Much of the town turned out for Father’s funeral. Half the doctors and nurses in the city had taken his science classes in high school. Monsignor Max came through with flying colors and started his eulogy by saying, “Jasper King was the finest man I’ve ever met on earth. I will wager that Jasper King will be finest man I will meet in heaven.”
A huge crowd was present as he was interred in St. Mary’s churchyard in a grave beside his son Steve. I thought my mother would collapse when she saw Steve’s name on his tombstone, and I realized she had never been to visit her oldest son’s grave. I had been there dozens of times, and it never failed to break my heart.
PART FIVE
CHAPTER 24 Home Again
When the Learjet taxies down the runway in Charleston, Ike spots the ambulance awaiting our arrival. The pilot parks the jet twenty feet away, and two orderlies rush out. With the steps lowered, Niles carries down Trevor, who slept the entire cross-country journey, and lays him out on the stretcher. Dr. David Biederman walks out on the tarmac to greet our disheveled, exhausted group. We look like a lost squad of soldiers that has been in the field and under fire for too long.
I shake hands with him. “Hello, David. I haven’t seen you since I handed over the receipt book to you when you took over my paper route. Now you’re a hotshot.”
“My God,” David says, “this plane is filled with the gods and goddesses of my freshman year in high school. Sheba Poe, I had such a crush on you.”
“Of course, you were David,” Sheba says. “Can you help my brother?”
“AIDS is a puzzle,” he says, “but yeah, I can help him. I’ll do everything in my power to keep him alive.”
“You keep Trevor alive, I’ll give you a toss in the sack every year,” Sheba says.
“I’m married now, Sheba,” he tells her. “Two kids.”
“Did marriage turn you into some kind of nutcase?” she says. “I’m not talking about spending the next fifty years together, just a friendly roll in the hay.”
“Leave David alone,” Betty tells her. “Hey, Doc, good to see you again. You remember my husband, Ike?”
“The new chief of police.” David shakes Ike’s hand.
“The pig of pigs,” Ike says. “Thanks for meeting the plane.”
Niles asks, “Want me to ride in the ambulance with Trevor, Doctor?”
“No, that’s my job. I want to check him out before we even get to the hospital. It sounds like he has not been on any medication.”
“None,” Molly says.
“He wasn’t getting the best of care,” Fraser says.
“It’s a miracle he’s alive,” Dr. Biederman says.
Sheba says, “It feels like we spent ten years in San Francisco. And now, because God obviously hates my guts, I get to go take care of my bitch of a mother. Anybody got any cyanide?”
“Is it for you or your mother?” Betty asks.
“I haven’t decided yet.” A limousine pulls up beside the plane, and the pilots begin moving the luggage out of the hold.
“Go rest now,” Ike says, “but we need to have a powwow Sunday.”
“Let’s go to my grandmother’s house at the beach,” Molly suggests.
After we drop off the others, I drive with Sheba to her mother’s house. I walk across the street to visit my own mother. The dutiful son called her with a report of each day’s activity in San Francisco, and she did a superb job of keeping me current about the high and low life in the city. After her retirement, Mother discovered that she had both a talent and a relish for gossip, especially of the salacious variety. I wrote several columns from hearsay she gathered during discussions at her garden club; it delighted her to be the unnamed source of some of my more controversial columns. Instead of viewing her spy work as rumor-mongering for her reputation-killing son, she considered her purposes to be Joycean: she had her ear to the Charleston ground as James Joyce did when he covered the streets and waterfront of Dublin.
The University of South Carolina Press is publishing a book of her essays on Joyce the following spring. She shows me the acceptance letter after we embrace in the doorway, and she leads me to a seat in the living room. Nothing ever changes in this house: the same furniture remains in the same position as when I was a child. Going home is like walking into a dream I have entered a thousand times before.
“Congratulations, Mother,” I say. “I’ll throw you a publication party.”
“Of course you will,” she says. “I’ve already talked to the Charleston Library Society to see about having it there.”
“Do they let you bring liquor and food into the society? I’ve never been to a party there.”
“That is under serious negotiation,” she responds. “And we have plenty of time to plan.”
“Pretty impressive. Your second book published when you’re eighty years old!”
She doesn’t rise to the bait, but tells me wearily, “Fix your mother a drink. I’m depressed.”
“Why are you depressed?” I rise and walk to the bar. “You’re getting a book published.”
“Monsignor Max got some bad news,” she says. “His lung cancer came back.”
“I’m sorry. I thought they got all the cancer the first time.”
“So did he. But he is taking it well. After all, he is a man of God, and he knows what his heavenly reward will be.”
“Does lying about your age keep you out of heaven?” I tease her.
“Not if you’re a woman,” Mother says. “Now tell me all about the syphilitic Whore of Babylon and her brother.”
“Sheba’s across the street with her mother,” I say. “Trevor’s in good hands at the Medical University. Sheba is not syphilitic, and she is not the Whore of Babylon.”
“You could’ve fooled me,” Mother says. “Evangeline is a mess, Leo. She keeps getting worse. They need to put that woman in a home.”
“That’s what my friends all say about you.”
“Invite them to my publication party,” she says, “and I’ll wow them with a lecture on the intellectual complexities of Dublin street slang in Ulysses.”
“I’d rather shoot them than have you bore them to death,” I said. “It’d be more humane.”
“It’s the final essay of my book, the illumination of my life’s work.”
“Studying the pages of the worst novel ever written in this great world,” I tease her, as I always have.
“You got a 499 on the English section of the SAT,” Mother shoots back. “Mediocre.”
“Is there a statute of limitations on those damn tests?”
“They’ll follow you to your grave. You never tested well. It’s held you back.”
“How has it held me back?”
“You could be a novelist,” she says, “instead of a smut peddler.”
Though it is hot in the city, I decide to walk over to Colonial Lake and toward Broad Street, letting the palm-filtered light welcome me back to Charleston. When I take a left on Tradd Street, the humidity of late afternoon makes my clothes cling to my perspiring body like some primordial skin. There are days in Charleston so hot it feels as though you are dog-paddling across a heated pool. A wind comes in from the harbor and I can smell the Atlantic again, the real ocean, the one that filled my nostrils in my boyhood. I slowly maneuver down the manicured, intimate narrowness of the street that has become my place of residence. I have returned to my home waters, and its un-sea-lioned depths, and its lukewarm shallows un-dungeoned by crabs. The Pacific is darker and grander and colder; I would choose a Gulf Stream over a Humboldt Current any time of year. As I make my way, I take in the good clean smells of the harbor welcoming me back to my birthplace.
As I near the Cotesworth-Canon house I think about the extraordinary circumstance that brought me a job to work off my obligation of community service in the glooms of Harrington Canon’s antique shop. The outraged but distant relatives of Mr. Canon contested the will with a ferocity that surprised me, but I received the deeds to his house a
nd his store two years after the case went into probate. I immediately rented the store to another antique dealer, who was pleased with my condition of retaining the name Harrington Canon Antiques.
His generosity gave me a jump start in the world. While I was a cadet at The Citadel, I rented out the first and second stories of the Canon house to young teachers at the College of Charleston. Mother was generous with her time and labor to be sure my garden was flourishing. In a large, spacious fountain, I raised Japanese koi and watched them swim, breaking to the surface through the lily pads, whose white blossoms were perfect complements to the gold and obsidian ballet of the fish.
I water the garden and check on the health of the koi before I let myself into my house. But the key I keep hidden on a hook attached to a drainpipe, and obscured by azaleas, is not where I left it. Nor has it fallen on the ground. My best friends all know where I keep the key, but they have just flown in with me from California.
Then it hits me in a bolt of pure knowledge, and I settle in for a long, recriminating night: Starla has come home for the first time in more than a year. I walk through a door I know will not be locked and into an air-conditioned house cool enough to preserve corpses in the morgue. Most of the liquor in the house will be feeding Starla’s bloodstream. The kitchen looks like someone has tried to clean it with a grenade. I find her in the den listening to her favorite country music station. I don’t think she has begun drinking yet, which can be either a good or a bad thing. With Starla, I know she is capable of presenting me with a whole array of women, all warriors, all hurt, and many of whom still love the man who found her in an orphanage chained to a chair.
I can tell she is taking psychotic medicine again because it always makes her gain weight. The story of every drink she has ever taken is written deep in her face. “Hello, my darling husband,” Starla drawls. “Glad to see your loving wife?”
“Nothing like it.” I walk over and peck her on the cheek.
“You don’t look that happy to see me,” she says.
“You’ve made it difficult the last two times you were home,” I say. “Want a drink?”
“I’ve gone through your white wine,” she says. “Let me kill a bottle of red now.”
“Coming right up,” I say. As I open it, I offer, “You look good, Starla.”
“I look like death warmed over,” she answers, turning and eyeing the room as I open the wine.
There is something in the order of my house that is capable of bringing to the surface my wife’s most vicious insights—some accurate, some absurd; always painful. She takes a step to the window and looks out on the peaceful vista of the side garden: fountain, draped crepe myrtle, koi pond. When she turns back to take her wine, her eyes fall on a small ocher and crimson icon on the wall. She says with incurious flatness, “You really are such a pious little son of a bitch, Leo. I always forget how your professional niceness can set me off. I find it overwhelming.”
“No doubt,” I answer. I’ve learned not to argue with her and pour my own wine. My detachment is my form of armor that draws a long stare of her dark eyes—still lovely, as they were when we were young.
Above all, Starla cannot endure being ignored, and with the skill of a master fencer, she continues in that dry, conversational voice, “More than anything else, it was the thing that I most detested in you. It drives me away, and it always has. My family always loved their little church, but I’ve always preferred the asshole to the Good Samaritan; liked Judas more than Jesus.”
She is openly baiting me now, and there was a day when I valiantly would have responded. But history has shown that waiting out the storm is more peaceful than flailing against it. And in any case, she has lost her edge with age. When we were young to marriage and she still had a grip on normalcy, her attacks were subtler and harder to withstand. This reduction to good and evil is symptomatic of a sad deterioration, and I stand there marblelike in my inability to be wounded, as she makes her case in an increasingly drunk, querulous voice. “I always have. I like shit better than ice cream. Breakdown better than the Rotary Club. I like the darkness,” she says, and in some ways, I know she is being nothing less than sincere. “I trust it.”
We have gone through many rounds of psychoanalysis and none of this is new to either of us. I nod, but my patience infuriates her, making her dig deeper, feeling for a soft spot. “I’m pregnant, Leo,” she confesses abruptly, with calculated nonchalance, and though I try to hide it, the news brings a flicker of reaction to my face.
Her ability to read me is undiminished, and her face almost softens as she shares the details. “A guy from Milledgeville, I think. I don’t know his name. I don’t know him. I saw the clinic doctor and he scheduled an abortion, but I don’t know,” she says, her face suddenly wistful. “Something in me also wants to have this child,” she says, and in the strange interior world that is my wife’s, there is a bit of honest, wholly unfounded optimism in her words.
I am almost drawn in. I almost mouth the inevitable words of support or worry or whatever it is you say to people like Starla when they make an outrageous claim. She sees her opening and, with catlike precision, lands her blow in the form of a casual confidence. “Face it, Leo—it’s the only kid I’ll ever have. You know, I aborted two of yours. Two boys,” she adds. “I asked.”
An eerie paralysis makes its way through the vast network in my body, and the veins in my face react as if she has set them on fire. In three Charleston households I walk the world known as Uncle Leo; I served as godfather for a dozen children over the years and have always honored that title. I take so much pleasure in the term godfather because I secretly believe I will never father a child with the doomed, hurt woman I chose to marry. In my own arrogance, I thought I could make Starla happy by offering her entrée into a life without want or malice or conflict. Never did it occur to me that some people make an early acquaintance with a dark, disfiguring anarchy so strong that they cannot consider a day complete without the music of chaos roaring in their ears. Starla is such a girl. She was a lost soul on the day I met her. I now know that the most dangerous words in the English language are the ones I once uttered in all innocence to Starla: “I can change you.”
As I sit in my den struck dumb by her callous admission of aborting our unborn children, I can feel nothing but a sadness that seems immortal. For a brief moment, I want to beat her head in with a fireplace tool. But that passes quickly as I look over and see the lostness in her eyes, which is her most chilling calling card. It is also the signature of an incurable madness that a shrink in Miami once diagnosed as borderline personality disorder. When I asked what that meant, the doctor told me, “It means you’re fucked. She’s fucked. I’ll load her up with drugs, but that’s about all I can do. The borderlines are mean, egomaniacal, relentless. Their job is to make everybody around them miserable. In my experience, they perform their jobs very well.” I cannot mention the word borderline to a shrink without noticing an involuntary flinch in their reaction. I experience an involuntary flinch in my whole body.
As is usual in our encounters, once Starla has inflicted a sufficient amount of pain, her voice takes on a conciliatory note that is not to be trusted. “Are you mad at me, Leo?” she asks. When I don’t immediately answer, she puts down her wineglass and says, “Please, Leo! Don’t be mad. I didn’t mean to say that to you. I hate it when I hurt you. I’ve ruined everything for you, and you’ve got to hate me for it. I beg you to hate me. To hit me. To kill me. To free me from all this. I’m crazy, Leo. I’m completely nuts. And I don’t know what to do about it.”
This is Starla reaching the boiling point, which is the time she becomes the most dangerous woman on earth. She is feeling around deep inside her, trying to resurrect the ghost of the young woman I fell in love with. But that woman ceased to exist long ago, and so did that exuberant young man who fell in love with her and promised to spend his life with her.
“Hate you, Starla?” I echo. “Can’t do it. I can do a lot
of things, but not that.”
“Toad, I can make you hate me. I’ve got powers that I haven’t used yet. The affairs I’ve had? I’ve had dozens of them. But no. Hey, I’ve got one—your kids! Abortion number one. I remember the nurses counting his arms and legs to make sure they cleaned everything out.”
As I take this soul-killing tirade into my already shut-down nervous system, I hear footsteps coming fast up the stairs. Then I hear Starla’s loud sobbing as she throws herself into her brother’s strong arms. Niles is always her safe house, her hermitage of last resort. How great to have a brother like Niles, I think.
And then the memory of Steve rises up in the room. It troubles me that I cannot even summon up the palest image of him. His face is lost to me forever, as though he never really lived at all. Even Steve’s photographs seem stillborn and shapeless to me. My memory has come to a terrible point, passing a statute of limitations from being able to call out my brother’s face from the void. While Starla weeps as Niles comforts her with a tenderness I seem to lack, I wonder where my brother would’ve lived in Charleston. I believe in my heart that he would’ve married a local girl, a good Catholic girl, and they would have a houseful of kids, living on James Island or maybe over in Mount Pleasant. I would be a real uncle many times over, and my nephews and nieces would love me, and I would volunteer to coach their Little League and soccer teams. They would grow up knowing everything about me. My brother’s kids, Steve’s kids, would be the ones to take care of me when I began to die. Yes, Steve’s kids, that noisy, chattering gang that lost all chances of being born when time and life went dark for Steve. I think of my own son, the one whose arms and legs were counted by an unnamed nurse—“One, two, three, four: all accounted for, Doctor”—and think of playing catch with him or taking him fishing in the Ashley River where my father fished with me.