“Mother will be disappointed,” he said. “What are you doing, Will, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Don’t tell Pig and Mark about this, but I’ve met a girl I really like.”
“You!” Tradd said, genuinely surprised. “Does she like you too?”
“Not that much,” I confessed.
“Is she a local girl? I may know her,” he said.
“No,” I lied. “She’s from way off. Some nonexistent place like North Dakota. Her father’s in the Navy.”
“When will I get to meet her?”
“Not for a while, Tradd. She’s very shy about meeting people. I can’t tell you everything now, but I will someday, I promise. And you’ll be the first one to meet her.”
“Why don’t you want Pig and Mark to know? They’ve been wanting you to have a girl friend for a long time.”
“For about the same amount of time as they’ve wanted you to have a girl friend” I laughed. “I just don’t want to get teased by them, Tradd. I’ve never been able to take teasing about girls.”
“I’ve never had to,” Tradd said, smiling to himself.
“I feel so awkward around girls. I never seem to think of the right thing to say. I can’t seem to make them feel comfortable, and I always think they wish they were with someone else. They make me feel terminally shy, Tradd. Even ugly. I think I’m so aware of my face and how I look and how I appear to them that I can’t even really see them or talk to them. How do you feel around girls, Tradd? I mean really. What goes on in your head when you’re around a girl you really like?”
“I feel threatened, Will,” he said seriously. “I feel like I’m about to be invaded, smothered completely. I’m rarely comfortable around them. But that’s not surprising. I’m rarely comfortable around anybody.”
“Except me,” I corrected.
“Except you,” he agreed.
“What about Mark and Pig?” I asked. “Why aren’t you comfortable around them?”
“It’s different with them, Will, and it’s a difference hard to explain. I have great affection for them, and I know they feel the same about me. But the only time it really works for us is when all four of us are together. They’re my friends and roommates only because of you. I didn’t earn their friendship on my own. I think they would do anything for me. I’ve never met people with such a strong sense of loyalty and we’ve shared so much together. But we’re such different types and it’s such a strange accident that all of us are together. Still, it’s a happy accident and I’m glad we all found each other.”
“A great accident,” I said.
“Especially for the honey prince,” he said bitterly.
“Forget that shit, Tradd. The Corps has this nasty way of pinning damaging nicknames on people.”
“It hurts only because it strikes so close to home, Will. One of the reasons I came to the Institute was because certain people, including my father, have always considered me effeminate. I thought if I survived the plebe system, it would quell all doubts about my masculinity. No one feared the plebe system as much as I did. I wasn’t like you, Will. I knew all about the brutality and the excesses and I knew the cadre would despise me from the moment I walked into the Gates of Legrand. But I needed to prove to myself that I could take everything they could dish out. I loved it when I heard that football players quit because they couldn’t take the system. I couldn’t help it, Will. I loved it. I thought since I stayed when stronger boys left I would no longer have to put up with taunts about my voice or my manner. But that’s not how it works at all. Not in the Corps of Cadets. It’s a good nickname for me, Will. It’s perfect. That’s why I hate it so much. You’ve no idea how much a perfect nickname can hurt. I can’t walk anywhere on campus without hearing it. Even if no one says it, I can still hear it.”
Taps sounded through the barracks with all the old infinite sadness of finality. All cadets were one day closer to being whole men.
We dried ourselves quickly and returned down the gallery to our alcove room in time for the all-in check. Mark and Pig were already in their racks and the lights were out. Tradd dressed in his modest striped pajamas while I fell into the bottom bunk in my shorts, my uniform crumpled in a heap beside my desk.
I loved this time of day best. It was my favorite time anywhere. I liked the approach of sleep as much as I liked sleep itself. The sheets were clean and the windows were open and the cicadas screamed in the dry oak branches outside the windows. The odor of the marsh was so urgent and strong, so evocative of the Atlantic and infinite fertility, that the breeze that lifted the sheets from my body smelled of trout and shad and mullet and flowed in a secret renegade creek through our room. Far off in that city of light and water the bells of St. Michael’s tolled high over Broad Street, freighters moved through dark water, and the nightwalkers began their solitary and uncontested rule of the brick alleys. Tradd shifted in his bed above me. Lightning flashed in the distance and the earth began to think of rain.
“Hey, Will,” Mark asked, “did you finish your paper for Edward the Great’s class?”
“Not yet,” I answered, turning toward the voice in the darkness. “I’m going to the library in the morning.”
“How can you guys stand to look at that fat blivet?” Pig asked, rising up on one elbow. “He weighs three hundred pounds if he weighs an inch. His body is disgusting. He doesn’t even need to go on a diet, man. He needs an operation to sew up his esophagus for about three months.”
“He’s a great teacher, Pig,” Mark countered. “The best I’ve ever had.”
“I’m not saying he’s not, paisan. I’m just saying I couldn’t sit and look at that body all day without getting sick to my stomach.”
“Maybe he has glandular problems, Piglet,” Tradd said. “Some fat people can’t help being fat.”
“That’s what they all say,” Pig explained. “Every fat blivet I’ve ever met told me he had bad glands. Not one of them ever told me about stuffing too much chow into their fat blivet faces. Reynolds ought to do himself a favor and take a vacation to some country having a famine.”
Then Mark changed the subject suddenly by asking, “Will, did you ever get laid this summer?”
“No,” I answered, rolling over to go to sleep and hoping that the gesture would end the conversation.
“Did you try?” Mark insisted.
“Sure,” I said. “I’m in a perpetual state of trying. I came close, though. One girl let me walk her home after a movie, and we shook hands at the front door.”
“Why can’t you score, Will?” Pig asked. “You’d think you were an amputee or a homo, with the luck you have with women. Hell, there are broads with wide-ons all over the place waiting for a guy like you to come along.”
“I got laid so many times this summer that I thought I was the only white man in South Philly,” Mark boasted.
“You are the only white man in South Philly,” Pig giggled.
Tradd’s voice came from above me after a moment of silence. “Why didn’t you ask me if I made love to a woman this summer, Mark?” Tradd said.
“You don’t even look at women, Tradd,” Mark explained. “Much less get laid by them.”
“I met a girl this summer. I even made love to her. At least twice,” he declared with stiff formality. “It happened when I was traveling in England.”
Pig and Mark screamed simultaneously, and I heard their bare feet hit the floor as they made their way through the darkness to Tradd’s rack. They began slapping his shoulders roughly and tickling his sides until he was breathless with laughter.
“You ol stud horse,” Mark said. “You’ve been keeping secrets from your roomies. Out there getting it and not saying anything.”
“It’s those quiet ones you can’t trust. My daughters are always gonna date guys with the biggest mouths in Brooklyn. If they’re talking then they can’t be fucking,” Pig crowed.
“Who was it, Tradd?” I said, rising up on the other side of the rack. “And was
it human?”
“It’s no one’s personal beeswax except my own. And the young lady’s in question, of course,” Tradd said demurely, but it was obvious that he had never been the central figure in any discussion of sexual prowess and was enjoying the experience in his own baffled manner.
“Was she a nice girl?” I asked.
“She was a wonderful person,” he replied. “But not really my type.”
“How many times did you say you blew her socks off?” Pig asked, his tongue tracing his upper lip.
“Did she scream and claw your back and beg for the banana?” Mark asked.
“As you can see, Tradd,” I said, “sex is a sacrament to our Italian roommates.”
“It has Extreme Unction beat all to hell,” Mark said.
“I want to hear about every disgusting, stinky detail,” Pig said in a tone that eloquently expressed all the wildness and animalism of sex.
“I’m surprised at you, Pig,” Tradd scolded. “You are forever thrashing innocent boys who come in this room and even look at Theresa in an untoward way, yet you insult my friend and my relationship with her by asking me to describe our acts of love together. I find your behavior very inconsistent.”
“Hey, you’re right, paisan. I’m sorry. I just didn’t think,” Pig said apologetically.
“I’m the last virgin left in the room,” I groaned. “Hell, I’m probably the last one left in the world.”
“You won’t ever have any more pimples,” Pig said with authority. “Pimples can’t survive regular sex.”
“I have regular sex,” I said, “only I have it with myself.”
“Oh, gross,” Tradd said. “I’m sorry I brought up this repulsive subject.”
“I think it’s great,” Mark said. “I’m proud of you, Tradd. I’m really proud. You’re a man now, boy.”
“Do you know one reason I did it?” Tradd said, and his voice was edged with that remote aristocratic sadness that was his trademark in serious conversation.
“It doesn’t matter, Tradd,” I said. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“It was wrong,” he said sharply. “It was very wrong, and I did it for all the wrong reasons. I didn’t enjoy it very much. I suffered tremendous guilt over the entire affair.”
“You’ve got to get used to it, Tradd,” Mark said gently. “Nobody likes it the first couple of times.”
“I’ve loved it since I was eleven,” Pig said dreamily. “I felt like the Lone Ranger when I first shot silver bullets into a broad.”
“You’re so gross, Pig,” Tradd said, “but I want to tell you all the reason. I did it because I wanted people to stop calling me the honey prince. I thought that after it was over people would look at me differently. I thought people would intuitively know. But nothing happened. Nothing changed. People still think I’m a queer, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“Tradd,” I sighed, “forget about that nickname. That’s all you’ve talked about since Reuben called you that. He didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Hey, paisan,” Pig said in a whisper, “if anyone calls you that name again, it will be like someone calling Theresa a cunt. I’ll break his mouth. I’ll wax the quadrangle with the bastard. I promise.”
“You know how I feel about you guys,” Tradd said, and the room was suddenly electric with the tension of inarticulate boys.
“We feel the same about you,” Mark said. “All of you guys know what’s in Mark’s heart.”
“Hey, we’re brothers, paisans,” Pig said. “I’d kick ass for all of you. Just point to a guy and ol’ Piglet will kick his ass.”
“I’ve never liked any of you assholes,” I said.
It began to rain and I could see lightning embroidering the sky with a violent, jagged silver. “It’s Satan setting the table,” my grandmother used to tell me. I was overcome with the power of the feelings that hovered in the room, mingling with the smell of ozone and marsh grass. There could be storm warnings even in the most delicate and banal of conversations. I heard the thunder, then the whistle of the Lowcountry Zephyr as it approached the trestle that crossed the Ashley River.
Then I heard the lion.
I had never heard the lion and the train at the same time. I had never heard the lion roar at 11:42 when the train passed over the river bearing its freight and passengers and mail. I had never heard the lion, the train, the thunder, and the sound of rain piercing through the parched oak leaves outside my window. At the time I thought it was a good omen, but I was wrong. I was very wrong, and the lesson made me understand why the Greeks employed mysterious oracles, humans with dazzling and miraculous powers, to divine the complex signals and messages given off by an implacable and bewildering universe. But I was young then and every omen was a good one. I fell asleep that night thinking of Tradd’s ineffable sadness, of Mark’s gruff gentleness, of Pig’s volatility and blind loyalty, of my virginity, of my pleasure in talking in bed at night, of secrets between roommates, of my inability to tell boys who loved me that I loved them. I went to sleep, deeply, silently, fully; and I never once thought about Bucky Poteete.
But from that night on, the year was marked with a curious inevitability, as though we were all engaged in an amazing and irresistible game. All the secrets of the year were contained in that one night’s conversation, so innocent and serious and natural, when the place settings were laid out by brisk, wicked hands. The storm embraced Charleston in a gale from the Atlantic. The drought of September ended, and all of us accepted invitations to a banquet of storm and ruin and evil. I had forgotten the rest of my grandmother’s story. She had told me that Satan could set his table anywhere he wanted; he didn’t need to wait for a storm.
Chapter Twenty-three
When Annie Kate began to show through the raincoat, Mrs. Gervais moved her out to the family beach house on Sullivan’s Island, a gray Victorian structure on the south end of the island, directly across from Fort Sumter, with an uncommonly beautiful view of the harbor and the city. Mrs. Gervais lived in mortal dread that someone who mattered, someone prominent in the thinly oxygenated heights of Charleston society, would spot Annie Kate during one of her nocturnal promenades through the quiet streets or while she distractedly picked flowers and nervously paced the brick pathways of their desultory garden. If Annie Kate had been a prisoner in the house of Church Street, she became both a prisoner and expatriate on the island, even though the beach was practically deserted during the winter and her freedom of movement was far greater, as we took three- and four-mile walks on the sand, collecting shells, and watching the ships enter and leave the harbor. She would wave vigorously to the freighters coming to Charleston to unload their cargo; she would ignore the ships embarking from the city as though she could not understand why anyone or anything would want to leave a place so perfect and desirable. In the completeness of her loneliness, she was growing more petulant and irrational. She spoke of Charleston as though it were a prize that exacted an awesome tithe of spirit from those who loved it. She was obsessed with regaining the city for herself, with reclaiming her inherent right to its privileges and charms. The pregnancy had deepened her, she said, and had made her wiser as she faced the lights of the city directly across from her porch on Sullivan’s Island. I never forgot what she said about Charleston in those slow wonderful days when we talked for hours and hours about the uncertain future. Charleston was not just a city, she said. Charleston was a gift and the gift must be earned. She would then stare longingly at those enchanted lights, strung like a brilliant necklace along the curved neck of the peninsula, and swear that one day she would earn back her rightful place in the city she had lost as a girl before she even realized how passionately she loved it or knew how desperately she would miss it when it was so cruelly taken from her.
I visited Annie Kate on the island every weekend and on four occasions had wheedled Charleston passes from the Bear so I could eat dinner with her during the week. I do not know when I fell in love with Annie Kate,
but that does not matter. Nor do I know why I fell in love with her, though that matters a great deal. All I know is that there came a point when I did not feel alive when I was not with her or talking to her on the phone or writing her a letter. She became part of every thought, citizen of every dream. I did not tell her of my love and barely even admitted it to myself. But I lived for those long casual walks down the beach and the sight of her small footprints in the glistening wet sand, and I prized each shell she lifted from the beach and examined in her delicate white hands. In those late months of autumn and in the first chill of that benign Carolina winter, I knew one thing for certain: It was not Charleston I was trying to earn.
I watched the changes in her body as her whole exterior ripened with child; the thing alive inside her had added its heartbeat to her bloodstream, its hunger to her hunger, its movement and needs to her own urgent desires. I observed her unconscious flowering, the effortless rosy bloom of her complexion, which seemed so vital and basic and life-affirming in that period of gestation in which I had no legitimate part. Her mother and I were the only witnesses to her shame and we alternately received both her gratitude and her scorn. She would cry often; her sorrow was of that black, despairing quality whose only cure she carried as flesh and baggage within her own flesh.
We were hunting sand dollars on the beach late on a Saturday afternoon in October. Annie Kate and I had explored the whole littoral for a mile, surveying the terrain left exposed at low tide with trained and patient eyes. This had become one of our rituals together, and though she would search for other varieties of shells when I was out of town or unable to see her, she would wait until I appeared on her front porch before setting off to extract these mute delicate coins from their settings in the sand. At first, we had collected only the larger specimens, but gradually as we learned what was rare and to be truly prized, we began to gather only the smallest sand dollars for our collection. Our trophies were sometimes as small as thumbnails and as fragile as contact lenses. Annie Kate collected the tiniest relics, round and cruciform and white as bone china when dried of sea water, and placed them in a glass-and-copper cricket box in her bedroom. Often we would sit together and admire the modest splendor of our accumulation. At times it looked like the coinage of a shy, diminutive species of angel. The sand dollar in its center bore the mark of a feathery cross, and it was this sign of the cross that we searched for in those leisurely hunts by the sea’s edge. Our quest to find the smallest sand dollar became a competition between us, and as the months passed and Annie Kate grew larger with the child, the brittle, desiccated animals we unearthed from the sand became smaller and smaller. It was all a matter of training the eye to expect less.