Beach Music (50 page)

“Daddy, I’m so excited,” Leah said, squeezing my arm. “I never dreamed I’d meet my family. Do you think they’ll like me?”

“They’ll eat you up with a spoon.”

“Is that a good thing?” Leah asked.

“They’ll love your little Roman ass.”

“Bad word. That’s a thousand lire.”

“Not now,” I said. “We’re going to land soon. Now, it’s a buck.”

“Is Ledare meeting us here?”

“No,” I said. “We go through customs in Atlanta and she’ll be waiting for us in Savannah.”

“Are you excited about going back to live in Waterford, Daddy?” my daughter asked.

“I’m terrified,” I admitted, and then added, “But, at least, it’s quiet in Waterford. Nothing much happens there.”

“Everything happens in Waterford,” Leah said and I saw that she was speaking directly to the photo album.

Before landing, I looked down at the green hills and hidden lakes of Georgia and tried to address my anxiety.

Then I watched my daughter move back and forth among the photographs of my past and realized that I had raised a child with a longing for any rumor of home, and that I would have to put aside my own fear.

Ledare met us at the Savannah airport and drove us straight to Elizabeth on Thirty-seventh for a dinner that I had arranged before I left Rome. I had already begun to worry about how to make my living as a travel writer when my travel was going to be limited to day trips from Waterford, but my editor at
Food and Wine
had told me about a new generation of Southern cooks who were both
classically trained and dedicated to revolutionizing the fundamentals of Southern cuisine. I was told they all preserved their fondness for grits and barbecue despite their desire to sneak goat cheese into the tossed salad.

In the handsome, high-ceilinged Victorian outside of the historic district, I went back into the kitchen to interview Elizabeth Terry and her staff as they prepared redolent and beautifully constructed meals for tables of conservatively dressed customers. She told me the names of all the leading chefs who were most intimately connected with the new transformation of Southern cooking. That first evening back in America we ate a light, superb meal that would have been impossible to find anywhere in the South except New Orleans during the seventies. Leah dined on pasta Amatriciana, which she pronounced delicious and wondered aloud why her father told her she would never again eat good pasta until they returned to Rome. I admitted my error and described the years I had labored as a food critic tasting ghastly combinations of pasta and sauce in Italian restaurants from Texas to Virginia that all deserved shutting down by the health department at best, a fire bombing at worst.

Later, we spent our first night beneath a South Carolina sky at the house on the Isle of Orion that Lucy had rented for us. Ledare had gotten the keys earlier and had done a preliminary inspection of the premises and found the house far more than adequate. It was built on a high bank overlooking a saltwater lagoon.

As I walked through the house for the first time, I was pleased to see that the owners, a Mr. and Mrs. Bonner, had selected their furniture and paintings with great care. They were people of good taste, people I would like to know, I thought, as I studied a wall of family photographs where the Bonners strutted their children’s blond good health and their straight toothy smiles that spoke so eloquently of the orthodontist’s art. The kitchen was adequate and Lucy had already stocked it with food. In the master bedroom, I found a writing table and a four-poster bed that I would have bet was a Bonner family heirloom.

Upstairs, I heard Leah squeal with pleasure as she discovered a bedroom to her liking. I unpacked her suitcases as Leah took a
shower. Taking care not to wrinkle the clothes that Maria had so sadly and lovingly folded, I filled up an antique dresser and laughed out loud when I discovered the three boxes of pasta and the whole salami Maria had packed in case the Americans failed to feed Leah in the proper manner. I made a mental note to call Maria in the morning to let her know we had landed safely and that Leah had eaten pasta that had met with her approval. Leah walked out of her newly claimed room in her pajamas, sleepy-eyed and smelling of powder. She was asleep before I got past the first sentences of a story.

I found Ledare downstairs lighting a fire she had already laid in the fireplace. She had fixed me a drink and handed it to me as I watched the flame consuming the dry oak.

“To your homecoming,” Ledare said.

“This could turn out to be hell but it’s decorated nicely,” I said, looking around.

“Why don’t you use a radical approach and try to enjoy your time here?” Ledare suggested.

“Please,” I said. “You must try to humor my existential anguish.”

“You’ll have plenty of time for that,” Ledare said. “Mike called, and he’d like us to write an outline of the mini-series in a month. He told me to tell you no more excuses and he wants a note from your doctor saying you actually got shot in the head by a terrorist.”

“I still feel uneasy about the project,” I said to Ledare. “How can we write for Mike without hopping into bed with Capers.”

Ledare said, “The subject’s fascinating and I think we can learn things about ourselves we don’t know. We can recapture some of the magic of the good, lost times.”

“It’s dangerous to write about what you don’t know,” I said.

Ledare got up to go and said, “It’s dangerous
not
to.”

I
woke much too early the next day, and when Lucy came by the house she found us watching a televangelist warning his audience that Armageddon was almost here due to the licentiousness and evil of mankind. Lucy cooked a large breakfast for Leah and lied to her when the child asked her the meaning of the word “licentiousness.”
I clearly corrected my mother’s error. After breakfast, Lucy made sure that Leah was dressed warmly enough, then took us both for a first long walk on the Isle of Orion’s four-mile beach. The tide was out and the water flat as we walked on the beach gathering shells and examining the barnacle-covered driftwood that had washed up during the previous night’s tides. The day was windless and even the seagulls had to stroke their great wings to keep aloft. The ocean mirrored the sky and few swells or ridges disturbed the brown pelican floating twenty yards away from us.

As we walked, Lucy showed Leah all the safe spots for swimming and where the water grew treacherous and riptides moved in fierce turbulence. She explained to Leah that if she were ever caught in the undertow’s grip that Leah must allow herself to submit to the undertow rather than fight against it.

“Allow the undertow to take you out to deeper water, darling,” Lucy said. “The undertow’s weak out there, and it will let you go. Then you can just swim slowly back toward shore and catch a wave all the way in.”

Together, woman and girl studied the detritus tossed in random piles near tide-pools. Lifting the broken shell of an Atlantic blue crab, Lucy pointed out the deep blue coloring along the torn claw, “the most beautiful blue in all of nature.”

Leah was so filled with delight and curiosity that the walk continued for hours as Lucy shared all the knowledge of the littoral she carried with her. They collected what shells they could find but only the coquina clams were plentiful on the beach. Lucy promised a cornucopia of them when the spring tides began and the ocean really began to warm up.

“Shells. We’ll gather the most beautiful shells the Atlantic has to offer. The rarest too. But we’ve got to be vigilant. We’ve got to work hard. We’ve got to commit ourselves to coming out here after every high tide.”

“We can do it, Grandma,” Leah said. “Daddy told me you could teach me everything there was to know about the sea.”

“He knows some things himself,” Lucy said modestly, but pleased. “Of course, I’m sure he’s forgotten most of it since he took
it on himself to become a European. Come over here, child. Let me show you how erosion is eating up this beach.”

On the seashore, Lucy had found the text of all creation imprinted daily on the sands of the Isle of Orion. By walking the beach each morning, Lucy had strengthened her belief in God and come to understand that she was no more important to the planet than the smallest plankton that floated in the invisible broth that served the softest orders of the food chain. It had helped Lucy when she could think of her own bloodstream as an inland sea not much different from the one that she and Leah walked beside. Her leukemia was similar to the virulence of red tides that attacked Southern beaches during the summer, causing fish kills that made the seabirds crazy with gluttony. A beach was a fine place to come to grips with all the cycles of the universe. It eased her fear of dying.

She watched Leah’s pretty run down the beach toward the carcass of a small shark. The crabs and gulls had already done their small-scale butchery. The shark’s eyes had been picked out and a larger predator had removed part of the dorsal fin. As her granddaughter ran, Lucy told me that she would teach this child everything and tie her to the South so completely that I could never take her back to Italy. I gave her a look, then let it go.

After we came in from the beach, I drove Leah the eighteen miles on Seaside Road in the oversized Chrysler Le Baron that Lucy had encouraged my landlord to leave for me.

We touched five sea islands before we crossed the J. Eugene Norris Bridge into Waterford proper. Even when I was recuperating in Rome I had imagined making this tour with Leah and had practiced the itinerary in my mind, choosing with care which streets I would drive her down and at which houses I would stop to reveal their histories.

I took a right after the bridge and drove slowly past the mansions of the planter class who had built their houses facing east toward the sun and Africa. Spanish moss hung from the water oaks in such smoky profusion that the houses looked like chapels seen through veils. Labrador retrievers slept on marble steps. Brick walls, inked with pearly lichen, hid carefully tended gardens from the common
view. It was the neighborhood where both Shyla and I had grown up and its streets seemed to disappear into a field of lost time and drift like childhood itself.

We drove down Porpoise Avenue past the stores of the main shopping street with their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century facades crowding both sides of the street. Once I could close my eyes and name all the shops and their owners on both sides of the street, but modern times had brought an influx of strangers to town who had opened up health-food stores, office-supply shops, and banks with unfamiliar names that had merged with giant financial institutions from Charlotte. I also noticed that the names of the oldest, most honored law firms had changed their aristocratic shingles to reflect the death of managing partners and the rise of feisty young attorneys who wanted their own names engraved on the signage of Porpoise Avenue. When we passed the Lafayette House I pointed out the shingle of my father and brother: McCall and McCall, Attorneys-at-Law. Luther’s Pharmacy had closed, the Huddle twins had given up their barbershop, and the Breeze Theater was now a fashionable men’s shop. Lipsitz’s shoe store was where it always was and its mere survival seemed a necessary corrective amid the change.

When we came to Rusoff’s Department Store I told Leah that was where we would find Max, the Great Jew. Then we drove to a poorer section of town and I showed her a small brick two-story building that had been the store that the Great Jew had opened when he first moved to Waterford. We drove past Waterford High School and the football field where I had played fullback and both Shyla and Ledare had been cheerleaders in that long-ago world where innocence was at least an illusion that young Southerners could cling to until the world brought them up short. Every street contained vivid transparencies of my past, and Shyla’s face began to appear to me in every billboard and stop sign. And I understood that I had come back to go face-to-face with Shyla for the first time since she died.

As we drove down De Marlette Road, named for the French explorer who had first landed at Waterford in 1562, I pointed out the Waterford River, caught in bright glimpses between the houses built along the high bluff. I once had been able to name every family
and the children who had lived in each house we passed, but death and mobility had scrambled the deck and made the certainty of my memories suspect. Finally we drove up to the entrance of the small but well-cared-for Jewish cemetery, a half mile from the town’s center.

It was surrounded by a vine-covered brick wall and oak and cottonwood trees provided shade and comfort as I swung open the iron gate decorated with the Star of David. I led Leah by the hand, walking through long rows of tombstones decorated with Hebrew letters that were a roll call of all the Jewish names that had followed Max Rusoff to Waterford.

I stopped before one of the graves, and when I read Shyla’s name it took my breath away. I had not returned to this graveyard since we buried Shyla, and seeing “Shyla Fox McCall” made me cover my eyes with my left hand. The word McCall looked out of place in this acre of Scheins and Steinbergs and Keyserlings.

“Oh, Daddy,” Leah said. “It’s Mama, isn’t it?”

I had expected to comfort my daughter but I fell speechless. The shock of Shyla’s death had quickly turned to its details, then to a trial to decide the fate of our child. That pain had rendered me tearless, insensate. Though I felt thunderstruck, I still could not cry, but only stare. I stroked Leah’s hair as she wept.

Finally, I said, “This is the wrong cemetery.”

Leah answered me, “I knew you’d make a joke.”

“I’m that predictable?” I asked.

“Yes. You always make jokes when you’re sad,” she said. “Tell me a story about Mama,” Leah said finally, kneeling down to pull weeds out of the pale winter grass that covered the grave.

“What’s your favorite?” I asked.

“Tell me one you haven’t told me before,” Leah said. “I can never really see Mama, she never seems real.”

“Have I ever told you a story about how your mother used to drive me crazy? How she could make me angrier than hell?”