Dress Gray

by Lucian K. Truscott

  Samantha Hand walked slowly toward Irit and took her by the arm. Her hand seemed frail, bony. Wordlessly they walked to the house. Inside, it was dark and cool, the windows shaded outside by huge oaks, fans stirring the air slowly within the house, drawing cool air from somewhere and circulating it through the rooms on the first floor.

  “Where is he?” Samantha asked without emotion. “I’ll call.” Irit gave her the number, and Samantha dialed the telephone, asking the desk for Slaight’s room. He picked up.

  “Ry, it’s Samantha. I’m sorry. Irit is here, and she has told me. She seems like a wonderful person. I’m glad she came with you. I would never have seen you otherwise. Please. Come over. Have you had breakfast? Come then. We’ll eat, and we can talk.”

  Samantha led the way to a terrace behind the house. The leafy foliage of giant rosebush thickly entwined a latticework gazebo. Samantha told a servant to show Slaight to the terrace when he arrived. The two women drank tea and talked of the weather as they awaited Slaight’s arrival. He was there within a few minutes. The former lovers greeted each other awkwardly and sat down across the table from one another. Irit offered to leave, but Ry held her hand, and Samantha asked her to stay. She seemed a steadying influence in a scene that needed one.

  It took Ry an hour to outline the events of the past few days, including his knowledge of the real autopsy, the existence of two “official” autopsies, his meetings with Major Consor, the commandant, and the sergeant major. The details were quickly drawn and to the point. David Hand was murdered. The doctor was convinced of it. The sergeant major suspected it. The commandant appeared to be eager to keep it quiet, having offered to buy off Slaight with a battalion command. There was a great deal of intelligence data on the case, the contents of which Slaight did not know. The Pentagon was somehow involved. What, Slaight wanted to know, had the family been told?

  “We were told it was an accidental drowning,” said Samantha Hand. “We were given no other details. The entire matter was handled very quietly and hurriedly by the authorities at the academy. My father took the superintendent at his word. David was interred without an autopsy here. The academy never informed us that an autopsy had been performed. This is the first I have heard about an official autopsy. Ry … I am sorry about my letter. I was distressed. It was just that … well … it was like I told you in the letter. My brother was obsessed by you. The obsession went back to when you were his squad leader during Beast Barracks. He wrote me in Paris during that time. And it never stopped. I often wondered. What had happened between you two that he would suffer such an obsession? I never told him about you and me. Never. Not before he went to West Point, and never afterward by mail from Paris. His obsession seemed to come from nowhere.”

  “It hardly came from nowhere, Samantha. It came from me. That’s the other thing I came down here to tell you about. Beast Barracks.” Slaight spelled out the story of David Hand during Beast Barracks in equally abrupt, concise detail. Samantha nodded her head once or twice, as if to agree, or to acknowledge something she already knew. When Slaight was finished, she sighed deeply.

  “I didn’t know all of it … not like that … but it sounds so much like him. Like what he would do. He was that way in high school. Headstrong. Impossible in many ways. My father was desperately opposed to his going to West Point. He is on the Board of Trustees at Tulane, and he wanted David to follow in his footsteps. David wouldn’t listen. My mother, on the other hand, was completely romanced by the idea of the academy. It appealed to her sense of patriotism, all those young men in their uniforms with their stiff white trousers and their full, proud chests. I guess, being from the South, she envisioned scenes of lawn parties with great tents spread over acres and acres of grass, girls in long flowing gowns moving soundlessly about, the tinkling of ice in crystal cups filled with punch, the sounds of a band playing a fox trot somewhere at the edge of the crowds of cadets…. They were at such complete odds with one another over David and West Point, I didn’t know what to do. I of course knew that West Point was nothing like my mother envisioned it … nothing like David envisioned it, for that matter. But my mother had violently opposed my going North to Vassar. She wanted me to attend a local girls’ school—a finishing school more than a college. And it was my father who gave his approval to Vassar. So I could not bring myself to come between them. I felt I had only one choice, and that was to stay out of the whole thing and let David make up his own mind. For whatever reasons of his own, he chose West Point. I never really understood why. I never asked. I accompanied him to West Point for the first day of Beast. I watched them march out to Trophy Point that afternoon to take the oath. I watched them march back to the barracks. The next day, I left by air for Paris. A week later, I learned you were his squad leader. You can imagine my shock!”

  “Well, you can’t imagine mine. One chance out of thirteen hundred, and I got him.”

  “Yes. And you ‘broke him,’ as you say. That must explain why he continued to follow you around the academy. He did, you know. He reported to me your every move. Everything.”

  “I didn’t know that. I never saw him again, after that last morning in Beast. Never heard anything about him, either. Not until that day on the area, when I was told he was … dead.”

  “David made it sound in his letters as if you two had become friends … of a rather distant sort. He made it sound like you confided in him from time to time. He always knew what you were up to. I found out about Irit within a week of your return to West Point in September of 1967. By Christmas, I felt as if I knew her. David must have spent half his free time spying on you, Ry. It’s all very strange. Very, very strange.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But he always lived in a fantasy world. He loved books and movies. In high school, he was completely wrapped up in the Thespians, and after school hours, with one of the local little theater groups. He was always dreaming. I think becoming a cadet … the army … it was just one more of his dreams. But the dream was bigger than he could have known this time. He was just a child. He had no way of knowing….”

  “He was more than just a child, Samantha.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “It’s the last thing I came down here to tell you. I wouldn’t tell you, but I’m convinced—and so is Dr. Consor—that this had something to do with his murder. I’m really sorry, Samantha …”

  “Ry. What is it?”

  “Did you know that your brother was a homosexual?”

  “That’s a lie! A despicable lie!”

  “It was part of the doctor’s findings in the autopsy, Samantha. I don’t want to go into the details, but the doctor found that your brother had had sex immediately before death. He had sex with another man.”

  “No.”

  “Samantha. I’m not lying to you. I’ve told you everything I know about your brother. Everything that went down between me and him. Now I’ve got to tell you this, because the doctor is certain, and I am certain, that the man with whom your brother had sex murdered him. He’s the guy we’re looking for. That’s what it comes down to, grim as it is. But it’s the truth.”

  Samantha stared blankly across the garden for a few moments before speaking. When she finally spoke, her voice was measured, firmly in control.

  “You are a contemptible whore, Ry Slaight. I knew the moment I agreed to see you that you would do nothing but cause more grief, more suffering. What is it about you? Why must you prey on me and my family like this?”

  “I didn’t come down here to … prey, Samantha. I knew I would cause grief. It wasn’t easy for me. If you won’t believe me, ask Irit.”

  Samantha Hand turned slowly and faced Irit. Tears dribbled down her cheeks. Their eyes met, and Irit simply nodded. Samantha faced Slaight.

  “It’s none of your fucking business, Ry.” She spoke rapidly, and the words came from deep within her chest, a rumble of anger and frustration.

  “I know, but….”

  “You’re always s
aying, ‘I know.’ Well, fuck you and all you know.”

  “Samantha …”

  “It isn’t doing me, or my family, or even you any good, all this you say you ‘know.’” She spat the word at him.

  “Goddammit, I didn’t come down here to do you or anybody else any good.” Slaight stood up from the table, pacing the concrete deck of the gazebo.

  “You wrote me a letter. You figured your brother was murdered. You said I had something to do with it. You told me I had something to do with the fucking war in Vietnam one day, too. Remember?” He glared at her, leaning forward, hands on the table, his face a foot from hers.

  “Remember that day? Well, fuck you and all you ‘know’ about that war, Samantha Hand. You and that bunch of overfed cunts from Vassar can take your bullshit about the war someplace else. Why don’t you demonstrate over at Yale? Ever think about that? Shit. A flower and a leaflet will get you laid at Yale. Those fuckin’ guys will end up buying and selling slots in line units in Nam, sister. One year from now, they’ll be trading stocks down on Wall Street. They’ll be trading blood stocks. They won’t have to watch the war on TV. They’ll see it every day on the broad tape, in numbers. All the companies that are feeding off that fucking war like a bunch of pigs at a trough. So fuck you and your uppity crap about me and West Point and the army and Vietnam. I don’t need it.”

  “Ry …”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Ry …”

  “I said fuck you.”

  “Ry. Wait.” The voice was Irit’s. Slaight stopped at the bottom of the steps to the gazebo. Samantha was standing, her head erect and proud. Irit stood next to her. Samantha spoke.

  “I didn’t mean to …”

  “You didn’t mean shit. You say you wanna know who killed your brother. So do I. You got your reasons. I got mine. I didn’t come down here to haunt you, or harass you. I came down because I need your help. You help me, and we’ll nail the son of a bitch who killed your brother. You take a walk now, and those fuckers at West Point will bury your brother but good. They’re runnin’ scared, Samantha. I don’t know from what, or why, but they’re runnin’. And they’re coverin’ their tracks as they go. You wanna help me nail your brother’s killer, talk If not, we’ll be on our way.”

  The three of them stood for a moment like cast-iron statues in the heat. Then Samantha sat down, Irit with her. Slaight returned to his chair and sipped his drink.

  “Okay, Ry.” Samantha stared across the garden. Her eyes were glazed. Her face was thin, drawn tight, brittle, like expensive porcelain.

  “You have no business knowing this, Ry.” She looked him in the eye for the first time all morning. “But you know everything else. You may as well know David the way I knew him.”

  Slowly at first, with the cultured broad-A tones spoken by natives of New Orleans, she talked about her brother, her family, and the city of New Orleans. They seemed tightly entwined, like the vine covering the gazebo. Slaight found the story fascinating. Irit found it chilling, uniquely American, like the late movies he always wanted to watch on television.

  David Hand had been valedictorian of his high school class. He was captain of the debate team, a contender for the state debate championship, president of the school’s Honor Society. He was president of the Key Club, the high school adjunct to the local Kiwanis. He often traveled to small towns near New Orleans to address Kiwanis luncheons.

  “He was popular, Ry,” said Samantha, hoping the word meant as much where Slaight came from as it did in New Orleans. It did. “David seemed to float through high school in an air-conditioned sphere of adulation and quick, easy fame. There was only one thing more beautiful, more perfect than the whole social scene we came from. David. And he knew it. He was like Troy Donahue in A Summer Place. Nobody noticed life wasn’t a movie. No one cared. He was too perfect, and they cherished him for it. They used him like a mirror. They all wanted to see something of themselves in him, and he knew it. He must have used you the same way, Ry. That would explain his letters, the way he followed you, watching you, admiring you.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” said Slaight, waiting for Samantha to continue. She spoke haltingly at first, picking up speed as her memory poured out, a catharsis interrupted only by the insistent buzzing of bees around the gazebo. Slaight listened quietly. Irit gripped his hand beneath the table.

  The town fathers were proud of young David Hand. When they lunched at Anthony’s they clapped the senior Hand on the back and told him the town, hell, the whole nation had a future leader in young David. He was a youngster they could all be proud of. When they learned he was going to West Point, not to Tulane, his father’s alma mater, the news failed to dim enthusiasm for David Hand. He would bring honor to New Orleans no matter where he went to school.

  Samantha explained that her father had remained deeply perturbed by David’s unexpected decision to go North to West Point. His displeasure had nothing to do with his politics, which were sufficiently conservative that beating the commies over in Vietnam seemed one hell of a good idea. He just didn’t want his boy David becoming a statistic before he had a chance to … make his mark. The very idea of the Military Academy displeased the elder Hand. It was almost like entering the seminary. You were locked up for a long time, four years, and when they let you out, the army still had you for five years’ active duty. An eighteen-year-old boy making a commitment like that! By the time his son had completed his obligation, he’d be married with a couple of kids, William Hand decided. An army career would be almost irresistible under those conditions. Even the prospect of inheriting Anthony’s, the finest restaurant in the French Quarter, would probably fail to lure his son from the army. He was too damn headstrong. Once he made up his mind, he’d never change it.

  William Hand had spent his whole life changing. He’d come up the hard way. His father had been a waiter at Anthony’s. The job had provided the family enough money to own a house, and to send William to Tulane, the university across town, across Canal Street, over near Audubon Park lazily scattered among the trees and grass and wide boulevards that didn’t exist in the Quarter. Tulane was to have been William Hand’s way out, and it was. He took a job with a bank downtown and rose to assistant manager. With a keen eye, he watched the real estate market. One day he withdrew all his savings and invested in a big piece of swampland not far outside town, a place no one figured would ever go anyplace. William Hand knew better.

  New Orleans reached the edges of its natural boundaries—the river to the south, west, and east, Lake Pontchartrain to the north. The peninsula of delta landfill which for two hundred years had contained the city of New Orleans was full. The city needed a place to spread. It needed suburbs. Those suburbs would become known as Fat City, the place people moved to when they left the Quarter and the grubby low-rent districts bordering the river. Fat City was William Hand’s swampland. He cleaned up. At thirty-five, in 1945, he bought Anthony’s where his father still waited tables. His father retired to a house in Fat City. In 1946 William Hand married Rosemary Bonaparte, the daughter of one of the wealthiest oilmen on the Mississippi Delta.

  Such a marriage was not socially out of order in New Orleans, Samantha explained. The city took the lavish spectacle of the son of an Anthony’s waiter marrying the daughter of Francis E. Bonaparte in its stride. It was part of Louisiana history, part of state pride, that the blood of disparate families mixed like silt in the waters of the Mississippi. Everybody knew the silt was there in the river, because it was deposited daily on the constantly shifting islands and backwaters and sloughs which were the Mississippi delta. But in the water, Mississippi silt was invisible. The water was muddy, and so were the histories of the families which had settled the only state in the Union with civil codes based in French law, instead of British law, like the other forty-nine. In New Orleans it seemed everyone was related in one way or another. The city rested, William Hand often told his daughter when she was old enough to understand, not on landfill, but on a quicksand of
family ties which depended on a peculiar gentlemanly form of blackmail for cohesion. In New Orleans you collected information on your fellows the way you deposited your money in a bank. You were what you knew.

  William Hand wanted his son to inherit Anthony’s. It was a matter of family pride. Samantha knew from the time she was a little girl that restaurants in New Orleans were a man’s business. Food was taken too seriously to be left to women. Because of the machismo surrounding her life in New Orleans, which naturally included the restaurant she knew she would never inherit, Samantha decided to go North to Vassar. She didn’t want to become another of the frail New Orleans blossoms that passed for girls in her high school class. Like her mother had been brought up, they were being trained for a different kind of success. In New Orleans women didn’t inherit businesses, they inherited men. Samantha didn’t want any part of it. She left in 1965 for Vassar.

  Her father could never figure out his own son. The boy was smart. That much had been confirmed many times over. He was headstrong, too … headstrong like his mother, a woman who masked a considerable will behind the floral flounce of New Orleans femininity. Samantha knew—or sensed, really—it depressed her father that everything about her brother had come from her mother’s side of the family. He had her handsome yet soft facial features, skin that looked so moist it seemed to be thinly coated with honey. He had his mother’s soft pale blue eyes, and her wispy, chocolate brown hair. When David spoke, you could hear the elegant, leisurely tones of his mother’s voice in the ebb and flow of his words. He talked the way the Mississippi moved, with an inexorable certainty, slowly, self-confidently, as if speech had been not a gift of God but a right, something which ran in his blood at birth.

  Samantha said David wasn’t just impressive in high school. He was downright precocious. Once, when she was home from Vassar for Christmas, her father had gotten drunk and told her late at night, the boy is possessed.