by Pat Conroy
Like other men who’ve spent much of their lives training to kill enemy soldiers, Rembert Elliott had made a perfectly appalling husband and father. Throughout his marriage, he had treated his wife like an adjutant who’d received a bad fitness report. Jordan had been raised by his mother’s kisses and his father’s fists.
The general rose heavily and went over to study the photographs again.
“That priest. That’s my son, isn’t it?” he said to me.
“How the hell would I know?” I said. “It’s my confessor. You ought to get to church more, General. You’ll notice this little screen separating the priest from the poor sinner. It’s there for a reason. So you can’t see each other clearly enough to make an identification.”
“You’re claiming this isn’t my son?” the general said.
“It’s my confessor,” I said again. “No court of law can make my confessor testify against me or vice versa.”
“I think this is my son.”
“Great. Congratulations. Together at last. Don’t you love happy endings?”
Celestine walked over and stood in front of her husband, looking directly into his eyes.
“It is Jordan, Rembert,” she said. “Every time we’ve been to Rome, I’ve gone to see him. I tell you I’m shopping.”
“Liar. Liar,” the general whispered.
“No, darling,” she said softly. “Mother. Mother.”
The general turned to me. “So you’ve been the courier.”
“That’s one way of putting it,” I answered.
“I was raising him to be a Marine officer,” the general said.
“Looked like the Gulag Archipelago to me,” I said.
“Jordan came of age in the sixties,” he said. “That’s what destroyed him. What would any of you know about fidelity or patriotism or a sense of values or ethics?”
I shot back, “Ask us what we know about child abuse.”
“You were a generation of liars and cowards. You shirked your duty to your country when America needed you.”
“I just had this same stupid conversation with Capers Middleton,” I said. “Let me sum up: bad war, started by bad politicians, fought by bad generals, and fifty thousand guys were flushed down the toilet for no reason whatsoever.”
“Freedom’s as good as any reason to die.”
“Vietnam’s or America’s?” I asked.
“Both,” he said.
Then I went over and embraced Celestine. “He moved to another monastery in another part of Rome. He’s safe,” I told her. “I’m sorry I had to destroy his letters.” And I walked out of the house.
As I was getting into my mother’s car, General Elliott appeared at the door and shouted down to me, “McCall.”
“Yes, General.”
“I want to see my son,” he said.
“I’ll tell him, General. He’s never had a father before. He might like it.”
“Will you help arrange it?” General Elliott asked.
“No, I won’t.”
“May I ask why?”
“I don’t trust you, General,” I answered.
“What do you suggest I do?” he asked.
“Wait,” I answered.
“You don’t think it’s possible for a man to change, do you?” he asked.
I looked at the straight-backed, unspontaneous man and said, “No, I don’t.”
“That’s smart,” the general said. “I don’t either.”
Celestine hurried out onto the porch. “Jack, go straight to the hospital. Tee just called. Your mother’s out of her coma.”
All my brothers except John Hardin were waiting for me outside the main entrance of the hospital when I arrived. I jumped out of the car and found myself surrounded by my brothers, who tossed me back and forth embracing me.
“Mama,” Tee screamed aloud, “she did it.”
“Is she tough or what?” Dupree said.
“It’ll take more than cancer to take that old girl out,” said Dallas.
“I couldn’t help but think she was pretending to be dying,” Tee said, “just to make me feel guilty.”
Dupree hit Tee playfully on the shoulder. “Mom’s got more important things to do than make you feel guilty.”
“Yeah,” Tee challenged. “Like what?”
“Yeah. Like what?” Dallas agreed.
“Only Dr. Pitts has seen her. He thought it would be a great idea if you went in to see her first,” Dupree said.
“Mama,” I said. “Mama.”
We whooped and hollered again and Tee reached over and held my hand briefly just as he used to do when he was a very small child and I was the largest, gentlest brother in the world to him.
The nurses had moved Lucy from intensive care and the family had gathered in a different, happier waiting room.
A spirit of euphoria seized us all and even the saturnine Father Jude looked relieved by the turn of events. We gathered around Dr. Pitts and listened to him repeat what the doctor had told him. As he told us of the fever’s lowering, the stabilizing blood pressure, and the slow return to consciousness, my brothers and I felt like inmates listening to a proclamation of amnesty. Since we had been jittery and downcast for so long, the elation felt odd, the sense of ebullience, foreign.
“Why don’t you go in to see your mother, Jack?” Dr. Pitts said.
“Tell her a few jokes,” Tee said. “Belly laughs are what she needs now.”
“I hardly think so,” Dr. Pitts said.
“Thinking’s never been Tee’s long suit,” Dallas said.
They were still talking among themselves when I left them and walked down to my mother’s private room.
Her eyes were closed, but her face was still remarkably pretty for a woman fifty-eight years old. I had not spoken to her in five years and that knowledge tore at me as I approached the bed. I had gone to Rome to save my life and had never once considered the thoughtless cruelty of just walking out of the lives of so many people. Lucy opened her eyes and her blue-eyed gaze took me in. Without question, Lucy was the most maddening, enthralling, contrary, and dangerous woman I have ever met. She claimed to know everything there was to know about men and I believed her. Her powers of description were vivid and refined. Her imagination was extraordinary and could not be reined in. She was a liar of prodigious gifts and saw no particular virtue in telling the truth anyway. She could walk into a roomful of men and stir them up faster than if someone had thrown a rattlesnake among them. She was also the sexiest woman I had ever seen in my life. One thing my brothers and I had learned the hard way was that it wasn’t easy being the son of the sexiest, most flirtatious, most legendary woman in your town. My mother never saw a marriage she didn’t think she couldn’t break up. She boasted that she had met few women in her league.
I waited for her first words.
“Get me some makeup,” Lucy said.
“Hi, Jack,” I said. “It’s wonderful to see you, son. Gosh it’s been a long time.”
“I must look like a crone,” she said. “Do I, do I look like a crone?”
“You look beautiful.”
“I hate it when you’re insincere.”
“You look like a crone,” I said.
“That’s why I want the makeup,” Lucy said.
“You must be tired,” I said, trying to say something neutral.
“Tired?” she said. “You’re not serious. I’ve been in a coma. I’ve never been so rested in my life.”
“Then you’re feeling good?” I tried again.
“Good?” she said. “I’ve never felt worse. They’re pumping me full of chemotherapy.”
“I’ve got it now, I think. You feel rotten, but very well rested,” I said.
“Did you bring Leah with you?” she asked.
“No, but she sends her love.”
“That’s not enough. I want to hold that girl and tell her some things,” Lucy said. “You, too. I have to explain my life to you.”
“You don’t ha
ve to tell me anything,” I said. “You’ve already managed to ruin my life. There’s nothing to add.”
“A little humor, right?” she asked.
“Right.”
“Just checking. Coming out of a coma’s odd. It’s like digging yourself out of your own grave. Am I still cute?”
“A doll. I already told you.”
“Get Dupree’s wife over here. Tell Jean I need makeup and plenty of it. She knows my brands.”
“A coma doesn’t seem to do much for vanity,” I said, teasing her.
“But it’s the ticket for weight loss,” she said. “I bet I’ve dropped five pounds since I’ve been here.”
“You had us worried.”
“The leukemia’s gonna kill me, Jack,” she said. “It’s incurable for a woman my age. Sooner or later it’s going to come back and kill me. The doctor thinks I have just over a year.”
“It terrifies me to hear you say that.”
“I had to tell someone. I’ll lie to the others,” she said, and I could see her weakening. “I want to visit you and Leah in Rome.”
“We’d love to have you,” I said.
“I need to see you over there. I don’t know what it’s like. I need to have you love me again. I need it more than anything in the world.”
I was not looking at my mother, but her words spoke deeply to me. She was quiet and when I looked up she was asleep. Lucy McCall Pitts going to Rome, I thought, and then thought that if Italy could survive the Huns, it could surely survive a simple visit by my fire-eating, cunning mother. She was sleeping deeply now and I, her oldest son, thought she looked eternal, unkillable, and the center of this earth. Dallas came in and motioned that it was time for me to go.
“What did she say?” Dallas asked me as we walked down the corridor.
“Not much. She told me that she loves me the best and would’ve had her tubes tied if she’d known the other sons would turn out to be such bitter disappointments.”
“Uh, that again,” he said. “Anything else?”
“She called for makeup.”
“She’s back,” Dallas said excitedly. “She’s really back.”
Tee and Dupree met us in the hallway. Tee whispered so he could not be heard by the others in the waiting room.
“Good news,” Tee said. “More family problems.”
Dallas groaned but Tee continued, “Grandpa just called. Ginny Penn’s missing from the nursing home.”
“Not again,” Dallas said.
“No problem,” Dupree said, always the pragmatist. “She’s in a wheelchair. It’s not like we’ve got to alert the highway patrol.”
“Her third breakout,” Tee said. “I’m getting the idea she’s not adjusting well.”
“Grandpa can’t lift her,” Dallas said. “It’s a temporary arrangement. Until her hip heals.”
“She thinks we’ve abandoned her,” Dupree said.
We left the hospital and piled into our mother’s car, and as I drove quickly through town, Dallas thought aloud, “Only three roads she could’ve taken and she couldn’t have gotten very far on any of them. She has not taken the rest home experience with much aplomb.”
“I talked to her on the phone,” I said. “She’s hated it.” Ten minutes later I took a left down the long paved road that led to the river and the home. Immediately, we could see our grandmother, working the two wheels of her wheelchair, grimly resolute. I passed by her, turned the car around in a driveway, then pulled up beside her.
Ginny Penn did not pay any attention to the car, but kept stroking those two wheels in time, like an oarsman navigating up a difficult stretch of river. Though she was sweating and red-faced, she was exhilarated by her escape and had put far more distance between herself and the nursing home than seemed possible. She looked to the side, saw us moving slowly beside her, and burst into tears. She looked at us again, then she pressed herself harder, her shoulders straining, until finally she stopped and began sobbing into her hands, reddened with oncoming blisters.
“You want a ride, Ginny Penn?” Dallas asked softly.
“Get away from me,” she said, through tears.
“Your doctor called,” Dallas said. “He’s worried about you.”
“I’ve fired that old coot. I need to be rescued, boys. Someone has to help me or I’m going to die in there. No one listens to you when you get old. No one listens and no one cares.”
“We’ll try to help you any way we can,” I said from the driver’s side.
“Then walk right back to that hospital and say, ‘We’re rescuing our grandmother from this hell hole.’ Gather up my belongings. And if you really want to help old people in this town, you should shoot the cook. She can’t even serve a raw carrot without mucking it up.”
Dallas looked at me and shrugged. “We were looking for a more diplomatic approach.”
“You boys just leave me alone,” Ginny Penn wailed. “I’m on my way to a friend’s home. I’m going to go calling.”
“What friend?” Dallas asked.
“I haven’t decided. I’ve got friends up and down the county and all of them would consider it an honor to entertain a lady like me. I’m not trash like your grandfather. My people were somebody.”
“Come on, Grandma,” I said. “Get in the car with us and we’ll entertain you.”
“You,” she said and her gaze at us was imperious and overbearing. “You were raised to be common. Your poor mother’s nothing but dirt and your father’s certainly nothing to write home about.”
“You raised Dad,” Dallas pointed out. “You’ve got to take some of the old credit there.”
“I take full responsibility,” our grandmother declared. “I married your grandfather with my eyes wide open and I knew what I was getting into. I married for all the wrong reasons.”
“Give us one,” I asked.
“He was an eyeful,” Ginny Penn said at last. “Oh, boy. I used to sweat just looking at him.”
“Enough of this trashy talk, Ginny Penn,” Dupree said, opening the door and walking toward his grandmother. Tee and I lifted her gently out of the wheelchair and placed her in the backseat of the car. It was like lifting a cageful of small birds and she seemed more husk than fruit as we placed her lying down on her back. She was now too weak to sit up.
“We’ll make a deal with you, Ginny Penn,” I said. “We’ll try to get you out of the home, but you’ve got to go back now. We’ve got to do it right.”
But Ginny Penn was already asleep when I spoke these words. We drove her back and turned her over to her nurses, who woke her and chastised her for her behavior.
“Traitors,” she hissed as a nurse pushed her and the wheelchair back to her room, her cell, her abandonment.
As I drove Dallas back to his law offices, all of us were silent and thoughtful.
“It must be terrible to get old,” Dallas finally said. “I wonder if Ginny Penn wakes up each day and thinks it’s her last day on earth.”
“I think she wakes up and hopes it’s her last day,” I said.
“We didn’t tell her Mom was out of her coma,” Tee said.
“Why make her feel any worse than she does now?” Dupree said and we all laughed.
“She’s tried her whole life to make the world think she was an aristocrat.”
Dallas said, “I think we should simply genuflect whenever we approach her and it’d cut down on the bullshit.”
“She’s a blue blood and we’re something a dog pulled off the road,” Tee said.
“Do you remember her telling us about the plantation where she grew up?” Dupree asked. “We always thought she was lying because she never took us there for a visit.”
“Burnside,” I said. “The famous Burnside Plantation.”
“She wasn’t lying,” Dupree said. “It really existed and that’s where she was raised.”
“Then where is it?”
“Under water,” Dallas said.
“Under water?” I echoed.
&
nbsp; “It was located outside of Charleston, near Pinopolis. When they dammed the river to make Lake Moultrie, Burnside was covered by the rising waters caused by the building of the dam. Ginny Penn was a Sinkler on her mother’s side and Burnside was the Sinkler plantation.”
“Now I get it,” I said. “Ginny Penn was so distressed after losing her ancestral home, she went out and married a Puerto Rican, our grandfather.”
“She could never tell how the story ended,” Dupree said. “She evidently saw the flooding of her home as a terrible sign from God. An omen of some kind.”
“How’d you find this out?” Tee asked.
“My wife, Jean, commutes to Charleston twice a week. She’s working on her master’s degree in history. She was fooling around over at the Charleston Library on King Street and came upon a memoir of the Sinkler family. Ginny Penn’s mentioned twice. The house was as pretty as Ginny Penn’s always claimed.”
“It’s a relief to know royal blood does flow through these tired veins,” I said.
“I like being a redneck,” Tee said. “It suits me.”
Dallas looked at his younger brother and said, “It sure does.”
“You don’t have to agree that fast,” Tee cautioned.
“It’s Tee’s friends you got to worry about,” Dupree said to me.
“I’ll second that,” Dallas added.
“Hey, I love my friends. Great guys, great gals,” Tee said.
“A shrimper’d look like a Rockefeller walking into Tee’s front door,” Dallas said.
“He’s drawn to the lower class,” Dupree said. “I’ve always wanted him to attract a higher type of scum.”
“Better brothers are all I need,” Tee said. “Ha. Good line. Huh? You guys used to maul me when I was a kid. But Lil’ Tee’s coming into his own. No longer can his brothers take him lightly.”
When we got home we watched the sunset from the upper veranda, where we had once played together as boys. I could remember sitting in this same wicker chair more than twenty years before feeding Tee a bottle while my mother, eight months’ pregnant with John Hardin, got dinner ready, my father working late at the office, and Dupree on the front lawn teaching Dallas how to throw a football. Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all. Yet we sat together where the light was best and the last seen light best of all. It was here we gathered to say farewell to the sunburned, dark-complexioned days which finger-painted the river in the tenderness of its insomniac retreat.