My Losing Season (28 page)

D. G. Keyser picked up his girlfriend first, then drove to a more unlucky neighborhood to pick up Annie Kate Gervais.

“You'll just love her,” the girl dating D.G. said. “She doesn't know how pretty she is.” When we came to her house, she bounded down the steps as soon as we pulled up and was in the car before I could hold the door for her. She held out her hand to me and said, “Very pleased to meet you, Pat. I'm Annie Kate Gervais.”

Her voice was country and high-pitched, but her perfect oval face and comely figure were rare enough to leave me speechless. Her smile broke like a thunderclap in that car. Riding to James Island High School that night, I let D.G. do all the talking and I sat in paralyzed silence trying to conjure sentences that would delight Annie Kate and make her happy to be in my part of the world. Wordless, I arrived at James Island High School for the Mr. James Island contest among the senior boys.

I took my seat on the aisle of the auditorium still trying to think of something to say to Annie Kate when there was a tap on my shoulder. A pleasant-faced woman said, “It's traditional to have a Citadel cadet help with the judging. Citadel men know what to look for in a young man.”

That might have been true, but I wanted to spend the evening next to Annie Kate and I pointed to D. G. Keyser down the row. D.G. would have none of it and solved the problem by saying, “Hey, smackhead. You do it. That's an order.”

As I got up to follow the woman to the front row, Annie Kate grabbed my hand from behind and pressed up against me to whisper a boy's name in my ear. “He's the cutest boy in school. By far,” she said. I took that boy's name into my consciousness and went to join the group of judges. I had liked the touch of Annie Kate's hand and the whisper of her breath in my ear. I had liked it very much.

The judges retired to a room backstage where we winnowed the senior boys down to five finalists. With my single vote, I made sure that Annie Kate's favorite made the cut, although the other four adults in the panel met my vote with some discomfiture. The boy who won the Mr. James Island contest was a short, stocky boy who radiated goodwill and the theater exploded in applause when his name was announced. We judges sent the whole high school home happy that night, and Annie Kate was delighted that I had fought for the boy she liked. It was the mother of Mr. James Island who stopped me on King Street the following year and said, “You're the cadet who judged the Mr. James Island contest, aren't you?”

“Yes, ma'am,” I said.

“You've got great taste,” she said. “That was my son who won the contest. Do you remember the girl you dated that night?”

“Annie Kate Gervais. I tried to get in touch with her.”

“Her family situation is somewhat unfortunate,” the woman said, and briefly filled in the course of events that had befallen Annie Kate during the summer. She concluded her story by telling me that a group of mothers and teachers were searching for Annie Kate and wanted to help her. “She's a very nice girl, considering the circumstances. She had people in Blacksburg, Virginia, and a neighbor thinks she might have gone there with her mother.”

“I'm going to Blacksburg next week,” I said. “The basketball team's playing Virginia Tech.”

“Let me write you down her mother's family name.”

The name was Caldwell. When I arrived in Blacksburg and checked into the hotel room with my team I turned to the Blacksburg phone book and began calling every Caldwell in the book. On the third call, I reached Annie Kate's uncle and he gave me an address on Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, just north of Charleston. I wrote her a letter telling her I had heard about her circumstances and it sounded like she could use a friend. I began writing her letters every day.

When I returned from the long road trip, there was a letter in my post office box 587 from Annie Kate and it was a cry of pure despair. “I have ruined my life,” it said, “and the life of my mother. And the life of this poor child I am carrying. Please be my friend, Pat Conroy. We have no one. We see no one. We listen to Citadel basketball games on the radio. We cheer every time you get in to play.”

On the following Tuesday, I drove after practice over to their small apartment on the north end of Sullivan's Island. Annie Kate was dressed in a raincoat, a prop that she would wear until the birth of her child. She pulled it tightly around her when she opened the door and she burst into tears at the sight of me. Though she hugged me, I did not return the hug, worried that her mother might misinterpret the gesture. The mother's fiery eyes were already aglitter with the easy malice one finds in women whose lives have gone sour in the middle years.

Annie Kate said, “Mama, this is Pat. The one who writes the letters—the basketball player.”

Isabel Gervais answered in a gravelly voice out of the poor-born and hardscrabble South of my mother. “Let me get this straight. You're a Citadel cadet in the prime of your life. You play on the basketball team, ain't too hard to look at, and you get to spend your Friday nights with an old woman and her knocked-up daughter.”

“Oh, please, Mama,” Annie Kate wailed.

“Mrs. Gervais,” I said, “my social life needs a little work. I admit that. But a boy's got to start somewhere.”

Mrs. Gervais laughed out loud, then eyed me, her pupils yellow like a lioness. “I like a smart-mouthed boy. The letters you write my daughter, Cadet,” Isabel said. “Are they love letters?”

“Mama,” Annie Kate screamed and I blushed hard.

“No, ma'am,” I said. “This is only the second time I've ever seen your daughter.”

Then turning to me again, she said, “You write beautifully, Cadet. I wait for your letters as much as Annie Kate does. But I'm curious. Why do you write my daughter now? What are your motives? Is it sex?”

“Mama. Please stop, Mama. Please don't do this to me. To us. To all of us.”

“She's ruined herself for a boy like you. A boy from a decent home. A boy with prospects. It's got to be the sex. You know she's easy, don't you, Cadet? Because she went and got herself knocked up?”

“Yes, ma'am,” I said in the astonished air of that sad house. “I'm in it for the sex.”

Later, Annie Kate asked me if I wanted to go for a walk on the beach. We crossed the street and walked through the backyard of an old Victorian that looked out on Fort Sumter and the shipping lanes of Charleston Harbor. On that first night, I mostly listened to Annie Kate tell the details of her life since I last had seen her. I learned all about the boy she had been in love with since her ninth-grade year, their courtship, and her first missed menstrual cycle. The boy wanted her to get an abortion, but offered no money nor the name of any illegal abortionist. He began to slap her around every time he saw her. Eventually he quit calling and refused to return her phone calls. Then his mother called to let her know that her son had moved to Atlanta and had left no forwarding address. Annie Kate would not hear from this boy for the rest of her life.

“When is the baby due?” I remember asking.

“Sometime in late February,” she said on a clear December night.

“Have you thought about names?”

“No. I haven't even let myself think about being pregnant,” she said. “I've hated this baby with all my heart the whole time I've been pregnant. It shames me to admit it, but it's true, Pat.”

“My mother used to complain sometimes during her pregnancies,” I said. “But she was always happy once the babies arrived.”

“How many children were in your family?”

“Seven.”

“My God.”

“There were also six miscarriages,” I said. “My sister Carol called them ‘the Lucky Ones.' It was her theory that those little embryonic Conroys heard what was going on between my mom and dad and just decided, no way.”

“What do you mean? What's wrong with your family?”

“My father's tough. Very tough,” I said, uncomfortable with the conversation.

“You ought to meet my stepfather. A real bastard. He makes my mother look like Grace Kelly. She threw him out a year ago. I couldn't have been happier.”

“I wish my mother would throw my father out, but that'll never happen,” I said.

“Why not?”

“He'd kill her,” I said. The three words shocked me as I said them that night on the beach at Sullivan's Island. I had spoken those words to a girl I barely knew, already I was revealing family secrets that I had hidden even from myself.

“I've got to get back to the barracks,” I said.

“Why? Please stay longer.”

“I'm a cadet. I turn into a pumpkin at midnight,” I said, using the old Citadel joke.

“Will you do me a favor, Pat?” she asked. “Will you keep writing me every day? It's the only thing Mama and I have to look forward to. They're the things that make me laugh.”

“If I've got time. I have six or seven other girlfriends that I've got to write first.”

“You're playing George Washington tomorrow night,” Annie Kate said.

“Want to go? I'll get you tickets,” I said.

“I can't go out. Not like this,” she said, patting her stomach. “We'll listen to George Norwig on the radio. The Voice of the Citadel Bulldogs.”

“Can I come and see you on Sunday?” I asked.

“I would love it, Pat. I would love it.”

So it began. Looking back at the baffled, virginal young man that I was at that time, I can forgive myself for everything that happened with Annie Kate. I had spent a lifetime watching my mother being backhanded by my Marine father. My mother worshiped me because I would rush to her defense and try to pull my father off her. He would turn and slap me to the floor, then my mother would fight to pull him off me. I would rise and try to get between them again. He would hit me and I would go down again and my mother would be on his back pulling him away from me. This was the long dance of my childhood. Love and agony became intermingled for me in profane ways. Rescue would become my theme and my downfall. Whenever I hear a woman weeping, I come back to the dance of my childhood. Long ago, the theme of rescue quit being my tragedy and took up residence as my fate. It can be factored into every great event of my life from the teaching of black children on Daufuskie Island to my recent divorce. My high school friend Bruce Harper summed it up best several years ago when I called to tell him I had fallen in love. “What's her sad story?” Bruce wisely asked.

Each day before practice I would call Annie Kate and we would talk for an hour. I do not remember a day where she did not weep, sobbing miserably that she had ruined her life and had no idea what would happen to her when the baby was born. I became Annie Kate's head cheerleader, confessor, shrink, and mentor during those afternoon phone calls. Daily I wrote letters that I hoped both Annie Kate and her mother would find charming and witty. Subconsciously, I was trying to get both women to fall in love with me, and I think that is exactly what happened.

On a freezing night in December before the team began its Christmas road trip that would end with the University of Toledo, Annie Kate drove me back to the barracks. No, she never once came onto the Citadel campus during our time together, but we would meet at the parking lot beside the Hampton Park Zoo outside Lesesne Gate. It was in this darkened lot a half hour before midnight that Annie Kate first took my hand into hers. I had never tried to hold her hand or kiss her during our long walks on the beach of Sullivan's Island. I was so prudish as a young man, so Catholic-shaped and South-haunted and goody-two-shoes, that my roommates used to tease me that I never looked at the pictures of girls in
Playboy
magazine. Because she was pregnant, I had never thought of Annie Kate in a sexual way. After she held my hand, I constantly and religiously thought of her only in a sexual way. My hand felt like it had gone to heaven.

“Would you like to feel the baby kick, Pat?” Annie Kate said.

“Love to,” I said, and she led my hand to her stomach where I felt her child move inside her. With my hand on her stomach, Annie Kate then kissed me for the first time, in the cold darkness of Charleston. When her tongue hit my tongue, all the fire and ice and mystery of what happens between men and women became suddenly clear to me. In her womb, I felt her baby stir inside her and, surprising myself, I promised that unborn child not to worry about a thing—that I was going to take care of it forever.

“I never thought a boy would love me again,” she whispered.

“Come over to the barracks, I'll introduce you to two thousand boys who'd be happy to fall in love with you.”

Annie Kate laughed, then kissed me again, and I thought that life itself was the most wonderful thing in the world. I made it to Fourth Battalion right at midnight and walked to the middle of the quadrangle and let out a whoop of pure pleasure at being in love beneath the stars of Charleston.

Because of Annie Kate's humiliation over her pregnancy, I told very few people in my life about her existence. No one on my team knew I was in love with anyone and no Citadel cadet ever laid eyes on her from the time I first visited her house until her child was born. My relationship with Annie Kate remained chaste and innocent the whole time we were involved with each other. I started talking about getting married the next summer. I would give up my basketball scholarship and quit The Citadel and go to work to support Annie Kate and the child.

“Have you told your mother and father about me, Pat?” she asked as we walked on the beach one night.

“No,” I admitted.

“Are you ashamed of me, Pat?” she asked.

“No, I'm ashamed of what my mother and father are going to say when they find out about you. I'm the first person on Mom's side of the family who's been to college. My getting a diploma means a lot to her.”

“What about your father?”