Honor and Duty (48 page)

Natural response is:

Each of the problems had an underlined answer, Q.E.D. Looking at the sheet gave me an otherworldly sensation. There were going to be fifty problems on tomorrow’s final. Intuitively, I knew I was looking at correct answers to real problems. I was holding department material. It was today’s whufer, a pass on tomorrow’s final. This wasn’t Maher’s dummy with the fake problems. It was the real thing.

“Oh, Jesus,” I said, suddenly looking around the room, as if I had been under observation. My heart slugged heavily. How’d this thing get here? I had been here all night, leaving only to get Chad’s java and to walk Sonny down the hall. Clint had come back early; Deke returned during the coffee break, and Bob walked in as Sonny was leaving. I felt chills. Who could’ve come in here without one of us seeing him? Ts’ao Ts’ao had stolen the march.

I turned the sheets over. On the backside of the tenth and final page, in red, was a circled star. Sonny was a lefty, and his stars canted to the left, with the two lateral points the largest. I rustled through my notes, finding the one he had given me for my one correct answer. It was his star.

29

West Point, January 11, 1967

I stood up. I put the papers into a folder.

I looked at the figure of Guan Yu on my desk, casting a small shadow onto the folder with the papers. I thought of Uncle Shim.

This was in Uncle Shim’s letter to me during Beast Barracks, in 1964, when he wrote about his departure from home as a youth to take the three days of Confucian tests en route to becoming a “superior man.”

“Good evening,
Dababa
,” I said into the phone. “This is Kai Ting. I am so sorry to call you so late.” It was after ten in California. “How are you?”

“I am happy to hear your young voice. Are you well?”

“
Dababa
, I want you to tell me one of your stories, about someone who faced the Fork of Pain. Where he has two choices—to destroy a friend, a Confucian friend, or to dishonor himself.”

“Do you ask for your own moral guidance? Or for someone else?”

“For me,” I said.

“How prophetic a woman was your mother.”

“Pardon me?” I asked.

“
Hausheng
, your mother said you would ask me someday
for a story of moral guidance. She said you would not ask your father, or your father’s second wife. You would ask me.”

“She knew my father would remarry?”

“Everyone knew that,” he said. “Your father had two small children. Naturally he would find a new mother. It was his duty.”

“Did my mother—did she have advice for me?”

“She was your mother,” he said.

“Did she ever face the Fork?”

“
Hausheng
, we all do.”

“What was her advice?”

“It is already known to you; it caused you to call me.”

I hesitated. “Oh, you mean it’s one of those general things. So, Uncle, what’s the answer?”

“K’e ji fu li,”
he said.

Silence.

“You think this does not help you? Then you are not thinking. You find no comfort in these words? Then you are not accepting. There is no guidance in the edict? Then I have been a most miserable teacher. Think,
Hausheng.
What does the Master tell you to do?”

I sighed. “To subdue the self and honor the rites, the bonds and relationships. First to the father, then to the emperor, and of the young to elders,” I said.

“Your mother, whom you do not know, whose face is no longer known to you, says to you, ‘Go forth into the world in peace; be of good courage; hold fast to that which is good; render to no one evil for evil; support the weak; help the afflicted; honor all persons; love and honor God.’ ”

“Is that Taoism?” I asked.

“It is the teachings of her Jewish Lord Jesu.”

I sighed. “That’s no help. I’m looking for Chinese guidance. This place is lousy with American, Christian regulations.”

“
Hausheng
, I am not trying to help you. I am performing my duty to my friend, who was your mother. She asked me to say those words to you when you requested help. She believed your family would be plagued with inherited problems, reaching down to you, ‘unto the third generation.’ She saw consequences to entire families over time, instead of Eastern, individual
yeh
, karma. These are not my precepts. They are hers. I have remembered them for fifteen years.”

“Is that your advice—
k’e ji fu li
and my mother’s Christian stuff?”

He repeated the advice for me. I wrote it down. It had been authored by “the other woman”: the bad mother, superstitious, illiterate, crude, confused about God and the gods, a fanatic for Jesus Christ, prone to the passions and death. She had abandoned us by dying.

I felt confused. But his words seemed right, and familiar, and I felt stirrings in the hollow parts of me.

“But
Dababa
” I said. “Master K’ung didn’t even mention mothers in the chain of obedience. Only men—the father, the emperor, the elder brother, and the elder friend.”

“I am the scholar, not you,” he said. “Your mother was learned and I tell you to also honor her by following her advice.”

I looked at the advice. Christian liturgy. I smelled Edna.

“You must not lose her face in your mind,” he was saying. “Remember her. Goodbye,
Hausheng.
”

I hung up. I concentrated, returning in my memory, trying to conjure the face of my first mother. I saw a Chinese woman; it was my sister, Jennifer Sung-ah. She was brushing our mother’s hair, smiling. Our mother was laughing next to her, but she had no face.

“Sonny,” I whispered. “Wake up.”

He jolted up, confused, looking to the right, at me, and then to the left, at the wall. He started to say something, and I clapped my hand over his mouth and held my left index finger across my lips. His eyes were bugged open, uncomprehending. He had been in the best sleep we get, in the hour before reveille.

“Look at this,” I said to him in the sinks. I watched him.

The color in his face drained. “Where’d you get this?”

“Above my bunk, last night. Look at the back, last page.”

“Jesus,” he said, twitching, squirming.

“Your star,” I said. “Function symbols look like yours.”

“Dammit to hell!” he spat. “Sorry. Hail Mary, full of grace. Forgive me, God.”

“Sonny,” I said, my heart in my throat. If he’s cheating, and admits it, I have to turn him in—for helping me. If I don’t turn him in, we are animal shit scum, forever. Guys who had spit on the Code, screwed in the inner sanctum of our brains and hearts. In what Uncle Shim called
hsin fa
, the mind-heart system, what Western people called “conscience,” but with
stronger obligations and duties to doing the correct thing. We would become the servants of Ts’ao Ts’ao.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“I was asked for a star. I gave one, on a blank page.” He flipped the paper. “This stuff wasn’t on it.”

“Who was it?” I asked. “Who asked you?”

He took a breath. “Big Bus. Bob Lorbus.”

“Bob wouldn’t do anything like this. That’s bullshit!”

“My stinkin’ star’s like a signature.” He ran his hand through his thick, dark hair. “Look,” he said, “I’m your tutor. This falls in your lap, looks like it’s from me. You use it, bust the Code in the chops and pass. Otherwise, ya gotta turn in a buddy. And that’d be tough, right? Hey,
right?
”

“I’d hate to see you go. Can I have your meal tickets?”

He smiled wanly, rubbing his whiskers. They rasped.

I rubbed mine. I would’ve sworn I heard something.

“You didn’t leave this thing, right?” I asked.

“God, no. We gotta report this.”

I sighed in relief. I looked at my watch. “Fifteen minutes before the buzzer.” False dawn freshened the sinks.

“Kai. Chad Enders’s your company Honor rep. Report it to him, get in sync with the Code. Ask him to meet us ASAP.”

“He’ll know that Bob couldn’t be part of whatever this is.”

“That’s not the test. Can’t go to Chad with
that
load. He’s got his duties, we got ours. All of us are in it deep. Including Bob, sweet Mary and the Son of God love him.”

“Some expression,” I said.

“That’s no expression. Want to pray with me?”

I laughed. “No. I’ll get Chad. Gotta see my P, Major Maher. Meet me in the A-3 orderly room after breakfast.”

We looked at our watches. “Let’s meet at oh-six-fifteen,” he said. “Scrag breakfast.”

I cleared my throat. “I’ll eat fast.”

“Cheez, forgot who I was talking to.” He squirmed, then looked at me. “What would you’ve done if I cheated for you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Been up all night, mucking it. Turned my brain into tapioca. What would you’ve done?”

He looked at me, eyes narrowed, as if he were saying goodbye to me. “I’d follow the Code.”

Sonny and I retraced the march to the graves, up the high hill of Washington Road, past the Old Cadet Chapel. It was a crisp and clear morning, and we looked upriver at the wall of the
long and loamy space of the West Point Cemetery. Here members of the Long Gray Line had been interred since 1817. With so many famous generals buried there, and so many campaigns fought and won, it was strange how we tended to think first of George Armstrong Custer, his brash tactics, unique obelisk grave marker, and his wife, Libby, buried next to him. Now, I would think only of Marco Matteo Fideli’s simple white gravestone. How could he be gone? Nothing was worth his loss.

Residents of these quarters could sit on their railed porches on summer evenings and watch the river, thinking about the strange nature of the soldiering profession, where violent death was a player, with the grand cemetery always waiting, stage left.

Sonny looked at the quarters. “Used to be the Old Soldiers Hospital. Inspiring view for old, shot-up vets,” he said, looking at the cemetery and the Old Cadet Chapel, where Benedict Arnold was remembered with a cryptic plaque that only said, “Maj Gen b. 1740.”

A woman in a red suit opened the door to Quarters 126A. She was athletic, of medium height, with light brown hair and warmly attractive. I thought: Polly Bergen. I heard children and smelled an invitingly robust breakfast. I hadn’t eaten for twelve minutes.

“Good morning. I’m Kai Ting; this is Sonny Rappa. I called about seeing Major Maher. Please excuse our intrusion.”

“How do you do, Kai and Sonny,” she said, shaking our hands. “Please call me Ann. Come in. Would you like some coffee?”

“No, thank you,” I said, following her into the entryway. A large living room was to the right.

“Great thundering balls of fire!” announced Major Maher thickly, chewing aggressively. He was in greens, holding a breakfast plate. A large tan dog panted by his leg, licking up an earlier spill and hoping for an accident. “What’s up?”

We showed the major the problems that had appeared on the top of my bunk while he scooped his entire breakfast plate into his mourn and closed the dining room doors. It was a technique I knew.

“I didn’t study them, but I know the writ, sir,” said Sonny.

The major looked at me, chewing fast with ballooned cheeks.

“I saw them, too, sir. I looked at them a lot.” I shook my
head. “Can’t remember anything about them. I of all people hate to say this, but they all looked alike to me.”

“This WFR,” he said, his normally eloquent voice mushy, “was in my office safe. Disappeared between 1900 hours Tuesday and 0800 yesterday, when I opened it. This is the only copy except for the one in my wallet.” He checked it.

“Sir, are you the writ officer?” Sonny asked.

“The Academy has great thinkers. In time of need, however, the forces of good customarily call on me. I don’t want to brag.” We laughed. “You can’t take this writ. I’ll write a new one for you.”

“Sir,” I said, “can we bring Mr. Rappa into the situation?”