I have known Clara Beauregard since she was knee-high to a grasshopper, which in Mississippi means approximately two feet, because grasshoppers here are not especially tall and neither were the children I grew up with.

What I did not know then — what nobody in this town knew, not really, though everybody suspected — was that the Beauregard name was both the family's greatest asset and its heaviest stone.

It was June 1954, and the Beauregard estate — which the town referred to as "the old house" with a mixture of reverence and barely concealed curiosity — was showing its age in the way a beautiful woman shows her age: with extraordinary effort and absolutely nobody willing to acknowledge what is happening.

The event that started the whole sorry business was a Founders' Day banquet at the country club, which in this case means a room above the Vicksburg Bank that had been decorated with fake flowers from Montgomery and a piano played by a man whose fingers were too thick for Chopin.

Mamaw Beauregard had arranged, with the quiet desperation of a woman watching her last card slip through her fingers, that Clara should be seen dancing with Jedidiah Croft. Mr. Croft was from Oklahoma, which in the vocabulary of this town was both an insult and an explanation. He had made money in oil — real money, not the pretend money of family names and inherited land — and he wanted something his money could not buy: a Southern name.

Clara was having none of it. I saw her leave the banquet hall at approximately ten o'clock, slipping through the French doors like a cat that had heard a mouse in the walls. She was wearing a dress that had been a dress three years ago and might have been a dress again if the fabric had held, but the fabric was thinning at the seams, much like the Beauregard story itself.

I was in the clinic that evening, suturing a fisherman's hand, when my phone rang. It was Clara's mother — no, I should say it was Mamaw Beauregard, who had adopted the role of mother so thoroughly that the real Mrs. Beauregard had essentially retired from the position.

"Clara is missing," Mamaw said. The word missing in a Southern woman's mouth does not mean what it means in a police procedural. It means: the story we have been telling about ourselves is falling apart, and I do not know how to hold the pieces.

"I will look for her," I said, which was not entirely true. I had already seen her. I had seen her walking down Magnolia Avenue with a purpose that was usually reserved for women who were either going to church or going to hell, and in this town the two were frequently the same destination.

She was at a gas station on the edge of town, the kind with a single pump and a neon sign that buzzed like a trapped insect. And she was not alone. She was sitting on the curb, talking to a young man who was leaning against a Ford truck that had seen better decades.

The young man was Cole Whitfield. I knew him by reputation — the boy from the wrong side of the river, the one who went to the war and came back different, though different in this town could mean anything from clever to dangerous. He was tall and lean in the way that comes from eating irregularly and walking regularly, with a mouth that was either smiling or grimacing and I could never tell which.

"Evening, Sister," he said when he saw me approach. His voice had that dry quality that makes you listen carefully because you never know when he is being serious.

"Mr. Whitfield," I said. "You are keeping my goddaughter from her destiny."

"She told me her destiny involved a man from Oklahoma who smells like gasoline and expensive cologne. I figured I was an improvement."

Clara, who was sitting on the curb in a dress that was doing its best and failing, looked up at me with an expression that I recognized immediately: the look of a person who has made a decision and is bracing for the consequences.

"Mary Agnes," she said, using the name I had been given at baptism, not the one the town used. "This is Cole. Cole, this is —"

"Sister Mary Agnes," Cole said. "I know who she is. Everyone in this town knows who Sister Mary Agnes is. She is the only honest person here, and that is why everybody pretends she is not."

Clara was quiet for a moment. Then, to my astonishment, she laughed. It was a real laugh, not the practiced titter that she used at church socials, but a laugh that came from somewhere beneath the surface and surprised even her.

Cole looked at her laughing and did something I have rarely seen him do: he looked caught, as if her happiness was something he had not expected and did not know what to do with.

"So," he said to Clara, when the laugh had settled. "You going back to that banquet, or are we going to stand here all night?"

Clara considered this. She looked at the gas station, at the neon sign, at Cole's truck, at the road that led back to the Beauregard estate with its peeling paint and its family tree embroidered on linen.

"I think," she said slowly, "that I have been to enough banquets for one lifetime."

And then, in a moment that I would recount to my confessor with some trepidation, she stood up, brushed the dust from her dress, and got into Cole Whitfield's truck.

I did not report her missing. I did not call her mother. I went back to the clinic and finished the fisherman's hand, and when I emerged at midnight, the truck was still there, parked behind the station, and two figures were sitting on the bumper, talking in voices too low to hear.

I drove home and wrote in my journal: "Today, Clara Beauregard got into a stranger's truck. This is either the worst thing she has ever done or the first truly free thing she has ever done. In Mississippi, the line between those two descriptions is thinner than the wallpaper in the Beauregard parlor."

The next morning, the town knew. In a town of twelve thousand people, news travels faster than the ambulance and with far more embellishment. By breakfast, three separate versions of the story were circulating: that Clara had been kidnapped, that she had eloped, that she and Cole were planning to run off to New Orleans and get married by a justice of the peace who charged twenty dollars and asked no questions.

Mamaw Beauregard was apoplectic. "A Whitfield," she told me at the clinic, her voice trembling with the particular rage of a woman who has been betrayed not by malice but by stupidity. "A Whitfield from the wrong side of the river! Does she think I raised her to marry a man who fixes tractors?"

"You raised her," I said carefully, "to preserve the family name. It appears she has decided that the name is not worth the price."

Mamaw Beauregard left without paying for my counsel.

Clara did not come to the clinic that day. She did not come to church. She did not come to anything that had an address and a schedule. But at three o'clock in the afternoon, I received a phone call from a booth outside the hardware store.

"Sister," Clara said. Her voice was different. Not different in tone or pitch, but different in the way that a person's voice is different after they have made a decision that cannot be unmade. "I need your advice."

"I am a Catholic sister, child. My advice is always the same: pray, suffer, and try not to make it worse."

"This time it is different. Cole and I — we have decided to pretend that we are dating."

I closed my eyes. "Pretend."

"To fool Mamaw. To fool the town. To give Jed Croft something to think about that is not just how much oil is in the ground under the Beauregard land."

"Sister Mary Agnes," Cole's voice came from the other end of the line. I could hear him in the background, which meant he was in the booth with her, which meant that in the economy of this town, they were already more than a rumor.

"Cole," I said. "If you are hurting her, I will pray for your soul. And I have a very effective prayer for that purpose."

"I am not hurting her, Sister. I am — I am going to try very hard not to."

There was a silence. Then Clara spoke again. "Will you help us?"

I thought about this. I thought about Clara as a child, sitting in my clinic while I treated her scraped knees, telling me stories about the moors of England even though she had never been to the moors of anywhere. I thought about Mamaw's family tree on linen. I thought about Jed Croft's money and Cole's truck and the long, slow death of a name that had outlived its usefulness.

"I will help you," I said. "But I am warning you: pretending is the hardest work there is. At least when you are honest about something, you can rest afterward."

And so the performance began. Cole Whitfield, the tractor mechanic from the wrong side of the river, started appearing at church socials and county club meetings and tea parties where he was either ignored or endured with the brittle courtesy that this town reserves for things it does not understand.

He was, I must admit, surprisingly good at it. He had not been educated at a finishing school, but he had read enough books in the Army library to understand that Southern society was a performance in which everyone played a part and the trick was to make your part look spontaneous.

At a garden party at the estate — the garden in question being a patch of weeds held together by the sheer force of Mamaw's denial — Cole stood beside Clara and answered questions with a wit that was sharp enough to cut but gentle enough to disarm.

"Mr. Whitfield," said Mrs. Pemberton, a woman whose hat cost more than Cole's truck, "what do you do for entertainment in your part of town?"

"Mostly we entertain each other," Cole said. "It is cheaper."

Clara, standing beside him, felt something that was not quite a laugh and not quite a sigh, and knew that the line between pretending and meaning it was a line she had already crossed.

Author Note & Copyright: