The Pat Conroy Cookbook (7 page)

H
ome is a damaged word, bruisable as fruit, in the cruel glossaries of the language I choose to describe the long, fearful march of my childhood. Home was a word that caught in my throat, stung like a paper cut, drew blood in its passover of my life, and hurt me in all the soft places. My longing for home was as powerful as fire in my bloodstream. I lived at twenty-three different addresses as my father moved from base to base flying the warplanes that kept our nation’s airways safe. When asked where my hometown was, I answered in a complete silence that baffled strangers and embarrassed me. Because of the question, I knew it was an American’s birthright to have a place name on the tip of your tongue; all I could come up with were military bases like Cherry Point, Quantico, or Camp Lejeune, vast acreages of federal property that I roamed known by the anonymous and utterly demeaning military coinage—dependent. Though I had no home, I had a grotesque father who had once—flying low, counting body parts, arms and legs and torsos as they floated in the blood-red river below him—wiped out a battalion of North Korean regulars he caught fording the Naktong River. My father made his children feel like the surviving
members of that battalion, and at times we envied those slain soldiers who did not have to grow up under his savage, tyrannical rule.

Though my mother could do nothing to stem my father’s cruelty, she held out great hope for her children’s ardent wish to find a home. She knew of my loathing for my homeless state, and she said as she turned our station wagon onto Highway 21 and my twenty-third address since birth: “From what I understand, Beaufort, South Carolina, is a perfectly charming town, Pat. I know you hate all this moving, but this might be a place you can call home.”

“I don’t have a home, Mom,” I answered. “I can’t have one. It’s too late.”

“It’s not too late,” she said. “You’re a military brat, son. Because your old man defends this country, you’ve got a right to claim any town in America as your hometown. Any town. It’s your choice.”

“I don’t know a single soul in Beaufort, Mom,” I said.

“It’ll take some work on your part, son,” she said. “You’ve got to earn a hometown.”

I took my mother’s advice to heart, and I buried myself like a wood tick into the arteries and the historical tissues of Beaufort, South Carolina. There was nothing Beaufort could do to stop my invasion of its cells. In six months, I found myself maddened with the love of this water-ringed town. The curve of the Beaufort River still remains the prettiest change of pace and direction I have ever seen a river have the innate good taste to make. The founding fathers of Beaufort agreed with me and put one of the loveliest towns in America on its high banks, and they lined Bay Street with a row of kingly mansions that look like a row of wedding cakes when viewed from the river. Within a month, I would roam the halls of Beaufort High School with classmates who lived in some of those breathtaking houses. The town had an immaculate feel of welcome to it, and I enfolded myself into its silky embrace. I have never looked back.

Most of the books I have written have been psalms and cards of pure, unalloyed praise of Beaufort, South Carolina. Before the town took me in, I had no idea that geography itself could play such a large role in the
shaping of a man’s fate and character. Because of the Marine Corps, I had entered at last into the country that was going to become the landscape of my entire artistic life. The great salt marsh spreading all around as far as my eye could see has remained the central image that runs throughout my work. I cannot look at a salt marsh, veined with salt creeks swollen with the moonstruck tides, without believing in God. The marsh is feminine, voluptuous when the creeks fill up with the billion-footed swarm of shrimp and blue crabs and oysters in the great rush to creation in the spring. The marsh taught me new ways that the color green could transform itself into subtle tones of gold as the seasons changed. The people in the Low Country measure the passing of the seasons not by the changing colors of the leaves of its deciduous trees but by the brightening and withering of its grand and swashbuckling salt marshes, the shining glory of the Low Country and the central metaphor of my writing life.

On the first day of school at Beaufort High School, the teacher of my life, Eugene Norris, presented himself to my junior English class. A kid on my left whispered that Gene’s nickname was Cooter. The marines in my life had all carried nicknames like Bull, Wild Man, and the Great Santini, so it was a pleasure to welcome a man who was named after a water turtle. Gene Norris was the anti–Don Conroy the antitoxin to childhood days so filled up with a screaming, out-of-control male. Gene was dapper and soft-spoken and good-humored, and in the first month, I found myself riding shotgun next to Gene as he drove me around the streets of the great cities of Charleston and Savannah, telling me the history of mansions and the names of the nearly mythical families who inhabited them. “Let’s ramble,” Gene would say, and we’d visit every antique store in the Low Country. During our rambles, Gene taught me to prize rarity and delicacy and craftsmanship. I learned about porcelain and coin silver and Empire furniture and Wedgwood, and I learned to recognize the furniture makers of Charleston above all others. For my mother’s birthday, Gene helped me select a gift that was within my slender budget. When my mother unwrapped the celery glass that, to me, was beyond beautiful, I said with a burst of pride, “It’s an antique, Mom! A real antique.” That celery glass sits in my writing room today, and I cannot
pass it without thinking of my pretty mother or the sweet-natured man who came into my life when I needed him the most.

The first mansion that I visited on the Point, Beaufort’s historic district, was the Christenson house, where Gene rented a second-story room with a veranda and a view of the Beaufort River. While driving around the Point, Gene would tell me a story about almost every house we passed. “That house was built in the late 1700s. It’s fine. Very fine. Its wooden paneling is one of the glories of South Carolina. The old woman who lives in the house across the street is just crackers and can’t even tell you her first name. Over there lives a common drunk but his wife covers for him by telling everyone he’s got the flu. Poor man’s had the flu going on thirty years. That house is called the Castle. It’s got the most beautiful staircase in Beaufort.” Passing another house, Gene whispered that the family had migrated to Beaufort as carpetbaggers after the Civil War but had managed to overcome this shameful origin by becoming valuable, first-rate citizens of the town.

It was through Gene Norris that I discovered the great motherlode of story that forms the scaffolding of almost every book I have written. I had never come to a town so overripe with narrative. In the fall of that year, I saw an albino porpoise swimming in a pod in the middle of Harbor River. I learned that the white porpoise was called Carolina Snow by the locals, and that it was a sign of good luck to see her. There were black voodoo doctors who practiced their trade for great profit out on St. Helena Island. A fifteen-foot alligator had taken advantage of a spring tide to swim close to a house on the marsh and had killed a small pony before being shot to death by the man of the house. In Beaufort, there were houses still marked by wounded Union soldiers who had signed their names before facing the fearful amputations and hospitals set up in abandoned mansions. Gene showed me a boardinghouse where E. B. White had visited each year, as did Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley as had General Mark Clark of The Citadel.

On Bay Street, Gene stopped his car in front of the Verdier house and said, “On that veranda, Count Lafayette addressed the citizens of Beaufort in 1825 as he made his triumphal tour of the United States of
America.” Turning on Craven Street, Gene pointed with great reverence to a two-story house and said, “That is my priest’s house, the Reverend Hardy, who is charged with the care of Gene Norris’s immortal soul.”

“Tough job,” I said. “Because you’re going to hell, Mr. Norris. So is Reverend Hardy.”

“Surely you aren’t telling me that you Romans are so arrogant that you think we Anglicans can’t go to heaven!”

“We sure are,” I said. “We’re that arrogant.”

“I never heard such a thing,” Gene said. “You papists repel me sometimes.” At the next house, he paused and said, “This is the Secession House. In this house, a man named William Rhett met with a group called the fire-eaters and planned the secession of the Southern states from the Union. This is sacred territory to a Southern Civil War buff.”

“Are you a Civil War buff, Mr. Norris?”

“Of course I’m a buff,” he replied. “I had two granddaddies fight in the Civil War.”

“Which side did they fight for?”

“My family is South Carolina born and South Carolina bred,” he said.

“So they fought for the losers.”

“Losers? How dare you call my distinguished ancestors losers, scalawag?” Gene thundered.

As his Buick poked along Bay Street, passing by its row of dignified mansions, Gene Norris told me of some of the great families who lived in those houses—the Fordhams, the Dowlings, the Trasks—and gave me brief histories of each family and the importance they had played in the making of the town. Stories leaked out of every windowsill and doorway we passed. On our left was the Jewish cemetery, which sent Gene into another reverie as he built his tales around the fortunes of the Lipsitz family as well as the Keyserlings and the Scheins.

I must have ridden out with Gene Norris thirty times in the two years I was at Beaufort High School, and I consider the time I spent with him as valuable as any college education could be. He taught me to value the old, to sharpen my eye for the most intricate detail, and to strengthen all the appetites upon which beauty itself fed. But most of all, Gene Norris
handed me a different model of how to conduct myself as a man, showing me that a man could behave with sensibility and restraint and that a love of language and art could sustain him. Unlike a ride in my father’s car, I never feared a backhand from my English teacher or a cuffed head or blood running down my face for displeasing the marine aviator. My father never talked to me about anything, so I discovered I loved being in a car with a man whose stories issued out in ceaseless tides. Gene Norris spoke with a storyteller’s voice, and it felt like I was sitting next to Homer as he sang out in his blindness the illustrious stories of the fall of Troy. In the end, Gene Norris handed me the key to my first hometown and made it feel like the most sublime gift.

So I set a claim on Beaufort, South Carolina, the first town in America I ever called home. Though I have lived out my adult life in Atlanta, San Francisco, Paris, and Rome, it is the small town of Beaufort that still has a mortgage on my heart. All of my novels smell of the marshes, the pages wet with storm water born in the creeks that feed into the Beaufort River. I wrote the prologue to
The Prince of Tides
while living on the Via dei Forragi in Rome, aching with homesickness for Beaufort so urgently that I brought the Low Country to Italy. I can go nowhere on earth without hungering for the South Carolina Low Country. I carry its taste in my mouth, and I have smelled its fragrant marshes when I walked on a cobbled road in Ephesus where St. Paul preached a sermon, or when I studied a pyramid near Cairo, or when I contemplated the haunches of a statue of Buddha in Thailand.

I came back to Beaufort County for good in 1993 to rest my soul from the whirlwind that had become my life. I bought a house on Fripp Island, where my mother was living when she died of leukemia in 1984. When the weather is fine, I swim in the Atlantic Ocean twice a day—once in the morning, once again at sundown. One morning, I awoke and found hundreds of snowy egrets surrounding the lagoon that sits behind my house, locked in an elaborate mating ritual that contained the mysteries of dance itself. White-tailed deer roam the island in silent brown herds. From trees in my yard, ospreys hunt mullet in the lagoon. The bones of an enormous sixteen-foot alligator washed up on the island last month. A
ten-foot alligator uses my yard as a highway to get to a lagoon that sits on a golf course. We have met, with some discomfort on both sides, on four occasions now.

When friends come to town, I give them my tour of Beaufort in honor of our friendship. It is, quite simply, a continuation of my rides in Gene Norris’s Buick when he could not pass a house without telling me a story about the people who lived there. But now, I have added my own history to the tour. I show the houses where Robert Duvall and Blythe Danner lived while making
The Great Santini
or the houses where Barbra Streisand and Nick Nolte lived while they were filming
The Prince of Tides
. Then I show them the house where I met my first wife, Barbara, and the first house we owned, on Hancock Street, also where I wrote
The Boo, The Water Is Wide
, and the first chapters of
The Great Santini
. I have imprinted my own history into Beaufort and those stories have replaced the ones that Gene Norris told me so long ago in the amazing generosity he brought to the life of a fifteen-year-old boy. At the end of my tour, as we walk to the graves of my mother and father in the national cemetery, I tell my friends that all my novels sprang out of my father’s terrible house, the front seat of Gene Norris’s Buick, and the day that the town of Beaufort took me in, enfolded me into her history, and let me know in all the aching beauty of her streets and gardens that she was proud to have me call her my hometown.

SOFT-SHELL CRABS
The first time I ever heard of soft-shell crabs was when I read about the delicious crustaceans in William Warner’s magisterial, Pulitzer Prize–winning book,
Beautiful Swimmers
. The people of the Chesapeake Bay and not the people of South Carolina learned the fine, patient art of catching crabs about to molt out of their old shells and into their new ones. Once these “peelers” or “busters” discard their old shells, they are among the most vulnerable creatures in the sea, and one of the most delicious.