by Pat Conroy
“Do you think Dr. Lowenstein can be trusted with that piece of information?” she asked.
I said, “Usually after I tell Dr. Lowenstein some dark secret, it mysteriously appears the very next day in The New York Times. Of course she can be trusted, Mom. She’s a professional.”
“I have too much pride to reveal such a shameful episode to a perfect stranger,” my mother said.
“I’m riddled with obsequiousness, Mom,” I said. “I like telling total strangers all about it. ‘Hi, I’m Tom Wingo. I was buggered by an escaped convict, but then I killed him with a statue of the Christ child.’ It establishes immediate intimacy.”
My mother studied me dispassionately, then asked, “Have you admitted to Dr. Lowenstein about your own problems, Tom? You’re good at revealing all of my family secrets, but I wonder how much you reveal about your own.”
“There’s nothing to reveal, Mom,” I said. “Anybody can see I’m an unhappy, desperate wreck of a man. The details would only bore them.”
“Have you told her that Sallie and I had to commit you to the tenth floor of the Medical College last year?”
“No, I haven’t,” I lied. “I thought I would let Dr. Lowenstein think that I came to my hatred of her profession through my extensive readings, not personal experience.”
“I think she needs to know that the stories she’s hearing are coming from someone who was committed to an insane asylum,” my mother said.
“I prefer to describe it as the psychiatric unit of a teaching college, Mom,” I said, closing my eyes. “It does so much more for my self-esteem. Look, Mom, I know it embarrassed you that I spent a week on the tenth floor. It embarrassed me even more. I was depressed. What more can I tell you? I’m still depressed. But I’m getting better. Despite Sallie and her doctor friend, this summer has been good for me. I’ve taken stock of my entire life and the life of my family and it’s a rare privilege for a man to have that kind of luxury in these grisly times. At rare moments, I’m even starting to like myself again.”
“I’m going to tell Dr. Lowenstein that you lied to her about the rape and about everything else you told her,” my mother said. “Then I’ll tell her they had to send bolts of electricity through your brain just to straighten you out.”
“They gave me two electroshock treatments, Mother,” I said. “It took me a long time to get my memory back.”
“I’m going to tell Dr. Lowenstein that it confused your memory and you started making up stories,” my mother said, extinguishing her cigarette.
“Mom,” I said, lighting her second cigarette for her, “people are raped in America every day. It wasn’t our fault. It was just our turn. Thousands of women are raped in America every day. The men who do it are sickos. Boys get raped in prisons at a hideous rate. It’s violent and horrible and it changes you forever. But it doesn’t do anyone any good to pretend it didn’t happen.”
“I wasn’t raped,” my mother said.
“What?” I said.
“You didn’t see what went on in that room,” she said, and she began to cry. “He didn’t rape me. You have no proof.”
“Proof? What proof do I need, Mama? The reason I didn’t think you were discussing Bogart films in there is simple. When you busted out of that room naked, I thought you were making a rather strong statement.”
My mother cried harder and I passed a handkerchief over to her.
“We showed them, didn’t we, Tom?” she said through her tears.
“We sure as hell did, Mama,” I said. “We showed the shit out of them.”
“It was horrible what he did to me in that room,” she said, sobbing.
“The last time I saw that guy alive he was checking out a tiger for halitosis,” I said. “I think it spoiled his whole day. He had kudzu growing out of his eyeballs the same night.”
“It’s odd how things work, Tom,” she said. “We’d be dead now if your father hadn’t bought that gas station. Having a tiger was the only thing that saved us that day.”
“Luke would have found some other way, Mom,” I said. “Luke always found a way.”
“Not always,” she said and paused.
“Will Savannah see me?”
“She doesn’t want to see any members of her family right now, Mama,” I said. “She’s considering whether she should ever see us again or not.”
“Do you know it’s been three years since she spoke to me?” my mother said.
“She hasn’t spoken with me, either,” I said. “Same with Dad. We’ve had some bad things happen in our family, Mom.”
“Which makes us exactly like every other family on earth,” she said.
“Savannah has also maintained that ours is one of the most screwed-up families in the history of families,” I said.
“We can hardly use Savannah as an unbiased arbiter,” my mother said. “She’s in an insane asylum.”
“I think it adds weight to her argument,” I said. “Why did you come up to New York, Mama?”
“Because I want both of you to start loving me again, Tom,” she said, and her voice broke.
I waited until she regained control of her voice. She seemed brittle and deeply hurt. It was hard for me to believe I could adore someone I distrusted so completely.
“I can do nothing to change the past,” she gasped. “I would change every minute of it if I could, but it’s not within my power. I don’t see any reason to spend the rest of our lives as enemies. I’ve discovered that I can’t stand it that my own children despise me. I want your good will again. I want your love, Tom. I think I deserve it.”
“I was angry with you, Mama,” I said. “I never stopped loving you. You’ve taught me that even monsters are people too. That was a joke, Mom.”
“It was a bad joke,” she said, sniffling.
“I want to be friends with you again, Mom,” I said. “I’m not kidding. I need it probably more than you do. I know that everything I say pisses you off. I’ll try not to say mean things to you. I mean it. I’ll try from this moment to regain my status as a perfectly wonderful son.”
“Would you have dinner with us tonight?” my mother asked. “It would mean so much to me.”
“Us?” I said. “Oh, God, Mama, you ask so much. Why can’t I just start loving you and maintain my undying contempt for your husband. That must not be uncommon in America. I’m a stepson. It’s my job to hate my stepfather. It’s a literary conceit I picked up somewhere along the trail. You know, Hamlet, Cinderella, all those people.”
“Please, Tom,” she said. “I’m asking it as a favor. I want you to be friends with my husband.”
“Fine, Mom,” I said. “It’ll be a pleasure to meet you for dinner.”
“I’ve missed you, Tom,” she said as she rose to leave.
“I’ve missed you, too, Mama,” I said, and we held each other for a long time, and it was hard to tell who was crying harder as the weight of all the lost years made us desperate to touch each other.
“Don’t ever be an asshole again, Mama,” I said.
She laughed through tears and said, “I have a perfect right to be an asshole. I’m your mother.”
“We’ve lost some good years, Mama,” I said.
“We’ll make up for them,” she said. “I’m sorry about Luke, Tom. I know that’s why you hated me. I cry about Luke every single day of my life.”
“Luke gave us something to cry about, Mom,” I said.
“Sallie wants you to call her, Tom,” she said. “I talked to her just before I left.”
“She’s going to leave me, Mom,” I said. “I’ve been practicing living without Sallie since I’ve come to New York.”
“I don’t think so, Tom,” she said. “I think she’s been jilted.”
“Why didn’t she pick up the phone and call me herself?” I asked.
“I don’t know, Tom,” she said. “She might have been afraid to. She tells me you’re starting to sound like the old Tom on the phone and in your letters.”
/> “The old Tom,” I said. “I hate the old Tom. I also hate the new Tom.”
“I love the old Tom,” my mother said. “And the new Tom is going to have dinner with me and my husband and I love him for it.”
“Be patient with me, Mama,” I said. “Most of what you say is still going to piss me off.”
“If we promise to love each other, Tom, the rest will come soon enough.”
“I want your husband to feed me very well, Mom,” I said. “I want this reconciliation to cost him a large sum of money. I want his blood pressure to rise and his life expectancy to fall when he gets the check.”
“We have reservations at the Four Seasons,” she said. “I made reservations for three.”
“You dog,” I said. “You knew I’d fall for your wicked charms.”
I met my mother at the bar of the St. Regis Hotel. She was sitting alone. My mother looked up suddenly and I turned around to see her husband entering the bar. I rose to greet him.
“Hello, Tom,” he said. “I’m very grateful you could come.”
“I’ve been a perfect jackass,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
And I shook hands with my stepfather, Reese Newbury.
24
In late August 1962 I reported early to freshman football practice at the University of South Carolina, becoming the first member of my family ever to matriculate on a college campus. In the histories of families, even these small advances take on monumental dimensions. On the same day I arrived at the university, Luke was shrimping the waters of Colleton in the new shrimp boat he had christened the Miss Savannah and was already catching more shrimp than my father. Savannah would not leave for New York until November and she would do it over the strong protests of my parents, who wanted her to stay in Colleton until she had her “head on straight.” The pledge of silence had held and I began practice with the guilty knowledge that I was most likely the only boy on the team lucky enough to have been raped by an escaped convict. I became shy in the shower room, fearful that my nakedness would reveal some mark of shame to my. teammates. I vowed to myself that I would begin my life again, regain that hell-bent enthusiasm I had lost during the assault on my house, and distinguish myself in every aspect of college life. But already my luck had changed, and college was to teach me that I was one of life’s journeymen, eager to excel but lacking the requisite gifts.
In the first week of practice, I was told by my coach that I did not have what it takes to be a college quarterback, and he assigned me to the position of defensive safety, where I was destined to live out the dreams of an athlete. I would return kickoffs and punts on the second unit for three years, and in my senior year, I intercepted four passes and was named to the all-conference second team. But I never threw a single pass or ran a single offensive play from the line of scrimmage. The thresholds of my talents were modest and my desire far exceeded my abilities. I was known as a hustler, and my coaches grew fond of me over the years. When runners burst through the defensive line, I made them remember me. I tackled them with a recklessness, a willed ferocity, not proscribed by minimal talent. Only I knew that this ferocity was the handiwork of terror. I would never lose my visceral fear of the game, but it was a secret I never shared with the world. I turned that fear into an asset and it helped me define myself as I spent a four-year apprenticeship beneath its languid jurisdiction. I played afraid but did not dishonor myself. It was the fear that made me love the sport so much and love myself for turning that fear into an act of ardor, even worship.
Until I went to college I had no conception of how countrified and ingenuous I appeared to others. The boys on the freshman team came from all over America, and with something approaching amazement, I listened to the four boys from New York City talk. I had no idea that such personal assurance, such easy swagger and natural confidence, could accrue so naturally to boys my own age. They were as exotic as Turks and their snappy, rapid-fire speech seemed like some alien, pernicious language to me.
I was so overwhelmed by the newness of college, by the magnitude of the change from island boy to college boy, that I made few alliances in the first year. Light on my feet and vigilant, I kept my own counsel, took it all in, and tried to grow savvy by imitating those glorious, confident southern city boys I admired so extravagantly. The juniors and seniors from Charleston walked like kings, and I tried to copy their elegance of manner, their unself-conscious sophistication, and their deft, civilized wit. My roommate was a boy from Charleston named Boisfeuillet Gailliard, or Bo, as he liked to be called. He reeked of good breeding and inherited privilege. His name sounded like a French meal to me, and one of his Huguenot ancestors had been governor of the colony before the great revolt against King George. I was pleased at my good fortune at drawing such a roommate and my mother had a moment approaching ecstasy when she heard a Wingo had aligned his destiny with a South Carolina Gailliard. I now know Bo was appalled to be saddled with such an undistinguished roommate but he was far too well schooled beneath the colonnades of southern custom ever to impart his discomfiture to me. In fact, after the initial shock, he seemed to take me under his wing as a kind of social reclamation project. He made only one rule, that I could never under any circumstances borrow his clothes. His closet was filled with marvelous suits and sport coats. He seemed stunned by my own negligible wardrobe, but again he said nothing, his eyes merely registering slight surprise when I proudly showed him the blue sport coat my mother had made for my graduation. Bo was happy when he found I played football and asked if I could get his family some complimentary tickets to the Clemson game. I told him I would be happy to and I supplied his family with free tickets for the next four years, long after he had ceased being my roommate. I did not know it then, but with Boisfeuillet Gailliard I was meeting for the first time that indigenous species of southern culture, the natural politician. In that first week, he told me he would be governor of the state when he was forty, and it did not surprise me to see him take the oath of office two years before that projected date. He asked me to be on the lookout for any girl I saw on campus who might be good material for First Lady of the state. I promised I would keep my eyes open. I had not met anyone like Bo Gailliard before. I was a country boy and not yet uncommonly good at sniffing out assholes.
It was Bo who made me want to become a fraternity man and I followed him from frat house to frat house during Rush Week that year, watching him disappear from my side as soon as we entered the smoky, noisy rooms filled with well-dressed Greeks who all seemed like the friendliest people I had ever met. I loved all the fraternities and all the brothers about equally well, but Bo convinced me that SAE was the best and the only one I needed to take seriously. But I ate dinner at all the houses whenever freshmen were invited and laughed at all the jokes and entered every conversation I could and offered my opinions on just about everything under the sun.
When it was time for me to fill out my pledge card, I looked long and hard, then put down the five most popular fraternities on campus as my first choices. The bids were to be placed by the fraternities at five o’clock in the afternoon and there was a huge crowd of boys and girls waiting at the post office when they were delivered. There were screams of joy when some boy or girl would receive a bid from the fraternity or sorority of his or her choice. There was an air of such joy and festivity that I was breathless with anticipation as I kept peeking into the small window of my mail slot.
At seven o’clock I was still there, still checking that empty box, wondering if there had been some terrible mistake. Bo found me there at eight, distraught and edgy, still waiting in the darkened post office.
“I got five bids, but I’ve been a natural-born SAE as long as I can remember. Come out and I’ll buy you a beer to celebrate.”
“I don’t think so, Bo,” I said. “Do they deliver some of the bids tomorrow?”
“Hell, no,” he said, laughing. “They’d have kids going crazy if they had to wait until tomorrow.”
“I didn’t get a bid,�
�� I said.
“That doesn’t surprise you, does it, Tom?” he said, not unkindly.
“Yes. It surprises me very much,” I said.
“Tom, I should have warned you, but I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. You became a class joke. Everyone was talking about you.”
“Why?” I asked.
“You wore the same sport coat to every single party, every meeting, every activity on campus. Then someone found out your mother had made the coat and everyone went crazy. The girls in some of the sororities thought it was the most adorable thing they had ever heard of, but it sure didn’t make you prime Greek material. I mean, who ever heard of a fraternity man walking around in a homemade coat? It would look good in a Norman Rockwell painting, but it doesn’t exactly fit the image of any fraternity on campus. Did the Dekes turn you down too?”
“I reckon.”
“If you couldn’t get in with the Dekes, then there’s no chance, Tom. But there are a lot of really sharp guys on campus who don’t even want to have anything to do with fraternities, Tom.”
“I wish I had been smart enough to be one of them.”
“Let me buy you a beer.”
“I’ve got to call home.”
I walked to the bank of pay phones near the entrance of the post office and sat in the darkness of the booth to collect my bruised thoughts before I called home. I was overcome with hurt and shame. I tried to analyze my behavior at the dizzying series of parties I had attended. Did I laugh too loud, use bad grammar, or seem too eager to please? I had always taken it for granted that people would like me. It was something I never worried about, but now I worried greatly. If I could just talk to some of the fraternity men and give them the history of the sport coat in my life, I could make them understand and reconsider. But even I understood the futility of such a pitiable gesture. I had simply not understood the nature of the milieu I was attempting to enter. I had tried to join a fraternity and found the Colleton League blocking my way. From my mother, I had learned nothing of the perils of over-reaching.
