Beach Music

by Pat Conroy

  “Good, but not smart. I gained a lot of weight after the birth of Sarah. I made a mistake by not losing it right away. I didn’t know that Capers was repulsed by overweight women. Not that he’s different from other men in this country. None of you men will be satisfied until bulimia becomes part of the wedding vows. So Mr. Capers began a series of affairs that ended with the lovely Betsy.”

  “But the kids?”

  “It took me about a year to lose the weight that lost Capers,” she said to the darkness. “By then, he had spread the word that my screen writing was more important than my marriage. We separated and I moved to New York with the kids. Started going out with most anyone who asked me. Wasn’t too picky. Or too careful. Bad time, Jack. And I’m ashamed of every minute of it. It helped take off the edge of my own hatred of Capers. Being married to him was like being buried under ice. He did to me what he did to you. Private eye. Photographs. One of the men was a black man, a writer I’d met on a book tour. Couple of the guys were married. That’s how he stole my kids from me.”

  “You want me to drive back and beat him up?”

  “Do you always talk about beating people up?”

  “I prefer to look at it as the heroic mode. Also, Ledare, I’m a guy. I know what worries and bothers other guys. Getting beaten up ranks real high on the list. Besides, you know I was just trying to make you feel better.”

  “If you want to make me feel better,” she said, “talk about killing him. Just beating him up isn’t enough.”

  Ledare took my left hand and held it up to what small amount of light the veranda could coax from the river. Twice she twisted my wedding ring in circles around my finger. My hands are small and look as if they belong on a man a half foot shorter than I am. “Why do you still wear your wedding ring?”

  “Because I never got a divorce. And I haven’t remarried. It reminds me of Shyla.”

  “Sweet Jack. Behind all that thunder, you’re just pure honey.”

  “No I’m not, but I would have been if I’d have had a different father.”

  “I just had a small run-in with my mother,” Ledare said. “Every time I hear my mother’s voice I get orphan-envy.”

  “You think it’s weird I still wear my wedding ring?”

  “No. I told you I thought it was sweet.”

  “But a little odd.”

  “A little. Do you take it off when you go out on dates?”

  “I don’t date much.”

  “Why not?”

  “When a woman you love kills herself, you worry about yourself, Ledare. Even though you know that complex forces—forces I don’t even know about and could never understand—contributed to her death, the fact is that I contributed my part. I think about that every time I call a woman to go out for dinner.”

  “You think the woman you take to dinner might commit suicide?”

  I laughed at her joke. “No. You think that if you like the woman and she likes you and there are many dinners and then many kisses and then wedding bells, that then you may be looking at another body in the morgue …”

  “I’m sorry I said that, Jack. Please forgive me.”

  “Every night of my life, I see Shyla leap in my dreams. It injects itself somehow. I could be kayaking in a river in Alaska and she would come out of the woods above me and hurl herself off a cliff. Or I can be walking down a street in Amsterdam, and find myself walking beside a canal, hear a scream, and Shyla will be plummeting from the heights of those great houses that press in on all the canals and I’ll leap in to save her. I’ll open my eyes underwater and there’ll be a thousand of her floating by me, all dead.”

  “You must really look forward to going to bed.”

  “Sleeping’s not my favorite part of the day.”

  There was silence for a while. “How’d you get to keep Leah?” Ledare asked quietly.

  “What happened to your oak tree?” I said, sitting up, and changing the subject. “You had the most beautiful oak tree of all of them.”

  “Capers,” she said. “All during our marriage, he thought that oak blocked the view of the sunset over the river. In the year it all fell apart, he would walk out to that tree with all of his office staff. They’d carry what looked like cups of beer and pretend to admire the sunset.”

  “It’s not making any sense.”

  “They were really carrying a very powerful weed killer in those cups. While admiring the sunset, each person would surreptitiously pour the weed killer into the ground. It took about six months before the poor tree began dying. Everybody in Waterford was furious, but Capers denied everything.”

  “Did you know about it?” I asked.

  “No, of course not,” she said. “A member of his staff told me about it years later. But my father suspected Capers right away.”

  “Funny, I’ve come to a point in my life when I prefer an oak tree to a human being. Hell, I prefer crabgrass to Capers Middleton.”

  “He still thinks you two’ll be friends before it’s all over.”

  “Not after tonight he doesn’t,” I said.

  “Back to Leah,” she said. “Let’s go back to your custody trial.”

  “Shyla’s parents, naturally enough, thought I was responsible for Shyla’s death. After the funeral, I had one of those small hideous depressions. My brothers checked me into the hospital in Columbia and they began treating me for depression. It took a while for the drugs to make me chipper and to want to play horseshoes with the other inmates.”

  “Where was Leah at this time?”

  “She was staying with the Foxes, who, of course, were grieving over their loss of Shyla. Leah was a magical kid even then. The idea came upon them, and I’m sure innocently enough, that Leah could replace Shyla. They sued for custody while I was still in Columbia.”

  “How did you win while you were in a mental hospital?”

  “My brother Dupree works at the hospital. He came to tell me what the Foxes had done. Rage is a major antidote for depression. My agony over Shyla’s death was replaced with my fury over her parents trying to steal our child. Her father testified during the trial that I had beaten Shyla repeatedly—the list of atrocities went on and on. He was lying, but they were desperate to keep Leah, to keep something of Shyla.”

  “No wonder you moved to Italy.”

  “My family rallied around me. Brother Dallas took the case for nothing. The Foxes fell apart on cross-examination. Shyla had written a suicide note. Then my family testified for me as a father. I never suspected my family had this kind of dignity … a greatness of soul despite everything that’s happened to us. I saw a family I didn’t know I had and that’s why they were so hurt when I left for Italy soon after the trial with no plans ever to see them again.”

  “I don’t blame them either.”

  “I did it all wrong,” I admitted. “But I can’t change it now.”

  “Shyla wouldn’t have liked it that you left the South forever.”

  Hearing in her voice a hint of gentle reproval, I looked at her.

  “I needed a rest from the South,” I said finally. “I find it exhausting to think about and overstimulating to live in and maddening to try to analyze.”

  “If Mike doesn’t do this project, I’d like to write about all of us,” said Ledare.

  “Make me a Charlestonian,” I said. “Then your mother wouldn’t have to disinfect the porch every time I come to the front door.”

  “She doesn’t do it every time,” Ledare said. “She just wishes you’d learn to use the back door.”

  “How you getting along with your parents?”

  “Daddy looks at me and thinks, ‘Bad seed.’ Mama gets teary-eyed and thinks, ‘Bad egg.’ They both get nauseous when they think their girl lost a chance to be the governor’s wife.”

  “If that guy becomes governor, birds won’t even fly south over this state for the winter.”

  “Sign on for this movie, Jack,” Ledare said suddenly.

  “Why?” I asked. “It all se
ems so wrong to me. Too many danger signals.”

  “We can get to know each other as grown-ups,” she said. “You’d like me as a grown-up.”

  Ledare reached out and took my hand. “Biggest danger of all,” I said.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The next morning I drove out in sweet sunshine, taking the two-lane road through the marshes and forests and over the tidal creeks that gave way to the Atlantic Ocean ahead. A black man was throwing his shrimp net from a bridge at low tide. It webbed out, spinning like a ballerina’s skirt, a flawless circle of hemp, hitting the water and sinking rapidly to the bottom. I imagined its weights sinking to the silty floor, trapping every mullet, shrimp, or crab passing through that circle’s arc, and wondered where my own cast net was, if I still had the patience to fill a beer cooler with shrimp when they were running strong and fast in the spring.

  Crossing the small bridge over Bazemore Creek, I thought of the map hanging in the study at Dad’s house. It was a Mercator projection of Gaston Sound that included the Waterford River and Waterford itself. It marked the limits of the territorial sea and the contiguous zone and it was on that map that I had learned there could be beauty in the sheer collection of useful information. The town was located at latitude 32° 15’ and the average mean high tide rose 7.5 feet in the Waterford River. Small but valuable numbers covered the channels and rivers in a meticulously arranged graffiti, each number telling the depth of the channel at mean low tide. I had loved studying the map because it was a printed explanation of where I had been placed on earth. It was a love song to location, a psalm of praise to both measurement and extent. I drove from island to island, moving past salt marshes that changed the way a man thought about the color green, and past black beauty parlors and closed-down gas stations. I saw every detail of that map, while my senses blazed with the almost animal smell of the marsh.

  At the Isle of Orion, I stopped at the security gate and gave my name to the guard. She eyed me fiercely, as though I had come to plunder all the silver and china on the island. Begrudgingly, she gave me a temporary pass and directions to the Elliotts’ house.

  “Don’t feed the alligators,” the woman ordered.

  “What’ll I do with the dead dog in the trunk?” I asked as I quickly pulled away from the gate.

  The Elliotts lived in a beautiful two-story house on the ocean-front. Knocking on the door, I waited only a few moments before Celestine Elliott opened the door and threw herself into my arms.

  “You’re still big,” she said.

  “You’re still pretty,” I said.

  “I am not. I’ll be sixty-eight years old next month,” Celestine said, but she was wrong. Her face contained a natural prettiness that time could work on but never completely eradicate.

  Celestine Elliott had always been called the perfect military wife, the handmaiden of her husband’s extraordinary rise through the ranks of the Marine Corps. She was a woman who dazzled without effort and who made her husband look far superior than he actually was simply because he had attracted such an uncommon woman to his side. She possessed the gift of total attention, especially when speaking to men who could advance her husband’s career.

  Many people, including Celestine, thought that General Rembert Elliott would have made Commandant of the Marine Corps if he’d never had any children. His only child, Jordan, had done more damage to his career than the Japanese bullet that had almost killed him at the Battle of Tarawa.

  Celestine led me into the living room and poured us two cups of coffee as I looked out toward the Atlantic at a ship making its way north toward Charleston.

  We sat and exchanged pleasantries before I handed her an elegant Fendi bag containing two letters and several gifts from her son.

  “There’s trouble, Celestine,” I said quietly.

  A deep voice echoed before she could utter a word. “More trouble than you’ve ever known, my dear.”

  Rembert Elliott, every inch the Marine general, stared at his wife with a blue-eyed look that was as pure and uncomplicated as sea air. He stood in the doorway that led to the back door of the house. All color drained from Celestine’s face and I calmly reached over and took the two letters she was holding.

  “Hand me those letters, Jack,” the general ordered.

  “They’re mine. I wrote them,” I said, standing.

  “You’re a liar. You and my wife are both liars,” the man said, his rage so visible that it almost made his face indecent. “You’re a traitor, Celestine. My own wife, a traitor.”

  “What happened to your golf game on Hilton Head, General?” I asked. I had not expected him to be at home.

  “It was a ruse to catch you two in the act,” the general said.

  “I call it a lie,” I said. “Welcome to our little club.”

  “Capers Middleton gave me these photographs taken in Rome,” the general said. He started to hand them to his wife, then thought better of it and threw them violently to the floor. Celestine said nothing as she picked up the photographs. Tidiness was second nature to her even during the most savage of her husband’s assaults. She paused to look at one of the photographs of her pale, ascetic son.

  Then Rembert Elliott did something that surprised both his wife and myself. He stepped back as Celestine retrieved the scattered photos, unsure of his next move, transfixed by doubt. The assault of fortified beaches was his specialty but the beachhead he now faced seemed much too dangerous for storming. It required strategies that demanded the subtleties of veils, ruses, and secret envelopment. The general had attended no war college that made his encounter with his own small family more easeful and less subject to discord. Even his wife, as she now stared at him defiantly, looked like an enemy scout who had slipped into his house beneath concertina wire to booby-trap his kitchen.

  When this man of action found himself unable to act, I took advantage of his uncharacteristic fixity. Leaving him posed in a standstill, I walked to a bathroom on the first floor and tore Jordan’s letters into fragments and flushed them down the toilet. When I returned, both Celestine and the general were sitting in chairs measuring their reborn distrust of each other.

  “You made me sit through a memorial service for a son who’d disgraced me when you knew he was alive?” the general asked.

  “I thought he was dead,” she answered.

  “Why didn’t you tell me when you found out?”

  I answered, “Because you hated him, General. You always hated him and Jordan knew it, Celestine knew it, I knew it, and you knew it. That’s why she didn’t tell you.”

  “I had a right to know,” the general said. “It was your duty to tell me.”

  “I’m not a Marine, darling. A fact you have some difficulty remembering.”

  “Your duty as a wife,” the general corrected himself.

  “Let’s talk about your duty as a father,” she fired back angrily. “Let’s talk about how you treated your son from the day he was born. How I sat by and watched you bully and torment that wonderful, sweet boy of ours.”

  “He was effeminate when he was a child,” the general said. “You know I can tolerate anything but that.”

  “He wasn’t effeminate,” she shot back. “He was nice and you can’t tell the difference.”

  “He’d have grown up as one of them if I left his raising to you,” her husband said, his voice accusatory and contemptuous.

  “One of them?” I asked.

  “A homosexual,” Celestine explained.

  “Ah! The horror of horrors,” I said. “The fate worse than death.”

  “Exactly,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t’ve put so much pressure on Jordan,” the general said, “if you’d been able to bear other children.”

  “Of course, how convenient it’s all my fault.”

  “A lone wolf makes the worst kind of soldier,” General Elliott said. “They’re a danger to any unit. They can’t tailor their egos for the good of the group.”

  “Sort of like you, d
ear,” Celestine said. “When it comes to family.”

  “You’ve never understood the military.”

  She laughed and said, “I’ve understood it all too well.”

  “For fourteen years, I’ve thought my son dead,” the general said, turning to me. “How do you expect me to feel?”

  “Glad,” I suggested.

  “I’ve already notified the proper authorities,” the general said.

  “What did you tell them?” Celestine said.

  “The name of the church where these photographs were taken,” he said. “And the possibility that he committed a crime. You’ve got a lot of questions to answer, Jack.”

  “And few answers to give, General,” I said.

  “You destroyed those letters, I presume,” he said.

  “Just notes I wrote to Ledare Ansley,” I said.

  “Tell her I’d love to see her,” Celestine said. “I heard she was in town.”

  “Jack,” the general said, “I could have you arrested for hiding a fugitive.”

  “You certainly could,” I answered. “Except no one’s been accused of a crime. And the criminal you suspect seems to be dead.”

  “Are you denying that my son is in those pictures?” the general said.

  “In Italy, I’m limited to those confessors who speak English,” I said.

  “It’s Jordan, isn’t it, Jack?” the general asked, his voice straining, incautious.

  “I can’t tell you that,” I said.

  “You mean, you won’t,” he said. “Celestine?”

  “Darling, I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.

  “All those trips to Italy,” the general said. “I thought it was your passion for art.”

  “The art’s always one of the highlights of the trip,” Celestine said.

  “I hate art museums,” General Elliott said to me. “That’s where she meets with Jordan. I see it clearly now.”

  I studied the general’s face and for a moment felt a chord of sympathy for this emotionally limited and tightly wound man. His mouth was as thin as the blade of a knife. He was short but powerfully built, in his late sixties, and his eyes burned with a simmering blue that could terrify men and charm women. All his life, people had been afraid of Rembert Elliott and this knowledge had given him great pleasure. He was the kind of man America needed during wartime but did not know where to put when the armistice was signed.