Beach Music (12 page)

“What I want is not important. You can choose for yourself. What I’d like is for you to study both and reject both.”

“Do they worship different gods?” she asked.

“No, honey. I think it’s the same cat. Look, I know I’m going to pay for this in the future. You’ll grow up without religious roots and when you’re eighteen I’ll find you dressed in saffron Hare Krishna robes with your head shaved, chanting Hindi, and playing a tambourine in the Atlanta airport.”

“I just want to know if I’m a Jew or a Catholic.”

“You pick, darling.” And I squeezed her hand.

“Martha says that I’m a Jew.”

“If that’s what you want to be, then that’s what you are. I’d love for you to be Jewish. Nothing would irritate my family more.”

“What’s South Carolina like?” Leah asked, changing the subject.

“Horrible. Very ugly and depressing to look at. It smells bad all the time and the ground’s covered with rattlesnakes. It has laws making all children slaves from the time they’re born until they’re eighteen. The state doesn’t allow ice cream or candy to be sold inside the state line and requires all kids to eat five pounds of brussels sprouts a day.”

“I hate brussels sprouts.”

“That’s only the start. All kittens and puppy dogs are drowned as soon as they’re born. Stuff like that. You never want to go there. Trust me.”

“Aunt Martha said it was beautiful and that she wanted me to come visit her next summer. May I go?” We walked on without my responding.

“What kind of ice cream do you want?” I asked as we walked into the bar near the Piazza Trilussa.
“Limone o fragola?”

“Fragola,”
she said, “but that didn’t answer my question.”

“You want to eat five pounds of brussels sprouts a day and be sold into slavery?”

“You just say those things so I won’t ask about Mama.”

We ate our cones in silence. Mine was hazelnut, which reminds me of smoke and ice and darkness. Leah had chosen the strawberry ice cream today. Each day, she alternated between the taste of lemons and strawberries; it was one way she brought a sense of order and structure to her motherless life.

On the Ponte Sisto, we stopped and looked down at the Tiber, its flow quickening as it neared the rapids close to the Isola Tiberina. Two elderly fishermen were casting their lines into the river, but I knew I lacked the raw physical courage required to eat a fish caught in those impure waters. Even in the softest light, the Tiber looked rheumy and colicky.

“I know all about Mama,” Leah said, licking her cone.

“If Martha said one word …”

“She didn’t,” Leah jumped in quickly. “I’ve known for a long time now.”

“How’d you find out?” I said, careful not to look at her, keeping my eyes on the fishermen.

“I heard Maria talking to the
portiere,”
she said. “They didn’t know I was listening.”

“What did they say?”

“That Mama killed herself by jumping off a bridge,” Leah said, and as the words came out of my pretty, over-serious daughter, I could feel the ruthless slipping of my heart. She tried to say it matter-of-factly, but the words resonated with the awful authority of Shyla’s act. At that very moment, I knew that by treating her as an
equal, I had robbed her of any chance of being a child. Worse, I had allowed Leah to mother me, stealing from a generous, eager child what my own mother had rarely been known to offer me. I had let Leah carry my implacable sorrow, and turned her childhood into a duty.

“Maria said my mother was burning in hell. That’s what happens to people who kill themselves.”

“No,” I said, kneeling beside her and gathering her to me. I tried to see if she was crying, but could see nothing through my own tears.

“Your mother was the sweetest, finest woman I’ve ever met, Leah. No God would ever hurt a woman that decent and good. No God would say a word to a woman who suffered so much. If a God like that exists, I spit on that God. Do you understand?”

“No,” she said.

“Your mother had periods of great sadness,” I whispered. “She would feel them coming and warn me that she was going away for a while. But she’d be back. There were doctors, hospitals. They gave her pills, did everything they could; and she’d always come back. Except the last time.”

“She must have been very sad, Daddy,” Leah said, crying openly now.

“She was.”

“Couldn’t you help her?”

“I tried to help her, Leah. You can be sure of that.”

“Was it me? Was she unhappy when I was born?” Leah asked.

I knelt and held her close again, letting her cry long and hard, and waited for her to slow down before I spoke.

“There never was a baby loved like your mother loved you. Her eyes filled up with love whenever she looked at you. She couldn’t keep her hands off you, wanted to breast-feed you forever. Shyla loved every single thing about you.”

“Then why, Daddy? Why?”

“I don’t know, darling. But I’ll try to tell you everything I understand. I promise if you’ll remove the strawberry ice cream cone from the back of my neck.”

We both laughed and dried each other’s tears with the napkins
that had come with the cones. I knelt down on one knee and let Leah wipe the ice cream from my shirt and neck. Two diminutive nuns approached us on the bridge, and when I made eye contact with one of them, she looked to the ground, shy as a whelk.

“Do you think it hurt?” Leah asked. “When she hit the water?”

“I don’t think she was feeling much. She’d taken a bunch of pills before driving to the bridge.”

“The bridge, Daddy,” she said. “Was it higher than this?”

“Much higher.”

“Do you think she was thinking of the night at the beach? When the house fell into the sea? When she fell in love with you?”

“No, darling. She had just come to a time in her life when she couldn’t go on.”

“It’s too sad. It’s just too sad,” Leah said.

“That’s why I couldn’t tell you. That’s why I never wanted this day to come. Why didn’t you ask me all this when you found out?”

“I knew you’d cry, Daddy. I didn’t want to make you unhappy.”

“It’s my job to be unhappy,” I said, stroking her dark hair. “You don’t have to worry about me. Tell me everything you’re thinking.”

“That’s not what you said. You said our job was to worry about each other.”

I picked my precious child up in my arms, squeezed her tightly, then hoisted her onto my broad shoulders.

“Now you know, kid. You’ll be learning to live with your mama’s death for the rest of your life. But me and you are a team and we’re gonna have a hell of a good time. Got it?”

“Got it,” Leah said, still crying.

“Did you say any of this to Aunt Martha?”

“No, I thought you’d get mad at her. I want to visit her. I want to meet the rest of my family, Daddy,” she said, with all the equanimity of a stubbornly precocious child.

B
efore dawn the next morning, Leah crawled into my bed and snuggled up to me, her form curving against my back, deft and supple as a kitten. She stroked my hair with her hand until we both fell asleep again. No words needed to be said and I marveled at the very strength of this child.

When we finally awoke, I realized how late it was and gently shook Leah.

“You’ve got to get ready. Maria’s taking you to visit her family in the country today.”

“Why don’t you come with us?” she said as she jumped out of bed after giving me a big hug.

“I’ll come later,” I promised. “I’ve got some business in Rome to take care of first.”

“Maria’s already here,” Leah said. “Smell the coffee.”

After I put them on a bus to Maria’s village, I walked down the Via dei Giubbonari still feeling bruised and shaken by the reality of what Leah now knew.

I walked through the Jewish Ghetto, past the theater of Marcellus, where a homeless man was living beneath a black arch among a nation of cats. The man was schizophrenic and harmless and I had seen old women in the neighborhood feeding leftover pasta from the same bowls to both the man and the cats.

I cut over to the Via di San Teodoro, then across the Circus
Maximus, and strolled the length of the rose garden at the beginning of the Aventine hill. The garden offered a panoramic view of both the Circus Maximus and the Palatine hill with its earth-colored broken palaces stretching along the ridge of the hill like a ruined alphabet.

I turned and surveyed the part of the city I’d just walked through, picking a spot among the roses where I could see if anyone had followed me. At times I felt foolish doing this, but the sudden appearance of Pericle Starraci in the piazza and Mike’s plan for the film seemed to confirm the rightness of my caution.

I left the rose garden and walked past the orangerie, where mothers entertained their small children and tourists took pictures of themselves with the Vatican captured in miniature far up the Tiber. When I passed Santa Sabina, I ducked into the courtyard and pretended to study the fragmentary mosaic over the nave of the church while looking again for a merciless stranger who might discover the whereabouts of Jordan Elliott because of my own lack of prudence.

It was because of Jordan, not Leah, that I had spotted the surveillance by Pericle Starraci the first day he had identified me in the Campo dei Fiori. “Paranoia has a sharper taste if the danger is real,” I once wrote to Jordan in a postcard from Bergen, Norway.

I walked quickly through the Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta, where a tour bus brimming with Americans was unloading its bovine cargo.

When I was sure I was not being followed, I slipped into the Benedictine Church of Sant’ Anselmo. Mass was in progress and I heard the monks lifting their voices in ancient plainsong as I made my way to the third confessional on the left-hand side of the church. A sign announced that its confessor spoke German, Italian, French, and English. After two Italian women came out making the sign of the cross, I entered the confessional and knelt down. The priest within turned off the light, indicating that he was done with absolving crimes against God on that day.

“Father Jordan,” I said immediately.

“Jack,” Jordan answered. “I’ve been waiting for you. Four people have already come to me for confession this morning. A record, I believe.”

“Word’s out,” I whispered. “A holy man’s on the loose at Sant’ Anselmo’s.”

“Hardly. Would you like me to hear your confession, Jack?”

“No, I don’t think so. I’m not ready for that yet.”

The voices of the monks lifted up in their serene chant to God.

“God’s patient, Jack. He’ll wait.”

“No, he won’t. He doesn’t exist. At least, not for me, he doesn’t.”

“That’s not true. He exists for all of us in different ways.”

“Prove to me there’s a God.”

“Prove to me there’s not one,” the priest said softly.

“That’s not much of an answer.”

“It’s not much of a question, either,” said Jordan.

“At least try,” I urged. “Tell me about the beauty of the sunsets or the grand designs of snowflakes. Tell me in words, no matter how stupid or silly, why you believe in God.”

Jordan sighed. I knew his own faith had stalked him through days and nights of despair, and when it finally chose to pounce, he was ready for it and let himself be devoured like a lamb. Readiness is the opening God needs, I thought, as I listened to my friend in the dark, Latinized air.

“Jack,” said Jordan, “the wing of a fly is proof enough of the existence of God for me.”

“I’ve lost the gift of faith. I used to have it, but I lost it and can’t seem to get it back. I don’t even know if I want it back. I’ve forgotten how to pray.”

“You’re praying now, Jack. You’re on a quest. It takes different forms with all of us.” Jordan paused. “How’d the trip to Venice go? How’s Mike? How’s pretty Ledare?”

“They’re both fine, although Mike has taken the Hollywood stuff to the extreme. He dresses in suits that look like they were made from the foreskins of llamas.”

“What is the movie that Mike wants to make?” he asked, ignoring my comments.

“The kind that tells the story of Jordan Elliott, who disappeared in 1971 and hasn’t been heard from since.”

The chanting had stopped and the church gave off a strong odor of incense and melting tallow. Without the chant, the church seemed suspended in midair, and I was aware that Jordan was strangely still.

“What does Mike want to tell about Jordan Elliott?”

“He wants to tell our story. The sixties included. It’s a hell of a story.”

“It ends with Jordan’s death.”

“That’s the conventional ending,” I said. “But it sure as hell isn’t the one that Mike believes. I implied that Mike’s become a trifle shallow. I didn’t say he’d become stupid.”

I tried to study Jordan’s face through the confessional screen but, as always, he kept his cowl pulled down around his head. Jordan was now only a voice to me, as he’d always tried to be since that amazing day when Jordan Elliott’s mother came to Rome to tell me that her son was living there in secret. Because he was a hunted man, Jordan agreed to meet with me if I would agree not to see him face to face.

“How did Mike hear the rumors that I was still alive?” the priest asked, and there was an exhaustion in his voice, something damaged that I had not heard in him before.

“The same source. Always the same source. When Mrs. McEachern went to confession at the Vatican several years ago and someone she taught English to in eleventh grade was her confessor.”

“Mistaken identity,” Jordan said. “That’s what I told her that day.”

“She’s also the voice teacher at Waterford High. Claims she never forgets a voice.”

Jordan scoffed, but he was shaken by what I had told him. “What are the chances of hearing in Italy the confession of a South Carolina English teacher who once taught you
Life on the Mississippi
in high school?”

“Not good,” I admitted. “The rumors started in earnest when she got back to town. But they had been floating around Waterford since the day of your untimely death.”

“I was so overwhelmed then. I didn’t have time to think it through.”

“You didn’t do badly. I read your obituary and I went to the memorial ceremony as an honorary pallbearer.”