“You’re a sweetheart when you’re drinking, Mrs. Gervais,” I said, my upper lip trembling, out of control, and I had to make a concentrated effort to make my words understood. “But I want to tell you about my lower-class family. You’ve never asked, of course, but I have this need to tell you about this family I come from.”
“I can’t think of anything more boring,” she said and yawned drunkenly.
“Tough shit,” I answered. “I’m going to tell you about them anyway and you’re going to listen because you’re too drunk to get up from that rocking chair.”
She answered me with a gesture of overstated eloquence; she emptied the vodka bottle into her glass and began downing it defiantly.
“My father was from Savannah, Mrs. Gervais, the oldest child in a family of nine that caught hell in the Depression. His father worked for the Southern Railroad, had little education, was dirt poor, and sent every one of his kids through high school. My father entered the Marine Corps when he was twenty, and he fought the Japanese to make the world safe for Charleston snobs to look down their noses at him and his family. My mother’s family came from the hills of Georgia. They were poor farmers and laborers, as poor as anyone I’ve ever known, yet there was a humility and simplicity about them that made them among the most remarkable people I have ever met. My mother never went to college, never had that chance, but she is beautiful and intelligent and possesses a natural class so innate that when I bring her to Charleston and introduce her to Commerce and to Abigail and to Tradd, it’s as though she had lived in this city for a hundred years. It’s like she invented this city and I get so proud I could burst. And then there’s me, Mrs. Gervais. Me. Ol’ Will.”
I was pacing back and forth across the room behind her rocking chair, gesticulating fiercely, and shouting at the motionless, defeated woman who sat in her rocking chair staring directly into the fire. Her glass was empty now.
“I’m halfway between my mother and father. My father wouldn’t have been interested in this city at all. He wouldn’t have given a flying crap about this city. If he’d even have known about South of Broad society, I’d have probably found him drunk in front of St. Michael’s one night shouting that he was going to beat the hell out of every male between twenty and fifty that he found cowering beneath verandahs clutching their genealogy charts. And I lack my mother’s natural social grace and her effortless tact at dealing with aristocracies that nature and circumstances prevented her from joining. Ever since I came to this city, I’ve been made painfully aware of my origins. There were times when I was actually ashamed of who I was and where I came from. But I looked around and I studied the terrain and I figured out some things, Mrs. Gervais. I’m the second generation up from the lowest classes. I’m an immigrant among the classes. I have more than my parents had and my children will have more than I. And we have one advantage over you and people like you. We never look back. Our eyes are straight ahead and we’re tough and we’re street smart and we’re still hungry and on the move. And we have the goddam tide of human destiny on our side.”
Mrs. Gervais had passed out. The rocking chair had not moved in five minutes and she had not heard a single word I had said. From the stairway leading up to the second floor of the house, I heard the sound of mocking, fraudulent applause. Looking up, I saw Annie Kate at the top of the stairs, dressed in her bathrobe and slippers and clapping vigorously for my performance.
“Hurrah for the goddam tide of human destiny,” she shouted.
I covered my face with my hands, leaned down, and rested my head against the bannister of the stairway. A moment later, I felt Annie Kate’s hand on my shoulder but I did not uncover my eyes.
“I’m so ashamed that you heard that,” I said. “I’m so ashamed that I said all that to your mother when she was drunk.”
“Mother has a way of getting to people when she’s been drinking,” Annie Kate said, stroking my hair. “She’s a nice person when she’s not.”
“I’m a nice person when I’m not making a horse’s ass out of myself. Jesus Christ, I was just delivering a Horatio Alger lecture to a woman who had passed out.”
“You’d have probably thrown her off the porch if she hadn’t passed out,” Annie Kate chided me, her finger tracing the stiffly barbered hairline at the back of my neck. “I’ve never seen you so mad.”
“Why do I care if your mother thinks I was born in the steerage section of a ship on the way to Ellis Island? What’s wrong with me? Why do I give a damn?”
“Because there’s a mystique and confidence that comes from being an old Charlestonian that you’ll never know, Will. That’s what you’re looking for. You’re right to be proud about who you are and what you said about your family was beautiful. It’s just that you’ll never have what we have or understand what we have.”
“I’m going to work hard not to want what you have. If what your mother said is true then I’ve been poisoned in this city. I’ve been poisoned by hanging around Tradd, these fine people and their fine houses, and you.”
“I don’t feel very poisonous right now,” she said. “Please carry my mother to the couch, Will. I’d do it. She’s very light, you know. But in my oh so delicate condition . . .”
I lifted Mrs. Gervais from the chair without the slightest strain; I calculated that she weighed less than ninety pounds. Her hair was feathery and disarranged. And as I laid her on the couch, I realized how wrong she was. She had not lost her beauty, though she was losing her youth.
Annie Kate covered her mother with a quilt.
Then we faced each other. Neither of us knew what to do or say. We had said and insinuated too much that evening for me to leave without further discussion or to stay without our destiny, our goddam human destiny, being further and irretrievably complicated.
My time in her gaze was a fine yet troubled thing. I could feel the fear of what the world had done to her rise up between us. She could sense my hurt, the inconceivable magnitude of my bruised vanity, and my need to allay the monstrously insistent fiats and injunctions of a male ego. I ached with a feverish, selfish, and awful need for her. I wanted to touch, to own, to have her. The room shimmered with my wanting her. Yet I could make no move, felt that I did not have the right to touch her or even think about touching her. The touch of a man had already harmed her enough.
Then she reached out for me. She led me up the stairs and I followed her, memorizing the lines of her body, the allure of roundness and the surprise of fullness and ripeness and youth. It was as though her entire body was filled up with milk.
When we entered her dark room, she turned and faced me. She untied her bathrobe and stepped out of her slippers in a shy clumsy movement. I drew her toward me and felt the nakedness of her back and shoulders, and the firmness of her buttocks. I kissed her eyes, her lips, her neck, her breasts. I had never touched a woman’s breast before. She undressed me and we lay down on the bed together.
We stared at each other for a long time. She took my hand and placed it on her stomach and I felt the child kicking inside her.
“I’m sorry I’m pregnant, Will,” she said. “I’m so sorry I’m pregnant.”
“It’s all right, Annie Kate. That doesn’t matter to me.”
“It should matter, Will.”
“No.”
We began to touch each other. We marveled at the warmth and youth and need of each other. Her tongue found my ear. My finger entered her. I kissed her breasts and began to circle her nipples with my tongue. I entered her and came almost at once. I was a terrible lover; humiliated, I apologized; I wanted to run away from that house and hide in the swells of the ocean that I could hear assaulting the rocks on the beach outside.
But she laughed and was kind and said it didn’t matter, that she liked the touching and the closeness and the intimacy. So we talked of intimate things and we kissed again and I forgot about my ineptitude. I grew hard again, went into her again, and we began to move together. I began to say things to her that I had wanted
to say to a woman since I was fifteen. We began to rock together, and moan together. I heard the sounds of the Atlantic and the sound of us loving each other and felt the child that lay between us and the easy, tender movement between us and her heels on the back of my thighs, her willingness, her openness to me, the completeness of the moment, the smell of her hair, then the fire, the fire again, and my spilling out inside her, and the cry that flowered in the room was my own cry.
And I lay there thinking, in all the new arrogance of lost virginity, “Now I know what it is like to love a woman, now I have touched the magic source, now I know why it is like nothing else in the world.” I was not thinking of Annie Kate at all, in fact, I had forgotten she was in the room. Abstractedly, I began to rub her swollen stomach and did not become aware of her presence again until I felt the sudden untroubled kick of her child. I wanted the child to feel the pulse of my wrist as though I were its father. I looked at Annie Kate, surprised that I had forgotten that she was in the room. Her face was hurt; she had acknowledged my betrayal.
“Annie Katie,” I said to her as she rolled away from me. “If you want to keep the child, I’ll be glad to marry you.”
“Aren’t you the noble one,” she said, and she was crying.
She cried for several minutes as I sat there naked on the bed, wondering whether I should try to comfort her or simply get dressed and return to the barracks. Both the truth and the cruelty of her remark had stunned me into a kind of dream-like immobility. When I finally touched her shoulder, she grabbed my hand and said through tears, “Will. I’m so sorry, Will. No matter what I say to you, don’t leave me now. I don’t know what I’d do if you left me. I don’t know why I have to hurt you, but I don’t mean it. I can’t help how I act now. But I can’t afford to lose you. You’re the only thing that’s keeping me alive.”
“You won’t be able to lose me, Annie Kate,” I whispered in her ear, kissing her neck and shoulders and spine.
I began massaging her back and soon she fell asleep and her breathing became calm again. I rose silently and checked my watch, the old ingrained nervous habit of the cadet. It was a law of the barracks that if you were having a good time it was fast approaching midnight. It was twenty minutes to twelve.
I put on my uniform hurriedly, kissed Annie Kate on the cheek, and raced downstairs. When I retrieved my field cap from the dining-room table, I glanced toward Mrs. Gervais. Her eyes were open and she was staring at me with a look ineffably grieving. Grief, her face said with a sad, wordless rhetoric: grief. I walked over and kissed her and pulled the blanket up around her.
I was going eighty when I crossed the Cooper River Bridge, high over the city, with the decks of ships below me in the river, going eighty and screaming with the joy and triumph and intoxication felt when a boy tenderly buries that shy, exhausted priest of his virginity and takes the first delicious step into the mansion of sex.
I made it inside the front gate of fourth battalion ten seconds before they locked the gates for the night. I danced across the quadrangle, and for the first time I did not care that there was nothing green in the barracks. I danced my way toward the stairwell of R Company, and I wanted to shout at the top of my lungs, “I am not a virgin! I am not a virgin!” I felt fertile and leafy and earthily fragrant with the odors of sex.
As I reached the steps leading up to first division I heard a voice call out from the darkness under the stairwell.
“Halt, Bubba.”
I saw the cigar blazing like a lone, abandoned eye in the alcove.
“Bear,” I said, surprised. “What are you doing here at this time of the night?”
“I’m the good shepherd and I’ve got to watch over my wayward lambs. What are you so happy about? I get nervous when I see you smile, McLean. You moved across that quad like you were trying out for Tinker Bell.”
“A girl, Colonel,” I said.
“When did you switch preferences, Bubba?”
“Tonight. Tonight, sir.”
“McLean,” the Bear said gently, his cigar blazing. “You’re acting like it was the first time, Bubba.”
“It was, Colonel.”
He reached into his uniform pocket and brought out a Thompson cigar from Tampa, Florida. “Congratulations, Bubba. That’s like inventing the wheel.”
I still have that cigar.
Chapter Thirty
I remember the winter of my senior year as one of the happiest times of my life. My walk was springy and I seemed to be in perfect step with the universe. I was playing good ball; I was in love with Annie Kate Gervais; I was taking Sunday afternoon walks with Abigail; my grades were good and my classes stimulating; there was an extraordinary harmony and contentment among my roommates. Those were magic times in Charleston; the days were cold and short, the city awoke to ice, and I arose each morning at the first bugle, refreshed and eager and golden in the darkness of 6:15 in the morning, vigorous and ready for the gifts the day would bring. In January during a game with George Washington, I had thrown a pass to Johnny DuBruhl who had cut toward the basket. He had not seen the pass and it had careened off the top of his head, hit the high part of the backboard, and fallen softly through the net. The scorekeeper awarded me a basket and Johnny an assist. That’s how it was in that radiant season.
Every small act became a celebration of sorts for me. I could be seen running to class and running to practice and running to my car. I did not want to miss anything. I wanted to taste it all, savor every experience, register every sight, smell, and taste of those months. Before each game, a high school girl, a basketball fan, would call me up in the barracks and tell me where on campus she had left a single red rose for me to find. I never met this girl even though I tried earnestly to arrange a meeting. But I would follow her directions and find a rose in the chapel before the Furman game, a rose carefully placed on a shelf in the library before we played Clemson, a rose floating in a fountain in the General’s front yard before we played William and Mary, a rose pinned on the climbing rope of the obstacle course before the Auburn game. The roses were a symbol of my good fortune and I knew when the season ended there would be no more roses hidden for my pleasure by an enchanted, invisible stranger. But I wanted there always to be accidents and mysteries and roses in my life.
Since that time I have come to distrust periods of extreme happiness and now when I discover myself in the middle of one, I glance nervously around me, examine all locks, cut back all the shrubbery around my house, avoid introductions to strangers, and do not travel on airplanes. Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration, like an albino. Like the albino it has no protective coloration. White. That is the color. Those placid, untroubled winter months are different shades of white in my memory, unsullied, and pure. But nature in the temperate zones is bitter toward all things white.
I know the day when things began to change. But the change was so slight, so imperceptible, I did not sense the shift. On the day we played the final game of the season, against Virginia Military Institute, the call from the mystery girl came just before noon formation. She had placed the final rose on the windshield wiper of my car along with a note. In the note she wished me all the luck in the world and was sorry that she was not pretty enough to meet me or to get to know me. The note was incredibly poignant. It shimmered with the solitude of a damaged and imaginative girl. She spoke the truth. It was the last rose of that winter, and I never did hear from her again. I hoped she would find a good man whom she could meet face to face. The one thing I knew for certain is that he would find her pretty enough. Of that, I had no doubt. There was only one thing different in her final gift. Her last rose was white.
I was up before the bugle that morning, splashing cold water on my face at the sink when reveille sounded across the campus. Often, I arose early on the days of games, all eagerness and drive and nervous energy. But I was always at my best in the morning anyhow. I had the metabolism of a canary at reveille, bright and chirpy and preening before th
e mirror. I was talkative in the morning, alive and glowing, one of those dreadful people who were the scourge of the cadets who relished silence and time and vast quantities of caffeine before their bodies could adapt to the shock of marching through a sunless world. But I drew energy and sustenance from the surge of the Corps around me. I felt like whistling and singing and joking as soon as my feet hit the floor.
When the bugle sounded, Mark shouted, “Fuck.”
Pig shouted, “Fuck.”
Tradd said wearily, “Oh, God. Already?”
“Up and at ’em, boys and girls,” I said gleefully. “Another big day at Disneyland.”
“Shut up, asshole.” Mark sighed, pulling a pillow over his head.
It was dangerous strategy to joke with Mark before noon formation. He had made it a law of the room that I was not to speak to him or even look at him in the morning. He was the only person I’ve ever known who could navigate four flights of winding stairs, march to the mess hall, and eat breakfast without ever once opening his eyes.
Before I could go over and shake my roommates into a state of semi-consciousness, Beasley, the knob, burst into the room to announce that the Bear had entered the barracks to check on seniors late for morning formation.
“Good lad, Beasley,” I said. “Pass the word among the freshmen that I’ll be down in a second and that I want them loud this morning. All right, beloved roommates, get out of the rack and onto the floor.”
“Fuck you, asshole,” Mark grumbled from beneath the pillow. Mark had never been on time to a formation since we had become seniors as far as I knew.