Beach Music

by Pat Conroy

  “Are you in charge of her appointment calendar?” my mother answered and I could tell her mind was made up in this matter. “Besides, Mary was Jewish. It makes perfect sense, if you look at it in a certain light.”

  “Mrs. Fox doesn’t seem like she’s on the same wavelength,” I observed.

  “Shyla,” Lucy asked with gentleness, “do you know the statue that I keep in the front hall of my house?”

  Shyla nodded her head.

  “Is that the lady you’re seeing? Is it the Blessed Virgin Mary? The Mother of Jesus of Nazareth?”

  Shyla looked at Lucy and affirmed the fact. “I think so.”

  Lucy made the sign of the cross and began to say the Apostles’ Creed. “Say a rosary with me, Jack. We are witnesses, like the shepherd children of Fatima or with Bernadette at Lourdes.”

  “Mrs. Fox is crying, Mama. I think we better get Shyla inside her house. We’re all covered with snow.”

  “And leave poor Mary outside alone?” Lucy said. “I wouldn’t think of such a thing.”

  “I don’t see nothin’, Mama,” I said nervously.

  “You and I were not chosen to see, Jack,” Lucy explained. “But we were chosen to bear witness to what Shyla has seen.”

  “I haven’t seen what Shyla’s seen. She’s shivering, Mama. Get her inside.”

  “Will you stay out here and keep Mary company?” Lucy asked.

  “Yeh,” I said. “I’ll baby-sit with Mary.”

  “Don’t you be flip, young man,” Lucy warned, helping Shyla to her feet and walking her to the back door of her house. “Ask for her intercession. Ask her to get your father to stop drinking.”

  “Mary, make my father quit being a drunk,” I said.

  “You call that praying?” Lucy said, looking back at me. “How about a little sincerity? If I was the Mother of God I wouldn’t give you a damn thing if you asked for something in that tone of voice.”

  “I never prayed to a wall before,” I said, irritable and cold.

  “No one likes a doubting Thomas, son. And they certainly don’t go far in life.”

  “What if it’s just a figment of Shyla’s imagination?” I asked. “What if there’s nothing but ivy on this wall? Then what exactly am I praying for?”

  “Then we’re just making Shyla feel better. We’re supporting her and believing in her. If there’s nothing on that wall, you’re just praying to the same God you normally pray to.”

  “I can do that inside where it’s warm.”

  “Keep her company,” Lucy warned.

  It was the first reported apparition of Mary in the history of the South Carolina diocese. The news did not please the Waterford rabbi nor did it amuse Father Marcellus Byrd, the passive, unsociable priest who had been bumped around backwater parishes of the diocese for twenty years. In fact, it pleased no one at all except for my mother.

  In the following six months, Shyla lived out her life among the hurt and insane at the mental hospital on Bull Street. Here, she learned the awful laws of electricity. Her vision of the weeping lady was replaced with nothingness and confusion. They stunned her brain and made it imageless. Her lady died by the conveyance of a power surge through the soft tissues of her brain. Shyla shuffled through the girls’ ward on slippers, untouchable and undismayable, and the doctors nodded to each other when after her therapy she could not tell them the name of her hometown. Shock treatment was a natural predator of memory and she did not recognize who I was when I sent her a letter that first week.

  I wrote her every week she was away and the live oak that served as highway and hiding place between us seemed bereft without her. My letters were inevitably shy and stilted, but in each one I told her I wished that she would come home soon. I had spent my entire childhood in shouting distance of Shyla and I felt uncentered without her in the middle of my own life. No one in town mentioned Shyla when she was away. The stigma of the asylum made her unmentionable and even her parents seemed to avoid me in shame whenever I saw them in the streets. Her disappearance was more of an erasure than a going-away.

  On the last day of school that June I left a note for my parents that Mike, Capers, and I were going fishing out at the fish camp on the Isle of Orion and not to expect me back for a couple of days. Now began that period of delicious freedom when my pals and I spent the entire summer on the river far from the gaze or worry of parents. If a Waterford boy did not want to spend all of his time on a boat or playing sports, it was a cause for real parental concern. My father found the note and felt a twinge of nostalgia as he thought of his own timeless, languorous hours spent cruising past the oyster banks in search of feeding bass or sheepshead so long ago in that faraway time when he was allowed to think of himself as a boy.

  At five in the morning, I went out of my window to the branch of the oak tree that almost touched down on the roof of my house. I caught a ride with a sheriff’s deputy who was transferring a prisoner to the Central Correction Center in Columbia who drove me to the main entrance of the state hospital on Bull Street after delivering a stern lecture on the dangers of hitchhiking.

  The grounds were lonely and well kept and the buildings looked well wrought but crestfallen. I wandered through the bricked-in campus for an hour, trying hard to look nonchalant and clearheaded. By the time I saw Shyla at visitors’ hours, I thought my own sanity was suspect and temporary.

  Shyla seemed older, more womanly than I remembered. She had the run of the place and took me on visits to the library, the canteen, where she paid for my lunch by signing her name, and the nondenominational chapel.

  “You ought to watch crazy people come here and pray. It’s better than the circus. Some of them scream out, ‘Amen,’ others shout ‘Mama,’ others go crazy and have to be dragged off to solitary by their attendants. But most of them just sing, pretty as angels. Crazy people have good voices. That’s been a big surprise.”

  As we circumnavigated the seventy-seven fenced acres, exploring every nook and cranny, I gave Shyla a summary of all that had occurred during her lost months away from school and Waterford.

  When we walked in front of the main administration building, Babcock, Shyla suddenly took me by the hand and led me up the front steps. We ran quickly to the back hall where she hurried me up three flights of stairs, then to a cavernous attic room that led to the great dome that dominated the skyline for miles around. A small narrow stairway took us through the gloomy fretwork of support beams that held the dome aloft. The woodwork was elaborate and it seemed as though ten forests had died to provide all the timber that buttressed that graceful, silver dome, which floated lighter than air above the trees of Columbia. When we reached the highest point on the stairway there was still a huge open space to the top of the structure. Hundreds of bats hung like baseball gloves, their eyes adjusted to the darkness. I could hear pigeons cooing in the eaves below them and could smell mildew and guano and mold in the stagnant air.

  “Look up. I wanted to surprise you,” Shyla whispered. “Straight up to the very top of the dome.”

  I did as I was told and I felt my retinas enlarge as I stared into the upper darkness, into a void that permitted no light. Gradually, I saw the bowl of the dome reveal itself in its amplitude and beauty of form but I saw nothing else.

  “Look harder,” she said. “They’re looking at you.”

  “What’s looking at me?” I asked.

  “The surprise,” she said.

  Then I saw them in all their shy but confident wildness. A nesting pair of barn owls, the shape of beer cans, looked down at us from an eave twenty feet above. The owls could not have chosen a more precarious spot for the raising of their young. They glowed slightly with an otherworldly light and we could hear the impatient noises of unseen owlets whose cries of hunger sounded like kids in soda shops sucking up the dregs of malteds from tall glasses. It seemed like a place where evil came to lick its wounds and plan its mischief, a place in fairy tales where the ogre made its appearance in the lives of lost children.r />
  Breathless, I watched the owls watch me with their rufous wings folded down tightly. I could not figure out if they reminded me of penguins or monkeys. There was beauty in their wildness, in their eerie stillness. They were praiseworthy sentinels to the country of the insane.

  “How many young?” I whispered.

  “Three left. There were five,” Shyla whispered back.

  “Where are the other two?”

  “They were eaten by their brothers and sisters. I watched. You can’t believe the number of rats and mice it takes to feed young owls.”

  “How did you find them?”

  “I have the run of the place,” Shyla said softly. “They know I’m not crazy.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Because I saw the lady,” she said.

  “Why’d you bring me up here?” I asked. “It’s spooky.”

  “So we’d be alone.”

  “Why’d you want us to be alone?” I said, feeling shut-in and misplaced.

  Shyla smiled at me and said, “Because of this.”

  Shyla kissed me on the lips. I pulled back at first as though she had slapped me.

  “Hold still, silly,” Shyla said.

  She kissed me again and her lips and mouth felt sweet against mine and I was happy to be in that place of fear and owls.

  We kissed each other several more times.

  “Good,” Shyla said, “we’ve got that out of the way.”

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “All the girls in the ward talk about kissing and everything else,” said Shyla. “I wanted to get started and I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  Licking my lips, which still tasted like her, I said, “We didn’t do bad, did we? For rookies, I mean.”

  “I was expecting a lot more,” Shyla admitted.

  “What were you expecting?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Just more. But that one didn’t count. It wasn’t real. We weren’t carried away by passion.”

  “You didn’t like it?”

  “I didn’t say that. It wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.”

  “Maybe I need to practice,” I said, yet I would not kiss Shyla again until we danced in the foundering sea-endangered house many years later.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Shyla said. “I love coming up to this dome. It makes me feel like the only person in the world. Do the kids at school know I’m at the Crazy House?”

  “They think you’re out sick. Like you caught a terrible disease or something,” I told her. “Mrs. Pinckney has us pray for you every week. We say the Lord’s Prayer for your quick recovery.”

  “The Lord’s Prayer?” Shyla said. “But I’m Jewish.”

  “It doesn’t hurt anything,” I said. “She just wants you to get well. We all do.”

  “Your daddy still drinking?”

  “Yeh,” I answered.

  In winter they had taken Shyla away and in summer they returned her to Waterford; her time away was barely noticed by her classmates, who found themselves totally absorbed by the marvelous details of their own growing up. Her reentry was seamless, uncommented upon, and her absence quickly forgotten. She resumed her life in the house of dark music and we once more took to the branches of the live oak, where we continued our commentary on the events of the town. Neither of us ever referred to the day we climbed up under the dome of the Babcock Building and exchanged shy kisses beneath the patronage of barn owls. But those kisses held great value for both of us and we each held the memory of that day inviolate.

  The summer she was away Jordan came to Waterford and his arrival would change Shyla’s life as much as the lives of the rest of us. Because he had lived all over the world, he had the courage to speak opinions that no other Waterford boy dared articulate for fear of ridicule. Though not a free thinker, he was an original one who had small talent for following the rumors of the herd.

  It was after an afternoon baseball game when my mother was feeding hamburgers to Capers, Mike, Jordan, and myself in the garden of our backyard that Shyla first saw Jordan. My brothers were tumbling around the yard playing hide-and-seek as Lucy yelled out that her azaleas were off-limits. Other grills in the neighborhood were lit and the smell of charcoal and grease and flame-licked steaks coalesced to make a one-time scent that would always smell like summer days to whoever inhaled it—along with the lavender and horsemint trampled by the children rushing to conceal themselves. My father, who had not attended the game, had poured himself a bourbon in a silver loving cup in his book-lined office and would continue to drink until he lost consciousness sometime that evening. His absence always took up as much room as his presence, and I would periodically look to the back door, every nerve ending alert, dreading my father’s sudden appearance.

  My mother, pretty with her children around her, loved feeding me and my friends after our games, not minding the fragrant sweat that lifted off our uniforms, and loved her garden and her house and her neighborhood and the sight of the light-infused river that curved by our property and out past the town. When she flipped the first batch of hamburgers, she noticed Shyla looking over the gate from behind the ivy.

  “Get in here, girl,” she called out to Shyla. “I’ll fix you a hamburger and Jack’ll introduce you to Jordan. He’s the new young stud who just moved here.”

  It was hard to tell who blushed harder, Jordan or Shyla, but she joined the picnic table and laughed as we told stories about the game while her father began to play the piano in the background. It was her father’s favorite form of disapproval. He went to his piano whenever he discovered her laughing among her friends. He punished her with music.

  “That’s a Beethoven piano sonata,” Jordan said, cocking his head toward the music. “Who’s playing that?”

  “It’s Shyla’s father,” my mother said.

  “He’s wonderful, Shyla,” said Jordan.

  “I’ll take Elvis any day,” Capers said to laughter.

  When Capers and Mike left on their bicycles, dusk had fallen on the garden and my mother had gone in to get the younger children ready for bed. The music of George Fox continued without a pause and the notes of a Bach sonata fell among us like flung coins. Jordan and Shyla were talking about the pieces of music they loved the best and I was growing touchy, feeling ignored. Then I noticed that Jordan had stopped talking and was studying Shyla’s face in the ever-changing yet still diaphanous light.

  “Jack, you guys are idiots,” Jordan said. “You didn’t see it, did you? It was right in front of you all the time. None of you had a clue.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  Jordan rose off the bench and went over to a frightened-looking Shyla. Carefully, Jordan took off her glasses and set them down on the picnic table. He undid the braid that held Shyla’s hair in place and let her luxuriant dark hair fall over her shoulders. Though she had stiffened, Shyla had not uttered a word of protest.

  “I’m an only child, Shyla, and I do my mother’s hair whenever my father isn’t around. My God, your hair is marvelous.”

  Her hair was a black winding river flowing through the dying light. He stroked that hair with his fingernails and it was as though he were digging his hands into a vault of black jewels. Too late, I saw it. Too late, I discovered what Jordan had found on the first day he ever met Shyla Fox.

  Sitting down beside her, Jordan reached up and touched Shyla’s face and smoothed the skin near her eyes and traced the line of her jaw and her cheekbone. I knew what Jordan was going to say long before he said it. I wanted to shout it out, but I did not have the right since I had not seen what had always been in front of me.

  “You missed it, Jack.” Jordan said again. “All you guys missed it. Shyla doesn’t even know it. Do you, Shyla?”

  “Know what, Jordan?” she asked.

  “You’re so beautiful, Shyla,” he said. “You’re the prettiest girl in this town.”

  “No, no,” Shyla said and she h
id her face in her hands.

  Jordan did not take his eyes off her. “You might as well get used to it, Shyla. You’re gorgeous. Not a girl in this two-bit town can hold a candle to you.”

  Shyla got up and ran toward the music of her house. But she had heard Jordan’s words and could not sleep that night when she thought of them. Later, in the first year of our marriage, she told me that her life began at that moment.

  “Your life didn’t begin until Jordan,” I said, as we lay in bed years later.

  “I was in an insane asylum that year, Jack. The lady came that year.”

  “They never did figure out what that was all about,” I said, breathing the smell of Shyla in as we talked in darkness.

  “My mother knew who the lady was from the very beginning,” Shyla said. “It was part of a story from the war that she told me.”

  “What’s the story?”

  “I don’t remember. I’ve tried, but nothing’s there.”

  “Who does your mother think the lady was?”

  “It’s not important, darling.”

  “It’s important to me. I’m your husband.”

  “My mother told me who it was on the first day she came,” Shyla said. “It terrified her.”

  “The name of the lady?” I insisted.

  Shyla kissed me, then rolled over to go to sleep.

  It would be many years before I would put the pieces together and realize that Shyla had seen the lady of coins.

  Chapter Thirty

  I felt shaken every time I approached Shyla’s front door. I could take no comfort, nor sense any touch of homecoming, when I brought my daughter to the house where her mother had played out the days of her childhood and had grown into the prettiest suicide the town had ever known. Her body lay between the Foxes and me and there seemed to be nothing we could do about it. We kept our meetings brief but cordial. Leah’s sheer exuberance and goodness bound us in an alliance that we all recognized as a valuable result of my return to Waterford. Since Leah had a need for us to love one another, we accommodated her as best we could. Ruth and I kept our discussions businesslike and friendly, while George and I kept out of each other’s way and acted as though we had an unspoken agreement to keep our contempt for each other under wraps. Our civility made the enmity between us seem less radical.