Beach Music

by Pat Conroy

  “When the war was over, Ruth had three coins left in her dress. She had necklaces made with each one of them. She wears one of them. Aunt Martha has another. This was your mother’s necklace, Leah. It was her most beloved possession. I’d like you to remember her every time you wear it. And remember your grandmother’s story.”

  Leah put on Shyla’s necklace and her neck and shoulders were as lovely as her mother’s. I was starting to notice the first shy ripening toward womanhood and it both touched and frightened me. I prayed that Leah would have the good fortune to fall in love with a man completely different from myself, a man less tortured and with a smaller stable of demons, one who loved laughter and language and possessed a small genius for sunniness and joy.

  “I’ll wear it every day of my life, Daddy,” Leah said.

  “Your mama’d love that,” I said. “We better be getting back, kid. You’ve got to help me get married today.”

  Leah said, “I can’t wait. It’s about time you got me a mother, don’t you agree?”

  “Yeh,” I said. “I agree. By the way, Leah. Thanks for being the kid you are. You are the sweetest, nicest, most adorable child I’ve ever seen in my life and you were that way from the day we brought you home from the hospital to right now. I didn’t do a goddamn thing except watch you in utter admiration and fascination.”

  “Take a little bit of credit, Daddy,” Leah said, studying the gold coin on the end of the necklace before looking back at me. “I didn’t grow up by myself. You raised me.”

  “It was a pleasure, kid,” I said.

  Late that afternoon, our wedding party gathered on the Capitoline hill, in a piazza designed by Michelangelo. Storm clouds were gathering and a light breeze from the Apennines suddenly turned gusty, and sheets of newspaper winged across the paving stones. The banns of over fifty couples were posted in the glass-encased bulletin boards that lined the outer wall of an ancient building that was part art museum and part wedding chapel. It was to this spot that Romans came to have their marriages legalized by the city of Rome. The banns were written down in an Old World showy penmanship. All around us, in distinct and separate groups, lovely Roman brides with their dark, nervous fiancés stood uncomfortably among their jubilant families, waiting for their names to be called in the overcast piazza. Looking around, I thought the human species was in fine shape and tried to think of something more beautiful than women and couldn’t come up with a thing. The propagation of the species was a dance of total joy.

  When our names were finally called, a loud cheer went up from our friends and relatives who had come to Rome for the ceremony. A large, rowdy contingent from Waterford had arrived the week before the wedding and it reminded me that there was no wilder crowd on earth than a group of traveling Southerners. They whooped and hollered as they made their way into the grand hall which smelled of leather and old velvet and whose high-ceilinged stateliness silenced everyone as we moved toward the solemn men, elegant and impassive as llamas, who would conduct and record the ceremony forever in the annals of Rome. The South Carolinians gathered on the left side of the aisle and my Roman friends took their seats on the right. Leah’s teacher, Suor Rosaria, was there, sitting beside Paris and Linda Shaw, and she blew me a kiss. I bowed to the Raskovic brothers, and waved to the waiter, Freddie, who had deserted Da Fortunato at noon to be at our ceremony. Several of the doctors who had cared for me after the airport massacre were there. Marcella Hazan and her husband had come down from Venice and Giuliano Bugialli drove down after his cooking class in Florence had finished for the week. Journalists and great cooks had come together to celebrate the marriage of one of their own. I took a quick, silent survey and figured that at least thirty cookbooks could be accounted for on this side of the chapel. If a bomb exploded during the wedding, I thought, the eating habits of half the world would change.

  Ledare blew kisses to our smaller South Carolinian contingent. My brothers and their families had arrived two weeks early and had traveled all over Italy in a whirlwind tour I had arranged. Ledare’s mother brought smiles to the Roman side when she waved one finger at them and drawled, “Ciao, y’all.” She and her husband had brought Ledare and Capers’ children with them. The Great Jew was there with his wife, Esther, accompanied by Silas and Ginny Penn, who had made a full and unexpected recovery from her broken hip. In Rome, she remained peevish because she thought the Italians spoke a foreign language just to be peculiar and irritate her. Dr. Pitts sat in the back with Celestine Elliott, who still had not spoken to her husband after his part in putting Jordan in jail. Three of Ledare’s suitemates from the university were there with their husbands. Mike arrived late, bringing with him the achingly beautiful actress Saundra Scott, who would later become his fifth wife. Shyla’s sister, Martha, sat in the front row with her fiancé from Atlanta.

  My father was not present and had sent a brief note explaining “… that I’m still drunk and probably always will be. I can’t make it, Jack and Ledare, and there’s no excuse for it. I just can’t. My wedding present to you is that I won’t embarrass either of you at your wedding. It’s the best I can do.”

  The magistrate performing the ceremony cleared his throat and motioned that the ceremony was about to begin. Leah moved up beside us holding a bouquet of flowers and wearing a white silk dress that made her long dark hair look like black flame against her shoulders. On her bare throat she wore Shyla’s necklace and the profile of Tsar Nicholas was as sharp as the outline of Leah’s collarbones.

  I bent down to kiss her and was surprised when I felt tears on her face. “Why are you crying?”

  “Because I’m happy, silly,” Leah said.

  Ledare and I took our places in two gilded, elaborately carved chairs. Beside us sat the best man and the matron of honor, the choice of whom had become the subject of some controversy.

  We had chosen George and Ruth Fox, and when both families had begun to object we told them the decision was not discussable.

  It had been Ledare’s idea and tears came to my eyes when she told me. Ledare had a lifelong instinct for the proper gesture and the moment of grace, and she recognized in both our lives the terrible, ineffable need for reconciliation and healing. I had told Ledare what the Foxes had endured during the war and how it had pained me that I had learned it so late. By asking Shyla’s mother to be her matron of honor, Ledare thought she was making a statement of pure love to Leah. My asking George Fox to be my best man would hopefully heal some of the old wounds and scars between us. It would also bring the spirit of Shyla into the proceedings and remind everyone of how much history and heartbreak had led to this wonderful moment when Ledare and I would pledge ourselves to each other for the rest of our lives.

  Then Ledare and I stood and looked at each other and both liked what we saw.

  When the magistrate pronounced us man and wife, our friends and families rose and gave us a standing ovation as I kissed Ledare.

  We all returned to the Piazza Farnese and had the wedding reception on the terraces of my apartment, my brothers having brought tapes full of Carolina beach music. The South Carolinians taught the Romans how to shag that night and the party did not break up until two in the morning. In an amazing show of graceful diplomacy, Dallas, Dupree, and Tee knew better than to play “Save the Last Dance for Me.” But they would tell everyone in South Carolina from that day forward that they had introduced beach music to Italy.

  I was serving cognac to the last guests when Ledare came over to tell me that she was going with her two children to take her parents back to the Hassler Hotel. I told her to let me come with her, but she pointed to all the people still lingering in the living room and said that she wanted to tuck her parents into bed. Both had drunk too much Italian wine and my brother Dupree had offered to drive and John Hardin wanted to go along for the ride.

  “But it’s our wedding night,” I said, and she stood on tiptoes to kiss me.

  “I’ll wake you up,” she promised.

  “I won’t be a
sleep,” I said. “I want to see the sunrise.”

  She smiled. “You made a good decision.”

  “Never made a better one.”

  “I’ll hold you to that,” she said.

  “That’s why I gave you that ring,” I said, pointing to her gold band.

  “And that’s why I accepted it.”

  When the party was finally over, I went up to the terrace again and looked out on the tawny, many-alleyed city. At night it looked carved from brown sugar. The two fountains spoke to each other in the pretty speech of falling water on the piazza below. I wanted to thank the city of Rome for healing me and treating me with kid gloves when I was broken on the inside. Rome had taught me that beauty alone was sometimes enough; it had sheltered and nursed me and put me back on course. I tried to find the words to thank a whole city and I looked out into the rooftops at the bright lights burning on the street along the Tiber and told myself I would one day write a love letter to Rome that would contain all the praise and thanks I could summon for my time here. There was a noise behind me and I turned to see Leah coming up to be with me.

  “I thought you’d gone to bed,” I said.

  “I was too excited to sleep,” she said as she took my hand. We looked out onto the piazza together, my daughter and I, who had made our life here for so long, looking down onto this spacious and comely piazza. I owed so much to this child and this city and I realized that words were sometimes nothing more than notes you wrote to your deepest self as you fought to articulate the splendor and the magic and the ineluctable sense of loss that you felt in the swift, disturbing hours.

  “It’s been you and me alone for a long time, Leah,” I said, as a single car passed below us in the night.

  “Too long, Daddy,” she said.

  “We’ve been like the Lone Ranger and Tonto,” I said.

  “Better than that,” she said.

  “I think so too.”

  “Daddy.”

  “Yeh, kid.”

  “I couldn’t help thinking about Mama,” she said. “I felt bad because I was really happy for you and Ledare.”

  “Don’t feel bad,” I said. “I’ve thought about her all day too.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I wanted to tell her everything about the wedding,” I said. “We used to talk about everything. I wanted to let her know about you, me, and Ledare.”

  “What would you tell her, Daddy?”

  “That I thought we were going to be all right,” I said. “Better than all right,” Leah said. “We’ll be great. We’ll be a family.”

  “You’ve always wanted that, haven’t you, kid?”

  “Uh-huh. But I wanted it for you, more than me. You were so lonely, Daddy. I couldn’t stand it that you were so alone.”

  “I should’ve hidden it better.”

  “No one else knew it,” she said. “But don’t forget: I’m your girl. There’s not much I don’t know about you.”

  A car pulled up to our building and we watched Ledare and my brothers get out of it below us. Dupree and John Hardin stripped down to their underwear and climbed in the great fountain and began swimming, Dupree going underwater, and John Hardin doing the backstroke. Leah broke free from me and ran down to join Ledare, who held their clothes.

  I laughed to myself as I watched my brothers enjoying their illegal swim. Tee and Dallas came out the front door with Leah, and Tee plunged into the deep fountain without even removing his suit. Leah joined him in her party dress and I watched it all unfold below me in a world that seemed far away, yet very dear.

  I began to fade out in this dream of a world with the rest of my life spread before me. I was grateful for so many things that they seemed uncountable.

  I wished my mother and father could have been here to share this evening with me. I tossed out a prayer to Lucy and I thanked her for loving me as well as she could. She had cherished me in her own way and she had made me feel kingly in a town where they had once laughed at her. I gave thanks to my brothers and my friends, my hometown and my home state, and my love of good food and travel and strange places. There was a fullness to my life now I was just recognizing. I had come to Rome a hurt and Shyla-haunted man and I knew now there were worse things to be.

  I heard the voices of those I loved laughing in the piazza below. I thanked the world for bringing them to me. Then I gave myself for a last time to Shyla Fox and let her spirit wash over me and forgive me my happiness.

  I thanked her to myself and apologized that I had to leave her now. Though I did not speak out loud, I told her that I had been as true to her as I knew how to be and that I would never have left her, no matter how grievous her suffering or permanent her scars. Closing my eyes, I filled up with my incurable need for Shyla again, my love for that girl who used to approach me through the secret, leafy avenues of an oak, who reconfigured my entire world by opening up the deposits of her soul for my inspection.

  “Jack,” I heard a voice call out from down below me, and it surprised me but there was my wife. Looking down, I saw that Ledare had joined her new family swimming in the dazzling fountain. She had always been a beautiful swimmer and she was side-stroking with Leah beside her. Her wedding dress clung to her, and my brothers and daughter waved for me to join them. I caught a glimpse of my left hand and was surprised to see it change forever with the ring that Ledare had bought and placed on my finger that day. I touched the new ring and it felt very much like new life.

  Before I went down to join Ledare and the others, I remembered my appointment and I smiled, knowing that one day Shyla and I would be together again. Because she had promised it and because she had taught me to honor the eminence of magic in our frail human drama, I knew that Shyla was waiting for me, biding her time, looking forward to the dance that would last forever, in a house somewhere beneath the great bright sea.

  BEACH

  MUSIC

  Pat Conroy

  A READER’S GUIDE

  A Letter to the Editor

  of the Charleston Gazette

  I received an urgent e-mail from a high school student named Makenzie Hatfield of Charleston, West Virginia. She informed me of a group of parents who were attempting to suppress the teaching of two of my novels, The Prince of Tides and Beach Music. I heard rumors of this controversy as I was completing my latest filthy, vomit-inducing work. These controversies are so commonplace in my life that I no longer get involved. But my knowledge of mountain lore is strong enough to know the dangers of refusing to help a Hatfield of West Virginia. I also do not mess with McCoys.

  I’ve enjoyed a lifetime love affair with English teachers, just like the ones who are being abused in Charleston, West Virginia, today. My English teachers pushed me to be smart and inquisitive, and they taught me the great books of the world with passion and cunning and love. Like your English teachers, they didn’t have any money either, but they lived in the bright fires of their imaginations, and they taught because they were born to teach the prettiest language in the world. I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid. They take an unutterable joy in opening up the known world to their students, but they are dishonored and unpraised because of the scandalous paychecks they receive. In my travels around this country, I have discovered that America hates its teachers, and I could not tell you why. Charleston, West Virginia, is showing clear signs of really hurting theirs, and I would be cautious about the word getting out.

  In 1961, I entered the classroom of the great Eugene Norris, who set about in a thousand ways to change my life. It was the year I read The Catcher in the Rye, under Gene’s careful tutelage, and I adore that book to this very day. Later, a parent complained to the school board, and Gene Norris was called before the board to defend his teaching of this book. He asked me to write an essay describing the book’s galvanic effect on me, which I did. But Gene’s defense of The Catcher in the Rye was so brilliant and convincing in its sheer power that it carried the day. I stayed close to Gene Norris
till the day he died. I delivered a eulogy at his memorial service and was one of the executors of his will. Few in the world have ever loved English teachers as I have, and I loathe it when they are bullied by know-nothing parents or cowardly school boards.

  About the novels your county just censored: The Prince of Tides and Beach Music are two of my darlings which I would place before the altar of God and say, “Lord, this is how I found the world you made.” They contain scenes of violence, but I was the son of a Marine Corps fighter pilot who killed hundreds of men in Korea, beat my mother and his seven kids whenever he felt like it, and fought in three wars. My youngest brother, Tom, committed suicide by jumping off a fourteen-story building; my French teacher ended her life with a pistol; my aunt was brutally raped in Atlanta; eight of my classmates at The Citadel were killed in Vietnam; and my best friend was killed in a car wreck in Mississippi last summer. Violence has always been a part of my world. I write about it in my books and make no apology to anyone. In Beach Music, I wrote about the Holocaust and lack the literary powers to make that historical event anything other than grotesque.

  People cuss in my books. People cuss in my real life. I cuss, especially at Citadel basketball games. I’m perfectly sure that Steve Shamblin and other teachers prepared their students well for any encounters with violence or profanity in my books just as Gene Norris prepared me for the profane language in The Catcher in the Rye forty-eight years ago.

  The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in Lonesome Dove and had nightmares about slavery in Beloved and walked the streets of Dublin in Ulysses and made up a hundred stories in The Arabian Nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in A Prayer for Owen Meany. I’ve been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career, all because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up every single thing those magnificent men and women had to give. I cherish and praise them and thank them for finding me when I was a boy and presenting me with the precious gift of the English language.