Early that evening I left the Gates of Legrand wearing my starched summer whites for my first general leave of the year. Humidity staggered the city throughout the summer. Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.
I drove slowly through the city, past Hampton Park, down King Street, through the business district with its rows of antique shops and fine men’s stores. For three years, I had felt the thumb of the city shaping me with a passion for marshes, for tidal creeks, for symmetry, and for the disciplined architecture of the eighteenth century. Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship. I have heard that an early inoculation to the sights and smells of the Carolina lowcountry is an almost irreversible antidote to the charms of other landscapes, other alien geographies. You can be moved profoundly by other vistas, by other oceans, by soaring mountain ranges, but you cannot be seduced. You can even forsake the lowcountry, renounce it for other climates, but you can never completely escape the sensuous, semitropical pull of Charleston and her marshes. It is one of those cities where childhood is a pleasure and memory a flow of honey; one of those cities that never lets go, that insinuates its precedence by the insistent delicacy of its beauty.
Charleston is built on a peninsula located between two tidal rivers, the Ashley and the Cooper, which flow together to form Charleston Harbor. The peninsula has produced, oddly enough, a people with the siege mentality of islanders. Observers have described Charlesto-nians as vainglorious, obstinate, mercurial, verbose, xenophobic, and congenitally gracious. Most of all, they elude facile description, but they do possess a municipal character that has a lot to do with two centuries of scriptural belief that they are simply superior to other people of the earth. If you do not subscribe to this theory or are even offended by it, well, it simply means that you are from “away,” that you are obviously not a Charlestonian. The entire mythology of the city is dependent on the existence of an ancient, beleaguered aristocracy who trace their heritage to the first stirrings of the Colony. They live—or would like to live—in the splendid mansions and townhouses South of Broad Street, or SOB, the rather mythical and whimsical Maginot Line of society. Each of these houses is a vessel of exquisite solitude and unrestricted privacy. Charlestonians have made an art out of living well, and the area South of Broad is arguably the most flawlessly preserved historical area in America.
The rest of South Carolina has a keenly developed inferiority complex about Charleston, a complex that Charlestonians feel is richly deserved. Unlike other cities in the region, including Savannah and Columbia, Charleston never had to endure the full fury of an assault by the armies of William Tecumseh Sherman. Charleston survived the Civil War with her architectural legacy intact and her collective unconscious simmering with aggravated memories of bombardment, reconstruction, and emancipation as she struggled to become whole again. The war succeeded in making an odd city odder, and it often seems as if Charleston still feels the presence of a phantom Armada holding the city under a perilous eternal siege. In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.
The mansions South of Broad Street form a magnificent archipelago of exclusion. It was not a matter of money that assured access to the charmed region; it was a matter of blood. The alloy of wealth and background was ideal, of course, but the century had proven testy and ungenerous in its treatment of some of the oldest, most celebrated families of Charleston. The descendants of planters often found themselves with the bank accounts of sewing machine salesmen. But a modest income alone never denied access to those haughty parlors; and wealth alone could never insure it. If you were crass, lowborn, or socially offensive, it would have made no difference to the proud inhabitants South of Broad that you owned France; they would not invite you to their homes. I knew girls my own age who would as soon be courted by a palmetto as by a boy denied access to South of Broad society. They were often blonde, long-stemmed girls, thin and clean and frail, who attended Ashley Hall for twelve years, went off to college in the hills of Virginia, then returned buffed and polished to marry princely fellows who were perfectly at home with all the stiffness and formality of the realm. But a casual inbreeding was beginning to have deleterious effects on some of the oldest families. During the day, the narrow streets filled up with ermine-headed children, with the eyes of Weimaraners, who were native to this land. Walking in their midst as they played games beneath the bored, distracted gazes of their nannies, I would look for chinless blonds or boys with nosebleeds. Aristocrats in Charleston, like aristocrats the world over, had proven the dangers of sipping from the genetic cup without a sense of recklessness or a gambler’s eye for the proper stranger. Too many blue-eyed men had married their blue-eyed third cousins, and it was not uncommon to find husbands and wives who looked like brother and sister.
I was not immune to the pleasures and enchantments of Broad Street, I was not immune to pleasures and enchantments of any kind. I admired the elegiac understatement of its streets, the whole taut containment of the lower city, fragrant in its vines, disciplined in its stones. In the presence of the people who lived here, I had learned much about myself and the way I really was. My flat Irish features often shamed me as I walked in their midst. There was nothing understated or subtle about me, and my aura was one of energy, restlessness, and inadmissability. I bobbed precariously on the immigrant flood; I smelled of Kilkenny, the back seats of station wagons, and the chlorine of YMCA pools. It seemed that I had to dive down through the waters of history even to glimpse these brilliant gouramis and golden carp who dwelled so easily in the distilled fathoms of their heritage. I was more at home among the multitudes than the chosen, and the chosen knew it very well.
But I had come often to South of Broad, and I had learned that aristocracy was not a navigable river. My access to this civilization came about by accident; my instructors in the art of moving among the habitués of a charmed circle were surpassingly fine, and I owed them much. One of my roommates was born and reared on East Bay Street. His name, Tradd Prioleau St. Croix, paid tongue-twisting homage to two hundred years of Carolina history. Because of Tradd and his family, I had become familiar with the manners and customs of old Charleston. I found a parking space on East Bay and walked to the wrought iron gate of the St. Croix mansion. The house of my roommate was as splendid an edifice as I would ever enter without paying admission. Architects considered it among the five finest houses in the city of Charleston. The Tradd—St. Croix house evoked a mythic, possessive nostalgia from the reverent crowds who walked single file through its hushed, candle-lit interior each April during the annual spring tour of homes, for it was emblematic of the most remarkable instincts of that form-possessed society. All the strict and opulent criteria of taste that had once brought pleasure to the wealthiest merchants of Charleston could be studied at leisure once you crossed the threshold of Twenty-Five East Bay Street.
Abigail St. Croix was waiting for me on the lower piazza. She leaned against one of the severe, rounded Doric columns, a large-boned, awkwardly constructed woman, silent in her meditative repose, watching me climb the steps toward her. Her movements were slow and languorous, without guile or stratagems, and as her large hands reached out to me I remembered how I had learned that there could be an immensely poignant beauty in the awkwardness of human beings from watching Abigail set a table or open a book or simply brush the hair from her eyes.
“Abigail,” I said happily, running to her.
“Welcome home, Will. We missed you. I missed you the most.
“Will, I want you to see the garden before you go in to see Tradd and Commerce. I also want to have a serious talk with you before Commerce starts in on football and the seven seas.”
We walked to the rear of the house toward her huge formal garden, designed and planted by her husbands great-great grandfather. Upstairs, Tradd was playing Mozart, the music spilling into the garden like snow out of season. Abigail talked as we drifted toward the bench in the rear of the garden.
“You knew my sister had a breast removed, didn’t you, Will? I thought I wrote you that. It was such a grisly summer. Missy Rivers, the girl next door, you know the one, a perfectly charming girl but ugly as homemade sin, married a boy from a very nice family in Virginia. Mrs. Rivers was absolutely furious that Tradd was in England and missed the wedding. One of the children of the rector of St. Michael’s drowned while sailing in the harbor. His wife is practically crazed with grief, and he’s requested a transfer from Bishop Temple. … So much has happened, Will, and it’s all so boring.”
The garden was scrupulously manicured and trimmed. It extolled the virtues of discipline in its severe sculptured rows and regulated islands of green and bloom. In this garden, few flowers were allowed to die on the bush or the trellis; most of them died in stale water contained within fragile vases near the reflection of family silver.
“What are you thinking, you spectacle?” Abigail asked, interrupting her abridged version of the past summers history.
“I’ve decided I want to live like this always, Abigail,” I said, making a sweeping imperious gesture with my arm. “What must I do to become a Charleston aristocrat?”
“What do you think you have to do?” she said, as we navigated the brick pathways without haste.
“Let’s see,” I thought aloud. “Judging from the aristocrats I’ve met, first of all, I should have a frontal lobotomy. Then I should become a hopeless alcoholic, chain a maiden aunt in an attic, engage in deviant sexual behavior with polo ponies, and talk like I was part British and part Negro.”
“I had no idea that you’ve met that many of my relatives, spectacle,” she said. “But please don’t forget that I happen to be one of those awful people.”
“I don’t mean you, Abigail. You know that. I’d love to be chained in your attic.”
“Hush, Will,” she demanded. “I want to show you some roses.”
It was in her garden that whatever physical grace Abigail St. Croix possessed asserted itself. She moved among her flowers with consummate natural fluidity, enjoying the incommunicable pleasures of growing things with the patience and concentration of a watchmaker. In this, her small, green country, surrounded by an embrasure of old Charleston brick, there were camellias of distinction, eight discrete varieties of azaleas, and a host of other flowers, but she directed her prime attention to the growing of roses. She had taught me to love flowers since I had known her; I had learned that each variety had its own special personality, its own distinctive and individual way of presenting itself to the world. She told me of the shyness of columbine, the aggression of ivy, and the diseases that affected gardenias. Some flowers were arrogant invaders and would overrun the entire garden if allowed too much freedom. Some were so diffident and fearful that in their fragile reticence often lived the truest, most infinitely prized beauty. She spoke to her flowers unconsciously as we made our way to the roses in the rear of the garden.
“You can learn a lot from raising roses, Will. I’ve always told you that.”
“I’ve never raised a good weed, Abigail. I could kill kudzu.”
“Then one part of your life is empty,” she declared. “There’s a part of the spirit that’s not being fed.”
“I feed the spirit with other things.”
“Such as?”
“Basketball for me.”
“Basketball?” she said, unable to purge the disdain from her voice. “You substitute basketball for roses? That’s so dull and common, spectacle. There’s too much sameness in the world, and sometimes there’s too much sameness in you. That’s what I love about flowers in general and roses in particular. Each one is different. Every rose that comes to this garden has its own inherent surprise, its own built-in miracle. And the world needs more roses far more than it needs more basketball players.”
“Abigail, basketball is like that for me. I know you think I’m an idiot for saying that, and I know it sounds common to you. I understand what you’re saying about roses. I really do. I’ll probably never grow a black-eyed Susan in my life, much less a rose, but I think I understand how someone could become completely attached to flowers. When I play basketball, every shot is different, complicated; and each game is beautiful or ugly in its own special way. I think I look at basketball the way you look at roses or Tradd looks at Mozart or Commerce looks at his ships. All of us have been lucky. We’re all passionate about something. I feel sorry for people who haven’t found their passions. But, you know, Abigail, I don’t think I’ve ever found sameness in anything in the world. Not if I looked hard enough. I used to think that the Corps represented sameness. We all dress the same, we look the same, we live by the same rules, everything. But each one of us is different. When I walk into this garden each rose looks about the same to me, and you go to a parade at the Institute and all two thousand cadets look exactly the same to you. But if you look at them carefully, Abigail, the same thing happens to those cadets as to your roses. Each one is different, with his own surprise, his own miracle.”
“There’s hope for my favorite jock,” Abigail said.
“But there’s something I want to ask you, Will,” she said. “Then we’ll go in and face the other men in my life.” Her eyes left mine and traveled up the brick, ficus-covered walls to the window, through which the bright, lovely petals of Mozart dropped into the garden. “You and I have never talked about Tradd. We’ve always had this silent acquiescence between us that there were things we both knew but never discussed. There have been far too many taboos between us, Will.”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean, Abigail.”
“What do the boys in the barracks really think about Tradd? I’d like the truth.”
“They like him a lot. They think he’s a really good guy. They’re always talking about how well he’s fitted in since his plebe year.”
“That sounds like what a courteous young man tells a mother to make her feel good about her son.”
“You should feel good. And you should feel very proud,” I said, somewhat defensively. “He had a terrible time his plebe year. But that’s not unusual. I had a terrible time, too. But once you make it through that year at the Institute, they leave you pretty much alone. Tradd has adapted to the ways of the Corps. He’s a first lieutenant, Abigail. He’s doing a lot better than I am.”
“Do they find him odd, Will? Do they find him effeminate?”
“He’s an English major, Abigail!” I almost shouted. “An English major like me. The Corps thinks all English majors are queer as three-dollar bills. He’s gentle and unathletic. He has a high-pitched voice, plays the piano, and refuses to use foul language, which is the only way to make yourself clearly understood in the barracks. That causes people to talk, but it’s not important. It doesn’t mean anything. I’ve tried to get him to show more interest in girls to quiet some of the talk. But you know what he says to me?”
“Of course not.”
“He says that he goes out with girls at least as much as I do.”
“And what do you say to that?”
“I don’t say anything, because it’s true.”
“Be patient about girls, Will,” Abigail said tenderly, touching my face with a large, hesitant hand. “Some fine girl will come along and appreciate you for all the right reasons. Young girls have an infinite capacity for being attracted to the wrong sort of men. I know about this. All about it.”
“Commerce is a fine man, Abigail,” I said, uncomfortable with the sudden turn of the conversation. “He’s got one of those screwed-up Charleston first names, but so does Tradd. So does everybody in this sad, silly town.”
“He was very handsome and charming and available when I met him. He was considerably older than I was, and there was as much pressure for him to get married as there was for me. I was gawky and big-footed and horse-faced and felt very lucky to get him. And we’ve made a life together, after a fashion. I think because he’s away from Charleston so much, we are able to enjoy each other’s company much of the time.”
“Is that why you seem unhappy sometimes, Abigail? Because of your marriage?”
“I’m not unhappy, Will. I want you to know that, and I want you to remember it. I have more to be thankful for than most people who inhabit the earth. I have a lovely home, and I’ve raised a fine and sensitive son. And I have a husband who loves me despite his eccentricities and my ample faults.”
I loved the face of Abigail St. Croix as I often love the faces of men and women who have an unshakable faith in their own homeliness. On this overcast late afternoon, her face, in the green, leaf-filtered gauze of light, was both classic and frozen in its demeanor and repose. Her face had integrity, an undefilable resignation. If it was handsome, it was all a cold, sedate handsomeness that gave off a somewhat disturbing aura of wisdom and pain, of having lived deeply, suffered, rallied, despaired, laughed at her despair until the face that survived all these countless darkening moods and transfigurements was lined with discernment, with a resolute sense of commitment to form, and the power to be amused slightly by the whole long journey. Long ago, her face had become beautiful to me.
We neared the house. Abigail was an unflaggingly dedicated student of her husband’s ancestral place. It was an education she gladly shared with me, and though I had no abiding interest in interior or exterior design, her enthusiasm was catching. There was no antidote against one of Abigail’s enthusiasms. In this extraordinary house I learned about the difference between Hepplewhite and Regency, and between Chippendale and Queen Anne. I could point out to tourists who happened by while I was reading on the wicker couch on the lower piazza, the enormous stone quoins at the entranceway, the exceptional stuccowork in those princely downstairs rooms, and the intricate delicacy of the woodwork. A passing knowledge of the Tradd-St. Croix mansion was a liberal education in itself.
It was impossible to study the history of South Carolina without encountering the venerable Huguenot name of St. Croix again and again. It was a name with an enviable, irreproachable past (unless one considered owning slaves reproachable, which, of course, the St. Croixs did not) but an uncertain future; it was a name ominously endangered by extinction. The rich and the well-born were not prodigious reproducers of their rare, thin-boned species, and my roommate Tradd had found himself in the unenviable position of bearing complete responsibility for carrying on the family name. He was the last St. Croix and the burden of extending the line weighed heavily upon him even though it was a subject he assiduously avoided. I had more first cousins than a mink, or so it often seemed. If I died suddenly, the name of McLean would flourish prodigally for a thousand years; if Tradd died, the St. Croix name would survive only as a street name, a house name, and in distinguished references in history books. The grandeur and terror of extinction had formed the character of Tradd and had nearly ruined the life of his father, Commerce.
We found Commerce St. Croix where I usually found him when I came to this house—in the upstairs sitting room watching television.
“It took you long enough to come visit us, boy,” he said formally as he rose to shake my hand. “I’ve been waiting around since morning for you to show up.”
Unconsciously, he led me to a seat beside him, while his eyes returned to the television. Commerce never looked at the person he was talking to during a conversation. Nor did he ever seem to change expression. Fury or joy or grief, it did not matter; Commerce had one face and only one face to offer the world.
“I have many duties since I became regimental commander,” I said, unbuttoning the bottom two buttons of my dress whites as I slumped into the chair.
“You were born a private, Will. My boy, Tradd, is a first lieutenant,” Commerce said, addressing the television. If I did not watch myself, I would find myself speaking to the television, too.
“I know, Commerce. I room with your boy.”
“Thank God you’re back, Will,” Commerce moaned. “Now I can talk to someone who knows a baseball score or two. Hell, Abigail and Tradd think the Boston Red Sox are a new clothing fad.”
“I’m glad you’re back too, Will,” Abigail intervened quietly. “Now I can quit pretending that I’m interested in baseball scores. If you gentlemen will excuse me, I’ll make us some tea.” She slipped down the back stairway, once more the dutiful wife.
Staring fiercely at the screen, Commerce said, “Your last year, boy. You’ll be an Institute man in June.”
“Just like you, Commerce.”
“What does it feel like? Tradd doesn’t talk to me very much.”
“It feels real different. My penis grew a foot and a half over the summer. That’s how I could tell graduation was getting close.”
“It’ll have to grow larger than that if you expect to be a real Institute man,” he cackled, glancing nervously at the door.
“Where’s Tradd?” I asked.
“He was practicing his goddam piano a minute ago. Don’t call him down yet, Will,” Commerce pleaded. “He doesn’t approve of mantalk like this. At least, not from me.” Then, leaning over toward the chair where I was sitting, his small, pale, ferret-like eyes still religiously affixed on the TV, he whispered, “Did you get any this summer, boy?”
“In the thousands, Commerce. The tens of thousands.”
“You ought to ship out with me next time. The women in Brazil will do anything you want. Anything. At least, that’s what the crew tell me. But don’t tell Tradd,” he said, putting a thin finger over his lips.
“You don’t look like you’re feeling very well, Commerce,” I said. Commerce always seemed enshrouded in a nimbus of unhealthiness. He was a short, wiry, rodent-faced man who even in repose had a motor running somewhere, as though his heart was working for no particular reason. Though twenty years older than Abigail, he didn’t have a single gray hair on his thin, nervously vigilant head.
“Boy, I can never feel good when I’m entombed in this city. You know that. I can never wait to get out of here, away from all of this. Charleston sickens me because I belong to it so entirely.”
After a pause, “I ship out again next week,” he said to the television.
“Where to, Captain?”
“South America again.”
“When will you be back?” I asked.
“I hope for the Ring Hop.”
“I hope so too, Father,” Tradd said, entering the room. “It would be so common if you weren’t there when I went through the ring.”
“Roommate,” I cried, leaping to my feet.
“Hello, William,” Tradd answered with stiff, innate formality. The St. Croix family had mastered the art of placing distance between themselves and others, eschewing physicality as an activity practiced by the lower classes.
“You should have come to Europe with me, Will. We could have made the grand tour together.”
“I’ve told you before, Tradd, but you seem to have a hard time grasping this concept: I’m a McLean, not a St, Croix. My family didn’t inherit a billion dollars to spend on the entertainment of their eldest son.”
“Excuses, excuses,” he replied. “Did you improve your slovenly habits this summer, or do I still room with the biggest slob in the Carolinas?”
“Oh, yes, I became neurotically compulsive about cleanliness. You can eat dinner on my fat behind now.”
Tradd winced. “Father, Will is a fine boy but he has a tongue that even soap couldn’t clean.”
“He’s one of the guys, son. That’s something you’ll never be. Just one of the guys. That’s what I love about being on a ship.”
“Since I got back three days ago, Father has been lamenting nonstop that I’m not a weightlifter or something else he could be proud of. I brought you a present, Will.”
“I hope it’s outrageously expensive,” I said.
Tradd handed me a small package wrapped in brown paper. I tore it quickly, opened a thin rectangular box, and lifted out a stubby, finger-worn fountain pen.
“It’s thirty years old. I found an eccentric store in London run by an even more eccentric old man who repairs old fountain pens. I thought you could use it to write your senior essay.”
I hugged Tradd before he could pull back. I kissed him on the cheek, and he blushed a deep scarlet and turned away from his father and me. His father, watching the television again, missed the gesture.
“Keep away from the sacred bod,” Tradd stammered, but I knew he was pleased.
“This is beautiful, Tradd. Absolutely beautiful. And I can’t think of anyone who deserves it more.”
“You don’t deserve anything nice until you learn to clean up your act. His corner of the room always looks as though it’s part of the city dump, Father.”
“And I bet your side of the room looks like the place little girls play dolls,” Commerce said. “I thought you and the other boys were going to teach Tradd how to fit in like one of the guys. Even when you try to act like a man you mess it up, son.”
Tradd adjusted the buttons on his blazer and walked over to the window, which looked out onto Charleston harbor and the Battery. Abigail entered the door on the opposite side of the room carrying glasses and a frosted pitcher of iced tea. She stared at her son by the window; she stared at her husband in his chair. I became suddenly invisible, the unassimilated motionless voyeur. It was experience, not clairvoyance, which brought Abigail instant recognition of the nature of the conflict. In the war for the soul of this one child, there had been no real battle. There had only been an occupation and three proud, dispirited casualties indissolubly linked by the bloodless yet passionate nature of the skirmish. No forces had ever taken to the field. Commerce had wanted his son to be an athlete, a companion, a drinking buddy. What he had produced instead was a slim, brilliant boy with a voice mannered and flutelike, a boy in love with architecture, painting, furniture, music, poetry: all the pursuits that would please Abigail and irritate Commerce. He had also produced one of the finest friends I had ever known.
Tradd had enrolled at the Institute to satisfy a dream of his father’s, who thought that his son would not—could not—make it through the plebe system but that the process, no matter how brief or cataclysmic, would liberate him from the soft and victorious tyranny of his mother’s rule. It had surprised and impressed Commerce that his son had survived that first year, but it also dismayed him that there had been no fundamental change in his son’s nature. The Institute had not purged his son of his reserve and delicacy. Even the Institute was helpless in erasing the signature of chromosomes. But it had proven that there was a toughness at the very center of Tradd that neither his mother, his father, nor he himself had recognized. It had been the one time in his life he had presented his father a gift of incalculable value. Few had suffered as long or endured as much humiliation that year, but Tradd had taken it all, every bit of it. He walked through the Gates of Legrand on the first day of our freshman year not knowing how to do a pushup. At the end of the year he could pump out fifty without breaking a sweat. But he never did another pushup after that first year and vowed he would never do another for the rest of his life. Once during our freshman year, I asked Tradd why he just didn’t quit and go to another college since his parents had enough pocket change to buy Yale. Tradd had explained to me, “I want to make my father glad that I’m his son for the first time in his and my lives. There isn’t an upperclassman in the world who could make me leave.” Many tried, but Tradd had been right, none of them could. In less than three months, he would wear the ring.
“When are Pig and Mark arriving?” Tradd asked, breaking the long silence in the room.
“They got permission not to report until Wednesday,” I answered.
“General Durrell’s letting me stay home until the plebes arrive. Will. I hope you won’t get too lonely in the room.”
“Why don’t you just stay here in the guest room, Will?” Abigail said, pouring tea into four glasses.
“There are no bugles here, Abigail. I can’t sleep without bugles or the sound of plebes dying on the quadrangle.”
“Tell General Durrell to kiss my fanny if you see him, boys,” Commerce shouted to the television, trying to direct the subject far away from the remark that had wounded his son. “I saw the pompous son of a bitch on King Street the other day. I think he was buying elevator shoes. He isn’t satisfied with being six-three. You would think he was somebody the way he carries on. My God, he’s from Spartanburg. Spartanburg of all the pitiful places. The upcountry. The goddam, no-count upcountry.
“The first exhibition football game is on Saturday night, Will,” he continued. “Why don’t you and Pig and Mark plan to watch it with me?” Commerce asked, aware he was being tested again in a trial by silence.
“Tradd,” Abigail sighed, but easily, and teasing again, “I’m thinking about having your father fed intravenously during football season this year. Hook up a couple of gallons of Cutty Sark and glucose beside his easy chair.”
“You might try to find other pursuits, Father. Other avocations. Only vulgarians and Methodists watch football games with such fanaticism.”
“Your poor old man is a vulgarian, Tradd. No doubt about it. A goddam one hundred percent unreconstructed vulgarian. Will, I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this story, but about ten years ago I read in the paper that bowlers have the lowest IQ’s of any athletes and were generally from a socially inferior class. Well, I ran right out and joined a bowling league in North Charleston. One sixty-four average. Met the greatest guys I’ve ever met on land.”
“How come you never invited these greatest guys on land for dinner, Father?”
“They must have been from Spartanburg,” Abigail teased. “The upcountry.”
“Bowling is so sweaty and uncultured,” Tradd sniffed, winking at me.
“Culture!” Commerce screamed at the television. “I’ve had culture shoved down my throat since I was born. Do you know I’ve been going to operas since I was six, Will? Six years old and I’m listening to fat broads belting out dago songs to bald-headed fags wearing silver pants. You can take all the culture in America, tow it out to the Sargasso Sea, and set it on fire and I wouldn’t even spit once to put it out. I’m embarrassed to tell you how often I wished my name were not St. Croix but something like John Smith or John Nigger. That’s it. John Thicklipped Nigger. That’s the name I’d have chosen.”
“Father, you certainly do overstate your case,” Tradd said, turning toward the window and facing Charleston harbor again.
“Who wants some more iced tea?” Abigail chirped brightly.
“I’m going to my room and let y’all literati get in some chi-chi cultural chit-chat before dinner. Will, could I see you upstairs for a minute? If you’ll excuse me, dear,” he said, rising and bowing to his wife in a quick, snapping motion like a blade returning to a jackknife.
By the time I followed Commerce upstairs, he was moving a potted palm outside of his study. Carefully unlocking the door, he then disappeared into this forbidden sanctum for a moment, leaving me to fidget in the hallway. No one was allowed in his private study, and according to Tradd and Abigail, no one entered the room, even when Commerce was out to sea. When he came out of the room, he led me by the arm to the third-story porch. We stared out at the garden, an aromatic black sea of vegetation that breathed in the salt from the river.
“Do you see it?” he asked.
“See what?”
“I put it on when I went into the room. On my hand, Will.”
I looked down on his right hand and saw its dull shine.
“The ring,” I said.
“I keep it in my room. Along with everything else.”
“Gold, frankincense, and myrrh.”
“Books and notes. Things I’ve collected in ports around the world that Abigail thinks are junk.”
“Why don’t you wear the ring all the time, Commerce?” I asked. “You’re the only Institute man I know who doesn’t treat the ring as if it were made from the nails of the True Cross.”
“My years at the Institute were the happiest in my whole life, Will. But ever since Durrell came back to be president and changed the plebe system into that brutal mess, I haven’t worn the ring. It was all his ego, too, Will. When I talked to him about it, he told me he was going to make sure that the Institute had the toughest plebe system in the world. According to you and Tradd, he succeeded admirably. But it wasn’t that bad when he and I were knobs. In fact, it was kind of fun.”
“You were in General Durrell’s class, weren’t you?”
“Yes, I know some things about him, too. I kept a diary when I was a cadet. It was good practice for when I went to sea and had to keep a log. I can look back and tell you everything I did since I was fifteen years old. I’m very disciplined about some things, Will.”
“Discipline is the one gift the Institute has not bestowed upon me.”
“You fought it, boy,” Commerce said. “Discipline comes easy when you decide to go whole hog at something.”
He stared at the ring for a full minute without speaking.
“Tell Tradd that I didn’t mean to hurt his feelings, Will. It just slipped out.”
“Why don’t you tell him, Commerce? I’m sure it would mean a lot more coming from you than from me.”
“If you don’t tell him, Will, he’ll never know how sorry I am when I say these things to him. Please tell him.”
“I will, sir.”
“I noticed something years ago, son. When I’m with the people I love most, I feel lonelier than at any other time on earth. Lonely, Will. Lonely. Lonely,” he declared in an undermined voice. Suddenly he turned his eyes toward me for understanding, for affirmation.
He gave me a look that linked us as spiritual allies, resolute desperadoes in headlong flight from the false and sinister veneer of Charleston. I did not return the look with equal measure or with any measure of faith in his basic premise that we shared some immensely suggestive linkage of soul and temperament. All because I like to watch football games, I thought. Since I was born a McLean and not a St. Croix, I was not tormented by the formidable demons of the city that cried out in disengaged voices for conformity from its sons and daughters. I could not help or even sympathize with the agony of being too well born, too well bred, or too well named. Nor could I help but notice that Commerce, despite his objections to the city, had chosen to live out his life in the dead center of the tribe he professed to hate. The pull of Charleston was lunar and feminine and partisan and even affected those natives, like Commerce, who professed to loathe her extensive artifice and the carnivorous etiquette of its social structure. He could no more cease being a Charlestonian than I could cease being a Caucasian male. Charleston possessed his soul and there was nothing he or I could do about it.
But he seemed satisfied with the look I gave him. I have eyes that give people what they want, eyes that whore in order to please, commiserate, endorse, affirm. People take from my eyes anything and everything that they need. Usually, I am simply looking at someone as they tell me a story; I am later amazed to discover they have believed I was agreeing with them completely. I have the eyes of a ward politician or a priest on the make with choirboys. I have eyes I have ’learned to distrust completely.
“I’ll tell Tradd what you said, Commerce,” I said as he left the porch and disappeared into his room, which was lit only by a ship’s lantern. I heard the door lock behind him.
When I left the house that evening, I turned to look back at the Tradd-St. Croix mansion and thought of the many accidents and distortions of fate that had occurred to make my history and the history of this splendid house commingle. Tradd had brought me home for dinner at the beginning of our freshman year, right after we had become roommates. When we left that night to return to the Institute, Abigail had taken me aside and thanked me for helping her son. I told her that I thought Tradd was incredibly brave and that he was enduring the full savage brutality of the plebe system without complaint. Later that year, on another of my visits, she had pressed something into my palm. It was a key to the Tradd-St. Croix mansion. “You have a home in Charleston now, Will,” she had said. “You can use that key anytime you want to, whether we’re here or not.”
I had never used the key, but I always kept it with me and I always liked to think that I could enter the house whenever I pleased. I wondered what the builder of the house, the distinguished barrister, Rhett St. Croix, would say if he knew that Will McLean was walking the streets of Charleston with a key to his house.