by Pat Conroy
“You care too much, Mama,” Savannah said. “You’re trying too hard to be something you’re not.” -
“I forbid you to solve your problems with your fists. That’s your father’s influence.”
“Tom was just letting everyone know a simple fact, Mama,” Luke said. “It’s an easy thing to make fun of a Wingo, but it ain’t such a smart thing. It’s okay for people to think all Wingos are trashy, but it’s not such a good thing to air those opinions.”
“Fighting just proves their point. Gentlemen don’t fight.”
“Tom was defending your honor, Mama. He knows the way people think about us is important to you. Dad doesn’t care. Neither do we,” Luke explained.
“I care,” I said.
“If you care,” my mother said, turning to face me again, “then you’ll go with me to the Newbury house and apologize to Todd man to man. And apologize to his mother. She called me today and said the most horrendous things about us.”
“So that’s why you’re so mad,” Savannah said. “That’s why you tried to beat Tom to death. Because of Isabel Newbury.”
“I won’t apologize to him, Mama,” I said. “There’s nothing you can do to make me apologize to that jerk, nothing in the whole world.”
The Newbury house was set beneath an enfolding grove of water oaks on a small knoll along the Street of Tides. It was centered among a distinguished group of eleven pristine mansions that had housed the plantation aristocracy before the War Between the States ended forever the system which sustained that aristocracy. Before the war, a secret parliament of secessionists had met in the house to discuss the creation of the Confederacy. Isabel Newbury’s great-grandfather, Robert Letellier, had presided over that meeting and had later perished in an artillery exchange during the Battle of Tulafinny. During the Civil War, Colleton fell into Union hands after the naval engagement of Port Royal Sound, and the Union army had requisitioned the house for a hospital. Wounded soldiers had carved their names on the marble mantelpieces and wooden floors as they waited their turns for amputations. The house owed its remarkability to that tormented, still visible roll of injured men, the graffiti of unanesthetized soldiers awaiting their moment beneath the knives of surgeons in a strange, inhospitable land. Pain and history had coalesced behind the fanlit doorway of the Newbury house, and it was this litany of anonymous men desecrating the grain of both marble and woodwork which imparted a sense of distinction and immortality to the house where Todd Newbury spent his childhood.
As we passed through the front yard and approached the front door, my mother gave me final, whispered instructions in the gentle art of groveling before a lady.
“You just tell her how sorry you are and how you’d do anything if it never had happened in the first place. You tell her that you couldn’t even sleep last night you felt so bad about what you did.”
“I slept like a baby,” I said. “I never thought about it once.”
“Hush now. I’m telling you what to say. So you just look and listen. If you’re real nice she might let you see those poor Yankee boys’ names carved all over her fireplace. That’s what happens when you let Yankee boys into a fine home. They just carved it up because they weren’t brought up right. You’d never hear of a southern boy doing that.”
We walked up the front steps of the house and my mother tapped the gleaming brass marker against the oaken door. It sounded like an anchor drumming against a submerged hull. I stood in the sunlight on the verandah, clearing my throat, fidgeting with my belt, and shifting my weight from foot to foot. I had been more uncomfortable in my life, I was sure, but I could not have told you when. I heard the light footsteps approaching the door. Isabel Newbury stood before us in the doorway.
Isabel Newbury had the most soul-chilling presence I have ever encountered. Her lips were thin and colorless and her mouth registered a most articulate narrative of unspoken disapproval. Her nose, sharp and well made, was her one perfectly wrought feature, and it twitched prettily as she stood in the gloom of her house as though the smell of me was repugnant to her. Her hair was blonde, but with help.
But it was the cold aquamarine glitter of her eyes enclosed in a harsh fretwork of lines that arrowed out toward her temples which drew my most breathless attention; they were like the rays of the sun in a child’s drawing. There were three deep wrinkles in her forehead, evenly spaced, which moved in harmony when she frowned. Every wound and grievance of her life had signed its name on her face, offered proof of its passage like those Yankee soldiers afraid to surrender to surgeons. She was a year younger than my mother and it was the first time I ever realized that human beings age differently. My mother’s generous beauty deepened every year and I had thought this true for all women. Standing there, mute and ashamed, I knew instinctively and for all time why Isabel Newbury disliked my mother, and it had nothing at all to do with her being a Wingo. Time had marked her early and cruelly with all the bend sinisters and cinquefoils of its inerasable heraldry. There was an aura of sickliness about her, the kind of decay that begins in the heart and works its way out to the eyes.
“Yes?” she said at last.
“My son has something to tell you, Isabel,” my mother said. Her voice was hopeful and repentant, as though it were she who had hurt Todd Newbury.
“Yes, ma’am, Mrs. Newbury,” I said. “I surely am sorry about what happened yesterday and I want to apologize to Todd and to you and Mr. Newbury. The whole thing was my fault and I take full responsibility for whatever happened.”
“He’s been worried sick about it, Isabel,” my mother said. “That I can vouch for. He didn’t get a moment’s rest last night. In fact, he woke me up in the middle of the night to tell me he was going to come over here today and say how sorry he was for everything.”
“How moving,” the woman answered.
“Is Todd here, Mrs. Newbury? I’d like to speak to him if I could,” I said.
“I’m not sure he wants to speak to you. Wait here, please. I’ll ask him.”
She closed the door and my mother and I stood on the verandah facing each other nervously.
“Isn’t this a lovely view,” my mother said finally, walking over to one of the banisters and looking at the bay through palmetto fronds. “I’ve always dreamed of living in one of these houses. When your daddy first brought me to Colleton he promised he’d buy me one of these mansions when he hit it big.” Then she paused and said, “There aren’t enough shrimp in this part of the world to buy one of these houses.”
“Nice of her to ask us in, Mom,” I said furiously.
“Oh, that. That’s nothing. We probably surprised her so that she forgot her manners momentarily.”
“She did it on purpose.”
“Wouldn’t you like to sit out here at night in one of these wicker chairs, drink iced tea, and wave at the whole town passing by?”
“I want to go home,” I said.
“Not until you apologize to Todd. I’m still so ashamed of you for doing what you did.”
The door opened again and Mrs. Newbury, severe and spectral in the shadows, stepped forth into the light. My mother and I turned to face her.
“My son has nothing to say to you, boy,” she said, and the way she said “boy” was not endearing. “He wants you to get off our property.”
“If Tom could just see your son, Isabel. Just for a sec. I’m sure they could part as friends.”
“Friends! I wouldn’t allow Todd to make friends with a boy like this.”
“But Isabel,” my mother continued, “you and I are friends. We’ve known each other for such a long time. Why, I was just telling Henry the other day about something I heard you say at a PTA meeting and we both laughed so about it.”
“We know each other, Lila. This is a small town. I know everyone but not everyone is my friend. I do want to tell you that if this bully ever touches my Todd again I’m going to call the law. Good day. You do know the way out, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I heard my
mother say, and I heard her voice stiffen. “We know our way out since we were never invited in. Goodbye, Isabel, and thank you for your time.”
I followed Mom off the porch and down the stairs and could hear her muttering unintelligible oaths to herself. She walked at a brisk pace down the sidewalk between two islands of immaculately trimmed caterpillar grass. She was a natural ambler and any increase in velocity was an accurate gauge of her displeasure. When she took a left toward town, she almost knocked Reese Newbury into the street.
“Whoa, Lila,” he said, “I didn’t hear the fire bell.”
“Oh, hello, Reese,” she said, flustered.
“What brings you to these parts?” he asked, his mood darkening as he spotted me coming up behind my mother.
“Our boys got into a little tiff yesterday, Reese. You probably heard about it.”
“Yes, I certainly did,” Mr. Newbury said, studying me grimly.
“Well, I brought Tom here to apologize. He wanted to and I thought your son deserved an apology.”
“That’s mighty nice of you, Lila,” he said, his eyes softening as they returned to my mother. But I had caught the hint of fury in their steely glint. “Boys get into these kinds of scrapes sometimes. That’s what makes them worth a damn. It makes them boys.”
“I don’t tolerate that kind of behavior, Reese. I simply won’t have it in my sons. I whaled the tar out of Tom last night when the principal called.”
He looked at me again, a long appraising look as though he were seeing me for the first time in his life, as though I suddenly had become worthy enough to merit his attention.
“It takes a big man to apologize, son,” he said. “I’m sure no good at it myself.”
“Neither is your son,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“He wouldn’t come down to accept my apology,” I said. “He told us to get off your property.”
“Follow me, please,” he said, and he turned down his walk and skipped up his stairs, taking them two at a time.
He disappeared into the house without waiting for us. We hesitated on the landing, then took a few tentative steps into the vestibule, where we awaited our summons. There was an Oriental rug running the length of the foyer to the curved mahogany stairway in the back of the house.
My mother pointed to it and said, “Oriental. It comes from the Orient.”
Motioning to a chandelier overhead, she whispered, “English. Made in England. I remember it from the Spring Tour.”
“Why isn’t our house on the Spring Tour,” I whispered back, trying to make a joke.
“Because we live in a dump,” my mother said quietly.
“Why are we whispering?”
“Because when you’re guests in Reese Newbury’s house, it’s correct behavior to be reserved.”
“Is that what we are? Guests in his house?”
“Of course. How gracious of him to invite us.”
We heard the back door slam and saw Mr. Newbury enter the foyer from the rear of the house.
“Isabel had to go out to do some shopping, Lila. She said to make yourself at home. Why don’t you have a little nip of something from the bar while I take young Tom up here to see my son.”
He led my mother by the arm through the living room and into a sumptuous paneled den where the leather chairs gleamed and made the room smell like a tannery.
“What’ll it be, Lila?” he said, smiling at my mother. “What will be your pleasure, ma’am?”
“I think a little wine would do just fine, Reese. What a lovely room.”
He poured my mother a glass of wine and led her to a seat by the fireplace.
“Please make yourself comfortable and we’ll be back in a jiffy,” Mr. Newbury said, his voice thick enough to be squeezed from a tube. “We menfolk are gonna have a little powwow in my study upstairs.”
“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this, Reese,” my mother said. “It’s so kind of you to take an interest.”
“I like a boy with spunk. I’ve been known to have a little spunk too, haven’t I?” he said, laughing. “Come along, Tom.”
I followed him up the stairs and saw the white fleshy legs above his socks. He was amply but softly built.
We came to his study, which was lined with leather volumes along one wall. He sat me in a chair facing his desk and went to get his son. I studied the titles of the books: The Works of Thackeray, The Works of Dickens, The Works of Charles Lamb and Shakespeare. I did not look up when Todd came into the room with his father. Mr. Newbury sat Todd in the chair next to mine, then walked around the desk and took a seat in his own oversized chair. He lifted a cigar out of a humidor and circumcised one end of it with his teeth, then lit it with a gold lighter he took from his coat pocket.
“Now you’ve got something to say to my son, I believe,” he said to me.
When I looked at Todd I was shocked by the puffiness of his face. His lips were swollen and there was an ugly bruise under his right eye, and I understood why he had not wanted to face me.
“Todd,” I said, “I wanted to come by to apologize. I’m awfully sorry for what I did and it’ll never happen again. I was hoping we could shake hands and be friends.”
“I wouldn’t shake your hand for anything,” Todd said, staring at his father.
“Why did you hit my son, Wingo?” Mr. Newbury said, blowing a blue plume of smoke toward me.
Todd jumped in and said, “He and his brother ambushed me in the schoolyard, Dad. I was just walking by minding my own business when his brother jumped me from behind and this one started hitting me in the face.”
“Why didn’t your brother come to apologize too?” Mr. Newbury asked. “I never liked two against one.”
“Why do you want to lie about it, Todd?” I said incredulously. “You know Luke wasn’t anywhere near when all that happened. Besides, Luke wouldn’t have needed me. He could eat you alive, boy, and you know it.”
“Are you telling me the truth, son?” Mr. Newbury asked Todd.
“If you want to believe that piece of trash instead of me, Dad, just go ahead. Be my guest. See if I care.”
“He called my family trash yesterday, Mr. Newbury,” I said, looking directly at the man.
“Did you say something about his family?”
Todd looked wildly about the room, then said, “I simply told him the facts of life. I was kidding around with him.”
“Did you call his family trash?”
“I said something like that. I don’t remember exactly.”
Turning his inquisitional gaze on me, Mr. Newbury continued, “And you took offense and with your brother’s help beat up my son.”
“My brother had nothing to do with it.”
“Wingo, you’re such a goddamn liar,” Todd said, rising out of his chair.
“Mr. Newbury,” I said, appealing to his father, “I don’t need my brother’s help to fight Todd. He’s weak as water.”
He spoke to Todd while staring at me. “Why did you call his family trash, son?”
“Because they are trash. Wingos have always been like white niggers in this town,” Todd said, screaming at me.
“That’s why your son gets hit, Mr. Newbury,” I said angrily. “He doesn’t know how to keep his mouth shut.”
“He doesn’t have to keep his mouth shut here, Tom,” Mr. Newbury said. “This is his house.”
“And I don’t like you stinking up my house,” Todd said.
“Keep your voice down, son. Mrs. Wingo is downstairs,” Mr. Newbury cautioned his son. Then he said to me, “What do you think about your family, Tom? I’m interested. Very interested indeed.”
“I’m proud of my family.”
“But why?” he said. “What are you proud of? Your mother’s a fine woman. A little rough around the edges maybe, but she tries real hard. But what else? Your grandfather is soft in the head. Your grandma could be called a whore except she managed to coax a couple of drifters to the altar. Your daddy�
�s been a failure at every single thing he’s tried. I even knew your great-granddaddy and he was nothing but a harmless drunk who used to beat his wife until she was half dead. I don’t see why you should get so mad at Todd for just speaking the truth. Why don’t you just go ahead and admit that your family’s shit? It takes a real man to face up to reality. A real man to face facts.”
I looked at him in an absolute stunned silence and he smiled at me behind his cigar.
“Even if you can’t admit it, Tom, I want you to know something. If you ever touch my son again, I mean lay a single finger on him, you’re going to be crabmeat somewhere in the river. My wife wanted to call the sheriff on you but that’s not the way I like to operate. I do things my own way. In my own time. I’ll get you back and you won’t ever know it’s me that got you. Except you will. You’ll be smart enough to figure it out. Because I want you to learn something from this experience. A Wingo doesn’t dare touch a Newbury. It’s law in this town. You didn’t know it before, but you know it now. Do you understand me, Tom?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“That’s good, son. Now, Todd, I want you to shake hands with Tom.”
“I don’t want to shake hands with him.”
“Get up, boy. I told you to shake hands with him,” his father ordered. “But before you shake hands I want you to slap his face and slap it hard.”
Todd looked at his father in absolute disbelief and I saw he was about to cry. There were two boys in that room about to cry.
“I can’t do that, Daddy. He’ll get me at school.”
“He’ll never touch you again. I promise you that.”
“I can’t, Daddy. Please. I just can’t hit someone in the face.”
“You just slap him, Todd. Look in the mirror and see what he did to you. Get mad, son. Look how he humiliated you. Then go slap his ugly face. A Newbury doesn’t let somebody like that get away with it. He’s sitting there, son, and he wants you to hit him. He came here today so you could even things up between you. He’s crawling because he knows it isn’t smart to have the Newburys hating him.”