South of Broad by Pat Conroy Page A

the subject in a sidestep unusual for her. “Have you taken the cookies to our new neighbors?”
    “I’m baking them now. Then I’ll let them cool.”
    “Do not be late. Lunch at the yacht club, then four o’clock to meet your new coach. And, Leo. I’m proud I’m raising you to be a feminist.”
    “No wonder everybody treats me like an oddball,” I answered in amazement. “I was raised by a nun.”
    J ust after three, I began packing the cookies in a tin as my father entered the kitchen carrying two bags of groceries.
    “Benne seed wafers?” he said. “They’re not mentioned in Ulysses.”
    “This is not part of the Bloomsday feast,” I said. “A new family’s moved across the street, remember?”
    Jasper King put the grocery bags on the counter and said, “The sweetest boy in the world needs to be kissed by his father.”
    I groaned, but knew the folly of resistance. He kissed me on both cheeks like he learned to do in Italy during World War II. All during my childhood, my father made up excuses to kiss me and my brother on both cheeks. When we were young, Steve and I would practice the groans we’d make whenever he approached us.
    With great care, I packaged the wafers in a rounded tin that once housed salted pecans. I tasted one to make sure it was worthy to enter a stranger’s home. It was. “I’m going to run these over to the new neighbors,” I said. “Sister Scholastica called, by the way.”
    “Haven’t heard from her in a coon’s age.”
    “You know her?” I asked, ignoring the subject of my mother’s nun-hood for the moment.
    “Of course I know Scholastica,” he said. “She was the maid of honor when your mother and I got married. By the way, I ran into Judge Alexander on Broad Street. He bragged about how highly your probation officer thinks about you. I told him how well you were doing.”
    T he moving van had already departed when I crossed the street to the Poe family. The cookies were warm in the tin as I bounded up the stairs of the nineteenth-century house that needed a facelift and a touch of rouge. I knocked twice and heard someone moving toward the door in bare feet. It opened and I got my first rapturous glance at Sheba Poe, who became the most beautiful woman in Charleston the moment she crossed the county line. Everyone I met, male or female, remembers the exact place where they first caught sight of this spellbinding, improbable blond beauty. It was not that we lacked experience in the presence of beautiful women; Charleston was famous for the comeliness of its well-bred and pampered women. But as Sheba stood tall in her doorway, her presence suggested a carnality that took me to the borderline of a cardinal sin just because of what I thought about as I gaped at her. To me, it felt like no appreciation of mere loveliness, but some corruption of covetousness or gluttony. Her green eyes drank me in, and I noted flecks of gold.
    “Hello,” she said. “My name is Sheba Poe. I’m the new kid on the block. My brother, Trevor, is sneaking up behind me. He’s wearing my ballet shoes.”
    “I’m wearing my own ballet shoes, thank you.” Trevor Poe appeared beside his sister. I was struck dumb by both his composure and his elfin size. If anything, he was prettier than his sister, but thinking that seemed to rewrite the laws of nature. Trevor noted my silence. “Don’t worry; Sheba strikes everyone that way. I have the same effect on people, but for an entirely different reason. I’ve played Tinker Bell in more class plays than I can count.”
    “I made you some cookies,” I said, flustered. “To welcome you to the neighborhood. They’re benne wafers, a Charleston specialty.”
    “Does it have a name?” Trevor asked his sister. It was an odd echo of my conversation earlier that day with the orphans, as if I weren’t in the room.
    This time, I answered: “Its name is Leo King.”
    “The Kings of Charleston? As in King Street?” Sheba asked.
    “No, we’re no