I throw the first shovelful of dirt into her grave and the second. Niles throws the third and the fourth. Mother, the next two. Then Molly, Fraser, Ike, Betty, then Chad and their children. Then Niles and I finish it off. I step back and survey the crowd; I try to speak but lose the shape of words as they cleave to the roof of my mouth. All sense of direction abandons me and I stumble. Niles and Ike grab my elbows and hold me up, then lead me back to the funeral home limo.
The spring shows early signs of being otherworldly. Mother spent long hours putting my garden into shape after Hugo, and her wizardry can be seen in the texture and spacing of palmettos and leather leaf ferns with morning glories and purple salvia. As a dedicated rosarian, she has dedicated a secret corner of the garden to Peace roses and Joseph’s Coat roses and Lady Banks roses, which eventually will curl over the koi pond. Since Mother has come to live with me and Trevor after the storm, she has transfigured my garden from a wasteland to a wonderland in a short space of time. In the great tradition of Charleston gardeners, she can stare at a square foot of mud and urge the shoots of buried lantanas and impatiens to fight for the sunlight.
Back at the house, my friends feed more than two hundred people while Coach Jefferson handles the bartending, as usual. It is a cool night, and our guests walk out in the garden to smell what spring will bring tiptoeing into Charleston in a scant two months. My walk toward the Cooper River seems narcotic and zombielike, but as I make a steady promenade along the seawall, I can feel Charleston beginning to perform the sacred rites of healing my withdrawn heart. To my right, I pass a row of dazzling mansions, and the perfect architecture pulls me tightly to the center of the city’s roselike beauty. It is a city of ten thousand secrets and just a couple of answers. Since the day I was born, I have been worried that heaven would never be half as beautiful as Charleston, the city formed where two rivers meet in ecstasy to place a harbor and a bay and an exit to the world.
My mother followed me. Mother and I stand at the point where the rivers meet, and look across to James Island and Sullivan’s Island. The sky, pearled with stars, throws a slash of moonlight on the water that lights up both of us. The tenderness of Charleston enfolds me in its solemn vows of palms and waterworks. The bells of St. Michael’s ring out for me, and it is surprising that they call out my name, and my name alone.
Walking down Broad Street, the city’s soft hands continue to heal the lesions and distempers of my inflamed psyche. As we pass the first floors of houses we peek into the private lives of our neighbors and can study their nighttime activities as though they are anchovies or pilot fish in an aquarium. One family is eating a late-night supper; one solitary woman listens to Così Fan Tutte by Mozart. Most families sit in joyless clusters watching television.
Before we make the turn at Tradd Street, Mother stops me. “There’s something I need to tell you, Leo. You’re not going to like it.”
“Hey, it’s the day I buried my wife,” I say. “A day like any other day.”
“It’s not perfect timing, I will admit,” she says, “but there’s never a good time. I’m going back to my convent. My order has accepted me back.”
“Una problema, piccola,” I tell her in my pidgin Italian. “What about me? Most nuns don’t have children.”
“You’re no problem,” she says. “They have a program for former nuns who’ve married and lost their husbands. Monsignor Max and I have been praying about this for a long time.”
“Can I visit you? Hey, Sister, I’d like to visit Mother. She’s a nun.”
“You’ll get used to it,” Mother says. “I’ve been floating on air since I made the decision.”
“Did I hear an evil cliché enter your conversation?” I ask in mock consternation.
“Well, that’s how I feel, like I’m floating on air. I’d like you to do the honor of driving me up to North Carolina, just as your father did all those long years ago.”
The next month I drive Mother to the hospital, and I remain outside the monsignor’s room out of respect for the privacy and devotion they had brought to their extraordinary friendship. Mother stays for an hour and is crying softly as I lead her back to the car. I drive her to the house that Father built, and she goes inside the freshly restored home and admires the improvements the construction crew has made. While she inspects the house, I spot a lone magnolia blossom high in one of her trees and scramble up to retrieve it, feeling older with every branch I climb. I break off the flower, the first of the season, inhale its sweetness, and decide it was worth the climb. I hand it to Mother and am delighted when she pins it to her hair.
We drive leisurely on the back roads of the Carolinas; the magnolia’s aroma makes the car smell like a broken perfume bottle. We note the exact moment we depart the Low Country and begin to climb the continent with a nearly imperceptible gradualness. Mother names every tree, shrub, and flower we pass, and she applauds when I stop the car and help a snapping turtle across the highway near a black-water creek. We eat lunch in Camden and reach the convent before five o’clock. The mother superior is waiting for us. She embraces Mother and says: “Welcome back, Sister Norberta.”
“It’s where I want to be, Sister Mary Urban,” she replies.
Mother and I take each other in and try to make it easy. But there is nothing on earth that can make this departure anything less than trying. I don’t remember when I started loving Mother, but it had happened. Nor do I have any idea when she started loving me, but the knowledge that her love is available in a boundless source had presented itself to me. I can use it as a sword on a pillow or a hermitage; a warm bath, a butterfly garden, or a flow of molten lava. Her love is thorned and complex and it can sometimes hurt me in the most tender places. But who said either love or life would be a cakewalk? Mother and I have fought our way screaming and clawing and lashing out as we rolled in the bloody dust, testing the brute, tensile strength of that armory where the sheet lightning of our love was stored. Our love ties us together forever.
“Thanks for letting me do this, Leo,” she says. “It’s generous of you.”
“My mother’s a tough old bird. She’s her own woman.”
“Will you take care of the monsignor?”
“I’ll read him a story every night,” I promise.
“I know you’re hurting now, Leo, but don’t give up on the Church.”
“I’m on a sabbatical,” I say. “Maybe it’ll be a brief one.”
“I wasn’t meant to be a mother,” she confesses. “I’m sorry I was such a poor one.”
“Best I ever had,” I assured her, and in an instant, she is in my arms.
“Try to meet a nice girl,” she whispers. “I’d love for you to become a father.”
I look over Mother’s shoulder toward Sister Mary Urban and ask, “Can a nun become a grandmother?”
“This one can,” the mother superior says with a smile.
Two sisters come down the steps to escort Mother into her once and future life. We kiss good-bye, and I watch as Mother disappears behind those dark, oaken doors. I think of Father making this same trip so many years before. I consider both the congruities and the dangers that circles represent in a human life. Delivering Mother to the convent steps represents a circle in the fate of two men named King. But it seems like a revoking and a starting over. Mother needs a place of refuge now, a place to escape the storms. I let her go. I set her free to drift into the sea-lanes of prayer and simplicity in the frankincensed glooms of a convent working out the dilemmas of darkness itself.
“Mother Superior?” I ask as she turns to go back to her convent.
“Yes, Leo?”
“Does the convent need anything? A year’s supply of anything?”
“We need everything,” she says. “Let me think. Lightbulbs. Yes, that’s our most pressing need at the moment.”
The next day I deliver a thousand lightbulbs to the convent’s back door, and mark off one more circle as I continue to monitor the navigational quadrants of my own l
ife. Now that I’ve been alerted, I develop an eye for circles and the strange power they exert over human connections.
CHAPTER 31 Film Studies
As Trevor’s strength grows, he begins walking the streets of Charleston with me in the evening. At first, we walk up to Broad Street and back, and Trevor is winded and exhausted when we return to the house. But each day we go farther. By the end of the summer, we are walking the full length of the Battery, turning north, and once reaching the Citadel gates. Often, we walk past the street where we met, and he checks his mother’s mailbox and I check the mail for Sister Norberta. I suffer an inner pang when I see the FOR SALE sign in front of Trevor’s house, and the phone number of his Realtor, Bitsy Turner.
“I’m absolutely certain that if Bitsy had been born a man, she would’ve chosen to be gay,” he says. “That’s a certainty, and not mere speculation. She’s a living doll.”
“Don’t share that with Bitsy,” I suggest.
“I would think she’d be honored,” Trevor replies. “What’s the idle gossip around the Holy City? The juiciest, dirtiest, basest, most disgusting filth you’ve got?”
“Judge Lawson was caught screwing his poodle,” I say. “That’s the kind of stuff I hear but can’t use in my columns.”
“It must’ve been a miniature poodle,” Trevor drawls in reply. “I’ve caught a peek at his private parts.”
“Where on earth did you see his private parts?” I ask as we turn west down Calhoun Street, passing the hospital.
“In the shower room at the yacht club.”
“I didn’t know they even had a shower room.”
“Oh, I’ve done a lot of things in that shower room. Seldom showered.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” I say.
“So uptight, so repressed, so Catholic.” Trevor shakes his head sadly. “I like it that way.”
“I’m starting to miss San Francisco.” There is wistfulness in his voice, a lost, dreamy quality that I have not heard in him for a long time. “I remember Saturday nights when I’d walk down Union Street about the time the sun was setting. I was young and beautiful and desirable, the king of any bar I’d choose. I made magic in that city. I made that city magic for a thousand boys.”
“How’s that AIDS thing going?” I ask.
“Do hush up,” he says, “and let me dream my perverted dreams of a young invert on the prowl.”
“They put Monsignor Max back in the hospital today,” I say. “He may not last much longer. Wanna go up with me to visit him?”
“Naw, I’ll see you back at the house.”
“You got something against the monsignor?”
“Not my cup of semen,” Trevor says with a hitch of his shoulder as he continues on Calhoun Street.
I go up to Monsignor Max’s room in the cancer ward and nod to several young priests as they complete their visitation. The room is dark and meditative and I think Max is asleep when I lay a pile of letters from Mother on his nightstand.
“I just received extreme unction,” Max says, his voice labored and scratchy.
“Then your soul is pure white.”
“One can only hope.”
“You’re worn-out,” I tell him. “Please bless me and I’ll be on my way. I’ll come back to see you tomorrow.”
I kneel by his bed and feel his thumb make the sign of the cross; I’m surprised when he blesses me in Latin. When I kiss him on the forehead, he is already asleep, so I tiptoe out of his room.
I return home and Trevor fixes me a drink. We sit facing each other, as easy in each other’s presence as an old married couple. We sit like this most nights and talk of many things: San Francisco, high school, my mother’s return to the convent. When we are drunk, we speak of Sheba and Starla, but it is too early in the evening for that.
“I walked past that high school you got kicked out of,” Trevor says.
“Bishop Ireland?”
He nods. “It looked very Catholic to me. It even smelled Catholic.”
“It’s a Catholic school. That’s the way it’s supposed to look and smell.”
“So you still believe all that Catholic bullshit?”
“Yes, I believe in all that Catholic bullshit,” I reply.
“And you think you’re getting into heaven? Or something like that? That all of you do?”
“Something like that,” I say.
“Poor brainwashed Toad.” After a long pause, he emits a deep exhalation of breath. “Well, I’ve got something to tell you, Toad. I know I have to, but I keep putting it off.”
“Do it.”
“I can’t,” Trevor says in a small voice. “It’s too horrible.”
“Horrible?” I echo. “That’s a strong word.”
“Horrible doesn’t begin to do it justice.”
For a moment I freeze. Then I repeat, “Do it.”
He takes another drink, then he tells me how a few days ago, after he’d begun to regain his strength, he’d started going through his things, including the steamer trunk and the boxes Anna Cole had forwarded to him from San Francisco. He’d come upon a cache of gay pornography I’d sent him many years ago when it was found in storage in my parents’ house, presumably left by one of my father’s boarders before he married. Having nothing but time on his hands, he had given it a closer look.
“I love gay porn and always have. When you sent the steamer trunk out to me, I was especially curious about the collection from so long ago—those were the dark ages, with production values about zero. All the films are scratchy, older, grainy. A lot of them are homemade, though you have to forgive that. They were pioneers in very dangerous times.”
“Glad you enjoyed them,” I tell him drily. “Why are you telling me this?”
Trevor takes a breath before he answers. “Well, I delved into the trunk deeper this time and brought out a black box—an old toolbox, very strong. I couldn’t get it open in San Francisco, and never bothered with it much. But when I was culling my earthly possessions”—he pauses to take a sip of drink—“I got curious, and shot off the lock with your pistol. By the way, I think it’s absurd to own a handgun. I am so antigun.”
“I bought that gun because of your lunatic father,” I remind him.
“Oh, that old chestnut,” Trevor says. “Then it’s absurd you didn’t buy me one too. Well”—he sighs again—“here goes. I shot off the lock, and there was a private collection in the box. Homemade. You know, the old home movies. I couldn’t wait to watch them, and—I made a discovery. An awful discovery, I’m afraid.”
“What did you find?”
“Maybe we need to stiffen these drinks,” he suggests. “You’re going to need it when you see this film. Here’s how bad it is—I had to force myself to watch it to be absolutely certain before showing it to you. I had to be sure it was who I thought it was. All week I’ve been debating destroying the film, and never telling you. I even prayed to God about it—the one I don’t believe in.”
“What did God say?”
“Well, the cat had His tongue, as usual, but I finally decided it was something you need to know.”
“Run it,” I tell him.
At three in the morning, I slip past nurses and night watchmen and enter into the stillness of Monsignor Max’s room, carrying my old Citadel backpack on my arm. By the dim glow of a nightlight, I remove an old-fashioned movie projector, plug it into the outlet, and turn it on. It hums like a jar filled with wasps, then a badly done home movie comes on, cast in shaking, flickering images against the stark white wall across from the monsignor’s bed. The eye of the camera is focused on a bed in an empty, unknown room. The camera is like a staring, motionless eye. Trevor explained that in homemade porn, the camera is often propped near a bed to catch the action. In the grainy film, a priest appears in the room with his arm around the throat of a struggling, naked boy. The boy is beautiful and blond; the priest is handsome, virile, and strong. The boy tries to scream, but the priest stops him with a hand around his mouth. Th
e boy struggles, but he is overpowered and raped by the priest, and raped brutally, as if there were any other way.
The priest is a younger, stronger Max Sadler, and the boy my brother, Steve. Stephen Dedalus King, the brother I found floating in a bloody bathtub the year I fell apart, the year I began my soul treks through mental hospitals and Thorazine hazes, struggling to find the boy I was before I pulled my brother as wreckage from that tub. As I sit there, I remember how I once entertained the horrible thought that my father was somehow complicit in Steve’s death, because I’d heard him scream out in a nightmare: “No, Father. No, please.” I thought he was calling out in fear of our own gentle father and not the beast who lies dying in the hospital bed beside me.