The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

  Thoughtfully, I considered the tactics of approach. Should I ignore her and mind my own business? But I dismissed that mode of operation as being inconsistent with my nosy, well-meaning character. Should I be professionally considerate, or should I directly ask her what is wrong and whether I can help her in any way?

  Because she was beautiful she would think I was making a pass at her no matter what I did or said. That was both the truth and the danger of a beautiful woman in distress, and I did not wish to add to her alarm. So, I thought, I’ll use the direct approach and admit to her right away that I’m impotent, that I’m a castrato singing in a Turkish boys’ choir, that I’m a homosexual engaged to a longshoreman, that I want to help her, that I cannot bear to see her unhappy like this.

  But I say nothing. I do not know how to make overtures of concern in New York. I am a stranger here, unfamiliar with the assizes and codes that govern human behavior in these glorious glass valleys. I decide to tell her that. Otherwise, I think, she will believe I am like all the rest of these alienated people, that I feel nothing more for her than I do when I pass a wino vomiting in a subway station. With utter certainty, I know that if she were homely or plain or even just pretty, I would speak to her immediately, I would offer to get her a handkerchief, to send out for a pizza, buy her a martini, wire her flowers, send her a Hallmark card, or beat up the husband who is abusing her. But I am dazzled by her inexhaustible beauty, rendered speechless by it. Every woman I had ever met who walked through the world appraised and classified by an extraordinary physicality had also received the keys to an unbearable solitude. It was the coefficient of their beauty, the price they had to pay.

  I laid the magazine down and without looking at her I said, “Excuse me, ma’am. My name is Tom Wingo, and I’m from South Carolina. Is there anything I can do for you? I feel terrible that you’re feeling so bad.”

  She did not answer. She shook her head angrily and cried even harder. The sound of my voice seemed to upset her.

  “I’m very sorry,” I whined. “Could I get you a glass of water?”

  “I came,” she said through tears and gasps, “to see a fucking shrink. I don’t need help from one of her fucking patients.”

  “Ah! A slight misunderstanding, ma’am. I’m not a patient of Dr. Lowenstein’s.”

  “Then why are you waiting around her office? This isn’t a bus stop.” Then she opened her purse and searched for something and I heard the rattle of keys. “Could you get me a Kleenex, please? I seem to have forgotten mine.”

  I sprinted toward the door, relieved to be of some service and grateful to be spared the explanation of how I came to be marooned in this office. Mrs. Barber handed me a Kleenex and whispered, “She’s in bad shape, Carolina.”

  Returning to the room, I handed her the tissue. She thanked me and blew her nose. It has always struck me as incongruous that stunning women should have to blow their noses, obscene even, that they too should be saddled with unseemly bodily functions. She dried her tears and in the process smeared the mascara into uneven purple deltas on her cheeks. Extracting a compact from her Gucci bag, she expertly fixed her make-up.

  “Thank you,” she said, composing herself. “I apologize for being so nasty. I’m having a very difficult time.”

  “Is it a man?” I asked.

  “Isn’t it always a man?” she said in a bitter, bereaved voice.

  “Do you want me to beat him up?” I asked, picking up a copy of the latest New Yorker.

  “Of course not,” she answered testily. “I love him very much.”

  “Just offering,” I said. “My brother used to do that for my sister and me. If anyone was picking on us at school, Luke would simply ask, ‘You want me to beat them up?’ We never did, but it always made us feel better.”

  She smiled at me but the smile dissolved into an affecting grimace. It was a measure of her beauty that the grimace only enhanced her high-cheekboned loveliness.

  “I’ve been going to my shrink for over four years,” she said, dabbing at her eyes again, “and I’m not even sure I like the son of a bitch.”

  “You must have a very good insurance policy,” I said. “My insurance policy doesn’t cover mental illness. My insurance policy doesn’t even cover physical illness.”

  “I’m not mentally ill,” she insisted, fidgeting in her chair. “I’m just very neurotic and I’m always falling in love with assholes.”

  “Assholes make up a very large percentage of the world. I’ve tried to figure it out mathematically and I think it’s about seventy-three percent and rising.”

  “In which category do you place yourself?” she asked.

  “Oh, me? I’m an asshole. A card-carrying, lifetime member. The only good things about it are I don’t have to pay dues and it puts me in a considerable majority.”

  Her laughter was harsh and unspontaneous. “What do you do for a living?” she asked.

  “I’m a high school football coach, or was,” I said, ashamed and knowing full well the incredulity of her response.

  “No,” she said. “I mean really.”

  “I’m a lawyer,” I answered, wanting to end this line of humiliating interrogation as quickly as possible. I always liked the instantaneous admiration it bestowed upon me when I confessed to strangers that I represented a particularly bold and voracious multinational corporation.

  “You don’t look like a lawyer,” she said, suspiciously looking at my khaki pants and my faded Lacoste shirt with its alligator heraldry only half attached. “You don’t dress like one either. Where did you go to law school?”

  “Harvard,” I answered modestly. “Look, I could tell you all about law school but it would only bore you. The agony of being editor of the Law Review. The disappointment I felt when I finished only second in my class.”

  “I’m sorry I was crying when I came in here,” she said, changing the subject back to herself.

  “No problem at all,” I answered, pleased that she had accepted my credentials.

  “I thought you were trying to make a pass at me. That’s why I was so rude.”

  “I don’t know how to make a pass at people.”

  “But you’re married,” she observed, looking at my wedding ring. “You must have made a pass at the woman who became your wife.”

  “No, ma’am. She tackled me in a shopping mall and worked my zipper open with her teeth. That’s how I knew she wanted to date me. I was shy around girls in my youth.”

  “I’m just a friend of Dr. Lowenstein’s,” she said, brushing her luxuriant blonde hair from her eyes with a distracted, indifferent movement of her hand. “I’m not her patient. My goddamn shrink is out of town, goddamn him. Dr. L. lets me use her for emergencies.”

  “That’s nice of her.”

  “She’s a beautiful human being. She’s got problems just like everybody else but you’re in very capable hands. Oh, shit, I’ve had a very tough day.”

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  She looked at me oddly, and said coldly, without malice, I think, “Look, when I need to have a will drawn up, mister, I may give you a ring. But I go to professionals for my personal problems.”

  “I’m very sorry,” I said. “Rest assured that I did not mean to pry.”

  She wept again, covering her face with her hands.

  Dr. Lowenstein came out of her office and said, “Monique, please come in.”

  When Monique had walked past her, Dr. Lowenstein said quickly, “I hope you don’t mind, Tom. This is a friend in distress. I’ll buy you a drink after this.”

  “It will be a pleasure, Doctor.”

  So my sister and I began our lives in Colleton as the children of the storm, the twins of Bathsheba. We did not leave Colleton County for the first six years of our lives; those years are unrecallable to me, lost in the coilings and overlays of a memory tight-fisted with the limitlessly prodigal images of a Carolina sea island. Here is how my mother remembered those early years: Her children took the busi
ness of growing up seriously and she never left our sides as we took our first steps, tongued those first ill-formed words and sang them to the river, and sprayed each other with hoses as we ran across fragrant summer lawns.

  As time passed from solstice to mild solstice in those occluded zones of my early childhood, I played beneath the distracted majesty of my mother’s blue-eyed gaze. With her eyes on me I felt as if I were being studied by flowers. It seemed to me that she could not get enough of us; everything we said or thought gave her pleasure. The sound of her laughter followed our barefooted gamboling across the grass. By her own definition, she declared that she was one of those women who adored babies and small children. In six charmed, sun-shot years she poured her heart into the peerless transformational duties of motherhood. It was not easy for her in those early years, and she saw fit to mention the hardships only every single day for the rest of our life together. But we were blond, buoyant children eager to play and to address ourselves to the secrets of the forests and to her astonishing private view of the universe. We did not know then that she was a most unhappy woman. Nor did we know she would never quite forgive us for growing up. But growing up was a misdemeanor compared to our one unforgivable crime: being born in the first place. My mother would not be a quick study. We were born to a house of complication, drama, and pain. We were typical southerners. In every southerner, beneath the veneer of cliché lies a much deeper motherlode of cliché. But even cliché is overlaid with enormous power when a child is involved.

  My father almost always came home after dark. Usually I was in bed when I heard his footsteps on the porch. I began to associate him with darkness. My mother’s voice would change and lose its music when he came. She became a different woman the moment he opened the door, and the whole environment of the house would change. I would hear their voices, low and susurrant, speaking over the late dinner, careful not to wake us, as they discussed the events of the day.

  Once I heard my mother crying and my father hitting her, but the next morning I saw her kiss him on the lips as he went out to work in the darkness.

  There were days when my mother did not speak to us at all, when she would sit on the porch, staring out at the river, at the town of Colleton, her eyes hooded with a melancholy resignation and torpor that even our crying could not banish. Her stillness frightened us. Abstractedly she would run her long fingers through our hair. Tears would flow out of her eyes but her expression would never change. We learned to grieve in silence when these seizures came upon her, gathering around her in a protective blond circle. We could not break through to her; she would not share the hurt. What my mother presented to the world and to her family was some white, impregnable essence, a filigreed and brocaded façade that represented the smallest, least definitive part of her. She was always a little bit more than the sum of her parts because there were essential parts she withheld. I have spent a lifetime studying my mother, and still I am no expert. In some ways she was the perfect mother for me; in other ways, she was the role model for the apocalypse.

  I have tried to understand women, and this obsession has left me both enraged and ridiculous. The gulf is too vast and oceanic and treacherous. There is a mountain range between the sexes with no exotic race of Sherpas to translate the enigmas of those deadly slopes that separate us. Since I failed to know my mother, I was denied the gift of knowing the other women who would cross my path.

  When my mother was sad or heartsore I would blame myself or feel I had done something unforgivable. A portion of guilt is standard issue for southern boys; our whole lives are convoluted, egregious apologies to our mothers because our fathers have made such flawed husbands. No boy can endure for long the weight and magnitude of his own mother’s displaced passion. Yet few boys can resist their mothers’ solitary and innocently seductive advances. There is such forbidden sweetness in becoming the chaste and secret lover of the father’s woman, such triumph in becoming the demon rival who receives the unbearably tender love of fragile women in the shadows of the father’s house. There is nothing more erotic on earth than a boy in love with the shape and touch of his mother. It is the most exquisite, most proscribed lust. It is also the most natural and damaging.

  My mother was from the north Georgia mountains. Mountaineers are isolates; islanders are citizens of the world. An islander greets the stranger with a wave; a mountaineer wonders why he came. My mother’s face, ethereally lovely, perpetually smiling, was a window on the world, but a window in appearance only. She was masterful at drawing out the slim, wounded biographies of strangers and equally adept at revealing not a single significant or traceable fact about herself. She and my father were oddly matched. Their life together was a thirty-year war. The only prisoners they could take were children. But there were many treaties and lulls, conferences and armistices signed before we could assess the carnage of that war. This was our life, our destiny, our childhood. We lived it the best we could and the island was lovely and kind.

  Then, suddenly, we were taken from it, and the period of my life that followed I have retained with almost total recall.

  In August 1950, much to his surprise and displeasure, my father was recalled into the service and received orders to report for duty in Korea. My mother decided it was not safe for a woman to live alone with three small children on Melrose Island and accepted my grandmother’s invitation to spend that year in Atlanta, where she lived in a house on Rosedale Road. I did not know until that time that I had a grandmother. My parents had never mentioned her name. She rose incarnate into our lives as both mystery and gift.

  We bade farewell to Grandpa Wingo in Colleton, locked up the white house, and drove toward Atlanta for our single year of city life as children. On Rosedale Road, I kissed my father’s mother for the first time as she led us up the narrow driveway toward her house. She lived with a man named Papa John Stanopolous. She had deserted my grandfather and her son during the height of the Depression and headed for Atlanta to find work. For a year she worked in the lingerie department of Rich’s department store and sent half her monthly salary back to her family in Colleton. When her divorce went through, she married Papa John a week after they met when he got lost in the lingerie department. She told him she had never been married. I listened with amazement when my father introduced us to Papa John as my grandmother’s cousins. The story would evolve over the years but evolve slowly. Our parents did not believe in telling their children too much; they only told us what they thought we should know. And by the time we arrived at the house on Rosedale Road, we had already learned to hold our tongues and keep our own counsel. My father introduced me to my grandmother, Tolitha Stanopolous, and ordered me to call her Cousin Tolitha. An obedient boy, I did exactly as I was told. When I asked my mother for an explanation that night, she told me it was none of my concern and, she would explain it when I got older.

  When we arrived, Papa John was recovering from the first of a series of heart attacks that would eventually kill him. He had a long, haggard face and a fabulous outsized nose attached to his face like a sheltering of stone. His bald head was kingly and soft. Childless, he loved us passionately from the first moment we entered that room in which he would die. He could not kiss us enough. He loved the taste and smell and sound of children. He called my father Cousin Henry.

  The house was built on a hill in a block of handsome, unpretentious houses of similar architecture. It was located in the area of Atlanta known as Virginia-Highlands but my grandmother insisted that she lived in Druid Hills, a much tonier address several blocks to the east. The house was made from a somber red brick, the color of dried blood, which gave the whole northeastern portion of the city a certain rusty, sinister patina. My grandmother’s house was composed of sharp spires and angled roofs. From the street its appearance was both comfortable and slightly wicked. Inside, the house rambled and spread. Though the rooms were claustrophobic and small, there were many of them, all with bizarre shapes, frightening corners, niches, indentations, and place
s to hide. It was a house designed to nourish the special fruit of a child’s nightmare.

  Below the house sat a gruesome, half-finished basement so hideous and fantasy-inducing that not even my mother would enter it after dark. Two walls of concrete, sweating with moisture and rainwater, contended with two walls of red Georgia earth gouged out of the hill, naked and ugly.

  The house was almost obscured from the street by four immense oaks whose branches spread over the house like a dark parasol. The trees were so large and thick that the house barely got wet during thunderstorms. But the trees were consistent with both the city and the neighborhood. Atlanta is a place where they built a city and left the forest intact. Possums and raccoons came to our back door at night and my mother would feed them marshmallows. In the spring, the air was censed with the green aroma of freshly cut lawns and as you walked beneath the dogwoods down to Stillwood Avenue, the sky above you was white as a marriage canopy.

  It was a time when I was aware of nothing but being a child. But a year is a long, instructive time and the year in Atlanta introduced me to my citizenship in the world. In the first week we were living in the house my grandmother apprehended the three of us children as we headed out the back door with string, a bucket, and a couple of chicken necks to go crabbing. We were on our way to find the sea or the tidal river around Atlanta. It was inconceivable to us that with all the pleasures of Atlanta, it was not possible to go crabbing. We could not imagine or conjure up an islandless world or a street that did not lead to the sea. But the street we would always remember—the one we would try to erase by the simple pleasure of crabbing in a city bereft of oceans—was the one that led to the foot of Stone Mountain.

  On the Saturday before my father departed for Korea, he drove us out of Atlanta before dawn, parked the car in darkness, and led us to the footpath that took us to the top of Stone Mountain, where we watched the sun rise out of the eastern sky. It was the first mountain we had ever seen, much less climbed. As we stood on the granite summit with the light coming through Georgia, it seemed as if the whole world had spread out beneath us. Far off we could see the modest skyline of Atlanta framed in sunshine. On the side of the mountain, the half-finished effigies of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson were cut into the stone, incomplete horsemen cantering through granite in a timeless ride.