by Pat Conroy
I lived out my childhood thinking my father would one day kill me.
But I dwelt in a world where nothing was explained to children except the supremacy of the concept of loyalty.
I learned from my mother that loyalty was the pretty face one wore when you based your whole life on a series of egregious lies.
We divided years into the number of times our father hit us. Though the beatings were bad enough, it was the irrationality of my father’s nature that was even worse. We never knew what would set him off; we could never predict the sea changes of the soul that would set the beast loose in our house. There were no patterns to adhere to, no strategies to improvise, and except for our grandmother, no impartial tribunal to which we could appeal for amnesty. Our childhood was spent waiting for him to attack.
In 1955, he put me to the floor three times. In 1956, he felled me five times. He loved me even more in 1957. His ardor increased in 1958. Each year he loved me more as I cringed my way toward manhood.
Since the year in Atlanta, I had prayed for God to destroy him. “Kill him. Kill him, please, Lord,” I would whisper on my knees. My prayers buried him up to his neck in the marsh flats as I prayed to the moon to make the ocean surge over him, watched the crabs swarm over his face, going for his eyes. I learned to kill with my prayers, learned to hate when I should have been praising God. I had no control over how I prayed. When I turned my mind to God, the poisons streamed out of me. With hands folded, I sang of pillage and slaughter inside the city wall, and my rosary became a garrote. These were introspective, dangerous years for me. Whenever I killed a deer, it was my father’s face beneath the rack of horns; it was my father’s heart I cut out and held aloft to the trees; it was my father’s body I strung up and emptied of viscera. I turned myself into something heinous, a crime against nature.
When my grandmother returned I slowly realized that she was someone my father feared, and thus attached myself to the destiny of the woman who had the courage to leave her family during the Depression and had never apologized to anyone for doing so. This gentle woman and my gentle grandfather had created a man who was dangerous to children. My mother taught us that it was the highest form of loyalty to cover our wounds and smile at the blood we saw in our mirrors. She taught me to hate the words family loyalty more than any two words in the language.
If your parents disapprove of you and are cunning with . their disapproval, there will never come a new dawn when you can become convinced of your own value. There is no fixing a damaged childhood. The best you can hope for is to make the sucker float.
7
It was not until my second week in the city that I developed the first unmistakable symptoms of the New York willies. I always felt an ineluctable guilt when I was just taking it easy in New York when all those grand museums, libraries, plays, concerts, and that whole vast infinitude of cultural opportunities beckoned me with promises of enrichment. I began to have trouble sleeping and felt as if I should be reading the complete works of Proust or learning a foreign language or rolling out my own pasta or taking a course at the New School on the history of film. The city always stimulated some long-dormant gland of self-improvement when I crossed her rivers. I would never feel good enough for New York, but I would always feel better if I was at least taking steps to measure up to her eminent standards.
When I couldn’t sleep, when the noise of postmidnight traffic proved too dissonant or the past rose up like a pillaged city in the displaced instancy of dreaming, I would rise out of my sister’s bed and dress in the darkness. On my first morning in New York, I had tried to jog to Brooklyn but had only made it to the Bowery, where I stepped over the recumbent shapes of malodorous bums who slept in the vestibules of fifty lamp shops on a street overripe with sconces and chandeliers. The next day I ran in the other direction and in the darkness surprised myself by-entering the flower district when the trucks were unloading their fragrant cargoes of orchids and lilies and roses. It was like running along the wrist of a beautiful woman who had anointed her veins with cologne. I had smelled many New Yorks but never the one governed by the sweet monarchy of a thousand slain gardens. At its best, New York was a city of accidental epiphanies and I vowed that I would open myself to many such moments as I made my way around the city that summer.
I composed a list of things I would do before I returned to South Carolina: I would run six miles in under fifty minutes; I would find ten great books in my sister’s library that I hadn’t read and read them; I would increase my vocabulary; I would learn to make a beurre blanc without having it separate on me; I would eat a meal at Lutèce, the Four Seasons, La Grenouille, La Cote Basque, and La Tulipe; I would watch the Mets play the Atlanta Braves and the Yankees play the Boston Red Sox; I would attend three plays and see five foreign movies; I would write in my journal every day and write home to my family three days a week; I would do fifty push-ups and sit-ups when I woke up in the morning; I would tell Dr. Lowenstein all the stories of my family that would help her keep my sister alive.
During the summer I would add to the list from time to time. My task was simple: By illuminating the mordant, unglossed chronicles of the past, I wanted to rediscover that spry, finger-popping, ambitious boy I had been when I grew up on a Carolina sea island and could name every creature that spilled onto the decks of my father’s shrimp boat when I loosened the teeming nets. With luck, I wished to return to my native land in superlative shape. My physical condition embarrassed me greatly, but I was a coach of uncommon skills and I understood how to rectify the situation. I knew how to make my body pay for years of cordial neglect.
It had been a week since I had last visited Savannah when I brought up the subject of my rescinded visitation privileges with Dr. Lowenstein. She had scheduled me late on a Tuesday afternoon but she seemed distracted and brittle during our session together. When she checked her watch three times in the last ten minutes of our hour, I could barely contain my aggravation.
It was nearly seven o’clock when she rose from her chair, signaling the end of our time together for another day. She motioned for me to stay for a moment and walked to her desk to use the telephone.
“Hello, darling,” she said lightly. “So sorry I couldn’t call you before now. I’ve been tied up. Will you be able to make dinner?”
Exhaustion had turned her face delicate, undefended. She was a woman in the middle of aging extraordinarily well. Except for the delicate suturing around the eyes and mouth—laugh lines that seemed more like a concordance than a quarrel with time—she could have been mistaken for a teenager. She wore her black hair swept to one side and she had developed a nervous, though lovely, gesture of sweeping that luxurious hair away from her eyes as she spoke.
“I’m sorry your rehearsal is going so badly, darling,” she said. “Yes, of course, I understand. Bernard will be home tomorrow evening for supper. He’ll be disappointed if you’re not there. All right. I’ll talk to you later. Goodbye.”
Turning, she revealed a look of hurt or disappointment on her face, but she recovered quickly, smiled at me, and began to check her appointment book to see when she could next fit me into her schedule.
“When can I see my sister?” I asked. “I came up to New York because I thought it would do her some good to know she had family in the neighborhood. I think I have a right to see Savannah.”
Dr. Lowenstein did not look up but said, “I have a cancellation tomorrow at two. Can you make it then, Tom?”
“You’re ignoring my question, Lowenstein,” I said. “I think I can do Savannah some good. I think she needs to know that I’m still around and that I’m up here to try to help her.”
“I’m very sorry, Tom,” said Dr. Lowenstein. “I already told you that her team noticed that your visits upset Savannah enormously. And, as you know, Savannah herself asked that your visits be curtailed for a while.”
“Did she explain why?” I asked.
“Yes, Tom,” Lowenstein said, meeting my gaze, “she did.”<
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“Do you mind telling me, Lowenstein?”
“Savannah is my patient, Tom,” Lowenstein explained. “And what she tells me as my patient is confidential. I’d like you to trust me and trust her team . . . ”
“Would you quit calling the rest of those assholes ‘her team,’ Lowenstein? It sounds like you’ve got her trying out for the New York Giants.”
“What would you like me to call them, Tom?” she said. “I’ll call them anything that you desire.”
“Call them ‘those assholes at Bellevue.’ Team, my ass. There’s the psychiatrist who sees her once a week and puts enough drugs in her to anesthetize a blue whale. Then there’s that feckless resident with the red hair, and that randy frontline of weightlifting, humorless nurses, and didn’t I meet a grinning activity therapist who’ll encourage Savannah to make potholders? The team! The fucking team! Who else is in on this all-American team? Oh, yes. The orderlies. Those muggers whose IQs are identical to the freezing point of water on the centigrade scale. Those paroled criminals hired for peanuts to beat up on crazy people. Why don’t you get her out of that place, Lowenstein, and into some posh country club where middle-class fruitcakes go to improve their Ping-Pong?”
“Because Savannah is still a danger to herself and others,” Lowenstein said, sitting down in her chair again. “She’ll stay in Bellevue until she’s no longer a threat to herself, until she’s stabilized sufficiently . . . ”
“You mean drugged sufficiently, Lowenstein,” I said, my voice louder than I meant it to be. “You mean when she’s so chock-full of Thorazine or Stelazine or Artane or Trilafon or whatever goddamn drug-of-the-month is in vogue at this minute. Stabilized! My sister’s not a goddamn gyroscope, Lowenstein. She’s a poet and she can’t write poetry when her bloodstream’s got more drugs than white blood cells floating in her brain.”
“How many poems do you think Savannah will write if she succeeds in killing herself, Tom?” Lowenstein asked angrily.
“Unfair question, Lowenstein,” I said, lowering my head.
“Wrong, Tom,” she said. “A very fair and very relevant question, I would say. You see, Tom, when I first saw Savannah after she slit her wrists, I was very grateful to ‘those assholes at Bellevue’ because whatever therapy I had used with Savannah had not worked. Savannah has picked up your same fear and distrust of drugs and would not allow me to prescribe the very medicine that could have prevented her suicide attempt. I’m grateful she’s now in a hospital where they force her to take drugs if she refuses to cooperate. Because I want Savannah to make it out of this alive, Tom. I don’t care if it takes drugs or voodoo or Extreme Unction or reading the tarot cards—I want her alive.”
“You have no right to keep me away from my sister, Lowenstein,” I said.
“The hell I don’t,” she answered.
“Then, why am I up here, Lowenstein,” I said. “What’s the point? Why do I sit around decoding a tape you made when Savannah was in her most lunatic phase, when she was elected generalissimo of the cuckoo’s nest? I don’t even know for sure what Savannah meant when she was screaming out all that gibberish. I know what some of it suggests to me, but I don’t know if it means the same thing to her. I feel like it’s me you have in therapy. How can my vision of my ghastly childhood possibly help Savannah? It was horrible being a boy in that family. Being a girl is unimaginable. Let her tell you all those stories and let me go home to fry catfish where I belong.”
“You’re not my patient, Tom,” Lowenstein said softly. “I’m trying desperately to help your sister. You concern me only because of the light you can shed on her past. Her situation is still desperate. I’ve never seen such a quality of despair with any patient before. I need you to continue to help me with Savannah. We don’t even have to like each other, Tom. That’s not what’s important. We want your sister to have a life.”
“How much are you getting paid, Dr. Lowenstein?” I asked.
“The money is inconsequential to me. I’m doing this for the sake of art.”
“Oh, sure!” I laughed. “A psychiatrist oblivious to money is like a sumo wrestler oblivious to body fat.”
“You can laugh at me, Tom, and I don’t give a damn if you do or not,” she said. “You may even have superior insights into my motives and think that this is some ego trip where I can reconstruct the psyche of the poet and make it whole again. I wish from the bottom of my heart to perform that service.”
“And Savannah, cured by the magic laying on of hands, would write endless poems extolling the miraculous powers of the shrink who exorcised the demons who possessed her frail soul,” I said.
“You’re right, Tom,” she said. “It would cast no small amount of credit on me if I could save her, if I can provide her the resources that will enable her to write again. But there’s one thing you don’t understand about me. I loved your sister’s poetry long before I ever knew I would be her doctor. I loved it and still do. Just read her poems, Tom …”
“What?” I shouted, lifting out of my chair and moving angrily toward Lowenstein. “Just read my sister’s poetry? I said I was a coach, Doctor, not an orangutan. And you must have forgotten that other minor detail in my pitiful curriculum vitae. I’m an English teacher, Lowenstein, a wonderful English teacher with astonishing, outsized gifts for making slack-jawed southern morons fall in love with the language they were born to damage. I was reading Savannah’s poetry long before you were having dialogues with hopeless neurotics, my friend.”
“Excuse me, Tom,” she said. “I apologize. I don’t think of you reading it because of the subject matter. Her poems are so personally written for and about women.”
“They are not.” I sighed wearily. “Goddamn it. They are not. Why is everyone in this fucking city so stupid? Why does everyone say the exact same thing about her poetry? It cheapens her work. It cheapens any writer’s work.”
“You don’t think it’s written mostly for women?” she asked.
“No, it’s written for people. Men and women who feel passionately. It’s meant to edify, even to amaze, but it does not require a certain politics to understand or enjoy. What is extraordinary about her poetry is not her politics. That’s what is commonplace and trivial about her poetry. That’s what weakens her poetry and sometimes makes it banal and predictable. There are a million pissed-off women in this city who have the same politics. But only Savannah can take the language and make it soar like a bird or sing like some wounded angel.”
“You could hardly be expected to understand a feminist viewpoint,” Dr. Lowenstein said sharply.
I looked up at her suddenly and something about her look struck me as overupholstered and studied to a fault.
“Ask me if I’m a feminist, Doctor,” I said.
She laughed and said, sarcastically, “Are you a feminist, Tom?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes?” she said. Then she started laughing, the first genuine laughter I think I had heard issue from the game and steadfast Dr. Lowenstein.
“Why are you laughing?” I asked.
“Because that was the last answer I was expecting you to give.”
“White southern male and all that.”
“Yes,” she answered seriously, “white southern male and all that.”
“Kiss my ass,” I said coldly.
“I knew you were a chauvinist,” she answered.
“Savannah taught me to say that, Doctor. Your feminist patient. She told me not to take any shit from feminists or racists or Third Worlders or obscurantists or lion tamers or one-armed jugglers—if I thought they were wrong, to trust my instincts and call them anything I wanted to.”
“That’s wonderful, Tom,” she said. “Very advanced, for a coach.”
“What’s your first name, Doctor?” I asked, studying her. “I’ve been up here for almost three weeks now and I don’t even know your first name.”
“That’s not important. My patients don’t call me by my first name.”
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��I’m not your goddamn patient. My sister is. I’m her Cro-Magnon brother and I’d like to call you by your first name. I don’t know a soul in this city except for a few of Savannah’s friends and I’m suddenly feeling very alone and I’m even forbidden to visit my own sister when I feel she needs me to be near her more than anything in the world. You’re calling me Tom and I’d like to call you by your given name.”
“I’d prefer to keep our relationship professional,” she answered, and I felt trapped in the sterile airlessness of that room, overwhelmed by a surfeit of pastels and understated good taste. “Even though you’re not my patient, you have come here because you’re trying to help me with one of my patients. I would like you to call me Doctor because I’m most comfortable with that form of address in these surroundings. And it scares me to let a man like you get too close, Tom. I want to keep it all professional.”
“Fine, Doctor,” I said, exasperated and bone-tired of it all. “I’ll agree to that. But I want you to quit calling me Tom. I want you to call me by my professional title.”
“What’s that?” she asked.
“I want you to call me Coach.”
“The feminist coach.”
“Yes, the feminist coach.”
“Is there a part of you that hates women, Tom?” she asked, leaning toward me. “Really hates them?”
“Yes,” I answered, matching the dark intensity of her stare.
“Do you have any idea why you hate women?” she asked, again the unruffled professional, dauntless in her role.
“Yes, I know exactly why I hate women. I was raised by a woman. Now ask me the next question. The next logical question.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“Ask me if I hate men, New York feminist doctor,” I said. “Ask me if I hate fucking men.”
“Do you hate men?” she asked.
