by Pat Conroy
22
On graduation night, my mother presented two large boxes to Luke and me as we were dressing for the ceremony. She gave Savannah a small gift elegantly wrapped.
“If I were rich, there’d be three Cadillacs parked out on the lawn,” my mother said, and her voice was teary and nostalgic. “And I’d just hand over the three keys.”
“Speaking of being rich, I had a brilliant idea the other day . . . ” my father said, but was cut dead by a withering glance from my mother.
Savannah opened her gift first and drew out a gold-plated fountain pen, which she held up to the light.
“That’s to write your first book with. In New York City,” my mother said.
Savannah hugged my mother fiercely and said, “Thanks so much, Mama. It’s beautiful.”
“It was way too expensive. But I got it on sale. I figured you’d have to write prettier poems if you used a prettier pen.”
“I’ll write beautiful poems with it, Mama. I promise,” said Savannah.
“Write one about the Big Dad,” my father said. “A really great poem requires a really great subject. Like me.”
“What a silly idea, Henry,” my mother said.
“I’m sure I’ll write lots of poems about you,” Savannah said, smiling at us.
“Open your presents,” my mother commanded Luke and me.
Together, Luke and I unwrapped our gifts. I opened mine first and saw the navy blue sport coat my mother had made. Luke pulled an identical though much larger sport coat from his box. We tried them on and they fit perfectly. For months, my mother had sat by her sewing machine while we were at school, preparing for this moment. I walked to my mother’s room and looked at myself in her full-length mirror. For the first time in my life, I appeared handsome to myself.
She drifted up behind me, surreal, quiet as a movement of clouds, and whispered, “I told you once that you’d always remember your first sport coat.”
“How do I look?”
“If I was young enough, I’d have a go at you myself,” she said.
“Mama,” I said, blushing, “don’t talk dirty.”
“I’m just speaking the truth. You’re better looking than your father ever was on the best day of his life.”
“I heard that,” my father cried out from the living room. “And it’s a goddamn lie.”
The graduation was held in the gymnasium and the seniors filed through the front entry two by two to the sound of “Pomp and Circumstance.” When Savannah’s name was announced as the valedictorian, my mother, grandfather, and grandmother rose to their feet and cheered loudly as Savannah walked to the podium to deliver her valedictory address. My father stood near the podium and filmed her entire speech for posterity. She began her speech with the line, “We were raised by the music of rivers, artless and unself-conscious, and we have spent our childhood days beside these waters, seduced by the charms of the loveliest town in the Carolina lowcountry.” Her speech was impressionistic and burned with a series of indelible images common to us all. It was the poet going public for the first time, cocky with the majesty of words that she used like a peacock fanning his gorgeous tail feathers for the sheer joy of ostentation. Savannah had a genius for the final act and the farewell gesture. She bid adieu to the world we were leaving behind and she did it in Savannah’s way: inimitably, memorially.
The superintendent of schools, Morgan Randel, handed out our diplomas one by one and wished us luck in the world. There was modest applause from the sweating crowd for each of us, but a murmur began moving through the bleachers as Benji Washington walked toward Mr. Randel to receive his diploma. The senior class did not murmur but rose collectively to its feet and gave Benji a standing ovation as he solemnly took his diploma and, with that same unbearably lonely dignity, crossed the stage and returned to his seat. He was surprised and embarrassed by the fuss and I turned and saw his mother pressing her face against her husband’s shoulder in heartfelt relief that her son’s long ordeal was over. It is history we are applauding, I thought, as I cheered for Benji Washington, history and change and a courage so superhuman that I would never see its like again, never feel its flame burning so brightly in subjugation to an ideal. The applause rose as he neared his seat and I thought about how many Benji Washingtons there were tonight in the South, black sons and daughters of lordly image, who have tested their resources in the bitter milieus of white kids trained from birth to love Jesus and to hate niggers with all their hearts.
To music again we marched out into the June heat. I was sweating profusely because I had insisted on wearing my new sport coat beneath my graduation gown.
It is midnight after graduation and we are sitting on the wooden bridge that connects our island and our lives to the continental United States. The moon quivers on the water of an in-breathing tide, a pale disc nickling in the current. Above us, the stars are in the middle of their perfect transit through the night and constellations are reborn in the luminous mirror of tides below us. On either side of us, the marsh accepts the approach of the tides with a vegetable pleasure, an old smell of lust and renewal. In the lowcountry, the smell of the marshlands is offensive to visitors, but is the fragrant essence of the planet to the native born. Our nostrils quiver with the incense of home, the keen pastille of our mother country. Palmettos close ranks at the head of each peninsula and the creek divides into smaller creeks like a vein flowering into capillaries. A stingray swims just below the surface like a bird in nightmare. The wind lifts off the island, a messenger bearing the odor of moonsage and honeysuckle and jasmine. In an instant the smell of the night changes, recedes, deepens, then recedes again. It is sharp as vinaigrette, singular as bay rum.
Savannah sits in the middle of her two brothers, lovely in the economy of her fragile lines. My arm is around my sister’s shoulders and I hold Luke’s massive neck in my hand, just barely. Luke takes a drink of Wild Turkey and passes it down the line to us. Luke has bought the bourbon not because it is expensive but because he associates it with hunting turkeys on cold winter mornings.
“It’s over now,” Savannah said. “What did it all mean?”
“It was just something we had to go through before they let us go,” Luke suggested.
Softened by the bourbon, I said, “It wasn’t that bad. I bet we look back on this as the best time of our lives.”
“It was dreadful,” said Savannah.
“Oh, c’mon. Look at the bright side. You always dwell on the bad stuff,” I said, passing the bottle to Savannah. “A sky can be perfectly blue and you start yelling about a hurricane.”
“I’m a realist,” she said, elbowing me in the stomach. “And you’re just a poor, dumb jock. You’re the only person I know who actually enjoyed high school.”
“I guess that makes me a terrible person, right?” I answered.
“I’ll never trust anyone who liked high school,” Savannah continued, ignoring me. “I’ll never trust anyone who looks like they even tolerated high school. I’ll refuse to even talk to anyone who looks like they played high school football.”
“I played high school football,” I said, hurt by her sweeping dismissal.
“I rest my case,” she said, throwing her head back and laughing.
“I don’t understand your hatred of high school, Savannah,” I said. “You did so well. You were valedictorian, cheerleader, secretary of the senior class, and you were voted best personality.”
“Best personality!” she screamed out toward the marsh, high on the bourbon. “I sure had a lot of competition for that title. I was one of the few people in that high school with any personality at all.”
“I have a wonderful personality,” I said.
“You throw touchdown passes,” Savannah said. “You don’t light up the world with personality.”
“Yeah, Tom,” Luke teased, “you don’t have personality for shit.”
“Who is that big hulk sitting on your left, Savannah?” I said, squeezing Luke’s neck. “He’s
too big to be a human being and too dumb to be a hippopotamus. Now tell me that wasn’t a terrific line. Tell me that we’re not dealing with a world-class personality.”
“I’d like to be a hippopotamus,” Luke said. “Just sitting down there on the bottom of rivers, kicking ass on occasion.”
“Why don’t you try to find out who you are in college, Tom?” she asked. “Why don’t you take some time to find out who inhabits that soul beneath the shoulder pads.”
“I know exactly who I am. I’m Tom Wingo, southern born and southern made, and I’m an ordinary guy who’s going to live an ordinary life. I’m going to marry an ordinary woman and have ordinary kids. Even though I am related to this goofball family and have a brother who wouldn’t mind being a hippo.”
“You’re so shallow you’re going to marry the first girl with big tits who comes along,” she said.
“Sounds good to me,” Luke said, taking a swallow of the bourbon.
“What about you, Luke?” said Savannah. “What’s in it for you?”
“In what?”
“In life,” said Savannah. “This is our graduation night and we’re required to talk about our future and make plans and plot out our destinies.”
“I’m going to be a shrimp boat captain like Dad,” Luke said. “Dad’s going to the bank at the end of the summer and help me finance my own shrimp boat.”
“He’s got a great credit rating at the bank,” I said. “I bet they wouldn’t let him finance a cast net and a cane pole.”
“He needs to clean up some debts before we go to the bank.”
“You could be more, Luke,” said Savannah. “You could be so much more. You listened to them and believed everything they said about you.”
“Why don’t you call up the coaches at Clemson or Carolina and tell them you’ve decided to play football for them, Luke,” I said. “Those guys would cream in their Fruit of the Looms if you’d play ball.”
“You know I can’t get passing grades in college,” Luke said to us. “I wouldn’t have passed in high school if you two hadn’t cheated for me. I don’t need college to remind me that I’m stupid.”
“You’re not stupid, Luke,” she said. “That’s the lie they fed you and the one you swallowed whole.”
“I appreciate your saying that, Savannah. But let’s face it. God forgot to pack the brains along with the muscle. I finished second from the bottom in our class academically. Only Viryn Grant finished lower than me.”
“I was working in the guidance department at the end of the year, helping Mr. Lopatka record grades in our permanent records and when he went out to lunch I found out what all of our IQs are,” Savannah said.
“No kidding,” I said. “That’s top-secret information.”
“Well, I saw them. And it was real interesting. Especially about Luke. Do you know that you have a higher IQ than Tom, Luke?”
“What?” I said, highly offended.
“Whoopee,” Luke screamed, flushing a marsh hen from its nest in the high grasses. “Pass the bourbon to Tom. This is going to ruin his whole graduation.”
“Why should it ruin his graduation?” Savannah asked. “Everyone knows an IQ doesn’t mean anything.”
“What was yours, Savannah?” I asked.
“Mine was one forty, which puts me up there with the geniuses,” she said. “I assume this comes as no surprise to my worshipful brother.”
“What was mine?” Luke asked, and I could not bear the triumph in his voice.
“Yours was one nineteen, Luke. Tom scored one fifteen.”
“I’m your twin,” I shouted. “I’m your goddamn twin. I demand a recount.”
“I always thought Tom was a little slow,” Luke said, grinning.
“Kiss my fat fanny, Luke,” I said, infuriated and worried. “I thought twins automatically had the same IQs.”
“Not even identical twins have the same IQ, Tom,” said Savannah, enjoying herself. “But you really got the short end of the stick.”
“Imagine that. I’m smarter than you, Tom,” Luke said. “I’ll drink to that.”
“But I use what I’ve got a lot better,” I said.
“Yeah, you sure do, little brother. You’ve done right well with that shabby little IQ of yours,” Luke replied, and he and Savannah fell back on the bridge, laughing.
“Well, I’ve decided to be a football coach,” I said, reaching for the bourbon, “so I don’t need to have a world-class brain.”
“You won’t need a brain at all,” Savannah said. “What a waste, Tom.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I’d like to take a team of assassins and kill all the coaches in the world. We’d go around and torture every male and female above the age of twenty-one we found wearing a sweat shirt and a whistle.”
“How would you torture them?” asked Luke.
“First, I’d make them listen to classical music. Then I’d make them take ballet lessons for a week. Let’s see, then I’d make them read the collected works of Jane Austen. I’d top it all off by giving them a sex change operation without anesthesia.”
“Such violence, Savannah,” I said. “What strange little thoughts roll around in your pretty head.”
“If Tom wants to be a coach, let him be a coach,” Luke intervened. “Why can’t he be what he wants to be?”
“Because he could be a lot more,” Savannah insisted, turning toward me. “He’s selling himself out to the South for cheap. I’m sorry, Tom. You’re a victim of the Southern Disease, boy, and there ain’t no known vaccine to save your ass.”
“I guess you’re going to be hot shit in New York Goddamn City,” I said.
“I’m going to be amazing,” she said simply.
“Mom still wants you to take that scholarship from Converse College,” Luke said. “I heard her talking to Tolitha the other day.”
“I’d rather die than stay in South Carolina a day longer than I have to. Do you know what Mama has in store for me? She wants me to marry some lawyer or doctor that I meet in college, then settle down in some teensy South Carolina town and plop out four or five children. If they’re boys, she’ll expect me to raise them up to be doctors or lawyers. If they’re girls, she’ll expect me to raise them up to marry doctors or lawyers. Even her dreams smell like death to me. But I’m not buying the program. I’m going to be whatever I want to be. In Colleton, everyone expects you to be a certain way and the whole town makes sure that no one deviates very far from that central idea. The girls are all pretty and perky and the boys all kick ass. No, I’m sick of hiding what I really am, what I feel inside. I’m going to New York where I don’t have to be afraid to find out everything there is to know about myself.”
“What are you afraid of?” Luke asked as a night heron, shy as a moth, took wing over the marsh.
“I’m afraid if I stay here, I’ll end up like Mr. Fruit. Crazy or feeble-minded, begging for sandwiches at the back doors of restaurants and bars. I want to be in a place where if I go crazy for a while it will pass unnoticed. This town has driven me nuts by the sheer effort it’s taken to pretend I’m just like everyone else. I’ve always known I was different. I was born in the South yet I’ve never been southern a single day in my life. This thing has almost killed me, Tom and Luke. I’ve been sick, crazy-sick since I was a little girl. I see things. I hear voices. I have terrible nightmares. Whenever I told Mama about it she said, ‘Take two aspirins and don’t have any dessert after dinner.’ It’s been a terrible strain to get this far.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Luke asked.
“What could you have done about it?” she answered.
“We’d have told you to take three aspirins and to skip dessert after dinner,” I said.
“Do you know what I see in the water below us?” she said, staring down into the moonlit tide. “There are hundreds of drowned dogs with their eyes open, staring at me.”
I looked down into the water and saw only water.
“Yep. May
be you should move to New York City,” I said.
“Shut up, Tom,” Luke said, looking at Savannah protectively. “There aren’t any dogs down there, poopy-doop. That’s just your mind playing tricks on you.”
“Sometimes I see the Infant of Prague. You know, that statue Dad brought back from Germany. The infant has pus flowing from his eyeballs and he gestures for me to follow him. Sometimes Mom and Dad are hanging naked from meat hooks, snarling at each other, snapping at each other with fangs and barking like dogs.”
“It’s hell having a one-forty IQ, isn’t it, Savannah,” I said.
“Shut up, Tom,” Luke said again, more firmly, and I shut up.
Silence fell upon the three of us—an awkward, uncomfortable silence.
“Jesus Christ. This is weird. Pass the bourbon, Luke. I suggest you drink half of it when it passes by you, Savannah. In fact, if I heard those voices and saw all those things, I’d just stay drunk. You know, wake up in the morning and take a nip. Then, just keep nipping until you pass out at night.”
“Why don’t you become a doctor instead of a coach, Tom?” Luke said. “Our sister’s in trouble and is trying to tell us something important and you just sit there and make jokes. We got to try to help her, not laugh at her.”
“There’s nothing you can do, Luke,” she said. “I’ve lived with it alone for a long time. I tried to get Mama to take me to a psychiatrist in Charleston but she found out they charge forty dollars an hour.”
“Forty dollars an hour,” I said, whistling. “They’d have to give me a handjob and a box of cigars to be worth forty big ones an hour. Hell, maybe I’ll be a psychiatrist. Let’s say I work ten hours a day, six days a week. I’ll work fifty weeks a year helping people who see their mamas hanging from meat hooks. I’ll be pulling down, my God, a hundred twenty thousand dollars a year before taxes. I didn’t know you could get rich helping out fruitcakes.”
“You’re drunk, Tom,” Luke said. “I done told you to zipper your lips or I’ll throw you in the creek to sober you up.”
“You think you could throw me in this creek?” I said, laughing and out of control. “You’re talking to much man. Much man. You’re talking to a goddamn college football player now, Luke. Not one of those high school jocks with fuzz on their cheeks.”
