"What's that, Colonel?"

"One rather bitter, limp-wristed grad who not only believed that The Ten existed but was still angry after thirty years that he had not been selected as a member insisted that one criterion for membership is physical strength. It is not an effete organization."

"Then why didn't they choose Muscles McLean?"

"There might have been some question about your loyalty to the Institute."

"Ha!" I laughed. "I hope there was a great deal of question."

"Hold your tongue, wastrel," he demanded, beating his fist on the wooden desk and scattering his lecture notes about the room. "I will not allow trench-mouthed swine to tarnish the good name of the Institute. Many men before you have talked bitterly about the school when they were cadets only to become among its most ardent champions. Some have even contributed vast sums to the Institute."

"I would contribute vast sums to the demolition team that would tear this campus down."

"And what would you replace this campus with, Mr. McLean?" he retorted hotly. "What institution of equivalent value would you put in its place? The Institute has produced statesmen, warriors, ambassadors, and captains of industry. Its record of service to America is unsurpassed for a school of its size. What would be your substitute? What would you place over the ruins of this great institution that would render equal service to mankind?"

"Oh, I don't know, Colonel," I said, my smile betraying my foreknowledge of his reaction. "How about a diaper cleaning service?"

"You are a scoundrel and a disgrace even to your whimpering breed. Out of my office, scalawag, and keep a civil tongue about the Institute or I will throttle you myself to an inch of your life."

"I'm not worried about you, Colonel," I teased. "At least, not anymore."

"Why, swine?" he said, narrowing his eyes.

"You didn't make The Ten."

"That is true, Mr. McLean. But let me hasten to assure you that I could take all ten members from my feckless, small-boned class and hurl them forthwith into the outgoing tide of the Ashley River."

"Sir, in your youth, and this might be a personal question, but were you . . . ah . . . were you, how shall I phrase it. . .". I stammered.

"You mean to ask in your whining cowardly way, sir, whether or not in my youth I was the same fat swine who sits before you today. I am not a man to mince words, Mr. McLean, and if we are to speak as reasonable men together-thinking, intelligent men-then you must speak the words as they spring from your whimpering tongue."

"Very well, sir," I said. "Were you fat when you were a cadet? I would like to know."

"Do you think I am fat now?" he inquired.

"I think, sir, that you are incredibly fat. Remember, sir, I am speaking freely as the words spring from my whimpering tongue."

"Does my weight disgust you, Mr. McLean?"

"Yes, sir, it disgusts me beyond all powers of description."

He rose suddenly and with surprising speed and grace made a lunge toward me across the desk. I stepped back toward the door, just barely avoiding his grasp. Breathing heavily and with a competitive glint in his eye, he growled, "If we had a fist fight this very moment, Mr. McLean, who do you think would emerge victorious?"

"I would, sir, because I would engage in a footrace before we began fighting. You would have a massive coronary after the fourth or fifth step, whereupon I would return and at my leisure strike you again and again in your left ventricle."

Laughter spilled out of his prodigious frame like gravel being unloaded from a dump truck. He was one of those large, dour men whose laughter was surprising in its infectiousness.

"I should have known better than to engage the Irish swine in a battle of words. But I would like to remind you of one indisputable fact, Mr. McLean. If you study history long enough with the diligence and passion it requires, you will come to recognize that the truly great men in history have been men of girth. Greatness does not often come in puny, fashionably slim packages. A great mind cannot be served by anything other than a massive body. Mark my words well. Only a fool would dispute such an assertion."

"I believe it, sir," I said. "And I can only assume from that theory that you must be among the greatest men in history."

"A perspicacious lad, Mr. McLean. A perspicacious swine, indeed. Not that I enjoy being overweight, mind you, and not that your insensitive jokes don't hurt. I have suffered greatly because of my size, you can make no mistake about that. It has altered my perception of the world; it has even altered my perception of God."

"How, sir?" I asked, puzzled.

"If there was a just and merciful God, Mr. McLean, then a dry martini would have a single calorie and a rye crisp would have four thousand. If there were truly a just and merciful God a banana split would have no calories and a bean sprout or a raw carrot would contain ten thousand calories. I have spent a great amount of time studying the cruelty of the universe."

I made a gesture of departure by picking up my books from the floor. "Thanks for your help, Colonel," I said. "By the way, if you were actually a member of The Ten, would you have told me what you just did about the organization?"

"I would not have told you a single word. I would have denied the existence of The Ten under torture. At least under the first phases of torture. I think it is a simple ass indeed who claims that he would not break down completely under the dominion of the torturer's grim art. I know myself well enough to realize that I would eventually crack after enough fingernails were removed by pliers or enough electric shock was applied to my genitalia."

"One last thing, sir," I said. "If I had been writing the history of the Institute I would have included all that you picked up about The Ten. I would have presented it as a rather intriguing rumor even if I had no documentary proof."

He looked hurt when I said this, deeply hurt, and he said soberly, "That is why you will never be an historian, Mr. McLean. I have greater documentation for the existence of Atlantis than I do for The Ten. History is not a higher form of astrology. I don't know if a single thing I told you is true or not."

"How do they decide who is worthy to wear the ring? That sounds strange, Colonel, especially since the plebe system takes care of that problem."

"I neglected to tell you that part. This rumor came from a rather hypocritical liberal who graduated in the midfifties and is presently a bureaucrat in Washington. He claimed that The Ten, if there is such a thing, and again, he had no more proof than any of the others, had vowed that the Institute would never graduate a woman or any man who would bring discredit on the school because of gross mental or physical peculiarities, which is rather humorous in the light of recent history."

"What's that?"

"The Ten supposedly has vowed that the Institute will never graduate a Negro. There are times, Mr. McLean, when I hope with all my heart that The Ten does exist, and . . ."

"And, sir?"

"And that they are true to their ideals. Good day, sir."

Chapter Twenty-eight.

The next evening, I sat in the mess hall eating supper with the din of the Corps at rest about me. The seniors were displaying their rings to the other members of their mess, even allowing the freshmen to examine the bright, newly minted emblem that marked them as blood members of the tribe. I had visited the library that morning to check for messages from Pearce and had then visited the ring display in the Institute museum. Whenever an alumnus was killed in battle, it was traditional for his next of kin to return his ring to the museum for enshrinement upon black velvet in the macabre trophy case where these rings were proudly mounted. The alumni who had fallen at Bull Run, at Antietam, in the Argonne Forest, at Guadalcanal, at the Bulge, at Pork Chop Hill-all, all had willed that their rings be returned to the Institute. Looking into that case, it was difficult to realize that each ring represented the life of a man and also a death by fire. Each time I viewed the display, I was moved by the silence and the gravity of those squads of rings, so carefully and lovingly spaced. Like all other cadets who visited this room, I could not help but wonder if one day my own ring would take its place in those chill accumulations of gold.

I handed my ring down to the freshman, Beasley, who had braced and asked permission to see it. Pig refused to take his ring off to show anyone and vowed that he would never take it off. Beasley handled the ring as though I had gifted him with a small bone of a saint. He turned it over and over again; his fingers studied its contours, his eyes strained to read the Latin inscription in the South Carolina seal.

"It's beautiful, sir," he said.

"It's expensive, dumbhead," I answered.

"It's worth it, sir. That's why all of us are here."

The speakers of the intercom crackled at that moment. Beasley reached for my cup and filled it with coffee. Pig was hunched over his plate, protecting his food with his massive round shoulders. But our ears tensed for the announcement. It was extremely rare that an announcement was made before the completion of a meal. The adjutant's voice, clear and precise, filled the hall. The two thousand listened.

"Gentlemen," he said, "we have just received word that General Durrell's son, Alfred, Class of 1964, has been killed by a land mine in the Que Noc Province of Vietnam. There will be a memorial service for Lieutenant Durrell at 1300 hours tomorrow in the chapel. All cadets are urged to attend."

A silence fell on the mess hall, a long, embittered silence. The Corps did not move; the Corps did not speak.

Most of the seniors had known Al Durrell in some way It was impossible to be the son of the General and escape notice in the Corps. But Al Durrell was not the typical son of a General. He never took advantage of his father's position while in the Corps. His plebe year was frightening to watch, I was told, because the cadre went to extraordinary lengths to prove there was no favoritism on their part, and he went to equally absurd lengths to prove he was no different from any other plebe. He took the worst they had to offer; he endured the most brutal excesses of the system. He kept his own counsel, in his solemn, patient acceptance of each outrage and humiliation, and won the respect of the Corps by never complaining to the Commandant's Department, or worse, reporting the hazing to his father. It was said that he even won the respect of his father, but this point was disputed. The General had stated publicly that he believed Al's ability to lead men was minimal. Al had inherited his father's nose and height but not the genes of greatness. He became a second lieutenant in the Corps, an unspectacular rank, and was a fair student and a game but mediocre intramural athlete. He was admired for his humility, his self-deprecating humor, and a certain quality of gentle detachment rarely prized in the barracks. I was bothered by a single thought when I tried to resuscitate my images of Al Durrell: It was easy to imagine him dead. I could not even recall the sound of his voice.

But outrage bloomed in the poisonous, oceanic silence that followed the announcement. No one was eating. A dead boy stuck in our throats.

"He was a nice guy. That's all he was. A nice guy," someone said behind me.

For several stunned moments the transfixion was complete as we rekindled the memory of Al Durrell in our minds and revived his shy, unaspiring grace. We had to kill him off in our memories, let the shrapnel have him, let the severing and the dying take place in our heads.

Then we were lifted out of our chairs as if an indiscernible cadre had begun barking orders, and I found myself walking with the Corps, the entire Corps, moving without cadence and in silence, with an awesome, unspeakable purpose. Many had grabbed the lighted candles from the mess tables, and we moved by the candlelight toward the mansion where the General, an inhuman figure to most of us, a man we thought of as immune from the travesties of history, sat with his wife and the now eternal absence of a son who had died in Asia.

We walked in a shifting sea of fire, each flame a small column in the chapel of our sorrow. The Corps stood on his front lawn, the light of the candles surreal and trembling as we fidgeted diffidently before the shadows on his verandah. We stood there numbly, not knowing what to do or say, not knowing how to express the feelings that thickened our tongues, not knowing how to cry or what to say to a mother who had lost her one son for all time and a warrior who had lost his one son to war.

But even though there was no order to our spontaneous assembly at the General's house, there was a ceremonial correctness to the gathering. The Corps had come together to honor Al Durrell, wearer of the ring, one of us, a boy who would always be a boy, a comrade who would always be a comrade, and to honor the father of this son, to ease the pain of his mother, to share their pain, and to show our own.

As we saw General Durrell and his wife appear at their front door, we realized we had caught them unawares: They had had no time to prepare for our reception. It was the first time I had ever seen General Durrell in civilian clothes. We were moved by Mrs. Durrell's tears; we were moved by his lack of tears. They stared into the light where we stood on the lawn. I could hear the breathing of the Corps around me, the suppressed fury of loss in the roar of our inhale. In that crowd of two thousand, twenty-eight of us would die in Vietnam. Twenty-eight rings would return to the glass case of the museum. I would think of those twenty-eight later, each of them, one at a time when I heard the news, and I would wonder if in this visitation to the General's house, the death of those twenty-eight was assured. But on that night, we breathed slowly, simultaneously, for it was one of those times when the Corps had become one. Our silence was fearful and magnificent as we faced the Durrells. The tide was out in the river and the smell of the marsh was a fertile, powerful musk. That night the smell of the ebb tide and the smell of death seemed one.

Our faces glowed above the candlelight. The General stepped forward to say something. He cleared his throat and looked down, his fingers moving as though he were shuffling imaginary notes on a podium. Then he stepped back when he heard his wife sob. She began to weep uncontrollably. Her weeping had the timbre of imponderable loss, even of despair. The General put his arm around his wife and stared back at us with eyes that had suddenly become institutional. It was difficult to interpret his actions. There was both a strain and a theatricality to his movements. He stood above us at attention, his bearing both stiff and formal as always, but the words of loss and endings were loose upon his tongue. He could not pull them together. He could not speak.

I wanted to embrace the man. I wanted to let his wife cry on my shoulder. I wanted to bring his quiet son back to life. Grief lined the General's face in an easily traceable fretwork. His eyes were drained of light.

Suddenly Mrs. Durrell stepped forward. In a voice that trembled with agony and hatred, and once again with despair, the frail and self-effacing woman shouted out to us: "Get them, boys. Get them. Get them and kill them. For Alfred. For me. For me." Then she broke again and returned to her husband.

I do not know where the chant started, but it was somewhere behind me. At first it was a single voice, low and primal. The others picked it up until it spread through the crowd. Then it was the Corps in a single voice thundering a message of violent condolence, of inchoate vengeance. In the language of the barracks, the Corps howled out its note of condolence to Alice Durrell.

"I want to go to Vietnam.

I want to kill some Vietcong.

I want to go to Vietnam.

I want to kill some Vietcong."

The chant passed over the campus. It was fearful and terrible and sublime; it came from the great violent heart of us. The power of evil burned through the conscience of the regiment, and it was the same as the power of love and grief.

Then Mrs. Durrell silenced the crowd by uplifting her hand.

"This is the most beautiful thing that has ever happened to me. Thank you, boys. Thank you so much for everything." Then she turned and walked into her house, her husband with her.

I spoke to no one on the walk back to the barracks. The Institute had affected me in strange ways, I knew, but I was not prepared for this proof of its authority. I had participated in the chant. I had screamed it out with the others. My voice and the voice of the barracks had merged as one. They were the same thing. It was the first time I knew it for certain.

Chapter Twenty-nine.

In the middle of December, before the team's first long road trip around the South, I drove out to Annie Kate's house to give her a Christmas present. She was not in the house when I arrived, and I found her sitting alone on the rocks watching the sun set behind the Charleston skyline again. Behind us, the moon, a shimmering bright disc of winter chrome, was rising over the island, attended by the first pale stars of evening. She was wrapped in a blanket and I could see the vapor of her breath as I approached.

I had not known what to buy a girl I loved. In my lifetime, I had never brought any skill or imagination to the art of gift-giving. I could never match a gift with how I really felt. I had written my mother and told her I was in love with a girl. I told her everything about Annie Kate except that she was pregnant with another man's child. That was my guilty secret and one that I would not share, not even with my mother. I told her that Annie Kate reminded me of her and that was true. All women I admired reminded me of my mother. I wanted her advice on what a son should give to the first girl he had ever loved. My mother wrote back with a list of suggestions: White Shoulders perfume, a good book (preferably a classic), a leather purse, or a gold chain. She preferred the gold chain and assured me it would make a lovely Christmas present for any girl, even a girl from an old Charleston family. My mother also told me I could invite Annie Kate home for Christmas and that she would be glad to write Annie Kate's mother extending an invitation. Anyone that I loved, my mother assured me, she would love. Anyone that I loved, she already loved.

It was a gold chain I brought wrapped to Annie Kate on the rocks, to Annie Kate by the sea.

I handed her the gift and sat down beside her, pulling my overcoat collar high over my dress grays. She removed the wrapping and lifted the chain from the box. She held the chain up to the last light of the sun and the first hard blaze of moonlight, gold on gold and gold on silver. Then she put it around her neck and kissed me.

She smiled at me as she ran her finger around the chain, then darkened suddenly as though some switch had been thrown in her consciousness due to a failure of power and nerve. "You're not doing this just because you feel sorry for me, are you, Will? You're not loving me because you pity me? Because I'm pregnant?"

"I've told you before, Annie Kate," I answered. "I would never have met you if you hadn't been pregnant. Answer this truthfully. Would I have had any chance with you at all if you hadn't been in trouble?"

"No," she said, staring down at the rocks. "You're right. I've been programmed since birth to marry in my own class. I got pregnant with someone from my own class and look where it got me. I don't have one friend in the world who knows where I really am. Do you know, Will, that I have Charleston friends who write me in Santa Barbara? They send me letters to the house of my mother's cousin, who sends them back to Charleston. I write back telling about college and all the new friends I've made. I tell of cute charming boys I go out with. I describe the mountains around Santa Barbara and tell of weekend trips to Big Sur and San Francisco. I send the letters back to my mother's cousin and she mails them out to my friends. I've never been to California in my life. Everything I write and say is a complete and total lie. My whole life is one huge ugly lie."

"You're much too hard on yourself, Annie Kate," I said. "You don't come from a society where you can cheerfully and honestly admit that you got knocked up. You and your mother are simply protecting your future. If your boy friend keeps his mouth shut, no one will ever know. Why didn't you just go to Santa Barbara and live with this woman, this mysterious cousin? Did y'all ever consider that?"

"My mother wouldn't have gotten the satisfaction of looking down her nose at me, telling me daily that I had ruined her life and everything she'd tried to do for me, if I'd gone to California. She wouldn't have been able to play her favorite role of the complete martyr. This way she gets to punish me a little bit each day. We both get to watch my betrayal of her grow a little bit each day. And we get to hurt each other a little bit each day. I sometimes go to bed at night and pray to God that I won't wake up. I think my mother would secretly bury me at sea rather than explain why I was in Charleston."

"Aren't you being a little hard on your mother, too? I think she's just trying to handle this in the best way she knows how."

"All she can talk about is how this affects her life and reputation. She never stops to think how it's affected me, how it's killing me one day at a time."

"What will you do with the baby, Annie Kate?" I said.

She turned on me furiously, screaming and out of control. "There is no baby. I've already told you that."

"You can pretend there's no baby and I can pretend there's no baby, but at the end of nine months, you're going to have to decide what to do with this phantom child who's going to be feeding at your breast."

"I would never breast-feed a child even if it were a normal child and not a bastard. I've always thought that women who breast-fed their children had horrid breasts. I bet the women in your family always breast-fed children. In my family, never! I had a colored wet nurse feed me."