The Perfection of Valor

By Bob Mustin

Colonel Fletcher Hinton, USMC, Retired, has had a storied career, but one aspect of his life remains wanting as his end approaches: family. Son Cary, a former Marine and now a college professor, is about to marry outside his race, and the old man, suffering a bout of dementia, insults Cary's fiancee. Too, Cary has moved his mother away from

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gridley Fires Books
• Release date: Mar 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781642550931

Bob Mustin

Bob Mustin has had a brief Naval career and a longer one as a civil engineer. In the 1990s he was the editor of a Georgia-based literary journal, The Rural Sophisticate, and was later a North Carolina Writer's Network Writer in Residence at Peace College in Raleigh.

Book preview

6:30 a.m.

Wedding days are supposed to be sunny occasions, promising reprieve from all lurking storms, but Cary Hinton’s wedding day began with no such assurance. He swiped at his clock radio’s off button, missed, and fell back into his pillow. The deejay’s perky talk drifted away as a song from Cary’s youth began: Just Remember I Love You. Its sentimental but somewhat gloomy lyrics pushed him deeper into the unease that had crept into his sleep, a state that had little to do with fiancée Cornelia.

He rolled to the bed’s edge and sat. His eyelids fluttered and again closed, but sleep wasn’t to return now. Instead, memories, decades of family baggage forced themselves on him. His and sister Marge’s difficult childhood. Marge’s recent death, courtesy of a naval mishap. For a moment, mother Betsy’s image scrolled past, followed by the daunting essence of the father, Marine Corps Colonel Fletcher Hinton, retired.

That last image drove away the remains of Cary’s torpor. He stood beneath the bedroom’s overhead air duct, turned beneath the hissing stream as if it were a shower, and he sang an atonal accompaniment to the song’s second verse. Then he backed away from the airflow and rubbed cold prickles from his forearms. His next back-step sent a stack of papers fluttering, and he fell onto the bed with a grunt.

A week earlier, he’d placed the scholarly papers beside his bed, intending to read them before the wedding. He hadn’t, of course; school’s advent and the onrush of wedding preparations hadn’t allowed time for literary theory. He dropped to his knees, shuffled the papers into an ordered stack, and pressed them with great care against the baseboard trim. The song’s final, repetitive chorus came and went, as did the brief, descending sax and guitar riff. Another song began without interruption.

The room seemed overly muggy. He reached behind the venetian blinds and slid open the room’s broad, chest-high window. The hot, humid air of late August gushed in, the temperature outside already nearing eighty. He shut the window and made his way to the bathroom.

Returning moments later, he stopped. A radio news bulletin described the progress of a hurricane he’d been hearing about for days, the Atlantic’s eleventh storm of the year, Katrina. It had surged across Florida, departing as a category one storm, had regained strength in the Gulf of Mexico, and had risen to category five – one of the strongest on record. If this intensity held, it would pound the Gulf Coast with two hundred mile per hour winds and a thirty-foot storm surge. He turned up the volume and closed his eyes. The day before, the storm had curled into a path roughly parallel to the Gulf Coast; meteorologists could only predict it would reach landfall somewhere between Mobile and Galveston. The music resumed.

Centenary College, where Cary held a professorship in English literature, was in the throes of its fall semester’s normal bumpy start. That the honeymoon would cost him a ten-day absence from his classroom routine had already unnerved him, and the storm bearing down on the Gulf Coast was pulling him away from both the classroom and his wedding. Cornelia and the Barber family were New Orleans natives. She was Neely to them, a diminutive Cary couldn’t bring himself to use. Her parents had arrived for the wedding the previous afternoon, and while they hadn’t voiced concerns, he knew the storm had them worried.

Well. It was his wedding day. He needed to stay focused. That was what the colonel would have advised, were he still of completely sound mind. Not that Cary had ever placed much value in his father’s counsel. The old man was everything Cary had grown to consider anathema – the epitome of military attitude and bearing.

During Cary’s teen years, the colonel, fresh from a deployment, would stride into the family’s quarters, kiss wife Betsy, and begin a rapid-fire interrogation of Cary and Marge, searching out adolescent malfeasance. Your hair’s too long, he would bark at Cary. Get it cut. He would eye Marge, then turn to Betsy. Get her some new jeans. Those are too tight. And I won’t have a daughter of mine wearing pants with the knees in tatters.

Betsy had quietly and evenly enforced the colonel’s mandates during his absences. Cary always acquiesced to his father’s demands, but he promised himself early on that he would reject the Marine Corps career he knew was expected of him. Still, he now had to admit, his father’s searing discipline had a shaping influence on his life. Despite Cary’s six-five height and reed-thin teenage build, he’d projected a toughness in high school other boys his age had come to respect. He came away from varsity basketball games bruised, mouth bloody, never backing away from the half-naked, sweat-drenched intensity of the games.

True, the family discipline Cary had been trained to had helped him thrive at Quantico and during the four Corps years the colonel had all but forced on him. Cary’s Marine quadrennium had included a tour of duty in Beirut during the 1983 stage of the Lebanese Civil War, a tour of duty that had pleased the colonel mightily. And that toughness had also buttressed him against the colonel’s rants and threats when Cary announced his decision to leave the Corps. After the dust settled over resigning his commission, the Hinton stick-to-itiveness impelled him through graduate school, then sustained more than a decade of imparting the finer points of English literature to flock after flock of easily bored students. Now he had to put that discipline to work in navigating the diciest of tasks: introducing Cornelia to the old man.

The phone rang. He turned off the radio and answered.

Are you up?

He couldn’t help smiling at Cornelia’s vivacious tone. He waited a moment, savoring the echo of her words, and replied, Are you kidding? You think I could sleep in today?

You’ll be here when?

Her attempt at officiousness parodied the stern pose Cary assumed on campus, his professorial persona an ongoing joke between them. His smile broadened. Give me thirty minutes.

He made a mental note to call Luke – he needed to assure himself that his best man hadn’t forgotten the wedding time and chapel arrangements – but that could wait a few more hours. He lifted the tuxedo from a hook behind the bedroom door, stripped away the plastic, and held the suit to an overhead light. He brushed its fabric with his free hand, re-hung it, and chose a workaday suit from his closet. The remainder of the clothing he needed, including a starched white shirt, lay in his only other piece of bedroom furniture, a chest of drawers. A mote of laughter rumbled up as he selected items from the chest. Wearing a suit on a day off. What a creature of habit I am.

His smile fell to a glum stare at the carpet. The colonel had bred his son to such routine. A disciplined routine produces excellence – that was the old man’s constant declaration. A surge of anger warmed Cary’s cheeks. His Spartan upbringing wasn’t proper mental fodder for a wedding day, nor was the emotional distance he’d always kept between himself and the old man.

Then the song crept in again. He tugged on his socks, grabbled for a belt and tie on a near-inaccessible inch of his closet’s hanger rod, and toed on a pair of shoes. He began to laugh, loudly this time, for no apparent reason.

Normally, moments of bliss such as this would have left him feeling uneasy and indulgent, and he would have reeled himself back to a more sober frame of mind. Dare, but remain vigilant, that was the old man’s credo, a maxim Cary had changed to live cautiously and vigilantly, lest he let down his guard with the colonel, or with some other authority figure on whom he might project his father’s image. But somehow the prospect of marrying Cornelia had begun to erode such timidity.

He was forty-five now. He’d had his share of romantic involvements, including a pair of called-off engagements, and such disappointments had shaped him into a marital cynic. His one-sixty-something I.Q. had all but guaranteed his undergrad years at UCLA would be a breeze and reinforced the Hinton discipline during post-graduate labors at Cornell and Rutgers, but it proved burdensome where relationships were concerned. Every first date found him searching out mannerisms he could inflate to flaws. Eventually, he quit searching for happiness in romantic encounters. Dating during his first years at Centenary had morphed into the looser convenience of companionship for movies, dining out, and attending university social events, these embellished randomly by casual sex.

Later, he began a slow withdrawal from even that tenuous social life. He spent summers and semester breaks hiking alone in the Southwestern states’ barren expanses. There, solitude would open him to a flood of new insights into his literary texts, this preoccupation helping keep a lurking depression at bay. On hikes he would stop, pull a notebook from his knapsack, and scribble ideas before they could evaporate into the arid landscape. Over time, he began to rely on this Southwestern solitude – a geography and frame of mind that helped ease his emotional ups and downs. He came to relish his time there, free from all encumbrances except his eventual return to Centenary. But these meditative treks never distanced him from a voice whispering of a growing inner void that seemed to mirror the stark landscapes he felt so drawn to.

Then the hollowness filled. Professor Cary Morris Hinton met Cornelia Waller Barber at a faculty meeting during her first week as assistant to the president of the College. The president frowned disapprovingly at their overlong conversation, but Cary asked Cornelia out anyway. Despite an almost two-decade disparity in age, they clicked immediately. Even so, it took him a while to realize it had been that romantic staple, love at first sight.

But soon old misgivings intruded. He considered that his thrall might simply be an overreaction to her attentiveness. Then he wondered whether he was merely lonely, or perhaps desperate enough to rationalize a passing fancy as love. Still, as their months of involvement slipped by, he found himself giving up such intellectualizing, and he surrendered to the new comfort Cornelia brought to his life.

Now, as he snugged his belt and cinched his tie, faces and vignettes from previous relationships returned, quaint as old photographs. He smiled this time at the foibles, the sad, awkward endings. The joke was no longer on him. It was as if life had finally tired of toying with his heart. He whistled as he locked the front door and, suit coat hung over a shoulder by one finger, he clambered into his Toyota 4Runner.

Normally, if traffic was light and he managed mostly green lights, he could make the short drive to Cornelia’s in seven and a half minutes. But today, rush hour traffic stymied his usual lane jockeying, prolonging the drive. Finally, the SUV dipped to a stop at the curb before Cornelia’s condo.

His father’s stern image hit him halfway up the walk. He wanted to turn around and drive home, but he couldn’t; he had to see through this introduction of father and fiancée. As he reached to knock, the door opened, and his foul humor dissipated like a flock of birds before mischievous children.

Cornelia allowed a pecking kiss, then another on her cheek before gently pushing away and giving him a strained smile. What was this? Where was the usual cheery greeting? She’s worried about meeting the old man, he thought. No, more likely protecting her makeup. No big deal. It had been enough to have the tickle of her long black curls against his ear, the touch of her cheek against his lips.

She retreated another step into her living room, hazy sunlight shimmering as it outlined her gray slacks and white, quarter-sleeve top. The smile had now turned faintly wry. Okay, Professor Hinton, one last chance to avoid marriage.

He laughed. His chest began the throbbing he’d never known before her. No way.

A sigh and a grin. Then you’re mine.

But she still wasn’t rising to her usual ebullience. Family issues, that had to be it. Her own family concerns.

Have you talked to your mom and dad this morning? he asked. Janine? Janine her sister, had remained in New Orleans.

Barely perceptible muscular movements deepened her expression. I just got off the phone with Papa. He’s worried about the storm. He wants Janine to leave. For a second, she peered past Cary’s bony shoulders to a southern sky already dull with smog. Then she found her purse and they were off.

Something about having her with him, regardless of her frame of mind, seemed to put a lifetime of difficulties with the colonel into a semblance of perspective. Too, the song was now becoming a pesky presence. He hummed it absently, his fractured version swallowed by the car’s faint baritone growl. At Shreveport’s Inner Loop, he accelerated into thickening traffic.

He felt her gaze on him; the storm was on her mind. He should have given her an opening to vent anxieties, but somehow he couldn’t make himself encourage it. Airing emotions in his family had always been seen as indulgence. Too, taking her to meet the imperious colonel had continued to upset Cary, as he knew it would. But soon he’d be through that. He exhaled, leaned forward, and focused on traffic stripes and concrete lanes. The Loop ended, and he exited north.

You’re taking the long way around? She asked the question absently, as if daydreaming.

He grunted. Despite her worries, she seemed a lot cooler about the coming encounter than he. But then her parents were civilized, social people, not presided over by a barbaric misfit like the colonel. Cary slipped into the right lane and turned.

The urge to abandon this formality, the obligatory introduction of father to fiancée, again overtook him. Anxiety. That’s all it is. We’ll be in and out, and then we’ll have our day. But hunger pangs had also begun to needle. Delay, he thought; get over the jitters. Breakfast would postpone the encounter, but that would be all right. The colonel would still be too addled from his night’s sleep to make a scene over tardiness.

Hungry? he asked. Maybe we should grab a bite.

She’d been frowning, head bowed, but now a slowly fructifying cheerfulness came. Are you stalling? She gave his leg a playful pinch. You are, aren’t you?

His grip on the wheel relaxed. Okay, I’m stalling, he replied. But all of a sudden I’m hungry.

His delay wasn’t completely driven by hunger, nor by dread at standing hand in hand before the colonel with his mocha fiancée. He owed Cornelia something of a confession about his family, about the colonel, actually. And he had to do it before taking her to see the old man.

7:55 a.m.

An IHOP sat at one corner of a shopping center parking lot. Cary jerked the wheel, they flounced into a parking space near the entrance, and moments later were bathed in the delectably greasy