Army Blue

by Lucian K. Truscott

  “I don't want to touch the situation over in Vietnam, except through official channels. Not for the time being.”

  “You're right about that, Brownie. I'll wait for your call. When do you leave on your goddamned State Department fact-finding tour over there, Brownie?”

  “Not for two days, sir.”

  “I see. Are you still coming over at cocktail hour?”

  “I think I'd better get on this pretty hard, sir,” said Lieutenant General Pelton. He paused for a moment, staring across the street.

  “Sir?” he asked tentatively.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you want me to call your son . . . ah . . . Colonel Blue, about this situation?”

  The General looked at him hard, then looked away.

  “You did the right thing coming to me with this, Brownie. I don't think it will be necessary to notify Matt's father.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Lieutenant General Pelton, uncomprehendingly.

  “We'll miss you, Brownie. But I'll be here. You know where to find me.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Lieutenant General Pelton.

  The General walked General Pelton upstairs and paused at the door.

  “You're a good man, Brownie, coming to me with this,” he said, touching the sleeve of Lieutenant General Pelton's jacket. Pelton turned and snapped a salute.

  “Thank you, sir,” was all he could think of to say. It was the first gesture of affection he'd gotten from the General in the thirty years they'd known each other. He turned and headed down the brick sidewalks of Georgetown toward his car, which was parked around the corner.

  No sooner had the General returned to his study, than the phone rang.

  “Blue here,” said the General. He was alert, but his attention was elsewhere.

  “Ma-a-a-atthew,” drawled a velvetlike, luxurious voice. “This is your sister-in-law, Aggie.”

  The voice belonged to the General's first wife's sister, Agnes Randolph. They had never been fans of one another. In fact, they hadn't talked in over twenty years.

  “Agnes. Good to hear from you,” growled the General.

  “I've just spoken to Matt.” She paused. “Your son,” she said.

  “You have,” the General said.

  “Yes, I have,” drawled the velvet-smooth voice. “He has told me about young Matt and his troubles. I think it best that you come down here and talk with your son about his son and your grandson. There is a lot at stake, Ma-a-a-atthew. You know it as well as I do.”

  “Where are you calling from, Agnes?” the General asked.

  “I'm at Wild Acres, where I've always been. Right here in Charlottesville. There is no one else here. It will be just the three of us. Matt is due here at nine. If you drive here directly, you'll be here by then easily.”

  “We haven't spoken in ten years, you know,” said the General, referring to his son.

  “All of that must be put aside now, Ma-a-a-atthew,” drawled the voice on the phone.

  “A boy's life is at stake. Your flesh and blood. Your pride, your son's pride . . . neither of you has that luxury anymore, Ma-a-a-atthew. I'll expect you at nine.”

  The phone went dead.

  The General stared at the receiver, then he leaned his head back against the thick leather of the armchair and stared at the brick wall festooned with the trophies of his trade. He hardly recognized anything hanging there. What good was a gun when there was nothing to shoot? What good a polo ball and mallet when there was no horse to ride, no game to play? What good a helmet when there was no war?

  He wondered if it wasn't all just for nothing, the mementos on the walls, the books, the politics . . . the memories. Then he remembered a boy somewhere ten thousand miles away, who was scared and alone, who had no cluttered wall and no politics and, relatively speaking, no memories. He was just starting out, and already someone was saying he was finished.

  That had happened to the General nearly fifty years before, when they had told him he'd never make it at West Point. The appointment he'd sought was going to someone else. His hopes for a military career were finished.

  Well, goddammit, they had told him it was over before he began, but that wasn't going to happen to his grandson. He stood up and tucked in his shirt and headed upstairs to get his shoes.

  Not only was the boy far from finished, but neither was his grandfather, General Matthew Nelson Blue, Jr., U.S. Army, Retired.

  3

  * * *

  * * *

  When Carey Randolph Blue died in September of 1947, she was buried in the graveyard at Monticello next to her mother, Mary Walker Randolph, because she and her mother and her eight sisters were great-granddaughters of Thomas Jefferson. If you are a blood relative of the nation's third President, burial at Monticello is an entitlement, for the graveyard's one and three-tenths acres are still owned by the descendants of President Jefferson, the rest of his property long since having been lost by the family, seized in lieu of unpaid taxes, when President Jefferson died.

  It had saddened the General, of course, to bury his wife in a place that had nothing to do with him and everything to do with her. He was destined for Arlington Cemetery, and he would have liked to have had her there with him. But her will dictated the family graveyard at Monticello, and he was loath to go up against the eight sisters who survived her, Aggie at their head. He knew they would stop at nothing to see their sister's will done. Pretty much everything having to do with his wife's family disturbed him. But being commanded from the grave, as it were, where he had to bury his wife of thirty years was on a vastly different plane from the usual disruption of having two sisters stay at the house for a week-long visit, listening to the three of them haggle and argue over people and incidents a half-century in the past with the attention to detail that only two centuries of family history could bring to their disputes.

  They were Southern aristocrats from Virginia; they had been raised at Edgehill Plantation, near Charlottesville; when they were girls, their bedrooms had been full of furniture that had come from President Jefferson's house; and when Carey Randolph was sixteen, she had been called with her sisters onto the lawn of Edgehill by her father one morning and told that there was no money left, that Edgehill had to be given up to the state for nonpayment of taxes. The last significant estate in Virginia remotely connected to the Randolph legacy had suffered the same fate as the house and property called Monticello. The life that they had known was over. The nine girls who had been tutored every morning, gone riding every afternoon, taken tea each day at five in long dresses and white gloves—all of them were, as of that morning, on their own. The year was 1910. They were certainly well educated, but having been raised within the cloistered confines of Edgehill, they were hardly schooled in the ways of the world. Carey Randolph accepted what few dollars her father proffered and took a train West.

  In Oklahoma she got a job as a nurse in what amounted to a frontier hospital on an Army post on the outer reaches of an uncultivated prairie. A year later she married a young Cavalry lieutenant by the name of Matthew Nelson Blue, Jr. She had her work cut out for her. He was, at the time, a graduate of the eighth grade. The one-room schoolhouse where he had gone to school had lost its teacher to pneumonia when Matthew Blue was fourteen, and he had taught the next four years of school. This showed initiative and fortitude, but it hadn't produced a school record or a certificate of graduation. He lost an appointment to West Point to the grandson of Sam Houston, and enlisted in the Army as a private. Two years later he received a direct commission as a second lieutenant, chiefly because of his abilities with horses. His squadron needed him on its polo team, and only officers played polo.

  Her sisters had always known she had educated him, that Carey had taken a sharecropper's son from the plains of Oklahoma and turned him into the dashing officer whose picture had eventually appeared on the cover of Life magazine. For this reason, chief among many others, they had always resented the General. They felt he had simply used their sister Car
ey, a woman so tiny and delicate she looked like a doll, with skin as white as porcelain and features, even on the day she died, as free of wrinkles as a magazine cover girl's.

  Of course, the sisters had never really known what went on between the coarse, burly General and his petite, demure wife. No one could possibly know the debt the General owed her, or the extent to which it had—or had not—been paid. This didn't prevent the sisters, however, from taking the dimmest of views of the General, and one of those who looked upon him most bleakly was Aggie Randolph Krill, the sister closest to Carey in age and friendship.

  Aggie Randolph Krill was widowed, like the General. Upon the death of her husband, a well-regarded professor of criminal law at Yale, she returned to Virginia and settled at Wild Acres, the last piece of Virginia land still belonging to that branch of the Randolphs descended from the family at Edgehill. By the standards of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello or Edgehill, it wasn't much—thirty acres of scrub pine, oak, and maple, on the outskirts of Charlottesville, across from an “outdoor theater,” as they called what was popularly known as a drive-in, which specialized in hot-rod epics and five-feature, dawn-to-dusk, moonshine-movie marathons. “Aunt Aggie,” as she was called by virtually everyone including the General, was the queen bee of Wild Acres, even though all eight sisters owned the property jointly.

  Agnes Randolph Krill knew that her phone call wouldn't sit well with the General. He would be meeting his son for the first time in ten years on ground that was not his, under the supervision of a woman who thought of him, when she thought of him at all, as a philistine who owed his elevated station in life to a dead woman he had wronged on a regular basis when she was alive and his wife.

  This wasn't the way the General was used to being treated, but she didn't give a damn. There was something more at stake here than the feelings of an old man who had shown little evidence over the years of having any feelings at all.

  Family was at stake. Not the family name, but family, the holy notion among those of the South, raised the way she was raised at Edgehill, which dictated that when anyone in the family was down, all family members dropped everything in their lives and came to his or her aid. This is what had made dynasties like the Randolphs powerful over the years—not the fact that a member of the family was a governor or a president or an artist or an industrialist. What made them powerful was the glue that held them together, the shared sense that when they faced it together, the world outside was a far less threatening place than when it was faced alone. In the Randolph family, this held true for sisters and brothers, relatives close and distant, and of course for farm hands’ and servants’ families who had worked for the Randolphs before, during, and after the War Between the States. Many was the story Agnes Randolph Krill could tell of her father wresting himself from bed at night to bring a sudden halt to the troubles of one of his farm workers who had been stopped on the road by the sheriff because he was walking along carrying six live chickens by their feet, chickens that were braying their discomfiture at a volume usually reserved for roosters at sunrise. Randolphs stood by Randolphs, and if you worked for a Randolph, you might not have the princely status of a descendant of Thomas Jefferson, but your boss did, and you could be damned sure he would exercise it on your behalf, public opinion be damned.

  Of course, many called it “taking care of your niggers,” but not to the face of Carey or Aggie or Mary Walker or Hollins Randolph himself, because no one wanted to face the wrath of the Randolph family, which, given cause to do so, behaved more like an army than a family.

  Indeed, Aunt Aggie had often thought that part of the General's problem with his wife's family was its closeness in spirit to the Army, which functioned more as a family to him than did his own flesh and blood.

  The Army.

  She had heard him joke at parties that he was wedded to the Army, but she had always seen the truth behind the joke in the eyes of her sister. Her eyes were alive with intelligence and wit, but wounded from neglect and the hollow feeling within all Army wives that forever they crouched beneath the monolithic Other Woman that was the Army. When the phone rang at 3:00 A.M., she knew he'd be in his boots and out the door to kill rats with a slingshot if that's what the man on the phone told him to do. The terrible thing about being an Army wife, Aunt Aggie thought, having watched her sister for thirty years trying to be as good an Army wife as one could possibly be, was that you didn't just play second fiddle to the Army.

  With a man like Matthew Nelson Blue, Jr., you were in the paying audience.

  Aunt Aggie and the Colonel were sitting in the living room at Wild Acres, waiting for the arrival of the General. The room wasn't large, but it seemed cavernous from the sofa facing the fireplace. There was a cathedral ceiling, its exposed beams reaching twenty-four feet above the floor at their apex. There was no wall separating the living room at one end from the dining room at the other end of what amounted to a great hall that you entered when you opened the front door of Wild Acres. The dining table, to the right, was a mahogany piece with six leaves that expanded it from a cozy table for six to a behemoth that sat twenty-six. Chairs to seat every one of them tucked themselves into crannies around that end of the room—next to the sideboard, up against a bookshelf, around a card table—so large was the room, they were hardly noticed.

  A broad expanse of polished floor separated the dining area from the living area. Off to the left was a hallway leading back to several small bedrooms and one bath. To the right was the door to the kitchen, a great, linoleum-armored, narrow space with windows that looked out on the barnyard next to the house. Down near the fireplace, furniture that had seen better days was gathered in one of those haphazard arrangements that looked so well lived-in you wouldn't dare move a chair. It seemed like a big country house, especially from inside, especially at first glance, but it wasn't.

  It was a Prohibition-era roadhouse that had featured a bar, a band, a dance floor, and a basement gambling casino that was reached through a trapdoor. America's flirtation with constitutionally enforced morality had left the Randolphs with a place that exuded character, if not history. Once Aunt Aggie had heard the General actually brag to an old Army friend about the pedigree of Wild Acres. She had thought for a moment there was hope for him yet, then she had watched him pinch the ass of a woman who was not his wife, and who in fact was the wife of the University of Virginia's dean of students. The University of Virginia had of course been founded by Thomas Jefferson, his wife's great-grandfather. It didn't escape her attention that the General had designs—and no doubt would execute those designs—on the wife of another man, in this case the wife of a man who was at least spiritually a retainer of his own wife's great-grandfather. Wives, after all, were just property, territory to him, and he had spent a life taking territory away from other men in war.

  He wasn't just coarse, she thought. He was low.

  The Colonel mixed an old-fashioned for Aunt Aggie and delivered it to her. She was sitting where she usually did, at the end of a chintz-covered couch, and she was perched there like an eagle, because that was the way she looked—like a great bird, about to swoop down on its prey, and its prey was you. They sat in the living room of the old place and waited for the arrival of the General, who was on his way down from Washington.

  She had her sister's nose, which was assertive, prominent, and, as years went by, even pronounced. Her eyes were slightly hooded, deepset, searching. They made people nervous, her eyes did. Randolph eyes had always made people nervous. Her mother had once told her that all her father had to do was look hard at someone, and he'd buckle. Even the sheriff had no stomach for Hollins Randolph's scowl, a grim, gray ghost of a countenance that could excavate a hundred years of history with the raising of an eyebrow.

  Aunt Aggie couldn't drop ‘em with an eyebrow, but she could stop ‘em with her drawl. When she spoke, the swamps of eastern Virginia oozed through her teeth. When she was angry, stones from granite outcroppings along the Blue Ridge cascaded down about
your feet. Her voice was slow and elegant and cultured and broad in its a’s and its o’s, but it wasn't her voice that counted. What she said was what stopped you in your tracks.

  There was the sound of automobile tires on the gravel drive outside, and they heard the iron gate in the stone fence open and shut. The door opened, and a rush of cool autumn air swept through the room.

  When the General walked in, she said, “Ma-a-a-atthew.” She paused and took a puff of her Fatima cigarette, which she smoked through a long, black holder.

  “Say hello to your son, Ma-a-a-atthew. He is a colonel now. I believe he was a captain the last time you two spoke.”

  The General stood in the open door for a moment, then closed it behind him. He took off his gray fedora and his coat, carefully folding the coat and laying it on a chair next to the door.

  “Yes, Aunt Aggie, I believe he was,” the General growled. He turned to look at the Colonel.

  “How are you?” he asked. He had his hat in his hand, and noticing it, he tossed it atop his coat on the chair.

  “I'm concerned about Matt. That's how I am. And I've been hoping that you and I can overcome our differences long enough to do what we can for him. He needs me, and God knows he might even need you before this is over.” The Colonel was standing next to Aunt Aggie. He was wearing a pair of khaki trousers and a blue blazer and a tie. Aunt Aggie always liked things on the formal side, and the Colonel was happy to oblige her.

  “Bruce Pelton filled me in this morning,” said the General. “It looks to me like the boy's got himself into a mess not of his making. It's going to be rough on him, but he's got a few characters on his side. Me, for one. Bruce Pelton's another. He's a lucky young man. He'll come out of this okay.”

  “I hope you're right,” the Colonel said flatly.

  “Come over and sit by me, Ma-a-a-atthew,” said Aunt Aggie, patting the cushion next to her on the sofa. “Fix your father an old-fashioned, Matt. You do want an old-fashioned, don't you, Ma-a-a-atthew?”