Beach Music (56 page)

“The dirty shag,” Leah squealed. “Sounds like fun.”

Leah became a lifelong lover of uncles on that day. She was consumed and enlarged by the joyous attention of her uncles and that pleasure shone in her face. Her body began to move in harmony with the rhythm and there seemed a ripening in the center of her girlhood as she spun in the full flood of her uncles’ admiration. They lined up to dance with her and argued whose turn it was. They turned an afternoon on a porch into a promenade of bright strange glamour she would remember all her life. She had been selected, singled out, and was as powerful as a fairy tale queen surrounded by her cheering, high-spirited armies. By the end of that day, she could shag as well as any of her uncles.

I watched every single dance Leah danced with my brothers, whose sweetness moved me greatly. Then Dupree tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Next song’s for you and Leah to dance to.”

The song, “Save the Last Dance for Me” by the Drifters, filled the air and Leah noticed the change in me.

“What’s wrong, Daddy?” she asked as I took her hand and asked for the privilege of this dance.

“Could you rewind so that I go back to the beginning, Dupree?” I asked. “I’ve got to explain the significance of this song.” Then I turned to Leah. “Remember the story of me and Mama falling in love?” I asked.

“The night the house fell into the sea?” Leah asked.

“Same one. Well, when Mama and I danced in that room alone when everyone had run out of the house, we danced the shag.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I should’ve taught you how to do it. My brothers are right.”

“It’s okay, Daddy. You taught me lots of things.”

“This was your Mama’s and my favorite song. We fell in love dancing to it.”

Leah had never danced with me, but she heard the humming of her uncles as they murmured with pleasure, watching us move to the words of the wonderful song. They clapped and stomped their feet and wolf-whistled at Leah as I spun her around on the weather-beaten
porch. Her greatest surprise was that she couldn’t shag as well as I did. And she said so. And as we danced I saw her slowly turning into a mirror image of Shyla, and then the tears came; they came, at last.

She didn’t notice that I was weeping until my brothers grew quiet. We stopped dancing and I sat down on the porch steps. My child held me as the song her mother and I had loved best in the world completely undid me. I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.

I
n early May, a month after our return, at Lucy’s insistence, I drove her up Highway 17 toward Charleston and the Trappist monastery out at Mepkin Abbey. Though she was vague about the reasons for her visit, she did mention she wanted to have Father Jude hear her confession. Ever since I had brought Father Jude to my mother’s hospital bed, where he gave her Extreme Unction, I suspected there was more to this relationship than penitent and confessor, but I no longer thought, as we had when we were younger, that they were lovers. I had questioned Lucy, but she was a master of indirection. There was no query she could not succeed at not answering. The English language on her tongue became a smokescreen without her eyes changing expression in the least. As we drove to Charleston, I looked over at her. She looked calm and pretty.

For a long time I had wanted to get her off by herself to ask her all the unanswered questions I had stored up from childhood and had thought of again with my eyes bandaged in Rome. Though I lacked a clear strategy for milking her of this concealed trove of knowledge, I wanted to initiate the inquiry without arousing suspicion.

“I’ve had some wonderful news,” she said suddenly, stretching her arms in the sunlight. Only since she developed leukemia could Lucy be talked into using her seat belt. She had always made it a point of honor not to wear one and it was odd for me to see her
safely buckled up. “I want to share it with you, but I want you to promise not to tell another living soul.”

“I promise to tell only one other person,” I said. “Otherwise, I find myself untrustworthy. Secrets are too much of a burden to me.”

“The Pope just annulled my marriage to your father. I can receive the sacraments again. Dr. Pitts and I got remarried in the church yesterday.”

“Thanks for inviting your children.”

“We didn’t want to make a fuss,” she said. “I wrote the Pope a thank-you note.”

“You had five kids with Dad,” I said.

“It was all a terrible mistake. I feel like I’ve awakened from a bad dream.”

“Does that mean we’re all bastards?” I asked, adjusting the rearview mirror.

Lucy giggled and said, “It never occurred to me. Oh dear. How comical. Yes, I imagine it does. I didn’t even think to ask. Jude’ll know.”

“So the marriage never happened. All that pain and grief and suffering. None of it happened,” I said.

“Everything happened,” Lucy explained, “but the Church wiped the slate clean. There’s no record of it happening.”

“I’m a record of it happening,” I insisted.

“No,” Lucy said. “You’re annulled.”

“If I’m nothing, I can’t be driving this car,” I shouted. “I don’t exist. I’m not here. My parents were never married and I was never born. Grab the wheel, Mama, because I’m one annulled son of a bitch.”

I threw my hands up in the air and Lucy leaned over and gained control of the wheel.

Lucy said, “I think not being born might be the nicest gift I could ever bestow on my children. It wasn’t a happy home I raised you up in.”

“Au contraire
. It was a dream come true,” I said. “Starring the bastard McCall children, their virgin mother, and their pickled father who would later be cuckolded and emasculated by the Pope himself.”

“When your father gets the news I want to know every single
word that comes out of his mouth. I’ll cherish every syllable of his pain.”

“You shouldn’t have hard feelings about Dad,” I said, taking control of the wheel again. “After all, you were never married to him.”

“I don’t have to be bitter anymore. It’s like it never happened. Perhaps we could even be friends.”

“I could introduce you,” I offered. “Judge McCall, I’d like you to meet Mrs. Pitts. The Pope has quashed all rumors that you were once husband and wife and that you produced five children during your long and ghastly marriage.”

“Now, you’re making fun,” Lucy cautioned.

“The Roman Catholic Church,” I said, shaking my head. “Why did you raise me in such a ridiculous, brain-dead, dimwitted, sexually perverse, odd-duck, know-nothing, silly-assed church? We’re Southern, for God’s sake, Mama. I could’ve been an Anglican and had a nice golf stroke. Presbyterian and I could’ve had a puckered asshole and been able to clear my throat with authority. Methodist and not gagged when someone melted marshmallows on sweet potatoes. Baptist and I could’ve drunk in secret with great pleasure. Church of God and I could’ve spoken in unknown tongues. But no, you condemn me to weirdness and freakdom and solitude by raising me in the only church that could mark me as a loser in paradise among my peers.”

“I raised my children in the Cadillac of religions,” said Lucy.

“We’re not your real children,” I said. “The marriage was annulled. You can forget about morning sickness, the pain of childbirth, messy placentas, two o’clock feedings, measles, chicken pox … none of it happened. Your kids are five little nightmares you never had.”

“The Cadillac,” she said. “The top of the line.” And she leaned her head back and closed her eyes.

Lucy said, after miles of silence, “I want Father Jude to hear my confession. Nothing else will quite do.”

“Tell me why Father Jude is so important to you.”

I could tell I had asked a question my mother didn’t like and she paused for a long moment before answering.

“Later. I’m not going to let you ruin my day,” Lucy said. “You always try to make me feel bad about the way I raised you. Well, here’s the bottom line. You got a college education, a pretty child, and you have written a bunch of books with your name and picture on each one. And you try and make me feel like I did a bad job. You had a great childhood.”

“Yeh, I sure lucked out.”

“You don’t even know what bad luck looks like.”

“Tell me about my luck,” I said, trying to sound ironic, not bitter, but bitterness leaked out all over the irony.

“When you were hit, you bled just like me,” Lucy said. “But you did your bleeding in a warm bed … with a full stomach and with your mama coming in to press a cold washcloth to your face.”

“When I was a little boy, you used to tell me you grew up in Atlanta.”

“I spent some time in Atlanta,” Lucy said defensively.

“You had a photograph of your parents on your bedside table.”

“It was a good story,” Lucy said. “It fooled your father.”

I looked over at her and said, “But not Ginny Penn.”

“Heavens no. Not Ginny Penn. She knew I came from nothing the moment she laid eyes on me.”

“What’s the deal?” I said.

Lucy didn’t say anything for a few moments. “It took Ginny Penn a while to check out my story. But she got round to it by and by. By the time she discovered the truth, I’d already dropped three of her grandchildren and had another on the way. By then, your daddy was personally trying to make a success out of that Jack Daniel’s distillery operation up in Tennessee. Ginny Penn realized, no matter who was my kin, I was good enough to clean up her boy’s vomit. I paid dearly for that little white lie.”

“Who were your parents?”

“You don’t want to know,” she said. “They were less than nothing, beyond sorry. When the South does sorry, there’s nothing sorrier on earth. That’s how it was with my parents. Mama was sweet-natured, but pathetic and broken down the middle. Daddy was mean, but like Mama used to say, only when he was awake … ha ha!”

Her laugh chilled me.

“Mountain mean’s different than other kinds of mean. A harder kind of man develops in a place where the light don’t get in till late morning. Daddy never saw enough light.”

“Did you love them?”

“Him, never. Wasn’t much to love. Couldn’t get a grip on something worthwhile …” she said. “He didn’t allow himself any soft places. I never saw him smile once.”

“Are they alive?”

“No, thank God,” she said. “Jude and I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale if they were.”

“Jude and you? What do you mean?”

“I didn’t say that,” said Lucy.

“Did your father drink?”

“Ha!” Lucy snorted. “He was a worse drinker than your father ever was.”

“No one’s that bad,” I said.

“That’s what I thought too. You’re too close to the middle line. Inch over. That’s right. You think you know what to look out for in life, Jack. You think your childhood teaches you all the traps you need to worry about. But that’s not how it works. Pain doesn’t travel in straight lines. It circles back around and comes up behind you. It’s the circles that kill you.”

We came to the road leading to the abbey. The car moved through pools of undisturbed shade, giving me a lost feeling. The earth itself seemed to grow quiet as we approached the kneeling, tonsured nation of Mepkin; the forest unfurled itself in all the proud wildness of forbidden flags springing up in the outback. Hundred-year-old vines, like rigging, hung from the branches of river birch and bent oaks. As we turned into the long drive leading to the monastery, Lucy and I grew silent, as though we both were listening to secret commands. The weather itself lent a caved-in, hushed collusion to it all. I parked the car and walked over and rang the visitors’ bell in the incensed air. Far off, we could hear the singing of monks. The buildings were new and looked like they were built for hillsides in California, not the South.

Father Jude appeared at the end of a pathway, his hands folded
and invisible under his sleeves, walking with his head bent slightly forward. He and Lucy embraced and held each other for a long time.

Jude looked insubstantial and vegetal, his pale flesh like the white asparagus famous in the Argenteuil region of France. The priest had a lived-in, tortured face, yet I knew the man had almost no experience in the outside world. And I wondered at the withheld intimacy between them as I watched Father Jude lead Lucy into the chapel where Mass was being said.

After the service, I excused myself and went to the library where I spent the afternoon writing letters and glancing through the odd selection of magazines that passed muster with the censorious monk responsible for ordering periodicals for the abbey. Lucy explored the grounds of the abbey with Jude and even though they had asked me to join them, I felt they preferred to spend the time alone with each other.

I envied the private, cut-off quality of contemplative life. I admired the intransigence of their discipline, and in a century that seemed more ridiculous to me with each passing year, I thought that solitude and prayer and poverty might be the most eloquent and defensible response to these absurd times where alienation was both posture and philosophy.

I loved the simplicity of monks and longed to emulate their all-consuming, uncomplicated love of God. I liked the idea of denial and silence, but doubted I could take gracefully to their practice.

On the ride back to Waterford, night moved slowly into the lowlands and Lucy’s weariness was obvious as we drove between the light-infused trees that crowded the highway. Her exhaustion worried me and I imagined the approach of the white cells massing along the contested borders of her bloodstream. Once I had nested within her, fed on the warm river that bloomed inside her, learned to love the safety of the darkness of women, come to know the serenity in the music of heartbeats, and that mother love begins in the temple of the womb, a stained-glass window that celebrates the origins and elixirs of blood-born life. The blood that fed me, I thought, is killing her. This is why people believe in gods and need them during the black hours beneath the cold light of stars, I said to
myself. Nothing else could touch the lordly indifference of the world. My mother, there, I thought; it was in her I first knew of Eden and the planet I was about to enter naked and afraid.