South of Broad (9 page)

“I think you’ve been perfect in every way.”

“You’re prejudiced.”

“That’s my job.”

“The fact that I was raised by a nun and didn’t even know it explains why I’ve been an altar boy for an early-morning Mass for practically my whole life. Why we say an endless rosary before we go to bed each night. I mean, c’mon, Father, what is it about the Hail Mary you don’t get the first thousand times you pray it? I’d like to dig up whoever invented the rosary and desecrate their bones.”

He chuckled, then paused and grew serious again. “The rosary is a spiritual discipline, Leo. It brings us close to God.”

“It’s a bore,” I said, then added, “and a pain in the ass.”

“Your language, son.”

“Sorry. How’d you meet Mother? She said you’d tell me the story.” “It’s a nice story.” He said it with infinite shyness. “The very best a man like me could hope to have.”

“What do you mean, ‘a man like you’?”

He said, “You know what I mean: a homely man. An ugly man.” “Why do you think you’re ugly?”

He grinned. “Next time you’re near my bathroom, walk in and look around. I happen to own a mirror.”

“You’re not ugly, Father!”

“Then I need to buy a new mirror. Mine keeps lying to me.”

He laughed at his own joke before pulling the rope and starting the engine again as I hauled in the anchor. Our eyes watched the families in the generous houses facing the river. We saw a ballerina practicing in an upstairs studio, two roller skaters moving without effort down the Battery seawall, sliding as though on ice, their hands behind their backs. Bicycles moved along the streets with headlights as dull as flashlights lighting their ways. Killing the motor as we drew opposite the Fort Sumter Hotel, we watched men order from menus by the glow of candlelight. Lovers promenaded the length and breadth of the Battery, some couples stopping to kiss at the exact point where the Ashley and the Cooper met to form Charleston’s fragrant harbor.

We baited our hooks and cast our lines. “I knew your mother my whole life, Leo,” Father said, “but I didn’t even begin to know her until we were juniors at Bishop Ireland and I saw her sunbathing on a floating dock off a plantation on James Island. This was the summer of 1937, and the whole world was about to change. I was early to the party. Like you, I didn’t date much in high school. I’m not sure I was as shy as you are, but it’s a possibility. I was tongue-tied when a girl was waiting for me to talk. Something about seeing your mother on that dock changed all that. Something broke inside me and I felt a million words tumble out, and I ran down that plantation lawn toward that dock. On that run, I decided that I wanted to marry your mother.”

“Oh, c’mon. Nothing happens that fast!”

“Who’s telling this story?” He described my mother’s pale blue bathing suit, her pretty legs and figure, and his surprise when she stood up and dove into the salt creek just before he arrived at his destiny. Backstroking against the tide, my mother saw him silhouetted in sunlight and asked, “Jasper, where is your bathing suit? We could go swimming together.”

He grabbed an inner tube from the dock, removed his shoes, and dove into the water fully clothed, a gesture he considered the most romantic and spontaneous of his life. “Have you gone crazy or something, Jasper?”

My mother squealed with laughter as he replied, “Something like that. Crazy for you, I think.”

“You’ve ruined your clothes!”

“My clothes’ll be fine. But I’d like you to pitch in some money to help me replace a watch and a perfectly good leather wallet.”

“That’s what you get for taking leave of your senses, Jasper King.”

“If you could see the way you looked from up there on that lawn, you’d know why I got a little jumpy, Lindsay Weaver.”

“Looked? What do you mean, how I looked?”

“You looked like the queen of the world.”

Drifting toward Charleston, she said, “I think I like that answer, Jasper King. I think I like it very much.”

Staring at each other across the diameter of that inner tube, the couple began to tell each other the stories of their lives, the ones that really mattered, the ones that remain secret until the right boy comes around the corner, or the perfect girl comes walking down the street. Taking turns, they told tales of their innocent lives that defined who they were.

By the time Jasper’s father had come by boat to retrieve the two swimmers, Jasper and Lindsay were in love and didn’t care who knew it. Both their classmates and their families joked about their elopement at sea when they returned to the gathering sunburned and unable to take their eyes off each other. When a storm hit that evening, they remained on the dock holding hands as the entire party observed them from the dry safety of the plantation manor house, while the lashing winds leaned into the palmettos and worried the live oaks along the river’s edge. The rain came in heavy sheets, and Lindsay and Jasper still sat holding hands, oblivious to the world and to the party playing out behind them. They talked to each other as though they had just discovered speech. Neither Lindsay nor Jasper had ever had a real boyfriend or girlfriend, and both expressed the thought that they had been waiting their whole lives for this day to happen. No one who saw them that day ever thought that Lindsay or Jasper would ever marry anyone else.

If you’re deeply religious—and my parents were back then and still were as I sat with my father in the boat—you would have to know that they thought it was God who arranged that chance encounter. They were simply following His inexorable design for how He wanted their lives to be lived. During that summer, my mother and father thought they were living the greatest love story ever written.

A quiet man, my father spoke to me of his courtship of my mother as though he were praying. He kept his eyes fastened on the line that disappeared into the black waters and chose his words with care. Before this tell-all night, I had barely known that my parents had been teenagers together. They had been older than the parents of my peers, and had once been mistaken for my grandparents. As I fished and listened and took in my father’s words, I realized he was introducing me to a passionate young couple I never dreamed existed.

That June, Jasper got a job at Berlin’s clothing store. He ate Sunday dinner with the Weaver family after Mass each weekend. During that magical summer, Lindsay and Jasper would walk through Charleston’s trimmed, ethereal parks and churchyards and avenues, talking about their bright future as husband and wife. They would walk holding hands from one end of the Battery to the other, waving to the freighters putting out to sea. Once, Jasper climbed a magnolia tree searching out the perfect blossom as an accessory for my mother’s jet-black hair. When he pinned it in her hair and she caught her reflection in the side mirror of a parked Buick, they declared it their favorite flower and promised they would get married only when they could cover the altar with magnolias. Another night, they decided to kiss in front of all their favorite Charleston houses and almost didn’t make it home for Lindsay’s curfew.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “How did all this kissing lead to the convent?”

He chuckled. “I’m getting to that part.”

Since Jasper and Lindsay were both daily communicants, they would meet on the steps of the cathedral every morning of the early Mass. Jasper had never known anyone, male or female, to surrender himself or herself to the transforming power of prayer the way his beloved did every single morning. She accepted the Eucharist in complete rapture as a feast shared with the godhead. She yielded to its mysteries with a submission that permitted no contention or rivalry. Where Jasper found impasses and obstacles that stood in the way of harmony with the spiritual world, Lindsay found its access easy. Jasper’s view of Catholicism was simple—his job was to accept the Church’s teaching and to attempt to live a good and decent life. Lindsay believed with all her heart that sainthood was the only logical pursuit of a good Christian. Not only did she want to join Christ in his suffering during his crisis in Gethsemane, she wished it to be a place with her footprints all over the garden, a refuge to which she could run barefooted with her arm outstretched to her Lord in agony. It was not just faith that Lindsay Weaver brought to the altar rail each day, it was a complete immersion and a perfect affinity with its mysteries. Jasper’s love did not stand a chance against such immovable faith.

In the following school year, Jasper King lost Lindsay Weaver. In September, a young priest named Maxwell Sadler, fresh from his ordination in Rome, came to the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist to begin his vocation as a parish priest and a teacher of religion at Bishop Ireland High School. In the Catholic world, the priest’s sermon at Sunday Mass was the only part of the service rendered in English. But it might as well have been spoken in Sanskrit for all the spiritual nourishment it provided. When it came to their homilies, there was nothing living that a Catholic priest could not put to sleep.

Maxwell Sadler changed that perception forever in the diocese of Charleston. Jasper and Lindsay were sitting together when the strikingly handsome young priest strode to the pulpit to deliver his first sermon. For a long moment, he stared out at the congregation and waited until there was discomfort and fidgeting at this silence. Then, at that moment, he roared out: “Johnny Jones went to church every single Sunday.” There was another long pause, a wait, and Father Max finished his couplet. “Johnny Jones went to hell for what he did on Monday.”

The new priest spoke in tongues of Southern fire and began to fill the cathedral. In the first months of his priesthood, he drew down the jealousy of Bishop Rice, who found his preaching vain and somehow sinister. When he began to teach the seniors of Bishop Ireland that September, he called his course Theology 101, and he changed the way each of his students thought about their relationship to their loving God. It was like having a matinee idol put his handprint on your soul. It was Maxwell Sadler who first admitted to Lindsay that he believed she had received a call to the sisterhood. He told her he knew a perfect convent of a teaching order in North Carolina that she could attend. He insisted that he’d had a vision and witnessed the ceremony in which she took the veil.

Secretly, without telling Jasper, Lindsay applied and was accepted as a novice at the convent in Belmont, North Carolina.

Father Sadler also tried to talk my father into taking a long, serious look at the priesthood. In his innocence, my father told Father Sadler that he had already committed his life to marrying my mother and raising a good Catholic family.

On the Christmas break of their senior year, Lindsay broke up with Jasper and announced her intention to enter the convent the following June, after her graduation. He did not take the news well. He said things to Lindsay that he would be ashamed of for the rest of his life, and it all came back to him in a rush of emotion as we fished together in the Ashley River. He had accused her of leading him on and ruining his life for nothing but the most selfish reasons. For hours, he begged and pleaded with her to change her mind, but to no avail. For a month afterward, they did not speak to each other and could not even bear to catch each other’s eyes as they passed in the hallways of Bishop Ireland.

Force of habit brought them together at the cathedral, and eventually their friendship survived the ordeal of their blasted love affair. At times, Jasper’s bitterness would rise up between them, but she would bring him back down to her by reminding him of his own devotion to the same God to whom she was surrendering her life and their future. When Lindsay left her family for Belmont, she asked that Jasper do her the favor of delivering her to the convent steps. He accepted with graciousness and resignation. On the morning of June 16, 1938, he drove the back roads, and they entered the convent grounds at nightfall. Lindsay had packed very little: all the worldly possessions she would need fit in the smallest of bags.

They both got out of the car, and Jasper lingered behind as she walked up and rang a bell that could be heard throughout the convent. A sister answered the door and made a motion for Lindsay to enter, where two other nuns awaited to ship her down a long hallway. Her new life was starting.

“Are you Jasper?” the first nun asked.

“Yes, Sister. I’m Jasper.”

“She wrote me about you,” the nun said. “My name is Sister Mary Michele. I am the mother superior here.”

“Could I come to visit Lindsay? Not often, just every once in a while?”

“That doesn’t sound like a good idea,” Sister Michele said.

“Can I write her?”

“You can if you wish,” the nun said. “I can’t promise they’ll be delivered. She belongs to this order now.”

“Then can I do something for the convent? Is there anything you need? I could buy it for you.”

The nun thought about it, then said, “Soap. We could use some soap for the sisters to bathe with.”

The next day, Jasper drove into Charlotte and cut a deal with a manager of Belk department store to have ten boxes of a simple but elegant women’s hand soap sent to the Convent of the Sacred Heart. In her first note to him, Sister Michele revealed to Jasper that the gift had been controversial from the start, some of the older nuns thinking the soap far too luxurious for convent use. But Sister Michele had reasoned with them and explained the nature of the gift as well as the sin of wastefulness and the importance of cleanliness in the convent’s daily life.

It began an annual pilgrimage for Jasper King. He would show up at the convent door on June 16 of each year and ask Sister Mary Michele if he could visit with Lindsay, who had undergone her metamorphosis into Sister Mary Norberta. Though my father’s visit often caught Sister Michele off guard, she was a practical woman.

“What does the convent require this year?” Jasper asked the mother superior one year.

“Laundry detergent,” Sister Michele said, and the next day a year’s supply of detergent arrived at the convent’s delivery door at the backside of the building. The following year it was floor polish, the next year hand towels, and the next year shoe polish.