Memorial Bridge

by James Carroll

  "I understand."

  But this was the one thing Sean Dillon would not be party to, speaking of conscience. He would not enable the delivery of one of their simplistic, war-prolonging speeches, not even Richard's.

  But if he said as much now, he sensed his son and he would be at the wall again, on opposite sides of it. Having come here and having seen Richard, and, more, having felt the tug of his old desire to protect him, Sean Dillon did not want to scare his son away. Alone, Richard would be 14121 at the mercy of a government that had, in this instance, lost its conscience. Dillon sat there for a long time, in stark silence. But not uselessly. He was thinking.

  "All right," he said at last. "I'll accept that, if you accept what I propose."

  "Which is what?"

  "Every criminal trial begins with a motions phase in which rules for evidence and procedure are set."

  "I know that."

  "Good. Then you won't be surprised when in that first phase, before jury selection begins, I move to dismiss the case."

  "On what grounds?"

  "Government malfeasance."

  "Malfeasance? Because of the war?"

  "I won't define it now. The point will be that before you broke the law, the government did. If the judge denies my motion—and they usually do—then you get your jury and I will call you to offer whatever testimony your conscience requires."

  "But if the judge grants it?"

  "The case is dropped and you're free."

  "Completely free?"

  "Yes. Except for a promise I want you to make to me right now, for your mother's sake."

  "What?"

  "If you are freed from these charges, you will still have to deal with your draft board. I want you to promise me that you will put in for CO status and that you'll file the statements necessary to get it."

  "You mean apply on religious grounds?"

  "If that's what it takes."

  Richard did not answer at first, but neither now did he lower his eyes or show other signs of vacillation. Sean realized what a strong, soul-centered man his son had become, despite the ravages of his anxiety.

  Sean said, "If you thought it was useful, I would help you with that too. I'm sure we can describe your position in ways that are true to you, but that also satisfy the board's requirement. Eligibility for CO status is a subtle point of the law, and most local board members—they tend to be potbellied legionnaires—are not theologically sophisticated, to say the least. I have no doubt the intention of the law was to respect the conscience of men exactly like you. I think together we could establish that."

  Richard smiled. "Together? We should be able to. Weren't we both trained by Jesuits?"

  Dillon didn't answer, and they were silent for some moments. Then Richard asked, "Government malfeasance?"

  Sean shook his head once, briskly. "I'm not explaining that until I have it more sharply in my sights. You have to trust me."

  "Because you're my lawyer?"

  "No, because I'm your father."

  Sean saw himself, dressed in dark clothing and basketball shoes, moving through a darkened corridor, guiding himself by the feel of his fingertips on the wall.

  Only the sensations of the moment registered—the smooth, cool tile broken at regular intervals by ridges of mortar, the muffled sound of his own footsteps and his careful breathing, the shapes around him of the shadows that marked doors he was passing. He was counting the doors. Somehow he knew the seventh on this corridor would be his.

  He found the knob, and below it, the lock. Quickly he took a key from his pocket—a key? from whose belt?—applied it, turned the knob, opened the door and went through. From another pocket he drew a small flashlight—from that cop's belt!—and snapped it on. As he expected, he was in another corridor, a shorter, narrower one off which other doors led.

  He pushed on the first door and it opened. Even in the darkness, the structure of the room was evident. Beyond a set of six typewriter tables and a supervisor's desk was a wall of filing cabinets.

  Typewriters, filing cabinets.

  Dillon began to cross the room, aiming the narrow beam of the light at drawer labels, at the trademarks of the typing machines.

  He made his moves easily, his mind purring along. He opened a cabinet drawer, and the sight of a bundle of letter folders exhilarated him, though he did not—

  He froze.

  The sound of voices behind him, voices carrying in from the short corridor outside. But it was the middle of the night. No one was—

  Not voices, he realized, but one voice.

  He crept back to the door of the room, and after listening for a moment, opened it a crack.

  A gruff male voice coming from the office at the end of the corridor. A man talking on the telephone. But in the middle of the night? The man's voice carried an urgency, something of panic and fury both, and Dillon realized that it was a voice he knew. But who?

  Raymond Buckley. Randall Crocker. J. Edgar Hoover. Lyndon Johnson.

  Dillon realized that he was not wearing gloves. He was leaving fingerprints everywhere!

  He heard the door open at the far end of the corridor. The man was coming.

  Dillon dashed back across the room for that file of letter folders. His hands shook as he pulled the folders from the drawer. They began to spill. He tried to stop them from falling. He banged the drawer closed, and the noise gave him away. The door opened behind him, and he faced the man whose room this was. A man in uniform. A general. Four stars on his shoulders. But old, very old. And angry. Like God.

  Dillon woke up.

  His fists were clenched in the sheet. Cass, with her back to him, was still asleep. He blinked at the clock. It was twenty past two.

  He sat up, aware at once of what had happened.

  A burglary, the third burglary of his life.

  Not Buckley's office, and not the navy's. Despite the fright with which he'd wakened, Dillon laughed to himself. He was fifty-nine years old, and at his exalted place in life, he could do his sneak-thief night work without leaving bed.

  And then he knew who the old coot general was, General Lewis B. Hershey, the head of Selective Service since 1941, when Dillon first knew him. Still hanging on, he was an exact peer of Hoover's, and a fossil like Hoover—and, Dillon realized, a file keeper like Hoover too.

  Hershey's files. They were what his dream had given him. Sean Dillon knew what he had to do now. He had just burglarized himself.

  Twenty-five

  Richard woke up and saw a naked girl standing by the foot of his bed. She filled the narrow space by the card table that he used for a desk. Beyond her the curtain, a tacked-up tie-dyed sheet, lifted in the warm morning breeze. Outside the window there were the traffic sounds of P Street, as cars crossing from Georgetown accelerated up the hill toward Dupont Circle.

  Jeannie. With the dark brown hair, which fell in a straight drop to a point below her shoulder blades. She was turned two thirds away, and he saw her mostly from the rear. He watched, without her knowing, as she lit a cigarette, then, inhaling, went up on her toes with pleasure. That movement pulled the line of muscles taut from her calves through her thighs to her biscuit-like ass. The sight stirred him. As she came down on her heels again, waving the match out, her breasts shook.

  "A room with a view," he said, propping himself with a pillow.

  "Hi, sweet." She faced him, smiling. Her eyes were bright as the light coming in under the makeshift, garish curtain.

  He raised a hand toward her. She came back to the bed. "I dream of Jeannie," he said, his old joke. They kissed, but with sated tenderness. He cupped her left breast and kissed it also. "What would I do without you?"

  "Self-abuse."

  "You're crass." He laughed, but in fact she often caught him off guard like that.

  "No, I'm cold. I need a shirt." She stood. Two steps took her to his closet. She opened it. "Gee, what's this?"

  He looked past her into the dark closet space, most of which was taken
up by a stack of cartons, his books. There were no shelves in the room and he didn't plan to be there long enough to build them. Next to the boxes his clothes were hung on hooks, but one item hung on a heavy wooden hanger.

  She lifted the blue sleeve and asked again, "Rich, what is this?"

  "My suit."

  Jeannie turned toward him, still holding the sleeve. The shock on her face surprised him. "Your suit? What suit?"

  Richard laughed. "My UVA moot court suit. I went home yesterday and got it."

  "Home?"

  "To Boiling." He looked away.

  "I didn't know you were going to wear a suit."

  "Jeannie, I have to wear a suit. There will be a jury. They will be average people. They won't listen to me if I look—"

  "Like what you are? You'll look ridiculous in that suit. What about your hair? You can't wear a blue suit with a ponytail." Then she saw what the sudden color in his face was telling her. "You're getting your hair cut? Jesus Christ, Richard. Did your father—?"

  "My father has nothing to do with it. He didn't mention my clothing."

  "Your mother, then."

  "Jeannie, my parents and I are way past that shit with each other. It's just a question of my wanting to communicate with people. Like if I was ringing doorbells for McCarthy."

  "Oh, Christ." She fumbled in his closet, past the suit, for a shirt and put it on, a faded brown workshirt with tails. "McCarthy. That's my point. Did you hear what he said yesterday in Chicago, about Czechoslovakia? It's 'no major world crisis,' he said. Jesus, Richard, the Russians send tanks to Prague, and McCarthy shrugs. He shrugs about the war by now."

  "McCarthy wasn't my point." Richard pulled the sheet up higher on his body. She wasn't naked anymore, neither would he be. "Communicating was."

  "But you're getting your hair cut?"

  "I didn't say that."

  "Well are you?"

  "I ... I hadn't decided."

  "Your trial's tomorrow. When were you going to decide?"

  "Today."

  "And you're wearing a suit? A tie?"

  "Why are you so uptight? Why does it matter so much to you?"

  Jeannie shook her head, not that she didn't know, but that she would not tell him. He was startled to see a sudden flow of tears in her eyes. "Jeannie..."

  "No. You're right. It's none of my business." She crossed to the other side of the bed, to the chair where she'd put her own clothes the night before. She took her underpants and her jeans and her own shirt and went into the bathroom. She closed the door.

  In the night she had made him feel that she understood him better than anyone ever had. He had told her everything. She had been the only person in the world. When they made love she had crushed him to her with her arms and legs both. She had cried out, her feelings for him spilling everywhere like the juices of their two bodies. He had never felt so free, so happy. He had felt they would be together always.

  He heard the toilet flush.

  He tossed the bed sheet back, hopped out of bed and pulled on his Levi's. He went to the table for a rubber band he used to hold his hair back, and with one deft movement he gathered his hair and fixed the rubber band at his nape. He reached for a cigarette, lit it, lifted the purple curtain away from the window, saw trees in the distance of drowsy Rock Creek Park, let the curtain fall and snapped on the cheap plastic radio. "Hey Jude," Paul McCartney sang. The tune was everywhere that month.

  She came back into the tiny room, and when Richard faced her he felt claustrophobic. There wasn't room for one in that shithole, much less two. How could it have seemed their perfect little space capsule the night before? Their trip to the moon.

  Dressed now in her T-shirt and bell bottoms, she held his brown shirt out to him. "Thanks," he said.

  He took the shirt but did not put it on. He stood there bare-chested.

  The Beatles were screaming now, a feature of the song. Richard turned the volume down to nothing.

  "Can I ask you something?"

  "Sure," he said.

  "Do you love your father?"

  He didn't answer at first. He knew she wasn't really asking that. She wanted him to declare himself politically to her; was he loyal to the movement or not? To their generation? To the pure and bright throng, much of which, even then, had descended on Chicago? Was he loyal to her?

  "I thought I told you that last night."

  "We talked about a lot of things last night."

  "But I said what it meant to me, didn't I? That he agreed to defend me?"

  "But he put all these conditions on you."

  "No, he didn't." Richard stepped toward her, smiling suddenly. "Except making me come out of jail. Which is why I met you."

  "I just think you should be who you are with them, Richard. You should be strong. If you try to take the edge off what you believe, it won't cut through all the bullshit they keep piling on us. Like McCarthy, he's the same as Johnson and Humphrey now."

  Richard took Jeannie by the shoulders. He realized that this was the other side of her fierceness as a lover. She had pressed things out of him he hadn't known were even there, and maybe—verbally—she was doing it again. "I think this is a good country," he said. "I believe in it, you know? I think Americans want to do what's right. They just don't understand what's happening now. I want to tell that judge and jury about the Vietnamese! Who talks about the Vietnamese? They're the ones getting mauled. They're the ones we have to make those jurors think about, or the judge at least. Judges could declare the war unconstitutional! I don't want them to be able to write off what I say because I look like—"

  "One of us."

  He shook his head. "I'm not getting my hair cut, Jeannie. I just decided."

  "It wasn't your hair that bothered me, it was your suit."

  "Why? Why is that so important to you?"

  "Because I made you a shirt."

  "What?"

  "For your trial."

  "A shirt?"

  "Yes. A cotton shirt, embroidered around the collar." She looked away from him. "Now I feel foolish."

  "Where is it?"

  "In my pack. I was going to give it to you today."

  "Can I see it?"

  She hesitated, then went to the card table, pulled the chair aside and stooped for her knapsack. She took a package out. It was wrapped in tissue. She brought it to him timidly.

  "I can still have it?"

  "I made it for you."

  He carefully unwrapped the package, put the paper aside, then held up an undyed muslin shirt with blousy sleeves and a high, plain collar edged in blue thread by a careful border of tiny crosses.

  "It's beautiful. Really beautiful. You made it?"

  "Yes. I made it for you because I love you."

  Richard pulled her shirt on over his head, then fastened the three buttons at his chest. The buttons, too, were homemade, wooden disks. "Jesus Christ, Jeannie, I love it."

  There was a cracked mirror on the near wall, and Richard turned toward it. "Holy shit," he said, "I look like Thomas Jefferson!"

  She laughed, throwing her hands back. "God, you do!"

  "Maybe now they'll listen to me." He struck a pose. " 'Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.'"

  He turned back to her, full of happiness and hope. He put his hands on Jeannie again, and drew her close.

  The joke of his resemblance to Jefferson—a particular statue of the young farmer in the rotunda at Charlottesville, the sleeves loose like his own, the hair tied back—changed into something else, a charged, and charging, gravity. After a moment's silence in which their two bodies settled against each other, he said quietly, " 'And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.'" He pulled back to look at her. "Or should we just fuck?"

  "The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!"

  That night in Grant Park, across the
street from the hotel where the McCarthy and Humphrey campaigns were headquartered, ten thousand demonstrators had gathered. Thousands of others milled about outside the convention hall across vast parking lots that had once been a corner of the stockyards, Chicago's Pride. After World War II the meat-packing industry had been transformed by frozen foods, and the stockyards had been closed now for more than a decade. Still, on warm, humid nights like that one, the old stench of the slaughterhouses rose from the pavement. Delegates and demonstrators from outside Chicago did not know why the air, even inside the hall—it had been built mainly for showing livestock—seemed rotten.

  The peace plank, a direct challenge to Johnson's war, had been roundly defeated that afternoon after not only Humphrey but even McCarthy declined to speak in favor of it. The terrible contest that had begun in New Hampshire half a year before was over, and the opponents of the war had lost. Now they were in the parks and streets of Chicago. The police, who'd been invited by Mayor Daley in April to shoot to kill, were in those parks and streets too, twelve thousand of them, together with another twelve thousand hastily deployed and heavily armed GIs.

  The clash was inevitable and had now come.

  "The whole world is watching!" The demonstrators chanted, desperately pointing at TV cameras and lights while helmeted policemen ran through the crowd swinging clubs and firing off canisters of Mace and tear gas.

  Prague. This was Prague again.

  Policemen with bullhorns could be heard replying with curses to the taunts of the hysterical kids. The throng kept falling away and circling back each time knots of policemen charged.

  Bloodied students were hauled toward police wagons. At intersections along Michigan Avenue combat troops had mounted machine guns, and sinister-looking army vehicles blocked the movement of fleeing, dazed demonstrators. Smoke and tear gas wafted above them, and many had covered their faces with their shirts. Cries and popping noises, sirens and chanting crowds—"Join us! Join us!"—filled the air.

  Policemen could be seen clubbing the inert forms of people who'd fallen to the ground.