sheba starts by saying, “Mother Superior, may I borrow a tampon? I left all mine at the Betty Ford clinic.”
“I’d like to wash your mouth out with soap,” Mother spits out. “How dare you say something like that in front of the monsignor?”
The monsignor pats my mother’s hand. “Remember, dear, I’ve spent a good portion of my life in confessionals. It’s hard to shock me.”
Sheba’s eyes do not leave my mother’s. “It’s acting, Mother Superior, just great acting. Lean back and enjoy the pure fraud of it.”
“Not fraud, my dear,” Mother answers. “I’d call it losing one’s soul a little bit at a time. I would never twitch my body to arouse the lust of every man who passed by.”
“Hell, Dr. King,” Fraser says, trying to lighten up the room, “I probably would have, but it wouldn’t work for me.”
“It worked on me, kid,” Niles says.
Fraser continues, “Sheba’s a movie star, Dr. King. Being sexy’s part of her job description.”
“It’s part of every woman’s job description,” Betty says with a laugh.
“Being sexy is one thing,” Mother snaps. “Being a slut is another.”
Without missing a beat, Sheba lifts a small linen cloth from the top drawer of a sideboard and pulls it over her head and shoulders like a cowl. She closes her eyes for a moment, then opens them suddenly, transforming herself by applying the strange alchemy of performance into something virginal and nunlike. Sheba turns her face toward us, as drawn in and sun-starved as a member of some cloistered order. The metamorphosis is extraordinary, a bird of paradise becoming a common grackle.
But the artist in our midst is not in a playful mood, and Sheba turns her newly minted Sister-of-the-Holy-Cross face on my mother and strikes out with no thought of mercy or restraint. “Mother Superior,” Sheba says, “I too have dedicated my life to prayer and good work. I could play the role of a nun far better than you did on your best day in the convent. Because God endowed me with a gift, I remain true to that gift, and I can play the part of an accountant or an astronaut or a trapped housewife or a lesbian. But you’re right; I can also play a stripper or a whore or a home wrecker or a lunatic.”
“In some of those roles, you’re a natural, Sheba,” Mother says. “No acting necessary.”
“Mother, would you kindly button your yap?” I cry. “Molly, why did you do this?”
“An error of judgment.”
“Molly’s good at those,” Chad says, mock-toasting his wife.
“But only one of them really counts,” Molly shoots back before Sheba regains control of the stage.
“Did it turn on Leo’s sweet father to see you in a nun’s habit, Dr. King?” Sheba asks. “Did it excite you that you kept poor Leo’s daddy horny and heartbroken all those years you spent in the convent? When did you know that he was turned on by the shaking of rosaries on the nun’s body hidden by ten pounds of black cloth? Some men like G-strings. What lit Jasper’s fire? Was it enclosure? The untouchable girl in the convent? Did you ever think that you did to him the same thing I was doing to every man on the street in that walk down Madison Avenue?”
“You’ve gone far enough, Sheba,” Betty says.
“I happen to be Sheba’s lawyer,” Chad says, ice tinkling in his silver cup. “She has broken no laws I’m aware of.”
“The laws of polite society?” Fraser suggests.
“Sheba’s never followed those,” Niles says.
Betty says, “Sheba, all of us in this room check in on your mother from time to time, Leo more than anyone, so you shouldn’t go after his mama. It’s not right.”
“Could we drop it?” Niles asks. “Or should I hog-tie the both of them? Leave Leo’s mama out of this, Sheba. She’s off-limits. Always has been.”
“Not off-limits for me, Niles,” Sheba says, “because Dr. King hated me from the first time she laid eyes on me. Isn’t that true, Doctor?”
“No, it isn’t,” Mother says. I hear something deadly and familiar in her
throat that I am sure no one else recognizes. I prepare for the worst, and the worst comes: “It took two or three months for the hatred to settle in,” Mother continues. “I fought against it. But it came, Sheba. And you’re right. It never left me. Everything was always about you; you were the center of the universe. I am certain you could find a spotlight in the darkest corner of hell.”
Holding fast to her nun’s habit, Sheba tightens the grip around the cloth. In a nunlike voice that makes the air seem murderous, she says, “I know your act, Mother Superior. I’ve known it from the beginning. I’ve been onto you.”
The monsignor, who seems transfixed and fascinated, springs to sudden life. “I know the moment when an evening has arrived at a point of no return. I think we should let the young people enjoy the rest of the evening together, Lindsay.”
“Who’s Lindsay?” Niles asks.
“That’s Dr. King’s first name,” someone answers.
“I always thought it was Doctor,” Niles says.
“Just a minute, Max.” Mother lifts a finger to fix the monsignor. “Sheba, do you remember what I told you the day before you graduated from high school?”
“How could I forget?” Sheba answers. “I was an eighteen-year-old kid who came up the hard way. My only crime was to befriend your lonely son, who was nicknamed ‘the Toad.’ Right, Leo?”
“Sounds right to me.”
“So my brother and I took the Toad into our lives and hearts, and he took us into his. It was the same year the mountain boy came down from the hills holding his damaged sister at arm’s length from the world. Remember her, Mother Superior? Anytime I do tragedy, I think of that mountain girl. If I have to do courage, I become that mountain boy. The actor is a natural-born thief, and I steal from everybody. For sweetness, I do Betty. For strength, I have Ike in reserve. See Fraser there? It’s her integrity I steal for my characters. For beauty, I have Molly. For success and self-assurance, I conjure up Chad. For kindness, I’ve got the Toad. I’ve got your terrific son, the one blushing over there, the kid you could never quite bring yourself to love.”