As told by Pat Conroy, Recipes of My Life
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 fall 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. Orringer’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.
Recipes of My Life
Copyright © Pat Conroy 2004