Beach Music (51 page)

“No,” Leah said.

So I told Leah the story of the black woman in Charleston who Shyla had found in an alley near Henry’s Furniture Store. Shyla had the heart of a socialist and the soul of a missionary and she spent a
lifetime unreconciled to human or animal suffering of any kind. Shortly after we were married Shyla was shopping when she came upon an unconscious black woman covered with sores lying in an alley.

Shyla walked into Henry Popowski’s store and asked that Henry call her a cab, which he gladly did. Then she had to cajole a most reluctant cabdriver into helping her lift the prone body of the anonymous black woman into the backseat of his cab. At the end of the cab ride she again coaxed the driver into helping her carry the woman into the one-bedroom carriage house we had rented behind a Church Street mansion.

When I arrived home from my job as restaurant and movie critic for the
News and Courier
, we had one of the bitterest arguments of our marriage. Shyla contended that no human being would leave a poor helpless black woman passed out in an alley surrounded by a racist white society. I argued that I would be more than happy to pass up such an opportunity. If that were the case, Shyla screamed, she had certainly married the wrong man and she would soon be looking for a husband who was far more humane and compassionate than I was. But I thought compassion had nothing to do with the fact that a black drug addict covered with sores and smelling like a billy goat was lying in the only bed in a one-bedroom apartment. I also contended that we’d be evicted as soon as our racist landlords found out that they had added a black hooker to their roster of tenants. Shyla shouted that she would not conduct her life to conform to the wishes of racists nor would she have married me had she known I was a secret Nazi. Nazi, I had yelled. I complain when you bring an unconscious heroin addict and put her into my goddamn bed and suddenly I’m in charge of all the crematoriums at Bergen-Belsen. Every time I argue with you, I start out on King Street in Charleston and end up at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin leading my Nazi youth boys in a spirited rendition of the “Horst Wessel Song.” If the shoe fits, Shyla fired back, wear it, and neither one of us had noticed that our guest had awakened until we heard her say, “Where the fuck I be?”

“You be in my fucking house,” I said to her.

“And you’re welcome to stay for as long as it takes to get back on your feet,” Shyla said sweetly.

“I’ll be damned if that’s so.”

“My husband is a racist bastard,” Shyla explained. “Don’t pay attention to him.”

The black woman, disoriented, said, “You people kidnap my ass?”

“Yeh,” I said, irritated. “We left a ransom note in your grandma’s outhouse.”

“Racist to the core,” Shyla shouted, beating her fists against my chest. “Racist scum. I go to bed each night with the chief Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan.”

“Good,” I said. “That’s a step up. From Auschwitz to Selma in a single goddamn leap.”

“You’re the fucking Klan, man?” the black woman asked.

“No, ma’am,” I explained, trying to control myself. “I’m not in the Klan. I’m just a poor, godforsaken white man, underpaid and underappreciated, who’d like you to remove your pus-covered body from my bed.”

“Racist pig,” Shyla screamed. “You’re what gives white Southern males, masters of oppression, a bad name.”

“Got that right, honey,” the black woman said, nodding her head.

“Our guest agrees,” Shyla said triumphantly.

“She’s not our guest,” I said.

“If I ain’t your guest, what the fuck am I doing here?” the black woman said.

“Sisterly togetherness,” Shyla said. “What a beautiful thing.”

“Can I take a bath?” the black woman asked.

“Of course,” Shyla said at the same time I said, “Certainly not.”

“Did you forget we were invited for drinks by my publisher?” I asked.

“I certainly did not,” Shyla said sweetly. “And I’m ready to accompany you to that Neanderthal’s house.”

“Do you mind if we don’t take your new friend, Harriet Tubman?” I asked faking civility.

“I have to go to a party with my soon-to-be-former husband,” Shyla said. “You take a bath and pretty yourself up. Here’s ten dollars for a cab. Leave your name and address and I’ll take you to lunch next week.”

“I personally am not leaving this house until this woman is out of it,” I said.

“Yes, you are,” Shyla announced, “or I file for divorce tomorrow. The first divorce in South Carolina history caused by white racism.”

Shyla rushed out of the carriage house and I, eyeing the black woman suspiciously, followed her out the door.

When we returned from Mr. Manigault’s party, the black woman had bathed, fixed herself a meal, then stolen all of Shyla’s clothes, shoes, and makeup. She packed it all up in the leather luggage Shyla had bought me for my birthday. On her way out, she lifted the sterling silver from the secretary near the doorway. Then she called a cab and cheerfully reentered the underworld of black Charleston.

I chuckled at the memory as I stood over Shyla’s grave with Leah.

“We laughed at that story more than anything that ever happened,” I said. “We’d go to some new, strange town in Europe and your mother would whisper, ‘Where the fuck I be?’ ”

“Did the police ever catch the woman?” Leah asked.

“Your mama would not let me call the police,” I said. “She claimed that the woman needed all that stuff more than we did. She was glad the woman took it. I wanted the woman to be enrolled in leather-tooling classes at the state pen.”

“Mama didn’t care that the woman stole her clothes?” Leah asked.

“I used to see the woman sometimes walking around in Shyla’s clothes,” I said. “I’d be off covering a story with a photographer and I’d see her working a stretch of territory near the Cooper River bridge and I’d have the photographer take a picture. Shyla used to love it that I kept those photographs in an album.”

“Did she get new clothes?”

“She drove straight to Waterford, went to the Great Jew, told
him what happened, and came back to Charleston with a whole new wardrobe. She could always depend on Max.”

“Were you mad at Mama?” Leah asked.

“At first, I was furious. Naturally. But everything that happened was in perfect character for Shyla. I could’ve married a hundred South Carolina girls who’d’ve walked over that woman in the alley. But I married the only South Carolina woman who’d’ve brought her home.”

Leah stared at her mother’s name for a long time before saying, “Mama was a nice person, wasn’t she, Daddy?”

“A sweetheart,” I said.

“It’s so sad, Daddy,” Leah said in a whisper. “It’s the saddest thing in the world. She doesn’t know anything about me. She doesn’t know what I’m like or how I could’ve loved her. Do you think she’s in heaven?”

I knelt down beside my daughter and the earth was hard and cold against my knee. I kissed her cheek and brushed the hair back from her face.

“I know what I’m supposed to say to make you feel better,” I said. “But I’ve told you. Religion confuses me. It always has. I don’t know if Jews even believe in heaven. Ask your rabbi. Ask Suor Rosaria.”

“I think Mama’s in heaven,” Leah said.

“Then so do I,” I said and we walked hand in hand out of the cemetery, pausing to look back at Shyla’s grave, once, before we got in the car.

I would always remember that visit to Shyla’s grave as one of the hardest things I had ever done in my life. I grew angry with Shyla again but kept that anger to myself. When she leapt from the bridge, Shyla never considered the day when I would have to bring our daughter to mourn her loss at graveside. There were so many things that Shyla hadn’t thought of.

From the cemetery, we drove back down Perimeter Road, past Williford Curve, took a left at the eyesore of a community college, and went four long blocks before turning into the driveway of my childhood home.

“This is where I grew up,” I told Leah.

“It’s so beautiful. And so big,” she said.

We walked out to the dock and I pointed back toward the town where the river doglegged left toward the sea. Carefully, I tried to acclimate her to where she stood and pointed toward the sea islands where we had spent the night in our rented house and then pointed in the general direction of Italy. Leah seemed uninterested in this geography lesson so I quickly took her back down the dock past the spartina grass of the marsh that had that wintered-in look of depletion. In the cold months, the marsh slept invisibly, beneath the mud, as the shoots of new grass, sharp as cut glass, began to form. The new marsh was beginning to make its move.

The back door of the house was unlocked and as we entered the kitchen I breathed in the smell that elucidated the complex issues of my childhood. The salt marsh was part of that smell, but so was my mother’s laughter, coffee grounds, the frying of chicken, sweaty uniforms thrown in heaps by the laundry room, cigarette smoke, cleaning detergent … all of them I remembered as I led Leah by the hand.

We moved out through the dark hallway and into the dining room, where I took a crystal salt shaker and tried to shake some salt in my hand, but the humidity had long ago turned the contents of that shaker into a small imitation of Lot’s wife. I sniffed the pepper but it was so old it could not even make me sneeze.

Upstairs, I showed Leah my bedroom, which still contained pennants I had put up when I was a kid. A dusty scrapbook, long unread, told the story of my small-town athletic career from Little League to college.

Leah pointed to a door that led to a half-hidden top-floor attic. Like all children, she gravitated toward the roomful of old trunks and discarded furniture. She discovered a bag full of roller skates and piles of strange-looking keys. Going deeper into the attic, she found an album of photographs of me taken when I was a baby. There was a clarinet and a sailboat and a box full of outdated life jackets.

I let her rummage around as I sat going through old scrapbooks in a desultory fashion. The newspaper clippings had aged as I had, and when I came across a picture of Shyla congratulating Capers
after a game, leaping into his arms in classic cheerleading fashion, I felt unbearably sad and replaced the scrapbook on its dusty shelf.

Then I turned my attention to the paperback books and it seemed that not a single one had been moved from its place. This room had long served as a retreat from the disharmony and sadness of the first floor, and it was here I had fallen in love with these books and authors in a way that only lifelong readers know and understand. A good movie had never once affected me in the same life-changing way a good book could. Books had the power to alter my view of the world forever. A great movie could change my perceptions for a day.

I had always kept these books in alphabetical order from Agee to Zola, and I had read for the way words sounded, not for the ideas they espoused.

“Hello, Holden Caulfield,” I said, taking the book from its shelf. “Meet you at the Waldorf under the clock. Say hey to Phoebe. You’re a prince, Holden. A real goddamn prince.”

Taking out
Look Homeward, Angel
, I read the magnificent first page and remembered when I had been a sixteen-year-old boy and those same words had set me ablaze with the sheer inhuman beauty of the language as a cry for mercy, incantation, and a great river roaring through the darkness.

“Hello, Eugene. Hello, Ben Gant,” I said quietly, for I knew these characters as well as I knew anyone in the world. Literature was where the world made sense for me.

“Greetings, Jane Eyre. Hello, David Copperfield. Jake, the fishing is good in Spain. Beware of Osmond, Isabel Archer. Be careful, Natasha. Fight well, Prince Andre. The snows, Ethan Frome. The green light, Gatsby. Be careful of the large boys, Piggy. I do give a damn, Miss Scarlett. The woods of Birnam are moving, Lady Macbeth.”

My reverie was broken by Leah’s voice. “Who are you talking to, Daddy?”

“My books,” I said. “They’re all still here, Leah. I’m going to pack them all up and take them back to Rome for you.” And I walked down the stairs, went back into my bedroom, and raised the
window that looked out to the roof and the garden. The wood was warped and it took me several minutes before I could remove the screen. Then I climbed out to a flat part of the roof that gave me a view of the river and the garden.

“You ever climbed a tree?” I asked.

“Not one this big,” Leah said. “Is it dangerous?”

“I didn’t think so when I was a kid,” I admitted. “But now that I think about you climbing around in it, I feel faint and dizzy—like I’m going to have a heart attack.”

“Is this your and Mama’s tree?” she asked.

“The same one,” I said. “Now the branches are so broad you can walk upright on some of them, but I want us on our hands and knees most of the time. Let’s be careful.”

“Were you and Mama careful?”

“No, we were nuts.”

I stepped out onto a limb that touched the roof and lowered myself to another huge branch, thick as a sidewalk. I reached back and helped Leah onto the branch and the two of us crept slowly to the center of the tree. The oak was the only thing from my childhood that never appeared smaller than I had remembered it. We made our way to a well in the trunk of the tree where the remnants of a tree house still provided a comfortable observation post. Leah was thrilled.

I pointed toward a smaller white house that sat at the very end of the garden. An older woman was sweeping the steps of her modest porch. “That’s Shyla’s mama. That’s your grandmother, Leah.”

“Can I speak to her?” Leah whispered.

“Yell down to her,” I said. “Ask if we can come over.”

“What do I call her?” she asked.

“Try Grandma,” I advised.

“Grandma,” Leah said, her voice bell-like in the great tree. “Grandma.”

Ruth Fox looked up, surprised. She took her broom and walked into the garden where she had heard a child’s voice.

“Up here, Grandma. It’s me, Leah,” Leah said, waving down at her grandmother.

“Leah. Leah. My Leah,” Ruth said, stammering. “Are you
crazy? Get down from that tree. Jack, are you trying to kill my only grandchild with your foolishness?”