The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

  “You’re saying I’m crazy,” Luke said. “You’ve always been the crazy one, Savannah.”

  “No, Luke,” she said. “I’m just the only one that knew it.”

  “But this was religious,” Luke said. “I felt like I’d been touched by God and He was allowing me to glimpse the future if I remained true to my mission.”

  “You’ve been out in the woods alone way too long,” I said.

  “But I didn’t dream up Mr. Fruit,” Luke said.

  “That’s the strangest part of your hallucination,” Savannah said.

  “No. He was there. They forgot about Mr. Fruit when they moved the town. He must have gotten scared when they started knocking the houses down. He hid out in the forest and lived the best he could. He was half starved and dressed in rags when I found him at his corner directing traffic. How are you going to explain to a man like Mr. Fruit about plutonium and right of eminent domain? He was half dead from malnutrition when I found him. I got him to a Catholic mission in Savannah even though it was hell to pull him off that street corner and get him into that boat. They sent Mr. Fruit to the state mental hospital up in Milledgeville. No one would listen when I explained he just needed a new street corner where he could get comfortable. But you had to grow up in Colleton to understand Mr. Fruit. No one would listen. I couldn’t make them understand the importance of Mr. Fruit in the grand scheme of things.”

  Savannah said, “You need help too. Just like Mr. Fruit. You’re just as much a victim of them moving the town as he was.”

  “My seeing the town was a moment of clarity, Savannah,” Luke said. “When you sit down to write a poem you must be able to see a poem hidden somewhere on a blank page. I saw our town on a piece of dark earth. I’m talking about imagination, not insanity.”

  “You need to go back with us,” Savannah said. “It’s time for you to start a life.”

  He buried his face in his enormous hands. There was a bestial, primitive quality to his grief. His face was lionesque and kingly but he had the soft, startled eyes of a fallow deer.

  “The FBI agent, Covington, Tom,” he asked, “do you trust him?”

  “I trust him as much as I can trust any man who’s hunting my brother,” I said.

  “He said I’d get three years in prison?” Luke asked.

  “He said you’d get three to five years,” I said. “That’s the deal he worked out.”

  “Maybe I can room with Dad,” he said.

  “He wants you to come in, too,” Savannah said. “He’s very worried. So is Mom.”

  “Maybe in about five years we can have a family reunion,” Luke said.

  “Let’s hold it at Auschwitz,” said Savannah.

  “Tell Covington I’ll give myself up at the Charleston Bridge, Tom,” Luke said. “I’d like to surrender to an officer of the National Guard. I’d like to surrender as a soldier.”

  “Why don’t you just go back with us tonight?” I said. “I could call Covington from our house.”

  “I’d like to spend a couple of nights out here alone,” Luke said. “I’d like to say goodbye to Colleton. I’ll meet them at the Charleston Bridge on Friday.”

  “The tide is coming in, Savannah,” I said. “We need to start soon.”

  “Let me stay with you, Luke,” she said worriedly. “I’m afraid to leave you here alone.”

  “I can take care of myself, little sister,” Luke said. “I’ll be fine. Tom’s right. If you don’t catch the tide in the next hour, you’ll never make it out tonight.”

  Luke helped me drag my boat to the water. He embraced Savannah and held her for a long time as she wept against his chest.

  Then he turned to me.

  I broke down as soon as he touched me.

  “It’s over now, Tom,” he said, holding me. “In three years we’ll laugh like hell about this. It all turned to shit, but we can change it back into something wonderful. I’ll get out and we’ll buy us a big shrimp boat and we’ll catch more goddamn shrimp than anyone on the East Coast. We’ll be famous and clean out bars of sailors and drink our liquor neat.”

  Savannah and I got into the boat and Luke pushed us off into the tide. Savannah blew him kisses and we left him enkindled in the papery light of a fine moon. We left him and turned into the comely boulevards of the great salt marsh as we left our home county for the last time in our lives. As I steered the boat through the narrow channel, I tossed a small prayer toward the river. It was a prayer of gratitude. Though God had burdened me with strange and wounded parents, he had granted me the presence of the most extraordinary brother and sister to balance the hand. I could not have made the journey without them. Nor would I have chosen to make it.

  On the way to his rendezvous at the Charleston Bridge, Luke made a last sentimental visit to the island where we had grown up in a small white house by the Colleton River. He was standing on the foundation of that house when he was killed by a single rifle shot by one of the ex-Green Berets who had been commissioned to hunt him down in Colleton County. J. William Covington delivered the news to my house on Sullivans Island on the Saturday after Luke failed to surrender to Colonel Bryson Kelleher at the Charleston Bridge.

  After the funeral, Savannah and I took Luke’s body far out beyond the three-mile limit and buried him at sea, in the Gulf Stream that he loved. When we put the weighted coffin overboard, Savannah read a poem she had written as a last farewell to Luke. She called the poem “The Prince of Tides.”

  When she had finished we returned to Charleston knowing that we had the rest of our lives to learn how to live without Luke. We had years to learn how to fall apart at the seams and to do it prettily.

  EPILOGUE

  There are last things to say.

  I took my time telling Luke’s story to Susan Lowenstein and all the words came hard. But it was easier telling it to a woman I loved and one who whispered every day that she loved me. She had awakened something in me that had slumbered far too long. Not only did I feel passion again, I felt the return of hope and a clearance of all storm warnings in the danger zones of memory.

  I had spent the summer writing love songs to my daughters and love letters to my wife. I missed my daughters terribly and the mere mention of their names could wound me. But they could not cast me out of their lives, and it was Sallie I thought I had lost forever. My letters to Sallie had one repeating theme: No one understood better than I the reason she had to find love outside our home. In my grief and bitterness I had turned my own wife into a stranger, a trespasser, and, most cruelly of all, a widow presiding over a house of purest sorrow. The island boy, Tom Wingo, had cut himself off from all who loved him and set himself adrift in the sea lanes of a long and dreamless attrition. I told Sallie that her affair with Dr. Cleveland had taught me that I could still hurt in those same places laid waste by the death of my brother. It had stopped my long slide into self-pity and I could feel the fighter in me struggling for recognition once again. Now I knew that deliverance often requires the kiss of Judas as prelude; there are times when betrayal can be an act of love in itself. I had thrown Sallie out of my heart and Jack Cleveland had welcomed her into his. I didn’t like it, but I told Sallie that I understood it perfectly. Her letters back to me were the letters of a hurt and bewildered woman. She needed time, she said, and I gave her time and waited for her decision. It never once occurred to me that the decision would be mine or that I would ever feel any emotion other than joy when leaving New York City.

  In the last two weeks of August, Susan Lowenstein rented a cabin on the coast of Maine and I told her of Luke’s death as I watched a much wilder and colder Atlantic assault the wild, indifferent cliffs. I told her everything and how I could not place a value on any life that did not include my brother. In that country cleansed beneath vast linens of snow each winter, I praised my brother’s spirit and mourned his death in the fierce green beauty of a Maine summer. I told her all the bleak, unornamental stanzas of both my allegiance and my grief. I could not measure the
cost of loving a family so deeply and with such cold fury.

  When I spoke of burying Luke at sea, Susan Lowenstein held me in her arms and stroked my hair and dried my tears. It was not as Savannah’s psychiatrist that she heard my story of Luke but as my lover, my companion and best friend. For two weeks we made love as though we had been waiting our whole lives to fall into each other’s arms. Each day we would walk for miles by the sea, pick wild-flowers and blackberries, and dig for clams, until she would turn toward me, slide her nails across my back, and whisper, “Let’s go back to the house and make love and tell each other everything in the world.” It was a pleasure telling Susan Lowenstein everything in the world.

  On our last night in Maine we huddled together on a rock with a blanket over our shoulders. The moon laid a sheet of silver across the ocean and the sky was starry and clear.

  “Aren’t you looking forward to getting back to the city, Tom?” she said, kissing my cheek. “I’m tired of all this peace, quiet, beauty, great food, and terrific sex.”

  I laughed and said, “If we stay together, Lowenstein, will I have to become Jewish?”

  “Of course not,” she answered. “Herbert’s not Jewish.”

  “Look, I don’t mind,” I said. “Everyone in my family’s doing it. Don’t forget about Renata.”

  “Hasn’t this been a nice look at what our life could be like together?” she said. “A preview of coming attractions.”

  I did not answer at first and the images of my wife and children bloomed in the darkness, vivid as fireflies. “Before I met you, I was in a deep sleep. I was a dead man and didn’t even know it. Should I call you Susan now, Lowenstein?”

  She answered, “No. I love the way you say ‘Lowenstein,’ especially when we’re making love. I feel beautiful again, Tom. I feel absolutely gorgeous.”

  I waited for a moment, then said, “I need to see Savannah when we get back.”

  “It’s time,” she agreed. “For both of you.”

  “I need to tell her some things,” I said. “I need to tell everyone some things.”

  “I’m afraid of what’s going to happen when Sallie calls and wants you back.”

  “How do you know she’ll want me back?” I asked.

  “I’ve sampled the merchandise,” she whispered. “I can’t wait to get back to the house so we can take off our clothes and tell each other everything in the world.”

  “Lowenstein,” I said, as I turned to kiss her, “you’ve got a lot to learn about the outdoors.”

  And I began unbuttoning her shirt.

  Savannah looked surprised to see me when an orderly led her into the visitors’ lounge. She seemed uncomfortable when she kissed me, but she held me tightly for a moment and said, “They let you in.”

  “Lowenstein’s letting you out for the day,” I said. “I’m going to be held strictly accountable if you do a half-gainer with twist off the Empire State Building.”

  “I’ll try to control myself,” she said, and she almost smiled.

  I took her to the Museum of Modern Art, where they were having an exhibit of Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs and Georgia O’Keeffe’s art. We spoke very little the first hour we were together, but wandered through the galleries side by side. Too much time and blood summered in the marshes of our shared past. We had lost years to the piracies of a ruthless fate and neither of us wished to speak too quickly.

  Her first question caught me off guard.

  “You know about Renata Halpern?” she asked as we studied a photograph of a New York street scene.

  “Yep,” I said.

  “It made sense to me at the time,” she said. “I wasn’t in very good shape.”

  “You needed an escape,” I said. “Anyone can understand that. Especially me.”

  “Do you?” she said, and there was a touch of anger in her voice. “You stayed in the South.”

  “Do you know what the South is to me?” I said back to her.

  “No,” she said, but my sister was lying.

  “It’s soul food, Savannah. I can’t help it. It’s what I am.”

  “It’s mean and cheap and backward,” she said. “The southern life is a death sentence.”

  I turned away from a photograph of a young and beautiful Georgia O’Keeffe and said; “I know that’s how you feel, Savannah. We’ve had this conversation a thousand times.”

  She took my hand and squeezed it. “You sold yourself short. You could’ve been more than a teacher and a coach.”

  I returned the squeeze and said, “Listen to me, Savannah. There’s no word in the language I revere more than teacher. None. My heart sings when a kid refers to me as his teacher and it always has. I’ve honored myself and the entire family of man by becoming one.”

  Savannah looked at me and said, “Then why aren’t you happy, Tom?”

  “For the same reason you’re not,” I said.

  We walked into the Monet room and sat down on a bench in the center of the gallery and studied the large canvases filled with lilies and pondwater. It was Savannah’s favorite place in the world and she always came here to lift her spirits.

  “Lowenstein’s going to let you go home soon,” I said.

  “I think I’m ready,” she answered.

  “If you ever decide to go away again, let me help you do it, Savannah.”

  “I may still need to stay away from all of you for a very long time,” she said.

  “I can love you no matter what you do,” I said. “But I can’t bear to think of a world without you.”

  “Sometimes I think the world would be better off without me,” she said, and the sadness in her voice touched a deep place within me.

  “We haven’t mentioned Luke’s name to each other since he died,” I said, taking my sister’s hand.

  She leaned her head against my shoulder and her voice was exhausted and fearful as she said, “Not yet, Tom. Please.”

  “It’s time,” I said. “We loved Luke so much we forgot how much we love each other.”

  “Something came apart in me,” she said, almost strangling. “Something unfixable.”

  “I know what can fix it,” I said, and I pointed to the dreaming, immemorial flowers of Monet floating in the cool waters or Giverny. Savannah looked up at the huge painting in her favorite room in Manhattan as I said, “Your art can fix it. You can write beautiful poems about our brother. You’re the only one who can bring Luke back to us.”

  She began crying but I could feel her relief. “But he’s dead, Tom.”

  “That’s because you haven’t written about him since he died,” I said. “Do with Luke what Monet did with flowers. Use your art. Give him back to us. Let the whole world love Luke Wingo.”

  Late that afternoon, the phone call from Sallie came, the one that Susan Lowenstein had come to fear, the one that I had come to fear. She started to speak but her voice broke.

  “What’s wrong, Sallie?” I asked.

  “He was having an affair with two other women, Tom,” she said. “I was planning to leave you and have him move in with me and the girls and he was screwing two other goddamn women.”

  “It was his collection of British motorcycles,” I said. “The meerschaum pipes were harmless affectations, but when a doctor starts collecting motorcycles, it’s a sign of something askew in the male ego.”

  “I loved him, Tom,” she said. “I won’t lie to you about it.”

  “Your taste in men has always been a little suspect,” I said.

  She said, “I feel used, violated, and disgusting. I didn’t know how to conduct an affair. It was all new to me and I’m sure I made a perfect ass out of myself.”

  “You did fine, Sallie,” I said. “No one knows how to do it right.”

  “He was horrible when I confronted him about the other women,” she said. “He said some terrible things to me.”

  “Do you want me to beat him up?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, “of course not. Why?”

  “I’d
like to beat him up,” I said. “I’d let you watch.”

  “He said I was too old for him ever to consider marrying,” she said. “One of his girlfriends was nineteen.”

  “Depth was never one of his big problems.”

  “What about us, Tom?” she said. “Where do we go from here? Your letters have been beautiful, but if I were you, I’d never forgive me.”

  “I’ve got to tell you about Lowenstein, Sallie,” I said.

  I waited for Lowenstein to come out of her office. I was trying to think of the proper words when I saw her come down the stairs of the brownstone. She saw me across the street, leaning against a lamppost. Her beauty moved me, as it always did, but it was her kindness that was breaking my heart as she approached me. When I tried to speak, the tears came. No one had invented the proper way to say goodbye to Lowenstein. She saw it and she screamed as she ran across the street. “No, no, Tom. No. It’s not fair.”

  She dropped her briefcase on the sidewalk and threw her arms around my neck. Her briefcase snapped open and papers fluttered down the sidewalk and beneath a row of cars. She wiped a tear from my face and kissed another one away.

  “We knew this day would come. We talked about it. One of the things I love about you, Tom, is you’re the kind of man who’ll always go back to his family. But goddamn her anyway. Goddamn Sallie for loving you before I did.”

  Her words cut through me and I cried harder, resting my head on her shoulder. She stroked my head and said, “I’ve got to find me a nice Jewish boy. You goys are killing me.” And through tears, Lowenstein and I roared with laughter.

  She was sitting in a chair in her apartment, staring out the window onto Bleecker Street. Her hair was discolored and her flesh was bleached and puffy. She did not turn around when I entered the room. I had packed my bags the night before and they were sitting by the kitchen door. From a florist on Eighth Avenue, I had bought her a gardenia bush in full flower. I cut off a single gardenia, walked over to her, and placed it in my sister’s hair.

  Then I asked her the old question, “What was your family life like, Savannah?”