South of Broad (4 page)

“Look,” she said, pulling her long hair away from her eyes. “Look at my left eye. What a cross-eyed bitch. Look! What an ugly cross-eyed jerk bitch I am. It was because you were nice—but if you hadn’t been nice, I would have said it anyway. It’s what I am,” she added helplessly, with a shrug, as if she couldn’t properly explain.

I took off my glasses and wiped them with a handkerchief, then I dabbed at my eyes and tried to compose myself. Putting my glasses back on, I said to Starla, “I know an eye surgeon. The best in the city. I’ll ask him to take a look at your eye. Maybe he can do something.”

“Why would he look at her eye?” Niles said, protective of his sister. “She doesn’t got a penny.”

“Have,” his sister corrected. “Quit talking redneck.”

“She doesn’t have a penny.”

“He’s a wonderful man, this doctor,” I told them.

“How do you know him, big shot?” Niles asked.

“Because I’m a paperboy, and I know everybody on my route.” I glanced at my watch and, with my mother’s list in mind, stood and told them in farewell, “I have to go, but I’ll get my father to invite you for dinner, okay? I’ll call you about the time.”

Both of them looked frankly astonished at something as simple as an invitation to dinner. Niles glanced uneasily at his sister, who offered as I turned: “And Leo, I’m sorry about what I said. I really am.”

“I said something mean to my mother today,” I admitted. “So I deserved it. It was God getting me back.”

“Leo?” Niles said.

“Yeah, Niles?”

“Thanks for this.” He held up his wrist. “When we met you, we were in handcuffs. When you’re leaving, we’re not. My sister and I won’t forget it.”

“We’ll remember it the rest of our lives,” she said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because,” Niles said, “no one’s ever nice to us.”

•   •   •

O
n the leisurely bike ride home, I congratulated myself for handling Sister Polycarp and the unruly orphans with some diplomatic skill. I was running an hour ahead of the schedule I had set for myself, and was thinking about the kind of cookies I would make for the new neighbors moving in across the street. My mother had ordered chocolate chip, but I was thinking of making cookies with more of a Charlestonian heritage and flavor. I was surprised to find my mother’s old-model Buick parked in our driveway as I navigated my Schwinn into the garage. My father had built our house with his own hands in 1950. It had not a single suggestion of architectural merit; it was nothing more than a two-storied, five-bedroom home that many Charlestonians considered the ugliest house in the historical district.

“Hey, Mother,” I called through the house from the kitchen. “What are you doing home?”

I found her in her orderly home office where she was writing a letter in her beautiful penmanship, her sentences all like well-made bracelets. As she always did, she completed the paragraph she was composing before she looked up to address me. “Normally, Bloomsday is a slow do-nothing day, but this one is heating up fast. I just received a phone call from Sister Polycarp, who said you handled the situation with the orphans well. So you completed directive number one. Your high school principal has several other directives for you.”

“You’ve given me the other two directives: I’m to bake cookies for the new family, then meet the new football coach in the gym at four.”

“There have been some events I must add. We are lunching at the yacht club. You’ll dress appropriately. Noonish.”

“Noonish,” I repeated.

“Yes. We are meeting the two seniors who were expelled from Porter-Gaud this morning. And their families, of course. I want you to look out for them the first couple of weeks at school. Both are rather bitter at having to attend a new high school during their senior year. But under no circumstances do I want you to get close to any of these new students. Not the orphans, not the kids across the street, not the kids from Porter-Gaud. Nor the coach’s son, who you’re going to meet this afternoon. All of them spell trouble in their own way, and you’ve already had enough of that. Help them, but do not make friends with them, Leopold Bloom King.”

I put my hands over my ears and groaned. “Please don’t call me that. Leo’s bad enough. But I would die of shame if people knew you named me for a character in
Ulysses.”

She said, “I admit I had you read
Ulysses
at too early an age. But I refuse to allow you to denigrate the greatest novelist who ever lived or the greatest novel ever written on this special day. Do I make myself clear?”

“No other teenager in America would even know what this talk’s about,” I said. “Why would you name me for an Irish Jew who lived in Dublin and isn’t even a real person?”

“Leopold Bloom is more alive than any man I’ve ever met. Except your father, of course.”

“You could’ve named me after my father! I’d have liked that.”

“I didn’t because your father knew that he married a great romantic, and great romantics are granted lots of slack by the men we love. They understand our great hearts. For instance, your father balked when we named your brother Steve after …” Mother stopped, and her eyes flooded with tears at the mention of her son’s name, which had rarely been spoken out loud within these walls since his death. Until memory rendered her speechless, she was about to confess that my father had balked at naming their first born Stephen Dedalus King, but my mother brought her gift for argumentative persuasion into play; she could have talked my affable, tongue-tied father into naming Steve “Hitler” and me “Stalin” had the inspiration seized her. My father was all red clay and alabaster in my mother’s hands, and she had sculpted him into her imaginary perfect husband long before I had come onto the scene.

I was searching for the proper word of apology for my outburst against her, but the words fluttered into my head like a colony of luna moths, in disorderly, undecipherable array. I longed for the day when I could say what I meant to say and at the precise time the thoughts came to me, but it was not today.

Our entire household pivoted on the immense pride my mother took in her distinction as a Joyce scholar who had received her doctorate from Catholic University for her unreadable (I tried once) dissertation, “On Catholic Mythology and Totemology in James Joyce’s
Ulysses,”
which was published by Purdue University Press in 1954. Each semester she taught a graduate-level course on Joyce at the College of Charleston that was both highly praised and fully subscribed by students as etiolated as egrets. On three occasions she had delivered papers on Joyce to enraptured Joycean scholars who acknowledged her deep affinity and rapturous nitpicking into even the most skillfully hidden minutiae as it related to Joyce’s uneasy Catholic boyhood. It was my mother who had compared the menses of Molly Bloom to the blood-drenched Stations of the Cross and its relationship to the divinity of Christ, and it had won her enduring recognition among her stultifying peers. On many occasions, my father and I had prepared elaborate meals for Joycean scholars of the first rank who had come to Charleston to sit at the feet of my mother so they could practice intoning ponderous inanities to one another. I believe in my heart that my father taught me to cook so that the two of us could escape those killer nights when academe came to our house to speak of Joyce and nothingness and then Joyce again.

Mother gathered her papers in her briefcase, then checked my list of directives. “Your day is filled up. No idle time for you to get in trouble, young man.”

“The banks are all safe from me,” I said. “At least for today.”

“You stole that line from your father. All your jokes came from your father. You should try originality. What do you and your father have cooked up for our Bloomsday feast?”

“Top secret.”

“Give me a hint.”

“Chicken Feet Florentine,” I said.

“Another tired joke of your father’s. You get all your attempts at wit from him. I’ve never said anything funny in my whole life. I think it’s a waste of time. Tootles; I’ve got to go, darling.”

“Tootles.”

I walked to the kitchen to make a batch of cookies. Unlike any other family I knew, the kitchen was my father’s bailiwick and his alone. Jasper King had cooked every at-home meal that my family had ever eaten, and he had turned his sons into table setters and sous chefs for as long as I could remember. I had seen my mother in the kitchen only during those times when she was passing through on her way to the garage. In a court of law, I could not swear she had ever lit the stove, defrosted the refrigerator, refilled the pepper mill, thrown out spoiled milk, or even knew the direction to the spice cabinets or where the oils and condiments were kept. My father washed and ironed the clothes, kept the sinks and toilets spotless, and kept the household running with an efficiency that I found astonishing. Over the years, he taught me everything he knew about cooking and grilling and baking, and we could make the crown princes of Europe happy to find themselves at our table.

I opened the copy of
Charleston Receipts
that my father had bought on the day I was delivered at St. Francis Hospital, and I turned it to the benne seed wafer thins, a recipe submitted by Mrs. Gustave P. Maxwell, the former Lizetta Simons. My father and I had cooked almost every recipe in
Charleston Receipts
, a transcendent cookbook put together by the Junior League and published to universal acclaim in 1950. Father and I placed stars each time we prepared one of the recipes, and the benne wafers had earned a whole constellation. I began toasting the sesame seeds in a heavy skillet. I creamed two cups of brown sugar with a stick of unsalted butter. I added a cup of plain flour sifted with baking powder and a pinch of salt, and a freshly beaten egg that my father had purchased from a farm near Summerville. As I was checking the brownness of the seeds, the phone rang. I cussed silently, because cussing was a flash point with both my parents, who wanted to raise a son who did not dare utter the word
shit
. A shitless son, I thought as I answered the phone.

“Hello, King residence. This is Leo speaking.” My Southern race does politesse with thoughtless grace.

An unknown woman’s voice spoke. “May I speak to Sister Mary Norberta?”

“Mary Norberta? I’m sorry, but no one lives here by that name.”

“Excuse me, but I believe you’re mistaken, young man. Sister Norberta and I were novitiates at the Sacred Heart convent many years ago.”

“My mother is the principal of a high school. My high school. I can assure you that you have the wrong number.”

“You are Leo,” the voice said. “Her younger son.”

“Yes, ma’am, I am Leo, her son.”

“Except for your glasses, you’re a very attractive young man,” she said. “I suggest you remove your glasses when your father takes your photograph.”

“He’s photographed me my entire life,” I said. “I don’t know what his face looks like, but I know what his camera looks like.”

“Your mother brags about how witty you are,” the voice said. “You get that from your father’s side of the family.”

“How would you know?”

“Oh, I haven’t identified myself, have I? My name is Sister Mary Scholastica. I called to wish your mother a happy Bloomsday. I bet that rings a bell with you, doesn’t it?”

“Never heard of it,” I said. “Sister Scholastica.”

“She’s never spoken to you of her time in the convent?”

“Not once in my life.”

“Oh, dear, I hope I haven’t broken a confidence,” the nun said.

“Not that I’m aware of,” I said. “Are you saying that my brother and I were illegitimate?”

“Oh, heavens, no. I’m afraid I must go gargle; it seems I have put my foot in my mouth. So, has she raised you a feminist? She bragged that she would.”

My mother had, indeed, bragged such a thing, to everyone, since I was born. “My God in heaven,” I breathed. “You do know her. Sister Norberta, huh?”

“She was the most beautiful nun I ever saw. Any of us, for that matter. She looked like an angel in her habit,” Sister Scholastica said. “Will she be in later?”

“Let me give you her phone number at the school.” And I did so, my rage a bile I could hardly control. But then I finished the task: added vanilla and the benne seeds, dropped them in dollops from a coffee spoon on a pan lined with aluminum foil, and placed them in a slow oven. Then I dialed my mother’s number.

When she answered, I said, “Yes, I admit it: once I called you Mother. But from now on, you’ll be Sister Mary Norberta to me.”

“Is this one of your jokes?”

“You tell me, Mother dear, if this is a joke or not. I’m on my knees, praying to St. Jude, the patron saint of hopeless causes, that it is a joke.”

“Who told you this?” my mother demanded.

“Someone with a dumber-sounding name than Norberta. Her name was Scholastica.”

“She knows that she’s never supposed to call me at home.”

“But it’s Bloomsday, Mother,” I said with more than a pinch of sarcasm. “She wanted to share your joy.”

“Was she drinking?” Mother asked.

“We were on a telephone. I don’t have a clue.”

“You get rid of that tone right this minute, mister,” she demanded.

“Yes, Sister. I’m sorry, Sister. Please forgive me, Sister.”

“I didn’t really keep this a secret. Look at the photograph on my dresser, the one with his parents and your father. You’ll see.”

“Why couldn’t you just tell me?” I asked. “And quit saying you’re raising me as a feminist.”

“You’ve always been strange enough, Leo. Steve knew all about my life as a nun. But you were so different and so difficult that I wasn’t sure how you’d handle it.”

“It’s going to take a while to get used to this,” I said. “It’s not every day a boy finds out his mother’s a professional virgin.”

“My vocation was very fulfilling to me,” she informed me firmly, then changed the subject in a sidestep unusual for her. “Have you taken the cookies to our new neighbors?”

“I’m baking them now. Then I’ll let them cool.”

“Do not be late. Lunch at the yacht club, then four o’clock to meet your new coach. And, Leo. I’m proud I’m raising you to be a feminist.”