“Leave my tootsies alone, rapscallion,” he said.
“This is part of my job, Mr. Canon,” I told him. “You always make it hard. Yet you and I know you like it. It makes your feet feel good.”
“Don’t go inventing words that never came out of my mouth, boy.”
I caught his right foot then swung it up on my knee, where I dried it thoroughly. The intimacy unnerved him, and he placed a towel on his head as I turned my attention to his left foot.
“Next week we might need to work on the pedicure.” I studied his toes. “Your pinkies look pretty good this week.”
“This is what I live for, Lord?” he moaned. “For a common criminal to praise my feet?”
I then began applying a cream made of aloe and eucalyptus, and massaged his feet from the heels to the toes. Sometimes, he moaned with pleasure, and sometimes with pain when I applied too much pressure. My goal was to rub his feet until they glowed with a renewed, healthy circulation; or at least that was the goal his doctor required of me. Mr. Canon suffered from sciatica and a weak back and could not bend to touch his feet. He knew my ministrations were good for his physical health, even as I offended his overdeveloped sense of modesty.
“Dr. Shermeta called me last week,” I told him.
“For the life of me, I cannot understand why I put myself under the care of a Ukrainian.”
“The Ukrainian wants me to start giving you a full shower. I’m responsible for hosing down your whole body from here on in.” I smiled at his towel-draped head.
“I would shoot you between the eyeballs if you attempted such a thing! How ghastly. So my life has come to this. Then, after I watched you suffer agonizing death throes, I would call a taxi, drive to Roper Hospital, and dispatch of this upstart Ukrainian. Then I would kill myself with a single shot to the head.”
“So, you don’t like the shower idea?” I asked. “Would you donate your body to science?”
“That’s why God created paupers,” he said. “My body will be buried in my family plot of distinguished ancestors in Magnolia Cemetery.”
“Just how distinguished are your ancestors, Mr. Canon?” I teased him.
He caught the note of teasing and thundered, “Canon? Canon? Open any history book of South Carolina and even an illiterate would stumble across my family name. They would make your sorry family look like Haitians, Puerto Ricans, or even Ukrainians.”
“Your podiatrist has to leave now,” I said. “Remember to say your prayers. And always floss your teeth.” Then I added in warning, “Soon I will have paid off my debt to society.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Judge Alexander has cut my community service to fifty hours, instead of a hundred.”
“That’s preposterous. I’ll call the judge at once. You were caught with enough cocaine to satisfy the entire ghetto of Charleston for a week.”
“I’ll see you next Thursday. Can I bring you anything?” I walked toward the front door.
“Yes,” he said. “You can, Leo. Try to bring me some sign of good breeding, a proper bloodline, a mastery of the small courtesies, and a much greater respect for your elders.”
“Consider it done.”
“You’ve been a great disappointment to me. I thought I could make something out of you, but I’ve been a dismal failure.”
“Then why do you keep my Father’s Day card in the top right-hand drawer, Mr. Canon?”
“You are a rogue and a blackguard,” he cried out. “Never darken the door of this shop again or I’ll have a warrant out for your arrest.”
“See you next Thursday, Harrington.”
“How dare you—the impudence of using my first name!” Then softening, he said, “Thursday it is, Leo.”
CHAPTER 5 Raised by a Nun
I took Ashley Street north toward the medical college and St. Francis Hospital, where my brother and I were born. I took a right at the old Porter-Gaud chapel, then another right on Rutledge, and into the parking lot, where I locked my bike to a door handle of my mother’s Buick. The sign that said PRINCIPAL ONLY filled me with a secondhand pride as I walked toward the school that had become a safe harbor. I had come to Peninsula High in complete disgrace. I knew that was what my mother wanted to talk to me about, with my final year approaching.
Sitting at her desk in her erect posture, my mother looked like she could have led a destroyer into combat. “I thought you knew I’d been a nun,” she said.
“No, ma’am. You never told me that.”
“You’ve been an odd enough boy,” Mother said. “I guess I didn’t want to say something that would give you an excuse to be even odder. Do you agree that you’ve been odd?”
“You’ve never seemed satisfied with me, Mother,” I said, looking out the window at the traffic on Rutledge Avenue.
“Your erroneous theory, not mine. And look me in the eye.” She opened up a permanent file on her desk, and then spent several moments studying a record that seemed odoriferous to her. “You have not distinguished yourself as a high school student, Mr. King.”
“I’m your son, Mother. You know how I hate it when you pretend we’re not related.”
“I treat you just like I treat every other student in my school. If you get bad grades in high school, no good college will accept you.”
“I’ll get into some college,” I said.
“But will I think it’s a good one?”
“I could get into Harvard and you’d think the whole Ivy League had lowered its standards.”
“No good college would touch you.” She studied my grades, tsk-tsking with her tongue against her teeth. Tsk-tsking belonged to the native vocabulary of nuns and atrociously bad public school teachers. “Your grade point ratio is 2.4 out of a possible 4.0. Below average. You’ve scored less than a thousand on your SAT exams. You have great potential, but so far you have wasted the best years of your life. Your grades in ninth grade destroyed your grade point ratio.”
“I had a bad year, Mother.”
“Disgraceful, I would call it.” She lifted out a sheet of paper and pushed it across the desk toward me. I recognized the paper and ignored it. “That’s the copy of your arrest warrant issued on the night of August 30, 1966. The night when you were found carrying a half pound of cocaine in your sports jacket. This forty-page document is the record of your trial in juvenile court. Here are the yearly reports of your probation officer. These are from your shrink, that love of your life.”
“Dr. Criddle has been a great help to me.”
“These are Judge Alexander’s letters describing your progress,” she continued. “There are other letters describing the community service you performed to keep you from serving time in the juvenile prison system.”
“I’m sorry that I put my family through that,” I said. “But you know all that.”
She cleared her throat, another nun’s trick, and said, “That night will follow you forever.”
“I made a mistake, Mother. I’d been in and out of mental hospitals after what happened to Steve. Six years had gone by since Steve.”
“Would you hush up about your brother? He doesn’t play a part in your screwup.”
“I walked into Bishop Ireland as a ninth-grader. The whole school saw me as a nutcase. Kids were nervous around me. I was invited to a party, my first high school party. You and Dad were happy that I was going to be a normal kid again. Some drinking was going on, then a police raid. A guy on the football team put a bag of something in my pocket and asked me to keep it safe for him, and I said okay. I was flattered that a guy on the football team knew my name. So I got caught.”
“Yes, and the next day your principal threw you out of Bishop Ireland, preventing you from getting a Catholic education, your parents’ dream for you.”
“You were my principal, Mother. You kicked me out of school.”
“I was following school policy. I resigned my position that same day. So did your father. We both fell on our swords to support you. T
hen you betrayed us by not telling the police the name of that boy who planted the cocaine on you.”
“I screwed up.”
“If you’d have named that boy, nothing would’ve happened to you.”
“It wouldn’t have been right to name that guy.” I said it for the hundredth time.
“But it was all right for a senior to plant drugs on an innocent freshman?”
“No, it was wrong of him.”
“Well, you finally admit that—after three years.”
“He shouldn’t have done that to me,” I agreed. “I see that now. I’m older, and I see it differently now.”
“None of it had to happen,” she said, her voice rising. “You didn’t have any idea what drugs were. You were innocent. You were terribly used by an older boy. It was your stubbornness, your impenetrable stubbornness. The stubbornness you inherited from me. Damn it, you got it from me.”
“Such vulgarity, Sister Norberta.” But I pitied my mother even as I tried to joke her out of her distress.
She said, “Moving on to another unpleasant subject: Sister Scholastica told me you were impertinent to her on the phone.”
“I was not. She caught me by surprise. She asked to speak to Sister Mary Norberta. I didn’t know that was your code name.”
“She didn’t like the tone of your voice. She detected a note of sarcasm.”
“I was nice to her,” I protested. “I thought it was a wrong number.”
“I’m always telling the nuns back at the convent that I’m raising you to be a feminist.” Her voice glittered with self-approval.
“I’m the only boy in the world who knows how to work a Singer sewing machine,” I said. “So you obviously wanted a daughter.”
“I resent you even thinking that,” she shot back. “I’ve taught you useful things, things they made me learn during my novitiate that I loathed doing. But they are useful.”
“Yeah, the whole football team roared when they found out I made you a dress.” I was still embarrassed by the memory.
“You made me a dress for Mother’s Day your sophomore year. It touched me more than you’ll ever know. It’s still my favorite.”
“Keep it up, Mother, and I’m going to sew another dress. Only I’ll wear it to the prom.”
She ignored me, and leaned down beside her desk to retrieve a framed photograph from her calfskin briefcase. She placed it upright before me and ordered me to study it. “You know that photograph, of course.”
“It’s on top of Father’s chest of drawers. But it’s up high. I barely could see it when I was a little kid.”
“You were born uncurious. You could’ve asked to see this picture anytime. Do you see it now?”
“There’s Father and his parents I never knew, standing beside a nun I don’t know.”
“Look closer at the nun.”
I had seen this photograph a thousand times, but it had always struck me as a picture of my father as an impossibly callow young man standing at attention between two strangers who had died before my birth. A shadow cut across the nun’s cowled, veiled face, a stick figure in her time-honored anonymity and medieval finery. Only as I studied it did my own mother’s face materialize. I could almost experience a field of force drawing my parents toward each other. It was like observing a pornographic chapter of my own history that had been written in invisible ink. I felt like I was trapped in a half-told life, a world of semi-lies and baffling fractions of controversial half-truths. I was staring at a photograph I had seen every day; it nearly brought me to my knees when I realized I was privy to the translations of all its opacities and secrets for the first time. In black and white, here was proof that my mother had been a member of a convent. I was trying to unravel the complicated trigonometry of the radical thought that silence could make up the greatest lie ever told. But on that day, I was far too young and unformed to hold a thought that deep. It etherized around me as I found myself in the gunsights of my mother’s withering gaze again.
“Mother,” I said finally, “I never knew you were such a living doll.”
“Thanks to the nth power, son.”
“I did not mean it the way it sounded.” I studied the photo with more attention. “You and Father were always so much older than the other kids’ parents.”
“I felt old when I had my first child,” she said. “Much older when I had my second.”
“Your second? I guess that’s me.”
“I guess it is,” my mother answered in her blank voice, the one that didn’t fire live ammunition or anything else that seemed real.
“So you just quit being a nun? I didn’t know you could do that.”
“You can’t. Your father’s going to explain it all to you. I left the job to him.” She looked at her watch. “He’s waiting for you now.”
My father handed me two tackle boxes, our favorite rods and reels, and a bucket of live bait I had caught by casting a shrimp net into the estuarine lake off Lockwood Boulevard, a lake that flooded our backyard during heavy spring tides. We walked down to the harbor. He untied the ropes on the mooring of the city dock where we kept a small fishing bateau. Father pulled the starter of the modest fifteen-horsepower outboard, and we moved out toward the center of the Ashley River, which formed the western border of the Charleston peninsula. Both of us baited up and cast our lines on opposite sides of the boat as the moon appeared in the east, as bright as a spoon.
The Ashley was a hiding place and a workshop and a safe house for my father and me to be alone with each other, to bask in the pleasure of each other’s company, and to cure all the hurts the world brought to us. At first we fished wordlessly and let the primal silence of the river translate us into no more than drifting shapes. The tide was a poem that only time could create, and I watched it stream and brim and make its steady dash homeward, to the ocean. The sun was sinking fast, and a laundry line full of cirrus clouds stretched along the western sky like boas of white linen, then surrendered to a shiver of gold that haloed my father’s head. The river held the gold shine for a brief minute, then went dark as the moon rose up behind us. In silence, we fished as father and son, each watching his line.
In the pale light, my father was a luminous silhouette, an emperor incised on a strange coin. With the movement of tides and the stillness of gentle fathers and the heartache one felt in the death of hot Charleston days, the Atlantic called out to us. Fishing gave me time to think and to pray and to sit with the man who had rarely raised his voice to me in my entire childhood. Because he was a scientist, his method of being a father was explanatory, and he made being his son feel like a tutorial. Even during the terrible time of Steve’s death, my father never employed a tone that did not convey a respect for every part of my boyhood. When I went crazy in the days following Steve’s funeral, he considered it the most natural thing in the world. Though I was now entering a time when I could not remember what my brother looked or sounded like, I could study my father’s face and see my brother sitting in the boat with us. His face was tender in repose, yet it often carried a haunted look, when I could tell that he was thinking of Steve too. His lips would grow thin, as though they were drawn with a ruler. His cheekbones were high and prominent, and though his eyebrows were thick, they were symmetrical and matched the strong curve of his nose. His glasses, as thick as mine, overemphasized his mahogany-brown eyes. He was a thoughtful man with a streak of mischievousness and an obsessive love of my mother. This fishing trip was arranged for him to tell me about it, and I waited for it to grow dark enough for him to talk. Only after dark did my father tell me the things that really mattered, and it had been on such a night, when I was a small child, and with Steve in the boat, that he had paused and reflected on the glories of the Charleston sunset, bathed in crimson, and sighed: “Ah. Boys. Behold: the Mansion on the River.”
We were starting later tonight, the red drained from the horizon, the sky metal blue as we drifted near the docks of the coast guard base. I handed my father my fishi
ng pole, grabbed the oars, and moved us back toward the middle of the river. I straightened the boat as we began our drifting passage before the houses along the Battery. They were lit up like theaters, and we could hear the voices of families talking on their verandas and porches. Downriver, a chamber orchestra was warming up before a small crowd that had gathered in White Point Gardens, which at this distance sounded like the conversation of field mice. Twice we dropped anchor, then floated toward Fort Sumter.
“Tell me about the phone call from Sister Scholastica, son,” Father asked as we anchored for the third time.
“It wasn’t much. She hit me with the news that she had attended a convent with my mother. I was surprised, that’s all.”
“After Steve,” my father said, then had to catch himself and get his voice back. “After Steve, your mother always insisted that we remain silent about the early part of her life. Steve knew something about it, but not much. We wanted to emphasize us as a family, not your mother’s life before we married.”
“Don’t you think it’s a bit weird?”
“No. Like the moon up there, Leo, every life goes through different phases. It’s part of natural law. And before we were together, the phase your mother went through was her years as an ordained nun. Granted, it lasted a long time. But still, you’d have to classify it as a phase.”
“It explains everything. Jesus Christ, I’ve been raised by a nun! I bet that’s why I call her Mother and you Father. Right? Here we are living in the middle of Mama and Daddy land, ‘the South,’ and I go around sounding like Prince Charles by saying ‘Mother dear.’”
“Nothing wrong with that,” my father, not my daddy, explained.
“She looks like a nun, acts like a nun, talks like a nun, and breathes like a nun. I was raised under false pretenses. Kids my age have always thought I was weird, and they’ve been right. Something’s always been a little off about me.”