The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

  “The police are coming,” my mother said.

  Suddenly, the man broke a pane of glass on the door with a brick and his long arm thrust into the hole. He reached for the lock on the door. Glass cut him and his wrist began to bleed. My mother reached for his arm, trying to keep him from unlocking the door. She grappled with him briefly but he backhanded her across the chest, knocking her to the floor. Somewhere I could hear Savannah and Luke screaming but they seemed displaced and faraway, like voices heard underwater. My whole body lost feeling, like a Novocained gum. He undid one lock, then struggled to turn the key that held him away from us. He was twisting the key, a low animal whine issuing out of him, when Luke approached him, swinging a fireplace tool. Luke crashed the poker across the man’s wrist. The man shouted in pain and withdrew his arm. He tried to put his arm through the window again but Luke was there waiting for him, swinging that poker as hard as any seven-year-old kid on earth.

  I heard something behind me, the sound of my grandmother’s slippers sliding down the polished floors of the hallway. I turned and I saw her round the corner with a small revolver in her hand.

  “Duck, Luke,” she ordered, and Luke dove to the ground.

  Tolitha opened fire on that glass door.

  The giant ran when the first shot pierced a windowpane close to his head. He ran with his penis flopping against his leg. He sprinted off the porch and toward the safety of the Callanwolde woods. We heard the sound of police sirens far off on Ponce de Leon.

  My grandmother yelled into the darkness from the porch: “That’ll teach you to fuck with a country girl.”

  “Your language, Tolitha,” my mother said, still in shock. “The children.”

  “The children just watched a guy with his dick in his hand trying to get to their mother. A little language won’t hurt ’em much.”

  When it was over, my mother found me eating popcorn, watching the Ed Sullivan Show as though nothing had happened. But for two days I could not speak. Papa John had slept through the entire attack and had not even awakened to the gunfire or the coming of the police. When he wondered at the reason for my silence, my mother said “laryngitis” and my grandmother seconded her lie. They were southern women who felt a responsibility to protect their men from danger and bad news. My silence, my pathetic wordlessness, affirmed their belief in the basic fragility and weakness of men.

  For a week the police parked a patrol car on Rosedale Road and a plainclothes detective circled our home several times during the night. My mother could not sleep at night and we would find her hovering over us after midnight, obsessively checking and rechecking the locks on our bedroom windows. Once I awoke and saw her framed in moonlight, staring out toward the forests of Callanwolde. As she stood there, I noticed her body for the first time, observed in guilt and terror its soft, voluptuous features, admired the shape of her full breasts and the curve of her waist as she scanned the moonlit yard for the approach of her enemy.

  The word Callanwolde changed meaning for us, and, following Savannah’s example, we began to refer to the man as Callanwolde. “Did Callanwolde come last night?” we would ask at breakfast. “Have the police caught Callanwolde yet, Mama?” we would ask as she read to us at bedtime. It became a catchall, portmanteau word for everything evil or iniquitous in the world. When Sister Immaculata described the terrors of hell in her sweet voice, she was explaining the boundaries and perimeters of Callanwolde to me and Savannah. When my father wrote in a letter that his plane had been hit with machine-gun fire and he had fought his plane all the way back to the air base, losing oil pressure and altitude, trailing black smoke, afraid that the plane would explode in midair, we called that dreadful flight a Callanwolde. It was a specific person, a specific place, and a general condition of a world suddenly fearful and a fate uncontrollable.

  After two weeks of diligent patrolling, the police assured my mother that the man would never return to the house.

  He returned that night.

  The phone rang in the house that evening. Again we were watching television and eating popcorn. My mother answered the phone in the hallway and we heard her say hello to Mrs. Fordham, the old woman who lived in the house next door. I saw my mother turn white and watched as she put the receiver down on the side table and say in a drained, uninflected voice, “He’s on the roof.”

  We lifted our eyes slowly to the ceiling and heard the faint sounds of his footsteps walking down the slanted shingles on the roof.

  “Don’t go upstairs,” my mother said. “He might be in the house.”

  She phoned the police.

  For ten minutes we listened to him moving unhurriedly about the roof. He made no attempt to enter an upstairs window. This visit had no meaning, except to establish his credentials in our lives again and to inspire a renewed panic in our hearts. Then the sound of sirens burst far off in the city, hovered over Atlanta like the cry of redemptive angels. We heard his footsteps run across the roof and felt him enter the limbs of the huge oak that grew beside the driveway. My mother walked to the bank of windows in the music room and saw him as he reached the ground. He paused, looking back, and saw her through the window. He waved at her and smiled. Then he ran in an easy, untroubled gait toward the dark harboring forest behind us.

  The next day the police took bloodhounds through the Callanwolde forest but they lost his scent somewhere along Briarcliff Road.

  He did not come again for two months.

  But he was there even when he was not there. He inhabited each alcove and recessed corner of that house. We could not open any door without expecting him to be waiting behind it. We came to fear the approach of night. The nights he did not appear were as spiritually exhausting as the ones when he did. The trees outside the house lost their healthy, luxuriant beauty and became grotesque in our eyes. The woods of Callanwolde became his domain, his safe hermitage, and a region of inexhaustible dread in our imaginations. His face was portrayed subliminally in every window. If we closed our eyes, we saw his image imprinted on our consciousnesses like a face on a veil. He sundered our dreams with his murderous eyes. Terror marked my mother’s face; she slept during the day and roamed the house checking locks at night.

  With my mother’s permission, we moved the forty jars of black widows out of the basement and transported them with great and serious concentration to our upstairs bedroom. None of the children could bear to descend into the terrifying depths of the basement when Callanwolde was threatening the house. The basement also had a door that led to the outdoors and the police had told my grandmother that this provided the easiest entrance into the house. She was as relieved as we were when we arranged the jars of spiders in long rows on an unused bookshelf in the far corner of our bedroom. When Sacred Heart School had a Pet Day, each of us brought a single black widow to school and collectively won the prize for most unusual pet.

  At night, with the lamps gleaming brightly, the interior of the house felt like an aquarium and we floated from room to room, feeling Callanwolde’s eyes study us from beneath the glooms of oaks. We assumed he was watching and appraising us; we assumed he was omnipresent and was biding his time, awaiting the. perfect moment to launch his next sortie against us. Swimming through the electric light of that besieged house, we waited in the charged, breathless atmosphere of our own obsessions. The police checked our house twice a night. They searched the bushes and trees with flashlights. They entered the woods. They would leave and the night would belong to him again.

  It was the year that Luke flunked second grade, a fact that humiliated Luke but caused Savannah and me great joy, since the three of us would now be joined happily in the same classroom when we returned to Colleton. It was the year I lost my first tooth, the year Savannah and I got the measles, the year a tornado destroyed three houses in Druid Hills, but in our memories, in the trackless shadows of our subconsciouses, it became the year of Callanwolde.

  It was a week before my father’s return from Korea. We had all gone into Papa John’s
room to kiss him good night. He was drawn and wasted and he was forbidden by his doctor to tell us bedtime stories, so we had taken to speaking to him in whispers. We had witnessed his daily diminishment, the leaking out of his fervent vitality, and he taught us a little bit about death each day as he fell further and further away from us. His eyes had already surrendered the light. My grandmother had begun drinking heavily in the evenings.

  My mother was feeling safer now that my father’s approach was imminent. All of us looked upon my father as the heroic figure, the redeemer, the knight errant who would deliver us from harm’s way and the fear of Callanwolde. I no longer prayed for my father to die. I prayed for him to be near me. I prayed for him to save my mother.

  That night when she read a chapter of The Yearling to us a strong wind moved the trees against the house. We said our prayers together, and she kissed each of us good night. She turned out the light and although we heard her footsteps descend the winding stairs, her perfume lingered in the darkness. I fell asleep listening to the wind in the trees.

  Two hours later I awoke and saw his face in the window, staring at me. He put his finger to his lips and bade me to be silent. I heard the knife cutting through the screen like the tearing of cheap silk. I did not move or speak. A paralysis of exquisite, impenetrable terror entered each cell of my body. His eyes transfixed me and I lay as rigid as a bird before the copperhead’s approach.

  Then Savannah awoke and screamed.

  His foot broke through the window in a brutal showering of glass.

  Luke rolled off the bed, shouting for my mother.

  I did not move.

  Savannah grabbed a pair of scissors from her nightstand and when that great arm entered the window and moved along the sill toward the lock, Savannah struck with those scissors and the blade stuck in his forearm. He howled with pain and withdrew his arm. Then he began kicking out the window frame with his foot and pieces of wood and glass splintered and fell into the room.

  His head, lionesque and cruel, peered into the room, and he smiled when he saw my mother standing in the hallway looking at him.

  My mother, trembling, begged, “Please, go away. Please, go away.”

  Savannah threw a hairbrush at his face. He laughed. He laughed again when he saw my mother try to control her trembling.

  Then the first jar broke against the wall above his head.

  Luke threw the next jar straight at Callanwolde’s face; it missed and exploded against the windowsill.

  Then the man’s head disappeared and we saw his huge leg swing into the window, slowly entering as he tried to make himself smaller and squeeze through the opening. Luke opened four jars and emptied them on his trouser leg. Savannah ran to the bookcase and returned with a jar. She hurled the contents at the advancing leg and the jar exploded against the floor. My mother was screaming for my grandmother. The man’s other leg slid through the window and he arched his spine, preparing to slide into the room, when the first black widow sent her venom shooting through his bloodstream. It was that enormous howl of pain we would remember most clearly later. In the light of the hallway we saw those huge legs withdraw as a small civilization of spiders found themselves on the loose and alarmed in the folds and creases of his trousers. He felt them moving on him and he rolled down the roof, panicked now, hurting and out of control. We heard his body hit the ground outside the window. He was screaming now, confused, rolling on the ground, beating at his legs and groin with his immense hands. Then, rising, he looked up toward my mother watching him from that destroyed window, screamed again, and ran toward the woods of Callanwolde as if on fire.

  We never learned how many spiders bit him. The dogs came the next day and lost his trail by the gas station on Stillwood Avenue. The police alerted every hospital. But no seven-foot giant with a red beard who had been bitten by black widows presented himself for treatment at a Georgia hospital. His disappearance was as mysterious and open-ended as his sudden appearance had been.

  My father returned the following weekend and we left the same day for the island. Our mother forbade us to tell our father a single thing about the man who had so shaken our lives. When we asked her why, she explained that our father had just returned from a war and had a right to come back to a happy family. More darkly, she suggested that our father might think that she had done something to invite the attentions of Callanwolde. My father often said to her that no woman was raped who had not asked for it. She told us this matter-of-factly and said there were many things that men could not understand.

  Luke, Savannah, and I spent the next three days trying to recapture the missing spiders. We found half a dozen in our bedroom. We found two in the attic and one in one of my old tennis shoes. We never slept in that room again. After we left my grandmother continued to find black widows in different places around the house. When Papa John died, she released all of them deep in the Callanwolde woods. She, nor any of us, ever killed a spider again. The spider became the first of a number of sacred species in our family chronicle.

  Many years later while going through some clippings in the Atlanta Public Library, I came upon a photograph and the following news item: “Otis Miller, 31, was arrested in Austell, Georgia, last night for suspicion of having raped and murdered Mrs. Bessie Furman, a local schoolteacher separated from her husband.”

  I made a photocopy of that story and inked a single word across it: Callanwolde.

  6

  We passed by healthy palms and fastidious bellhops in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel as we made our way to the Oak Room and took a table in a discreet corner. It was five minutes before the waiter approached us with an imperturbable combination of hauteur and studied indifference. Then he took our orders, imperiously, as though he were issuing stock options. I considered ordering beef jerky or pickled pig’s lips but he did not look easily amused. I ordered a martini on the rocks with a twist of lemon, knowing he would bring me my drink bearing the round weight of a blasphemous green olive instead. The word lemon is always translated “olive” in a certain category of expensive hotel bars. Dr. Lowenstein ordered a glass of Pouilly Fuissé.

  When the drinks came I fished the olive out of the martini and placed it in the ashtray.

  “You said olive,” the waiter stated as he walked away.

  “I always make that mistake,” I said.

  “Don’t you just love New York waiters?” said Dr. Lowenstein.

  “I think I prefer Nazi war criminals, but I’m not sure. I’ve never met a Nazi war criminal.” I raised my glass and said, “A toast to you, healer of souls. My God, Doctor, how do you stand being around people in such pain day after dreary day?”

  She took a sip of her wine, her lipstick imprinting the glass, then said, “Because I always think I can help them.”

  “But doesn’t it depress you?” I asked. “Doesn’t it break you down after a while?”

  “Their problems are not my problems. I have enough of my own to worry about.”

  “Ha!” I laughed. “I bet I’d love to have your problems.”

  “There you are,” she said. “You’re absolutely sure you could handle my problems, but you have trouble handling your own. That’s the way I feel about my profession. When I leave the office at six o’clock, I leave everything behind me. I don’t think once about the patients I saw that day. I’ve learned to separate my professional life from my private life.”

  “That sounds so cold and remorseless to me,” I said. “I couldn’t be a psychiatrist. I’d listen to these stories all day and they’d drive me crazy all night.”

  “Then you couldn’t help anyone. You have to maintain some distance, Tom. Surely, you must have come upon students with emotional problems when you were teaching.”

  “Yeah, I did, Doc,” I said, taking a sip of the martini, wincing when I tasted the salty ghost of the loathed and pungent olive. “And I couldn’t stand it; I can take an adult having problems, but it kills me when it’s a kid. There was one girl in particular. She was i
n my sophomore English class, an ugly kid but with a great spirit. Funny as hell. Got terrible grades. Acne. But boys seemed to like her. She had this charm, this incredible joy. She came to school one day with her face all beaten up. Her left eye was swollen shut. Her lip was puffed out to here. She didn’t say a word about it, even when the other kids started teasing her. She just joked back at them. I kept her after class and asked her what happened. Her name was Sue Ellen. She started crying as soon as the other kids left the classroom. Her father had beaten her and her mother the night before. Usually, she told me, he would hit them where the bruises wouldn’t show. But that night, he’d gone for their faces. So there I was, Doc, in a professional capacity, listening to this great little kid telling me about her father punching her face in. I’m not the type to keep my professional distance.”

  “What did you do?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure it was in the best interest of Sue Ellen, her family, or me, but I did something.”

  “I hope you did nothing rash.”

  “Perhaps you’ll think so,” I said. “You see, the memory of Sue Ellen’s face worked on me all day. After practice that night, I drove over to the Isle of Palms and found this tiny little house where Sue Ellen lived. I knocked on the door. Her father answered. I told him I wanted to have a conference with him about Sue Ellen. He told me to go fuck myself. Then I heard Sue Ellen crying somewhere in the house. I pushed him backwards and stepped into the house. She was lying on the couch. She looked up at me and I saw blood coming from her nose. She was embarrassed and said, “Hi, Coach Wingo, what brings you to this neck of the woods?”

  “I think you should have gone through proper channels,” Dr. Lowenstein interrupted. “Contacted the proper authorities.”

  “You’re right, of course, Doctor. And it’s one of the reasons you are rich and respected and I wear sweat shirts when I go to work.”

  “Then what happened?”