The Lords of Discipline (45 page)

We walked in a shifting sea of fire, each flame a small column in the chapel of our sorrow. The Corps stood on his front lawn, the light of the candles surreal and trembling as we fidgeted diffidently before the shadows on his verandah. We stood there numbly, not knowing what to do or say, not knowing how to express the feelings that thickened our tongues, not knowing how to cry or what to say to a mother who had lost her one son for all time and a warrior who had lost his one son to war.

But even though there was no order to our spontaneous assembly at the General’s house, there was a ceremonial correctness to the gathering. The Corps had come together to honor Al Durrell, wearer of the ring, one of us, a boy who would always be a boy, a comrade who would always be a comrade, and to honor the father of this son, to ease the pain of his mother, to share their pain, and to show our own.

As we saw General Durrell and his wife appear at their front door, we realized we had caught them unawares: They had had no time to prepare for our reception. It was the first time I had ever seen General Durrell in civilian clothes. We were moved by Mrs. Durrell’s tears; we were moved by his lack of tears. They stared into the light where we stood on the lawn. I could hear the breathing of the Corps around me, the suppressed fury of loss in the roar of our inhale. In that crowd of two thousand, twenty-eight of us would die in Vietnam. Twenty-eight rings would return to the glass case of the museum. I would think of those twenty-eight later, each of them, one at a time when I heard the news, and I would wonder if in this visitation to the General’s house, the death of those twenty-eight was assured. But on that night, we breathed slowly, simultaneously, for it was one of those times when the Corps had become one. Our silence was fearful and magnificent as we faced the Durrells. The tide was out in the river and the smell of the marsh was a fertile, powerful musk. That night the smell of the ebb tide and the smell of death seemed one.

Our faces glowed above the candlelight. The General stepped forward to say something. He cleared his throat and looked down, his fingers moving as though he were shuffling imaginary notes on a podium. Then he stepped back when he heard his wife sob. She began to weep uncontrollably. Her weeping had the timbre of imponderable loss, even of despair. The General put his arm around his wife and stared back at us with eyes that had suddenly become institutional. It was difficult to interpret his actions. There was both a strain and a theatricality to his movements. He stood above us at attention, his bearing both stiff and formal as always, but the words of loss and endings were loose upon his tongue. He could not pull them together. He could not speak.

I wanted to embrace the man. I wanted to let his wife cry on my shoulder. I wanted to bring his quiet son back to life. Grief lined the General’s face in an easily traceable fretwork. His eyes were drained of light.

Suddenly Mrs. Durrell stepped forward. In a voice that trembled with agony and hatred, and once again with despair, the frail and self-effacing woman shouted out to us: “Get them, boys. Get them. Get them and kill them. For Alfred. For me. For me.” Then she broke again and returned to her husband.

I do not know where the chant started, but it was somewhere behind me. At first it was a single voice, low and primal. The others picked it up until it spread through the crowd. Then it was the Corps in a single voice thundering a message of violent condolence, of inchoate vengeance. In the language of the barracks, the Corps howled out its note of condolence to Alice Durrell.

“
I want to go to Vietnam.
I want to kill some Vietcong.
I want to go to Vietnam.
I want to kill some Vietcong.
”

The chant passed over the campus. It was fearful and terrible and sublime; it came from the great violent heart of us. The power of evil burned through the conscience of the regiment, and it was the same as the power of love and grief.

Then Mrs. Durrell silenced the crowd by uplifting her hand.

“This is the most beautiful thing that has ever happened to me. Thank you, boys. Thank you so much for everything.” Then she turned and walked into her house, her husband with her.

I spoke to no one on the walk back to the barracks. The Institute had affected me in strange ways, I knew, but I was not prepared for this proof of its authority. I had participated in the chant. I had screamed it out with the others. My voice and the voice of the barracks had merged as one. They were the same thing. It was the first time I knew it for certain.

Chapter Twenty-nine

I
n the middle of December, before the team’s first long road trip around the South, I drove out to Annie Kate’s house to give her a Christmas present. She was not in the house when I arrived, and I found her sitting alone on the rocks watching the sun set behind the Charleston skyline again. Behind us, the moon, a shimmering bright disc of winter chrome, was rising over the island, attended by the first pale stars of evening. She was wrapped in a blanket and I could see the vapor of her breath as I approached.

I had not known what to buy a girl I loved. In my lifetime, I had never brought any skill or imagination to the art of gift-giving. I could never match a gift with how I really felt. I had written my mother and told her I was in love with a girl. I told her everything about Annie Kate except that she was pregnant with another man’s child. That was my guilty secret and one that I would not share, not even with my mother. I told her that Annie Kate reminded me of her and that was true. All women I admired reminded me of my mother. I wanted her advice on what a son should give to the first girl he had ever loved. My mother wrote back with a list of suggestions: White Shoulders perfume, a good book (preferably a classic), a leather purse, or a gold chain. She preferred the gold chain and assured me it would make a lovely Christmas present for any girl, even a girl from an old Charleston family. My mother also told me I could invite Annie Kate home for Christmas and that she would be glad to write Annie Kate’s mother extending an invitation. Anyone that I loved, my mother assured me, she would love. Anyone that I loved, she already loved.

It was a gold chain I brought wrapped to Annie Kate on the rocks, to Annie Kate by the sea.

I handed her the gift and sat down beside her, pulling my overcoat collar high over my dress grays. She removed the wrapping and lifted the chain from the box. She held the chain up to the last light of the sun and the first hard blaze of moonlight, gold on gold and gold on silver. Then she put it around her neck and kissed me.

She smiled at me as she ran her finger around the chain, then darkened suddenly as though some switch had been thrown in her consciousness due to a failure of power and nerve. “You’re not doing this just because you feel sorry for me, are you, Will? You’re not loving me because you pity me? Because I’m pregnant?”

“I’ve told you before, Annie Kate,” I answered. “I would never have met you if you hadn’t been pregnant. Answer this truthfully. Would I have had any chance with you at all if you hadn’t been in trouble?”

“No,” she said, staring down at the rocks. “You’re right. I’ve been programmed since birth to marry in my own class. I got pregnant with someone from my own class and look where it got me. I don’t have one friend in the world who knows where I really am. Do you know, Will, that I have Charleston friends who write me in Santa Barbara? They send me letters to the house of my mother’s cousin, who sends them back to Charleston. I write back telling about college and all the new friends I’ve made. I tell of cute charming boys I go out with. I describe the mountains around Santa Barbara and tell of weekend trips to Big Sur and San Francisco. I send the letters back to my mother’s cousin and she mails them out to my friends. I’ve never been to California in my life. Everything I write and say is a complete and total lie. My whole life is one huge ugly lie.”

“You’re much too hard on yourself, Annie Kate,” I said. “You don’t come from a society where you can cheerfully and honestly admit that you got knocked up. You and your mother are simply protecting your future. If your boy friend keeps his mouth shut, no one will ever know. Why didn’t you just go to Santa Barbara and live with this woman, this mysterious cousin? Did y’all ever consider that?”

“My mother wouldn’t have gotten the satisfaction of looking down her nose at me, telling me daily that I had ruined her life and everything she’d tried to do for me, if I’d gone to California. She wouldn’t have been able to play her favorite role of the complete martyr. This way she gets to punish me a little bit each day. We both get to watch my betrayal of her grow a little bit each day. And we get to hurt each other a little bit each day. I sometimes go to bed at night and pray to God that I won’t wake up. I think my mother would secretly bury me at sea rather than explain why I was in Charleston.”

“Aren’t you being a little hard on your mother, too? I think she’s just trying to handle this in the best way she knows how.”

“All she can talk about is how this affects her life and reputation. She never stops to think how it’s affected me, how it’s killing me one day at a time.”

“What will you do with the baby, Annie Kate?” I said.

She turned on me furiously, screaming and out of control. “There is no baby. I’ve already told you that.”

“You can pretend there’s no baby and I can pretend there’s no baby, but at the end of nine months, you’re going to have to decide what to do with this phantom child who’s going to be feeding at your breast.”

“I would never breast-feed a child even if it were a normal child and not a bastard. I’ve always thought that women who breast-fed their children had horrid breasts. I bet the women in your family always breast-fed children. In my family, never! I had a colored wet nurse feed me.”

“I grew up with this strange idea that a woman’s breast was made for feeding children,” I said. “You pick up all kinds of weird ideas growing up outside of Charleston.”

“You’re trying to pick a fight with me, Will. You’re trying to make me feel squalid and low again.”

“No, I’m not,” I protested. “I’m trying to get you to face reality. To make some plans. I’m trying to get you to think about what you’re going to do with the child, Annie Kate. I’ve been trying since I first met you to get you to talk about it, and all you do is change the subject or pretend that I didn’t really ask the question.”

“It’s not a child to me, Will,” she said. “Can you understand that? I can’t let it be. It’s not alive inside me. If I thought about it as my child, I would start to love it. I have to protect myself. I have to think about it as something inanimate, something growing in me like a tumor or a plant, something that should have been cut out but wasn’t. You see, I can’t let this baby interfere with my life. I plan to have a wonderful life full of gay and happy times. Full of charming people.”

“What about the baby?” I whispered. “Are you going to put it up for adoption?”

“Yes,” she finally answered. “They’re going to take it from me as soon as it’s born. Does that satisfy you, Will? Does that answer your question? They’ll give it to a nice family. They’ve promised me that.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said.

“What do you want me to do with it, Will? Put it in a perambulator, dress it in pink or blue, and parade it up and down the Battery, waving to my friends?”

“I don’t know what to do,” I said. “I’ve never been faced with a decision like that, and I don’t know what I would do in your place. I’m sorry if I’ve upset you. It’s none of my business.”

“I sometimes pretend this is all happening to someone else, Will. Someone odious and despicable. I can’t believe that God would let something like this happen to someone He didn’t hate. I know that I sinned, but God knows that I’ve paid for that sin. I didn’t do anything to deserve this kind of punishment. Yet it’s so odd to have this thing growing inside me. Sometimes I hate it with all my heart. At other times I’m so full of love for it I could burst. It needs me so completely. It’s so trusting and absolutely dependent on me. It can’t help what I did. It’s happy inside me. I know that; I can feel that. It doesn’t even know that it’s going to come into the world as a bastard. A bastard descended from some of the oldest families in Charleston.”

“I wish there was something I could do, Annie Kate,” I said, taking her hands into mine again. “I’d do anything to help you.”

“Be my friend, Will McLean. Don’t leave me during all this, no matter how cruel or horrid I am to you, no matter what mean things I say. Be my friend, but remember to keep your distance. I feel vile and unclean, and I don’t want to infect you.”

“Infect me, Annie Kate? I want to take it all. I want to feel every hurt you have, and I want us to beat them down together.”

We kissed again, a harder, more urgent kiss. I pressed her body against mine and felt her small breasts flatten against my chest and the pressure and weight of her pregnancy coming between us. Her child came between us, a symbol of both what divided us and what had brought us inextricably together. But touching the place where the child was made it no longer symbolic; it was real and palpable and material.

I had dreamed often of this child of Annie Kate’s. I had seen it run along the shore of Sullivan’s Island chasing migrating birds and suddenly released balloons. I could see this child clearly; it had no discernible sex, but it was a blond and airy thing, a sea-child who stood knee-deep in the surf and laughed at the flight of pelicans and the sprints of sandcrabs to their lairs. I could see it lifting from the beach stranded jellyfish, which would hang off its fingers like translucent laundry, and the child would not be stung. It would lift stingrays from the shallows without fear of harm. This would be a magic child, inspirited with the wisdom and cunning of sea life—and none of the old silent rancor of Charleston.

As we returned toward her house, stepping carefully over the rocks, I wondered about that child moving in the mysterious inland sea of Annie Kate’s body. I held her hand and realized that the blood I felt rushing through her wrist would soon be rushing through the brain of the fetus, that her body had become an aquarium and that her child was a swimmer in its lightless pool. We were three human hearts on that walk down the beach, three different views of the universe, three sets of aligned yet separate dreams. I wondered if I had dreamed in my mother’s womb. What would be the first dream in a newly created brain—perhaps some ancient common dream of the species, an image of fire or the first shuddering memory of stars or bison on the walls of caverns? Or do the dreams of mothers become the dreams of the half-children? Did I dream my mother’s dreams? Did I learn of roses and aircraft and snowfall because my mother’s dreams had traveled her body with their images intact and electric and full of messages from the outside world?