“Tom, I don’t remember that at all. It’s frightening.”
“It doesn’t make any difference, Savannah. I won’t tell anyone.”
“Tom, there’s a lot I don’t remember after it’s happened. Then I have to pretend I remember everything. It gets confusing.”
“What else?”
“Do you remember that time in Atlanta when we were on Stone Mountain and I hit you?”
“Sure. You were a jerk that day.”
“I don’t remember anything about it. That whole day is blank to me, like it never happened. And the giant. When he came into our room and Luke and I threw all those jars of spiders . . . ”
“I know, and I just lay there in bed doing nothing.”
“I don’t remember a single thing about that night. I only know it happened when I hear people say it happened.”
“Are you serious?”
“Tom, I need you to remember things for me. I can’t sometimes. There are too many days that disappear from me and it frightens me more than anything in the world. I tried to talk to Mama about it but she just laughed and said I wasn’t concentrating.”
“Sure. I’ll be glad to tell you, Savannah. Only you can’t call me a liar and make fun of me every time I tell you something that’s happened. Luke looked at me like I was a plain fool when I told about you and Rose Aster today.”
“Tom, I didn’t believe you until I felt this wet spot in the bed. And my nightgown was damp, too. Why would I do such a thing?”
“Because you were sad about the baby and thought she might be lonely. You didn’t mean anything harmful. You care about things, Savannah. Mom says you’re oversensitive because you’re a girl and that it’s going to cost you a lot of grief in your life.”
“Something’s wrong with me, Tom,” she said, holding my hand and looking out toward the storm of the river. “There’s something awful wrong with me.”
“No there’s not,” I said. “You’re wonderful. You’re my twin. We’re exactly alike.”
“No! No! Tom. You’ve got to be the twin that remembers. I’ll do everything else, I promise. But you’ve got to tell me the stories. I’m starting to keep a journal. You tell me the stories and I’ll write them down.”
So Savannah began to write, filling a small school notebook with the jottings and chiselings of her daily life. There was nothing insurrect or minatory in these early writings. They were fresh and childish. She recorded conversations she had with favored dolls and imaginary playmates. Even then, her interior life was far more important to her than her external one.
It was the year my mother made us learn the prayer to our guardian angels. All our religion we learned by rote, and prayer was no exception. It was the same year we memorized the Act of Contrition and the Act of Hope. Yet our mother could never explain to our satisfaction just who these guardian angels were. They sat nameless on our right shoulders, whispering to us whenever we were stumbling blindly toward actions that would offend God. Assigned to us at birth, they would not forsake their posts just above our shoulder blades until we died. They monitored our sins like scrupulous accountants. On our left shoulders an ambassador of Satan acted in maleficent counterbalance to our guardian angel. This devil, a black articulate seraph, tried to lead us toward the succulents of perdition.
The duality led to much theological confusion. But Savannah welcomed two invisible companions into her life. She called the good angel Aretha; the dark angel was called Norton.
But she had misheard my mother’s pronunciation of the word guardian and when she wrote down the dialogues between Aretha and Norton, she described them as her “garden angels.” There were many “garden angels” surrounding our house, hovering like the souls of azaleas above us. There were unborn Wingo children simmering beneath the thorns of roses. The garden angels were under a divine obligation to love and protect our house. They said vespers in the trees and watched over us, not because God required it, but because they cherished us and could not help it. She even recruited Norton as a foot soldier in that silent army of occupation which patrolled the winds above the river. Even a dark angel was susceptible to Savannah’s enthusiastic overtures. Savannah never believed that Norton was an agent of Satan; she claimed he was just Presbyterian.
Yet the garden angels did not intervene when my mother burned my sister’s notebook in the wood stove after Savannah recorded a fight between my mother and father word for word. In a rage, my mother burned a year’s work one page at a time as Savannah wept and begged her to stop. The words of a child became smoke above the island. Sentences took wing and fell in black fragments upon the river. My mother screamed that Savannah was never to write another word about her family again.
The next week I found Savannah kneeling in an exposed sandbar in the river at the lowest tide. She was writing furiously in the sand with her index finger. I watched from the shore for half an hour. When she had finished, the tide was turning and the water began to cover her words.
She stood and looked back toward the house and saw me watching her.
“My journal,” she cried out happily.
There was something orderly and refined about the Coach House that made it seem like home territory. A carriage house always retains a secret memory of the business of feeding well-bred, exhausted horses. Its proportions are graceful, never ostentatious, and I have yet to see a carriage house fail to make a charming residence or restaurant. The Coach House, at 110 Waverly Place, was the nonpareil of the breed. Its very shape was pleasant to my soul; the place exuded seriousness about food, and all the waiters looked competent enough to curry a thoroughbred if they burst from the kitchen and found themselves transported back to the days when hansoms glided across the cobblestones of Greenwich Village. It was the only restaurant in New York I had found without Savannah’s guidance, and Luke and I had taken her there for dinner on the publication day of The Shrimper’s Daughter. The Coach House had served us a splendid meal as Luke and I toasted our sister again and again and had her sign copies of her book both to our waiter and to Leon Lianides, the owner. Before we left, Mr. Lianides sent us each a glass of cognac, courtesy of the house. In memory, that evening carried weightlessly all the grandeur of celebration, all the rich courses of a feast we considered timeless, and all the love that flowed without effort when the three of us locked arms in our perfect, extravagant affection for each other. I carried that evening with me, flawless and exhilarating, and I brought it forth often during years of sadness, suffering, and waste, brought it out of darkness with the happy taste of champagne on my tongue and laughter in my eyes, brought it out when my life fell apart around me and my brother was gone from the river and my sister could not trust herself around knives; it was the last happy ending that the three of us would ever have together.
It was raining when I arrived at the Coach House at 9:30 to meet Susan Lowenstein for dinner. The maître d’ led me to a comfortable table upstairs, placed remotely beneath several folk paintings aging well on the red brick walls. I ordered a Manhattan, honoring the island on which I sat, and only when I tasted the ghastly concoction did I remember why I had never developed a fondness for that particular cocktail. The waiter understood perfectly and brought me a dry martini to cleanse my palate.
Alone, I watched the mannerisms of the other diners as they ordered their meals and spoke to one another in the inscrutable and melancholy light of candles. I felt an intimate connection to myself as I drank alone in all the complex validation a stranger could summon when a city began to allow him access into its rarest and most tantalizing obscurities. A good restaurant freed me from the desolate narrowness, the definitive thinness of experience, that is both the vainglory and the dead giveaway of a provincial man. Above the perfect napery, I could purchase my own place in the city for the night and compose a meal that I would remember with unstinted pleasure for the rest of my life. Drinking my martini, I thought of all the exquisite meals being prepared at that very moment in Manhattan. By coming to the
Coach House I had connected myself to the largess and sublimity of a city’s grand cuisine. Though I lifted my voice often in an endless baleful serenade against New York, there were times when the food and wine of that bewildering, insuperable city could make me the happiest man on earth. Susan Lowenstein approached the table unseen as I studied a sculpturally impeccable list of appetizers. I smelled her perfume, which entered into a modest agreement with the fresh flowers on the table, before I looked up and saw her face.
She possessed one of those faces that was different every time you saw it. Though lovely in all its forms, it never seemed to belong to one person but to an entire nation of beautiful women. She could change her hair and change the way the world perceived her at the same time. Her beauty was uncapturable and vague, and I would bet that she did not photograph well. She wore a white, low-cut dress and it was the first time I had noticed the superb figure of my sister’s psychiatrist. Her black hair was piled high, long gold earrings dangled against her cheekbones, and she wore a thick gold necklace on her throat.
“Lowenstein, you look dangerous tonight,” I said.
She laughed, pleased, and said, “I bought this dress as a present for myself last year. I’ve never quite had the courage to wear it. My husband thinks I look too virginal in white.”
I studied her with generous appreciation and said, “You do not look virginal in white, Lowenstein.”
“What’s good to eat here, Tom?” she said, but she was smiling at the compliment. “I’m utterly famished.”
“Everything is good here, Lowenstein,” I said as the waiter brought us a bottle of cold Chablis I had ordered brought to the table when my guest arrived. “They’re famous for their black bean soup, but I prefer their lobster bisque. They poach their channel bass to perfection. They are flawless with their presentation and preparation of red meat of any kind. The appetizers are terrific, especially the smoked trout with horseradish sauce. Desserts are simply ambrosial here.”
“How do you know so much about food?” she asked.
“Two reasons,” I said as I lifted my glass to hers. “My mother was a terrific southern cook who thought she could improve her social status if she learned about French cuisine. Her social status remained precarious but her sauces were terrific. When Sallie went to medical school, I was forced to learn to cook. I surprised myself by loving it.”
“If I couldn’t afford to hire a cook,” she said, “my family would perish from malnutrition. The kitchen has always seemed like a slave galley to me. This wine is lovely.”
“That’s because it’s very expensive, Lowenstein. I’m charging this meal on my American Express card and the bill will be sent to my house in South Carolina and paid for by my wife.”
“Have you heard from your wife since you’ve been in New York?” Dr. Lowenstein asked.
“No,” I said. “I’ve talked to my children several times on the phone, but she’s never been at home.”
“Do you miss her?” she said, and I saw my wine glass reflecting off the gold at her throat.
“No, Lowenstein,” I said. “I’ve been a lousy husband for a long couple of years now and I’m just grateful to be away from her and the kids awhile so I can try to put myself together in some form recognizable as a man.”
“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.”
“Didn’t you tell me that Sallie was having an affair, Tom?” she said.
“Yes,” I said, “and it’s funny. I’ve noticed my wife for the first time in over a year. Only when she stopped loving me did I realize how much I loved her.”
“Have you told your wife you love her?” she asked, drinking her wine.
“I’m a husband, Lowenstein,” I said. “Of course I haven’t told my wife I love her.”
“Why do you joke when I’m asking you a serious question, Tom?” she asked. “You always divert serious questions with your humor.”
“I find it painful to even think about Sallie,” I said. “When I talk about her I can barely breathe. Laughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world was falling apart.”
“I would think tears would be far more effective than humor,” she said.
“With me,” I said, “tears seem to spring only from cheap moments. I cry when I watch the Olympics, when I hear the national anthem, at all weddings and graduations.”
“But you’re talking about sentimentality,” she interrupted. “I was speaking of grief and sorrow.”
“Southerners don’t look at sentimentality as a flaw of character, Lowenstein. A southerner can be moved to tears by almost any absurdity. It binds them to other southerners and makes them ridiculous to anyone born in the Northeast. I think it’s more a matter of weather than of temperament. The language of grief is an impoverished one in the South. Sorrow is admired only if it’s done in silence.”
She leaned across the table and said, “Savannah’s language of grief is certainly not impoverished, Tom. Her poems resonate with a terribly powerful anguish that she articulates brilliantly. And there’s not one drop of sentimentality in her poems, yet she’s southern too.”
“But she’s in the wacko ward, Doc,” I said. “And I’m drinking Chablis with her shrink at the Coach House. She’s paid a dear price for her lack of sentimentality.”
I was grateful when the waiter arrived to take our orders. I could see I had angered Susan Lowenstein with my unseemly remark about my sister’s institutionalization. Yet there was something unsettling about her ingrained curiosity about the South that could produce both a suicidal poet of magisterial gifts and a coach on the downslide who was that poet’s twin brother. There were times when she studied me with such withering intensity that she looked like a geologist hoping to find a trace of gold in the luster of gneiss. Also, I had the unsettling intuition that Dr. Lowenstein was withholding something from me about Savannah’s condition. The revoking of my visiting privileges appeared odd to me and somehow inevitable, as if Savannah had preordained my exclusion from her company long before she entered the hospital. Whenever I told Dr. Lowenstein some memory of my family, I always expected her to say, “That’s exactly how Savannah remembered it,” or “That’s very helpful in light of what Savannah told me, Tom.” It was like screaming into the mouth of an echoless cave that I was forbidden to enter. My duty was to dance to the music of my interrogation, my interpretation of those wounded screams of my sister. I would receive no corroboration in return, no applause for my honesty, and no censure for my lies. I would simply receive the next question from Susan Lowenstein and go on from there. I had somehow become the repository of memory in a family where memory had entered a fatal concubinage with suffering. I was the only witness available to explain why my sister’s madness was only a natural response to an indiscriminate curriculum of ruin.
Turning my attention to the menu, I ordered, to start with, a pair of soft-shelled crabs sautéed in butter and lemon juice and sauced with a beurre blanc studded with capers. Lowenstein had ordered the smoked trout as an appetizer and the poa
ched sea bass for an entrée. There was not a single entrée on the menu that did not appeal to me, but I finally settled on sweetbreads in a wine and morel sauce.
“Sweetbreads?” Dr. Lowenstein inquired with a raised eyebrow.
“Part of our family chronicle,” I said. “It was referred to obliquely on the tapes. My mother introduced them one mealtime and they caused a bit of friction between my parents.”
“You speak of your mother with half awe and half contempt,” she said. “It confuses me.”
“I think it shows a proper balance when speaking of my mother,” I responded. “She’s a remarkable and beautiful woman who spent her whole life searching for who she really was. With her murderous skills, she should have gotten a job sharpening guillotines. Otherwise she was simply wasting her talents.”
“Does Savannah share your exaggerated view of your mother’s powers?” she asked. Again I felt constricted as Dr. Lowenstein tried to break new ground with each question.
“You should know the answer to that question better than I do,” I said as the waiter approached with our appetizers. “She’s your patient and I’m sure she’s got very strong feelings on the subject.”
“Tom,” Dr. Lowenstein said, “Savannah was my patient for only two months before her suicide attempt. There are some things I can’t tell you about our time together in those two short months, but I’ll try to tell you sometime. I’ll need Savannah’s permission and she’s in no condition to grant it right now.”
“So you really don’t know Savannah at all, do you, Lowenstein?” I said.
“No, Tom, I really don’t know her,” she answered. “But I’m learning amazing things all the time. And I know that my instinct to ask you to stay in New York was absolutely correct.”
“Savannah could tell you these stories much better than I could,” I said.
“But could she suggest such wonderful food at restaurants?” Lowenstein answered as she took a bite of smoked trout moistened with horseradish sauce.