The Lords of Discipline by Pat Conroy

Author:Pat Conroy
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media LLC
Published: 0100-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-five

If I had to say what I loved most about the city of Charleston, I would say that I loved the stillness and leisure of its early Sunday afternoons. There was a timelessness to those Sundays: a greenness to its parks and private arbors; the quiet hum of well-dressed crowds gathering beneath the columns of its churches; then the sudden bloom of sails and the gestures of small crews far out in the river; the abstraction of the walkers along the Battery; the pleasant symmetry of eighteenth-century houses clustered along the narrow feminine streets; bells over the city; the shrill robust games of happy children and the healthy glow of those children; the movement of freighters into the harbor after trans-Atlantic voyages. On Sundays, Charleston, without the dissonance of commerce or traffic, had the serene regularity of a city so magical in its harmony, so purified of stridency or disorder, so certain of its virtues, that it seemed a city separated from its century by an incorruptible cleanliness of spirit and image, a perfect environment for recreation and quiet pleasure. On Sundays, Charleston became a city of gardeners and strollers and fishermen and sailors cutting toward buoys. It was a city that could sit quietly observing itself, listening to the cooing of its pigeons in the colonnades, the purring of bees among the mint gardens, and the rumors of old people beneath the columns and belvederes.

I learned some things on those Sundays in Charleston, and my teacher was Abigail St. Croix. She taught me to see the city as she saw it and to measure all other cities by the standards of Charleston. Abigail would often take me for long walks after lunch at her house on Sunday. She would make me ache with love for the city. She would point out details I never would have noticed alone. Together, we studied the antiques in shop windows on lower King Street, and she would deliver small lectures on the histories of spoons, the travels of porcelain to the New World, or the elegance of the Queen Anne period. She would name each item that struck her fancy in the window and if I was not moved by its charm she would winsomely explain why I should be charmed and we would continue our walk. She would name things for me that previously existed only as parts of the undifferentiated landscape. She taught me the names of trees and flowers, styles of architecture, historical figures in the city, the names of mansions as they appeared in the National Register, the names of the families of harbor pilots, the various forms of Charleston brick—anything she thought of or needed to let me know as we walked off our lunches and enjoyed the languor of the city. Sometimes she took me to the houses of her friends, introduced me, and showed me formal interiors where each room was a work of art, where every corner had been created with the cautious, gifted eye of the miniaturist.

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