by Pat Conroy
Mark was crouched in a classic boxer’s stance, watching Otto’s movements with that scowling and formidably embittered look that was a warning to strangers that he was not a man to be taken lightly. And Otto was not taking Mark lightly but was beginning to move easily, hugely and wickedly, relying on all the countless moments when he had roamed this roped, canvas province, stalking the strongest boys in hundreds of Southern counties, confident of his powers and his experience and his manhood. The hostility of the crowd, surreal and absurd when mingling with calliopes and the frenetic salesmanship of barkers, shimmered across the ring and Otto’s broad back like something electric, ignited, and deadly. A hueless pallor dulled Mark’s face, a proud untouchability so incongruent on a face that suddenly belonged to a boy. These moments were only seconds, instants of appraisal as Otto regained his bearings and moved in for the kill as though stalking some toothless cub for his own pleasure and entertainment.
But before Otto could close in on Mark, a new, strident sound entered the tent. It began low and steady like the hum of a high-tension wire, then increased in volume and shrillness, bestial and wild and un-namable, until we realized that it was coming from Pig. It ended in a kind of battle cry, a furious tattoo of combat and outrage. His eyes had cleared, and Pig was crouched in an oddly distorted, yet ceremonial, position as though he were offering prayers to a ruthless and malignant deity. His feet were planted widely apart, his knees were bent, and his hands were placed stiffly and formally in front of his face, like the forelegs of a praying mantis.
The cadets went wild.
“Karate!” they shouted in unison as Mark dove out of the ring beneath the bottom ropes.
Otto made another tour of the ring, watching Pig closely and waiting for him to make an aggressive opening move. But Pig was locked in his first position like a man in prayer or in pain. Again Pig’s martial whine filled the tent. I had never seen him angrier. At that moment I wished I had brought Theresa’s picture. I would have held it aloft and screamed, “Otto just called Theresa a gaping, flapping twat.” But the one thing Pig did not require was motivation. Otto had done something no human being had ever done to Dante Pignetti; he had humiliated him physically and had done it before a tent full of witnesses. Every vein in Pig’s body seemed to stand out in bold relief. Blood discolored his head in the place where Otto had yanked a snatch of his hair completely out.
Not that Otto appeared frightened or alarmed in the least. He simply looked bemused and interested in the novelty of Pig’s stance. He was accustomed to twenty-second fights, brief and violent slaughters. He began laughing and as he laughed, he moved in with amazing speed and grace for the denouement.
He was still laughing when Pig kicked him across the ring.
Pig’s kick caught Otto squarely in the forehead and with enormous force snapped the big man’s head back savagely and sent him crashing into the far ropes. When Otto came off the ropes, his gait was drunken and staggered and the eyes that searched the lights for the opponent who had hurt him were unfocused and confused. Pig caught him on the rebound from the ropes and doubled him up with short, slashing punches to the midsection that sounded like an axe ruining soft wood. Grabbing a fistful of peroxided hair, Pig straightened Otto carefully, then drove the heel of his open palm into the center of the big man’s face. Otto’s nose exploded like an overripe berry, and he lay panting and semiconscious on the canvas deck. The blood spread evenly across his face with a terrible symmetry, like a rose finger-painted by a child.
The cadets chanted, “Pig!”
And Pig answered, holding his arms victoriously above his head, “Oink.”
“Pig!” the cadets repeated.
“Oink,” he answered.
“Pig!”
“Oink.”
Pig danced up to the referee, who was angrily tending to his hurt champion, and snatched the hundred-dollar bill from his pocket, waved it like a hankie to the crowd, then bent down on one knee to help minister to Otto the Facebreaker.
We drove away from the fairgrounds in my silver-gray 1959 Chevrolet with which my mother had bribed me when I threatened to drop out of the Institute in the spring of my sophomore year. We talked excitedly about the fight, each of us recounting the event in four separate and distorted narratives of the exact same events. By the time we had reached the city, the fight had become fiction, the truth divisible in four distinct incongruent ways. Three hundred unjoined versions would circulate through the barracks by midnight, gathered and appropriated by cadets who were not present but who would claim they were, until the fight would enter into the history of that academic year according to joyous laws of storytelling where the annexation of myth becomes a form of truth itself.
“I’ve got to stop for gas,” I said, as we pulled into the Gulf station on Meeting Street, four blocks from Tradd’s house. The old slave market with its glooms and arches cast its severe shadows on us. “Have any of you assholes been using my car lately? I’ve been getting shitty mileage.”
“I used it last week, Will, when mine was in the garage,” Mark said.
“How was the trip to Oregon?”
“I only went downtown. Goddam, let me pay you a buck,” he answered.
“I probably need a tune-up.”
Pig said from the back seat, “I’ll check it out for you this week when I’m working on my clunker, Will.”
“How’s the fifty-dollar car coming along, Pig?” Tradd asked. “Do you think that sad machine will ever work?”
“It’ll work,” Pig said. “It may not work for long, but I’ll get it working.”
“By the way, Pig,” I teased, “I thought you weren’t supposed to use karate.”
“I wasn’t, paisan. I was wrong to use it.”
“Was it because he poked his fingers in your eyes that you used it?” Tradd asked, turning around in the front seat to face Pig.
“Fill it up with regular,” I said to the attendant, a wizened, elderly man who seemed in pain when he moved.
“Naw, the eyes didn’t bother me,” Pig said. “But when he started messing with the gorgeous curls, I knew that there’d be some heavy-duty chink-fighting going on in that ring.”
Mark said, “You shouldn’t have gotten into that ring, you dumb bastard. You could have gotten hurt real bad. And you could have gotten us all hurt.”
“You couldn’t have gotten Will hurt” Tradd said, smiling at me.
“I could have been seriously hurt if I’d been hit by one of your bodies flying out of the ring,” I answered.
Pig turned serious for a moment. “Why didn’t you come into the ring to help me, paisan? The whole room would have been in there duking it out for each other.”
“I froze, Pig,” I said, looking at him in the rearview mirror. “I was scared to death to get in that ring. Physical courage has never been my forte. I go in for moral courage, because with moral courage you don’t get your face beat in or your eyes gouged out. By the way, Tradd, that was a brave thing you did.”
“A stupid thing,” Mark disagreed.
“It was wonderful,” Tradd said dreamily. “Wonderful. That was the first courageous thing I’ve ever done in my whole life. I don’t know what got into me. I simply cannot imagine what made me do it. Please don’t tell Mother. She would disapprove, although I am equally sure that Father would love it.”
“I got to tell her, paisan,” Pig said, squeezing Tradd’s frail neck affectionately. “You put it all on the line for me, Tradd. If it wasn’t for you, Otto would be cleaning my nuts from between his toes. And you too, Mark.”
“I went in there because of Tradd,” Mark insisted. “You deserved to get your ass kicked for pulling off a dumb stunt like that. It would have done you good to get your ass kicked by that monkey. You got too much luck for your own good. You’ve always been able to step in manure and come out smelling like Chanel No. 5. But your time is coming, Pig. No one has luck all the time. You’re using up too much of yours on stupid shit.”
Whe
n the attendant approached the window to get paid, Pig thrust the hundred-dollar bill into his face.
“I can’t cash this,” the man sputtered.
“It’s all we’ve got,” Pig said sorrowfully.
“No, it isn’t,” I said, handing the man a ten-dollar bill.
“You don’t have to pay for my gas, Pig,” I said. “You’ll be needing that money for other things, like tuition.”
“I’m going to try to pay my own way this year, paisan,” Pig announced. “I may need to borrow a little bit every once in a while, but I’m going to be hustling money all year. I’ve even got a job as a bartender on weekends down at the Merchant Seaman’s club every other weekend.”
“You’ll get thrown out of school if they find out, Pig,” Tradd warned. “That’s too much of a chance for you to take. I won’t hear of it.”
“Just buy your own deodorant,” Mark said. “I’m sick of finding your greasy armpit hairs on my deodorant stick.”
“Oh gross,” Tradd said. “How did I get stuck with such gross-talking creatures for roommates?”
“I’ll never use your deodorant again, paisan.”
“Good.”
“Don’t worry so much about money, Pig,” I said. “You’re starting to get obsessive about the subject. We’ve always made it OK. We’ve made it just fine.”
Pig looked at Mark and said with a vast unchristened hurt in his voice and a nakedness rare in the chronicles of our life together, “Mark, I can’t help it that I was born poor. Do you think I like it? Do you think I like begging from guys I love?”
“Stop it,” I demanded.
“Let’s stop this silly talk of money,” Tradd agreed.
“I want you to get your own deodorant, Pig. That’s all,” Mark said uneasily, examining the shadows of the slave market.
“We’ll find out where Otto the Facebreaker buys his,” I said. “Then we’ll go shopping.”
“Do you think I like it, Mark? Do you think I like it, Mark?” Pig said again.
“Yeh,” Mark answered. “I think you like it.”
Chapter Twenty-five
If I had to say what I loved most about the city of Charleston, I would say that I loved the stillness and leisure of its early Sunday afternoons. There was a timelessness to those Sundays: a greenness to its parks and private arbors; the quiet hum of well-dressed crowds gathering beneath the columns of its churches; then the sudden bloom of sails and the gestures of small crews far out in the river; the abstraction of the walkers along the Battery; the pleasant symmetry of eighteenth-century houses clustered along the narrow feminine streets; bells over the city; the shrill robust games of happy children and the healthy glow of those children; the movement of freighters into the harbor after trans-Atlantic voyages. On Sundays, Charleston, without the dissonance of commerce or traffic, had the serene regularity of a city so magical in its harmony, so purified of stridency or disorder, so certain of its virtues, that it seemed a city separated from its century by an incorruptible cleanliness of spirit and image, a perfect environment for recreation and quiet pleasure. On Sundays, Charleston became a city of gardeners and strollers and fishermen and sailors cutting toward buoys. It was a city that could sit quietly observing itself, listening to the cooing of its pigeons in the colonnades, the purring of bees among the mint gardens, and the rumors of old people beneath the columns and belvederes.
I learned some things on those Sundays in Charleston, and my teacher was Abigail St. Croix. She taught me to see the city as she saw it and to measure all other cities by the standards of Charleston. Abigail would often take me for long walks after lunch at her house on Sunday. She would make me ache with love for the city. She would point out details I never would have noticed alone. Together, we studied the antiques in shop windows on lower King Street, and she would deliver small lectures on the histories of spoons, the travels of porcelain to the New World, or the elegance of the Queen Anne period. She would name each item that struck her fancy in the window and if I was not moved by its charm she would winsomely explain why I should be charmed and we would continue our walk. She would name things for me that previously existed only as parts of the undifferentiated landscape. She taught me the names of trees and flowers, styles of architecture, historical figures in the city, the names of mansions as they appeared in the National Register, the names of the families of harbor pilots, the various forms of Charleston brick—anything she thought of or needed to let me know as we walked off our lunches and enjoyed the languor of the city. Sometimes she took me to the houses of her friends, introduced me, and showed me formal interiors where each room was a work of art, where every corner had been created with the cautious, gifted eye of the miniaturist. Do everything well, Abigail said, and leave nothing to chance. There was no such thing as an insignificant detail, and everything had a name. She said many things on those walks and I remember most of them. Gardens, tended by quiet thoughtful people, make for pleasant cities, said Abigail St. Croix. And a century is a patient thing, she once observed, as we studied the delicate lattice-work of ficus attached to the south face of a carriage house on Legare Street. We would stop to listen to the songs of black women coming from kitchens, or conversations of men cleaning fish on their back porches, or the voice of the carriage driver describing the city to tourists as his horse moved through the narrow streets. Sometimes I would carry a shovel and a bag to scoop up the horse manure deposited on the streets for use in Abigail’s own garden. Once we watched unseen as a woman arranged daffodils in a blue-flowered vase set on a table in a bay window curving out to the sidewalk. The woman’s hands, with their length and thinness and their pale blue veins, looked exactly like Abigail’s hands; and I wondered if Charleston women all came to have the same lovely hands, if a lifetime of handling flowers and linen aged their hands with a special softness and delicacy.
On those walks we talked about Tradd and Commerce, God, and politics, as well as the silliest, most fatuous, most inconsequential things. We talked about everything except those things that hurt or damaged or mattered most significantly in our lives. We never took each other to those intimate gardens hidden from the eyes of visitors. When I look back on those Sundays, I believe that Abigail and I each wanted to allow the other the privilege of entering those gardens at will, but we did not know where to find the gates and keys that would permit free and easy access. We knew about those gardens, but we did not know how to enter them.
On the second Sunday in November, I went to say good-bye to Commerce St. Croix, who was leaving the next week to meet a ship in Philadelphia. The dinner that afternoon consisted of those things that Commerce loved the best and would miss the most in his two-month absence. It began with a thick she-crab soup flavored mildly with an expensive dry sherry. The soup was followed by a superb coquille St. Jacques served in a spinach puree, which Abigail had imitated from a meal she and Commerce had enjoyed on a trip to the Dodin Bouffant in Paris years before. The meal ended with a homemade lime sherbet, followed by small demitasses of espresso, which we took in the living room.
The living room was not used, to my knowledge, except on Sundays. The room itself was, quite simply, an accumulation of precious objects. I sat rather stiffly in a Regency chair that had been pictured in a book celebrating the craftsmanship of Charleston antiques. A chandelier, the most famous in South Carolina, hung like a brilliant crystal stalactite from the ceiling, and the smell of furniture polish gave a permanent, opulent odor to the room, a perfume of endurance and nostalgia. Our conversation was rather muted and pleasant. Our voices were like prayers lifted up and offered as invocations to the house, and the house itself was an invocation to slower, more cautious days.
I was privileged to be a part of all this, I thought, as I listened to Commerce talk about his itinerary, and it seemed to me there were far worse strategies in life than to try to make each aspect of one’s existence a minor work of art. But I was also beginning to notice something chilly and remote in an ambiance of such co
nscious perfection. There was no urgency in the effortless, classical preference for the simple over the ornate and showy. There was no personal statement in the house, no indelible signature of individuality; it was as though the collective unconscious of all Charlestonians, the living and the dead, had formed a committee of restrained equilibrists to design the interior of each room. There was nothing ugly or comical or beloved on the walls, no souvenir of travel, no bibelot or trinket to inspire memory. There was nothing hallucinatory or disturbing in the house, nothing to induce the white desperate blaze that had haunted the houses of my youth. Perhaps it was because my family had no nostalgia for the past, no sense of responsibility to uphold a proud and carefully wrought tradition. I had once bought the St. Croixs a hunting print from an antique shop in Charlottesville, Virginia. The print had cost twenty dollars, and it was the most expensive gift I had ever bought anyone. Abigail had seemed immensely pleased with the print, yet I never saw it hanging anywhere in the house. In fact, I never saw the print again. But something in me always looked for it, every time I entered the St. Croix mansion. Much later, on one of our Sunday walks, Abigail instructed me on the value of some English prints displayed in the windows of Schindler’s. When she had finished I realized I had bought the St. Croixs a reproduction of a famous print, and even I knew that a reproduction would never hang in the house of St. Croix. All of this had something to do with why Pig and Mark seldom attended these dinners on Sunday afternoon. Unlike me, it bothered them to feel like reproductions.
Commerce looked over at me with a mischievous, excited expression. The sound of frail cups clicking into their saucers was the only other sound in the room when he announced, “I want to read something funny I found while re-reading one of my oldest journals last week. You and Tradd will really enjoy this, Will.”
He left the room with his swift, birdlike gait and we heard his footsteps quick and light on the stairs.
