The car slowed as it approached the guardhouse at the gate.
Two soldiers wearing white helmets marked "AP" snapped to attention, saluting, as the car went through. Once more Sean returned the salute with what seemed to Cass an effortless panache.
Now as Cass stared out the window, what she saw was an exotic, unfamiliar realm. Only a hundred yards inside the gate the flight line began where a large formation of silver airplanes sat with their noses pointing at the clouds. They reminded Cass of birds bathing in the flow of wind on the edge of a South Side Chicago roofline.
At a low, round-roofed building marked "Base Ops," the car turned onto a road bordered on one side by glistening steel hangars and on the other by a string of pristine white buildings. These were set amid crisply edged lawns with low fences of gracefully draped white chains. That the driver had so slowed the car gave Cass the feeling she was expected now to inspect what they were passing. She could not identify them as such yet, but the diverse structures were barracks buildings, a commissary, the base exchange, the rehearsal hall of the USAF band and the headquarters of the First District Command. One building, from the side, looked like a hangar, but it had a brick façade and a theater marquee which announced The Third Man. Another building's sign read, "USO." Then they came upon a small white church with a steeple, clapboard siding and frosted glass windows. It reminded Cass of churches on calendars, New England churches, Puritan ones, but they were always surrounded by snowy fields and mountains in the distance.
"That's the Protestant church?"
"Everybody's," Sean said.
The unornamented sign read, "Base Chapel. Sunday Services 1100 hours, Catholic Mass 0730 daily, Sunday 0730,0815."
"They have Mass in there?" There was no cross on top of the steeple. Protestants didn't believe in showing Christ's crucified body.
"There are dispensations in the military," Sean said. "Soldiers can eat meat on Fridays."
Cass looked with surprise at him, but he didn't notice. He was pointing out the window on his side, toward a swimming pool in which a throng of children splashed and cavorted. "There's a pool that Rickie will love."
Cass leaned toward him, to see. It reminded her of pools on the South Side which would be crowded in the same way with ecstatic summer children.
Sergeant Hewitt said from his place at the wheel, "Actually, General, that's the NCO pool. Your pool is up by the Officers' Club. There, see it?"
Cass and Sean watched in silence as the Officers' Club came into view, its broad veranda overlooking a landscaped terrace and pool. The swimming pool here, twice as large as the other, had almost no one playing in it. Didn't officers have children? Women were lounging in deck chairs. Waiters could be seen moving among them with trays of drinks. All at once Cass had the feeling that more than one of those ladies behind the dark glasses were turning their languid eyes up from their magazines toward her.
The car stopped at a corner, then turned, passing by the front of the Officers' Club. It was large, three stories, a Georgian manor house made of brick. A sloping curved driveway led to an entrance defined by an overarching dark blue canvas awning. Cass pictured those swimming pool ladies arriving beneath that awning in evening gowns with white gloves to their elbows. Their hands would be linked to the arms of their handsome husbands, who would pass Sean by without seeing him.
The car kept on, and all at once the very air around them changed, becoming cooler, as they drove into a distinctly set-off enclave. The street was a tunnel of graceful old elm trees the leaves of which stirred shadows in a breeze that until now Cass had not noticed. A sign with the same utilitarian stencil lettering as the one outside the chapel proclaimed, "Off Limits To Unauthorized Personnel." Beyond it Cass saw on one side a line of large brick houses in the Georgian style of the club. Each house was set apart from its neighbors by a broad apron of grass clipped as smooth as a putting green. Not houses, Cass thought, but mansions.
Across from each house, folded into a wooded hillside, was a garage with spaces for three automobiles. In front of each residence were tidy, more formally lettered signs.
"This is Generals' Row, Mrs. Dillon," the driver said.
"Maj. Gen. Cabot," she read, "Lt. Gen. White, Lt. Gen. Davis, Maj. Gen. Ford."
One house was even larger than the others and had an entrance awning like the Officers' Club. Sean poked her as they passed it. "Gen. Eason," she read. A curtain moved inside a window, and Cass saw a woman staring out at them. It seemed to Cass that their eyes met. The curtain fell. Cass shivered to think that here was a female version of General Eason's coldness.
Several houses farther along the car slowed and pulled to the curb.
Mother of God, she thought.
A sign right there, where the car stopped: "Brig. Gen. Dillon." She read it again, pressing Sean's hand. His soaking hand.
"Brig.?" she asked. "What's 'Brig.'?" But she answered at once herself: a military word for jail.
"Brigadier," he said quietly. His lightheartedness was gone. "This is it."
Cass couldn't move.
Sergeant Hewitt had come around to Cass's door and now opened it. Still she did not move.
She looked at Sean. "This is what?"
He shrugged.
"When were you going to discuss this with me?"
Sean glanced awkwardly toward the driver. A screen door clapped shut, and when Cass looked toward the house, two men in white waiters' jackets were coming toward them. Both were smiling. One was colored.
Not waiters' coats, she saw then, for on each man's sleeve were sergeant's stripes, like the driver's.
"Who are they?"
"Our aides, Sergeant Jones and Sergeant Austin."
"Welcome, General," the colored sergeant, Austin, said. He seemed to be in charge. "Welcome, Mrs. Dillon."
And when they both saluted, she realized to her horror—she could never do this!—they were also saluting her.
Fourteen
By November of 1948 the Berlin airlift was in its sixth month. More than a hundred thousand flights had been logged in and out of the blockaded city, and more than a million tons of fuel and food had been brought in. Air force fliers, the very men who had savaged German cities only three years before, were now referred to by the children of Berlin as the "bubblegum bombers." The air crews had taken to tying little sacks of gum and candy to tiny parachutes and dropping them by the hundreds out the bays of their C-47s and C-54s each time they swooped in for landings at Tempelhof, Gatow and Tegel. The laden planes landed every few minutes around the clock, to be off-loaded by squads from among more than twenty thousand German volunteers. Still, it would be another six months and another hundred thousand flights before the Russians would lift the blockade. When that finally happened—and it would happen within a few days of the suicide of James Forrestal—Winston Churchill would say, "America has saved the world."
But in dank November no one could foresee that triumph. To the air force brass who were managing it from Washington, the airlift had begun to seem futile. The Russian impunity in continuing to shut off access to Berlin seemed to prove the point they were so desperately trying to make to the beleaguered Forrestal, and to the House Armed Services Committee—that the American monopoly of the A-bomb was no threat to Stalin without a new long-range bomber with which to deliver the thing to Russia itself. But Forrestal had come fully over to the navy position, whence he'd started, and the committee, long divided, had lately seemed to be leaning that way too: the atomic bomb should be based on a massive new carrier fleet, with a new navy airplane to match, which would not depend on a permanent, far-flung network of air bases on foreign soil. Forrestal was pressing the committee for a decision, one way or the other, before the December recess. Almost surely it was going to be a decision not only against the B-36 but against, really, the future combat role of the air force.
The generals of the Air Staff, Dillon's neighbors, were thus a dispirited group by that November. Early one morning, as they enact
ed the ritual of their departure for work, it seemed to Dillon more absurd than usual, even as he participated in it. Without ever acknowledging the irony, given their death struggle with the navy, the air force brass traveled every day from Boiling to the Pentagon by boat.
At precisely 0700 a line of more than twenty blue staff cars, each with its plate bearing one, two, three or four silver stars, cruised passed the Officers' Club onto Generals' Row. The filigreed branches of the bare elm trees laced the sky above the automobile procession like a long canopy. There was a car for each house, a driver for each general. By 0710 the generals had all come out and their cars were all under way again, now each with its lone backseat rider. Instead of proceeding off base through congested Washington, finally inching across the bridge to the Pentagon, the limousines drove directly to the far side of the flight line, to the riverbank and Boiling's one-wharf dock. There the generals left their cars and boarded a fifty-seven-foot-long teak-and-mahogany motor launch, the Valkyrie, which President Roosevelt had favored for twilight summer cruises down to Mount Vernon and back. In addition to staterooms below, the yacht featured a luxuriously appointed main salon where a crew of air force stewards waited to serve the generals their coffee and hot sweet rolls while the yacht purred upstream to the river entrance of the Pentagon.
From his first experience of it the previous summer, the Potomac River boat had seemed to Dillon a ludicrous way to commute. He much preferred the productive solitude of time in his car. He needed Hewitt and his car available to him at the Pentagon in any case, for the ride home hours after the other generals had departed on the late afternoon launch, if not for one of his many trips into Washington, where the job of selling OSI to various government officials was never finished. The other generals regarded the boat as a perquisite, as did their wives, who, unlike Cass Dillon, had their husbands' staff cars and drivers at their disposal throughout the day. Dillon's intuition was that the members of the Air Staff prized the motor launch because, unconsciously, they too recognized that those who were at ease in and around boats were somehow better. In America farm boys, auto mechanics and simple tinkerers had become fliers, some had become war heroes and perhaps a few, even, air force generals. But only men of a certain background became admirals. In his time at the Pentagon Dillon had become a connoisseur of condescension, for he was an interloper on whom even a lowly ROTC-commissioned state-college graduate could look down. He had concluded that the argument between the air force and the navy drew its ferocious energy from the old conflict of class. Randall Crocker, as an Ivy League–educated New Deal lawyer known, despite his handicap, to be a successful skipper of racing sloops, was the great exception on the side of the air force, but the generals distrusted him anyway as a former Wall Street associate of Forrestal's. If they wanted proof that Crocker was out to undercut them, they had only to point to Dillon.
Morning after morning he had boarded the motor launch despite himself. This was his only informal contact with his new colleagues, and it was here that they had made their attitude toward him very clear. The OSI was Crocker's brainchild, but it remained an air force stepchild and they had simply not accepted it. Dillon himself, the instant general, was an affront to everything they had all achieved, whatever their backgrounds, and even as he implemented his charter, resolutely extending his authority to OSI field offices in every command, their equally resolute rejection of him was by now undermining his fledgling operation. Dillon knew that, behind his back, the brass referred to him contemptuously as "the cop." To his face they had not hesitated to turn down his various, regular requests for support. Time and again Dillon, to his own chagrin more than theirs, had had to call on Crocker to back him up in disputes with Eason and other commanders. He knew that every such victory over these men was, at a deeper level, a defeat. Their resentment of OSI was choking him. Even officers who had specialized in security and counterintelligence, men whom Dillon was sure he had won over otherwise, understood soon enough that an assignment to his organization was a career killer. Not only were such men slow to volunteer for the OSI; many already assigned were requesting early transfers out.
"Good morning, Herb." Dillon took a chair next to Herb Dalby, another BG, the deputy for plans, just as the launch pulled away from the dock. Since they were of the same rank, Dillon's use of his first name was not an issue. He tucked his hat under his arm as if he'd been doing so for years, then looked directly at Dalby, forcing him to react. Dillon had decided months ago that he was not going to make it easy for these bastards. That was why he was here instead of in his quiet car. Day in and day out, he made them all do this to him.
Dalby grunted and snapped open his copy of the Times Herald.
One of the white-haired senior generals, sitting with a cluster of his own peers, called back to Dalby with a generous camaraderie—a reward, no doubt, for his having efficiently snubbed Dillon. "Turn to page seven, Herb. See what Forrestal said yesterday."
The announcement caught the attention of most of the others, and they fell silent, looking toward Dalby, who scanned the paper until he found it. Aware of his audience, he read aloud, "The secretary of defense said, 'All Americans should be proud of what the air force is achieving in the western sector of Berlin.'"
"Hear! Hear!" a voice called, and another added, "Damn right!"
Dalby paused to grin at his fellows. Mostly they had remained silent, savvy and skeptical, and were now waiting for Dalby to read on, to tell them what else Forrestal had said. A steward carrying a tray of Danish had halted to listen too.
Dalby continued, building to a punch line. ". . .and what the airlift proves is that the air force is ideally suited to a primary mission of transport and supply."
Hoots then, groans and real curses. "Fuck Forrestal!" someone said loudly, an extreme expression even for them. It silenced the group for a moment.
A major general, a former bomber pilot named Spike Brown who was famous for his pearl-handled swagger stick, reached that stick across to lay it on Dalby's forearm. He said in a stage whisper, for Dillon's benefit, "And while you're at it, fuck Crocker too."
Dillon stood up, brushing General Brown's stick back. The boat lurched and he grabbed an overhead rail, back for an instant to the Archer Avenue El careening down the slope into Canaryville. The jolt brought his face closer than he wanted to General Brown's. "Why not include the commander in chief, General? Fuck him too, 'while you're at it,' eh? And why not the U.S. Constitution for that matter?"
Later Dillon would chide himself for this—not the display, but the failure to defend Crocker explicitly. What were Truman's prerogatives to him, or the Constitution's? What angered him was the insult to Crocker, pure and simple.
Brown stared blankly at Dalby. "Do you smell something, Herb? Did someone fart?"
Dillon pushed Brown's stick against his chest and held it there. "What is this, high school?"
Brown slowly moved his eyes to Dillon's hand. "As you were, Mr. Dillon."
Dillon moved away from him.
Dalby raised his voice to read a further paragraph from the newspaper story. " 'The committee expects to hear testimony from General Mark Macauley, the much decorated head of the Strategic Air Command, who during the war led the night raids against Dresden.'" Dalby looked up. "It's about time. Mac will tell those bozos. If he can't tell them, no one can."
Dillon moved toward the salon door, through the various expressions of confidence in Macauley, a man whose gift Dillon remembered as more for bluster than for thought. No wonder these fools think well of him.
Just before he left the salon for the deck outside, Dillon's eye caught General Eason's. The chief was sitting alone at a small table in the forward port corner of the cabin, removed from the others, as if judging them. He watched Dillon's exit with cold detachment, and all at once Dillon realized what this room had just become to the others. It was the officers' mess of a combat air group, the place in which hyper pilots vent their anxiety in raucous irreverence—"Fuck Forrestal!"—
before and after the most dangerous and destructive activity yet known to man. The gift for thought was not a virtue in such a room. Bluster was precisely what had gotten men like these— these men—through the worst nightmares it was possible to have outside sleep.
And who the hell are you, Dillon—here was Eason's question—to feel superior in this company?
The biting wind hit him as he stepped outside to the rails, and with it came a recognition. He had made a huge mistake in becoming vulnerable to such men. He knew he would never win them over. The wind in his face seemed to be blowing back on him from a time when he would remember this as the largest moment of his life, and also as the moment of his largest failure. The boat lurched again, and Dillon saw that their craft had just hit the wake of some bigger vessel which was as invisible to him, and as unsettling, as the future. His stomach jumped, pathetic landlubber that he was. The bile of coffee shot up into his throat, and he thought for a dread instant that he was going to vomit.
Cass Dillon came out of the house on Generals' Row shortly after her husband did, but she left on foot and alone, not in the parade of blue limousines. She blinked up at the slate November sky, trying to read it for rain. A shiver curled up her spine as she thought for the hundredth time how she hated the weather here. But she hated other things more. She decided not to go back inside for her coat because she would have to explain herself to Sergeant Jones, and Richard would start all over again his pleading to come with her.
She turned up the collar of her plain Donegal tweed suit. She wore a simple green hat. Her hair tickled the back of her neck and made her think how she hated that too. Her hair was at an awkward length, neither here nor there, because she was letting it grow out again, having made the mistake nearly two months before of listening to the girl at the base's beauty shop. "The New Look," the girl had said in a thick southern drawl. "I'll make you look like Paris. Paris, France." It was the way the girl had seemed to be responding to what Cass regarded as the secret of her unhappiness that had made Cass say yes. "The change will cheer you right up," the girl had said. By now, at age thirty-four, Cass's hair was the color—her own color—of burnished copper, and even bobbed—it looked like a Chicago flapper's hair to Cass, not some chic fashion model's—her hair was still her glory. But the hairdo had seemed to change her into someone else, as if even the gum-snapping beautician knew that the real Cass Dillon was not good enough for Generals' Row.
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