Beach Music (65 page)

My mother had saved Shyla’s party by making the children
forget about what they could not bring themselves to eat, but not for long.

When Samuel Burbage’s mother came to retrieve her son, he screamed out as he ran to her, “They gave us raw fish in whipped cream, Mama. I puked when I ate it.”

Harper Price’s mother heard that her daughter had burned her tongue on the tea and that the doughnuts were hard as rocks.

“They’re called ‘bagels,’ ” Shyla tried to explain. “My mother bought them at Gottlieb’s in Savannah.”

Capers Middleton had never seen red soup and Ledare had never eaten cold fish or sweetened noodles and Elmer Bazemore, a shrimper’s son, took only one taste of gefilte fish before he spit it out on his napkin. He swore to his parents that he had no idea where they found such a fish in American waters and that the flesh of that Jewish fish had actually burned his tongue and caused him to ask Mrs. Fox for several glasses of water. Later, Ruth Fox explained that she had probably served the gefilte fish with too much horseradish.

The utter foreignness of Shyla’s household became a minor obsession of her friends and classmates in Waterford. Children are born with a herd instinct, and nothing causes them to suffer more than habits of their parents that single out the child for censure and ridicule. Shyla spent her childhood aching to be an American. Yet it was deeper and more extraordinary than that: Shyla Fox yearned for another unreachable level of Americanism—she tried to turn herself into a Southerner, the most elusive and evasive American of all. Her whole life became a quiet devotional to mimicry. Each year her accent differed and thickened as she listened to the collective voices of the women in her town. The idioms of Southern speech delighted her as much as her parents’ use of Yiddish appalled her. She became tyrannical and refused to let them converse in Yiddish when she was present. Their Yiddish was out of place and discordant in a land of azaleas, hominy, plantation tours, onion rings, buttered popcorn, Necco wafers, and 3 Musketeers candy bars “big enough to share with a pal.”

“She thinks she is a Yankee Doodle Dandy,” her father would often scoff.

“She wants a normal life,” her mother would argue. “Show me the great sin. It’s the same thing I want for her.”

It was more intuition than knowledge that led me to believe the atmosphere in the house across the yard was off-kilter and bizarre. That they celebrated holidays I had never heard of and could not pronounce seemed exotic enough, and I used to try to get Ruth Fox to teach me dirty words in Yiddish so I could torment my brothers when they got on my nerves. But there was something deeply disturbing and unsettled in the House of Fox that no one in my small town could begin to fathom. It was not merely foreignness that set their house apart, but a sadness so profound that it settled like a killing dust in every square inch of those immaculate, spacious rooms.

George and Ruth Fox were afraid of dogs and cats and their own shadows. I could see them peeking out at me from behind closed curtains whenever I would come knocking at the back door. They jumped whenever there was an unexpected knock at the door. Their hands trembled when they answered a ringing telephone. When Ruth Fox hung laundry to dry in the sun, she kept looking around for the movement of enemies on her flank. For years and years, I tried to decipher what was wrong. I spied and eavesdropped and watched the quiet motion of their family as I monitored their activities from the branches of the oak tree after dark. The only thing I could ever come up with was that Shyla’s parents seemed to grow darker, not older. Mr. Fox would often wake up screaming in the middle of the night during nightmares he had brought with him to this country. When I asked Shyla what made her father scream at night, she told me that I must be dreaming myself, that she had never heard a thing. Once I heard him scream out the name of a woman, but it was no one I had ever heard of nor anyone who had ever lived in our neighborhood. After he awoke with this strange woman’s name on his lips and as I moved along the branches of the moonlit oak that gave me access to such secrets, I heard Ruth comforting her husband. Listening to this sorrowful and intimate scene, I pinched myself hard, for Shyla’s sake, to make sure I was not dreaming. I tried to overhear their conversation, but they were speaking to each other in another language. Though I could not understand that
langugage, I knew enough about words to know that Ruth loved George Fox beyond all measure and time.

In the years that followed Shyla’s party the sense of darkness and unhappiness in the Fox household seemed to deepen. I often thought perhaps it came from George Fox’s fanatical absorption with his music. All of us were afraid of Mr. Fox, with his impeccable Old World manners, his disfigured hand, his suffering, and his reticence that seemed unnatural when accompanied by his baleful glare. Though his music students adored him, they were gathered up from the most sensitive and highly strung children. At night, as I tried to go to sleep, I listened to Mr. Fox play the piano, and I learned from those evening recitals that music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.

I remember when I first told my mother that I thought something was wrong with Shyla. I had noticed that Ruth talked differently to Shyla when she did not know I was around. One day I had gone over to Shyla’s bedroom through the oak tree and was about to go search for her in the house when I heard her mother speaking to her downstairs. Before I tiptoed back to the window and made my way back through the secret avenue that connected our houses, I heard Ruth’s voice again. What she said made me stop to make sure I had heard it correctly.

“Close that door when you talk to me,” Ruth shouted, “or we’ll all be dead of pneumonia. That’s what you want. For all of us to be dead. Go and wash your hands. Don’t play in the dirt anymore. God didn’t make you an ant. My God. Those hands. Come here. Turn off that stove. Are you crazy or what? Do you want the fire department to get a raise?”

I did not recognize the woman who was speaking, this off-center, nerve-damaged version of Ruth Fox. It was my first occluded view of the childhood Shyla was living through because the Germans had overrun and destroyed her parents’ world. It would be much later that I would learn that the Nazis were frequent visitors to that house, that they sat with their blue-eyed stares through meals, belched at the lighting of the candles on every Sabbath eve, and that Shyla grew up believing that germs were simply lowercase Germans who fed on the souls of Jews.

As I passed through the thick branches of oak, I heard Ruth say, “Get away from that window, Shyla. The Angel of Death could be passing by.”

I turned back and saw Shyla’s small, fearful face. She waved at me and I waved back. I realize now that the Foxes’ house on the Point in Waterford was simply an annex of Bergen-Belsen, a rest stop on the way to the crematoriums. Neither of Shyla’s parents could leave the country of their hideous past. George Fox played his music to console those who went up in smoke and joined the airstreams over Poland. Each black note celebrated the loss of a soul who entered the river of death without the consolation of music. The house floated with tears and terror and uncontainable fury and music that made children dream of the jackbooted intruders who lit their way with torches made of Jewish hair.

After we were married, Shyla would tell me about her Southern childhood. She thought that at any moment German soldiers could surround her house in a rapid flanking movement in which every vine and redbud and azalea would perish. But these were offhand and unusual confessions for Shyla. Mostly she was silent to the point of obsession about her parents’ war experiences. The subject became
verboten
, especially after Leah was born. Shyla could not bear thinking about a world that could put a child as affectionate and helpless as Leah inside a gas chamber. That world became the building material of her nightmares, but she rarely allowed it to make an appearance in her daily life.

I had no idea of the depth of her morbid obsession until I saw the freshly minted number of her father’s tattoo on her forearm in the Charleston morgue after she killed herself. The presence of that raw angry number was an eloquent annotation binding her to the great blood-letting of her people.

After her death, it was I who became Holocaust-obsessed, I who studied those broken-open years with a passion and completeness I could not believe possible. That number on Shyla’s arm haunted me because it hinted at a tortured life she had lived without my knowledge. I am sure I could have helped her had I known the depth of her preoccupation with the destruction of the Jews. She had spent her life hiding her Jewishness, wrapping it in a cocoon of secret,
precious silks. Her spirituality bore fruit in darkness and a grotesque moth with skull marks on its powdery wings tried to take flight in the museum where she kept her soul chloroformed and pinned to velvet. Only when Leah was born did she seem interested in coming to terms with her Jewish roots. Shyla Fox had been raised in the dead center of Southern Christendom, accepted by her Christian playmates, happy in the changeless backwaters of small-town life where her Jewishness made her slightly bizarre and out of step. But at least her parents were considered churchgoing and God-fearing people, and Shyla used her small synagogue as escape hatch, theater, masquerade ball, and oasis. By the time she was a senior in high school, fifty Jewish families met for Sabbath ceremonies each week, and in a riot of light and noise and gossip Shyla felt she was in the center of a world that both cherished and was proud of her.

Her mother had not told Shyla anything about puberty or issued a mother’s warning about the changes that were going to take place in her body. When she first bled she thought she had cancer, thought she had displeased God in the most desperate, unspeakable manner. She entered her womanhood innocent and unprepared, and this marked her, at least to herself, as singular, chosen, and strange. She grew dreamier and more withdrawn. Her mother had protected her fiercely, and mother and daughter grew closer that year before the breakdowns began. It was then that Ruth Fox began to tell her daughter about the stories of the war. They began to spill out of Ruth in an undiluted manner she could not stem or help. Stories of both Ruth’s and George’s terrifying experiences entered the imagination of their precocious, exquisitely intense daughter, stories so lit with anguish that they would return with all their excessive power intact over and over again; and often when she began to bleed. So in Shyla’s mind, the suffering of her parents during the war would be associated with her own shedding of blood. Ruth had always intended to tell Shyla all that happened to her, her husband, and their families in Eastern Europe, but had been waiting for the proper time, for Shyla to reach a certain point of maturity. Though she thought it was important that Shyla understand the world as a dangerous, unscrupulous place, she did not wish to imprint this information too early, nor did she wish Shyla to be filled with fear at the
untrustworthiness and savagery of mankind. Somewhat arbitrarily, Ruth chose Shyla’s puberty as the time to begin sharing these stories.

Inevitably, Ruth would look into the eyes of her Waterford neighbors and wonder what conditions would be required for them to take to the streets, wild and unappeasable, in their collective lust for Jewish blood. All through my childhood, unbeknownst to me, Ruth would study my face and try to place it under the visor of a Nazi cap. In every Christian she met, Ruth looked for the Nazi who lived just below the surface. But all of this I would learn later.

Shyla was a good listener and she took these stories and made them part of herself. They built libraries along the ridges of her brain where the weight of them turned to migraine and nightmare. It had relieved Ruth to share a portion of the agony she had held inside her for so long, but it was a while before she understood the depth of agony she had delivered to her oldest child.

From the age of ten to thirteen, Shyla retreated into the interior, became distant from her family and friends, and went through several bizarre episodes that led her to the offices of several child psychiatrists in the South. Though she did well in school, she withdrew from almost all association with her friends and playmates. These were the years she made the most progress at the piano and the ones that gave her father hope that she might become a great teacher of music even if she lacked the virtuosity and passion that marked all of the best concert pianists. Shyla practiced for hours, and, like her father, she found respite in the black notes, escape in the dark, mysterious arrangement of music. Her discipline at the piano turned from a virtue into a form of dementia.

Soon she began to skip meals in order to master a new piece. Her love of her art made her fast, her parents said, and there was pride in their voices. The music seemed to play on forever: It lifted off her fingers in a ceaseless flood of notes, a river of noise and plainsong and elegy, that a dutiful daughter played out of a misspent, indirect love of a father who distrusted words and cherished only the harmonies of a keyboard. As a teacher, George was severe with Shyla because he believed that she was trying to reach a realm of competency that he thought she was not talented enough to reach. He
pushed her hard, and each time she passed imaginary barriers he set for her. She mastered concertos he declared beyond her competence. As she dared him to set limits on her talent, he raised the ante higher and higher, knowing that she did not possess the range and the fluency that greatness in art required. He was right, and George Fox pushed his daughter until he broke her. When she finally snapped, she had lost ten pounds that she could barely afford to lose and the doctors in Waterford could not get her to eat. In the hospital they fed her glucose intravenously while her fingers played noiseless sonatas against her blanket.

When they let her out of the hospital, Shyla began what she would later call her “dark year,” the year of masks, hallucinations, and grieving for the dead whose names she did not know. Without telling either of them, she took the stories that her mother had secretly told her and she took her parents’ place, walking every step that they had walked, and suffering what they had suffered. Shyla starved herself, she refused water, her hands made music wherever her fingers touched down, and she spent that year grieving for parents who had not had the time to grieve, nor the resources, and certainly not the permission.