The Lords of Discipline (77 page)

But I was no longer listening to Tradd. There was a fire in the southwestern corner of the garden in the trash barrel where Abigail burned leaves during the fall and I was watching the fire. The flames rose high above the garden wall and illuminated the taut, nervous figure of Commerce St. Croix. He was burning his journals one at a time, offering the history of his life to the flames. For several moments, I watched him. He was destroying his autobiography, his secret, modest legacy to the literature of his times, and he was crying as he did it.

“Tell Commerce I know that what I did with his journals was unforgivable, but it was the only way,” I said, then turning back toward them. “I never felt happier in Charleston than when I was in this house. There was such peace here. Such safety. I felt completely safe here.”

“You can still feel safe here,” Abigail said.

“Please, Will,” Tradd said, close to tears. “Please. I deserve one more chance. Please don’t leave me like this. We love each other. You know we do, Will. Tell me you don’t love me. Yes, tell me that. Tell me you don’t love me, Will.”

“I can’t tell you that, Tradd,” I said. And I left the St. Croix mansion forever.

Chapter Forty-nine

O
n the last night I would ever be a cadet, I walked the old city of Charleston as an act of homage and gratitude. My time in the city was up and the long seasoning was complete. Tomorrow I would walk across the stage beneath the gaze of colonels for the last time. I could bear the tonnage of their gaze no longer. My education at the Institute was finished. I knew what I had to do now and what I had to watch out for and whom I had to fear. I could write my own Blue Book now and its rules and codicils would be my own. I would think my own thoughts, not theirs.

But I would not forget the lessons of the Institute. The Institute was my destiny, my character, and my metaphor. I would walk along the dark galleries, from arch to arch, from cadre to merciless cadre, from taming to taming, from system to unconscionable system for as long as I lived. The landscape would change, and the faces, and the names, but there would be no leaving of the barracks for me.

Slowly, I walked the entire Battery from Murray Boulevard to East Bay. It had rained in the afternoon and the rain was fresh in the alleyways. I walked the streets I loved the best: King and Legare, Tradd and Water, Meeting and South Battery, Church and Lamboll. I walked down Stoll’s Alley and back to the water down Longitude Lane, then up Tradd Street again and through Bedon’s Alley to Elliot Street.

Memory in these incomparable streets, in mosaics of pain and sweetness, was clear to me now, a unity at last. I remembered small and unimportant things from the past: the whispers of roommates during thunderstorms, the smell of brass polish on my fingertips, the first swim at Folly Beach in April, lightning over the Atlantic, shelling oysters at Bowen’s Island during a rare Carolina snowstorm, pigeons strutting across the graveyard at St. Philip’s, lawyers moving out of their offices to lunch on Broad Street, the darkness at reveille on cold winter mornings, regattas, the flash of bagpipers’ tartans passing in review, blue herons in the marshes, the pressure of the chinstrap on my shako, brotherhood, shad roe at Henry’s, camellias floating above water in a porcelain bowl, the scowl of Mark Santoro, and brotherhood again.

As I walked the streets I listened to the conversations and murmurings of families on verandahs. I walked slowly through the city of the four-year test, the city of exquisite, measureless beauty, smelling the wet flowers shimmering with aroma in the secret gardens behind high brick walls. All around me was the smell of sweetbay and jasmine, loquat and wisteria, and the stammering of insects among the daphne and tea olive.

I had come to Charleston as a young boy, a lonely visitor slouching through its well-tended streets, a young boy, lean and grassy, who grew fluent in his devotion and appreciation of that city’s inestimable charm. I was a boy there and saw things through the eyes of a boy for the last time. The boy was dying and I wanted to leave him in the silent lanes South of Broad. I would leave him with no regrets except that I had not stopped to honor his passing. I had not thanked the boy for his capacity for astonishment, for curiosity, and for survival. I was indebted to that boy. I owed him my respect and my thanks. I owed him my remembrance of the lessons he learned so keenly and so ominously. He had issued me a challenge as he passed the baton to the man in me: He had challenged me to have the courage to become a gentle, harmless man. For so long, I had felt like the last boy in America and now, at last, it was time to leave him. Now it was the man. The man was the quest.

I stopped along the Battery, at the exact point where the Ashley and the Cooper rivers met; and I stared out toward the lights on Sullivan’s Island. Beneath the streetlight, I pulled a letter from my back pocket and read it again. Since I had received it the previous day, I had read it over and over again, obsessively—the only letter I ever would receive from Annie Kate Gervais.

“Dear Will,
     “Now you know everything. I cried when I heard you knew. And I felt bad about myself again. Abigail called and asked me to intercede with you on Tradd’s behalf. After what she and Tradd had put me through, I never wanted to hear their names again. I told her that, too. But I’m sorry you had to be hurt by me again. I don’t remember much about our time together, Will, but I remember you were sweet. And I remember that you loved me. I’m not sure I loved you back, but some of me did. I’m sure of that, Will. You’ll make some girl a fine husband, but I was not right for you.
     “I want to tell you why Tradd would not marry me. It’s important for me to tell you. My father was from North Charleston. They called him white trash South of Broad, but he was a wonderful charming man who swept my mother right off her feet. Mother’s family was very fine, but also poor, and they never forgave her. You know the rest, Will. There won’t be any debutante parties for me, no St. Cecilia ball, no yacht club. Tradd was my only chance. But, of course, Abigail wouldn’t have a St. Croix marrying a Gervais from North Charleston. It’s a funny story, isn’t it, Will? She thought I got pregnant intentionally and convinced Tradd of the same thing. Isn’t it a funny story?
     “I’ve got to go now. I’m getting good grades. California is nice. I just love to watch the surfers, and everyone out here thinks I’m a charming Southern belle from an aristocratic family. That’s what I tell them. I never look for shells or sand dollars when I walk on the beach out here. Please don’t answer this letter, Will. I hope you understand.

“Annie Kate.”

I turned away from the seawall and walked across White Point Gardens. I tried to think of a summing up, a chronicle of things I had learned at the Institute; I wanted a list of the strengths and deficiencies I was bringing to the task of becoming a man. I knew this or thought I did: I wanted to live life passionately, in luxurious free form, without squads, without uniforms or ranks. Freedom was the only thing I had never known, and it was time to walk with abandon, immune from the battalions, answerable only to myself. I would make my own way now, conscious of my singularity, proud of it. I would run wild, out of step, and unrestrained. And though I had learned in the barracks that I would always be afraid, I had also learned that I was not for sale and could not be rented out for any price. I had found one thing—at last, at last—to like about myself.

I walked the beautiful city in uniform for the last time. I knew now it was possible to fall in love with a whole city. I stopped in Hampton Park to say good-bye to the lion. Then I returned to the barracks.

M
ark and I dressed for graduation. It was a perfect June morning. I had just watched as Mark and hundreds of my classmates were sworn in as second lieutenants in the Army. In two years, eight of them would be dead in Vietnam. On returning to the barracks, I had thrown all my uniforms except my full dress into the garbage can in fourth division, doused them with gasoline, and lit them with a match. The blaze had been spectacular and infinitely satisfying.

It was lonely in the room with just the two of us.

“Hey, lieutenant,” I said as I adjusted my suspenders. “I don’t want to hear about you winning any medals in Vietnam. You hear me?”

Mark turned and grinned at me. “Yeh, I hear you, asshole-breath.”

“Promise me, Mark,” I said seriously, “promise me that you’ll be careful. Promise me.”

“I will. I’ll be careful. I promise, Will. And I won’t win any medals.”

And he was careful. But sometimes being careful is not enough. It was not enough for my roommate, Mark Santoro. He lied about the medals. Mark won lots of medals and became the most decorated Institute graduate of the Vietnam era. His father had the medals mounted and framed and displayed them proudly to me on the day that Mark Santoro’s portrait was unveiled on the wall of the library at the Institute.

We finished dressing for graduation and we embraced for a long time. Then we went down to the quadrangle and formed up with the seniors of R Company. We marched out of the barracks to join the rest of the four hundred.

Four thousand people sat beneath the trees on the south end of the parade ground to watch the graduation. I saw my family and waved to them. The campus was beautiful and leafy and the parade ground blazed in the deepest green of summer. There were brown-skinned girls in cotton print dresses and proud mothers and fathers applauding as their sons crossed the stage to receive their diplomas from the General.

When my name was called by the adjutant, I walked toward the General, received the diploma in my left hand, stepped back, and saluted him.

He returned the salute coldly and shook my hand.

“Do not disgrace the ring, Mr. McLean,” he said.

“Dante Pignetti,” I answered. “Dante Pignetti, my roommate, sir.”

He stared at me, then turned away.

As I walked across that stage I felt something growing within me, something powerful, deeply committed, and unfathomable. I wondered if the crowd could see it in my walk. It was the witness, one afflicted with all the hurt and burden and grandeur of memory. I wondered if they could see the difference.

No, they saw only a boy who had joined the Line, a boy with a diploma, a smiling happy boy. They saw a boy who would be an Institute man for the rest of his life. A Whole Man.

They could not see the difference. They did not know their system had profferred me an inestimable gift: It had given me the chance to prove that, though I wore the ring, I was not one of them.

When the ceremony was over, I found the Bear and handed him my diploma along with a ballpoint pen.

“What’s this for, lamb?”

“I want you to sign it, Colonel. I want you to make it official,” I answered, and pointing to General Durrell’s signature, I said, “I want the name of a man I can respect on my diploma, Colonel.”

He handed me back the diploma without signing it. “There already is, Bubba,” he answered. “There already is.”

And he pointed to my name.

A Biography of Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy (b. 1945) is one of America’s most acclaimed and widely read authors and the
New York Times
bestselling writer of ten novels and memoirs, including
The Water Is Wide
,
The Lords of Discipline
,
The Great Santini
,
The Prince of Tides
, and
South of Broad
.

Conroy was born in Atlanta, Georgia. Growing up as the first of seven children in a military family, Conroy moved twenty-three times before he turned eighteen, constantly switching schools as a result. His father, a Chicago-born pilot in the U.S. Marine Corps, was physically and emotionally abusive to his children, an experience that colored much of Conroy’s writing.
The Great Santini
(1976) in particular drew from many painful elements of Conroy’s childhood, a fact that caused friction within his family and played a role in his parents’ divorce as well as in Conroy’s own divorce from his first wife, Barbara.

In 1963, after graduating high school, Conroy enrolled in the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina. His experience at the Citadel provided the basis for his first book,
The Boo
(1970), as well as his novel
The Lords of Discipline
(1980) and his memoir
My Losing Season
(2002).
The Lords of Discipline
stirred up controversy for exposing incidents of racism and sexism at the Citadel, though the resulting rift between Conroy and the school would later heal. The Citadel awarded Conroy an honorary degree and he delivered its commencement address in 2001.

After graduating from the Citadel, Conroy took a job as a school teacher in an impoverished community on Daufuskie Island off the coast of South Carolina. He was fired after one year for personal differences with the school’s administration, including his refusal to abide by the school’s practice of corporal punishment. His book
The Water Is Wide
(1972), which was honored by the National Education Association, was largely based on his experiences.

In the 1980s, Conroy moved from South Carolina to Atlanta, and then to Rome, Italy, after marrying his second wife, Lenore. While living in Rome, he wrote
The Prince of Tides
(1986), about a former football player’s tragic upbringing and its effect on his family. The novel, which has sold more than five million copies worldwide, drove a wedge between Conroy and his sister, Carol, on whom many sections of the novel were based. In 1991, the book was made into a major motion picture starring Barbra Streisand and Nick Nolte that was nominated for seven Academy Awards. After publishing his fourth novel,
Beach Music
, in 1997, Conroy married his third wife, Cassandra King, who is the author of four novels. Since their marriage, he has written the memoir
My Losing Season
(2002),
The Pat Conroy Cookbook: Recipes of My Life
(2004) with Suzanne Williamson Pollak,
South of Broad
(2009), and the collection of essays
My Life in Books
(2010).