The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

  The doorman nodded toward the elevator and went back to reading the New York Post. Though I was carrying two huge shopping bags, I managed to press the correct button on the elevator, which lifted me with a shudder of straining cables and moved upward so slowly it felt as if it were rising through seawater.

  Bernard was waiting for me at his front door.

  “Good evening, Bernard,” I said.

  “Hello, Coach,” he answered. “What do you have in the bags?”

  “Dinner and some other stuff,” I said, coming into the entrance hall.

  I whistled as I looked around. “Jesus Christ, what a house. This looks like a wing of the Met.”

  The foyer was decorated with velvet-covered chairs, cloisonné vases, sidetables, a small Waterford chandelier, and two grim eighteenth-century portraits. I could see a grand piano in the living room and a portrait of Herbert Woodruff playing the violin.

  “I hate it,” Bernard said.

  “No wonder she doesn’t let you lift weights in the house,” I said.

  “She changed the rule last night. Now I can lift weights when my father’s not at home. But only in my bedroom. I’ve got to keep my weights under the bed so he doesn’t see them.”

  “If he wants to,” I said, looking at the portrait over the fireplace, “I could put him on a weight program and you could lift together.”

  He was a handsome and fine-boned man with a thin mouth that suggested either refinement or cruelty.

  “My father?” Bernard said.

  “Okay, let’s get moving, Bernard. Let me take this food to the kitchen; then show me your bedroom. I want to get you decked out before your mother gets home.”

  Bernard’s bedroom was on the opposite side of the apartment and was decorated as tastefully and expensively as any of the other rooms we passed. It had none of the garish trappings of a boy’s room, no posters of sports heroes or rock stars, no clutter or excess. I ripped open the bag and said to Bernard, “Okay, Tiger. We is going to do the whole thing. Whip your clothes off.”

  “For what, Coach?” he asked.

  “Because I like watching guys get naked,” I answered.

  “I can’t do that,” he said, deeply embarrassed.

  “Do I have to teach you to get undressed, Bernard?” I said. “That’s not in my contract.”

  “Are you gay, Coach?” he asked in a nervous voice. “I mean, it’s okay. It doesn’t bother me or anything. If you are, I mean. I believe in people doing whatever it is they want to do.”

  I did not answer but lifted a beautiful set of Wilson shoulder pads out of its wrapping.

  “Those are for me?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “But I wanted you to try them on before I gave them to your mother.”

  “Why would my mother want them, Coach?” he asked as I put them over his head and began to lace them up.

  “Bernard, let’s work on your sense of humor instead of your passing. Let me take two hours each day and try to teach you what a joke is.”

  “I’m sorry I asked if you were gay, Coach. Hey, you understand. I was a little confused and us here alone and everything.”

  “Right, Bernard. Now get out of those clothes, boy. I got a meal to cook. But first I’m going to show you how a football player gets dressed.”

  Susan Lowenstein was late. I was sitting in a wing-backed chair in her living room, looking across Central Park as the sun began to pull back from the Hudson River behind me. I could smell the leg of lamb roasting in the oven, filling the house with a brown perfume. I could see my own pale reflection in the picture window and the baroque fight of chandeliers dreamily illuminating the rooms behind me. In the falling light, the window became both mirror and fabulous portrait of a darkening city. The huge buildings of the lower city turned sapphire and rose in the descendent retreat of sunlight, then began to answer back with their own interior light. The city was laid out before me in a forest of transfigured architecture, devotional and splendid. The sun, exhausted, caught one building whole in its last sight and imparted the hues of a coral reef in a thousand grateful windows, then slid down that building from window to window, losing itself halfway down as the whole city rose like a firebird into the singing night. The city shook off the last foils of sunset and in a thrown-back, overreaching ecstasy transformed itself into an amazing candelabrum of asymmetrical light. From where I sat, in complete darkness now, the city looked as if it were formed from glass votive candles, lightning, and glowing embers. In the beauty of those rising geometrics and fabulous metamorphosed shapes, it seemed to enlarge the sunset, improve upon it.

  “I’m so sorry I’m late,” Susan Lowenstein said, coming through the front door. “There was a problem with a patient at the hospital. Did you find the liquor cabinet?”

  “I was waiting for you.”

  “The lamb smells divine,” she said. Then, looking out on her city, she exulted, “Now tell me that’s not one of the most beautiful sights you’ve ever seen in your life. I want to hear you rail against New York when you’re looking at the best she can do.”

  “It’s stunning,” I admitted. “I just don’t get to see this that often.”

  “I see it every night and I still find it absolutely astonishing.”

  “This is a hell of a place to watch the other side of a sunset,” I said admiringly. “You and your husband have exquisite taste, Lowenstein, and an awful lot of money.”

  “Mother,” a voice called from behind us.

  We both turned and saw Bernard in full football gear walk softly into the living room in his sweat socks. In his hands he was carrying his new shoes with their gleaming cleats. In the strange light he looked enormous, misshapen, reborn to something he was never meant to be.

  “Coach Wingo got this for me today. A whole uniform.”

  “My God” was the only thing the stunned Susan Lowenstein could get out.

  “Hey, don’t you like it, Mother? C’mon, Mom. Tell me I don’t look good. Everything fits except the helmet, and Coach Wingo said he could fix it.”

  “Dr. Lowenstein,” I said, “I’d like to introduce you to your son, Killer Bernard. They call him the Mississippi Gambler because he always goes for the long bomb on fourth and one, deep in his own territory.”

  “Your father will divorce me if he ever sees you like this,” she said. “You must swear you’ll never let him see you in this uniform, Bernard.”

  “But how do you like it, Mother? How do you think I look?”

  “I think you look deformed,” she said, laughing.

  “Okay, Bernard,” I said. “Go dress for dinner. We eat like kings in forty-five minutes. You lifted weights today?”

  “No, sir,” Bernard said, still flooded with anger at his mother and breathing hard again.

  “Try to press seventy-five pounds. I think you’re about ready for it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And when you come out for dinner, my name is Tom. I don’t like being called sir when I eat dinner.”

  “You look very different, Bernard,” his mother said. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings at all. It’ll just take me a little while to grow accustomed to you looking so fierce.”

  “So you think I look fierce, huh?” Bernard said happily.

  “Son, you look positively bestial.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” Bernard said, sprinting across Oriental carpeting back to his room.

  “Compliments take the oddest form sometimes. Let me fix us both a drink,” she said.

  Dinner was a subdued affair, unsullied at first. Bernard mostly talked about football, his favorite teams and players. His mother kept looking at him as though she were discovering a new child at her table. She asked several questions about the game, revealing an ignorance so astonishing that she reduced me to wordlessness when I tried to reply to her.

  I noticed that mother and son were nervous around each other and seemed glad to have a dinner companion to defuse the tension between them. This tension stimulated t
he gland of entertainment in me and I found myself in the role of master of revels, the evening fool, with cards in my sleeves and a ready joke for every interval of silence. I hated myself in this role, yet I was incapable of refusing the performance. Nothing made me more edgy or neurotic than the silent hostility of people who loved each other. So I spent the evening cracking jokes, carving the lamb with the flair of a surgeon, serving the wine like a sommelier trained in burlesque, tossing the salad wildly. By the time I brought in the crème brûlée and espresso I was exhausted, worn down by my own theatrics. And as we ate dessert the old silences between mother and son took control again and I heard the deadly tinkling of silverware against the small glass bowls.

  “Why’d you learn to cook, Coach?” Bernard finally asked.

  “When my wife went to medical school, I had to. So I bought a good cookbook and for three months I performed unspeakable acts upon wonderful cuts of meat. I made bread that birds wouldn’t touch. But I learned that if I could read, I could cook. I surprised myself by liking it.”

  “Didn’t your wife ever cook?” he asked.

  “She was a great cook but she didn’t have time to when she was in medical school. She didn’t even have time to be married. It hasn’t changed that much since she became a doctor and we had kids.”

  “So your kids didn’t see their mother when they were little either?” he said, looking at his mother.

  “Sallie wasn’t around much for a while, Bernard,” I said quickly. “But she never would have been happy with just an apron and a stove. She was too bright and ambitious and she loves being a doctor. It makes her a better mother.”

  “How many of the meals do you cook now?”

  “I cook all of them, Bernard,” I said. “I lost my job more than a year ago.”

  “You mean you’re not even a real coach?” Bernard said, and I detected a note of betrayal in his voice. “My mother didn’t even hire me a real coach?”

  Dr. Lowenstein said in a thin-lipped, barely controlled voice, “That will be quite enough from you, young man.”

  “Why aren’t you coaching now?” Bernard demanded.

  “I was fired from my coaching job,” I said, taking a sip of my coffee.

  “Why?” he asked again.

  “It’s a long story, Bernard. One I don’t usually tell to kids.”

  “False pretenses,” he said to his mother. “He’s coaching me under false pretenses.”

  “You apologize to Tom immediately, Bernard,” his mother said.

  “Why should I apologize? He’s been pretending he’s a coach and now I find out he’s not. He’s the one that owes me an apology.”

  “Then I apologize, Bernard,” I said, poking at my dessert with a spoon. “I didn’t realize you required an employed coach for your purposes.”

  “Adults just kill me. They really do. I hope I’m never an adult.”

  “You probably won’t be, Bernard,” I said. “You might have peaked out as a teenager.”

  “At least I don’t lie about what I am,” he answered.

  “Lest we forget, Bernard, you told your parents you were on the football team at school. You were not. It’s a small lie but it helps us define our terms,” I said.

  “Why do you always have to do this, Bernard?” the doctor asked, and she was close to tears. “Why do you lash out at anyone who tries to get close to you or tries to help you?”

  “I’m your kid, Mother. Not one of your patients. You don’t have to give me any of that shrink talk. Why don’t you just try to talk to me?”

  “I don’t know how to talk to you, Bernard.”

  “I do, Bernard,” I said as the boy turned furiously on me, breathing hard, sweat forming on his upper lip.

  “You do, what?” he asked.

  “I know how to talk to you,” I said. “Your mother doesn’t but I do. Because I understand you, Bernard. You’re hating yourself for ruining this evening but you couldn’t help yourself. It was the only way you could hurt your mother and you had to do it. That’s fine. That’s between you two. But I’m still your coach, Bernard. And tomorrow morning you’re going to meet me in that same field and this time you’re going to be wearing full battle array.”

  “Why should I let you coach me? You just admitted you were a fake.”

  “You’ll find out if I’m a fake or not, Bernard,” I said, facing this sad, unformed man. “And I’ll find out tomorrow if you’re a fake or not.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Tomorrow I find out if you’re afraid to hit or not. That’s the real test. If you can take a hit or dish one out. Tomorrow, for the first time in your life, Bernard, you play a contact sport.”

  “Oh, yeah, and who am I gonna hit? Some tree or bush or wino walking through the park?”

  “Me,” I said. “You’re going to try to tackle me, Bernard. And then I’m going to try to tackle you.”

  “But you’re a lot bigger than me.”

  “You don’t have anything to worry about from me, Bernard,” I said coldly. “You see, I’m nothing but a fake.”

  “Oh, real fair.”

  “Are you afraid when I say I’m going to tackle you?”

  “No,” he said defiantly. “Not at all.”

  “Do you know why you’re not afraid, Bernard?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you. Because you’ve never played football, Bernard. If you had, then you’d know that you should be afraid. But I also know you want to play football, Bernard. For whatever screwed-up reason, you want that more than anything in the world, don’t you?”

  “I guess so,” he said.

  “If you learn to tackle me, Bernard,” I said, “and you learn to take it when I tackle you, then you’ll make your team next year. I promise you that.”

  “Tom, I think you’re too large to tackle Bernard.”

  “Oh, Mother, please,” he pleaded with his mother. “You don’t know the first thing about football.”

  “So help me clear the table, Bernard,” I said, rising and stacking the dessert dishes. “Then go to bed and get rested up for tomorrow.”

  “I don’t have to clear the plates,” he said. “We’ve got a maid for that.”

  “Son,” I said to Bernard, “please don’t talk back to me again. And please don’t ever again run a number on me and your mother like you ran tonight. Now grab a few plates and hustle your ass into the kitchen with them.”

  “Tom, this is Bernard’s house, and the maid is coming tomorrow.”

  “Shut up, Lowenstein. Please shut up,” I said, exasperated, walking toward the kitchen.

  When I said good night to Bernard, I returned to the living room and felt the immense solitude of that harmonious, obsessively orderly room. Everything was expensive yet nothing was personal. Even Herbert’s portrait looked like some idealistic impression of the man instead of the man himself. In it, he was playing his violin, and though one could not judge the tenor and depth of the man from the rendition, one could feel the rapture of his art. I saw that the sliding glass door to the terrace was open and it was there that I found Dr. Lowenstein. She had poured both of us a glass of cognac. I sat down and inhaled the perfume of the Hennessey; it flowered in my brain like a rose. I took the first sip and felt it slide down my throat, half silk, half fire.

  “Well,” Dr. Lowenstein said, “did you enjoy the Bernard and Susan show?”

  “Do you have these performances often?”

  “No,” she said. “Generally, we try to ignore each other. But the edge is always there. Even our politeness is murderous. My stomach is usually tied in knots whenever we have dinner together alone. I find it hard, Tom, to be hated by the only child I’ll ever have.”

  “What’s it like when Herbert’s here?” I asked.

  “He fears his father and rarely makes a scene the way he did tonight,” she said reflectively. “Of course, Herbert does not allow conversation at dinner.”

  “Excuse me?” I said, looking at her.
>
  She smiled and took a long sip of cognac. “A family secret. A family ceremony. Herbert likes to relax completely at the dinner table. He listens to classical music during dinner as a way to decompress after a day’s work. I used to fight him about it but I’ve gradually become accustomed to it. It even relieves me since Bernard has entered this new aggressive stage.”

  “I hope you will forget that I told you to shut up in front of your son,” I said to her dark silhouette. “That was my obsession in the kitchen. That I would finish the dishes and that you would tell me to get the hell out of your house and never come back after I dried the silverware.”

  “Why did you tell me to shut up?”

  “I had just re-established some control over Bernard and I didn’t want you to break that hard-won spell because you could not stand to see someone hurt your son.”

  “He’s very vulnerable. I saw the expression on his face when you spoke so roughly to him. He’s very easily hurt.”

  “So are we, Doctor. But it was open season on the both of us for ten minutes. I didn’t like it one teensy-weensy bit.”

  “He’s just as spoiled as his father. I think what bothered Bernard the most was that he saw right away that you and I are friends. That would bother Herbert too. Herbert has always made it a practice to despise any new friend I made on my own when I was not with him. He used to treat my friends contemptuously, so badly, in fact, that I quit inviting them to dinner, quit seeing them socially at all. Herbert, of course, has gathered a fascinating, glittering set of friends around him who have become my good friends too. But the lesson was clear. Herbert has to be the one who discovered them and brought them to the inner circle. Does that sound strange to you, Tom?”

  “No,” I answered. “It sounds like a marriage.”

  “Do you do that to Sallie?”

  I cupped my hands behind my head and looked straight up into the stars of Manhattan, dim as buttons above the free-flung light of the city.

  “I guess I do,” I said. “I’ve loathed some of the doctors and their wives she’s dragged home to dinner over the years. If I hear a doctor talk about income tax or socialized medicine in England one more time in my life, I will ritually destroy myself before their very eyes. But then I’ve brought home some of my friends from the coaching profession who would spend every evening writing out plays on paper napkins and talking about the time they scored ‘the big one’ in high school, and I’ve watched Sallie’s eyes glaze over in utter boredom. So we’ve gathered a set of friends that survived the mutual cut. There’s one high school coach, whom Sallie adores. There are two doctors I thought were terrific guys. Of course, one of those terrific guys is now Sallie’s lover, so I may try to change the system when I get home. I’m beginning to like the sound of Herbert’s system.”