The Lords of Discipline by Pat Conroy Read Free Book Online

when he and I were knobs. In fact, it was kind of fun.”
    “You were in General Durrell’s class, weren’t you?”
    “Yes, I know some things about him, too. I kept a diary when I was a cadet. It was good practice for when I went to sea and had to keep a log. I can look back and tell you everything I did since I was fifteen years old. I’m very disciplined about some things, Will.”
    “Discipline is the one gift the Institute has not bestowed upon me.”
    “You fought it, boy,” Commerce said. “Discipline comes easy when you decide to go whole hog at something.”
    He stared at the ring for a full minute without speaking.
    “Tell Tradd that I didn’t mean to hurt his feelings, Will. It just slipped out.”
    “Why don’t you tell him, Commerce? I’m sure it would mean a lot more coming from you than from me.”
    “If you don’t tell him, Will, he’ll never know how sorry I am when I say these things to him. Please tell him.”
    “I will, sir.”
    “I noticed something years ago, son. When I’m with the people I love most, I feel lonelier than at any other time on earth. Lonely, Will. Lonely. Lonely,” he declared in an undermined voice. Suddenly he turned his eyes toward me for understanding, for affirmation.
    He gave me a look that linked us as spiritual allies, resolute desperadoes in headlong flight from the false and sinister veneer of Charleston. I did not return the look with equal measure or with any measure of faith in his basic premise that we shared some immensely suggestive linkage of soul and temperament. All because I like to watch football games, I thought. Since I was born a McLean and not a St. Croix, I was not tormented by the formidable demons of the city that cried out in disengaged voices for conformity from its sons and daughters. I could not help or even sympathize with the agony of being too well born, too well bred, or too well named. Nor could I help but notice that Commerce, despite his objections to the city, had chosen to live out his life in the dead center of the tribe he professed to hate. The pull of Charleston was lunar and feminine and partisan and even affected those natives, like Commerce, who professed to loathe her extensive artifice and the carnivorous etiquette of its social structure. He could no more cease being a Charlestonian than I could cease being a Caucasian male. Charleston possessed his soul and there was nothing he or I could do about it.
    But he seemed satisfied with the look I gave him. I have eyes that give people what they want, eyes that whore in order to please, commiserate, endorse, affirm. People take from my eyes anything and everything that they need. Usually, I am simply looking at someone as they tell me a story; I am later amazed to discover they have believed I was agreeing with them completely. I have the eyes of a ward politician or a priest on the make with choirboys. I have eyes I have ’learned to distrust completely.
    “I’ll tell Tradd what you said, Commerce,” I said as he left the porch and disappeared into his room, which was lit only by a ship’s lantern. I heard the door lock behind him.
    W hen I left the house that evening, I turned to look back at the Tradd-St. Croix mansion and thought of the many accidents and distortions of fate that had occurred to make my history and the history of this splendid house commingle. Tradd had brought me home for dinner at the beginning of our freshman year, right after we had become roommates. When we left that night to return to the Institute, Abigail had taken me aside and thanked me for helping her son. I told her that I thought Tradd was incredibly brave and that he was enduring the full savage brutality of the plebe system without complaint. Later that year, on another of my visits, she had pressed something into my palm. It was a key to the Tradd-St. Croix mansion. “You have a home in Charleston now, Will,” she had said. “You can use that key anytime you want to, whether