Because I Come from a Crazy Family Page 7

  We went and ate breakfast in the dining car. I was amazed at how heavy the knives and forks were, and how thick were the china plates, cups, and saucers, all white with a thin sky blue line around them for decoration. I had fried eggs, bacon, and, for the first time, grits. “You’ll be having lots of grits in Charleston,” Uncle Unger said. “It’s a staple of the South.”

  “What’s a staple?” I asked.

  “It’s something you have every day. But a staple is also something you punch into papers to hold them together. It’s a word with two meanings. There are lots of those.”

  Uncle Unger loved words, too. He had worked for the Saturday Evening Post in New York City before he retired. He was retired when I met him. Jamie told me being retired meant he was rich enough so he didn’t have to work.

  15.

  People I would come to know well met us at the station in Charleston. They were cousins of Unger’s: J. J. and Chance Ravenel. One of their sons, Trippy, was about my age and became one of the few friends I made during my three years in that city.

  “Hey,” Trippy said that day as he ambled my way. I’d learn that “Hey” was Charlestonese for “Hi.” “Wanna put a penny on the track?” Trippy asked with great enthusiasm.

  “Sure. What does that do?”

  “When the train leaves the station and rolls over the penny, it flattens it out like you can’t believe.”

  Trippy took a penny out of his pocket, walked over to the track, bent down under the train, and put the penny on the rail in front of one of the smooth steel wheels. I watched carefully. There was a stark contrast between the black, greasy undercarriage of the train hovering above the blackened, sooty stones of the railroad bed, and the still, silvery rail itself that practically glistened in the daylight of Charleston, as well as the even more silvery surface of the part of the wheel that rolled on the rail.

  Sure enough, after the conductor, holding on to a silver bar on the side of the car, with one leg on the train and one leg out, cried in a long, loud drawl, “Booooaaaard! Awwwaaall aaaabooooard!” and the train, which I had so relished riding on, hissed and gathered up its haunches, gradually pulling out of the station and leaving us standing there on the concrete platform with our bags and our welcoming troupe, what was left of Trippy’s penny was no longer a penny at all. It looked as if it had melted right there on the rail, like a butterscotch sundae left out in the sun. As I was about to be, it had been squished by enormous force into a totally different shape.

  “Here,” Trippy said, giving me the transformed penny, “this is for you. Welcome to Charleston.”

  I had no idea what was in store for me, but I figured I’d find a way to live without Lyndie and Jamie in this new city. We rented a beautiful house at 75 King Street, with high ceilings and fancy furniture.

  Most mornings I’d wake up to a loud cry it took me a while to understand. “Shrimpy-raw-raw-raw! Shrimpy-raw-raw-raw!” Once I knew what the woman was calling out, it was easy to understand it, but until I asked our maid what on earth that woman was yelling and why, I had no idea. “Go out on the street and look,” Victoria, one of our two maids, said.

  Sure enough, outside was a woman, who looked a lot like Victoria, pushing a green wooden cart filled to overflowing with shrimp. Maids, mothers, and whoever else wanted to hustled out of houses and bought the shrimp fresh off the boats. The way Victoria cooked them, all crispy with a bread crumb coating, was to die for. I’ve never had them done like that since. They were the best shrimp I ever ate, or, as one of Victoria’s friends said, “best shrimp you ever et.”

  As tasty as those shrimp were, the stink of Charleston’s pluff mud was equally foul. I can still smell that pluff mud. Found in the salt marshes in the low country, it is a deep, gray, gooey mud created by the decomposition of the cordgrasses along with the rich marine life the tides bring in, crabs, shrimp, and various fishes, all worked on by that master creator of stink, anaerobic bacteria. When the wind blows from a certain direction, parts of Charleston reek of the hydrogen sulfide those anaerobes put out. You get used to it, even like it, the way some people like the smell of a stable, but it stinks nonetheless. Why do I miss it, I wonder, foul as it was?

  I soon fell into a routine. I’d wake up on my own, go downstairs and pour myself cereal and eat it. I’d then get the newspaper, which was delivered to the front door, the Charleston News and Courier, lie down on the living room rug, and read the comics before school. I followed one comic strip in particular, Dondi. It was about a war orphan brought back to the United States. I read other comic strips each day, but I went to Dondi first.

  Each morning I’d ride a Schwinn bike I’d picked out soon after we arrived in Charleston to the school Mom enrolled me in. I had no Jamie to walk to school with, but I had my red Schwinn, which I liked a lot. I liked being able to ride fast, no-handed, with my Army surplus backpack on my back.

  In third grade, I attended my first private school. I didn’t know the difference between private and public school. I didn’t know any of the other kids at my school because Trippy went to a public school. I would later learn that my grandmother paid my tuition and all my other expenses, even though Uncle Unger could easily have afforded to.

  After school, I’d bike home. Victoria would have made me lunch, which I would eat on my own, usually in front of a TV watching As the World Turns, since my mother and Uncle Unger ate “dinner,” which the midday meal was called, later, around two o’clock. This meant he started drinking earlier than he used to in Chatham, as drinks preceded the two o’clock dinner. The evening meal, supper, usually found everyone so sloshed that Victoria or Georgiana, our other maid, or sometimes my mother, or sometimes I myself, would put together a meal for me. I started to like to cook.

  In the afternoon, I would find random things to do, like put together a birdhouse from a kit someone had left in the shop/greenhouse abutting the main house. After putting it together, I hung it with string from a pecan tree in the yard and stocked it with birdseed bought at the Rexall drugstore a few blocks down King Street. I liked my birdhouse. I grew into a bit of a birdwatcher, prizing the bluejays and cardinals and other birds I didn’t recognize who stopped by to eat.

  I also joined the Cub Scouts and would go to meetings once a week and work on projects with other kids. I didn’t make any good friends there—being a Yankee, I talked funny, so while the other kids were perfectly nice to me, they didn’t go out of their way to befriend me.

  One time a kid in my class invited me to his house for “dinner.” I remember sitting at a rather formal dining room table eating with his family and thinking this was great, I’d made a new friend.

  But not long after that he came up to me and told me that I had been a really nice kid at first, but I had changed, so we couldn’t be friends any longer. This was actually OK with me, because I had my classmate, Bobby Hitt, as a friend, and I liked being by myself. But I wondered in what way I had changed enough that this kid went from asking me to his home for dinner to dropping me as his friend. Looking back now, I think it was either that his parents had decided he shouldn’t be friends with a Yankee, or the wear and tear of living in the same house as Uncle Unger was taking its toll and I was indeed changing for the worse in ways I was not aware of.

  What I did most on those afternoons was develop an ardent love of movies. There were three theaters within biking distance of our house: the Gloria, the Garden, and the luxurious Riviera. The Gloria and Garden cost ten cents admission, while the Riviera was twenty-five. Popcorn and a soda were a nickel. I went to the movies as much as I could. Nobody cared, which was great. For a kid, it was a dream come true. Do whatever you want.

  I saw lots of war movies and westerns, with actors like John Wayne, Richard Widmark, Fess Parker, and Edward G. Robinson, whom I especially liked because his first name, Edward, was the same as mine. I liked the Three Stooges movies probably best of all, but I liked pretty much any movie that had a plot.

  The Riviera showed the more
sophisticated, adult movies like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, or Separate Tables, which I would go to because they were movies, but I thought they were boring. I didn’t like them nearly as much as war movies, westerns, or comedies.

  I remember laughing so hard, all by myself, that I wet my pants while watching No Time for Sergeants with Andy Griffith. The scene when he makes the toilet seats go up totally cracked me up. I also loved the epics. I went to The Ten Commandments seven or eight times, the same for Ben-Hur.

  Movies meant the world to me. They gave me a new world, not so much an escape as an entrance into action, adventure, laughter, spectacle, all under control, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Movies were paradise for me during those years, a godsend.

  16.

  Not long after we arrived in Charleston, and before I started school, I found myself in a church getting baptized. I think I was eight.

  Other than Marnie teaching us about blackness at the end, and being told that Grandpa Kent had been a minister, I knew nothing about religion.

  I did know about God, though. My mother would say the Lord’s Prayer with me every night, and she would tell me never to worry about anything because “God is everywhere.” That had been my religious training but it worked. I believed her.

  There was also a Quaker theme that my Gammy Hallowell continued, I believe out of respect for our ancestor Lucretia Mott. Gammy considered herself a Quaker of a very vanilla, not devout, sort and went to Quaker Meeting now and then in Sandwich. She told me how proud she was of the Sandwich meeting because it was—is—the oldest continuing meeting in America, having started in 1656. I was impressed, but not for the reason Gammy would have hoped. I was so young I thought the “Sandwich meeting” was where they served sandwiches.

  The most noticeable manifestation of Quakerism in my early childhood was that Gammy Hallowell, Duckie and Uncle Jimmy, and Lyndie and Jamie all called each other “thee” and used the possessive pronoun “thy.” So when Duckie would greet me, she’d say, “Well, there thee is!” or “How is thee?” I grew so used to it that I didn’t even notice it but when friends visited they’d always ask me what it was all about.

  Dad thought it was stupid, so we never got into the thee-thy habit. I always kind of liked it and wished we had adopted it.

  But no one—not Duckie and Uncle Jimmy, not Mom or Dad, and only rarely Gammy Hallowell—had gone to church or Quaker meetings regularly, or any other sort of religious ceremony. That I said the Lord’s Prayer before I went to bed set me apart from Jamie and Lyndie, but we never talked about it. They didn’t tease me about it or anything like that, and I really didn’t make anything of it. Jamie and Lyndie said “thee” and I said the Lord’s Prayer, but we didn’t make any more of it than we did of preferring Whiting’s milk to Hood’s. In fact, that we all drank Whiting’s mattered more, just as we all knew Fords were classier than Chevrolets.

  But there I was, in a church, about to be baptized. My brother Ben joined the ceremony, as did my mother. Uncle Unger had been baptized years before. It turns out that joining the Episcopal Church was what well-bred white people did in Charleston.

  So off we went to St. Michael’s. Chance Ravenel, Trippy’s mom, was my godmother, and Hugh Stiles, Uncle Unger’s cousin, whom I called Uncle Hugh, was my godfather. Uncle Hugh was a doctor, the team doctor for the football squad at the Citadel, and one of the nicest men I ever met in my life.

  DeWolfe Perry was the minister, or what Episcopalians call the rector. He dripped water onto my forehead, and the foreheads of the others getting baptized, and prayers got said, including the one I knew, the Lord’s Prayer. Before I knew it, I was an Episcopalian.

  I was signed up for the choir. Whoever did it didn’t ask me, I was just told to go to choir practice at the church on Wednesdays at five o’clock. So I did.

  The choir director was also the organist. She was a beautiful woman. I was always amazed that she played the organ not only with her hands but with her feet.

  There was also a pretty girl in the choir named Tinka Perry, the rector’s daughter. I never told her how pretty I thought she was, nor did I ever have a one-on-one conversation with her (until fifty years later), but she was my first crush.

  Because of Tinka, but also because of the nice lady who directed us, I came to love choir. I would ride my red Schwinn to St. Michael’s every Wednesday at five and ride it there again every Sunday morning at eight because Uncle Unger and Mom never went to church, opting to sleep in and recover from the night before. My mother would wake up to tie my tie, then fall back asleep while I got on my bike. Once at church, the choir members would don our red cassocks and white surplices, and we’d process, sing, recess, and have fun.

  After services, there was always a wonderful breakfast. It was called “coffee hour” but there was much more than coffee. The highlight was the ham biscuits, “beaten biscuits,” which meant the dough was beaten for fifteen to thirty minutes, until it blistered. This gave it a special texture and flavor able to stand up to the thin slice of salt-cured ham that would be laid within it, slathered with mustard butter. I could have eaten them all day, along with the copious amount of orange juice I washed them down with.

  St. Michael’s became my clubhouse and the choir my club. I listened to the services, and Reverend Perry’s sermons, but they zipped right over my head. Many of the hymns stuck with me, like “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty,” or “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” or “Jesus Christ Is Risen Today,” and, of course, all the Christmas carols.

  The choir rehearsed for months for the big combined-choirs Christmas service. I felt I was part of something special, rehearsing for that event, one eye on Tinka, the other on everyone else, singing, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.” I didn’t know who Emmanuel was, but I joyfully sang and invited him to come, O come. I was really pretty clueless about theology and the various beliefs I supposedly held and affirmed every Sunday. I didn’t know what the service was all about but I still loved church.

  And not just for the ham biscuits, the singing, and Tinka. I loved the feelings I got at St. Michael’s: the joy I felt whenever I went to church, the happiness and hope. I never left church or choir practice feeling anything but happy and glad. Those bike rides to and from St. Michael’s were some of my happiest times in Charleston, right up there with the bike rides to and from the Garden, Gloria, and Riviera.

  Sometimes I would take home with me the little pamphlets that were on display outside the church office. I didn’t actually read them—they were about prayer and eternal life and the promises we make to God and such—but it wasn’t the content I cared about so much as that they were mementos of church, keepsakes from a place I loved.

  I didn’t notice that no black people attended the church. I would learn many years later that after one of the services during my years in Charleston, one of the wardens (in Episcopal churches there is a vestry, a committee of people that run the church, which is headed by a senior warden and a junior warden) told Reverend Perry that he was going to report him to the bishop for allowing a black man to sit in the congregation one Sunday. If he ever did report him, nothing came of it. I would also learn that “colored people” were allowed to sit in the balcony for a wedding or a funeral of a person in whose home they worked, but otherwise they were not allowed in.

  One day I built a little altar in my bedroom on the third floor of our new house on the harbor, right near the Battery, within sight of Fort Sumter, where the Civil War started. I had a window with a deep windowsill that looked right out onto Charleston Harbor.

  I took some linen napkins from the drawer in the dining room and went up to the attic where some candlesticks were stored and set up an altar on the windowsill, which was more than deep enough to hold all my paraphernalia. I stocked my altar with the pamphlets I had taken from church along with the Book of Common Prayer I’d been given as a baptism present by Uncle Hugh and Chance.

  I also found a red upholstered foots
tool in the attic that I used to kneel on in front of the altar. It was pretty similar to the stools we knelt on in church, so it felt authentic to me.

  At random times I would kneel on the footstool, bow my head, and pray. I would always say the Lord’s Prayer. Sometimes I’d read from one of the pamphlets or from the Book of Common Prayer. I didn’t know what else to pray, so I would just ask for what I hoped for, usually that Uncle Unger could be less mean and that my mother could be happy.

  I came to love my bedroom on the third floor of 76 East Bay St., the house we moved to from 75 King St. Not only did I have my little altar with its view of the harbor, I could also see the old rotting ship that Bobby Hitt and I turned into a fort/clubhouse, and I had my magic carpet of a TV. That bedroom became one of the many places I created in my life where I could feel safe and cozy, a place where I could live in fantasy as much as I pleased.

  17.

  Sober, Uncle Unger was a charming man, urbane, witty, a one-of-a-kind character, a man, even after I came to hate him, whom I emulated in many ways and who to this day makes up a significant part of who and what I am.

  When the alcohol hit him, it changed a man who, when sober, looked rather like Clark Gable into a living gargoyle, a truly horrifying sight. It was usually gin that unleashed this poison, but sometimes it was bourbon. When he’d had more martinis than anyone could remember or count, a terrible, buried part of him rose up and slithered through him, taking possession of him altogether. The ominous telltale signs were the many pat phrases Uncle Unger used only when drunk, like the aforementioned “Shove off!”