Beach Music (89 page)

“Let’s wrap it up in about ten minutes,” Mike said to the crew, who were working with precision and speed. “Everybody knows the drill. Once we get started, my guests are not to be aware you boys are in the building.
Comprende?
You’re neither to be seen nor heard. We’re not after art here. I just want this recorded,” he said as Ledare and I moved down the front aisle.

“What union rules apply here?” the man setting up camera angles asked and his voice was teasing.

“None, mousedick,” Mike said, smiling. “South Carolina’s a right-to-work state. Ever since Fort Sumter they’ve hated everything that even reminded them of the word ‘union.’ ”

“What’s this for?” a cameraman shouted from a rear balcony.

“Just a home movie,” Mike said, clapping his hands.

As we approached Mike, he clapped his hands again and his crew disappeared and we did not see them again. His preparation was exacting and precise. We were the first to arrive.

“You’re early,” Mike said. “Early makes me nervous.”

“Then we’ll leave,” Ledare said.

“No, I’ve staggered the time of arrival for everyone. Capers and Betsy were supposed to get here first, but they’re late. Go up and take your seats. You’re on stage left. The food’s to die for and there’s plenty to drink.”

“What’re our roles?” Ledare asked.

“Today, we improvise. Anything goes. Everything out on the table,” Mike said. “It’ll become clear to you when everyone shows up.”

A movement caught my eye in the back of the theater and I turned to see the straight-backed silhouette of General Rembert Elliott standing at attention beside the back rows. He was joined by a
taller gray-haired man and it surprised me when I saw my own father walking down the aisle dressed in his judicial robes. Together, they had driven up from Waterford. A woman cleared her throat behind me onstage and I turned to see Celestine Elliott, who must have entered by the stage door, watching her husband approach with a look that could have shattered chrome.

When he saw his wife, General Elliott halted in his tracks and watched as she took her seat on the left side of the stage. I knew that they had not seen each other since the disastrous visit to Rome and had only communicated through the offices of their attorneys. The general bowed to me and Ledare with exaggerated formality.

“It scares me, Jack,” Ledare said as we watched them make their way to their places.

“What?” I asked.

“When I’m seventy, I want all my mistakes behind me. I want thirty years of good and brilliant living behind me. Look at them. The judge, the general, Celestine. They’re all in agony. I couldn’t bear it if I thought the rest of my life would be as painful as my past.”

“Introspection’s a mistake,” I said. “Be happy drifting along the shallows.”

“That’s no answer,” she said.

“I agree,” I said. “But at least it’s a game plan.”

Capers Middleton gave a shout of greeting to everyone as he and Betsy made their bold, confident entrance from the rear. Everything about them seemed exaggerated to me as if their metabolism was burning a bit brighter than the rest of ours. Their smiles seemed like grimaces to me. Like every politician I had ever seen, Capers’ eyes took in all the players in the room at a single glance. I saw him nod at Ledare, but the gesture was condescending, dismissive. When Capers left someone behind, it was permanent and he granted no right of appeal, unless, of course, he found he needed a favor from that person along the way. With businesslike economy, he steered Betsy to their seats on the stage, wasting no time on small talk with Mike or us. Though it was vitally important to Capers that he seem in command of every situation, I could tell that he was nervous in the midst of this gathering from our mutual pasts.

Mike checked his watch and looked toward the side door of the Dock Street. My father had taken his place behind a desk on a raised platform with a judge’s gavel on the desk. He hit the hammer twice on the oak desk, more to break the extraordinary tension than anything else. He looked more broken than old, and I realized how much I had neglected him since my return to Waterford and my clumsy attempts at caring for my mother. I tried to make myself feel about him the way I thought a son should about his father, but I could not fake an emotion that was not there. Pity surged through me unbidden when it was love I was after. My father stood up, smoothed out his robes, and adjusted his tie and collar. Then he sat down and resumed his seat like the rest of us.

Mike had arranged the seating brilliantly. At the back of stage center was the judge’s chair and table and directly to the right was a handsome high-backed chair. Flowing from this centerpiece were comfortable plush chairs, set in big semicircles and facing each other. They were color-coordinated, lending an atmosphere that was both convivial and homey. On the left sat Ledare, Celestine, and I; next to me was a chair as yet unoccupied. Across from us were Capers, Betsy, General Elliott, and another unoccupied chair. Behind each of our chairs had been placed several taller wooden chairs. High above me on the left, I caught the barely perceptible movement of a cameraman adjusting a lens.

Mike stood at center stage, next to the judge, near the high-backed chair, where he could see all of us easily. “Welcome, my friends, and thank you for joining me today. I want all of you to know that you’re being filmed and recorded. If you feel like speaking out, just raise your hand and Judge McCall will grant you permission to speak. When I take my seat, this will become like a court of law. The judge will preside. He is the only paid participant tonight. The rest of you are here because you’ve all been important to me in some way. I’m bound by my love and admiration for you. I’ve known most of you my whole life.

“Why here?” Mike asked rhetorically. “Because I thought in this theater, we could come together as though we were in a play, a drama that we will write together, tonight. I have brought two mystery guests to the Dock Street. This play will have surprises, but it
will also have resolution. All of us will vote at the end of this performance. The man on trial has given me his permission to allow each of you to cast a vote deciding his fate.

“Ah! I see you’re interested. Intrigued, perhaps. Hooked. I would give you the rules, but there are no rules. You are going to be asked to do nothing more or less than sit in judgment on the past. All of you except Betsy were either participants in the events we are about to describe together or witnesses. Some of you are the stars of this production, but all of you helped move the action in some way.
Hamlet
would not be
Hamlet
without Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and this story would be incomplete without each of you.

“Everyone knows that Capers, Jack, and I were inseparable growing up. When I think of friendship, these are the two names that come to me first. Jack and I have grown apart and this hurts me more than I can say. I think it is also safe to say that Jack hates Capers, or at least dislikes him very much.”

I sat in my place across from Capers and looked directly into his eyes and said, “Hate’s the word, Mike.”

Capers’ wife, Betsy, who was seated next to her husband, said, “I told you from the beginning, Mike, I don’t like this at all. I won’t sit here and let my husband be criticized by a fake sous-chef.”

I smiled and said, “I like you for your mind, Betsy. I wept during that last beauty pageant when you played ‘Ode to Joy’ on the kazoo.”

“Don’t bully my poor wife, Jack,” Capers said. “It doesn’t become you.”

My father rapped his gavel on his desk at center stage and said, “That’ll be enough, son.”

“You don’t get it,” Capers said. “I still love you, Jack. That’s what this evening’s all about.”

“Then it’s going to be a long evening, pal,” I said.

The gavel came down again. “I want order here.”

Again, the gavel hammered against the oak desk and this time I kept quiet before my father’s red-faced fury.

General Elliott stood up from where he sat, every inch the military man, his bearing authoritarian, fractious. He still looked as
though he could swim a river and cut the throat of every guard near an ammo depot.

“This evening’s about my son, isn’t it?” he asked Mike.

“What happened to Jordan is central to everything, General. All of us know that. If the Marine Corps hadn’t stationed you on Pollock Island, none of this would’ve happened. Jack and Capers would still be best friends. You and Celestine wouldn’t be getting a divorce. I think it’s possible that even Shyla might be alive today, though that may be a stretch. But Jordan coming to town changed everything. He not only became our best friend, he became our destiny.”

“If you know anything about the whereabouts of my son, then you are required to report it to federal authorities. If you know where he is, you could be accused of harboring a fugitive. I’ll turn you in myself, Mike, and you know I’m as good as my word.”

“Shut up,” Celestine said.

The judge rapped the gavel once more, a single, echoing note of order. The general turned again toward Mike. His voice was so pained it was as if he were addressing the commander of a firing squad.

“If you know the whereabouts of my son, you have a moral obligation to report that information to the authorities,” he said.

From behind the curtain at stage left there was a slight movement and Jordan Elliott, immaculate in his Trappist robes, walked to center stage. Another monk and Father Jude accompanied him partway, then took their seats at the side of the stage in the shadows.

“Hello, Dad,” Jordan said to the general. “You never did know what happened. You know all parts of the story except mine.”

“Two innocent people died because of you,” the general said, his astonishment at the sight of his son removing some of the edge in his voice. “Instead of a soldier, I raised a fugitive and a weakling.”

“None of us knew it then, Dad,” Jordan said, “but you had raised a priest.”

“My Church would not accept a murderer at the altar,” said the general, staring at the other two priests on the stage.

The abbot rose and went to stand beside Jordan, then said, “I met your son in Rome when he was a novice. I became both his
sponsor and confessor. The forgiveness of sins is central to the profession of the Roman Catholic faith. Among the Trappists who have come to know him, your son is considered a good man by all and a saintly man by some.”

“He’s a disgrace to his country and his faith,” the general said. “Who considers him a saint?”

“His confessor does,” the abbot said, bowing and returning to his seat.

“I did not give you permission to sit down,” the general said.

The abbot wiped his brow with his sleeve and said, “I don’t need your permission to sit, thank you, General. You, sir, have retired and your rank is merely decorative. I am presently the abbot of Mepkin Abbey and my authority bears the weight and imprimatur of an unbroken two-thousand-year spiritual reign. And do not raise your voice to me again, sir. Your son is here at my suggestion and forbearance and I can take him away from here and hide him in places you’ve not dreamed of on this globe.”

“Vatican II,” the general sneered. “That’s when the Church went wrong. That fat Pope who couldn’t do a chin-up if his life depended on it got every liberal-thinking dildo and dandy he could dig up, got them together at Vatican II to dismantle everything that was true and unreplaceable in the Catholic Church. When the Church was stern the Church was good. I loathe this new, limpwristed, feel-good, touchy-feely Church where the priests and nuns screw like mink and play the guitar at High Mass singing ‘Kumbaya.’ ”

My father hit his desk again and said, “You’re wasting time, General. You’re rambling. It’s time to move forward.”

“There’s one more mystery guest to present,” Mike said. “Many of you won’t know this guest except as legend. If you read the papers during our college years at Carolina, you’d recognize his name. Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce you all to ‘Radical Bob’ Merrill, the leader of the Students for a Democratic Society at Carolina from 1969 to 1971.”

As I turned to watch Bob Merrill walk onto the stage behind me, I had a terrible realization that this night was going to be harder and more destructive on everyone than Mike had ever dreamt. I
thought I hated Capers Middleton more than anyone in the world, but I had forgotten all about Radical Bob Merrill. Radical Bob had made a cameo appearance in all our lives, did incalculable damage, then dropped out of sight.

Merrill walked over to Capers and the two men embraced. Bob then came across to Jordan and he embraced the priest. Turning to me, he extended his hand warily.

“If I take your hand,” I said, “then the next stop’s your throat.”

“You should really try to grow up, Jack,” Bob said. “It’s time to let bygones be bygones.”

“When you accepted this invitation tonight, Bob,” I said, “did you figure out how you were going to get out of this theater without me kicking the shit out of you?”

The hammer sounded again, the judge cleared his throat, and Mike moved between the two of us.

“Who is Radical Bob?” my father asked.

“Radical Bob was the original leader of the antiwar movement on campus that swept us all up in its activities,” Mike explained.

“Where is all this leading, Mike?” my father asked.

“Judge,” Mike said, delighted at his cue. “I can’t answer that question until we come to the very end of this production.”

Ledare stood up and faced Mike. “What do you get out of this, Mike? You’ve always been generous, but you’ve never been generous to a fault.”

“Thanks for that sterling recommendation, darling,” Mike said. “But Ledare is right. I get the rights to Jordan’s story for arranging this evening. If we decide that Jordan is guilty, then he’ll turn himself in to the proper authorities on Pollock Island. Capers has offered his services as an attorney if Jordan is prosecuted for his crimes. Free of charge.”

“So Capers will look heroic to the voters of South Carolina,” Ledare said. “ ‘Middleton to Defend Killer Priest, Boyhood Friend.’ ”

“Cynicism makes you less pretty, dear,” Capers said, smiling.