Honor and Duty (25 page)

“Mr. Mankoff. You can cold max the writ, so long as—”and Captain Mac raised both arms to the section—

“WE PUSH THE OUTER EDGE OF THE ENVELOPE OF OUR BEINGS!” we chorused, somewhat raggedly.

I read
To Kill a Mockingbird
in one night. I waited until the last possible evening to pick it up. It did not transform my life with the power of religious vision or atomic war, but it was close. I was exhausted when the cannon went off, the buzzer rang, the building shook, and the band’s Hellcats broke into the fury of that marvelously stirring hit and perennial favorite, reveille.

I hated the tune. It was cheery and energetic, befitting lambs prancing down a wooded country lane in late spring, eating ivy, looking forward to a day of gentle grazing.

“Piss me off … hate dat damn gun … too early … get up ta dis crap … buzzer an’ dat bullcrap-eatin’ tune … miserable, lousy, assbite Army musicians … play too loud … where the
hell
are my frickin’ socks?” Joey’s Bronx cheer never appeared at dawn.

“Hiya, buddy!” said Bob Lorbus, grinning as he thumped Joey on his chest. I had slept less than an hour, but churning thickly through my tired blood and math-beaten brain were the spirits of Scout, Jem, Atticus, Tom Robinson, Calpurnia, and Boo. I had been touched by an author who saw evil in familiarity, and hope within an old culture predicated in so many ways on despair. I realized that I had known nothing about the South, despite having read
Gone with the Wind.

An old tune ran through my sluggish mind, and I smiled. It
was an old ’hood song, chanted by kids and mommas alike. Its structure was like storytelling, allowing anyone to throw in his own stanza, so long as it rhymed. I used to call it the “Papa Ditty,” but it was more commonly known as the mockingbird song.

To Kill a Mockingbird
indicted a way of life in San Francisco. My old neighborhood had been an urban version of the shantytown where the Robinsons lived, shunted off and away from white people. And folks in the ’hood had been hard on Sippy Suds just like the folks in Maycomb had been bad to Boo Radley.

I felt as if I had a read a book with fire in its pages, scourging prejudice in any form.

Atticus, the lawyer, had liked his children. Lawyers defended the poor, the weak, the victims of prejudice and unfairness and abuses of power. There were lawyers in the Army.

Mockingbird
became my standard for judging books. I wrote more energetically in my journal, and was no longer inclined to judge a book before I read it.

I asked “Pensive” Hamblin what he thought of it. Pensive was from Meridian, Mississippi. “Segregation was sin, but integration’s killin’ us. Story like that, it coulda happened. Prob’ly did.” He shook his head sadly. “If so, things gotta change. But I surely hate a damn Yankee captain ta tell me about it.”

“Stagger desks, gentlemen,” said Captain Mac. “Answer the question: ‘Who Is Boo Radley?’ ” Desks were shifted to disarm inadvertent glances.

I was too tired to remember the ecstasy of the story. Soporifically, I remembered “critical analysis.” I was transformed. I could write English and change lives. I was going to be analytical. Boo Radley, I wrote, was a symbol for the wretched of the earth, whose goodness could only be perceived by a child still in a state of innocence. Frightened by an abusive world,
Boo Radley was reduced to being able to relate, at a distance, only to children. “The Harper Leeaic Voice,” I opined, “utilizes Boo Radley as the perigee of social hierarchy. The apogee is Atticus Finch, Father, Attorney, Arbiter of Justice and Advocate for the Weak. Scout is the mechanism of realization.”

Thirty minutes passed. “Cease work!” ordered Captain Mac. A cascade of pens fell onto desktops, since continuing to write after the cease-work order constituted an Honor violation.

I received a 2.4—a miserable grade, similar to a C-plus. Captain Mac had not been impressed:

I was deflated. I thought I had found some truths and had used some exceptionally fancy English to express them. Harper Lee, I thought, was not as fantastic as I’d originally imagined.

I returned to Shakespeare with relief. Following Harper Lee’s upcoming lecture, we were going to be examined on three of the Bard’s tragedies. Joey and Clint were trying to avoid becoming two more of them. Captain Mac informed us that one of the exam points would be the use of irony.

“How’d Shakespeare use irony?” I asked. Blank faces. “What’s ironic about
Romeo and Juliet?
”

“Girl an’ boy,” said Joey in his rich Bronx tones, which were beginning to affect my highly absorbent speech patterns. “Here, dat’s irony.”

“Girl, boy, and no sex,” said Clint. “Here, that’s
not
irony.”

“Try again,” I said.

“All dem fancy clothes, an’ no ironin’ at all,” said Joey.

“How about love instigating hate?” I asked, looking at him.

He clapped his hand to his forehead. “Got it,” he said.

I smiled. “Okay,
Othello?
”

“Black and white,” said Joey.

“Good,” I said. “Now, one level deeper.”

Two blank faces, four shrugging shoulders.

“Othello’s a Muslim general,” I said, “defending Venetian Christians against fellow Muslims. Weird, right? Okay, think about
Julius Caesar.
Think about Mark Antony.”

Nothing. “Clint?” I said. He shook his head.

“Antony,” I said, “in front of his Romans and countrymen, compliments Brutus for killing Caesar. But what really happens?”

“He tells the Thayer joke and dey get a Fall-out with Big Bites,” said Joey.

“Doesn’t the mob get pissed at Brutus?” asked Clint.

“Right! Antony uses irony to nail Brutus!” I said.

“I need an equation for dis crap,” said Joey. “Who gives a shit ’bout irony, copper, brass, or any of that stuff?”

“Kai—enough,” said Clint. “Shakespeare, Byron, Keats—what a bunch of rot. Hey—we’re gonna be late. I woulda thought you’d be first there. You
like
this junk.”

“Aw,” I said, “she’s just an author.”

The irony of their having a Chinese-American roommate who enjoyed the class that could flunk them out of West Point was something over which Joey, Clint, and I often kidded.

“Too bad we don’t have to take
Chinese
,” Clint said. “I’d probably do better’n you.”

South Aud—or Odd—South Auditorium in Thayer Hall—was a new, twelve-hundred-seat theater wired for sound and light. Here, during Beast, had come instruction on the Honor Code, on the Code of Conduct for POWs, and on the objectives of tactics instruction. Here, next month, the Firsties, the seniors, would learn which branch—Infantry, Armor, Artillery, Signal Corps, or Engineers—was to be theirs to serve as second lieutenants. Beyond the walls waited MACV, Military Assistance Command, Vietnam—which needed Infantry platoon leaders.

When the aud seated upperclassmen, it boomed with the deep, bright bass of high-hormoned males. With us, it hummed with the whispers and low tones of muted voices. Tonight, under subdued lighting fit for a state funeral, we were even quieter. I sat with Clint, Joey, Bob, Arch Torres, tall Hawk Latimer, and Pee Wee McCloud. There were ample seats due to class attrition. We used to fill the aud. I remembered the absent ones, how they had looked in soaked fatigues during the
scorching days of Beast, trying to hold on, trying to meet expectations, trying not to be the boys who left West Point in a summer that was too hot. The lights dimmed.

Colonel Sutherland, the mustached head of the Department of English, approached the podium on the high stage below us. He was a lean patrician with high, angular shoulders, walking with a stateliness born to royalty or induced by bad knees. He had been an Infantry officer in Europe and had become a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania. He looked like Don Quijote.

Colonel Sutherland welcomed us to “a signal event.” Limited, he said, by the modesty of our guest, he was merely going to introduce her. He then described the unprecedented honors that had been paid Harper Lee for her work. He did not complain that the Superintendent had failed to direct the entire Corps to appear for the lecture. Appropriate applause was delivered, and Clint, Joey, and other English goats settled deeper into the comfortable padding of their seats, preparing to catch some badly needed rest. Plebe year operated on the axiom that an hour in the rack was an hour away from West Point. There was a gentle snort as classmates awoke someone who had already collapsed into the arms of Morpheus, even before the arrival of the Harper Leeaic voice.

Miss Harper Lee sat at a small table on stage.

“Good evening, General Jannarone, Colonel Sutherland, faculty of the Department of English, ladies and gentlemen, and gentlemen of the Fourth Class of the Corps of Cadets.”

She was a small person, conservatively garbed in a simple dark dress, her hair wrapped into a conservative bun atop her head. Her voice was softly Southern, with high musical notes, and crystal clear in a hall that was utterly silent. It reminded me of someone, and I sat up, breathing rapidly.

“This is very exciting,” she said slowly, “because I do not speak at colleges. The prospect of it is too intimidating. Surely, it’s obvious—rows of bright, intense, focused students, some even of the sciences, all of them analyzing my every word and staring fixedly at me—this would terrify a person such as myself.

“So, I wisely agreed to come here, where the atmosphere would be far more relaxing and welcoming than on a rigid, strict, rule-bound, and severely disciplined college campus.”

The auditorium erupted in laughter, something we had not yet done together, and it released tensions that had begun on
Reception Day, had increased through the rigors of Beast and Plebe year and the loss of friends, and until now had not been freed. I laughed until Clint hit me to shut up. We applauded thunderously, which probably confused her.

“She’s great,” I breathed.

“If we were blessed with parents who love, and who love others,” she said a while later, “we have souls who will live within us for all our lives. They fortify us in times of need, strengthening our hearts when we need strengthening most. Most of you young men are in this category, of having been loved by family, aided and cared for by people who know you best.”

I thought of Toos and his mother, Tony, Uncle Shim. I thought of Jack Peeve and his parents, and all the people at the Y.

“Today we are urged to live beyond our homes, in industry, education, the professions. Here we are in the midst of some who do not love, do not cherish our quaint habits, and are uncaring about our needs. This experience need not be sad, but it is clearly different than being with family.”

She took a small sip of water from the tumbler on the table.

“When we seek to replace family in new environs, we seek to reestablish trust, and love, and comfort.

“But all too often, we end up establishing difference instead of love. We like to have all our comforts and familiars about us, and tend to push away that which is different, and worrisome.

“That is what happened to Boo Radley, and to Tom Robinson.

“They were not set apart by evil men, or evil women, or evil thoughts. They were set apart by an evil past, which good people in the present were ill equipped to change.

“The irony is, if we divide ourselves for our own comfort,
no one
will have comfort. It means we must bury our pasts by seeing them, and destroy our differences through learning another way.

“Of course, many people, not including a
soul
present tonight, come from families that include members who do not like change, do not love their neighbors, detest their own children, despise people of other colors, and loathe those from other states.

“As a writer, I am fascinated with these people, cursed with
hate, overladen with dislikes. For they contain within their souls the foibles and weaknesses of us all.”

I sighed.

“Our response to these people represents our earthly test. And I think,” she said, speaking to the small microphone before her, her hands crossed on her lap, her head at a small angle, as if she were studying it, “that these people enrich the wonder of our lives. It is they who most need our kindness,
because
they seem less deserving. After all,
anyone
can love people who are lovely.”

I thought of Christine, who was lovely, and not easy to love.

“Are these principles for life? Perhaps. Some of this affected me when I wrote
To Kill a Mockingbird.
To me, it is a simple love story about family and honoring that which is good.”

Love. A lecture on love and tolerance at the United States Military Academy, from a woman novelist speaking to a society of men. I could hear the air ducts dusting the air in the auditorium. An unoiled chair distantly squeaked near the back of the aud.

“People in the press have asked me if this book is descriptive of my own childhood, or of my own family.

“Is this very important? I am simply one who had time and chance to write. I was that person before, and no one in the press much cared about the details of my life. I am yet that same person now, who only misses her former anonymity.