South of Broad by Pat Conroy Read Free Book Online Page A

my mother’s old-model Buick parked in our driveway as I navigated my Schwinn into the garage. My father had built our house with his own hands in 1950. It had not a single suggestion of architectural merit; it was nothing more than a two-storied, five-bedroom home that many Charlestonians considered the ugliest house in the historical district.
    “Hey, Mother,” I called through the house from the kitchen. “What are you doing home?”
    I found her in her orderly home office where she was writing a letter in her beautiful penmanship, her sentences all like well-made bracelets. As she always did, she completed the paragraph she was composing before she looked up to address me. “Normally, Bloomsday is a slow do-nothing day, but this one is heating up fast. I just received a phone call from Sister Polycarp, who said you handled the situation with the orphans well. So you completed directive number one. Your high school principal has several other directives for you.”
    “You’ve given me the other two directives: I’m to bake cookies for the new family, then meet the new football coach in the gym at four.”
    “There have been some events I must add. We are lunching at the yacht club. You’ll dress appropriately. Noonish.”
    “Noonish,” I repeated.
    “Yes. We are meeting the two seniors who were expelled from Porter-Gaud this morning. And their families, of course. I want you to look out for them the first couple of weeks at school. Both are rather bitter at having to attend a new high school during their senior year. But under no circumstances do I want you to get close to any of these new students. Not the orphans, not the kids across the street, not the kids from Porter-Gaud. Nor the coach’s son, who you’re going to meet this afternoon. All of them spell trouble in their own way, and you’ve already had enough of that. Help them, but do not make friends with them, Leopold Bloom King.”
    I put my hands over my ears and groaned. “Please don’t call me that. Leo’s bad enough. But I would die of shame if people knew you named me for a character in Ulysses.”
    She said, “I admit I had you read Ulysses at too early an age. But I refuse to allow you to denigrate the greatest novelist who ever lived or the greatest novel ever written on this special day. Do I make myself clear?”
    “No other teenager in America would even know what this talk’s about,” I said. “Why would you name me for an Irish Jew who lived in Dublin and isn’t even a real person?”
    “Leopold Bloom is more alive than any man I’ve ever met. Except your father, of course.”
    “You could’ve named me after my father! I’d have liked that.”
    “I didn’t because your father knew that he married a great romantic, and great romantics are granted lots of slack by the men we love. They understand our great hearts. For instance, your father balked when we named your brother Steve after …” Mother stopped, and her eyes flooded with tears at the mention of her son’s name, which had rarely been spoken out loud within these walls since his death. Until memory rendered her speechless, she was about to confess that my father had balked at naming their first born Stephen Dedalus King, but my mother brought her gift for argumentative persuasion into play; she could have talked my affable, tongue-tied father into naming Steve “Hitler” and me “Stalin” had the inspiration seized her. My father was all red clay and alabaster in my mother’s hands, and she had sculpted him into her imaginary perfect husband long before I had come onto the scene.
    I was searching for the proper word of apology for my outburst against her, but the words fluttered into my head like a colony of luna moths, in disorderly, undecipherable array. I longed for the day when I could say what I meant to say and at the precise time the thoughts came to me, but it was not today.
    Our entire household pivoted on the immense pride my mother took in her