Beach Music (105 page)

“So, here it is,” Ledare said, as I handed it to her. “The famous letter.”

“It deserves to be famous,” I said. “You’ll see.”

“Who’s read it?” she asked.

“The courts of South Carolina and now you,” I said. “I won’t give it to Leah soon. She’s been through enough for a while.”

“I’m already jealous enough of you and Shyla, of all that I think you had together,” Ledare said. “Will this make it worse?”

“It’ll explain it. Part of it’s written about you.”

“About me?”

“You’ll see.”

Ledare took the letter out of the envelope carefully. It had been written quickly and it took her a while to grow accustomed to the idiosyncrasies of Shyla’s troubled, hurried hand.

Dear Jack,

It shouldn’t end this way, but it must, my love, I swear to you it must. Remember the night we first fell in love, the night the house fell into the sea and we learned we couldn’t keep our hands off each other? We couldn’t imagine then loving anyone else because of the fire we started that night. And remember the night we conceived Leah in the bed on the top floor of the Hotel Raphael in Rome? That was the best for me because we both wanted a child, the best because we were turning all the craziness and desperation of our lives into something that indicated hope between us. When you and I were right, Jack, we could set the whole world on fire with our bodies and make the world perfect.

I didn’t tell you why I left you and Leah, Jack, but I’m telling you now. It’s crazy again. And this time it’s too much. The lady came back. The lady of the coins came back, the woman I told you about when we were kids. She only came to stare at me and have pity on me when I was a child, but this time she came back cruel. This time she talked in the voices of Germans and spat at me for being a Jew. As a girl, Jack, I couldn’t bear what my parents had suffered. Their pain touched me as nothing else ever has. I woke up every morning to their unspoken grief, their war with the world that no words could ever explain. I carried their pain inside me like a child. I sucked on it, fed off it, let it ride in my blood in shards and crystals. Never have I been strong enough to measure up to my parents’ terrible history. What they endured tortures me, moves me, makes me wild with helplessness.

The lady of the coins is calling for me now, Jack, and I can’t resist her voice. I have no coins sewn into the buttons of my dress to buy my way out or pay anyone off. The camps call me, Jack. My tattoo is fresh and the long ride in the cattle cars is over. I dream of Zyklon B. I have to follow the voice and when I leap off the bridge, Jack, I am simply going to the pits of the starved and broken bodies of six
million Jews and throwing myself among them because I can’t stop their haunting of me. My mother’s and father’s bodies lie among these slaughtered Jews and they weren’t ever lucky enough to get to die. In these pits, where I’ve always dreamed I belonged, I’ll take my rightful place. I’ll be the Jew who pulls the gold teeth from the dead, the Jew who offers her emaciated body for the making of soap to wash the bodies of the soldiers of the Reich as they battle on the Russian front. It is madness, Jack, but it is real. It’s always been the truest thing about me and I beg your forgiveness.

But, Jack, Dear Jack, Good Jack—how can I leave you and Leah? How do I tell the lady of the coins about my love for you both? But it’s not my love she’s after, it’s my life. Her voice is so seductive in its brutal sweetness and she knows her business well. She knows I can’t love anyone when my country is the country of the altered, the obsessed, the weeping, and the broken.

It’s for the best, Jack, the best for me. After I’m gone, please tell Leah all about me. Tell her all the good parts. Raise her well. Love her for the both of us. Cherish her as I would have. Find the mother in you, Jack. She’s there and she’s a good mother and I’m depending on you to find and honor her and raise Leah with that sweetest, softest part of you. Do the job I was supposed to, Jack, and don’t let anyone stop you. Honor me and remember me by the adoration of our child.

And, Jack, dear Jack, you’ll meet another woman someday. Already I love this woman and cherish her and respect her and envy her. She’s got my sweet man and I’d have fought any woman in the world if she’d tried to take you away from me. Tell her that and tell her about me.

But tell her this and I’m telling you this, Jack, and I want you to listen to it.

I’m waiting for you, Jack. I’m waiting in that house that the sea took the first night we loved each other, when we knew that our destinies had touched. Love her well and be faithful to her, but tell her I’m getting that house ready for
your arrival. I’m waiting for you there now, Jack, while you’re reading this letter. It’s beneath the sea and angels float in its corners and peek out behind the cupboards. I’ll listen for your knock and I’ll open the door and I’ll drag you up to that room where we danced to beach music and kissed while lying on the carpet and I dared you to fall in love with me.

Marry a nice woman, Jack, but not one so nice that you won’t want to get back to me in our house beneath the sea. I hope she’s pretty and I hope she’ll love our daughter as much as I would have. But tell her I won’t give you up completely, Jack. I’ll let her borrow you for a little while. I go now, but I’ll be waiting for you, darling, in that house pulled into the sea.

I command you, Jack, as the last cry of my soul and my undying love for you, marry a fabulous woman, but tell her that I’m the one who brought you to the dance. Tell her that you have to save the last dance for me.

Ledare read the letter three times before she folded it carefully and handed it back to me. For several moments she did not speak, trying to hold back her tears.

“I can’t love you the way Shyla did, Jack,” she said, at last. “I’m not built that way.”

“It was a mistake to show you the letter,” I said.

“No it wasn’t,” she said, taking my hand in hers and kissing it. “It’s a beautiful letter and a heartbreaking one. As your bride-to-be, I find it a bit intimidating. I find it unanswerable.”

“So do I,” I said. “In some ways I’ve been a prisoner to that letter. I used to cry every time I read it. I quit crying a couple of years ago.”

“Let’s go down the hill and have a hell of a life, Jack,” Ledare said. “Let’s love each other as well as we can. But Shyla can have the last dance. She earned it.”

Jordan had sent a long letter from his prison cell in Leavenworth
blessing our marriage and promising to say a Mass for us that same day in the States. He had learned that cells held no fear for him and that the discipline of prisons seemed almost lax to him after following the strictures of the Trappist rule for so long. He had written to me about the prison ministry the authorities allowed him to run and the courses in both theology and philosophy he taught to the inmates. He said it made him ache for humanity to see so many men in such great and ceaseless pain and it alarmed him that so few of them knew how to pray for relief of their suffering. It was not that the other prisoners were godless men that disturbed Jordan, but the fact that their belief in God gave them so little comfort. They talked to him about the stultifying emptiness of their American lives. Their spirits were bereft and undeveloped. Dreamlessness made their eyes vacant and trapped. Jordan had never met so many men in desperate need of spiritual advice.

In one letter he had written that he was very happy. His time in prison had reintroduced him to the world and had made his commitment to the priesthood all the stronger. It had ratified and enhanced his vocation. He had turned Leavenworth into a wing of his monastery and he infused many of his fellow prisoners with the strange luminant beauty of a Trappist’s willful solitude. Jordan wrote that he prayed often and did his best to atone for the crime he committed while being a hot-blooded young man when he, along with his country, split apart along some central seam. Daily, he prayed for the repose of the souls of the young man and woman he had killed by accident, but killed nonetheless. He also sent his love and blessings and asked that he be allowed to marry us again when he got out of prison.

I wired him that same day that Ledare and I would not really consider ourselves married until he personally blessed our union.

The next day, on the morning of the wedding, Leah and I left the Piazza Farnese for a walk through the brown dazzling alleyways of the city where she had lived most of her childhood. I wanted one last morning with my daughter alone and Ledare had understood perfectly. When it was right, I thought as I walked hand in hand with Leah, the love between us contained elements of tenderness
and reliance and secret conveyance that made it different from all other forms of love.

Since hearing the stories of George and Ruth Fox, I often found myself looking at Leah and trying to imagine her being loaded onto a cattle car or her head being shaved before she stumbled toward the gas chambers or her small hands raised up in terror as she was being force-marched through a village to a freshly dug pit where the machine-gunners awaited her. I drank in the beauty of my daughter and knew I would kill every German in the world before I would let them hurt my child. I could not bear the thought that the world had once been demonic enough to hunt down and exterminate children as though they were insects or vermin. Leah McCall, daughter of a Jewish woman, would have been black ash hanging over the mountains of Poland had she been born fifty years before this day, I thought, tightening my grip.

But on this morning, I told Leah the story of Ruth Fox and her harrowing survival during World War II. I described the murder of Ruth’s family, her escape into the world of the Catholic Resistance, and her hiding in a convent until the Great Jew miraculously ransomed her out of wartime Poland and brought her to Waterford, South Carolina. For the first time I told Leah about the dress her great-grandmother had sewn for her daughter Ruth, and how that long-dead woman had hidden eight cloth-covered gold coins as buttons which Ruth was to use to buy her way out of trouble.

As we drifted past the dark shops, I felt the power of the story grab me again as I told Leah how Ruth had concealed the coin-laden dress behind an altar where the Virgin Mary stood crowned as the Queen of the Angels and how her grandmother Ruth had prayed to this woman that she knew had been born a Jew in Palestine two thousand years ago. I told her that Ruth had believed her whole life that Mary had heard and answered the prayers of one Jewish girl who asked for her intercession in a church in war-torn Poland. Ruth had called the statue the lady of coins and it was a story that had marked Leah’s mother Shyla deeply and for all time.

On Ponte Mazzini, overlooking the Tiber, I presented Leah with the coin necklace that Shyla had worn every day of her life, except her last one. In her will, Shyla specified that the necklace be
given to Leah when she was old enough to hear the story. She trusted me to make the decision when that would be.

“When the war was over, Ruth had three coins left in her dress. She had necklaces made with each one of them. She wears one of them. Aunt Martha has another. This was your mother’s necklace, Leah. It was her most beloved possession. I’d like you to remember her every time you wear it. And remember your grandmother’s story.”

Leah put on Shyla’s necklace and her neck and shoulders were as lovely as her mother’s. I was starting to notice the first shy ripening toward womanhood and it both touched and frightened me. I prayed that Leah would have the good fortune to fall in love with a man completely different from myself, a man less tortured and with a smaller stable of demons, one who loved laughter and language and possessed a small genius for sunniness and joy.

“I’ll wear it every day of my life, Daddy,” Leah said.

“Your mama’d love that,” I said. “We better be getting back, kid. You’ve got to help me get married today.”

Leah said, “I can’t wait. It’s about time you got me a mother, don’t you agree?”

“Yeh,” I said. “I agree. By the way, Leah. Thanks for being the kid you are. You are the sweetest, nicest, most adorable child I’ve ever seen in my life and you were that way from the day we brought you home from the hospital to right now. I didn’t do a goddamn thing except watch you in utter admiration and fascination.”

“Take a little bit of credit, Daddy,” Leah said, studying the gold coin on the end of the necklace before looking back at me. “I didn’t grow up by myself. You raised me.”

“It was a pleasure, kid,” I said.

Late that afternoon, our wedding party gathered on the Capitoline hill, in a piazza designed by Michelangelo. Storm clouds were gathering and a light breeze from the Apennines suddenly turned gusty, and sheets of newspaper winged across the paving stones. The banns of over fifty couples were posted in the glass-encased bulletin boards that lined the outer wall of an ancient building that was part art museum and part wedding chapel. It was to this spot that Romans
came to have their marriages legalized by the city of Rome. The banns were written down in an Old World showy penmanship. All around us, in distinct and separate groups, lovely Roman brides with their dark, nervous fiancés stood uncomfortably among their jubilant families, waiting for their names to be called in the overcast piazza. Looking around, I thought the human species was in fine shape and tried to think of something more beautiful than women and couldn’t come up with a thing. The propagation of the species was a dance of total joy.

When our names were finally called, a loud cheer went up from our friends and relatives who had come to Rome for the ceremony. A large, rowdy contingent from Waterford had arrived the week before the wedding and it reminded me that there was no wilder crowd on earth than a group of traveling Southerners. They whooped and hollered as they made their way into the grand hall which smelled of leather and old velvet and whose high-ceilinged stateliness silenced everyone as we moved toward the solemn men, elegant and impassive as llamas, who would conduct and record the ceremony forever in the annals of Rome. The South Carolinians gathered on the left side of the aisle and my Roman friends took their seats on the right. Leah’s teacher, Suor Rosaria, was there, sitting beside Paris and Linda Shaw, and she blew me a kiss. I bowed to the Raskovic brothers, and waved to the waiter, Freddie, who had deserted Da Fortunato at noon to be at our ceremony. Several of the doctors who had cared for me after the airport massacre were there. Marcella Hazan and her husband had come down from Venice and Giuliano Bugialli drove down after his cooking class in Florence had finished for the week. Journalists and great cooks had come together to celebrate the marriage of one of their own. I took a quick, silent survey and figured that at least thirty cookbooks could be accounted for on this side of the chapel. If a bomb exploded during the wedding, I thought, the eating habits of half the world would change.