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

distinction as a Joyce scholar who had received her doctorate from Catholic University for her unreadable (I tried once) dissertation, “On Catholic Mythology and Totemology in James Joyce’s Ulysses,” which was published by Purdue University Press in 1954. Each semester she taught a graduate-level course on Joyce at the College of Charleston that was both highly praised and fully subscribed by students as etiolated as egrets. On three occasions she had delivered papers on Joyce to enraptured Joycean scholars who acknowledged her deep affinity and rapturous nitpicking into even the most skillfully hidden minutiae as it related to Joyce’s uneasy Catholic boyhood. It was my mother who had compared the menses of Molly Bloom to the blood-drenched Stations of the Cross and its relationship to the divinity of Christ, and it had won her enduring recognition among her stultifying peers. On many occasions, my father and I had prepared elaborate meals for Joycean scholars of the first rank who had come to Charleston to sit at the feet of my mother so they could practice intoning ponderous inanities to one another. I believe in my heart that my father taught me to cook so that the two of us could escape those killer nights when academe came to our house to speak of Joyce and nothingness and then Joyce again.
    Mother gathered her papers in her briefcase, then checked my list of directives. “Your day is filled up. No idle time for you to get in trouble, young man.”
    “The banks are all safe from me,” I said. “At least for today.”
    “You stole that line from your father. All your jokes came from your father. You should try originality. What do you and your father have cooked up for our Bloomsday feast?”
    “Top secret.”
    “Give me a hint.”
    “Chicken Feet Florentine,” I said.
    “Another tired joke of your father’s. You get all your attempts at wit from him. I’ve never said anything funny in my whole life. I think it’s a waste of time. Tootles; I’ve got to go, darling.”
    “Tootles.”
    I walked to the kitchen to make a batch of cookies. Unlike any other family I knew, the kitchen was my father’s bailiwick and his alone. Jasper King had cooked every at-home meal that my family had ever eaten, and he had turned his sons into table setters and sous chefs for as long as I could remember. I had seen my mother in the kitchen only during those times when she was passing through on her way to the garage. In a court of law, I could not swear she had ever lit the stove, defrosted the refrigerator, refilled the pepper mill, thrown out spoiled milk, or even knew the direction to the spice cabinets or where the oils and condiments were kept. My father washed and ironed the clothes, kept the sinks and toilets spotless, and kept the household running with an efficiency that I found astonishing. Over the years, he taught me everything he knew about cooking and grilling and baking, and we could make the crown princes of Europe happy to find themselves at our table.
    I opened the copy of Charleston Receipts that my father had bought on the day I was delivered at St. Francis Hospital, and I turned it to the benne seed wafer thins, a recipe submitted by Mrs. Gustave P. Maxwell, the former Lizetta Simons. My father and I had cooked almost every recipe in Charleston Receipts , a transcendent cookbook put together by the Junior League and published to universal acclaim in 1950. Father and I placed stars each time we prepared one of the recipes, and the benne wafers had earned a whole constellation. I began toasting the sesame seeds in a heavy skillet. I creamed two cups of brown sugar with a stick of unsalted butter. I added a cup of plain flour sifted with baking powder and a pinch of salt, and a freshly beaten egg that my father had purchased from a farm near Summerville. As I was checking the brownness of the seeds, the phone rang. I cussed silently, because cussing was a flash point with both my parents, who wanted to