Memorial Bridge

by James Carroll

  "I can't say exactly. There are precautions one would take through confinement, watching for swelling and headaches, but once the blood pressure starts to soar, there's nothing we can give her to stop it. We would just have to take the baby, no matter what."

  "That's what I'd want. The baby would never come first."

  "Then don't go to a Catholic hospital, Mr. Dillon. This condition kills women. You could be lucky. Maybe she could get through pregnancy and delivery all right, but I'm telling you she almost died today. Her body threw off the baby to save itself. That could happen again too, preempting us. How would that make her feel? There are, you see, a range of risks. You two will have to decide, that's all."

  "My wife has already decided."

  "That's how she feels today. That's natural. She's a grieving mother. If she still feels that way later..." Dr. Bigelow shrugged. "I just think nature is trying to tell you two something. I think you should listen."

  "I'm listening to you, Doctor. I have to listen to my wife too."

  "She's devastated. It's natural. You are too, I think."

  "Not like Cass is."

  "Well, no, of course not. The woman bears the brunt."

  Bears the child, Dillon heard him say. But he hadn't.

  Cass was asleep, so Dillon went downtown. The briefing had occurred and the surveillance teams were set; there was nothing to do. He returned to the hospital. It was after midnight when he slipped into her room, intending just to sit with her, to watch her sleep.

  But at once she opened her eyes.

  "Did you talk to the doctor?"

  "Yes."

  "I've been thinking about it, Sean, and I want you to know how I feel."

  "Cass, we—"

  "No, listen!"

  When he took her hand, she squeezed it hard.

  "If it's God's will, we're going to have a baby, Sean. That's all."

  God's will? Dillon was confused. If God's will is awful, whose fault is it?

  Ten

  The encumbrance of their love took Cass by surprise as much as Sean. She had never thought of herself as a needy person. Quite the opposite. But after the baby, feelings of competence and independence were like rumors to her of the person she had been. The isolation of her life in Washington became intolerable in large part because, to her, that isolation had caused the loss. Not that she blamed Sean, when she was rational, and not that there was anything to do about it while the war continued. Cass told herself to relax, and eventually, in a way, she did.

  When Sean came home, usually she was already in bed, and they still made love occasionally, she nestling into him groggily, the way she always had. But sex was different too; how could it not be? Though she never said as much, she was afraid of it now, not of his body, but of her own. This was what Sean was incapable of understanding—that if she had stopped trusting anyone, it was herself. Whether she trusted him or not was no longer relevant. And so, of course, the act itself, which once had seemed simple and natural, had become a matter of her wincing and him withholding his weight, as if he expected her to break when he pushed in. She didn't know, in those first months after the baby, what frightened her more, the thought of getting pregnant or the thought of not.

  The baby died in February. Cass became pregnant again the following August. Her mother came from Chicago, and Cass went to bed in October and stayed there. At last she let herself go, falling back into the feeling that someone was there to catch her.

  During that winter and spring, the very world seemed blessed, for the war too came to its head. In early April Cass gave birth to a nearly full-term son. Once more her blood pressure shot up, and once more there was an air of emergency about the delivery. But the doctors were ready this time. They performed an immediate cesarean. Still, nothing they did while she was in conscious distress mitigated the certainty she had, at the moment of going under the anaesthesia, that she was about to die. When she came to, and Sean himself was there to put the healthy baby into her arms, she just cried and cried.

  He said to her, about their baby, words she would always remember: "Darling, we have a perfect son." He kissed her. And then, as if he knew all about the terror she'd thought her secret, her private failure, he said, "And you never have to do this again. I won't let you. You are too precious to me." And in reply, all that she could do was squeeze his hand and sob.

  President Roosevelt died, but so did Hitler, and just this week the war in Europe ended.

  Now the Dillons had come to the crypt-church of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, the half-finished basilica on top of Washington's tallest hill in far Northeast. Cass had been the one to want the baptism here, as a gesture of thanksgiving to the Blessed Mother. During her sojourn in Washington, the Shrine had been a place to which she'd go for solace, and she'd never failed to find it. Now more than ever—she was a mother!—she felt a bond with Mary.

  Construction of the Shrine had been discontinued at the beginning of the war, and all it really consisted of was the largest untopped basement in the city. The crypt, even with its unclad stonework and awkward bulking exterior, was nevertheless a point of reference for Cass. The various stone rooms, windowless and cool, linked by raw concrete corridors like catacombs, evoked an air of secrecy that she had learned to associate with the Church's age of glory, but which also gave form to feelings she had about herself in an alien city. The barrel-vaulted chapel itself, illuminated only by candles or the pseudo-candles of dim electric light fixtures, made her want to bow from the waist.

  Sean stood by Cass at the baptismal font. Behind him were Mike Packard and his wife Ellie. They looked ill at ease. The light of votive candles flickered on the walls. Cass was holding the baby. She wore brown gloves, a stylish yellow suit and a broad-brimmed hat with a lace veil pinned up into the silk band. Even to those who did not know her well, like the Packards, she seemed a woman who had her happiness back.

  Beside her were her mother and, just in from Chicago, her Aunt Flo and Molly. At eighteen, Molly had grown into a striking young woman. She was about to graduate from high school and start a job at Bell, indeed as an operator at Cass's old Switchboards Building. The limit of Molly's ambition was to be like her cousin, but Cass was crushed that Molly was not going to college. Instead of disapproving of her, though, Cass had chosen that moment of letdown to ask Molly to be the godmother of their new baby.

  "What name do you give your child?" the priest asked with ritual solemnity. He was Monsignor Barry, the famous rector of the Shrine. Cass regarded it as an honor that he had assigned himself to this christening, instead of one of the assistants.

  Cass and Sean exchanged a look. The name of their baby was a grave matter to them. Sean had been the one to suggest it, but Cass had wanted it as much as he.

  Sean answered firmly, "Richard."

  In memory of Doc Riley, the only Richard they both knew.

  Cass and Sean were not the same people who had left Chicago nearly five years before, but in that way they were like most Americans. Their own odyssey was a personal version of what the whole nation had undergone. Those five years, more than any other half-decade in the entire century, altered the meaning and the feel of life in their country. It would never be as hard as it had been, perhaps, but neither would it be as simple.

  Sean had made a new place for himself in the work he did. With the Sylvia Yergin operation, he'd enabled the Bureau to play a real part in the most important maneuver of the war, for on D day a full third of Hitler's infantry and a quarter of his panzer force were still uselessly deployed in the Danube Basin. By now Dillon was the deputy assistant director for counterintelligence, an extraordinary position for a man in the Bureau only five years. Since shortly after D day, most of a year before, Dillon had been one of a few top agents supervising the transition of counterintelligence focus from the Nazis to the Soviets. The FBI director had, of course, been famous for hostility to Communists since his days as an assistant to the notorious Red-baiting Attorney General
Palmer, but that was before Stalingrad. Everyone knew that without the Russians, the Allies would have lost. For years, therefore, the Reds had had free run of Washington and, though no one knew it or had even heard of the place yet, free run of a desert town called Los Alamos. It was a counterspy nightmare now to track and plot their multipronged penetration, not to mention trying to devise ways to undo it. In those weeks after the Red Army and the GIs met up at the Elbe River, it was far from clear that they were not going to turn their weapons on each other. Washington, having hardly caught its breath after Hitler, was bracing for what Forrestal called "a new barbarian invasion of Europe." One war was only half finished, but Dillon and others like him were already preparing to fight another.

  Richard had not protested when Monsignor Barry, using the classic golden scallop shell, splashed his forehead with holy water, but no sooner was the ceremony finished than he began to cry loudly. His complaint echoed in the vaulted chapel, and it was Sean who took him.

  Sean loved the way his son fit the crook of his arm like a football. All during Cass's pregnancy, he had anticipated this baby's coming as if it would be an event belonging primarily to her. The obvious and powerful fact that the baby was growing inside Cass had made Sean feel that his relationship to the born child, and the born child's to him, would be equally indirect and abstract. But the birth had jolted him. Whatever the baby meant to his wife, to Sean the baby was the answer to a question he hadn't even known he was asking. The living baby, so physical in its demands, so absolute in its presence, filled up a hole in Sean's heart that he had never admitted having. Now, swinging the baby in the cradle of his arm, Sean felt that happiness again, and it redoubled when Richard's wailing quieted, and peace came over him. What Sean loved most was the simplicity of the baby's needs, and the ease with which he and Cass could meet them. The miracle to Dillon was that his presence soothed, and his arm cuddled, and his love registered as welcome. Dillon was in no way prepared, in other words, for the connection he felt to his son, how it transformed him too. What a surprise to discover in the same moment—a birth—both his huge, unanticipated need as a man and the one thing that could fill it.

  "You doll," he said aloud, his face just above the baby's. Dillon was sure Richard knew him for his father. They were in the corner of the chapel, near a rack of votive lights. The others were chatting quietly at the baptismal font while the priest put away the paraphernalia.

  Dillon became aware of someone on the other side of him. He brought his face up from his baby's and turned. A man beyond the last pew began to walk away. His body jerked awkwardly as he pressed the weight of each step down onto the handle of a cane. The sound echoed, the click, click, clicking of his wooden leg.

  "I'm so sorry," Randall Crocker said when Sean had caught up with him in the next cavernous hall, a memorial room on the stone walls of which workers had begun chiseling the names of benefactors' beloved dead. "The last thing I intended was to intrude."

  "Not at all, Mr. Crocker. Are you here because of us?"

  Randall Crocker had never been in the Catholic basilica before. "Because of your baby," he said simply. Dillon was still carrying Richard, and Crocker slid his forefinger inside the curl of the infant's fist. "I had to see him."

  "I would have invited you."

  "I was going to wait outside, to greet you when you came out, but I couldn't resist." Crocker smiled warmly.

  Dillon, in an unprecedented gesture, put his hand on the older man's arm.

  Cass joined them. Everyone else had remained in the chapel.

  "This is my wife, sir. Cass, this is Mr. Crocker."

  "Hello, Mrs. Dillon. Forgive me. You must think me awfully rude." Despite his lameness, Crocker greeted Cass with a slight bow that was graceful beyond anything she was accustomed to. He held on to her fingertips while he said, "When I learned of your child"—he inclined toward Richard again—"I was entirely happy for you."

  "You wrote to me last year..."

  "Yes, I did. I was so very sorry."

  Even now, when she thought of that other baby, her eyes burned. All she could think to say was, "A beautiful, beautiful letter, Mr. Crocker."

  Now it was Crocker who touched Cass. He would never refer to it, but, looking at her face just then, he knew very well what had compelled him to come here.

  He knew why he had continued to feel so close to Dillon even after they'd wound up the Lothrop case, why he'd kept himself informed about Dillon's climb in the Bureau hierarchy and why, when he'd learned that Dillon's wife was pregnant again, he'd asked his secretary to keep track of her due date.

  "If I may say so, your son is beautiful."

  Cass leaned to kiss Richard. Crocker was pleased to see her happiness, but he was in no way ready for it when she swung back up toward him, saying, "I remember that you have a son."

  Crocker looked away.

  Sean's heart sank at the flash of pain he saw in Crocker's face. "Mr. Crocker has a son in the army."

  The silence betrayed them. Crocker stared off at the shadowy near wall, the names of the dead.

  The baby broke them free by beginning to cry. Cass automatically took him back from Sean, and Richard became quiet again, nestling on his mother's heart. Cass asked directly and simply, "Is your son all right, Mr. Crocker?"

  His pain was long since fused into place. It wasn't himself he was thinking of, but them. How he hated to have intruded like this, but Crocker was incapable of the greater offense it would be now to deflect these two good people. "My son was killed in February. There was a battle for a bridge on the Rhine. My son was one of the first Americans across the river."

  "Oh," Sean said, a gasp. Then, "I remember when he came through Omaha Beach all right."

  Crocker nodded. "If we made a mistake, it was in thinking that by surviving D day, he had survived. Strange, isn't it? How we arrange our perceptions according to little check-off boxes in our minds that have nothing to do with reality."

  Tears had come into Cass's eyes, even as she pressed her infant child closer. "I am so sorry, Mr. Crocker."

  "Thank you." Crocker swung toward Dillon. "You look awfully well, Sean." Then he lifted his eyes toward the low ceiling. "Are we allowed to talk in here?"

  "You mean is it secure?" Sean grinned.

  "No, is it respectful." But Crocker was grinning too.

  "Come back with us to our apartment," Cass said. "We have a ham."

  "I wish I could, but thank you." He leaned and kissed the baby, a farewell. Then he said to Dillon, "I have something in the car. Could you walk out with me?"

  "Certainly."

  "Goodbye, Mrs. Dillon. I'm very happy for you."

  Cass dammed the corner of her eye with her gloved knuckle. "Could I write to Mrs. Crocker?"

  "My dear wife died many years ago. That's why I'm a man with no manners. My Hillary would be horrified at my showing up uninvited like this. But at least I brought something."

  "Could I come out with you?"

  "Of course, but I"—Crocker looked toward the chapel—"I hate to take you—"

  "It's all right." Cass glanced back quickly. Her aunt and mother were laughing at something the monsignor had said.

  They left the hall and took the stairs up to the street. Crocker's car, a big black Chrysler, was by the curb near the entrance. His driver had been leaning against the front fender, enjoying the bright afternoon. When he saw his boss, he dropped his cigarette, moved to the door and opened it. Crocker retrieved from the seat a package wrapped in silver paper tied with white ribbon. He turned back to the Dillons with it.

  The driver moved away discreetly.

  "I hope this is all right." He gave it to Cass, whose hand dropped with the unexpected weight.

  "May we open it?" Cass gave it over to Sean, who unwrapped it.

  A black leather-bound Bible, a new one, with gold-leafed pages, a far finer edition than either Cass or Sean had ever held. Sean opened it and saw that the registry page had been filled out in formal Gothic
script: his name, Cass's, Richard's and the date, May 19,1945.

  "It's beautiful," Sean said.

  "It's the Douay-Rheims version," Crocker said, "which I'm told is the preferred translation." He meant for Catholics, and Sean knew it. The man had thought of everything. "In my family," Crocker added, "everyone gets his Bible at his christening."

  Cass impulsively stepped forward and kissed his cheek, an act which parted the curtains on all her lost affection. Jostling her baby made him cry. She managed to say, "I should feed him," then turned and almost ran back into the hulking unfinished church.

  The two men stood looking at the door into which she had disappeared.

  "I apologize," Crocker said at last, "for intruding with my personal circumstances. I'm not myself."

  "But your coming here honors us, sir."

  "I've upset your wife."

  "No, it's a confusing time. The baby, and our other baby, and her mother and aunt ... Cass's feelings are all jumbled up, I guess."

  "I think the women have a lot more to handle than we men do." Crocker flashed his kindly smile. "We take care of the world. They take care of the people who live in it."

  Dillon sensed what a façade Crocker's equanimity was. Crocker might admit to stress or fatigue, but he would not show it. He had himself, even his grief, perfectly under control, and he would until one day he simply died. The compensating fitness of a crippled man.

  "Do you know what I think?" Crocker took a step back toward his car, his leg clicking. Dillon realized that he often covered that sound by talking over it. "I think we're all damn near shot with this war." He slammed the flat of his hand against his car. "This goddamned war which has left Europe a charnel house! The dead! Christ, you wouldn't believe the dead! Now that it's over we're beginning to see what it's been."