by Pat Conroy
After a pause, “I ship out again next week,” he said to the television.
“Where to, Captain?”
“South America again.”
“When will you be back?” I asked.
“I hope for the Ring Hop.”
“I hope so too, Father,” Tradd said, entering the room. “It would be so common if you weren’t there when I went through the ring.”
“Roommate,” I cried, leaping to my feet.
“Hello, William,” Tradd answered with stiff, innate formality. The St. Croix family had mastered the art of placing distance between themselves and others, eschewing physicality as an activity practiced by the lower classes.
“You should have come to Europe with me, Will. We could have made the grand tour together.”
“I’ve told you before, Tradd, but you seem to have a hard time grasping this concept: I’m a McLean, not a St, Croix. My family didn’t inherit a billion dollars to spend on the entertainment of their eldest son.”
“Excuses, excuses,” he replied. “Did you improve your slovenly habits this summer, or do I still room with the biggest slob in the Carolinas?”
“Oh, yes, I became neurotically compulsive about cleanliness. You can eat dinner on my fat behind now.”
Tradd winced. “Father, Will is a fine boy but he has a tongue that even soap couldn’t clean.”
“He’s one of the guys, son. That’s something you’ll never be. Just one of the guys. That’s what I love about being on a ship.”
“Since I got back three days ago, Father has been lamenting nonstop that I’m not a weightlifter or something else he could be proud of. I brought you a present, Will.”
“I hope it’s outrageously expensive,” I said.
Tradd handed me a small package wrapped in brown paper. I tore it quickly, opened a thin rectangular box, and lifted out a stubby, finger-worn fountain pen.
“It’s thirty years old. I found an eccentric store in London run by an even more eccentric old man who repairs old fountain pens. I thought you could use it to write your senior essay.”
I hugged Tradd before he could pull back. I kissed him on the cheek, and he blushed a deep scarlet and turned away from his father and me. His father, watching the television again, missed the gesture.
“Keep away from the sacred bod,” Tradd stammered, but I knew he was pleased.
“This is beautiful, Tradd. Absolutely beautiful. And I can’t think of anyone who deserves it more.”
“You don’t deserve anything nice until you learn to clean up your act. His corner of the room always looks as though it’s part of the city dump, Father.”
“And I bet your side of the room looks like the place little girls play dolls,” Commerce said. “I thought you and the other boys were going to teach Tradd how to fit in like one of the guys. Even when you try to act like a man you mess it up, son.”
Tradd adjusted the buttons on his blazer and walked over to the window, which looked out onto Charleston harbor and the Battery. Abigail entered the door on the opposite side of the room carrying glasses and a frosted pitcher of iced tea. She stared at her son by the window; she stared at her husband in his chair. I became suddenly invisible, the unassimilated motionless voyeur. It was experience, not clairvoyance, which brought Abigail instant recognition of the nature of the conflict. In the war for the soul of this one child, there had been no real battle. There had only been an occupation and three proud, dispirited casualties indissolubly linked by the bloodless yet passionate nature of the skirmish. No forces had ever taken to the field. Commerce had wanted his son to be an athlete, a companion, a drinking buddy. What he had produced instead was a slim, brilliant boy with a voice mannered and flutelike, a boy in love with architecture, painting, furniture, music, poetry: all the pursuits that would please Abigail and irritate Commerce. He had also produced one of the finest friends I had ever known.
Tradd had enrolled at the Institute to satisfy a dream of his father’s, who thought that his son would not—could not—make it through the plebe system but that the process, no matter how brief or cataclysmic, would liberate him from the soft and victorious tyranny of his mother’s rule. It had surprised and impressed Commerce that his son had survived that first year, but it also dismayed him that there had been no fundamental change in his son’s nature. The Institute had not purged his son of his reserve and delicacy. Even the Institute was helpless in erasing the signature of chromosomes. But it had proven that there was a toughness at the very center of Tradd that neither his mother, his father, nor he himself had recognized. It had been the one time in his life he had presented his father a gift of incalculable value. Few had suffered as long or endured as much humiliation that year, but Tradd had taken it all, every bit of it. He walked through the Gates of Legrand on the first day of our freshman year not knowing how to do a pushup. At the end of the year he could pump out fifty without breaking a sweat. But he never did another pushup after that first year and vowed he would never do another for the rest of his life. Once during our freshman year, I asked Tradd why he just didn’t quit and go to another college since his parents had enough pocket change to buy Yale. Tradd had explained to me, “I want to make my father glad that I’m his son for the first time in his and my lives. There isn’t an upperclassman in the world who could make me leave.” Many tried, but Tradd had been right, none of them could. In less than three months, he would wear the ring.
“When are Pig and Mark arriving?” Tradd asked, breaking the long silence in the room.
“They got permission not to report until Wednesday,” I answered.
“General Durrell’s letting me stay home until the plebes arrive. Will. I hope you won’t get too lonely in the room.”
“Why don’t you just stay here in the guest room, Will?” Abigail said, pouring tea into four glasses.
“There are no bugles here, Abigail. I can’t sleep without bugles or the sound of plebes dying on the quadrangle.”
“Tell General Durrell to kiss my fanny if you see him, boys,” Commerce shouted to the television, trying to direct the subject far away from the remark that had wounded his son. “I saw the pompous son of a bitch on King Street the other day. I think he was buying elevator shoes. He isn’t satisfied with being six-three. You would think he was somebody the way he carries on. My God, he’s from Spartanburg. Spartanburg of all the pitiful places. The upcountry. The goddam, no-count upcountry.
“The first exhibition football game is on Saturday night, Will,” he continued. “Why don’t you and Pig and Mark plan to watch it with me?” Commerce asked, aware he was being tested again in a trial by silence.
“Tradd,” Abigail sighed, but easily, and teasing again, “I’m thinking about having your father fed intravenously during football season this year. Hook up a couple of gallons of Cutty Sark and glucose beside his easy chair.”
“You might try to find other pursuits, Father. Other avocations. Only vulgarians and Methodists watch football games with such fanaticism.”
“Your poor old man is a vulgarian, Tradd. No doubt about it. A goddam one hundred percent unreconstructed vulgarian. Will, I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this story, but about ten years ago I read in the paper that bowlers have the lowest IQ’s of any athletes and were generally from a socially inferior class. Well, I ran right out and joined a bowling league in North Charleston. One sixty-four average. Met the greatest guys I’ve ever met on land.”
“How come you never invited these greatest guys on land for dinner, Father?”
“They must have been from Spartanburg,” Abigail teased. “The upcountry.”
“Bowling is so sweaty and uncultured,” Tradd sniffed, winking at me.
“Culture!” Commerce screamed at the television. “I’ve had culture shoved down my throat since I was born. Do you know I’ve been going to operas since I was six, Will? Six years old and I’m listening to fat broads belting out dago songs to bald-headed fags wearing silver pants. You can take a
ll the culture in America, tow it out to the Sargasso Sea, and set it on fire and I wouldn’t even spit once to put it out. I’m embarrassed to tell you how often I wished my name were not St. Croix but something like John Smith or John Nigger. That’s it. John Thicklipped Nigger. That’s the name I’d have chosen.”
“Father, you certainly do overstate your case,” Tradd said, turning toward the window and facing Charleston harbor again.
“Who wants some more iced tea?” Abigail chirped brightly.
“I’m going to my room and let y’all literati get in some chi-chi cultural chit-chat before dinner. Will, could I see you upstairs for a minute? If you’ll excuse me, dear,” he said, rising and bowing to his wife in a quick, snapping motion like a blade returning to a jackknife.
By the time I followed Commerce upstairs, he was moving a potted palm outside of his study. Carefully unlocking the door, he then disappeared into this forbidden sanctum for a moment, leaving me to fidget in the hallway. No one was allowed in his private study, and according to Tradd and Abigail, no one entered the room, even when Commerce was out to sea. When he came out of the room, he led me by the arm to the third-story porch. We stared out at the garden, an aromatic black sea of vegetation that breathed in the salt from the river.
“Do you see it?” he asked.
“See what?”
“I put it on when I went into the room. On my hand, Will.”
I looked down on his right hand and saw its dull shine.
“The ring,” I said.
“I keep it in my room. Along with everything else.”
“Gold, frankincense, and myrrh.”
“Books and notes. Things I’ve collected in ports around the world that Abigail thinks are junk.”
“Why don’t you wear the ring all the time, Commerce?” I asked. “You’re the only Institute man I know who doesn’t treat the ring as if it were made from the nails of the True Cross.”
“My years at the Institute were the happiest in my whole life, Will. But ever since Durrell came back to be president and changed the plebe system into that brutal mess, I haven’t worn the ring. It was all his ego, too, Will. When I talked to him about it, he told me he was going to make sure that the Institute had the toughest plebe system in the world. According to you and Tradd, he succeeded admirably. But it wasn’t that bad when he and I were knobs. In fact, it was kind of fun.”
“You were in General Durrell’s class, weren’t you?”
“Yes, I know some things about him, too. I kept a diary when I was a cadet. It was good practice for when I went to sea and had to keep a log. I can look back and tell you everything I did since I was fifteen years old. I’m very disciplined about some things, Will.”
“Discipline is the one gift the Institute has not bestowed upon me.”
“You fought it, boy,” Commerce said. “Discipline comes easy when you decide to go whole hog at something.”
He stared at the ring for a full minute without speaking.
“Tell Tradd that I didn’t mean to hurt his feelings, Will. It just slipped out.”
“Why don’t you tell him, Commerce? I’m sure it would mean a lot more coming from you than from me.”
“If you don’t tell him, Will, he’ll never know how sorry I am when I say these things to him. Please tell him.”
“I will, sir.”
“I noticed something years ago, son. When I’m with the people I love most, I feel lonelier than at any other time on earth. Lonely, Will. Lonely. Lonely,” he declared in an undermined voice. Suddenly he turned his eyes toward me for understanding, for affirmation.
He gave me a look that linked us as spiritual allies, resolute desperadoes in headlong flight from the false and sinister veneer of Charleston. I did not return the look with equal measure or with any measure of faith in his basic premise that we shared some immensely suggestive linkage of soul and temperament. All because I like to watch football games, I thought. Since I was born a McLean and not a St. Croix, I was not tormented by the formidable demons of the city that cried out in disengaged voices for conformity from its sons and daughters. I could not help or even sympathize with the agony of being too well born, too well bred, or too well named. Nor could I help but notice that Commerce, despite his objections to the city, had chosen to live out his life in the dead center of the tribe he professed to hate. The pull of Charleston was lunar and feminine and partisan and even affected those natives, like Commerce, who professed to loathe her extensive artifice and the carnivorous etiquette of its social structure. He could no more cease being a Charlestonian than I could cease being a Caucasian male. Charleston possessed his soul and there was nothing he or I could do about it.
But he seemed satisfied with the look I gave him. I have eyes that give people what they want, eyes that whore in order to please, commiserate, endorse, affirm. People take from my eyes anything and everything that they need. Usually, I am simply looking at someone as they tell me a story; I am later amazed to discover they have believed I was agreeing with them completely. I have the eyes of a ward politician or a priest on the make with choirboys. I have eyes I have ’learned to distrust completely.
“I’ll tell Tradd what you said, Commerce,” I said as he left the porch and disappeared into his room, which was lit only by a ship’s lantern. I heard the door lock behind him.
When I left the house that evening, I turned to look back at the Tradd-St. Croix mansion and thought of the many accidents and distortions of fate that had occurred to make my history and the history of this splendid house commingle. Tradd had brought me home for dinner at the beginning of our freshman year, right after we had become roommates. When we left that night to return to the Institute, Abigail had taken me aside and thanked me for helping her son. I told her that I thought Tradd was incredibly brave and that he was enduring the full savage brutality of the plebe system without complaint. Later that year, on another of my visits, she had pressed something into my palm. It was a key to the Tradd-St. Croix mansion. “You have a home in Charleston now, Will,” she had said. “You can use that key anytime you want to, whether we’re here or not.”
I had never used the key, but I always kept it with me and I always liked to think that I could enter the house whenever I pleased. I wondered what the builder of the house, the distinguished barrister, Rhett St. Croix, would say if he knew that Will McLean was walking the streets of Charleston with a key to his house.
Chapter Three
It took a brief moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness when I entered Henry’s Restaurant at noon the next day The August sun was dazzling at high noon in Charleston. I walked toward the smell of cigar smoke. The Bear was sitting in a corner booth with an unimpeded view of the door. He was eating a dozen raw oysters and had ordered a dozen for me. I saluted him before I took a seat across from him.
“I think I’ll have oysters, Colonel.”
“Don’t eat the shells, Bubba. Just spit. ’em out on the plate.”
“I’ve never eaten oysters that taste like cigars,” I said through a miasma of smoke.
“No joking around today, Bubba,” Colonel Berrineau said, extinguishing his cigar. “You and Poppa Bear are going to have a serious heart to heart.”
When I was a freshman, I had quickly learned the central underground law of the Corps. The law was unwritten and unpublicized and essential for survival in that militant, inflammatory zone entered through the Gates of Legrand. The law was this: If you are ever in trouble, no matter if it is related to the Institute or not, go see the Bear. You sought out the Bear when there was trouble or disaffection or grief. You looked for the Bear when the system turned mean. You found him when there was nowhere else to go. In my tenure at the Institute, I never saw a cadet in serious trouble who did not request an interview with the Bear as soon as possible. Often, he would yell at the cadet, berate him for negligence or stupidity, offer to pay his tuition to Clemson, burn him for unshined shoes, insult him in front of the secretaries in the
commandant’s office; but always, always, he would help him in any way he could. That was the last, indispensable codicil to the law. No one outside the barracks was aware of the law’s secret unofficial existence, not even the Bear.
“Bubba, I know you’ve heard about Pearce coming to the Institute.”
“The Negro?”
“Yeh. That’s the one. We’re a little behind the times, Bubba. Every other school in South Carolina integrated a good while ago and God knows we held out as long as we could, but Mr. Pearce is coming through these gates next Monday and he isn’t coming to mow the lawn or fry chicken in the mess hall. He’s entering the Long Gray Line. Now some very powerful alumni have tried for years to keep this school as white as a flounder’s belly. We’re one of the last holdouts in the South, if not the last. Now, several members of the Board of Visitors know that it’s very important for this young lamb to make it through this school. Otherwise, there could be real trouble with Federal funds and every other damn thing. They also know that the General has hated everything black since a platoon of niggers he commanded in the Pacific broke and ran from the Japs. So they’re just sweet-talking the General and keeping him out of it. The Board doesn’t talk much to the General unless they want water changed into Burgundy or the Ashley River parted. He’s the school’s miracle man, Bubba, but he’s a little too old to have much to do with the nuts and bolts of running the place. I asked you here today because we’ve got to keep Pearce in school. That means we’ve got to keep these Carolina white boys off his tail as much as we can.”
“You’ll have to put him in a cage for that, Colonel. And if you show him any favoritism at all, the whole Corps will run him out, and you and I know they can get rid of any freshman they want to if they’re so inclined. They could run Samson and Hercules out of here the same night if they thought they didn’t belong here.”
“Bubba, thanks for the lecture about the Corps. But I’ve been watching it a lot longer than you have and I know what the Corps can and cannot do a lot better than you do. But you’re right. They can run him out with the morning trash. The thing is we selected Pearce over five other black applicants. We lucked out—or at least we think we did. He’s smart. Comes from a good family, wants to make a career out of the military, and is pretty good looking for a nigger. But most important, he’s tough. He could eat any five other freshmen for breakfast. But God knows he’s going to need to be tough. We want you to be his liaison, Bubba. You watch over him when you can. Work out a system where he can contact you if things get out of control. He got a bunch of threatening letters this summer, and word is out that there’s a group on campus that doesn’t want him to make it, that has sworn to run out every nigger that the Federal government jams down our throat. It’s up to you and me and the other authorities and good cadets to make sure they fail.”