The Great Santini (31 page)

"Dad let me drink some this morning," Ben answered. "I drank it black."

"If you want to drink it when you get away from my house, then drink it. But in my house you won't touch it. The caffeine's bad for you."

"The reason I don't believe that fighter pilot stuff, Mom," Ben said, pouring the coffee back into the pot," is that I remember Major Finch."

"You barely even knew Lamar. He was a prince of a man."

"I went to school with his son and I used to play pick-up basketball games with Marines who worked on his plane. Do you know what was different about him?"

"There was a lot different about Lamar Finch."

"I heard over and over again that he was the best pilot in the Marine Corps. And he never said a single word to anybody. He was quiet and polite and just a nice guy. Billy Lamar told me that his father didn't drink, cuss, smoke, or brag, or anything. That's what everybody said. But the story I loved the best was that Major Finch whipped Dad's fanny when they hassled together on maneuvers. So if Major Finch didn't have to drink and brag and kick his kids around, why do Dad and some of his other Marine buddies have to?"

"Major Finch was the exception. He was not seduced by the myth of the Marine Corps."

"What do you mean?" Ben asked.

"Your father has taken the whole mythology of the Corps, or what he interprets as the mythology, and entwined it with his own personality. Sometimes your father acts like a living, breathing recruitment poster. I don't know if he was like that when I married him because I don't really know what I was like when I married him. I just think the ego is bloated into something monstrous when a man decides to make the Marine Corps a career. Had your father become something in the civilian world, our lives would have been very different. Major Finch didn't need the Marine Corps. He had the quiet confidence of a man who believes in himself and who doesn't need a structure to reinforce that belief."

"No. With Dad it doesn't make any difference, Mama," Ben said. "He could be an insurance salesman and still be the same type of guy. I can see him coming home from work, kicking a door down, and shouting, 'Stand by for an insurance salesman!' He's the way he is because he can't be anything else."

"You're wrong, Ben. The Marine Corps is a stronger force than you know. It can take a stupid, spineless man and make him feel like he could face the armies of God and stand a fifty-fifty chance of winning. If the Corps gets a strong man in the beginning, then it can make him feel that the armies of God are kamikazes for having the nerve to challenge him in the first place. The Marine Corps takes a small ego and makes it gigantic; it takes a large ego and then steps back to see how large it can grow. Your father's is still growing even though I feel it now dwarfs a few small Alps."

"Well, ol' Ben will be out of it next year."

"Have you been thinking about college?"

"Sure. I've narrowed it down to Harvard and Yale."

"Don't be ridiculous."

"Seriously, I'd like to go to Chapel Hill."

"You can't go there for two reasons. It's too expensive for out-of-state students and your father heard that it was a training ground for Communists when we were stationed at Cherry Point."

"Dad thinks every college is a training ground for Communists."

"He heard this from an impeccable source. General Whitehead. His son went there for a year until the Communists drove him out."

"He flunked out, Mom. And you know as well as I do that General Whitehead is an idiot. Dad thinks he's an idiot too."

"Anyway, it's too expensive."

"Where can I go, Mom?"

"Well, if you don't win a scholarship for basketball, you could try to get an appointment to the Academy."

"No."

"Well, it was just a thought. I think your grades have slipped too much for that anyway."

"I make good grades in English and history," Ben said.

"You only study things that come easy to you. There's nothing character-building in doing something where there's no struggle. If you made A's in math and science, the subjects you detest, I would be certain that you were made of something tough and indestructible and that you would go far in life. I've taught you to love literature and love language but I often think I made a mistake by emphasizing it too much. A man needs to know math and science if he's going to be a pilot."

"Who said anything about being a pilot, Mom?"

"You don't need to say anything about it, Ben. You grew up around it. The only men you really know are pilots. I don't think you'll make the Marine Corps a career, but I think a couple of years will do you some good."

Ben lifted his left shoe up on his chair and began unlacing it. "Sometimes I think you hate the Marine Corps, Mom. Then other times I think you love it. Which is it?"

"What do you want for breakfast? I'll make you anything you want on your birthday."

"Which is it?"

"The Marine Corps has been good to us. It has provided security for us all. We've never been hungry and we've always had a nice roof over our heads. I have no quarrel with the Marine Corps. I do sometimes have a quarrel with what I think it's done to your father."

"Fix me some fried eggs once over light, bacon, toast and honey, and some yellow grits."

"Coming up," Lillian said, lighting the stove.

Mary Anne walked into the kitchen wearing her green bathrobe and slippers. On her face was a heavy residue of Clearasil left over from the bedtime toileting of the night before. Her hair was in pin curls.

"She walks in beauty, like the night," Ben quoted.

"Happy birthday, golden boy," she said. "Eighteen. That's old. That's real, real old. You're gonna be dead before you know it."

"What a terrible thing to say," Lillian said while frying bacon. "If you don't care about Ben's feelings, how do you think that makes me feel?"

"I'm sorry, Mama. I apologize. I know it must be awful being your age and having death staring into your face with every breath you draw."

"I have a lot of good years left in me, girl," Lillian said angrily.

"I imagine you have several anyway."

"Why didn't you wash your face and fix your hair before you came down to breakfast? A lady would never make her appearance until she had at least fixed her face."

"I kind of like it, Mom," Ben said. "Not many guys have a sister with a green face."

"The Clearasil needs time to work. Killing pimples requires patience. By the way, Ben, since women live seven years longer than men on the average, I imagine I'll be attending your funeral one day."

"Mary Anne, that's quite enough from you," Lillian said.

"She's just teasing, Mom," Ben said.

"No, I'm not. I'm serious. I'll even be sad, Ben. Even though you've spent your whole life making vicious remarks to me, I will try not to be amused at your funeral."

"Thanks," Ben said, laughing.

"By the way, I got a great present for you, big brother."

"Dad gave me his flight jacket."

"Of course, that means that the ol' cheapo won't have to spend any money on your birthday. I saved my tiny little allowance to buy this present for you."

"Your allowance is certainly more than I got when I was your age," Lillian said.

Mary Anne ignored her mother's rebuttal. Turning to Ben she said," Dad's flight jacket will be good to wrap fish in or cover a body if we ever witness a murder."

"No one thinks you're funny, miss. No one in the whole world thinks you're even mildly amusing."

The kitchen filled up with the odors of fried bacon, eggs frying in bacon grease, toast in the oven, coffee, and grits bubbling in the pot. When everything was ready, Lillian took Ben's plate to a counter out of his vision. She opened a drawer, removed a box, then struck a single match. When she came around the stove, she had put birthday candles into the eggs, the toast, the grits, and lit them all. Lillian and Mary Anne both sang" Happy Birthday" as Ben blew out the candles that flickered over his breakfast meal. Ben knew that he would find candles in his lunch sandwiches and in his school books. Lillian had a genius for the small rites of celebration.

Before he left the house to walk the single mile to the high school, Lillian handed him a letter and told him to read it when he found the time. She told him it was of no importance but just something she wanted him to have. The letter was passed with such palpable nonchalance and unconcern that Ben knew that the letter was very important indeed.

In his second period French class, he opened the letter and placed it inside his book. He read the letter as another student in the class did irreparable damage to the French language and a short story by de Maupassant. The letter was not long but Ben felt tears coming as soon as he began to read it. "My dear son, my dear Ben, my dear friend who becomes a man today, I want to tell you something," the letter began. "You are my eldest child, the child I have known the longest, the child I have held the longest. I wanted to write you a letter about being a man and what it means to be a man in the fullest sense. I wanted to tell you that gentleness is the quality I have admired the most in men, but then I remembered how gentle you were. So I decided to write something else. I want you to always follow your noblest instincts. I want you to be a force for right and good. I want you to always defend the weak as I have taught you to do. I want you to always be brave and know that whatever you do or wherever you go, you walk with my blessings and my love. Keep your faith in God, your humility, and your sense of humor. Decide what you want from life then let nothing deter you from getting it. I have had many regrets in my life and many sadnesses but I will never regret the night you were born. I thought I knew about love and the boundaries of love until I raised you these past eighteen years. I knew nothing about love. That has been your gift to me. Happy Birthday. Mama."

Ben was dressed in a dark blue suit that Lillian had bought at a PX sale for ten dollars the year before. It had been a little small when she bought it and now the sleeves were high up Ben's wrists and too much ankle showed between his cuff and his shoe. His brown hair was combed into a moderately high pompadour and had the slick appearance that came with the overly ambitious application of Wild Root Cream Oil. There were white traces on the back of his hair where he had not rubbed in the hair tonic. His face had a quality of inlaid unripeness. He studied the shadows. All of them looked like his father and none of them did. Gradually, his eyes adjusted and faces materialized. In the far corner, he saw Bull and Colonel Hedgepath watching him, enjoying his uncertainty, his callowness.

"Congratulations, godson," Colonel Hedgepath said, rising to shake Ben's hand.

"Thanks, Colonel."

"Paige took our present over to your house this morning. Then she and your mother chewed the fat for about four hours. She called to tell me dinner would be late, so I decided to come over here and have a quick drink. Damn, it makes me mad that you're eighteen."

"Why, Colonel?"

"Because that means I'm eighteen years older than I was when you were baptized. It means I'm getting old."

"Sit down, boy," Bull said to Ben. "What'll you have?"

"I'll have a Coke, Dad," Ben answered.

"That's not what I mean," Bull said. "I didn't bring you over here this afternoon to drink soda pop and eat pretzels. You're eighteen and that means you're now old enough to buy a drink. You ever drank before?"

"Just when you gave me sips of your drinks or beer," Ben said.

"Well, it's my job to see that you learn to drink like a gentleman," Bull said.

"I better give you a few lessons, Bull, so you'll know something about the subject," Colonel Hedgepath said.

"Hey, Virge, why don't you go under the table and bite hard on the biggest thing you see."

"I'm tired of chewing on your big toe, Bull."

"What do you want to drink, sportsfans?" Bull said, ignoring Colonel Hedgepath. "What would you like to drink?"

"Mom will get mad, Dad," Ben warned.

"You've probably noticed I'm shaking all over. I'm practically passing out from fear," Bull said.

"Ben's right, Bull. Lillian is not going to like it at all," said Colonel Hedgepath.

"Virge, I realize that Paige has got a ring in your nose and a handle on your ass. But some of us Marines are the masters of our households. Our word is law. I'm going to teach my eighteen-year-old son how to drink."

"It's almost basketball season, Dad. I'm in training."

"You just don't have the nads. You just got a terminal case of the yellow spine," Bull said.

"If the boy doesn't want to drink, don't make him drink, Bull."

"I don't think they serve lemonade, Ben," his father teased. "They might have a spare lollipop around."

The waiter was passing near the table where the two officers and the boy sat. Ben called him over with an inaudible snap of the fingers. He knew that the eyes of the two Marines were on him; he also knew that he was in the middle of a test that had something to do with the tortoise-slow approach of manhood. He hesitated. He thought. Then he asked," Do you have a menu, sir?"

His father and Colonel Hedgepath howled with laughter. But most of Ben's hatred and humiliation was directed at the waiter, who shook his head with a patronizingly bemused tolerance. Without waiting for his father's laughter to die, Ben lowered his voice and said," Then I'll have a double martini on the rocks with a twist of lemon. "He had heard this drink ordered at squadron parties when his parents entertained the pilots in their home. Instead of quelling the laughter of the two men who sat with him, it merely increased it. Ben noticed that other Marines were beginning to watch their table as the word of the neophyte drinker spread around the bar.