The Lords of Discipline (36 page)

“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

W
hen 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.

But on that cold Saturday, I lifted out of the hard wet sand the largest sand dollar either of us had ever seen. It was the size of an ashtray, and I was about to skip it across the waves of an angry, wind-roiled sea when Annie Kate stopped me.

“Have you ever opened a sand dollar?” she asked, taking it from my hand and breaking it carefully in half as though she were dividing a slice of bread. “It has religious significance like the dogwood tree. You know about the true cross on the outside of the shell, but I bet you didn’t know that the Holy Ghost made a home in the sand dollar on Good Friday. He had to find a quiet place to hide in the world during those hours Christ hung on the cross. Do you remember how the Holy Ghost always appeared in the form of a dove? Here are four doves, which commemorate the visit of the Holy Ghost. The cross, of course, represents Good Friday and the Crucifixion.”

Annie Kate carefully picked four birdlike shells from the dried-out insides of the sand dollar, small and perishable as the wing bones of a hummingbird, each identical to the other, and each a perfectly wrought image of a grieving, secluded Paraclete. I did not know if the dovelike cartilage was part of the sand dollar’s circulatory system or not and I never tried to find out. Southerners had a long tradition of looking for religious significance in even the most humble forms of nature, and I always preferred the explanations of folklore to the icy interpretations of science.

As I was looking at the four doves, Annie Kate said, “Mother doesn’t want me to walk on the beach during the day anymore. She says that anyone can tell I’m pregnant from half a mile away and I can’t take a chance on anyone in town accidentally seeing me.”

“Why has she just started worrying now, Annie Kate? I’ve been surprised she’s let you walk around on Sullivan’s Island the way she has. It’s not like you’ve gone to Tahiti. You can see the whole city from here.”

“But you don’t know Charleston,” she insisted. “Nobody who is anybody ever comes to Sullivan’s Island after Labor Day. Everyone knows that.”

“I can’t believe your mother owns two houses,” I said, changing the subject.

“She owns two houses and can’t afford to keep either one of them up.”

“Why doesn’t she rent this one out on the beach?” I asked.

“That would be admitting to the world that she doesn’t have any money. It’s true that she doesn’t have a single dime, but she’s far too proud to admit that. She thought I was going to marry a filthy rich boy who would restore our family to wealth and splendor. But then this happened,” said Annie Kate distractedly, as she patted her stomach and we began to walk back toward her house.

“Annie Kate,” I said, “can I ask you a personal question?”

I could feel her stiffen as we moved along the beach, our arms touching slightly. “It depends on how personal, Will.”

“I wouldn’t hurt your feelings for the world, I really wouldn’t,” I stammered. “But why did you decide to have this baby? Why didn’t you get an abortion when you realized you were pregnant? Why did you decide to put yourself through this incredible trauma? No one had to know. It would have made your life so much simpler. And you’d be so much happier now. Every time I see you it makes me sad to see you so sad. I can’t wait until the baby is born so I can see you smile every once in a while.”

She turned on me angrily. “Never mention the baby to me again, Will. There is no baby. There is no baby at all. There are just nine horrible months of my life that never happened. There are nine horrible months when time stood absolutely still.”

“What are you going to do with the baby, Annie Kate?” I said, looking away from her. “You’ve got to at least think about what you’re going to do.”

“You have no right to force me to think of anything, Will. I think too much as it is,” she said bitterly, then softened when she saw the pained expression on my face. “Before I met you, Will, I used to smile all the time. And I know when this is over, I’ll smile again. I’m really a very happy person. When I first realized I was pregnant, I hoped that I was just late with my period. I’ve always been irregular. I just drove the thought out of my mind. Even when I got morning sickness I pretended it was the flu. Meanwhile, I think I subconsciously knew what was happening. I was doing everything possible to get the boy to marry me before I told him. I didn’t want to force him. I couldn’t imagine telling my mother I was pregnant and had ruined all her plans for me. But I was even more embarrassed to tell her my boy friend said he never wanted to see me again. Finally, I was beginning to show a little bit, and I had to tell somebody. So I told him. I’ll never forget how he looked at me, Will. He told me he would pay for an abortion, but by then I was so hurt and angry and shocked that I couldn’t agree or disagree to anything. I was numb all over. Completely numb and humiliated. So for the next week I thought of ways to kill myself. I bought razor blades and collected sleeping pills. I called his house every single day and begged him to marry me. I went to his house once and begged him on my knees. It was horrible. I cried and cried until his mother brought me home; She was very kind and talked to my mother. They both cried for a long time. They cried for each other and cried for themselves but not for me and not for the baby. The boy left town the next day and went somewhere, up north to college, I think, but no one ever said. My mother and his mother concocted this plan: I was to tell everyone that I was changing my plans for college. Instead of going to Hollins, I was going to the University of California at Santa Barbara. Then I would hide out in my house until my time was up. There’s a doctor in Charleston, an old friend of my mother’s, who has agreed to deliver the baby. But I don’t want to think of that. You see, Will, I was alone, completely alone, until I saw you get into your car on East Bay Street at the end of August.”