The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

  “Have you quite finished, Tom?” she asked.

  “No. As soon as I can think of something truly insulting to say to you, I’m going to launch into another long speech.”

  “I may have been wrong not to tell you everything from the beginning. That was my decision. You see, I was warned about you, Tom. Savannah knows you very well. She understands that though you pretend to be helpful, you’re deeply ashamed of her problems, that you fear them, that you would do almost anything to be rid of them, to deny them, to cast them out into the darkness. Yet she also knows you have a strong sense of family and duty. My job was to balance these two counterweights. If I could have done this without you, so help me God, I would have. I’ve dreaded the day you’d find out about this—I’ve dreaded your self-righteousness and anger.”

  “How do you expect me to react?” I asked. “What if I had done the same thing to Bernard? What if I had taken this morbidly unhappy child and instead of coaching him, I taught him a way to get out of his miserable family life? Change your name, Bernard. Come with me to South Carolina. We’ll get you on the football team and set you up with a nice family who’ll let you start all over again.”

  “It’s not the same thing and you know it. My son did not try to kill himself.”

  “Give him time, Lowenstein,” I said. “Just give him a little time.”

  “You son of a bitch,” she said, and I did not see her pick up the American Heritage Dictionary on her coffee table and, with remarkable accuracy, hurl it in my direction.

  It hit me squarely on the nose, bounced off my lap, and lay open on the floor. It was opened to page 764, and in shock, I looked down and saw the heading “load displacement.” Then I saw my own blood obscuring the entry describing the Russian mathematician Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevski. As I lifted my hand to my nose, the blood pulsed through my fingers.

  “Oh, my God,” she said in horror at her own loss of control. She gave me her handkerchief. “Does it hurt?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I find it agonizing.”

  “I have some Valium,” she said, opening her purse.

  I roared laughing but it made the blood rush faster and I stopped. “Do you think I can stop the bleeding by sticking two Valiums up my nostrils? It’s lucky for the world you didn’t try to become a medical doctor.”

  “It might help calm you.”

  “I’m not agitated, Lowenstein,” I said. “I’m bleeding. You injured me. I see a big malpractice suit coming out of this.”

  “You took me to the limits of my endurance,” she said. “I’ve never had a violent moment in my whole life.”

  “Now you’ve had one. That was a good throw.”

  “It’s still bleeding.”

  “That’s because you almost took my nose off,” I said, laying my head on the back of the chair. “If you’ll just quietly close the door behind you, on your way out, Doctor, I’ll just good-naturedly bleed to death.”

  “I think you should see a doctor,” she said.

  “I’m with a doctor.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Why don’t you go down to the mental hospital and rustle me up a catatonic. I’ll just press him up against my nose for an hour or two. Look, Doc, relax. I’ve had nosebleeds before. This too will pass.”

  “I’m very sorry, Tom. I’m deeply embarrassed,” she said.

  “I’ll never forgive you,” I said, and the silliness of this scene had brought me again to the point of giggling. “Holy God, what a day. I get dropped by a dictionary and I find out my sister is practicing to be a Brooklyn Jew. Jesus Christ!”

  “When you stop bleeding, Tom, please let me take you to lunch.”

  “It’s going to be expensive, Lowenstein,” I said. “No hot dog at Nathan’s today. No cheese pizza. I can see it now. Lutèce or La Cote Basque or the Four Seasons. Everything I order will come to the table on fire. You’re going to spend money, Lowenstein. Plenty of money.”

  “At lunch, I want us to talk seriously and reasonably, Tom,” Dr. Lowenstein said. “I need to explain further about Savannah and Renata and me . . . ”

  She could not go on. My laughter stopped her cold.

  When I walked through the doors of Lutèce, I felt that I was moving in my own half-dreamt fugue state, so giddy and lightheaded was I after the nosebleed and the unraveling of the mystery of Renata. Madame Soltner greeted Susan by name and they conversed in colloquial French for a minute as I marveled again how easily Susan managed the customs and fluid courtesies of her charmed and civilized life. She was effortlessly poised and unstintingly correct, like a brilliant creature trained in all the plenary arts one could cultivate with access to the proper circles and an abundance of clean folding money. She was the first person I had met in New York who was not atomized and made ridiculous by the roaring, plenipotentiary authority of the city. Indigenous to the avenues, her gestures were economical and sure. To me, her confidence was an exorbitant gift, but then, I had only met immigrants to New York. Susan Lowenstein was the first incumbent of the great island I had known, my first Manhattanite. I had learned there was a sublayer of passion beneath those cool lawns of her exterior, and my throbbing nose was testament to this.

  We were led to a good table with Madame Soltner casting only a single troubled glance at the tissue I had wadded up my left nostril. I thought of the high probability that she had escorted very few customers into the hushed interiors of Lutèce suffering from nosebleeds. Excusing myself, I went to the men’s room to remove the ghastly Kleenex; then, having satisfied myself that I was no longer hemorrhaging, I washed my face and returned to the main salon. My nose had swollen like a fat nugget of puff pastry. I was not handsome but I was hungry.

  A waiter, who looked as if he had been cornstarched in arrogance, took our orders for drinks. I leaned across the immaculate napery and whispered, “When the drinks come, you won’t be embarrassed if I just soak my nose in mine for a minute or two? The alcohol will disinfect the wound.”

  She lit a cigarette and blew a plume of smoke my way. “At least you’re joking about it. I still can’t believe I threw a book at you. You can be very exasperating at times, Tom.”

  “I’m a perfect jerk at times. I said something unforgivable about Bernard and I fully deserved to have a dictionary flatten my schnozz. I owe you the apology.”

  “My failure to be a good mother for Bernard is a constant torture, Tom,” she said.

  “You’re not a bad mother. Bernard is a teenager. Teenagers are, by definition, not fit for human society. It’s their job to act like assholes and make their parents miserable.”

  The waiter brought the menus and I studied mine with both thoroughness and anxiety. This was the first time I had ever dined within earshot of a world-class chef and I did not want to squander my opportunity by a thoughtless and unimaginative order. Carefully, I questioned Susan Lowenstein about every meal she had ever eaten at Lutèce and I admitted that she would ruin my entire meal if I ordered something simply grand, only to be eclipsed by her order of something ambrosial and otherworldly. Finally, she offered to order my complete meal and I sat back as she asked the waiter to bring me the duck mousse studded with juniper berries as a first course. For my next course, she chose a soupe de poisson au crabe and with a wink guaranteed its sublimity. My brain reeled happily as she listed a choice of entrees she described as flawless. Again she noted my hesitation, my choking in the clutch, and she directed the waiter to have Chef Soltner prepare the râble de lapin.

  “Rabbit!” I said in surprise. “This is described as a gastronomic temple, Lowenstein, by all the hotshot food magazines, and you’re going to humiliate me by ordering me a bunny rabbit?”

  “It will be the best meal you’ve ever eaten,” she said confidently. “Trust me on this one.”

  “Do you mind if I tell the waiter I’m the food critic for The New York Times?” I asked. “I’d like to put real pressure on André to do some serious overachieving in the kitchen back there.”
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  “I’d rather you didn’t, Tom. Let me order us some wine and then I’d like to talk a little bit about Savannah.”

  “Could I have the waiter remove every item on the table that might be flung in my direction? Or would you allow me to wear a catcher’s mask?”

  “Tom, do your friends and family sometimes find your joking a bit excessive?” she asked.

  “Yes, they all find it repulsive. I’ll be dull for the rest of the meal, Doctor, I promise.”

  The wine arrived at the table, a Chateau Margaux. My duck mousse materialized simultaneously. I tasted the wine and it was so robust and appealing that I could feel my mouth singing with pleasure when I brought the glass from my lips. The aftertaste held like a chord on my tongue; my mouth felt like a field of flowers. The mousse made me happy to be alive.

  “My God, Lowenstein. This mousse is fabulous,” I moaned. “I can feel battalions of calories marching toward my bloodstream. I’d like to get a job gaining weight in this restaurant.”

  “Savannah has repressed a great deal of her childhood, Tom,” Dr. Lowenstein said.

  “What does that have to do with duck mousse?” I answered.

  “She has whole periods of her life she has blanked out. She calls them her white intervals. They seem to coincide with those times when her hallucinations are out of control. They seem to exist outside of time or space or reason.”

  “She’s always had trouble remembering things,” I said.

  “She told me it had always been a problem with her when she was growing up, but an unmentionable one. Her terrible secret. She said she had always felt different, unsafe, and alone because of it. She became a prisoner of lost time, unremembered days. Lately, she was disturbed because her poetry was suffering. She felt that her madness was overtaking her, coming at her in overwhelming forces. The thing she feared most is that she would enter one of these periods in which there was no memory and never return to herself.”

  As she spoke, I watched Susan Lowenstein’s face soften imperceptibly, a transformation caused by her passion for her profession. It was one of the few times I felt the zeal she carried into her office, the spirit she invoked in her role as sojourner among wounded, disabused souls. Her voice was animated as she recalled those first months when Savannah would come to her office to speak of her life, her youth, her work, but always there were incredible blank spots, diffusions of memory and impasses that brought her again and again to frustration and dead ends. Something was at work, deep in Savannah’s subconscious, that was censoring out her youth entirely. Whenever she turned to her childhood, she could recall only disconnected fragments, all of them attached to a vague and debilitating sense of terror. There were times that whenever she conjured up a solitary image of that childhood—a marsh bird in languorous flight, the starting up of the shrimp boat’s engine, her mother’s voice in the kitchen—she would enter into a realm of darkness, into timelessness, into a life that was not her own. It had been like this for two years and by an effort of will she trained herself to concentrate only on her life in New York. Her cycle of poems “Considering Manhattan” was completed in one feverish three-month period when she felt her powers return, felt the old welcome weight of the language and saw herself once more as the center of the world, sending out love songs and requiems.

  It was the writing of the children’s book that had sent her reeling back into the weightless harmonics of her madness. When the story had come to her in the nightmare, she transcribed it in an eight-hour burst of unbroken creativity exactly as she had dreamed it. As she wrote it, she realized she was describing one of these lost interludes in her life. She could feel missing elements in the story and they were far more powerful than the ones she had included. The three men struck a particularly mordant chord in her and their approach to the house caused something to sound in her, far off, like a bell of some deconsecrated church ringing in the wind. She studied the story as though it were a lost sacred text that held inscrutable allusions to the mysteries of her own life. She read the story over and over again, convinced it was a parable or outline for something with far graver implications. Something had happened to her, but for the story she wrote she could come up with only one missing element: the statue of the Infant or Prague her father had brought back from World War II that sat on a table by the front door. She did not know the role the statue had played in the story but she knew it should be there. After Renata killed herself that statue made a hideous appearance in those hallucinations which always came to her in periods of suffering. The Infant of Prague joined forces with the chorus of voices within her, linked up with the black dogs of suicide and the angels of negation. Again, these apparitions chanted the withering litany she had heard since childhood, taunting her with her worthlessness, regaling her with murderous hymns and chants, calling for her death. She began to see the dogs hanging on meat hooks from her apartment wall, their bodies twisted in agony. Hundreds of these crucified dogs screamed out, their voices sibilant and intertwined, for her to kill herself. “They’re not real. They’re not real,” Savannah had repeated to herself, but her voice was drowned out in the demonic howling of the impaled accusatory dogs. She would rise up from her living room chair and walk into her bathroom to escape the gathering of dogs. There she found the menstruating angels hanging from the shower rod and the ceiling, with their necks broken, moaning with exquisite suffering. Their voices, delicate and soft, asked her to come home with them, to the safe place with long vistas, to the corridors of endless sleep, to the long night of silence, of voicelessness, where the angels were whole, immaculate, and kind. They lifted their arms toward her in a gesture of solidarity and possessiveness. Their eye sockets were black holes flowing with pus. Above them, she saw the small feet of the Infant of Prague, lynched from the ceiling, his face disfigured and bruised, speaking to her in her mother’s voice, demanding that she maintain her silence. Whenever she took out her razor blades and began to count them, she could hear the pleasure of the dogs twisting on the hooks, the ecstasy of those disfigured angels with their fluted, encircling voices. Each night, she counted razor blades and listened to that sullied nation clamoring out the laws of storm, murmuring a compline of suicide.

  “I only saw Savannah for a couple of months before her suicide attempt, Tom,” Susan Lowenstein said. “I didn’t fully realize the danger of her trying to hurt herself. The therapy was so exhilarating. A therapist should not feel that kind of exhilaration. You need to remain calm, aloof, and professional. But Savannah was a poet who spoke to me and dazzled me with words and images. I made a mistake, Tom. I wanted to be known as the therapist who made it possible for a poet to write again. I made a terrible blunder of arrogance.”

  “It wasn’t arrogance, Susan,” I said as my knife cut into the rabbit on my plate. “It just got too weird for you, just like it’s gotten too weird for me.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Let’s take my experience,” I said. “I hear about my sister cutting her wrists up here on happy Manhattan isle. I come dashing up here to play my ritual role of savior, twentieth-century Christ figure, a role I can play, by the way, in my sleep, marching in a band, or with my hands tied behind my back. Because it makes me feel needed. It makes me feel superior. The golden twin mounts his steed to ride to the rescue of his lovely sister, poet, crazy person, unsuccessful suicide.”

  “What if I’d told you on that first day that Savannah was thinking of simply disappearing from New York and going to a strange city to live out her life as Renata Halpern?” she asked.

  “I’d have laughed my ass off,” I admitted.

  “Of course you would have,” she said. “You made no secret of your contempt for therapy the first day we met.”

  “I grew up in a lucky town, Doc,” I said. “We didn’t even know what a psychiatrist was.”

  “Ah, yes,” she said. “A very lucky town. From your description of Colleton, it sounds as though the whole town was suffering from some collective psychosi
s.”

  “Well, it no longer suffers from anything.” I turned my attention to the rabbit before continuing. “You still haven’t explained to me why Savannah can’t tell you the same stories I have.”

  “I tried to tell you, Tom, but you were either not listening or you didn’t believe the explanation. There are great blank spaces in her memory, vast areas of repression that sometimes span years at a time. It was Savannah who once told me that you could tell the stories. You’ve always told me about the strange closeness you and Savannah had as twins. I discounted it at first because I thought you were part of her problem. But you’ve led me to believe otherwise.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You served a valuable function for Savannah when you were growing up, Tom. You and Luke protected her from the world, and especially her world. Even though she was different from the very beginning, her brothers gave her the appearance of normality. You both led her way through a very difficult childhood. And you, Tom, performed a critical role. She began the process of blocking memories very early in her life; the process of subtracting out the killing memories. I would call it repression but I know how much it disturbs you when I resort to Freudian terminology. So she assigned you a job very early on. You became Savannah’s memory, her window to the past. You could always tell her what had happened, where she had been, and what she had said when she surfaced from one of her dark periods.”

  “If she had no memory,” I asked, “how could she have been a poet?”

  “Because she has genius and her poetry comes from the pain of being human and the pain of surviving as a woman in our society.”

  “When do you think she first started relegating the duty of memory to me?”