In 1980, a year after my wife leapt to her death from the Silas Pearlman Bridge in Charleston, South Carolina, I moved to Italy to begin life anew, taking our small daughter with me. Our sweet Leah was not quite two when my wife, Shyla, stopped her car on the highest point of the bridge and looked over, for the last time, the city she loved so well. She had put on the emergency brake and opened the door of our car, then lifted herself up to the rail of the bridge with the delicacy and enigmatic grace that was always Shyla's catlike gift. She was also quick-witted and funny, but she carried within her a dark side that she hid with bright allusions and an irony as finely wrought as lace. She had so mastered the strategies of camouflage that her own history had seemed a series of well-placed mirrors that kept her hidden from herself.

It was nearly sunset and a tape of the Drifters' Greatest Hits poured out of the car's stereo. She had recently had our car serviced and the gasoline tank was full. She had paid all the bills and set up an appointment with Dr. Joseph for my teeth to be cleaned. Even in her final moments, her instincts tended toward the orderly and the functional. She had always prided herself in keeping her madness invisible and at bay; and when she could no longer fend off the voices that grew inside her, their evil set to chaos in a minor key, her breakdown enfolded upon her, like a tarpaulin pulled across that part of her brain where once there had been light. Having served her time in mental hospitals, exhausted the wide range of pharmaceuticals, and submitted herself to the priestly rites of therapists of every theoretic persuasion, she was defenseless when the black music of her subconscious sounded its elegy for her time on earth.

On the rail, all eyewitnesses agreed, Shyla hesitated and looked out toward the sea and shipping lanes that cut past Fort Sumter, trying to compose herself for the last action of her life. Her beauty had always been a disquieting thing about her and as the wind from the sea caught her black hair, lifting it like streamers behind her, no one could understand why anyone so lovely would want to take her own life. But Shyla was tired of feeling ill-made and transitory and she wanted to set the flags of all her tomorrows at half-mast. Three days earlier, she had disappeared from our house in Ansonborough and only later did I discover that she had checked into the Mills-Hyatt House to put her affairs in order. After making appointments, writing schedules, letters, and notes that would allow our household to continue in its predictable harmony, she marked the mirror in her hotel room with an annulling X in bright red lipstick, paid her bill with cash, flirted with, the doorman, and gave a large tip to the boy who brought her the car. The staff at the hotel remarked on her cheerfulness and composure during her stay.

As Shyla steadied herself on the rail of the bridge a man approached her from behind, a man coming up from Florida, besotted with citrus and Disney World, and said in a low voice so as not to frighten the comely stranger on the bridge, "Are you okay, honey?"

She pirouetted slowly and faced him. Then with tears streaming down her face, she stepped back, and with that step, changed the lives of her family forever. Her death surprised no one who loved her, yet none of us got over it completely. Shyla was that rarest of suicides: no one held her responsible for the act itself; she was forgiven as instantly as she was missed and afterward she was deeply mourned.

For three days I joined the grim-faced crew of volunteers who searched for Shyla's remains. Ceaselessly, we dragged the length and breadth of the harbòsr, enacting a grotesque form of braille as hooks felt their way along the mudflats and the pilings of the old bridge that connected Mount Pleasant and Sullivan's Island. Two boys were crabbing when they noticed her body moving toward them beside the marsh grass.

After her funeral, a sadness took over me that seemed permanent, and I lost myself in the details and technicalities connected to death in the South. Great sorrow still needs to be fed and I dealt with my disconsolate emptiness by feeding everyone who gathered around me to offer their support. I felt as though I were providing sustenance for the entire army in the field who had come together to ease the malignant ache I felt every time Shyla's name was mentioned. The word Shyla itself became a land mine. That sweet-sounding word was merciless and I could not bear to hear it.

So I lost myself in the oils and condiments of my well-stocked kitchen. I fatted up my friends and family, attempted complicated recipes I had always put off making, and even tried my hand at Asian cuisine for the first time. With six gas burners ablaze, I turned out velvety soups and rib-sticking stews. I alternated between cooking and weeping and I prayed for the repose of the soul of my sad, hurt wife. I suffered, I grieved, I broke down, and I cooked fabulous meals for those who came to comfort me.

It was only a short time after we buried Shyla that her parents sued me for custody of my child, Lean, and their lawsuit brought me running back into the real world. I spent a dispiriting year in court trying to prove my fitness as a father. It was a time when I met a series of reptilian lawyers so unscrupulous that I would not have used their marrow to feed wild dogs or their wiry flesh to bait a crab pot. Shyla's mother and father had gone crasy with grief and I learned much about the power of scapegoating by watching their quiet hatred of me as they grimaced through the testimony regarding my sanity, my finances, my reputation in the community, and my sexual life with their eldest child.

Though I have a whole range of faults that piqued the curiosity of the court, few who have ever seen me with my daughter have any doubts about my feelings for her. I get weak at the knees at the very sight of her. She is my certification, my boarding pass into the family of man, and whatever faith in the future I still retain.

But it was not my overriding love of Leah that won the day in court. Before she took her final drive, Shyla had mailed me a letter that was part love letter and part apology for what she had done. When my lawyer had me read that letter aloud to the court, it became clear to Shyla's parents and everyone present that laying her death at my feet was, at best, a miscarriage of justice. Her letter was an act of extraordinary generosity written in the blackest hours of her life. She blew it like a kiss toward me as a final gesture of a rare, exquisite sensibility. Her letter saved Leah for me. But the ferocity of that court battle left me exhausted, bitter, and raw around the edges. It felt as though Shyla had died twice.

I answered my wife's leap from the bridge and the fierceness of that legal battle with a time of disorientation and sadness; and then with Italy. Toward Europe, I looked for respite and hermitage, and the imminence of my secret flight from South Carolina again restored a fighting spirit within me. I had made a good living as a food and travel writer and running away had always been one of the things I did best.

The flight to Europe was my attempt to place the memory of both Shyla and South Carolina permanently in the past. I hoped I would save my life and Leah's from the suffocation I was beginning to feel in the place where Shyla and I had come of age together. For me, the South was carry-on baggage I could not shed no matter how many borders I crossed, but my daughter was still a child and I wanted her to grow into young womanhood as a European, blissfully unaware of that soft ruinous South that had killed her mother in one of its prettiest rivers. My many duties as a father I took with great seriousness, but there was no law that I was aware of that insisted I raise Leah as a Southerner. Certainly, the South had been a mixed blessing for me and I carried some grievous wounds into exile with me. All the way across the Atlantic Leah slept in my lap and when she awoke, I began her transformation by teaching her to count in Italian. And so in Rome we settled and began the long process of refusing to be Southern, even though my mother started a letter-writing campaign to coax me back home. Her letters arrived every Friday: "A Southerner in Rome? A low country boy in Italy? Ridiculous. You've always been restless, Jack, never knew how to be comfortable with your own kind. But mark my words. You'll be back soon. The South's got a lot wrong with it. But it's permanent press and it doesn't wash out."

Though my mother was onto something real, I stuck by my guns. I would tell American tourists who questioned me about my accent that I no longer checked the scores of the Atlanta Braves in the Herald Tribune and they could not get me to reread Faulkner or Miss Eudora at gunpoint. I did not realize or care that I was attempting to expunge all that was most authentic about me. I was serious about needing some time to heal and giving my soul a much needed rest. My quest was amnesia; my vehicle was Rome. For five years, my plan worked very well.

But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters. No matter how much they sympathized with all my motives, those who loved me most read a clear text of treason in my action. They thought that by forcing me away from South Carolina, Shyla's leap had succeeded in taking Leah and me over the rail with her.

I understood completely, but I was so burnt out I did not care. I threw myself at the Italian language with gusto and became fluent in the street talk of the shopkeepers and the vendors of our neighborhood. In the first year of our exile, working all the angles of my trade, I completed my third cookbook, a compilation of recipes I had gathered over a ten-year career of dining out in some of the best restaurants in the South. I also wrote a travel book on Rome that became popular with American tourists as soon as it hit the giornalai. I urged every American who read it to understand Rome was both sublime and imperishably beautiful, a city that melted into leaf-blown silences and gave a splendid return to any tourist adventurous enough to stray from the main trade routes of tourism. All the pangs and difficulties of my own homesickness went into the writing of that book. The artfully hidden subtext in those first years was that foreign travel was worth every discomfort and foul-up, but took a radical toll on the spirit. Though I could write about the imperishable charms of Rome forever, I could not quiet that pearly ache in my heart that I diagnosed as the cry of home.

I kept that cry to myself, in fact, did not even admit that it was something I heard or felt. I concentrated on the task of raising Leah in a culture alien to me and I hired a maid named Maria Parise from the Umbrian countryside and watched with pleasure as she took over the task of mothering Leah. Maria was a simple, strong-willed woman, God-fearing and superstitious, as only a peasant can be, who brought an undiminishable joy to the raising of this small motherless American.

In a short amount of time Leah became part of the native fauna around the Palazzo Farnese, a beloved romanina adopted by the people who lived and plied their trades around the piazza, and she rapidly turned into the first real linguist produced by my family. Her Italian was flawless as she navigated the teeming stalls along the Campo dei Fiori with its wild rivers of fruit and cheese and olives. Very early on, I taught Leah how to tell where we were in the Campo by using her sense of smell. The south side was glazed with the smell of slain fish and no amount of water or broomwork could ever eliminate the tincture of ammonia scenting that part of the piazza. The fish had written their names in those stones. But so had the young lambs and the coffee beans and the torn arugula and the glistening tiers of citrus and the bread baking that produced a golden brown perfume from the great ovens. I whispered to Leah that a sense of smell was better than a yearbook for imprinting the delicate graffiti of time in the memory. I knew that Leah had developed a bloodhound's nose when in the middle of the second year she stopped me as we passed by the Ruggeri brothers' alimentari and said, "The truffles have arrived, Daddy, they're here," as I caught that signature odor of pure earth. As a reward, I bought Leah a fraction of that truffle, priced as dearly as uranium, and sliced it into her scrambled eggs the next morning.

The raising of Leah consumed a large portion of my days and made me place my own sorrow over the loss of Shyla in a seldom visited back lot of my life, allowing me no time to devote to my own complex feelings over her death. Leah's happiness superseded everything in my life and I was determined I would not pass our family's infinite capacity for suffering on to her. I knew that Leah, as Shyla's child and my own, would get more than her portion of the genes of grief. Together, our families contained enough sad stories to jump-start a colony of lemmings toward the nearest body of water. I had no idea if the seeds of our madness burned in secret deposits in my beautiful child's bloodstream or not. But I vowed to protect her from those stories, from both sides of her family, that could set in motion the forces that had brought me spiritually bloody and beaten to the Fiumicino airport in the first place. I confess that I became the censor of my daughter's history. The South that I described to Leah at bedtime every night existed only in my imagination. It admitted no signs of danger or nightmare. There was no dark side to the Southern moon that I recalled to my daughter, and the rivers ran clean and the camellias were always in bloom. It was a South that existed without sting or thorns or heartache.

Because I have inherited my family's gift for storytelling, my well-told lies became Leah's memories. Without realizing it, I made the mistake of turning South Carolina into a lost and secret paradise to my daughter. By carefully editing what I thought would harm her, I turned my childhood into something as glamorous as forbidden fruit. Though Rome would mark her with its most exacting emblems, I did not note the exact moment I touched my child with a lust to see the fierce, rarefied beauty of her birthplace. Even as Leah became part of the secrets that Rome whispered, she was not a native of the city, not indigenous like the flowery lichens that grew along the wall that held back the Tiber.

Almost every night in Rome, when I put Leah to bed, I would tell her a different story about either my or her mother's childhood. But there was one story she had me tell and retell over and over until it took on a fixed, by-the-numbers quality as rote as a catechist's response. Again and again, she would have me repeat the story of the night that Shyla and I first fell in love. Though we had grown up in houses that backed up to each other, had played together as toddlers, had waved back and forth from our bedroom windows, we had rarely thought of ourselves as anything other than best pals. I came from a family of five brothers and Shyla was the closest thing to a sister I ever had. Until the night on the beach in our senior year, when Shyla approached me in a most unsisterly fashion.

"I bet you flirted with Mama first," Leah would say.

"I did not," I said. "I was shy."

"Then why aren't you shy now?" she teased.

"Because your mother helped me make a delightful discovery," I said. "That I had a terrific personality."

"Even in high school?" Leah laughed, knowing the answer.

"I didn't have a personality in high school," I said. "I had pimples."

"But you dated Ledare Ansley, the class goddess, the head cheerleader," Leah said.

"She was shy too, though no one thinks a pretty girl has any right to be bashful. Because we were both afraid of everything, we made a perfect team."

"Her mother didn't like you at all," Leah said.

"She thought Ledare could do a lot better," I said. "She had a way of looking at me when I picked up Ledare as though I were a urine sample."

"You are always so crude," said Leah. "But you get mad at me if I'm crude ever."

"I never get mad at you. My job is to adore you. I find it easy."

"Go on with the story. Tell me about you and Mama falling in love. Get to the good part, to the beach party. Get to Mama, Capers Middleton, Mike, and Jordan."

As I spoke, my voice crossing the years and the Atlantic, Leah would always look at the photograph of her lovely, wide-eyed mother that rested on the bedside table. I knew that the story made her love her mother more deeply, feel closer to her in a way nothing else could, and it was just what I intended.

"I first fell in love with Shyla Fox, a girl I had known my whole life, on St. George's Island."

"It was St. Michael's Island," Leah corrected. "It's the island just before the Isle of Orion, where your mama lives now."

"That's right," I said, always pleased by her attention to detail. "A friend of mine was throwing a party at his father's house."

"It was Capers Middleton. His father owned the Coca-Cola bottling company in Waterford. He lived in the nicest mansion on Bay Street."

"Good girl. His father owned the beach house..."

"And Mama had dated Capers and a lot of other boys. She was real popular in high school, the sweetheart of Waterford High School. But Capers had brought her to the party."

"You gonna tell this story or you gonna let me?" I asked.

"You. I love the way you tell it," Leah said, her eyes resting again on her mother's picture.

Then I would begin in earnest, going back to St. Michael's Island during that storm-tossed year of northeast winds when the erosion along the barrier islands reached dangerous levels. On the shifting, undermined beach where part of an ancient forest was newly underwater to the north, the baseball team of Waterford High was throwing a party at high tide. It was the night it was predicted the Middleton house would begin to break up and fall into the sea. Four houses, a mile to the south, had been lost during the last spring tides. Though the house was condemned and abandoned, we were giving it a going-away party. Already it had begun to shift seaward, to lean toward the chased silver of the incoming breakers. The surf kept time to our dancing and counted out loud the slipping away of those last hours we would ever be teenagers. All of us had been there at the birth of rock and roll and we had done our part in putting rhythm and desire to music as we danced our way in both wildness and innocence through high school. The authorities had declared the house off-limits and we had broken through the sheriff's lock and liberated the house for one last party at flood tide.

I was almost eighteen and still in possession of that crazy edge of a teenager. Full of bravado and Maker's Mark, I had boasted that I was going to be in that house when it set sail from its anchorage on the old Seaside Road. Ledare Ansley, my date, had too much horse sense to stay in that tilted house illuminated only by the headlights of cars my teammates had driven to the party. On the way to the island, Ledare had told me sweetly that it was time we began seeing other people, that her parents were insisting that we break up soon after graduation. I nodded my head, not in agreement, but because I had not yet found my voice, which lay hidden under a hormonal frenzy that struck me nearly dumb. She also confided in me that she was going to ask Capers Middleton to accompany her to her debut at Charleston's St. Cecelia Society's Ball. My origins were iffy and much rougher than Ledare's, and my mother had warned me for years that this night was coming, but she'd never told me it would hurt as badly as it did.

The whole team and their dates had begun the night dancing to the music of transistor radios; the local station, WBEU, playing all the songs that had accompanied our class through four years of high school. The sea rose invisibly beneath us and the moon shone smooth and bright. A glossy flute of light, like velvet down a bridal aisle, lit the marlin scales and the backs of whales migrating a hundred miles at sea. The tides surged through the marsh and each wave that hit the beach came light-struck and broad-shouldered, with all the raw power the moon could bestow. Magically, an hour passed and we, ocean dancers and tide challengers, found ourselves listening to the sea directly beneath us as the waves began to crash in earnest against the house. Previous tides had already loosened the pilings and foundations pressing the house into the sands. When the noise of the surge and the breakup of concrete and wood grew too loud, many of my teammates and their dates broke prudently and ran for the line of cars and safety, as the water continued to rise beyond all believing. This great tide would eventually rise just over eight feet and it looked as though it meant to overwhelm the whole island. More and more of the dancers broke and ran laughing as the sea began to take the house apart from below. The salt-rusted nails were moaning like cellos in the grain of endangered wood. I was in the middle of doing the shag to "Annie Had a Baby" when a wave tore off the banister of the front porch and I lost my partner, Ledare Ansley, who fled outside with most of the others, squealing with fear and wearing my letterman's jacket.

Left alone, I took my pint of Maker's Mark up to the top floor and went out onto the deck just off the master bedroom. I stood face to face with the moon and the ocean and the future that spread out with all its bewildering immensity before me. It was a time in my life when many things bored me deeply and I hungered for beauty and those realms of pure elation granted to those who had the imagination to know what to look for and how to find it. It was one of the reasons I loved playing right field for the baseball team during that long season as we sparred on the immaculate fields in the sheer beauty of the game's discipline, a law unto itself. Right field was a home place for thinkers if you had the arm to keep the swift boys from going from first to third on a double. I had the arm and the mineral patience of the daydreamer and I roamed the outfield green, lamb happy and nervous when southpaws came to the plate.

A door opened behind me.

"Mama!" Leah squealed.

I looked around to see Shyla Fox in the moonlight. She looked as though she had dressed for this moment with the help of the moon. Bowing deeply, Shyla asked me if she could have the pleasure of this dance.

So we danced toward the central motion of our lives. The winds roared and a strange love rose like a tide between us and rested in the crown of waves that was loosening the frame of the house. Alone we danced beneath the full moon and the battery-powered light of cars as the team and their dates cheered each time they saw the giant shift taking place in the water-damaged foundation. As the Atlantic waters rose in a sanctioned dance of wave and tide, the house began to sway like the first terrible lifting of Noah's Ark. We could hear the other five remaining couples as they screamed with pleasure and terror in that room directly beneath us. I held Shyla closely, dancing with the girl who had taught me how to dance on the veranda of my house. Outside, the players and their dates were begging us to abandon the foundering house and join them at the driftwood fires. They screamed out of worry and honked their car horns out of pure admiration for our daring.

Then the house shuddered as a large wave struck against its cinder-block foundation. Though I felt that same chilling fear that had sent the others running out of the house, Shyla's eyes held me as we listened to the hammering of the waves beneath us. The cries of our friends now turned to pleas each time a wave washed down over the broken-up road, the salt spray exploding off the beaten-down tarmac that had eroded over time like a cookie half-eaten by a child.

A deck piling snapped outside, loud as a rifle shot. On the radio the Drifters began to sing "Save the Last Dance for Me." Together, as though this scene had long been choreographed in some zodiacal prophecy, we said together and with no hesitation, "My favorite song."

From first note to last, we danced the song that became ours at that very moment. We were silent above the lapping waters as I spun her into the changed shape of a girl who looked at me as none other had. Before her eyes, I felt like a prince fresh-born on the crests of the light-driven waves. She granted me a beauty I did not have and my soul turned proud in the fury of her centered wanting of me. Watching, I felt her ardor creating something glittering and good from my heart. It was then that she led me into the bedroom and I found myself on the torn carpet with Shyla's lips pressed against mine, her tongue against my tongue, and I heard the fierceness and urgency of her whisper: "Fall in love with me, Jack, I dare you to fall in love with me."

Before I could answer, I heard the house shudder once again and push off as it took its first primal step toward the sea. The house tilted, then fell forward as though it were prostrating itself before the power of this once-in-a-lifetime tidal surge. It felt as though a mountain were trying to rise up beneath us.

We left the rug and went out to the newly imbalanced balcony, holding hands to steady ourselves. The moon lit the sea in a freeway of papery light and we watched the boiling white caps feeding on the broken cement scattered beneath the house. We continued to dance while the house kept its appointment with the long tide and I blazed with the love of this young girl.

Our love began and ended with seawater. Later, I would often wish that Shyla and I had entered into a lovers' pact that night and remained in that water-damaged house, enclosed in each other's arms, and had let the ocean pour through the open windows until we rose in some invisible withdrawal and allowed the sea to pull us in a death clench out toward the Gulf Stream and beyond all hurt of history.

When I saw Shyla last I identified her broken body at the city morgue with the Charleston coroner in attendance. He was a man of great compassion and he left me alone as I wept over her all but unrecognizable form. I prayed out Catholic prayers over her because they were the only ones I knew and they came as easily as tears, if only half-remembered. She was bloated from her time in the water, leaving all signs of her prettiness in the shallows of the harbor, and the crabs had done their work. Something caught my eye as I rose to leave her and I bent down and turned her arm. On her left forearm was tattooed the number 36 364 04.

"It was recently done," the coroner said quietly. "Any idea why?"

"Her father was at Auschwitz," I said. "It's his number."

"That's a first," he said. "You think you've seen everything here. But that's certainly a first. Odd. Was she very close to her father?"

"Not at all. They barely spoke."

"You going to tell the daddy about the tattoo?"

"No. It'd kill him," I said, looking at Shyla's body for the last time.

My name is Jack McCall and I fled to Rome to raise my daughter in peace. Now, in 1985, as I went up the spiral staircase that led to my terrace and a rooftop view of Rome, I took a music box that Shyla had given me as a present on our fifth wedding anniversary. Winding it, I looked over the Roman night. Far off, a bell struck, sounding much like a lost angel, and a breeze came off the Tiber. The music box played Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21, one of my favorite pieces of music in the world. The air was heavy with the dinner smells rising from Er Giggetto's restaurant below: grilled lamb, mint leaves, and sage. I closed my eyes and saw Shyla's face again.

From inside the music box I took the letter she had mailed to me on the day of her death and looked at how she had written my name. Her handwriting was pretty and she took special care whenever she put my name on paper. I thought about reading it again but instead I listened to the traffic moving past the Tiber and lifted the gold necklace from the music box. It had been a gift from her mother received at her sweet sixteen party and she had never taken it off until that final day. The necklace had become part of my memory of our lovemaking. In her will, Shyla made it clear she wanted Leah to wear it when "she was old enough to understand the nature of the gift." Shyla's parents had asked for the return of the necklace when they sued me for custody of my child. Because it seemed like such a talisman of evil and bad luck to me, I had often thought of mailing it to them with no note or return address. It was only a necklace to me that night and I put it back in the music box.

Though I did not know it as I scanned the passersby moving down below, I was in the middle of a year that would change my life forever.

Copyright © 1995 by Pat Conroy