Beach Music (52 page)

We climbed down from the great oak tree and Leah jumped into the arms of her grandmother. Ruth fell apart when she took Leah into her arms. I felt like an eavesdropper as I turned my back and saw something I had forgotten near the fish pond in the garden. Walking away from Leah, I noticed that the small stone epitaph was in bad repair. Coi and goldfish floated like chrysanthemums in the dark pond. I rubbed the worn lettering on the flat stone and made out the words, “The Great Dog Chippie.”

I decided that I would show Leah Chippie’s grave some other day. Turning back, I saw Ruth saying something to Leah that was making her smile with pleasure. I wondered if George Fox knew that his granddaughter had come home.

Then I heard music coming from the Fox house, Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini. The choice of homecoming music surprised me because I knew that George Fox held that particular composition in contempt and thought it banal and sentimental. But I also knew that it was Shyla’s favorite piece of classical music and George was playing it with such passion and conviction out of homage to Shyla and an act of gratitude to me for the return of their granddaughter to his house.

The music ended and George Fox appeared at his window and we looked at each other. We sized each other up and a great hatred ran like a stream between us.

“Granddad,” I heard Leah say as Ruth pointed to her husband. Our mutual love of Leah softened both of us and brought us back into our better selves. As Leah ran up the stairs into the Foxes’ house, George Fox and I bowed to each other. He mouthed the words “Thank you,” then disappeared from view.

A
s a seasoned travel writer, I had returned to the embarkation point, entered the forbidden city of Waterford as though permitted voyage at last, to a severe wonderland that had killed my wife outright and that had left me estranged from my own family and friends. In my eyes, the town was a dangerous place, riddled with cul de sacs and dead ends, and you could not turn your back on it for a single instant.

It was my daughter, Leah, who returned my town to me as a favor and an endowment. She found magic in it because all my stories began and ended here, and because each day she ran into Shyla’s childhood by accident. At school, she sat at the same desk near the window where she was told her own mother had sat during elementary school. After school, she would go to the Foxes’ house where her grandfather gave her piano lessons and Ruth Fox took great pride in spoiling her rotten. Leah found it odd that I had spent so much time away from a town so comfortable. Rome could tuck Waterford into a small pocket of its coat and never even notice a change in its clangorous, teeming environment. For Leah, it was like living life in miniature. Intimacy came with the territory. By removing Leah from her birthplace, I had only proved that exile was the surest way to sanctify the path that led toward home.

Though I had told no one how long I was staying, I had based my whole return on my mother’s health. Ledare and I worked on
the movie project for Mike because the pay was good; we got to study the past at our leisure and kept learning new details that surprised us, and it offered a time each day when we could be together. I had never spent time with a woman so easy to be with for such long periods. The story we worked on was partially our own, but the more direction we received from Mike Hess the more we realized that the disappearance of Jordan Elliott from our lives was pivotal to the success of the project. Mike seemed to think that he could fix all of our lives, if only we could make sense out of the series of catastrophic events that had divided us down the middle at so early an age. Mike carried around with him a nostalgia for a time and a set of friendships that was irreparable. Ledare and I conducted hundreds of interviews and wove together a narrative that cast light on both the mini-series and the high points of all of our lives. By asking about others, we learned thousands of things about ourselves. Yet those things we could not answer made the other half-completed and inert. Jordan had disappeared completely into the underworld of Catholic Europe. Neither his mother nor I had heard from him since the day his father betrayed him in the Piazza del Popolo. Jordan’s war with his father and Shyla’s leap from the bridge were the two bookends of our conflicted time together in the South. Ledare and I spent the last of winter and the first months of spring making up a timeline of all the incidents that had brought us to this state of preparation and watchfulness. We waited for something to happen that would cleanse us of all that was unknowable or ambiguous about our pasts. What we lacked was resolution, an ending. I could tell myself I had come back to write the script, show my daughter the country and the people from which she had sprung, and maybe fall in love with Ledare just a little bit. Only my mother knew, because of her instinctive and complete mastery of every nuance of my behavior, that I had come home for reasons I could not admit even to myself and that I would not leave until she had died. The movie became my excuse.

Each morning at six-thirty, before school, Lucy would meet Leah and take her for a long walk on the beach. Here, Lucy made the shoreline a text of great beauty. On early-morning walks Lucy taught Leah to recognize the eggshell of a skate, the dark triangle of
a shark’s tooth, the differences between starfish, and the aesthetics of shell collecting in general. Lucy’s favorites were the angel wings, with their folded, ethereal flamboyance, the olive shell, in all its modesty, the channeled whelk, and the oyster drill for the intricacy of its seemingly accidental architecture. She had retained her girlish love of sand dollars even though this beach was a Comstock Lode of these doubloon-shaped relatives of sea urchins. Their prevalence along the shell-strung beach soon cheapened them even to Leah, but like all shells their value lay in the symmetry of their form. To Lucy, the whole coastline of South Carolina was a love letter written by God as a literal translation of his abundant love for the beachcombers of the world. She also tutored Leah in how to recognize the signs that the mother loggerheads made in the sand when they began to lay their eggs in May.

After their walks, they would hose their feet off, dry them with large towels left on the deck, and Lucy would drive Leah into town for school. Because of her illness, Lucy demanded that I surrender all mornings to her, and because of that same illness, I complied. It was another warning from my mother that her days were numbered and that she wished to tie up all the loose ends of her life and needed some forbearance from her children to accomplish all these soft duties with a certain amount of grace.

Each day after school, George and Ruth Fox were waiting for Leah as she emerged from her classroom in town. They would walk her to their house on the Point where Ruth would fix her cookies and milk, and George would give her piano lessons three times a week. She played with vivacity for a girl her age and the only thing she lacked to keep her from being great was obsession. The piano required monogamy, and Leah had far too many other interests and hobbies for her to surrender her life to the keyboard. But George was a patient teacher and her training in Italy had been impeccable. Leah’s natural ebullience was more than a match for George’s attraction to darkness. The music they made together gave great pleasure to both of them. After each lesson, George would play for Leah, trying to show her what beauty could be coaxed out of a piano if someone took the time to be the instrument’s servant and devotee.

Every Friday, Leah spent the Sabbath with her grandparents.
Ruth would light the Sabbath candles, then serve the Sabbath meal. Though I had promised Shyla that I would raise our daughter as a Jew, I fully expected the brunt of that responsibility to fall on Shyla’s shoulders. There were few questions about Judaism I could answer easily, and no matter how many books I read, no text could illuminate the theological rain forest where the tenets of that complex and hairsplitting faith luxuriated and multiplied like papayas. I had tried to raise her to be a good Jew, but I did not exactly apprehend what constituted such a notable creation. Together, we had learned the simplest Hebrew prayers, but I felt like an impostor whenever I mouthed the beautiful, mysterious words. I was as uncomfortable with a language that read from right to left as I was with rivers that flowed north. It was outside the natural order of things as I knew it, even though I was fully aware that Hebrew predated English by nearly two thousand years. I was relieved that George and Ruth took over Leah’s religious instruction without a word ever passing between us. Friday and Saturday belonged to them from sunset to sunset. Though they were grateful to me, the Foxes never invited me to share one of these Sabbath meals. The history between us was still on fire. We were courteous around each other to the point of parody. Actors in the same drama, we played our parts with a certain stiffness and dissonance. All the words were pleasant and all rang false. Ruth tried to hide the tension with her volubility and high-pitched laughter and she fluttered like a songbird on the days when I arrived at five-thirty in the afternoon to pick up Leah. George hovered always in the background, hands folded primly. Solemnly, he would bow to me and I would reply with my own terribly formal nod of the head. Though both of us were glad of the armistice, neither of us knew what strategies would lead us around the impasse of distrust and hatred that we both felt whenever our eyes met. For Leah’s sake, we were cordial; for Shyla’s sake, we were no more than that.

In the first month of our return, I introduced Leah to everyone who had importance to Shyla’s and my lives and showed her everything about the world we had grown up in. We pored over high school yearbooks that had been left behind in the Foxes’ attic when Shyla and I had gotten married.

Pressed between the pages were mementos of Shyla’s high school life: orchids from proms fell out in tough, withered petals like lost gloves of elves. She had kept the ticket stubs of movies she attended with the names of the movies carefully inscribed along with her date for that night. I smiled as I came across stub after stub with Jordan Elliott’s name written out in Shyla’s clear hand. There were programs from school plays and football games and events at the synagogue. Notes that had been passed to her in class were also dated and annotated. An essay she had written about Lady Macbeth in Advanced English with its A+ grade and its rapturous note of congratulations written by her teacher, John Loring, were preserved in the advertisements at the end of the book.

“Let’s see what you wrote,” Leah said, flipping through the yearbook.

“Oh my God, I’m praying I didn’t sign the stupid thing.”

“Of course you signed it, Daddy. You married Mama.”

“Yeh, but I didn’t know I was going to marry her then.”

“Here it is. Look, Daddy. Read it to me.”

“This is worse than I thought. This is horrible. I can’t possibly read this when I’m sober.”

On a page marked “reserved,” the word itself penned in by an emphatic parenthesis, I in my stupid embryonic manhood had written, “Dear Shyla, Just little ole me getting in line to write some ‘sweet nothings’ to one of the sweetest girls in the world. Never forget fifth-period English class and the way Mr. Loring’s face turned red every time you called him ‘stud.’ We sure have been through a lot together, but I can honestly say it was worth every minute of it and it was all done in the spirit of good, clean fun. (Well, not that clean!) When you get tired of that nasty sex maniac, Jordan, you know you can crawl up the tree to my window anytime. (Ha! Ha! That’s a joke!) Don’t forget who put the ‘bop in the bop-she-bop’ and who put ‘the ram in the ram-a-lang-a-ding-dong.’ Always remember the Senior Trip and the time that Crazy Mike put the rattlesnake in Mrs. Barlow’s car. Try not to get into too much trouble this summer and let’s get drunk together every night at the university next year. To a girl who’s 2 sweet 2 B 4 Got-10. Jack.”

Looking up from the yearbook, I was more embarrassed than moved by what I had written at the end of senior year.

“I was an idiot. A perfect jackass. Now I can understand why the Foxes hated my guts,” I said. “Why your mother ever married me’ll remain one of life’s mysteries.”

“I think it’s very nice,” Leah said.

F
orce of habit was not one of my major virtues, but I had tried to cultivate at least the camouflage of certainty with Leah. Like most children, regularity appeased some primitive urge in her. Leah was used to having a schedule and it gave her an inherent sense of order and time and the correctness of things. Without the presence of Leah I feared that my travels would all begin at midnight and that all my meals would be completed beneath the silence and star shine of three in the morning. My child ensured a certain normality and provided the antidote to my natural disconnectedness.

Several days a week we met my mother and Dr. Pitts for drinks at their beachfront house at six. I wanted to spend as much time as I possibly could with my mother, and though it bothered me that I had to share this time with a relative stranger, I realized that Dr. Pitts was part of the package. For her entire life, Lucy had been searching for a man who would hang on every word she said and who would take with utter seriousness her most flippant and random thoughts. She had found that man in Jim Pitts. He adored her.

I did not wish to pass my knowledge of cold inarticulateness on to Leah. Deep in my heart, I thought that it may have killed Shyla. By coming home to be with my mother, I hoped that the glacier inside me would finally calve and break off and seek the warmth of the Gulf Stream waters that were also my heritage.

Lucy had done exceptionally well in remission; her complexion was rosy again and her health improving. We all knew this flowering as a false spring, but Lucy was inspirational in her desire to live and her enthusiasm was catching. She was not about to surrender without a fight.

I was sitting in the living room of my mother’s house and
watching Dr. Pitts as he made his stiff, ritualized approach that took place at six every evening.