Beach Music (22 page)

But the coin had diverted John Hardin’s attention.

The doctor surveyed the room and it was clear from his eyes that
he was ill at ease among our brawling, quicksilver McCall clan. Our high-spirited unpredictability was unnerving him.

“Mrs. Pitts has a temperature of one hundred and five degrees,” Dr. Peyton said and his announcement silenced the room. “John Hardin’s technically right when he says that I’m killing his mother. I’ve put her on the most powerful chemotherapy we can. Her white cell count is alarmingly high. She’s in terrible danger. Lucy could die at any time. I’m trying to prevent that. I don’t know if I can.”

John Hardin screamed, “Ha!” and began a threatening walk toward the young doctor, wagging an index finger menacingly. “All of you heard him. He admitted he isn’t worth a shit. He just admitted he’s killing her. Follow me, brothers. We’ve got to save our mother’s life.”

“Calm down, John Hardin, or I’ll be driving you to Bull Street myself,” Dupree said, mentioning the location of the state mental hospital.

“But you heard him, Dupree,” John Hardin said, his arms outstretched now. “He’s killing our mother. He just said it.”

“He’s trying to save our mother,” Dupree said. “Let’s not make it any harder on the doctor.”

The judge cleared his throat from across the room and the court of venue changed again in that emotionally charged room.

“This is God’s way of punishing Lucy for leaving me,” the judge said in the silence that followed. “This is just desserts. Nothing more or less.”

I had promised myself I would keep calm and be inconspicuous, but Dad’s remark flushed me out into the open. “Hey, Dad, how ’bout shutting up. Nothing more or less.”

“You don’t frighten me, son,” he said. “Free speech is a protected right in America the last time I was in a law library. Add that to the fact that I’m armed.”

Dr. Pitts and Dr. Peyton were wordless as they both stared at judge McCall, who returned their stare without malice and with perfect equanimity.

“He’s just kidding, Dr. Peyton,” Tee assured him. “Pops doesn’t have a gun.”

With this challenge, Dad lifted a pistol from an ankle holster and began spinning it on his finger, a parody of old gunslingers. Dallas walked across the room, took the gun away, and returned with it, opening the cylinder, revealing that the gun was not loaded.

“No guns in the waiting room, Judge McCall,” Dr. Peyton said, relieved.

“I got a deputy sheriffs badge right here.” The judge held up his billfold. “Says I can carry a gun anywhere in Waterford County. Bring that firearm back to its rightful owner, son.”

“Give it to you later, Dad,” Dallas said. “It makes me nervous when you flash it when you’re sober.”

“I’m glad we don’t have gun control in this country,” Dallas said. “So drunks like Dad can walk around practicing their draw.”

“It keeps the Indians away.” The judge tried to joke, but his sons were angry with him.

I began to feel the roots of exhaustion curling into the deepest tissues of my body. I had written over ten articles on the perils of jet lag and considered myself something of an expert on how a precipitous change of time zones can exact a terrible price from a traveler. And now, deep inside myself, I felt my body preparing for sundown in Italy, even though the day was young in South Carolina. I was used to the night sounds of the piazza, of police sirens far off in the city of Rome, musicians playing mandolins for tourists, and the sound of Leah’s bare feet coming down the hall to have me read her a story.

Leah. Her name cut into me and I checked my watch and promised myself to call her at three in the afternoon, which would coincide nicely with her bedtime. I looked at those surrounding me in the waiting room and realized Leah would not recognize a single person in this room besides myself. And I couldn’t decide if I had rendered her a great service or cut her off from those powerful forces that were one half her legacy of blood and cunning and folly, the legacy that was gathered in a dark vigil to protest the death of our mother. Though I had differences of opinion with almost everyone in the room and though dissonance was what my family did best, there was an inalienable beauty and affirmation in this drawing together
and it moved me. Five years ago I had declared myself a man without a family. Now, I could not decide if that was a cardinal sin or merely wishful thinking.

I got up, restless, eager to move around.

Walking down the corridor to be alone, I was followed by Dr. Pitts and we continued until we found ourselves standing outside the main entrance. Though he was still uncomfortable with me, his solicitude and obvious concern for my mother moved me.

“Jack, may I have a word with you?” Dr. Pitts asked.

“Sure.”

“Your mother wants to receive the last rites.”

“How do you know?”

“I know everything about her,” Dr. Pitts said. “I know she would want me to get in touch with Father Jude at Mepkin Abbey. You know him.”

“The Trappist,” I said. “Mom used to take us up to visit him a lot when we were kids. He even lived with us for a while in the fifties.”

I walked back to the telephone and called the abbey, and then returned to the waiting room and led my stepfather to an open window, away from the family crossfire.

“Have you called Father Jude?” he asked.

“I talked to his abbot. I’ll drive up for him now.”

“Take your mother’s car, it’s still in the lot,” Dr. Pitts said. He then broke down and with those tears, he proved again that his love for her was, at least, a match for our own.

I
could smell my mother’s perfume, White Shoulders, in the airways and crannies of her Cadillac. Part showboat and part gas hog, the car in its imperial spaciousness fitted the image my mother had constructed for herself since she’d become a doctor’s wife. A judge’s wife is always shortchanged by the need for judiciousness and caution. Though Lucy had led a spectacularly injudicious life, she’d always felt the pressure of those strict injunctions. As a doctor’s wife, she’d blossomed into the sweet vanity of her natural flashiness. Leukemia is her reward for such behavior, I thought.

Taking back roads all the way, I drove from Waterford toward Mepkin Abbey, a small city of prayer hidden deep in a semitropical forest thirty miles from Charleston, South Carolina. Its isolation was intentional. In the hazes of the backwater of the Cooper River, quiet men with their heads shaved retreated from the world to dedicate their lives to solitude and spiritual rigor.

Here, silence was one of the lesser gods and fasting one of its adherents. They raised their voices in song each day, some of the men, old and frail and lovely as hourglasses. They sold their eggs and their honey to local middlemen, Baptists and Methodists, who distributed the produce throughout the state. I had always thought these were the oddest men, despite the fact that Mepkin Abbey had been a place of refuge for my mother and the rest of us when the judge had been drinking heavily. We used to come to Mepkin Abbey
to escape and heal our broken spirits. We would stay in the guest houses and go to Mass each day with the monks and my mother would walk the woods with Father Jude for hours. I grew up believing that my mother was in love with this baffling and quiescent man.

As I drove down the long driveway leading up to the monastery, a small red fox, a saucy and fresh-faced pup, ran out of the forest and stopped. I slowed down and watched the pup, which showed not a trace of fear. I whistled and he cocked his head, his stare steady and inquisitive. Then his mother rushed out of the woods and grabbed her errant pup by the nape of his neck and carried him swiftly back to her lair.

Wildness, I thought, that’s what I’ve missed in Italy, that intimate connection with the inhuman and untamable.

Father Jude was waiting for me beside the bell that divided the strictly accounted-for hours in the lives of monks. He was a tall man, built like a heron and with the face of a spooked herbivore, and vaguely off-balance. In human relationships he had always seemed maladroit and overly cautious. To my mother, Jude was indisputably a holy man, but to me he made faith seem like melancholia. When I was a child, I thought he was afraid of me, as though my bones were made of the most fragile porcelains. As an adult, he avoided all eye contact with me. I headed the car toward the same highway that had brought me to him. He was so jumpy you would have thought I was driving him to a whorehouse.

On the ride back to Waterford he spoke very little and was oblivious to the cypress swamps and ink-black rivers of the Edisto and Ashepoo and Combahee. But as we crossed the first of a series of bridges that marked the beginning of the saltwater zone, where the marshes of Waterford assumed dominion over the cottonwood and tupelo forests, he found his voice:

“Do you miss God?” the priest asked. The pure simplicity of the question startled me.

“Why do you ask, Father?”

“You were a very religious boy once,” the priest said.

“I believed in the tooth fairy then, too,” I said. “That dime underneath my pillow. I like solid proof.”

“Your mother told me you were a fallen-away Catholic,” he said.

“That’s right,” I said, annoyed by the statement, but trying to catch myself. “That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy a little bingo game every now and then.”

“That’s all the Church meant to you?” the priest said. “Bingo?”

“No,” I answered. “It also means the Inquisition. Franco. The Pope’s silence during the Holocaust. Abortion. Birth control. The celibacy of priests.”

“I see,” the priest said.

“Just the tip of the iceberg,” I said.

“But God,” he said, “what of him?”

“We’re having a lovers’ quarrel,” I said.

“Why?”

“He helped kill my wife,” I answered. “Not really, of course. But I find it easier to blame him than me.”

“An odd take,” he said.

I looked over at the thin-faced man with his profile of a minor saint. His gauntness gave him a fierceness his soft voice lacked.

“We thought Mom was having an affair with you when we were younger. We all were sure of it.”

The priest smiled but did not look shaken by the revelation.

“You were too close,” I continued. “There was always something strange and unspoken when you two got together. Whispers and touching of hands. Going off together in the woods. My father was jealous as hell. He’s always hated you.”

“Ah. The judge,” the priest said. “Yes. But he didn’t understand either. He once confronted me about your mother and said he had proof we were lovers. He even claimed that he’d written the Pope.”

“Were you lovers?” I asked.

“No, but we loved each other,” Father Jude said.

“But why? What was the attraction?”

“It was not attraction,” the priest said. “It was history.”

“History?”

“I knew her before she met your father.”

“Keep going,” I encouraged him.

“Our souls take comfort in each other,” the priest said. “Secrets bind us. Early ones.”

“Why don’t you just speak in Latin? You’d make more sense,” I said.

“Do you know anything about your mother’s childhood?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“What?”

“She was born in the mountains of North Carolina. She was raised in Atlanta. She met my father in Charleston.”

“You know nothing. Just as I thought,” he said.

“I know more than you do,” I said, then added, “pal.”

We rode for a minute in complete silence before he answered, “No, you don’t …” He waited for a full ten seconds before he completed his sentence.

“… pal,” he said.

As soon as I parked my mother’s car, we hurriedly but silently entered the hospital and went straight to my mother’s bedside. I waved to my brothers as we passed them, but the priest moved through the waiting room as though they were invisible. Already, his lips were moving in prayer as he laid his case at the foot of her bed and began to prepare himself for administering the last rites. But before he began, Father Jude knelt beside my mother, took her hand in his, kissed the center of her palm, closed her hand, then quietly wept.

Finding his behavior odd and unbecoming, I walked over to the window. I looked out the blinds toward the river, trying to make my presence disappear. This priest was a difficult man to warm up to, ice cold in the center, blizzardy at the edges. My mother’s friendship with him always seemed like a rejection of me.

Then I heard him say, “They don’t know what we went through, Lucy. They don’t know how we got here.”

The words surprised me as much as his tears. Here I was judging this gaunt priest for his remoteness, yet I stood before my unconscious mother without allowing myself to feel a thing. My own tears seemed landlocked and frozen in a glacier I could not reach or touch
within me. What kind of man was I who could not even bring himself to weep at the bedside of his dying mother? I thought. My mother had raised her sons to be hard and stoical and it cost her that portion of tears we should have shed for her in this hospital. I turned back toward Father Jude, who was now preparing himself to administer Extreme Unction.

Extreme Unction, I said to myself, as the priest lit candles and handed them to me. Introit and compline, I said, eucharist and consecration, kyrie and confiteor. Was there ever a boy who loved the soaring language of his church more than I? In the language of my church I could approach the altar of God with words like flung roses sustaining me. Without faith so long, I could hear my church singing me love songs as the priest stepped closer to my mother: The words were winged and feathered, drifting like Paracletes around me. This mother, this holy earth, this basilica that once had housed me.

Vested in a violet stole, Father Jude put a crucifix to Lucy’s mouth for her to kiss. Because she was unconscious and in danger of death he forgave Lucy all of her sins and, according to the faith, Lucy’s immortal soul blazed like a newly formed coin. It was now pure white.

Father Jude made the sign of the cross and addressed me. “Will you please say the responses?”

I nodded. “Been a long time. English or Latin?”