Read Online South of Broad by Pat Conroy - Free Book Online Page A

me to attend. The yacht club was plush but threadbare and in need of renovation. For me, it carried the silent menace of enemy territory as I walked beneath the contemptuous stares of the club’s founders. Their faces scowled down at me, disfigured by the ineptitude of their portraitists. The artists of Charleston made the movers and shakers of the river-shaped city look like they needed both a good dentist and an effective laxative. My freshly shined shoes moved across the Oriental carpets as I looked for a uniformed guard to halt my progress toward the inner sanctum of the club, but the few men I passed neither noticed nor spoke to me as I moved toward the murmurous conversations of the lunchtime crowd. Outside, the Cooper River was lined with white sails limp in the breathless air like butterflies trapped in a strange, city-spawned amber formed by buttermilk and ivory. Even behind the closed windows, I could hear the profanity of the stalled sailors cursing the lack of wind. Before I entered the dining room, I drew a deep breath and wondered again what I was doing at this lunch. Charleston could produce men and women so aristocratic they could smell the chromosomes of a passing tramp in the armpits of a tennis-playing Ravenel. It was a city and a club that knew exactly who it wanted, and I didn’t fill the bill in any of its particulars. And I was well aware of it.
    Across the room my father rose out of a chair and motioned for me, and I felt like a booger in a Kleenex as I crossed the room. But I noticed that the stillness of the river lent it a green, almost turquoise, shine; the slight movement of the tides cast moving shadows on the ceiling that passed like reluctant waves from chandelier to chandelier.
    The table I joined was not a happy one, and my intrusion seemed welcome. “This is our son, Leo King,” my father said to the table in general. “Son, this is Mr. Chadworth Rutledge and his wife, Hess. Sitting beside them is Mr. Simmons Huger and Mrs. Posey Huger.”
    I shook hands and said my howdy-dos to all the adults, then faced three teenagers about my age. Meeting my own peers had often been more intimidating than any introduction to adults. Since I was in a chair directly across from them, I couldn’t help but be uncomfortable beneath their curious scrutiny. But these were my own internal demons and had nothing to do with the three young people who sat across from me.
    “Son, the young man sitting across from you is Chadworth Rutledge the tenth,” my father said.
    I reached across the table to shake his hand. I could not help but ask, “The tenth?”
    “Old family, Leo. Very old,” young Chadworth said to me.
    “And the lovely young lady sitting beside him is his girlfriend, Molly Huger, whose parents you just met,” Father added.
    “Hello, Molly.” I shook her hand. “It’s nice to meet you.” And it certainly was: Molly Huger looked as though she had long grown accustomed to being the prettiest girl at the debutante ball.
    “Hello, Leo,” she said. “It looks like we’re going to be classmates this year.”
    “You’ll like Peninsula,” I told her. “It’s a nice school.”
    “The other young lady is Fraser Rutledge,” Father continued. “She’s a junior at Ashley Hall, the sister of young Chad. And Molly’s best friend.”
    “Fraser Rutledge?” I asked. “The basketball player?”
    The girl blushed, a deep one that rouged her porcelain skin. Her hair was shiny like a colt’s; she was strong and tall and healthy and broad-shouldered, an Olympic athlete in repose. I remembered her lionesque presence under the backboard from a game I had witnessed the year before. Fraser nodded her head, but lowered her eyes.
    “The game I saw was against Porter-Gaud,” I said. “You had thirty points and twenty rebounds. You were great. Just great.”
    “State champs,” her father, Worth Rutledge, said from down the table. “Ashley Hall wouldn’t have won a game without her.”
    Hess