by Pat Conroy
“Welcome back, kid,” I said fondly.
“It makes a mom feel good when her boy flies thousands of miles to sit by his mother’s sickbed as soon as he gets the word. I dreamed you were reading me poetry.”
“I was actually reading you poetry,” I said.
“I had a terrible nightmare. One night, I dreamed your father came into my room and I felt his huge head hovering over me. That nearly brought me out of my coma.”
“He’s out in the waiting room, Mom,” I said. “John Egan’s been great to everybody. He invited Dad down. He’s been here every moment.”
“John’s my sweetie pie,” Mom said.
“I’ve got to get back to Rome,” I said. “We’re thinking about moving back to Atlanta to be closer to you, Mom. You fought hard. You were incredible.”
“Never forget that your mama is a mountain girl, and there’s nothing tougher on earth than a mountain girl,” Mom said. Then: “By the way, what’s the name of your new book?”
“The Prince of Tides,” I said.
CHAPTER 11 •
Trip to Rome, Georgia
By the sad winter of 1984, I would find myself once again in my mother’s hospital room, at Fort Gordon, Georgia. My stepfather, Dr. John Egan, sat on the other side of the bed. Mom’s chemotherapy treatments were agonizing. This round of treatments had moved like a whirlwind through her weakening body again.
I didn’t enjoy watching people hurting in general, and found it all but unbearable to be the eyewitness of my mother’s morbid suffering. Even then, I couldn’t bring myself to believe that the person I loved most in the world was dying. As she regained her strength she’d begin to tell me stories of her childhood, repeating the ones she knew I loved, then going deeper into stories I had never heard. When Dr. Egan arrived, the nature of her reminiscences would pivot and change in a revolutionary way. In telling her history to me, she was a poor mountain girl who almost starved to death in the Depression, but in John’s presence, she turned herself into a privileged belle of the old South, who knew well the languor of mansions and the smell of wax from candelabras after a ball. Transfixed, I sat in complete, awkward silence as my mother lied with convincing sincerity to the man she had wed after her storm-tossed marriage to my father. In one preposterous tale of taking a train to Atlanta (after the cotton crop was brought in by worshipful sharecroppers), her parents took their three daughters to Atlanta to shop at Rich’s department store for their new trousseaus. “Daddy wanted his girls to be beautiful,” Mom said. “He only bought us the very best.”
My stepfather, who was wide-eyed in love with my mother, said to me, “It’s a miracle that a poor Irish kid from New York would grow up to marry a Southern aristocrat.”
“Aristocrat?” I echoed.
Mom interrupted. “I may never have told you, son, but my family once owned more plantations than any of the other first families of Alabama. They stretched from the Chattahoochee to the Mississippi.”
“What happened to that fabulous race, Mom?” I asked. “I’ve met their descendants. Something bad happened.”
Looking infinitely sad, my mother said, “the Woe.”
“The Woe?” I asked.
“The Civil Woe,” my mother said, exaggerating her Southern accent, which needed no extra frills. “They lost everything. Their land. Their money—but not their pride.”
My mother had never lost her capacity to make me feel like I was living inside a badly lit, moss-draped Southern movie.
“Okay. The war was bad. Then what happened? Something bad had to happen to those Piedmont people up in Alabama,” I said.
“The Depression,” my mother replied. “One day they’re owners of banks and insurance agencies. The next day, they’re penniless and without hope.”
“But they kept their pride,” I said.
“Oh, hush,” my mother said. “No, both you gentlemen go to the waiting room. I need my beauty rest.”
John left immediately, but it took some time for me to gather up my books and journals. “Mom,” I said, “I’ve met these people. Okay, the war was bad. The Depression was bad. But when did they reach the point that none of them could read or write?”
She threw a pillow at me, but I saw her laugh.
The following day, Aunt Helen Harper arrived from Orlando for a visit with her youngest sister. From the time I can remember, I was crazy about Aunt Helen. She was lovely and poised and delicate, and as religious as any human being I’d ever met. A field of disturbance always existed between Aunt Helen and my mother, yet I never understood its origins. In the first half hour of her visit I could tell that Aunt Helen was getting on my mother’s nerves. My aunt had the temperament of a Carmelite nun, while my mother descended from a showier, flashier breed. Throughout her lifetime, my mother grew accustomed to being the prettiest girl in the room. When my aunt Helen pulled out her well-used Bible and began reading from the Gospel of Luke, I saw my mother roll her eyeballs in despair. Knowing that Aunt Helen’s stamina for Bible reading bordered on the supernatural, I let her read for ten minutes before I stood up, clapped my hands, and said, “We’ve stayed too long, Aunt Helen. Doctor’s orders.”
My mother surprised me by asking, “I’d like the two of you to do me a favor.”
“I’d do anything for you, Frances,” Aunt Helen said, using my mother’s childhood name that always irked her.
“I’ve never seen the house I was born in,” my mother said. “I’ve never been back to Rome, Georgia, since we left there. I’d like Pat to drive you there, Helen, and let him take a picture of it. It had charms. Not a mansion, but close to being one.”
“It was a nice house,” my aunt agreed.
“We’ll leave tomorrow morning and we’ll be back for dinner,” I said.
“Have you ever been to Rome, Pat?” Aunt Helen asked.
“It’s strange. I lived in Rome, Italy, for two years, but I have never seen the town where you and my mother were born.”
Taking the back roads, I passed over the lush blue highways of a rural Georgia I was unfamiliar with as Aunt Helen filled me in on the news about my far-flung family. I was happy that I was relieved of hospital duty, as I had come to hate the cancer ward of the Eisenhower hospital almost as much as my mother had. Aunt Helen updated me on my relatives in Piedmont, whom I barely knew. As we drove I listened to my aunt’s soft Southern drawl as she filled me in on the details of a large group of relatives my mother had written out of my life.
When she finished she asked me about my own family, and I invited her to visit us in Atlanta, where we had recently moved. Then she asked me about the new book I was writing, a subject she always brought up and one that caused me great discomfort.
“It’s about a shrimper’s family in Beaufort,” I said. “I’m calling it The Prince of Tides.”
“Is it filth like your other books have been?”
“Yes, according to your harsh standards, it’s trashy beyond human belief.”
“You know, I think you have talent, Pat. I’ve told friends of mine at church that one day you’ll write a book that even a Christian can read.”
“Oh, happy day,” I said.
Halfway through the trip, we stopped at a country store, and a slouching local boy came out to fill my car with gas. I went inside the store and purchased some snacks for the journey and an icy bottled Coke for my aunt Helen. When I returned to the car, Aunt Helen was talking to the boy as he finished filling the tank.
“There he is,” my aunt said. “That’s my nephew Pat Conroy. He wrote the book The Water Is Wide, which became the movie Conrack. Jon Voight was the star. He wrote The Great Santini, about my sister and her husband, and also The Lords of Discipline. You should remember this day forever.”
The boy looked at me and displayed the same amount of interest as if my aunt had introduced him to a highway underpass.
“Be quiet. Don’t do that again,” I said to Aunt Helen, as we got back into the car.
“I’m very
proud of you,” she said. “Even when all you write is pure trash.”
When we pulled into the pretty hill town of Rome, Georgia, it surprised me in its modest comeliness and pretty streets, stately architecture and well-tended yards. My mother had spoken of her hometown very few times in my life, and she cadenced these stories with a narrow-gauged layer of pain. There was not a single day of the Depression that my mother liked. It pollinated every corner of her personality with the dark ash of insecurity she would take to her death. In the rare times she mentioned Rome, her whole face darkened with memories she found all but unbearable to retell. It puzzled me that my mother never mentioned the uncommon prettiness of her native town.
“Let’s go see the house all of you were born in,” I said to Aunt Helen.
“I can’t. I don’t know where it is.”
“What? Didn’t you grow up there? You went to high school here,” I said.
“It was all so long ago,” Helen said. “So much has changed.”
In the next block we passed the Carnegie Library, and I pulled into the parking lot and told my aunt I would sift through old records of the town. She and I entered the front door and I went to the main desk and asked the librarian on duty where they stored the microfilm of old newspapers, and where they kept the census records, tax records, anything that might help me complete our assigned task. The lady delivered good advice and soon I was going through census records of the 1930s. I was looking for the name of Jasper Catlett Peek, my grandfather, and could not find mention of him in the few documents I checked, when my search was interrupted.
Looking up when I heard a swoosh of footsteps bearing down on me, I saw my aunt Helen leading the charge of a covey of librarians as they bore down on my desk armed with folders. I laid my head down on the library table and moaned out of frustration. I should have known that if my aunt bragged about me to boys pumping gas out in the country, she would have a field day with librarians.
We introduced ourselves all around, and the librarians opened their folders, all of which contained stories and articles about me.
“Ladies, I’m sorry my aunt has a big mouth. Before this trip I always thought she was a pious, demure woman,” I said.
“They have a right to know,” my aunt replied. “Remember, Pat, they’re librarians.”
The woman I took to be the head librarian said, “Mr. Conroy, we’ve been on your trail for a long time. This is serendipity. We’ve heard you have roots here?”
“Call me Pat. This is the first time I’ve ever been to your town. You need to ask my perfidious aunt any questions about my family’s ties to Rome,” I told her.
The second librarian said, “Aunt Helen, we’ve done a lot of research on this and we can’t find anybody in town who even remembers your family living here. We studied church records, club records, and tax records—you don’t seem to exist.”
Embarrassed, my aunt blushed deeply and said, “We were poor. But we were very clean.”
“But surely you remember the names of friends, or the church you attended, or the names of the preachers, or where your father worked?”
“My father had a barbershop on your main street,” Helen said. “But he was touched by the Lord when the Depression hit, and he closed the shop and started to street-preach about the end of the world. We were poor but very clean,” she added.
“Where did you live?” a librarian asked.
“I don’t remember,” my aunt said. “We were poor but very clean.”
By this time, I realized they were accidentally humiliating my aunt Helen. I jumped in. “Would you quit saying you were poor but very clean? Tell them you belong to the family they’re dying to know about.”
“It’s not a sin to be poor,” Aunt Helen said to me.
“It’s certainly not,” I said, then looking at the librarians, who were good-natured women, “but Helen and her family were filthy as pigs.”
“He’s kidding!” Helen said. “He’s just like his father.”
“I get suicidal when someone tells me that,” I said, then saw a television crew sprinting down an aisle of books.
“Congrats, Aunt Helen,” I said. “You just got yourself on the evening news.”
“I confess,” the head librarian said, “I called them.”
The news crew was skilled and professional, but before the interview started, my aunt was paralyzed with fright. Her hands trembled noticeably.
“I’ve never been on TV,” she said, “in my whole life.”
“Except for that booger coming out of your nose, you’ll do fine,” I said.
Her compact snapped open and she said, “I look all right, don’t I?”
“You’ve always been a doll,” I said, and the reporter started the interview by asking what business had brought us to Rome. I explained about my mother’s leukemia and her burning need to see a photograph of the home she was born in. The problem, so far, was that we didn’t even know where to begin looking, but the librarians were proving invaluable in helping us.
“We were very poor, but very clean,” my aunt said, repeating her mantra three or four times during the interview.
But the librarians hit pay dirt when they found my aunt’s high school yearbook and located her photograph in the senior section. There she was, her beauty a form of homage to delicacy itself.
“What a babe, Aunt Helen,” I said.
She pointed to a young man and said, “He used to court me.”
A librarian said, “He still has a law practice in Rome. Let me try to get him at his office.”
In less than five minutes a dapper, well-dressed man walked in the front door of the library and moved toward the crowd of us. Coming to Aunt Helen in a beeline, he shook her hand and said, “You’re as lovely as you were in high school, Helen Peek.”
“I wish that were true,” she said.
I shook hands with this very nice lawyer and promptly forgot his name, as I did the names of all those helpful librarians who were so good-natured about assisting us in our quest. Uncharacteristically, I had left my journals and notebooks back in Augusta, and I recorded none of the facts that we discovered that day.
The lawyer drove his own car out into the country, reminiscing about high school with my aunt Helen beside him. I followed in my car as we passed farmhouses and small run-down churches on the way to my mother’s mythical childhood home. Turning onto a dirt road, we made our way past modest houses and parked in the dirt yard of an exceedingly unprepossessing white farmhouse. A black family poured out of the house, and I got out to introduce myself to the grandmother, who was watching over five of her daughter’s babies. I explained our mission and that my mother had been born here fifty-nine years before. A tall, craggy white man made his way up the road and into the gathering, listening to me asking whether I could be allowed to visit inside the house.
Finally, he said in a friendly voice, “You a Peek, son?”
“Yes, sir, I’m a Peek on my mother’s side,” I said. “This is my mother’s sister Helen Peek.”
“Helen, I grew up down the road in that brick farmhouse. I was a little fella myself the night your sister was born. I came up to sit in the living room. I heard your mother’s first cry, son.”
“Do you remember the room she was born in?” I asked.
“Sure do. Maggie, you mind if these folks look around your house? I can vouch that they lived here.”
“The boy wants to see where his mama was born,” Maggie said. “Let me get you some iced tea.”
“My mother’s dying,” I said to the black woman, and I realized it was the first time I’d uttered this terrible phrase, even to myself.
“You close to your mama, son?” Maggie asked me.
I found myself wordless, afraid that if I even spoke I would fall apart. Grateful, I heard my aunt behind me: “Pat worships his mother. Always has.”
“That’s the way it’s s’posed to be,” the woman said as she led us through her front doorway. The house was smal
l, but neat and well cared for. The white man put his hand on my shoulder and led me to the front bedroom.
“Your mama was born in this room,” he said, “in a bed that sat exactly where that bed is today.”
So it began here in this bedroom, the woman who would become my mother, born in a rush of blood and fluid. She now lay in a hospital room and would soon be buried in South Carolina earth. The secret of her great irreparable social shame had also found its conception in this same house. I would bet my life that my mother’s embarrassment over her roots had originated in the shades of this dreary house and the inhospitable fields around it. But that girl had done all right. She became an officer’s wife, danced at a ball at the White House, shared a stage and gave a speech beside President Jimmy Carter, was the commanding officer’s wife on a base in Hawaii, had traveled the world, and saw her fictional self played by the magnificent Blythe Danner. My mother had risen from this bed and turned her life into something glamorous as well as something ruined and sad. But she and her children were the only ones to know of that sadness. That baby girl born here so long ago had produced two writers, a novelist and a poet, because of her insatiable love of reading and the majesty of words strung together in a way that tried to make magic in a hard world.
The girl born in this room had gotten up and done some things. After making our farewells, taking a few snapshots of the house, I drove back to Rome. Then I stopped off at a drugstore. I went into the store and looked at a rack of postcards. I chose one of a historical home in Rome, a proper Southern mansion of suitable grandeur.
That night when I went up to the Eisenhower hospital to say good night to my mother and stepfather, I handed the postcard to my mother.
“This is it? My house?” my mother asked. “Are you sure?”
“Five librarians helped me and Helen find this house,” I said. “They found some old records, and the residents of this house were Jasper Catlett Peek and his wife, Margaret. They listed the names of the kids. That’s the place. You were born in the upstairs bedroom. We got a tour of the house today.”
“John, it’s even more beautiful than I remember,” my mother said, handing it to her husband. “Promise me we’ll go there when I beat this thing.”