South of Broad, Page 2

  The gardens of Charleston were mysteries walled away in ivied jewel boxes emitting their special fragrances over high walls. The summer had proven good for the magnolias that had bloomed late. I passed one old forty-foot tree that looked as though a hundred white doves had gathered there in search of mates. My sense of smell lit up as the temperature rose and the dew started to burn off the tea olive and the jasmine. My armpits moistened, and I began to offer my own scent back to the streets where coffee began brewing in hidden kitchens and the noise of the newspapers hitting the soft wood of the verandas sounded like mullets jumping for joy in giant lagoons. Turning right on Legare, I was hitting my stride; moving fast down the center of the street, I arched my longest throw of the morning at the mansion behind the Sword Gate House, putting it on the third step. At the Ravenel house toward the end of the street, I made my first real misfire on what had been a morning of machinelike precision, and hurled a paper into a mass of oversized camellias. I stopped the bike, skipped through the gate, retrieved the paper from the top branches, and sailed it up to the front door. The small dark nose of a King Charles spaniel named Virginia poked through the bottom of the fence across from the Ravenels’, and I hurled a paper to the far corner of the yard, where the exquisitely tricolored dog retrieved it in a flash and carried it in triumph to its master’s doormat. I followed that throw by tossing a small dog biscuit into the same yard, which Virginia would then walk down to retrieve with great dignity.

  When I’d taken the job three years earlier, all the arrayed stars of my life had been aberrant and off course. So I promised myself I would do this job well. If I heard of a customer rummaging around in the garden hunting for their morning paper, I always called to apologize. A good paperboy was a study in timeliness and steadfastness and accuracy, and that’s what I wanted to bring to my customers. It was what Eugene Haverford had growled at me during my week of orientation.

  So there I was, a delivery boy making my rounds in a city where beauty ambushed you at every turn of the wheel, rewarded every patient inspection, and entered your pores and bloodstream from every angle; these images could change the way the whole world felt. It was a city that shaped the architecture of my memories and dreaming, adding cornices and parapets and the arched glooms of Palladian windows every time I rode those streets, full of purpose and duty. I threw missile after missile of pages chock-full of news as well as art show openings on King Street and sales taxes making their way through senate committees in Columbia, a total eclipse of the sun due in the fall, and a terrific sale at Berlin’s clothing store entering its last week.

  When I started the job, my life was at a standstill, my choices down to one, and my opportunities barren on the vine. From the day I took the job, I was watched over by the South Carolina Juvenile Court, a child psychiatrist connected to Roper Hospital, my worried and overarching mother, and a gruff hillbilly from a North Charleston trailer park, Eugene Haverford. I looked upon this paper route as a source of redemption, a last chance to salvage a childhood ruined by my own baffling character and one unspeakable tragedy. When my share of the world’s cruelty struck, I was nine years old. It would take a great portion of my time as an adult before I realized that tragedy was hurled freely into everyone’s life as though it were a cheap newspaper advertising porno shops and strip shows thrown into an overgrown yard. I was an old man by the time I turned ten years old, and I caught the terrible drift of things many years before my number should have been called.

  But by age seventeen, I had come through the bad times intact and functioning, leaving friends behind in the impersonal mental wards of my state whose eyes stayed opaque with a milky, nameless rage. I had loved the faces of the hopeless up close and held them trembling through hallucinations that never left them a minute’s peace. Living among them, I discovered I was not one of them; yet they hated me when they saw a calmness return to me years after I found my beloved older brother, his arteries severed, dead in the bathtub we both shared, my father’s straight razor on the tiles of our bathroom floor. My screaming brought a neighbor running to the house through a first-story window and finding me, in hysterics, trying to pull my brother’s lifeless body from the tub. A serene, uneventful childhood ended for me that night. When my parents returned from the Dock Street Theatre, Steve’s body lay in an unnatural peace in the downtown morgue. The police were trying to calm me down to question me. A doctor administered a sedative by injection, and my life among drugs and needles and psychological testing and shrinks and therapists and priests began. It was a time that I believe to this day ruined both my parents’ lives.

  When I turned my bicycle left on Meeting Street, the sun was high enough on the horizon for me to cut off the bike lamp. Meeting was spacious and cocky, with mansions on both sides of the street, a showboat of a street in a city brimful with them. Here, I zigzagged from one side to the other, taking dead aim at front doors heavy and sumptuous enough to be the entrances to the residences of kings. The traffic was still light, and if my rhythm was true, I could service the length of the street all the way to Broad in five to seven minutes. Taking a right at Broad Street, I hit the doorways of a dozen lawyers’ offices, sometimes three at a doorway, four at one, and six at the Darcy, Rutledge, and Sinkler law firm, the largest in the city. At Church and Broad on the southeast corner, there were several fresh piles of newspapers waiting for me. I stopped to reload, not losing my rhythm while noticing the increasing traffic of ambulatory lawyers picking their way to favorite restaurants and cafés. The street began to smell of coffee and bacon frying on grills, and a slight wind from the harbor told of buoys and ship hulls brined by the tides and the years; the awakening of gulls followed the first freighter making the turn toward the Atlantic, and the bells of St. Michael’s answered the puny, half-human cry of the gulls. Working fast, I loaded up with the last hundred newspapers of my route and blasted down Church Street, my arms whirling again in the eccentric morning dance of paperboys.

  Early on, I could feel the redemptive powers of hard work, and I basked in the praise of Mr. Haverford and my customers who lived on this island of the peninsula city. My predecessor had been born to great privilege and lived in one of the houses I now served, but the hours proved too early for him and the labor too intrusive on his late-night social life. He was soon let go, not fired, because of his family connections that traced back to the actual founding of the colony. When the upper management of the News and Courier decided to take a chance on me, it was a nod of approval and gratitude to my parents’ distinguished life as educators in the city as well as a way to pull my entire family back from the brink after the death of my brother. Steve’s death had wounded the city in some profound, inchoate way. I was granted the job not because of who I was, but because of who Steve had been.

  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 te
rrible 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.

  In 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.”