Beach Music

by Pat Conroy

“I can’t tell you that,” Mike said. “We’re still in negotiations. He’s like trying to pin down the Holy Ghost. But I think this is the breakthrough for our little film. He wants a confrontation with Capers.”

  “Why did he get in touch with you?” I asked.

  “He finally agreed to let me buy his life story,” Mike explained. “I think he wants to turn himself in. If you ask me, I bet he needs the money for his legal defense.”

  “Mike,” I said, catching my friend by the wrist, “if you or Capers try to have Jordan arrested, they’re going to find you both floating face down in the lobster tank at Harris Teeter.”

  “I’m on your side in this, man,” Mike said. “Capers wouldn’t think about crossing me.”

  “Be careful with this,” I warned. “Half this party attended Jordan’s memorial service in 1971. They still think he’s dead.”

  “These are good Christian people,” Mike said, his eyes surveying the party. “Resurrection should be an easy concept for them to swallow.”

  “Who else is going to be there?”

  “Negotiations are still ongoing,” Mike said. “I’ve told you more than I’ve told anyone. Keep Thursday open.”

  “I can’t. I’m going to Fordham’s Hardware to buy fertilizer for my African violets.”

  “You and Ledare come together,” said Mike, ignoring me. “I’ll call with the details.”

  “Do people in Hollywood ever tell you to get laid, Mike?” I asked.

  “People are terrified of me in Hollywood,” Mike said and his tone was informational, not hostile. “The maggotry can offer no higher compliment.”

  “I’ll see you Thursday,” I said.

  “I was a nice kid, wasn’t I, Jack?”

  “You were wonderful. There’s never been a nicer boy,” I said.

  “You don’t like what I’ve become, do you?” Mike asked.

  “I sure don’t.”

  “Not even gravity can stop a free fall, Jack,” Mike said, his voice odd with its slight furor of regret. “I once saw myself differently. A young man on the move. A man of distinction and accomplishment. Then I started watching the movie of my own life and was horrorstricken by what I saw. I embarrass my own mother.”

  “Be nicer, Mike. We’re Southerners. There’s a lot wrong with that, but nice comes easy to all of us. It’s who we are.”

  “Ah!” Mike said, his attention drawn to a 1968 Volkswagen convertible that was once yellow, but was now unwashed and sun-bleached. “Look what’s coming down the Avenue of Oaks. Didn’t you drive that car in college?”

  “It’s been passed down to all my brothers. John Hardin’s got it now. He’s been making a present for Mom,” I said.

  A piece of furniture covered with blankets hung out of the convertible as John Hardin navigated the vehicle between parked cars until he reached the center table, where Lucy was holding court. The crowd was smaller now, but her dearest friends were still in attendance and the bartenders were still busy mixing drinks on two sides of the plantation house. Leah was sitting beside Lucy as she entertained the folks at her table with a series of stories that charmed with their wit, yet contained not a trace of rancor. Leah watched Lucy mesmerize her audience by halting in mid-sentence and raising a single, quizzical eyebrow in abbreviation before delivering her punch line. At home, Leah tried this technique on me, but could not arch one eyebrow without the other following suit. As Leah watched, Lucy’s athletic eyebrow rose, aimed at John Hardin’s car as her son made his way to her. John Hardin had the power to unnerve my mother, but her love for him, her wounded baby, was incontestable. She tried not to let her agitation show as he greeted her and her friends with his suspicious but palmy effusions. He had finished his gift and timed it perfectly to present it to her at her party. The crowd applauded as she rose and walked over to the car, her arm holding his. John Hardin still glistened from the sweat of his labors.

  He possessed a theatrical side to his nature that could come off sometimes as bizarre and other times larger-than-life. With a showman’s sense of timing, he made Lucy cover her eyes and one of the Ramblers, catching the spirit of the moment, accompanied the unveiling with a drum roll. Showing enormous flair, John Hardin pulled off a series of tarpaulins and blankets that were tied around his gift, then hesitated when he was about to take off the final layer. He gave it a yank, then lifted his present out of the backseat and laid it at his mother’s feet, not noticing, at first, the gasp of surprise that exploded from the crowd.

  John Hardin had made a coffin for Lucy from an oak tree that lightning had killed on the back side of the Isle of Orion. He laid the coffin out on the grass and demonstrated the workmanship to Lucy, moving her hand across the deeply polished grain of wood as though he had made her a violin from the most delicate, sweetest-smelling woods. The coffin shone and you could see the grain of the oak where the saw had cut and left its mark. I saw that she, too, had received a shock when John Hardin had lifted the last blanket covering his gift, but she had recovered faster than anyone else and knew that in John Hardin’s proscribed and shaken world, this coffin was the love note of a schizophrenic son who could never tailor his inarticulate, stumbling gestures of ardor to the mainstream.

  Dallas shook his head and said, “He also brought her three gallons of embalming fluid.”

  “Look at the workmanship,” Dupree said admiringly. “It’s perfect. John Hardin ought to be building yachts.”

  “I’d like to say something witty,” Tee said, moving over to be with us, “but I’m the slow-witted brother. I’ll think of something hilarious I could’ve said, but it’ll be two months from now when I’m getting off an interchange on I-26 or trying to get money from an instant banker when I know my account’s overdrawn. I know you boys’ve already said six or seven lines that are drop-dead funny and you’re waiting for me to weigh in with just one. I can’t. Dad’s sperm weakened as he aged. Mom’s eggs were old and cracked when John Hardin and I came along. Let me just say, I think it’s weird to give your mother a coffin when she’s got cancer. Yeh, that’s my statement to the press. Give it to any wire service you’d like.”

  “He saw a real need,” Dupree said. “It may be a bit odd. But it sure saved Dr. Pitts a lot of cash.”

  “Poor Mom. What a trooper,” Dallas said. “Now she’s got to thank John Hardin like he just bought a wing of a college and had it named after her.”

  Lucy stood on her tiptoes and kissed John Hardin on the cheek and pulled him tightly against her. She put his forehead against hers and smiled at him until he blushed. Then Lucy stepped back, looked at the coffin, and played to the crowd. “Who gave my secret away? It’s just what I wanted and I can’t wait to try it on.”

  The laughter of the crowd was relieved and grateful. They cheered Lucy’s quickness, her deftness at diffusing the situation.

  John Hardin surprised us by responding. “I wanted to give my mother something that few sons have ever given their moms. Most of ya’ll know that I’ve caused my mother great worries because I’ve suffered from things beyond my control. I worried that my mama would think I made this because I thought she was going to die soon. That’s not it at all. Mama always taught her children that words were pretty, but anyone could talk. She said, pay attention to that man or woman who acted, who did, who performed. She taught us to trust in things we could see, not that we heard. I almost die myself when I think of my mother not being here. I can’t stand it. I can barely speak about it. But when your time comes, Mama, I want you to know that I made this coffin loving you every minute. I cut the tree down and took it to the sawmill, and sanded down every inch of wood. I polished it until I could see my face in its reflection. My brothers put this party together and I didn’t help them a bit. I was doing this. I was afraid it would upset you and your friends. But I pretended that I was building the house you would live in forever, the house you’d be in when God came to get you.”

  Lucy hugged her son again and John Hardin wept against her shoulder as the cro
wd cheered even louder. Then, he broke away from her and with his enormous strength, he lifted the coffin as easily as if it were a surfboard, returned it to the backseat of the convertible, and drove out of the vast backyard without even tasting the barbecue.

  “Upstaged by a schizophrenic,” Dallas said. “The story of my life.”

  “No,” I said. “What we just saw was more. The party just had a perfect ending.”

  Chapter Thirty-four

  So, Jack.

  “You think you want to know what happened to me during the war? In your innocence you believe it will provide answers, the hidden clue, the reasons why poor Shyla went off that bridge in Charleston. You think the bridge that took Shyla is connected to the gates of Auschwitz, don’t you, Jack? In your life everything’s a recipe. Just follow the directions in order, be careful with the measurements, do not experiment, time everything, and all can enjoy a perfect meal in a safe American home. But you think I left an ingredient out. Once you have it, you can hold it in your hands, weigh it, smell it, catalog it, add it to the recipe, and voilà, throw it in the stockpot, the recipe for the death of Shyla Fox will be complete.

  “Got some time for hell, Jack? Let me give you a brief biography of worms. The worms of Europe were the fattest in the world during those years. I will walk you into the corridors of hell and I believe you will find my tour memorable and complete. I was there once, given an all-expense-paid trip by the unsmiling travel agents of the Third Reich. You like jokes, Jack, you always have and I expected you to smile when I said that, but no, you remained grim. No sense to be so serious. You and Shyla always told me that. The past is past. Let bygones be bygones. Okay. So you will not laugh. One promise though. You must sit through the whole story. No time out for vomiting. No tears. I will try to strangle you myself if you dare shed one Christian crocodile tear over the deaths of the ones I loved. Agree?”

  “Agree,” I said.

  “So, Jack.

  “We come together at last. You and I with our years of contempt for each other; no one else knows how deep it is or how long it has existed between us. I hated you for reasons you could not help, reasons unknown to you. How could you know you look like the son of an SS man, a panzer man, some pilot from the Luftwaffe? Blue eyes sing to me only a song of death. Blue eyes met my family on the platform of Auschwitz. Your blue eyes grew up next door to my house in Waterford. With blue eyes, Mengele pointed left and sent my whole family to the gas chamber. Shyla, too, went to the left when she walked into your arms.

  “You have never met an artist like me. No, an artist as I once was. I rose out of the long traditions of Europe where artistry runs deep in the marrow of the selected few. Early, I indentured myself to the five horizontal lines where black notes were written on a sheet of music. It is a world of signs and notations that speaks to me with perfect clarity. It is a place of time signatures, fermatas, ledger lines, grace notes, and demisemiquavers that are the common tongue and heritage of musicians all over the world. It is something you know nothing about. As for music, you and your whole family are perfect idiots. It is something I cannot imagine being without. For without music, life is a journey through a desert that has not ever heard the rumor of God. In music’s sweet harmony, I had all the proof I needed of a God who held the earth together between the staffs, where the heavens lay. Here, he marked all the lines and spaces with notes so perfect that they praised all of his creation with their beauty. Once I thought I was good enough to play even the music that God had written and coded secretly in the alignment of stars. At least, this is how I was taught to think. Look at the stars sometimes. They are only notes. They are music.

  “Ah! The Holocaust, Jack. Yes, that word again. That stupid word, that empty vessel. I am so sick of that word. It is an exhausted word that means nothing, and we Jews have shoved it down the world’s throat and dared anyone to use it improperly. One poor word cannot bear that much weight, yet this poor word must stagger under the load forever. The tracks of all the cattle cars, the moans of all the old people as they felt their own shit run down their legs in the befouled darkness, the screams of young mothers who watched as their infants died in their arms, the terrible thirst of children during the endless transits, the killing thirst, the thirst unforgettable until the millions rushed toward the ceilings of gas chambers ripping off their bloody fingernails as the gas killed them like insects … Holocaust. One English word should not be required to carry so many human hearts.

  “We are not survivors. None of us. We were dice. We were thrown, hurled into the mouth of hell, and we learned that a human life was as worthless as a horsefly. Maggots hatching in excrement had a better chance of survival than a Jew caught up in the machinery of the Third Reich. The Nazis had a genius for death. When the war began I had never seen a man die. Before it was over, I had come to terms with death, begging him to deliver me from a world beyond nightmare. I learned that nothing is worse than death’s refusal to come. But death does not heed the wishes of mere dice. Dice just roll and come up with a number according to chance. But dice cannot feel. Dice are simply thrown, cast into the abyss. I can tell you how to find your way around in nothingness. I have the map in my possession, Jack. All the street names are covered with blood and the streets are all cobbled with the skulls of Jews. You are a Christian, Jack, and should feel right at home in this place. I hate your Christian face. I am sorry. I always have and I always will.

  “The killing of the Jews, the roundups, the unimaginable savagery, the unimaginable made commonplace. The Holocaust was a Christian production from first to last. Sometimes, it was strictly a Catholic one. It all began with an observant Jew, this Christ. This same Jewish Christ has seen millions of his brothers and sisters killed in his name. This Christ who was circumcised, who kept faith with Jewish law to the letter, whose followers hunt down Jews like microbes or vermin. Even the cries of our children cannot move the Christian heart. The crying of our babies enraged the German soldiers. Babies. Their lack of control was an affront to the Reich. They were lucky when they made it as far as the gas chamber doors.

  “You hate my eyes, Jack. Everyone hates my eyes. Because they are cold. Dead. You think I do not know this? I have a mirror. I avoid my eyes even when I shave. These eyes died in my head a long time ago and were forced to go on living because my body was alive. I can force myself to remember nothing. But my eyes saw, and there are bodies hung on meat hooks just behind my retina. My eyes became tinny and opaque from overexposure to horror. My eyes are repellent, not because they long for rest, but because they long for oblivion.

  “It is all cliché now. Who has not heard this story a thousand times before? Jews cry out ‘we must never forget’ and then proceed to tell the same tale over and over again so repetitively, so desperately, that the words unravel around the edges, grow indistinct, and even I want to cover my ears and say ‘shut up’ to whoever is speaking. I am afraid that a time will come when our story cannot be heard because it has been told too often. It is a cliché because of German exactitude. Once they settled on the machinery of death, the Nazis did not deviate in their methodology. They entered every city, town, and shtetl with a careful blueprint for the destruction of Jews. All of us tell the same story. Only small details change.

  “I was not born among Jews like you know here in Waterford. My father was a Berliner who fought for the Kaiser and who was wounded and decorated for his courage at the Somme. My mother’s people were musicians and factory owners famous throughout Poland. These were people of the world, Jack, who had tasted the very best Europe had to offer. The Jews of Waterford are descendant from the dregs of Russian and Polish Jewry, the ones who lived out their lives unlettered and unschooled and smelling of raw potatoes and herring going bad. Why do you raise your eyebrows at me? You must understand this or you will understand nothing about me.

  “Ruth is a descendant of such people. They were peasants who were peddlers and woodcutters who spoke Yiddish by day and searched their body hair for li
ce at night. In America, they would be like the black ones, the Schwarzen. I make no judgment. But this is who Ruth is and who I am. These are the origins. The history of Europe and my family conspired to make me a musician. I composed my first sonata when I was seven. At fourteen, I wrote a symphony in honor of my mother’s fortieth birthday. There is not a family in South Carolina as cultivated as the one into which I was born. I say this for definition’s sake. There is no arrogance in my claim, just fact. Europe marked my family in its depths. It enfolded us in a culture that was a thousand years in the making. America has no culture. She is still in diapers.

  “I had four sisters, all older than me. Their names were Beatrice, Tosca, Tonya, and Cordelia, not Jewish names you will note, but names chosen with discrimination from the worlds of literature and opera. Laughter followed them wherever they went. All married well, brilliantly. They seemed like young lionesses to me, strong, willful, and they refused to let my mother say a single harsh word to me. Whenever my poor mother would try to scold me, these sisters would surround me in a protective circle, their silk dresses brushing up against me, their tiny waists eye level, their hands caressing me and stroking my hair, their four voices arguing with my poor outnumbered mama. My father would read the paper, amused, as though he were watching the latest comedy from Paris.

  “We were not good Jews; we were good Europeans. My father’s library was breathtaking to behold with its leather sets of Dickens, Tolstoy, Balzac, and Zola. He was well schooled and brilliantly polished. As a factory owner, he was beloved. He avoided crassness, authoritarianism, and from his vast reading he knew that the happiness of workers would come back to him a thousand times in the riches that contentment always brings.

  “My family attended synagogue on the High Holidays only. They were humanists, rationalists. My father was something of a freethinker, a man with his head in the clouds when he was not adding columns of numbers or ordering supplies for his factory.