by Pat Conroy
And I? What had I become, sleepless and dazzled by the monstrous seraphim prowling before my sister’s eyes? What was my role, and did it contain the elements of grandeur or ruin? My designation in the family was normality. I was the balanced child drafted into the ranks for leadership, for coolness under fire, stability. “Solid as a rock,” my mother would describe me to her friends, and I thought the description was perfect. I was courteous, bright, popular, and religious. I was the neutral country, the family Switzerland. A symbol of righteousness, I paid homage to the irreproachable figure of the child my parents always wanted. Respectful of the courtesies, I had entered my adulthood timid and eager to please. And while my sister screamed and fought against the black dogs of her underworld and my brother slept like an infant, I stayed up the night and knew that I had passed an important week in my life. I had been married for almost six years, had established my career as teacher and coach, and was living out my life as a mediocre man.
3
It had been nine years since that first visit to New York to witness Savannah’s triumphant reading in Greenwich Village. A full three years had passed since Savannah and I, once the inseparable twins, had spoken a word to each other. I could not utter her name without hurting. I could barely think about the past five years without coming apart. Memory had become both regent and keepsake of nightmare as I again crossed the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge by taxi and came to Manhattan as king’s horseman, required by custom to put my sister together again.
Savannah’s psychiatrist was one Dr. Lowenstein and she worked out of an elegant brownstone in the East Seventies. Her waiting room was all tweed and leather. The ashtrays were heavy enough to kill squirrels. There were two modern paintings, jangling enough to induce schizophrenia, hanging from opposite walls. They looked like Rorschach ink-blots gone to seed in a field of lilies. I stared at the one hanging behind the receptionist before I opened my mouth.
“Did someone really pay money for that thing?” I asked the proper, no-nonsense black woman behind the desk.
“Three thousand dollars. The art dealer told Dr. Lowenstein he was giving it away,” the woman said icily, not looking up.
“Did the artist stick his finger down his throat and puke at the canvas, or do you think he used paint?”
“Do you have an appointment?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am. I’m supposed to see the doctor at three o’clock.”
“Mr. Wingo,” she said, checking her schedule and studying my face. “You planning to stay the night? This isn’t a hotel.”
“I didn’t have time to drop my suitcase off at my sister’s house. You don’t mind if I leave it out here when I see the doctor, do you?”
“Where are you from?” the woman asked me.
For a moment I was going to lie and say I was from Sausalito, California. Everyone loves you if you say you’re from California, while everyone is filled with sorrow or loathing if you admit you’re from the South. I’ve known black men who were strongly tempted to fillet me when they heard me drawl out the words “Colleton, South Carolina.” I could see it register in their eyes that if they rid the earth of this one sad-eyed cracker they’d be avenging ancestors kidnapped from the veldt centuries ago and brought chained and bleeding into southern ports. Nat Turner lives deep in the eyes of all modern black men.
“South Carolina,” I said.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, smiling but not looking up.
The music of Bach filled the room, entered my ears. The flowers were fresh on the sideboard at the end of the room; they were purple irises, carefully arranged, and they leaned toward me like the small, delicate heads of birds. I closed my eyes and tried to relax into the music, yield to its seduction. The music slowed my heartbeat and it felt like roses beneath my eyes. My head was aching slightly and I opened my eyes, wondering whether I had packed aspirin in my suitcase. There were books on the sideboard and I rose to inspect them as the Bach concerto ended and Vivaldi spilled into the room. The books were well selected and cared for and some of them were signed by the authors. The inscriptions were personal and I realized many of the writers had sat in this same room, shivering before this unnamed artist’s ghastly vision of the world. On the top shelf, I spotted Savannah’s second book of poetry, The Prince of Tides. I opened it to the dedication page and almost cried when I read the words. But it was good to feel the tears try to break through. It was proof I was still alive inside, down deep, where the hurt lay bound and degraded in the cheap, bitter shell of my manhood. My manhood! How I loathed being a man, with its fierce responsibilities, its tally of ceaseless strength, its passionate and stupid bravado. How I hated strength and duty and steadfastness. How I dreaded seeing my lovely sister with her damaged wrists and tubes running down her nose and the bottles of glucose hanging like glass embryos above her bed. But I knew my role so clearly now, knew the tyranny and the snare of maleness, and I would walk toward my sister as a pillar of strength, a vegetable king striding over the fields of our shared earth, my hands sparkling with the strength of pastures, confident in cycles, singing of her renewal, comforting her with the words of the coach and good news from the king of seasons. Strength was my gift; it was also my act, and I’m sure it’s what will end up killing me.
I turned the page to the first poem in the book. I read the poem aloud, accompanied by violins and irises and Vivaldi, trying to catch the tone and spirit of Savannah’s inflection, the palpable reverence she brought to the lectern when she read her own work.
I blaze with a deep sullen magic,
smell lust like a heron on fire;
all words I form into castles
then storm them with soldiers of air.
What I seek is not there for asking.
My armies are fit and well trained.
This poet will trust her battalions
to fashion her words into blades.
At dawn I shall ask them for beauty,
for proof that their training went well.
At night I shall beg their forgiveness
as I cut their throats by the hill.
My navies advance through the language,
destroyers ablaze in high seas.
I soften the island for landings.
With words, I enlist a dark army.
My poems are my war with the world.
I blaze with a deep southern magic.
The bombardiers taxi at noon.
There is screaming and grief in the mansions
and the moon is a heron on fire.
Then I turned again to the dedication and read:
Man wonders but God decides
When to kill the Prince of Tides.
When I looked up, Dr. Lowenstein was staring at me from the door of her office. She was expensively dressed, and lean. Her eyes were dark and unadorned. In the shadows of that room, with Vivaldi fading in sweet echoes, she was breathtakingly beautiful, one of those go-to-hell New York women with the incorruptible carriage of lionesses. Tall and black-haired, she looked as if she had been airbrushed with breeding and good taste.
“Who is the Prince of Tides?” she asked without introducing herself.
“Why don’t you ask Savannah?”
“I will when she’s able to speak to me. That might be some time,” she answered, smoothing her jacket. “I’m sorry. I’m Dr. Lowenstein. You must be Tom.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, rising and following her into her office.
“Would you like a cup of coffee, Tom?”
“Yes, ma’am, I would,” I said nervously.
“Why do you call me ma’am? I believe we’re exactly the same age.”
“Good home training. And nervousness.”
“Why are you nervous? Do you take anything with your coffee?”
“Cream and sugar. I get nervous every time my sister slits her wrists. It’s a quirk of mine.”
“Have you ever met a psychiatrist before?” she asked, bringing back two cups of coffee from a closet nea
r her desk. Her walk was graceful and assured.
“Yes. I think I’ve met all of Savannah’s doctors at one time or another.”
“Has she ever attempted suicide before?”
“Yes. On two other bright and happy occasions.”
“Why do you say ‘bright and happy’?”
“I was being cynical. I’m sorry. It’s a family habit I’ve fallen prey to.”
“Is Savannah cynical?”
“No. She escaped that part of the family horror.”
“You sound sorry she escaped your cynicism.”
“She tries to kill herself instead, Doctor. I would far prefer her to be cynical. How is Savannah? Where is she? When can I see her? And why are you asking me these questions? You haven’t told me about her condition.”
“Is the coffee good, Tom?” she asked with complete control.
“Yes. It’s fabulous. Now, about Savannah.”
“I want you to be patient, Tom. We’ll get to the subject of Savannah in a moment,” the doctor said in a patronizing voice shaped by far too many advanced degrees. “There are some background questions I need to ask if we’re going to help Savannah. And I’m sure we want to help Savannah, don’t we?”
“Not if you continue to talk to me in that unbearably supercilious tone, Doctor, as though I were some gaudy chimp you’re trying to teach to type. And not until you tell me where my goddamn sister is,” I said, sitting on my hands to stop their visible trembling. The coffee and the headache intermingled and the faraway music scratched along my eardrum like a nail.
Dr. Lowenstein, annealed to hostility in all its multifarious guises, looked at me coolly. “All right, Tom. I will tell you what I know about Savannah. Then will you help me?”
“I don’t know what you want.”
“I want to know about her life, everything you know about it. I want to hear the stories of her childhood. I need to know where these symptoms first manifested themselves, when she first started demonstrating signs of her illness. You did know about her mental illness, didn’t you, Tom?”
“Yes, of course,” I answered. “Half her poems are about her madness. She writes about it the way Hemingway wrote about killing lions. It’s the dementia of her art. I’m sick of Savannah being crazy. I’m tired of all this Sylvia Plath bullshit. The last time she opened herself up, Doctor, I told her that I wanted her to finish the job the next time. I wanted her to swallow the barrel of a shotgun and blow the back of her head out. But no. She’s got this attraction to razor blades. See? I can’t stand looking at her scars, Doctor. I can’t stand seeing her lying in bed with tubes running from her nose. I’m a good brother, but I don’t know what to say to her after she’s slit herself open like she was cleaning a deer. I’m not good at it, Doctor. And no shrink, no fucking shrink—and there have been scores of them—has ever helped Savannah quiet the demons that torture her. Can you do that, ma’am? Tell me. Can you do it?”
She took a sip of her coffee; her indigenous calm infuriated me as much as it formed a bold-stroked parenthesis around my lack of control. She replaced her cup into the saucer, where it clinked into its round groove nicely. “Would you like another cup of coffee, Tom?” she asked.
“No.”
“I don’t know if I can help your sister,” Dr. Lowenstein said, turning her professional stare on me once again. “Her suicide attempt took place over a week ago. She is now in no danger of dying from her wounds. She almost died the first night at Bellevue, but the receiving doctor in the emergency room did excellent work, I’m told. She was in a coma when I first saw her, and we didn’t know if she would live. When she came out of it, she started raving and screaming. It was gibberish but, as you might imagine, of a highly poetic and associative quality. I taped it and it might give us some clues about the latest cycle. Yesterday something changed. She ceased to speak. I called a poet I know and she found out your mother’s telephone number from Savannah’s next-door neighbor. I sent your father a telegram but he didn’t respond. Why do you think he didn’t?”
“Because you live in New York. Because you’re a woman. Because you’re a Jew. Because you’re a shrink. And besides, it scares him to death every time Savannah has one of her breakdowns.”
“So he handles it by refusing to answer a cry for help?”
“If Savannah cried for help, he’d be right here beside her if he could. He divides the world into Wingos, assholes, and asshole Wingos. Savannah is a Wingo.”
“And I’m an asshole,” she said without emotion.
“You’ve broken the code,” I answered, smiling. “By the way, my father couldn’t have received your letter.”
“Does your family hate Jews?”
“My family hates everyone. It’s nothing personal.”
“Did your family use the word nigger when you were growing up?”
“Of course, Doctor,” I said, wondering what this topic had to do with Savannah. “I grew up in South Carolina.”
“But there must have been some educated, enlightened people who refused to use that odious word,” the doctor said.
“They weren’t Wingos. Except my mother. She claimed that only poor white trash used that word. She prided herself on saying Negro with a long ‘o.’ She thought that put her high in the ranks of humanitarians.”
“Do you use the word nigger now, Tom?” she asked.
I studied her pretty face to see if she was joking, but these were business hours and the doctor was all seriousness, without time for the small subsidies and occlusions of humor.
“I only use that word when I’m around condescending Yankees like you. Then, Doctor, I can’t stop myself from using the word. Nigger. Nigger. Nigger. Nigger. Nigger. Nigger,” I said.
“Are you quite finished?” she said, and I was delighted I had offended her upholstered sensibilities.
“Quite.”
“I don’t allow that word to be used in this office.”
“Nigger. Nigger. Nigger. Nigger. Nigger. Nigger,” I replied.
She controlled herself with effort and spoke in a tense, coiled voice. “I did not mean to condescend to you, Tom. If you think I did, then please accept my apologies. It just startled me somewhat that the family of the poet Savannah Wingo used that word. It seems hard to believe her family was racist.”
“Savannah is who she is today because her family was racist. She reacted against her family. She began writing as an act of outrage that she was born to such a family.”
“Are you mad that you were born to such a family?”
“I would be mad no matter what family I was born to. But I’d have chosen the Rockefeller or Carnegie family if I’d had a choice. Being born a Wingo has just made it all the more difficult.”
“Explain, please.”
“I think life is painful to all human beings. It’s especially hard when you’re a Wingo. But, of course, I’ve never been anything but a Wingo, so I’m speaking theoretically.”
“What religion did your family practice?” the doctor asked.
“Catholic, for godsakes. Roman Catholic.”
“Why did you say ‘for godsakes’? There’s nothing wrong with being a Catholic.”
“You have no idea how weird it is to be raised a Catholic in the Deep South.”
“I might have some idea,” she replied. “You have no idea how weird it is to be raised Jewish anywhere in the world.”
“I’ve read Philip Roth,” I said.
“So what,” she answered, and there was real hostility in her voice.
“Oh, nothing. Just a cringing attempt at establishing a fragile bond between us.”
“Philip Roth despises both Jews and women and you do not have to be either Jewish or female to see that,” she said, delivering her statement as though the subject could be dropped forever.
“That’s what Savannah thinks, too,” I said, smiling at the memory of Savannah’s vehemence and dogmatism on the same subject.
“What do you think, Tom?”
; “Do you really want to know?”
“Yes. Very much.”
“Well, with all due respect, I think both you and Savannah are full of shit on that subject,” I answered.
“With all due respect, why should we entertain the opinion of a white southern male?”
I leaned forward and whispered, “Because, Doctor, when I’m not eating roots and berries, when I’m not screwing mules from the tops of stumps, and when I’m not slaughtering pigs out back at the still, I’m a very smart man.”
She smiled and studied her fingernails. In the silence, the hushed music seemed to spill into the room, each note clear and bright, like a waltz coming across a lake.
“In your sister’s poetry, Tom,” Dr. Lowenstein tried once more, “are you the brother who is the shrimper or are you the coach?” I knew this woman was more than a match for me.