by Pat Conroy
“She hasn’t heard a single one of the stories I’ve told about our childhood.”
“Yes, she has. I’ve taped them all and played parts of them to her when I see her at the hospital.”
“Watergate!” I screamed, rising, and began pacing the length of the room. “Get Judge Sirica on the phone. I want those tapes erased, Lowenstein, or used to light your charcoals the next time you barbecue steaks on the terrace.”
“I often tape sessions, Tom. There’s nothing unusual about it and you told me you’d do anything to help your sister. I took you at your word. So please sit down and quit trying to bully me.”
“I’m not trying to bully you. I’m thinking about beating you up.”
“Sit down, Tom,” Dr. Lowenstein said, “and let’s settle our differences calmly.”
I sat down heavily in the soft chair and stared once more at Susan Lowenstein’s unruffled countenance.
“It’s that self-pitying male ego I fear the most when you finally do get to see Savannah again, Tom.”
“I’m a completely defeated male, Doctor,” I said edgily. “You have nothing to worry about. I’ve been neutered by life and circumstances.”
“Not a chance. I’ve never seen a male yet who wasn’t completely ruled by the necessity of being male at any cost. And you’re one of the worst I’ve ever seen.”
“You don’t know anything about men,” I said.
She laughed and said, “Tell me everything you know. We’ve got ten minutes.”
“What a lousy thing to say. It’s not as easy being a man as you seem to think.”
“Oh, I’ve heard this sad song before, Tom. Half my male patients try to enlist my sympathy by humming the bars to this tragic lament. My husband uses the same exhausted strategy, not knowing I hear it fifty times a week. Now you’ll start telling me about the old agony of command, won’t you, Tom? It’s lonely at the top, little girl. The awesome responsibility of the head of the household. I’ve heard all this before.”
“Lowenstein,” I said, “there’s only one thing difficult about being a male. It’s something the modern woman doesn’t understand. Certainly Savannah and her radical feminist friends didn’t understand it. All her friends used to scream at Luke and me when we’d come up to New York to visit Savannah. I think my sister thought it was good for her poor redneck brothers to be screamed at about the evils of wearing a penis in the modern world. Radical feminists! God preserve me. Because of Savannah, I’ve been screamed at by radical feminists more than any southern man alive. They believe that they can scream at you at will for forty-eight-hour intervals, then expect you to be so grateful for the lessons that you’ll gladly stick your dick into a blender and punch the frappe button.”
“When I first met you, Tom, you told me you were a feminist.”
“I am a feminist,” I said. “I am one of those feckless, sad-sack males who learned how to whip up a soufflé and make a perfect béarnaise sauce while his wife opened cadavers and comforted cancer patients. I say this knowing that a man who calls himself a feminist is the most ridiculous figure of our silly times. When I say it to my men friends, they chuckle and tell me the latest pussy joke. When I say it to most southern women, they look at me with utter contempt and say how much they enjoy being women and having car doors opened for them. When I say it to feminists, they are the most vicious of all. Feminists take it as an unctuous, patronizing gesture coming from some hairy spy planted by the enemy camp. But I am a goddamn feminist, Lowenstein. I’m Tom Wingo, feminist, conservationist, white liberal, pacifist, agnostic, and because of all these things I can’t take myself seriously at all and neither can anyone else. I’m thinking about applying for lifetime membership as a redneck so I can get back some small measure of self-respect.”
“I think you’re still a redneck, Tom. Despite all your protestations.”
“No, a redneck has integrity.”
“You were about to tell me something about being a man. What was it?” Dr. Lowenstein asked.
“You’ll just laugh at me,” I whined.
“Probably,” she admitted.
“There’s only one thing difficult about being a man, Doctor. Only one thing. They don’t teach us how to love. It’s a secret they keep from us. We spend our whole lives trying to get someone to teach us how to do it and we never find out how. The only people we can ever love are other men because we understand the loneliness engendered by this thing denied. When a woman loves us we’re overpowered by it, filled with dread, helpless and chastened before it. Why women don’t understand us is that we can never return their love in full measure. We have nothing to return. We were never granted the gift.”
“When men talk about the agony of being men,” she said, “they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of self-pity.”
“And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.”
“It’s not easy being a woman in this society.”
“Boo-hoo. Let me tell you something, Lowenstein. Being a man sucks. I’m so sick of being strong, supportive, wise, and kingly that I may puke if I have to pretend I’m any of those things again.”
“I haven’t seen much evidence that you’re any of those things, Tom,” said the imperturbable Dr. Lowenstein. “Most often I don’t know what you are or what you represent or what you stand for. There are times you’re one of the sweetest men I’ve ever met. But there are other times, always unpredictable, when you become bitter and cornered. Now, you tell me you can’t feel love. Other times you claim to love everybody in sight. You’ve declared your love for your sister over and over again, then you get furious at me when I’m trying to do everything in my power to help your sister. I can’t trust you completely, Tom, because I don’t know who you are. If I tell you about Savannah, I don’t know if you can handle it. So what I think I’m asking, Tom, is that you start acting like a man. I want you to act strong and wise and responsible and calm. I need it and so does Savannah.”
“I began this discussion, Doctor,” I whispered, “by merely asking about the relationship between Renata and my sister. I considered this a fair question. By some twist of rhetoric you have succeeded in putting me on the defensive and making me look like a horse’s ass in the process.”
“You began this discussion by storming into this room and throwing that book across the table at me. You screamed at me and I don’t get paid to have people scream at me.”
I covered my eyes and could feel her level gaze on my hands, steady and judgmental. I dropped my hands and met her brown gaze. Her beauty, dark and carnal and disturbing, stirred me as it always did.
“I would like to see Savannah, Doctor. You’ve got no right to keep us apart. None in the world.”
“I’m her doctor, Tom, and I’d keep you away from her for the rest of her life if I thought it would help her. And I think it just might.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Savannah believes, and I’m beginning to see her point, that she may have to break off all relations with her family if she is to survive.”
“That’s the worst thing she could do, Doctor,” I said.
“I’m just not sure of that.”
“I’m her twin, Doctor,” I said acidly. “You’re nothing but her fucking shrink. Now who is Renata? I would like to know and think I’ve earned the right to know.”
“Renata was a very special friend of Savannah’s,” Dr. Lowenstein began. “She was very fragile, very sensitive, and very angry. She was a lesbian, a radical feminist, and she was Jewish. I’m afraid she didn’t like men very much . . .
“Jesus Christ,” I moaned. “She sounds like half the assholes Savannah pals around with up here.”
“Shut up, Tom, or I won’t continue.”
“Excuse me. That was uncalled for.”
“Savannah had a psychotic episode a little over two years ago. Renata nursed her through it. They had met in a poetry workshop that Sava
nnah taught at the New School. When Savannah had her breakdown, Renata wouldn’t let Savannah go to a mental hospital and pledged to Savannah that she’d see her through the whole thing. Savannah was much the same way she was when you saw her in the hospital, Tom. But Renata got her through the bad part. According to Savannah, Renata was like having her own personal guardian angel. Three weeks after Savannah was able to return to her own apartment, Renata threw herself in front of the train.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Who knows why? The same reason anyone attempts suicide. Life has become unbearable and there seems to be only one way out. Like Savannah, Renata had a history of suicide attempts. After Renata’s death, Savannah went into another long decline. She began walking the streets, disoriented and out of control. She’d wake up in strange doorways, having spent the night out in the city. She would have no memory of these long fugue states. She would recover slightly, go back to her apartment, and try to write. Nothing would come. She would try to remember her childhood, Tom, and nothing would come back to her. She could only have nightmares about her childhood. One night, she dreamed of three men coming to your island. She knew the dream was important, essential. She knew that something like that had happened but she could not recall enough details. The children’s story came directly out of the dream.
“Savannah then decided to sign Renata’s name to the children’s book as an act of homage to Renata’s memory. She sent it out to a different agent to see if she could get it published. Then Savannah came up with what she thought was the grand idea of her life, the one that would save her.”
“I tremble to hear what this is,” I said.
“She decided to become Renata Halpern, Tom,” Susan Lowenstein said, leaning slightly toward me.
“Pardon me,” I said.
“She decided to become Renata,” she repeated.
“Back up, Doctor. I’m missing something.”
“When Savannah first came to see me as a patient, Tom, she told me her name was Renata Halpern.”
“Did you know she was really Savannah Wingo?” I asked.
“No. How would I have known that?”
“You’ve got her books out there in the waiting room.”
“I’ve got Saul Bellow’s books out there too, but I wouldn’t know him if he entered my office and told me he was George Bates.”
“On, God,” I said, “my soul is queasy. When, pray tell, did you find out that Savannah was Renata or Renata was Savannah or Savannah was Saul Bellow or whatever you found out?”
“It’s hard to fool me about being Jewish.”
“She told you she was Jewish?” I asked.
“She told me she was Renata Halpern. When she described her parents to me, she told me they were both Holocaust survivors. She even remembered the numbers tattooed on their arms. She said her father worked as a furrier in the garment district.”
“I don’t understand any of this. Don’t people usually come into therapy for help? I mean, why would she come to you pretending she was someone else? Why would she refuse to try to get help based on her own history instead of getting help for one she made up?”
“I think she wanted to try out her new identity to see if she had her story absolutely right. Also, I think she was in deep trouble no matter who she claimed to be. She was coming apart at the seams, Tom, and it really didn’t make any difference who she said she was. She was in desperate trouble as either Renata or Savannah. Calling herself Renata was only part of the disturbance.”
“When did she tell you she wasn’t Renata?”
“I started asking her a series of questions about her past she couldn’t answer. I asked her what shul she attended and she didn’t know what a shul was. I asked her the name of her temple and her childhood rabbi. She told me her mother kept a kosher kitchen but did not know what I meant when I asked her if she ever ate food that was trayf. She knew very few words of Yiddish even though she claimed her parents were from a shtetl in Galicia. Eventually, I told her I didn’t believe her story and that if I was going to help her I had to know the truth. I also told her that she didn’t look Jewish to me.”
“You’re a racist, Lowenstein,” I said. “I knew it the minute I set eyes on you.”
“Your sister has a classic shiksa face,” she answered, smiling.
“Is that an unforgivable insult?”
“No, it’s simply an undeniable fact.”
“What did she do after you confronted her?”
“She got up and walked out of my office without saying goodbye. She missed her next appointment, but she called to cancel it. The next time we met she told me that she once was called Savannah Wingo, but was planning on assuming a new identity, moving out to the West Coast, and living out the rest of her life as Renata Halpern. She was never going to get in touch with any member of her family again. As long as she lived. It was too painful to see any of them, she said. She could not bear the memories any longer and she was losing what memories she had. She refused to continue being surrounded by so much pain. She had been inconsolable for long enough. As Renata Halpern, she thought she had a chance to live a reasonable life. As Savannah Wingo, she thought she would be dead within a year.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said, and I closed my eyes and tried to think of us as children, blond and lean in the Carolina sun. A vision of the river appeared before me: marsh birds fished in the estuaries and we three children swam in the green river, full-tided and still as linen. There was one ritual we developed when we were very small that we revealed to not another living soul. Whenever we were hurting or damaged or sad, whenever our parents had punished or beaten us, the three of us would go to the end of the floating dock, dive into the sun-sweet water, then swim out ten yards into the channel and form a circle together by holding hands. We floated together, our hands clasped in a perfect unbreakable circle. I held Savannah’s hand and I held Luke’s. All of us touched, bound in a ring of flesh and blood and water. Luke would give a signal and all of us would inhale and sink to the bottom of the river, our hands still tightly joined. We would remain on the bottom until one of us squeezed the hands of the others and we would rise together and break the surface in an explosion of sunlight and breath. But on the bottom I would open my eyes to the salt and shadow and see the dim figures of my brother and sister floating like embryos beside me. I could feel the dazzling connection between us, a triangle of wordless, uplifted love as we rose, our pulses touching, toward the light and terror of our lives. Diving down, we knew the safety and silence of that motherless, fatherless world; only when our lungs betrayed us did we rise up toward the wreckage. The safe places could only be visited; they could only grant a momentary intuition of sanctuary. The moment always came when we had to return to our real life to face the wounds and grief indigenous to our home by the river.
At this very moment, in Dr. Lowenstein’s office, I wanted to seek the asylum of slow currents, deep places, river bottoms. I would like to have taken my sister, hugged her to my chest, and sunk to the bottom of an azure sea to hold her close to me. A new man, I would hurt or destroy anything that moved in to harm her. I could always take down a large ordnance of the finest, most cutting weaponry to defend her when I thought or dreamed about Savannah. But in real life, I could not even shield the soft veins of her wrists from her own interior wars.
“I told Savannah,” Dr. Lowenstein said, “that I would try to help her in any way I could. But I had to know what she was running away from in her past or I could not help her. Unless she resolved the problems of Savannah Wingo, I didn’t think Renata Halpern had a chance.”
“Why would you help someone become another person?” I asked. “I mean, what are the ethics of this, or if not ethics, what are the therapeutic statistics you’re relying on? How in the world do you know that this is best for Savannah? What if you’re wrong, Lowenstein?”
“I’ve never known of another case like this, so I’m not relying on any set body of professional literature. Nor did I a
gree to help Savannah become Renata Halpern. I simply told her I would try to help her become the most fully integrated person she could become. She had to make the difficult choices. I would help her make those choices right for her.”
“You have no right to do that to Savannah, Dr. Lowenstein. You have no right to help turn her into someone who will never see her family again. I can’t reconcile myself to a kind of therapy that will turn my southern sister into a Jewish writer. It’s not therapy you’re practicing now. It’s black magic, witchcraft, all the dark arts combined. If Savannah wants to become Renata Halpern, then that’s simply one manifestation of her madness.”
“It might be one manifestation of her health. I simply don’t know.”
I was suddenly exhausted, depleted down to the very center of the soul, and I rested my head on the back of the chair, closing my eyes and trying to clear my mind. I struggled to marshal some reasonable arguments to use against Susan Lowenstein, but I was feeling far too eclipsed and alienated to be reasonable.
Finally, I summoned the strength to say, “This, Lowenstein, is the reason I loathe the century I was born in. Why did I have to be born in the century of Sigmund Freud? I despise his mumbo jumbo, his fanatical adherents, his arcane incantations to the psyche, his dreamy unprovable theories, his endless categorizations of all things human. I would like to make an announcement, and I’d like to make it after great thought and deliberation. Fuck Sigmund Freud. Fuck his mother, his father, his children, and his grandparents. Fuck his dog, his cat, his parakeet, and all the animals at the zoo in Vienna. Fuck his books, his ideas, his theories, his daydreams, his dirty fantasies, and the chair he sat in. Fuck this century year by year, day by day, hour by hour, and take everything in this miserable hundred-year abortion of time and flush it down Sigmund Freud’s fragrant commode. Last, but not least, fuck you, Lowenstein, fuck Savannah, fuck Renata Halpern, and fuck anyone else my sister might wish to become in the future. As soon as I can move, I’m going to leave your well-appointed office, pack my meager belongings, and order one of those unspeakable, scrofulous cab drivers to take me to La Guardia. Ol’ Tom’s going home to where his wife is in love with a heart specialist. And as terrible as that is, it at least makes sense to me, whereas nothing about Savannah and Renata does.”