by Pat Conroy
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.
My father bought one of the first television sets ever to appear on Spencer Avenue, and Carol and I would watch mesmerized for hours. I did not realize we were eyewitnesses to the early days of television because I was cocooned in a child’s vision of time and had been on the planet a mere six years. Carol and I were watching the Cisco Kid and Pancho one afternoon when our parents came up behind us, and my mother said, “Would y’all like to see the Cisco Kid and Pancho tomorrow?”
“Sure,” we both said.
Our parents drove us downtown to the main business street of New Bern, where we joined hundreds of parents and children who were herded into the movie theater to see those Western heroes on tour. I now know that poor Cisco and Pancho must’ve been on the tour from hell if they were in New Bern, but I thought it was a splendid and magical thing when I was a first grader. At the end of a screening of their film, the two Mexican cowboys made their way onstage with their gaudy costumes and outlandish hats. They drew tickets out of a hat for door prizes, and they called out my ticket number. Dad lifted me out of my seat, and I walked appalled with every eye in the theater affixed on me. I approached the two giant men on the stage, and they shook hands with me.
“Are you a good little boy?” Cisco asked me.
I have no memory of this, but my mother said I brought down the house by replying, “Si, Ceesco.”
The next month, my mother walked by her two children in front of the television, and she reports that I said, “Mama, next week I’d like to meet Superman and the Lone Ranger and Tonto.”
The country of first grade blends with the newfoundland of second grade, but I had to change neither teachers nor towns as Sister Maurice graduated to the second grade with me and my class, and the saltwater town of New Bern stayed the same. Each night of our childhood my mother would read books and poetry to Carol and me. I fell in love with my mother’s lovely, softly accented voice. Whatever she read, Carol and I fell in love with. Though both of us bear unhealable scars from that childhood, I think both of us are writers because of it. This was the year my mother read The Diary of Anne Frank to her two children. As a young boy I was caught up in the immediacy and brightness of Anne Frank’s unmistakable voice. I studied photographs of Anne Frank and noted how pretty she was and how she looked exactly as I expected her to look—fresh and knowing and, this was important to me, smarter than the adults around her. I fell in love with Anne Frank and have never fallen out of love with her.
But my mother did not prepare her children for the abruptness of the diary’s ending. Anne’s voice went silent after the Nazis invaded her family’s attic hideaway, a place I visit every time I find myself in the watery, cross-stitched city of Amsterdam.
“What happened to Anne, Mama?” I asked.
“Why’d she stop writing?” Carol asked.
And my Georgia-born mother, who did not go to college and was born into the deepest Southern poverty, began telling us about the coming of the Nazi beast, the cattle cars, the gas chambers, and the murder of six million Jews, including babies and children and the lovely Anne Frank.
I will always love and honor my mother when I think of the words she spoke to us next. “Carol Ann and Pat, listen to me. I want to raise a family that will hide Jews.” And Peg Conroy repeated, “I want to raise a family that will hide Jews.”
And I will always adore the spirit of my sister Carol, who asked me to walk next door to Mrs. Orringer’s house on Spencer Avenue in the marvelous town of New Bern. Mrs. Orringer came to the door, dressed in grand flamboyance.
“Yes, children? What is it?”
My sister Carol looked up into Mrs. Orri
nger’s eyes and said with a child’s simplicity and ardor, “Mrs. Orringer, don’t worry about anything.”
“What are you talking about, child?”
“We will hide you,” Carol said.
“What?” Mrs. Orringer said.
“We will hide you,” Carol repeated.
She marched us into her living room and made us sit on her sofa as she called my mother next door for an explanation. We heard our mother’s voice describing the reading of Anne Frank. When she got to the part about hiding Jews, Mrs. Orringer surprised us by laying the phone down in its cradle and bursting into tears. She covered us with kisses and stuffed us with chocolates from Switzerland. Before going to The Citadel, I moved twenty-three times in my nomadic, troubled boyhood, but I never had a neighbor who loved my sister and me with the passion of the generous-hearted Mrs. Orringer.
Because I was so happy there, I have never been back to New Bern, not once in my life.
GOOSEBERRY PIE My lifelong love of pies got an upgrade when I used to take my children to spend part of the summer with my sister Carol on the North Shore of Lake Superior. My sister told me it was beautiful at the North Shore, but she did not tell me it was a spectacular landscape with rivers pouring out of the Mesabi range that were wild and tumbling and so pure you could drink the water fresh in your cupped hands. The Temperance River was one of the most beautiful bodies of water in which I have ever swum. I let it take me out into Lake Superior because I was curious when the famous cold water of Superior would overwhelm the warm-watered river—I found the exact spot and was lucky to get back to the shore alive. A local fisherman told me, after I asked him why his boat lacked a life preserver, that Lake Superior killed you after fifteen minutes’ submersion in its icy waters, so they had no need for life preservers on the lake.
But what my girls and I take from that summer is our love of the pies made by Minnesota women. Restaurants stretch from Duluth to the Canadian border, and every one we entered boasted homemade pies that loom large in our collective memory of those wonderful summers. It was in Minnesota that I first tasted a gooseberry pie. It is easy to make and will put you on a fast track to heaven.
The method for rolling and shaping the pie crust is the same for each recipe in this chapter. • SERVES 8
1 recipe Pie Dough (page 7)
FOR THE FILLING
4 cups gooseberries
3 tablespoons cornstarch
¾ cup plus 1 tablespoon sugar
Pinch of salt
1. Top and tail each gooseberry by pinching off the small stems with your fingers or clipping them with scissors. Preparing the gooseberries takes time, but this tart pie is spectacular.
2. Combine the gooseberries, cornstarch, ¾ cup sugar, and salt in a bowl and set aside.
3. Roll the larger piece of dough into a 12-inch circle. It is easiest to roll the dough using plastic wrap. Place a large sheet of plastic on the counter and put the dough in the center. Flatten the dough into a disk, place a second sheet of wrap on top, and roll with a wooden rolling pin. Remove the top plastic sheet and use the bottom sheet to help invert the dough into a 9-inch glass pie pan. Cover with plastic wrap and place the pie pan in the refrigerator while rolling the smaller top piece.
4. Using the same technique, roll the smaller piece of dough into a 10-inch circle. Keeping it covered with plastic wrap, put the top dough circle in the refrigerator.
5. Take the prepared pie pan out of the refrigerator and remove the plastic wrap. Transfer the gooseberries to the pie shell.
6. Remove top circle of crust from the refrigerator and lay it over the filling. Press the edges of the dough together and trim away the excess, leaving a ½-inch overhang. Press the top and bottom crusts between your finger and thumb to make a decorative border.
7. Cut four slits in the top pie crust (like spokes on a wheel). Cover the pie with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 1 hour.
8. While the pie is resting in the refrigerator, place a large piece of foil on the bottom floor of the oven to catch any pie drippings.
9. Set a baking sheet on the foil. The pie pan will go directly on the baking sheet, so the bottom crust will get cooked all the way through and brown nicely. It is also easier to remove the baked pie from the oven when it is sitting on the baking sheet.
10. Preheat the oven to 425°F.
11. Remove the pie from the refrigerator and brush a little water on the pie crust, then sprinkle with the 1 tablespoon sugar.
12. Bake the pie on the baking sheet for 40 to 50 minutes, until the top crust is golden brown.
13. Cool the pie on a rack for 2 to 4 hours before cutting.
FOUR RED FRUITS PIE • SERVES 8
1 recipe Pie Dough (page 7)
FOR THE FILLING
¾ pound rhubarb stalks
½ pint red currants
½ pint raspberries
1 pint bing cherries, pitted
⅔ cup plus 1 tablespoon sugar
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
½ lemon, juiced
Pinch of salt
1. Wash and trim the rhubarb and cut into ½-inch pieces; you should have 2 cups. Rinse the red currants and remove the stems. Place the rhubarb, currants, raspberries, and cherries in a bowl with the ⅔ cup sugar, flour, lemon juice, and salt.
2. Preheat oven to 425°F. Proceed with the dough-rolling and pie-filling instructions for Gooseberry Pie (page 40). Roll the smaller piece of dough into a 10-inch round and cut into six 1 ¼-inch-wide strips. Weave strips on top of filling in a lattice pattern. Pinch the edges of the strips together with the edges of the bottom crust to make a decorative border. Sprinkle with the tablespoon of sugar.
3. Place the pie on a baking sheet and bake on the bottom of the oven for 40 to 50 minutes, until the lattice crust is golden brown.
PEACH PIE Whenever I think of South Carolina peaches, I think of Dori Sanders, the novelist and cookbook author, who still sells peaches on the highway by her family farm in York County. Dori tells me that the peaches of York County are the finest-tasting in the world. I have not seen any conclusive proof that she is wrong, but I have tasted enough York County peaches to think she might be right. A ripe peach is a thing perfect unto itself, and the fruit is a tree’s way of expressing devotion to sunshine. In their season, I gorge myself with fresh peaches, which always make me happy that I found South Carolina when I was a boy, or that it found me.
This peach pie is gilding the lily—the only natural way I know for peaches to taste any better than straight out of the orchard.
• SERVES 8
1 recipe Pie Dough (page 7)
FOR THE FILLING
3 pounds ripe, firm peaches (about 8 large peaches)
½ cup plus 1 tablespoon sugar
2 tablespoons cornstarch
2 teaspoons finely grated lemon zest
1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice
Pinch of salt
1. Peel, pit, and slice the peaches. (See page 157.)
2. In a medium bowl, stir together the ½ cup sugar, cornstarch, lemon zest, lemon juice, and salt. Add the peaches and toss to coat them.
3. Preheat oven to 425°F. Proceed with the dough-rolling and pie-filling instructions for Gooseberry Pie (page 40). Sprinkle with the tablespoon of sugar.
4. Place pie on a baking sheet and bake on the bottom of the oven for 40 to 50 minutes, until the top crust is golden brown.
Home 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 w
as 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.”