Beach Music

Lucy’s leukemia comes out of remission. She cries when she tells Jack. He is disappointed in himself for not knowing how to comfort her or show her the warmth she needs. Lucy asks Jack not to tell his brothers until after the big Labor Day party that they’ve planned in her honor.

The night before the party, a group of locals and tourists gathers to witness Lucy and her volunteers release turtle hatchlings from their protected nests. Lucy enlists Leah’s help to dig the baby turtles out and carry them to the ocean. One of the tourists calls the sheriff, because it is against the law to disrupt turtle nests. She and Lucy debate the merits of intervening with nature to save the little turtles. The sheriff arrives and handcuffs Lucy. Lucy is weak and ill; when she faints from all the excitement, the sheriff releases her.

The entire town shows up for Lucy’s party. John Hardin shocks the guests by gifting his mother a hand-made coffin. At the party, Mike tells Jack that Jordan reached out to him, and that they will all get together in a few days. Mike doesn’t share any other details.

George Fox tells his life story to Jack. He begins by telling Jack that he’s always hated Jack because he looks like the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Nazis who tormented him during World War II.

George grew up in a wealthy, cultured household in Warsaw. He was a virtuoso piano player from a young age and won international competitions. George met his first wife, Sonia, at one of his piano concerts. George describes his relationship with his first wife in passionate, romantic terms; he loved her deeply.

George and Sonia had three sons. As news of the spreading war and Nazi cruelties reached George in Warsaw, he buried himself in his music to avoid facing his fear. After Warsaw was bombed, George and Sonia fled to Ukraine with her parents. Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, so the family was safe for a few months until Germany declared war on the USSR.

When the German Gestapo occupied the town where George and his family were living, they forced all Jewish citizens to pay heavy taxes and wear Stars of David to identify themselves. The Nazis established a Jewish ghetto and created a committee of Jews called the “Judenrat” to oversee it. Like all committee members, George joined the committee under threat of death, thus becoming a Nazi collaborator forced to make terrible decisions about who lived and who died in his community. He protected his family for some time, but this was not enough to counterbalance the unbearable weight of the guilt and the cruelty of the position.

The head of the Gestapo, a man named Kruger, forced George to play the piano for him. George later found out that Kruger also forced Sonia to have sex with him, infecting Sonia with a sexually transmitted disease. Kruger also made George witness and participate in terrible violence. George complied, hoping it would save the lives of his family.

Eventually, all the remaining residents of the Jewish ghetto, including George and his family, were forced onto trains bound for Auschwitz, a mass-murder extermination camp. On the train, their youngest child died in Sonia’s arms. When they disembarked from the train, George was separated from Sonia and their other two sons. Sonia and the boys were killed in the gas chambers.

George was forced to work in the camp, removing bodies from the gas chambers and taking them to the crematoriums. In 1945, George was marched with other prisoners from the camp by the Nazis, who were fleeing the approaching Russian army. He was nearly dead in another camp, Dachau, when the Americans arrived to free those interned.

Jack and Ledare drive to Charleston to meet Mike at the Dock Street Theater. They do not know what to expect. When they get to the theater, they see that a film crew is setting up to record them. Mike directs Jack and Ledare to sit, and then General Elliot, Celestine, Johnson Hagood, Capers, and Betsy arrive.

Mike tells them all that he wants them to have a trial, with Jack’s father serving as Judge to help keep the peace. The trial will center on the series of events that happened while Jack and his friends were in college, events that led to Jordan killing two people before faking his own death. They will all tell their sides of the story and then vote on Jordan’s guilt or innocence. They are all surprised when Jordan walks in. There is another surprise guest, Bob Merrill, aka “Radical Bob,” the leader of the campus antiwar movement at the University of South Carolina when Jack and his friends were students.

Johnson Hagood takes turns calling on people so that everyone can tell their side of the story. They let each other speak, although they can’t resist a few passionate outbursts and interruptions.

Ledare starts the conversation, explaining how none of their friends was very political during their first year of college, and how the Vietnam War was relatively popular on campus for a while, because South Carolina was a conservative state. Ledare was not very caught up in the antiwar movement when the rest of their friends became activists. She says it is Shyla who truly became involved and drew the rest in.

Mike and Capers speak next. They describe how Shyla met “Radical Bob” in 1969 and how Bob used Shyla’s friendship to draw Mike and Capers into the antiwar movement. Shyla and Capers started dating and became the two figureheads of the antiwar movement on campus. They were arrested often for participating in protests.

Jack tells his story to the group gathered at the Dock Street Theater. He felt that Shyla and Capers were lost to him because he did not share their fanaticism about the war. Jack recalls thinking that they were more interested in the rhetoric and the excitement of being radicals than they were in the actual movement, especially Capers.

Then, news arrived that the National Guard shot and killed four college students at Kent State University in Ohio. This triggered a strong reaction from many students on campus at South Carolina, including Jack and Jordan. They joined a protest led by Capers and Shyla. Law enforcement intervened, beating up and arresting Capers before demanding that everyone else disperse. A small group of students, Jack and Jordan among them, refused. As punishment, they were arrested, suspended from the university, and not allowed to graduate.

Jack continues with his story. Shyla and Capers met Jack and Jordan after they left jail and took them to the headquarters of the Students for a Democratic Society (the activist group led by Bob). Jack recalls that he and Jordan “were being cast as brothers in a circle we did not even like” (680). They got swept up into plans for more extreme forms of protest.

The group, including Capers and Shyla, broke into the Selective Service Office of South Carolina intending to burn draft files and spread cow’s blood around the offices. Bob lit the fire just as law enforcement arrived.

Since the Selective Service Office is federal property, their crimes were very serious, and they were put on trial. Shyla’s, Capers’s, and Jack’s parents stood behind them and help with their legal defense. General Elliot, on the other hand, hit Jordan in public and spit in his face in front of journalists’ cameras. He did not show up to court to watch their trial.

The trial was very dramatic. Capers, the first witness for the prosecution, revealed that he had been recruited and paid to infiltrate the antiwar movement. The second witness for the prosecution was Radical Bob, who was also an undercover FBI informant. Jordan, Jack, and Shyla felt deeply betrayed by Capers’s actions. The three of them were convicted of trespassing and destruction of federal property, but the judge waived their prison time.

At the Dock Street Theater, Capers defends his actions as patriotism.

Jordan tells his side of the story, sharing details that no one (not even Jack) has heard before.

Jordan’s father sent him to the same in-patient mental hospital where Shyla had been sent as a girl and where John Hardin now receives treatment. They isolated him and placed him on strong doses of drugs to calm him because he was furious and would yell at the nurses. They also administered shock treatments.

Jordan was in the hospital for almost a year. After Jordan was released, he wrote his parents that he was going to California. In fact, he went to their house on the military base in South Carolina, sneaking in to get food and sometimes to sleep. He also used his father’s workshop to make a small bomb. After stealing his father’s car, Jordan drove it to the air strip, where he blew up a plane—which he supposed to be empty—to make a statement. Jordan would not learn until later that there were two people on the plane. He did not mean to kill anyone.

After blowing up the plane, Jordan faked his own death. He left a suicide note for his parents, and then used blood stolen from the hospital to make it look like he died by suicide in a boat out at sea.

At the theater, Jack picks up the story again. He describes how Jordan snuck into his house in the middle of the night asking for help. Jack told Jordan that two people were killed in the explosion, but Jack and Shyla helped Jordan escape to Canada, renting a canoe in the boundary waters of Minnesota and paddling across the border. The trip was peaceful and memorable for all three of them. Shyla and Jack got married the day after they left Jordan.

In the silence after Jack finishes, he sees the love and the pain that are shared by everyone in the conversation. As he puts it, “Our pain bound us in a terrible love knot” (707).

Capers asks everyone for forgiveness. He apologizes, and Jack reluctantly accepts the apology. The general defends himself and his actions again, telling everyone that he wants to hold Jordan accountable and asking everyone to cast their vote about whether Jordan is guilty. Everyone votes “not guilty” except the general. The general tells Jordan that if he turns himself in, he will stand by his side and defend him as a father should. The abbot and Father Jude, who have accompanied Jordan to this meeting, reveal that Jordan already turned himself in that morning.

That night, the friends gather at Capers’s home. After dinner, the four men walk the beach and float on a surfboard together, talking about the past and reconnecting.

Lucy is in the hospital. Jack and his brothers set up a schedule so that one of them is always at the hospital with her. John Hardin is still struggling to grasp the full severity of Lucy’s illness and frightens the hospital staff with his outbursts. Still, the brothers want to include him and thus assign him shifts in the schedule.

Late one night, John Hardin smuggles Lucy out of the hospital. This is very dangerous for Lucy, who is weak and whose immune system is compromised due to her chemotherapy treatments. The brothers enlist help from friends and local law enforcement to find John Hardin. After three days, they finally trace him down at a friend’s country house. Lucy is near death, running a dangerously high fever.

After she’s back in the hospital and recovering from her fever, Lucy apologizes to Jack for her flaws as a mother, telling him that she tried her best. She thanks him for teaching her how to read; she learned to read alongside him when he was in school, although he didn’t know it.

Lucy decides she wants to leave the hospital to die at home. It is October, and Lucy’s volunteers plan to release the final nest of turtle eggs for the season. The whole family joins them, and Leah digs the turtles out at her grandmother’s request. They release the turtles into the water.

All the brothers and Leah gather in the final hours of Lucy’s life to tell stories. Jack tells a final Great Dog Chippie story about the dog fighting off the devil and escorting Lucy to heaven.

After Lucy’s funeral, Leah and Jack swim in the ocean. Ledare brings them a tiny loggerhead turtle that was found disoriented on the golf course. They worry that it is dead, but take it out to deep water to see if it will revive since they don’t think it could survive swimming through the breaking surf on the beach. It stirs back to life as Jack holds it in the water.

Jack and Ledare get married in Rome. Before their wedding, Jack shares Shyla’s final letter with Ledare. This is the first time the reader sees the whole letter. In it, Shyla encourages Jack to remarry but tells him she’ll be waiting for him in the afterlife. George and Ruth Fox participate in the wedding ceremony alongside Jack and Ledare’s family and friends.

Jordan is sentenced to prison. His father relocates to live near the prison so that he can see his son often. The general and Jordan develop a close relationship for the first time.