Beach Music

by Pat Conroy

  “Why here?” Mike asked rhetorically. “Because I thought in this theater, we could come together as though we were in a play, a drama that we will write together, tonight. I have brought two mystery guests to the Dock Street. This play will have surprises, but it will also have resolution. All of us will vote at the end of this performance. The man on trial has given me his permission to allow each of you to cast a vote deciding his fate.

  “Ah! I see you’re interested. Intrigued, perhaps. Hooked. I would give you the rules, but there are no rules. You are going to be asked to do nothing more or less than sit in judgment on the past. All of you except Betsy were either participants in the events we are about to describe together or witnesses. Some of you are the stars of this production, but all of you helped move the action in some way. Hamlet would not be Hamlet without Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and this story would be incomplete without each of you.

  “Everyone knows that Capers, Jack, and I were inseparable growing up. When I think of friendship, these are the two names that come to me first. Jack and I have grown apart and this hurts me more than I can say. I think it is also safe to say that Jack hates Capers, or at least dislikes him very much.”

  I sat in my place across from Capers and looked directly into his eyes and said, “Hate’s the word, Mike.”

  Capers’ wife, Betsy, who was seated next to her husband, said, “I told you from the beginning, Mike, I don’t like this at all. I won’t sit here and let my husband be criticized by a fake sous-chef.”

  I smiled and said, “I like you for your mind, Betsy. I wept during that last beauty pageant when you played ‘Ode to Joy’ on the kazoo.”

  “Don’t bully my poor wife, Jack,” Capers said. “It doesn’t become you.”

  My father rapped his gavel on his desk at center stage and said, “That’ll be enough, son.”

  “You don’t get it,” Capers said. “I still love you, Jack. That’s what this evening’s all about.”

  “Then it’s going to be a long evening, pal,” I said.

  The gavel came down again. “I want order here.”

  Again, the gavel hammered against the oak desk and this time I kept quiet before my father’s red-faced fury.

  General Elliott stood up from where he sat, every inch the military man, his bearing authoritarian, fractious. He still looked as though he could swim a river and cut the throat of every guard near an ammo depot.

  “This evening’s about my son, isn’t it?” he asked Mike.

  “What happened to Jordan is central to everything, General. All of us know that. If the Marine Corps hadn’t stationed you on Pollock Island, none of this would’ve happened. Jack and Capers would still be best friends. You and Celestine wouldn’t be getting a divorce. I think it’s possible that even Shyla might be alive today, though that may be a stretch. But Jordan coming to town changed everything. He not only became our best friend, he became our destiny.”

  “If you know anything about the whereabouts of my son, then you are required to report it to federal authorities. If you know where he is, you could be accused of harboring a fugitive. I’ll turn you in myself, Mike, and you know I’m as good as my word.”

  “Shut up,” Celestine said.

  The judge rapped the gavel once more, a single, echoing note of order. The general turned again toward Mike. His voice was so pained it was as if he were addressing the commander of a firing squad.

  “If you know the whereabouts of my son, you have a moral obligation to report that information to the authorities,” he said.

  From behind the curtain at stage left there was a slight movement and Jordan Elliott, immaculate in his Trappist robes, walked to center stage. Another monk and Father Jude accompanied him partway, then took their seats at the side of the stage in the shadows.

  “Hello, Dad,” Jordan said to the general. “You never did know what happened. You know all parts of the story except mine.”

  “Two innocent people died because of you,” the general said, his astonishment at the sight of his son removing some of the edge in his voice. “Instead of a soldier, I raised a fugitive and a weakling.”

  “None of us knew it then, Dad,” Jordan said, “but you had raised a priest.”

  “My Church would not accept a murderer at the altar,” said the general, staring at the other two priests on the stage.

  The abbot rose and went to stand beside Jordan, then said, “I met your son in Rome when he was a novice. I became both his sponsor and confessor. The forgiveness of sins is central to the profession of the Roman Catholic faith. Among the Trappists who have come to know him, your son is considered a good man by all and a saintly man by some.”

  “He’s a disgrace to his country and his faith,” the general said. “Who considers him a saint?”

  “His confessor does,” the abbot said, bowing and returning to his seat.

  “I did not give you permission to sit down,” the general said.

  The abbot wiped his brow with his sleeve and said, “I don’t need your permission to sit, thank you, General. You, sir, have retired and your rank is merely decorative. I am presently the abbot of Mepkin Abbey and my authority bears the weight and imprimatur of an unbroken two-thousand-year spiritual reign. And do not raise your voice to me again, sir. Your son is here at my suggestion and forbearance and I can take him away from here and hide him in places you’ve not dreamed of on this globe.”

  “Vatican II,” the general sneered. “That’s when the Church went wrong. That fat Pope who couldn’t do a chin-up if his life depended on it got every liberal-thinking dildo and dandy he could dig up, got them together at Vatican II to dismantle everything that was true and unreplaceable in the Catholic Church. When the Church was stern the Church was good. I loathe this new, limpwristed, feel-good, touchy-feely Church where the priests and nuns screw like mink and play the guitar at High Mass singing ‘Kumbaya.’ ”

  My father hit his desk again and said, “You’re wasting time, General. You’re rambling. It’s time to move forward.”

  “There’s one more mystery guest to present,” Mike said. “Many of you won’t know this guest except as legend. If you read the papers during our college years at Carolina, you’d recognize his name. Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce you all to ‘Radical Bob’ Merrill, the leader of the Students for a Democratic Society at Carolina from 1969 to 1971.”

  As I turned to watch Bob Merrill walk onto the stage behind me, I had a terrible realization that this night was going to be harder and more destructive on everyone than Mike had ever dreamt. I thought I hated Capers Middleton more than anyone in the world, but I had forgotten all about Radical Bob Merrill. Radical Bob had made a cameo appearance in all our lives, did incalculable damage, then dropped out of sight.

  Merrill walked over to Capers and the two men embraced. Bob then came across to Jordan and he embraced the priest. Turning to me, he extended his hand warily.

  “If I take your hand,” I said, “then the next stop’s your throat.”

  “You should really try to grow up, Jack,” Bob said. “It’s time to let bygones be bygones.”

  “When you accepted this invitation tonight, Bob,” I said, “did you figure out how you were going to get out of this theater without me kicking the shit out of you?”

  The hammer sounded again, the judge cleared his throat, and Mike moved between the two of us.

  “Who is Radical Bob?” my father asked.

  “Radical Bob was the original leader of the antiwar movement on campus that swept us all up in its activities,” Mike explained.

  “Where is all this leading, Mike?” my father asked.

  “Judge,” Mike said, delighted at his cue. “I can’t answer that question until we come to the very end of this production.”

  Ledare stood up and faced Mike. “What do you get out of this, Mike? You’ve always been generous, but you’ve never been generous to a fault.”

  “Thanks for that sterling recommendation, darling,�
� Mike said. “But Ledare is right. I get the rights to Jordan’s story for arranging this evening. If we decide that Jordan is guilty, then he’ll turn himself in to the proper authorities on Pollock Island. Capers has offered his services as an attorney if Jordan is prosecuted for his crimes. Free of charge.”

  “So Capers will look heroic to the voters of South Carolina,” Ledare said. “ ‘Middleton to Defend Killer Priest, Boyhood Friend.’ ”

  “Cynicism makes you less pretty, dear,” Capers said, smiling.

  Ledare asked Jordan, “You agreed to let Capers be your lawyer?”

  Jordan shook his head. “It’s a nice offer, but it’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

  “If he defends you, I hope you get the electric chair,” I said.

  “Jack, Jack,” Capers said. “People’ll get the idea we’ve had a falling out.”

  “Mike,” I said, rising out of my seat. “You get a movie out of this. Capers gets to be governor. Jordan, maybe, gets to go to jail. Tell me, why this stage? This setting? With friends and enemies gathered together in the same room? This could be settled privately. If Jordan is happy as a priest, then let him be happy. Leave him in peace. Let him walk off this stage and return to wherever he’s come from. You’ve put Jordan in great jeopardy. And why? For one of your movies? For Capers’ election?”

  “No, Jack,” Mike said. “I’ve noticed over the years how few times I’ve actually felt a part of a moment, electric, with every cell dazzled and tingling, with my whole body burning as though I were about to burst into flames. Listen to all of us breathing here. Feel the tension. This promises to be a night that none of us ever forgets. Our history surrounds us and tortures us. Yet there was once love that traveled among us, lighting us up and lighting our way. Tonight, I want us to find out together what happened to that love and why hatred can take the place of love with such ease.”

  “How do we start?” Capers asked.

  My father hammered his gavel and said, “Whoever wants to speak must come to this witness chair. Whoever speaks must tell his or her truth, just as if this were a real court.”

  “Our stories are all so different,” Ledare said. “I’m not the same person I was in college. I hate the girl I was.”

  “Then tell us about that hatred,” Mike said. “All of us will tell our stories. There will be no order to the telling. Our stories will form some kind of truth that none of us at this moment grasps. All of our voices will form one story line. None of us can be hurt in any way by what is said here … except Jordan Elliott. But if we come to some truth about Jordan, I think we can come to the truth about each of us, about what we did during that time.”

  Mike snapped his fingers and the lights went out in the theater, leaving only the stage bathed in bright illumination. For a moment there was complete silence until the gavel rapped and Mike said, “We return now to the Vietnam War. President Nixon is in the White House. The country is at war with itself. The campuses around the nation are temples of rage. In Columbia, South Carolina, we are in the middle of our college lives. We are Southern. We are basically apolitical. The war is popular in our state, because South Carolina is conservative. Yet something is taking place at the university. The antiwar movement is taking hold and growing day by day. But we are still preoccupied with having dates for the football games and getting jobs after graduation.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I suggest to all of you that we walked into the history of our times without guile or preparation. We were sweet-natured, fun-loving, hard-drinking, fast-driving, quick-talking kids from Waterford. We could dance all night and often drove down to Myrtle Beach to do just that. The boys were all handsome and the girls were all pretty. We played hard, we laughed loud, and we were all in love with ourselves and our world. Then the larger world tapped us on the shoulder and introduced itself. Tapped hard. Made its presence known.

  “Let us begin. Please don’t stop until we listen to everyone.”

  Through a chorus of different voices and unique perspectives the story began to unfold. My father called on people to speak and at first he was strict about allowing no interruptions. The footlights bathed him in a mother-of-pearl corona as he listened, dressed in the black robes of justice, his authority unquestioned. He looked handsome and fine; authority became him.

  He nodded first to Ledare, who understood his intent and took the witness chair. She had survived the battle we were about to relive by being a dispassionate witness, and it seemed fitting that it was she who would introduce the scene we were about to reenter.

  As I listened to her sketch the background of those times, I realized that I never thought that Ledare had been paying any attention back then. It seemed to me that she had drifted along the fringes of cataclysm, impervious to outrage and untouched by any of the fevers or seizures that shook the rest of us. Her choice was to watch and not participate, and as she spoke I realized that she had become invisible to me back then as she slipped into the role of observer while the rest of us were pulled toward the epicenter.

  “Who knew anything about Vietnam at first?” Ledare said, looking at my father. “I mean, it had finally become a real war by the time we went to college. Sure, I watched all the demonstrations on TV, but South Carolina was different. I was far more interested in my sorority and good parties than anything else. All of us were like that. I thought more about makeup than the Mekong Delta. I was that kind of girl and there’s no sense apologizing for it because that’s how I was brought up. My parents wanted me to be serious about finding a mate and I had no responsibilities after that. College, for them, was a polishing off. The biggest deal on campus in my first two years was over the lack of student parking. I mean it. That was the real sore point among the students, what really got them riled up. Then things changed. Almost overnight. Everyone noticed it. It was in the air …”

  Listening to her stirred my own memories and it took me back to those college years when I had never felt more a part of things as I made my way to classes in that comely and welcoming campus. In that first year the war was overwhelmingly popular and all of us went to hear Dean Rusk speak when the Secretary of State came to campus to defend his Democratic administration’s policies. By this time, it had become dangerous for Dean Rusk to appear on an American campus, but as Carolina students we greeted him with enthusiasm and admiration. He warned against “communism,” the most terrifying word in the English language at that time. As Southerners we could easily imagine working on a commune, but few of us could imagine living out the rest of our days as a godless people, bereft of our faith. And I thought quietly: the Vietnam War had another thing going for it in the South—we did not mind killing people or going to war against a nation we had never heard of. As Southerners we distrusted the federal government when it levied taxes or tried to interfere with the integrity of state laws, but we trusted it completely when it sent its soldiers into perilous, watery climes to kill yellow people who spoke in unknown tongues. No recruitment officer ever had trouble meeting his quota in South Carolina.

  Then, in 1968, there was the Tet Offensive, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the murder of Robert Kennedy, the Chicago Convention, a whole coloratura of horror in transit along a time line.

  As Ledare continued I remembered that our campus had been quiescent, indifferent, as students took over administration buildings at Columbia and Harvard. But hints and markings of change began to appear without the presence of any rhetoric or forethought. We started wearing our hair longer, grew mustaches, and the first beards began to appear. A gradual dressing down had begun subliminally and an SAE boy in a suit began to look odd, a museum piece drifting as flotsam along fraternity row. The daughters of small-town insurance adjusters and Baptist ministers began to dress like hippies and stopped wearing makeup except on weekend visits home. Except for Secession, no trend had ever had its birthplace in South Carolina. But the tumult on the other campuses and the antiauthoritarian tenor of the times could be measured by the length of the side
burns creeping down the faces of Carolina men.

  Girls like Ledare had their lives already written for them long before they went to college. Her beauty was safe and homegrown, not exotic like Shyla’s, not dangerous to the touch. The Tri Delts rushed her, feted her; she was practically crowned before she ever stepped onto the campus. The high school cheerleader simply changed the color of her pompons and skirt, and learned the new and much fancier routines of the college sidelines. Ledare was the kind of girl who dated the quarterback, but married the guy who edited the Law Review. During her sophomore year, she reigned as Miss Garnet and Black, and she was Homecoming Queen her junior year. Except for Shyla, few noticed she was Phi Beta Kappa and was majoring in philosophy. Throughout their time there, Shyla tried to engage Ledare in political discussions, but Ledare felt safer in the libraries and in the blazing noise of autumn football crowds than locked in the malice of debate.

  She was frightened of the times and she held back from them. Because she was so lovely, no one took the time to get to know her, including herself. And so it was in the Dock Street Theater that Ledare Ansley became the best person to describe the way we once were. She had seen the whole thing, observed it all from the top of homecoming floats. Only she could tell the point at which the everydayness of our college lives became inextricably bound up with the murderous urgencies of the war. Now, as I tuned back in to what she was saying, Ledare said it was Shyla who held the key. It was Shyla who changed the most, Shyla who turned herself into a dangerous and fascinating woman, and Shyla who brought Radical Bob into our close-knit group.

  Onstage, Radical Bob Merrill laughed out loud when his name was mentioned for the first time.

  “ ‘Radical Bob,’ ” he said. “Hearing that takes me back a long way.”

  “I agree with Ledare,” Capers said, rising from his chair and addressing the audience after he replaced Ledare in the witness stand. “It’s hard to describe Shyla in those days. I don’t remember Shyla ever talking much during elementary or junior high school. Remember how painfully shy she was back then? It seemed to hurt her physically just to be looked at. That fragility seemed to melt away in high school. She got prettier every year. Then sexier. Then you had that sheer intelligence, that brightness that could bully or tease or cajole. She could take over a room with her brain. In college, Shyla discovered she was a leader. She’d have made a great Republican.”