Beach Music (55 page)

“But you don’t have fifty thousand dollars cash,” the congressman said, with finality, rising from the table with the air of a man who has spent enough time on a disagreeable subject. “Nobody in this town has that kind of cash.”

“Except you,” Silas said. “Elect a man to Congress in this state and he’s a millionaire in four years. Tell me how it works, Barnwell.”

“God smiles on lambs and fools,” Barnwell answered.

That night Max took Esther out on the veranda overlooking the Waterford River and together they watched the sun gild a low-lying herd of clouds with an unearthly, brokered gold. They drank schnapps from small crystal glasses. It was a ritual that celebrated their prosperity and their need to relax after the endless labors of their first years in the town.

Max could not figure out a way to tell the woman he loved best in the world that she had lost her entire family. Esther came from a family of enormous intimacy and affection, and he did not know how to tell her that her Europe had died.

Max had a second schnapps and then told her in Yiddish.

For six days, Esther Rusoff mourned and then a young rabbi conducted Sabbath services in their house. Max and Esther pledged to build a synagogue in Waterford to honor their families.

When shiva was over, Esther lay in Max’s arms again and whispered to him before they went to sleep.

“That girl, Max. The one that Barnwell mentioned to you.”

“I have been thinking of her too,” Max said.

“What can we do?”

“Sell everything,” Max replied. “This house. The department store. The supermarket. Start again.”

“Can we get fifty thousand dollars? It is a lot. Too much maybe.”

“The bank will lend us the difference,” Max said. “I am sure of it.”

“Then this is what we will do,” Esther said.

“Yes,” Max said.

“You would do it whether I agreed or not,” Esther said. “I
know you, my husband. I am smart enough to go along with what you have already decided. But it is right. Even if it may take away from our own children.”

“How does it hurt our own children to save another child?” Max asked.

In the following months, Max sold the department store to the Belk’s chain out of Charlotte, sold the food market to a retailer out of Charleston, and sold their house on Dolphin Street to a lieutenant general in the Marine Corps stationed on Pollock Island and nearing retirement age. He wired the fifty thousand dollars to Barnwell Middleton in Washington and received back a sobering telegram that stated how long the odds were and how improbable it was that this rescue could actually be consummated. But Barnwell Middleton pledged he would try his best.

Max had not sold the building of the small store that he had first opened in Waterford so many years before, and it was empty. The Rusoff family moved back into the top floor, and in no time, Max and Esther were back in business.

Nearly a year passed before Max received a telegram from Barnwell Middleton informing him that a merchant ship would arrive in the small port of Waterford on July 18, 1944. A girl named Ruth Graubart was listed among the passengers. Max called his wife and told her the good news, then called Silas McCall who told the news to Ginny Penn. The news moved from house to house in Waterford the way news travels in small towns, light and frisky and buoyant because the story brought such a sense of joy into a world too familiar with the news of hometown boys dying overseas.

When the boat arrived in Waterford, a pretty teenage girl walked down the gangplank accompanied, with grave formality, by the ship’s captain. She looked shy and bewildered as she heard the noise begin in the crowd. Meeting Max and Esther, who greeted her in Yiddish, she curtsied. Max wept and opened his arms to her. When she rushed into them and buried her head in his great chest, the town roared out its greeting to her. It let her know that she was part of Waterford, South Carolina, from that day forward, that she had found her home. The town would take the girl, Ruth Graubart, into their hearts and watch her finish high school and come of age
to marry George Fox. The town would be there when she bore her first child, Shyla, and would be there when Ruth buried that same child.

But what the town remembered most and best was that first moment when the Jewish orphan, ransomed by strangers, touched down on Waterford soil for the first time and flew into the arms of the Great Jew.

Silas McCall would later tell his grandchildren that when he watched the girl’s arrival, it marked the first time he was certain that America would win the war. No matter how many times he told the story to his grandchildren about Ruth’s arrival, he always ended it the same way and it always gave the McCall children goose bumps when he got to the end.

The town roared, he would say, the town just roared.

But Ruth told her own story to no one in Waterford except to her husband and her daughter Shyla, until she told it to me in the spring of 1986 after we had reconciled and I had returned to the town with her granddaughter, Leah, to help my mother die.

It was only when Ruth had told me about her terrible history in Poland that I learned, at last, the identity of the lady of coins.

I
drove my grandfather, Silas McCall, over to Waterford to pick up Ginny Penn from the nursing home. I left my brothers at my grandparents’ house as they finished off a ramp for Ginny Penn’s wheelchair. My grandfather was a compact, cigarette-smoking Southerner, observant, but a man of few words.

“Be glad to get Ginny Penn home?” I asked.

“Don’t have much choice,” Silas said. “She likes to drive the nurses crazy.”

“Dad all right?”

“Slept it off. Then caught a ride to town.”

We put my grandmother in the backseat, exhausted by the effort and emotion caused by the mechanics of checking out of the home. Bureaucracy always requires an expenditure of energy that is too much to ask, especially of the very old and very sick. Ginny Penn did not even wave back at the nurses who lined the porch to bid her farewell.

“Monsters,” she said as Silas and I waved to them. “Leeches. Bed-pan emptiers. Disease-spreaders. Penicillin-fungi. They should not be allowed to touch genuine ladies or women of pure refinement.”

“I thought they were nice,” Silas said quietly, almost an aside.

“You never came to see me once,” Ginny Penn hissed. “Better
had I married Ulysses S. Grant than the traitorous wretch Silas McCall.”

“Could you stop off at the feed store?” my grandfather asked me. “I’d like to buy a muzzle.”

“Grandpa came to see you every day, Ginny Penn,” I said.

“My grandchildren deserted me. The whole town was on a death watch. It would’ve exploded with joy at the news of my demise.”

“I’d have led the parade down Main Street,” Silas muttered.

“Don’t egg her on,” I warned, touching his wrist. “Ginny Penn, my brothers are all down. We spent the day building you a wheelchair ramp.”

“That’s what you call a homecoming gift? A wheelchair ramp?”

“I oversaw the preliminaries,” I said. “It’ll be great.”

My four brothers were gathered at their grandparents’ house when I drove up into the yard. The house had aged well and looked distinguished among the modern beach houses that had sprung up around it. Behind it, the fourteenth hole of a golf course designed by Robert Trent Jones made a dogleg away from the backyard. A golf cart bearing two sedate and dignified retirees drifted as soundlessly as a sailing ship toward the distant green. Four female white-tailed deer, beautiful in their streamlined thinness, fed on the high grasses in the rough. When I was a boy, I thought, the island was wild and you could look forever and never find a golf ball, but everything’s different from when I was a boy.

Except, I thought, my grandparents were the same. Always they had seemed peculiar and unsuitable. They had also appeared conjoined by habit and not by love. It hurt Ginny Penn that we, her grandsons, preferred Silas to her and that we loved him with a fierce attachment that she would never know. But we would disagree with that assessment and tell her with clarity and accuracy that we loved her exactly as much as she would allow us to and that was always dependent on the ungovernable valences of her moods.

“The boys,” I said.

“The best boys in the world,” Silas added.

“They’ll do in a pinch,” Ginny Penn said, but I could tell she
was both excited to be home and to have a reception committee waiting for her.

My brothers let out a cheer and ran down to greet her. They pounded on the side of the car and kept up their cheering until even the dour Ginny Penn had to smile. When she smiled, all four boys pretended to feel dizzy and fell onto their backs in a dead faint.

“They’ve always been goofy as puppies,” she said, as Silas helped her out of the car and I retrieved the wheelchair from the porch.

Tee ran up the new ramp that lent the whole yard the smell of fresh lumber. He lay down at the top of the ramp and yelled to Ginny Penn, “Hey, old woman.”

Ginny Penn flared and said, “Don’t you call me ‘old woman’ or I’ll switch you till it thunders.”

“Look, Ginny Penn,” Tee said happily. “Perfect angle.”

Then, pretending he was a dead man in a B movie, Tee let himself roll down the ramp and out onto the sidewalk.

“It needs some varnish,” Ginny Penn said. “I detest raw wood. It offends my aesthetic.”

“It’s wonderful to see you too, Grandma,” Dallas said.

“Thank you, boys, for building the ramp,” Dupree added in a girlish voice.

“Not even a near-death experience changed her one iota, boys,” Silas said, glumly pushing her up the ramp. “She’ll be hell until she dies.”

“That’s my plan,” she said.

In the middle of the ramp, my brothers stopped the wheelchair and began kissing her in welcome. They kissed her face and neck and tickled her ribs. They kissed her eyes and cheeks and forehead until she began to fend them off with her cane. They retreated from her, laughing, then pounced on her again when Silas maneuvered her near the front door. She seemed to both welcome and barely tolerate the kisses. It was their attention she craved, not their touch. She had always considered kissing to be the most overrated of human activities.

Outside we sat around the front porch as John Hardin sanded the ramp, smoothing down the rough spots. Of all of us, he was the only
true carpenter and there was nothing he could not do with his hands. Though gifted, he was also unemployable since he could never take the pressure that even the most serene workplace made inevitable. We watched him sand the fresh lumber, admiring the economy of his labor.

Tee broke the silence by saying, “Let’s face it. Ginny Penn’s an asshole. Am I the only one that’s noticed it?”

“Who?” Dupree said. “That sweet ol’ thing?”

Leah walked out onto the back porch after having read Ginny Penn a poem she had written in honor of her homecoming.

“Did Ginny Penn like your poem, darling?” her uncle Dupree asked.

“I couldn’t tell,” Leah said. “She said she did.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Tee said. “Being nice is out of character.”

“Too much to ask,” Dallas agreed.

“Did all of you know my mother?” Leah asked my brothers, who were surprised at the question. They gathered around her solicitously.

“Sure, Leah,” Dupree said. “What do you want to know? What do you remember most about Shyla?”

“I don’t remember much about having a mother, Uncle Dupree,” Leah said.

“You sure had a nice one, darling,” Dallas said.

“Pretty as a picture, just like you,” Tee added.

“Did all of you like her?” Leah asked.

“Like her?” Dupree said. “We were all in love with your mama. Don’t know if your daddy told you, but that was one sexy girl.”

“Best dancer I ever saw,” Tee said. “I never saw anyone who could do the shag as well as she could.”

“What’s the shag?”

“A girl born in South Carolina doesn’t know what the shag is?” Dupree said. “That’s a crime against humanity.”

“Means your daddy ain’t worth a damn,” said Tee.

“They don’t do the shag in Italy, boys,” I defended myself. “I might as well teach her the hula.”

“No excuses,” Dupree said. “Let me pull my pickup truck close to the porch and I’ll put on a tape. There’s a tragic gap in my niece’s education.”

“Be better if the girl had been raised in a South Carolina orphanage,” Dallas teased. “Makes me ashamed you’re my brother, Jack.”

“Look at Dupree with that pickup truck,” John Hardin sneered. “He loves playin’ dirtball better than anybody I’ve ever seen.”

“Dupree’s a redneck at heart,” Tee said. “A redneck wannabe. It’s the lowest form of life.”

Dupree pulled his truck up to the porch, which was wind-burnt from exposure to the sea. He put in a tape and turned the volume up full blast.

“Carolina beach music,” Dupree said, coming up on the porch. “The holiest sound on earth.”

“Your uncles’ll now make up for your father’s negligence,” Dallas said. “In fact, I may file a civil suit against him.”

Dupree took Leah’s hand and began showing her the steps. I grabbed Tee and began to dance and Leah watched with fascination, never having seen me dance before.

“The essence of the shag, Leah,” I said, “is to put on a face of utter coolness. The shag is not about passion. It’s about summer and secret desires and attitude. You have to have an utterly careless expression on your face.”

“Who is this guy—Plato? We’re just teaching the kid how to dance,” Dupree said.

“The reason I can dance the girl’s part,” Tee said to Leah, “is because I’m younger and they used to force me to be the girl when they practiced the shag.”

Dallas asked Leah to dance when the next song, “Double Shot of My Baby’s Love,” came blasting out of the truck.

“Your mother was the greatest shag dancer that ever lived,” Dallas said.

“She could dance any dance there was,” Dupree said. “Hey, tell me Leah’s not getting it fast,” Dallas said in admiration.

“Got her mother’s blood,” Tee said. “This girl was born to shag.
I got the dance after John Hardin. I’m gonna teach her the dirty shag.”