Beach Music

by Pat Conroy

  Later, we spent our first night beneath a South Carolina sky at the house on the Isle of Orion that Lucy had rented for us. Ledare had gotten the keys earlier and had done a preliminary inspection of the premises and found the house far more than adequate. It was built on a high bank overlooking a saltwater lagoon.

  As I walked through the house for the first time, I was pleased to see that the owners, a Mr. and Mrs. Bonner, had selected their furniture and paintings with great care. They were people of good taste, people I would like to know, I thought, as I studied a wall of family photographs where the Bonners strutted their children’s blond good health and their straight toothy smiles that spoke so eloquently of the orthodontist’s art. The kitchen was adequate and Lucy had already stocked it with food. In the master bedroom, I found a writing table and a four-poster bed that I would have bet was a Bonner family heirloom.

  Upstairs, I heard Leah squeal with pleasure as she discovered a bedroom to her liking. I unpacked her suitcases as Leah took a shower. Taking care not to wrinkle the clothes that Maria had so sadly and lovingly folded, I filled up an antique dresser and laughed out loud when I discovered the three boxes of pasta and the whole salami Maria had packed in case the Americans failed to feed Leah in the proper manner. I made a mental note to call Maria in the morning to let her know we had landed safely and that Leah had eaten pasta that had met with her approval. Leah walked out of her newly claimed room in her pajamas, sleepy-eyed and smelling of powder. She was asleep before I got past the first sentences of a story.

  I found Ledare downstairs lighting a fire she had already laid in the fireplace. She had fixed me a drink and handed it to me as I watched the flame consuming the dry oak.

  “To your homecoming,” Ledare said.

  “This could turn out to be hell but it’s decorated nicely,” I said, looking around.

  “Why don’t you use a radical approach and try to enjoy your time here?” Ledare suggested.

  “Please,” I said. “You must try to humor my existential anguish.”

  “You’ll have plenty of time for that,” Ledare said. “Mike called, and he’d like us to write an outline of the mini-series in a month. He told me to tell you no more excuses and he wants a note from your doctor saying you actually got shot in the head by a terrorist.”

  “I still feel uneasy about the project,” I said to Ledare. “How can we write for Mike without hopping into bed with Capers.”

  Ledare said, “The subject’s fascinating and I think we can learn things about ourselves we don’t know. We can recapture some of the magic of the good, lost times.”

  “It’s dangerous to write about what you don’t know,” I said.

  Ledare got up to go and said, “It’s dangerous not to.”

  I woke much too early the next day, and when Lucy came by the house she found us watching a televangelist warning his audience that Armageddon was almost here due to the licentiousness and evil of mankind. Lucy cooked a large breakfast for Leah and lied to her when the child asked her the meaning of the word “licentiousness.” I clearly corrected my mother’s error. After breakfast, Lucy made sure that Leah was dressed warmly enough, then took us both for a first long walk on the Isle of Orion’s four-mile beach. The tide was out and the water flat as we walked on the beach gathering shells and examining the barnacle-covered driftwood that had washed up during the previous night’s tides. The day was windless and even the seagulls had to stroke their great wings to keep aloft. The ocean mirrored the sky and few swells or ridges disturbed the brown pelican floating twenty yards away from us.

  As we walked, Lucy showed Leah all the safe spots for swimming and where the water grew treacherous and riptides moved in fierce turbulence. She explained to Leah that if she were ever caught in the undertow’s grip that Leah must allow herself to submit to the undertow rather than fight against it.

  “Allow the undertow to take you out to deeper water, darling,” Lucy said. “The undertow’s weak out there, and it will let you go. Then you can just swim slowly back toward shore and catch a wave all the way in.”

  Together, woman and girl studied the detritus tossed in random piles near tide-pools. Lifting the broken shell of an Atlantic blue crab, Lucy pointed out the deep blue coloring along the torn claw, “the most beautiful blue in all of nature.”

  Leah was so filled with delight and curiosity that the walk continued for hours as Lucy shared all the knowledge of the littoral she carried with her. They collected what shells they could find but only the coquina clams were plentiful on the beach. Lucy promised a cornucopia of them when the spring tides began and the ocean really began to warm up.

  “Shells. We’ll gather the most beautiful shells the Atlantic has to offer. The rarest too. But we’ve got to be vigilant. We’ve got to work hard. We’ve got to commit ourselves to coming out here after every high tide.”

  “We can do it, Grandma,” Leah said. “Daddy told me you could teach me everything there was to know about the sea.”

  “He knows some things himself,” Lucy said modestly, but pleased. “Of course, I’m sure he’s forgotten most of it since he took it on himself to become a European. Come over here, child. Let me show you how erosion is eating up this beach.”

  On the seashore, Lucy had found the text of all creation imprinted daily on the sands of the Isle of Orion. By walking the beach each morning, Lucy had strengthened her belief in God and come to understand that she was no more important to the planet than the smallest plankton that floated in the invisible broth that served the softest orders of the food chain. It had helped Lucy when she could think of her own bloodstream as an inland sea not much different from the one that she and Leah walked beside. Her leukemia was similar to the virulence of red tides that attacked Southern beaches during the summer, causing fish kills that made the seabirds crazy with gluttony. A beach was a fine place to come to grips with all the cycles of the universe. It eased her fear of dying.

  She watched Leah’s pretty run down the beach toward the carcass of a small shark. The crabs and gulls had already done their small-scale butchery. The shark’s eyes had been picked out and a larger predator had removed part of the dorsal fin. As her granddaughter ran, Lucy told me that she would teach this child everything and tie her to the South so completely that I could never take her back to Italy. I gave her a look, then let it go.

  After we came in from the beach, I drove Leah the eighteen miles on Seaside Road in the oversized Chrysler Le Baron that Lucy had encouraged my landlord to leave for me.

  We touched five sea islands before we crossed the J. Eugene Norris Bridge into Waterford proper. Even when I was recuperating in Rome I had imagined making this tour with Leah and had practiced the itinerary in my mind, choosing with care which streets I would drive her down and at which houses I would stop to reveal their histories.

  I took a right after the bridge and drove slowly past the mansions of the planter class who had built their houses facing east toward the sun and Africa. Spanish moss hung from the water oaks in such smoky profusion that the houses looked like chapels seen through veils. Labrador retrievers slept on marble steps. Brick walls, inked with pearly lichen, hid carefully tended gardens from the common view. It was the neighborhood where both Shyla and I had grown up and its streets seemed to disappear into a field of lost time and drift like childhood itself.

  We drove down Porpoise Avenue past the stores of the main shopping street with their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century facades crowding both sides of the street. Once I could close my eyes and name all the shops and their owners on both sides of the street, but modern times had brought an influx of strangers to town who had opened up health-food stores, office-supply shops, and banks with unfamiliar names that had merged with giant financial institutions from Charlotte. I also noticed that the names of the oldest, most honored law firms had changed their aristocratic shingles to reflect the death of managing partners and the rise of feisty young attorneys who wanted their own names engraved on
the signage of Porpoise Avenue. When we passed the Lafayette House I pointed out the shingle of my father and brother: McCall and McCall, Attorneys-at-Law. Luther’s Pharmacy had closed, the Huddle twins had given up their barbershop, and the Breeze Theater was now a fashionable men’s shop. Lipsitz’s shoe store was where it always was and its mere survival seemed a necessary corrective amid the change.

  When we came to Rusoff’s Department Store I told Leah that was where we would find Max, the Great Jew. Then we drove to a poorer section of town and I showed her a small brick two-story building that had been the store that the Great Jew had opened when he first moved to Waterford. We drove past Waterford High School and the football field where I had played fullback and both Shyla and Ledare had been cheerleaders in that long-ago world where innocence was at least an illusion that young Southerners could cling to until the world brought them up short. Every street contained vivid transparencies of my past, and Shyla’s face began to appear to me in every billboard and stop sign. And I understood that I had come back to go face-to-face with Shyla for the first time since she died.

  As we drove down De Marlette Road, named for the French explorer who had first landed at Waterford in 1562, I pointed out the Waterford River, caught in bright glimpses between the houses built along the high bluff. I once had been able to name every family and the children who had lived in each house we passed, but death and mobility had scrambled the deck and made the certainty of my memories suspect. Finally we drove up to the entrance of the small but well-cared-for Jewish cemetery, a half mile from the town’s center.

  It was surrounded by a vine-covered brick wall and oak and cottonwood trees provided shade and comfort as I swung open the iron gate decorated with the Star of David. I led Leah by the hand, walking through long rows of tombstones decorated with Hebrew letters that were a roll call of all the Jewish names that had followed Max Rusoff to Waterford.

  I stopped before one of the graves, and when I read Shyla’s name it took my breath away. I had not returned to this graveyard since we buried Shyla, and seeing “Shyla Fox McCall” made me cover my eyes with my left hand. The word McCall looked out of place in this acre of Scheins and Steinbergs and Keyserlings.

  “Oh, Daddy,” Leah said. “It’s Mama, isn’t it?”

  I had expected to comfort my daughter but I fell speechless. The shock of Shyla’s death had quickly turned to its details, then to a trial to decide the fate of our child. That pain had rendered me tearless, insensate. Though I felt thunderstruck, I still could not cry, but only stare. I stroked Leah’s hair as she wept.

  Finally, I said, “This is the wrong cemetery.”

  Leah answered me, “I knew you’d make a joke.”

  “I’m that predictable?” I asked.

  “Yes. You always make jokes when you’re sad,” she said. “Tell me a story about Mama,” Leah said finally, kneeling down to pull weeds out of the pale winter grass that covered the grave.

  “What’s your favorite?” I asked.

  “Tell me one you haven’t told me before,” Leah said. “I can never really see Mama, she never seems real.”

  “Have I ever told you a story about how your mother used to drive me crazy? How she could make me angrier than hell?”

  “No,” Leah said.

  So I told Leah the story of the black woman in Charleston who Shyla had found in an alley near Henry’s Furniture Store. Shyla had the heart of a socialist and the soul of a missionary and she spent a lifetime unreconciled to human or animal suffering of any kind. Shortly after we were married Shyla was shopping when she came upon an unconscious black woman covered with sores lying in an alley.

  Shyla walked into Henry Popowski’s store and asked that Henry call her a cab, which he gladly did. Then she had to cajole a most reluctant cabdriver into helping her lift the prone body of the anonymous black woman into the backseat of his cab. At the end of the cab ride she again coaxed the driver into helping her carry the woman into the one-bedroom carriage house we had rented behind a Church Street mansion.

  When I arrived home from my job as restaurant and movie critic for the News and Courier, we had one of the bitterest arguments of our marriage. Shyla contended that no human being would leave a poor helpless black woman passed out in an alley surrounded by a racist white society. I argued that I would be more than happy to pass up such an opportunity. If that were the case, Shyla screamed, she had certainly married the wrong man and she would soon be looking for a husband who was far more humane and compassionate than I was. But I thought compassion had nothing to do with the fact that a black drug addict covered with sores and smelling like a billy goat was lying in the only bed in a one-bedroom apartment. I also contended that we’d be evicted as soon as our racist landlords found out that they had added a black hooker to their roster of tenants. Shyla shouted that she would not conduct her life to conform to the wishes of racists nor would she have married me had she known I was a secret Nazi. Nazi, I had yelled. I complain when you bring an unconscious heroin addict and put her into my goddamn bed and suddenly I’m in charge of all the crematoriums at Bergen-Belsen. Every time I argue with you, I start out on King Street in Charleston and end up at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin leading my Nazi youth boys in a spirited rendition of the “Horst Wessel Song.” If the shoe fits, Shyla fired back, wear it, and neither one of us had noticed that our guest had awakened until we heard her say, “Where the fuck I be?”

  “You be in my fucking house,” I said to her.

  “And you’re welcome to stay for as long as it takes to get back on your feet,” Shyla said sweetly.

  “I’ll be damned if that’s so.”

  “My husband is a racist bastard,” Shyla explained. “Don’t pay attention to him.”

  The black woman, disoriented, said, “You people kidnap my ass?”

  “Yeh,” I said, irritated. “We left a ransom note in your grandma’s outhouse.”

  “Racist to the core,” Shyla shouted, beating her fists against my chest. “Racist scum. I go to bed each night with the chief Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan.”

  “Good,” I said. “That’s a step up. From Auschwitz to Selma in a single goddamn leap.”

  “You’re the fucking Klan, man?” the black woman asked.

  “No, ma’am,” I explained, trying to control myself. “I’m not in the Klan. I’m just a poor, godforsaken white man, underpaid and underappreciated, who’d like you to remove your pus-covered body from my bed.”

  “Racist pig,” Shyla screamed. “You’re what gives white Southern males, masters of oppression, a bad name.”

  “Got that right, honey,” the black woman said, nodding her head.

  “Our guest agrees,” Shyla said triumphantly.

  “She’s not our guest,” I said.

  “If I ain’t your guest, what the fuck am I doing here?” the black woman said.

  “Sisterly togetherness,” Shyla said. “What a beautiful thing.”

  “Can I take a bath?” the black woman asked.

  “Of course,” Shyla said at the same time I said, “Certainly not.”

  “Did you forget we were invited for drinks by my publisher?” I asked.

  “I certainly did not,” Shyla said sweetly. “And I’m ready to accompany you to that Neanderthal’s house.”

  “Do you mind if we don’t take your new friend, Harriet Tubman?” I asked faking civility.

  “I have to go to a party with my soon-to-be-former husband,” Shyla said. “You take a bath and pretty yourself up. Here’s ten dollars for a cab. Leave your name and address and I’ll take you to lunch next week.”

  “I personally am not leaving this house until this woman is out of it,” I said.

  “Yes, you are,” Shyla announced, “or I file for divorce tomorrow. The first divorce in South Carolina history caused by white racism.”

  Shyla rushed out of the carriage house and I, eyeing the black woman suspiciously, followed her out the door.

  When we returned
from Mr. Manigault’s party, the black woman had bathed, fixed herself a meal, then stolen all of Shyla’s clothes, shoes, and makeup. She packed it all up in the leather luggage Shyla had bought me for my birthday. On her way out, she lifted the sterling silver from the secretary near the doorway. Then she called a cab and cheerfully reentered the underworld of black Charleston.

  I chuckled at the memory as I stood over Shyla’s grave with Leah.

  “We laughed at that story more than anything that ever happened,” I said. “We’d go to some new, strange town in Europe and your mother would whisper, ‘Where the fuck I be?’ ”

  “Did the police ever catch the woman?” Leah asked.

  “Your mama would not let me call the police,” I said. “She claimed that the woman needed all that stuff more than we did. She was glad the woman took it. I wanted the woman to be enrolled in leather-tooling classes at the state pen.”

  “Mama didn’t care that the woman stole her clothes?” Leah asked.

  “I used to see the woman sometimes walking around in Shyla’s clothes,” I said. “I’d be off covering a story with a photographer and I’d see her working a stretch of territory near the Cooper River bridge and I’d have the photographer take a picture. Shyla used to love it that I kept those photographs in an album.”