Memorial Bridge

by James Carroll

  Two of Occoquan's buildings were new and housed, in college-style dormitories, trusties who did road work throughout that part of Virginia. But the central building, in which Richard and other pretrial inmates were held, was a sinister-looking structure dating back to the Civil War. Until the April riots emergency, it had been abandoned as obsolete. Built of huge granite blocks, long since blackened, the jail had a squat dome and four bastion towers at each corner. Inside, the cellblocks were arranged as balconies ringing an atrium that was open all the way up the five stories to the concave black vault of the dome. If there had ever been windows, they had been long since bricked in, and now the only light came from naked bulbs that protruded at intervals above each balcony. Richard's cell was on the fourth level, and he shared it with five others. The men at Occoquan were an intimidating lot, either too poor to make bail or too criminal to have been offered it. As a group they behaved contemptuously, with endless shouting and cursing from their cells that guards made no effort to control and that echoed through the cavernous space all day long.

  But Richard, in his own cell after the first terrifying night, had found it possible to rein his fear. He had been relieved that the cell was a large space, relatively, and that it had beds, not mattressless bunks, and that they were lined up in a neat row against the one true wall, giving the cell the feel, in Richard's compensating mind, of a military barracks. There was even a partition isolating the toilet and sink, both of which by some miracle still functioned. And because six men shared the space, instead of two, the threat of unwanted intimacy seemed far less here than in the courthouse lockup. Richard's cellmates were blacks who wore their hair in Afros and carried themselves like militants, but they were alike in ignoring him. It was as if his skin color had made him invisible, which was fine. All in all, in other words, once he'd made it through that first night, he'd found things to feel okay about.

  But the days going by had seemed like months because this crowded, ad hoc jail was understaffed and lacked an organized routine and even minimal facilities for prisoners' work or recreation. There were no radios or television, and no true library. Kept in their cells, the inmates passed the daytime hours stretched out on the beds, on which they then slept fitfully at night. Absent the natural light of windows, time itself seemed as imprisoned as the men. Richard would have paced the cell, but he was afraid of irritating his cellmates, so he spent a lot of time standing, leaning against the bars, his back to the men who did not speak to him, looking out across the balcony catwalk and through the Cyclone fence that had been raised above the old iron railing to prevent suicide leaps. He stared either at the wall of dark barred cells across the cavern or down at the scene below, the floor of the atrium, called "the pit." It was an object of endless fascination for Richard, the source of most of the noise and the only action. Milling prisoners transformed the pit into a plaza during their one-hour shifts of "out-time," which, apart from thirty-minute forays to the grim dining hall for meals, constituted their single break of the day.

  One morning, Richard's fourth day there, the bell marking the first shift of out-time rang as usual, but the guards did not file onto the balconies to escort the designated prisoners from the cells down to the pit. The prisoners slated for the break began to protest with bar banging and curses—"Where are you, motherfuckers?"—which inmates from all five tiers were soon echoing. Still the guards did not come, and then the realization spread among the prisoners that the guards were nowhere in evidence, not on the catwalks or on the scaffold stairways or on the floor below. That the guards had for some reason been withdrawn seemed ironically like a further deprivation, and that led to a redoubling of protests.

  Now all five of Richard's cellmates were lined up at the bars beside him, and like countless others they were banging the iron rods with metal objects, contraband spoons and belt buckles. The noise grew to a crescendo, then fell, then grew again. Richard was paralyzed by the anarchy at first, but then began to let out a throaty roar of his own, and the relief he felt at once made him go all the way with it. He gave himself over to the mass anger, yet without letting go of his acute appreciation that these fearsome lawbreakers had summoned this rage to protest the infraction of what they regarded as the law of their schedule.

  Still the guards did not come.

  Where are the motherfuckers? Richard too wanted to know. Just as it occurred to him that the officers had abandoned him to these desperadoes, a guard showed himself in the pit.

  The sound of their hatred soared as the redneck guard walked to the very center of the vacant floor, looking up at them. In his hands he carried a yellow battery-powered megaphone. This was unprecedented in Richard's short experience. There had been until then no announcements by the jail authorities or general communication of any kind. Gradually, as the prisoners registered the fact of the megaphone, the noise decreased. It never quite stopped, but when it had dropped to isolated curses and the bar banging of a few diehard hysterics, the guard raised the megaphone to his mouth.

  "Even you assholes," the disembodied southern voice began, "ought to know this." He paused, then quickly announced, "Some motherfucker shot Bobby Kennedy in California, and this morning he died."

  At that the guard lowered the megaphone and slowly moved his gaze around the great hall. Now, at last, for the first time except for short periods in the night, stillness descended on the jail, a simple stunned silence which itself grew and grew as each single prisoner proved incapable of breaking it, as earlier the noise had grown with each one's piled-on outrage.

  First the President, then Malcolm, then Dr. King. Now Bobby? The silence grew through phases of, first, shock that was familiar, then fear that was new, into a rare deeper silence that was absolute.

  And Richard Dillon decided at that moment, with a kind of perverse relief, that none of this was really happening, and the guard saying that about Kennedy—Bobby?—proved it. Richard decided that, in fact, he was crazy, that was all. He had finally lost his mind.

  The visiting room at Occoquan was in the dining hall wing, a drab one-story cinder block addition that had been grafted onto the domed granite antiquity after the First World War. The visiting room itself, with its concrete floor and light bulbs dangling from cords, was as unfinished as a garage, but windows were spaced across one wall and morning light cheerfully splashed into the place. The shadows it cast included bars, but what the men from the cellblocks saw was light. Visitors, seated on their side of the rough fixed table that bisected the stark room, always felt oppressed and claustrophobic, but the jailed men, on being admitted here, always felt released.

  Richard hesitated at the door, blinking like a boy stepping into the bright street from a Saturday matinee.

  Seven or eight prisoners were at the long table, apart from one another. Across from them sat lawyers or girlfriends. The pairs leaned toward each other but the table was too broad for them to touch. The cryptic murmur of their whispers filled the room.

  Guards slouched against opposite walls at either end of the long table, mirroring each other, even the way they cradled shotguns. One of them tossed a look at Richard, then flicked his head at a point on the table. Richard went to it. No sooner had he hitched his legs over the bench and sat than the room's other door opened, the one from the world, and his mother walked in alone.

  Not since Mr. Crocker's funeral—no, not since the bail hearing afterward had he seen her.

  She was wearing a green summer dress; a broad yellow ribbon held her hair tightly away from her face. Sunglasses blanked her eyes. Cass Dillon seemed to have drawn to herself all the color of that drab room, and as she approached her son, he beheld her as a kind of apparition. He was aware of it when the eyes of the others went to her, but to them she could have seemed only like an image from the movies or a figment from a dream. To him she was an epiphany.

  But she crossed to the table with mundane efficiency and took her place opposite Richard.

  "Hello, Mom."

  "Hello, R
ichard." She removed her sunglasses. Her eyes were red, but from tiredness, he sensed, more than emotion.

  Instantly they fell silent. Each had thought of remarks with which to open, but now neither could think what they had been.

  Despite everything she'd intended, Cass felt herself slipping down into her pain. Yes, she was glad to see him, and yes, thank God he seemed to be all right. But also, yes, how hurt she was. The last thing she'd intended was to begin with accusations, but that unpredicted, pinging silence took her under. "Why have you refused to see me?" she asked.

  He dropped his eyes. "It wouldn't have done any good. I knew you would just argue with me about the lawyer."

  His direct statement jolted her because it was true. Since his arrest she had been obsessed with the question of his lawyer. Lloyd Macmillan had tried everything to get the court to assign him to Richard's case, but he had failed. In addition, Richard had refused to see the appointed public defender as well, and the court had upheld him in that too. What did the court care if he was an overstressed, too sensitive boy behaving self-destructively out of all too obvious complexes that made him completely vulnerable to the madness of the times? It was the times that were mad, Cass had insisted, and she had rejected Lloyd Macmillan's last proposal, to initiate proceedings to have Richard declared incompetent.

  She said softly now, "I didn't come to argue with you,"

  "I'm glad you came again, Mom. I told them I would meet with you this time because of Bobby Kennedy. That really knocked me for a loop. Even here, it affected everybody. A lot of these guys are here because of going nuts after Martin Luther King was killed, and now Bobby ... It made me..." He shrugged his shoulders, unable to explain, completely unaware that in that particular gesture was the life of another man.

  Cass recognized Sean in her son's stolid muteness, that rise and fall of shoulders. How long had it been since either of her men had found it possible, once coming to this wall of inarticulateness, to push through? No wonder they were both such loners; she had never seen their resemblance in that light before. They were alike in how alone they were—even with her.

  "He was so thin," Richard added incongruously, as if that note of Kennedy's physique explained a mystery, as if anything did.

  "You're thin too, Richard. I've never seen you so thin." Cass paused, then went on, "I thought Bobby Kennedy was important to you because he was saying so much of what you believe."

  Richard nodded, but looked down at his hands. "He was lately."

  And Cass wondered, Was Kennedy's death serving in this way everywhere now, to bring children together with their parents? In the way typical of her kind, Cass had long admired and been proud of the Kennedys and had even felt a real love for Jack, especially when he'd singled out Sean as one of his special men. But Bobby had taken over a corner of her heart without her even knowing it. The same was true, obviously, for Richard, and it was those corners that now had overlapped.

  Cass said, "Did you read what he said when he was shot?"

  Richard shook his head. "We don't have any newspapers to read. I haven't read anything. All I know is that he's dead." He blinked at his mother, trying to place himself. "What did he say?"

  "After he was shot, he was lying on the floor of that hotel kitchen. Four or five other people were shot too. Did you know that?"

  Richard looked up, appalled. "No."

  "They aren't going to die. He was the only one to die. What he said was, 'Is everybody all right?' Those were his last words. 'Is everybody all right?'"

  After a moment she reached into a pocket for a tissue. As she did, she glanced along the table toward one of the guards.

  "What did Dad say?"

  "He was just. . . like everyone. Very sad. Very worried. We were at the cemetery yesterday, so soon after Mr. Crocker's—"

  "Yesterday? For Bobby's funeral?"

  "No. The funeral was Saturday. Yesterday it was just people filing past the grave. Half of Washington, I think. A lot of colored people were crying, just crying and crying. Everyone was. They buried him just to the side of the President. Your father and I stood in line, like everybody. We wanted to. It took us three hours just to—"

  "You waited three hours? You and Dad?"

  "Did you think we wouldn't feel this?"

  "But Bobby was against the war. He said the war was criminal. I would have thought Dad would regard him ... as a traitor."

  Cass shook her head, so sadly. "He doesn't regard you as a traitor either, if that's what you think."

  "At Arlington, at Mr. Crocker's funeral, when the agents were arresting me, you asked him to intervene for me and he refused. I saw that."

  "I was very upset. There was nothing he could do. I understand that now. Your father is a lot like you are, Richard. He sees only what he sees."

  "That's not like me." Richard grinned with unmistakable, and quite sane, self-mockery." 'You see things; and you say, "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say, "Why not?" '" He laughed. "George Bernard Shaw. Back to Methuselah. Bobby's favorite quote."

  But Cass nodded quite seriously. "That's true. You are different from your father in that way."

  "We're opposites."

  Cass smiled. "I don't know if I'd say that."

  "I would."

  "Then you don't know him. He's a good man," she said simply.

  Richard flushed. "I know how much you admire Dad, how proud you are of him."

  "Does that mean I can't be proud of you?"

  Richard had to look away from her.

  "I know you care so much about your father, what he thinks. Do you want to know what I think?"

  "About me? About what I'm doing?"

  Cass nodded.

  Richard realized only then how afraid his mother was that compared to his father's judgment hers meant little or nothing to him. Was it that he didn't care? Or that he'd taken hers for granted? He felt his face redden, and his hand went to the place on his cheek where she'd slapped him at the Shrine. "Yes," he said. "I do want to know."

  "Then look at me."

  He did.

  "I think you are strong and honest and good, Richard. You surprise me because your conscience is so much your own. At first that angered me, and foolishly I let it hurt me, but now I am proud of you for it. And I am sorry it has taken me this long to tell you so."

  Instinctively Richard put both his hands into the forbidden middle space of the table. "You think that? Really?"

  She nodded, twisting her Kleenex. "I think the war should end, just end right now. A lot of wives think that. And I think you were brave to refuse the draft."

  He could hear the "but" coming. Strangely he did not dread it. There was an incipient "but" in him too.

  "But I don't understand, Richard, about this." She let her eyes, their quick circuit of the sterile room, explain her statement.

  " 'This' is where I should have been in the first place, Mom. Instead of Canada. Dad told me I was a coward for taking off, and I see now that he was right. He said I should face the consequences of my choice, and that's what—"

  "But, Richard!" Now she stretched toward him, reaching across to his hands.

  "No contact!" boomed a guard's voice. "No contact!"—another guard, so filling the room it was impossible to tell which of the two had spoken.

  Cass reacted immediately, jerking her hands back and looking from one guard to the other with fear twisting her face.

  "It's okay, Mom." Richard had not jumped. He smiled. "You get used to it."

  She shook her head fiercely. "I can't stand it, Richard, thinking of men like that over you."

  "It's all bluster. The guards are like that because they're as afraid as we are. They're victims too."

  "You're the only victim I care about. I want you to come out of here, Richard. I've never asked you for anything before. I want you out of here, please. Please, Richard, come out."

  "I can't, Mom. I'm stuck. The feeling is, I'm stuck."

  "Then, see your father," Cass
said, falling automatically back, despite every reason not to, on her lifetime's one refuge. "Talk to him."

  "About what? He's as stuck as I am. Isn't that the problem?"

  And, of course, it was. Her problem, her child's problem. Could she possibly leave it at this?

  "He'd never come here, Mom."

  "If you asked him to, he would."

  "You don't believe that."

  "I do, Richard. I know your father better than you." The strange, awful room around her seemed silent, as if everyone were listening to them.

  She decided he was not going to say anything else.

  But then he said, his voice hardly more than a whisper, "Well, would you ask him for me then? Would you say I need him?"

  He spoke as if the words made him ashamed.

  It was early afternoon by the time Cass arrived at the Pentagon. She rarely went there, and as she pulled into the south parking lot from Shirley Highway, it was impossible not to remember the night she'd waited here for hours and then he'd come, full of his secrets and his need. They had kissed, like passionate teenagers, before crossing the bridge back into Washington where, finally, they had parted.

  Now, when she looked back on their life together, it seemed, more or less, a smoothly running stream, with swallows skimming its surface. She had long since adjusted to the fact that its strongest currents ran underground.

  The long walk from the car to the river entrance gave her time to collect herself, but in her mind she returned to that water image of her life. It seemed a harsh desolation: she was just a floating twig, bent and black and very frail, tossed from one thicket of dammed branches to the next, but never catching.

  Security at the entrance surprised her. Always before she'd been able to gain admittance with her dependent's ID, but now, since the demonstrations, it wouldn't do. Not even as a general's wife could she get in.