by Pat Conroy
“The coach,” I admitted.
“Why did you lower your voice? Are you ashamed of being a coach?”
“I’m ashamed of the way other people feel about coaches. Especially in New York. Especially a shrink. Especially a woman shrink.”
“How do you think I feel about coaches in general?” she asked in complete control once more.
“How many coaches do you know in particular?”
“None,” she said, smiling. “I don’t seem to meet many of them in my circle.”
“You wouldn’t allow one in your circle if you knew one.”
“That’s probably true, Tom. Who makes up your crowd in South Carolina?”
“Just other coaches,” I said, feeling trapped and constricted in that fragrant room. I could smell her perfume and knew it well but could not recall its name. “We sit around reading the sports section, arm wrestling, and sucking on each other’s blood blisters.”
“You’re a very enigmatic man, Tom. I cannot help your sister if you only answer my questions with jokes or riddles. I need you to trust me. Do you understand?”
“I don’t know you, ma’am. I don’t speak easily about personal things with people I love, much less with people I’ve known for only half an hour.”
“But this cultural gap between us seems to concern you overmuch.”
“I can feel your contempt for me,” I said, closing my eyes. The headache surrounded my eyes in a pure netting of pain.
“Contempt?” she said in disbelief, rolling her eyes. “Even if I loathed everything you stood for, I would not feel contempt for you. I need you in order to help your sister—if you’ll let me. I’m completely familiar with her work, but I need to know the details of her life so that when she’s lucid again I can try to break through this destructive pattern she seems to have been in for as long as anyone can remember. If I can find a few clues in her background perhaps I can help her devise some strategies of survival, so she can pursue her art without such devastating consequences.”
“Ah, now I’ve got it,” I said, rising and beginning to pace around the room, disoriented and increasingly out of control, dizzy with the pastels. “You’re the heroine in this late-twentieth-century drama. The sensitive and dedicated therapist who saves the feminist poet for the ages, who lays her healing, manicured hands on the artist’s gaping wounds and, with the holy words of Sigmund Freud, brings her back from the edge of the abyss. The doctor becomes a small but revered footnote in literary history.” I squeezed my head with both hands and began to massage the temples with my fingers.
“Do you have a headache, Tom?” she asked.
“A terrible one, Doctor. Do you have a spot of morphine around?”
“No, but I’ve got some aspirin. Why didn’t you say something?”
“You feel bad complaining about a headache when your sister has slit her wrists.”
She had walked to her desk and emptied three aspirins out into her palm. She poured me another cup of coffee and I took the aspirin.
“Do you want to lie down on the couch?”
“No, for godsakes. I was terrified you were going to make me lie down on the couch when I came in here this afternoon. Like they do it in the movies.”
“I try not to do it the way they do in the movies . . . I don’t mean to shock you, Tom, but when I first saw her, she was covering herself with her own excrement.”
“That doesn’t shock me.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve seen her covering herself with shit before. It’s shocking the first time. Maybe the second. Then you get used to it and it becomes part of the scenery.”
“Where did you see it the first time?”
“In San Francisco. She was on a reading tour. She got herself in a genuine loony bin. The most depressing place I ever saw. I couldn’t tell if covering herself with shit was an act of self-hate or she was just redecorating her room.”
“You make jokes about your sister’s psychosis. What an odd man you are!”
“It’s the southern way, Doctor.”
“The southern way?” she said.
“My mother’s immortal phrase. We laugh when the pain gets too much. We laugh when the pity of human life gets too . . . pitiful. We laugh when there’s nothing else to do.”
“When do you weep . . . according to the southern way?”
“After we laugh, Doctor. Always. Always after we laugh.”
“I’ll meet you at the hospital. Is seven o’clock okay?”
“It’s fine. I’m sorry I said some of the things I said today, Doctor. Thank you for not kicking me out of the office.”
“See you tonight. Thank you for coming,” she said, then added in a teasing way, “Coach.”
In mental hospitals, no matter how humanistic or enlightened, keys are the manifest credentials of power, the steel asterisks of freedom and mobility. The march of orderlies and nurses is accompanied by the alienating cacophony of singing keys striking against thighs, annotating the passage of the free. When you find yourself listening to their keys and owning none, you will come close to understanding the white terror of the soul that comes with being banished from all commerce with mankind. I learned the secret of keys from one of my sister’s poems that she wrote at one sitting after her first internment. She looked upon keys as the talismans and ciphers of her dilemma, her undeclared war with herself. Whenever she was sick, she would awake to the subtracting noise of keys.
That evening when Dr. Lowenstein took me in to see her, Savannah was crouched in a corner, her arms wrapped around her knees, her head turned away from the door and resting against the wall. The room smelled of excrement and ammonia, the corrupt and familiar bouquet that debases each long hour of the insane, the essential defining fragrance of the mental hospital, American style. She did not move or look up when we entered the room. And I knew this would be one of the bad times.
Dr. Lowenstein approached Savannah and gently touched her shoulder. “Savannah, I have a surprise for you. I’ve brought your brother, Tom, for a visit.”
My sister did not move. Her spirit had been subtracted out of her flesh. There was a mineral stillness to her repose, an immaculate divinity to the black ensemble of her catatonia. The catatonic has always seemed the holiest of the psychotics to me. There is integrity in the vow of silence and something sacred in the renunciation of movement. It is the quietest human drama of the soul undone, the solemn dress rehearsal for death itself. I had seen my sister not move before and I faced her this time as a veteran of her incurable quietude. The first time I had come apart and had hidden my face in my hands. Now, I remembered something she had told me: that deep within her stillness and solitude, her spirit was healing itself in the unreachable places, mining the riches and ores that lay concealed in the most inaccessible passages of her mind. And, she had added, she could not hurt herself when she was not moving, only cleanse herself, only prepare for the day when she reached again for the light. When she reached for that light, I planned to be there.
I took Savannah by the shoulders, kissed her neck, and sat down beside her. I held her tightly and snuggled my face against her hair. I avoided looking at the bandages on her wrists. “Hey, Savannah. How are you, darling?” I said softly. “Everything’s going to be all right because the kid is here. I’m so sorry you’re feeling bad, but I’m going to be right here until you get well. I saw Dad the other day and he sent his love. No, don’t worry, he hasn’t changed. He’s still an asshole. Mom couldn’t come up to see you this time because she had to wash her pantyhose. Sallie and the kids are fine. Jennifer is starting to grow breasts. She came up to me after her bath the other night, pulled down her towel, and said, ‘Look, Daddy, bumps,’ then ran giggling and screaming down the hall, with me chasing lewdly behind her. South Carolina hasn’t changed much at all. It’s still the goddamn cultural center of the world. Even Sullivans Island is starting to get some culture. They cut a ribbon on a new barbecue house out on the highway the other day. I st
ill haven’t found a job, but I’ve been looking hard. I know you’ve been worried about that. Saw Grandma Wingo at the nursing home in Charleston the other night. It was her birthday. She thought I was the Bishop of Charleston in 1920 and that I was trying to have sex with her. And I saw . . .”
For thirty minutes I talked to my sister, until Dr. Lowenstein interrupted my monologue by touching me on the shoulder and motioning that it was time to make our departure. I stood up. Then I lifted Savannah in my arms and carried her to the bed. She had lost weight and her cheeks were dark and sunken. Her eyes registered nothing; they were two turquoise gems lying inert in a field of off-white. She curled like an embryo when I set her down on her bed. I pulled a brush from my pocket and began stroking her damp, tangled hair. I brushed hard until I could see some of the gold return; I stroked her hair until some of its glorious luster and shine ignited down her back. Then I sang her a song from our childhood.
Take me back to the place where I first saw the light,
To the sweet sunny South take me home,
Where the wild birds sing me to sleep every night.
Oh, why was I tempted to roam?
I stood over her in silence for a moment, then said, “I’ll be back to see you tomorrow, Savannah. I know you can hear, and just remember this: We’ve been here before. And you’ll come out of it again. It takes time. Then we’ll go singing and dancing and I’ll say shitty things about New York and you’ll punch my arm and call me a redneck. I’m here, darling. And I’ll be here for as long as you need me.”
I kissed my twin on the lips and pulled the sheet over her.
When we were outside, in the late spring air, Dr. Lowenstein asked me if I had eaten, and I remembered I had not. She suggested a small French restaurant, Petite Marmite, that she knew well and liked. I instantly thought about the cost, the automatic response of a South Carolina schoolteacher humiliated by years of coolie wages. My joblessness I had forgotten. American teachers are all trained to think poor; we love conferences and book fairs with hospitality suites, expenses paid and banquets of rubbery chicken, sweet French dressing, and unspeakable peas.
“Is it expensive, Doctor? I’ve paid for some meals in this city where I thought I was sending the chef’s kid to private school.”
“It’s very reasonable by New York standards, I think.”
“Wait here. I’ll call my bank and see if I can arrange a loan.”
“I’ll buy, Coach.”
“As a completely liberated male, I accept, Doctor.”
The maître d’ greeted Dr. Lowenstein with an understated intimacy that let you know immediately that she was a regular. He led us to a corner table. The couple at the next table were moaning passionately to each other; their hands were clenched, their eyes orgasmic and engorged with candlelight, and you could tell they wanted to fling themselves across the pure white tablecloth and copulate over the béarnaise sauce. The doctor ordered a bottle of Macon Blanc, then looked briefly at the leather-bound menu.
“Can I have an hors d’oeuvre?” I asked.
“Of course. Have anything you like.”
“Can I have all the hors d’oeuvres?”
“No, I want you to eat a well-balanced meal.”
“You are Jewish.”
“Damn right,” she said, smiling. Then, growing serious, she asked, “What did you think about Savannah?”
“It’s worse than it’s ever been. But I feel a lot better.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I find it much harder to deal with her when she’s screaming and hallucinating and out of control. When she’s like this it’s almost as if she’s resting, building up her strength, getting ready to step out into the world again. She’ll be coming out of it in a month or two, Doctor. I promise you that.”
“Can you make predictions like that?”
“Not really, but this is the pattern I know.”
“Why don’t you have a job now?”
“I was fired.”
“May I ask why?”
“It’s part of a long story,” I said, “and for now, you cannot ask why.”
The sommelier brought the wine to the table and poured some into Dr. Lowenstein’s glass. She inhaled it, tasted it, and nodded. I love the small dramas of mealtime, the elegance of ritual. I tasted the wine gratefully and felt it enter my body to begin the night’s long siege against the migraine. I knew I should not drink but I wanted to. I was supposed to tell this woman my story in order to help my sister. But I had decided on a different strategy: I would tell her my story to save myself from myself.
“I’ve got a migraine headache coming on, Doctor. I don’t have a job and I have no prospects for getting a job. My wife, who is an internist, is having an affair with a heart specialist. She is thinking about leaving me. I hate my mother and my father, yet in five minutes I’d tell you that I didn’t really mean to say that and I love them with all my heart. My brother Luke is a family tragedy. You’ve heard about Luke but have not yet made the connection with Savannah. Did I mention that my father is in prison? That’s why he didn’t respond to your telegram. The story of the Wingos is one of humor, grotesquerie, and tragedy. Tragedy predominates. You’ll see that Savannah’s madness was the only natural response to our family life. And that my response was the unnatural one.”
“What was your response?”
“I pretended none of it happened. I have a gift for denial inherited from my mother, and I use it well. My sister calls me the Coach of Unremembrance. But I think I remember a lot more than she does.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m in the process of falling apart. That’s never been a role reserved for me. My family has always expected me to be the tower of strength, the man with the whistle, the good coach. I’ve always been the first secretary and star witness to the family melodrama.”
“Aren’t you being a bit dramatic, Tom?”
“Yes. And now I’ll stop and be charming.”
As we ordered our meals, she told me about her life, and she grew softer over candlelight. She ate soft-shell crabs encrusted with almonds and I told her about pulling crabs from the Colleton River. I ate salmon napped in a velvet dill sauce and she told me about watching the salmon fishermen in Scotland. There was another bottle of wine and a mushroom salad so fresh it was like tasting the bottom of the forest. The vinaigrette was mottled with basil leaves. The headache was gone now, but I could feel the approach of the migraine in the spine, moving upward, marshaling its forlorn powers slowly, like a train in the mountains. I had raspberries and cream for dessert. When her sorbet arrived, she began questioning me about Savannah again.
“Does the word Callanwolde mean anything to you, Tom?” she asked.
“Sure, why?”
“It’s one of the things Savannah kept repeating when she first regained consciousness. One of the things she was screaming.” She handed me a piece of paper across the table and asked me to read it. “I told you I recorded everything Savannah said in those first few days. I thought it might prove helpful once she’s well enough to return to therapy. I culled this paragraph out of a dozen hours of gibberish.”
I reached for the wine and read the words.
“Taps for the Prince of Tides. Dogs to my birthday party. Come to live in the white house, the marshes are never safe. Black dog not related to tigers. Daddy get the camera. Daddy get the camera. The dogs are roaming in packs. Three men are coming down the road. Callanwolde. Callanwolde. Out of the woods of Callanwolde and up to house on Rosedale Road. Taps for the Prince of Tides. The brother’s mouth is not safe. The marsh is never safe. The shrimp are running, the shrimp are running, the dogs are running. Caesar. Red pins and gardenias. Now. Now. The giant and Coca-Cola. Bring the tiger to the back door. Play Dixie for the seals. A root for the dead men by the crow. Do you hear someone, Mother? The graves are talking again. Someone outside? Someone pretty, Mother. The snow is stolen from the river and someone prettier than me, Mother. How many
angels dropped from the womb bloomed into ugliness in springtime? Where is fruit and Grandpa is cross. Stop the boat. Please stop the boat. I’m going to be with you for a very long time. Hurt you. Promise I will hurt you. Hurt the tiger man. Hurt the tiger man. Kill the tiger man. Stop the boat. Where is Agnes Day?”
When I finished reading I said, “Jesus Christ.”
Dr. Lowenstein took back the paper and folded it neatly. “Is there anything in this that you recognize as significant?”
“I recognize a lot of it. Everything seems significant.”
“What does it mean?”
“She’s screaming out her autobiography to you . . . to anyone who is listening . . . to herself.”
“Her autobiography? Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?”
“From beginning to end, Doctor. For as long as you need me.”
“Can you start tomorrow at five?”
“Fine,” I said. “I’ve got some terrible things to tell you.”
“Thank you for wanting to help Savannah, Tom,” she said.
“No,” I replied. And, almost strangling, I said, “Help me. Help me.”
It was past midnight when I entered my sister’s apartment on Grove Street. Sheridan Square appeared languid and surreal on a moonless night and through it drifted those casteless citizens of the after-midnight city. Each night they crossed each other’s paths with no sign of recognition. Always, they moved through the plangent light in a ceremony of surprised nostalgia. Their faces had the glow of some interior, sustained equinox beyond the comprehension of strangers. Nightwalkers, unafraid, I had studied each of them as they passed me by, oblivious of me. I tried to mimic their expressions, so ethereal, unsponsored, and original. But my face is a lousy actor. They knew how to walk in a great city and I did not. Outlander, visitor, I could smell the sea as I entered the lobby of Savannah’s apartment, the old familiar scent of the Eastern seaboard roaring up the Avenues.
The antique elevator, the size and shape of a coffin, wheezed and groaned its way to the sixth floor. I set my luggage on the marble floor and tried twelve keys before I discovered the four that slid back the enormous bolts that protected my sister from the world.