by Pat Conroy
“I charge seventy-five dollars an hour,” she said.
“Fine.” I grinned. “I’ll take it.”
“I certainly didn’t agree to pay you that.”
“Look, Doc, because you’re a friend of the family, you get a cut-rate deal. Sixty bucks an hour and don’t even Bother to thank me.”
“I hardly think that coaching for an hour is comparable to an hour of psychiatric therapy,” she said, and her voice was even, but I did not like the belittling emphasis she put on the word coaching.
“Oh really? Why not? What’s the difference?”
“You have no idea the cost of going to medical school.”
“Yes, I do. I sent my wife through medical school.”
“What was your top salary as a coach?”
“I made seventeen thousand dollars one year, before taxes,” I answered.
“How much does that amount to an hour?” she asked.
“Well, let’s take three hundred sixty-five days. I teach and coach for nine months. Then I would coach baseball in the summer. That’s about forty-six bucks a day, I think. Let’s divide that by a ten-hour day.”
She wrote the figures down in her notebook, then looked up and announced, “That’s four dollars and sixty cents an hour. I’ll pay five dollars an hour.”
“How generous,” I said.
“That’s the highest pay you’ve ever received.”
“Oh, the humiliation,” I moaned, looking about the restaurant. “The utter and constant humiliation. A coach going one on one with a shrink and losing in overtime by seventy big buckeroos.”
“Then it’s a deal,” she said, snapping her notebook shut.
“No,” I said. “Now that I’ve been slaughtered on this field of battle, I want to gain some measure of self-respect from this debacle. I’d like to coach Bernard for free, Doctor. Once again I’ve been annihilated when I tried to equate coaching with a real way of making a living. Tell him we’ll start the day after tomorrow. Now let’s order a fabulous dessert.”
“I’ve eaten far too much already.”
“Don’t worry about gaining weight, Lowenstein,” I said. “We’ll rustle up a mugger right after dinner and let him chase you all the way to Central Park. It’s a perfect way to burn off calories after a New York meal.”
“Which reminds me,” she said. “Remember when you met Monique at my office? Why did you tell her that you were a corporate lawyer? She mentioned that to me when she was in my office.”
“She didn’t believe me when I said I was a coach,” I said. “Also, she was beautiful and I wanted to impress her. Also, I was lonely at the time and I wanted to keep talking to her.”
“Do you think she’s beautiful?”
“I thought she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen,” I said.
“It’s very strange, Tom. That’s the second time she’s come to my office hysterical and out of control. She’s having a ghastly affair with an investment banker who works for Salomon Brothers—at least that’s what she tells me.”
“Her shrink’s out of town,” I said. “Is there anyone in this city who doesn’t go to a psychiatrist, or do they make those folks all move to New Jersey?”
“She plays the flute in my husband’s ensemble,” Dr. Lowenstein said. “You’ll see her again next month.”
“Ah, shit. She’ll ask me about my law practice,” I said. “Let me get you a glass of cognac, Susan. You’re right, we can skip dessert.”
When the cognac came, we toasted each other again and the taste of cognac took me spinning into the past, when I last had sat in this restaurant with my brother and sister. While drinking the cognac that the owner of the Coach House had given us for free, Savannah had pulled out four new poems she was working on and read them aloud to Luke and me. She was planning to write an autobiography in a long cycle of poems and she read to us about the white porpoise of Colleton, my grandfather’s annual walk on Good Friday, and the first football game of Benji Washington. Her language was lush and fiery and she pulled bright images from her life like peaches from a fragrant orchard. When spoken, her poems were like a gift of fruit, and on that night we had perfumed the fruit with cognac.
“What are you thinking about, Tom?” Susan asked.
“I was thinking about the time I was here with Luke and Savannah,” I said. “We were all so happy then.”
“What happened?”
“Nature abhors a vacuum, but it abhors perfect happiness even more,” I said. “Susan, do you remember my mentioning my nervous breakdown?”
“Of course,” she said softly.
“It wasn’t a breakdown,” I said. “It was a sadness so overwhelming that I could barely move or speak. I didn’t think it was mental illness then; I don’t think it now. For two years, I managed to function even though I carried this sorrow around in my heart. I had suffered a terrible loss and I was simply inconsolable. I coached three sports and I taught English five classes a day and my work held me together. Then I could no longer bear the weight of this sadness. I was teaching one day and reading “Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas to one of my classes; I became so moved by the poem that it brought tears to my eyes. The poem is beautiful and it moves me every time I read it, but this time was different. I couldn’t stop crying. My class was distraught. I was distraught, but I couldn’t help myself.”
“And you didn’t consider this a breakdown of sorts, Tom?” she said, softly.
“No,” I said. “I thought it was a normal response to great sadness. It was abnormal to have carried the weight of that sadness around so long without crying. A week later I was walking on the beach when I passed a man who looked like my brother and I fell apart again. I sat on the rocks overlooking Charleston Harbor and shook with my own sobbing for over an hour. Then I thought there was something I was supposed to be doing. I had forgotten something important, but didn’t know what. Sallie found me on the beach that night shivering in the cold.”
“What had you forgotten?”
“A game. I forgot that my team had a game that night. I forgot that my own team that I had coached and drilled and disciplined had a game.”
“That was when they fired you?”
“Yes, that was when they fired me,” I said. “So I stayed at home and refused to get help from anyone. I let the sadness take me and it took me hard. After a month, my wife and my mother had me sign some papers and they took me to the tenth floor of the Medical College and I had a couple of shock treatments.”
“You don’t have to tell me any of this, Tom,” she said.
“Since I’m going to be coaching Bernard, I thought you should know you were getting damaged merchandise.”
“Are you a good coach?” she asked.
“I’m a terrific coach, Susan,” I answered.
“Then I’m very lucky that you’ve come into my life at this very moment,” she said. “Thanks for telling me all that. I’m glad you told me here instead of at the office. I think you and I are going to be good friends.”
“There’s something you’re not telling me about Savannah, isn’t there?”
“There’s a lot I’m not telling you about Savannah,” she said. “There’s a lot I’m not telling you about a lot of things. When I just mentioned Monique, it nearly killed me when you told me you thought she was so beautiful.”
“Why?”
“I think she’s having an affair with my husband.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because I know my husband very well,” she said. “I can’t figure out why she keeps coming to me for help, whether it’s cruelty or just curiosity. She always makes me swear not to tell Herbert she’s been to see me.”
“I’m sorry, Susan,” I said. “Maybe it’s your imagination.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, Lowenstein, I’ve met both you and Monique. Monique is lovely but she’s got a lousy personality and she’s a little on the mean side. Since you wore that terrific dress tonight, I
could not fail to notice that you’re walking around in a world-class body. You’re a little serious for my taste, but I love being with you. Monique can’t hold a candle to you, darling,” I said.
“Not darling, Tom,” she smiled. “Remember, I’m a feminist.”
“Monique can’t hold a candle to you, feminist,” I said.
“Thanks, Coach,” she said.
“Do you want to go dancing at the Rainbow Room?”
“Not tonight, Tom,” she said. “But ask me again this summer.”
“Will you promise to wear that dress?” I asked.
“I’ve got to get home,” she said. “Fast.”
“You’re perfectly safe, Lowenstein. I’ve had electroshock therapy,” I said, rising from the table. “C’mon. I’ll pay the bill and hail you one of the city’s hideous, but colorful, cab drivers.”
“I’ve had a wonderful evening,” Susan Lowenstein said as I opened the cab door on Waverly Place in a light rain. She kissed me on the lips, softly, just once, and I watched the cab disappear into the rain and the night.
8
Within weeks of her surprise return, my grandmother went to purchase her own coffin from Winthrop Ogletree, and we learned that she enjoyed visiting the Colleton cemetery to speak to the dead. Like most southerners, Tolitha had fashioned a small and personal art form out of ancestor worship, and the authentic intimacy of cemeteries made her happy. She looked upon death as a dark and undiscoverable longitude encircling the secret geography of the earth. The subject of her own death filled her with pleasant reveries of journeys both imminent and surprising.
Because my grandmother did not attend church regularly or openly profess a belief in God, it gave her license to embrace more exotic prescriptives of the spirit, more vivid distillations and tonics to add character to her view of the world. She maintained an innocent trust in horoscopes and planned her days around the proud alignment of stars and the obscure cues and insinuations of the zodiac. With ceaseless curiosity, she sought the advice of fortunetellers, believed in the shining powers of crystal balls, the cryptic allusions in the pattern of tea leaves, the marching orders she received from carefully shuffled tarot cards, and anything else that seemed suspect and revolutionary in a southern town. A gypsy in Marseilles had read Tolitha’s palm, studied her abbreviated, bifurcated life line, and made a prediction that Tolitha would not live past her sixtieth birthday. Tolitha had just turned fifty-six when she hit Colleton to make her peace with the world. Each day she consulted the I Ching, which my grandfather considered a satanic text, at best. She believed in every divagation and acknowledgment of the Ouija board—no matter how entangled in obscurity. Her faith was a catechism of undigested verities. She consorted with psychics, witch doctors, and prognosticators. All were weathermen of her bouncy, untroubled soul. Tolitha was the most Christian woman I have ever known.
But she took the gypsy’s death sentence with a stoical and bemused gravity, and she began to prepare for her own demise as though it were a voyage to a fabulous country whose borders had long been closed to tourists. When it came time to purchase her casket and to make the final arrangements for her interment, she insisted that her grandchildren accompany her. Always the teacher, Tolitha wanted us to learn not to fear death. She spoke about the impending purchase of her coffin with gaiety and acted as though she were about to confirm a hotel reservation at the end of a most arduous journey.
“It’s simply, the last stage of life. The most interesting stage, I imagine,” she said as we walked along the Street of Tides, passing by the storefronts and saying how-de-do to neighbors and strangers alike.
“But you’re in perfect health, Tolitha,” Luke said, looking up at her in the sunlight. “I heard Dad say you’re going to be peeing on all of our graves.”
“Your father is a vulgarian, Luke. Please do not imitate the speech of shrimpers,” my grandmother answered, walking straight ahead, proud as a mast. “No, I will not survive my sixtieth year. This was not just a gypsy who read my palm. This was the queen of the gypsies. I only seek opinions from specialists. I’ve never been to a GP in my life.”
“Mama told us it was a sin to get your future told by a gypsy,” said Savannah, holding my grandmother’s hand.
“Your mother has only been in two states in her whole life,” Tolitha sniffed. “She doesn’t have my world view.”
“Did the gypsy say what you’re gonna die of?” I asked, studying her, worried that she would drop dead on the street.
“Heart failure,” my grandmother announced proudly, as though she had just given the name of a much favored child. “I’ll drop like a stone.”
“Are you going to be buried like a Zen Buddhist?” Savannah asked.
“It’s too impractical,” Tolitha said, nodding sweetly to Jason Fordham, who ran the hardware store. “I wanted your grandfather to take me up to Atlanta and lay me out naked on Stone Mountain and let the vultures devour my earthly flesh, but he was horrified. That’s how they do it in India. I wasn’t sure they had enough vultures in Georgia to really do the trick.”
“That’s the most terrible thing I ever heard of, Tolitha,” said Luke, looking at her with true admiration.
“I hate doing things the common way, children. But what can I do? Each society has got its own customs.”
“You’re not afraid of dying, are you, Tolitha?” I asked.
“We all got to turn up our toes someday, Tom,” she replied. “I’m just lucky enough to be able to plan for my time so it won’t come as such a shock to my family. I want everything to be ready.”
“What kind of coffin do you expect to buy, Tolitha?” Savannah asked.
“A pine box. Nothing fancy for me. I want the worms to get at me as soon as possible. Let’s face it, that’s how they make their living, and I’ve never been against the way a man makes his living.”
“How do worms eat you? They don’t have any teeth,” Luke asked as we passed Wayne Fender’s barbershop.
“They have to wait for the earth to soften you up some,” Tolitha explained, and her voice rose to a higher pitch. Such grisly detail excited and animated my grandmother. “See, the undertaker drains all your blood out of you so you’re dry as a corncob. Then they fill you up with embalming fluid so you won’t rot too fast.”
“Why don’t they leave the blood in there?” Savannah asked, her eyes wide with horror.
“Because you spoil too fast with the blood in.”
“But they stick you in the ground and you’re s’posed to spoil in there,” I said.
“They don’t want you to stink up your funeral. You kids ever smelled a corpse that’s going bad?”
“What does it smell like, Tolitha?” Luke asked.
“It smells like a hundred pounds of shrimp which has done turned.”
“That bad?”
“Worse. It sickens me just to think about it.”
We came to the intersection of Baitery Road and the Street of Tides and to one of Colleton’s two traffic lights. Out in the harbor, sailboats canted into the wind, their sails papery and overwhelmed with sunlight. A fifty-foot yacht made the turn in the river and signaled the bridge tender with four throaty barks of the horn. Mr. Fruit, sporting a baseball cap and white gloves, was directing traffic at the intersection. We waited for him to grant us permission to cross the street. It did not matter to Mr. Fruit if the light was red or green. Mr. Fruit relied on intuition and his own internal sense of balance and symmetry to get the traffic through his corner of the world.
Fantastic, bizarre, and vigilant, he was a tall, lanky black man of indeterminate age who seemed to consider the town of Colleton his personal responsibility. I don’t know to this day if Mr. Fruit was retarded or deluded or some harmless sweet-faced lunatic given free rein to drift about his native town spreading the joy of an inarticulate gospel to his neighbors. I don’t know his real name or who his family was or where he spent the night. I know he was indigenous and that no one questioned his right to direct
the traffic on the Street of Tides.
There was a time when a new deputy tried to teach Mr. Fruit about the difference between a red and a green light, but Mr. Fruit had resisted all efforts to reorder what he had been doing perfectly well for many years. He not only monitored the comings and goings of the town, his presence softened the ingrained evil that flourished along the invisible margins of the town’s consciousness. Any community can be judged in its humanity or corruption by how it manages to accommodate the Mr. Fruits of the world. Colleton simply adjusted itself to Mr. Fruit’s harmonies and ordinations. He did whatever he felt was needed and he did it with style. “That’s the southern way,” my grandmother said. “That’s the nice way.”
“Hey, babe,” he cried out when he saw us, and “Hey, babe,” we cried back. He wore a silver whistle around his neck and a beatific, inerasable smile on his face. He tooted his whistle and waved his long arms in graceful exaggerated swoops. He pivoted and danced toward the lone approaching car, his left hand at a right angle to his bony wrist. The car stopped and Mr. Fruit motioned for us to cross the street, blowing on his whistle in perfect synchronization with my grandmother’s footsteps. Mr. Fruit was born to direct traffic. He also led all parades in Colleton, no matter how solemn or festive the occasion. Those were his two functions in the life of the town and he performed them very well. My grandfather would always tell us that Mr. Fruit had done as well with what he had as any man my grandfather had ever met.
The town of Colleton had a population of ten thousand backwater souls when I was born, and each passing year it lost a small percentage of this population. The town was built on the land of the Yemassee Indians, and it was considered a mark of eminence that there was not a single Yemassee remaining on earth. Yemassee was a word that shimmered with the dark luster of extinction. The last battle between the settlers and the natives had been fought on our island, on the northern end of Melrose. Colleton’s militia had surprised the tribe by attacking at night, slaughtering as many as they could in their sleep; then, using dogs, they drove the survivors through the forests, driving them like deer, until at dawn they had pushed them down to the sandy flats by the river. They herded the Yemassee into the river and cut them down with swords and muskets, sparing neither women nor children. I once found a small skull when I was searching for arrowheads with Luke and Savannah. A musket ball rattled in the brainpan and dropped out of the mouth when I lifted it out of the underbrush.