The Pat Conroy Cookbook (10 page)

“Mr. Monte, my English teacher at Gonzaga High School, gave us extra credit if we went to see
The Virgin Spring,”
I said. “I wrote a paper on it.”

“This Mr. Monte must have been a special teacher,” she said. “This is my personal copy. Take it home, but bring it back. I loathe people who don’t return books and their tribe is legion.”

“I’ll bring it back next class,” I offered.

“Thank you. You used the word ‘poignant’ in one of your poems. I dislike that word intensely. It’s been greatly overused by untalented people.”

“Poignant’s gone, Mrs. M,” I said.

“Why did you call me Mrs. M?” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I shorten people’s names. It’s a bad habit.”

“Mrs. M,” she said coldly. “I like it. Please call me that.”

Though my affliction with Thomas Wolfe was now an effervescence that lit up my prose, Mrs. M gave me assignments that showed me another way to go. She required that my adjectives actually mean something when I landed them into one of my overloaded paragraphs. She brought all six of her students news of the world of writing, read us letters from both her agent and editor, and took our efforts with high seriousness. I discovered that my lab mate in physics, Allen Ryan, was the best poet in the school by a long shot; that his sister, Terry, might have been the smartest person I’d ever met; and that a shy, unartificial girl named Joan Fewell produced work every week that was surprising, original, and offbeat. I took great delight in the work that our carefully selected class produced, and the six of us ended up filling over half the literary magazine at the end of the year. We took Mrs. M’s class with the
solemnity that her massive coolness seemed to require. Never once did she seem comfortable around us, her gravity and reserve forces of nature that deflected the possibility of any caprice or horseplay in her presence. She never gave the slightest sign that she was falling in love with us as we turned in our sketches, poems, and stories for her critical inspection.

Once, during basketball season, Mrs. M stopped me outside the library door and said, “Pat, where are you attending college next year?”

I blushed and said, “I don’t know, Mrs. M.”

“You don’t know? That’s absurd. Allen’s already been accepted to Stanford.”

“I’ve got to win a basketball scholarship,” I said. “Otherwise I don’t know if my parents can afford it.”

“What nonsense. Your father’s an officer in the Marine Corps,” she said. “You don’t come from a family of beggars. What’ll you do if you don’t get a scholarship?”

“I don’t know, Mrs. M.”

“This is preposterous. I wish to speak with your father,” she said.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Mrs. M. Dad’s a little different.”

“I’m a graduate of Antioch College in Ohio,” she said. “I think you’d flourish in such an atmosphere. It’s free-spirited and bohemian.”

“I wouldn’t tell my father that.”

“What are your parents thinking?” she said.

After basketball practice that night, I entered the car of my scowling father and he got right to the point. “Who is this Morse broad that’s teaching you?”

“Mrs. M. It’s an English class, Dad,” I said.

“You’re lying. It’s a goddamn creative writing class. Did I ever give you permission to be in an artsy-fartsy class like that? Damn right, I didn’t. The Morse broad started lecturing me about when we’re supposed to apply for you to go to college. Like it’s any of her goddamn business. Do you know what she told me? That she thought she could get you a free ride to Antioch on a creative writing scholarship. Isn’t that some shit? You know what Antioch’s famous for producing?”

“No, sir.”

“Communists, that’s what. They turn ‘em out like sausages up there. It’s a whole college full of fruitcakes and weirdos and pinkos. What a pushy broad. She talked to me like I was a fucking shoeshine boy and she was the Queen of fucking Sheba. Drop that course, pal. That’s an order.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Antioch fucking communist Ohio,” he said. “You can bet your sweet ass you ain’t going there.”

When Mrs. M drove up to the high school parking lot for the next class, I opened the door of her car and explained that my father had demanded that I drop her course. Mrs. M handed me a briefcase filled with her books and papers and we walked together toward the library.

“I must be honest, Pat,” she said. “I found your father to be a dreadful man. Our conversation was not fruitful.”

“You’ve got to catch Dad on the right day,” I said defensively. “He takes some getting used to.”

“He was a perfect ass,” she said, and I laughed because I had never heard anyone called that in my life. “Your mother must be a saint.”

“You’d like Mom a lot, Mrs. M.”

“Are you going to quit my course?”

“I have to. Dad’d kill me if he knew I disobeyed him,” I said.

“He told me that he was going to make you quit,” Mrs. M said. “But I have come up with a plan.”

“What is your plan?”

“Simplicity itself. Guerrilla warfare. I scratch you off my class roll. Yet you continue to come to class. You do all the work. If anyone asks, I will claim that you dropped the class. You do the same. We will protect each other’s flanks. Our work is literature, Pat. A philistine like your father will not make us deviate from our chosen course.”

“If he finds out, I’m a dead man.”

“I’ll call his office today to say you dropped out,” she said. “I’ll try to get him to reconsider. Because your father is obstinacy itself, he will refuse. It’s foolproof.”

“I’ll do it, Mrs. M.”

“One day, Pat—not now—but someday down the road when you have some distance from all this,” she said, thinking, “you need to write about that guy.”

After that year, Mrs. M never let me drop out of her life and wrote me carefully considered decorous letters that brought me both news of Beaufort and her career and thoughtful commentary on the poems and short stories I had published in The Citadel’s literary magazine,
The Shako
, which I sent for her review. She kept her criticism upbeat and engaged and it was through her letters that I came to know the more passionate artist who simmered beneath that ice palace of a woman whose capacity for reserve seemed like a vocation. In her letters, I could translate her great fondness for me, and she let me know that she took my work with utter seriousness. She sent me a copy of Hemingway’s
A Moveable Feast
when it first came out and told me that one day she and I would travel to Paris together and visit all of Hemingway’s cafés and haunts. In 1979, I took that journey, but Mrs. M did not come with me.

In 1968, the first year I was teaching at Beaufort High School, Gene Norris called me at home to tell me that Ann Head Morse had died of a massive stroke at her home. Dumbstruck, I attended her funeral. I was twenty-two; it was long before I would publish a single word or reward her for the generous faith she had shown in me as a young writer. At the time of her death, Mrs. M was the only writer I actually knew by sight, and her untimely and unforeseen death robbed me of the mentor I thought would help me navigate the fearful world of American publishing. My amateurish entrance into that world was directly related to her disappearance from my life. Her remoteness now seems one of the ways that shyness can manifest itself in people who prize silence. Though I was not her type, she worked to make me her type and succeeded. I was lucky that she found me as a boy, and whenever I publish a new book, I take a rose to her headstone at St. Helena Cemetery in Beaufort and place it before her without a word, respecting her detachment as part of the bond between us. Mrs. M had a hard eye, always on the lookout for the sentimental or the maudlin, and she would disapprove of my visit. She would absolutely shudder at the rose.

ROASTED BEETS WITH BLUE CHEESE AND SHERRY VINAIGRETTE
I have a thing for sugar beets, and I make them in a variety of ways. The recipe presented here is for those excitable moments when I wish to put on the dog. I like to roast or boil beets, chop them up with vigor until they are bite-size, then dress them with Dijon mustard, a knuckle of freshly minced garlic, and the juice of half a lemon. I’ve done the same using sour cream, horseradish, and lemon juice. The only flaw I find with beets is the deep magenta coloring they impart so generously to clothes and hands. Cautious cooks use rubber gloves when handling beets, but I go for several days caught red-handed by friend and foe alike.     
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SERVES 4

OMELET FINES HERBES
The well-folded omelet is the mark of a good cook. My omelets are temperamental, hit-or-miss, or suffer from slight deformities. Nathalie Dupree insisted on the eggs being stovetop for the entire journey, but I have enjoyed greater success with the broiler method. When my father was dying, I made him an elaborate omelet that took a half hour of prep work. I served it to him and he ate it with pleasure, then said, “Best scrambled eggs I ever had, pal.”     
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SERVES 1

ASPARAGUS AND POACHED EGG SALAD WITH BACON

Asparagus with poached egg salad is notable because it is easy to make and tastes as good as anything on earth. It makes me want to sprint to the kitchen.     
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SERVES 1