Beach Music (70 page)

I asked in the silence that followed, “Were you wearing the dress your mother made for you when you arrived in America?”

“No,” Ruth said. “I had grown too big for it. But I had brought it with me. It had brought me luck during my journey.”

“Where is the dress now?”

“By my bedside table. In a drawer,” Ruth said to me.

“How many coins were left when you arrived in America? You seemed to have left them with a lot of people.”

“Three. There were only three left. The dress was very heavy when I first put it on. It was light when I arrived here in America,” she said.

“Shyla’s necklace …” I asked.

Ruth reached for a gold chain on her throat and pulled out a necklace that shone in the light. She had made it from one of the remaining five-ruble coins.

“I never take it off. Ever,” Ruth said.

“Neither did Shyla,” I said. “Until the end.”

“My daughter Martha wears the other one. She, too, never takes it off.”

“The lady of the coins?” I asked.

“The statue of Mary in the church,” Ruth said. “I made the mistake of telling my Shyla that I think it is this lady who saved me. This is what I think to myself. It is here I pray to this lady who hides the coins. I say to Shyla that I think this Mother of Jesus took pity on me. She saw one Jewish girl and I think I reminded Mary of herself as a young girl.”

“You think that was the lady that appeared to Shyla?” I asked. “The one she saw in her hallucinations.”

“That is what I think, Jack,” Ruth said. “If I had not told Shyla this story, maybe my daughter would be with us now. For so long, I feel like I helped kill my Shyla by telling her this.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “It’s kind of nice in a way.”

“How? I do not understand.”

“Wouldn’t it be nice if Mary appeared to Shyla after all the
horror of the war? It’d be sweet, Ruth. The Jewish mother of the Christian God apologizing for what happened to a Jewish girl’s parents during the terrible ordeal of the Polish Jews. What a nice thing for the Mother of God to do.”

“Such a thing does not happen,” Ruth said.

“Too bad,” I said. “It should.”

“My husband wishes to speak to you soon, Jack,” she said.

“About this?”

“He does not tell me.”

That night, after Leah and George returned from the Spoleto Festival, we ate dinner with the Foxes. Since Leah was tired, I agreed that she could spend the night with her grandparents and I would pick her up the following morning. She fell asleep while I was reading her a story in Shyla’s old bed surrounded by the stuffed animals and teddy bears her mother had once loved. I kissed my daughter softly on the cheek and considered the despair and fury I would feel if this house were filling up below with soldiers who did not mind murdering children. The Jupiter Symphony of Mozart was playing softly downstairs and it was the sound of this music that made me seek out the company of George Fox.

In his first-floor music room, I found George Fox listening to the music, drinking cognac, and lost in reverie. Even in his own house, sitting on his own furniture, George had the haunted, broken look of a fallen angel. He jumped when I approached, and it was only then that I realized that every stranger who approached George Fox was an SS man in disguise. I wanted to say something kind and transfiguring to my father-in-law, but I stood before him wordless.

“You look pale, Jack,” George said at last. “Have a glass of cognac with me.”

“Ruth lost her whole family. I always knew that. But I really didn’t know it at all.”

“The story you just heard,” George said, looking straight into me, “Ruth blames that story for Shyla’s death. But I disagree with her.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I think what happened to me in Europe killed Shyla. And I never told the whole story to anyone, Jack. No one has heard
what happened to me because I thought anyone who heard it would never be able to sleep again or have any peace. You know what I learned, Jack? I learned that a story untold could be the one that kills you. I think Shyla might have died because of what I did not tell her, not what Ruth did. I thought silence was the proper resolution and strategy for what happened to me. I did not think my poisons and hatreds and shame would leak out and poison everything I loved.”

“Darkness,” I said. “That’s the word that comes to me when I hear your name.”

“Could I tell you what happened to me, Jack?” George Fox asked, his eyes now looking out toward the river and stars. “Would you listen? Not tonight. But sometime soon.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think I need to hear it. Ruth’s story was bad enough.”

“There is a reason I would like to tell it to you,” he said. “We have never liked each other, Jack. That is the truest thing between us. No?”

“True,” I said.

“But you are raising Leah as a Jew. That surprised me.”

“I am fulfilling a promise to Shyla.”

“But Shyla is dead,” George said.

“She’s alive enough for me to keep that promise,” I said.

“Will you have a cognac?”

“Yes,” I said, sitting down, facing my old enemy.

“Will you come back and listen to me?” George started, then said a word that I had never heard him use. “Please.”

I
tried to observe how the low country worked on Leah’s imagination. Since she was new to the territory, I wondered if the lowlands would strike the same notes of authentic magic in her as it had in me. I doubted it had the power to refashion a girl who had grown up subject to the fabulous riot and confusion of Rome, but I had not reckoned with Waterford’s quiet stamina of insinuation, the muscular allure of spartina and azalea, storax and redbud. The town took you prisoner and never once considered amnesty or early parole. I witnessed the process as Waterford began to lay its delicate fingerprints on Leah, and I hoped it would place its fingers on her heart and not her throat.

But it was the Isle of Orion that was fixing Leah’s destiny.

I used the lagoon in back of our rented house as playground and textbook. When the weather got hot, we crabbed for our dinner with fish heads and chicken necks. I taught Leah that the flesh of the Atlantic blue crab was one of the most extraordinary delicacies in the kingdom of food, and that it was better even than the taste of Maine lobsters. Together, we caught a tubful of crabs and cleaned them on a picnic table in the backyard, the white meat glistening and fragrant with sea water. I taught her to make sea crab soup with fish stock that we spent days reducing. I believe in great, not good, stocks. When we tired of soup, I taught her to make crab cakes using
only lumpfin crabmeat bound together with flour and egg whites, then flavored with Chablis, capers, scallions, and cayenne. I did not desecrate my crab cakes with bread crumbs or broken-up crackers. The taste of crab was what I loved. As a cook, I passed all my prejudices on to Leah, and as a rapt student she accepted these opinions and made them her own. Every night we cooked together, creating a bank of memories we would treasure all our lives.

I also taught Leah to roast the perfect chicken, fry things the Southern way and the Italian way, bake a loaf of bread, compose a salad, put on a barbecue, shuck an oyster in under five seconds, make the best chocolate chip cookies in that part of the world, cook fish in parchment with fresh garlic, ginger, white wine, and soy sauce, and make biscuits that were better than Lucy’s. When I was in a kitchen I could no longer feel the pressure of the world on my shoulders; for me cooking has always been a high form of play, and teaching someone how to make a meal memorable was a combination of thrill and gift that I never tired of giving.

On some low tides, I would take Leah to the small creeks at the back of the island and teach her to throw a cast net. I bought her a small net of her own and taught her to wrap the cord around her left wrist, to spread the net with her hands balanced between the weights, and to put the net between her teeth prior to the toss. I told her that the unfolding of a net is like the action of a woman’s hoop skirt during the course of a waltz. It was a slow but satisfying way to catch a shrimp dinner. It was a fast way to trap bait.

I showed Leah that there was no inch of land or water without carnage or ambush: everything that lived in the tides was a hunter of some kind. The smallest minnow loomed like a barracuda in the world view of midges and the larvae of blue crabs and mussels.

When we had filled up our buckets with bait, we baited the hooks of our casting rods and fished for spottail bass, flounder, and sheepshead in the incoming tide.

“There’s no animal you can’t eat,” I said one morning as Leah pulled a spottail bass on to the shore. “You can eat this fish raw if you need to.”

“I don’t need to,” she said. “I’ll never need to.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ll be like you when I grow up,” she said. “I’ll have credit cards.”

I laughed.

“Listen to me. I’m very serious. You can eat insects, turtle eggs. You could eat a loggerhead turtle if you had to. Frogs, raccoons, possums. The world of protein’s a large and varied one.”

“It makes me want to throw up,” she said.

“You never know what’s going to happen,” I said.

I thought about this for a moment before I went on. “Something terrible happens in everybody’s life. Something out of the ordinary. I’m trying to raise you to be light on your feet. To be on your toes at all times, ready for the unexpected. You won’t be able to prepare for it. It’ll always take you by surprise. Like my mother: she finally divorces my drunken, worthless father, marries a nice man, then gets rabbit-punched from behind with leukemia. It comes at night, when you’re sleeping, when your guard is down.”

“You shouldn’t call your father worthless,” Leah admonished. “It’s not nice.”

“You’re the first kid I ever met who could make me feel immature,” I said.

“You’re mean to your daddy,” she said, not looking at me. “All of you are.”

“He’s also drunk all the time.”

“Maybe that’s what happens to lonely people.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“He visits me at school during lunchtime,” Leah said. “He’s always nice to me and he’s never drunk. He’s very sweet, Daddy, and I know he wishes you liked him better.”

“I wish I liked him better too.”

Leah said, “It’s your job to like him. He’s your daddy.”

“You’re awfully bossy for someone in elementary school.”

“You taught me to be nice to everyone,” she answered.

“Let me amend that slightly,” I said. “Be nice to everyone except my father.”

Leah shook her head sadly. “You’re a bad son. All my uncles are. Except John Hardin. He loves everybody.”

“John Hardin doesn’t count,” I said.

“You don’t understand John Hardin,” she said. “Just like you don’t understand your daddy.”

“You’re getting awfully big for your britches.”

“Why? I’m glad I’m grown-up. Don’t you like it?” she asked.

“Not at all. If the truth be known, I’d like to keep you exactly at this age for the rest of your life. I adore you at this exact time of your life. I like being around you ten times as much as I like being around any other person on earth. Though it might seem strange to you, I like you better than anyone else I’ve met on the planet earth. But like’s not strong enough a word. How about ‘adore,’ ‘worship,’ ‘plumb nuts about,’ ‘insane over’ … nothing quite cuts it.”

O
ne should never underestimate the power of good teaching, but even bad teaching can have a strong effect. Delia Seignious taught South Carolina history for over forty years to the ninth-graders of Waterford and squelched any passion for history that was budding in the imaginations of her students. There was no area of the subject that she could not render paralyzingly dull. The text was as dry as a logarithm chart and her high-pitched, one-toned voice could induce stupor in the most hardened insomniac. It was one of the town’s rites of passage to fall asleep in Mrs. Seignious’ history class. Her week-long lecture on the siege of Charleston was so tedious that some students left her class never realizing the siege had ended.

Mrs. Seignious almost grew faint with delight on the first full day of classes in 1962 when she announced to her class that two descendants of some of the most distinguished names in South Carolina history were on her roll of students. She had Capers Middleton and Jordan Elliott stand up to be admired for the good taste they had displayed by being born into such notable families. Capers stood up tall and proud. His face had a chiseled beauty even in ninth grade. But Jordan arose scowling and disoriented in those new surroundings with the other kids regarding him with suspicion as a transfer student with strange ties to royalty.

On the following day, Jordan was tossed from class when he was
caught placing wads of Juicy Fruit, to which Delia Seignious was famously “allergic,” behind the map of colonial South Carolina. Mrs. Seignious explained to the class that Jordan was high-spirited and mischievous, but he was only following the immutable laws of genetics, since even a fool would know (Mrs. Seignious said this breathlessly) that it took a great deal of high spirits to break away from Mother England. And both Capers and Jordan were related to three South Carolinians who signed the Declaration of Independence. She herself, she added with becoming modesty, was related only to
one
signer of the Declaration.

“Both Mr. Middleton and Mr. Elliott come from fine, old, distinguished South Carolina families. One might ask what difference it could possibly make, but experience teaches it makes all the difference in the world. You can tell by the line of the jaw of both these young men that they descend from men and women who placed righteousness above mere glitter, justice above mere retribution, and elegance above the showy or the meretricious. You know what you’re getting when you do business with a Middleton or an Elliott. Their character is set. Their breeding impeccable. Have sons, Capers. Have sons, Jordan. You must not allow these splendid South Carolina names to die out and be relegated into the boneyards of history. We will be studying the writings and exploits of your distinguished ancestors this year and both of you will walk taller when you apprehend the value of the fine stock from which you issue. Every daughter you have will be a great name lost and cause for sorrow. Every son will be a name-carrier.”