Beach Music

by Pat Conroy

  “Did she get new clothes?”

  “She drove straight to Waterford, went to the Great Jew, told him what happened, and came back to Charleston with a whole new wardrobe. She could always depend on Max.”

  “Were you mad at Mama?” Leah asked.

  “At first, I was furious. Naturally. But everything that happened was in perfect character for Shyla. I could’ve married a hundred South Carolina girls who’d’ve walked over that woman in the alley. But I married the only South Carolina woman who’d’ve brought her home.”

  Leah stared at her mother’s name for a long time before saying, “Mama was a nice person, wasn’t she, Daddy?”

  “A sweetheart,” I said.

  “It’s so sad, Daddy,” Leah said in a whisper. “It’s the saddest thing in the world. She doesn’t know anything about me. She doesn’t know what I’m like or how I could’ve loved her. Do you think she’s in heaven?”

  I knelt down beside my daughter and the earth was hard and cold against my knee. I kissed her cheek and brushed the hair back from her face.

  “I know what I’m supposed to say to make you feel better,” I said. “But I’ve told you. Religion confuses me. It always has. I don’t know if Jews even believe in heaven. Ask your rabbi. Ask Suor Rosaria.”

  “I think Mama’s in heaven,” Leah said.

  “Then so do I,” I said and we walked hand in hand out of the cemetery, pausing to look back at Shyla’s grave, once, before we got in the car.

  I would always remember that visit to Shyla’s grave as one of the hardest things I had ever done in my life. I grew angry with Shyla again but kept that anger to myself. When she leapt from the bridge, Shyla never considered the day when I would have to bring our daughter to mourn her loss at graveside. There were so many things that Shyla hadn’t thought of.

  From the cemetery, we drove back down Perimeter Road, past Williford Curve, took a left at the eyesore of a community college, and went four long blocks before turning into the driveway of my childhood home.

  “This is where I grew up,” I told Leah.

  “It’s so beautiful. And so big,” she said.

  We walked out to the dock and I pointed back toward the town where the river doglegged left toward the sea. Carefully, I tried to acclimate her to where she stood and pointed toward the sea islands where we had spent the night in our rented house and then pointed in the general direction of Italy. Leah seemed uninterested in this geography lesson so I quickly took her back down the dock past the spartina grass of the marsh that had that wintered-in look of depletion. In the cold months, the marsh slept invisibly, beneath the mud, as the shoots of new grass, sharp as cut glass, began to form. The new marsh was beginning to make its move.

  The back door of the house was unlocked and as we entered the kitchen I breathed in the smell that elucidated the complex issues of my childhood. The salt marsh was part of that smell, but so was my mother’s laughter, coffee grounds, the frying of chicken, sweaty uniforms thrown in heaps by the laundry room, cigarette smoke, cleaning detergent … all of them I remembered as I led Leah by the hand.

  We moved out through the dark hallway and into the dining room, where I took a crystal salt shaker and tried to shake some salt in my hand, but the humidity had long ago turned the contents of that shaker into a small imitation of Lot’s wife. I sniffed the pepper but it was so old it could not even make me sneeze.

  Upstairs, I showed Leah my bedroom, which still contained pennants I had put up when I was a kid. A dusty scrapbook, long unread, told the story of my small-town athletic career from Little League to college.

  Leah pointed to a door that led to a half-hidden top-floor attic. Like all children, she gravitated toward the roomful of old trunks and discarded furniture. She discovered a bag full of roller skates and piles of strange-looking keys. Going deeper into the attic, she found an album of photographs of me taken when I was a baby. There was a clarinet and a sailboat and a box full of outdated life jackets.

  I let her rummage around as I sat going through old scrapbooks in a desultory fashion. The newspaper clippings had aged as I had, and when I came across a picture of Shyla congratulating Capers after a game, leaping into his arms in classic cheerleading fashion, I felt unbearably sad and replaced the scrapbook on its dusty shelf.

  Then I turned my attention to the paperback books and it seemed that not a single one had been moved from its place. This room had long served as a retreat from the disharmony and sadness of the first floor, and it was here I had fallen in love with these books and authors in a way that only lifelong readers know and understand. A good movie had never once affected me in the same life-changing way a good book could. Books had the power to alter my view of the world forever. A great movie could change my perceptions for a day.

  I had always kept these books in alphabetical order from Agee to Zola, and I had read for the way words sounded, not for the ideas they espoused.

  “Hello, Holden Caulfield,” I said, taking the book from its shelf. “Meet you at the Waldorf under the clock. Say hey to Phoebe. You’re a prince, Holden. A real goddamn prince.”

  Taking out Look Homeward, Angel, I read the magnificent first page and remembered when I had been a sixteen-year-old boy and those same words had set me ablaze with the sheer inhuman beauty of the language as a cry for mercy, incantation, and a great river roaring through the darkness.

  “Hello, Eugene. Hello, Ben Gant,” I said quietly, for I knew these characters as well as I knew anyone in the world. Literature was where the world made sense for me.

  “Greetings, Jane Eyre. Hello, David Copperfield. Jake, the fishing is good in Spain. Beware of Osmond, Isabel Archer. Be careful, Natasha. Fight well, Prince Andre. The snows, Ethan Frome. The green light, Gatsby. Be careful of the large boys, Piggy. I do give a damn, Miss Scarlett. The woods of Birnam are moving, Lady Macbeth.”

  My reverie was broken by Leah’s voice. “Who are you talking to, Daddy?”

  “My books,” I said. “They’re all still here, Leah. I’m going to pack them all up and take them back to Rome for you.” And I walked down the stairs, went back into my bedroom, and raised the window that looked out to the roof and the garden. The wood was warped and it took me several minutes before I could remove the screen. Then I climbed out to a flat part of the roof that gave me a view of the river and the garden.

  “You ever climbed a tree?” I asked.

  “Not one this big,” Leah said. “Is it dangerous?”

  “I didn’t think so when I was a kid,” I admitted. “But now that I think about you climbing around in it, I feel faint and dizzy—like I’m going to have a heart attack.”

  “Is this your and Mama’s tree?” she asked.

  “The same one,” I said. “Now the branches are so broad you can walk upright on some of them, but I want us on our hands and knees most of the time. Let’s be careful.”

  “Were you and Mama careful?”

  “No, we were nuts.”

  I stepped out onto a limb that touched the roof and lowered myself to another huge branch, thick as a sidewalk. I reached back and helped Leah onto the branch and the two of us crept slowly to the center of the tree. The oak was the only thing from my childhood that never appeared smaller than I had remembered it. We made our way to a well in the trunk of the tree where the remnants of a tree house still provided a comfortable observation post. Leah was thrilled.

  I pointed toward a smaller white house that sat at the very end of the garden. An older woman was sweeping the steps of her modest porch. “That’s Shyla’s mama. That’s your grandmother, Leah.”

  “Can I speak to her?” Leah whispered.

  “Yell down to her,” I said. “Ask if we can come over.”

  “What do I call her?” she asked.

  “Try Grandma,” I advised.

  “Grandma,” Leah said, her voice bell-like in the great tree. “Grandma.”

  Ruth Fox looked up, surprised. She took her broom and walked into the
garden where she had heard a child’s voice.

  “Up here, Grandma. It’s me, Leah,” Leah said, waving down at her grandmother.

  “Leah. Leah. My Leah,” Ruth said, stammering. “Are you crazy? Get down from that tree. Jack, are you trying to kill my only grandchild with your foolishness?”

  We climbed down from the great oak tree and Leah jumped into the arms of her grandmother. Ruth fell apart when she took Leah into her arms. I felt like an eavesdropper as I turned my back and saw something I had forgotten near the fish pond in the garden. Walking away from Leah, I noticed that the small stone epitaph was in bad repair. Coi and goldfish floated like chrysanthemums in the dark pond. I rubbed the worn lettering on the flat stone and made out the words, “The Great Dog Chippie.”

  I decided that I would show Leah Chippie’s grave some other day. Turning back, I saw Ruth saying something to Leah that was making her smile with pleasure. I wondered if George Fox knew that his granddaughter had come home.

  Then I heard music coming from the Fox house, Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini. The choice of homecoming music surprised me because I knew that George Fox held that particular composition in contempt and thought it banal and sentimental. But I also knew that it was Shyla’s favorite piece of classical music and George was playing it with such passion and conviction out of homage to Shyla and an act of gratitude to me for the return of their granddaughter to his house.

  The music ended and George Fox appeared at his window and we looked at each other. We sized each other up and a great hatred ran like a stream between us.

  “Granddad,” I heard Leah say as Ruth pointed to her husband. Our mutual love of Leah softened both of us and brought us back into our better selves. As Leah ran up the stairs into the Foxes’ house, George Fox and I bowed to each other. He mouthed the words “Thank you,” then disappeared from view.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  As a seasoned travel writer, I had returned to the embarkation point, entered the forbidden city of Waterford as though permitted voyage at last, to a severe wonderland that had killed my wife outright and that had left me estranged from my own family and friends. In my eyes, the town was a dangerous place, riddled with cul de sacs and dead ends, and you could not turn your back on it for a single instant.

  It was my daughter, Leah, who returned my town to me as a favor and an endowment. She found magic in it because all my stories began and ended here, and because each day she ran into Shyla’s childhood by accident. At school, she sat at the same desk near the window where she was told her own mother had sat during elementary school. After school, she would go to the Foxes’ house where her grandfather gave her piano lessons and Ruth Fox took great pride in spoiling her rotten. Leah found it odd that I had spent so much time away from a town so comfortable. Rome could tuck Waterford into a small pocket of its coat and never even notice a change in its clangorous, teeming environment. For Leah, it was like living life in miniature. Intimacy came with the territory. By removing Leah from her birthplace, I had only proved that exile was the surest way to sanctify the path that led toward home.

  Though I had told no one how long I was staying, I had based my whole return on my mother’s health. Ledare and I worked on the movie project for Mike because the pay was good; we got to study the past at our leisure and kept learning new details that surprised us, and it offered a time each day when we could be together. I had never spent time with a woman so easy to be with for such long periods. The story we worked on was partially our own, but the more direction we received from Mike Hess the more we realized that the disappearance of Jordan Elliott from our lives was pivotal to the success of the project. Mike seemed to think that he could fix all of our lives, if only we could make sense out of the series of catastrophic events that had divided us down the middle at so early an age. Mike carried around with him a nostalgia for a time and a set of friendships that was irreparable. Ledare and I conducted hundreds of interviews and wove together a narrative that cast light on both the mini-series and the high points of all of our lives. By asking about others, we learned thousands of things about ourselves. Yet those things we could not answer made the other half-completed and inert. Jordan had disappeared completely into the underworld of Catholic Europe. Neither his mother nor I had heard from him since the day his father betrayed him in the Piazza del Popolo. Jordan’s war with his father and Shyla’s leap from the bridge were the two bookends of our conflicted time together in the South. Ledare and I spent the last of winter and the first months of spring making up a timeline of all the incidents that had brought us to this state of preparation and watchfulness. We waited for something to happen that would cleanse us of all that was unknowable or ambiguous about our pasts. What we lacked was resolution, an ending. I could tell myself I had come back to write the script, show my daughter the country and the people from which she had sprung, and maybe fall in love with Ledare just a little bit. Only my mother knew, because of her instinctive and complete mastery of every nuance of my behavior, that I had come home for reasons I could not admit even to myself and that I would not leave until she had died. The movie became my excuse.

  Each morning at six-thirty, before school, Lucy would meet Leah and take her for a long walk on the beach. Here, Lucy made the shoreline a text of great beauty. On early-morning walks Lucy taught Leah to recognize the eggshell of a skate, the dark triangle of a shark’s tooth, the differences between starfish, and the aesthetics of shell collecting in general. Lucy’s favorites were the angel wings, with their folded, ethereal flamboyance, the olive shell, in all its modesty, the channeled whelk, and the oyster drill for the intricacy of its seemingly accidental architecture. She had retained her girlish love of sand dollars even though this beach was a Comstock Lode of these doubloon-shaped relatives of sea urchins. Their prevalence along the shell-strung beach soon cheapened them even to Leah, but like all shells their value lay in the symmetry of their form. To Lucy, the whole coastline of South Carolina was a love letter written by God as a literal translation of his abundant love for the beachcombers of the world. She also tutored Leah in how to recognize the signs that the mother loggerheads made in the sand when they began to lay their eggs in May.

  After their walks, they would hose their feet off, dry them with large towels left on the deck, and Lucy would drive Leah into town for school. Because of her illness, Lucy demanded that I surrender all mornings to her, and because of that same illness, I complied. It was another warning from my mother that her days were numbered and that she wished to tie up all the loose ends of her life and needed some forbearance from her children to accomplish all these soft duties with a certain amount of grace.

  Each day after school, George and Ruth Fox were waiting for Leah as she emerged from her classroom in town. They would walk her to their house on the Point where Ruth would fix her cookies and milk, and George would give her piano lessons three times a week. She played with vivacity for a girl her age and the only thing she lacked to keep her from being great was obsession. The piano required monogamy, and Leah had far too many other interests and hobbies for her to surrender her life to the keyboard. But George was a patient teacher and her training in Italy had been impeccable. Leah’s natural ebullience was more than a match for George’s attraction to darkness. The music they made together gave great pleasure to both of them. After each lesson, George would play for Leah, trying to show her what beauty could be coaxed out of a piano if someone took the time to be the instrument’s servant and devotee.

  Every Friday, Leah spent the Sabbath with her grandparents. Ruth would light the Sabbath candles, then serve the Sabbath meal. Though I had promised Shyla that I would raise our daughter as a Jew, I fully expected the brunt of that responsibility to fall on Shyla’s shoulders. There were few questions about Judaism I could answer easily, and no matter how many books I read, no text could illuminate the theological rain forest where the tenets of that complex and hairsplitting faith luxuriated and multiplied like
papayas. I had tried to raise her to be a good Jew, but I did not exactly apprehend what constituted such a notable creation. Together, we had learned the simplest Hebrew prayers, but I felt like an impostor whenever I mouthed the beautiful, mysterious words. I was as uncomfortable with a language that read from right to left as I was with rivers that flowed north. It was outside the natural order of things as I knew it, even though I was fully aware that Hebrew predated English by nearly two thousand years. I was relieved that George and Ruth took over Leah’s religious instruction without a word ever passing between us. Friday and Saturday belonged to them from sunset to sunset. Though they were grateful to me, the Foxes never invited me to share one of these Sabbath meals. The history between us was still on fire. We were courteous around each other to the point of parody. Actors in the same drama, we played our parts with a certain stiffness and dissonance. All the words were pleasant and all rang false. Ruth tried to hide the tension with her volubility and high-pitched laughter and she fluttered like a songbird on the days when I arrived at five-thirty in the afternoon to pick up Leah. George hovered always in the background, hands folded primly. Solemnly, he would bow to me and I would reply with my own terribly formal nod of the head. Though both of us were glad of the armistice, neither of us knew what strategies would lead us around the impasse of distrust and hatred that we both felt whenever our eyes met. For Leah’s sake, we were cordial; for Shyla’s sake, we were no more than that.

  In the first month of our return, I introduced Leah to everyone who had importance to Shyla’s and my lives and showed her everything about the world we had grown up in. We pored over high school yearbooks that had been left behind in the Foxes’ attic when Shyla and I had gotten married.

  Pressed between the pages were mementos of Shyla’s high school life: orchids from proms fell out in tough, withered petals like lost gloves of elves. She had kept the ticket stubs of movies she attended with the names of the movies carefully inscribed along with her date for that night. I smiled as I came across stub after stub with Jordan Elliott’s name written out in Shyla’s clear hand. There were programs from school plays and football games and events at the synagogue. Notes that had been passed to her in class were also dated and annotated. An essay she had written about Lady Macbeth in Advanced English with its A+ grade and its rapturous note of congratulations written by her teacher, John Loring, were preserved in the advertisements at the end of the book.