by Pat Conroy
“People that have worked with me,” he said. “They’ll back me up.”
“Let me give Jack some other numbers, Mike,” Ledare said. “The people who spit over their left shoulders when your name’s mentioned.”
“You make enemies in my business,” Mike said. “That’s the nature of the beast.”
“Then give Jack the numbers of people who’d set you on fire just to see if their lighter worked. Half that town thinks you’ve always been a son of a bitch.”
“But they didn’t know me as a boy,” Mike said. “Not like you guys did. I wasn’t this way when I was growing up.”
“I’m sorry, Mike,” Ledare said, “I didn’t mean for it to sound like that.”
“No problem, Ledare. I know where it’s coming from. I don’t know what happened to me any more than you do. That’s why I want you and Jack to do this project. I’d like you to help me find out. I know I’m alive. I just don’t know how to feel it anymore. Ciao, amigos. I got a meeting. You two, powwow.”
As we made our way toward the elevators, Ledare asked, “You’re not going to take Mike’s offer, are you, Jack?”
“No. The thing I love about the past most is not thinking about it.”
Chapter Four
The next afternoon I led Ledare through different parts of the city and watched her watch Italian women, exquisitely turned out, moving along the narrow alleys toward their homes. A woman came out of a small boutique and walked toward us, making me step behind Ledare on the narrow walkway just off the Calle del Traghetto.
Ledare stopped and stared at the woman, meeting her eyes, taking in what she was wearing, the high carriage of her walk, the beautiful legs, the thoughtless elegance, everything. She inhaled her scent.
“You’ll get used to that,” I said.
“I doubt it,” Ledare answered. “She is beautiful.”
“There’s something magic about Italian women.”
“She looked like she was spun from pure gold. If I were you, I’d follow that woman to the end of the line and never lose sight of her,” Ledare continued.
I laughed and again moved beside her as we crossed through the Campo di Santa Margherita, where a group of small boys were playing soccer beneath the disapproving gaze of an elderly monsignor. An old woman watered a window box full of geraniums and an artist stood at the entrance of the Campo painting the whole scene in the late-afternoon light.
I was deeply aware that I was walking beside one of the lives I had refused to live. Once our pasts were entangled in such complex ways that it seemed we were meant for each other if we allowed ourselves to surrender to the simplest lures of inertia. The friends of our childhood paired us off, almost by fiat. Our temperaments seemed tranquil and complementary from first grade on. Both of us, from the beginning, looked as though we belonged on the same side of the chessboard. It was my mother who first gave me the signifying key that Ledare was bashful to the point of torment. My mother taught me that beauty was often a fine, untouchable gift, but it almost always belonged to the world more than the girl. She spotted the burden and responsibility of Ledare’s unasked-for beauty and recognized that the child was lonely. Wordlessly, Ledare and I effected a merger of our solitudes, giving ourselves up to the main current in our lives. As we walked beside each other in Venice, both of us felt the force of a story untold and a journey not taken. It moved as a third person between us.
I knew that Ledare was hard on herself for the choices she had made. But she had grown up in that pampered, baby-talking way that the South has of making its girls follow the paths of least resistance. Just when she thought she was learning to think for herself and make up her own mind, she found herself in perfect lockstep with her parents’ worst instincts. Though she knew she had long been immune to her parents’ gift-wrapped poison, she found it began to kill her only when she chose a husband. By a series of flawless stratagems and carefully thought-out choices, she managed to marry the one person who thought she was both worthless and contemptible. She married a man who was happy to ratify her most negative assumptions and sentiments about herself, and who eventually came to hate everything about her.
When I was a young man I would have thought this kind of marriage rare. Now I believe it is as common as grass. I have seen enough loveless marriages to fill up most of the empty spaces in the desert regions of the American West. American mothers teach their sons how to break a girl’s spirit without even knowing they are imparting such dangerous knowledge. As boys, we learn to betray our future wives by mastering the subtle ways our mothers can be broken by our petulance and disapproval. My own mother provided me with all the weaponry I will ever need to ruin the life of any woman foolish enough to love me.
Ledare hooked her arm through mine and for a moment we both were happy.
Ledare had married one of those American men who used language and sex without regard to consequence or decency. Her love for him had damaged her confidence in her love for herself. For five years, she had tried to recover a sense of equilibrium after her husband left her for a twenty-year-old woman who was physically a younger, flashier edition of Ledare herself. She told me she had made up a list of the men in her life whom she would trust to fall in love with if she ever felt strong enough to sally forth in those sharply contested fields again. I had been on that list until Ledare remembered that Shyla had committed suicide. When she remembered that, she had crossed me carefully off the list and put in phone calls to the other three men who survived the cut. Like the other women who knew me, Ledare thought I bore much of the responsibility for Shyla’s death, even though she knew little or nothing about our life together.
From a bridge overlooking one of the minor canals, I pointed at two elderly craftsmen putting the finishing touches on a gondola. They were employed by the gondola factory that still made the boats by hand.
“I’ve got a friend named Gino,” I said, taking Ledare’s arm. “His station’s not far from here.”
“You figured out a nice way to make a living, Jack. I knew you could roast oysters and cook a pig, but I never dreamed you’d write cookbooks. And it never occurred to me you’d spend your life writing about beautiful cities and great places to eat.”
“No one thought you’d write for the movies either.”
“I think I did,” she said, turning toward me. “But I also think you just might have run away.”
“I might have, Ledare. But it’s my call and I get to do what I want to do. It’s one of the few benefits of growing up.”
“I sometimes tell friends in New York about what it was like growing up in Waterford, Jack. I tell about the crowd we ran around with—all of us—and they can’t believe the stories. They say I make it sound like I grew up surrounded by gods and goddesses. They tell me I’m exaggerating. They never believe it. I tell them about Mike first, because they’ve all heard of him. Tell about you and your family. Shyla and her family. Capers and Jordan. Max, the Great Jew. Mother … I can never tone the stories down to make them believable. Was there one of us who didn’t seem smart to you, even then?”
“Yeah. I didn’t seem so smart to me. Even then. Not smart enough to get out of the way.”
“Out of the way of what?”
“I didn’t know that everything you do is dangerous—everything—the smallest, most inconsequential act can be the thing that brings you crashing to earth.”
“Were there any signs or omens? Tea leaves we could have read if we’d been alert?”
“You’re not supposed to see the signs. They’re invisible and odorless and don’t leave tracks. You don’t even feel them till you find yourself on your knees weeping over their unbearable weight,” I said.
I maneuvered her toward an alley that led past a trattoria and a dry cleaner’s with misted windows. The smell of garlic and hanging pork poured out of the trattoria.
“I’ve never eaten in that trattoria. It must be new.”
“How wonderful,” Ledare said. “Is that how we turn t
he subject away from the horror of it all?”
“I’ve trained myself not to think about South Carolina much, Ledare. Especially those parts that only cause pain. Like Shyla. I hope you understand. If you don’t, pardon me, but I don’t need to ask your permission about what I get to think about. Nor do you have to ask my permission to write about anything you goddamn feel like. And never, not once, Ledare, have you written a word about what happened to us gods and goddesses of your childhood.”
“Why, Jack, it’s been years since I’ve heard the president of my senior class give a speech,” she teased, smiling.
“You shitbird, you trapped me.”
“It’s funny, Jack, South Carolina’s always been the forbidden subject to me. I’ve never written a word about it, alluded to it in the slightest way, and never thought I would until Mike took me to lunch in New York last month. My parents live in absolute terror that I’ll reveal secrets of the manor that’ll bring shame and disaster to the family name.”
“Your family doesn’t have secrets, Ledare,” I said. “It’s just got bones.”
“Does it surprise you that Capers is running for governor?”
“Capers is running for governor.” I laughed out loud. “It was inevitable. Do you remember how he used to talk about running for governor when we were in first and second grade? Can you believe someone can be that ambitious and single-minded when they’re only seven years old?”
“Of course I can believe it. If you remember, Jack, I married him and mothered two of his children,” she said and a trace of bitterness put a ragged edge on her voice.
“You know what I think about your ex-husband,” I said. “Let’s let that subject pass.”
“But you don’t know what I think about him,” she said. “At least not currently. Do you believe he’s running as the Republican candidate?”
“A Republican?” I said, genuinely surprised. “I’d rather have a sex-change operation than vote Republican in South Carolina. Even Capers should be ashamed of his ass. No. Not Capers. Shame has no part to play in his buttoned-down theater of the absurd.”
“My son and daughter are his greatest fans.” She paused and seemed to hold her breath. “They don’t like me as much as they like their father. He’s a bastard, but charming. You could put Capers next to a chameleon and Capers would be the one to change colors.”
“I can’t even think about any of these people without being overwhelmed by a sense of guilt. I feel guilty that I hate Capers, even though I know I’ve got perfectly legitimate reasons for hating his ass.”
“I don’t feel a bit guilty for hating him,” she said. We stopped for a moment to watch a brindled cat sleeping in a window. “You once tried to explain the relationship of Catholicism and guilt, and I didn’t understand a word of it. Your being a Catholic was just one more odd thing about the McCall family.”
“Guilt’s my mainstream,” I explained. “The central theme of my life. The Church laid a foundation of pure guilt inside me. They raised a temple in the soft center of a child. Floors were paved with guilt. Statues of saints were carved out of great blocks of it.”
“You’re an adult now, Jack. Get on with it. Surely you’ve figured out how silly and stupid this all is.”
“No one agrees with you more. But you were raised an Anglican and Anglicans only feel guilty if they forget to feed their polo ponies or cover their stock margins.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. You’ve always acted like guilt was something real, something you could hold in your hands. You need to let go of it, Jack.”
We walked deeper into Venice in silence. As I caught glimpses of Ledare’s face, I found her beauty still diffident and withheld. She was so pretty that her comeliness seemed more of a mission than a gift. Ledare had always proved reluctant to accept the responsibilities that beauty asks of women.
I can still remember watching Ledare water skiing in the Waterford River after her mother had bought her a yellow bikini in Charleston. She had always been a show-off on skis, being pulled by a fast boat, doing fancy tricks on her slalom. But on that day, the men of the town lined the banks like crows on a wire to admire the soft, newly sculpted curves that had happened so recently on her thin, girlish body. Her ripening was so sudden and lush that it became a topic of conversation in the pool halls and along the bar stools in town. She had found being pretty trying enough; Ledare found being sexy unbearable. Since nothing discomfitted her more than the unwanted attention of men, Ledare packed the yellow bikini in the same box that held the summer dresses of her childhood days.
I studied Ledare’s face, her loveliness, her fine features.
“You promised me a gondola ride,” Ledare said, changing the subject as we began walking back toward the Grand Canal.
“We’re near Gino’s spot. The handsomest of the gondoliers.”
“Does he prey on pretty American girls?”
“You’re doomed, kid,” I said, winking at her.
As we walked through streets that seemed too narrow for breathing, we smelled onions frying in olive oil and heard the sound of voices carrying, airborne and mysterious, along the canals. We passed houses where canaries sang to each other from brightly lit windows, and inhaled the aroma of fried liver and heard the slapping of water against the dark, carved hulls of the gondolas and the scream of male cats. Ledare paused at a mask shop where grotesque, quasi-human faces stared back at us in all the mute terror of their eyelessness. We continued on, listening to the church bells and squabbles among children, pigeons calling to each other from rooftops, and the sound of our own footsteps along the canal.
Gino was waiting at his post near the Accademia and smiled when he saw us. He bowed deeply when I introduced him to Ledare. Gino was short and blond, and had a gondolier’s deeply sculpted body. I noticed that Gino took Ledare in all at once in a long appreciative gaze.
The gondola rode high in the Grand Canal, swan-necked and proud as a horse as Ledare sat by me with her arm through mine. Gino moved with strong, perfect motions behind us, a sweet action of wrists and forearms.
Ledare let her hand drift down the side of the gondola as a wave from a vaporetto washed over it while Gino maneuvered the craft expertly through the choppy waters of the canal.
Ledare said, “This city does something to reality. I’ve felt like a contessa since I arrived. Floating through here, I feel like I’m made of silk.”
“You’ll wish you were made of money before you leave,” I promised. “It’s cheaper to live in heaven.”
“You think heaven’s prettier than Venice?” she asked, looking around us.
“Too much to ask,” I said.
I remembered my stay in Venice during Carnevale, after Shyla died, when I had been covering the revelry of Venetians before the long fastings and privations of Lent. During the wildest part of that first night, I had marveled that these people who were celebrating the pleasures of the flesh with such open-ended immoderation could turn so quickly to the darker joys of self-denial.
It had snowed that February, deep drifting snow born in the high passes of the Alps, and I had felt like a child throwing snowballs with other tourists in St. Mark’s Square. I had forgotten that Southerners are always made happy by the sight of snow. It always surprises us.
I bought a mask and a costume to blend in with the Venetians in their suddenly disguised city. Running through the streets following various bands of revelers, I joined parties I was not invited to as I let the crowds steer me past the entryways of snow-dusted, candle-lit palazzos. In silence and in costume, I drifted through that white, starry world as strange as those attendant angels who filled up the wall space in unpraised chapels. By not speaking, I lost myself in the lawlessness of Carnevale and felt the power of masks to disfigure the shape of my own superego for the lurid rites of celebration. I thought that Shyla’s leap had unmasked me in some profound, unknowable way. But on that night, the mask returned me to myself as I rushed through the city with a sense of
rising joy. In the cold of Venice, I felt time burn off me as I danced with anonymous women and drank wine that flowed easily in this greenhouse of pleasure where I felt myself recovering something lost in a playing field of masks. I watched a young priest scurry into a safe passageway, as though the air itself was contaminated. He looked around once, taking it all in, and we bowed to each other before he disappeared. He was right to flee this unloosened night, religious only at the fringes, and he crossed himself as he entered his hermitage. The priest had escaped the one licensed whirl that centered around lust’s shining eloquence.
Then I ran down slippery, half-lit streets, going deeper and deeper into the unknown Venice, wishing I could weep, at last, for poor lost Shyla. I thought the tears would come easily behind a mask, but I was wrong again. After her death, I had no time to cry for Shyla and I covered my grief with the excuse that Leah needed my strength far more than any breakdown. So I made an appointment for myself at Carnevale and as I wandered farther into Venice covered with chasubles of snow, I wanted to make time for all the tears I carried in me. None came, not a one, because the spirit of the city lifted me along with the fog that rose up along the waterways as ice began to erase the current in the smaller canals.
Another party of ten to twenty people sped past on a narrow and treacherous path and a woman reached out and grabbed my hand. I followed her as fireworks exploded high above the Grand Canal and a siren went off deep in the unsleeping city. She led me up stairs to an apartment where we slow-danced to a Frank Sinatra album of love songs at a party so crowded that we simply swayed against the other bodies in the smoke-filled room.
The woman was masked but my imagination filled in every detail of her features. In their masks, all the women turned into famous beauties and all the men dazzled with their handsomeness and the woman I danced with began to ask me questions in Italian. I could not speak a word of Italian without letting the entire country in on the fact that I was an American.
“Ah!” the woman said in her rich, musical voice. “I was hoping you were Chinese.”
