by Pat Conroy
When I told this part of my family’s history in my next session with Dr. Lowenstein, she listened without interruption.
“What part had he left out?” Dr. Lowenstein asked me.
“He left out one small, insignificant detail,” I said. “Do you remember my telling you about the pregnant farmer’s wife who discovered him sleeping?”
“The one with the pretty face that reminded him of your mother,” she answered.
“I told you that she screamed and ran to get her husband,” I said. “That much was true, but my father did not rush out and hide in a cave beside a river. He caught that pretty woman and he strangled her to death in that barn. Because he was a pilot, he had never seen the faces of the people he killed. The German woman’s face was five inches from his own as he crushed the bones of her throat and she died in agony right before his eyes.”
“When did you discover that part of the story, Tom?” she asked.
“He told me the night my mother left him,” I said. “I think he needed to explain to both me and himself what it was that had turned him into a father to be feared. The German woman was both his secret and his shame. We are a family of well-kept secrets and they all nearly end up killing us.”
“The story is fascinating, but I’m not sure it tells me anything about Savannah.”
“The tapes, the transcripts,” I said. “She mentioned this in the tapes.”
“How, Tom?” she asked. “Where? There was nothing about Germany or the storm. Nothing about the priest or the midwife.”
“Yes, there was. Or at least I think there was. She mentioned a woman, Agnes Day. I just told you about Agnes Day. Its origin. I told you where Agnes Day came from.”
“I’m sorry, Tom. You did not,” Dr. Lowenstein said, a puzzled frown on her face.
“When we were children, Doctor, we heard this story over and over again. It was like a bedtime story to us. We couldn’t get enough of it. What did Father Kraus look like? Did he have a beard? Where did Sarah Jenkins live? How many people were in the Fischer family? We could actually see Father Kraus saying Mass, or we thought we could. But we’d confuse the story when we were kids. Sarah Jenkins would end up feeding my father in the bell tower. Or Father Kraus would carry my mother through the flood-waters. You know how kids do things to stories. You know how they confuse things and make the story something else.”
“But who is Agnes Day?”
“She was a mistake. Savannah made it first. Luke and I picked it up. Savannah screamed it out over the tapes. Agnes Day was the first thing my father heard the priest say.”
“I don’t remember that, Tom.”
“Agnus Dei. In the choir loft. Savannah thought Agnes Day was the woman the priest loved in Hamburg and that he loved her so much he even cried out her name when he was celebrating Mass.”
“Wonderful,” Dr. Lowenstein said. “Simply wonderful.”
5
After the first week, there came to be a shape and character to all those New York summer days—those introspective, confessional days when I spun out the history of my dispirited, sorrow-struck family to Savannah’s lovely psychiatrist whose job it was to repair the damage sustained by one member of that family.
The story grew slowly and as it unfolded I began to feel an interior strength flicker into life. I spent the first few days reviewing the tapes that so chillingly recorded the extent of my sister’s breakdown. She spoke in hurt fragments of language. I wrote her screams down on paper, studied them, and each day startled myself with some clear vision of memory I had repressed or forgotten. Each of her phrases, no matter how surreal or bizarre, had a foundation in reality, and each memory led to another and another until my head blazed with small intricate geometries of illumination. There were days when I could hardly wait for my five o’clock meetings with Dr. Lowenstein.
But in the unconscious, I began to encounter both wild fruit and vast disciplined vineyards. I tried to censor the superfluous or the commonplace, yet I knew large truths lay hidden in the clovers, sweet grasses, and wild mint. As gleaner of my sister’s troubled past, I wanted to leave nothing out but wished to find the one rose that might contain the image of the tiger when found blooming on the trellis.
My enemy was indeterminacy as I sat surrounded by books and plants in my sister’s living room. The task I had set for myself that summer was simple enough: I was to embark on a grand tour of self. I would study the events and accidents that had led to the creation of a defensive and mediocre man. I moved slowly through those days. Time pushed through me courteously as I took note of the sun’s transit over Manhattan. I tried to place myself in the confluence of things, study my own interior satellites as dispassionately as some astronomer noting the twelve moons attendant to the pearly mass of Jupiter.
The silence of early mornings began to please me. In stillness, I started to keep a journal, making solemn notations in the formal public school handwriting that grew smaller each year, mirroring my own diminishment. At first, I concentrated only on what was essential to Savannah’s story, but I kept returning to myself, able to tell the story only through my own eyes. I had no right or credibility to interpret the world through her eyes. The best I could do for my sister would be to tell my own story as honestly as I could. I had lived a singularly uncourageous life, a passive, though surveillant, one, brimming with surfaces of terror. But one strength that I had brought to the task at hand was that I had been present at almost every significant occasion of Savannah’s life. My voice would sound a pure noise of witness and I would raise it in a cleansing song.
I had a mission here, a job. I wanted to explain why my sister, my twin, opened her veins, saw hideous visions, and was haunted by a childhood of such conflict and debasement there was small chance of her ever coining to terms with it. And as I would try to explode the levees of memory, I would record the spillage flooding the dry imagined streets of the only town I ever loved. I would tell Dr. Lowenstein of the loss of Colleton and how the death of a town left traceries of whitewash and markings the color of eggshell silvering in memory. If I could summon the courage to tell it all, by speaking without forestallment, by humming the melodies of all those dark anthems that sent us marching so resolutely toward our appointments with a remorseless destiny, I could explain my sister’s heartbreaking war with the world.
But first there had to be a time of renewal, time to master a fresh approach to self-scrutiny. I had lost nearly thirty-seven years to the image I carried of myself. I had ambushed myself by believing, to the letter, my parents’ definition of me. They had defined me early on, coined me like a word they had translated on some mysterious hieroglyph, and I had spent my life coming to terms with that specious coinage. My parents had succeeded in making me a stranger to myself. They had turned me into the exact image of what they needed at the time, and because there was something essentially complaisant and orthodox in my nature, I allowed them to knead and shape me into the smooth lineaments of their nonpareil child. I adhered to the measurements of their vision. They whistled and I danced like a spaniel in their yard. They wanted a courteous boy and the old southern courtesies flowed out of me in a ceaseless flood. They longed for a stable twin, a pillar of sanity to balance the family structure after they realized Savannah was always going to be their secret shame, their unabsolvable crime. They succeeded not only in making me normal but also in making me dull. But their most iniquitous gift they did not even know they were bestowing. I longed for their approval, their applause, their pure uncomplicated love for me, and I looked for it years after I realized they were not even capable of letting me have it. To love one’s children is to love oneself, and this was a state of supererogatory grace denied my parents by birth and circumstance. I needed to reconnect to something I had lost. Somewhere I had lost touch with the kind of man I had the potential of being. I needed to effect a reconciliation with that unborn man and try to coax him gently toward his maturity.
Again and again, I thought of Sallie and
our children. I had married the first woman I ever kissed. I thought I had married her because she was pretty, blessed with horse sense and sass, and unlike my mother in any way. But I had married a fine and comely girl, and with brilliance and craft and all instincts of self-preservation jettisoned, I succeeded over the years, through neglect, coldness, and betrayal, in turning her into the exact image of my mother. Because of some endemic flaw in my manhood I could not just have wives or lovers. I required soft enemies humming lullabies of carnage in the playroom, snipers in floral print dresses gunning for me from the bell towers. I was not comfortable with anyone who was not disapproving of me. No matter how ardently I strove to attain their impossibly high standards for me, I could never do anything entirely right and so I grew accustomed to that climate of inevitable failure. I hated my mother, so I got back at her by giving my wife her role. In Sallie, I had formed the woman who would be a subtle, more cunning version of my own mother. Like my mother, my wife had come to feel slightly ashamed of and disappointed in me. The configuration and tenor of my weakness would define the fury of their resurrection; my failure would frame their strength, blossoming, and deliverance.
Though I hated my father, I expressed that hatred eloquently by imitating his life, by becoming more and more ineffectual daily, by ratifying all the cheerless prophecies my mother made for both my father and me. I thought I had succeeded in not becoming a violent man, but even that belief collapsed: My violence was subterranean, unbeheld. It was my silence, my long withdrawals, that I had turned into dangerous things. My viciousness manifested itself in the terrible winter of blue eyes. My wounded stare could bring an ice age into the sunniest, balmiest afternoon. I was about to be thirty-seven years old, and with some aptitude and a little natural ability, I had figured out how to live a perfectly meaningless life, but one that could imperceptibly and inevitably destroy the lives of those around me.
So I looked to this surprise summer of freedom as a last chance to take my full measure as a man, a troubled interregnum before I ventured into the pitfalls and ceremonials of middle age. I wanted, by an act of conscious will, to make it a time of reckoning and, if I was lucky, a time of healing and reconstitution of an eclipsed spirit.
Through the procedure of remembrance, I would try to heal myself, to gather up the strength I would need to manifest as I guided Dr. Lowenstein along the declivities and versants of the past.
I usually awoke with the first light, and after the perfunctory annotation of the night’s dreams, I would rise, shower, and dress. Then I would drink a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice, that first cleansing sting of citrus a joy to the tongue. I would walk down the back stairway of the apartment and emerge on Grove Street. At Sheridan Square, I would buy a copy of The New York Times from the disturbingly anonymous vendor. He was representative of a whole subspecies of New Yorkers who performed thankless yet essential jobs with appearances as unspecified as subway tokens. Backtracking to Bleecker Street, I would buy two croissants from a French bakery run by an insouciant Madame from Lyon. As I walked back to the apartment, I would eat one of the croissants. These were admirable croissants, light and warm as birds, and they broke apart in crusty leaves while they still contained a slight heat of the ovens. My hands smelled like good bread as I sat in the living room chair and opened to the sports section. I was a lifelong prisoner of the morning sports section and I memorized its long clean columns of statistics. Because of its hieratic obsession with numbers, baseball was my favorite season, each day framed and ennobled by the lucid numerology of box scores.
With the paper finished and strewn around me, I faced the terror of summer mornings. Defeat was my theme.
The air-conditioning thermostat in Dr. Lowenstein’s office was always turned down too low. I would come in off those torrid, filmy streets, begrimed with sweat and dust, and involuntarily shiver as I entered that suite of well-appointed offices with their false, unseasonal weather. The outer office where the receptionist, Mrs. Barber, worked was always a degree or two warmer than the chill, nearly arctic temperature of the waiting room. Five o’clock sunlight divided her face into symmetrical slats whenever I entered for my weekday soliloquies with Dr. Lowenstein.
Mrs. Barber looked up when I came in for one of my sessions. “Oh, Mr. Wingo,” she said, checking her appointment book, “we’ve got a change of schedule today. Dr. Lowenstein hoped you wouldn’t mind.”
“What’s up?”
“Emergency. One of her friends called up all upset. Dr. Lowenstein hoped you’d just wait around and you two could go out and have a drink somewhere.”
“Yeah,” I said, “that would be fine. Can I just sit in the waiting room and catch up on all the back issues of those swank magazines?”
“I’ll tell her,” Mrs. Barber said. Then, looking at me softly, maternally, she asked, “You doing okay, Carolina?”
“Not really, Mrs. Barber,” I said, and my voice trembled with the unsuspected candor of my answer.
“You grin and joke around a lot for someone who isn’t doing okay,” she said.
“It fools you, doesn’t it?”
“Nope,” she said, looking at me. “It doesn’t fool me for a minute. I’ve been hanging around people in trouble for a long time. It’s always in the eyes. If I can do anything for you, anything at all, you just give me a yell.”
“Mrs. Barber, will you stand up for a minute?” I asked, suddenly overwhelmed with a vast, insupportable love of this stranger.
“What for, honey?”
“I want to drop on my knees and kiss your ass. It’s a reflex I have these days when anyone is even slightly kind to me.”
“You’re just worried about your sister.”
“No, no, not at all,” I said. “She’s just a front I use. Whenever I fall completely apart, I use her as my excuse and justification. I blame all my sadness on her and I do it in the lowest, most cowardly way.”
“Here,” she said, unfastening her purse and casting a furtive glance at the doorway leading to Dr. Lowenstein’s inner office. “Whenever I’m having a to-do with my husband or I’m fretting about the children, I go to Dr. Jack for a little relief.”
She pulled a half pint of Jack Daniel’s out of her purse and poured me a shot in a small paper cup she took from the water cooler.
“Dr. Jack always makes house calls and the boy cures what ails you.”
I downed the bourbon in a single swallow and felt its brown glow in my stomach.
“Thanks, Mrs. Barber.”
“Don’t tell Dr. Lowenstein I gave you that, Carolina.”
“My lips are sealed,” I promised. “By the way, how are the penguins?”
“What penguins?” she asked suspiciously.
“It’s so cold in here I thought the doctor must be raising penguins or that most of her clients must be manic-depressive Eskimos.”
“You get out of here, now, Carolina,” said Mrs. Barber, issuing me a summary dismissal with a wave of her hand. “Dr. Lowenstein likes it cool in summer and hot in winter. I got to wear sweaters all summer and damn if I don’t feel like strutting around this office in a bikini when there’s snow piling up outside in February.”
“But does she cure a lot of crazy people, then lose them to pneumonia?”
“Get,” she commanded, and returned to her typing.
I shivered again as I entered the chilled sanctum where patients awaited Dr. Lowenstein’s summons.
I took a stack of Architectural Digests from a coffee table and began idly leafing through them, laughing at the thought that any human beings could live and suffer and play in those voluptuous rooms. There was an excessive, overripened sensibility at work in the creation of every house I studied. I turned to a library of an Italian architect so ebullient and rococo that you could tell not a single book had ever been read in those glistening leather chairs that stood artfully arranged in perfect intervals along the walls. Even books had become furniture. The decorator had purloined windows from dismantled estates,
lifted paneling from the halls of damaged castles. Nothing was original. Everything was the result of a vision, amalgamations of booty plundered from auction houses—the personal touch surrendered to the stately majesties of overwrought beautification.
“Where are the cat boxes, the playpens, the wastepaper baskets, the ashtrays?” I said aloud, turning the pages and studying the photographs of a restored chateau in the Loire Valley. “Where’s the Kleenex, the toilet paper, the Drano, the toothbrushes by the sink?”
Talking back to magazines and newspapers was a much favored hobby of mine: I considered it a callisthenic of mental health. I did not see or hear the woman enter the waiting room and take a seat near the door.
She sat erect in her chair, almost incorporeal in her stillness, grieving and spent. She was one of those classically beautiful women who inspired a wordless awe in me. There is such a thing as too much beauty in a woman and it is often a burden as crippling as homeliness and far more dangerous. It takes much luck and integrity to survive the gift of perfect beauty, and its impermanence is its most cunning betrayal.
She wept without tears and it sounded as though she were strangling. Her face was misshapen from the effort to control her grief, like the ones on those stricken, exhausted Madonnas who hover lovingly over their broken sons in Pietàs all over Europe.
Though I was in the same room, muttering at photographs, she did not look at me or acknowledge my presence.
Ha! A New Yorker, I thought to myself. None of the small talk or little courtesies to ease the embarrassment of this chance encounter.
I returned to the pages of Architectural Digest and kept my criticisms to myself. For several minutes I read in silence. When I heard her weeping again, this time there were tears.