The Lords of Discipline (75 page)

The General rose from his seat and walked over to the window.

“Report back to the barracks immediately, Mr. Santoro,” he shouted out to Mark from the open window. “I have called the Provost Marshal.”

Mark Santoro smiled at General Bentley Durrell, war hero and four-star general, and shot him the finger.

I walked over beside the General and slowly began to remove my ring.

The General grabbed my wrist.

His hands were spidery, liver-spotted; their fragility moved me with their age. Their spent, exhausted weakness.

“Send your roommate back to the barracks, Mr. McLean. I think we can arrange something satisfactory to both sides.”

He picked up the papers he had just signed expelling me from school and began tearing them up, deliberately and carefully.

I gave a thumbs up signal to Mark and he began walking toward the barracks. Then I turned again to face General Durrell alone.

He had returned to his seat; his eyes were closed and his face was loosened and unjoined as though all the salts and preservatives of unvanquishable authority had washed away in some sudden, unforeseeable monsoon. But he calmed himself as he sat there and I watched as the disciplined old veteran returned slowly, reviving himself as he mastered his environment again, as he realized once more who he was and who I was, the vast division of age and experience that separated us, as we faced each other in the nakedness of truth at last, without stratagems or mysteries or any more cards to play, in the hot afternoon. sun of that sweltering Charleston day in 1967.

He began to speak to me in a fatigued, desiccated voice. “If I had gotten to you early enough, Mr. McLean,” he began, “if I had recognized your potential, I could have made an outstanding cadet out of you, an outstanding soldier. You think well on your feet. Very rare for an athlete. What a shame you remained hidden from me until the very last. What a loss for both of us.”

“I would make a terrible soldier, General,” I said. “This school has proven that to me.”

“Why, Mr. McLean?” he asked, his eyes still tightly closed.

“Because, sir,” I answered, “I think I would willingly die for a man like Colonel Berrineau, but I could never follow a man like you.”

His eyes opened, an angry flowering of yellow light.

“No cadet has ever talked to me like that, Mr. McLean,” he said. “No cadet has ever dared. They tell me I’m greatly feared in the Corps of Cadets, and I’ve always taken that as a most extraordinary compliment. Imagine an old man like me being feared by two thousand bucks in the prime of their manhood.”

“I’ve always been afraid of you, sir,” I admitted. “Scared to death of you. I never could speak to you even when you came back into the locker room to congratulate the team after a victory. I’ve never spoken to you without fear or a sense of inadequacy. I was required to read your book when I was a knob, required to memorize your battle campaigns, to read your biography. My father had wanted you to run for President instead of Eisenhower. I grew up hearing your name. I’ll never forget seeing you on that first day of school four years ago when you talked to the incoming freshmen about duty, honor, and a moral commitment to serve mankind. One thing never occurred to me that day.”

“What is that?” he asked wearily.

“It never occurred to me that I might be a better man than you ever were, General. And that I would meet many far better men here at the Institute.”

He rose imperiously and began pacing the carpet behind his desk, every inch the General again, every inch the Great Man defending the sanctity of his myth.

“You!” he sneered. “You will never be one percent of the man I am or was, Mr. McLean. When I took the job as President of this college, I sensed this country was in imminent danger from within and without. I knew that it was going to take men of iron to turn this country around. I took this job because I wanted to fill this nation with patriots, with men who would die for this country rather than submit to tyrants. I wanted to turn out men unlike you in every way, Mr. McLean, men who could change the history of the world, who would take from the Institute a vision of America so great and so transcendent that nothing could damage that vision. I wanted to produce a new breed of valiant men, citizen warriors, who would continue to strive to make this country the greatest in the history of the world. And I have done it, Mr. McLean. And I will continue to do it even if one or two misfits like you and your roommate make it through the Institute. You will do me no harm, Mr. McLean, and you will make no mark.”

“Yeh, yeh, yeh,” I answered. “I’ve heard it all before, General. I’ve heard it in every speech you’ve ever delivered to the Corps. Now I just don’t believe any of it when it comes from your lips.”

“You will leave my office immediately, Mr. McLean. But first, I need a single piece of information from you. I need to know how you came in possession of that list. You and your roommate will graduate with your class. But I must know where you got the list.”

“And if I don’t tell you?”

“Then you will not graduate and I will have to fight against your slander in other ways. It would be difficult for the college but we could weather the storm, Mr. McLean. There is no doubt about that.”

“I broke into Commerce St. Croix’s house and copied the lists from his journals. He doesn’t know I did it.”

“You’re a man of high moral integrity, McLean,” the General answered. “I could expell you for that reprehensible act alone.”

“You didn’t exactly model your career after the life of Christ, General Durrell,” I answered.

“You are free to go, Mr. McLean,” he said, in control again. “But I want your word of honor that you will destroy those letters. Every single copy of them.”

“You have my word of honor, sir.”

I saluted him and began walking to the door. Before I reached the door, I heard him say, “One last thing, McLean. Do you ever think about your place in history? What do you think will be your place in the history of the Institute? I already know my place. But what about yours? Tell me about your place in the history of the school.”

He was laughing at me, mocking me, and I turned, loathing every single thing he stood for on earth.

“General,” I said, “I want you to hear this and I want you to think about it.”

“What do you have to say, McLean?”

“I plan to write that history, sir.”

Chapter Forty-eight

T
hat night I sat alone in the St. Croix garden, listening as Tradd and Abigail played a duet for harp and piano in the music room. Far off in the city, I could hear the barking of dogs and the sound of traffic on Broad Street. Biding my time circumspectly among the roses, I watched them in secret, thinking the long, troubled thoughts of my last days as a cadet. In the supernatural light of chandeliers, their faces were clear and shining; they appeared so thoughtlessly unmarked, so charmingly innocent of all the furies and conspiracies and irreversible fragmentations that had brought me to their garden.

Abigail’s arms moved with elegant grace along the shining gold strings of the harp. At the piano, Tradd’s white fine-boned face was taut with rapt concentration as he read the notes of the score and instantly translated them into sound. The music infiltrated the garden like the movement of flowers. There was an unnamable loneliness to the harp and also a quiet, decorous lust in its accompaniment. I had learned about flowers and music in the St. Croix mansion. And I had learned much, much more.

The son and the mother looked at each other and smiled. Their eyes met in a gentle and satisfied concordance as the music danced from their fingertips. Tradd’s piano would pose a delicate question and receive an answer from the harp with startling immediacy and with questions of its own. I felt the sharp sting of emptiness and solitude that you feel so acutely and with such internal sorrow and wonder whenever music is performed well. But my head was filled with nightmares featuring trains.

How different this garden was from Annie Kate’s and her mother’s, I thought. In this garden, nature was denied its capacity for accident. Abigail controlled too tyrannically the luxuriant vegetable flow that grew in such thriftless riot in the warm Carolina days. The alien quality of this garden was in the severe zealotry of its tending. Never cut back too radically, Abigail, I said to myself. Grant to nature and to climate some freedom, some vivacity of form, some of the ancient symmetry that comes from wildness.

I let them finish the piece. The music changed at the very end. The piano flowed through the garden like swift water and the harp replied with clean honey that poured into the water. I lifted up out of the roses and jasmine when they were done. Summoning my courage, I rapped the polished brass knocker at the front door. Once again, I was set loose to drift in the city beneath the palms and spires, a stranger among the gardens. Loneliness again, I thought, my native land.

Tradd answered the door and did not immediately recognize me in the shadows of the verandah.

“Will,” he said at last. “I heard you made it. I heard you beat the General. Congratulations, you old thing.”

He embraced me warmly. “This is a night to celebrate. Mother, it’s Will. He’s come home and he’s going to graduate as an Institute man.”

Abigail came to the vestibule, her clumsiness of gesture and movement somehow more eloquent and moving than they had ever been before. Her guileless eyes appraised me lovingly and I laid my head against her cheek and let her hands stroke the back of my head. “It’s all over now, Will. We can now start the business of forgetting this dreadful year. Where’s Mark? Is he coming over?”

“No, Abigail,” I said. “He stayed in the barracks. He was too tired to come.”

“What did you say to the General, Will?” Tradd asked. “I’ve had three cadets call to say that you and he went to war and that you won hands down. It’s all over the campus. And I heard the Bear was fired as Commandant. I want to hear every word of it. Every single syllable, and I refuse to let you skip over any parts of it.”

“Of course, he’ll tell us everything, Tradd. Let the poor boy come inside and fix himself a drink and get comfortable. He’ll catch a death of a cold standing in this draft.”

“A cold, mother?” Tradd said. “Oh, really now, not at the end of May.”

“That’s the easiest time to catch a chill, when you’re least expecting it. I’ve always caught the most horrid chills in summer.”

“Where’s Commerce?” I said, looking nervously toward the stairway.

“Father was rather a grouch when he came in, Will,” Tradd said. “He’s in one of his black humors.”

“He’s in his study,” Abigail said crossly. “As usual he’s agitated about something. He came home today muttering and incoherent and doing everything to make himself unpleasant. He’s been in his room all afternoon and has refused to speak. I tried to get him to join us for dinner, but he wouldn’t even answer my knocks. Men are the strangest of all God’s creatures, at least the one I married. He did do a very singular thing though. When he returned from an alumni meeting at the Institute today, he changed the lock on his study. It’s a combination lock and it looks extremely tacky. I told him that too, but of course, he simply ignored me.”

“He’ll get over it, Mother,” Tradd said. “He always does.”

“What’s in the jar, Will?” Abigail inquired, noticing for the first time the container I held in my left hand.

“Water,” I said. “It’s chilled and fine. Vintage 1967. I want to begin a new tradition in the St. Croix family. One that you can remember me by. I want this occasion to be as memorable as when we drank the water from the Aegean.”

“We don’t need traditions to remember you by, Will,” Abigail said. “You’re a part of all this now. You’re part of the traditions of this house. But the human soul can always use a new tradition. Sometimes we require them. It’s been a hard year on both of you. A tragic year.”

Abigail took the jar of water and poured it slowly into the Waterford decanter on her sideboard in the dining room. Tradd and I took our seats at the dining room table.

“Have we changed much since our knob year, Tradd?” I asked. “Do we look the same? Do we feel the same things? Do we think the same thoughts?”

“Goodness, no, Will,” he said assuredly. “At least, I pray that we’ve matured considerably since then. We were boys our knob year and all our thoughts were foolish, boyish thoughts. In a matter of days we’ll officially be whole men. Then we’ll think mature, noble thoughts for the rest of our lives. I’m just joking, of course, but we have earned our maturity, Will. We went through the system and that automatically changes you. It’s what makes us different from our contemporaries in other colleges.”

“Do you really believe that, Tradd? Or do you just want to believe it?” I asked.

“I sincerely believe it, Will. And I’ve believed it the whole time I’ve been at the Institute. Tradition has always held an important place in my life and I’ve believed in the system. I have never felt the need for rebellion the way you have. That’s why I’m fairly astonished that you want to start a new tradition tonight.”

“If Will wants to start one, then I want to participate in it,” Abigail said, coming toward us with a tray, three wine glasses, and the decanter of water.

I poured the water into the three slender glasses.

“It looks filthy,” Tradd exclaimed, grimacing at his mother. “Are you sure it’s safe to drink, Will? I certainly don’t want to contract rickets or typhoid fever or whatever it is you catch from drinking contaminated water.”

“Heavens, Tradd,” Abigail laughed. “We’re not in Mexico.”

“It’s perfectly safe,” I promised. “A toast.”

“Let’s all make toasts,” Abigail suggested.

“A splendid idea, Mother.”

“Here’s to the success of my son in his career and to the success of my adopted son in his career,” Abigail said, her eyes moving from Tradd to me.

Tradd raised his glass to me and said with feeling, “Here’s to my roommate, Will McLean, who has been the best friend I ever had in my life.”

“To friendship,” I said, and there were tears in all of our eyes.