by Pat Conroy
“Hiroshima,” she answered.
“And what has life been like since you left that wonderful family?”
“Nagasaki,” she said, still not turning to face me.
“Name the poem you wrote in honor of your family,” I said.
“ ‘The History of Auschwitz,’ ” she said, and I thought she was about to smile.
“Here’s the really important question,” I said, leaning down over her and smelling the gardenia in her hair. “Whom do you love more than anyone in the world?”
She pulled my head down against her face and her tears and she whispered, “I love my brother, Tom Wingo. My fabulous goddamn twin. I’m so sorry for everything.”
“It’s all right, Savannah,” I said. “We’ve made it back to each other. We’ve got lots of time to try our hands at restoring the ruins.”
“Hold me, Tom,” she said, “hold me tight.”
When I was ready to leave her apartment, I brought my bags into the hallway where Eddie Detreville was waiting to help me with my luggage. I embraced Eddie, kissed him on the cheek, and told him I had rarely known such a generous and loving man. Then I turned to say goodbye to my sister. She looked up at me from her chair, appraising me, and she said, “Do you think you and I are survivors, Tom?”
“I think I am. I’m not sure about you,” I said.
“Survival. So that’s the gift our family gave to you.”
I kissed her, held her, then walked toward the door. I lifted my luggage and said to Savannah, “Yeah. But the family gave you something far greater.”
“Ha!” she said bitterly. “What’s that?”
“Genius,” I said. “It gave you genius.”
That night Susan Lowenstein took me high above the city where we ate a final meal at Windows on the World. The sun had already set when we arrived and there was only a last hint of ruby julienned through the clouds massed along the horizon. Beneath us, the city was laid out in a noiseless place setting of fire and crystal. New York was never the same city no matter how many times you saw it or from what angle. Nothing in God’s world was as beautiful as Manhattan Island seen from above at night.
Over wine I asked, “What do you feel like eating tonight, Lowenstein?”
In silence, she watched me for a moment, then said, “I plan to order a perfectly lousy meal. I don’t want to have anything like a wonderful meal on the night you say goodbye to me forever.”
“I’m going back to South Carolina, Lowenstein,” I said, reaching over and squeezing her hand. “That’s where I belong.”
“You could belong anywhere you wanted to,” she said, turning her eyes out toward the city. “You just chose not to belong here.”
“Why are you making it so hard for us to part as friends?” I asked.
“Because I want you to stay with me, Tom,” she said. “I think you love me and I’m certain I love you and I think we have a chance to make each other happy for the rest of our lives.”
“I couldn’t make anybody happy for the rest of their life,” I said.
“Everything you say is only an excuse to leave me,” she said, snatching up the menu suddenly and studying it carefully so our eyes did not have to meet.
Then she said, “What’s the worst thing on this menu? That’s what I want to order.”
“Someone recommended pig’s anus tartare,” I said.
“Do not even try to make me laugh tonight,” she said, her face hidden by the menu. “This is the night you’re leaving me for another woman.”
“The other woman happens to be my wife,” I said.
“Why did you let it go so far between us,” she said, “if you knew, in the end, you’d return to Sallie?”
“I didn’t know that,” I said. “I thought we might be together forever.”
“What happened?”
“My character rose to the surface,” I said. “I didn’t have the courage to leave my wife and children to make a new life with you. It’s just not in me. You’ll have to forgive me, Lowenstein. One part of me wants you more than anything else in the world. The other part of me is terrified of any major change in my life. That’s the strongest part.”
“But you love me, Tom,” she said.
“I didn’t know it was possible to be in love with two women at the same time.”
“Yet you chose Sallie.”
“I chose to honor my own history,” I said. “If I were a braver man, I could do it.”
“What could I do to make you stay?” she asked me fiercely. “Tell me, please. I don’t know how to beg, but I’ll try to learn the words and all the steps. Help me with them, please.”
I closed my eyes and took both her hands in mine and said, “Have me born in New York City. Take away my past. Take away everything I’ve known and loved. Make it so I never met Sallie and that we never had children with each other. Make it that I don’t love Sallie.”
She smiled and said, “I thought I could make you stay if I made you feel guilty enough, if I made you feel responsible for me.”
“A shameless breed, you shrinks.”
“If it doesn’t work out between you and Sallie,” she said, then stopped in midsentence.
“Then you’ll find me barking like a dog outside your building on Central Park West,” I said. “I find it strange, Lowenstein, that at this very moment I love you more than I ever remember loving Sallie.”
“Then stay with me, Tom.”
“I’ve got to try to make something beautiful out of the ruins, Lowenstein,” I said, looking into her eyes. “I don’t know if I’ll succeed, but I’ve got to try. That’s what I told Savannah when I saw her this afternoon.”
“Speaking of ruins, Herbert called today,” she said as she waved off a waiter who had come to take our order. “He’s begging me to give him another chance. He even claimed he broke off his affair with Monique.”
“You wouldn’t happen to have Monique’s phone number handy, would you?” I asked.
“That’s not even humorous by your slapstick standards,” she said.
“This atmosphere seems heavy enough to be made of titanium. I thought I’d lighten it a bit.”
“I don’t want to lighten it,” she said. “I’m perfectly miserable and I have a right to wallow in that misery.”
“I like the thought of Herbert begging, Lowenstein,” I said. “It must become him so.”
“He doesn’t do it very well,” she said. “I’ve told him about our affair. He finds it unimaginable that I’m consorting with someone like you.”
“Tell the son of a bitch about my elephantine genitalia,” I said, slightly irritated. “Or my wicked use of the Chinese basket trick during intercourse.”
“I told him that we were wonderful in bed together,” she said, abstractedly gazing out toward the city. “I told him that we sizzle.”
“Sizzle,” I said. “You make us sound like two New York strips.”
“It’s terrible how much I’ve come to enjoy hurting him,” she said. “Have you told Sallie about us, Tom?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Then you used me, Tom,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “I used you, Susan, but not before I started loving you.”
“If you liked me enough, Tom . . . ”
“No, Lowenstein. I adore you. You’ve changed my life. I’ve felt like a whole man again. An attractive man. A sensual one. You’ve made me face it all and you made me think I was doing it to help my sister.”
“So this is how the story ends,” she said.
“I believe so, Lowenstein,” I answered.
“Then let’s make our last night perfect,” she said, kissing my hand, then slowly kissing each one of my fingers as the building swayed in a strong wind from the north.
After dinner we went to the Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center and we toasted each other with champagne. I kissed her with all the city below us and the Atlantic moving its tides into the Hudson and my sister, at home again, sleeping in her apartment on Grove St
reet. We checked into the Plaza for the night and stayed awake all night talking, making love, then talking again. Since we had no plans to make, there were only eight hours in the world left for us. But I had made my refusal. I had said no.
When I said goodbye at La Guardia, I kissed her once and began walking rapidly to the gate without looking back. But she called my name and I turned and heard her say, “Tom, remember the dream I had about you and me dancing in the snow storm?”
“I’ll never forget it,” I said.
Now Susan was crying and leaving her was a killing thing again when she said, “Promise -me this, Coach. When you get back to South Carolina, dream one for me. Dream one for Lowenstein.”
A year after my New York summer, I drove to Atlanta alone to pick up my father on the day he was released from the federal penitentiary. I wanted to give him some time to compose himself before he had to face the abundant, guilty love of a damaged family who did not know how to welcome him home. None of us knew what his life would be like now that he had lost so much time and his own vigor. He was thinner and his face was sallow and jowly. I was with him when he picked up his personal possessions and the warden signed his papers of release. The warden said the prison would miss him and that it needed more prisoners like Henry Wingo.
“The only thing I ever did right,” my father said. “I made a great jailbird.”
We took in a Braves game at the stadium and spent the night at the Hyatt Regency. The next day, we left early and took the back roads to Charleston, driving slowly, taking time to know each other again, trying to find the right words, the safe words, painfully avoiding the wrong subjects.
My father looked older, but so did I. In his face, I saw Luke’s face. In my face, as he shyly studied me, I knew he must have seen my mother’s face. My face hurt him now but neither one of us could help that. We talked about sports and coaching. The long, clean seasons of football, basketball, and baseball that divided all the years of our lives and provided this father and son with the only language of love allowed to pass between them.
“The Braves are only four games out of first, Dad,” I said as we crossed the Savannah River.
“Niekro’s got to get hot for them to have any kind of a chance at all. No one in the major leagues can touch his knuckleball when he’s got it dancing good,” Dad answered, but beneath the answer I heard the inarticulate cry, the heartbreaking cry of the father’s clumsy effort to force up all the strength of love he could summon for a child. I heard it and it was enough.
“Are you gonna have a good team this year?” he asked.
“I think we might surprise some people,” I said. “Maybe you can help me coach the linemen.”
“I’d like that,” he said.
Savannah had arrived from New York when we drove up into the back yard on Sullivans Island. My children poured out of the house and shyly approached their grandfather.
“Be careful, girls,” I said. “He hits.”
“No, I don’t, kids. Come here and kiss your grandpa,” he said in a beaten, tired voice, and I was sorry I said what I did.
Sallie came to the door, slim and dark-haired, tanned and serious. She ran up to my father, threw her arms around him, and tears were streaming down her face as he turned her round and round and buried his face against her shoulder.
“Welcome home, Dad,” she said.
Then Savannah came out of the house. And there was something I cannot explain that I felt as they ran to each other and where I felt it was in the deepest part of me, an untouched place that trembled with something instinctual and rooted in the provenance of the species—unnamable, yet I knew it could be named if it could be felt. It was not Savannah’s tears or my father’s tears that caused this resonance, this fierce interior music of blood and wildness and identity. It was the beauty and fear of kinship, the ineffable ties of family, that sounded a blazing terror and an awestruck love inside of me. There was my father, the source of all these lives, the source of all these tears, crying now, crying hard and without shame. The tears were water, salt water, and I could see the ocean behind him, could smell it, could taste my own tears, the sea and hurt within me leaking out into the sunlight and my children crying to see me cry. The story of my family was the story of salt water, of boats and shrimp, of tears and storm.
And my twin, my beautiful, damaged sister, her scarred wrists around my father’s neck, her eyes dimmed by a lifetime of visions and laying hold to a language strong enough to make these visions clear, to turn nightmare and horror into the astonishing lyrics that burned into the consciousness of her time, to turn sorrow into a life-giving beauty. And my wife, who had married into this family and who had to grow tolerant of a large cast of family demons, who did it because she loved me, even though I was incapable of responding to love from a woman, that I could never make her feel loved or needed or wanted even though that’s what I wanted to give her more than anything else in the world. And my children, three daughters, whom I could love with some perfect love that seemed unrelated to me, because I wanted so badly to make them unlike me in any way, because I wanted to make sure they would never have a childhood like mine, that they would never be struck by me, that they would never fear the approach of their father. With them, I tried to re-create my own childhood as I dreamed it should have been. With them, I tried to change the world.
In the late afternoon we loaded the station wagon with a beer cooler and a picnic basket and drove toward Charleston. We turned off at the shrimp dock at Shem Creek and I parked the car in sight of the only shrimp boat still at the docks.
“You know how to work one of those things?” I asked my father, pointing toward the shrimp boat.
“Naw,” he said, “but I bet I could learn fast.”
“It’s registered under the name of Captain Henry Wingo,” I said. “It’s a homecoming gift from Mom.”
“I can’t accept that,” he said.
“You wrote that you wanted to get back on the river,” I said. “Mom wanted to make a gesture. I think it’s a nice one.”
“It’s a fine boat,” my father said. “They catching many shrimp this season?”
“The good ones are,” I said. “It’s a month before I have to start football practice, Dad. I’ll work as your striker until you can hire one.”
“I’ll pay you six cents on the pound,” he said.
“The hell you will, you cheap son of a bitch,” I said. “You’ll pay me ten cents on the pound. The price of labor has gone up.”
He smiled and said, “Tell your mother thanks.”
“She wants to see you,” I said.
“I don’t know about that,” he said.
“You’ve got all the time in the world, Dad,” I said. “Now, I want you to take us up the Wando River.”
We entered the main channel of Charleston Harbor an hour before sunset and the bells of St. Michael’s Church rang clearly through the shimmering light and the humid perfumed air of the old city. My father steered the shrimp boat beneath the enormous iron vertebrae of the two Cooper River bridges and we passed a white freighter loaded with cargo from the docks of North Charleston moving out to sea. All of us waved and the invisible captain sounded his horn in greeting. We made a starboard turn into the Wando River and the tide was so high that my father did not have to refer to the navigational charts a single time. We went for a mile until we neared a vast marsh in the round curve of the river and there was not a house in sight.
“It’s about time, Tom,” Sallie said, coming into the wheel house.
“Time for what?” my father asked.
“A homecoming surprise for you and Savannah,” Sallie said, checking her watch.
“Tell us, Mama,” my children said.
“No,” she answered, “then it won’t be a surprise.”
We swam in the warm opaque waters, diving in deep from the shrimp boat’s bow. After swimming, we ate dinner from the picnic basket and toasted my father’s homecoming with champagne. Savannah ap
proached my father and I watched them as they walked to the front of the boat holding hands.
I tried to think of something to say, a summing up, but I could think of nothing. I had taught myself to listen to the black sounds of the heart and learned some things that would serve me well. I had come to this moment with my family safely around me and I prayed that they would always be safe and that I would be contented with what I had. I am southern made and southern broken, Lord, but I beseech you to let me keep what I have. Lord, I am a teacher and a coach. That is all and it is enough. But the black sounds, the black sounds, Lord. When they toll within me, I am seized with a capacity for homage and wonder. I hear them and want to put my dreams to music. When they come I can feel an angel burning in my eye like a rose, and canticles of the most meticulous praise rise out of the clear submarine depths of secret ambient ecstasy.
The white porpoise comes to me at night, singing in the river of time, with a thousand dolphins in radiant attendance, bringing charismatic greetings from the Prince of Tides, calling out our name: Wingo, Wingo, Wingo. It is enough, Lord. It is enough.
“It’s time, Tom,” Sallie said, lifting up to kiss me on the lips.
The whole family gathered on the bow of the boat to watch day come to an end.
The sun, red and enormous, began to sink into the western sky and simultaneously the moon began to rise on the other side of the river with its own glorious shade of red, coming up out of the trees like a russet firebird. The sun and the moon seemed to acknowledge each other and they moved in both apposition and concordance in a breathtaking dance of light across the oaks and palms.
My father watched it and I thought he would cry again. He had returned to the sea from prison and his heart was a lowcountry heart. The children were screaming, pointing to the sun, then turning to look at the rising moon, calling to the sun, then to the moon.
My father said, “It’ll be good shrimping tomorrow.”
Savannah came up beside me and put her arm around my waist. We walked to the back of the boat.
“A terrific surprise, Tom,” she said.
“I thought you’d like it,” I answered.
“Susan sends her love,” Savannah said. “She’s dating a lawyer now.”