Uncomfortably, I looked around the room and out the windows at the overrun garden of untended grounds. I cleared my throat and realized my mother had given me no clear directions about why I was meeting these two hostile strangers.
“Hey,” I said, at last. “Must be great being orphans, ending up in a swell place like this.”
Both of them glared at me as though I had not spoken.
“That was sort of meant as a joke,” I said. “You know, to break the ice between us.”
Again, I was met with those hollowed-out stares. I started over. “Hello, Starla and Niles Whitehead. My name is Leo King. My mother is the principal of your new high school. She wanted me to come over and meet you, to see if I could help you. I know it’s hard to change schools.”
“Nothing I hate worse than a brownnosing little booger,” the girl said. “How about you, brother?”
“They’re always the same.” Both spoke in bored, lethargic voices as though I were not in the room to hear.
“But I’m still in hysterics over his orphan joke,” she said.
“I was trying to be friendly,” I explained.
The brother and sister looked at each other and a sneer passed between them.
“Why did you run away from the last orphanage?” I asked.
“For the chance of meeting swell guys like you,” Niles said.
“Take the hint, Leo. Isn’t that your name? We don’t want your help. We’ll figure things out on our own,” said Starla. As she brushed a wave of black hair away from her eyes, I noticed the strabismus in her left eye. When she saw me notice it, she shook her head and a curtain of her straight hair half-covered the wandering eye again.
“I can help you. I really can,” I said.
Niles looked at me with a hard manlike stare, and I took his measure for the first time. Though he was seated, his physical presence was impressive; he looked a couple of inches over six feet tall. His long arms were muscled and veiny, even in repose, but his eyes were bright blue and seemed purloined from a Scandinavian face. The girl was cross-eyed but cute; the stiff face of Niles Whitehead was simply beautiful.
“If you want to know the really good teachers, I can tell you who they are,” I said. “If you want to have the easy ones, I know them too.”
“We want to know when you’re going to leave us alone,” Niles said.
“I can see why your parents left you on the orphanage steps, Niles, old boy,” I said. He flung himself across the table, his left hand going for my throat. It was only then that I saw that someone had handcuffed the right hands of the orphans to their chairs.
“Count! Count Lafayette!” I shouted, and the large man came running through the library door.
“Get them out of the handcuffs,” I said.
He stiffened and said, “Believe me, those two deserved the cuffs. And a lot worse too.”
“Go ask Sister Polycarp to uncuff them,” I said, “or I’m calling my mother. Remind the sister that my mother assigned these kids to me as a project because I have to complete three hundred hours of community service. She won’t like it that they’re handcuffed to their chairs.” The mention of my mother’s name struck the right chord of terror in the hearts of most Charlestonians. “You handcuff criminals. They’re going to be my high school classmates,” I continued. “Besides, they promised me they wouldn’t run away if you took off the cuffs.”
“They did?” Mr. Lafayette eyed the boy and girl with suspicion, and it was clear that he liked neither one of them.
“We just made an agreement, and they gave me their word of honor. Tell him,” I said to them.
“Yeah, boy,” Mr. Lafayette said to Niles. “You made that promise?”
“Sure did,” Niles said.
“Wait here. I’ll go ask Sister Polycarp,” he said while walking toward the main door.
I turned and leaned across the table, talking fast. “I can help you two fruitcakes if you’ll let me. You don’t want my help, tell me now, and I’m out of here.”
The brother turned to the sister, and I watched them pass information back and forth with a wordless intensity. Starla said, “We’ve got to get through this year, Niles, then we’re free to walk out of orphanages forever.” Her dark hair fell away from her face, and her gaze softened her brother’s fury.
“Tell us what to do, Leo,” said Niles.
“Promise me you won’t run away. Right now. Fast, and mean it.”
“We promise,” both of them said.
“Polycarp is mean,” I said in a whisper. “A sadist and a psychopath. Learn to say ‘Yes, Sister; No, Sister.’ ‘Yes, sir; No, sir’ to the Count. He’s a sweetheart. Get him on your side. Get those snotty looks off your faces. Try to smile once a year. You can work this place.”
“How do you know all this?” Starla asked.
“When my brother died I didn’t handle it well, so I was in a mental hospital for a couple of years. Had to figure out a plan to get out.”
“Then you ain’t no better off than us, numbnuts,” Niles said.
“I ain’t handcuffed to no chair, hillbilly,” I said. “Why are you wearing those ugly jumpsuits?”
“They’ve got the word orphan stenciled on the back,” Niles answered. “Sister had them specially made for us. ‘Cause we’re runaways.”
“Why do you keep running away?”
“We’ve got a mama. And a grandma. They’re looking for us,” Starla said.
“How do you know?”
“Because we’d kill ourselves if we thought they weren’t,” Niles said.
Behind me, I heard the oak door swing open, and I turned to see Mr. Lafayette walking toward us with a set of keys in his hand. He walked around the table and unlocked Starla’s handcuffs first, and then Niles’s. Both of them rubbed their sore wrists.
Mr. Lafayette possessed a sunny disposition, but he looked careworn and harried as he addressed me. “I’ll get fired, Leo, if these kids run away. I can’t lose this job.”
“Mr. Lafayette has four children,” I told Niles and Starla. “Is your wife still on dialysis?” I asked him.
“Yeah. She’s not well.”
“We’re not going to run away, Mr. Lafayette,” Starla said.
“Speak for yourself,” her brother said.
“Shut up, Niles. I speak for my brother too. We won’t cost you your job, Mr. Lafayette.”
“I’ll watch out for you two,” Mr. Lafayette said, looking back toward the library entrance. “I can help you in a million ways.” He then walked back toward the main hall.
When I got up to leave, Starla Whitehead surprised me by saying, “Hey, four-eyes. Didn’t anyone tell you how ugly your glasses are? They make your eyes look like two busted bungholes.”
I blushed deeply, the blood rushing up to my face, soon to be followed by a blotchiness that would make my appearance all the more comical. I had inherited my father’s shyness, his chalky paleness, and his tendency to redden from throat to crown when he was caught off guard. I learned the harsh lessons of being unattractive very early in my career as a child, but I never grew accustomed to it being highlighted or laughed at by my peers. But now I surprised even myself by tearing up, the most infantile and unwarranted reaction I could think of, and not the course I would have chosen in front of these newcomers to my life. I wanted to run and hide from my own face.
Then Starla surprised me by bursting into tears herself, crying hard, realizing the damage she had inflicted on me. It was the first time I think she truly saw me. “I’m so sorry, Leo. So sorry. I do it every time. I can’t help it. I do it every time someone’s nice to me. I say something hurtful, something no one can forgive. Something bad, evil. I don’t trust it when someone’s nice to me. So I say something to make them hate me. Tell him, Niles. I always do it, don’t I?”
“She always does it, Leo,” Niles agreed. “She doesn’t mean it.”
“Look,” she said, pulling her long hair away from her eyes. “Look at my left eye. What a
cross-eyed bitch. Look! What an ugly cross-eyed jerk bitch I am. It was because you were nice—but if you hadn’t been nice, I would have said it anyway. It’s what I am,” she added helplessly, with a shrug, as if she couldn’t properly explain.
I took off my glasses and wiped them with a handkerchief, then I dabbed at my eyes and tried to compose myself. Putting my glasses back on, I said to Starla, “I know an eye surgeon. The best in the city. I’ll ask him to take a look at your eye. Maybe he can do something.”
“Why would he look at her eye?” Niles said, protective of his sister. “She doesn’t got a penny.”
“Have,” his sister corrected. “Quit talking redneck.”
“She doesn’t have a penny.”
“He’s a wonderful man, this doctor,” I told them.
“How do you know him, big shot?” Niles asked.
“Because I’m a paperboy, and I know everybody on my route.” I glanced at my watch and, with my mother’s list in mind, stood and told them in farewell, “I have to go, but I’ll get my father to invite you for dinner, okay? I’ll call you about the time.”
Both of them looked frankly astonished at something as simple as an invitation to dinner. Niles glanced uneasily at his sister, who offered as I turned: “And Leo, I’m sorry about what I said. I really am.”
“I said something mean to my mother today,” I admitted. “So I deserved it. It was God getting me back.”
“Leo?” Niles said.
“Yeah, Niles?”
“Thanks for this.” He held up his wrist. “When we met you, we were in handcuffs. When you’re leaving, we’re not. My sister and I won’t forget it.”
“We’ll remember it the rest of our lives,” she said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because,” Niles said, “no one’s ever nice to us.”
· · ·
On the leisurely bike ride home, I congratulated myself for handling Sister Polycarp and the unruly orphans with some diplomatic skill. I was running an hour ahead of the schedule I had set for myself, and was thinking about the kind of cookies I would make for the new neighbors moving in across the street. My mother had ordered chocolate chip, but I was thinking of making cookies with more of a Charlestonian heritage and flavor. I was surprised to find 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 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 raise a son who did not dare utter the word shit. A shitless son, I thought as I answered the phone.