by Pat Conroy
“Yes,” I replied. “I hate men because I was raised by a man.”
For a moment we held each other in the tensile embrace of a mutual transfiguring hostility. I was trembling all over now and a great sadness had bivouacked in my heart again. I burned with the despair that slips up on the powerless and the disinherited. Something in me was dying in this room, but there was nothing I could do about it.
“My name is Susan,” she said quietly.
“Thank you, Doctor,” I almost gasped in my gratitude toward her. “I won’t use your name. I just needed to know it.”
I saw the softening around her eyes as we both began the voluntary withdrawal from the field of conflict. Her temper was quick but so was her willingness to draw back without inflicting any further wounds. There was a grace and a scrupulous integrity in the manner she salvaged something essential from our dangerous tournament of wills. She had allowed me a small, inconsequential victory and it was her voluntary compliance that made it important to me.
“Thank you, Lowenstein,” I said. “You handled that situation beautifully. I don’t mind making an ass out of myself, but I hate making a male ass out of myself.”
“Why did you stay in the South, Tom?” she asked after a few moments.
“I should have left it,” I answered, “but I lacked the courage. Because my childhood wasn’t right, I thought if I stayed in the South I could fix that childhood by making my adult life wonderful. I traveled some but nothing was right. I could never trust a place enough to take me in. So, like an asshole, I stayed in South Carolina. It wasn’t so much a failure of nerve as it was a failure of imagination.”
“And?” she asked.
“And each year, I lose a little bit more of what made me special as a kid. I don’t think as much or question as much. I dare nothing. I put nothing on the line. Even my passions are now frayed and pathetic. Once I dreamed I’d be a great man, Lowenstein. Now, the best I can hope for is that I can fight my way back to being a mediocre man.”
“It sounds like a desperate life.”
“No,” I disagreed, “I think it sounds like an ordinary one. Look, I’ve kept you here late. Is it possible I could take you to dinner to make up for my inexcusable behavior?”
“My husband was supposed to meet me for dinner, but his rehearsal session went badly,” she said.
“There’s a place I took Savannah and Luke when her first book came out.”
“Where’s that?” she asked.
“The Coach House,” I said.
She laughed and said, “The Coach House? Was that intentional?”
“No, it wasn’t,” I admitted. “Savannah thought it was a hoot and had to explain the rather overobvious pun to me, but I read an article that said it was a quintessential New York restaurant.”
“I should be getting home,” she said. “My son is arriving home from school tomorrow.”
“Never refuse free food and liquor, Lowenstein,” I said. “It’s bad luck and bad taste.”
“All right,” she said. “The hell with it. This is the fourth time in two weeks I’ve been stood up by my husband. But you have to promise me one thing, Tom.”
“Anything, Lowenstein.”
“You’ll have to tell me again during dinner that you think I’m beautiful. You’d be amazed, Tom, how many times I’ve thought of that since you said those words at the Plaza.”
I offered her my arm. “Will the beautiful Susan Lowenstein accompany Coach Wingo to a quintessential New York restaurant?”
“Yes,” she said, “the beautiful Susan Lowenstein would be happy to.”
Until 1953 my family were the only Catholics in the town of Colleton. My father’s wartime conversion, the one radical act of the spirit in his lifetime, was a perilous and invigorating voyage on weedy, doctrinal seas. My mother accepted her own conversion without a word of protest. Like him, she looked upon his deliverance in Germany as incontrovertible proof that God was alive and dabbling still in the quotidian affairs of humankind. And such was the nature of my mother’s naiveté that she thought her conversion to Catholicism would mean an automatic rise in her social prestige. She would learn, slowly and painfully, that there is nothing stranger or more alien in the American South than a Roman Catholic.
My parents came to their roaring faith with their ignorance shining and intact. They knew nothing of that immense, intricate architecture which supported the See of Rome. They learned their theology piecemeal, a tenet at a time, and like most converts brought a scrupulous obstinacy to their efforts to become the first practicing papists along their stretch of the Atlantic seaboard. But though they feasted on that succulent corpus of dogma whole hog, they remained hard-shell Baptists masquerading under the veils and gauderies of an overripe theology. Their souls were like summering fields, accustomed to indigenous crops, suddenly required to produce amazing and unnatural vegetation. But their consciousness of the Church’s rules and more obscure codicils was always sketchy at best.
For years, my mother would read to us from the Bible every night after dinner, her pretty voice skipping in breathless arpeggios up and down the scales of the King James Version. It was not until I was ten that my mother learned her new church proscribed the reading of that singing work of post-Elizabethan prose and demanded the study of the more pedestrian verses of the Douay-Rheims Version. She was ignorant of the laws of imprimatur, but she adjusted quickly, and the last phase of our youth resonates with the ponderous, workmanlike phraseology of the Catholic Bible. Even my mother’s voice, like water running, could not coax authentic rhythms from the Douay Version. It always sounded a bit off, like a mistuned guitar. But what we sacrificed in poetry we made up for by the knowledge that we had corrected a theological error. My mother even claimed that she far preferred the Douay-Rheims Version and knew it was the real thing the first time she opened its pages randomly and began to read from Deuteronomy.
Such was their innocence that my parents seemed to be the only Catholics in America who took the doctrine of the Pope on birth control seriously. Despite the estrangement of their marriage, they managed a healthy and, I imagine, vigorous sex life—if the number of my mother’s pregnancies is an indication of anything. Later, I would find out that they diligently used the rhythm method, checking the calendar every night, discussing whether they would partake of sex (their language of sex would always remain chaste and obscure). There were probably more children born of the rhythm method in the 1950s than were sired by random sex. Savannah, far more advanced in the arcane knowledge of such things than her brothers, later dubbed my mother Our Lady of the Menses. The nickname did not amuse my mother when she discovered it, but it had accuracy and style.
For four straight years, from 1952 to 1956, my mother was pregnant. She carried each child full term and each child was stillborn. We buried those sightless, wordless half-children beneath the grove of oaks at the rear of our house, fashioning crude wooden crosses and carving their names in the wood as my mother wept in her bed. My father never participated in these small ceremonies of grief, nor did he ever mention out loud any emotion he might have felt over the loss of these children. He would baptize them perfunctorily under tap water from the kitchen sink, then freeze them in plastic bags until my mother was well enough to return from the hospital.
“This one is Rose Aster,” he said in the summer of 1956 as we watched silently from the kitchen table. “She wouldn’t be much good on a shrimp boat anyhow, I suppose.”
“I’m good on a shrimp boat, Daddy,” Savannah said, her eyes fixed sadly on the dead child.
“You aren’t worth a damn on a shrimp boat, Savannah,” he answered. “All you can do is head shrimp.” Then he baptized the frail-boned Rose Aster in the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, doing so in a flat, atonal voice purged of both sadness and pity, as though he were saying grace before a meal. He walked out to the back porch, placed the tiny girl in a clear plastic bag, and laid her on top of the boxes of frozen shrimp and fish
in the freezer.
“I didn’t get a chance to say hello to my sister, Daddy,” said Savannah, following him to the back porch.
He opened the top of the freezer and said, “Now’s your chance. Say hi. Say anything. It doesn’t matter, girl. Rose Aster isn’t nothin’ but dead meat. There’s nothing there. Do you hear me? She’s like five pounds of dead shrimp. There’s nothing to say hello to or goodbye to. Just something to plant in the ground when your mother gets home.”
When my father left for the shrimp boat the next morning, I lay awake in my bed hearing some small, unidentified animal yelping in the darkness. I couldn’t tell if a wildcat had crawled beneath the house to have her kittens or what the sound was. Leaving my bed, I got dressed without waking Luke. I walked out into the living room and heard the noise coming from Savannah’s bedroom. Before I knocked, I listened to my sister’s violently suppressed weeping, that murderous coming apart of the soul that would become both the recessional and the trademark of her madness. I entered her room quietly, fearfully, and found her clutching something tightly to her chest. There was such anguish in her cries that I almost did not disturb her, but there was a scoured, raw quality about Savannah’s pathetic sorrowing that I could never walk away from. I turned her over and in a kind of daze or seizure of brotherly pity, I pried her arms loose from the cold, still body of Rose Aster.
“Let me hold her, Tom,” Savannah cried out. “She was going to be our sister and no one ever stopped a moment to love her. I just wanted to talk to her for a minute. She’s got to know the whole world isn’t like them.”
“It’s not right, Savannah,” I whispered. “There’s nothing you can tell her. Mom and Dad would both beat you if they knew you took her out of the freezer. Besides, you might spoil her before we bury her.”
“There is something I can tell her,” Savannah said, snatching the small form back from me and pressing her close to her chest again. “There’s a lot I could tell her. I just told her we’d have taken good care of her. We wouldn’t have let them hurt her in any way. We’d have protected her from them. Tell her that, Tom. She needs to know that.”
“Savannah, you can’t talk like that. God hears everything. It’s a sin to talk like that against your parents.”
“She’s the fourth one that’s died, Tom. That’s some kind of sign from God, don’t you think? I think these poor little creatures are choosing not to live. I think they hear what goes on in this house and are just saying, ‘No, sir, this surely ain’t for me.’ They don’t know that you, me, and Luke are good.”
“Mama says we’re bad,” I said. “She says it every day. She says we get worse each year. Dad said the reason she loses the babies is because we’re so bad and don’t give her any peace of mind.”
“She blames everything on us. But you know what I think, Tom? I think these little kids like Rose Aster are the lucky ones. I think they’re smarter than we were. They know that Mom and Dad are mean. They probably just feel that their time is coming and they just probably commit suicide in Mom’s belly. I wish you and I had been that smart.”
“Let me take Rose Aster back to the freezer, Savannah. I think it’s a mortal sin to take a baby out of the freezer.”
“I’m just comforting her, Tom. She never even got to see the pretty world.”
“She’s in heaven now. Dad baptized her.”
“What are the names of the other ones? I always forget.”
“There’s David Tucker. Robert Middleton. Ruth Frances. And now Rose Aster.”
“We would’ve had a big family if they’d all lived.”
“But they didn’t, Savannah. They’re all in heaven taking good care of us. That’s what Mom says.”
“They aren’t doing a very damn good job at it,” she said with astonishing bitterness.
“The sun’s gonna be up soon, Savannah. The house is gonna smell like Rose Aster and we’re gonna be in a heap of trouble.”
“I slept with her all night. She’s got such pretty hands and feet . . . the tiniest little fingers and toes you’ve ever seen. I thought all night how wonderful it would be to have a little sister. I’d have killed Mom and Dad if they tried to hurt her.”
“Mom and Dad would have loved her,” I said, troubled, “just like they love us.”
Savannah laughed out loud, then said, “Mom and Dad don’t love us, Tom. Haven’t you figured that out by now?”
“That’s a terrible thing to say. Don’t even think such a thing. Of course they love us. We’re their children.”
“They hate us, Tom,” she said, her eyes forlorn and wise in the pale light. “It’s easy enough to see.”
She held the small corpse up in her hands and kissed it tenderly on its small hairless head.
“That’s why Rose Aster here is one of the lucky ones. I was crying because I envied her. I wish I could be with her and the others.”
I took the pale blue body from my sister’s arms, gently, and carried it to the back porch. The sun was starting to rise as I wrapped my baby sister again in plastic and laid her down once more among the fish and shrimp.
When I returned I heard Savannah talking to herself in a voice I didn’t recognize, but I did not disturb her again. Instead, I started the fire in the stove and laid six pieces of bacon in the iron frying pan. It was my morning to cook breakfast and our mother would be returning from the hospital that afternoon.
We buried Rose Aster in unconsecrated ground late that day before my father returned from the river. My grandparents had driven my mother home from the hospital and she was lying in bed when we got home from school. She had refused to let my grandparents stay with her, saying she needed some time to be alone.
Luke and I dug the grave and Savannah wrapped the twice-frozen corpse in a clean white blanket my mother had brought from the hospital. My mother stayed in her room until Luke went up to the house to get her. She leaned heavily on him as she came out to the back yard for the ceremony; she walked as though each step was hazardous and excruciatingly painful. She sat down in a kitchen chair Savannah had brought from the house. Her face, bereaved and anemic, was as long-suffering as any Byzantine Madonna, distraught beneath a cross, awaiting the death of her transfigured child. Grief had changed her mouth into a thin, bitter horizon. She had not spoken a word to us since we had come home; nor had she allowed us to tell her how sorry we were. When she was seated, she nodded for Luke and me to begin the burial.
Savannah had laid Rose Aster in the small wooden box we had built for the interment. The box was not much longer than an oversized bird house, and the infant herself looked like some defeathered, unevolved species of bird. We nailed the box shut and I brought the small coffin and laid it on my mother’s lap. She wept as she stared at the box. Then she lifted the box slightly and covered it with kisses. She raised her eyes skyward and screamed out suddenly in helplessness and anger. “No, I do not forgive you, Lord. This is not allowed. It’s simply not allowed. I’ve now buried four of them under this tree and I will not give you another. Do you hear me, Lord? I’m no longer interested in your Holy Will. Don’t you dare to take another child of mine. Don’t you dare.”
Then she lowered her eyes and said, “Bring your sister, boys. And all of you pray with me. We have given the heavens another angel. Be gone to the arms of the Lord, Rose Aster. Watch over the family that would have loved and protected you and kept you safe from harm. You’ll be one of God’s small angels now. Keep watch over this house with your brothers and sisters. There are four Wingo angels now and that should be enough to watch over any house. If it’s not, then God help us all. But that decision is plainly the Lord’s and not mine. His wish upon the earth is a mystery to those of us who worship him. Oh God. Oh God. Oh God, damn you.”
Though we could say the Confiteor in Latin, believed in transubstantiation and the transmigration of souls, there was in all of us something strange and unassimilated that made us respond to ecstasy and madness more than simple catechismic piety. The Catholic sou
l is Mediterranean and baroque and does not flourish or root easily in the inhospitable soil of the American South.
“The least you can do is pray for your sister. Get on your knees. I’ll call you in for supper.”
“Storm is coming, Mama,” I heard Luke say.
“You won’t even pray for your sister’s soul,” my mother said in a haggard, exhausted voice.
We fell to our knees, bowed our heads, and closed our eyes as my mother limped back toward the house. The wind lifted the moss in the trees and dark clouds scudded angrily out of the north. I prayed hard for the small soul of Rose Aster. I saw that soul as something light and fragrant as a biscuit. Her soul rose up out of that grave into rain and thunder over the island. Sudden rungs of lightning pulled her upward. Thunder praised that smallest, most fragile relic of our desperate lives. The rain fell heavily and we looked toward the house, waiting for our mother to call for us.
I heard Savannah say again, “You’re the lucky one, Rose Aster. You’re lucky not to have to live with them.”
“If lightning hits this tree, she’ll be burying the whole lot of us,” Luke said.
“We gotta pray,” I said.
“If God wanted us to pray in the rain, he wouldn’t have us build no churches,” Luke said.
“They’re both crazy,” Savannah said, her hands still folded on her chest. “They’re both crazy, Lord, and you got to help us make it out of here.”
“Savannah, shut up. God doesn’t want to hear that,” I said.
“He may not want to hear it, but I’m gonna say it. He put us here with ’em so he must know they’re nuts.”
“They’re not nuts, Savannah. They’re our parents and we love them.”
“I’ve watched the way other people act, Tom. I’ve studied it. No one acts like they do. They’re just plain odd.”
“Yeah, who ever heard of praying for a dead baby in a rainstorm?” Luke said.
“We want Rose Aster to go to heaven,” I argued.
“Shoot,” Savannah said. “Tell me one good reason why Rose Aster isn’t in heaven right now? What kind of God would send Rose Aster to hell?”