by Pat Conroy
The house had been built in that faux-Southern style that is both main attraction and main affliction of Southern suburbs. All are ghastly imitations of Tara, or Tara-inspired. One may safely subtract five points from any Southerner’s IQ for each column in the front of his or her house. White columns are often the metaphorical bars of the Southern prison from which there is no parole or escape.
I walked through the fussed-over garden wary of entering the house. I passed a gardenia bush on my way to the dock and felt a sudden wounding at my leaving my mother on this night. There across the river in the distance was the hospital where she lay comatose.
I was startled by Ledare’s voice: “Hello. Welcome home.”
Turning, I looked at the pretty woman who stood before me, and kissed her lightly on the lips, as brothers and sisters do.
I turned into the breeze. “Is the house prettier on the inside?”
“Mike used a Hollywood decorator,” Ledare answered. “Flew him out here and gave him a blank check. It’s like Monticello meets A Thousand and One Nights. It’s unique.”
We walked along a brick path to the front door of the house. The interior design looked hasty; everything appeared bought, nothing collected, each room being more antiseptic than the last. Several English hunting prints hung on the sitting room walls: pale, attenuated Englishmen riding to the hounds on the South Carolina sheetrock. In the South, those emblematic hunting prints populate the walnut-paneled walls of meretricious and second-rate law firms.
As though reading my mind, Ledare said, “Mike’s sensitive about his hunting prints. His home in L.A. is awash with them.”
“I see,” I said. “Where is the host?”
“He called from the airport on his portable phone,” she answered. “He should be arriving any minute. I should warn you. He said he had mystery guests coming for drinks after dinner.”
“How’d you get here? I didn’t see another car.”
“I took my father’s boat across the river,” Ledare said.
“You still know the river,” I said with admiration.
She smiled.
I said, “Can I help with dinner?”
“I didn’t tell you?” she said. “You’re cooking it.”
“Wonderful.”
“You write cookbooks. I write screenplays. It wasn’t hard to figure. My father gave us a washtub full of shrimp.”
“Let’s peel them together. Did you get any pasta?”
“I got everything,” Ledare said. “Mike told me to stock up, so I bought everything edible they had in Charleston.”
It is an unwritten law that people who don’t cook and who do not savor food own the finest and most fabulously equipped kitchens, and Mike was no exception. Standing side by side before an immaculate counter, Ledare and I peeled shrimp that had been swimming in Waterford creeks two hours earlier. We headed the shrimp, then disrobed the white flesh of their pale, translucent shells. With a sharp knife, I removed the long, inky vein that ran from head to tail. Outside, the sun lay down on the river and the tides blushed in rosy gold. Even the kitchen had a view of the river. As we worked, the spiny crowns of the shrimp piled up in the bottom of the sink.
“Are you working on Mike’s project?” I asked.
Ledare nodded and answered, “It’s not an accident we’re here now. Mike heard about your mother and called me right away in New York. He’s not given up on you participating in some way. How’s your mother? Not getting better, I understand?”
“She’s hanging in there,” I said. And then, changing the subject as tactfully as I could: “Are you staying at your parents’ house?”
“Just for a while,” she said. “I figure there’ll be six months of research before I write a single line. There’s still room for you on this project. I’d love it if you’d do it.”
“It’s not for me, Ledare.”
“Think about it. Mike’s taking this seriously. It’d be the longest mini-series in history if he can pull it off.”
I checked the water in the pasta pot. “Not enough happened in this town to do a mini-series. Not enough happened in this town to do a sixty-second commercial.”
She looked at me.
“You and I are two of the main characters … in the later episodes of course. Names’ll be changed, everything fictionalized, but we’re in it.”
“Mike, of course, didn’t tell me that.”
“He would have told you, but you showed no sign of being interested in the project.”
“The project. Sounds like NASA. I don’t know this version of Mike. I don’t like what he’s become.” I turned the knob on the electric stove to high, then switched it off. I hate electric stoves, and love the sight of flame on a stove top.
“Mike’s become a producer in all the full horror of the breed,” Ledare started to explain when we heard a car pull up the driveway. “It’s the lowest form of human life and he’s the nicest one I know. Smile, Jack. The shallowness comes with the territory.”
Mike entered the house on the run.
“Sorry about your mama, Jack,” he said as he hugged me. “I got about a thousand people in Hollywood I’d pay good money to get leukemia and God has to give it to someone sweet as her.”
“That’s nice, Mike,” I said. “I think.”
“Ciao, sweetheart,” Mike said, kissing Ledare on the cheek. “It’s heaven to see you both. I’m starting not even to recognize myself in L.A. I yelled at a kid, a nineteen-year-old intern, yesterday. Made her cry. Felt like shit.”
“You’re famous for yelling at people,” Ledare said.
“But I don’t like it. It’s not the real me.”
“It is if you keep doing it,” I said. “You want a drink?”
“I sure do, and not club soda,” Mike said. “Fix me a margarita.”
“I can’t,” I said, “I’m an American.”
“Bourbon, then,” he said.
“Me too, Jack.”
I got the drinks and we sat on the screened porch, letting the perfume of the garden, the smells of our town, flow over us. I was grateful for a respite from the hospital.
“Jack,” Mike said, “I want to apologize to you for how I acted in Venice. That wasn’t the real me you met in that city. That’s the asshole I’ve become, to my shame. I act like that because that’s how I get things done in the industry. Kindness is laughed at … goodness met with contempt. I’m embarrassed and I only hope you’ll forgive me.”
“We were babies together,” I said.
“All of us were,” Ledare added. “We love you for life, Mike.”
“We know who you are and where you come from,” I said. “It’s hard to be famous, isn’t it?”
Mike looked up suddenly, his eyes shining. “There’s not one good thing about it. Except the money. And sometimes I think that’s the worst of it.”
“Assuage the guilt,” Ledare said. “Share the money with your pals.”
“I’ve made shitty films,” Mike said. “I’ve been a perfect prick and all I’ve got to show for it is money.”
“I’ve been a perfect prick too and all I’ve got to show for it is I know how to make pasta,” I said, leaning over and squeezing Mike’s shoulder. “Come on, let’s get dinner.”
“I’ll help,” said Ledare.
Grudgingly turning back to the electric stove, I assembled the ingredients and soon the smell of garlic frying in a rich green olive oil wafted out onto the porch, where Mike remained staring out toward the garden and the river. I was aware of how Ledare and I suddenly seemed more comfortable with each other. She began to tell me what she had learned of Mike’s life since I had been gone. For five years, Mike had been seeing the most prominent psychiatrist in Beverly Hills and he was having fugitive moments of perception that had brought him to the idea of the Waterford film.
The action adventure movie had become his stock-in-trade and all of them played off the lionhearted fantasy life of teenage boys. His films had more need of plasma units than
the Red Cross did after an earthquake. They also had more need of ammunition than an Israeli battalion staring down at Syria from the Golan Heights. But the films were not sleazy, just unimportant. They entertained “with a capital E,” as Mike would tell his investors, men who trusted Mike’s unerring sense of bad taste. Market research was apparently the vehicle Mike depended on to instruct him in the secret capriciousness of public taste. In one movie, the hero died in an apocalyptic shootout with a local gang, until a poll after the preview screening demonstrated that the audience preferred to exit into the night with a grinning, triumphant hero in their collective consciousness rather than a corpse. Reshooting took place on a back lot, a modern resurrection ensued, and voilà, the hero walked slowly into the alphabet of the closing credits, all limbs intact and all villains inert and harmless on the battleground of his last stand. Because of market research, Mike no longer had to depend on the hunches of directors or the artistry of screenwriters. The public knew exactly what it wanted and Mike was bright enough to feed it to them raw.
Like many powerful men in Hollywood who had made too much money too fast, Mike was now in a strange, illusory time where he wanted to make films of stature and substance. He was beginning to want Hollywood’s respect as well as its fear and envy. He also acknowledged to Ledare that there was no more dangerous time in the life of a producer. Nothing was more pathetic or superficial than a movie producer who wished to make a statement with a film. Sentimentality appalled him, yet he could hear it sounding in himself, far off, like wind chimes. Desperately, he now wanted to tell the world about the courage of his own family and the small Southern town that had embraced and taken that family into its safekeeping and shelter.
Ledare and I were crucial to his plans.
Over dinner, Mike unfolded for me in detail his ideas for the series. He wanted it to begin with his grandfather, Max Rusoff, who was a butcher in a Russian shtetl when a pogrom led by a regiment of Cossacks broke out. The film would follow Max out of Russia to Charleston and his life as a peddler who walked Highway 17 between Charleston and Waterford. One of Max Rusoff’s first customers in Waterford had been my grandfather, and their friendship had not wavered for over fifty years.
“I know all the stories,” I said to Mike. “I grew up hearing them.”
“I want to tell my family’s story because other Jews don’t even believe that Jews live down South.”
“Let me ask you this, Mike, and I’d like an honest answer,” I said. “Are you planning to have my wife, Shyla, leaping off that bridge in Charleston?”
Silence and restraint broke the energy of conversation and my words seemed to hang in the air. Ledare looked to Mike.
“We’re changing all the names,” Mike said. “The story will be definitely fictionalized.”
“But a Jewish woman will kill herself by jumping off a bridge?”
Ledare took my hand. “Shyla’s part of all of our stories, Jack. Not just yours.”
“Shyla was my cousin,” Mike said. “She’s just as much a part of my family’s history as she is yours.”
“Good,” I said. “Glad you feel that way about your family. How do you feel about your other cousin, my daughter, when she watches your TV program and sees a fictionalized version of her mother leaping off a bridge? And Mike and Ledare, how do you think I’m going to feel about it and how dare you two even think I’d participate in a project like that?”
“The suicide takes place off-screen,” Mike said quickly. “Jack, I have to have you on this one. I’m going to need your help. I need it badly and so does Ledare.”
“The suicide of Shyla does not have any part of this goddamn screenplay,” I shouted.
“A deal,” Mike said, “if you agree to help us with the rest of the story.”
“You know the rest of the story,” I said. “We all lived through the same things. We danced to the same music. We went to the same movies. We even dated the same people.”
“He’s talking about Jordan,” Ledare said, her voice registering neutrality.
“We went to Jordan’s memorial service together,” I said evenly. “We sat together and we cried together, because Jordan was our first friend to die.”
“You’re lying,” Mike said. “Hate to be so brutally frank, pal. But you’re lying through your teeth.”
Reaching into his breast pocket, he pulled out a packet of photographs and threw them across the table at me. They were snapshots taken of Jordan coming out of the confessional at Sant’ Anselmo, of Jordan entering the cloistered garden. I saw several of myself looking around to see if I was being followed.
“A nice snapshot of my confessor in Rome,” I said, examining the photographs one by one. “And here’s a nice picture of me walking up the Aventine. And another of me going into the confessional. And what do you know, here I am coming out again, free of sin and beloved by the Lord.”
“I’ve had those photographs blown up out at Warner Brothers and compared to pictures of Jordan in high school. Jordan Elliott is your confessor in Italy. You pass him messages and letters from his mother. I’ve got a tape of one of your so-called confessions.”
I turned to Ledare, and for a long moment, I could not find my voice.
“Did you know anything about this, Ledare?” I asked.
“Leave melodramatics out of it,” Mike said. “I’ll pay you for Jordan’s story and I’ll pay you to tell everything that happened between you and Capers Middleton at the University of South Carolina.”
“One question, Mike,” I asked. “Who’s gonna pay me to kick your ass? I don’t much like being followed. I don’t much like being photographed in secret. And I sure as hell don’t like having my confessions taped.”
“They’re not confessions,” Mike said. “There’s nothing religious about it. I want this story to cover my family, from Russia, through the Holocaust, all of our friendships—and goddamn they were friendships, Jack. It’s gonna end with Capers Middleton’s election as governor of the State of South Carolina.”
“If Capers Middleton is elected governor of South Carolina, then I don’t believe in democracy anymore,” I said, trying to compose myself and calm my voice, which was shaking. “This state has already made me distrust democracy by continuing to elect Strom Thurmond year after year.”
“You were his campus campaign manager when he ran for president of the freshman class at the university.”
“Don’t hold that against him,” Ledare said. “Capers was different then. And I was Capers’ first wife. The mother of his two children.”
“He admits he was a lousy husband to you, Ledare,” Mike said. “Who hasn’t been? I’ve been married four times. Shyla swan-dived off the bridge.”
My control broke and before Mike knew what was happening I lifted him off his chair by his tie and pulled him toward me until our noses almost touched.
“I like to think, Mike, that the reason Shyla killed herself didn’t totally have to do with my being a rotten husband. I was a rotten husband for your information, but I pray to God not rotten enough to send my very nice and very tormented wife to that bridge over the Cooper River. Do you understand, Mike? Or do I have to break your nose as a small reminder?”
“Put Mike down, Jack,” Ledare ordered.
“I apologize, Jack. That was a terrible thing to say. I’m truly sorry. That wasn’t the real me speaking …”
Ledare finished the line by saying, “It’s the asshole I’ve become in Hollywood.”
I gently returned Mike to his chair and adjusted his tie with a quiet tenderness.
“I’m very sorry, Mike,” I said.
“I deserved it. You should have broken my whole face in. I say things all the time that I can’t believe I say,” Mike said and his voice was soft, chastened. “Do you know my mother hates me? She does. No, don’t look at me that way, but I’m telling you, she hates everything I’ve become. I disgust my own mother. She looks at me and says, ‘What’s wrong with just being happy? Where’s the sin
?’ ”
Suddenly the lights of an automobile illuminated the living room, and a car pulled in front of the house.
“The mystery guests have arrived,” Mike said brightly, quickly moving toward the door.
“Do you have a clue?” I asked Ledare.
Ledare said, “Not the slightest.”
Then I saw a surprise and an agony register in Ledare’s eyes that even her well-known composure could not hide. There was heroism in the way she brought herself under control and I turned around to see her ex-husband and my ex-friend Capers Middleton walking in with his second wife, Betsy.
“Hello, Capers,” Ledare said, shaken. “Hello, Betsy.”
Betsy said to Ledare, “We were going to bring the kids, but they both have tests tomorrow and it’ll be late when we get back to Charleston.”
“I’m coming to see them this weekend,” Ledare said stiffly.
“You were right, Mike,” Capers said in appreciation. “I think this is a complete surprise.”
“Man,” Mike said, pleased with himself. “Bingo!”
“Hello, Jack,” Capers said. “It’s been a very long time. I’ve told Betsy all about us.”
“Take a good look at me, Betsy,” I said, “because you’re never going to see me again.”
“He told me you’d be like that,” Betsy said, giving her husband an appreciative glance.
Capers Middleton was one of those Southern boys who had a perfect, polished, glittering look to him with no anomalies of expression or carriage. His handsomeness was an extension of his impeccable breeding. Once, I had loved looking at his face as much as girls did. It was the same face that taught me that good looks were the last things to be trusted.
Capers put out his hand to shake mine, but I refused.
“I’m not over it, Capers. I never will be.”
“It’s all in the past,” Capers said. “I’m sorry about what happened. I wanted to tell you that to your face.”
“You’ve told me,” I said. “Now get out of my sight.”
“He’s here for a purpose,” Mike said. “I invited him and I want you to act nice to our future governor and his wife. Let’s go into the den for a drink. Capers has a proposal that I think you should listen to, Jack.”