Beach Music

by Pat Conroy

  When the boat arrived in Waterford, a pretty teenage girl walked down the gangplank accompanied, with grave formality, by the ship’s captain. She looked shy and bewildered as she heard the noise begin in the crowd. Meeting Max and Esther, who greeted her in Yiddish, she curtsied. Max wept and opened his arms to her. When she rushed into them and buried her head in his great chest, the town roared out its greeting to her. It let her know that she was part of Waterford, South Carolina, from that day forward, that she had found her home. The town would take the girl, Ruth Graubart, into their hearts and watch her finish high school and come of age to marry George Fox. The town would be there when she bore her first child, Shyla, and would be there when Ruth buried that same child.

  But what the town remembered most and best was that first moment when the Jewish orphan, ransomed by strangers, touched down on Waterford soil for the first time and flew into the arms of the Great Jew.

  Silas McCall would later tell his grandchildren that when he watched the girl’s arrival, it marked the first time he was certain that America would win the war. No matter how many times he told the story to his grandchildren about Ruth’s arrival, he always ended it the same way and it always gave the McCall children goose bumps when he got to the end.

  The town roared, he would say, the town just roared.

  But Ruth told her own story to no one in Waterford except to her husband and her daughter Shyla, until she told it to me in the spring of 1986 after we had reconciled and I had returned to the town with her granddaughter, Leah, to help my mother die.

  It was only when Ruth had told me about her terrible history in Poland that I learned, at last, the identity of the lady of coins.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  I drove my grandfather, Silas McCall, over to Waterford to pick up Ginny Penn from the nursing home. I left my brothers at my grandparents’ house as they finished off a ramp for Ginny Penn’s wheelchair. My grandfather was a compact, cigarette-smoking Southerner, observant, but a man of few words.

  “Be glad to get Ginny Penn home?” I asked.

  “Don’t have much choice,” Silas said. “She likes to drive the nurses crazy.”

  “Dad all right?”

  “Slept it off. Then caught a ride to town.”

  We put my grandmother in the backseat, exhausted by the effort and emotion caused by the mechanics of checking out of the home. Bureaucracy always requires an expenditure of energy that is too much to ask, especially of the very old and very sick. Ginny Penn did not even wave back at the nurses who lined the porch to bid her farewell.

  “Monsters,” she said as Silas and I waved to them. “Leeches. Bed-pan emptiers. Disease-spreaders. Penicillin-fungi. They should not be allowed to touch genuine ladies or women of pure refinement.”

  “I thought they were nice,” Silas said quietly, almost an aside.

  “You never came to see me once,” Ginny Penn hissed. “Better had I married Ulysses S. Grant than the traitorous wretch Silas McCall.”

  “Could you stop off at the feed store?” my grandfather asked me. “I’d like to buy a muzzle.”

  “Grandpa came to see you every day, Ginny Penn,” I said.

  “My grandchildren deserted me. The whole town was on a death watch. It would’ve exploded with joy at the news of my demise.”

  “I’d have led the parade down Main Street,” Silas muttered.

  “Don’t egg her on,” I warned, touching his wrist. “Ginny Penn, my brothers are all down. We spent the day building you a wheelchair ramp.”

  “That’s what you call a homecoming gift? A wheelchair ramp?”

  “I oversaw the preliminaries,” I said. “It’ll be great.”

  My four brothers were gathered at their grandparents’ house when I drove up into the yard. The house had aged well and looked distinguished among the modern beach houses that had sprung up around it. Behind it, the fourteenth hole of a golf course designed by Robert Trent Jones made a dogleg away from the backyard. A golf cart bearing two sedate and dignified retirees drifted as soundlessly as a sailing ship toward the distant green. Four female white-tailed deer, beautiful in their streamlined thinness, fed on the high grasses in the rough. When I was a boy, I thought, the island was wild and you could look forever and never find a golf ball, but everything’s different from when I was a boy.

  Except, I thought, my grandparents were the same. Always they had seemed peculiar and unsuitable. They had also appeared conjoined by habit and not by love. It hurt Ginny Penn that we, her grandsons, preferred Silas to her and that we loved him with a fierce attachment that she would never know. But we would disagree with that assessment and tell her with clarity and accuracy that we loved her exactly as much as she would allow us to and that was always dependent on the ungovernable valences of her moods.

  “The boys,” I said.

  “The best boys in the world,” Silas added.

  “They’ll do in a pinch,” Ginny Penn said, but I could tell she was both excited to be home and to have a reception committee waiting for her.

  My brothers let out a cheer and ran down to greet her. They pounded on the side of the car and kept up their cheering until even the dour Ginny Penn had to smile. When she smiled, all four boys pretended to feel dizzy and fell onto their backs in a dead faint.

  “They’ve always been goofy as puppies,” she said, as Silas helped her out of the car and I retrieved the wheelchair from the porch.

  Tee ran up the new ramp that lent the whole yard the smell of fresh lumber. He lay down at the top of the ramp and yelled to Ginny Penn, “Hey, old woman.”

  Ginny Penn flared and said, “Don’t you call me ‘old woman’ or I’ll switch you till it thunders.”

  “Look, Ginny Penn,” Tee said happily. “Perfect angle.”

  Then, pretending he was a dead man in a B movie, Tee let himself roll down the ramp and out onto the sidewalk.

  “It needs some varnish,” Ginny Penn said. “I detest raw wood. It offends my aesthetic.”

  “It’s wonderful to see you too, Grandma,” Dallas said.

  “Thank you, boys, for building the ramp,” Dupree added in a girlish voice.

  “Not even a near-death experience changed her one iota, boys,” Silas said, glumly pushing her up the ramp. “She’ll be hell until she dies.”

  “That’s my plan,” she said.

  In the middle of the ramp, my brothers stopped the wheelchair and began kissing her in welcome. They kissed her face and neck and tickled her ribs. They kissed her eyes and cheeks and forehead until she began to fend them off with her cane. They retreated from her, laughing, then pounced on her again when Silas maneuvered her near the front door. She seemed to both welcome and barely tolerate the kisses. It was their attention she craved, not their touch. She had always considered kissing to be the most overrated of human activities.

  Outside we sat around the front porch as John Hardin sanded the ramp, smoothing down the rough spots. Of all of us, he was the only true carpenter and there was nothing he could not do with his hands. Though gifted, he was also unemployable since he could never take the pressure that even the most serene workplace made inevitable. We watched him sand the fresh lumber, admiring the economy of his labor.

  Tee broke the silence by saying, “Let’s face it. Ginny Penn’s an asshole. Am I the only one that’s noticed it?”

  “Who?” Dupree said. “That sweet ol’ thing?”

  Leah walked out onto the back porch after having read Ginny Penn a poem she had written in honor of her homecoming.

  “Did Ginny Penn like your poem, darling?” her uncle Dupree asked.

  “I couldn’t tell,” Leah said. “She said she did.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Tee said. “Being nice is out of character.”

  “Too much to ask,” Dallas agreed.

  “Did all of you know my mother?” Leah asked my brothers, who were surprised at the question. They gathered around her solicitously.

  “Sure, Leah,” Dupree
said. “What do you want to know? What do you remember most about Shyla?”

  “I don’t remember much about having a mother, Uncle Dupree,” Leah said.

  “You sure had a nice one, darling,” Dallas said.

  “Pretty as a picture, just like you,” Tee added.

  “Did all of you like her?” Leah asked.

  “Like her?” Dupree said. “We were all in love with your mama. Don’t know if your daddy told you, but that was one sexy girl.”

  “Best dancer I ever saw,” Tee said. “I never saw anyone who could do the shag as well as she could.”

  “What’s the shag?”

  “A girl born in South Carolina doesn’t know what the shag is?” Dupree said. “That’s a crime against humanity.”

  “Means your daddy ain’t worth a damn,” said Tee.

  “They don’t do the shag in Italy, boys,” I defended myself. “I might as well teach her the hula.”

  “No excuses,” Dupree said. “Let me pull my pickup truck close to the porch and I’ll put on a tape. There’s a tragic gap in my niece’s education.”

  “Be better if the girl had been raised in a South Carolina orphanage,” Dallas teased. “Makes me ashamed you’re my brother, Jack.”

  “Look at Dupree with that pickup truck,” John Hardin sneered. “He loves playin’ dirtball better than anybody I’ve ever seen.”

  “Dupree’s a redneck at heart,” Tee said. “A redneck wannabe. It’s the lowest form of life.”

  Dupree pulled his truck up to the porch, which was wind-burnt from exposure to the sea. He put in a tape and turned the volume up full blast.

  “Carolina beach music,” Dupree said, coming up on the porch. “The holiest sound on earth.”

  “Your uncles’ll now make up for your father’s negligence,” Dallas said. “In fact, I may file a civil suit against him.”

  Dupree took Leah’s hand and began showing her the steps. I grabbed Tee and began to dance and Leah watched with fascination, never having seen me dance before.

  “The essence of the shag, Leah,” I said, “is to put on a face of utter coolness. The shag is not about passion. It’s about summer and secret desires and attitude. You have to have an utterly careless expression on your face.”

  “Who is this guy—Plato? We’re just teaching the kid how to dance,” Dupree said.

  “The reason I can dance the girl’s part,” Tee said to Leah, “is because I’m younger and they used to force me to be the girl when they practiced the shag.”

  Dallas asked Leah to dance when the next song, “Double Shot of My Baby’s Love,” came blasting out of the truck.

  “Your mother was the greatest shag dancer that ever lived,” Dallas said.

  “She could dance any dance there was,” Dupree said. “Hey, tell me Leah’s not getting it fast,” Dallas said in admiration.

  “Got her mother’s blood,” Tee said. “This girl was born to shag. I got the dance after John Hardin. I’m gonna teach her the dirty shag.”

  “The dirty shag,” Leah squealed. “Sounds like fun.”

  Leah became a lifelong lover of uncles on that day. She was consumed and enlarged by the joyous attention of her uncles and that pleasure shone in her face. Her body began to move in harmony with the rhythm and there seemed a ripening in the center of her girlhood as she spun in the full flood of her uncles’ admiration. They lined up to dance with her and argued whose turn it was. They turned an afternoon on a porch into a promenade of bright strange glamour she would remember all her life. She had been selected, singled out, and was as powerful as a fairy tale queen surrounded by her cheering, high-spirited armies. By the end of that day, she could shag as well as any of her uncles.

  I watched every single dance Leah danced with my brothers, whose sweetness moved me greatly. Then Dupree tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Next song’s for you and Leah to dance to.”

  The song, “Save the Last Dance for Me” by the Drifters, filled the air and Leah noticed the change in me.

  “What’s wrong, Daddy?” she asked as I took her hand and asked for the privilege of this dance.

  “Could you rewind so that I go back to the beginning, Dupree?” I asked. “I’ve got to explain the significance of this song.” Then I turned to Leah. “Remember the story of me and Mama falling in love?” I asked.

  “The night the house fell into the sea?” Leah asked.

  “Same one. Well, when Mama and I danced in that room alone when everyone had run out of the house, we danced the shag.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “I should’ve taught you how to do it. My brothers are right.”

  “It’s okay, Daddy. You taught me lots of things.”

  “This was your Mama’s and my favorite song. We fell in love dancing to it.”

  Leah had never danced with me, but she heard the humming of her uncles as they murmured with pleasure, watching us move to the words of the wonderful song. They clapped and stomped their feet and wolf-whistled at Leah as I spun her around on the weather-beaten porch. Her greatest surprise was that she couldn’t shag as well as I did. And she said so. And as we danced I saw her slowly turning into a mirror image of Shyla, and then the tears came; they came, at last.

  She didn’t notice that I was weeping until my brothers grew quiet. We stopped dancing and I sat down on the porch steps. My child held me as the song her mother and I had loved best in the world completely undid me. I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  In early May, a month after our return, at Lucy’s insistence, I drove her up Highway 17 toward Charleston and the Trappist monastery out at Mepkin Abbey. Though she was vague about the reasons for her visit, she did mention she wanted to have Father Jude hear her confession. Ever since I had brought Father Jude to my mother’s hospital bed, where he gave her Extreme Unction, I suspected there was more to this relationship than penitent and confessor, but I no longer thought, as we had when we were younger, that they were lovers. I had questioned Lucy, but she was a master of indirection. There was no query she could not succeed at not answering. The English language on her tongue became a smokescreen without her eyes changing expression in the least. As we drove to Charleston, I looked over at her. She looked calm and pretty.

  For a long time I had wanted to get her off by herself to ask her all the unanswered questions I had stored up from childhood and had thought of again with my eyes bandaged in Rome. Though I lacked a clear strategy for milking her of this concealed trove of knowledge, I wanted to initiate the inquiry without arousing suspicion.

  “I’ve had some wonderful news,” she said suddenly, stretching her arms in the sunlight. Only since she developed leukemia could Lucy be talked into using her seat belt. She had always made it a point of honor not to wear one and it was odd for me to see her safely buckled up. “I want to share it with you, but I want you to promise not to tell another living soul.”

  “I promise to tell only one other person,” I said. “Otherwise, I find myself untrustworthy. Secrets are too much of a burden to me.”

  “The Pope just annulled my marriage to your father. I can receive the sacraments again. Dr. Pitts and I got remarried in the church yesterday.”

  “Thanks for inviting your children.”

  “We didn’t want to make a fuss,” she said. “I wrote the Pope a thank-you note.”

  “You had five kids with Dad,” I said.

  “It was all a terrible mistake. I feel like I’ve awakened from a bad dream.”

  “Does that mean we’re all bastards?” I asked, adjusting the rearview mirror.

  Lucy giggled and said, “It never occurred to me. Oh dear. How comical. Yes, I imagine it does. I didn’t even think to ask. Jude’ll know.”

  “So the marriage never happened. All that pain and grief and suffering. None of it happened,” I said.

  “Everything happened,” Lucy explained, “but the Ch
urch wiped the slate clean. There’s no record of it happening.”

  “I’m a record of it happening,” I insisted.

  “No,” Lucy said. “You’re annulled.”

  “If I’m nothing, I can’t be driving this car,” I shouted. “I don’t exist. I’m not here. My parents were never married and I was never born. Grab the wheel, Mama, because I’m one annulled son of a bitch.”

  I threw my hands up in the air and Lucy leaned over and gained control of the wheel.

  Lucy said, “I think not being born might be the nicest gift I could ever bestow on my children. It wasn’t a happy home I raised you up in.”

  “Au contraire. It was a dream come true,” I said. “Starring the bastard McCall children, their virgin mother, and their pickled father who would later be cuckolded and emasculated by the Pope himself.”

  “When your father gets the news I want to know every single word that comes out of his mouth. I’ll cherish every syllable of his pain.”

  “You shouldn’t have hard feelings about Dad,” I said, taking control of the wheel again. “After all, you were never married to him.”

  “I don’t have to be bitter anymore. It’s like it never happened. Perhaps we could even be friends.”

  “I could introduce you,” I offered. “Judge McCall, I’d like you to meet Mrs. Pitts. The Pope has quashed all rumors that you were once husband and wife and that you produced five children during your long and ghastly marriage.”

  “Now, you’re making fun,” Lucy cautioned.

  “The Roman Catholic Church,” I said, shaking my head. “Why did you raise me in such a ridiculous, brain-dead, dimwitted, sexually perverse, odd-duck, know-nothing, silly-assed church? We’re Southern, for God’s sake, Mama. I could’ve been an Anglican and had a nice golf stroke. Presbyterian and I could’ve had a puckered asshole and been able to clear my throat with authority. Methodist and not gagged when someone melted marshmallows on sweet potatoes. Baptist and I could’ve drunk in secret with great pleasure. Church of God and I could’ve spoken in unknown tongues. But no, you condemn me to weirdness and freakdom and solitude by raising me in the only church that could mark me as a loser in paradise among my peers.”