My Losing Season

by Pat Conroy

  “When is the baby due?” I remember asking.

  “Sometime in late February,” she said on a clear December night.

  “Have you thought about names?”

  “No. I haven’t even let myself think about being pregnant,” she said. “I’ve hated this baby with all my heart the whole time I’ve been pregnant. It shames me to admit it, but it’s true, Pat.”

  “My mother used to complain sometimes during her pregnancies,” I said. “But she was always happy once the babies arrived.”

  “How many children were in your family?”

  “Seven.”

  “My God.”

  “There were also six miscarriages,” I said. “My sister Carol called them ‘the Lucky Ones.’ It was her theory that those little embryonic Conroys heard what was going on between my mom and dad and just decided, no way.”

  “What do you mean? What’s wrong with your family?”

  “My father’s tough. Very tough,” I said, uncomfortable with the conversation.

  “You ought to meet my stepfather. A real bastard. He makes my mother look like Grace Kelly. She threw him out a year ago. I couldn’t have been happier.”

  “I wish my mother would throw my father out, but that’ll never happen,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “He’d kill her,” I said. The three words shocked me as I said them that night on the beach at Sullivan’s Island. I had spoken those words to a girl I barely knew, already I was revealing family secrets that I had hidden even from myself.

  “I’ve got to get back to the barracks,” I said.

  “Why? Please stay longer.”

  “I’m a cadet. I turn into a pumpkin at midnight,” I said, using the old Citadel joke.

  “Will you do me a favor, Pat?” she asked. “Will you keep writing me every day? It’s the only thing Mama and I have to look forward to. They’re the things that make me laugh.”

  “If I’ve got time. I have six or seven other girlfriends that I’ve got to write first.”

  “You’re playing George Washington tomorrow night,” Annie Kate said.

  “Want to go? I’ll get you tickets,” I said.

  “I can’t go out. Not like this,” she said, patting her stomach. “We’ll listen to George Norwig on the radio. The Voice of the Citadel Bulldogs.”

  “Can I come and see you on Sunday?” I asked.

  “I would love it, Pat. I would love it.”

  So it began. Looking back at the baffled, virginal young man that I was at that time, I can forgive myself for everything that happened with Annie Kate. I had spent a lifetime watching my mother being backhanded by my Marine father. My mother worshiped me because I would rush to her defense and try to pull my father off her. He would turn and slap me to the floor, then my mother would fight to pull him off me. I would rise and try to get between them again. He would hit me and I would go down again and my mother would be on his back pulling him away from me. This was the long dance of my childhood. Love and agony became intermingled for me in profane ways. Rescue would become my theme and my downfall. Whenever I hear a woman weeping, I come back to the dance of my childhood. Long ago, the theme of rescue quit being my tragedy and took up residence as my fate. It can be factored into every great event of my life from the teaching of black children on Daufuskie Island to my recent divorce. My high school friend Bruce Harper summed it up best several years ago when I called to tell him I had fallen in love. “What’s her sad story?” Bruce wisely asked.

  Each day before practice I would call Annie Kate and we would talk for an hour. I do not remember a day where she did not weep, sobbing miserably that she had ruined her life and had no idea what would happen to her when the baby was born. I became Annie Kate’s head cheerleader, confessor, shrink, and mentor during those afternoon phone calls. Daily I wrote letters that I hoped both Annie Kate and her mother would find charming and witty. Subconsciously, I was trying to get both women to fall in love with me, and I think that is exactly what happened.

  On a freezing night in December before the team began its Christmas road trip that would end with the University of Toledo, Annie Kate drove me back to the barracks. No, she never once came onto the Citadel campus during our time together, but we would meet at the parking lot beside the Hampton Park Zoo outside Lesesne Gate. It was in this darkened lot a half hour before midnight that Annie Kate first took my hand into hers. I had never tried to hold her hand or kiss her during our long walks on the beach of Sullivan’s Island. I was so prudish as a young man, so Catholic-shaped and South-haunted and goody-two-shoes, that my roommates used to tease me that I never looked at the pictures of girls in Playboy magazine. Because she was pregnant, I had never thought of Annie Kate in a sexual way. After she held my hand, I constantly and religiously thought of her only in a sexual way. My hand felt like it had gone to heaven.

  “Would you like to feel the baby kick, Pat?” Annie Kate said.

  “Love to,” I said, and she led my hand to her stomach where I felt her child move inside her. With my hand on her stomach, Annie Kate then kissed me for the first time, in the cold darkness of Charleston. When her tongue hit my tongue, all the fire and ice and mystery of what happens between men and women became suddenly clear to me. In her womb, I felt her baby stir inside her and, surprising myself, I promised that unborn child not to worry about a thing—that I was going to take care of it forever.

  “I never thought a boy would love me again,” she whispered.

  “Come over to the barracks, I’ll introduce you to two thousand boys who’d be happy to fall in love with you.”

  Annie Kate laughed, then kissed me again, and I thought that life itself was the most wonderful thing in the world. I made it to Fourth Battalion right at midnight and walked to the middle of the quadrangle and let out a whoop of pure pleasure at being in love beneath the stars of Charleston.

  Because of Annie Kate’s humiliation over her pregnancy, I told very few people in my life about her existence. No one on my team knew I was in love with anyone and no Citadel cadet ever laid eyes on her from the time I first visited her house until her child was born. My relationship with Annie Kate remained chaste and innocent the whole time we were involved with each other. I started talking about getting married the next summer. I would give up my basketball scholarship and quit The Citadel and go to work to support Annie Kate and the child.

  “Have you told your mother and father about me, Pat?” she asked as we walked on the beach one night.

  “No,” I admitted.

  “Are you ashamed of me, Pat?” she asked.

  “No, I’m ashamed of what my mother and father are going to say when they find out about you. I’m the first person on Mom’s side of the family who’s been to college. My getting a diploma means a lot to her.”

  “What about your father?”

  “He’ll just beat me up,” I said.

  “Would you do me a favor, Pat?”

  “Anything.”

  “Don’t talk about getting married again,” she asked. “I have enough pressure on me already. Let’s let the baby get here. Then we’ll talk.”

  So I kissed her like I thought I knew what tomorrow forever felt like—Annie Kate could always stop me from talking by asking me to kiss her. It was a tactical command for silence that I enjoyed.

  My game improved while I was in love. Like a madman, I dove for every loose ball, knowing that George Norwig, the voice of the Bulldogs, would send my name cruising along the airwaves into Annie Kate’s radio. My love of Annie Kate transported me through the cold months that year. Because I was a Citadel cadet I could not visit her during the week and only could see her on Friday nights and Sunday afternoons. Saturday was always game night and there was not enough time to drive out to Sullivan’s Island and get back to the barracks by midnight curfew. But we talked on the phone every day and my letters poured into her house in a ceaseless flood of adolescent emotion. I loved writing letters to a girl who said she loved m
e every time I spoke with her. I felt handsome for the first time in my life. We beaten boys have trouble liking the faces our fathers tore apart with their fists. I grew to like my face when Annie Kate could not seem to look at it enough.

  I did not see the terrible isolation of Annie Kate and her mother until it was too late. Their solitude was so complete that I became their sole link to the outside world. When I would call, the phone would ring once and Annie Kate would answer it with great immediacy and ardor. Always, she would put Isabel on the phone to talk with me for several minutes and Isabel would laugh at everything I said to her. At that time in my life I saw myself as the carrier of a great tragedy—the fact of my father’s great violence to his family—and I did not place myself as the jokester who offered comic relief in the drama of my own life. But Isabel howled the whole time I was in her house or on the phone and sometimes would bend double when I was telling some stories of barracks life.

  On February 16, 1965, I received a phone call at the hotel where the team was staying. In sheer terror the whole team had gathered in Bob Kiggans and Dick Martini’s room to watch an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. We had originally been watching this program separately, but by the end of the production, all of us clustered terrified in our co-captains’ room. In the pandemonium of that moment, the phone rang by Dick Martini’s bed. Thinking it was Mel telling us to keep it down, he answered it. He looked puzzled then looked up to me. “Hey, midget,” he said to me, “it’s for you.”

  I answered the phone and heard Isabel on the other end of the line. “Annie Kate went into labor last night. My kid had a tough time. The baby didn’t make it. The umbilical cord wrapped around its throat. Strangled it.”

  “Boy or girl?” I asked, stunning the room still in pandemonium around me.

  “What difference does it make? Dead’s dead,” she said. And then she hung up.

  I wept that night for the lost child. I had felt it kick in Annie Kate’s womb so many times and had promised that child that I would father and protect and champion it. For a week I called Annie Kate at her house and no one answered. Her letters, which had arrived on a daily basis, stopped arriving at all. We went on another road trip the following weekend and I still had not heard from her. Davidson handled us easily, but my mind was scattered and desperate, and I do not remember if I got in the game or not. The next Sunday I drove out to Sullivan’s Island to see what was going on with Annie Kate.

  She was expecting my visit. Annie Kate rose to greet me and met me at the door with a sisterly kiss. In my dress grays I looked around the tiny room and saw that someone had removed every clipping and photograph of me with a basketball.

  “I’m sorry about the baby,” I said to Annie Kate.

  “There is no baby, Pat,” she said. “It worked out for the best. For all of us. You won’t have to drop out of The Citadel. You won’t have to break your mother’s heart. I get to pretend that none of it happened.”

  “What do you mean, none of it happened, Annie Kate?” I said, bewildered. “It changed everything. It changed me . . . forever.”

  “Pat, listen to me. I knew you were going to be difficult.”

  “Difficult. I’m in love with you. I want to marry you,” I said. “What’s difficult about that?”

  “Please sit down,” she said. “Pat, listen to me. You’ve got to understand me. I’ve just lived through the worst year of my life. I can’t describe the humiliation I’ve felt. The shame of not being able to leave the house except at night. What I’ve felt was despair. I thought of killing myself a hundred times, Pat. Then you came into our lives. What a sweet, nice boy you’ve been to us. You saved my life, Pat. You really did. But you made the mistake of loving me during the worst time of my life. You loved me when I hated myself. You loved me when I hated the world. Don’t you see, Pat, I can never forgive you for when you loved me. I’ve tried, I promise. But both of you, you and Mama, are the only two people who saw me during that whole horrible time. I’m going to start over, Pat. I’m making a fresh start. I’m looking for a normal life. That’s it. Nothing else. A nice guy. Sells insurance. Goes to the Methodist church. He’ll never know a thing about what happened to me. Neither will my kids.”

  “Were you pretending to love me, Annie Kate?” I said.

  “I wasn’t pretending at all. But I see your face and I see the worst December I ever spent on earth. I see your face and there’s the worst January. I see your face and there’s February. It shouldn’t be that way, but it is.”

  Annie Kate and I cried hard and soon I got up and made my departure. I drove back to The Citadel dazed and hurt. It had never occurred to me that I could love someone with my body and soul and simply have that love returned to me as cheap merchandise. That night as I brushed my hair for retreat formation, I looked up and saw my face and my own repulsion as I looked at it for the first time as the face of a boy that Annie Kate Gervais could not bring herself to love. And now, three years later, Isabel said as she walked me to my car, “You found yourself a girlfriend yet?”

  “Not yet, Isabel,” I said. “Still looking.”

  “No, you’re not, Pat. You still love my girl,” she said. “It’s written all over your face.”

  “Then I’ve got to change my face.”

  “Timing’s everything. Yours was off.”

  “I didn’t know I was being timed, Isabel. I didn’t know anything.”

  CHAPTER 21

  STARVING IN UTOPIA

  WHEN THE CITADEL TEAM PULLED UP TO THE SHODDY MOTEL near the interstate that cut straight through the city of Jacksonville, Mel made the mistake of letting his team lounge about the seedy waiting room as he checked in with a sad-eyed, unshaven man at the main desk. Some of the team heard the man ask Mel, “You want these rooms for one hour or for two? Also got half-hour rates.” Our laughter embarrassed Mel and he silenced us with a scowl like a lion baring his fangs at the antics of bothersome cubs. Still, we giggled and I looked the place over with renewed interest. The run-down whorehouse seemed emblematic of the depths to which our promising team had sunk.

  Later Cauthen poked his head out of his room and said, “You got your room for one hour, Conroy.”

  “I always need two, Zipper,” I said.

  “Bullshit, you’ve never even had a date,” Bob said as I opened up the room next to his and threw my bag onto the bed nearest the window. Greg Connor followed me inside and surveyed the room. Both of us got into our underwear to take a nap before the game. Before we went to sleep, Greg said, “Conroy, could I ask you a favor?”

  “I’m a senior and it is my job to take care of helpless little sophomores,” I said.

  “Listen to me, Conroy. This is important. Someone from A Company set me up with a date with a sorority girl after the game tonight.”

  “Congratulations. I’m supposed to have a date, too,” I said.

  “You?” Greg said, surprised.

  “Rumors of my prowess are beginning to spread among the coeds of the Southeast. Entire sororities surround Fourth Battalion on big weekends chanting my name.”

  “Cauthen told me he was positive you were a virgin, Conroy,” Greg said. “Have you ever had sex with a girl?”

  “I’ve thought about it,” I said. “In fact, I don’t think I’ve thought of anything else for more than four or five seconds since I turned thirteen.”

  “I haven’t had a date since I’ve been to The Citadel. Not one. It’s driving me crazy. This is supposed to be a really nice girl. And pretty. She’s supposed to be real pretty. I’ve got to go out with this girl . . . I’ve just got to. Will you talk to Coach about it?”

  “I’ll be glad to. But Mel’s never taken a great interest in his team’s love life. He doesn’t want some strange girl taking over his job of removing all bodily fluids from us.”

  “Conroy, it kills me when I see the cheerleaders on the other teams. They’re so damn beautiful. The Auburn girls . . . the East Carolina girls . . . my God, the Florida State girls! I’ve
been so horny the whole time I’ve been here, I just want to go out on a date. That’s not a crime, is it? I’ve been playing pretty good ball lately.”

  “You’ve been playing great ball.”

  “Who’s your date?” Greg asked.

  “A girl I met last homecoming. A cadet had stood her up, so some Florida cadets searched the barracks and found me studying. I put on my salt-and-pepper uniform and became her date for homecoming. Her name is Karen, and she apologized when she met me for wearing such thick eyeglasses. They were thick, but I couldn’t help noticing that the girl who wore them was lovely. I got a letter from her this week, and she wants to show me Jacksonville. But I don’t think we’ll be going anywhere, Greg. Mel’s a little weird about sex.”

  “I’m not talking about sex,” Greg said. “I want to go on a date. I want to talk to a girl.”

  “I’ll ask Coach after the game,” I promised.

  “You think he’ll say no, don’t you?”

  “I know he will.”

  “If he doesn’t let me go on this date, I may quit the team,” Greg said, his voice despairing.

  “We’ll miss you.”

  “How many dates—real dates—have you been on after basketball games, Conroy? I want to know.”

  “Two,” I said. “Cauthen set me up with two girls from Winthrop after we lost tournament games in Charlotte.”

  “Two dates in four years,” he moaned.

  “It’s the price of being part of a big-time college basketball program,” I said.

  “Conroy, do you have any idea how many times we’d be getting laid if we’d gone to civilian colleges?”

  “But we wouldn’t be whole men. Citadel men. We wouldn’t be able to wear one of these,” I said, flashing my Citadel ring in the air.

  “We wouldn’t be horny. Don’t you think it’d be great not to be horny?”

  “I wouldn’t know what it’s like not to be horny,” I said, turning away from Greg, trying to sleep. “I’ll do my best with Mel. Try to have a good game. We’ve got a lot better chance if we beat Jacksonville.”