by Pat Conroy
“Sometimes we luck out and get to drive garbage trucks. By the way, raincoat, I don’t like Charleston snobs.”
“I’ve hurt your feelings,” she said coyly. “A sensitive ethnic.”
“This is fun, but I have important things to do,” I said, checking my watch.
“Like what? How could a cadet from the Institute possibly have something important to do?”
“I’ve got to get back to the barracks and wash my socks.”
“All cadets are exactly the same. All cut from the same cookie cutter.”
“Just like Charleston girls.”
“Who were you seeing in this neighborhood? This neighborhood does not cotton to ethnics.”
“It’s none of your business, but Tradd St. Croix is my roommate.”
She cleared her throat, stepped back as if she were leaving, and said, “And I thought you didn’t like Charleston snobs.”
“Do you live South of Broad? Where do you live?” I asked.
“That’s none of your business.”
“Your name is none of my business. Where you live is none of my business. It doesn’t look like we have any business together. Besides it’s getting toward midnight, that magic hour when cadets turn into pumpkins. I’ve got to be going.”
“I’m not sorry one single bit. I wish you had gone ten minutes ago.”
“Well, good night, raincoat.”
“Good night, cadet,” she said, touching my arm, gently “Maybe I’ll come talk to you again if I feel like it.”
“My heart leaps like a gazelle just thinking about it. Do you know that I think you’re crazy? I’ve met a lot of Southern girls in my life, but I’ve never met anyone so obviously stark raving mad. I’ve never . . .”
Then another voice sounded through the darkness, a controlled, peremptory voice that could have come from either a man or a woman. The girl made a high animal noise of surprise or fear or a combination of both.
“Get to the house, Annie Kate,” the voice ordered.
The voice came from a slightly wizened, diminutive woman who scowled at me from behind a cigarette ash.
“Mother,” Annie Kate said, her answer more supplicating than responsive.
“You know better than to go out like this,” the woman said, approaching us slowly. She passed the girl and walked directly up to me, appraising me with clear, angry eyes.
“Good night, young man. My daughter is only visiting for the weekend. She will be gone tomorrow.”
“I was just leaving, ma’am,” I said.
“Splendid,” she answered. “Do not let us keep you.”
“Good night, Will McLean,” Annie Kate said.
“Good night, Annie Kate. Now, at last, I know your name.”
“Don’t forget that I’m stark raving mad.”
“Shut up, Annie Kate,” her mother commanded.
“It was a pleasure meeting both of you, ma’am.”
“Yes, it was such an extraordinary pleasure, young man. It is too bad we will never see each other again. Do I make myself absolutely clear? No one even knows she’s here. As a gentleman, I ask you to tell no one you saw her.”
“There’s no one I could tell who would even know her, ma’am.”
“I am asking you as a gentleman not to tell anyone, Mr. McLean.”
“I won’t tell anyone.”
“Thank you. I’ll hold you to your word. Good night, sir.”
They turned and walked down Stoll’s Alley together. They were not going to let me know if they lived in a house adjacent to the lane, but I had no time to find out. I had seven minutes to get to the barracks or receive confinements for breaking curfew. The midnight hour was a perilous time on the streets and highways of Charleston for cadets broke all existing speed records returning from general leave. But now I knew the fastest routes through the narrow streets of the old town. As a cadet, I had learned the Charleston streets by rote and was always refining my knowledge of shortcuts on the peninsula.
When I entered the barracks, a few seconds to spare before midnight, I heard a voice from the guardroom shouting my name in the barracks. My name reverberated off the four barracks walls with an astonishing resonance. “Will McLean. Telephone call for Will McLean.”
“Hello,” I said picking up the receiver in the guardroom.
“Hi, ethnic.”
“Annie Kate.”
“Surprise,” she said. “I have to talk low so my mother won’t hear me. I wanted to tell you that I enjoyed talking to you even if you try to act like a stand-up comic sometimes.”
“I’m nervous when I meet people at first. Especially girls. I always think they’ll like me if I can only make them laugh. It’s never worked, not once in my life, but I still do it. I just don’t know what to say to them.”
“You certainly don’t,” she agreed, a bit too quickly I thought. “Are you shy?”
“No, I’m catatonic. Once I didn’t move for four years. My mother put me on a hanger and hung me in a closet until I started showing vital signs.”
“There you go again. You don’t have to be nervous talking to me, Will. Why don’t you try to relax and be yourself? I’m not going to bite you.”
“Bite me. Please bite me. No, that’s not why I’m nervous now, Annie Kate. In a minute, some guy is going to knock on my door and say, ‘All in.’ The Institute kind of likes it if I’m there for bed-check.”
“So you don’t want to talk to me,” she pouted. “No wonder you don’t have any girl friends.”
“I told you. Three hundred girls from Sweet Briar.”
“I’m in love with a boy,” she said suddenly.
“Congratulations.”
“He doesn’t love me, though I still love him. Very much. I’ll always love him.”
“That’s great.”
“You can be my friend if you want, Will.”
“Sure, I’ll look you up in California the next time I’m out there.”
“Do you ever get lonely, Will?” she responded, ignoring my sarcasm.
“No, I’m surrounded by two thousand other fabulous guys.”
“You were the first person I’ve talked to in a month besides my mother.”
“I didn’t think people were that unfriendly in Santa Barbara.”
“Good night, Will,” she said angrily.
“Wait a minute. Please wait a minute,” I shouted in the phone, attracting the curiosity of the OG. “Tell me what this is all about. I don’t understand any of this, Annie Kate. None of it. I’ll be your friend. I’ll be happy to be your friend. Anybody’s friend. But you’re leaving tomorrow and I’m in Charleston and your mother told me that I would never see you again. She told me to forget that I ever met you in the first place. You heard her say that. Look, Annie Kate, I’ll write you. I write funny letters. Girls love me when I write them letters. They love me all the way up to the time they meet me. If you’re lonely, I can help that. I’ve never been anything but.”
“You don’t know anything about loneliness,” she said in a pitiless voice. “There’s a garden behind my house on Church Street, Will. You can get to it by walking down an alley that cuts beside the second house on Stoll’s Alley. There’s a wooden gate at the end of the alley. In the garden, we can meet on the wrought iron bench behind the carriage house. Mother will never see us, and she always goes visiting on Sundays anyway. Can you come then?”
“As soon as mass is over, I’ll be there.”
There was a groan and she said, “Oh, dear, you’re not a Catholic, are you, ethnic? Oh, of course, you are. How tiresome. How predictable.”
“And you’re an Anglican. Right?” I answered.
“Yes.”
“And you belong to St. Michael’s.”
“Yes.”
“And you have a Huguenot last name.”
“Yes.”
“And your family belongs to the Yacht Club and the St. Cecilia Society and your mother was in the Junior League and your grandfather fought for the Conf
ederacy.”
“Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.”
“Don’t talk to me about being tiresome and predictable.”
“Be nice to me next Sunday, Will. I need a nice ethnic at this time in my life.”
“I’ll be nice,” I answered. “Good night, Annie Kate.”
“And, Will. One more thing. You’re right about me being a little crazy. But it’s a temporary thing. It will only last a little while. I promise you that. Will you promise me one thing?”
“Sure.”
“Don’t wear that silly nose next week.”
“I promise,” I said, and we both hung up laughing.
Chapter Seven
The plebes arrived on the following day. They came from forty states and seven foreign countries. Seven hundred freshmen, most of them accompanied by their parents, entered through the Gates of Legrand on a day of astonishing clearness, a sweltering, bone-rusting day beneath a blue sky that made the heat seem all the more potent and dazzling. The campus was weightless and tense.
This was the day officially set aside for the swift business of transformation; a day when civilians would become recruits and boys would be reduced to something less than boys. The cadre was brisk, efficient, and courteous. The courtesy would vanish when the parents departed from campus that afternoon.
I spent the morning walking among the freshmen and their parents. Outside the four barracks, I witnessed scenes of unbearable tenderness in the awkward charades of sons leaving their families for the first time. I saw women kissing their sons again and again and the sons pull back blushing and moved. Fathers shook hands stiffly with their sons as they attempted to address them as men for the first time. The cadre watched, their eyes invisible beneath the oiled brims of their field caps. They joked and laughed with both the parents and the recruits. The laughter would cease when the parents left through the Gates of Legrand.
The plebes were fine-looking boys for the most part, but their eyes were lusterless and fearful. You could see in their faces the need to survive this one day, this one hour, so that they then could be about the business of surviving the year. You could feel their need to escape the soft, worried eyes of their families. They wanted to make it as easy as possible on their families and on themselves. Most of all, they wanted it to begin. At last, they wanted to measure for themselves the mystique and cunning weight of the plebe system. They wanted to test themselves in its landscape. But the landscape would not present itself until the parents left the city of Charleston.
Parents took a last measure of their sons, so that at the end of this year they could calculate how far their sons had traveled.
As the morning deepened, more and more freshmen took leave of their families and entered the main sally port of Number Two barracks to face the icefield of the cadre’s eyes. Inside the barracks, cadre members sat at card tables with file boxes and name tags, their black field hats pulled low over the eyes and noses giving each of them the appearance of a monstrous, carnivorous species of bird. Once you entered the barracks, you surrendered to the plebe system, renounced the world outside the Gates of Legrand, and submitted to the laws of the Corps.
By 1000 hours, sophomore corporals swollen with the joy of calling cadence for the first time expertly marched squads of freshmen to Durrell Hall for the ritual haircuts. Other long lines of freshmen queued up outside of Alumni Hall being fitted for uniforms. I walked across the parade ground to Durrell Hall, where I watched the ceremony of Institute barbers render new heads bald with several athletic sweeps of their humming razors. A black janitor swept the immense piles of hair toward the back door. Each movement of his broom brought forth a new creature with its own perverse shape. After their haircuts, the freshmen, transformed now into plebes, moved back across the parade ground with their heads shiny as light bulbs. The air filled up with the rhythm of cadence. There was a decorous, efficient simplicity in this transfiguration from civilian to military, and the cadre performed its tasks with extraordinary precision and dispatch.
I enjoyed watching the fear and anxiety of the plebes. I had to admit that. It made me feel infinitely superior to these trembling, perspiring newcomers. I, along with every member of the cadre, had experienced my own first day. I had known the terror of this day but now found I enjoyed seeing the terror in others. The Institute had changed me as it changed all its sons. I knew that anyone who aspired to become an Institute man had to tolerate the solitary astonishment of that first day. All had to know and endure the awful violence of separation. I had all the markings of an upperclassman: There was something instinctive and primal in me that wanted all plebes to suffer as I had suffered. That and that alone gave any kind of certification to the fear and solitude of my own plebe year.
On the second floor of Durrell Hall at 1100 hours I listened to the General address the parents on what to expect from the Institute and what to expect from their sons in the coming weeks. Clearly, some of the parents were nervous (and, brother, did they have a right to be, I thought), but the vast majority of them believed that the Institute offered their sons the very finest education in the country. But apprehension was loose in the room; it created a tremulous, undirected energy that danced above the crowd like phosphorous on a night sea. They had come to be reassured, comforted, even praised. They rose when the General entered and gave him an emotional standing ovation that lasted for minutes. Imperially, he faced them, tall, slim, and imposing, as if he had been fashioned and whittled down from the barrel of a howitzer. When the applause subsided, his voice broke through the hall.
“Because of you, the parents of the Class of 1970, we have been able to assemble the finest incoming class of freshmen in the history of Carolina Military Institute. They will be trained by the finest cadre in the school’s history. They have chosen the finest school in the United States of America.”
The parents, hearing what they needed to hear, applauded wildly. With an upraised hand, he silenced them and continued: “Today, your sons are alone. They are frightened and they are leaving home for the first time. I promise you this: We will not strip your son of his individuality; we will enhance it. Today, you hand us a new recruit. In June, I will hand you back a cadet. Four Junes from now, I will hand you back an Institute man, and I can promise all of you parents that it will be one of the proudest days in his and your lives. He will wear the ring of the Institute, the tangible symbol of his worth and sacrifice, a symbol that is recognized all over the world by the men who belong to the brotherhood, to the proud intrepid fraternity of Institute men.”
A reverent silence gripped the hall as the Great Man spoke. His voice controlled the audience by the power and conviction of his fervent, undistilled belief.
“Now,” he said, his mood lightening. “I will tell you parents something that I know is a fact. In the next month you will be receiving a frantic phone call from your son. Mothers, you will be especially vulnerable to this call. In fact, your sons will probably call when they are sure their fathers are not home. When this call comes, brace yourself. Your son will be asking you, possibly begging you, to let him come home. Tell him no. Emphatically, tell him no. Tell him that under no circumstances will you allow him to quit before the completion of his freshman year. Tell him that you did not raise him to be a quitter, a man who ran away the first time he faced adversity.
“The first year is hard, ladies and gentlemen; make no mistake about it. It was hard when I was a freshman; it will be hard one hundred years from now. I will let you in on a little secret. As President of this college, I have done everything in my power to make the system harder. But the system is also effective. It has produced an extraordinary breed of Americans, and your son is about to embark on a journey that will make him equal to that breed. As you were, it will make him better than that breed. We are producing a higher quality of Institute man now than ever before. That is because America requires more than ever the kind of man produced by the Institute.”
He paused, drew a deep breath, and, with a sl
ow magisterial gaze, swept his eyes from the right side of the hall to the left. The pause was prelude. He always ended his speeches with grand, symphonic statements. I always waited for his exultant finishes; I always enjoyed them.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I will tell you why I chose not to go into politics after my military career was over. I came to the Institute not simply because I believe in the greatness of this college. No. I came here because I was and am appalled at the weakness and vulnerability of America. It has always been my dream that the Institute and her sons would be at the vanguard of a moral revolution, a resurgence of the American dream itself. It is my most heartfelt desire that the American spirit be rejuvenated from its weakness and degeneracy by the disciplined, patriotic bands of men we produce at the Institute each year. I am asking you this favor. Give your sons to me and let me keep them for this first year. I want them to know the satisfaction of submitting themselves fully to a system of discipline that has been tried and tested as effective again and again. I want each of them to know the pleasure of walking up to his parents four years from now, strong, proud, clear-eyed, and erect, and thanking you for giving him the strength and fortitude to endure the rigors of the plebe system. America is fat, ladies and gentlemen. America is fat and sloppy and amoral. We need men of iron to get her on the right path again. We need Institute men. We need your sons. Help us not to lose them in the difficult but rewarding days ahead. Help us make them submit to the will of the cadre, the shapers and molders of our strong creed. Help us turn them from the frightened boys you have brought us today into men of iron, men of the Institute.”
General Durrell walked off the stage quickly and down the aisle to the exit. He did not acknowledge the deafening cheers. As he disappeared, I thought that he had neglected to tell the parents some important and vital statistics. Of the seven hundred boys who arrived on campus this August morning, one hundred would not survive plebe week, three hundred would not survive plebe year. Only men of iron would remain. Men like me, I thought.
Chapter Eight
