Beach Music

by Pat Conroy

  “ ‘Ha!’ Satan cried out. ‘You think I should fear a dog.’

  “He was addressing God himself, still holding Lucy.

  “ ‘No. You need not fear a dog,’ God answered. ‘Except for this one.’

  “ ‘Why this one? Why this cur?’

  “ ‘Because I sent the dog. The dog does my will,’ God answered.

  “And the Prince of Darkness released Lucy and returned to his house of fire.

  “Lucy went to her knees and kissed the Great Dog Chippie and accepted her kisses in return. Then the dog led the way through flowers, toward the light.”

  That night Lucy died with my brothers and me around her. When the undertaker came to take her body the next morning, her nightgown was still wet from the tears of her five sons, two husbands, one brother, and her granddaughter Leah McCall. The world seemed to stop when she stopped breathing, but a high tide was on the way into the rivers and sounds, and the sun lit a fire on the horizon, the first sunrise Lucy had ever missed since she had slept in her seaside house.

  At her funeral Mass, one could hear an entire town mourning. Her five sons and her ex-husband, the judge, served as her pallbearers and they carried the beautiful, polished coffin her son John Hardin had made for her to the front of the church. It was a gray overcast day and Dr. Pitts wept during the whole service as did Dallas, Dupree, Tee, John Hardin, my father, and I. There was not a stiff upper lip among us. Lucy’s love had indentured and leveled us; her tenderness leaked out of us. She left us hurt and powerless, on our knees. At the cemetery, my brothers and I buried her, taking our time speaking with her as though she could hear us. I had lost the word “mother” forever, and I could not bear it.

  After listening to the condolences of the town, which had gathered at the house on the Isle of Orion, tired of mourning and depleted from the effort of smiling, I put on my bathing suit and with Leah went out for a long swim in the ocean. The water felt warm and silken and Leah’s hair glistened like a seal’s as she dove off my shoulders and rode the huge breaking waves all the way to shore. I said little but took comfort and undiminishable pleasure in the physicality of swimming, the pull of the tide, the swell and rocking of the ocean itself. Leah had learned to swim like an otter, throw a shrimp net as well as I could, and could already slalom behind a ski boat. She was becoming a low country girl and I held her close to me as we rested in the surf twenty yards from shore.

  “Look, Daddy,” Leah said. “Ledare’s calling us in.”

  On the shore, still dressed from the funeral, but barefoot now with her black dress and pearls, Ledare waved to us and we both swam toward her.

  When we reached the shore, Ledare held something in her hand. “Betty Sobol just brought this by. Someone found it wandering on the golf course. She thinks it’s been lost for days.”

  Ledare opened her hand and in it was a tiny loggerhead turtle, but pure white, the first albino I had ever seen. It was motionless, and Ledare said, “Betty thinks it might be dead. She was wondering if you and Leah would take it out to deep water. If it’s alive, she doesn’t think it could survive this surf.”

  I took the turtle in my hand and held it like a pocket watch in my palm. “No sign of life,” I said.

  “Let’s put him in the water, Daddy,” said Leah. “We’ll go as deep as we can.”

  I put Leah on my shoulders and I began walking toward the strong waves, bracing myself as they broke across my chest. I handed the turtle up to Leah and told her to keep it high above her head, away from the waves.

  “Even if it’s not alive, Leah, it can become part of the food chain,” I said.

  “Great, Daddy. Being part of the food chain.”

  The walk against the tide was a struggle, but when we were beyond the breakers, Leah handed the lifeless turtle to me. I checked it a last time, then took it and plunged it into the rich warm Atlantic waters. After a few moments, I felt the loggerhead stir once, then I felt the ignition as the turtle moved all four flippers and the life force of instinct burned through every cell in its body.

  “It’s alive,” I cried out to Leah and I released the turtle at the surface. Both Leah and I then swam beside it as the albino got its bearings, drew in a breath, and disappeared from sight. Dog-paddling, we saw the tiny white head come up six feet away from us, then plunge again. We followed the turtle until we reached water over my head. Then we swam back to shore, where Ledare was waiting for us.

  Epilogue

  The following summer, Ledare Ansley and I got married in the city of Rome and invited everyone we loved to the wedding. When we wrote the movie that Mike Hess had hired us to write, we discovered that we could not live without each other. When I finally got around to asking her to marry me, I found out that Ledare and Leah had recently picked out her wedding dress in Charleston; she had already made up a guest list and written out the announcement for the newspaper. The only person surprised by my falling in love with Ledare was me. But I had lived a long time knowing of the hardships and perils that eat around the edges of even the strongest loves. I wanted to be absolutely sure.

  I popped the question to her at a party we gave for Jordan Elliott the day before he began serving his prison sentence at Fort Leavenworth. He had received a five-year prison term for manslaughter and malicious destruction of federal property. The lead prosecutor wanted to put Jordan behind bars for twenty years for murder, but Capers Middleton worked out a deal after convincing the federal authorities that a whole monastery would testify to Jordan’s saintly attributes if the case ever came to trial. General Rembert Elliott moved to Kansas to be with his son for the entire period of his incarceration. Throughout the pretrial maneuverings, the general was fiercely protective of his son at every step. Each day, General Elliott visited Jordan in prison, and a deep affection grew between them. To their surprise and delight, they discovered how deeply a friendship between a father and son could cut through all the hurt and refuse of a troubled past. In the ruins of their lives, they had found each other and clung to each other and became reconciled even to their amazing differences.

  On the night before the wedding, Ledare and I walked up to the Janiculum with the ancient, misted city spread beneath us in a secret hive of final, rushing motion before the sun’s last light splashed along the fringes of the western hills. The last party we would ever attend without being man and wife was in preparation down there amid the pale lights that came on one by one in the many neighborhoods. I had decided that the Janiculum was the right place to give Shyla’s letter to Ledare. The letter explained some things in a clear, exact way that I knew I could never manage to express. In a courtroom long ago, it had won me the right to raise Leah after the Foxes had sued me for custody of their grandchild. It had touched me deeply, blindingly. It had let me know that I had once known a passion that very few men or women would ever know or feel or even long for in their entire lives. It was the reason I could let Shyla go, but never tell her good-bye. Now, on the night before my wedding to Ledare, I needed to break off and to let the love of Ledare perform its gentle work on my damaged, Southern heart.

  “So, here it is,” Ledare said, as I handed it to her. “The famous letter.”

  “It deserves to be famous,” I said. “You’ll see.”

  “Who’s read it?” she asked.

  “The courts of South Carolina and now you,” I said. “I won’t give it to Leah soon. She’s been through enough for a while.”

  “I’m already jealous enough of you and Shyla, of all that I think you had together,” Ledare said. “Will this make it worse?”

  “It’ll explain it. Part of it’s written about you.”

  “About me?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Ledare took the letter out of the envelope carefully. It had been written quickly and it took her a while to grow accustomed to the idiosyncrasies of Shyla’s troubled, hurried hand.

  Dear Jack,

  It shouldn’t end this way, but it must, my love, I swear to you it must.
Remember the night we first fell in love, the night the house fell into the sea and we learned we couldn’t keep our hands off each other? We couldn’t imagine then loving anyone else because of the fire we started that night. And remember the night we conceived Leah in the bed on the top floor of the Hotel Raphael in Rome? That was the best for me because we both wanted a child, the best because we were turning all the craziness and desperation of our lives into something that indicated hope between us. When you and I were right, Jack, we could set the whole world on fire with our bodies and make the world perfect.

  I didn’t tell you why I left you and Leah, Jack, but I’m telling you now. It’s crazy again. And this time it’s too much. The lady came back. The lady of the coins came back, the woman I told you about when we were kids. She only came to stare at me and have pity on me when I was a child, but this time she came back cruel. This time she talked in the voices of Germans and spat at me for being a Jew. As a girl, Jack, I couldn’t bear what my parents had suffered. Their pain touched me as nothing else ever has. I woke up every morning to their unspoken grief, their war with the world that no words could ever explain. I carried their pain inside me like a child. I sucked on it, fed off it, let it ride in my blood in shards and crystals. Never have I been strong enough to measure up to my parents’ terrible history. What they endured tortures me, moves me, makes me wild with helplessness.

  The lady of the coins is calling for me now, Jack, and I can’t resist her voice. I have no coins sewn into the buttons of my dress to buy my way out or pay anyone off. The camps call me, Jack. My tattoo is fresh and the long ride in the cattle cars is over. I dream of Zyklon B. I have to follow the voice and when I leap off the bridge, Jack, I am simply going to the pits of the starved and broken bodies of six million Jews and throwing myself among them because I can’t stop their haunting of me. My mother’s and father’s bodies lie among these slaughtered Jews and they weren’t ever lucky enough to get to die. In these pits, where I’ve always dreamed I belonged, I’ll take my rightful place. I’ll be the Jew who pulls the gold teeth from the dead, the Jew who offers her emaciated body for the making of soap to wash the bodies of the soldiers of the Reich as they battle on the Russian front. It is madness, Jack, but it is real. It’s always been the truest thing about me and I beg your forgiveness.

  But, Jack, Dear Jack, Good Jack—how can I leave you and Leah? How do I tell the lady of the coins about my love for you both? But it’s not my love she’s after, it’s my life. Her voice is so seductive in its brutal sweetness and she knows her business well. She knows I can’t love anyone when my country is the country of the altered, the obsessed, the weeping, and the broken.

  It’s for the best, Jack, the best for me. After I’m gone, please tell Leah all about me. Tell her all the good parts. Raise her well. Love her for the both of us. Cherish her as I would have. Find the mother in you, Jack. She’s there and she’s a good mother and I’m depending on you to find and honor her and raise Leah with that sweetest, softest part of you. Do the job I was supposed to, Jack, and don’t let anyone stop you. Honor me and remember me by the adoration of our child.

  And, Jack, dear Jack, you’ll meet another woman someday. Already I love this woman and cherish her and respect her and envy her. She’s got my sweet man and I’d have fought any woman in the world if she’d tried to take you away from me. Tell her that and tell her about me.

  But tell her this and I’m telling you this, Jack, and I want you to listen to it.

  I’m waiting for you, Jack. I’m waiting in that house that the sea took the first night we loved each other, when we knew that our destinies had touched. Love her well and be faithful to her, but tell her I’m getting that house ready for your arrival. I’m waiting for you there now, Jack, while you’re reading this letter. It’s beneath the sea and angels float in its corners and peek out behind the cupboards. I’ll listen for your knock and I’ll open the door and I’ll drag you up to that room where we danced to beach music and kissed while lying on the carpet and I dared you to fall in love with me.

  Marry a nice woman, Jack, but not one so nice that you won’t want to get back to me in our house beneath the sea. I hope she’s pretty and I hope she’ll love our daughter as much as I would have. But tell her I won’t give you up completely, Jack. I’ll let her borrow you for a little while. I go now, but I’ll be waiting for you, darling, in that house pulled into the sea.

  I command you, Jack, as the last cry of my soul and my undying love for you, marry a fabulous woman, but tell her that I’m the one who brought you to the dance. Tell her that you have to save the last dance for me.

  Oh, darling

  Shyla

  Ledare read the letter three times before she folded it carefully and handed it back to me. For several moments she did not speak, trying to hold back her tears.

  “I can’t love you the way Shyla did, Jack,” she said, at last. “I’m not built that way.”

  “It was a mistake to show you the letter,” I said.

  “No it wasn’t,” she said, taking my hand in hers and kissing it. “It’s a beautiful letter and a heartbreaking one. As your bride-to-be, I find it a bit intimidating. I find it unanswerable.”

  “So do I,” I said. “In some ways I’ve been a prisoner to that letter. I used to cry every time I read it. I quit crying a couple of years ago.”

  “Let’s go down the hill and have a hell of a life, Jack,” Ledare said. “Let’s love each other as well as we can. But Shyla can have the last dance. She earned it.”

  Jordan had sent a long letter from his prison cell in Leavenworth blessing our marriage and promising to say a Mass for us that same day in the States. He had learned that cells held no fear for him and that the discipline of prisons seemed almost lax to him after following the strictures of the Trappist rule for so long. He had written to me about the prison ministry the authorities allowed him to run and the courses in both theology and philosophy he taught to the inmates. He said it made him ache for humanity to see so many men in such great and ceaseless pain and it alarmed him that so few of them knew how to pray for relief of their suffering. It was not that the other prisoners were godless men that disturbed Jordan, but the fact that their belief in God gave them so little comfort. They talked to him about the stultifying emptiness of their American lives. Their spirits were bereft and undeveloped. Dreamlessness made their eyes vacant and trapped. Jordan had never met so many men in desperate need of spiritual advice.

  In one letter he had written that he was very happy. His time in prison had reintroduced him to the world and had made his commitment to the priesthood all the stronger. It had ratified and enhanced his vocation. He had turned Leavenworth into a wing of his monastery and he infused many of his fellow prisoners with the strange luminant beauty of a Trappist’s willful solitude. Jordan wrote that he prayed often and did his best to atone for the crime he committed while being a hot-blooded young man when he, along with his country, split apart along some central seam. Daily, he prayed for the repose of the souls of the young man and woman he had killed by accident, but killed nonetheless. He also sent his love and blessings and asked that he be allowed to marry us again when he got out of prison.

  I wired him that same day that Ledare and I would not really consider ourselves married until he personally blessed our union.

  The next day, on the morning of the wedding, Leah and I left the Piazza Farnese for a walk through the brown dazzling alleyways of the city where she had lived most of her childhood. I wanted one last morning with my daughter alone and Ledare had understood perfectly. When it was right, I thought as I walked hand in hand with Leah, the love between us contained elements of tenderness and reliance and secret conveyance that made it different from all other forms of love.

  Since hearing the stories of George and Ruth Fox, I often found myself looking at Leah and trying to imagine her being loaded onto a cattle car or her head being shaved before she stumbled toward the gas chambers or her small hands
raised up in terror as she was being force-marched through a village to a freshly dug pit where the machine-gunners awaited her. I drank in the beauty of my daughter and knew I would kill every German in the world before I would let them hurt my child. I could not bear the thought that the world had once been demonic enough to hunt down and exterminate children as though they were insects or vermin. Leah McCall, daughter of a Jewish woman, would have been black ash hanging over the mountains of Poland had she been born fifty years before this day, I thought, tightening my grip.

  But on this morning, I told Leah the story of Ruth Fox and her harrowing survival during World War II. I described the murder of Ruth’s family, her escape into the world of the Catholic Resistance, and her hiding in a convent until the Great Jew miraculously ransomed her out of wartime Poland and brought her to Waterford, South Carolina. For the first time I told Leah about the dress her great-grandmother had sewn for her daughter Ruth, and how that long-dead woman had hidden eight cloth-covered gold coins as buttons which Ruth was to use to buy her way out of trouble.

  As we drifted past the dark shops, I felt the power of the story grab me again as I told Leah how Ruth had concealed the coin-laden dress behind an altar where the Virgin Mary stood crowned as the Queen of the Angels and how her grandmother Ruth had prayed to this woman that she knew had been born a Jew in Palestine two thousand years ago. I told her that Ruth had believed her whole life that Mary had heard and answered the prayers of one Jewish girl who asked for her intercession in a church in war-torn Poland. Ruth had called the statue the lady of coins and it was a story that had marked Leah’s mother Shyla deeply and for all time.

  On Ponte Mazzini, overlooking the Tiber, I presented Leah with the coin necklace that Shyla had worn every day of her life, except her last one. In her will, Shyla specified that the necklace be given to Leah when she was old enough to hear the story. She trusted me to make the decision when that would be.