The Lords of Discipline (17 page)

“I’m brighter than anyone who goes to that second-rate college you go to. The Institute’s a rinky-dink college for cretins who weren’t smart enough to get into a military academy. A boy of intelligence wouldn’t think of going there.”

“You can’t offend me by cutting down the Institute,” I told her truthfully. “I’m impervious to all criticism of my alma mater.”

“You ought to have more loyalty. I detest disloyal people. I’m very well known for my loyalty.”

“What are you loyal to?” I asked.

“My family. My city. My heritage. My religious beliefs.”

“And Santa Barbara, your college,” I added.

She whirled on me furiously and said, “God don’t like ugly, Will McLean. He doesn’t like ugliness and he doesn’t forgive ugliness and you’re acting like just about the ugliest human being I’ve ever met. Most girls I know have too much pride to be seen with a crude, nasty cadet like you.”

“You’re not being seen with me. We’re hiding in a garden behind a carriage house. You’d have to have a pack of bloodhounds to flush us out of this jungle.”

“No one forced you to come, Will, and I certainly couldn’t care less whether you stay or not,” Annie Kate said. A freeze had entered her voice. I stood up and walked in front of her.

“I’m not very good at talking to girls, Annie Kate. I tried to tell you that. I don’t know why it always ends up like this when we talk. I was really looking forward to seeing you. I was looking forward to it all week because . . . because it was so strange and I thought something wonderful could come out of our meeting.”

“Nothing wonderful can come from our meeting. I can promise you that. Nothing wonderful will ever happen to me again. I had a perfect childhood in Charleston, Will. An incredible childhood full of rope swings and summer nights in hammocks and August regattas and debutante parties and climbing over the seawall on the Battery. But that’s all in the past now and will never happen again. That’s all finished and those times are dead.”

“Yeh, your life is over,” I said. “You must be all of twenty.”

“I’m nineteen. Don’t you make me older than I am. I won’t be twenty for three months.”

“It’s hard to tell how old you are when you always wear those sunglasses, that scarf, and that raincoat.”

“Do I make snide remarks about your silly uniform?” she replied. “Cadets all look like ice cream salesmen in those tacky summer uniforms.”

“I’m very sensitive about my uniform. It’s my outlandish loyalty at work again. No, I can explain why I wear my uniform, but I don’t understand why you wear yours.”

“I wear it because I’m in prison,” she answered.

“If you think this is a prison,” I said, gesturing around the garden, “let me show you the Institute sometime. But that’s not the point. I’m asking questions about the sunglasses, Annie Kate, for a very good reason. Someday before I get gouty and rheumatic and live in a nursing home, I’d like to see what your face looks like.”

“I’ve got a very pretty face,” she said simply.

“I’d like to see what color your eyes are and what color your hair is.”

“My eyes are of a very light blue. Not as light as yours, but my eyes aren’t as threatening as yours are. Not as empty. Your eyes don’t look inhabited.”

I laughed, a bit too loudly, for she put a finger to her lips and turned in the direction of the main house. All was silent in the garden when I spoke again. “You keep talking like that and I’m going to wear sunglasses. I’ve always been told I have very nice eyes. That’s the only thing people can think of when they try to say something nice about my face.”

“If I were you, Mr. McLean, I wouldn’t just wear sunglasses,” she said coyly. “I’d purchase a huge mask or perhaps a shopping bag.”

“You have a sharp tongue beneath those sunglasses.”

“I told you I was smart.”

Before I could answer another voice in the garden said, “Not that smart, my dear.”

The woman was smaller than I remembered her and much thinner. But it was not her diminutiveness that left the strongest impression on me; rather, it was a quality of beleaguered delicacy, as though her spirit had endured the same heedless inattention as her garden. There was something insufficient and untended about her. Her voice was troubled and defeated, all low sad tones like the scrupulous grief of cellos.

“Ma’am,” I said in the silence that followed the shock of her noiseless onslaught, “you are indeed a quiet little person.”

But her arrival held no real elements of surprise. The very artificiality of the secret meeting invited capture. The mother’s face was flushed with triumph and disapproval. Annie Kate had not looked up since she heard the other woman’s voice. The garden resonated with melancholy and shame, with betrayal and sin.

“You are on private property, young man, and if you don’t depart from these grounds at once, I will call the police and have you thrown in the city jail by the river. The Charleston city jail is famous for the size of its rats.”

“Mother, please,” Annie Kate moaned.

“I demand to know why you’re pursuing my daughter.”

“Mother!”

“What I’m doing, Annie Kate, I’m doing for you. You know that. You know that I don’t like it any better than you do, but you know that it’s absolutely necessary. This young man was not my idea. Remember that,” she said, turning her attention back to me. “Cadet, you are neither absolutely necessary nor even very desirable.”

“Ma’am, I did not just trip on a crack in the sidewalk on Church Street and accidentally land in this garden. I was invited here by Annie Kate, who appears to be badly in need of someone to talk to. She told me she needs a friend. I can be a good friend. I can also be discreet and if Annie Kate robbed a bank or molested chickadees in a bird sanctuary, I don’t care. If you don’t want anyone in Charleston to know that Annie Kate’s in town, then I won’t tell anyone. If you don’t want me to know why you’re acting like Annie Kate’s radioactive, then you don’t have to tell me. You have my word that I won’t tell another living soul that I’ve met either one of you.”

The older woman eyed me for a long time then asked her daughter, “Do you think you can trust him, Annie Kate?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “He’s got Catholic eyes.”

“My daughter is very lonely and very bored, Mr. McLean. That is partially my fault and partially hers.”

“Ma’am, if she’s leaving anonymous notes on cars of cadets, she’s more than bored.”

“I’m stark raving mad,” Annie Kate said, slumping down on the garden bench.

“Quit being silly, Annie Kate. You decide what to tell Mr. McLean. I’ll leave that all up to you. Since you’ve tried to prove what a grownup girl you are, you can decide if he comes back to this house or not. And Mr. McLean,” she said, fixing me with both the intensity and sadness of her gaze, “I’m holding you to your word of honor to speak of this with no one, not even your closest friends.”

“Yes, Ma’am. I promise.”

She disappeared down the brick pathway that led to the main house. Her walk was stiff, formal, and painfully graceless. As she left I became aware of a deep wild perfume exhumed in the rising heat of the day, lifting invisibly from the untrimmed hedges and grottoes of ill-disciplined flowers. The garden smelled like an abandoned florist’s shop. Annie Kate read the drift of my thoughts as I sat back upon the bench.

“We used to have a gardener,” she said. “Before my father died.”

“It looks like the gardener died, too.”

“Mother let him go several years ago. She said it was because of his drinking, but it was actually because we had no money.”

“You won’t be needing a gardener soon. They’ll be leading safaris through your back yard.”

“You have a very Irish face,” she said, observing me closely.

“Why don’t you say that I have a very sexy face?”

“You don’t have a very sexy face. You have a funny, sad clown’s face.”

“Women go wild over this face. They’re always knocking into each other trying to lay a pinkie on my face.”

“I want to be honest about this relationship from the very beginning.”

“Yes, honesty’s your long suit.”

“Don’t be cynical,” she said. “I don’t need a boy friend. I only need a friend.”

“I need a girl friend, but I’ll be glad to be your friend.”

“You don’t need me for a girl friend, Will. I promise you that.”

“Why not?” I asked. “You look like a perfectly respectable girl to me. A little weird the way you dress, but a fine specimen of womanhood.”

“It’s over for me, Will. My whole life is over,” she said as she rose from the bench and stood facing me.

She removed her scarf and her long blonde hair fell luxuriantly to her shoulders.

Carefully, she took off her sunglasses and I saw her eyes for the first time. They were blue, shining, and lovely. Tears were spilling out of them. She unbuttoned her raincoat, then flung it open with sudden violence, sudden liberation.

“My baby is due in February,” she said. “Would you like to be the father, Will?”

Chapter Fourteen

C
ain Gilbreath poked his head in my room the night before the regular class schedule began. A guard on the football team, Cain was a native of Richmond, Virginia, and carried with him all the opulent aromas of Tidewater gentry gone to seed. His family once had money and it was the obsession of Cain’s life that they would have it again. Politically a conservative, he considered me a dangerous radical because I had supported Johnson in the 1964 election. At the Institute, being a Democrat was beginning to smack of sedition. Mostly Cain and I were friends for the single reason that both of us enjoyed the type of collegiate dialogue that began with insult and ended with threats on each other’s life.

“God is love,” Cain began. He always thought about his opening sally deep in advance. “Love is blind. Ray Charles is God. God’s a blind nigger.”

“Too much time on the football field, eh, Gilbreath? The brain is showing signs of softening.”

“It’s painful to be a genius, McLean.” He sighed, walking across the room and reclining heavily on my bed.

“Good to see you, Cain. Sure, go ahead and lie down on my bed.”

Cain had a massive torso and thick muscled shoulders and a neck that sloped imperceptibly into those shoulders. But his hands and feet were disproportionately small, delicate, and sensitively made. His legs were thin and hairless, like a girl’s, and his arms were short and stubby, hardly formidable weapons to bludgeon the chins of charging defensive linemen. In his face, one could trace the proud lineage. And in his tiny oriental hands and feet. His total appearance was as unlikely and surprising as a wildebeest’s.

“I said it’s painful being a genius. Thinking deep thoughts all the fucking time. There are times I consciously try to be shallow, to lower myself and frolic a bit with the herd, the banana-eating chimpanzees that make up the student body of this college, but it’s hard, Will. Extremely hard. Speaking of chimpanzees, where are your roommates, the two gorillas and the harmless fag?”

“I’d like you to do me a favor and call Pig and Mark chimpanzees when they’re present sometime, Cain. Or call Tradd a harmless fag when they’re present. You’d be thinking deep thoughts as you were airborne off the fourth division.”

“Let’s have a debate,” he said, rising up on one elbow and grinning at me. His finger unconsciously traced a long, ugly, centipede-shaped scar that resulted from surgery on his shoulder the year before. He was boyishly proud of the scar, and he walked shirtless around the barracks when the weather permitted.

“I don’t want to debate,” I said. “That’s all we ever do when we see each other.”

“Let’s debate Vietnam again. I murdered you the last time.”

I groaned and buried my head in my arms on the desk. “Everyone murders me when we talk about Vietnam.”

“That’s because you’re the only one in the school without a military contract.”

“Yeh, I’m a real asshole.”

“Do you want to know what I think, McLean?”

“No.”

“Well, I’ll tell you anyway. I think you’re against the war just because everyone else is for it. I think that you like to be different for no other reason than to be different.”

“That’s it, Gilbreath. Bingo. Bull’s eye. You figured it out completely. You’re giving me a rare new insight into my personality. Nothing I can say to that. You’ve defined me, boy. Wow!”

“About Vietnam, Will,” he said, enjoying me. “You ought to think of the war as an extension of your basketball career. A place for testing yourself. Aren’t you curious about how you’d react in battle? Don’t you think that it’s only in battle that a man really learns what he’s made of? I don’t care about Vietnam one way or the other, but I look upon it as my chance for the great test. My support of the war is simply an act of faith in America, and I’m delighted that my two years in the Army will be spent in battle and not in some dull stateside post where enlisted wives walk around commissaries in pin curlers. Tell me the truth, Will, aren’t you just a bit worried about missing the only war of this generation?”

“No, Cain, I’m worried about missing the only balls I have in this generation. And I already know how I’d react in battle. I’d be scared shitless. I’d be even afraid to walk around because of the land mines. I don’t care about the great test, and I hope this
is
the only war in our generation.”

“You must be the first pacifist this college has produced.”

“I didn’t say I was a pacifist, Gilbreath. There are wars that I would fight in joyously. For instance, I’d lead a goddam rebellion in Shenandoah Valley if you’re ever elected governor of Virginia. And I’d make a general out of the National Guardsman who brought your nuts to me in a Mason jar. But this just isn’t my war, Cain, and I’m not going to fight in it.”

“Surely, Will, you must be sympathetic to the cause of the South Vietnamese and their efforts to repel the spread of communism in Southeast Asia.”

“You sound like Radio Free Europe. Sure I’m sympathetic. I’m also sympathetic to the North Vietnamese. In politics, I find myself sympathetic with everybody. Every side has points for and against them. I just get confused. Do you remember what Mudge said last year in military science class, Cain, when we were studying communism? You must know the enemy before you can hate him. Well, that class affected me. We spent half a semester studying what total shits communists are and how they kill babies with pitchforks and bayonet virgins in the vagina.”