South of Broad (2 page)

And what a boy Steve had been, I thought, as I took a right on South Battery, bringing the sweet-smelling papers onto the steps of what I considered the prettiest row of mansions in the city. Steve would one day have lived in one of those houses, after marrying the most comely and glittering debutante in Charleston, after graduating from Harvard and coming back to South Carolina for law school. In my mind, Steve would always remain eighteen months older than I would ever be, a natural leader known for his great wit and charm. Many people thought he would ripen into one of the best athletes ever raised in Charleston. In the summer he turned into a new color of gold, his hair a shade of blond that reminded one of the tawniness of Siamese cats. His eyes were bright blue and emotionless and almost textureless when you saw him sizing up a new person or situation. All of Charleston agreed that he was the last boy on earth who would take a razor to his arteries and fill up a bathtub with his own blood. He was so dazzling in both presentation and personality that the city could not come to terms with the violent self-hatred suggested by his death. On the other hand, I was exactly the melancholy, apprehensive kind of child, a Venus-flytrap type of boy overshadowed by his rosy-cheeked, overachieving brother, who could commit such a terrible crime to himself and to the image the city had of itself.

Ahead of me, I saw Miss Ophelia Simms watering her flower boxes in front of her house. Stopping the bicycle, I handed a newspaper to her. “How’s that for service, Miss Simms?”

“I should think it approaches perfection, Leo,” she said. “And how are we today?”

“We are fine today.” I was always thrilled that Miss Simms referred to me in the lordly plural. “And how are our flowers today?”

“A little piqued,” she would always say during our rare encounters among her phlox and impatiens. To me, Miss Simms was a knockout, and I knew that she had celebrated her fiftieth birthday that year. I hoped that I would one day marry a girl in her twenties half as lovely as Miss Simms. But that probably was a long shot, and I was reminded of it every time I looked at myself in the mirror. Though I wouldn’t call myself ugly, it wouldn’t surprise me if I heard that someone else had said it. I blamed it on the black horn-rimmed glasses my mother had bought me, but I was so nearsighted that the lenses looked like they could have served as the portholes of ships. My eyes held a fishlike cast that those lenses managed to overemphasize, and had been the butt of much teasing among my peers, unless my brother was around. Steve was overprotective of his baby brother as he hovered over me, patrolling the cruel airways above the school playground like a red-tailed hawk. Fearless and sharp-tongued, he let no one bully his little brother. Steve’s obvious superiority caused me some discomfort and even resentment as a child, but his fierce championing and unwavering love of me made me feel special. My brother was so handsome that I could sense my own mother’s disappointment every time she looked at me.

Zigzagging through the smaller streets and alleys south of Broad, I would finally reach the coast guard station and pause to rest for a minute or two. I could make this run blindfolded, and I also prided myself on hitting certain corners at the correct time. I always checked my watch to see how I was doing, panting from exertion and the good pain I felt in my thigh and arm muscles. Putting myself into high gear again, I pushed off with the sparkling Ashley River to my right, a river I could hear beating against a seawall on stormy nights near my house. The Ashley was the playground of my father’s childhood, and the river’s smell was the smell my mother opened the windows to inhale after her long labors, bearing my brother, and then me. A freshwater river let mankind drink and be refreshed, but a saltwater river let it return to first things, to moonstruck tides, the rush of spawning fish, the love of language felt in the rhythm of the wasp-waisted swells, and a paperboy’s hands covered with newsprint, thinking the Ashley was as pretty a river as ever a god could make. I would start the last sprint of my route, flinging papers with confidence and verve, serving the newer houses built in the filled-in corpses of saltwater marshes as I headed due east again. Running past White Point Gardens, I would turn north when I saw Fort Sumter in the distance, sitting like a leatherback turtle in the middle of Charleston Harbor. I would service the really big mansions on East Bay, then Rainbow Row, take a left at Broad and do both sides of the street, weaving through traffic and still more strolling lawyers, young hotshots and old lions alike; the Riley Real Estate firm; the travel agency; ten for city hall; and the final paper of the morning I sent crashing into the front door of Henry Berlin’s Men’s Store.

With the last paper nesting against Berlin’s doorstep, Charleston ceased to be mine, and I released ownership to the other early risers who had a greater claim on it than I ever would, a boy at ease in darkness.

I
n my three years of high school, I had become a familiar, even famous, sight on the early-morning streets south of Broad. Later, people told me they could set their watches when I passed their houses before and after first light. All of them knew about the death of my brother, my subsequent breakdown and disappearance, and all would later tell me how they rooted for me during my long penitential season of redemption. When I made my monthly collection runs for their subscriptions, the adults appreciated that I came to their doorsteps in a sports coat, tie, and white shirt, penny loafers impeccably shined. They admired the correctness, if not the stiffness, of my manners, and they appreciated my inarticulate attempts to initiate conversation and that I always brought treats to the families owning cats and dogs; I always remembered the names of these animals. I asked about their kids. They accepted my painful shyness as a kind of initial calling card, but most households remarked that my confidence gradually grew as I grew comfortable approaching their front doors. When it rained, they loved it that I rose an hour earlier to hand-deliver the newspapers to dry porches I was not sure I could reach with my usual toss. They assured me, later, of their certainty that I was well on my way to becoming both a charming and a fascinating young man.

But on June 16, 1969, as I rode my bike the two short blocks between Berlin’s and the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, my portrait of myself was of a natural-born loser who at eighteen had never been on a date or danced with a girl, nor had a best friend, nor had ever received an A on a report card, nor would ever cleanse his mind of that moment when he discovered his carefree, one-of-a-kind brother in a bath of his own blood. In all the days since that unkillable day, neither my mother or my father, nor any shrink or social worker, nor priest or nun, nor relative or friend of the family, could show me the pathway to a normal productive life with that ghoulish entry visa affixed to my passport. During the rosary for my brother’s funeral, I had retreated to the men’s room and locked myself into a stall where I wept silently and out of control because the inconsolable nature of my grief seemed selfish in the face of my parents’ complete devastation.

From that moment I marked the time when the earth opened up to swallow me whole. I left simple grief on the road behind me and held madness at arm’s length as it stormed the walls of my boyhood with its tireless regiments coming at the most tender parts of my psyche in wave after unappeasable wave. For three years, I entered the country of the pit viper. Every dream contained poisonous snakes lying in wait for me—the cottonmouth moccasin coiled against the cypress root, the coral snake beneath the hollowed-out log, the copperhead invisible in a bright carpet of autumn leaves, and the eastern diamondback with its deadly warning rattle serving as the lone musician composing the debased libretto of my distress, my fury, and my helpless sadness. The doctors called it a nervous breakdown, terminology I found to be correct. I came apart. Then, with the encouragement of some good people, I put myself together again. The snakes acknowledged my returning health by their silent withdrawal from my dreaming life and I was never afraid of snakes again, acknowledging that even they had played a necessary role in my recovery. Because I had long feared them with my body and soul, their mordant shapes, their curved fangs, and their venom, they kept my brother’s face out of my night world and I awoke to his permanent residence in my psyche only at daybreak. When I look back, I see that my tragedy was that I could never summon Steve in all his apple-cheeked, athletic good looks and ornamental charm. Once he had died and I had found him, I could never pull my brother out of that horrible tub.

I parked my bike in the rack beside the elementary school, and skipped into the back entrance of the cathedral as I did every morning, the entrance that all the insiders knew—from bishop and priests to nuns and altar boys like me. When I opened the door, the smell of the Catholic world washed over me. I walked to the room where Monsignor Maxwell Sadler had almost finished decking himself out in the sumptuous finery of a summer morning Mass. Monsignor Max had been a fixture in my family drama since well before I was born: he had taught my parents in their 1938 graduating class at Bishop Ireland High School. He had married my parents, baptized both Steve and me, placed the wafer on my tongue at First Communion. Steve and I were altar boys together when I served my first Mass. When Steve died, the monsignor hovered about our house, as ubiquitous as my mother’s reading chair. When the bishop of Charleston refused to bury Steve in holy ground, Monsignor Max (Father Max then) worked through the creaky, impenetrable bureaucracy of the pre-Vatican II Church and had Stephen’s body exhumed from a public cemetery west of the Ashley and reburied in the sacred ground of St. Mary’s Church among my mother’s people.

I was the cause of ceaseless trouble in those days, and had given up the Catholic faith in a titanic schoolboy’s rage, refusing to worship my God or belong to any church. The Catholic Church had rejected the corpse of my brother. Then I entered the realm of child psychiatry and understaffed mental hospitals and yawning tutors as my poor parents tried to mend the broken boy they had on their hands after their favorite son left them. Monsignor Max remained faithful to us in our darkest days, and told me that the Church was patient and would always be waiting for me to return. It was, and so was he.

I watched Monsignor Max comb his hair with flair, making certain that the crease on the left side of his head was as straight as a guy wire. He saw me in his mirror and said, “Leo, my altar boy called in sick. Get in your cassock and surplice. Your mother and father are out there already. And this is your mother’s special day, Bloomsday.”

Of all the elements of my childhood that rang a false note, I was the only kid in the American South whose mother had received a doctorate by writing a perfectly unreadable dissertation on the religious symbolism in James Joyce’s equally unreadable
Ulysses
, which I considered the worst book ever written by anyone. June 16 was the endless day when Leopold Bloom makes his nervous Nellie way, stopping at bars and consorting with whores and then returning home to his horny wife, Molly, who has a final soliloquy that goes on for what seemed like six thousand pages when my mother force-fed me the book in tenth grade. Joyce-nuts like my mother consider June 16 to be a consecrated mythical day in the Gregorian calendar. She bristled with uncontrollable fury when I threw the book out the window after I had finished it following an agonizing six months of unpleasurable reading.

It took me seconds to dress in my surplice and cassock, then I stood before the radiant, comely monsignor as he admired his own image in the mirror. Ever since I had known him I had heard the women of the parish whisper “What a total waste” when their stylish movie star of a priest floated out toward the altar in all his gallant finery.

“Happy Bloomsday, Monsignor Max,” I said.

“Don’t make fun of your mother, young man.
Ulysses
is her passion, James Joyce the great literary love of her life.”

“I still think it’s weird,” I said.

“One must always forgive another’s passion.”

“I could forgive her if she hadn’t named me Leopold Bloom King. Or my brother Stephen Dedalus King. That’s taking it a little far. Have you ever read
Ulysses?”

“Of course not. He is a flagrant anti-Catholic. I’m a Chesterston man myself.”

I felt an old flush of pride as I led the monsignor out to the central altar and spotted my parents in the front row, both of them saying the rosary. My father looked up and smiled when he saw me and gave me an exaggerated wink of his right eye, the one my mother could not see. She tolerated playfulness at church not at all. At every Mass, she wore her game face for a crucifixion as though she were an actual eyewitness to the death of Jesus each time she knelt in her pew.

As he faced the small, mostly octogenarian congregation, Monsignor Max began the Mass in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. The words I heard him utter in his operatic voice washed over me like a clean stream from my boyhood, the delicate latticework of memory and language.

“I will go to the altar of God.”

And I went with him and let the ancient, sacrosanct rhythms of the Church seize me. When the priest called for water, I provided him with water. When he needed to cleanse his hands for the coming mystery, I emptied cruets over his fingers. When he called for wine, I supplied him with wine in the gold shine of chalices. At the moment of consecration, when he turned the wine into the blood of Christ and the bread into the body of the same God, I rang the bells that had sounded beneath altars for two thousand years. When I opened my mouth and received the unleavened bread from the consecrated finger and thumb of the priest, I felt the touch of God on my tongue, His taste in my palate, His bloodstream mingling in my own. I had come back to Him, after a full-pledged embittered retreat, after He stole my brother from my bedroom and killed him in my bathtub.

But I had come back to Him, and that is part of my story.