South of Broad (56 page)

Two sisters come down the steps to escort Mother into her once and future life. We kiss good-bye, and I watch as Mother disappears behind those dark, oaken doors. I think of Father making this same trip so many years before. I consider both the congruities and the dangers that circles represent in a human life. Delivering Mother to the convent steps represents a circle in the fate of two men named King. But it seems like a revoking and a starting over. Mother needs a place of refuge now, a place to escape the storms. I let her go. I set her free to drift into the sea-lanes of prayer and simplicity in the frankincensed glooms of a convent working out the dilemmas of darkness itself.

“Mother Superior?” I ask as she turns to go back to her convent.

“Yes, Leo?”

“Does the convent need anything? A year’s supply of anything?”

“We need everything,” she says. “Let me think. Lightbulbs. Yes, that’s our most pressing need at the moment.”

The next day I deliver a thousand lightbulbs to the convent’s back door, and mark off one more circle as I continue to monitor the navigational quadrants of my own life. Now that I’ve been alerted, I develop an eye for circles and the strange power they exert over human connections.

CHAPTER 31
Film Studies

A
s Trevor’s strength grows, he begins walking the streets of Charleston with me in the evening. At first, we walk up to Broad Street and back, and Trevor is winded and exhausted when we return to the house. But each day we go farther. By the end of the summer, we are walking the full length of the Battery, turning north, and once reaching the Citadel gates. Often, we walk past the street where we met, and he checks his mother’s mailbox and I check the mail for Sister Norberta. I suffer an inner pang when I see the FOR SALE sign in front of Trevor’s house, and the phone number of his Realtor, Bitsy Turner.

“I’m absolutely certain that if Bitsy had been born a man, she would’ve chosen to be gay,” he says. “That’s a certainty, and not mere speculation. She’s a living doll.”

“Don’t share that with Bitsy,” I suggest.

“I would think she’d be honored,” Trevor replies. “What’s the idle gossip around the Holy City? The juiciest, dirtiest, basest, most disgusting filth you’ve got?”

“Judge Lawson was caught screwing his poodle,” I say. “That’s the kind of stuff I hear but can’t use in my columns.”

“It must’ve been a miniature poodle,” Trevor drawls in reply. “I’ve caught a peek at his private parts.”

“Where on earth did you see his private parts?” I ask as we turn west down Calhoun Street, passing the hospital.

“In the shower room at the yacht club.”

“I didn’t know they even had a shower room.”

“Oh, I’ve done a lot of things in that shower room. Seldom showered.”

“I don’t want to hear it,” I say.

“So uptight, so repressed, so Catholic.” Trevor shakes his head sadly. “I like it that way.”

“I’m starting to miss San Francisco.” There is wistfulness in his voice, a lost, dreamy quality that I have not heard in him for a long time. “I remember Saturday nights when I’d walk down Union Street about the time the sun was setting. I was young and beautiful and desirable, the king of any bar I’d choose. I made magic in that city. I made that city magic for a thousand boys.”

“How’s that AIDS thing going?” I ask.

“Do hush up,” he says, “and let me dream my perverted dreams of a young invert on the prowl.”

“They put Monsignor Max back in the hospital today,” I say. “He may not last much longer. Wanna go up with me to visit him?”

“Naw, I’ll see you back at the house.”

“You got something against the monsignor?”

“Not my cup of semen,” Trevor says with a hitch of his shoulder as he continues on Calhoun Street.

I go up to Monsignor Max’s room in the cancer ward and nod to several young priests as they complete their visitation. The room is dark and meditative and I think Max is asleep when I lay a pile of letters from Mother on his nightstand.

“I just received extreme unction,” Max says, his voice labored and scratchy.

“Then your soul is pure white.”

“One can only hope.”

“You’re worn-out,” I tell him. “Please bless me and I’ll be on my way. I’ll come back to see you tomorrow.”

I kneel by his bed and feel his thumb make the sign of the cross; I’m surprised when he blesses me in Latin. When I kiss him on the forehead, he is already asleep, so I tiptoe out of his room.

I return home and Trevor fixes me a drink. We sit facing each other, as easy in each other’s presence as an old married couple. We sit like this most nights and talk of many things: San Francisco, high school, my mother’s return to the convent. When we are drunk, we speak of Sheba and Starla, but it is too early in the evening for that.

“I walked past that high school you got kicked out of,” Trevor says.

“Bishop Ireland?”

He nods. “It looked very Catholic to me. It even smelled Catholic.”

“It’s a Catholic school. That’s the way it’s supposed to look and smell.”

“So you still believe all that Catholic bullshit?”

“Yes, I believe in all that Catholic bullshit,” I reply.

“And you think you’re getting into heaven? Or something like that? That all of you do?”

“Something like that,” I say.

“Poor brainwashed Toad.” After a long pause, he emits a deep exhalation of breath. “Well, I’ve got something to tell you, Toad. I know I have to, but I keep putting it off.”

“Do it.”

“I can’t,” Trevor says in a small voice. “It’s too horrible.”

“Horrible?” I echo. “That’s a strong word.”

“Horrible doesn’t begin to do it justice.”

For a moment I freeze. Then I repeat, “Do it.”

He takes another drink, then he tells me how a few days ago, after he’d begun to regain his strength, he’d started going through his things, including the steamer trunk and the boxes Anna Cole had forwarded to him from San Francisco. He’d come upon a cache of gay pornography I’d sent him many years ago when it was found in storage in my parents’ house, presumably left by one of my father’s boarders before he married. Having nothing but time on his hands, he had given it a closer look.

“I love gay porn and always have. When you sent the steamer trunk out to me, I was especially curious about the collection from so long ago—those were the dark ages, with production values about zero. All the films are scratchy, older, grainy. A lot of them are homemade, though you have to forgive that. They were pioneers in very dangerous times.”

“Glad you enjoyed them,” I tell him drily. “Why are you telling me this?”

Trevor takes a breath before he answers. “Well, I delved into the trunk deeper this time and brought out a black box—an old toolbox, very strong. I couldn’t get it open in San Francisco, and never bothered with it much. But when I was culling my earthly possessions”—he pauses to take a sip of drink—“I got curious, and shot off the lock with your pistol. By the way, I think it’s absurd to own a handgun. I am so antigun.”

“I bought that gun because of your lunatic father,” I remind him.

“Oh, that old chestnut,” Trevor says. “Then it’s absurd you didn’t buy me one too. Well”—he sighs again—“here goes. I shot off the lock, and there was a private collection in the box. Homemade. You know, the old home movies. I couldn’t wait to watch them, and—I made a discovery. An awful discovery, I’m afraid.”

“What did you find?”

“Maybe we need to stiffen these drinks,” he suggests. “You’re going to need it when you see this film. Here’s how bad it is—I had to force myself to watch it to be absolutely certain before showing it to you. I had to be sure it was who I thought it was. All week I’ve been debating destroying the film, and never telling you. I even prayed to God about it—the one I don’t believe in.”

“What did God say?”

“Well, the cat had His tongue, as usual, but I finally decided it was something you need to know.”

“Run it,” I tell him.

A
t three in the morning, I slip past nurses and night watchmen and enter into the stillness of Monsignor Max’s room, carrying my old Citadel backpack on my arm. By the dim glow of a nightlight, I remove an old-fashioned movie projector, plug it into the outlet, and turn it on. It hums like a jar filled with wasps, then a badly done home movie comes on, cast in shaking, flickering images against the stark white wall across from the monsignor’s bed. The eye of the camera is focused on a bed in an empty, unknown room. The camera is like a staring, motionless eye. Trevor explained that in homemade porn, the camera is often propped near a bed to catch the action. In the grainy film, a priest appears in the room with his arm around the throat of a struggling, naked boy. The boy is beautiful and blond; the priest is handsome, virile, and strong. The boy tries to scream, but the priest stops him with a hand around his mouth. The boy struggles, but he is overpowered and raped by the priest, and raped brutally, as if there were any other way.

The priest is a younger, stronger Max Sadler, and the boy my brother, Steve. Stephen Dedalus King, the brother I found floating in a bloody bathtub the year I fell apart, the year I began my soul treks through mental hospitals and Thorazine hazes, struggling to find the boy I was before I pulled my brother as wreckage from that tub. As I sit there, I remember how I once entertained the horrible thought that my father was somehow complicit in Steve’s death, because I’d heard him scream out in a nightmare: “No, Father. No, please.” I thought he was calling out in fear of our own gentle father and not the beast who lies dying in the hospital bed beside me.

I let the film run out, the frames turning to a scratched, noisy white, when I realize the monsignor has awakened and is watching the film with me. “I should have destroyed that film,” he says finally.

“I wish you had,” I tell him, and my mildness draws him out.

“A man’s demons are a man’s demons,” he explains in a chilling, credible voice.

“Must be,” I say.

“He was too beautiful not to have,” he adds in an almost querulous tone, as if I would have argued. “I couldn’t keep my eyes off him. You, on the other hand, were ugly.”

“Lucky me,” I say. “What was it like to officiate at his funeral?”

“More difficult than you’ll ever know. But it didn’t stop me, Leo. Even then.”

“I know. I’ve spent the evening viewing your handiwork. How did it come to be stored in my father’s house?”

For a moment, he hesitates. When he has gathered strength, he continues in an instructive voice, devoid of conscience: “A silly error. I stored my belongings with your father once, when I moved back to the rectory. I knew I’d lost some of my early collection. But I could hardly ask.”

“Your collection seems limited to the very young. Have you ever made love to a man?”

“No. Why would I want to do that?” he asks, as though I am insulting his intelligence. I look at him levelly in the dim light, and he stares back, guiltless.

“That film should be destroyed,” he says. “I have confessed my sins and received the last rites. According to the laws of our church, my soul will soar to heaven without blemish.”

“You need to pray that God likes child molesters,” I tell him coldly. “That he likes to see his nice little altar boys raped by psycho priests.”

“You can’t touch me, Leo,” he says in a dead voice. “My place in the history of the South Carolina diocese is untouchable. My reputation in the religious community is impeccable. You can do nothing to smear it.”

I look down at him and think of my brother’s agonized, humiliated face. He would rather die than tell my parents that their beloved mentor had raped him. Steve would not have known what kind of language to use to express such a thing, or that such a world even existed.

“If the God I pray to is real,” I say, “then you will burn forever in the lake of fire. And because of this film, I’ll be swimming in that lake with you. You’re a fine Roman Catholic, aren’t you, Max?”

“And what about you?” he spits out.

I lean close to the bed to tell him, “On the worst day of my life, I am a better Catholic than you were on your best day.”

“I’ll be with my Father in heaven, very soon,” Max says smugly.

I unplug the projector and whip the cord around my arm. “If you are, then my father will be there. And he will beat the living shit out of you.”

He seems unfazed. “But my reputation will be intact. You can’t touch it.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I tell him grimly as I pick up the projector. “I might be able to fog it up a little.”

I pack up the projector and walk out of the room. “Leo!” he calls to my retreating back. “Don’t leave without my blessing! Let me give you my blessing!”

•   •   •

T
he monsignor dies in his sleep later in the morning. His obituary is front-page news, above the fold, in both Charleston newspapers. There are editorials all across the state praising his distinguished life, his ambassadorial skills among the leaders of other religions, the aura of saintliness he brought to his ministry, and his heroic role in the civil rights movement, which was highlighted by his march on the Selma Bridge. HOLY MAN DIES IN HOLY CITY one headline reads. I attend his elaborate funeral and take Communion at the end of the solemn High Mass, attended by Cardinal Bernardin and three other bishops. After the service, I hear parishioners say they wish that Monsignor Max could be canonized as an American saint.

I go to my office immediately afterward and write a dutiful column describing the ceremony in every detail. There is only one detail I leave out: after his burial, I slip back to the graveyard at twilight and spit on his grave. The following day, I go to work on his legacy. For my next column, I take his solid and well-earned reputation, and cut it up for bait.

EPILOGUE
A Final Prayer

S
o.

I had a story to tell, and I told it. After I publish my inflammatory column that makes the name of Monsignor Max anathema in every house in the city, I begin the process of falling apart in the mainstreams of my own life. When I begin a column with the words “Family is a contact sport,” a sadness overwhelms me in the office, and my editors send me home for the day. I enter a season of depression and melancholy. I take account of my life and find that I have lived a lot, but learned very little.

In a journal, I write this sentence: “Real life is impossible for someone born with a gift for acting.” I think I am writing about Sheba, and continue, “An actor can’t experience a real life unless imitating a life made up by someone else,” and I am brought up short when I realize that I’m not writing about Sheba after all. I’m writing about myself. I find myself in a black hole of despair, and I have to let it take me down to the darkest places before I can engineer my escape. The film of my brother’s rape plays itself over and over in my head. Valium cannot touch it, nor can bourbon dim its malignity. Even receiving Communion every day cannot daunt its repellant powers. I can feel my body caving in on itself.

In despair, I find my way back to the office of the psychiatrist who rescued me from the coma of my failed childhood. Dr. Criddle is in her late sixties now, still practicing. After a three-hour session, she informs me with infinite gentleness that I am the most suicidal client who has ever walked into her office. I surprise myself with my response: “I can’t wait to die.”

She takes me at my word and signs me into the psychiatric ward of the Medical University Hospital of South Carolina. In the morbid pathology of my thinking I note with pleasure that the hospital is on the same street as the J. Henry Stuhr funeral home. I find it a happy coincidence and am soon cave-diving into my consciousness, a lost continent where all the jungles have impenetrable canopies, all the mountains are alpine, and all the rivers contain strange currents of desire and intrigue.

All the king’s horses and all the king’s shrinks work hard at returning the jigsaw puzzle of my life to order, with help from unexpected sources. In a deep, drug-induced sleep, my body takes me soaring into a world of dreams that help cure the steady ache that has turned my soul into such a lost and ruined place. My father, Jasper King, dives into the chlorinated water at the deep end of a pool to pull me to safety and pound my small back until I vomit and cough up pool water, while my brother, Steve, shouts for me to breathe. I come back from drowning with an indrawn rush of air that feels like deliverance into a brand-new life. I find myself standing beside my father, and we are making cookies for the family that has just moved into a house across the street. Father is struggling to read a recipe from our worn copy of
Charleston Receipts
. We make benne wafers and chocolate chip cookies and give them to everyone on our street and the next one.

Between every house, my father stops to show me how to dance.

A door of one of the houses opens and a pretty nun comes out to join the dance. I don’t know it’s my mother till she begins dancing with my father, who rewards her with a smile that could light up the known world. Over several dream nights, he returns to me. We fish in Charleston Harbor or look for salamanders and butterflies in the Congaree Swamp. He comes back to teach me how to live with the exuberant gifts he brought to the art of loving a son, of loving anyone. I realize afresh how lucky I am to have been born to such a man. I learned everything I needed to know about the softness of fathers from him. He brought me news from my own interior.

Time becomes a lost country for me, and I don’t remember the night when Steve does a surprise encore in those dramatic, multicolored precincts of sleep. We are tossing a football, running through the neighborhood, pretending we are star quarterbacks for a Rose Bowl team, or a Sugar Bowl team, or The Citadel, or even Bishop Ireland. We throw and catch and run through those peerless, queenlike Charleston streets with their houses made of rainbows and lace. I remember what a fine thing it is to have a brother who loves you and protects you and cherishes everything about you. When I wake from the long nightmare of my days, I need to know that.

Another night, a shadow pays a visit and does not identify himself for half the dream. I toss in my sleep, but when the shadow orders me to remain as still as a yard jockey, I recognize the voice of Harrington Canon, who is sitting at his English desk in his antique store. He is grousing that it is now my antique store, and that every night I park my fanny in his house on Tradd Street. He asks why in God’s name I do not give more dinner parties and show off the fine china and silverware he left for me.

“You must appreciate beauty for it to endure,” he tells me. “That goes for inanimate objects as well as living things, even though I far prefer inanimate objects.”

Mr. Canon speaks in his most gossipy, effete manner, complaining about all the shortcomings of the younger generation and its appalling lack of manners and civility. He tells me that we are so boneheaded and slack that he welcomed his death as a liberation from a world he could no longer tolerate.

I hear myself laughing at Mr. Canon. I have not heard myself laughing for a long time.

I begin to look forward to the nighttime ritual when the night nurse brings me a little cupful of pills and I can close my eyes and watch the gold-leaf ceiling paintings fall into their thousand shapes on my closed eyelids. My sleep turns into a pleasure palace, a carnival with tigers leaping through burning hoops, elephants marching in strict formation, and fireworks bursting overhead. I discover that you can dream to waken yourself. I never knew that.

Starla walks out of a cave hidden behind a waterfall. She takes my hand and leads me down a mountain path to a vineyard where she feeds me scuppernong grapes, then dips her hand into a hive of bees and comes out dripping with mountain laurel-scented honey. When I try to apologize to her for my failures as a husband and as a man, she seals my lips with her hand, still dripping with honey. She leads me to a deep pool beneath a waterfall that is as white as a bridal dress above us, as dark as a moonless night below us. We hold each other in a nakedness and silence and make subtle amendments in our drifting away from each other in the swirling currents until we reach a level of comfort and peace we never achieved in waking life.

But the night visitor I welcome most is the radiant and breathtaking Sheba Poe, the eighteen-year-old Sheba, who makes a grand entrance into my dream life. She comes like a ball of fire, all fanfare and glitz, with no trace of a whimper anywhere in earshot. When I last saw her, she was a butchered corpse lying near her blood-soaked mother. Now she approaches me shouting: “Five minutes!” No one knows the art of performance better than Sheba Poe.

“I’ve come to teach you how to act, Leo,” she says. “It’s going to be the role of a lifetime. I’m going to teach you all the steps. You’re going to hit all your marks, and memorize all the words to perfection. We’re starting
now
. No excuses, no doubts, no bullshit. Here is your part, Leo: you’re going to act like a happy man. I know, I know—it’s the hardest role in the world. Tragedy’s easy. But you and I have spent our lifetimes doing tragedy, right? We can do that in our sleep. Buck up. Shut up. Listen to me. Smile. You call that a smile? It’s a grimace. Get rid of it. Smile like this,” she says, and offers a brilliant demonstration. “Make it come up from the inside like a blush. Will it into your life. Throw yourself into it. Try again. That’s better, but still not enough. Put some sunshine into it, Leo! A smile starts in the toes. Plant your feet firmly; let it rise through your legs. Put your groin into it, then let it ride up your spine like a train. Let it shine like fox-fire in your mouth and teeth. Flash it, son—you’re on my stage now, and I’ll kick your ass if you fake anything. Now, there’s a smile! Now let’s put some words into that smile. Tell me a story, Leo. Feel it. Show it. Mean it. Oh, the words will come. I’m not asking, sugar—that’s an order. You want to be in the nuthouse the rest of your life? I didn’t think so. Have you met the guy down the hall, the one who cut off the fingers of his left hand and ate them? Hey, we can use that. Write it, get it to me for a weekend read. Can I act? You’re asking
me?
No wonder you’re locked up! I’ll let you babysit my Academy Award. The smile, Leo. You lost it. Get it right, like this. Yes, my smile, a pretty girl’s smile. No, I was never happy. But Leo—I could act my ass off.”

The next morning I awake early, and am writing in my journal when the nurse arrives with my breakfast. My smile catches her by surprise, and she mentions it. I have started writing about a boy nicknamed the Toad, whose life unexpectedly begins on Bloomsday in the summer of 1969 when a moving van parks in the driveway across the street, I find two orphans handcuffed to their chairs, and I learn that my mother had been a nun. In all the rules of circuitry and the orbit of planets in their fixed, unbreakable transits, my fate begins to show itself, and I meet the main characters who will take a leading part in the dance, the great arching motion of my life.

In the final week of my hospital stay, a young nurse surprises me by visiting me from her post in the endocrinology department. She is not only lovely and likeable, she possesses that uncommon centeredness that all nurses seem to share. As we talk, I realize with a shock that she has come up here specifically to visit me. When I ask her about it, she explains that I went to high school with her oldest sister, Mary Ellen Driscoll.

“She said that you wouldn’t remember her.” She holds out her hand for a shake. “I’m Catherine.”

“Mary Ellen Driscoll wore pigtails,” I say. “You were a Catholic family, and I always wondered why you didn’t go to Bishop Ireland.”

“No money,” Catherine explains. “Dad was a bum, Mom an angel. Same old story. The Irish psycho play.”

“I know it well,” I say.

“Your wife died, didn’t she, Leo?”

“She committed suicide.”

She blushes prettily. “I’m so sorry to hear that. I had no idea.” She makes an endearingly clumsy attempt to divert me. “So, when are you going to start your column again? I’m a big fan.”

“You are?” I say, flattered.

“You always make me laugh,” she says with a smile.

“I sure haven’t done that for anyone lately.”

“You’ve had a tough patch,” she says. “I’ve had a few of them myself. I’m a single mom. Got a cute kid named Sam, but things have been tough since my divorce,” she says. “Ah—if you ever want to call me or anything—I mean—oh, God, shut up, Catherine! I must sound like an idiot to you.”

“Are you asking me for a date, Catherine?” I say in surprise.

“No, of course not. Well, yeah. Maybe. Do you like kids?”

“I love kids. Do you make a habit of asking out all the visiting lunatics?”

Her laugh is unaffected and charming. “See? I knew you’d make me laugh. And, no, I don’t hit on all the lunatics. But I heard you were leaving and knew it’d be my only chance to meet you. You’re Mr. Big in this town, Leo King.”

“And what are you, Catherine?”

“I’m Nurse Small.”

“Hello, Nurse Small,” I say.

“Hello, Mr. Big,” she says shyly as she hands me her card. “Here’s my phone number.”

“You’ll be hearing from me, Nurse Small.”

She flashes me a brilliant smile. “You’re going to like me, Mr. Big.”

U
pon my release from the hospital, I walk from Calhoun to King Street. I feel like a canary freed from its cage. When I pass the J. Henry Stuhr funeral home, I shoot it the bird and say, “Not yet, pal.”

I walk to my office at the
News and Courier
, kiss Kitty Mahoney, and take the good-natured razzing of my colleagues, laughing aloud when Ken Burger asks how I liked the cuckoo’s nest. “Better than this place,” I shout as I walk into my office. I remove the sign I had placed on the door before I left: GONE CRAZY—BE BACK SOON. LEO KING. I write a column for the next day’s morning edition. The kid is back in the saddle.

But there is one more ritual I have to perform before I can be whole again. At five the next morning, I ride my bicycle to the delivery point where Eugene Haverford used to sit in the darkness talking about the news of the day as I folded newspapers with skill and swiftness. Mr. Haverford died nine years ago, and I delivered his eulogy. I needed his help one last time.

“What’s our job, son?” he asks in my head.

“To deliver the news of the world, sir,” I answer aloud.

“And do it right. Every day of the year, we do it the right way. Now get going. Your customers are waiting for you. They need you.”

“They can trust me, sir.”

“That’s why I hired your little ass.”

“Thanks for being so nice to me, Mr. Haverford,” I say.

He lights his cigar. “Shut up, kid,” he says, but he smiles. “You’ve got a job to do.”

Once more I take off in the darkness. I reach for an imaginary newspaper and hurl it onto the front porch of the first house on Rutledge Avenue. The moon lights up Colonial Lake as the next paper leaves my hand, and the next and the next; my body retains a perfect memory of every house on my long-ago route. I turn left on Tradd, flinging papers with my left and right hands, admiring their arching trajectories. I shout out the names of my customers, many of whom have been dead for years. “Hey, Miss Pickney! Hey, Mr. Trask! How’s it going, Mrs. Grimball? Top of the day to you, Mrs. Hamill. Hello, General Grimsley!”

I am riding hard through the most beautiful streets in America, my native city. I know I have to cure myself with Charleston. There is nothing that the Holy City cannot right. I turn south on Legare Street and papers fly out of my hands as I pass the Sword Gate House. I hurl an invisible paper at Mrs. Gervais’s house and another at the Seignious house and another at the Maybanks’. I serve the great families of my ethereal city as I ride past concealed gardens flush with morning glories, ligustrum, white oleanders, and lavender azaleas galore. The morning birds sing a concerto for me in my swift flight beneath them. The forgotten music of a city awakening comes back to me as I turn on Meeting Street and hear dogs barking, my papers landing on front piazzas with the same sound that fish make when they leap for joy in brackish lagoons. Ah, the smell of coffee brewing, that secret pleasure I had forgotten! Lawyers, the early risers, are walking to their Broad Street offices like their fathers and grandfathers did before them. It is Charleston. I hear the bells of St. Michael’s ring out on the four corners of the law. It is Charleston, and it is mine. I am lucky enough a man that I can sing hymns of praise to it for the rest of my life.