The Lords of Discipline (46 page)

T
he beach house was a three-story Victorian structure painted a dark and depressing gray and set thirty yards back from the groin protecting the undermined beach. During very high tides, sea water made large pools in the grass. A third of the lawn was desiccated and whitened with deposits of salt and the skeletons of small fish that had come in with the tide through the rocks and escaped the patient investigations of the seabirds patrolling that sector of the island.

But there was something unique and extraordinary about this summer home of Annie Kate’s. It was the kind of house that invited the curiosity and the dread of the neighborhood’s imaginative children. Its rooms were tall and narrow, but each one had a different shape, giving the house an odd imbalance yet, at the same time, an odd symmetry.

There were two high porches with excellent views of the harbor. The lower porch had French doors that connected to the living room; the upper porch led to the master bedroom. The furniture could only be described compassionately as beach furniture, but it reflected an eclectic, practical consciousness at work over the years.

As we approached the house we could smell oak burning in the fireplace and caught an unobstructed view of Annie Kate’s mother rocking vigorously in front of the fire. Annie Kate dropped my hand quickly, and I moved laterally away from her.

“Mother!” she whispered unnecessarily.

“Oh, shit,” I said. “Do you mind if I have a heart attack?”

“Don’t you dare,” she commanded. “We didn’t do anything wrong. Do you think she might have seen us before the sun went down?”

“I’m going to tell her that you attacked me sexually while I was saying the rosary out there on the rocks.”

“She’s drunk,” Annie Kate said.

“How can you tell?”

“By the way she’s rocking. And because it’s after sunset. And because I’ve lived with her for twenty years.”

When we entered through the French doors, Mrs. Gervais turned her head and said, “Well, well. The two lovebirds.”

Annie Kate fired back, “Mother, you have absolutely no right to spy on me.”

“I wasn’t spying, darling. I just drove out to visit my daughter.”

“You don’t want to visit with me,” Annie Kate yelled. “You got drunk and wanted to come out here and tell me just one more time how I ruined your life and all your plans for me.”

“Every goddam one of them,” Mrs. Gervais hissed at the same time as she caught me staring rather pensively at her. I have a naturally pious stare and don’t mean a thing by it, as I could have told her, but it was not the proper moment for explanations. “What are you looking at, cadet? I can drink in my own home without some callow-faced merchant’s brat looking at me like I was dirt. Can’t I? Don’t I have that right?”

“I’m not looking at you, Mrs. Gervais,” I said foolishly, since I had not taken my eyes off her since I had entered the room.

“What do you want from my daughter, Will?” Mrs. Gervais asked, appraising me coldly with drunken, hostile eyes. This was the first time I had ever seen her drinking heavily, though Annie Kate had commonly made vague references to this weakness of her mother. I had only known her as a rather perfect specimen of Charleston society on the downward slide.

“I want to be her friend, Mrs. Gervais,” I said.

“That was a very affectionate way you have of expressing friendship.”

“I’m sorry,” I stammered, blushing and looking for a mildly graceful way to leave.

“You
were
spying on us, Mother,” said Annie Kate, bristling and outraged. “I refuse to let you spy on me or to interfere any further with my life.”

“Well, at least with this one, I don’t have to worry about your getting pregnant,” she said, staring morosely at her daughter.

“You drunken, filthy slut,” Annie Kate screamed, lunging for the bottle of vodka, which Mrs. Gervais had tucked carefully in the crook of her arm.

“Oh, so now it’s me that’s the slut. I would like to remind you, dear, and for the information of your pimply cadet, that your father and I were duly married in the eyes of the Lord a full three years before I brought you squalling into Charleston society. Calling your own mother a slut. After what you’ve done to me—after what you’ve done to the family name. To disgrace me and your dead father. He’s lucky to be dead. He’s lucky he didn’t have to face this.”

Annie Kate sobbed, turned away, and swiftly ran to the stairs.

When she was gone I said, “I’m glad you dropped by, Mrs. Gervais.”

“Don’t be impertinent with me, cadet,” she said. “Not with me, Cadet Will McLean. Poor stupid Will McLean. Did you know, Will, that God planned that the world was to be a vast orb of disillusionment and pain? He planned it that way and it pleased him to see that the plan was letter perfect,” she said, pouring herself a tall glassful of vodka.

“Why don’t you quit drinking that stuff, Mrs. Gervais,” I said.

“I own this house, cadet,” she snapped. “You have no right to issue orders or even make suggestions in my own house. I issue orders here. I order you out of my house. I order you not to touch my daughter again. I order you not to look at my daughter with those pitying, self-righteous eyes of yours. Get back to the barracks where you belong, Will.”

I turned to leave the house when she called my name with a despairing, disconsolate voice. “Will. It’s no one’s goddam fault. It’s not your fault. It’s not my fault. It’s not Annie Kate’s fault. I just don’t want any of us to get hurt any more. I’ve been hurting so long now, it seems natural to me.”

“It seems natural to me, too, Mrs. Gervais,” I answered, with my back still turned away from her. “I think I’m going to find out that you’re right. I hope you’re wrong, but I don’t think so.”

“Come back here and look at me,” she commanded, as she took a huge swallow of vodka. “Look at my face, Will. Look at it closely, cadet,” she croaked as I approached her. “This face was once beautiful. I mean beautiful and not just pretty. Do you see what’s happened to it? Do you see how it’s been lined and ruined? It was so quick, Will, so quick. I was beautiful; then, suddenly, I was old. I don’t know how it happened or why it happened or what any of it means, but I want you to memorize my face and watch how cruelly the years will scratch and claw away at your own. And remember this moment, Will, remember it when you’re looking at your face in the mirror thirty years from now and seeing an ugly old man instead of a smooth-skinned cadet. It’s the quickness of it all that will surprise you. The incredible swiftness. It’s as if I’ve pulled down a shade on twenty years of my life,” she said, taking another enormous swallow of her drink. “I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t slow it down. And I’ve worried about it every single day of my life since my twenty-eighth birthday. Isn’t that sad and stupid? Isn’t that human?”

I knelt down beside her and whispered, “I think you’re a fine looking woman, Mrs. Gervais.”

She looked at me with furious skeptical eyes and said in a slow, measured voice meant to wound, “Go to hell, cadet. I don’t need your condescension or your pity. I just need you to listen to my liquor talk and keep your mouth shut. I’m from Charleston, cadet, did you hear me? Charleston! And you aren’t from anywhere. I’m from Charleston and my family was on the second ship that arrived in this city. Do you know what that means? Do you have any idea what that means?”

“Yeh, Mrs. Gervais,” I shouted. “It means nothing. It doesn’t mean a goddam thing. You still get old and Annie Kate still gets pregnant just like any other poor bastard on earth.”

“If it means so little to you, cadet, then why do you hang around it so much? Why do you room with Tradd St. Croix? Why do you waste your time with Annie Kate? Can’t you find a girl to like you who isn’t pregnant and who isn’t desperate for friendship? Can’t you find a normal relationship? Or isn’t it true that you know a Charleston girl would never look at a cadet from the lower classes unless she found herself absolutely and completely alone? But I want to tell you a truth about this society you’re toadying up to—you wouldn’t be worthy of Annie Kate if she had twenty-five bastards and four of them were fathered by blue-gum niggers.”

“You’re a sweetheart when you’re drinking, Mrs. Gervais,” I said, my upper lip trembling, out of control, and I had to make a concentrated effort to make my words understood. “But I want to tell you about my lower-class family. You’ve never asked, of course, but I have this need to tell you about this family I come from.”

“I can’t think of anything more boring,” she said and yawned drunkenly.

“Tough shit,” I answered. “I’m going to tell you about them anyway and you’re going to listen because you’re too drunk to get up from that rocking chair.”

She answered me with a gesture of overstated eloquence; she emptied the vodka bottle into her glass and began downing it defiantly.

“My father was from Savannah, Mrs. Gervais, the oldest child in a family of nine that caught hell in the Depression. His father worked for the Southern Railroad, had little education, was dirt poor, and sent every one of his kids through high school. My father entered the Marine Corps when he was twenty, and he fought the Japanese to make the world safe for Charleston snobs to look down their noses at him and his family. My mother’s family came from the hills of Georgia. They were poor farmers and laborers, as poor as anyone I’ve ever known, yet there was a humility and simplicity about them that made them among the most remarkable people I have ever met. My mother never went to college, never had that chance, but she is beautiful and intelligent and possesses a natural class so innate that when I bring her to Charleston and introduce her to Commerce and to Abigail and to Tradd, it’s as though she had lived in this city for a hundred years. It’s like she invented this city and I get so proud I could burst. And then there’s me, Mrs. Gervais. Me. Ol’ Will.”

I was pacing back and forth across the room behind her rocking chair, gesticulating fiercely, and shouting at the motionless, defeated woman who sat in her rocking chair staring directly into the fire. Her glass was empty now.

“I’m halfway between my mother and father. My father wouldn’t have been interested in this city at all. He wouldn’t have given a flying crap about this city. If he’d even have known about South of Broad society, I’d have probably found him drunk in front of St. Michael’s one night shouting that he was going to beat the hell out of every male between twenty and fifty that he found cowering beneath verandahs clutching their genealogy charts. And I lack my mother’s natural social grace and her effortless tact at dealing with aristocracies that nature and circumstances prevented her from joining. Ever since I came to this city, I’ve been made painfully aware of my origins. There were times when I was actually ashamed of who I was and where I came from. But I looked around and I studied the terrain and I figured out some things, Mrs. Gervais. I’m the second generation up from the lowest classes. I’m an immigrant among the classes. I have more than my parents had and my children will have more than I. And we have one advantage over you and people like you. We never look back. Our eyes are straight ahead and we’re tough and we’re street smart and we’re still hungry and on the move. And we have the goddam tide of human destiny on our side.”

Mrs. Gervais had passed out. The rocking chair had not moved in five minutes and she had not heard a single word I had said. From the stairway leading up to the second floor of the house, I heard the sound of mocking, fraudulent applause. Looking up, I saw Annie Kate at the top of the stairs, dressed in her bathrobe and slippers and clapping vigorously for my performance.

“Hurrah for the goddam tide of human destiny,” she shouted.

I covered my face with my hands, leaned down, and rested my head against the bannister of the stairway. A moment later, I felt Annie Kate’s hand on my shoulder but I did not uncover my eyes.

“I’m so ashamed that you heard that,” I said. “I’m so ashamed that I said all that to your mother when she was drunk.”

“Mother has a way of getting to people when she’s been drinking,” Annie Kate said, stroking my hair. “She’s a nice person when she’s not.”

“I’m a nice person when I’m not making a horse’s ass out of myself. Jesus Christ, I was just delivering a Horatio Alger lecture to a woman who had passed out.”

“You’d have probably thrown her off the porch if she hadn’t passed out,” Annie Kate chided me, her finger tracing the stiffly barbered hairline at the back of my neck. “I’ve never seen you so mad.”

“Why do I care if your mother thinks I was born in the steerage section of a ship on the way to Ellis Island? What’s wrong with me? Why do I give a damn?”

“Because there’s a mystique and confidence that comes from being an old Charlestonian that you’ll never know, Will. That’s what you’re looking for. You’re right to be proud about who you are and what you said about your family was beautiful. It’s just that you’ll never have what we have or understand what we have.”

“I’m going to work hard not to want what you have. If what your mother said is true then I’ve been poisoned in this city. I’ve been poisoned by hanging around Tradd, these fine people and their fine houses, and you.”

“I don’t feel very poisonous right now,” she said. “Please carry my mother to the couch, Will. I’d do it. She’s very light, you know. But in my oh so delicate condition . . .”

I lifted Mrs. Gervais from the chair without the slightest strain; I calculated that she weighed less than ninety pounds. Her hair was feathery and disarranged. And as I laid her on the couch, I realized how wrong she was. She had not lost her beauty, though she was losing her youth.

Annie Kate covered her mother with a quilt.

Then we faced each other. Neither of us knew what to do or say. We had said and insinuated too much that evening for me to leave without further discussion or to stay without our destiny, our goddam human destiny, being further and irretrievably complicated.

My time in her gaze was a fine yet troubled thing. I could feel the fear of what the world had done to her rise up between us. She could sense my hurt, the inconceivable magnitude of my bruised vanity, and my need to allay the monstrously insistent fiats and injunctions of a male ego. I ached with a feverish, selfish, and awful need for her. I wanted to touch, to own, to have her. The room shimmered with my wanting her. Yet I could make no move, felt that I did not have the right to touch her or even think about touching her. The touch of a man had already harmed her enough.