Excerpt

Prologue
The Mansion on the River

It was my father who called the city the Mansion on the
River.

He was talking about Charleston, South Carolina, and he was a
native son, peacock proud of a town so pretty it makes your eyes
ache with pleasure just to walk down its spellbinding, narrow
streets. Charleston was my father's ministry, his hobbyhorse, his
quiet obsession, and the great love of his life. His bloodstream
lit up my own with a passion for the city that I've never lost nor
ever will. I'm Charleston-born, and bred. The city's two rivers,
the Ashley and the Cooper, have flooded and shaped all the days of
my life on this storied peninsula.

I carry the delicate porcelain beauty of Charleston like the
hinged shell of some soft-tissued mollusk. My soul is
peninsula-shaped and sun-hardened and river-swollen. The high tides
of the city flood my consciousness each day, subject to the whims
and harmonies of full moons rising out of the Atlantic. I grow calm
when I see the ranks of palmetto trees pulling guard duty on the
banks of Colonial Lake or hear the bells of St. Michael's calling
cadence in the cicada-filled trees along Meeting Street. Deep in my
bones, I knew early that I was one of those incorrigible creatures
known as Charlestonians. It comes to me as a surprising form of
knowledge that my time in the city is more vocation than gift; it
is my destiny, not my choice. I consider it a high privilege to be
a native of one of the loveliest American cities, not a
high-kicking, glossy, or lipsticked city, not a city with bells on
its fingers or brightly painted toenails, but a ruffled, low-slung
city, understated and tolerant of nothing mismade or ostentatious.
Though Charleston feels a seersuckered, tuxedoed view of itself, it
approves of restraint far more than vainglory.

As a boy, in my own backyard I could catch a basket of blue
crabs, a string of flounder, a dozen redfish, or a net full of
white shrimp. All this I could do in a city enchanting enough to
charm cobras out of baskets, one so corniced and filigreed and
elaborate that it leaves strangers awed and natives self-satisfied.
In its shadows you can find metalwork as delicate as lace and
spiral staircases as elaborate as yachts. In the secrecy of its
gardens you can discover jasmine and camellias and hundreds of
other plants that look embroidered and stolen from the Garden of
Eden for the sheer love of richness and the joy of stealing from
the gods. In its kitchens, the stoves are lit up in happiness as
the lamb is marinating in red wine sauce, vinaigrette is prepared
for the salad, crabmeat is anointed with sherry, custards are baked
in the oven, and buttermilk biscuits cool on the counter.

Because of its devotional, graceful attraction to food and
gardens and architecture, Charleston stands for all the principles
that make living well both a civic virtue and a standard. It is a
rapturous, defining place to grow up. Everything I reveal to you
now will be Charleston-shaped and Charleston-governed, and
sometimes even Charleston-ruined. But it is my fault and not the
city's that it came close to destroying me. Not everyone responds
to beauty in the same way. Though Charleston can do much, it can't
always improve on the strangeness of human behavior. But Charleston
has a high tolerance for eccentricity and bemusement. There is a
tastefulness in its gentility that comes from the knowledge that
Charleston is a permanent dimple in the understated skyline, while
the rest of us are only visitors.

My father was an immensely gifted science teacher who could make
the beach at Sullivan's Island seem like a laboratory created for
his own pleasures and devices. He could pick up a starfish, or
describe the last excruciating moments of an oyster's life on a
flat a hundred yards from where we stood. He made Christmas
ornaments out of the braceletlike egg casings of whelks. In my
mother's gardens he would show me where the ladybug disguised her
eggs beneath the leaves of basil and arugula. In the Congaree
Swamp, he discovered a new species of salamander that was named in
his honor. There was no butterfly that drifted into our life he
could not identify by sight. At night, he would take my brother,
Steve, and I out into the boat to the middle of Charleston Harbor
and make us memorize the constellations. He treated the stars as
though they were love songs written to him by God. With such
reverence he would point out Canis Major, the hound of Orion, the
Hunter; or Cygnus, the Swan; or Andromeda, the Chained Lady; or
Cassiopeia, the Lady in the Chair. My father turned the heavens
into a fresh puzzlement of stars: “Ah, look at Jupiter
tonight. And red Mars. And isn't Venus fresh on her throne?”
A stargazer of the first order, he squealed with pleasure on the
moonless nights when the stars winked at him in some mysterious,
soul- stirring graffiti of ballet-footed light. He would clap his
hands with irresistible joy on a cloudless night when he made every
star in the sky a silver dollar in his pocket.

He was more North Star than father. His curiosity about the
earth ennobled his every waking moment. His earth was
billion-footed, with unseen worlds in every drop of water and every
seedling and every blade of grass. The earth was so generous. It
was this same earth that he prayed to because it was his synonym
for God.

My mother is also a Charlestonian, but her personality strikes
far darker harmonies than my father's did. She is God-haunted and
pious in a city with enough church spires to have earned the name
of the Holy City. She is a scholar of prodigious gifts, who once
wrote a critique of Richard Ellman's biography of James Joyce for
the New York Review of Books. For most of my life she was
a high school principal, and her house felt something like the
hallway of a well-run school. Among her students, she could run a
fine line between fear and respect. There was not much horseplay or
lollygagging about in one of Dr. Lindsay King's schools. I knew
kids who were afraid of me just because she was my mother. She
almost never wears makeup other than lipstick. Besides her wedding
band, the only jewelry she owns is the string of pearls my father
bought her for their honeymoon.

Singularly, without artifice or guile, my mother's world seemed
disconsolate and tragic before she really knew how tragic life
could be. Once she learned that no life could avoid the
consequences of tragedy, she soft¬ened into an ascetic's
acknowledgment of the illusory nature of life. She became a true
believer in the rude awakening.

My older brother, Steve, was her favorite by far, but that
seemed only natural to everyone, including me. Steve was blond and
athletic and charismatic, and had a natural way about him that
appealed to the higher instincts of adults. He could make my mother
howl with laughter by telling her a story of one of his teachers or
about something he had read in a book; I could not have made my
mother smile if I had exchanged arm farts with the Pope in the
Sistine Chapel. Because I hero-worshipped Steve, it never occurred
to me to be jealous of him. He was both solicitous and protective
of me; my natural shyness brought out an instinctive championing of
me. The world of children terrified me, and I found it perilous as
soon as I was exposed to it. Steve cleared a path for me until he
died.

Now, looking back, I think the family suffered a collective
nervous breakdown after we buried Steve. His sudden, inexplicable
death sent me reeling into a downward spiral that would take me
many years to fi ght my way out of and then back into the light. My
bashfulness turned to morbidity. My alarm systems all froze up
inside me. I went directly from a fearful childhood to a hopeless
one without skipping a beat. It was not just the wordless awfulness
of losing a brother that unmoored me but the realization that I had
never bothered to make any other friends, rather had satisfied
myself by being absorbed into that wisecracking circle of girls and
boys who found my brother so delicious that his tagalong brother
was at least acceptable. After Steve's death, that circle abandoned
me before the flowers at his graveside had withered. Like Steve,
they were bright and flashy children, and I always felt something
like a toadstool placed outside the watch fires of their mysteries
and attractions.

So I began the Great Drift when Steve left my family forever. I
found myself thoroughly unable to fulfill my enhanced duties as an
only child. I could not take a step without incurring my mother's
helpless wrath over my raw un-Stephenness, her contempt for my not
being blond and acrobatic and a Charleston boy to watch. It never
occurred to me that my mother could hold against me my unfitness to
transfer myself into the child she had relished and lost. For
years, I sank into the unclear depths of myself, and learned with
some surprise that their haunted explorations would both thrill and
alarm me for the rest of my life. A measurable touch of madness was
enough to send my fragile boyhood down the river, and it took some
hard labor to get things right again. I could always feel a flinty,
unconquerable spirit staring out of the mangroves and the
impenetrable rain forests inside me, a spirit who waited with a
mineral patience for that day I was to claim myself back because of
my own fi erce need of survival. In the worst of times, there was
something that lived in isolation and commitment that would come at
my bidding and stand beside me, shoulder-to-shoulder, when I
decided to face the world on my own terms.

I turned out to be a late bloomer, which I long regretted. My
parents suffered needlessly because it took me so long to find my
way to a place at their table. But I sighted the early signs of my
recovery long before they did. My mother had given up on me at such
an early age that a comeback was something she no longer even
prayed for in her wildest dreams. Yet in my anonymous and
underachieving high school career, I laid the foundation for a
strong finish without my mother noticing that I was, at last, up to
some good. I had built an impregnable castle of solitude for myself
and then set out to bring that castle down, no matter how serious
the collateral damage or who might get hurt.

I was eighteen years old and did not have a friend my own age.
There wasn't a boy in Charleston who would think about inviting me
to a party or to come out to spend the weekend at his family's
beach house.

I planned for all that to change. I had decided to become the
most interesting boy to ever grow up in Charleston, and I revealed
this secret to my parents.

Outside my house in the languid summer air of my eighteenth
year, I climbed the magnolia tree nearest to the Ashley River with
the agility that constant practice had granted me. From its highest
branches, I surveyed my city as it lay simmering in the hot-blooded
saps of June while the sun began to set, reddening the vest of
cirrus clouds that had gathered along the western horizon. In the
other direction, I saw the city of rooftops and columns and gables
that was my native land. What I had just promised my parents, I
wanted very much for them and for myself. Yet I also wanted it for
Charleston. I desired to turn myself into a worthy townsman of such
a many-storied city.

Charleston has its own heartbeat and fingerprint, its own mug
shots and photo ops and police lineups. It is a city of
contrivance, of blueprints; devotion to pattern that is like a bent
knee to the nature of beauty itself. I could feel my destiny
forming in the leaves high above the city. Like Charleston, I had
my alleyways that were dead ends and led to nowhere, but mansions
were forming like jewels in my bloodstream. Looking down, I studied
the layout of my city, the one that had taught me all the lures of
attractiveness, yet made me suspicious of the showy or the
makeshift. I turned to the stars and was about to make a bad throw
of the dice and try to predict the future, but stopped myself in
time.

A boy stopped in time, in a city of amber-colored life that
possessed the glamour forbidden to a lesser angel.

South of Broad
by by Pat Conroy [5]

Genres: Fiction [10]
paperback: 544 pages
Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback
ISBN-10: 0385344074
ISBN-13: 9780385344074