Beach Music (28 page)

“Did you bring Leah with you?” she asked.

“No, but she sends her love.”

“That’s not enough. I want to hold that girl and tell her some things,” Lucy said. “You, too. I have to explain my life to you.”

“You don’t have to tell me anything,” I said. “You’ve already managed to ruin my life. There’s nothing to add.”

“A little humor, right?” she asked.

“Right.”

“Just checking. Coming out of a coma’s odd. It’s like digging yourself out of your own grave. Am I still cute?”

“A doll. I already told you.”

“Get Dupree’s wife over here. Tell Jean I need makeup and plenty of it. She knows my brands.”

“A coma doesn’t seem to do much for vanity,” I said, teasing her.

“But it’s the ticket for weight loss,” she said. “I bet I’ve dropped five pounds since I’ve been here.”

“You had us worried.”

“The leukemia’s gonna kill me, Jack,” she said. “It’s incurable for a woman my age. Sooner or later it’s going to come back and kill me. The doctor thinks I have just over a year.”

“It terrifies me to hear you say that.”

“I had to tell someone. I’ll lie to the others,” she said, and I could see her weakening. “I want to visit you and Leah in Rome.”

“We’d love to have you,” I said.

“I need to see you over there. I don’t know what it’s like. I need to have you love me again. I need it more than anything in the world.”

I was not looking at my mother, but her words spoke deeply to me. She was quiet and when I looked up she was asleep. Lucy McCall Pitts going to Rome, I thought, and then thought that if Italy could survive the Huns, it could surely survive a simple visit by
my fire-eating, cunning mother. She was sleeping deeply now and I, her oldest son, thought she looked eternal, unkillable, and the center of this earth. Dallas came in and motioned that it was time for me to go.

“What did she say?” Dallas asked me as we walked down the corridor.

“Not much. She told me that she loves me the best and would’ve had her tubes tied if she’d known the other sons would turn out to be such bitter disappointments.”

“Uh, that again,” he said. “Anything else?”

“She called for makeup.”

“She’s back,” Dallas said excitedly. “She’s really back.”

Tee and Dupree met us in the hallway. Tee whispered so he could not be heard by the others in the waiting room.

“Good news,” Tee said. “More family problems.”

Dallas groaned but Tee continued, “Grandpa just called. Ginny Penn’s missing from the nursing home.”

“Not again,” Dallas said.

“No problem,” Dupree said, always the pragmatist. “She’s in a wheelchair. It’s not like we’ve got to alert the highway patrol.”

“Her third breakout,” Tee said. “I’m getting the idea she’s not adjusting well.”

“Grandpa can’t lift her,” Dallas said. “It’s a temporary arrangement. Until her hip heals.”

“She thinks we’ve abandoned her,” Dupree said.

We left the hospital and piled into our mother’s car, and as I drove quickly through town, Dallas thought aloud, “Only three roads she could’ve taken and she couldn’t have gotten very far on any of them. She has not taken the rest home experience with much aplomb.”

“I talked to her on the phone,” I said. “She’s hated it.” Ten minutes later I took a left down the long paved road that led to the river and the home. Immediately, we could see our grandmother, working the two wheels of her wheelchair, grimly resolute. I passed by her, turned the car around in a driveway, then pulled up beside her.

Ginny Penn did not pay any attention to the car, but kept stroking
those two wheels in time, like an oarsman navigating up a difficult stretch of river. Though she was sweating and red-faced, she was exhilarated by her escape and had put far more distance between herself and the nursing home than seemed possible. She looked to the side, saw us moving slowly beside her, and burst into tears. She looked at us again, then she pressed herself harder, her shoulders straining, until finally she stopped and began sobbing into her hands, reddened with oncoming blisters.

“You want a ride, Ginny Penn?” Dallas asked softly.

“Get away from me,” she said, through tears.

“Your doctor called,” Dallas said. “He’s worried about you.”

“I’ve fired that old coot. I need to be rescued, boys. Someone has to help me or I’m going to die in there. No one listens to you when you get old. No one listens and no one cares.”

“We’ll try to help you any way we can,” I said from the driver’s side.

“Then walk right back to that hospital and say, ‘We’re rescuing our grandmother from this hell hole.’ Gather up my belongings. And if you really want to help old people in this town, you should shoot the cook. She can’t even serve a raw carrot without mucking it up.”

Dallas looked at me and shrugged. “We were looking for a more diplomatic approach.”

“You boys just leave me alone,” Ginny Penn wailed. “I’m on my way to a friend’s home. I’m going to go calling.”

“What friend?” Dallas asked.

“I haven’t decided. I’ve got friends up and down the county and all of them would consider it an honor to entertain a lady like me. I’m not trash like your grandfather. My people were somebody.”

“Come on, Grandma,” I said. “Get in the car with us and we’ll entertain you.”

“You,” she said and her gaze at us was imperious and overbearing. “You were raised to be common. Your poor mother’s nothing but dirt and your father’s certainly nothing to write home about.”

“You raised Dad,” Dallas pointed out. “You’ve got to take some of the old credit there.”

“I take full responsibility,” our grandmother declared. “I
married your grandfather with my eyes wide open and I knew what I was getting into. I married for all the wrong reasons.”

“Give us one,” I asked.

“He was an eyeful,” Ginny Penn said at last. “Oh, boy. I used to sweat just looking at him.”

“Enough of this trashy talk, Ginny Penn,” Dupree said, opening the door and walking toward his grandmother. Tee and I lifted her gently out of the wheelchair and placed her in the backseat of the car. It was like lifting a cageful of small birds and she seemed more husk than fruit as we placed her lying down on her back. She was now too weak to sit up.

“We’ll make a deal with you, Ginny Penn,” I said. “We’ll try to get you out of the home, but you’ve got to go back now. We’ve got to do it right.”

But Ginny Penn was already asleep when I spoke these words. We drove her back and turned her over to her nurses, who woke her and chastised her for her behavior.

“Traitors,” she hissed as a nurse pushed her and the wheelchair back to her room, her cell, her abandonment.

As I drove Dallas back to his law offices, all of us were silent and thoughtful.

“It must be terrible to get old,” Dallas finally said. “I wonder if Ginny Penn wakes up each day and thinks it’s her last day on earth.”

“I think she wakes up and hopes it’s her last day,” I said.

“We didn’t tell her Mom was out of her coma,” Tee said.

“Why make her feel any worse than she does now?” Dupree said and we all laughed.

“She’s tried her whole life to make the world think she was an aristocrat.”

Dallas said, “I think we should simply genuflect whenever we approach her and it’d cut down on the bullshit.”

“She’s a blue blood and we’re something a dog pulled off the road,” Tee said.

“Do you remember her telling us about the plantation where she grew up?” Dupree asked. “We always thought she was lying because she never took us there for a visit.”

“Burnside,” I said. “The famous Burnside Plantation.”

“She wasn’t lying,” Dupree said. “It really existed and that’s where she was raised.”

“Then where is it?”

“Under water,” Dallas said.

“Under water?” I echoed.

“It was located outside of Charleston, near Pinopolis. When they dammed the river to make Lake Moultrie, Burnside was covered by the rising waters caused by the building of the dam. Ginny Penn was a Sinkler on her mother’s side and Burnside was the Sinkler plantation.”

“Now I get it,” I said. “Ginny Penn was so distressed after losing her ancestral home, she went out and married a Puerto Rican, our grandfather.”

“She could never tell how the story ended,” Dupree said. “She evidently saw the flooding of her home as a terrible sign from God. An omen of some kind.”

“How’d you find this out?” Tee asked.

“My wife, Jean, commutes to Charleston twice a week. She’s working on her master’s degree in history. She was fooling around over at the Charleston Library on King Street and came upon a memoir of the Sinkler family. Ginny Penn’s mentioned twice. The house was as pretty as Ginny Penn’s always claimed.”

“It’s a relief to know royal blood does flow through these tired veins,” I said.

“I like being a redneck,” Tee said. “It suits me.”

Dallas looked at his younger brother and said, “It sure does.”

“You don’t have to agree that fast,” Tee cautioned.

“It’s Tee’s friends you got to worry about,” Dupree said to me.

“I’ll second that,” Dallas added.

“Hey, I love my friends. Great guys, great gals,” Tee said.

“A shrimper’d look like a Rockefeller walking into Tee’s front door,” Dallas said.

“He’s drawn to the lower class,” Dupree said. “I’ve always wanted him to attract a higher type of scum.”

“Better brothers are all I need,” Tee said. “Ha. Good line. Huh? You guys used to maul me when I was a kid. But Lil’ Tee’s coming into his own. No longer can his brothers take him lightly.”

When we got home we watched the sunset from the upper veranda, where we had once played together as boys. I could remember sitting in this same wicker chair more than twenty years before feeding Tee a bottle while my mother, eight months’ pregnant with John Hardin, got dinner ready, my father working late at the office, and Dupree on the front lawn teaching Dallas how to throw a football. Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all. Yet we sat together where the light was best and the last seen light best of all. It was here we gathered to say farewell to the sunburned, dark-complexioned days which finger-painted the river in the tenderness of its insomniac retreat.

From my father’s poorly stocked kitchen, I brought up cold beer that we had stopped to buy at Ma Miller’s, along with peanuts, dill pickles, and a rectangle of sharp Cheddar cheese, which I sliced and placed on saltines with slivers of red onion. My brothers ate for fuel, not pleasure, and there were few things I could serve that they would not put in their mouths. The phone rang deep inside the house and Dallas went in to answer it.

When he came out Dallas said, “Mom ate some solid food.”

We cheered and offered a toast to the river and our mother, who could look out at the same body of water from her hospital window a mile downriver.

“That’s one tough broad,” Dupree said, taking a swallow of beer.

“Not tough enough for leukemia,” Dallas said. “It’ll get her next time.”

“How can you say that?” Tee said, jumping up and walking to the railing, his eyes turned from us.

“Sorry,” Dallas said. “Reality helps me make it through the bad times … and the good ones.”

I could see that Tee was wiping tears away from his eyes as soon as he shed them. His emotion made the rest of us edgy and I said, “It was my love that brought her through the crisis. My heroic flight across the Atlantic to be with my mother in her time of need.”

Dallas smiled, then said, “No, it was the quiet love of her often-ignored, often-ridiculed third son, Dallas, that rescued her from the crypt.”

“Crypt,” Tee said. “Our family doesn’t have a damn crypt.”

“I reserve the right to be literary,” said Dallas. “That was a literary flourish.”

“I didn’t know you were a literary man,” I said. “I’m not,” said Dallas, “but I like to nurse a few pretensions now and then.”

“A few,” Dupree said. “You had any more a CPA couldn’t keep up with them.”

“Quit crying, Tee,” Dallas said. “It makes me feel I don’t love Mom enough.”

Tee said, sniffling, “You don’t. You never have.”

“Not true,” Dallas said. “I was a little kid once and thought there was no one like her. Then I grew up and started to learn all about her. Naturally, I was horrified. I’d never been face to face with such powers of deceit. I couldn’t handle it. So I ignored her. No sin in that.”

“I love her ass,” Tee said. “Even though she’s screwed up my whole life and ran off every girlfriend I ever had.”

“Can’t hold that against her,” Dupree said. “Your girlfriends were all natural disasters.”

“You didn’t know them like I did.”

“Thank God,” Dallas and Dupree said together.

“You’re lucky you can cry,” I said to Tee. “It’s a gift.”

“You cried since Mom’s been sick?” Dallas asked Dupree.

“Nope. Don’t intend to,” Dupree said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Who wants to be a pansy like Tee?” he asked.

Darkness came up on us and stars lit up one by one in the eastern sky. I thought about my own tears, the ones I had never cried over Shyla. In the days after her death I waited for them to come in floods, but none appeared. Her death dried me out and I found more desert land in my spirit than rain forest. My lack of tears worried, then frightened me.

So I began to study other men and was comforted to find I was not alone. I tried to come up with a theory that would explain my extreme stoicism in the face of my wife’s suicide. Each explanation became an excuse, because Shyla Fox McCall deserved my tears if
anyone on earth ever did. I could feel the tears within me, undiscovered and untouched in their inland sea. Those tears had been with me always. I thought that, at birth, American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do, with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our livers eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.

“Have another beer, Tee,” Dallas said. “It’ll help.”

“Don’t need help, bro,” Tee answered. “I’m crying because I’m happy.”