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Her nose had been broken, but the emergency room doctor had assured her that once the swelling went down, it should be good as new. Her lip was split; it, too, would mend. Her skin was eventually going to regain what had once been referred to by a suitor given to flowery compliments as its poreless, alabaster complexion. A gross exaggeration, that, but her complexion was the one physical attribute she took pride in, and anything would be an improvement over its current condition, which was a rainbow of hideous bruises, ranging the spectrum from dense purple to saffron yellow.
    But, basically, the doctors had told her, her injuries were superficial. She was lucky, they had said. No other broken bones, no eye damage, no concussion to report, no lost teeth. After the fuss her mama had made in the emergency room, they’d rushed to assure her she would once again regain her former beauty. Those assurances had satisfied Mama, but left Aunie feeling quite ambivalent.
    Because, sometimes, her looks had been a blessing.
    But, sometimes, they had been a curse.
     

CHAPTER 2
    There was no place quite like the South for one to be a member of the impoverished gentility. Southerners for generations had been raising that condition to an art form and Aunie felt she could write a book on the subject, no research necessary. After all, she had firsthand experience as an only child in a family that was a poor relation to two venerable old Southern names.
    Her daddy was L. Martin Franklin III, a dreamer in a family of overachievers. He was a vague, scholarly presence that barely made a ripple in her life. He cared only for his books and his projects, and his lack of business acumen was an accepted idiosyncrasy regarded by his family with the same half-amused, half-irritated tolerance that was accorded Uncle Asa’s drinking or Uncle Beau’s womanizing.
    Her mama was a Pearlin—of the Savannah Pearlins? That was the way she always qualified it upon anintroduction … her voice sweet as sorghum with a gently questioning inflection at the end. The unspoken inference was that a body must surely be lacking in breeding indeed if they had never heard of that august family. Aunie was perhaps five or six years old before she realized that the phrase Pearlin-of-the-Savannah-Pearlins wasn’t her mother’s exact maiden name.
    She was almost as young when she first began to comprehend the expectations her family had of her. It was difficult to remember a time when her looks and an obligation to marry well had not gone hand in hand.
    Her mama was an unhappy woman. She hated her lack of wealth, even if the Pearlins and L. Martin’s family did see to it that they were never lacking in the amenities. They were nevertheless forced to live in those tacky old apartment houses! She found it impossible to forget that, until her marriage, she had lived in a glorious mansion where she’d been raised to expect that her every wish would be granted.
    Then she’d had to go fall in love with a scholar with impeccable antecedents and not one ounce of marketable ambition.
    She drummed it into Aunie’s mind that she could do better. It’s all very well to marry for love, she’d often said. But when the passion fades — and, sugah, it will — you want to make sure something tangible remains. Use the attributes God gave you. Fall in love, if you must. Just see to it that you fall in love with a rich man. How many times had Aunie heard that in her lifetime?
    Her daddy never gave her advice at all…. He was quite oblivious that she might be in need of it. At the best of times, Aunie was not quite certain he was even more than vaguely aware of her existence.
    The rest of her relatives, however, tended to agree with Mama; they talked about her prospects for a good marriage as if it were a foregone conclusion. She grew up in elegant old apartment houses that retained shabby vestiges of their former glory, wearing her cousin Nola’s hand-me-down designer clothing. She