Beach Music (90 page)

Ledare asked Jordan, “You agreed to let Capers be your lawyer?”

Jordan shook his head. “It’s a nice offer, but it’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

“If he defends you, I hope you get the electric chair,” I said.

“Jack, Jack,” Capers said. “People’ll get the idea we’ve had a falling out.”

“Mike,” I said, rising out of my seat. “You get a movie out of this. Capers gets to be governor. Jordan, maybe, gets to go to jail. Tell me, why this stage? This setting? With friends and enemies gathered together in the same room? This could be settled privately. If Jordan is happy as a priest, then let him be happy. Leave him in peace. Let him walk off this stage and return to wherever he’s come from. You’ve put Jordan in great jeopardy. And why? For one of your movies? For Capers’ election?”

“No, Jack,” Mike said. “I’ve noticed over the years how few times I’ve actually felt a part of a moment, electric, with every cell dazzled and tingling, with my whole body burning as though I were about to burst into flames. Listen to all of us breathing here. Feel the tension. This promises to be a night that none of us ever forgets. Our history surrounds us and tortures us. Yet there was once love that traveled among us, lighting us up and lighting our way. Tonight, I want us to find out together what happened to that love and why hatred can take the place of love with such ease.”

“How do we start?” Capers asked.

My father hammered his gavel and said, “Whoever wants to speak must come to this witness chair. Whoever speaks must tell his or her truth, just as if this were a real court.”

“Our stories are all so different,” Ledare said. “I’m not the same person I was in college. I hate the girl I was.”

“Then tell us about that hatred,” Mike said. “All of us will tell our stories. There will be no order to the telling. Our stories will form some kind of truth that none of us at this moment grasps. All of our voices will form one story line. None of us can be hurt in any way by what is said here … except Jordan Elliott. But if we come to some truth about Jordan, I think we can come to the truth about each of us, about what we did during that time.”

Mike snapped his fingers and the lights went out in the theater, leaving only the stage bathed in bright illumination. For a moment there was complete silence until the gavel rapped and Mike said, “We return now to the Vietnam War. President Nixon is in the
White House. The country is at war with itself. The campuses around the nation are temples of rage. In Columbia, South Carolina, we are in the middle of our college lives. We are Southern. We are basically apolitical. The war is popular in our state, because South Carolina is conservative. Yet something is taking place at the university. The antiwar movement is taking hold and growing day by day. But we are still preoccupied with having dates for the football games and getting jobs after graduation.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I suggest to all of you that we walked into the history of our times without guile or preparation. We were sweet-natured, fun-loving, hard-drinking, fast-driving, quick-talking kids from Waterford. We could dance all night and often drove down to Myrtle Beach to do just that. The boys were all handsome and the girls were all pretty. We played hard, we laughed loud, and we were all in love with ourselves and our world. Then the larger world tapped us on the shoulder and introduced itself. Tapped hard. Made its presence known.

“Let us begin. Please don’t stop until we listen to everyone.”

Through a chorus of different voices and unique perspectives the story began to unfold. My father called on people to speak and at first he was strict about allowing no interruptions. The footlights bathed him in a mother-of-pearl corona as he listened, dressed in the black robes of justice, his authority unquestioned. He looked handsome and fine; authority became him.

He nodded first to Ledare, who understood his intent and took the witness chair. She had survived the battle we were about to relive by being a dispassionate witness, and it seemed fitting that it was she who would introduce the scene we were about to reenter.

As I listened to her sketch the background of those times, I realized that I never thought that Ledare had been paying any attention back then. It seemed to me that she had drifted along the fringes of cataclysm, impervious to outrage and untouched by any of the fevers or seizures that shook the rest of us. Her choice was to watch and not participate, and as she spoke I realized that she had become invisible to me back then as she slipped into the role of observer while the rest of us were pulled toward the epicenter.

“Who knew anything about Vietnam at first?” Ledare said,
looking at my father. “I mean, it had finally become a real war by the time we went to college. Sure, I watched all the demonstrations on TV, but South Carolina was different. I was far more interested in my sorority and good parties than anything else. All of us were like that. I thought more about makeup than the Mekong Delta. I was that kind of girl and there’s no sense apologizing for it because that’s how I was brought up. My parents wanted me to be serious about finding a mate and I had no responsibilities after that. College, for them, was a polishing off. The biggest deal on campus in my first two years was over the lack of student parking. I mean it. That was the real sore point among the students, what really got them riled up. Then things changed. Almost overnight. Everyone noticed it. It was in the air …”

Listening to her stirred my own memories and it took me back to those college years when I had never felt more a part of things as I made my way to classes in that comely and welcoming campus. In that first year the war was overwhelmingly popular and all of us went to hear Dean Rusk speak when the Secretary of State came to campus to defend his Democratic administration’s policies. By this time, it had become dangerous for Dean Rusk to appear on an American campus, but as Carolina students we greeted him with enthusiasm and admiration. He warned against “communism,” the most terrifying word in the English language at that time. As Southerners we could easily imagine working on a commune, but few of us could imagine living out the rest of our days as a godless people, bereft of our faith. And I thought quietly: the Vietnam War had another thing going for it in the South—we did not mind killing people or going to war against a nation we had never heard of. As Southerners we distrusted the federal government when it levied taxes or tried to interfere with the integrity of state laws, but we trusted it completely when it sent its soldiers into perilous, watery climes to kill yellow people who spoke in unknown tongues. No recruitment officer ever had trouble meeting his quota in South Carolina.

Then, in 1968, there was the Tet Offensive, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the murder of Robert Kennedy, the Chicago Convention, a whole coloratura of horror in transit along a time line.

As Ledare continued I remembered that our campus had been quiescent, indifferent, as students took over administration buildings at Columbia and Harvard. But hints and markings of change began to appear without the presence of any rhetoric or forethought. We started wearing our hair longer, grew mustaches, and the first beards began to appear. A gradual dressing down had begun subliminally and an SAE boy in a suit began to look odd, a museum piece drifting as flotsam along fraternity row. The daughters of small-town insurance adjusters and Baptist ministers began to dress like hippies and stopped wearing makeup except on weekend visits home. Except for Secession, no trend had ever had its birthplace in South Carolina. But the tumult on the other campuses and the antiauthoritarian tenor of the times could be measured by the length of the sideburns creeping down the faces of Carolina men.

Girls like Ledare had their lives already written for them long before they went to college. Her beauty was safe and homegrown, not exotic like Shyla’s, not dangerous to the touch. The Tri Delts rushed her, feted her; she was practically crowned before she ever stepped onto the campus. The high school cheerleader simply changed the color of her pompons and skirt, and learned the new and much fancier routines of the college sidelines. Ledare was the kind of girl who dated the quarterback, but married the guy who edited the
Law Review
. During her sophomore year, she reigned as Miss Garnet and Black, and she was Homecoming Queen her junior year. Except for Shyla, few noticed she was Phi Beta Kappa and was majoring in philosophy. Throughout their time there, Shyla tried to engage Ledare in political discussions, but Ledare felt safer in the libraries and in the blazing noise of autumn football crowds than locked in the malice of debate.

She was frightened of the times and she held back from them. Because she was so lovely, no one took the time to get to know her, including herself. And so it was in the Dock Street Theater that Ledare Ansley became the best person to describe the way we once were. She had seen the whole thing, observed it all from the top of homecoming floats. Only she could tell the point at which the everydayness of our college lives became inextricably bound up with the murderous urgencies of the war. Now, as I tuned back in to
what she was saying, Ledare said it was Shyla who held the key. It was Shyla who changed the most, Shyla who turned herself into a dangerous and fascinating woman, and Shyla who brought Radical Bob into our close-knit group.

Onstage, Radical Bob Merrill laughed out loud when his name was mentioned for the first time.

“ ‘Radical Bob,’ ” he said. “Hearing that takes me back a long way.”

“I agree with Ledare,” Capers said, rising from his chair and addressing the audience after he replaced Ledare in the witness stand. “It’s hard to describe Shyla in those days. I don’t remember Shyla ever talking much during elementary or junior high school. Remember how painfully shy she was back then? It seemed to hurt her physically just to be looked at. That fragility seemed to melt away in high school. She got prettier every year. Then sexier. Then you had that sheer intelligence, that brightness that could bully or tease or cajole. She could take over a room with her brain. In college, Shyla discovered she was a leader. She’d have made a great Republican.”

Mike said, “She hated Republicans with her body and soul. She told me something during the McGovern campaign I’ve never forgotten. Shyla said, ‘They used to call Southerners who hated black people racists. Now they call them Republicans.’ ”

“The Republicans haven’t done a good job getting our message out to the black electorate,” Capers agreed. “But we’re working on it.”

“If you get a single black vote, it means democracy ain’t working,” I said.

“Coming from you I take that as a compliment,” Capers said.

The judge hammered his gavel and ordered, “That’ll be enough from you, Jack. Settle down.”

Capers began clapping, but the applause was mocking, increasing the tension: “A genius for exaggeration. A gift of Jack’s as large as his overgrown body. He thinks his heart’s as large as all outdoors. The pathetic fallacy of all American liberals. In theory, they love the black, the downtrodden, the crippled, and the poor, yet you never find any of these people at their dinner table.”

The gavel again and the judge said, “Let’s continue. You boys’re like scorpions in a bottle.”

General Elliott sat off to stage left, removed from everyone, his face a mask of disapproval. If he was listening he gave no sign of it. He stared directly at his son, who returned the stare without judgment. Jordan, the priest, was every bit as erect and gaunt, as righteous and as handsome as the general. Only one great difference was manifest between them: the darkness that Jordan brought to the theater was soft and lauds-polished, the general’s darkness looked stolen from a firing range.

“Capers and I’ll take up this part of the story,” Mike said, “from the time when all of us boys grew our hair longer.”

“I let my hair grow down to my shoulder blades,” Capers remembered.

Ledare said, “Long hair’s one thing but none of us lost a friend in the war. No matter what else happened none of our friends died in Vietnam.”

“Some of mine did,” General Elliott said loudly, his voice a sudden force onstage.

“But not Jordan. Not your son. Jordan’s right in front of you,” Celestine said. “He’s here tonight facing you at last.”

The general replied, “Jordan’s deader than any soldier who fought and died honorably in Vietnam, Celestine. He’s invisible to me. His cowardice blinds me to his reality. There’s a fog between us so thick, so impassable. A river of blood stands between us. The blood of men I ordered into battle. Every time I try to see my son, their blood gets in my eyes. Their names blind me when I try to catch sight of Jordan. All the names on the wall of the Vietnam Memorial come toward me. Hundreds of thousands of letters, the names of all the dead boys who did their duty, who did right by America—their names march toward me in endless regiments when I try to catch sight of our cowardly son. Our Jordan.”

There was silence, a breathtaking silence, and then I stood up and screamed at General Elliott, “With assholes like you leading us, I’m amazed one American boy ever came back in one piece from Vietnam. How can one, broken-down rigid old fart know everything in the world? Answer me that, General. That’s your son there.
It’s not a flag, or an M-1, or a guidon, or a hand grenade, or a parade ground, or a foxhole—yet you’ve shown more love and devotion to all these things than you’ve ever shown to your son. You knocked Jordan around his whole childhood and everyone here knows it. You knocked Celestine around too, but only a couple of us know that. Oh, Brave General of the Republic, who sits in judgment of his son tonight … you’re not half the man your son is and you never were. You’re a child-beater and a wife-beater, a lightweight thinker, a first-class bully, and the only reason you’re not a full-fledged Nazi is you can’t speak German and we’ve got this Constitution that keeps shitbirds like you in check.”

The gavel. “Shut up, Jack. And sit down. You’re already too emotional and we have hardly started.”

“No, Judge,” Mike said. “We’re well into our drama.”

“I want to answer Jack,” the general said, rising to his feet and pointing his finger menacingly.