The Lords of Discipline (42 page)

We came together, the four of us, with our arms locked around each other’s shoulders, rocking slowly from side to side, in a close intimate huddle. Wordlessly we communicated the depth and primacy of our feelings. Then we placed our newly ringed hands together in the center of the circle, and we stared downward at the cluster of rings, the ring repeated four times; and the numeral of our class, 67, winked in the candlelight as our hands moved.

Pig laid his hand straight out, palm downward. I laid my hand on top of his, Tradd’s on mine, Mark’s on Tradd’s. We looked at each other, but we could not hold each other’s gaze for long. There was too much history in our eyes. No words were spoken until Pig spoke for all of us. “Paisans,” he said simply, “for as long as we live. Paisans.”

I remembered a line from my class on the origins of the English language. My professor had said something one day in class that I wasn’t sure I heard correctly, but I never asked. Sometimes clarifications are undesirable, and this was such a time. I thought he said this: “The generic word for ‘brother’ is
brother.
” I hope this is true, but I don’t really care if it’s not. I thought about that line after Pig had called us “paisans.” No matter how brutal the Institute was in its rites of initiation and passage, there was always a heartbreaking romanticism in all the ceremonies and forms of the military. I shook hands with Mark and congratulated him. I shook hands with Pig and Tradd. We congratulated each other and honored each other with our eyes. The generic word for “brother” is
brother.

As I looked around the hall at the rest of my classmates, as I shook hands and slapped the backs of the other R Company seniors, my mind flashed suddenly to plebe year, to a nightmarish vision of sweat parties under the stairwell, in the shower room, on the quadrangle. I remembered the screaming at every meal, at every formation, relentless and without end. The pressure of that year again inhabited my thoughts like a migraine. That year could still hurt me when I least expected it. But I knew this on the night I received the ring: The reason I felt so genuinely transformed was because I had survived it with these classmates. There had been seven hundred of us present on the four quadrangles when our Hell Night ended, but only four hundred were destined to wear the ring. I had attached my fate to their fate, and they had attached theirs to mine. Each of us had made an individual decision not to be broken by the system. We had earned this moment. The Institute, with its genius for ceremony, had made us lust for this moment from the first day we had entered the Gates of Legrand.

I felt a tap on my shoulder. When I turned around I almost burned my nose on the end of a cigar.

“They didn’t really give you a ring, did they, Bubba?” the Bear said plaintively in his rumbling basso profundo voice. “Let me buy it back from you and save the reputation of this school. How much will you take? A thousand dollars? Ten thousand? Just name the price, and I’ll make an appointment with my banker.”

“Can’t have it, Colonel,” I said, flashing it before him. “But it sure looks good, doesn’t it, Colonel?”

“No, Bubba, it looks bad. Very bad,” he said, as though he were sinking into some long-term spiritual malaise. “It’s nauseating. Pure nauseating, that’s what it is. When I see that ring on that grubby finger of yours, McLean, I feel like dynamiting the Gates of Legrand. I don’t know whether to laugh or commit suicide. You may not believe this, but this school used to have high standards. You’re living proof that we’re going downhill fast. Quit now, Bubba, and I’ll pay your way to Clemson. What’s going to happen to the image of this school if we allow you to graduate?”

“I’ll be one of the few demonstrably literate people ever to graduate from this school, Colonel.”

He threw his head back and laughed, his cigar ash cascading to the floor. “I just wanted to come over here and congratulate you, Bubba. It’s a great feeling to wear the ring, isn’t it?”

“One of the best feelings I’ve ever had,” I answered truthfully.

He glanced over my shoulder, his shrewd eyes appraising the activity in the hall. I looked behind me instinctively and saw Tradd studying us. The Bear always made Tradd nervous. The Bear began to talk to me in a slow controlled whisper.

“Have you heard from Oswald Spengler?” he asked.

“The West is still declining, Colonel.”

“Is Africa declining?” he responded cryptically.

“Pearce is holding his own, Colonel. You must have taken care of that overaggressive sophomore corporal who was giving him grief down in E Company.”

The Bear cackled and said, “He’s now a gentle-as-a-lamb sophomore private walking eighty tours for hazing a dumbhead.”

“You’re a harsh man, Colonel.”

“I’m a Girl Scout, Bubba,” he answered, his eyes continuing to scan the crowd. “I’ve got the heart of Bambi.”

“And if you’ll be so kind as to permit me an observation, sir: You’ve also got the looks of Rin-Tin-Tin.”

“Insulting a commissioned officer is good for forty tours, lamb,” he said, bringing his hot cigar ash to within an inch of my left eye. I could feel the heat of the ash deep in the retina and I backed away from him. But he anticipated the retreat, and matched my step, following me with the cigar. His smile was brown and toothy and ironic.

“I like the way Rin-Tin-Tin looks, Colonel,” I said, leaning out of the cigar’s range. “But you’re right. That statement might be misconstrued as an insult. I take it back, sir. You look a little better than Rin-Tin-Tin.”

“I’m gonna look like a matinee idol, Bubba, when you’re walking the quad with your M-1 rifle slung over your shoulder. By the way,” he said, suddenly growing serious again, “when’s the first road trip for you basketball bums?”

“The first week of December, Colonel. Why?”

“Because I’ll need to read Spengler for a week if you’re not on campus. Someone’s got to watch out for Pearce when you’re out proving that you’re one of the worst athletes in the history of the Institute.”

“Thanks, Colonel,” I said. “But I’ve already taken care of that. My roommates will check on Pearce for me during those weeks the team is on the road.”

“They know that you’re bird-dogging Pearce for me?” he said angrily. “I told you not to tell a living soul, Bubba.”

“They’ve known it from the beginning, Colonel Berrineau. I knew I’d be on the road a lot, and I tell them everything. There are no secrets in our room.”

“If I’d wanted them, I’d have picked them myself,” the Bear said, his eyes hot and blazing like his cigar ash. “St. Croix is steady and harmless. But I don’t know the other two very well. I’ve never trusted folks whose last names ended in an ‘i’ or an ‘o’ and I’ve never known a Yankee that can keep a secret.”

“These two can. I promise, Colonel,” I insisted.

“Do they like niggers?” the Bear asked.

“No, sir.”

“Good,” he said. “That makes me feel better. I trust people that hate niggers a lot more than I trust people like you. OK, Bubba. You made the new rules. Do they know to come see Papa Bear if there’s trouble?”

“Yes, sir. They know the whole procedure.”

“There’s something you might be interested in knowing, Bubba,” he said, catching Tradd in the act of watching us. He glowered back, forcing Tradd to drop his eyes as he resumed talking to Mark. “Did you ever hear of that knob Graubart, down in first battalion?”

“The kid from California,” I answered. “Everybody’s heard about the Western Waste, Colonel. I heard the cadre couldn’t even make him do pushups. He was a legend by the time he quit.”

“He resigned last week,” the Bear explained. “Except he didn’t resign in my office, not that he was a stickler for procedure. He resigned by telegram from San Francisco. When I went to inspect his room, I found something very interesting.”

“What, Colonel?”

“Don’t even tell this to your roommates, Bubba, and I mean that. I still don’t know what it means, but I’m sure going to find out. I found a number painted on his door.”

“So what, Colonel?”

“The number was a ten, Bubba.”

“You think it was The Ten who ran him out?”

“I don’t know who it was, Bubba. I just found the number on the door. It might just be a joke one of my lambs pulled off, but it sure did arouse my curiosity. If there is a Ten on this campus they’re gonna wish they were a thousand when the Bear catches them farting downwind. This may be their first mistake or it may be nothing at all.”

“How can we find out about The Ten?” I asked. “Where can we look?”

“Just keep your eyes and ears open, Bubba,” he replied. “And keep your mouth shut.”

“I’ll start with Edward the Great,” I said. “He knows everything that’s ever happened on this campus.”

“Colonel Reynolds will treat you differently the next time you talk to him,” the Bear said, starting to move away from me.

“Why, Colonel?” I asked, puzzled.

“It’s simple, Bubba,” he said, moving out into the jubilant crowd again. “Now you wear the ring.”

Chapter Twenty-seven

I
chose my professors at the Institute with discrimination and care, on the basis of their legend in the Corps or the passion and neurosis they brought to the lectern, not on the subject they taught. Early on, I had discovered that I would rather take “Principles of Business Management” taught by an excellent teacher than suffer through “Shakespeare’s Tragedies,” a subject I normally would have enjoyed, with a mediocre one. Nothing bored me more than flaccid, humorless academicians punishing their students with limpid melancholy lectures while they polished up their deadly little monographs on vital subjects like “The Nose Hair of Grendel.”

I developed The Great Teacher Theory late in my freshman year. It was a cornerstone of the theory that great teachers had great personalities and that the greatest teachers had outrageous personalities. I did not like decorum or rectitude in a classroom; I preferred a highly oxygenated atmosphere, a climate of intemperance, rhetoric, and feverish melodrama. And I wanted my teachers to make me smart.

A great teacher is my adversary, my conqueror, commissioned to chastise me. He leaves me tame and grateful for the new language he has purloined from other kings whose granaries are filled and whose libraries are famous. He tells me that teaching is the art of theft: of knowing what to steal and from whom.

Bad teachers do not touch me; the great ones never leave me. They ride with me during all my days, and I pass on to others what they have imparted to me. I exchange their handy gifts with strangers on trains, and I pretend the gifts are mine. I steal from the great teachers. And the truly wonderful thing about them is they would applaud my theft, laugh at the thought of it, realizing they had taught me their larcenous skills well.

I developed this theory in the classrooms of Colonel Edward T. Reynolds, whom the cadets called Edward the Great. Among the teachers in my life, and I had many good men and women, he belonged to the royal family.

But he was a difficult and temperamental man, and both Mark and I were nervous when we approached his class five minutes late the Monday afternoon after the Ring Ceremony. It took an act of courage to walk into Edward the Great’s room after he had begun a lecture, but it was better to face his wrath than to incur a month’s restriction to campus and twenty tours on the quadrangle.

“You do the talking, Will,” Mark said, an agitated tremor in his voice. “It’s your fault we’re late.”

“It’s always my fault we’re late,” I agreed. “No problem, Mark. You just walk quickly to your seat and I’ll take the grief from the Great.”

Colonel Reynolds was deep into his lecture when we entered the room. He stopped in midsentence, colored furiously, and gave us a stare that could have frozen Montego Bay.

I smiled broadly and saluted him in a friendly, brotherly manner as Mark slipped to the rear of the classroom.

Because of his obesity, it was easy to forget that Reynolds was a remarkably handsome man. He was immaculately groomed; his black hair was always combed with obsessive neatness, and his nails were always manicured precisely. He was fine-featured, with expressive green eyes that could register violence or merriment with equal eloquence.

He weighed well over three hundred pounds and had no visible neck, just a monumental round head, proud and fierce and inscrutable, resting on an enormous body. His arms, though short, were stacked with muscles that carried an awesome authority.

He was both admired and dreaded on campus. He was as mercurial and unpredictable as the English history course he taught. His aroused green eyes and massive immovable dignity gave him the appearance of a deranged and overweight inquisitor. There were no quarrels with Edward the Great, only vendettas.

Yet he was a quintessential gentleman, courtly in the finest sense, with a troubled, endangered civility rooted in the bruised mythology of the Old South. His classroom was his private domain, in which he approached the business of teaching with absolute gravity. When he lectured on the history of England, he was the most brilliant and passionate scholar I had ever heard, outrageously partisan, an immodest dispenser of inflamed rhetoric. He cherished language and its skillful use, and his own style was one of sustained floridity. Prose rolled off his tongue with both the sweetness and the sting of the hive about it. From him, the English language was a fine dancing thing, and you understood that, when properly used, it could bring about the fall of kings or the birth of gods or the death of kings and gods together.

But it was not his use of language that made him so controversial on campus; it was the extremity of his views. His colleagues on the faculty were mostly conservative but their conservatism possessed no fervor. It was not the fact that he was a racial supremacist that irritated his peers, it was that he seemed to loathe all the races and religions. He lacked the grace and acumen to despise only the blacks. He hated with equal gusto the French, the Jews, all Orientals, Slavs, Russians, Italians, Latin Americans, Turks, Arabs; in fact, he seemed to have a supreme, footnoted contempt for the entire family of man. The only races he did not hate were the races without history, without a chronicle of their crimes and atrocities. His field had not hardened him; it had made him narrow and paranoid, and his classroom was a forum for the astonishing bleakness of his creeds. But even though he was the most stunningly prejudiced man I had ever met, there was a sense of excitement and conflict and drama in his class that I had found nowhere else at the Institute. You learned much by disagreeing with everything that Edward T. Reynolds propounded.