Charleston was my father’s ministry, his hobbyhorse, his quiet obsession, and the great love of his life. He was talking about Charleston, South Carolina, and he was a native son, peacock proud of a town so pretty it makes your eyes ache with pleasure just to walk down its spellbinding, narrow streets. “It was my father who called the city the Mansion on the River. It is an unforgivable crime for teenagers not to be able to absolve themselves for being ridiculous creatures at the most hazardous time of their lives.” But since a teenager is denied a crystal ball that will predict the future, there is a forced march quality to this unspeakable rite of passage. The prince of acne rallied in college and is now head of neurology, and the homeliest girl blossoms in her twenties, marries the chief financial officer of a national bank, and attends her reunion as president of the Junior League.
Time is the only ally of the humiliated teenager, who eventually discovers the golden boy of the senior class is a bloated, bald drunk at the twentieth reunion, and that the homecoming queen married a wife-beater and philanderer and died in a drug rehabilitation center before she was thirty. It is a fun-house mirror where distortion and mystification led to the bitter reflection that sometimes ripens into self knowledge. “Being a failed teenager is not a crime, but a predicament and a secret crucible.
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