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There is no fixing a damaged childhood. The best you can hope for is to make the sucker float.
“She’s the fourth one that’s died, Tom. That’s some kind of sign from God, don’t you think? I think these poor little creatures are choosing not to live. I think they hear what goes on in this house and are just saying, ‘No, sir, this surely ain’t for me.’ They don’t know that you, me, and Luke are good.”
She had imprisoned me with the bitterness and honesty of her testimony; by taking me into her confidence, she made me an unwilling co-conspirator in her undeclared war against Luke and Savannah.
“I’ve always thought that dreams were both the love letters and the hate mail of the subconscious. It’s just a form of discipline to remember your dreams.”
“Luke, the fanatic. Tom, the failure. Savannah, the lunatic.”
Mom has to have what she can’t get. That’s the only thing that’s ever meant anything to her.”
I felt a desire stir in me like some nearly extinct beast shaking off the effects of a long and troubled hibernation.
As lovers, they begat children; as enemies, they created damaged, endangered children.
I could always feel the fury of some higher love shimmering between them, even in their worst and most dangerous moments.
It was clear my father adored my mother, but it was not clear to me why a man should feel compelled to abuse what he loved the most.
“I’ve never done one thing in my life that makes me deserve to burn in hell for all eternity. Any god that does that isn’t deserving of the name. I’ve tried hard to live an interesting life and I don’t see any harm that comes from that.”
There were many things wrong with my childhood but the river was not one of them, nor can the inestimable riches it imparted be traded or sold.
All the women who loved me, who took me to their breast, who felt me inside them, moving in them, whispering their name, crying out to them in darkness, all of them I betrayed by turning them slowly and by degrees from lovers into friends.
I could always take down a large ordnance of the finest, most cutting weaponry to defend her when I thought or dreamed about Savannah. But in real life, I could not even shield the soft veins of her wrists from her own interior wars.
“You’re not a bad mother. Bernard is a teenager. Teenagers are, by definition, not fit for human society. It’s their job to act like assholes and make their parents miserable.”
The aftertaste held like a chord on my tongue; my mouth felt like a field of flowers. The mousse made me happy to be alive.
Susan Lowenstein reached across the table and took my hand in hers. She put my hand to her lips and bit the flesh on the top of my hand and that is what I remember most from my meal at Lutèce.
It had been a long time since my mother and I had faced each other as friends; it had been years since she could utter a single word without my interpreting it as a cunning strategy to leave me helpless before one of her soft and perfumed assaults on the soul.
Love would always come to me disguised in beauty, disfigured by softness. The world can do worse than make an enemy of your mother, but not much.
“We were raised by the music of rivers, artless and unself-conscious, and we have spent our childhood days beside these waters, seduced by the charms of the loveliest town in the Carolina lowcountry.”
We were about to learn that fear is a dark art that requires a perfect teacher. In blood, we were about to sign our names in the indifferent pages of the book of hours. Our perfect teachers had come. But it all began with music.
All pandemonium was loose in that house, and the smell of death and the sweet odor of brain and the radio playing a song by Jerry Lee Lewis made Floyd Merlin know just before he died that they had chosen wrong when they chose the house of Wingo.
Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; its afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.
Violence sends deep roots into the heart; it has no seasons; it is always ripe, evergreen.
In silence we would honor our private shame and make it unspeakable.
No, I cried because my children would never know him and I knew that I was not articulate enough in any language to describe the perfect solitude and perfect charity of a man who believed and lived every simple word of the book he sold door to door the length and breadth of the American South.
There is an art to farewell, but we were too young to have mastered it.
As a town, we had made the error of staying small—and there is no more unforgivable crime in America.
“Because she’s my mother and it’s a natural law and a sign of mental health when any woman can summon enough strength to hate her mother,” she answered. “My analyst says it’s an important stage for me to work through.”
He thought he understood the American soul and learned that he could not even sound the depths of his own.
The story of my family was the story of salt water, of boats and shrimp, of tears and storm.
“I’m going to make it, Tom,” she said. Then, looking at the sun and the moon again, she added, “Wholeness, Tom. It all comes back. It’s all a circle.”