South of Broad (11 page)

As they sat in armchairs that faced each other, Jasper studied Sister Norberta’s face and found himself dismayed that eleven years of separation from this woman had done nothing to dampen his boyish ardor for her. Lindsay’s beauty had deepened with age and with the contemplative life she had chosen.

“I never got over you, Lindsay,” he said.

“Please call me Sister Norberta.”

“I never got over you, Sister Norberta.”

“I know that, Jasper,” she said. “Sister Michele told me about your visits. At first, she disapproved of you greatly. But she softened over the years. You got to her, Jasper, by your persistence, your generosity toward the convent, and your kindness. She began to cherish your yearly visits. And she loved your letters.”

“Did you ever see any of them?”

“Not when they were written. But last summer, Sister Michele and I were on retreat together. A forest near the retreat house had beautiful pathways, and we’d take long walks. She started talking about you. She told me that she felt I had never really belonged in the convent. That night, she gave me the box containing your letters.”

“Did you read them?”

“Yes, Jasper. I read every one of them.”

“What did you think?”

“I’ll have an answer for you someday. Not today. But soon, I promise.”

Already Lindsay had initiated the convoluted and Byzantine process of being released from the vows of sisterhood. Her decision pleased no one, and she had to convince the head of her order in America of her seriousness, who forwarded that request to the order’s headquarters in Europe, who passed it along to the world of men and all the way to the offices of the Pope himself. To Lindsay, the pace seemed snail-like and agonizing. But for her time and place in a church locked into the embers of its immovable laws, Lindsay’s deliverance from her vows arrived in a timely manner. The See of Rome, exhausted by the travails of World War II, was dealing with the broken Catholic soul of a ruined Europe. It had little energy to waste on a Southern nun who had discovered late that she had other fish to fry. Her letter of manumission was signed by Pope Pius XII himself.

Lindsay Weaver was wearing the same clothes when Jasper King picked her up in the fall of 1949. In a small ceremony, they were married at the main altar of St. John the Baptist and Father Maxwell Sadler performed the ceremony with all the panache for which he had become so famous in the diocese of Charleston. Stephen Dedalus King was born ten months later in 1950, and I was born in 1951. Jasper’s patience had earned him, at last, the love of his life.

“The wind is picking up, Leo,” Father said. “Let’s get back to the marina.”

We reeled in our lines. I took care of the gear as my father cranked the boat and we made our way back up the river, the small motor strumming against the tide.

Trailing my hand in the warm saltwater, I tried to think of the strangeness of time when I was not a part of it; how unimaginable a world denied the coiled, itchy presence of Leo King. Yet my father had permitted my entry into a landscape where mothers were cloistered and celibate and fathers were handed back to lives of solitude, even bitterness. A week ago, I would have written out my autobiography and not even come close to approaching its central truth. If the beginning of knowledge is when you discover more gargoyles than realities in your past, then my father and I had spent a long and fruitful night together on the Ashley River.

At the marina, we tied up our boat and gathered our gear, treated our rods and reels properly, and cleaned the fish we had caught with dispatch and expertise; Father made a fetish out of performing tasks the correct way. There was an efficiency and economy of his motions that I always found a pleasure to watch and a pain to mimic. When we walked across Lockwood Boulevard and returned to the house, I walked to my mother’s bedroom and knocked on the door as my father stacked the fish in the freezer. Not unbelievably, she was reading
Ulysses
.

“Did you catch any fish?” she asked, laying the dog-eared book on her bedside table.

“It was a good night,” I said, going in and lying down beside her. I am not an affectionate boy by nature, and this was a rare gesture for me.

She put her arm around me and I nestled my face against her shoulder, a rarity for a woman not famous for her affectionate nature, either.

“Thanks for leaving the convent, Mother,” I said. “You did a hard thing.”

She did not say anything for a moment, then asked, “Why do you say that?”

“Because I know you. I bet you were happy in the convent. You felt safe there.”

“I wanted to be a wife. I longed to be a mother. I wanted it all. Or thought I did.”

“You didn’t know about things like Steve,” I said.

“I never wanted to know about things like Steve. We almost lost you because of Steve. Your father and I almost lost each other.”

My father came into the room and could not hide his happiness in finding me in my mother’s arms. “I’ll leave you two alone.”

“I was just going to bed,” I said, jumping up.

“Good night, Leo,” Mother said.

My father grabbed me and kissed me and said, “Good night, sweet pea.”

“Night, Father.” Smiling, I couldn’t help myself: “Good night, Sister Mary Norberta.” I escaped the room before the copy of
Ulysses
, flung at my head, hit my parents’ door as I ran laughing to my room.

CHAPTER 6
Dear Old Dad

I
lay in the darkness of the room, going over the events of the past week, amazed at their variety and complexity. The forces I had encountered during the week began to materialize as I set my clock for 4:30 A.M. In the country of dreams, I began my nightly voyage. Steve was there, as he always was. I got to tell him about the orphans, the twins across the street, the black football coach and his sullen son, the lunch at the yacht club, the fishing trip, and our mother’s convent days. I woke when I heard screaming and crying and my father at my door, turning on the light. “Get up, Leo. There’s trouble across the street.”

I put on pants and a T-shirt and Docksiders. I reached for my glasses and rushed out of my room and encountered a sobbing Sheba Poe, her dazed brother, and their half-drunken mother. In the living room, my mother opened a gun cabinet, handed my father his shotgun and then me mine, the one I had inherited from her father. Goofy from the lack of sleep, my father slipped shells into the chamber of his weapon. I caught the box of shells Mother threw my way one-handed and was loading as my father said, “Someone’s breaking into the Poes’ house.”

“We came here because we don’t know anybody else,” Trevor Poe said, his voice despairing.

“He’s found us again, Mama,” Sheba screamed at her mother.

“He always finds us,” she muttered, half-coherently.

My mother in her nightgown was running for the telephone to call the police as Father and I raced out of the house in darkness. There were times I hated being Southern, other times I reveled in it, and this was one of the latter. Since my parents had wanted me skilled in the ways of the woods and streams, I could work a shotgun the way a majorette handled a baton. My gun was a comfort as I followed my father and we circled the Poes’ house, watching for movement and listening for sound. We found no signs of forced entry. We made our way through old growths of azalea and camellia bushes, then came to the front door as sirens bloomed overhead all throughout the city. My mother had not just called the cops, but the chief of police, whose daughters she taught.

It was my father who saw the odd, grotesque sign painted on the front door—a smiley face painted in a large, scrawling hand, seemingly in blood. It had a single tear coming out of its left eye. My father got out a handkerchief and removed a small drop of it and put it to his nose.

“Fingernail polish,” he said. The cop cars hit the yard like landing craft, and officers spread all over the house and yard. Father grabbed my shotgun and whispered, “You’re still on probation, son.”

“Forgot,” I whispered back.

Neighbors began to drift out on their first- and second-story piazzas, sleep-dazed and curious. One police car had parked in front of our house, and I saw a policeman interviewing Trevor and Sheba and their mother. Belle Faircloth walked down the length of the street and reported seeing a stranger in a white car parked near Colonial Lake for two straight nights. The man was a chain-smoker and had blondish hair, but she could provide no other physical description. A basement window had been broken and the Poes’ house entered beneath an untrimmed hedge. For more than three hours the police scoured the house for clues or explanations, but they could find nothing moved or disturbed or stolen. Only the grotesque smiley face painted on the front door merited their attention.

When the police left, my father and I returned home exhausted by the emotional night we had shared. Mother poured a shot of bourbon for her and my father, and made a cup of hot chocolate for me. As we sat at the kitchen table whispering about the events of the night, my mother motioned upstairs and said she had put the Poe family to bed in the extra rooms my father had once rented out.

“Something terrible has happened to that family,” she said quietly. “Something traumatic. They think someone came to that house to kill them.”

“Not likely,” my father said. “It might be a random break-in.”

“Leo,” Mother said, “be nice to these kids. Be as nice as you can, but don’t let them into your heart. You don’t know how mean the world can be. You’re so innocent, you don’t know the dangers.”

“Were you scared tonight, Leo?” Father asked as I finished my hot chocolate.

“Terrified.” I stood up to return to bed.

“You didn’t show it,” Mother said.

“That’s because my father was with me.”

It was just after three when I went back to bed and the neighborhood was quiet again. Sleep came easily. I had traveled far into a dream when I felt a girl’s lips touch mine, and I saw a naked Sheba Poe move into bed beside me. I had never been on a date or alone with a girl in a car, yet here I found myself naked with the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, her hands moving up and down my body. Slowly, she brought my lips to her breasts, then she took my hand and placed it inside her, and I learned how a woman could smell like earth; that her wetness felt like a place where fire could be born and brought to sublime life. Her tongue went down my throat and my chest and she taught me in minutes all the places a tongue could go, all the places I had ever dreamed a tongue could go. When I entered her I did it with her direction; I had never imagined the pleasure one body could derive from another. On top of me, she rose and pitched like a small well-made boat in a storm-tossed river as her hair came over her shoulders in soft, hot waves. She kept thanking me in a throaty whisper. When she came to me I was dreaming, then she pulled me into a life that was far greater and more sublime than any dream could be. After I came inside her, with her hand over my mouth to keep me from screaming, she slid out of my bed and disappeared into the night. Wordlessly, I lay awake, intoxicated by the life I was starting to live. As the sun rose out of the east, I thought of nothing but Sheba. Later that morning, I thought of her face with every copy of the
News and Courier
I threw onto the porches of Charleston. It would be years before I learned that my mother had witnessed Sheba Poe’s withdrawal from my room that night. And my mother was not the only one.

O
n Sunday evenings, my parents made a domestic tradition of sitting on the screened porch off their bedroom to watch the sun set over Long Lake and the Ashley River. Though they could be steely-edged and ruminant to a fault about the life of the mind, I found them both loopy and unapologetic about their own sappy romanticism when it came to their love for each other. Whenever they put on their Johnny Mathis or Andy Williams albums after dinner on Sunday, it was time for me to skedaddle to the comforting solitude of my room. It caused me a high level of anguish to know that my parents took pleasure in each other’s bodies, long before I knew anything of my mother’s career path as a nun. After my single night with Sheba, it seemed like an abomination. Because of the Catholic Church, I would always feel paroxysms of guilt at any thought of sex, peckers, vaginas, intercourse, and the whole shebang. The teachings of the Roman Catholic Church would cover my soul like a condom for the rest of my life. Already, I could feel nothing but guilt for luxuriating in the pleasures of Sheba Poe’s heaven-sent body, even as I wrestled with a great desire to see her again and tell her honestly, sincerely, and from the very core of my being that I loved her. It was an essential truth that I had been too thunderstruck to tell her that night; one that now shouted to be told. Loving her would square the guilt, ease my conscience, and go a long way in that futile Catholic exercise of Making Things Right.

My guilt seemed to have been contagious, as my parents called me out to the porch that morning soon after they were seated, their faces unusually serious and distressed. Facing me, Mother said, “We’re worried about you, Leo. We think the Poe twins are in trouble. Your father and I are concerned about the whole situation.”

I turned to my father, who was usually the voice of reason, but even he was thoughtful. “The break-in at their house the other night—it doesn’t add up. Except for the broken window, the police found no sign of forced entry,” he explained. “There were no footprints around the house except for yours and mine, and the mother has been so drunk they can’t get a signed statement. Even the twins are vague. And that smiley face at the door? It was fingernail polish. They found the same shade in both the mother’s room and Sheba’s.”

He paused then, till Mother prodded. “You’re not telling him everything, Jasper.”

“They found a bottle of the same fingernail polish in Trevor’s room,” Father added. “It seems he paints his toenails.”

I listened with a rising fear and a wholly selfish desire to defend Sheba. “They’re nice kids,” I argued. “They’ve had a hard life.”

“You don’t know what a nice kid is, Leo.” The sternness of my mother’s voice irritated me. “You’ve never had a friend.”

I stood up and began to pace the porch, like a lawyer at the bar defending a client. “That’s not true. I had Steve, and I’ll never have a better friend. I’ve made lots of friends in the past couple of years. Because of the drug thing, none of them are my age. That’s my fault, and I’m not blaming anybody but myself. But the people I meet every day, the ones on my paper route, Harrington Canon, my shrink—they all like me. The orphans and the twins don’t know about the cocaine, but I can tell they want to be friends with me. So does the coach’s son, Ike, now that we’re getting to know each other. You’re wrong to say that I have no friends. I’ve spent my whole life lonely, but I’ve got some friends now. I plan to keep them. My whole life, I plan to keep them, and love them as long as they love me. I’ll even love them if they quit loving me.”

“That’s our point,” Mother said. “We’re afraid the orphans and the Poe kids will use you.”

“They won’t,” I said. “They need me. They need my help, just like those rich kids who got busted for drugs. Just like Coach Jefferson and Ike. I don’t mind being needed. I don’t even mind being used,” I said, feeling a small strength that I’d picked up from Sheba, an unaccustomed boldness. “I’m sick of being lonely. I never mean to be lonely again.”

I turned at that, and bolted off the porch and back into the house, half jogging to my room. Though I was close to tears, I fought them off and became resolute instead. I reached to my bedside table and pulled out a rosary, blessed by the Pope, that Monsignor Max had given me on the day of my First Communion. I tried to pray, but all the words turned to dust for me. Going to my closet, I retrieved my collection of Topps baseball cards. I kept my priceless card of Ted Williams on the top of one of the piles in the box, while Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and Mickey Mantle crowned the other three. The box also contained the only photograph I had of my brother, Steve, and me. After his suicide, all photographs of my brother disappeared, as though his extraordinary light had not once illuminated the spirit of our household. As I lifted the photograph out, I noticed how it seemed to grow more fragile with the passing of time. But there I was in the snow-white suit of my First Communion finery with my brother’s arm draped around me in a fierce, protective gesture. When my prayers rang truest to me now was when I prayed to Steve. Since his death, I had come to think of him as some fearless, irrepressible angel who watched over me, part Rottweiler, part guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and part seer who would one day unlock the mystery of both our lives. In my worst moments, I could pray to Steve and not to the God who had stolen my brother and left me to face a terrifying world without my greatest ally by my side.

I
n the great timepiece that was my life, my dance card was filled up every hour, my routine as set as a well-made cake. I awoke when my alarm went off the next morning and performed my morning toilet in ritual and darkness, then pedaled my bicycle down toward Colonial Lake and watched as Eugene Haverford’s
News and Courier
truck pulled up to our appointed corner and four bundles of newspapers were heaved to the sidewalk. His cigar smoke was the first proof of my being alive each morning; that, and the blood surging through my thighs and the warm air, thick as marmalade, and the first traffic sliding down Rutledge Avenue. Paper route, daily Mass, breakfast at Cleo’s, five new vocabulary words: my life was overencumbered by habit.

As I took my wire cutters and freed my stacks, I breathed in the odor of fresh ink and could smell the richness of the shallow tidal broth thrown off by Colonial Lake. I worked fast to fold my papers as tight as furled flags. Inside the truck, I heard Mr. Haverford cuss the president, Mayor Gaillard, Chief of Police John Conroy, and the Atlanta Braves. Not a morning went by when Mr. Haverford did not cuss with inflammatory gusto all the major and minor players who appeared for his court of disapproval in the morning paper.

Off I went into the deep Charleston darkness, flinging the news of the world to the people of my route. Still, I thought of little but Sheba Poe, and the night she came to my room. Crossing Broad Street on the fly, I took a left on Tradd and did not work up a real sweat until I hit Legare Street. I would be back to some of these houses this very evening to collect for the delivery of next month’s newspaper. I would learn the gossip and secrets and off-kilter and off-centered and off-putting history of my city. I was bound in a deep connection of appreciation and community to every reporter, editor, typesetter, secretary, ads man, publisher, columnist, and deliveryman who worked in producing the
News and Courier
every day. By tying my destiny with this newspaper, I had given myself permission to pursue a career I hoped to find deeply satisfying.

In a complete reverie, thinking of Sheba, I steered through the streets and could hear the mansions and the turned-in row houses whisper their stories to me. Toward the end of my route, I turned up Stoll’s Alley, so I could do the south end of Church Street. In my life already, I had fallen in love with shortcuts, alleyways, secret passageways, and cut-through easements like Stoll’s Alley and Longitude Lane. Often I came to Stoll’s Alley because of its mystery and inwardness; its narrowness was like a form of perversity or flawed design, making it my favorite getaway in the city. The sun had not yet fully risen, and it was as dark as a confessional booth as I made my way with caution. A large man stepped suddenly out of a doorway, surprising me by blocking the lane. Then he shocked me by almost knocking me out with his fist.