Free South of Broad by Pat Conroy Page B

parents, if not both.
    However, it was Fraser Rutledge, the great Ashley Hall basketball player, who broke out of a cocoon of shyness and said, “Shut up, Daddy. Shut up, Chad. You’re only making it worse, and you’re making it much worse for Molly.”
    “Don’t you dare talk to your father like that, young lady,” Hess Rutledge snarled through thin lips.
    Posey Huger added, “He can’t make it much worse for Molly. She’s restricted for the rest of the summer.”
    “That so?” Mr. Rutledge asked. “Funny thing, I’m sure my son told me that he and Molly were going to a dance at the Folly Beach pier next weekend. Didn’t you mention that, son?”
    “My daddy was never one to keep a secret,” Chad said, winking at the entire table and somehow coming across as a charming rascal rather than the darker creature that I felt staring me down every time he looked my way. His courtliness was the flip side of his aggression. It might not have been pretty, but it was masculine and, I thought, Charlestonian to the core.
    “You’re not going anywhere next Friday,” Hess said to her son, evidently realizing what a spoiled figure he was cutting for my silent but appraising mother.
    “Ah, Mama,” Chad replied, “I was even thinking about getting my sister—old Muscle Beach down there—a blind date for the dance.”
    Fraser stood up with quiet dignity and excused herself to the ladies’ room. The suffering of plain girls who were born with a duty to be beautiful to rich and shallow families was almost unbearable to me. I nearly rose to follow her, then thought I would look strange in a ladies’ room. But Molly Huger did rise abruptly. Molly excused herself, shot her boyfriend a murderous look, then followed her friend out of the dining room. In her own beauty and straight-backed carriage, Molly had fulfilled the most pressing and necessary duties for a Charleston girl of her generation. For the rest of her life, she could sit around being beautiful, marrying Chadworth the tenth and bearing his heirs, rising to the presidency of the Junior League, and putting fresh flowers on the altar of St. Michael’s. With thoughtless ease she could throw parties for her husband’s law firm, sit on the board of the Dock Street Theatre, and restore a mansion south of Broad. I could write out Molly’s entire history as she passed in hot pursuit of her bruised friend. Because she was pretty, there was nothing about Molly that was not a cliché to me. But I had no idea how history was about to manhandle Fraser, a girl with a man’s shoulders, a twenty-rebound game on her résumé, and a future that contained uncertainty and, I was certain, great sorrow. In a flash, it bothered me that I was much more attracted to Molly than to Fraser.
    “You shouldn’t say things like that to your sister, Chad,” Simmons Huger said, a gesture that seemed correct and timely. “You’ll regret it when she’s older.” Fraser’s mother followed the two girls.
    “I was just teasing, Mr. Huger,” said a contrite Chadworth the tenth. “She’s never had much of a sense of humor.”
    “She’s a sensitive girl,” Mr. Huger agreed, then turned to my parents. “Dr. King? Mr. King? Thank you for your time and for the help you’re giving Molly. I’m going to be late for an appointment if I don’t get going.”
    “Certainly,” my father said. “We’ll let you know what’s been decided.”
    “Thanks for arranging this, Worth,” Mr. Huger said. “And thanks for springing for lunch.”
    No one had noticed my mother’s tundralike silence as this small-time passion play between troubled families unfurled around her. It was a huge tactical error for Worth Rutledge to bring up my drug connection to defend the actions of his own son, but Mr. Rutledge was a well-known litigator in Charleston, which made him eager to engage whenever he smelled blood in the water.
    Mrs. Rutledge and the two girls entered the dining room again. I followed my