The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

From the very beginning she was lyrical in her advocacy of New York’s essential greatness, which she considered undeniable and beyond discussion. I denied it and discussed it obsessively.

He had torn his shirt from his back and held it tightly between her legs, the blood pumping through his fingers each time her heart beat.

the demonic, cataclysmic howl of the wind as it rushed through the barn.

From that day, I renounced the part of me that was his and hated the fact I was male.

“Because I was a shoe salesman, sweetie,

Papa John was a shoe salesman, the most common thing in the world. So he raised black widows, too. Black widows eat their husbands, after mating.

My lifelong love of spiders and insects began with my nose pressed close against Mason jars, observing the tedious and horrifying existence of black widows.

The narrator had a lifelong love of spiders and insects.

We became attuned to the seasons of spiders and time poured out of the red hourglasses in shimmering, ill-formed webs.

Female black widows have red hourglasses on their abdomens.

Atlanta

Papa John lived near Atlanta.

We longed to glimpse a single member of that noble and enchanted family.

Papa John lived near the Candler family, Coca-Cola heirs.

It was only later that I realized I loved Atlanta because it was the only place on earth I had ever lived without a father.

Callanwolde.

Callanwolde was the Candler family estate, where the giant terrified the family.

Melrose Island,

The Wingos lived on Melrose Island.

Then I felt the room go dead with fear and heard Savannah say the single, electrifying word: “Callanwolde.”

Lila,

The Wingo mother was named Lila.

The word Callanwolde changed meaning for us, and, following Savannah’s example, we began to refer to the man as Callanwolde.

After the attack, the Wingo children referred to the giant as Callanwolde, the name of the Coca Cola family estate.

Luke

Luke was a year older than the twins.

More darkly, she suggested that our father might think that she had done something to invite the attentions of Callanwolde. My father often said to her that no woman was raped who had not asked for it.

Many years later while going through some clippings in the Atlanta Public Library, I came upon a photograph and the following news item: “Otis Miller, 31, was arrested in Austell, Georgia, last night for suspicion of having raped and murdered Mrs. Bessie Furman, a local schoolteacher separated from her husband.” I made a photocopy of that story and inked a single word across it: Callanwolde.

“What’s shiva?” “Prayers for the dead,” she answered.

My childhood was one of disorder, peril, and small craft warnings.

And how many days would it take before I, Tom Wingo, child of storm, would silence her laughter and song for all time?

She did not know that she was on a collision course with a boy so damaged and bewildered he would spend his whole life trying to figure out how love was supposed to feel, how it manifested itself between two people, and how it could be practiced without rage and sorrow and blood.

From noon to three on that commemorative day he would walk up and down the length of the Street of Tides to remind the backsliding, sinful citizenry of my hometown of the unimaginable suffering of Jesus Christ on that melancholy hill above Jerusalem so long ago.

After a while, I met Papa John and married him a couple of days later.”