The waiter approached, bringing the check, and his reprieve. How Dillon welcomed it that he did not have to respond to her. He would never respond to her.
He signed his name, then snuffed out his cigarette, a gesture of adjournment. "I'm not letting you go over there today. It's not safe to leave the base yet."
Cass pushed her seat back from the table. "He's at the hospital at Andrews, Sean. You know that. Andrews is an air base just like Boiling is."
"You'd have to drive the Suitland Parkway. The rioters have been throwing debris down on cars from the overpasses. Suitland is one of the most terrorized areas. You're not going."
"And you're not telling me that. It's Easter, and Mr. Crocker deserves a visit. You can't stop me." Her anger had purged her of nervousness. Cass stood up and walked away from the table.
Sean watched her go. He had to admire the way she left the terrace, despite her fury, as if she were going ahead to use the powder room. She gave away only what she wanted to, and only to whom. From a distance there was no evidence of her coming rheumatism or the general slackness of her skin. His wife was fifty-four now, but still had a young figure and moved gracefully. That surface poise, he realized, had always been her strongest suit, but always too it took its power from the dark torrent of feeling that ran beneath it. Even after all these years she could still surprise him. Despite her denial of it, he knew damn well she had just challenged him precisely on Vietnam. Paralyzed, she had said. And of course he was. She had instinctively cut to the core of his situation. He had been powerless to influence events in Vietnam for years, standing by with nothing but timid queries, like every other man of his rank, while the endless supply of grunt heroes was fed into the maw of a war that was both too little and too much.
But not paralyzed, not paralyzed at all. He had been bumping futilely against first one wall, then the next. Not paralyzed, he wanted to call after her, but corralled, JCS on one side, OSD on the other, CIA and MACV and always, forever, the individual service branches which automatically undercut him every chance they could. The corrals and chutes of his permanent situation. The Pentagon. The stockyards. What he had so proudly—Chicago's Pride—left behind.
When Cass had disappeared through the open French doors, sheer curtains billowed in the wind, pointing his gaze toward the distant river, across the flight line. His eyes seized upon a soaring V-shaped wing of birds. The Lord is risen, alleluia, he thought, the Lord is risen indeed. Never had he felt the need more for a robust dose of the resurrection, and never had the formulas of his faith seemed staler.
As he watched the birds winging north toward the black spire of Georgetown, he thought of St. Bede's sparrow. Into the hall, out again and gone.
Like her.
Sean stood, and as he crossed the terrace he was aware that the majors, colonels and generals at the other tables had noticed him, but he sensed from their open glances and even, here and there, nods, that they had no idea of what had just passed between him and Cass.
He found her in a phone booth off the lobby, with the glass door closed. He waited for her to finish her call. She hung up the phone and came out.
"What was that?" he asked.
"I called a taxi," she said, and brushed past him, out the door.
Under the Officers' Club's fancy entrance awning he took her elbow. "Look, Cass, if I have problems with your driving across Suitland, I'm certainly not going to let you do it in some damn taxicab."
"What is this 'let' me? Since when do you 'let' me?"
He saw that he was going to lose this, so, still with her elbow, he pulled her toward their car. "All right, I'm driving you. You simply cannot go out there alone. That's all. I'm driving you."
They exchanged not a word for the twenty minutes it took to reach Andrews Air Base. They drove under a dozen overpasses on which they saw not one rioter or looter or arsonist, nor one Vietcong.
At the long circular drive leading up to the General Malcolm Grow Air Force Hospital, the flagship medical facility that was the air force's equivalent of Bethesda and Walter Reed, Dillon ignored the marked general officers' parking places to pull right up to the door. He stopped the car with more of a jolt than he intended.
Cass opened the door, then looked back at him. "You're really not coming?"
He shook his head no.
"Do you want me to tell him anything?"
And he shook his head again. "I'll wait here."
Cass got out of the car and slammed the door behind her. She went into the cool hospital, her heels clicking on the tile floor as she made for the VIP wing, without looking back at her rigid husband, resolving to forget him for the hour.
Mr. Crocker was quiet that afternoon, but he held fiercely to Cass's hand. Now and then his good eye snapped into focus and he seemed to register that she was by his bed. But he was free of the agitation and restlessness that sometimes made time with him so upsetting to her. The entire left side of his body was slack, his mouth drooped, his arm and leg lay in his bed as if unrelated to the rest of his body, like logs that the doctors used to reinforce the metal railing.
Cass propped the book against her knee with her free hand, and as always she read in a steady, quiet monotone. Casino Royale was the name of the novel, and the truth was, though she had spoken each word of its first two thirds aloud, she had little or no idea what it was about. It was the third James Bond novel she had read to him. Often she had decided he was not listening, and had stopped, but he had surprised her regularly by sending a protesting jolt of energy through his fist. Her custom was to read until he was asleep, then to sit there, still holding his hand, for the length of time it took to say her rosary.
She could not say that old friend of a prayer now without thinking continually of Richard, but she never felt that Mr. Crocker would mind. As she recited the Hail Marys and Our Fathers and Glory Bes, she replayed with like rote-mindedness a favorite sequence of quick memories: Richard's first laughter filling the halls of the Mellon Art Gallery as she tickled him; his staring in wonder at the Indian statues at the Smithsonian; a snow-suited Richard on his back on the hard-frozen reflecting pool near the Lincoln Memorial, flailing his arms and legs to make ice angels; a teenage Richard at the door one Mother's Day carrying a young but flowering dogwood tree by its dirt ball; the warm, powdered weight of Richard's infant body against hers, the liquid motion of the rocking chair; Richard at seven or eight carrying a stick like a cane in emulation of Mr. Crocker.
Mr. Crocker. She remembered the open admiration in his eyes the time she'd sweet-talked J. Edgar Hoover on the phone. She thought of his unannounced arrival at the crypt church of the unfinished Shrine, the leather-bound Bible he had brought for Richard, the Bible she had held for Sean when he took his air force oath. She thought of the affectionate laughter with which he'd say after some pointed comment of hers, "You have an angel in you, Cass, but I think it's trying to get out."
She blessed herself at last, her prayer at an end, and she put her rosary away. She looked at him. His head had fallen to the side of his pillow, and he was breathing with rough steadiness, asleep. A line of drool hung from the dead side of his mouth. She pulled her hand free of the clamp of his fist, then fumbled in her purse for a tissue. She wiped his chin clean, then noticed that his left eye had begun to tear, only his left one, and she wiped it too.
"Dear, dear man," she said gently, and almost added, "Pa," which, when she realized it, shocked her. The ache it soothed to be here for him was the oldest one she had.
She was not aware of Sean.
He was standing in the hallway behind her, looking in.
She did not move from Crocker's side. After a few minutes Sean walked away from the door, to the window at the end of the corridor. The view was of the tops of trees running off, a carpet, into the hills of Maryland, but it was easy to see it as the view from the Bethesda Naval Hospital, the view of Washington, the view Forrestal glimpsed one last time as he went through his window. But then Dillon remembered that i
f he were looking at the city skyline, it would now be smeared with the smoke of smoldering fires.
A pair of F-105s leapt out of those trees, screaming into the sky. The Andrews runway was hidden in the distance. The fighter planes were brown and black, sinister darts, killers. Dillon had to stifle the automatic repugnance that still set him apart from other air force men. Despite the effect of his daily effort, especially his supervision of target selection, the actual sight of warplanes dressed for combat, so thrilling to their pilots, who regarded every other kind of airplane as an effete plaything, always made Dillon uneasy. It was alienation which, ordinarily, he quickly fended, but not now. Instead, he stayed with it long enough to let it open out into a far larger alienation, a far more dangerous one.
What drives a man to suicide? Twenty years before, at the time of Forrestal's, Dillon could not imagine. Suicide, he'd thought then, could only be the act of a deranged mind, but now he felt differently, far less smug and sure. Had Forrestal simply perceived something more sharply than others had? What if, in looking back on the arc of his life, public or private, a man saw only a bending sequence of grave mistakes? What if the end product of a life was itself seen to be a grave mistake? Sean Dillon knew that Randall Crocker and others like him had become so enraged in the argument over Vietnam because to them the war called into question the real character of the postwar American order, the creation of which was the climactic labor of their lives. Dillon had had no such experience regarding Vietnam—the order held for him, indeed he was defending it, but he felt no smugness in that either. The truth was he had not dared to look at the arc of his own life with a view to judging it, and the two who had done precisely that, Crocker and Richard, he had completely shunned.
He turned and walked back along the corridor to Crocker's room, stopping once more in the doorway. He was fully aware what a grave mistake it would be now, whatever came of his fugitive son, if he were to let Randall Crocker die without knowing how much he loved him.
Cass sensed his arrival this time. She stood and came to the threshold. She took Sean's hand and led him to Crocker's bedside. The old man's eyes were open. Cass joined their hands. The pressure of the grip with which they held each other turned their fingers white.
Twenty-two
"Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live."
The gold-edged pages of his prayer book fluttered in the hot breath of the wind, costing him his place, but it had been decades since the old minister had needed text for this service. He folded the book into his arms, and his eyes moved to the coffin in front of him, the chasm below.
"He cometh up and is cut down like a flower, he fleeth as it were a shadow and never continueth in one stay."
A few feet away, in front of felt-covered folding chairs, Cass clutched at Sean's arm, staring hard at the flag-draped box, the end with stars. Behind them was a group of several hundred. Many of the men, like Sean, were in uniform. Cass's face was darkened by a veiling lace mantilla that made her look like a Spanish lady. Rosary beads slipped through the fingers of her free hand.
"In the midst of life we are in death; of whom may we seek for succor but of thee, O Lord?"
Without a cue from the minister, or an evident order from their officer, a squad of soldiers stepped forward for the flag. With rigid solemnity they uncovered the casket, folding the flag back into the traditional three-sided bundle. They passed it to their officer, who held it before his face, unmoving.
The minister took a small handful of dirt from the acolyte's tray and began to sprinkle it, rubrically, on the lacquered wood. "Unto God's gracious mercy and protection we commit you, Randall..."
When the prayer was finished, the officer crossed to Cass and Sean. With the stilted precision of a wind-up doll, he presented the flag to her. She pressed the thing against her bosom, as if damming a hole. Randall Crocker had expressly indicated that the flag be presented to her, as she knew, but still, it was a shock, one last loving gesture from a man who, despite all that made such a thing unthinkable, had become her one true father.
And not only hers.
The honor guard officer saluted.
Dillon returned the salute. He stood holding his breath, his face squared against the sky and shining trees. He had never seemed more the hard, spare man. The morning light glinted off the silver stars on his epaulets.
The rifle squad stood at a distance, and its first volley made the people jump.
Dillon stared hard across the river valley as the sound of the guns boomed across to the marble city. Three volleys of gunshot signified, originally, that the bodies of the fallen had been retrieved, and now the battle could resume. It was June 1, 1968.
They were gathered on an Arlington knoll two hundred yards south of the Lee mansion. Some of the mourners were of Crocker's generation—Harriman was present, in from Paris where the peace talks had just begun, and Acheson and William O. Douglas. The disgraced McNamara was here, and his replacement at Defense, Clark Clifford. So were Rusk and Rostow, the Joint Chiefs resplendent in their stars and ribbons, and two dozen other generals, especially of the air force. An exhausted-looking Hubert Humphrey stood on the other side of Cass. He had come in from California for this funeral, though he would go right back because of the campaign.
A lone bugler on a distant hillside began to play. Fades the light... Those sweet notes unlocked the last corner in which the sadness of all those men and women had been sealed. Cass had known better than to wear makeup on such a morning. Sean put his blue arm around her shoulder, but it braced him as much as her. The last mournful notes of "Taps"— Leadeth all I To their rest —floated into the air above them.
Most of the military men, unlike the civilians, stood at perfect attention, staring blindly. Their faces seemed dead. This was part of what they'd been trained to do. Their young colleagues died all the time and they had developed a system of their own—soldiers and fliers lived by systems and died by them—for dealing with a destiny that had become as mundane as it was tragic. They were listening, actively, intently. They were listening past the bugle for another sound, a sound of theirs.
It came at first as a faint low roar funneling at them from the south, up the river valley from Alexandria, from the mouth of the great Potomac. As the last echo of "Taps" faded, the roar grew quickly louder. The mourners turned toward what had become a screech, and saw swooping down from the blue yonder, wheeling in a wide arc away from the Jefferson Memorial and the Washington Monument, a flight of sleek fighter planes, four of them, with long thin fuselages, sharp as arrows, maneuvering on clipped wings, heading right at Randall Crocker's grave.
The missing-plane flyover was taken to be an honor, and Crocker was a rare civilian to receive it. But what those particular dignitaries recognized in the screaming airplanes was rage. Wouldn't those pilots see in the tormented, ineffectual government elite the enemy they could never see in fleeing, naked, almond-eyed children—that emblazoned, forever-photographed girl-child on the road, her Munch shriek—whose skin they'd bubbled with their napalm? The four Thunderchiefs pulled out of their dive at the last second, and as they passed perhaps three hundred feet above the hilltop, they rolled slightly in a perfectly synchronized wing dip.
When the planes had gone, climbing away into the Virginia sky, Dillon looked around and saw that he was the only man in uniform not saluting. His right arm still encircled his wife's shoulders, which moved gently with emotion.
The flag in front of Lee's mansion was being lowered to half-mast in strict silence. Every military eye was fixed upon it, as required. The flag at such a moment was the nation.
Dillon, even to offer the homage he most believed in, did not remove his arm from her. Instead, he pressed the woman of his life closer as softly, softly, the flag fell on its pole. He saw the other flag, the one she held against her breast, and he realized with a sharp, fresh pain that she was cradling it as if the flag were her baby.
Her baby. His. He thought again of their son, who
didn't even know that Crocker had died. He remembered carrying Rickie in his arms like that, not a flag, a football. How he had loved to tuck the boy into his side and run. Now Richard did his running alone. He had been in Canada for months.
Then the ceremony was over, and Cass was clinging to her husband, whispering, "Oh, Sean!" Her mantilla rippled in the summer wind that snapped across the hillside, as if the backwash of the fighter planes had sucked it up from the languid river. Dillon felt he had an exotic dark flower in his arms, felt for the first time in years that he could hurt her if he pressed too hard—the black petals crumbling on one another—which was ridiculous. His wife was stronger than he was.
"You're a good woman, Cass."
She pulled back to look him in the eye. "He was a good man. He loved you."
Dillon wanted to say, I loved him too, but the old wall of his reticence stopped him. She settled into his embrace once more. He stroked her shoulder.
But suddenly he tensed. A human cry pierced the air from the valley behind them, and he heard it at once as having meaning for him.
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