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you and the other boys were going to teach Tradd how to fit in like one of the guys. Even when you try to act like a man you mess it up, son.”
    Tradd adjusted the buttons on his blazer and walked over to the window, which looked out onto Charleston harbor and the Battery. Abigail entered the door on the opposite side of the room carrying glasses and a frosted pitcher of iced tea. She stared at her son by the window; she stared at her husband in his chair. I became suddenly invisible, the unassimilated motionless voyeur. It was experience, not clairvoyance, which brought Abigail instant recognition of the nature of the conflict. In the war for the soul of this one child, there had been no real battle. There had only been an occupation and three proud, dispirited casualties indissolubly linked by the bloodless yet passionate nature of the skirmish. No forces had ever taken to the field. Commerce had wanted his son to be an athlete, a companion, a drinking buddy. What he had produced instead was a slim, brilliant boy with a voice mannered and flutelike, a boy in love with architecture, painting, furniture, music, poetry: all the pursuits that would please Abigail and irritate Commerce. He had also produced one of the finest friends I had ever known.
    Tradd had enrolled at the Institute to satisfy a dream of his father’s, who thought that his son would not—could not—make it through the plebe system but that the process, no matter how brief or cataclysmic, would liberate him from the soft and victorious tyranny of his mother’s rule. It had surprised and impressed Commerce that his son had survived that first year, but it also dismayed him that there had been no fundamental change in his son’s nature. The Institute had not purged his son of his reserve and delicacy. Even the Institute was helpless in erasing the signature of chromosomes. But it had proven that there was a toughness at the very center of Tradd that neither his mother, his father, nor he himself had recognized. It had been the one time in his life he had presented his father a gift of incalculable value. Few had suffered as long or endured as much humiliation that year, but Tradd had taken it all, every bit of it. He walked through the Gates of Legrand on the first day of our freshman year not knowing how to do a pushup. At the end of the year he could pump out fifty without breaking a sweat. But he never did another pushup after that first year and vowed he would never do another for the rest of his life. Once during our freshman year, I asked Tradd why he just didn’t quit and go to another college since his parents had enough pocket change to buy Yale. Tradd had explained to me, “I want to make my father glad that I’m his son for the first time in his and my lives. There isn’t an upperclassman in the world who could make me leave.” Many tried, but Tradd had been right, none of them could. In less than three months, he would wear the ring.
    “When are Pig and Mark arriving?” Tradd asked, breaking the long silence in the room.
    “They got permission not to report until Wednesday,” I answered.
    “General Durrell’s letting me stay home until the plebes arrive. Will. I hope you won’t get too lonely in the room.”
    “Why don’t you just stay here in the guest room, Will?” Abigail said, pouring tea into four glasses.
    “There are no bugles here, Abigail. I can’t sleep without bugles or the sound of plebes dying on the quadrangle.”
    “Tell General Durrell to kiss my fanny if you see him, boys,” Commerce shouted to the television, trying to direct the subject far away from the remark that had wounded his son. “I saw the pompous son of a bitch on King Street the other day. I think he was buying elevator shoes. He isn’t satisfied with being six-three. You would think he was somebody the way he carries on. My God, he’s from Spartanburg. Spartanburg of all the pitiful places. The upcountry. The goddam, no-count