In 1962, I was playing the first baseball game of the season with Beaufort High School. Our best pitcher was the boy who sat next to me in Gene Norris’s English class, Randy Randel, son of the school superintendent. Randy was a superb athlete and a delight for us other boys in the classroom—mouthy, irreverent, and extroverted.
Mr. Norris would get ex asperated with Randy and say, “Sit down in your seat, Randy, you fool. And hush your mouth, boy.”
“Norris,” Randy would say sadly, “don’t forget who my father is. Your job’s hanging by a thread, Gene. One word from me, and you’re in the unemployment line.”
“Don’t you dare call me Gene, you little scalawag,” Mr. Norris would rage. “How dare you threaten me with my job!”
“No threat, Gene,” Randy would say, grinning at the class. “I’m talking fact here, son.”
Randy had asked me to go golfing with him on Easter weekend, when his parents were returning to his grand mother’s house in Newberry, South Carolina. Because I was a military brat, I had never gone to anyone’s house for a whole weekend in my life. Up until then my high-school years had been excruciatingly lonely ones. My mother was thrilled that Randy had extended this invitation, and gave me permission to go immediately.
At 15, Randy was six feet four inches tall and a true baseball talent. Already there was talk about his pitching in the major leagues one day. But that first game our coach started Jimmy Melvin, a lanky junior who was hit hard by the visiting Wade Hampton team in the first inning. Jimmy Melvin’s name is now enshrined on the wall of black marble honoring those killed in action in Vietnam during that long, dispiriting war. The coach replaced Jimmy with Bruce Harper, who had a fastball I was afraid of, but Bruce was throwing wild that afternoon. Soon the coach had Randy warming up in what passed for a bull pen at Beaufort High. Bruce Harper would walk out of the history of that game and into the history of his time: He would serve with distinction as one of John Ehrlichman’s lawyers during the Watergate trials.
Then it was Randy Randel’s time, and he was called on to shut down the Wade Hampton Generals. Randy was going to prove that there was substance to all the talk about his chances in the majors. He struck out five of the first seven batters he faced, and the other two batters did not even get the ball out of the infield.
Randy Randel had not allowed a single hit when he fell suddenly to the ground after striking out his fifth batter. The ambulance finally ar rived, and a girl named Pat Everette gave Randy mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until Dr. Herbert Keyserling moved her aside and injected a shot of pure adrenaline into Randy’s heart. The doctor said that Randy had been dead when he hit the ground. In that moment, the lives of every witness to Randy Randel’s fall to the earth had been changed, and changed for all time.
In Eugene Norris’s English class the next day, Randy’s empty seat exuded a disconsolate sense of loss. His seat’s emptiness filled the room. The whole world seemed misplaced and ill-fitting. My class and I were in a state of shock when Gene Norris walked into the room, cleaning his glasses with his tie.
“I was just thinking about grief and how we express it. Or how we don’t. Boys seem to have the toughest time showing how much they hurt, but don’t be afraid to. Not in this room. Not among those who loved Randy with you.”
The room came apart, and I cracked like an egg. I wept for two days and could do nothing to stop myself. I wrote my first poem about Randy’s death and gave it to his mother and father after the funeral. Nor did I have to call off my trip to Newberry, because Randy was buried there with his mother’s people in the Rosemont Cemetery. I rode to Newberry with Gene Norris and stayed in his Uncle John and Aunt Elizabeth’s house, where I fell in love with Gene’s pretty cousin, Liz, or “Cuz,” as he called her.
I did not know then that love and death could find each other at the same dance. Liz was an uncommonly lovely freshman at Columbia College, and I was smitten the moment I walked into the room. She moved with a dreamy, sophisticated air that made me and the other high-school boys who encountered her unsteady in our loafers.
On the way to Randy’s burial service, I asked Mr. Norris, “Does Liz ever date high-school boys, Mr. Norris?”
“Of course not,” Gene said, dismissing the fact out of hand. “She wouldn’t be caught dead with a high-school Harry like you. Liz only dates the cream of the crop. College boys. From the very best fraternities. Her boyfriend’s going to be a doctor. Yes, sir, a doctor.”
“If she ever breaks up with her doctor friend, I’d sure be interested, Mr. Norris.”
“Of course you’d be interested, boy,” he said. “But she’s got big plans with a Clemson man. She left you boys back in the playgrounds a long time ago. Now quit mooning over my cousin and start thinking about Randy.”
When I got to Randy’s grandmother’s house, I could smell the food all the way up the hill on Main Street, where we parked the car. His grandmother, Mrs. Smith, who would soon become Mamaw to me, introduced me to Dunbar macaroni. She gave me the history, lore, and legend of the dish as she served me a large portion.
“No one knows who Mr. Dunbar was, but we are absolutely sure he was a Newberrian. The dish is native to this town. You’ll never find another single soul eating this anywhere. And it’s delicious. Though there are two or three versions, I’m letting you eat mine. I make it the classical way. No frills or fuss.”
I knew so little about food and the way it was prepared that all I remember about her Dunbar macaroni was that she watched me closely as I ate her concoction of cheese and macaroni and onions. It was my first South Carolina funeral, and everything about that day remains bright, vivid, and profoundly sad.
Though I had never felt sadder, I had never eaten better in my whole life. There was something scandalous to me about combining mourning Randy with the exquisite pleasures of the Newberry table.
I did not eat Dunbar macaroni again for 30 years. I was in the middle of finishing the novel Beach Music when I got a call from my old English teacher, Gene Norris, late at night. He could hardly speak as he told me that his cousin, Liz, the one who had infatuated me as a boy, had died in her sleep at the age of 49. Liz had followed her plan with immaculate precision and married that Clemson fraternity man, who then set about becoming a doctor. They had lived out their lives as important citizens of Newberry, raised two children, attended the Lutheran church, and had some fine years before it began to go wrong with them. Their divorce was almost final when she was found dead in her bed.
Sadness had attached itself to her final years, and Gene would periodically ask me to call Liz to cheer her up when things were really bad. I tried to get her to come to a screening of The Prince of Tides in New York City with Gene, but her lawyer said it could be used against her in court. I sent her the bottle of Champagne that Barbra Streisand had had delivered to my hotel room after that screening. Liz called me to tell me she and several of her girlfriends had made an elaborate ceremony out of drinking it. When I gathered with her family after her burial, I saw the note I had written when I sent her the Champagne. It was hanging by a magnet on her refrigerator door.
I was reading my note to Liz when one of her friends tapped me lightly on the shoulder and said, handing me a plate, “You’ve got to eat this. It’s a Newberry County specialty. We call it Dunbar macaroni.”
I had never seen Liz Norris after that day of Randy’s funeral. We had, of course, spoken on the phone, but our paths never crossed again. As I ate Dunbar macaroni for the second time in my life, I said a prayer for Liz and thought how strange it was that her high-school Harry had finally caught up with her when it was far too late for either one of us.