Beach Music (60 page)

Lucy’s experience at the orphanage was not as successful. After the soft ministrations of Lotus, Lucy felt more like an inmate at St. Ursula’s than welcomed guest. The sister in charge of the girls’ ward was a tight-lipped, straight-backed woman who tolerated neither laxness nor levity among the sixteen girls assigned to her dormitory. The world frightened her and she made sure she transferred that fear to all those girls in her charge. She taught them to hate their bodies because they had committed the unforgivable crime of being born female. In the Bible, there was proof that God hated women when he highlighted their subordination and created them second from a useless rib of Adam. The menstrual cycle gave testimony to woman’s crime and her uncleanliness. Bernadine did not enjoy being a girl.

So, the city of Charleston, a stain-windowed greenhouse of ferny richness and wall-eyed, leering perversion, became the vessel of rescue for the two wandering children who had been born unlucky in the mean South. Charleston broke its poor in the same way the mountains did, but the city camouflaged the soft emanations of evil.

Charleston would prove to be a lucky city for Jude and a very unlucky one for Lucy. Their lives divided here and they would lose touch with each other for years. Jude would bloom under the tender gazes of nuns and priests who would glow in the presence of his natural goodness, which began to take on an otherworldly quality as he grew older. The rituals of Catholicism would nurture him from
his first days in St. Ursula’s. He withdrew into a country of prayer and, for him, that withdrawal contained the seeds of vocation. The Common of the Mass was rich in both silence and language and his spirit ripened in the luxury of its forms. Under the tutelage of John Appassionata, he asked that he and his sister be baptized in the Catholic cathedral as Roman Catholics. Thoroughly battle-hardened and cynical, Lucy saw the wisdom in this move and memorized the answers to catechism texts she heard the other girls reciting in class. Already, the nuns had noticed that Lucy could not read or write a word and she was openly referred to as “retarded” by Sister Bernadine. The word seemed to fix Lucy in time and made her invisible.

Soon she ran away from St. Ursula’s for the first time. She knew what it was like to be a runaway, but she was new at doing it alone or in a city. Lucy was thirteen years old when she crossed East Bay Street and headed for the docks. Fast lessons would accrue to her and she would learn that there was nothing more dangerous in the world than a young girl trying to make it on her own in the sad part of a city. A man bought her a train ticket to Atlanta, where she led a wanton, luckless existence until my father walked into her life. That’s what passed for a lucky day in my mother’s life.

S
ince the first day we had arrived in Waterford, Leah felt enormous pressure from all sides to be happy. It became almost a civic duty for her to look as though she were having a good time. People remarked about her happiness as often as they commented on the possibility of rain or the barometric pressure. Many times, she felt as closely watched as a prisoner on parole for good behavior. She did not mind being noticed, but resented being studied. The town made her far more aware of being motherless than Rome ever had. Wherever she turned, Leah was bumping into Shyla’s past. Suddenly, her mother seemed everywhere, yet for Leah she remained elusive, untouchable in both her consciousness and life. The more Leah learned about her mother the less she was certain she knew anything about Shyla at all. In synagogue, one Saturday, Elsie Rosengarten, an elderly Jewish woman who had taught Shyla in the second grade, burst into tears when she was introduced to Leah.

I explained later, holding my child’s hand. “It shocks people because you look so much like your mother.”

“I look something like you too.”

“Not enough for anyone to notice,” I said, catching a sideways glimpse of Leah, wondering if the beauty of their children humbled all parents. Since our return there was rarely a night when I didn’t get up at three in the morning to make sure Leah was still breathing.

“Do people think I’m going to do something to myself just because Mama did?” Leah said. “Is that why they’re looking at me?”

“No, not at all,” I said.

“It is so,” she said. “You’re just protecting me.”

“No, I’m not. People can’t believe I could raise a girl all by myself who’d seem so normal and well adjusted,” I explained. “Your mother was all over you when you were a baby. Nuts for you. She wouldn’t let me or anyone else near you for the first year. She made it seem as though it was a great sacrifice to let me change your diaper.”

“How disgusting,” Leah said.

“You’d think so,” I said. “But it’s nice when it’s your kid and it’s part of the job to be done. I liked changing your diaper.”

“You’re worried about your mother dying, aren’t you?” Leah said, putting her cheek on my forearm. “I can tell.”

For a moment I hesitated, but I could hear the call for intimacy in her voice, the desire for me to let her enter those grottoes where I tended my own fear of my mother’s illness.

“You don’t know what a bad son I’ve been to her, Leah,” I said. “You don’t know the things I’ve said to her. Unforgivable things. I’ve looked at her with pure hate in my eyes so many times. I never understood her and I punished her for that ignorance. I’m afraid she’s going to die before I’m ever able to apologize enough times.”

“She knows you love her, Daddy,” Leah said. “I heard her tell Dr. Peyton the other night that she doesn’t know any other son in the world who would move all the way from Italy just to be with his mama when she needed him.”

“Did you make that up?”

“She said something like that,” Leah said. “That’s what she meant anyhow.”

Early that night we walked on the beach again and felt the sea underfoot as we waded through the reflections of the evening star endlessly repeating itself in the pools created by the withdrawing tide. The coming of summer was announcing itself as the water temperature grew warmer every day. The cells of each wave began to light up with the approach of June, and each field on the way to town was covered with tomato vines and green fruit pulling sunlight
out of the air. The days were already beginning to be hot long before the sea got the word. An ocean was a hard thing to warm up, but Leah and I felt it happening as we splashed along the beach waiting for the moon to rise. A mist rose off the cooling sand and gulls flew north above them in the last light. A gull cried and it always made me think of heartbreak and a solitude that had no name. I hoped my own loneliness was not contagious and that it would not pass through my bloodstream and enter the pale wrist of my daughter. I loved Southern nights like these, and I wished I were a brighter, less-brooding figure as we walked hand in hand along the beach and I steered her beneath the great sisterhood of stars unfurling in the night sky.

For an hour we walked along the shore until the night had taken hold completely as we started back toward Lucy’s house. The stars were brilliant now and the air smelled of sargassum, mollusks, and pine. Up ahead, we heard a sudden commotion. The moon threw off a reluctant, crescent-shaped light, and in it Leah spotted the huge turtle ahead of us and let out a cry of distress when she saw a young man jump on the loggerhead’s broad-backed shell and begin slapping against the turtle’s shell and front flippers screaming like a buckeroo. We ran forward.

“Get off the turtle, son,” I said, trying not to lose my temper.

“Fuck you, mister,” the boy spat out and then I saw that he was showing off for his girlfriend.

“Please get off the turtle, son,” I said. “That’s about as nice as I can say it, kid.”

“Maybe you don’t hear too well,” the college-aged boy said. “Fuck you.”

I grabbed the boy’s shirt and he somersaulted backward off the turtle. He was older and larger than I had first judged and he rose up ready to fight.

“Relax. This is a female loggerhead who’s coming ashore to lay her eggs,” I said.

“I hope you got a good lawyer, asshole,” the boy said, “because there’s a big lawsuit in all this.”

“Daddy, she’s going back to the ocean,” Leah cried out.

The loggerhead had slanted off to the right and was in the midst
of a great heavy turn navigating her ponderous way back to the water. The boy tried to cut her off but stepped aside when I warned, “Her jaws can take your leg off, son. She can kill a full-grown shark with those jaws.”

The boy skittered out of the way as the great beast rushed forward hissing, her breath rank and fishlike, polluting the air with an otherworldly smell. As soon as she reached deep enough water to displace her enormous weight, she transformed herself into something swift and angelic and disappeared like a seabird into the enfolding sea.

“You let it get away,” the boy shouted.

“What were you going to do with it, kid,” I asked, “paint its back and sell it to a five and dime?”

“I was going to cut its throat.”

I had not noticed the approach of a flashlight coming down the beach, but Leah had and was already running toward the approaching figure. The next thing I knew the young man held up his knife threateningly close to my face.

“Loggerheads are on the endangered species list. It’s a crime to interfere with their nesting,” I said.

“Put the knife down, Oggie,” the girlfriend pleaded.

“I’ve been fishing and hunting my whole life, partner,” Oggie said, “and my father always told me how good turtle steaks tasted cooked over a driftwood fire.”

“Your daddy’s an old-timer,” I said. “That could get you jail time now. There’s easier ways to eat seafood.”

“Can I see the bill of sale where it says you own this beach, asshole?” Oggie said.

“I used to swagger the same way when I was your age,” I said, “but I didn’t used to cuss. That’s what MTV does to your sorry generation, don’t you think?”

“Who climbed on the turtle’s back?” I heard my mother say as the flashlight blinded Oggie, who turned his head away.

“I did,” Oggie said. “I rode it for about ten yards before this jerk-off knocked me off it.”

“What’s the knife for, son?” Lucy demanded.

“This guy attacked me,” Oggie said. “It’s for self-defense.”

The flashlight cracked down on the boy’s wrist bone and the knife fell to the sand. I picked it up, walked to the water’s edge where the surf was breaking cleanly, and hurled the knife as far as I could out to sea.

“That knife’s private property,” Oggie said, massaging his wrist.

“It still is,” I said.

“My mother’ll report you to the cops,” he said, walking back toward the line of houses glowing with electric light.

“Who’re your people?” Lucy asked. “Who do you belong to?”

“I’m a Jeter. My grandfather’s Leonard Jeter.”

“Tell Len I said hi. I’m Lucy Pitts,” she said. “Keep off the turtles, son. We want them to put their eggs in the sand.”

“I don’t see you wearing no badge, lady.”

“Shut up, Oggie,” his girlfriend said as they disappeared out of the flashlight beam and into the paler light of houses.

“What’ll the turtle do now?” Leah asked her grandmother.

“She might just dump her eggs in the ocean, darling girl,” my mother responded, directing a beam of light out toward the waves. “But the urge is pretty strong for her to put them in the sand. Maybe she’ll wait us out and come in when there’s not a soul on the beach.”

“Especially Oggie,” Leah said.

“He’s a Jeter,” Lucy said. “His people are nothing but trash.”

“Mother, please,” I said.

“I’m just stating the facts,” she said. “The whole family’s got dirty fingernails. It runs with ’em, like freckles.”

“Daddy doesn’t like people to put labels on other people, Grandma,” Leah explained.

“He doesn’t?” Lucy said. “You can call a loggerhead a two-headed chicken, but that don’t make it so. Same as a Jeter. You can dress that boy up in a tux, teach him the manners of a queen, and you still ain’t got no Huguenot. Call a Jeter Rockefeller and you still got a Jeter striding up your backyard. Right, Jack?”

“Shut up, Mama,” I said. “I’m trying to raise her to think differently.”

Lucy laughed and said, “Too bad, son. You brought her South. That’s the way the South thinks and she might as well get used to local custom.”

T
he next morning Leah woke me before sunrise, telling me to hurry. She had fixed me a cup of coffee to take to the beach for the morning patrol. We rode our bicycles to Lucy’s house and parked them near the outdoor shower before removing our Docksiders and joining Lucy who was already on the beach. Lucy handed Leah three seashells, which she had gathered along the tide line.

“Those are perfect for your collection. We’ll fill up a jar of them and make you a lamp to take back to Rome,” Lucy instructed, placing three lady slippers into Leah’s hand. Leah admired them, then put them carefully into my pocket, and warned me not to forget they were there.

“Did the mother turtle come back?” Leah asked.

“It’s your job to find out,” Lucy said. “You and your father are responsible for this next mile of beach. I’m responsible for the whole program.”

“We’re the first people out,” Leah said, surveying the island from north to south.

A squadron of brown pelicans flew overhead, their shape and wingspan so effortless in the morning air that their appearance seemed a quiet psalm in praise of flight itself. They passed over us like shadows stolen from the souls of other shadows.

“Let’s go swimming,” I suggested.

But Leah shook her head. “Not before we check the beach for loggerheads.”

“I trust Leah with this job,” Lucy said. “I don’t trust you, Jack.”

“A few minutes wouldn’t make any difference.”

For three hundred yards we walked in the wet sand, our footprints of different size but related in shape and with precisely the same arch. Leah kept her eyes on the ground ahead of her and she screamed when she saw the heavy markings of the loggerhead, cutting a swathe through the sand ahead of us.

“She came back,” Leah shouted. “She came back.”