The Lords of Discipline (41 page)

“The disease,” Tradd and Abigail echoed.

And another Sunday passed away in the St. Croix mansion. When I left the house, I could see by the look on Abigail’s face that she was hurt that I did not have time for one of our walks around the city. I made an excuse about falling behind in my studies with the basketball season coming so close. But I embraced Commerce, told him I would write him, made my farewells, and walked to my car on East Bay Street.

Then I drove to Annie Kate’s. I had already caught the Beauty Disease. It was a secret malady that I could share with none of my friends, but I was glad that at least this secret had a name.

Chapter Twenty-six

W
e received our rings on the first truly cold day in November. The Carolina lowcountry did not have the spectacular autumns that were famous in the mountainous part of the state above Greenville; instead, there was a rather subtle transfiguration of the trees, a patient, almost invisible killing of the lush greens of summer and a reluctant, though inevitable, turning toward the coming winter months. The week before, the cadets had gone into their wool dress grays, a sign of winter’s approach in Charleston more accurate than the discoloring of an oak leaf.

But it was in the marsh at the edge of the Institute that the winter could be most visibly seen and felt. Almost imperceptibly, at the beginning of November, the marsh began to change its color. Its marvelous fertility and brazen health, its deep, brilliant greenness altered and waned almost daily, as winter with its chilly nights and the slow cooling of the Atlantic started to settle into each stem and living thing in the marsh. The oystermen of Charleston began to haunt the banks and protected creeks around Folly Beach, and the shrimpboats anchored at Shem Creek were already dragging the shallows along the coast when the first light broke across the Eastern Seaboard. The entire marsh for two hundred miles began the lovely turn, the slow leisurely withdrawal into its vestments of gold, as the lowcountry prepared for the cycle of death and renewal. The marshes of Charleston had a different look when the weather was cold. And the Institute had a different look, and I felt like a different man the night I put on the ring.

The senior class gathered at 1900 hours on the parade ground to muster for the grand march to the South Carolina Hall on Meeting Street. We were arrayed in our full-dress uniforms, and we gathered in companies on the north end of the campus to begin the march by walking between two long lines of cadets composed of the boys from the three under classes. The cheering was deafening as the drums began to roll and the A Company seniors began the promenade of honor between the two immense files of underclassmen.

The ring march was the longest and most pleasant of a cadet’s career. We left the Gates of Legrand with the regimental band playing fight songs of the Institute. We passed beside Hampton Park and the handsome residences of Moultrie Street before we turned south on Rutledge Street and began the long march to Broad. The city aged as we headed down the peninsula, the houses grew older and more distinguished, as though we were marching backward into history. Black children waved and danced to the music of the band, and old people watched our progress from sagging, unpainted verandahs. Policemen halted traffic at each intersection as our heels thundered on the asphalt, creating that strange alarming music of disciplined men moving according to a single will. The streetlights struck the brass insignias of our field caps as though someone was striking matches just above our eyes.

We passed Highway 17, Ashley Hall, and Charleston High School, crossed Calhoun Street, and neared the Charleston museum on our right, the oldest city museum in North America. The band quit playing as we approached the museum, and I heard Jeff Pomerantz prepare the seniors for the annual salute to the whale.

The baleen whale, whose skeleton hung like a graceful trellis from the ceiling in the main hall of the museum, was the unofficial mascot of the Institute. Plebes were required to make a special visit to the museum to salute the whale before they left for the Christmas holidays.

A Florida cadet had begun the tradition in 1910 when he had been denied entry into a debutante ball because of his questionable ancestry. The same week the cadet had learned the story of how the bones of a baleen whale, an extraordinary rarity in the coastal waters of South Carolina, had come to rest in the Charleston museum. In 1881, Charlestonians promenading along the Battery were more than mildly surprised to see the forty-foot whale entering the main channel of Charleston harbor. A long sea chase ensued, with Charlestonians, armed with harpoons, taking to the river in tugs and smaller boats to engage the disoriented mammal. For two days the harpoonists pursued the whale around the harbor until the beast died of its wounds and the exhaustion of the chase. It was dragged ashore, photographed, butchered, and its bones preserved and reassembled on the museum’s ceiling. The cadet from Florida recognized in the epic of the baleen a perfect metaphor for Charleston’s relationship to the outsider. He and every other cadet who came to the Institute from “away” knew some things the whale did not know: The city has never taken to visitors or uninvited strangers who tried to force an entry into the aristocratic milieu South of Broad. Many Charlestonians far preferred even whales to cadets, and the annual Salute to the Baleen was the Corps’s recognition of this irrefutable truth.

When we reached the South Carolina Hall, we broke ranks and entered the main ballroom. The seniors of each company sat together at long tables that were covered with white damask and decorated with candelabra and carnations. We found our names printed on small place cards and sat primly, awaiting the arrival of the General. The band played light classical music, and most of the seniors stared at the small black box set beside each place card.

I looked around at the Romeo Company seniors and tried to relate the proud faces to the shivering, aghast initiates who had endured Hell Night on the fourth battalion quadrangle over three years before. We looked older and more mature, but we also looked the same. However, the difference was enormous and part of the bizarre and glorious alchemy that made us love the Institute more than anything we had ever loved before. That was the single most sublime and untranslatable mystery of the school. And I felt the immense weight and actuality of that mystery as I studied the small black box that was before me. Inside that box was an Institute ring. But this ring was different from all the other rings ever made. Engraved in a feathery script on the inside shank was the name:
William McLean.
Here, at last, was the symbol, the absolute proof, that I was part of all of this, that I had earned the right to love the school, and to criticize it.

As I looked around the Hall, I felt irrationally close to my classmates who had come to the auditorium for the most meaningful ceremony of our careers as cadets at the Institute. From the beginning of my plebe year, I could always articulate what I loathed about the school but never could find the adequate words or the proper voice to praise it. It was not a dilemma of language but of emotion and persona. I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.

But in this gathering, this coming together of the eldest members of the Corps, I was moved deeply and profoundly before the ceremony had even begun, before I had actually put on the ring. I was seized by the ineffable power of membership, of finally belonging to something. So long had I secretly thought of the day when I would wear the ring that not even my reflexive cynicism, not even my loneliness among the regiment, not even the profound differences that I insisted separated me from all the rest of them, could diminish my joy at wearing the ring. On this night I was adding my small inconsequential history to the history of the ring. It transformed you into something beyond the powers of men unseasoned by the Institute to comprehend. The ring would be our alterer, our connection to the bright circuit of immemorial fraternity.

The General walked through the center of the room followed by his usual cortege of aides. He acknowledged our cheers with an imperial wave of his arm. In his dress whites, he seemed a splendid figure of a man, one who could be elected emperor by acclamation in a crowd of boys. He made his way down the center aisle, calling many of the seniors by name as he passed by them. As he passed the R Company table, I saw his eyes focus on me, he smiled, and called out, “Congratulations, Will. Let’s beat Auburn.”

“Thank you, sir. We will, sir,” said I, exhilarated that the General could recognize me on sight, that he chose to speak to me in front of my friends on the night I received the ring.

The General cleared his throat and adjusted the microphone at the head table. “Gentlemen,” General Bentley Durrell said, “tonight it is my pleasure to welcome you to the brotherhood of the ring. On this night you enter into a realm of grandeur and distinction. On this night, you enter into the fellowship of the Line.”

The auditorium was soundless. The fire-crowned candles flickered in white colonnades above the fresh linen, held in place by silver candelabra. The hall glowed like a cathedral nave at Eastertide.

“In the ancient days of empire,” he continued, “when the words of emperors and kings were translated into law the moment they spoke, the ring of the emperor was the seal of his word and carried the imprimatur of his authority. When his subjects saw the imprint of the ring in the sealing wax of documents, they were certain of the legitimacy of those documents, and they knew that they came directly from the hand of their ruler. If the emperor was a weak man, the sight of his mark would evoke laughter and contempt, but if he was a stern and powerful ruler, his mark would instill fear and trembling and obedience.

“When people see the Institute ring on your hand, they will know that it represents power and discipline and the legitimacy of your passage through the system. With this ring you will be accepted by the entire fellowship of the Institute alumni. You will be welcome in their ranks no matter where you may meet them in your travels. Institute men are not merely emotional about the ring, they are religious about it. It is the sacred symbol of the ideals represented by the Institute. This circle binds you to the brotherhood, to the inviolable ranks. This ring encircles the world. He who wears the ring, the Great Seal of the Institute, wears it more proudly than any mere emperor or king.”

He paused and with a voice almost undone by emotion and conviction said in a clear ringing pronouncement, “Gentlemen, at this moment, and according to the powers invested in me by the Board of Visitors, I command you now to wear the ring, the ring that you and you alone so gallantly and resolutely have earned.”

Each of the four hundred seniors opened the small box in front of him, lifted the ring from its slot of black velvet, and placed the ring on his finger. Each of us felt the weight of the ring for the first time.

Then we heard the General’s voice again as he intoned solemnly, “In the mystery of the circle, in the mystery of shape, of the shape without end, of the infinite form, the perfect form, I bind you to the brotherhood. I declare to the world that from this day forward you will walk as men of Carolina Military Institute. Gentlemen, by placing the ring on your fingers, you have vowed to be true to the Line. I accept that vow and I shall hold you responsible to it.”

An aide brought the General a glass of port.

We raised our glasses of port to the General.

He raised his glass to us.

“The ring,” he said.

“The ring!” we roared back in one immense, passionate roar. Then we drank to the ring and to our vow.

“The Line,” he said.

“The Line!” we roared, and we drank to the Line.

My hand felt different as I looked at my ring for the first time. I studied its adroit, inexorable images and translated the silent eloquence of its mythology and language so simply and unceasingly uttered in gold. Until this moment an essential part of me, some vital and unnamable center, had never felt that I was really part of the school. But now the cold gleam of the ring had enclosed me, bound me, and linked me to the Line, for as long as I lived. My hand had sprung suddenly alive as though I had taken its existence for granted. The ring on my finger made an articulate statement; it conveyed a piece of extraordinarily important information to me. It said—no, it shouted out—that Will McLean had added his weight and his story and his own bruised witness to the history of the ring, to the meaning of the ring, and its symbolism. I had encoded my own messages, scripts, and testimonies into the blazonry of the ring. I studied my new identity, my validation, and I felt changed, completely transfigured in the surprising grandeur of its gold. I was part of it. I had made it.

The General and the tactical officers and all the high-ranking members of the administration began moving through the hall congratulating each table of seniors. There was a forty-thousand-dollar investment on the hands of the four hundred seniors, and one element in the lore of the barracks was that the Institute ring contained more gold than any other college ring in the country. The room hummed with a euphoric, celebratory noise.

“Paisans,” Pig said, taking our wine glasses and pouring all the remnants into his glass.

He made a toast to us.

“This is to brotherhood,” he said. “The Brotherhood of the Room.”

He took a sip of the wine and passed it to Tradd.

“Drinking out of the same glass! There’s no telling what we’ll all catch,” Tradd said, wincing. But then he raised his ring to eye level and pointed the seal at all of us and said, “I propose a toast for all of us. To the four roommates who earned the ring together, who worked for the ring, who fought for the ring.”

He drank and passed the glass to me.

I toasted: “To the best roommates in the world.”

Mark did not or could not speak a word, he was so powerfully moved. He finished the wine and squeezed each of our shoulders with his hand. Tradd and I gave yelps of pain. Pig looked at Mark with an expression of naive placid sentimentality. Pig’s eyes had filled up with love of us, with the amazed, free-floating love of the world he always radiated when something touched his heart.