1.
YOU WANT TO KNOW ABOUTLa Maddalena, and I’ll get to that. But to understand everything that happened on the island, you’ve got to understand a little bit about me and why, when Paul Archer proposed not just marrying him but moving with him to a tiny island smack dab in the middle of the Mediterranean, I said yes.
I had spent the whole of my life—all twenty-three years of it—in Charleston, South Carolina, and at that time the Holy City was still very much a navy town. The Battery was there, same as always, but the Peninsula wasn’t like it is today—Louis Vuitton and Gucci fighting for space on King Street and restaurants like FIG and Husk getting written up inThe New York Times. Back then folks were still shopping at Woolworth’s and Silver’s, and the nicest place to eat was a restaurant called the Blue Hawaii, where, if you were willing to drive all the way to Mount Pleasant, you could get yourself a pupu platter and a rum cocktail called a Flaming Volcano.
I had been born on the Peninsula, at St. Francis Hospital, but spent my childhood on James Island, where my father repaired boats and my mother taught second grade. The house they owned, near Lighthouse Point, was nothing special—just a fourteen-hundred-square-foot brick ranch they’d built in 1956, but it backed up onto the sound, which is where my brother, Lenny, and I learned to swim and skip rocks, to catch tadpoles and bait crabs.
Lenny was not a student. Looking back now, I’m sure he had ADHD and maybe even some sort of processing disorder, but no one talked about such things then. Instead, teachers just decided he was thick or not trying hard enough or both. I was only two years younger than Lenny, so on the first day of school each year, I always had some teacher who read the name Eileen O’Malley on her roll and asked, without even trying to hide her disregard, if we were any relation.
When Lenny graduated from high school, he went to work for my dad,and for a few years things looked pretty good. He had always been smart with boats, could take apart the motor of our Bonefisher and put it back together with his eyes closed, so the work made him happy. And it made Dad happy, knowing he was giving Lenny some training and that one day—if Lenny took over the business—he’d be able to earn a decent living.
I graduated from high school in 1969 and enrolled at the College of Charleston, where I had decided to major in English if for no other reason than that I liked to read and didn’t know what else to study. The College of Charleston was still private at that point, but they gave a big break to kids from Charleston County. If I remember correctly, my tuition was nine hundred and twenty-five dollars a year. Adjusted for inflation, that’s under eight thousand dollars. Can you even imagine a private school charging so little today?
I lived at home that first year, to save money, but in the fall of 1970, my parents let me go in on an apartment at Rutledge Rivers with a couple of girls I knew from the neighborhood. To pay the rent, I got a part-time job at Condon’s, which was a department store on King Street, up near Marion Square. It wasn’t as high-class as Berlin’s, where all the rich kids shopped, but they put me in the cosmetics department, which seemed fancy, and the pay was good. With what I made, I could cobble together my rent and have enough left over for a couple of whiskey sours at Big John’s.
I was starting to think I had my life all figured out, but then Lenny got drafted and a letter from the Selective Service arrived at the house, ordering him to report for induction into the Armed Forces of the United States. By October of my sophomore year, he was headed to basic training at Fort Polk; by February, he was in Da Nang; and by May, two guys in uniform were sitting on my parents’ sofa, telling them how their only son had taken his last breath at a field hospital in Nha Trang.
The day we got the news, it was my dad who tracked me down at Condon’s. My manager told me I had a call on line two, and I fell all over myself apologizing because we weren’t supposed to take personal calls at the store. He waved me off, like he’d heard it all before, and when I got on the phone and realized it was my dad on the line, I was relieved. At least I wasn’t going to get in trouble over some Citadel cadet who couldn’t get a clue. Then it occurred to me that my dad had never once called me at the store, and if he was doing so now, something was wrong.
He didn’t tell me about Lenny, probably didn’t want me driving across the Ashley River out of my mind, so he just told me to come home.
My shift didn’t end for another three hours. “Right now?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, and there was something about the way that one little word cracked on the way out that told me not to argue.
I cashed out my drawer and handed the bank bag to my manager, who seemed to sense that this was not the time to give me any grief about cutting out early. “You going to be in tomorrow?” he asked, and I said I didn’t know, then went to get my purse out of the break room and walked to my car, which I’d forgotten I’d parked on Calhoun Street. By the time I finally found it, my hands were shaking so badly I couldn’t get the key in the lock. “You don’t know what this is about,” I said aloud to myself, and eventually, I managed to unlock the door.
It was one of those perfect spring days in Charleston—hot enough to roll the windows down but not so hot that my skin felt sticky. Ordinarily, I’d have sung along to the radio, maybe stuck my hand out the window just to feel the air drag against my open palm. But that day I gripped the steering wheel like a life preserver, stopped at every yellow light, counted to three at every stop sign. I drove five miles under the speed limit the whole way home because a big part of me believed that if I could just delay my arrival, I could keep my brother alive a little longer.
2.
AFTER LENNY DIED, I MOVEDhome with my parents. The transition happened so slowly that I almost didn’t see it coming. First, I was just trying to make it through the funeral. Then I was going to stay until I stopped having nightmares. Before I knew it, it was July, and I hadn’t been over to my apartment in almost two months.
My roommates had come to the service, and even called the house a couple of times that summer, trying to convince me to go out with them. But I was a mess, and in early August, when they finally got around to asking if I wanted to stay on the lease, I told them it was probably a bad idea.
My parents acted like my presence was temporary. “Just until you get things figured out,” my dad kept saying, but we all knew I wasn’t going anywhere. I started doing all my old chores, plus I mowed the lawn and took out the trash because I couldn’t stand watching my dad doing the chores that used to belong to Lenny. In the evenings, my mother fixed all the same meals she’d made my entire childhood—shepherd’s pie, meat loaf, beef bourguignon—but we ate on trays in front of the television because no one could bear to sit at the kitchen table, where Lenny’s empty chair might as well have had a spotlight shining on it.
That was the fall of my junior year, or what would have been my junior year if I’d stayed in school. I had had good intentions going into the semester, but there I’d be in the Main Building, listening to some professor drone on about how Faulkner’s novels were formal tragedies—not dramatically tragic but narratively tragic—and I couldn’t write down a word, couldn’t even nod my head in mute agreement. All I could think was that every last professor I had was full of shit. That the real tragedy, the only tragedy worth talking about, was thirty thousand kids dying for a cause that none of us fully understood.
That winter I went full-time at Condon’s, where they eventually transferred me from cosmetics to the men’s department after I complainedthat the perfume was giving me headaches. I’m fairly certain, looking back, that the perfume had nothing to do with it, and the headaches were a manifestation of grief or depression or God knows what else, but I guess it doesn’t matter because I wound up liking the men’s department fine. Most guys wanted to get in and out of the store as fast as they could, so if you told them they looked good in something, they bought it in every color. I made decent money, and before too long, I started grabbing drinks with the girls on the floor and saying yes to the guys who lingered at the cash register, working up the confidence to ask me out. It wasn’t the life I’d envisioned for myself, but it was a life, and in the wake of Lenny’s death, it felt like I wasn’t entitled to ask for more.
3.
BY THE TIME PAUL ARCHERwalked into Condon’s, on a rainy night in January 1974, I had been working in the men’s department for about two years and could have done the job blindfolded. Which was why, when Paul poked his head out of the fitting room to see if I had a pair of 33s in a darker denim, I took one look at him and asked if he didn’t want me to look for a pair of 32s.
He stepped out of the fitting room, turning one way and then another in front of the store’s three-way mirror. “You think these are too big?”
He was wearing an undershirt, but he’d lifted it up so I could see his waist, which was narrow and had those little divots near his hip bones that might as well have been arrows pointing due south. His skin was pale, and there was a smattering of hair—a shade darker than the dirty blond on his head—that disappeared beneath his waistband. If he’d been a woman, I might have yanked at the jeans, trying to ascertain whether he could really go down a size. Instead, I just blushed and said, “I’ll be right back.”
Out on the floor, I grabbed a pair of 32s, and because I knew an easy upsell when I saw it, I picked out a few collared shirts that would bring out the blue in his eyes. “See if any of these work,” I said as I handed over the clothes, then yanked the curtain shut.
I figured I’d have a minute to collect my thoughts while he tried everything on, but he kept talking to me through that curtain, asking how long I’d worked at Condon’s and if it ever got old, giving advice to guys like him with no sense of style. The question made me smile because, while he didn’t exactly have style, he had swagger, which was almost the same thing.
“This any better?” he finally asked, pulling back the curtain so I could get a good look at the 32s, which he’d paired with one of the shirts I’d chosen.
The jeans were intended to be as tight in the ass as they were wide in the leg, and now that he was wearing the right size, they hugged him in all the right places. I swallowed and said, “Much better.”
He dipped back into the fitting room, and while he was changing, I tried to decide if I wanted him to ask for my number. He was cute, for sure. And he seemed plenty confident. But his hair was cut short on the sides, which meant there was a decent chance he was a cadet, and at twenty-three, I was all done with them.
