Beach Music (67 page)

“Look up. I wanted to surprise you,” Shyla whispered. “Straight up to the very top of the dome.”

I did as I was told and I felt my retinas enlarge as I stared into the upper darkness, into a void that permitted no light. Gradually, I saw the bowl of the dome reveal itself in its amplitude and beauty of form but I saw nothing else.

“Look harder,” she said. “They’re looking at you.”

“What’s looking at me?” I asked.

“The surprise,” she said.

Then I saw them in all their shy but confident wildness. A nesting pair of barn owls, the shape of beer cans, looked down at us from an eave twenty feet above. The owls could not have chosen a more precarious spot for the raising of their young. They glowed slightly with an otherworldly light and we could hear the impatient noises of unseen owlets whose cries of hunger sounded like kids in soda shops sucking up the dregs of malteds from tall glasses. It seemed like a
place where evil came to lick its wounds and plan its mischief, a place in fairy tales where the ogre made its appearance in the lives of lost children.

Breathless, I watched the owls watch me with their rufous wings folded down tightly. I could not figure out if they reminded me of penguins or monkeys. There was beauty in their wildness, in their eerie stillness. They were praiseworthy sentinels to the country of the insane.

“How many young?” I whispered.

“Three left. There were five,” Shyla whispered back.

“Where are the other two?”

“They were eaten by their brothers and sisters. I watched. You can’t believe the number of rats and mice it takes to feed young owls.”

“How did you find them?”

“I have the run of the place,” Shyla said softly. “They know I’m not crazy.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because I saw the lady,” she said.

“Why’d you bring me up here?” I asked. “It’s spooky.”

“So we’d be alone.”

“Why’d you want us to be alone?” I said, feeling shut-in and misplaced.

Shyla smiled at me and said, “Because of this.”

Shyla kissed me on the lips. I pulled back at first as though she had slapped me.

“Hold still, silly,” Shyla said.

She kissed me again and her lips and mouth felt sweet against mine and I was happy to be in that place of fear and owls.

We kissed each other several more times.

“Good,” Shyla said, “we’ve got that out of the way.”

“Why’d you do that?”

“All the girls in the ward talk about kissing and everything else,” said Shyla. “I wanted to get started and I didn’t think you’d mind.”

Licking my lips, which still tasted like her, I said, “We didn’t do bad, did we? For rookies, I mean.”

“I was expecting a lot more,” Shyla admitted.

“What were you expecting?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Just more. But that one didn’t count. It wasn’t real. We weren’t carried away by passion.”

“You didn’t like it?”

“I didn’t say that. It wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.”

“Maybe I need to practice,” I said, yet I would not kiss Shyla again until we danced in the foundering sea-endangered house many years later.

“I wouldn’t know,” Shyla said. “I love coming up to this dome. It makes me feel like the only person in the world. Do the kids at school know I’m at the Crazy House?”

“They think you’re out sick. Like you caught a terrible disease or something,” I told her. “Mrs. Pinckney has us pray for you every week. We say the Lord’s Prayer for your quick recovery.”

“The Lord’s Prayer?” Shyla said. “But I’m Jewish.”

“It doesn’t hurt anything,” I said. “She just wants you to get well. We all do.”

“Your daddy still drinking?”

“Yeh,” I answered.

I
n winter they had taken Shyla away and in summer they returned her to Waterford; her time away was barely noticed by her classmates, who found themselves totally absorbed by the marvelous details of their own growing up. Her reentry was seamless, uncommented upon, and her absence quickly forgotten. She resumed her life in the house of dark music and we once more took to the branches of the live oak, where we continued our commentary on the events of the town. Neither of us ever referred to the day we climbed up under the dome of the Babcock Building and exchanged shy kisses beneath the patronage of barn owls. But those kisses held great value for both of us and we each held the memory of that day inviolate.

The summer she was away Jordan came to Waterford and his arrival would change Shyla’s life as much as the lives of the rest of us. Because he had lived all over the world, he had the courage to speak
opinions that no other Waterford boy dared articulate for fear of ridicule. Though not a free thinker, he was an original one who had small talent for following the rumors of the herd.

It was after an afternoon baseball game when my mother was feeding hamburgers to Capers, Mike, Jordan, and myself in the garden of our backyard that Shyla first saw Jordan. My brothers were tumbling around the yard playing hide-and-seek as Lucy yelled out that her azaleas were off-limits. Other grills in the neighborhood were lit and the smell of charcoal and grease and flame-licked steaks coalesced to make a one-time scent that would always smell like summer days to whoever inhaled it—along with the lavender and horsemint trampled by the children rushing to conceal themselves. My father, who had not attended the game, had poured himself a bourbon in a silver loving cup in his book-lined office and would continue to drink until he lost consciousness sometime that evening. His absence always took up as much room as his presence, and I would periodically look to the back door, every nerve ending alert, dreading my father’s sudden appearance.

My mother, pretty with her children around her, loved feeding me and my friends after our games, not minding the fragrant sweat that lifted off our uniforms, and loved her garden and her house and her neighborhood and the sight of the light-infused river that curved by our property and out past the town. When she flipped the first batch of hamburgers, she noticed Shyla looking over the gate from behind the ivy.

“Get in here, girl,” she called out to Shyla. “I’ll fix you a hamburger and Jack’ll introduce you to Jordan. He’s the new young stud who just moved here.”

It was hard to tell who blushed harder, Jordan or Shyla, but she joined the picnic table and laughed as we told stories about the game while her father began to play the piano in the background. It was her father’s favorite form of disapproval. He went to his piano whenever he discovered her laughing among her friends. He punished her with music.

“That’s a Beethoven piano sonata,” Jordan said, cocking his head toward the music. “Who’s playing that?”

“It’s Shyla’s father,” my mother said.

“He’s wonderful, Shyla,” said Jordan.

“I’ll take Elvis any day,” Capers said to laughter.

When Capers and Mike left on their bicycles, dusk had fallen on the garden and my mother had gone in to get the younger children ready for bed. The music of George Fox continued without a pause and the notes of a Bach sonata fell among us like flung coins. Jordan and Shyla were talking about the pieces of music they loved the best and I was growing touchy, feeling ignored. Then I noticed that Jordan had stopped talking and was studying Shyla’s face in the ever-changing yet still diaphanous light.

“Jack, you guys are idiots,” Jordan said. “You didn’t see it, did you? It was right in front of you all the time. None of you had a clue.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

Jordan rose off the bench and went over to a frightened-looking Shyla. Carefully, Jordan took off her glasses and set them down on the picnic table. He undid the braid that held Shyla’s hair in place and let her luxuriant dark hair fall over her shoulders. Though she had stiffened, Shyla had not uttered a word of protest.

“I’m an only child, Shyla, and I do my mother’s hair whenever my father isn’t around. My God, your hair is marvelous.”

Her hair was a black winding river flowing through the dying light. He stroked that hair with his fingernails and it was as though he were digging his hands into a vault of black jewels. Too late, I saw it. Too late, I discovered what Jordan had found on the first day he ever met Shyla Fox.

Sitting down beside her, Jordan reached up and touched Shyla’s face and smoothed the skin near her eyes and traced the line of her jaw and her cheekbone. I knew what Jordan was going to say long before he said it. I wanted to shout it out, but I did not have the right since I had not seen what had always been in front of me.

“You missed it, Jack.” Jordan said again. “All you guys missed it. Shyla doesn’t even know it. Do you, Shyla?”

“Know what, Jordan?” she asked.

“You’re so beautiful, Shyla,” he said. “You’re the prettiest girl in this town.”

“No, no,” Shyla said and she hid her face in her hands.

Jordan did not take his eyes off her. “You might as well get used to it, Shyla. You’re gorgeous. Not a girl in this two-bit town can hold a candle to you.”

Shyla got up and ran toward the music of her house. But she had heard Jordan’s words and could not sleep that night when she thought of them. Later, in the first year of our marriage, she told me that her life began at that moment.

“Your life didn’t begin until Jordan,” I said, as we lay in bed years later.

“I was in an insane asylum that year, Jack. The lady came that year.”

“They never did figure out what that was all about,” I said, breathing the smell of Shyla in as we talked in darkness.

“My mother knew who the lady was from the very beginning,” Shyla said. “It was part of a story from the war that she told me.”

“What’s the story?”

“I don’t remember. I’ve tried, but nothing’s there.”

“Who does your mother think the lady was?”

“It’s not important, darling.”

“It’s important to me. I’m your husband.”

“My mother told me who it was on the first day she came,” Shyla said. “It terrified her.”

“The name of the lady?” I insisted.

Shyla kissed me, then rolled over to go to sleep.

It would be many years before I would put the pieces together and realize that Shyla had seen the lady of coins.

I
felt shaken every time I approached Shyla’s front door. I could take no comfort, nor sense any touch of homecoming, when I brought my daughter to the house where her mother had played out the days of her childhood and had grown into the prettiest suicide the town had ever known. Her body lay between the Foxes and me and there seemed to be nothing we could do about it. We kept our meetings brief but cordial. Leah’s sheer exuberance and goodness bound us in an alliance that we all recognized as a valuable result of my return to Waterford. Since Leah had a need for us to love one another, we accommodated her as best we could. Ruth and I kept our discussions businesslike and friendly, while George and I kept out of each other’s way and acted as though we had an unspoken agreement to keep our contempt for each other under wraps. Our civility made the enmity between us seem less radical.

Ruth’s house would always be a piece of Europe lost in the hallucinatory placement of days. The Foxes had carried the gravity of their nostalgia for a homeland in their trunks and valises. This new country had succeeded in turning the Fox children into Americans, yet had not laid a finger on the parents. The English language was slippery on their tongues, too miscellaneous for precision, yet too colloquial and inaccessible to lend any sense of mastery to the immigrant. English was a fourth language for George, a third for
Ruth. George Fox still dreamed in Polish; Ruth, in Yiddish; and both found it miraculous that they still dreamed at all.

It was during the Spoleto Festival that Ruth Fox called me and asked if I would allow her husband to take Leah to a chamber music concert in Charleston. When I readily agreed, she asked me if I would come to lunch at her house and said that there were some things she wished to discuss with me. In the formal manner we had adopted with each other, I realized that Ruth was going to tell me about her childhood during the war in Europe. We had developed a shorthand code so information could be passed between us with very little being said. Because of Shyla we tried to be gentle with each other. Because of Leah we tried to find the diplomatic means of truce and detente that would one day enable us to love each other again.

The subject of Leah was our safe ground and we discussed her long after we waved good-bye to Leah and George as they pulled out of the Foxes’ driveway to begin the ninety-minute car ride to Charleston. We ate lunch on a white wicker table and she poured us glasses of California chardonnay. A dog barked far off in the town and the drone of lawn mowers could be heard on unseen lawns. The air was full of summer smells and honeybees sang in the full glory of jasmine. In this loneliest and safest of Southern towns, Ruth began to speak of Poland after the German invasion. She gave almost no introduction to her subject matter, but began in a far-off voice that I barely recognized as hers. I only tried to stop her once, but she silenced me with an uplifted hand. She needed to tell me the events that had brought her out of Poland to this veranda in Waterford—how a Jewish girl’s fate could be so complex as to bring her to such an afternoon when she would face her Christian son-in-law and tell him of what she knew about damage and terror and bedlam in a world set afire and turned upside down by cataclysmic events. By telling me what happened to her, I soon recognized that Ruth was handing over to me a gift of extraordinary value. By informing me of her history, she was demonstrating her own need to close the door on our embattled past. It was the most generous thing anyone had ever done for me: Ruth was providing me with some key to the mystery of Shyla’s death.

• • •

R
uth Fox had grown up in the town of Kronilov in Poland, the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi named Ephraim Graubart whose love of the Talmud was famous in many towns. Her mother’s name was Hannah Shem-Tov. Her grandfather was a merchant who sold vodka and brandy, a rough, outspoken man with a thousand opinions. Ruth’s grandmother was named Martha, a pious woman loved by Jew and non-Jew alike.