The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

But there is no magic to nightmares. It has always been difficult for me to face the truth about my childhood because it requires a commitment to explore the lineaments and features of a history I would prefer to forget. For years I did not have to face the demonology of my youth; I made a simple choice not to and found solace in the gentle palmistry of forgetfulness, a refuge in the cold, lordly glooms of the unconscious. But I was drawn back to the history of my family and the failures of my own adult life by a single telephone call.

It’s an act of will to have a memory or not, and I chose not to have one. Because I needed to love my mother and father in all their flawed, outrageous humanity, I could not afford to address them directly about the felonies committed against all of us. I could not hold them accountable or indict them for crimes they could not help. They, too, had a history—one that I remembered with both tenderness and pain, one that made me forgive their transgressions against their own children. In families there are no crimes beyond forgiveness.

I had lived life in the shallows for too long and she led me gently toward the deeper waters where all the bones, wreckage, and black hulks awaited my hesitant inspection.

They were ten, nine, and seven, two brown-haired girls divided by one blonde, and their ages and size and beauty always startled me; I could measure my own diminishment with their sunny ripening.

“I do not. But I know we’re screwing you up a little bit every day. If we knew how we were doing it, we’d stop. We wouldn’t do it ever again, because we adore you. But we’re parents and we can’t help it. It’s our job to screw you up. Do you understand?”

“Do you think our kids will think that?” “No, our kids will only hate their father. Have you noticed they’re already sick of my sense of humor and the oldest is only ten years old? I’ve got to develop some new routines.” “I like your routines, Tom. I think they’re funny. That’s one of the reasons I married you. I knew we’d spend a great deal of the time laughing.” “Bless you, Doctor. Okay, here’s Mom. Could you tie some garlic around my throat and bring me a crucifix?”

into strangers. I tried to fight my way back toward Sallie, tried to regain contact. “I haven’t figured everything out yet. I can’t figure out why I hate myself more than anyone else in the world. It doesn’t make sense to me. Even if Mom and Dad were monsters, I should have come out of it with some kind of respect for myself as a survivor, if nothing else. I should have at least come out of it honest, but I’m the most dishonest person I’ve ever met. I never know exactly how I feel about something. There’s always something secret hidden from me.”

breaking into a sweat, and gasping for air. If I could hurt the body, I would not notice the coming apart of the soul.

In her last poems, Savannah spoke of her breakdowns, her demons, her insanity. She spoke of them with astonishment and respect and a heartbreaking sadness. But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention. There were no gargoyles in her work, only defiled angels crying for home. It was all new to New York, but it wasn’t new to me and Luke. We were witnesses at the creation. In our house by the river we had watched a poet grow.

“That doesn’t change the past,” she answered. “What do you do about the past? Why hasn’t it harmed you like it’s harmed me?” “I don’t think about it, Savannah,” I said. “I pretend it never happened.” “It’s over, sweetheart. We survived it. Anyway, we’re adults now and we’ve got the rest of our lives to think about,” Luke added. “Until I figure out the past, I can’t bear to think about the rest of my life. It fucked me up, Luke and Tom. I see things. I hear things. All the time. I don’t just write that in the poems. I’ve been seeing a psychiatrist ever since I came to New York.” “What kind of things do you see and hear?” I asked. “I’ll tell you before you go back. I promise I will. I don’t want to tell you now.” “It’s from eating this kind of shit,” Luke said, directing his scorn for the city toward the wilting croissant. “Your constitution just isn’t used to it. I had diarrhea the whole time I was in Vietnam from eating all that gook food.” “Please shut up, Luke,” I said. “She’s talking about mental illness, not diarrhea.” “How do you know mental illness is not some kind of diarrhea of the brain, big man? Something goes haywire and the body has a thousand different ways of letting you know something’s wrong. The body’s got integrity and you’ve got to listen to it.”

“You and I aren’t crazy, Tom. We’re normal. Especially me. You get a little moody sometimes but I think that’s because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up.

“All right,” I said. “But don’t you pretend that day never happened. Because that makes me crazy. We’ve pretended too much in our family, Luke, and hidden far too much. I think we’re all going to pay a high price for our inability to face the truth.”

“No. I just think the truth is leaking out all over her. I don’t think she faced it any better than we did, but I don’t think her powers of suppression are as strong as ours either.” “She’s crazy because she writes.” “She’s crazy because of what she has to write about. She writes about a young girl growing up in South Carolina, about what she knows best in the world. What would you have her write about—Zulu teenagers, Eskimo drug addicts?”

Yet I would not sleep anymore on this last remarkable night in New York City. Instead, I thought about how we had all arrived at this point in time, what benedictions and aggrievements each of us had carried from the island and how each of us had an indisputable and unchangeable role in our family’s grotesque melodrama. From earliest childhood, Savannah had been chosen to bear the weight of the family’s accumulated psychotic energy. Her luminous sensitivity left her open to the violence and disaffection of our household and we used her to store the bitterness of our mordant chronicle. I could see it now: One member of the family, by a process of artificial but deadly selection, is nominated to be the lunatic, and all neurosis, wildness, and displaced suffering settles like dust in the eaves and porches of that tenderest, most vulnerable psyche. Craziness attacks the softest eyes and hamstrings the gentlest flanks. When was Savannah chosen to be the crazy one? I thought. When was the decision made and was it by acclamation and had I, her twin, agreed to the decision? Had I played a part in stringing up the bleeding angels in her room and could I help cut those angels down?

Because of his enormous strength, there was something untouchable about his presence. He had the soul of a fortress and eyes that had peered at the world from battlements too long. He spoke his gospels and philosophies with his body alone. His injuries were all internal and I wondered if he would ever have to assess the extent of his wounds. I knew he would never understand our sister’s running war with the past and the long march of her private, inimitable demons through her daylight hours, nor did I think Savannah could appreciate the magnitude of Luke’s dilemma: the undermining responsibilities and duties of inarticulate strength. Luke acted when the heart cried out; the poetry in him was wordless. Luke was neither poet nor psychotic. He was a man of action, and that was the intolerable burden our family presented to him simply because he was born first of all.

And I? What had I become, sleepless and dazzled by the monstrous seraphim prowling before my sister’s eyes? What was my role, and did it contain the elements of grandeur or ruin? My designation in the family was normality. I was the balanced child drafted into the ranks for leadership, for coolness under fire, stability. “Solid as a rock,” my mother would describe me to her friends, and I thought the description was perfect. I was courteous, bright, popular, and religious. I was the neutral country, the family Switzerland. A symbol of righteousness, I paid homage to the irreproachable figure of the child my parents always wanted. Respectful of the courtesies, I had entered my adulthood timid and eager to please. And while my sister screamed and fought against the black dogs of her underworld and my brother slept like an infant, I stayed up the night and knew that I had passed an important week in my life. I had been married for almost six years, had established my career as teacher and coach, and was living out my life as a mediocre man.

The first time I had come apart and had hidden my face in my hands. Now, I remembered something she had told me: that deep within her stillness and solitude, her spirit was healing itself in the unreachable places, mining the riches and ores that lay concealed in the most inaccessible passages of her mind. And, she had added, she could not hurt herself when she was not moving, only cleanse herself, only prepare for the day when she reached again for the light. When she reached for that light, I planned

I knew I should not drink but I wanted to. I was supposed to tell this woman my story in order to help my sister. But I had decided on a different strategy: I would tell her my story to save myself from myself.

“Now I’m in the process of falling apart. That’s never been a role reserved for me. My family has always expected me to be the tower of strength, the man with the whistle, the good coach. I’ve always been the first secretary and star witness to the family melodrama.” “Aren’t you being a bit dramatic, Tom?” “Yes. And now I’ll stop and be charming.”

But there are some things only sisters can teach the coaches in their lives. Teach them this, Tom, and teach them very well: Teach them the quiet verbs of kindness, to live beyond themselves. Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness, pull them deep into yourself, pull them upward toward manhood, but softly like an angel arranging clouds. Let your spirit move through them softly, as your spirit moves through me.

The silence of early mornings began to please me. In stillness, I started to keep a journal, making solemn notations in the formal public school handwriting that grew smaller each year, mirroring my own diminishment. At first, I concentrated only on what was essential to Savannah’s story, but I kept returning to myself, able to tell the story only through my own eyes. I had no right or credibility to interpret the world through her eyes. The best I could do for my sister would be to tell my own story as honestly as I could. I

But first there had to be a time of renewal, time to master a fresh approach to self-scrutiny. I had lost nearly thirty-seven years to the image I carried of myself. I had ambushed myself by believing, to the letter, my parents’ definition of me.

They succeeded not only in making me normal but also in making me dull. But their most iniquitous gift they did not even know they were bestowing. I longed for their approval, their applause, their pure uncomplicated love for me, and I looked for it years after I realized they were not even capable of letting me have it. To love one’s children is to love oneself, and this was a state of supererogatory grace denied my parents by birth and circumstance.

thought I had succeeded in not becoming a violent man, but even that belief collapsed: My violence was subterranean, unbeheld. It was my silence, my long withdrawals, that I had turned into dangerous things.

So I looked to this surprise summer of freedom as a last chance to take my full measure as a man, a troubled interregnum before I ventured into the pitfalls and ceremonials of middle age. I wanted, by an act of conscious will, to make it a time of reckoning and, if I was lucky, a time of healing and reconstitution of an eclipsed spirit.

Every woman I had ever met who walked through the world appraised and classified by an extraordinary physicality had also received the keys to an unbearable solitude. It was the coefficient of their beauty, the price they had to pay.

My mother’s voice would change and lose its music when he came. She became a different woman the moment he opened the door, and the whole environment of the house would change. I would hear their voices, low and susurrant, speaking over the late dinner, careful not to wake us, as they discussed the events of the day.

I have tried to understand women, and this obsession has left me both enraged and ridiculous. The gulf is too vast and oceanic and treacherous. There is a mountain range between the sexes with no exotic race of Sherpas to translate the enigmas of those deadly slopes that separate us. Since I failed to know my mother, I was denied the gift of knowing the other women who would cross my path.

walk up that mountain and discover the invisible cuttings in the granite where I once listened to my father call me a girl. I’ll never forget my father’s words on that day, or how my face felt after he slapped me, or the sight of the blood on my brother’s pants. I did not understand, but I did know that I wanted to model myself after my mother. From that day, I renounced the part of me that was his and hated the fact I was male.

Slowly, we began to demythologize the outlawed woods. Soon we knew the acreage of that forest better than any Candler ever had. We learned its secrets and boundaries, hid in its groves and arbors, and felt the old thrill of disobedience buoyant in young hearts gallant enough to ignore the strange laws of adults.

When it was over, my mother found me eating popcorn, watching the Ed Sullivan Show as though nothing had happened. But for two days I could not speak. Papa John had slept through the entire attack and had not even awakened to the gunfire or the coming of the police. When he wondered at the reason for my silence, my mother said “laryngitis” and my grandmother seconded her lie. They were southern women who felt a responsibility to protect their men from danger and bad news. My silence, my pathetic wordlessness, affirmed their belief in the basic fragility and weakness of men.

When Papa John died, she released all of them deep in the Callanwolde woods. She, nor any of us, ever killed a spider again. The spider became the first of a number of sacred species in our family chronicle.

“Monique’s pain is as real to her as Sue Ellen’s pain was to her. I’m perfectly sure of that. No one has the patent on human suffering. People hurt in different ways and for different reasons.” “I would make a lousy shrink.”

Her voice was colder when she answered. “Why do you want to be attractive to me, Tom? I don’t see how that could help either your sister or you.” “There’s nothing to be alarmed about, Dr. Lowenstein,” I groaned. “I did not say what I was trying to say very well. Jesus God, I apologize. I see I’ve activated every one of the feminist warning flags flapping in your central nervous system. I only wanted you to like me because you’re a bright and beautiful woman. I haven’t felt attractive in a very long time, Lowenstein.” Again, there was a softening, and I watched her mouth relax as she said, “Neither have I, Tom.” Looking at her, I was astonished to realize that she was speaking a painful truth. There was a large mirror behind the bar and I saw the two of us reflected as languorous images beneath the shining cocktail glasses.. “Do you see yourself in that mirror, Dr. Lowenstein?” I said. “Yes,” she said, turning away from me and looking toward the bar. “That’s not an attractive face, Dr. Lowenstein,” I said, rising to leave. “By any measure or by any standard in the world, that is a beautiful face. It’s been a pleasure staring at it for the last couple of weeks.” “My husband doesn’t find me very attractive,” she said. “It’s nice of you to say that.”

By rambling about, Tolitha discovered that there were things to be learned on the tangents and the extremities. She honored the margins; the wild side made all the difference. At the summer solstice of 1954, an amiable band of Sherpas led my grandmother on a two-week trek through the Himalayas where at dawn one morning on the brutally cold rooftop of the world, she watched sunlight disclose the snowy flanks of Mount Everest. A month later she saw a migration of sea snakes in the South China Sea and was on her way home.

Her secret, we would discover, was that once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers, that the mind can never break off from the journey.

Tolitha gave not a shit about the public opinion of Colleton. She was the only woman I knew when I was growing up who had ever been divorced. In many ways, she was the first modern woman that Colleton had produced. She offered no explanations and no apologies for her actions. After her return there were rumors of other marriages on the road, alliances with lonely men on ships, affairs of both convenience and the heart, but Tolitha said nothing. She simply returned to my grandfather’s house and began living with him again as his wife. Amos still bored her with the rapture of his religious convictions. But there was something ineffable between them, something comfortable, something friendly. My grandfather was delighted to have her back. He had never looked at another woman. He was one of those rare men who are capable of being fully in love only once in their lives. I think my grandmother could have loved a hundred men. As I grew older and got to know her, I think she probably did. She was irresistible to men and a threat to every woman who crossed her path. Her allure was offbeat, indefinable, and original.

She understood the nature of sin and knew that its most volatile form was the kind that did not recognize itself.

From her mistakes, she had codified an unadulterated ethic: Love was not a bridesmaid of despair; love did not have to hurt.

But my grandmother brought back from her journeys a revolutionary doctrine: Love has no weapons; it has no fists. Love does not bruise, nor does it draw blood.

with a man committed to saintliness. Saints make wonderful grandfathers but lousy husbands. Years

For very different reasons, neither of my grandparents ever got around to the fundamental business of raising their only child. There was something unsponsored, even unreconcilable, about my father’s quarrel with the world. His childhood had been a sanctioned debacle of neglect, and my grandparents were the pale, unindictable executors of my father’s violations against his own children.

If your parents disapprove of you and are cunning with their disapproval, there will never come a new dawn when you can become convinced of your own value. There is no fixing a damaged childhood. The best you can hope for is to make the sucker float.

“And each year, I lose a little bit more of what made me special as a kid. I don’t think as much or question as much. I dare nothing. I put nothing on the line. Even my passions are now frayed and pathetic. Once I dreamed I’d be a great man, Lowenstein. Now, the best I can hope for is that I can fight my way back to being a mediocre man.” “It sounds like a desperate life.” “No,” I disagreed, “I think it sounds like an ordinary one. Look, I’ve kept you here late. Is it possible I could take you to dinner to make up for my inexcusable behavior?”

“Every time you say something personal, Tom,” she said, “it seems as though you’re putting more distance between us. There are times you seem very open, but it’s a false openness.” “I’m an American male, Lowenstein,” I said, smiling. “It’s not my job to be open.” “What exactly is the American male’s job?” she asked. “To be maddening. To be unreadable, controlling, bull-headed, and insensitive,” I said. “You’d be amazed at the different points of view I hear expressed by my male and female patients,” she said. “It’s as though they were speaking of citizens from entirely different countries.” “There’s only one crime a woman cannot be forgiven for,” I said. “No husband will ever forgive her for marrying him. The American male is a quivering mass of insecurities. If a woman makes the mistake of loving him, he will make her suffer terribly for her utter lack of taste. I don’t think men can ever forgive women for loving them to the exclusion of all others.”

I could not hear about Susan’s father without cringing at the thought of the harm I had caused the women of my own family. In happy times, love poured out of me like bright honey from a stolen hive. But in times of hurt and loss I withdrew into a self-made enclosure of impenetrable solitude, and the women who tried to touch me there—all of them—drew back in utter horror as I wounded them again and again for daring to love me when I knew my love was all corruption. I was one of those men who killed their women slowly. My love was a form of gangrene withering the soft tissues of the soul. I had a sister who had tried to kill herself and who did not wish to see me, a wife who had found a man who loved her, daughters who did not know a thing about me, and a mother who knew far too much. “Change it all,” I said to myself as I sat listening to Susan Lowenstein while she relaxed under the influence of the wine and the sedate ambiance of the Coach House. “Change everything about yourself and change it absolutely.”

“Yes,” she said. “I’ve always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position.”

I was eight years old and I remember it clear as if it happened fifteen minutes ago. That’s the only strange part of life. I still feel like an eight-year-old girl trapped in an old body. Johnny was as ugly as a muskrat from the day he was born.”

Standing there, mute and ashamed, I knew instinctively and for all time why Isabel Newbury disliked my mother, and it had nothing at all to do with her being a Wingo. Time had marked her early and cruelly with all the bend sinisters and cinquefoils of its inerasable heraldry. There was an aura of sickliness about her, the kind of decay that begins in the heart and works its way out to the eyes.

Yet nothing my father could accomplish as a shrimper would ever have value to my mother. In my mother’s eyes, my father was vulnerable, helpless, and shrill. He tried hard to remake himself in the image of the man he thought she wanted him to be. He hungered for my mother’s unqualified respect. His efforts were self-defeating and pathetic, but he could not help himself. Their marriage was dissonant and harsh. His success as a shrimper financed his disastrous business schemes. The bankers laughed behind his back. He became a joke in town. His children heard the jokes at school; his wife heard them on the streets of Colleton.