Beach Music

by Pat Conroy

  For over a half-hour, I pulled them up and down the Waterford River, then heeding a signal from Ledare that Leah was tiring, I anchored the boat on the sandbar directly across from the town. After they climbed up into the boat, and toweled themselves dry, Ledare passed out tomato sandwiches, made with tomatoes from her mother’s garden, lettuce, mayonnaise, and Vidalia onions. I moaned with pleasure as I bit into the sandwich and the rich juice spilled out of the sandwich and down my face and arms. I opened the sandwich to inspect the slice of tomato I had just tasted. It was large and fire-engine red and glistened with juice and health. I remembered long ago, when I had gone out into a field with my grandfather, who had leaned down and cut a ripe tomato from a vine heavy with fruit. Silas had peeled the tomato with his pocketknife, then salted slices and handed them to me. I could not imagine that nectar in Paradise could have tasted any better than that freshly picked tomato. And for me that taste has always been and will be the taste of Waterford and summer.

  The day was ending when we started back for the Isle of Orion, the sun playing along the surface of the water, turning a bank of cumulus clouds red in the west. On the way, we called out the buoys and channel markers and I could feel my sunburn start to tighten my face as the air cooled. As we passed Ladyface Island, Ledare suddenly pointed to a creek that I had fished when I was a boy. It was on an isolated, back side of the island that had escaped most of the overdevelopment that was changing the composition and feel of all the low country.

  “Go by Henry Thomas’ place,” Ledare said.

  “I haven’t seen Henry since high school,” I said. “He still have his welding business?”

  “Went broke welding. He’s in construction over on Hilton Head. The whole known world’s in construction on Hilton Head. I saw him in the Piggly-Wiggly the other day. He asked about you.”

  “Henry and I played football together,” I explained to Leah. “He was a player.”

  Leah asked through glazed, exhausted eyes, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “The boy was tough. He’d tear your head off if he got the chance.”

  “A redneck,” Leah ventured. “Like my uncles talk about?”

  “Of the purest variety,” Ledare said. “The Grade-A, high-test kind. He could hide forever at the Darlington 500. That’s a car race, darling.”

  “Henry’s simple. But a real good citizen,” I said.

  “I went by his place last week. He wanted me to meet his youngest son,” Ledare said. “He has Down’s syndrome, but he’s a sweetheart. Let’s go see him.”

  “Leah’s tired,” I complained.

  “I want Leah to see this,” she said.

  As the tide went out, the boat rode lower in the marshes and I made my way down long corridors of the marsh grass we had ridden above just hours ago. There was a time in my life I knew all these creeks well enough to navigate at night without ever consulting a chart, but now I consulted a map twice to check for bars and low water before I brought the boat in sight of Henry Thomas’ house. It was an old wooden farmhouse with a screened-in porch that ran along the front. Four vehicles were parked around the yard, one permanently. A cock crowed somewhere in a field beyond the house and an egret hunted beneath the pilings of Henry’s dock until he flushed when our boat drew too near his hunting grounds. Ledare pointed to a spot twenty yards across the creek where the water was shallower and whispered for me to cut the motor and drop anchor.

  “Aren’t we going to go on to the dock and say hello to Henry?”

  “Shh,” Ledare said, putting her finger to her lips. “He knows we’re here. I told him we were coming.”

  The sunset turned the marsh gold and the western sky transformed itself into a window of rose and violet as its edges flowered and dimpled in its final burning haze. The water around us caught fire and the boat rested in a pool of cold flame. In silence, we watched the water shimmer like a peacock’s feather in that shining foil of soft tide in retreat. Leah put her hand down and touched the lemony surface of the water.

  A little boy ran out of Henry Thomas’ house followed, at a distance, by his mother and father and two older sisters. The boy wore a tee shirt and shorts, a pair of black high-top sneakers, and a tiny life preserver. Yet he was fearless as he ran, slowing only when he inched his way down the ramp to the floating dock.

  “His name is Oliver,” Ledare whispered as Leah and I watched the boy thrust out his arms toward the sunset on the marsh and begin to spin in graceful circles. His thin, high-pitched voice broke out in song, and though the words were difficult to make out, I recognized the tune of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Oliver looked toward the water expectantly, but saw nothing and cried out in surprise or frustration. Going down on his knees, he began to beat his hands against the warped, unpainted boards, singing another song, the words again unrecognizable, but the tune haunting and familiar.

  “Rock of Ages,” Ledare whispered to Leah.

  Looking toward his family, Oliver, bewildered and hurt, threw his hands up, then began stamping his feet hard against the dock and his incessant tattoo echoed through the marsh. He began a third song and then a fourth. His family watched in motionless silence, although Henry waved once to welcome the visitors in the boat.

  “Here it comes,” Ledare said.

  A dorsal fin, curved as beautifully as a gondola, broke the still waters two hundred yards away coming out of much deeper water. The porpoise came swiftly, its green body jonquil-colored in the last light, then the color of straw, then a touch of ecru, until it rose out of the water when it approached the dock where Oliver sang. It lifted its head and Leah stood up and leaned forward when she heard the porpoise emit high-pitched sounds of its own.

  The boy spun in delirious circles and began to speak or scream or croak out sounds too excited to have the discipline of language. If it was speech, it was dissonant and inhuman and strange. Oliver’s face was lit with ecstasy and he put his arms out toward the porpoise and sang the tune to “Jesus Loves Me” to the bottle-nosed creature and all the long-legged wading birds who paused to listen to this strange outcry, this primitive interlude between sunset and night. As the boy grew more excited his voice grew shriller and less distinct. The voice seemed to calm the porpoise, which swam in slow circles, rising out of the water to make quieter noises of its own. Oliver’s song had an eerie, unworldly harmony to it, but the porpoise’s voice seemed half-human and more familiar. The rapture of the boy increased and he danced and pointed toward the porpoise and looked back toward his family. At the very end, Oliver was grunting and squeaking unintelligible sounds and every so often, the porpoise would answer with a faraway and much sadder sound.

  When the porpoise turned back toward the sea, Oliver screamed out in protest, then waved furious and petulant good-byes, then sank to his knees, motionless, exhausted. Henry came down to the dock in half-light and lifted Oliver up in his arms. He waved to all of us in the boat, then walked the boy back to his family. For a full minute, the three of us in the boat were quiet, still in the scene we had witnessed. We could not name what we had just seen, but we knew it was a rare form of communion and dialogue.

  “What was Oliver saying to that porpoise, Daddy?” Leah asked at last.

  “Something wonderful, I think,” I said. “But I don’t know.”

  “Guess,” she said.

  “I know what they were saying,” Ledare said as I started the motor.

  “Tell me,” Leah said.

  “Oliver’s saying to the porpoise, ‘Does Jack love Ledare? Does Jack love Ledare?’ And the porpoise is answering, ‘He should. He should.’ ”

  Leah rode in Ledare’s lap as we followed in the wake of the porpoise as it headed out the sea lanes for the Atlantic, and the stars shone on us with a brightness of complete indifference.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  For me memory was the country of the usable past but now I began to wonder if there was not also a danger to unremembrance. I had recently become acutely aware that mistr
anslation, mistakes of emphasis, and the inevitability of a flawed interpretation of an experience could lead to an imperfect view of things. I had thought that Shyla was fairly happy in our marriage. Though I knew well the history of her moods and depressions and migraines, I began to think I had underestimated the battalion strength of those malignant, subterranean demons that took her in despair to that bridge. I had always thought her sadness was part of Shyla’s depth, for there was nothing I distrusted in people more than sunniness, personalities whose optimism seemed unearned. Shyla was full of so many deep places that I often felt she was exploring some newly discovered country of glaciers and ice fields whenever her black indwelling spirits took possession of her. Part of her allure was also her buoyancy and unpredictability. Shyla could not be kept down long, but I now knew I had failed to recognize the flip side to this virtue, that her time in the sunshine was limited because her truest self lay in her most inaccessible places.

  As I told Leah stories of her mother, I kept coming upon images that had failed to speak their importance at the time. Following the music of her interior, Shyla had gone straight to a rendezvous with her own hangman. When I began the hard work of trying to figure out the course that had led to Shyla’s destruction, I recalled strong images that I had carried intact without knowing what they really meant. Now I realized that Shyla had seemed embarrassed by her parents from the time I had any memory of the Foxes at all. Their accents embarrassed her. Their foreignness caused her shame.

  Very early, Shyla used to spend afternoons at our house soaking up the rowdy atmosphere of an American home that seemed normal to her. Whenever she smelled hamburgers or popcorn or fried chicken being prepared in my mother’s kitchen, Shyla would appear at the back door with her timid knock and Lucy would invite her in to feast on whatever was cooking.

  I remembered well the first birthday party the Foxes gave Shyla.

  My mother had taken Shyla and me to a movie matinee at the Breeze Theater, where we saw Come Back Little Sheba with Shirley Booth. The film was an odd choice for children our age but it was the only movie in town and my mother had no choice but to sit through the entire film as Shyla and I wandered the aisles and even ventured upstairs to the “Colored Section,” which we found completely empty. The discovery thrilled us and my mother had to come looking for us in the middle of the film and found us taking turns drawing tattoos on each other’s arms in ball-point pen. Before we left the movie house, Lucy scrubbed both tattoos off with Kleenex and her own saliva.

  The party was to be a surprise and when Shyla came through the front door, her father played a baroque and spirited rendition of “Happy Birthday” that intimidated the Waterford children into an uneasy silence. Ruth and George and Lucy were the only ones who sang and Shyla had her face in her hands as she saw some of the neighborhood boys snickering at her fathers’ guttural accent. Then George Fox announced, as though he were talking to a sophisticated audience at Carnegie Hall, that he had prepared a very special concert in honor of his daughter’s birthday. The ten children invited to Shyla’s party then had to sit still as George Fox played Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody Number 2.

  After the concert had mercifully ended, the awestruck but very restless children were herded into a dining room that was formally set and lit by silver candelabra. Shyla wore a bewildered expression that could have been disbelief or fear, but her face looked as though it had been flash-frozen. She knew what was coming, but felt helpless to interfere with the course of events.

  “So,” her mother said as her classmates sat in formal misery around the table, “now we eat like pigs. A feast for my sweet Shyla who was born, as you know it, on this day. She is an American girl and she should have an American birthday, no?”

  Ruth pronounced the word “girl” like “gull” and the children at the table did not understand a single word she said. Several of the boys went under the table to hide their laughter. Only my mother’s presence kept any semblance of order and she circled the table three times quelling the outbursts of silliness by the boys.

  But even my mother could not control the amazement that broke spontaneously from the children’s mouths when Ruth uncovered the numerous bowls which contained the feast she had been days secretly preparing for her daughter. There was borscht and sour cream, which none of us had ever seen, a Russian salad composed of mayonnaise, peas, and flakes of salmon, and something called cheese kreplach. One boy, Samuel Burbage, threw up in his own lap when he tasted pickled herring in sour cream. Hot tea was served in glass cups with handles and a plate of handmade Kaiser rolls was passed around the entire table without a single taker. Gefilte fish brought cries of amazement and several of the boys discovered happily a bowl of hard-boiled eggs that they identified and quickly passed around as the one food recognizably American.

  Shyla endured her trial without commentary, but I remember the relief on her face when Ruth Fox returned to the dining room, followed by my mother, carrying a frosted birthday cake decked out with lighted candles. My mother led the children in a spirited rendition of “Happy Birthday,” then took the cake out to the front porch to get all the children away from the scene of Mrs. Fox’s crime. Outside, Shyla blew out the candles, and then the presents were brought out to be opened. Lucy then organized a game of hide-and-seek for all the boys and girls. But as Lucy was organizing the games in the front yard, Ruth was weeping while she cleared the table of dishes full of untouched food.

  My mother had saved Shyla’s party by making the children forget about what they could not bring themselves to eat, but not for long.

  When Samuel Burbage’s mother came to retrieve her son, he screamed out as he ran to her, “They gave us raw fish in whipped cream, Mama. I puked when I ate it.”

  Harper Price’s mother heard that her daughter had burned her tongue on the tea and that the doughnuts were hard as rocks.

  “They’re called ‘bagels,’ ” Shyla tried to explain. “My mother bought them at Gottlieb’s in Savannah.”

  Capers Middleton had never seen red soup and Ledare had never eaten cold fish or sweetened noodles and Elmer Bazemore, a shrimper’s son, took only one taste of gefilte fish before he spit it out on his napkin. He swore to his parents that he had no idea where they found such a fish in American waters and that the flesh of that Jewish fish had actually burned his tongue and caused him to ask Mrs. Fox for several glasses of water. Later, Ruth Fox explained that she had probably served the gefilte fish with too much horseradish.

  The utter foreignness of Shyla’s household became a minor obsession of her friends and classmates in Waterford. Children are born with a herd instinct, and nothing causes them to suffer more than habits of their parents that single out the child for censure and ridicule. Shyla spent her childhood aching to be an American. Yet it was deeper and more extraordinary than that: Shyla Fox yearned for another unreachable level of Americanism—she tried to turn herself into a Southerner, the most elusive and evasive American of all. Her whole life became a quiet devotional to mimicry. Each year her accent differed and thickened as she listened to the collective voices of the women in her town. The idioms of Southern speech delighted her as much as her parents’ use of Yiddish appalled her. She became tyrannical and refused to let them converse in Yiddish when she was present. Their Yiddish was out of place and discordant in a land of azaleas, hominy, plantation tours, onion rings, buttered popcorn, Necco wafers, and 3 Musketeers candy bars “big enough to share with a pal.”

  “She thinks she is a Yankee Doodle Dandy,” her father would often scoff.

  “She wants a normal life,” her mother would argue. “Show me the great sin. It’s the same thing I want for her.”

  It was more intuition than knowledge that led me to believe the atmosphere in the house across the yard was off-kilter and bizarre. That they celebrated holidays I had never heard of and could not pronounce seemed exotic enough, and I used to try to get Ruth Fox to teach me dirty words in Yiddish so I could torment my brothers when they g
ot on my nerves. But there was something deeply disturbing and unsettled in the House of Fox that no one in my small town could begin to fathom. It was not merely foreignness that set their house apart, but a sadness so profound that it settled like a killing dust in every square inch of those immaculate, spacious rooms.

  George and Ruth Fox were afraid of dogs and cats and their own shadows. I could see them peeking out at me from behind closed curtains whenever I would come knocking at the back door. They jumped whenever there was an unexpected knock at the door. Their hands trembled when they answered a ringing telephone. When Ruth Fox hung laundry to dry in the sun, she kept looking around for the movement of enemies on her flank. For years and years, I tried to decipher what was wrong. I spied and eavesdropped and watched the quiet motion of their family as I monitored their activities from the branches of the oak tree after dark. The only thing I could ever come up with was that Shyla’s parents seemed to grow darker, not older. Mr. Fox would often wake up screaming in the middle of the night during nightmares he had brought with him to this country. When I asked Shyla what made her father scream at night, she told me that I must be dreaming myself, that she had never heard a thing. Once I heard him scream out the name of a woman, but it was no one I had ever heard of nor anyone who had ever lived in our neighborhood. After he awoke with this strange woman’s name on his lips and as I moved along the branches of the moonlit oak that gave me access to such secrets, I heard Ruth comforting her husband. Listening to this sorrowful and intimate scene, I pinched myself hard, for Shyla’s sake, to make sure I was not dreaming. I tried to overhear their conversation, but they were speaking to each other in another language. Though I could not understand that langugage, I knew enough about words to know that Ruth loved George Fox beyond all measure and time.