Beach Music

by Pat Conroy

  “She’s a paradox,” Dallas said. “The last thing you want your mother to be.”

  “How’s your law practice?”

  “So many clients I have to give out numbers in the waiting room,” said Dallas. “I’ve had to hire armed guards to control the crowds.”

  I laughed and said, “Going into practice with Dad hasn’t turned out so well.”

  “People in small towns like their attorney of record to be sober when he draws up their will or checks a title,” Dallas said. “Dad passed out on the conference table last week while we were conducting a deposition.”

  “Didn’t you tell me he was on the wagon?” I remarked.

  “His liver must look like a distillery,” Dallas said. “Let us say it hasn’t done the practice much good.”

  “Do you still hero-worship me and consider me a god among men?” I asked. “Like you did when I was a kid.”

  “I’ve missed you, Jack,” Dallas said. “I don’t make friends easily. We’re brothers and don’t have any choice in the matter. I take my family seriously because it’s all I’ve got.”

  “I had to heal myself, Dallas,” I said. “I didn’t do it so well, but it came naturally. It felt right to go to Rome.”

  “You can leave,” he said, “I’ve got no problem about that. But where’s the rule against visiting. What about letter writing?”

  “When I first left,” I said, “I wanted to disappear out of my own life. You ever felt that way?”

  “No,” he answered. “Not once in my life.”

  “We’re different people.”

  “I like guys like me a lot better than I like guys like you,” Dallas said.

  “So do I,” I answered and my brother laughed. Though my whole family was bruised and tested, it had found solace in the healing unctions of laughter. This dark humor had preserved us from both sanctimony and despair.

  “How’s your darling wife and family?” I asked.

  “Fine. Thanks for asking,” he answered.

  “Don’t worry. I won’t call her Miss Scarlett when I see her.”

  “Thanks for nothing,” Dallas said.

  “You tell her Lincoln freed the slaves yet?” I asked.

  “I don’t care that you hate my wife.”

  “I don’t hate your wife, Dallas,” I said, delighting in his defensiveness. “She kind of floats into view like a Portuguese man-o’-war … or a jellyfish. I distrust women who float.”

  “She just has good posture. We’re very happy together.”

  “Anytime I hear a husband pathetically say, unasked, that he’s very happy with his wife, I smell the divorce courts, mistresses, and midnight flights to the Dominican Republic for quickie separations. Happy husbands never mention the fact. They just live in pure ether and grin a lot.”

  “A positive attitude takes you a long way,” he said. “Something you haven’t had for a long time.”

  “Nothing phonier than a good attitude,” I responded. “It’s so American.”

  “Great to have you back,” Dallas said, shaking his head. He started the car and eased out of his parking space. “It seems like only yesterday that I used to think you were a fabulous guy.”

  “Time flies.”

  “I’m glad you came, Jack. Mama might be dead by the time we get there.”

  “That old positive attitude,” I said, then caught myself.

  When Dallas said nothing, I attempted safer territory.

  “Where am I staying?”

  “You can stay with us if you like, but Dad really wants you to stay with him. He says you can have your old room.”

  “Great—just what I long for,” I said sarcastically.

  “He’s gotten kind of lonely, Jack. You’ll see. It’s hard to hate someone who’s so needy and eager to please.”

  “It’ll be a snap for me.”

  “Do you ever get tired of having all the answers?”

  “No,” I snapped back. “Do you ever get tired of asking none of the right questions?”

  “Can you ever forgive Mom and Dad for being exactly who they were born to be?” Dallas’ eyes were focused on the dark band of roadway leading from Garden City to the small bridge that crossed the Savannah River west of the city.

  “No, that’s the one thing I can’t forgive them for.”

  “Fine,” he replied grimly. “Half your problems with the world are about to be solved, big fella.”

  “Watch the road, counselor,” I said. “We’re passing into our home state.”

  Because it serves as a borderline between two states, the Savannah River holds a prominence in my mind that other rivers lack. A sign bid us farewell to Georgia and another welcomed us into the state where all the McCall children had been born, raised, and touched by the routines and dialects of our homeland.

  But some invisible river also runs among the members of my family, marking off separate realms of the spirit that render our brotherhood both inscrutable and promissory. People have always made the mistake of thinking we are closer than we really are. We resemble each other in some ill-made, unthought-out way, like cheap copies, but in most things we relate to the world in opposing styles.

  Dallas is comfortable being a Southerner and has never aspired to being anything else. What makes him feel complete and centered in the world can all be found in a hundred-mile radius of our birthplace. He carries himself with a seriousness missing from the nervous systems of the rest of us. Of all my brothers, it is Dallas who has chosen the most conventional path, one with built-in safety features. Throughout his life, he admired the men who became church elders in Waterford, or served on the city council, or headed up the funding drives for United Way. People trust him because he avoids extremes. His is the voice of reason in our passionate, breakneck family, where screaming is considered a higher form of discourse and a shouting match the upside of dialogue.

  I reached across the car and squeezed the back of my brother’s neck. His muscles were taut and he winced with pain at my touch. Though Dallas had a reputation for being gifted at arranging treaties of armistice and missions to the interior, I knew that was only a trick of the trade the lawyer’s art had taught him. He had forged a reputation for levelheadedness that he had paid a steep price for in bulk purchases of antacids. His calm exterior had been won with the chalky help of Maalox. Though Dallas faked his way through his professional life by assuming an air of self-possession and presence of mind, he knew there was not the slightest chance I would be fooled by the charade. Though he longed to take his place among the cooler heads in our town, a working knowledge of fire was the way to his heart.

  I breathed in the low country air as each mile took us farther away from the industrial effluents that distilled in the bright sunshine of Savannah.

  The shinier, silk-tender air came streaming over me with each mile we traveled and I could smell my own boyhood sneaking up in a slow, purloined dream as I closed my eyes and let the chemistry of time allow me to repossess those chased-off, ghostly scents of my lost youth. I found my whole body leaning forward in anticipation as the car crossed over the pine barrens of Garbade Island and I saw the long graceful bridge that spanned the mile-long Broad Plum River. On its own, my spirit seemed to relax, like a folding chair let out by a pool. Because even beauty has its limits, I shall always remain a prisoner of war to this fragrant, voluptuous latitude of the planet, fringed with palms and green marshes running beside rivers for thirty miles at a time, and emptying out on low-lying archipelagoes running north and south along the coast before the Atlantic’s grand appearance. The low country had laid its imprint on me like the head of some ancient king incised on a coin of pressed copper. The whole earth smelled as though a fleet of shrimp boats had returned for a day’s work on tides of rosewater and eelgrass.

  “Miss that smell?” Dallas asked. “You could live in Rome for a thousand years, but I bet you’d still miss the smell of those tidal flats.”

  “Rome’s got its own smells.”

&
nbsp; “You gotten the itch out of your system yet?” Dallas asked. “It’s hard to make your life’s work packing a bag.”

  “My life’s taking place in another part of the world,” I said. “No sin in that.”

  “You raising Leah to be an Italian?”

  “Yep. I sure as hell am.”

  “Better get that girl on over here. We’ll give her a couple of weeks of basic training. Bring out the redneck in her.”

  “You know, you sound like an idiot when you play ‘Southern boy’ with me,” I said.

  Dallas punched me playfully on the shoulder. “That’s why I do it. See if you still get pissed off when I go into one of my routines.”

  “It’s not a routine anymore, Dallas. I suspect, by now, it’s a life.”

  “I’m Southern to the bone,” Dallas said, glancing at me. “Unlike you, I don’t hang my head when I say it out loud.”

  “You know better than that,” I said, then changed the subject. “What does Mama look like?”

  “Like road kill,” he said through tight lips.

  “How’s everybody taking it?”

  “Great,” Dallas said sarcastically. “Mom’s dying of cancer. Things couldn’t be rosier.”

  The hospital was prettily situated on the banks of the Waterford River, but once inside, it gave off that institutional antiseptic smell that was uniquely American. The hallways were lined with drawings by schoolchildren, octogenarians, and lunatics who had excelled with crayons and fingerpaints during occupational therapy. For the last twenty-four hours I had made a grand effort to think of everything except my mother’s condition. The past was one country where I tried to limit the number of free trips. When we came to the waiting room where the family had gathered together in mute, rough-hewn vigil, I felt as if I were walking into a mine field.

  “Hello, everybody,” I said, trying not to make eye contact with anyone in the room. “Long time, no see.”

  “I’m Jim Pitts,” an unfamiliar man’s voice said. “Your mother’s husband. We haven’t had the pleasure.”

  I shook hands with my new stepfather and felt light-headed, as though I were walking through the atmosphere of a planet so dense that songbirds could neither fly nor sing.

  “How are you, Dr. Pitts?” I said. “You have nice taste in women.”

  “Your mother will be very grateful that you came,” said the doctor.

  “How is she?” I asked.

  Dr. Pitts looked perplexed, then frightened, and I saw that this tall, white-haired stranger with his baritone voice was close to tears. When he tried to speak and no words followed, he could not have given me a more accurate or devastating portrait of my mother’s condition. In appearance, the doctor was a much softer, toned-down version of my father, but when I mentioned this later to my brothers, none of them had made this connection. Like teenagers, the doctor and my mother had eloped two years before, when the ink was barely dry on our parents’ divorce decree. My brothers had kept Dr. Pitts at arm’s distance and still treated him as an unlikely addition to the family circle. He looked like a man who valued constancy and recited maxims about birds in the hand.

  “The other kids call me Doctor,” he said. “Please call me Jim.”

  Except for my youngest brother, John Hardin, the other “kids” were in their early thirties, but I said, “Glad to, Jim.”

  “The face is familiar,” my brother Tee said out loud to the room. “But I can’t place the name.”

  “You from around these parts, stranger?” Dupree said, winking at Dallas.

  I told them both to get laid in Italian and Dallas broke out laughing. Dupree rose out of his chair first and gave me a hug. He was the only person I knew who could embrace you and keep his distance at the same time. Being the smallest of the brothers, he had a natural gift for arbitration, for those delicate negotiations which bind families together or send them into scattered and ungatherable fragments.

  “It’s good to see you, Jack,” said Dupree. “Any chance of us getting to meet Leah again?”

  “Seems like there’s a chance for anything,” I said, returning his embrace, then accepting the full-fledged bear hug of my brother Tee, the second youngest of five boys. Tee’s emotions were always out front, running over the banks. My mother considered him the softest version of the McCall male and by far the best shoulder to cry on among the McCall brothers. But Tee also held the biggest grudge against our mother. He was the only one who would say, out loud, that she had crimes of incompetence and inattention to answer for … Because of this, her coma had hit him particularly hard.

  “Brace yourself, Jack,” Tee said. “Mom looks like shit. I don’t know what Dallas told you but it’s worse than you imagine.”

  “He’ll see soon enough,” Dallas said.

  “I thought it was an act,” Tee said. “You know, our mother’s not above putting on an act to get her way. I tried to figure out what she wanted. The doctor here bought her a Cadillac, so I knew it wasn’t a car. He got her a ring big enough so a gorilla couldn’t lift his arm. So I knew it wasn’t a diamond. But she’s a master planner. Right? We know she’s got something up her sleeve. Right?”

  “I resent what you’re implying about my wife,” Dr. Pitts said.

  “Relax, Doctor,” Dupree said. “Tee’s just thinking out loud.”

  “Hey, Doc. Trust me,” Tee said. “You don’t know the broad. You’re brand-new at the game. I’m not criticizing Mom. Really. I admire this about her. Just because it happened to screw up my life. Hey, I’m not one to hold grudges.”

  “Could you write me a prescription for an animal tranquilizer, Doctor,” Dupree said. “I need to put Tee down for the night.”

  “Your mother’s the most wonderful woman in the world,” Dr. Pitts said, rising to leave the waiting room. “What a shame her sons can’t see it.”

  When he had left I said, “I go away for a little while and you guys go to seed. I thought I’d trained you better than that.”

  Dallas shook his head and said, “Dr. Pitts has had some trouble adjusting to us. He lacks wit, irony, sarcasm, all the necessary cruelty that makes life possible in this family.”

  “He thinks Mom’s perfect,” Dupree said. “Nothing wrong with that. It’s how a husband’s supposed to think.”

  “Dupree hasn’t changed,” Tee said. “Still the biggest phony in the world.”

  “Go see Mom, Jack,” Dallas said. “Get ready for the shock of your life.”

  Then I walked down the corridor with Dallas and entered the intensive care unit. Once the door shut behind us I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and leaned against a wall to regain whatever equilibrium I could before looking at my mother.

  “Tough, huh?” Dallas said. “I should have warned you that the brothers had all gathered.”

  A nurse in a gauze mask motioned us toward a bed and signaled five minutes with her left hand as I approached a bed where a woman unrecognizable as my mother lay. The name tag read “Lucy Pitts” and for a moment my heart swelled thinking a terrible mistake had been made, that this broken woman was masquerading as the beautiful mother who had borne five sons and could still fit into her wedding dress. Her body was frail and covered with bruises.

  I touched my mother’s face; it was hot to the touch and her hair was wet and unkempt. I leaned down to kiss her and saw my own tears fall on her face.

  “Jesus, Dallas,” I said. “She’s not faking. Who would’ve ever thought that Mom was mortal.”

  “Be careful. The doctor tells us she might be able to hear us, even in the coma.”

  “Really?” I wiped my tears away. Then I leaned over again and said, “Your son Jack loved you the most. Your other children resented you and thought you were horseshit. It was Jack who was always your biggest fan, your number-one cheerleader. Jack, Jack, Jack. That’s the only name you must remember with love and adoration when you wake up from all this.”

  I took my mother’s hand, pressing it softly against my cheek, and said, ‘I
keep expecting her to open her eyes and scream ‘Surprise.’ ”

  “Not this time,” Dallas said.

  “The guy she married,” I said. “He seems all right.”

  “A nice guy. Further right than Attila the Hun, but a decent sort.”

  “She deserves a decent sort. She always has.”

  “Mom thinks you hate her,” Dallas said.

  “I’ve had my days.”

  “Dad thinks you hate him too.”

  “He’s on the right track. How’s his drinking?”

  “Not bad lately,” Dallas said. “He got drunk for a month when Mom married Dr. Pitts, but then he sobered up and started dating teenagers.”

  “Has he been to see Mom yet?”

  “You’ve been out of the loop for a while, Jack. After Mom’s honeymoon with Dr. Pitts, they returned to their house on the Isle of Orion and found Dad sitting in their living room. He had drunk all the doctor’s booze and he had a shotgun pointed at Dr. Pitts’ heart. He had a plan worked out to kill Dr. Pitts, kill Mom, then kill himself.”

  “Should you be talking like this?” I asked, pointing to the bed.

  “She knows all about this,” Dallas said. “She even got where she could laugh about it, but it took a while. Dad had been drunk a month, and the whole week that Mom and Dr. Pitts were in Jamaica. His scheme was foolproof except he had not planned on being drunk when the happy couple returned from their travels. Nor did he expect that Dr. Pitts would have such a well-stocked liquor cabinet. Dad had drunk every drop of liquor the man owned, but it had taken him the full week to do it. He was too drunk to lift the gun to fire when the honeymooners returned. By the time he got organized, Mom and Jim Pitts had run screaming into the night.”

  “Did they press charges?”

  “Yes. They certainly did.”

  “You got them to drop the charges.”

  “Yes. But it took some work. Dr. Pitts is terrified of the man who graciously gave of his own sperm to bring us into this world. All my considerable legal skills were brought into play. It was a mess.”