by Pat Conroy
“I kicked him all over that house. I bounced him off walls. I beat his head on the floor. Then I heard a noise. It was like coming out of a dream. The noise was Sue Ellen cheering me on at the top of her voice. The other noise was her mother screaming for me to stop. When he came to, I told him if he ever touched Sue Ellen again, I’d come back and kill him.”
“That’s the most violent thing I’ve ever heard, Tom,” she said, aghast.
“I take it home with me,” I said, glancing down at my drink. “I can never leave it at the office.”
“Yet I think there can be a far more helpful response than the one you gave. Are you always that overemotional?”
“Sue Ellen’s dead, Dr. Lowenstein,” I said, looking into her dark brown eyes.
“How?”
“Like a lot of other girls, she chose a husband like her father. I think I understand it. They start connecting love with pain. They begin searching out men who will hurt them, thinking they are searching for love. Sue Ellen found one of God’s losers. He killed her during a domestic quarrel. Took a shotgun to her.”
“That’s horrible,” Dr. Lowenstein gasped. “But you see that your actions didn’t do any good at all. That violence does not absolve your own violent acts. What dreadful lives. What hopelessness.”
“I wanted to tell your friend Monique about Sue Ellen today. Because I was curious. I had never seen a more beautiful woman than Monique, never in my whole life. I always thought that Sue Ellen had this terrible luck because she wasn’t pretty.”
“That’s not true, Tom, and you know it.”
“I’m not sure, Doctor. I’m trying to figure out how it all works. Why does fate select some people to be ugly and unlucky. One is enough to make the world difficult. I wanted to hear Monique’s story and compare it with Sue Ellen’s to see if she was hurting as badly as she seemed to be.”
“Monique’s pain is as real to her as Sue Ellen’s pain was to her. I’m perfectly sure of that. No one has the patent on human suffering. People hurt in different ways and for different reasons.”
“I would make a lousy shrink.”
“I agree. I think you’d make a lousy shrink,” she answered me, then continued after pausing for a moment. “What did you learn from that incident with Sue Ellen, Tom? What does that story mean to you?”
I thought about it for a moment, tried to conjure the face of a dead girl out of my past, and said, finally, “Nothing.”
“Not one thing?” she said, surprised.
“Look, Doctor. I’ve considered myself in the light of that story for years. It says something about my temper, my sense of right and wrong . . . ”
“Do you think you were right to go to her house and beat up her father?”
“No. But nor was I completely wrong.”
“Explain that to me, please.”
“I don’t know if you’ll understand. But when I was a little kid and my father would abuse one of his kids or go for my mother, I made a promise that I would never let a man nit his wife or children if I could do anything about it. This has made me a partner to many unpleasant, even hideous, scenes. I have stopped fathers from hitting their children in airports, have broken up brawls between husbands and wives who were total strangers to me, and beat up Sue Ellen’s father. Something happens to me that I can’t explain. But I think I’m changing.”
“Perhaps you’re growing up.”
“No. I think I no longer care.”
“Have you ever hit your wife or your children?” she asked with sudden fervor.
“Why do you ask that, Doctor?”
“Because violent men are usually most violent at home. They are almost always violent around defenseless people.”
“And you have decided I am a violent man?”
“You just described a scene where you were violent. You coach a violent sport.”
“No,” I said, swirling the half-melted ice in my glass. “I am incapable of touching my wife or my children. I promised myself I would not be like my father in any way.”
“Has it worked?”
“No,” I smiled. “I am like my father in almost every way. Except that one. Chromosomes seem awfully powerful to me.”
“Sometimes they don’t seem powerful enough to me,” Dr. Lowenstein said. She finished her wine and gestured to the waiter. “Do you want another?”
“Sure.”
The waiter came and stood above us. He curled his lips as a sign he was ready to accept an order.
“I’d like a martini on the rocks with an olive,” I said.
“White wine again,” said Dr. Lowenstein.
He returned from the bar quickly. I noted with triumph the yellow sliver of lemon peel winking in the cubes.
Dr. Lowenstein’s face softened at the corners and I saw flecks of lilac in her dark eyes as she lifted the wine glass to her lips and said, “I talked to your mother today, Tom.”
I lifted my hand in front of my face as if warding off a blow. “Please, Lowenstein, I would consider it an act of mercy if you never reminded me again that I have a mother. She’s a leading character in this autopsy of my family and you’ll learn that her only job on earth is to spread insanity. She can walk through the produce department of a grocery store and even the Brussels sprouts have schizophrenia when she leaves.”
“She sounds wonderful when you tell about her,” Dr. Lowenstein said.
“When I was a little kid I thought she was the most wonderful woman in the world,” I admitted. “I’m not the first son to be completely wrong about his mother.”
“She was very nice on the phone and sounded very concerned,” she said.
“A mere front,” I answered. “She once read in a textbook that mothers traditionally are supposed to show concern when their daughters slit their wrists. Her phone call is the result of study and strategy, not instinct.”
Dr. Lowenstein examined me with her serene but indecipherable eyes, and said, “She told me that you hated her.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “I simply don’t believe anything she says. I’ve watched her for years and I’ve been absolutely astonished by her power to lie. I keep thinking that she’s got to fuck up at least once in her life and tell the truth about something. But my mother is a liar of the first order with oak leaf clusters all over her. She’s as adept with small lies as she is with lies that could topple nations.”
Lowenstein smiled and said, “That’s funny. Your mother told me that you would probably tell a great many lies about her.”
“Mom knows I’m going to tell you everything, Doctor,” I said. “She knows that I’ll tell you things that are too painful for Savannah to remember or for Mom to admit.”
“Your mother cried on the phone when she told me how you and Savannah felt about her,” said Dr. Lowenstein. “I must admit, she moved me very much, Tom.”
“When my mother cries,” I warned her, “she could get a job as a crocodile along the river Nile eating the fat natives who beat their clothes against rocks at the water’s edge. My mother’s tears are simply weapons to be counted when calculating the order of battle.”
“She’s very proud of her children. She told me how proud she is that Savannah is a poet.”
“Did she tell you that she hasn’t heard from Savannah in three years?”
“No,” Dr. Lowenstein said, “she didn’t. But she told me you were the best high school English teacher anyone ever saw. She told me that one of your football teams won the state championship.”
“Whenever Mom praises you, you wheel suddenly around, hoping to catch the exact moment when she thrusts the sword in your back,” I said, happy that there was gin in the world and that I was drinking a glass of it. “After she told you these wonderful things about me, Doctor, she then breathlessly informed you that I had a nervous breakdown.”
“Yes,” Dr. Lowenstein said, looking at me with a meticulous tenderness. “That is the exact phrase she used.”
“Nervous breakdown,” I
said. “I’ve always liked the sound of it. It sounds so reasonable and safe.”
“She didn’t mention Luke even once,” Lowenstein said.
“Of course not. The unspeakable word. We’ll come to her silence on the subject of Luke. When I tell these stories, Dr. Lowenstein, observe Luke carefully. None of us suspected it when we were growing up, but Luke was the one living the essential life, the only one that mattered,” I said, exhausted by the discussion of my mother.
“Whatever happened, Tom,” she said softly, and there was a slightly amorous quality to her voice, “you’ve come out of it very well.”
“I’ve been an object of pity around my family in South Carolina for a long time now, Lowenstein,” I said. “I wasn’t going to tell you about my own falling apart. I was going to keep that part of the story secret. Because I wanted to practice becoming a completely new man with you. I’ve tried to be charming, witty, and I was secretly hoping you would find me somewhat attractive.”
Her voice was colder when she answered. “Why do you want to be attractive to me, Tom? I don’t see how that could help either your sister or you.”
“There’s nothing to be alarmed about, Dr. Lowenstein,” I groaned. “I did not say what I was trying to say very well. Jesus God, I apologize. I see I’ve activated every one of the feminist warning flags flapping in your central nervous system. I only wanted you to like me because you’re a bright and beautiful woman. I haven’t felt attractive in a very long time, Lowenstein.”
Again, there was a softening, and I watched her mouth relax as she said, “Neither have I, Tom.”
Looking at her, I was astonished to realize that she was speaking a painful truth. There was a large mirror behind the bar and I saw the two of us reflected as languorous images beneath the shining cocktail glasses..
“Do you see yourself in that mirror, Dr. Lowenstein?” I said.
“Yes,” she said, turning away from me and looking toward the bar.
“That’s not an attractive face, Dr. Lowenstein,” I said, rising to leave. “By any measure or by any standard in the world, that is a beautiful face. It’s been a pleasure staring at it for the last couple of weeks.”
“My husband doesn’t find me very attractive,” she said. “It’s nice of you to say that.”
“If your husband does not find you attractive,” I said, “he is either a homosexual or an idiot. You look fabulous, Lowenstein, and I think it’s high time you got some enjoyment out of the fact. Is it all right if I see Savannah tomorrow morning?”
“You changed the subject,” she said.
“I thought you would think I was flirting,” I said.
“Were you flirting, Tom?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I was only thinking about starting to flirt, but women laugh when I flirt with them and they find me ridiculous.”
“Some of the staff feel that you upset Savannah when you visit,” she said.
“That’s true,” I answered. “The sight of my face fills her with pain. So would the sight of any Wingo.”
“They’ve been adjusting her medication lately,” she said. “I think the hallucinations are under control, but her anxiety level has increased recently. Why don’t you wait awhile to visit her, Tom,” she said. “I’ll talk it over with her team.”
“I don’t tell her things that upset her, Lowenstein,” I said, “I promise. I only talk about things that will make her happy. I read poetry to her.”
“Has she talked to you at all, Tom?”
“No,” I answered. “Does she talk much to you?”
“It’s been a slow process,” Lowenstein said. “She told me she didn’t want you to visit her anymore.”
“In those words?” I asked.
“In precisely those words, Tom,” said Dr. Lowenstein. “I’m very sorry.”
My grandmother, Tolitha Wingo, is now dying in a Charleston nursing home. Her mind, as they say, is wandering a bit, but she still has rare moments of perfect clarity when one can glimpse the full, illuminant personality that her advancing age has veiled with a shroud of senility. The capillaries in her brain seem to be drying up slowly, like the feeder creeks of an endangered river. Time no longer means the same thing to her as it does to us; she no longer measures it out in hours and days. It is a river she walks from its source to its delta. There are moments when she is a child asking her mother for a new doll. In the next eye-blink she is a gardener concerned over her dahlias or a grandmother complaining that her grandchildren never come to see her. On several visits she has mistaken me for her husband, her best friend, my father, or a Rhodesian farmer named Philip who evidently was once her lover. I don’t know which part of the river I shall enter when I approach her wheelchair. The last time I saw her, she lifted her arms up to me and said in a quavering voice, “Oh, Daddy. Oh, Daddy. You’ve come to hold me.” I sat her carefully in my lap and felt the terrifying fragility of her bones as she laid her head against my chest and wept like an eight-year-old child being comforted by a father who had been dead for forty years. She weighs eighty-five pounds now. Eventually she will die the way all old people in America die . . . from humiliation, incontinence, boredom, and neglect.
There are times she does recognize me, when her mind is sharp and frisky and we spend the day laughing and reminiscing. But when I rise to leave, her eyes register both fear and betrayal. She clutches my hand in a hard, blue-veined grip and pleads, “Take me home with you, Tom. I refuse to die among strangers. Please, Tom. I know you understand that, at least.” My departures kill her a little bit more each time. She breaks my heart. I love her as much as I love anyone in the world, yet I do not allow her to live with me. I lack the courage to feed her, to clean up her shit, to ease her pain, to assuage the abysmal depths of her loneliness and exile. Because I’m an American, I let her die by degrees, isolated and abandoned by her family. She often asks me to murder her as an act of kindness and charity. I barely have the courage to visit her. At the front desk of the nursing home, I spend a great deal of my time arguing with the doctors and nurses. I scream at them and tell them that an extraordinary woman is living among them, a woman worthy of their consideration and tenderness. I complain about their coldness and unprofessionalism. I claim that they treat old people like meat carcasses hanging on steel hooks in freezers. There is one nurse, a black woman in her fifties named Wilhelmina Jones, who works there and receives the brunt of my frustrated tirades. She once told me, “If she’s such an extraordinary woman, Mr. Wingo, why did her family put her in this hellhole to rot away? Tolitha ain’t meat and we don’t treat her as such. The poor chile just got old and she didn’t walk in here by herself. She was dragged in here by you, against her will.”
Wilhelmina Jones has my number. I am the architect of my grandmother’s final days on earth, and because of a singular absence of nerve and grace, I have helped to make them squalid, unbearable, and despairing. Whenever I kiss her, my kisses mask the artifice of the traitor. When I brought her to the nursing home, I told her we were going for a long ride in the country. I did not lie . . . The ride has not yet ended.
When Papa John Stanopolous died late in 1951, Tolitha buried him properly in Oak Lawn Cemetery in Atlanta, sold the house on Rosedale Road, then set out on an extravagant odyssey that would take her around the world three times in three years. So deeply did she associate her grief over losing Papa John with the city of Atlanta that she never returned there, even for a visit. She was the kind of woman who knew instinctively that extreme happiness could not be duplicated; she knew how to shut a door properly on the past.
Tolitha traveled by ship, always first class, and in those years of relentless footloose travel managed to visit forty-seven countries. She sent back hundreds of postcards elucidating those travels, and those postcards, written in her barely legible scrawl, became the first travel literature any of us ever read. In their right-hand corners, they bore the most luminous, wonderful stamps, miniature aquarelles and landscapes from obscure countries
or grand replicas of world-class art from the European ones. The African nations celebrated the fabulous sunshine over rain forests and the breadth of savannahs; their stamps sang with bright fruit, parrots preening in mango trees, mandrills scowling with fierce rainbow faces, elephants fording deep rivers, and a processional of gazelles crossing the plains below Mount Kilimanjaro. Without knowing it, she transformed us into passionate philatelists as we struggled to decipher those hasty travelogues she wrote during storms along the horse latitudes, as she navigated the sea lanes of the world. Whenever she wrote letters she included a handful of coins from all the countries she had entered. Those coins, solid and exotic, were our introduction to the idle joys of numismatics. We stored those coins in a grape jelly jar and would spread them out on the dining room table and match each coin with its country by placing it on a map of the world my father had bought to monitor Tolitha’s wanderings. Using a pale yellow crayon we colored in each country on the map once she had set foot inside its borders. We grew fluent in the invocation of mysterious place names: Zanzibar, the Belgian Congo, Mozambique, Singapore, Goa, Cambodia. Those names tasted like smoke in our mouths; they reverberated with bell echoes of the primitive and the obscure. As children we considered Tolitha brave, prodigal, and lucky. On the day that Savannah, Luke, and I were confirmed by the Bishop of Charleston, a white rhinoceros struck my grandmother’s jeep on the plains of Kenya. During the week we entered third grade, Tolitha wrote about the stoning to death of an adulteress in Saudi Arabia. She took enormous risks and told about all of them in exhilarated detail. Far up the Amazon, she watched a school of piranha reduce a tapir to bones in several horror-filled minutes. The tapir’s screams echoed off the walls of an impenetrable jungle until the fish reached the animal’s tongue. The tongue was like dessert, she added wickedly, in one of those chilling, exquisite details that enlivened her prose the more experienced her eye became as she slowly circumnavigated the earth. At the Folies-Bergère, she wrote that she saw more teats on stage than she’d ever seen on a milk farm. From Rome, she sent us a postcard picturing the macabre arrangement of monks’ skulls stacked like artillery ordnance in a side altar at the Capuchin catacombs. She sent boxes of seashells she had collected on the East African coast, a shrunken head she had purchased “for a song” from a reformed headhunter with bad teeth in Brazil. One Christmas she bought my father a salt-cured tongue of a water buffalo. She purchased and mailed a flute used by cobra charmers, a piece of the true cross she had bought from a one-eyed Arab, a camel’s tooth, the fangs of a bushmaster, and a loincloth she had bought directly off the genitalia of a savage (which my mother promptly burned, saying we had enough germs in South Carolina without worrying about African germs). Tolitha took a child’s delight in the bizarre, the surreal, the definitively unique.
