Memorial Bridge

by James Carroll

  "It doesn't feel over to me."

  "Well, of course, with Japan it isn't yet. But the Japs will settle now. They don't want to be ravaged like Germany was. You wouldn't believe what Hitler's done..." Crocker paused, thinking of photographs he'd seen that week of what GIs were finding in the death camps. "I was thinking of Europe."

  "I'm thinking of Europe too. I'm no military man, but I have to admit it looks to me like we should have gone in through the Balkans. Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Rumania, Hungary, Poland, maybe Austria, most of Germany. If this war began when no one challenged Hitler over a few hundred square miles in the Rhineland, what will come of not challenging Stalin over half of Europe?"

  "What do you want us to do, Sean? Set Patton loose?"

  "As I say, I don't know strategy, but I will tell you what I do know." Dillon was aware of the transition they were making, back to the world, away from the people who lived in it, including themselves. "Encrypted cable traffic out of the Soviet embassy on Sixteenth Street, back to Moscow, has increased in volume fiftyfold over the last four weeks. Cipher clerks transmit around the clock now. We can't read it, but it's hard not to think they're clearing the decks. They are sending back everything they can get their hands on. They are still our ally, of course. So all we can do is watch. We're watching them pound stakes down the middle of Europe. And we're watching them loot Washington for information."

  "What else are you seeing?"

  "That isn't enough?"

  "I have the impression there's more."

  "Perhaps I've said too much already, sir."

  "My clearances are in place, Dillon." Crocker's authority thinned the air suddenly.

  "It was the founding meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco last month that started things. The Russians used it as a justification for flooding us with NKVD agents."

  "Beyond the usual delegation?"

  "Twice the usual. They sent men as typists who couldn't type. They sent men as chauffeurs who haven't touched the wheel of an automobile. Every member of their delegation was an agent. The State Department granted their every request: double-length visas, freedom to travel, unrestricted telegraph, accommodations requiring the use of an entire hotel. Claiming some connection to the UN, they applied for and got credentials to triple their staffs in New York and Washington. Eighty-two agents with free access to every point in the country, and they are using it. The UN conference is over for weeks, but none of them have left the country. We have them spotted in Seattle, Atlanta, New Mexico and Maine. They pretend to be sightseeing, although they assume they're being watched and so they make a show of collecting road maps and phone books and photographing National Guard armories and police stations, as if they are after general intelligence."

  "And they're not?"

  "They're doing it so openly that we have to assume they are up to something else. They pretend to be inept, but when they want to shake us they do. The guess is they're making last contacts with members of a deep-cover network already in place, preparing to activate it when the diplomats are expelled if the U.S. and Russia break off relations. They are getting ready for war with us, and the State Department is helping them."

  "The State Department would probably say it is helping them get ready for war with Japan. The Russians have to carry our water in Manchuria, Sean."

  "But why can't we restrict their travel in the U.S.? Why can't we limit their use of transmission cables? Why can't we send their UN delegates home with every other nation's? They're playing us for saps."

  Crocker, who had listened with such sobriety, smiled as he realized that, though he had practically ordered Dillon to brief him, he had played into Dillon's hands. "You're telling me all this for a reason."

  "Just small talk, Mr. Crocker."

  "You want me to go to Stimson."

  Dillon shook his head. "I've heard you're acquainted with the President."

  " 'The President,' to me, is still a phrase that refers to Roosevelt."

  "But you supported Truman when Roosevelt was thinking of naming him vice president. Truman owes you."

  "How do you know that?"

  "Didn't I read it in Time magazine or someplace?"

  "No, Sean, you didn't."

  "My point, sir, is that President Truman should be getting assessments from somebody besides the State Department."

  "J. Edgar is surely making this information available, isn't he?"

  "I'm afraid with Mr. Hoover it's like the boy who cried wolf. He has sounded alarms about the Reds before. This time it's real. They are getting ready for war with us. The cable traffic alone warns of something. Mr. Truman should hear that from somebody besides the Bureau. What is Donovan saying? Or General Strong?"

  "You can imagine what they would say if I went to Truman with intelligence provided by the FBI. I'm War Department, remember? You want me to make war on State. As for Donovan, forget it. His standing depended on FDR. Truman has no use for OSS, not that I did. But it's a disgrace how these generals chew each other up, not to mention the admirals. You've probably heard that General MacArthur refused to allow OSS in his theater, and Truman backed him up. Score one for General Strong. No one is in charge over there. That's the biggest problem we've had in this war, competition between army and navy fiefdoms, all those goddamn geniuses, and intelligence is the worst of the lot, a bunch of hot-rodders, and all they want to do is drag-race with each other. If Truman asked my advice, which he hasn't, I'd tell him to get the whole operation out of the Pentagon altogether, maybe give it to you people, but someone should be in charge. Someone/"

  "It would never be Hoover," Dillon said matter-of-factly. "Not if Truman's doing the appointing. The President has, shall we say, old friends who are old enemies of ours. That's another reason the director can't get Truman's ear on what the Soviets are up to."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Pendergast in Kansas City. Truman's sponsor. He's the one who lined up Frank Hague from Jersey City and Ed Kelly from my own Chicago. Among the three of them Truman was launched. I know how machines like those operate, and they always call in their chits eventually. I make certain assumptions, in other words, even about the President."

  "Truman is a bigger man than that."

  "He is now. Now he's the President. But once he was a ward boss. He's a politician." Dillon didn't bother to hide his disdain.

  Crocker sighed with discouragement. "Well, I'm no politician. I've often thought I should be, that maybe with a little more deviousness and a lot more compromise I could have gotten things to work better where I am. No politicians in the damn army or navy, just virtuous men of principle who refuse to give an inch. Given the crap I've seen flying between the services, we're damn lucky to have beaten Hitler. And don't ever forget something, lad, and if it cost us the Balkans, so be it: we would not have won without Stalin. And we still need him."

  "Was the war worth it, though, if all we've done is replace one monster with another?"

  Crocker shrugged. "Worth it? I can't answer that. I don't know."

  "We should know, Mr. Crocker, with all due respect. Isn't that what government service is about? If we can't justify what's happened, who can? And how do we do that if we lose half of Europe?"

  " 'Government service'? Christ, it seems like years since I heard that phrase."

  "I don't mean to sound pompous."

  "And I don't mean to deflate..." Crocker laughed and slapped Dillon's shoulder. "You remind me of my boy. Did I tell you that? He was a great believer."

  "In what you taught him."

  "I guess that's right. Maybe it's a function of age, though. My brain has more trouble than it used to with the great abstractions, the noble ideas men fight wars over."

  Was that the difference between them? Age? Abstractions? Dillon didn't think so. "In any case, Mr. Crocker, the recent activities of the Soviet diplomats inside the United States are not abstractions. Will you approach the President with what I've told you?"


  "Does Hoover know you're asking me this?"

  "I didn't know myself. Did I know I'd be seeing you?"

  Crocker's silence was pointed, then he said, "It hasn't been announced yet, but Truman is meeting Stalin in two weeks in a suburb of Berlin. It will be a game of bluff, and knowing Harry, he'd like to have an extra card or two to play. He probably hasn't answered Hoover's phone calls because people like me keep telling him the action is all overseas."

  "It isn't, not by a long shot."

  "Can you give me exact numbers and dates on the upswing in cable traffic? Can you give me exact records on the diplomats' travels and a paragraph on what it might mean? And I want you to give me every detail you have on their interest in New Mexico, don't ask me why."

  "I'll have it for you tomorrow. But I have to tell Hoover I'm doing it."

  "He'll object to your going through me."

  "I can handle Mr. Hoover. I just can't do this behind his back. What I hope is that Truman will take what you give him and want to talk to Hoover then."

  "You've been learning how it goes in this city, haven't you?"

  "I've had good teachers, Mr. Crocker."

  "I guess you have." Crocker absently pulled his pipe out of a pocket. In the silence he notched its stem with his thumbnail. Then he said in a more personal tone of voice, "A minute after midnight on V-J day, my suitcase comes down from the shelf in my closet. I'm going back to New York to practice law. Wall Street will seem straightforward and honest after this place." He fussed tobacco into the bowl of his pipe.

  Dillon watched him in silence.

  Crocker went on casually, "What are your plans?"

  "I'm sony, sir?"

  "After the war."

  "Which war? As I was telling you, it seems to some of us another war is almost under way."

  Crocker shook his head. "You have a narrow view. I don't dispute what you report or underestimate its meaning, not at all. But it's only one piece. There are other things you don't know about. We're not going to war with the Soviets. They're destroyed. Their industrial base is gone. And the Japs will settle before the summer is out. The war is over, and we won. We won it all. You can think of yourself for a change." When he noticed Dillon glance back toward the bunker-church, Crocker added, "You can think of them."

  Sean nodded as if he knew only too well.

  "You'd best get back to them." The men shook hands. "File what I'm saying for later. When the war ends I want you to consider coming to work with me."

  "Sir?"

  "At my firm in New York. Crocker, Wells. Look it up."

  Sean did not have to look it up. He found it impossible to answer.

  "It's a new ball game in this country, Sean. The war will at least have done this for us: taught us how to value each other for something besides who our father's tailor was."

  Sean laughed. "My Pa's tailor was Montgomery Ward."

  Crocker squeezed Dillon's hand one final time. "I want you in New York as one of my lawyers."

  "Sir, I..."

  "Just think about it, will you?"

  The word "No" formed itself in his mouth, as his tongue went flat against his upper teeth. But why? "No" was the word around which he had built his life: "No" to Canaryville, "No" to the Church, "No" to Lambert, Rowe in Chicago. To his horror he saw that now his entire future involved a new kind of "No" to Cass. Renunciation, he'd been taught to believe, was the way to salvation.

  But did he believe that now? He didn't want to. No? He threw the word back on itself. "Thank you, sir," he said. "I will think about it. Yes."

  "Are you awake, sweetheart?"

  "Yes, I'm just lying here."

  "Me too."

  "I think I'm waiting for the baby to start again." Gass laughed. "This is one way to avoid being wakened in the night. Just never go to sleep." She turned on her side toward him. When he opened his arm, she went inside. "What about you?"

  "I've been watching the car lights flashing on the ceiling, how they come and go. Like sparrows, I was thinking."

  "Sparrows?"

  "Do you remember Father Ferrick?"

  "At Loyola."

  "He told me a story once about a sparrow's coming into a great hall, flying through it, then going out."

  Cass hadn't a clue what he was talking about. "Are you sure you're awake?"

  He laughed and squeezed her. "I'm a pompous fool, aren't I?"

  "Not pompous."

  But he'd been pompous with Crocker. "I was thinking about the last time I saw my father. It was that morning when he left for work. He had a hard-boiled egg swelling his cheek when he left the kitchen." Dillon took Cass's hand. "But then I stop seeing my father and I see someone else."

  Cass thought he was going to say their little boy. In place of his father, his son.

  But instead he said, "I see Mr. Crocker."

  "In place of your father?"

  "I guess so, yes."

  "Why?"

  "He encouraged me today to think about after the war, what we would do."

  "What do you mean?"

  "If we didn't stay in Washington."

  "Not stay in Washington?" Cass was so surprised she sat up, adjusting her nightgown as she did. In the dark she could not see what was written on his face. "I don't understand."

  "Mr. Crocker offered me a job in his law firm."

  "In Chicago?" Cass grasped Sean's hand with an unprecedented burst of joy, and in those two words the entire landscape of what separated them, a flash in the dark, seemed illuminated.

  Sean pulled his hand back from her, and he sat up too, against the headboard. He leaned across to the bedside table and snapped on the light to wash out what, with stark clarity, each had already seen.

  When he looked at her, she was surprised at how obviously startled he was.

  "Chicago?" he asked. "Who said anything about Chicago?"

  "I thought you did."

  "No, New York. Mr. Crocker's firm is on Wall Street. Wall Street, Cass!"

  "Oh." She was so deflated—and he so charged with pleasure—that she had to face away. Wall Street? How could her Sean have anything to do with Wall Street?

  Perversely, Sean's mind tossed up an image of Sylvia Yergin in that exact posture, that same place on the edge of a bed, the same feeling of disappointment in a thick-skulled man. But Sylvia Yergin was a whore. It shamed him to think of her here. To shut that image off, he touched Cass's shoulder, turning her toward him once more. "You want to go back to Chicago?" he asked with amazement.

  "I wouldn't have ever brought it up to you."

  "But you do?"

  She nodded. Unable to look at him, she dropped her eyes to her hands.

  "God, Cass, I had no idea." He leaned forward and took her in his arms. "Is it your mother's being here, and your Aunt Flo's, that brings this feeling up?" If so, he could understand her emotion, he could outlast it.

  "Yes," Cass shuddered. "They've both gotten so old." Cass hesitated, then felt obliged to add, "But it isn't just them. Even more, it's our baby, Sean. I don't want to raise him here. We're too..." She did not mean to include Sean in her "we," and that, for her, was a summary of the problem. "...alone."

  "But we're not alone. We have friends. What about the Packards?"

  "I love Ellie and Mike, you know I do. But they're Mormons."

  "Mormons! What does that have to do with it?"

  "Nothing! It has nothing to do with it!" She pulled away as her anger flared. "You asked me about feeling alone. And this is what I mean! Not even you understand. I try to explain, and you make what I say seem silly. Ellie and Mike are Mormons, and so we can't ask them to be Richard's godparents. That's what it has to do with it. We have to ask Molly and my brother Jerry, who can't even get here, so we have a godfather in absentia. In absentia! That's what it has to do with it. And that lovely Mr. Crocker, when he came today, it made me cry because the most thoughtful, sensitive gift to our new baby, to us, should have come from a complete stranger."

  "He's no
t a stranger to me."

  "Well, he is to me, and that's the difference. You were asking about how I felt. How I feel counts!"

  "I know it does."

  "Nobody knows each other here. Nobody talks to each other at the Laundromat. I've been shopping at the same IGA for three years, and they still don't know my name. The grocer doesn't bother to learn it because he thinks when the war ends, all of his customers are going to go home, and most of them are."

  Dillon could not think what to say. It was like being brought to the top of a mountain renowned for its view of a lush green valley, but seeing instead a vast desert.

  "I don't want to go to New York," Cass said. "And I don't want to stay here."

  He stared at her, the only view there was. He was amazed at the directness of her statement. What had they been to each other all this time? Why had she never talked like this before?

  "I never thought we'd be going back to Chicago," he said.

  "I didn't either." Cass leaned against him again. "It feels like a defeat."

  "Chicago's not what it was, and neither are we." Even as he said that, he heard the cry of something dying. Not him, not her, but what they might have been together. Already he understood that their baby had replaced him in the center of her heart, and though he would not have said so, he felt relieved.

  She raised her face to him. "Do you mean...?"

  "The grocer is right. When the war ends, everybody will be making new decisions. We can too."

  "Would the Bureau let you go back?"

  "If we decide to go back, they'll have to, won't they?" Sean smiled. He pictured himself announcing his decision to Mr. Hoover. He felt a rare relief, a freedom. The director would fire him on the spot for arrogance, or think more of him than ever. Either would be all right. As for New York, so what? Sean Dillon was not fated to wear three-piece suits, a watch fob and English cordovans. And the truth was, that relieved him too. Maybe all he really wanted—what else could the sudden inner peace he felt mean?—was to pay attention at last to the miracle of what had just happened to them. Their child had made them into a family. Cass was healthy. And now she was asking for something from him that he could give her.