Honor and Duty (16 page)

“Ladies like your looks. Your wife was beautiful,” I said.

Barney was writing ring grades. He stopped without looking up, his breath condensed. Talk about Clara was strictly off-limits.

Eleven years ago, Clara had tired of Tony’s dalliances: she had scooped up Tony Jr. and his teddy bear, her rosary, extensive wardrobe, and cosmetics, and walked out, forever.

Tony was at his desk, aimlessly sorting glove laces, Ace hand wraps, old keys, chits, busted mouthpieces, carpenters’ pencils, fossilized pieces of chewed gum and old food, back and forth, his huge, hamlike hands moving with an ageless speed, an inborn dexterity. Tony could thread a needle with those hands, throw a wad of bills into the collection plate at St. Boniface’s from two pews back, and punch two-by-fours into toothpicks; but he had trouble writing and shaking hands. Big piles of desk junk became small piles, then changed back into big ones. Whenever he thought he ought to clean out his desk—which usually followed a hundredth attempt to find the liniment closet key—he made piles. It was the same scarred metal desk he had when I met him, ten years before.

He stopped and looked up at me. “Jeezus, kid. Sometimes yur legs shake. But yur mouth has no friggin’ fear,
none
.”

Barney resumed writing. Sweat was on my brow. I smiled thinly.

“Clara,” continued Tony, “an’ dames, chased me cuz I had a name, I could cook. Had a footlocker fulla cash. I had press. I had front seats at Bimbo’s 365 an’ Ernie’s an’ Tarantino’s. Arthur Constance and Herb Caen, they wrote about me in the paper. The afternoon dailies used ta interview me when I belched.

“Ya got a name? No, ya ain’t got a name. Any money? No, Master Kai Ting, ya ain’t got one thin dime. So ferget the fancy dames.
Grace Kelly?
Who ya tryin’ to kid?” He opened the desk drawer and with his trunklike arm swept the piles on the desktop into it, and with a ferocious flick of his wrist, he closed it with a metallic screech and a resounding boom that sounded like a bad car crash.

“Nah, nah. Don’ show me her freakin’ pitture again!”

“Tony! At least
admit
she’s beautiful,” I urged.

“It’s a freakin’ pitture. How can youse tell anythin’? Ya pull ’at dam’ thing out like it was the one good clippin’ fer yur only good fight. I saw it.
You
oughta
read
it. It says ‘Yur good fren’.’ I ain’t educated, but I get it. Means youse ain’t gonna be
Mr.
Grace Kelly. Means the atomic bomb goes off an’ kayos the world ta full count an’ it’s a two a ya left under a desk, ya still ain’t gonna be Mr. Whoosis. Ya still gonna be ‘good fren’.”

“Tony,” said Barney, “I believe Kai got your main thought. You’re ahead on points and swinging after the bell.”

I knew, with the prescience of the
I Ching
, the Book of Changes, that Christine exceeded reality. Sitting next to her in history caused my heart to pound as if I were going to sprint or box. I wanted to be American, and she was Miss America. I looked at her school photo for hours the way other kids watched TV, making the experience more personal by speaking to her in imaginary conversations in which I violated
ji hui
by speaking of my strengths. The beauty of her perfectly proportioned face on the front of the photo overcame the paucity of affection on its back. There was the promise of a future in her words “
good
friend.”

For three years I had asked her every question about herself I could imagine. I could not know too much about her. She asked me about China and my family. “Doesn’t your mom talk about it?”

“She doesn’t know much about it,” I said. “I mean, my first mother died when I was real little. I hardly knew her.”

“So you have a stepmother,” she said.

“She’s my mother, my true mother,” I recited. “She taught me English. My first mother was not a very good person.”

“Why do you say that?” she asked.

“She was superstitious, and primitive. And a complete religious fanatic—a crazy, illiterate Christian.”

“Do you remember her that way?”

I sighed. “I don’t remember her at all. I mean, I don’t even know what she looked like.” I had said too much.

“But she must have loved you very much.”

“I don’t think so. She was corrupt. She didn’t love me. My real mother raised me, made a lot of sacrifices for me. She taught me English, and—discipline.” I had almost said, “and table manners so I don’t eat like a Chinese.”

“That sounds so harsh, so biased,” she said, frowning.

I shook my head. Edna told the truth. She was my mother.

“I’m biased about you,” I said reverently.

Christine had glanced at the noon, lunch yard basketball game. I had left it in an instant to sit by her.

“Boys like me for my looks.” Her eyes were shaped in large and perfect almonds, almost like Chinese eyes. Her mouth was wondrous mystery. She was breathtaking. Her smile could break a heart from fifty yards, the range of my visual acuity. I nodded vigorously.

She shook her head. “Going on about my looks, about going steady … boys want all your time, to consume you. That’s what I like about you. You don’t care about looks and appearances.”

I gulped. “But your boyfriends are the best-looking guys.”

She waved away the observation that I could not ignore.

On one of those rare sunny days in the fog belt, sitting next to her on the lunch yard steps, I saw our reflection in the cafeteria windows. She was a blond goddess, Grace Kelly in
The Swan.
My appearance was heartbreaking. Even in my cool Jack Peeve cast-offs, I looked like the kitchen help, an unattractive, broad-shouldered Chinese kid in glasses with a death-row-inmate haircut. I hated what I saw, feeling unworthy to be seated so close to her.

When I passed the locker room mirror on the way to Y boxing class, I faced myself. “You’re an ugly piece a dark, squinty-eyed, fat-lip shit, and you’re stupid thinkin’ you could be with her.” I appreciated my muscles and disliked my face. All that work on my body, and it meant nothing. “You’re revolting,” I added.

“Kid,” said Tony, looking at me, “stow it. Don’t let no one talk to ya like that, even you.”

Christine and I had been good friends until I could no longer contain myself and had to commit social suicide in her presence. I confessed that I loved her, more than humanity had planned or the cosmos or the gods of the East or the West had contemplated. Any normal boy would love her, but even I was surprised by the force of my declaration of affection.

She looked sad. “No, Kai.
Please
say you’re not serious.”

I looked at her, absorbing her intensity. I was special, and I was like everyone else. I held to this moment of joy and pain.

“I’ve always loved you. I always will. You’re the most beautiful girl in the world. I’m in love in with you.” I could never take it back. I was exhilarated and brokenhearted.

Christine was from a world filled with soft borders, elastic materials, and pastels. I had fallen in love with her when I heard her sing the theme from
A Summer Place
in accompaniment to the cafeteria jukebox. Her voice was clear and bright, the voice of angels. The sweetness and grace in her voice caused me to close my eyes so I could savor the sound. Christine’s voice and face were more dreamlike than my imagination. It was clear that whoever this girl picked would have a happy life, forever after; I wanted something of her to rub off
on me, as if whatever she possessed could be communicated to others, like measles. She was the
yin
, female, side of America, as much as West Point was the
yang.
Together, they represented happiness and belonging. Her lack of interest in me only confirmed the wisdom of my taste; it was never easy becoming American. I had not understood in those days the distinction between image and reality, love and affliction.

“Kai—oh, please—don’t change our friendship.” Her face was radiant, her fingers gripping my forearm, studying my muscles, neither of us particularly experienced with touching.

I looked at her hand touching me. It made the pain go away. But the confession was a blow I had landed on the simple nature of our unromantic friendship. I had been special by being Chinese and unique in apparently evading her global spell on boys. Now I was like all the others, in the worst way, emphasizing the dissonance of my Negro ’hood sliding around her Swedish-Irish roots and Upper West Portal rose gardens. She was the love of my life; as a mature teenager, she resisted commitments, dedicating loyalty to deceased Germans. “I can’t stand school; it has no adults,” she said. She read Immanuel Kant, studied Kierkegaard, and admired Heidegger. “I can’t wait to start college.” Her voice was the call of sirens, delivering laments. She had criticized boxing and my teaching younger kids the Sweet Science. She did not understand that boxing had saved my life, that by learning a code of fighting I had found physical courage and, ironically, a way to avoid bloodshed. She disliked West Point on general principle.

Christine graduated six months early, in the middle of our senior year. Early graduation was in the gym, and I watched her go the way Abelard must have watched Heloise after the knife fell. Her absence from my own graduation, with a thousand of us at the Masonic Auditorium, seemed a greater reality than the moment when my name was called with other scholarship students, and I received the applause of my classmates, so pleased, so uncomfortable, and so lonely for her.

An old sensation with formless edges and no bottom, a thing that seemed foreboding and enclosing, a thing that sucked air and denied thought and caused pain, welled up in me, expanding through my chest and into the small corners where I tried to hide.

I had selected for the love of my life someone who was more dream than girl, someone utterly beyond my reach. She was drawn to me for every cause except romance. I hoped to
have improved myself in her eyes by being accepted at the toughest of American schools, and it had only pushed me farther away.

I was proud of my self-control, for I had told her only once how luminously beautiful she was.

The only mail I received was a letter from Major General Schwarzhedd and a note from someone whose name I did not at first recognize. The letter from Na-men congratulated me on my appointment. “Beast Barracks,” he wrote,

The other letter seemed to be from a child, corrected by an adult; with the cross-outs, it was hard to read. It was signed “Deloitte.” I realized that it was from Sippy Suds.

“ROOM ATTEN-HUT!!” screamed Mersey and Pee Wee McCloud.

It was Mr. Fideli. On August 1, First Detail Beast had departed for summer leave. Messrs. Alsop, Arvin, Spillaney, Armentrot, Stoner, and the other modern Inquisitors had done a final inspection in ranks, openly wondering who would survive Second Beast. Then they left, leaving only Mr. Fideli to serve a second tour. Why him? we wondered. Bad
yeh
, very bad karma.

He gave me special Plebe poop to spec. It wasn’t military, but nonsense from Broadway plays, like
A Funny Thing Happened
on the Way to the Forum.
He usually arrived to give me more.

“Sir, a little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down our pants. Sir, you have heard minor tones and middling chords, but mine are wretched, odious, and creaking. It is auditory Armageddon, screechy, off-key, and forlornly Ting-y.”

He smiled. “Are you writing in your journal? Quietly, please.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.” He pointed his fine chin at me. “Two decades after Beethoven sketched an idea it became an opus. I think of him when I hear you sing, because Beethoven was as deaf as an old shoe. I commend to you the painting of him, listening to a storm that bends trees, but he cannot hear. Mr. Ting, you actively fraternize with your classmates, all over Beast. Were you always a social maven?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

I hesitated. “Sir, I worked. Sir, my mother did not allow me to—socialize.”

“Allow me to understand you. Are you saying that you now possess more social freedoms than you did as a high school senior?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. Bestier and McCloud blinked.

“Well. Was I the first to critique your singing?”

“No, sir. Sir, when I was twelve, singing in a Baptist church, a little girl said to me, ‘Y’all don’ havta sing
evera
song.’ ”

Mr. Fideli laughed. “Thespis does not hold your future.” He faced my roomies. “Heed—I dub New Cadet Ting—‘Caruso.’ Nicknames are almost obligatory here, Caruso. Down Thespis, up Mars. Who knows what happened in Southeast Asia this month?”

No fists emerged. He paced, his expression thoughtful, his brilliantly shined shoes hitting our floor. “Two weeks ago, North Vietnamese patrol boats attacked the U.S. destroyers
Maddox
and the
C. Turner Joy
in Tonkin Gulf. We retaliated with air strikes on North Vietnamese naval ports. Gentlemen, we are about to enter a ground war in Asia, against all good military advice.”

The American army fighting Asians. I would look like the enemy. I had prayed to the gods that this would not happen.

Three companies were drilling under cadre commands to fifes and drums, making the sharp music of five hundred rifles slapping from hands to shoulders with the sound of a huge mechanical beast throwing steel. We had six minutes to gym formation under arms.