Honor and Duty (59 page)

Edna had hated my Chinese mother and loathed her memory, fearing her more as a ghost than as a woman with a life now ended. My mother from China had died, and now, joining her, was my American mother. Edna had set aside her hatred. Momma LaRue would have said that Edna was trying to make peace with her maker.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

“You … good … boy,” Edna murmured. “Don’ cry,” she said. She sounded like Momma LaRue. She was fading. I stood and found Dad and Megan at the end of the hall. They returned. Dad held Megan’s hand. I stood back, adjusting the details of my uniform, doing the familiar, again and again.

I imagined my father putting his arm around Megan when she was fourteen, when they had met for a moment near the end of the Run, the
boh-la
, from Shanghai to Chungking to America. Born in China, raised in China, fled from China. For all their vast differences and their accumulated disappointments, they were connected in ways I could never emulate. They were true Chinese, not
jook sing
like me, and had seen war without end. I was American, and had fought all my battles within my family, both here and at West Point.

Edna was speaking to Dad, and Dad to her, and Megan tried to separate herself, but Dad needed her, needed her arm, and she stayed, weeping. Megan’s tears accentuated their absence in me. My father and my American mother said farewell to each other. They had been married fourteen years and should have had many more.

“Sorry … for Silly Dilly,” Edna said.

“It’s okay,” I said, surprised by my words. I think she wanted me to say that she had been good for me. I don’t think she wanted me to cry for her, although I would never know. I felt a Buddhist nothingness that paradoxically had clear borders, as if part of me had been excoriated not by fire, but by a surgeon’s knife. I looked at my father and felt sadness, and loss, and frustration. I admired Megan’s spirit, even the part that opposed me. I had so many confused feelings about Janie. I grieved for the Honor crisis, for Tony Barraza searching for
his lost boy, for Clint, for Pee Wee, for Pearl’s dilemma with her father. I felt sorry for Silly Dilly.

Edna—nothing.

I had hated this woman, and now she was dying. I had caused it. I caused people to die, to bleed, and I felt nothing.

Megan sobbed when she saw the photo of our mother, who had been unaccountably cruel to her. Megan’s sadness opened like the gates of heaven, and she wept louder for so many hurts, so long endured. I heard my father crying, a sound utterly new to me.

I clung to my emotional immobility, again noting that even within my own family, I was a minority who could never fit in. When others were stern, I laughed like a madman. When others wept, I felt nothing. My father and Edna would have preferred a different child than me. I realized that I was supposed to have been a nonasthmatic, perfectly visioned, physically beautiful, mathematically endowed Caucasian girl, and not who I was.

My father wept.

“I’ll miss you, darling,” she said to my father.

36

West Point, May 1967

West Point’s Class of 1835 began the American tradition of graduation rings. Ours displayed the high and sharply spread wings of an American eagle, fiercely crouching on the centerpiece “68.” Under the numerals appeared a bold “USMA” and the hilts of Academy cavalry sabers. On the opposite side was the Academy crest with a scrolling bilateral streamer reading, “Duty, Honor, Country, West Point, 1802, USMA.” Graduates wear the Academy crest inward, emblematic of the school’s closeness to the heart.

The L. G. Balfour Company held the Class Ring Expo in
the Post Gym. We made our selections of gold, stone, and inscriptions. Most of us picked gold rings. Pearl suggested I choose white gold. “See,” she said, “it goes better with your skin.”

“My father loved his American Infantry ring more than anything else. Look how big it is! A ‘crass mass of brass and glass.’ ”

The ring symbolized our camaraderie, the bonds and the brotherhood of West Point, forged by common effort against uncommon challenges. It was more symbolic of the effort, and the comradeship, than any building or monument on post, or any speech, tactics formula, or epithet created or remembered in its halls. “It’s like the whole thing’s inside the stone. All the lifelong friendships are smelted into the gold. A stamp of approval from the Academy, from your classmates. From all West Pointers.”

“You think this ring will make you American,” said Pearl.

I nodded. I filled out the form. I entered the letters “D.L.” for Dai-li, Mah-mee’s initials, for the inside. The eagle of my country, the gold of Honor, the weight of duty, were in its patent features. But there was more—it emulated my father’s ring. The black onyx saluted the other part of my heritage, and the gold was chosen by Pearl. The ring would be the unified icon of my life.

“What do you think?” asked Bill Ericson, who headed up the Ring and Crest Committee. He was a ramrod-straight Airborne poop schooler with chiseled features. We were looking at the mock-up.

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

“Pardon me?” he asked.

“Congratulations, and thanks. You guys did a beautiful job.” Pearl beamed at me. She always liked me when I was emotional.

Deke wanted to play tennis on the river courts, Arch was putting together a touch football game on the practice field, and Bob was looking to play basketball. I wanted to do it all. It was a spectacularly sunny spring Saturday afternoon with no duties; a fine cool breeze blew in through the windows while the radio played. Sonny was leaning on me to study Juice.

Harper’s Bizarre was singing “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)”: “Slow down / You move too fast / You got to let the morning last.…”

“Kai—you gonna play or not?” asked Arch.

“He’s not,” said Sonny. “Don’t ever ask ’im again. He doesn’t play
any
games—no hearts, no hoops, no hallway touch,
nothin
’—until he gets past the Juice whufer.”

“Good point,” said Bob. “You and good times, Kai, just got a divorce.” There was a low, indecipherable mumble of common assent.

“Great,” I said.

“That sounded insincere,” said Mike.

Sonny hung large sections of butcher paper on the walls of my room. They were filled with multicolored Juice problems. “Remember the OMI lesson—that we retain seventy percent more from visuals than through our ears. Here’s your visuals.”

Mike kept looking at me while I looked at the equations. Black for the problem, red for the derivation, and blue for the solution. I studied the derivations flowing from the problems.

It was nonsense. Satanic scribblings from the ancient Chia dynasty of China. Bone scrawls, cave etchings, blue-dyed tattoos of dead deities left in memory of extinct civilizations, offering explanations to the smiles of sphinxes and the rising of phoenixes.

Sonny looked at me and scratched his healed leg, scrunched his face. “Kai,” he said. “Am I a bad tutor?”

“God, no, Sonny. You’re the best. I just got sawdust for brains. I’m the scarecrow in
The Wizard of Oz.
There’s only so far you can take me before all the stuffing falls out.”

He got up, looking at me and Mike, seated at the desks, the room empty now except for the three of us. A gaggle of guys wrestled in the hallway; distant chatter from the Great American Public on Thayer Road crept through the window; and, with the approach of June, some of my Plebes were singing the lyrics to Broadway show tunes at the tops of their lungs for the pleasure of the upper classes. It was mostly quiet.

“Over here,” said Sonny, pointing to his right, “is heaven, a month away, as a Firstie with the Good Deal First Class Trip around the U.S., no more hard engineering. Ya get
two
electives an’ the best military art, strategy, and tactics courses in the Academy. Stuff ya came here for. You’ll get ta write the script for One Hundredth Night an’ you’ll be a platoon leader, at least. We get rings in two stinkin’ months. Turn in our lousy rifles an’ pom-poms an’ get sabers an’ plumes. Unlimited weekends in New York with Pearl—no more stinkin’ movies in the gym. The Corvette or T-Bird or whatever ya want. We
cheer as the best Army team since Dawkins rolls over the competition. Kai,” he said, taking a big breath, “you’ll be with your classmates.”

“Sounds good,” said Mike. “Too bad it’s not a real college.”

“Over here,” said Sonny in a low voice, pointing to his left, “is the nadir in bullshit humiliation and personal defeat.”

“Uh, I pick the other side,” I said.

“This,” he said, “is sayin’ hi ta your old man cuz ya got found.
He
doesn’t care that ya flunked only one course, or that you’re good in other subjects. He just knows ya let him down. Same for your civilian friends—the ones who aren’t Communists. In California, that’s probably about two people.

“Anyway,” he said, cocking his head to the door. “That’s Vietnam as an NCO, no control over what kinda platoon leader ya get. That’s goin’ over without us, which may not be a Good Deal. And if ya get killed over there, you can’t even get buried in the cemetery with Custer and Fideli. Bad Deal. Nothingburger. No degree, ring. No class reunions so ya can tell the new Corps they’ve gone to hell. No chance for ya to come back as faculty and use your lawyer talk to get ’em to make Juice an elective. This,” he said, “is giving up the three hardest years in your life, without the
payoff
, the
fun
, the
easy
year. Ya get this? This makin’ sense?”

“I get it. I’m a jerk. You’ve given me a lot of your time.”

“Good,” he said. “Better’n feelin’
stupid
, and a lot better’n feelin’
kicked out.
”

“Yes, Sonny,” said Mike. “If you weren’t helping Kai, you could sleep sixteen hours during the day and still get eight hours of rack at night.” It was a joke; Sonny tutored everyone.

“You wanta take a break? Come back to this later?”

I nodded. “I need to run,” I said.

Running in tennis shoes and shorts was a basic Academy tradition. I was surprised to learn during my summer leaves that this was not true at Cal, or Stanford, or Yale. Pearl thought I was crazy, running voluntarily while no one was chasing me. West Point was a beautiful place to run, and I took the course around the chapels and the cemetery so I could end up at Trophy Point. The view was a reward.

Random thoughts cruised through my consciousness while I ran. I thought of Pearl, how she had established through our dates at the Academy a regular routine of kissing, knowing that much more was at stake; she was still seeking a husband.

Battle Monument was remarkably empty of sightseers. I
stretched, then sat on the pedestal of the huge granite column and huffed.

This was my school. I belonged here. I had friends almost beyond count: hundreds and hundreds—battalions—of talented and idealistic young men who would smile at the sight of my Chinese features. I loved to run all over the Academy, visiting and talking with friends about anything but math. In a hundred conversations I had learned about the fifty states and explored authors and films. In thousands of talks we had fought and designed and won the war in Vietnam, imagined terrible death and hoped for enduring survival.

This was the most remarkable institution in the world, and I was in the heart of it. I was even admired by some, and could count among my acquaintances some of the outstanding members of my class and of West Point’s faculty. I had been in the company of some of the best teachers in the world.

This was the Hanlin, with its bright yellow pennons, imposing stone walls, and ancient traditions, all so steady and strong for the good of all. And I was one of its members.

“I might be a surgeon, but I’m thinking about psychiatry.” Michael Warren Benjamin, number-six man in the class, was next to me in his running gear. He smiled his Clark Gable grin, ending my rather stunning analysis of the world at hand.

“My best friend wanted to be a doctor,” I said. Toos, where are you? “Psychiatry?” I asked.

“Frontier of the mind,” he said. “Motivation, pleasure, anger, hope.” He laughed, fully, slapping his knee. “It’s great!
Nothing
more exciting. Surgery’s macho.” We had done macho.

“I like psychology,” I said. “Say ‘conditioned response’ and I say ‘Pavlov.’ Actually, I can’t wait for you to have me lie on a couch and tell me about my injured childhood.” Pearl had said, “Chinese people in America need a lot of help.”

“You gave me that copy of Sun Tzu’s
The Art of War.
He says that figuring out yourself and what the other guy is going to do is the essence of the military art. And that,” Mike said triumphantly, “is psychology. Right now, I’m trying to figure out why you can’t study. Why you’re blocked in Juice.”

I looked down. “I’m just not that smart,” I said.

“You always hate math?” he asked.

I nodded. Then, a jolt. “No, wait,” I said, with the unique urgency of the Honor-bound cadet. “I think I liked it until I was, I don’t know—ten? Eleven? Young. Long time ago.”

“What happened then?” he asked.

I saw the Cadet Chapel, its geometry. “My dad tutored me.” “That didn’t help?”