The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

  He was breathing hard, trembling, unnerved.

  “Go fuck yourself, buddy,” he said in a voice that forecast tears.

  “I already fucked myself when I agreed to have something to do with you.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me,” he said, controlling his voice with difficulty.

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Bernard,” I said, going for the kill, hating myself as my voice grew colder and meaner. “You’re one of the unhappiest kids I’ve ever met in my life. And there’s something I know about you and I’ve only seen you for five minutes. You don’t have a friend in the goddamn world, boy. Lonely up there at Phillips Exeter in the winter, is it, Bernard? Do they pick on you, Bernard? Do they tease you? I know they exclude you, but do they also make your life a living nightmare, Bernard? Do they slap you around, Bernard? You see, I know boys real well and I know how they treat misfits. What’s the name of your friend, Bernard? Tell me his name.”

  He started crying, tried to hold it back but the tears flooded out of his eyes like the floodwater over a levee. His shoulders shook and he sobbed loudly, lifting his hands to his face. The tears streamed out between his fingers and fell on the grass.

  Then he looked up and stared at his wet hands. “I’m crying,” he said, surprised. “You made me cry.”

  “I bullied you, Bernard,” I said. “I was hoping you would cry so I could see if there was something human down there.”

  “Is that how you coach?” he asked bitterly.

  “With a kid like you,” I said, “yeah. That’s how I coach.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “I don’t give a shit, kid.”

  “My mother said you were nice,” said Bernard. “She lied.”

  “I’m real nice to nice people. I’m real nice to people who like me.”

  “I’m going to tell her what you said to me,” he threatened. “How you treated me, everything.”

  “My knees are suddenly jelly, kid.”

  “She thinks adults should treat children as if they were adults.”

  “Is that right?”

  “That’s right. She’s not going to like this one little bit, I can tell you that,” Bernard said, still unable to control his breathing.

  “Let’s go see her, then,” I said. “Right now, Bernard.”

  “She’s working. She’s seeing patients now.”

  “So what,” I insisted. “We’ll catch her during one of her ten-minute breaks. Then you can tell her everything I said. Then I’ll explain why.”

  “She doesn’t like to have her time wasted when she’s working.”

  “Neither do I, kid. And you’ve just wasted a pile of it.”

  “You call this work?” he said, sneering again.

  “I call this hard labor, Bernard,” I said, my voice rising again. “Cruel and unusual punishment. Torture. I hate hanging around kids like you.”

  “Well, who’s asking you to?” he said, offended.

  “Your mother. So let’s go to her office and get this settled.”

  “No. It’ll just get me in trouble.”

  “No, Bernard,” I said, unable to control the mockery. “She’ll just talk to you as though you were an adult.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ll tell my father and get both of you in trouble.”

  “You can’t get me in trouble, Bernard.”

  “Oh, yeah?” he said, pointing his finger at me. “Do you know who my father is? Do you?”

  “No. Who is he?”

  “He’s Herbert Woodruff.”

  “Same last name, huh?” I said, tiring of Bernard rapidly.

  “Do you know who he is?” Bernard shouted at me. “He’s one of the most famous violin players in the world.”

  “I’ve always been scared shitless of violin players,” I said.

  “He knows some really powerful people. Really powerful people, mister,” Bernard said, and his voice was so unhinged and pathetic that I thought he would cry again.

  “Is it hard, Bernard?” I said wearily. “Is it hard being an asshole? I’ve always wanted to ask that question every time I’ve met one, but I’ve never really gotten the chance.”

  He threw his hands up in the air in an odd, inappropriate gesture and said, “So that’s what you think of me, huh? You don’t know me. You can’t know a person after talking to them for only fifteen minutes.”

  “Wrong again, Bernard. There are times when you can know all you ever want to know about a person in thirty seconds.”

  He turned as if to walk away from me, then stopped, and his breathing came hard again. “I’d rather you not talk to my mother,” he said quietly.

  “All right,” I answered.

  “You mean you won’t?” he said, turning around to face me again.

  “No. That’s a reasonable request and you made it nicely. I like to reward nice behavior.”

  “What will you tell her when you see her?”

  “That you’re a prince of a guy who very naturally decided he wanted to work on his violin playing instead of being coached in football.”

  He diverted his eyes to the ground again and began kicking at the dirt with his gym shoe.

  “I didn’t play football last year.”

  “Your mama said your daddy spotted you in a team picture.”

  “I was the equipment manager. I went out for the team and didn’t make it. The coach asked us to tackle people the first day. I never tackled anyone in my whole life. They all laughed at me.”

  “Do you remember who laughed at you?”

  “Of course, but why?” he asked.

  “Because, if you let me coach you, Bernard, we’ll take the smiles off those boys’ faces . . . I’ll teach you to tackle so hard they’ll think they were hit by a Buick when you take them down. But why did you tell your daddy you were on the team?”

  “Because I wanted him’ to think I was on the team.”

  “Why, Bernard?”

  “I don’t know,” Bernard said. “Because I knew he’d hate the thought of it. He hates sports. It makes him furious that I’m interested.”

  “You’re not interested, Bernard. You’ve spent the afternoon proving that to me.”

  “You don’t like me very much, do you?” he said in a half plea, half whine.

  “Bernard,” I said, “I don’t like you at all. I don’t like the way you treated me. I don’t like your attitude. You’re a mean, unhappy bastard and I don’t know if football can help you or not. Because the only good thing about football, Bernard, the only good thing at all, is that it can be a lot of fun to play. That’s it. Otherwise, it’s a stupid, useless game. You don’t look like you’ve ever had any fun in your whole life. But more important for me is that coaching you doesn’t look like it would be any fun for me, Bernard. Because I like it. I take it seriously. Football is a joyous thing for me and I don’t want you to ruin it for me.”

  “My father made me practice the violin two hours a day,” he said strongly.

  “Bernard, I a much rather be able to play the violin than play football. I promise you that. If I could play the violin, I’d bring the birds out of the trees I’d play that son of a bitch so pretty.”

  “Do you play any instrument?” he asked.

  “No. Do you know what I can do? I can still pass a football forty yards in the air. It makes me a real hit at dinner parties. Well, look, Bernard, I’ve got to be going. It was nice meeting you. I’m sorry we didn’t hit it off better. I like your mother a lot. I won’t tell her anything about what happened. That’s a promise.”

  I walked away from this disconsolate, sullen kid and headed across the park toward Fifth Avenue. I walked for twenty yards, carrying the football in my right hand and loving the feel of it, the laces biting into the joints of my fingers. Bernard did not say goodbye, said nothing—until I heard him call out behind me. ,

  “Coach Wingo.”

  I had not been called Coach for so long it both surprised me and moved me. When I turned I saw his ha
nds half raised in a melancholy, supplicating gesture. His voice trembled, rose, and broke as he fought to get the words out, as he sought to connect.

  “Teach me,” he said, and the tears were coming again. “Teach me, please. I want them to stop laughing.”

  I turned and walked back to him, striding toward him as something new and unknown in Bernard Woodruff’s life. I returned to him as his mentor, his coach.

  “We’ll make them bleed,” I said to the boy. “First they’ll laugh. Then they’ll bleed. I promise you. Now you’ve got to promise me some things.”

  “What?” he asked suspiciously.

  “You got to shut up, Bernard,” I said. “Your mouth pisses me off.”

  “Yeah,” he said, gasping. “Okay, okay.”

  “ ‘Yes, sir’ is the correct way to answer me now, Bernard,” I said. “There are certain courtesies and forms we are going to follow. When we meet here on this field, you may call me Coach or sir, whichever you prefer. You’ll never be late under any circumstances. You’ll do whatever I tell you to do and you’ll do it with enthusiasm. I’m putting you on a weight program immediately. I’m going to run your ass off every day. I won’t be interested in your home life, your music lessons, your sex life, your pimples, or anything else. I’m not going to become your buddy or try to impress you. I’m going to teach you how to look and act like a football player. I’m going to teach you how to block, tackle, punt, run, and pass, and I’m going to teach you well. You’ve got good size, real good size. I’m going to make you strong, Bernard. I’m going to make you tougher than you ever thought you could be. Because the guy you’re going to be blocking and tackling is going to be me, Bernard.”

  “But you’re a lot bigger than me.”

  “Shut up, Bernard,” I said.

  “Yes, sir,” he answered.

  “And, Bernard, after I run you till you drop, make you lift weights until you can’t move, make you do push-ups until you’re breathing pure grass, and make you tackle me until your arms cramp, something’s gonna happen that’s never happened in your shitty life.”

  “What’s that, sir?” he said.

  “You’re gonna love my ass, Bernard,” I said.

  11

  My mother never quite finished the task of creating herself; she was always a work in progress. She rarely told a story about her childhood that was not a lie and she practiced the study of her own history with the reckless, renegade eye of the fabulist. Never daunted by something as inconvenient as truth, she made her lies an essential part of her children’s identities.

  In a thousand days of my childhood, she offered a thousand different mothers for my inspection. As a child, I never got a clear sighting of her; as a male, I never received a clear signal from her. I became a lifelong geographer of my mother’s character but I could never resolve the irregularities along the antipodes or in the torrid zones. She could smile one moment and make me think of the shy commerce of angels; the next moment the same smile could suggest a hermitage for morays and an asylum for terrorists. She was always too much woman for me.

  In her secret self she legislated a whole series of untested laws of behavior that became her own freemasonry of cunning and design. There was not a single person in Colleton who did not underestimate the powers of Lila Wingo, including herself. It would take me thirty years to realize that the woman who raised me was a warrior of inalienable talents. Discussing her variety of gifts, her children later devised a list of occupations in which our mother would have excelled. She could have prospered, we decided, as a princess in an obscure Himalayan country, an assassin of minor cabinet officials, a fire-eater, the wife of the chairman of AT&T, or a belly dancer who brought the heads of saints to kings. When I once asked Luke if he thought our mother was pretty, he reminded me that her beauty had been powerful enough to lure a homicidal giant out of the woods in Atlanta, beautiful enough to inspire the demonic obsession of Callanwolde.

  “Did that prove that she was beautiful?” I had asked.

  “It proved it to me,” he had said.

  Her childhood in the mountains of Georgia had been hideous. Her father, a drunkard with an evil temper, had died of cirrhosis of the liver on her twelfth birthday. Her mother worked the night shift in a textile mill and died of brown lung when Lila was sixteen. After her mother’s death, my mother took a bus to Atlanta, got a room at the Imperial Hotel, and was hired by Davison’s department store as a trainee. Two months later she met my father and made a child’s mistake by falling in love with the merry, fast-talking pilot from South Carolina. My father presented himself as a great land owner from the lowcountry who was a gentleman truck farmer with interests in the “fisheries industries.” He never told her he was a shrimper until they arrived on Melrose Island.

  But my mother had already begun the process of revising her own life. She told people in Colleton that her father had been a successful banker in Dahlonega, Georgia, ruined by the Depression. By a simple effort of will, her austere mother—whose photograph featured a flat, tortured face as nondescript as a cutlet—was transformed into a refined grande dame with entree into the finest elements of society. “The finest elements,” my mother would repeat breathlessly years later. Her voice conjured up a distilled, privileged subculture floating over golf greens, languidly sitting beside aquamarine pools, with the silky murmuring of gentlemen in the endless twilight and sherbets served by white-gloved hands. Though we descended from shrimp and textiles, we began to construct an inaccurate image of ourselves based on our dreamy mother’s glass palace of lies. Savannah was the first poet our family produced, but Lila Wingo was certainly the first to practice the craft of fiction.

  As her children, she looked upon us inconsistently as both her co-conspirators and her enemies. She was the only mother I ever met who held her children responsible for her unfortunate choice of a husband. She looked upon our births as crimes we committed against her. Yet it was extraordinarily rare for her to complain about her fate. She could not bring herself to admit, except during rare outbursts of candor, that anything was unpleasant. She possessed a heroic glossary of optimistic phrases. In public, she overdid happiness. She was militantly cheerful. Once we reached school age, she volunteered for every charitable function in Colleton. In the town, she slowly became known as someone you could depend on in a pinch. People outside the family considered her sweet, beautiful, industrious, and much too good for my father. Lila Wingo was all those things and a field marshal to boot.

  From my father I inherited a sense of humor, a capacity for hard work, physical strength, a dangerous temper, a love of the sea, and an attraction to failure.

  From my mother I received far darker and more valuable gifts: a love of language, the ability to lie without remorse, a killer instinct, a passion to teach, madness, and the romance of fanaticism.

  Luke, Savannah, and I inherited all these tendencies in a deadly and varied mosaic of genes. In an outcry of pure bitterness my mother would later sum it all up by saying, “Luke, the fanatic. Tom, the failure. Savannah, the lunatic.”

  By then, my mother had laid waste to the town and family that had failed to appreciate the fearful resonance of her shame at being only a shrimper’s wife.

  When I was growing up my heart was full of sorrow for my mother and unspoken rage against my father. It need not have been. Henry Wingo just wasn’t in her league. While my father had his temper, his enormous strength, his hapless ideas of sudden wealth, and his fists, my mother had a plan. She proved to all of us that nothing is as powerful or unconquerable as a simple dream slow in the dawning. She wanted to be a woman to be reckoned with, a woman of remarkable parts. In Colleton, her position in town was set, but she refused to accept this painful social reality. In 1957 she somehow managed to get herself nominated to the Colleton League, and a deadly business was born.

  The Colleton League. It had been founded in 1842 by Isabel Newbury’s great-grandmother. In its charter, the stated purpose of the League was to initiate good
works and worthwhile projects among all citizens of Colleton. The women of the League would be drawn from the finest families and include, at all times, the most remarkable women living within the borders of Colleton County. It was this final proviso that endowed my mother with the sanguine expectation that she would one day find herself inducted into full membership. What began as an aspiration turned soon to an unappeasable hunger. My mother’s nomination for the Colleton League was unanimously rejected by the membership committee and Isabel Newbury had said in a withering summation that eventually reached my mother’s ears, “Lila Wingo is definitely not League material.”

  Not League material. How this delicate, summary phrasing must have devastated my mother when she heard it. There is little discretion or protocol to these bloodless autos-da-fé of small-town southern life. Mom played her part well and never complained; she merely went about her task of convincing League members that she would be an asset to their club. It was not until 1959 that she saw her first real chance to convince the ladies of the Colleton League of her worth.

  In April of that year, the League announced in a full-page ad in the weekly paper that it was inviting all the women of the town to submit recipes for possible inclusion in a cookbook containing the best recipes in the lowcountry. My mother viewed this as a splendid opportunity to impress the members of the cookbook committee, which included a healthy percentage of her most articulate detractors, with her culinary skills. She went to her closet and pulled out all the back issues of Gourmet magazine. Tolitha had given my mother a subscription to Gourmet in 1957, and it was this magazine which provided my mother with her entry into the world of cuisine. It was this magazine which also made my mother one of the finest cooks ever to boil water in a Carolina kitchen.

  She did not just read Gourmet magazine; she studied it exhaustively. She had always been a superior southern cook, one who could work a personalized magic with biscuits, a handful of beans, and a freshly killed fryer. She could even make grease taste good. But through her careful readings of Gourmet, she made the observation that the preparation of food was one eloquent signature of social class. Once she made the connection that there was a higher palisade of cuisine than the southern one, she initiated another one of her long projects of obsessional self-improvement that further alienated her from my father and endeared her to us. Henry Wingo was a meat and potatoes man and considered my mother’s béarnaise sauce a French plot to ruin a perfectly good steak.