Honor and Duty

by Gus Lee

  There were shouts in the hallway. With a big roar, most of our classmates squeezed into the room, led by Clint. “Man, we just dropped a Mountain BA on Frenchy O’Ware—it grossed him so bad he fell down the stairs!”

  “It was atomic!” shouted Chad “The Man” Enders.

  “Nuclear,” cried Jimmy Buns Butte. “Five man base, three on the second row, one on top, and four on the side for dressing!”

  “It was perfect!” crooned Rocket Man Ziegler. “O’Ware chugs those stairs, head down. He crests the steps and eyeballs thirteen bare derrieres pointed at him, dead-on, in the cross hairs—then Chad takes his picture with a Polaroid flash.”

  “Frenchy just upped and died,” drawled Meatball Rodgers. “Threw his rifle in the air and commenced to bounce down the whole damn staircase.”

  “It was outa sight,” said Moon Shine reverently.

  Clint spoke quietly in my ear while the crowd passed around the Polaroid. “He’ll never call you names again,” said Clint.

  Most of the Corps had left. I was a pinger, a fast mover through cadet tasks, but now I dawdled. I didn’t want to go home. Clint said he’d go with me over to Second Regiment to visit Pee Wee McCloud.

  “Stay in shape for Buckner,” said Bob. “It’s gonna be real physical.” Buckner would teach us advanced infantry skills and patrolling. It sounded serious. It was the stuff my father knew.

  I would run on the beach every day. I would go home for that. I was going to ask Christine for a date. I was going to see Tony and tell him about Coach Fabrizi. Winterland, ’47. I looked out our window; never again would the clock tower seem so foreboding, such an enemy of overspent Plebe time. Although tens of thousands of exulting celebrants were here, West Point seemed quiet and subdued.

  The Firsties were gone. They and the Great American Public were at Michie Stadium, listening to the address by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Earle Wheeler. In thirty minutes, First Captain Robert Arvin would call the Class of ’65 to attention and dismiss them. They would scream and throw their white cadet hats in the air, members of the Long Gray Line.

  After packing, Clint and I strode through the unique quiet of the Academy, through the ghostly hush of Central Area, to Second Regiment’s East Barracks.

  “Guys,” said Pee Wee slowly in his deep voice, “stay for retreat. Promised Dad I’d remember our classmates who didn’t make it, at retreat, last day of Plebe year.” Pee Wee’s size and goofy voice had drawn hazing, but when the upperclassmen realized that Pee Wee was a hive and tutor to others in all subjects, they had felt affection for the buffoonish-sounding genius who played excellent football and beat everyone in chess.

  We stood at attention on the Plain, no longer bracing. The cannon boomed and we saluted as the lone bugler played retreat against the falling summer sun. The melancholy, almost tragic, echoing bugle call wafted through the low hills of the Academy, and I thought of those now gone who, for many long months, had heard this same bugle at the end of the longest days of their lives. The last note sounded. We ordered arms. “Rituals are important,” said Pee Wee thickly. “Hardly have them in America, anymore.”

  Pee Wee had us do this at Lake Fredericks, the Plebe encampment at the end of Beast. We had stood together, eleven months ago as four Beast roomies, our rifles slung, saluting retreat and wondering if we could last a year of Plebedom. Now we were three—two sons of generals and a son of a Chinese colonel.

  On the way to Marco Fideli’s room, Clint said, “Makes me wonder if Joey woulda passed, if you weren’t also coaching me.”

  Marco Fideli’s room was full of spanking-new second lieutenants and I saluted. One of them, Lars McCreary, smiled and gave me a dollar bill as a certificate of having been the first to salute him. All of them had elected Infantry. Mr. Fideli’s tar bucket hat was on his desk. In it was a large, rolled envelope.

  “Open it later, Caruso.” He shook hands, recognizing us.

  “Good luck in Vietnam, Marco, and thank you.” I crushed his hand in mine, and had the same feeling I had experienced when I left Tony the year before. Clint and Pee Wee watched us.

  I later put the envelope in my B-4 bag. Sonny, Mike, and I caught a C-141 from McGuire to Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio to spend a week together in the home of Colonel and Mrs. Benjamin. On the 141, while eating a second box lunch, I opened it.

  When you feel like frowning, sing. Hold my tarbucket, remember my voice, and don’t worry—just sing in round, full tones, fearing nothing. Sing “Amazing Grace” or “Sons of Slum and Gravy.” When you sing, God’s with you, and there can be no despair. When you feel contemplative, write. You have the hearing that Beethoven lacked. Read Augustine’s Enchiridion, grasp Seneca’s sordid appreciation of Honor, and strive to write satura—prose with poetry—as Boethius. I am so glad that you will be a West Pointer. We need you. God bless you.

  Marco

  Behind the letter was a black-and-white etching: Beethoven Listening to the Storm. He sat, uncaring, with his sketchbook against a tree bending perilously in a gusting wind, composing.

  I imagined telling Tony: “I met a paisan who adopted me last year. He sings Italian opera and he nicknamed me ‘Caruso.’ ”

  “Good name fer ya,” he’d say. “Ya sing like a ruptured duck.”

  The flight landed at Travis before dawn, and I entered the Y as it was opening its doors at seven for the Saturday crowd. I watched Leroy and his new assistant. They took valuables, rang up sales, passed towels and basketballs, and answered the phone. The new guy was not as good as I had been. He made people wait too long, didn’t smile at anyone, and wasn’t enjoying himself. After a year that had seemed so much longer, Leroy was moving with greater method. He was slowing down. I felt that this was my fault. I shouldn’t have left. I waited in line, smiled broadly as Leroy said, “Hey!” and shook my hand in his soft mitt. He and I never said much; our companionship was formed by work and not by words. He winked, I shook hands with the new guy and went to the elevator.

  The ring was empty. Tony would be at his desk struggling with fight evaluation cards. He wrote the way I would if I used my feet.

  “Paisan, che a!” I shouted as I entered the office. It was empty. Tony’s desk was so clean it looked dead. I opened the old drawers. They were empty. I was blinking a lot, looking around the tiny office for an explanation. I rubbed my short scalp. Oh, God. I walked around and sat slowly in his chair, as if he were in it. I rubbed the top of the desk and my hands were deep in dust.

  “Junggworen,” I said. “How’s the Junior Leaders?”

  “Hey! Kai Ting!” said Pinoy Punsalong, the intermediate boxing instructor. Pinoy was part junggworen—Chinese. He was also part Japanese, part French, part Filipino, and all heart. He rose from the lobby office desk. We shook hands. He was unchanged, his wide face youthfully round and tautly smooth, his eyes limpidly bright. Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia had Punsalong eyes.

  “You look great, Pinoy. And yeah, I look skinny again.”

  “Is okay. I like skinny. Only you, and Tony, like muscle-bound. Skinny mean speed. Move. Junior Leaders do fine. Hey! Everybody!” he shouted. “This Kai Ting—last year, president, Junior Leaders. Now, West Point cadet!” The light music of Ping-Pong ended as paddles clattered on the thin wood tables, and the kids playing checkers rose from the tables to stand around me. My picture was still on the wall. I thought I looked goofy, as if my face and my arms didn’t belong to the same body. “Kai Ting!”

  “Hi, Bobby … Michael! How you, bloods?” I shook hands with them all, and with the Junior Leaders, the old and the new, glad to be back. It smelled like boys. I remembered the first time I had entered the lobby. I was seven, barely able to open the door. The trophies had looked like cups for giants, and the Ping-Pong tables like aircraft carriers.

  “How hard is it, man?” asked Joe Davis, the third of four brothers. A bodybuilder, he had doubled his size.

  “Hey, are you lookin’ good?” I said as he smiled with all his te
eth, proud of his work. “It was hard,” I said. “No food.”

  Everyone’s eyes opened wide. “That what happen in the Army?”

  “Just West Point,” I said. “Only West Point does that. When you get drafted in the Army, they’ll feed you.”

  “You know how ta kill people?” asked a rookie seven-year-old member.

  “Not really,” I said, jarred by the question. “I’m good with a rifle. But Mr. P. teaches more unarmed fighting than I learned at the Academy so far. But I’ve only been there a year.”

  “You like it?” asked Mike Fox.

  I thought for a moment “Yes, I do like it.” I smiled. “I like it a great deal now that Plebe year’s over.” I was aware that I was speaking formally, the way Captain Mac spoke. “Now I can eat.”

  They studied me. I sensed the weight of a passing year, of the coin that Plebe year at West Point carried for them, for many boys in America. I was no longer one of them. The year had traversed twelve months, and it felt like a lifetime, as if I had returned from a distant land and romantic wars.

  “Okay, everybody buzz away—we’re talking,” said Pinoy, waving his arm. The group disbanded. Pinoy put his hands on his hips. “You study your wu-shu, Chinese martial art?” he asked.

  “Just the liang-jiang.” I looked at him. He read my face.

  He nodded. “Tony take vacation. First time, ever.” He stepped into me on silent feet, inside the reach of my arms in a flashing moment, as if he were in the ring and I were dead meat for the picking of his fists. I was taller, but he lowered his head. “Tony gone look for the boy, Tony Jr.,” he whispered. “His boy your age. Man now. He go Italy, look, real hard. May stay.” He backed up.

  Tony gone … may stay. I had trouble breathing.

  Pinoy studied me. “Proud of you,” he said.

  Tony had lost his boy, and now I had lost him.

  “You light candle at St. Boniface, for Connie?” he asked.

  “No,” I said quietly.

  “You come with me, light candle with me,” he urged.

  “Okay.”

  “You worse Catholic I ever know, whole world.”

  “I’m not Catholic,” I said.

  “Ayyy! See? You confess that in front of God?”

  He grabbed my arm, shaking it, making my head wobble. “Come, do wing chun gong fu—arm-blocking drill. Like old days. And, buy me donuts for breakfast at Angie’s an’ say hi to Sally Craft. They happy to see you! Then, go church, pray to patron saint.” St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes, once the most unpopular of all saints because people had confused him with Judas.

  “You not so orphan no more. You owe him, plenty. Right?”

  I nodded my head. “Tony, too. And you, and Barney,” I said.

  Pinoy looked at me. “Okay,” he said, “we pray St. Jude for Tony and his boy. Sure, you miss him. Hey. Don’t be sad! Tony okay. You know, Barney not here, either. He big boss now at Oakland Y.”

  Barney and Tony, gone. “They say anything about me before leaving?” I asked.

  Pinoy hit my arm hard. “You forget what YMCA is. This place for street kids. Otherwise, they drink, fight knives, go to hell. You grown man now. Little boys, they need Tony and Barney. Not you. Besides, you know—Tony not real sentimental.”

  In the garage below lay shark jaws, deer antlers, rams’ horns, old Chevy engines, and punctured German helmets. I knocked.

  “Hi, Mrs. Peeve.” I hardly recoiled as she hugged me.

  “Oh, don’t cry!” I urged.

  She shook her head as she pulled a hanky from her apron and blew her nose. “Papa and Uncle Yorch are at work. Jack’s gone. He’s at Fort Lewis, Washington State. He didn’t write you, did he?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s so lonely without him. And the war. God, if anything happens to him …” She began to cry. “Come in,” she said wetly.

  “I really can’t. Haven’t been home yet. Just wanted to say hi. Can I have Jack’s address? I’m sorry I didn’t write.” Oh, man, I thought, looking at her. I hadn’t written to Momma LaRue or Toussaint.

  “Where have you been? How did you get here so early?”

  “Hello.” My ears began to ring deep inside my head.

  “You probably came back to see Christine. What have you been doing? How long will you stay? Have you told your father that you’ve arrived? Didn’t school let out over a week ago?”

  “Yes. I’ve been with Mike Benjamin’s family in San Antonio. He’s a classmate. I haven’t called Dad yet. I’m staying for a week, then I’m heading back. I want to see Christine. And eat. I didn’t want to come home at first. But I left St. Boniface and just jumped on the L car, without thinking. Is Dad at work?”

  “I dislike your tone. This is so rude, showing up without the slightest notice. You were probably with those Italian and Negro people at the Y. What were you doing at St. Boniface? Your last church was Christian Science.”

  I looked at her face, handsome but angry, familiar, pain inflicting, smoldering from our history of discord.

  “You’re frowning,” she said.

  “I am being rude. I should’ve called, but I didn’t. I’m sorry. I won’t blame you if you want me to leave. I can stay at the Bachelor Officers Quarters at the Presidio.” I hadn’t been sincere in my apologies to her. “I’m sorry,” I would hiss, between clenched teeth—sorry I screwed up one of your stupid, illogical, unfair, tyrannical, and petty little stinking rules. Hollow offerings, worth nothing. She was angry.

  “Going to bust an airplane?” I asked, charitably.

  Edna drew in breath, her mouth open. I had learned in the last year how to face anger. I put on my inscrutable Plebe face, through which no emotion leaked and no pain was visible. I could endure Beast, march with a rifle, steel pot, and fifty pounds on my back up heartbreaking hills, recite MacArthur, sweat pennies, go without food, sleep, or rest, or raise a table-limits pot on the fourth round for a pair of threes. I could stay up late and could somehow pass the first year of a college engineering curriculum while undergoing more discipline than the boys on Alcatraz.

  She had gained weight, but her lean and cool aspect was unperturbed. She wore a simple navy dress, against which her brightly blond hair produced a two-tone rainbow of blue and gold.

  “You look nice,” I said.

  She closed her mouth. “Well, thank you. That is a handsome uniform. I am astonished; you look good in it.”

  “Can I come in?”

  She backed up. I entered and took off my garrison cap. The living room, the flowered couch, the ashtray, Dad’s large reading chair, where he absorbed the books of the world, the television—all looked the same, but smaller.

  “I got the flowers you sent through your friend Duke.”

  She stepped away and returned with a letter. It was from Luther “Duke” Troth, in New York City, to me. She had tried to reseal the envelope, but it opened easily the moment I touched it.

  This is for your mother. Sorry for any misunderstandings. I’ll give you a call during leave. I hope we can be friends. Best wishes, Duke

  “They were lovely,” said Edna. “They’re dead now; had you returned earlier, you could have seen them.”

  “I didn’t send them and he’s no friend.”

  “Oh, do make up with him. He sent his picture, in uniform, which I kept. He’s quite—presentable—a lovely friend.” She smiled. “I think you should forgive him for his imagined wrongs.”

  “Christine, this is Kai. How are you?” I was in the living room of my parents’ home, sitting back in a chair, with one leg crossed over the other, as if sitting in my own house and using the telephone to call a girl were normal events. This, I thought, was how John Glenn felt circling the earth.

  Edna sat next to me, malignantly. I knew Christine’s number like the number stamped on the receiver of my rifle.

  Christine’s voice. “Kai! Oh, Kai—hello, hello! Are you home? How are you?” Her voice was so sweet, so rich with passion and my heart p
ounded as it flowed out of the phone into my ear. Edna’s glare became imposingly brilliant, for this was her very own weird problem child, that strange Chinese boy Kai Ting, talking with a girl on a telephone in her house. This should have hit my alarm bells and induced a stutter or a sudden recitation of preadolescent nonsense, or laughter, or polio. Only the buzz in my ear persisted. Somehow, Mr. Spillaney, the Man in the Red Sash, Mr. Arvin, Mr. Armentrot, Mr. O’Ware, Plebe math, Mr. Flauck, and the Spirit of the Bayonet had been more intimidating. I wanted to marvel at this accomplishment, and perhaps call the press, but all I could do was hear Christine’s voice, and rejoice.

  “I’m great, Christine. It’s wonderful to hear your voice, to have your voice come out of this telephone. Can I see you?”

  “Are you home for the summer?” she asked.

  “I have a week,” I said. “What are you doing tonight?”

  “Oh, I’m busy,” she said. “Remember Kyle Bush?”

  “How about tomorrow?”

  “Kai, let’s get together Tuesday; I don’t have a thing.”

  That was four days from now. I could do a lot of running and weightlifting. “Okay. I’ll see you at breakfast at eight, for lunch, twelve noon, and for dinner, at five, on Tuesday.”

  She laughed. “You want to see me three times?”

  I laughed. “For starters.”

  I stepped into my room. The four model airplanes hung from the ceiling, heavy with dust. I stepped to the window. The view of the backyard was the same, although the flowers, whose names I had never learned, seemed brighter and healthier. I put Marco Fideli’s etching of Beethoven and the storm on the shelf, then shook my head and put it back in my bag. It didn’t belong here.

  Edna entered after I showered and was changing into civvies. “You are all sinew and muscle,” she said. “They truly didn’t feed you much, did they.” She put down a plate of Underwood devilled ham sandwiches and a glass of milk. “You’re a man now, and can have food in your room,” she said simply. “Can I get you anything else?”