The Heavenly Table(28)

For a brief moment, though, as he sat in his scratchy uniform listening to the racket going on around him, Bovard almost wished he was sipping a glass of ice tea at the Sandcastle Inn on the breezy Atlantic seashore, or lying in a shady hammock at his parents’ summer cottage in the Adirondacks. But then he heard Sergeant Malone’s hoarse voice in the distance screaming obscenities at a couple of unlucky privates. No, he reminded himself, this was exactly where he wanted to be, among men preparing to go to war. The old life of soft, mindless pleasures was over with. From here on out, he would take his comforts in the mess halls and barracks and trenches smelling of sweat and burned coffee and gun grease. It was his destiny, he could see that as clearly as he had seen anything in his twenty-two years of living.

Even so, it had taken him several weeks to get used to Camp Pritchard. At six foot two, with wavy brown hair and sea-green eyes flecked with tiny blue deposits and a perfectly straight nose passed down from his great-grandfather, a minor French aristocrat who had been lucky enough to escape to America with his head during the Reign of Terror, Bovard stood out among the crude Midwestern farmers and store clerks and mill hands that made up the bulk of the camp’s troops like a polished stone sitting atop a pile of coal clinkers. A large part of his initial problem with handling the harsh realities of camp life was owing to his education. Trained in classics, he had entered the military with abnormally high expectations, but unfortunately, the men he had encountered so far were a far cry from the muscle-bound sackers of Troy or the disciplined defenders of Sparta that he had been infatuated with since the age of twelve. Still, even though the draftees had been a sore disappointment, both physically and mentally, he had quickly learned to deal with them. It was simply a matter of lowering one’s standards to fit the circumstances. After all, how could one expect any of these poor, awkward, illiterate brutes to have even heard of Cicero or Tacitus when at least half of them had difficulty comprehending a simple order? In just a matter of days, he went from trying to form a Latin reading club to thinking that a lowly private who still had most of his teeth and could name the presidents was practically a paragon of good breeding and sophistication.

Stretching out his legs, Bovard pulled a small leather case from his pocket and took out a cigar. His father had sent him a box of them last week, along with a carved walking stick and the last known copy of Colonel Pritchard’s memoir, a musty tome called A Great Man Looks Back, which he’d found completely unreadable and had passed on to the camp library. He cut off the end of the golden brown Cuban with a small pair of snips and reached for a match. He still found it hard to believe that just three months ago he was sitting in a hotel room in Columbus, Ohio, drunk and filled with self-loathing, mulling over the best way to kill himself. As he puffed, he thought again about the initial cause of his despair, his former fiancée, Elizabeth Shadwell. Just as he was finishing his degree at Kenyon College, and turning his thoughts to their upcoming wedding, she had suddenly jilted him, explaining in her Dear John letter that she had fallen in love with somebody else, an attorney already moving up in a well-respected firm in New York that worked chiefly on behalf of several major industrialists with war contracts amounting to millions. Looking back on it now, Bovard knew that he shouldn’t have been so surprised at her desertion. Ever since he had left Harvard at the end of his second year to go study at Kenyon with Professor Hubert Lattimore, a world-renowned expert on ancient Greek and Roman board games, Elizabeth had hinted that she was having doubts about his choice of study, even referring to it on several occasions as nothing more than “a frivolous pastime.” To think that he had worked himself half to death to become one of the only five people on the planet who understood the convoluted and seemingly nonsensical rules of divide et impera, only to have her call it a hobby! “Again, I am sorry,” she had added in a postscript to that last missive, “but I have to think of the future. I wish you the very best of luck with whatever you finally decide to do with your life.” He had sensed her oil tycoon father’s influence behind the entire thing, it being no secret that Bernard Shadwell was revolted by his potential son-in-law’s apparent lack of interest in moneymaking. And so, in just a few lines of delicate script, Elizabeth had violently altered the course of his life, a life that seemed, in the immediate aftermath of her betrayal, to have been wasted on ancient ideals and traditions that couldn’t even begin to compete with the ego-driven, cannibalistic forces of twentieth-century capitalism.

Though he had put on a brave front when his parents arrived from Philadelphia for his graduation ceremony, as soon as he saw them back onto the train, he’d packed a bag and fled to a hotel in nearby Columbus. After ordering a case of brandy brought up to his room, he had stripped down to his underwear and proceeded to get completely soused, his plan being to slit his veins open in the bathtub upon finishing the last bottle, just as the noblest of Romans had done. However, near the end of his third day, something began to bother him. Perhaps it was some vague sense of manly completeness he was after, or, more likely, just plain old revenge, but he suddenly felt the need to lose his virginity before committing himself to the Great Beyond. With a faithfulness that now seemed downright comical, he had kept himself pure for his wedding night, but now there would be no such night. How many times, he drunkenly wondered, as he cracked open another bottle, had that little slut been untrue while he walked around the Kenyon campus at two in the morning with a throbbing pair of blue balls?