The Pat Conroy Cookbook (5 page)

SMITHFIELD HAM SPREAD
In the South, the Smithfield ham sets the gold standard. For me, I thought the word “Smithfield” was a synonym for excellence. After the funeral of a friend in Atlanta, I heard a guest boast, “There are four hams on the table. All Smithfield. That’s how much people thought about her.”     
•
MAKES
2½
CUPS

BENNE WAFERS

from
Charleston Receipts
(collected by the Junior League of Charleston, 1950)
     
•
MAKES SEVERAL DOZEN

CRAB LOUIS

from
Party
Receipts from the Junior League of Charleston

•
MAKES 2 CUPS

VIDALIA ONION DIP

from
Windows
(Brenau College Alumnae Association, Gainesville, Georgia)
     
•
MAKES ABOUT 5 CUPS

I
n 1951, my mother enrolled me in St. Paul’s Catholic school in the magical city of New Bern, North Carolina, where Sister Mary Maurice would teach me the useful gift of reading. Everything about New Bern seemed charged with mystery and spectacle and amusement. My mother caught a five-pound bass in the Trent River beneath the bridge, and I remember that black face rising toward the hooked worm like some behemoth out of mythology. There was a shoe store downtown where I could slide my shoes beneath an X-ray machine and study the bones of my small feet. My mother and I would mount a neighbor’s stone fence and feed a speckled fawn found abandoned in the deep woods around New Bern. On the next street, a man with a scuppernong arbor with grapes cascading in green profusion told my grandfather and me to help ourselves to as many grapes as we could eat. My father taught me how to ride a bike on Spencer Avenue. Our next-door neighbors were Lebanese Catholics, the Zatoons, and their cousins, the Shapoos, lived across the street. Janet and Marilyn Shapoo were the prettiest girls in the town where Pepsi was invented. (Because I was born in Atlanta and my grandmother’s property abutted the mythical Candler estate, Callanwolde, I was not allowed to switch my cola affiliation. To Peg
Conroy, drinking a Pepsi was an act of apostasy and a decision as unthinkable as a sex change operation.) Gourds as large as your head grew on vines along our backyard fence. I heard my mother sing along with Patti Page as both women celebrated Mockingbird Hill. My mother’s other favorite songs that year were “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” and “The Tennessee Waltz.” I loved the sound of my mother singing, even though it would be years before I discovered she could not carry a tune. I like to think that my mother was happy in New Bern that year; I like to think that I was.

On Sundays, we dressed up and attended St. Paul’s small but pretty church. I could study the altar where my mother and father exchanged their vows. It was a city of pretty stores and distinguished houses and deep, shaded gardens where a child could lose himself in the dreaminess of games. My mother told me that New Bern was once the capital city of North Carolina and that the people who lived here had once had the courage to rise up and repel the soldiers of a British king. That is when she let me in on the secret that my countrymen were once British citizens. I did not know what Britain was or what a citizen was, but I was in first grade and wanted to know everything in the world. “The redcoats once marched down this street,” my mother said with contempt, and my heart filled up with loathing of those redcoats that my mother held in such disfavor.

In school I had trouble finding my way. I discovered I could not say a word out loud because of a baffled shyness I could not control. Sister Maurice spent the year coaxing me to say anything at all to her, and it frustrated her immensely that I would not read to her from my reader or answer her questions about addition. She divided the class into three reading groups, the Eagles, the Bluebirds, and the Toads. I was placed, in great shame, among the poor Toads. I have loved all species of frog since that moment of pure mortification. When my first report card was issued, I overheard my mother tell my father, “I don’t think Pat is as smart as we thought, Don.”

But it was New Bern, a city enchanted with itself and the boys and girls lucky enough to be growing up on her watch, that granted me the
gift of my own voice. The day after report cards came out, Sister Maurice wrote a word up on the blackboard, a new word, strange as a hieroglyph to the eyes of first graders. “Sound it out. Sound the word out. We won’t go to recess until one of you sounds out this word.” For two minutes, I stared at that unknown word, and I made sounds in my mind, then I raised my hand. Sister called out my name. “Radio,” I said, and Sister Maurice said, “Recess time.” The class stormed out into the playground. The next day she wrote another word on the blackboard, this one curlicued and laden with strange syllables. The word stared back at me as I fought against its waves and its multivoweled insolence. Three minutes and I raised my hand. “Umbrella,” I said. “Recess time,” the good nun said, and my classmates spilled out into the light. Sister Maurice stopped me, hugged me with great sweetness, and whispered something to me. I flew out into the sunshine, an Eagle at last.

In the school yard that same year, my father did something wonderful for me, words that do not appear often in my collected works. At recess, with the whole school watching and waiting, my father made a swift and sudden appearance in his black-winged fighter plane, the powerful and otherworldly AD. He flew so low over the playground I recognized his face. He dipped the wings of his craft as a salute to the screaming children below. He made two more passes and I kept screaming, “That’s my dad. That’s my dad.” Then he turned his plane and headed back to Cherry Point. The high point of our life as father and son was over.

It was a time before air-conditioning, all the windows were open, and the wives all baked fresh pies and let them cool on the windowsills. Mrs. Orringer, a high-spirited Jewish woman who lived to our left in a large house that dwarfed our own, gave my sister and me free run of her garden and let us gather any blooming flowers to make bouquets for our mother. She fed us expensive chocolates made in England or Switzerland that she bought on trips to see her son in New York, who was married to one of my father’s favorite singers, J. P. Morgan. It made me dream of exotic worlds where the women could call themselves J.P. My sister Carol’s verbal precociousness began to assert itself about that time, and I heard her asking my mother if eating chocolate was “habit-forming.”
Carol was four years old and had started constructing sentences out of the longest, most difficult words uttered by the adults around her. Often she would not have the slightest idea of what the words meant, but she threw around phrases like “the Russian Revolution” and “the bombing of Hiroshima.” To me Carol seemed extraterrestrial in her verbal alacrity. None of us knew what she would say next. She was capable of saying anything and everything, a habit that has continued to this very day. An American poet grew up in the bedroom next door, and it was thrilling to see the language turn to orchids and amethysts and centipedes on her lips as she threw words all over the air in our tiny New Bern home.