South of Broad (5 page)

“No wonder everybody treats me like an oddball,” I answered in amazement. “I was raised by a nun.”

J
ust after three, I began packing the cookies in a tin as my father entered the kitchen carrying two bags of groceries.

“Benne seed wafers?” he said. “They’re not mentioned in
Ulysses.”

“This is not part of the Bloomsday feast,” I said. “A new family’s moved across the street, remember?”

Jasper King put the grocery bags on the counter and said, “The sweetest boy in the world needs to be kissed by his father.”

I groaned, but knew the folly of resistance. He kissed me on both cheeks like he learned to do in Italy during World War II. All during my childhood, my father made up excuses to kiss me and my brother on both cheeks. When we were young, Steve and I would practice the groans we’d make whenever he approached us.

With great care, I packaged the wafers in a rounded tin that once housed salted pecans. I tasted one to make sure it was worthy to enter a stranger’s home. It was. “I’m going to run these over to the new neighbors,” I said. “Sister Scholastica called, by the way.”

“Haven’t heard from her in a coon’s age.”

“You know her?” I asked, ignoring the subject of my mother’s nun-hood for the moment.

“Of course I know Scholastica,” he said. “She was the maid of honor when your mother and I got married. By the way, I ran into Judge Alexander on Broad Street. He bragged about how highly your probation officer thinks about you. I told him how well you were doing.”

T
he moving van had already departed when I crossed the street to the Poe family. The cookies were warm in the tin as I bounded up the stairs of the nineteenth-century house that needed a facelift and a touch of rouge. I knocked twice and heard someone moving toward the door in bare feet. It opened and I got my first rapturous glance at Sheba Poe, who became the most beautiful woman in Charleston the moment she crossed the county line. Everyone I met, male or female, remembers the exact place where they first caught sight of this spellbinding, improbable blond beauty. It was not that we lacked experience in the presence of beautiful women; Charleston was famous for the comeliness of its well-bred and pampered women. But as Sheba stood tall in her doorway, her presence suggested a carnality that took me to the borderline of a cardinal sin just because of what I thought about as I gaped at her. To me, it felt like no appreciation of mere loveliness, but some corruption of covetousness or gluttony. Her green eyes drank me in, and I noted flecks of gold.

“Hello,” she said. “My name is Sheba Poe. I’m the new kid on the block. My brother, Trevor, is sneaking up behind me. He’s wearing my ballet shoes.”

“I’m wearing my own ballet shoes, thank you.” Trevor Poe appeared beside his sister. I was struck dumb by both his composure and his elfin size. If anything, he was prettier than his sister, but thinking that seemed to rewrite the laws of nature. Trevor noted my silence. “Don’t worry; Sheba strikes everyone that way. I have the same effect on people, but for an entirely different reason. I’ve played Tinker Bell in more class plays than I can count.”

“I made you some cookies,” I said, flustered. “To welcome you to the neighborhood. They’re benne wafers, a Charleston specialty.”

“Does it have a name?” Trevor asked his sister. It was an odd echo of my conversation earlier that day with the orphans, as if I weren’t in the room.

This time, I answered: “Its name is Leo King.”

“The
Kings
of Charleston? As in King Street?” Sheba asked.

“No, we’re no relation to the famous Charleston Kings,” I said. “I’m descended from the nothing Kings.”

“A pleasure to be friends with one of the nothing Kings,” Sheba said. She took the tin of cookies and handed it to her brother, then took my hand and squeezed it, as mischievous and flirtatious as she was lovely.

Then a darker, more menacing presence approached from the rear of the house unsteadily, like a dog with three legs.

“Who is it?” There was something wrong with the woman’s voice. A lovely but diminished version of both her twins appeared in the doorway, parting her two children like a wave. “What do you want from us?” she asked. “You’ve already got your check for the move.”

“The movers are long gone,” Trevor said.

“He brought us some cookies, Mama,” Sheba said, but there was a nervous, stilted quality to her voice. “From an old family recipe.”

“It’s from
Charleston Receipts,”
I said, “a local cookbook.”

“My great-aunt has a recipe in that cookbook,” the woman said, and a note of familial pride entered the slurred speech of what I now recognized as a common drunk.

“Which one?” I said. “I’ll cook it for you.”

“It’s called breakfast shrimp. My aunt was Louisa Whaley.”

“I’ve cooked it often,” I told her. “We call it mulled shrimp and serve it over grits.”

“You cook? What a faggoty thing to do. You and my son are destined to be bosom buddies.”

“Why don’t you go back inside, Mama?” Sheba suggested, but with diplomacy in her voice.

“If you become friends with me, Leo,” Trevor explained, “it’s a kind of kiss of death to my mother.”

“Oh, Trevor, Mama’s just joking,” said Sheba, guiding her mother back into the shade of the house.

“You wish,” said Trevor.

“Would you like to subscribe to the
News and Courier?”
I asked the retreating figure of Mrs. Poe. “We’ve got a special introductory offer: the first week is free except the Sunday edition.”

“Sign us up,” she said. “If you’re the milkman, we need milk and eggs too.”

“I’ll call the milkman,” I said. “His name is Reggie Schuler.”

Sheba appeared at the door again and said in an exaggerated Southern accent, “I don’t know what my mother, Miss Evangeline, would do without the kindness of flaming assholes.”

I laughed out loud, surprised by the profanity coming from such a pretty face and knowing the witty reference to Tennessee Williams, which seemed dangerous. Her twin was not nearly as amused as I was and chastised his sister. “Let’s wait until we make a friend or two until we reveal our true trashiness, Sheba. My sister apologizes, Leo.”

“I most certainly do not,” Sheba said, mesmerizing me with her eyes. Her Southern accent was extraordinary for its depth, although it was certainly not a Charleston accent, which was gussied up with its own bold flares and Huguenot accessories. Her brother’s voice was high-pitched, but hard to place in a geographical setting, though I would have guessed the West.

“My natural charm has captivated Leo, has it not, my little benne wafer?” Sheba had opened the cookies and was eating one as she passed another to Trevor. Their mother’s sudden reappearance took them by surprise.

“You haven’t left yet,” the mother said. “I forget your name, young man.”

“I don’t think I introduced myself to you, Mrs. Poe. I’m Leo King. I live in that brick house across the street.”

“I find it most undistinguished,” she said.

“My father built it before the Board of Architectural Review got strong,” I explained. “It’s considered dreadful by most Charlestonians.”

“But you’re a King. One of the King Street Kings, I suppose.”

“No, ma’am. We’re the nothing Kings. I already explained that to your kids.”

“Ah, you’ve met my darling children. A faggot and a harlot. Not bad for a single lifetime, don’t you agree? And to think I came from the Charleston aristocracy. The Barnwells, the Smythes, the Sinklers, all that and more. So very much more, Mr. Nothing King. The blood of the founders of the colony flows through these veins. But my children are hideous disappointments to me. They poison everything they touch.”

Mrs. Poe stopped in midstream that was half-genealogy and half-tirade and finished off a drink in a cut-glass tumbler. Then she placed her nose against the screen door leading to the piazza and said, “I think I’m going to puke.”

She did not puke, but she did fall through the screen door and straight into my arms. I caught her, stumbled once, then righted myself and lifted her off the piazza floor, where she would have suffered some severe damage to her face. Sheba and Trevor both cried out, then together we carried their mother to her upstairs bedroom. The furniture we passed smelled newly out of the box, cheap copies of antiques, even the four-poster, rice-planter bed we laid her upon. The twins seemed undone that I had witnessed this humiliating event. But I was feeling heroic for catching their mother as she popped through her front door, invoking the infield fly rule and declaring her immediately out, and carrying her out of sight before anyone on the street could report the event.

Back at the front of the steps, Sheba grabbed my hand and asked, coming very close to begging: “Please, Leo, don’t tell anyone what you just saw. This is our last year in high school and we can’t take much more.”

“I won’t tell a soul,” I said, and meant it.

Trevor said, “This is our fourth high school. Our neighbors can only take so much of this. Mom is capable of far worse.”

“I won’t even tell my mother and father,” I said. “Especially not them. My mother’s your new high school principal, and my father will teach you physics this year.”

“You won’t allow this to hurt our newfound friendship,” Sheba said, close to tears.

“I won’t let anything hurt our friendship,” I said. “Nothing at all.”

“Then let’s start with some truth. Just a little dab,” Trevor said. “My mother is from Jackson, Wyoming. We last lived in Oregon. You don’t want to know a thing about my father. Mama doesn’t have a drop of Charleston blood. And my sister is one of the greatest actresses who ever lived,” Trevor continued.

That’s when Sheba astonished me by falling silent, wiping her eyes with her fingers, and giving me the most dazzling smile. “But that’s all part of the secret too. No one can know that either.”

“I won’t tell a soul,” I repeated.

“You’re an angel,” the newly composed Sheba Poe said, kissing me gently, becoming the first girl ever to kiss me on the lips. Then Trevor kissed me lightly on the lips too, and sweetly, causing me much greater surprise.

At the bottom of the steps, I turned back toward the twins, not wanting to walk out of their presence just yet: “None of this happened. Simple as that.”

“Some of it happened, paperboy,” Trevor said as he went back into the house, but his sister lingered.

“Hey, Leo Nothing King. Thanks for being in the neighborhood. And by the way, Leo, it’s not just my good looks that will make you fall in love with me. You’re not going to believe how nice I am, kiddo.”

“You could be mean as hell and ugly as sin, Sheba Poe,” I said. “But I’d still fall in love with you.” I waited several beats, then added, “Kiddo.”

Floating back to my house, I realized I had never said anything like that to a girl, ever; I had flirted with a girl for the first time. A changeling self crossed that street as I skipped toward my house, having been kissed by both a girl and a boy for the first time.

CHAPTER 3
Yacht Club

I
t was the noonday hour, under a man-eating Charleston sun, the air so full of humidity it made me wish for a set of gills beneath my earlobes. I walked into the main dining room of the Charleston Yacht Club for the luncheon my mother had ordered me to attend. The yacht club was plush but threadbare and in need of renovation. For me, it carried the silent menace of enemy territory as I walked beneath the contemptuous stares of the club’s founders. Their faces scowled down at me, disfigured by the ineptitude of their portraitists. The artists of Charleston made the movers and shakers of the river-shaped city look like they needed both a good dentist and an effective laxative. My freshly shined shoes moved across the Oriental carpets as I looked for a uniformed guard to halt my progress toward the inner sanctum of the club, but the few men I passed neither noticed nor spoke to me as I moved toward the murmurous conversations of the lunchtime crowd. Outside, the Cooper River was lined with white sails limp in the breathless air like butterflies trapped in a strange, city-spawned amber formed by buttermilk and ivory. Even behind the closed windows, I could hear the profanity of the stalled sailors cursing the lack of wind. Before I entered the dining room, I drew a deep breath and wondered again what I was doing at this lunch. Charleston could produce men and women so aristocratic they could smell the chromosomes of a passing tramp in the armpits of a tennis-playing Ravenel. It was a city and a club that knew exactly who it wanted, and I didn’t fill the bill in any of its particulars. And I was well aware of it.

Across the room my father rose out of a chair and motioned for me, and I felt like a booger in a Kleenex as I crossed the room. But I noticed that the stillness of the river lent it a green, almost turquoise, shine; the slight movement of the tides cast moving shadows on the ceiling that passed like reluctant waves from chandelier to chandelier.

The table I joined was not a happy one, and my intrusion seemed welcome. “This is our son, Leo King,” my father said to the table in general. “Son, this is Mr. Chadworth Rutledge and his wife, Hess. Sitting beside them is Mr. Simmons Huger and Mrs. Posey Huger.”

I shook hands and said my howdy-dos to all the adults, then faced three teenagers about my age. Meeting my own peers had often been more intimidating than any introduction to adults. Since I was in a chair directly across from them, I couldn’t help but be uncomfortable beneath their curious scrutiny. But these were my own internal demons and had nothing to do with the three young people who sat across from me.

“Son, the young man sitting across from you is Chadworth Rutledge the tenth,” my father said.

I reached across the table to shake his hand. I could not help but ask, “The
tenth?”

“Old family, Leo. Very old,” young Chadworth said to me.

“And the lovely young lady sitting beside him is his girlfriend, Molly Huger, whose parents you just met,” Father added.

“Hello, Molly.” I shook her hand. “It’s nice to meet you.” And it certainly was: Molly Huger looked as though she had long grown accustomed to being the prettiest girl at the debutante ball.

“Hello, Leo,” she said. “It looks like we’re going to be classmates this year.”

“You’ll like Peninsula,” I told her. “It’s a nice school.”

“The other young lady is Fraser Rutledge,” Father continued. “She’s a junior at Ashley Hall, the sister of young Chad. And Molly’s best friend.”

“Fraser Rutledge?” I asked. “The basketball player?”

The girl blushed, a deep one that rouged her porcelain skin. Her hair was shiny like a colt’s; she was strong and tall and healthy and broad-shouldered, an Olympic athlete in repose. I remembered her lionesque presence under the backboard from a game I had witnessed the year before. Fraser nodded her head, but lowered her eyes.

“The game I saw was against Porter-Gaud,” I said. “You had thirty points and twenty rebounds. You were great. Just great.”

“State champs,” her father, Worth Rutledge, said from down the table. “Ashley Hall wouldn’t have won a game without her.”

Hess Rutledge added, “Fraser’s always been an incorrigible jock. She was doing cartwheels on the beach at Sullivan’s Island before she was two.”

“A lot of cartwheels,” her brother said, “but not many dates.”

“Leave Fraser alone,” Molly said in an even-toned voice to her boyfriend.

“Do you like sports?” I addressed the question to Chad and Molly.

“I sail,” Molly said.

“I’m a duck hunter, a deer hunter, and I ride with the hounds,” her boyfriend said. “I’m a sailor too, because I grew up at this club. Played a little football at Porter-Gaud.”

My mother then spoke to me, a brief summation of the day so far. “We spent the morning getting Chad and Molly registered for their classes. I thought, Leo, that you might be able to answer any questions they might have about Peninsula High.”

As a nervous habit, I removed my glasses and began cleaning them with a handkerchief. The room blurred and the people across the table were almost faceless until I put my glasses back on. I felt like a guppy in a jelly jar as those people took my measure.

Mrs. Rutledge said, “It’s so nice of you to meet us here on such short notice. Did I hear it right? Is your first name Lee?”

“No, ma’am,” I said. “It’s Leo.”

“I thought you might’ve been named after the general. I don’t think I’ve known a Leo. Who were you named after?”

“My grandfather,” I said quickly. I heard my father chuckle, then flashed my mother a death’s-head glance as a fair warning if she gave away the shameful provenance of my name.

“How’s the cafeteria food, Leo?” Molly asked. I turned my gaze on this lovely, unapproachable girl, a type who seemed to spring so effortlessly from the city’s upper-class homes—their hair, their skin, their bodies, all shone with a surprising inner light. They looked as if they had been put together with the casings of discarded pearls and the manes of palominos. Molly was so pretty she was hard to look at without feeling like a humpbacked whale.

“It’s like cafeteria food everywhere: inedible. Everyone complains about it for nine months,” I answered.

At the other end of the table, an officious and no-nonsense Worth Rutledge clapped his hands together and said, “Okay, back to business. I took the liberty of ordering for everyone—thought it would save some of our valuable time.” He had established himself as a man of action and didn’t wait for any better suggestions. His wife nodded her bleached-out face in agreement. On Molly’s father’s face, there was a look of resignation, even defeat. But Mrs. Huger also nodded, in an odd, faithful imitation of Mr. Rutledge’s wife.

“It’s been a rough morning,” Worth Rutledge said. “Do you think we’ve covered everything? We don’t want the kids to fall through any cracks now, do we?”

“I think everything’s been taken care of,” my mother said, checking a list beside her plate as a white-jacketed waiter produced several baskets overflowing with rolls, biscuits, and cornbread. Water glasses were refilled and drinks replenished around the table. My parents were drinking iced tea, but Mr. Rutledge was drinking a martini with three tiny onions on a toothpick. They looked like the tiny shrunken heads of albinos. The other adults were drinking tall Bloody Marys, each skewered with a celebratory stalk of leafless celery.

As my mother checked her list again, her voice droned over the barebacked details that she excelled in: “We’ve talked about health insurance, the policy for sick leave. The cost of a senior ring. The dress code. The penalties for drugs and alcohol found on any school property. The senior trip. The eligibility requirements for an extracurricular activity.”

My mother was cut off abruptly by Worth Rutledge: “Why did you bring up the drug thing again, Dr. King?”

Simmons Huger, a pallid man who had barely spoken since I had arrived, said, “Oh, for God’s sakes, Worth. We’re all here because of drugs. Our kids were arrested and thrown out of Porter-Gaud. The Kings have been very kind in helping us out.”

“There must be some mistake, Simmons,” Worth said, his voice edged with a withering irony. “I don’t believe I directed the question to you. So I’d appreciate your silence if I can’t count on your support.”

“Dr. King is checking her list,” Simmons replied. “You just asked her if we covered everything at our meeting. She was doing exactly as you asked. That’s all I’m saying.”

Mrs. Rutledge joined the debate. “In my day, we just drank and got in trouble. I don’t understand anything about this drug culture. If Molly and Chad want to be bad, just go out to the beach house and get drunk. Sleep it off and come home the next day, and no one will be the wiser for it.”

“If you don’t mind, Hess,” Simmons said, “we’d rather Molly not get drunk, and we’d much rather she sleeps in our house than your beach house.”

From our end of the table, during the course of this low-key disagreement, I watched as Worth Rutledge drained his martini and sucked the onions off the toothpick. Another martini appeared by his plate without a hand sign or gesture being made. A waiter began ladling out a bowlful of she-crab soup as I heard the subject turn to me.

“Hey, Leo?” Mr. Rutledge said. “You had some pretty big problems with drugs when you were younger, didn’t you?” With those words, Worth Rutledge altered the mood of our lunch.

“Hush up, Worth,” his wife snapped. “For God’s sakes.”

“I don’t think my son has anything to do with today’s meeting,” my father said. I had never appreciated his calmness under fire as I did then.

“I asked you a simple question, Leo,” Mr. Rutledge said. “I think it’s a fair one under the circumstances. Maybe you can give our kids some tips on your rehabilitation. I looked up your record: you were caught with a half pound of cocaine and kicked out of Bishop Ireland High School. So I imagine you can offer some good advice to Molly and my boy.”

“Attacking a kid,” said Simmons Huger. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Worth.”

“I’d like Leo to tell us about his experience. It seems to have a lot of relevance to what we’ve discussed today,” Worth replied.

“Yes, sir,” I admitted. “I was caught and charged with possession of cocaine. I’m still on probation and have some community service to perform.”

“So you’re proof that this isn’t the end of the world for Molly and my boy. Right, Leo?” Mr. Rutledge’s voice intimidated me into confusion, if not silence.

“I’ve got a couple of more weeks of court-appointed therapy, then I’ll—”

“Therapy? You go to a shrink, Leo?” Mr. Rutledge was staring hard at me, failing to notice my mother’s arctic and dangerous silence.

“Yes, sir,” I answered. “Once a week. But I’m almost finished.”

“Son,” Father said, “you don’t have to tell Mr. Rutledge a thing about your life. It’s of no concern to him.”

Mr. Rutledge turned to my father. “Beg to differ with you, Jasper.” When he pronounced my father’s first name, there was mockery. I knew my father was sensitive about his name and wished his mother’s father had carried a different one.

“Daddy, your tone of voice,” Fraser said to her father, embarrassment reddening her cheekbones.

“I didn’t hear anyone ask for your opinion, either, young lady,” her father retorted.

Hess Rutledge entered the fray, but with trepidation. “She heard the anger in your voice, dear. You know how your anger upsets her.”

Her husband threw up his hands. “All day I’ve been condescended to about my son, and what this does to his chances to get into a good college, and whether he’ll even graduate from his class next spring.”

Then I heard my mother say, “Who was condescending to you, Mr. Rutledge?”

“You were, madam,” he answered. “And your schoolteacher husband, Jasper, over there. None of this would’ve happened if that goddamn prick of a headmaster over at Porter-Gaud would listen to reason. Pardon my French. I apologize for my language.” Mr. Rutledge’s blood was at full tide, a rage that excited his son, embarrassed his wife, and humiliated his daughter, who was near tears across the table from me.

Simmons Huger tried to defuse the tension, but again he sounded weak-willed and indecisive. “Our kids are in trouble, Worth. The King family is helping us all out of an unfortunate situation.”

“Porter-Gaud should’ve handled this internally. We should not be here on our knees trying to get our kids into a crappy public school,” Mr. Rutledge said.

“Are you quite finished, Mr. Rutledge?” Mother asked. Not one person at the table had touched a drop of the soup when the waiters came to clear the table.

“For now,” he answered. “At least, for now.”

The black waiters moved in phantom shapes around the tables, bringing a veal marsala for the second course with a mound of ghastly mashed potatoes and carrots cooked to lifelessness as accompaniments. It did us all good to concentrate on eating, letting the atmosphere around us decompress before the conclusion of the meal.

When the veal plates were taken away, Simmons Huger cleared his throat, then said, “Posey and I are very grateful to you, Dr. King, for handling this in such a professional manner. The last couple of days have been very traumatic for all of us. Molly’s never given us an ounce of trouble in her life, so this has caught our family by surprise.”

“I won’t let you down, Dr. King,” Molly added in a soft voice.

“I’m a changed man,” the younger Rutledge said. “This has taught me a big lesson, ma’am.”

“The males in the Rutledge line have a long history of being hell-raisers,” his father explained. “It’s sort of a way of life by now, part of a heritage.”

Hess Rutledge interrupted to say, “But you’ll see no sign of that, Dr. King. My son has sworn to me he’ll behave himself.”

“If he doesn’t behave himself,” Mr. Huger said, “he won’t be dating Molly when she comes off restriction at the end of the summer.”

“You’re on restriction?” Chad asked Molly. “Why?”

“We were arrested the other night, darling,” Molly said. “It didn’t make my parents very happy, okay?”

“Kids are young once,” Chad’s father said. “It’s their main job to go out and have as much fun as it’s possible to have. The only mistake they made the other night was getting caught. Am I right? Yes or no?”