Beach Music

by Pat Conroy

  In the years that followed Shyla’s party the sense of darkness and unhappiness in the Fox household seemed to deepen. I often thought perhaps it came from George Fox’s fanatical absorption with his music. All of us were afraid of Mr. Fox, with his impeccable Old World manners, his disfigured hand, his suffering, and his reticence that seemed unnatural when accompanied by his baleful glare. Though his music students adored him, they were gathered up from the most sensitive and highly strung children. At night, as I tried to go to sleep, I listened to Mr. Fox play the piano, and I learned from those evening recitals that music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.

  I remember when I first told my mother that I thought something was wrong with Shyla. I had noticed that Ruth talked differently to Shyla when she did not know I was around. One day I had gone over to Shyla’s bedroom through the oak tree and was about to go search for her in the house when I heard her mother speaking to her downstairs. Before I tiptoed back to the window and made my way back through the secret avenue that connected our houses, I heard Ruth’s voice again. What she said made me stop to make sure I had heard it correctly.

  “Close that door when you talk to me,” Ruth shouted, “or we’ll all be dead of pneumonia. That’s what you want. For all of us to be dead. Go and wash your hands. Don’t play in the dirt anymore. God didn’t make you an ant. My God. Those hands. Come here. Turn off that stove. Are you crazy or what? Do you want the fire department to get a raise?”

  I did not recognize the woman who was speaking, this off-center, nerve-damaged version of Ruth Fox. It was my first occluded view of the childhood Shyla was living through because the Germans had overrun and destroyed her parents’ world. It would be much later that I would learn that the Nazis were frequent visitors to that house, that they sat with their blue-eyed stares through meals, belched at the lighting of the candles on every Sabbath eve, and that Shyla grew up believing that germs were simply lowercase Germans who fed on the souls of Jews.

  As I passed through the thick branches of oak, I heard Ruth say, “Get away from that window, Shyla. The Angel of Death could be passing by.”

  I turned back and saw Shyla’s small, fearful face. She waved at me and I waved back. I realize now that the Foxes’ house on the Point in Waterford was simply an annex of Bergen-Belsen, a rest stop on the way to the crematoriums. Neither of Shyla’s parents could leave the country of their hideous past. George Fox played his music to console those who went up in smoke and joined the airstreams over Poland. Each black note celebrated the loss of a soul who entered the river of death without the consolation of music. The house floated with tears and terror and uncontainable fury and music that made children dream of the jackbooted intruders who lit their way with torches made of Jewish hair.

  After we were married, Shyla would tell me about her Southern childhood. She thought that at any moment German soldiers could surround her house in a rapid flanking movement in which every vine and redbud and azalea would perish. But these were offhand and unusual confessions for Shyla. Mostly she was silent to the point of obsession about her parents’ war experiences. The subject became verboten, especially after Leah was born. Shyla could not bear thinking about a world that could put a child as affectionate and helpless as Leah inside a gas chamber. That world became the building material of her nightmares, but she rarely allowed it to make an appearance in her daily life.

  I had no idea of the depth of her morbid obsession until I saw the freshly minted number of her father’s tattoo on her forearm in the Charleston morgue after she killed herself. The presence of that raw angry number was an eloquent annotation binding her to the great blood-letting of her people.

  After her death, it was I who became Holocaust-obsessed, I who studied those broken-open years with a passion and completeness I could not believe possible. That number on Shyla’s arm haunted me because it hinted at a tortured life she had lived without my knowledge. I am sure I could have helped her had I known the depth of her preoccupation with the destruction of the Jews. She had spent her life hiding her Jewishness, wrapping it in a cocoon of secret, precious silks. Her spirituality bore fruit in darkness and a grotesque moth with skull marks on its powdery wings tried to take flight in the museum where she kept her soul chloroformed and pinned to velvet. Only when Leah was born did she seem interested in coming to terms with her Jewish roots. Shyla Fox had been raised in the dead center of Southern Christendom, accepted by her Christian playmates, happy in the changeless backwaters of small-town life where her Jewishness made her slightly bizarre and out of step. But at least her parents were considered churchgoing and God-fearing people, and Shyla used her small synagogue as escape hatch, theater, masquerade ball, and oasis. By the time she was a senior in high school, fifty Jewish families met for Sabbath ceremonies each week, and in a riot of light and noise and gossip Shyla felt she was in the center of a world that both cherished and was proud of her.

  Her mother had not told Shyla anything about puberty or issued a mother’s warning about the changes that were going to take place in her body. When she first bled she thought she had cancer, thought she had displeased God in the most desperate, unspeakable manner. She entered her womanhood innocent and unprepared, and this marked her, at least to herself, as singular, chosen, and strange. She grew dreamier and more withdrawn. Her mother had protected her fiercely, and mother and daughter grew closer that year before the breakdowns began. It was then that Ruth Fox began to tell her daughter about the stories of the war. They began to spill out of Ruth in an undiluted manner she could not stem or help. Stories of both Ruth’s and George’s terrifying experiences entered the imagination of their precocious, exquisitely intense daughter, stories so lit with anguish that they would return with all their excessive power intact over and over again; and often when she began to bleed. So in Shyla’s mind, the suffering of her parents during the war would be associated with her own shedding of blood. Ruth had always intended to tell Shyla all that happened to her, her husband, and their families in Eastern Europe, but had been waiting for the proper time, for Shyla to reach a certain point of maturity. Though she thought it was important that Shyla understand the world as a dangerous, unscrupulous place, she did not wish to imprint this information too early, nor did she wish Shyla to be filled with fear at the untrustworthiness and savagery of mankind. Somewhat arbitrarily, Ruth chose Shyla’s puberty as the time to begin sharing these stories.

  Inevitably, Ruth would look into the eyes of her Waterford neighbors and wonder what conditions would be required for them to take to the streets, wild and unappeasable, in their collective lust for Jewish blood. All through my childhood, unbeknownst to me, Ruth would study my face and try to place it under the visor of a Nazi cap. In every Christian she met, Ruth looked for the Nazi who lived just below the surface. But all of this I would learn later.

  Shyla was a good listener and she took these stories and made them part of herself. They built libraries along the ridges of her brain where the weight of them turned to migraine and nightmare. It had relieved Ruth to share a portion of the agony she had held inside her for so long, but it was a while before she understood the depth of agony she had delivered to her oldest child.

  From the age of ten to thirteen, Shyla retreated into the interior, became distant from her family and friends, and went through several bizarre episodes that led her to the offices of several child psychiatrists in the South. Though she did well in school, she withdrew from almost all association with her friends and playmates. These were the years she made the most progress at the piano and the ones that gave her father hope that she might become a great teacher of music even if she lacked the virtuosity and passion that marked all of the best concert pianists. Shyla practiced for hours, and, like her father, she found respite in the black notes, escape in the dark, mysterious arrangement of music. Her discipline at the piano turned from a virtue into a form of dementia.

  Soon she began to skip meals in o
rder to master a new piece. Her love of her art made her fast, her parents said, and there was pride in their voices. The music seemed to play on forever: It lifted off her fingers in a ceaseless flood of notes, a river of noise and plainsong and elegy, that a dutiful daughter played out of a misspent, indirect love of a father who distrusted words and cherished only the harmonies of a keyboard. As a teacher, George was severe with Shyla because he believed that she was trying to reach a realm of competency that he thought she was not talented enough to reach. He pushed her hard, and each time she passed imaginary barriers he set for her. She mastered concertos he declared beyond her competence. As she dared him to set limits on her talent, he raised the ante higher and higher, knowing that she did not possess the range and the fluency that greatness in art required. He was right, and George Fox pushed his daughter until he broke her. When she finally snapped, she had lost ten pounds that she could barely afford to lose and the doctors in Waterford could not get her to eat. In the hospital they fed her glucose intravenously while her fingers played noiseless sonatas against her blanket.

  When they let her out of the hospital, Shyla began what she would later call her “dark year,” the year of masks, hallucinations, and grieving for the dead whose names she did not know. Without telling either of them, she took the stories that her mother had secretly told her and she took her parents’ place, walking every step that they had walked, and suffering what they had suffered. Shyla starved herself, she refused water, her hands made music wherever her fingers touched down, and she spent that year grieving for parents who had not had the time to grieve, nor the resources, and certainly not the permission.

  One day I found Shyla weeping on the garden bench against the brick wall that separated our two houses. I lifted myself up onto the wall and with both arms extended balanced myself expertly and ran along the wall until I spoke from above her and asked what was wrong. Then I saw the blood on her legs. Taking her by the hand, I led her a back way through a neighbor’s gate and overgrown yard toward a portion of marsh that led to the dock behind our house. The jasmine was blooming and the bees looked as though they were stitching flowers together with invisible silken thread. I made her take off her shoes and socks and then both of us dove in our light summer clothes into the incoming tide.

  “Saltwater cures everything,” I assured her.

  “I’m dying. I want to die I’m so embarrassed.”

  “It’s probably something you ate,” I said, using my mother’s stock reply for everything.

  “My mother will kill me when she sees I went swimming in this dress.”

  “We’ll sneak into my house. We’ll use the tree,” I suggested.

  The tides of Waterford washed Shyla clean and she and I sneaked into the yard of my house and scrambled up the back side of the live oak where I had hammered two-by-fours to make a ladder. Shyla undressed in my room and put on a tee shirt and old pair of my shorts; then she handed me her wet dress and underpants and asked me to throw them away. Afraid for her and worried about their discovery, I dug a deep hole beside the marsh in a place hidden by fences and placed the bag within. While I was completing my task, Shyla went to inform her mother she was bleeding to death.

  Yet it was not that bleeding that was killing her slowly, but Shyla’s inability to incorporate the wounds of her parents into a world that made any sense to her. Though she was being raised in a quiet backwater Southern town where almost any child could find a sense of safety, cohesion, and composure, she was born a child who could pull every electron of anguish from the aura surrounding a loved one and take it gladly into her own system. She consumed the pain of others because that was her food of choice, the one fruit she would always choose to smuggle out of Eden. Her disease was Auschwitz, but that was a difficult diagnosis for anyone to make in the low country of South Carolina in 1960.

  For over a year she managed to hold herself together. Then her mother followed her after dinner one night, a meal that Shyla had barely touched, up the stairs to the attic, where she heard Shyla talking in whispers to a group of girls who were not answering back. For fifteen minutes she listened to this fearful monologue of instructions and encouragement, then opened the door suddenly and found Shyla surrounded by all the dolls of her girlhood, shrouded in black like nuns. Shyla was smuggling food to them every night and warning the dolls not to make noise when the Germans were patrolling outside.

  Horrified, Ruth took her daughter in her arms and apologized for telling her anything about the terrible past. She had underestimated the extraordinary power of her own story and the fabulous sensitivity that Shyla brought to the taking in of that story.

  The next day, my mother watched in disbelief as Shyla walked into our backyard and buried all her dolls in a mass grave she had dug the night before. That August was one of the hottest on record and it marked the first time that Shyla was sent to the Children’s Division of the South Carolina State Mental Hospital. She was committed to Bull Street, where she remained for six weeks and was treated for extreme depression.

  Shyla returned from Columbia unchanged, except that she seemed more inward and self-contained. Her fragility made her special, but we remained comfortable with each other and often did our homework together at the kitchen table at my house where the noise in that overpopulated household seemed to have a calming effect on her. I thought she was getting back to be the Shyla I had always known, and then one night that winter it snowed in Waterford for the third time in the twentieth century. The snow triggered some clear but inexplicable image in Shyla that had nothing to do with the weather itself. The strange chemistry of snow and memory took possession of her and she learned again that madness wore many masks, could change addresses at will, was master of disguise, guile, and the cheap shot. This time it came to her in human form, in the shape of a beautiful, sorrowing woman.

  When the woman appeared she brought with her an imaginary country that only Shyla could enter.

  She subtracted the real world, erased it completely as she showed herself to Shyla and comforted her with wordless majesty. She was exceedingly kind.

  Though Shyla always knew these visitations were born within her own mind, she never lost the sense of excitement the coming of the lady inspired within her. She could not summon her at will: The lady planned the visits with foresight and cunning. Each month, she followed the laws of menses and came only after Shyla’s period had begun.

  Once I found Shyla on her knees in a trancelike state in her garden. It was beginning to snow.

  “Something’s wrong with Shyla,” I said when I found Mrs. Fox.

  “What has happened?” she said, drying her hands on her apron and running out into the yard. She saw Shyla kneeling by the brick wall, moving her lips, but with no words coming forth from her slightly opened mouth, staring, transfixed, at something invisible.

  “Shyla, it is your mother. Listen to me, Shyla. You cannot do this to me. Not to me or your father. You are a happy girl. You have everything. Everything, you hear? There’s nothing to be afraid of. There’s nothing to hurt you. You must be happy. It is your duty to be happy. What did he do to you? Did Jack hurt you? Did he touch you?”

  “Jack would never do anything to hurt Shyla, Ruth,” I heard my mother’s voice say. “You know that better than anyone. How dare you accuse Jack of such a thing!”

  Ruth turned her sad eyes toward my mother and put both hands up in the air in a pathetic, supplicating gesture. “I cannot bear it if something is wrong with my Shyla. I simply could not stand it, Lucy. You do not understand, but this is my hope and my husband’s hope and every dream we have or ever had is contained in this girl and her sister. How could there be anything wrong? There is plenty of food and nice people and no bombs blowing up people in their sleep. Everything is good and I find her like this. For what, Lucy? You tell me for what.”

  My mother approached the kneeling girl from behind as the snow continued to fall. She knelt beside Shyla and put her arm around her shoulder.

/>   “You all right, good-looking?” Lucy asked after a minute.

  “What’s that?” Shyla said, as she noticed the white buildup on her sweater.

  “It’s snow. I grew up with it in the mountains. But it’s rare down here. You scared us, honey. It was like you went off to the moon for a visit.”

  “No, Mrs. McCall. I was here. Could you see it too?”

  “See what, Shyla?” Lucy asked, looking back at Ruth.

  “The lady,” Shyla said.

  “Oh my God, she is crazy for sure,” Ruth said, walking around in circles until my mother stopped her with a withering look.

  “How nice. Are you sure it was a lady?” Lucy asked.

  “Oh yes, such a beautiful lady.”

  “I have dreams like that sometimes, too, Shyla,” Lucy whispered. “Sometimes I think I see my poor dead mother and we have the nicest talk together and she seems so real I could reach out and brush the hair out of her eyes, but then I realize she’s not really there at all. Maybe it’s your imagination. Maybe you’re just dreaming.”

  “No, Mrs. McCall. She’s still there. She’s on the fence.”

  “What else does the lady look like?” Lucy asked. “Describe her more carefully.”

  “Her hands are folded in prayer. A light around her head.”

  “Don’t ask her anything more, Lucy,” Ruth said. “I beg of you. She is crazy enough without having to answer these questions.”

  Lucy looked over at me, ignoring Ruth, and said, “It’s the Virgin Mary. The Mother of Jesus. We’re privileged to be witnesses of a holy apparition.”

  “I don’t think Mary appears to Jews, Mama,” I said.