An American Requiem

by James Carroll

  And to my surprise at last, after Pope John, Hans Küng, Cardinal Spellman, Martin Luther King, Allen Tate, Daniel Berrigan, and Pope Paul VI, I thought: I am a real priest.

  This was Jenny's gift to me. What I was never able to get from my father, or from the Church, or from my beloved Paulists—a sense of my first vocation as mine —I got from this perfect child with the large heart and the lungs that were just a little small. I am a real priest, if only to you. That is what I thought, but what I said, with water sealing my bond with her forever, was, "I baptize you, Jenny, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost."

  From one scrubbed room to another. From my daughter's fiercely opened eyes to the eyes of my father, which are closed. The words of this story are inscribed in the air between me and the barely moving form under the sheet on the bed, six feet away from the chair in which I sit. "Dad" is the word. "Daddy." "Abba." This is his room at the Mount Vernon Nursing Home, two miles south of the house in which, even now, my mother is sleeping. It is the middle of the night. Otherwise, she would be here. My brothers and I are taking turns sitting with him around the clock, because he is dying.

  A month ago, having come down with a debilitating pneumonia, he slipped into a coma. He has not opened his eyes since, but his breathing is slow and steady. His face is pink, and his hair is a soft and snowy white, angel's hair at last. He has a baby's skin. When I wash him, I use what I have learned in washing Lizzy and Pat.

  A couple of days ago, the night nurse found that he had moved enough in his unconsciousness to have pulled the feeding tube from his nose. He had been receiving nutriment through it for weeks. The nurse, as it happened, had hospice experience and knew not to simply reinsert the tube, as others had done. She called Mom and asked for a family decision. It was January 15, 1991, the birthday of Martin Luther King and the day by which Saddam Hussein was supposed to have removed his troops from Kuwait. When the phone rang, Dennis calling, I was watching the evening news. Only moments before, the night sky over Baghdad had begun to explode with the Roman candles of American bombs and Iraqi antiaircraft fire. When I heard Dennis's voice, I'd thought at once he was calling to share the grief that yet again our country was at war. But no. "Dad," he said. "It's Dad."

  I flew to Washington at once. Dennis picked me and Kevin up at National Airport. Soon we were together with Mom in a small sitting room at the nursing home. The doctor had recommended an intubation, the surgical insertion of the feeding tube into Dad's abdomen. The procedure would enable him to live indefinitely, but in what state? Our mother's point of reference was the fate of Karen Ann Quinlan, who had lived with such a feeding tube for years, unconscious, while curled into a fetal knot. Once such a tube was inserted, who would order it removed?

  Our parents had each enacted the living will years before. The Church taught that to prolong life by extraordinary means was not necessary, and in some cases not proper. In this case, we all firmly agreed. Dad's eyes had been closed for weeks, which we took as his signal. "He wants to go to God," Mom said, a simple statement of the truth. We called the doctor and told him not to reinsert the feeding tube. Then we began our vigil.

  I am grateful to be here in the middle of the night. By now, the war in the Gulf is in fourth gear. During all other hours of the day and evening, television sets blare from every room on the corridor. The resounding noise of explosions, the clatter of armored vehicles, supersonic fighters, missiles—it all sickens me. The TV news people, in their safari jackets and shrapnel vests, convey the panic about gas attacks in Jerusalem. With deadpan neutrality, they report the barely veiled Israeli threats to use the nuclear bomb. The frantic search is on for Scud missile launch sites. The other residents of this wing of the nursing home must be deaf to have kept the volume turned so high. Throughout the day I was in a constant state of nausea, and kept my eye on all the buckets and sinks into which I could vomit. The feeling had been so old, so familiar, and so much a part of my memory of my father. America never more itself. America, in George Bush's terms, escaping at long last the emasculation of the Vietnam syndrome.

  I watch Dad breathe, and I unfold my mind from around the primordial image of our relationship, that sepia photo of the brand-new general in his tan uniform, holding the hand of a stunned but eager cowboy. Now I am face-down in the dirt of the end zone, as the one truly glorious moment of my life takes shape. There he is, tall, smoking, perfect in his uniform at last, stars glinting, blue limousine behind. I blink and he is hunched over his putter, stroking the ball, while immediately above him the last of the B-52S hovers with Ah! Bright wings! That roar fades into the silence of our ride along South Capitol Street, the silence out of which spring the words I'd lived to hear and say. And bang, there he is throwing a crumpled linen napkin on his plate. Bang, his head is in my hands, the still point of a sobbing man I hardly know.

  My eyes drop to the book in my hands. It is the blue, pocket-sized New Testament that an Air Force chaplain gave me years ago. He said, "I tell GIs, 'Carry it in your shirt pocket, at your heart. These books are known to stop bullets.'" Already lost, I thought he was joking. So I replied, "But can they stop a war?" The chaplain looked at me as if one of us were dead.

  Dead? I feel a cold wind come into my father's room, and immediately I raise my eyes again. My eyes go right to his. My heart is the one that stops, because my father's eyes are open. For the first time in a month, his eyes are open, glaring furiously at me.

  "You!" His voice jolts me. I jump in the chair. The one word, but in it I hear everything. You! Here I am dying, and they have left me with you!?

  You! My last moments on the earth, and I am with you!?

  You! You are starving me! My enemy! My betrayer! You! You are starving me!

  I close my eyes, sure that when I open them again, his will be closed, as ever. This is a hallucination, a dream, a nightmare. I open my eyes. And he is still staring at me. His lips are firmly together. You? Did he say, "You"?

  "Dad?"

  I stand up. "Dad?"

  I move closer. His eyes seem to follow me, like some mosaic Christ's. How is this possible? "Did you speak?" His eyes are wet, as if about to spill over. What I see in them is sadness, not anger. "Dad?"

  I move around the bed to its other side. And still his eyes follow me. "Dad?"

  I bolt from the room, and halfway down the dim corridor I come upon a stout black woman, an aide. "Would you help me?" The desperation in my voice conscripts her. She follows me as we race back to my father's room. I take the woman's hand and pull her to the foot of the bed. "Are his eyes open?" I ask. "Are they?"

  "Lord, have mercy," she says, leaning toward him. She caresses the protrusion of the sheet that is his foot. "Joe?"

  Her use of his name startles me.

  "Joe? Is that you, Joe?"

  She moves around the bed, to his side. She takes his hand in hers, tenderly. His eyes have not left her. "Joe, it is you." Spontaneously, she leans to his forehead and kisses him. "It is you!"

  When she turns to me, she says, "It's a miracle."

  A miracle? Who prayed for a miracle? I begin to back out of the room. Jesus Christ. Instantly waves swamp me, first of regret that he has come back, then of guilt that I should have such a feeling. A moment later I am in the phone booth, talking to Dennis. "He opened his eyes, Den. For a minute I thought he spoke to me. But he opened his eyes. His eyes are open now. He's still here!"

  And Dennis—how I love him for this, how I envied him—responded unhesitatingly, "Jim, that's great. Jesus, that is great!"

  "Yeah," I said numbly. "And it means we should put the tube back in. We have to feed him."

  "Of course."

  "So I'll order it, okay?"

  "Should we ask Mom?"

  "He's still here, Dennis. We can't starve him if he's still here. There's no point in asking Mom."

  "Right."

  "I'll call the doctor now." And I do. He says, "As long as you understand what this means. Your father may
be alive for a long time."

  "I can't starve him if he's still here."

  The next morning, I am preparing to leave, to go back to Boston. Kevin is staying for another day, but I can't stand it anymore. He, Dennis, Mom, and I are crowded into Dad's room so I can say goodbye. "I'll see you, Dad." The blank look he gives me seems entirely familiar. I almost ask him: Dad, did you speak to me? But I know he didn't. "You!" If anyone said that word aloud, it was me.

  I kiss him on the forehead where his angel hair meets his pink skin. "I'll see you," I say again, thinking it is true.

  Two nights later, just after midnight on January 20, 1991, at the age of eighty, with Dennis at his side—Dennis, who had refused to abandon the vigil, as years before he had refused to abandon the hope of a father's love—Dad died. It was clear by then that the Gulf War was a rout.

  Robert E. Lee's greatness had been apparent to me as a freshman in high school, when I prankishly raised the Stars and Bars on his birthday. It had been apparent also to Abraham Lincoln, who offered Lee command of the Union Army. Lee declined and went back across the Potomac, to his great family mansion in Arlington. Though he had denounced slavery as a "moral and political evil," and though he had opposed Virginia's secession as "anarchy, nothing but revolution," he embraced the Confederacy. Lincoln regarded him as a traitor.

  Union soldiers were beaten badly in the early battles that raged across the rolling hills on which, a century later, I would play games of "army" and "war." They hated Lee in particular. Beating retreats to Washington, Yankees fell like furies upon Lee's estate. They took it over, and with pointed contempt they dug up Nellie Custis Lee's rose garden and used it as a mass grave for their dead. An act of personal vengeance aimed at Lee led to the transformation of his estate into Arlington National Cemetery.

  My mother's last gift to my father was the site of his grave. When, about a year before he died, she visited the cemetery superintendent, the man showed her the nearly full section that was designated for future burials. The plot he offered was in a remote corner among innocuous tombstones—not what Mary Carroll had in mind at all. The superintendent was an old man himself, and Mom asked if he would be interred in Arlington. When he said yes, she asked if he would show her the place he'd picked out for himself. He was delighted to do so. While they walked among the markers and door-shaped tablets, doors opened on their stories. The superintendent described his own career, and the general's wife described her husband's. By the time they stood together on the knoll just to the side of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the most sacred hill of all, she was holding on to his arm. The man pointed out the nearby graves of General Thomas White, an Air Force chief of staff, of General Maxwell Taylor, and General Lewis B. Hershey. My mother told him related stories of "my Joe." The superintendent marked the end of their hour together by taking her to the highest point of that knoll, as close as one could get to the shrine of the Unknown, from which the entire city could be seen across the bridge that had linked Lee to Lincoln at last. And he offered her the spot for Dad.

  The requiem took place at the pristine post chapel at adjacent Fort Meyer, a Mass offered by an old family friend. The chapel is a smaller version of the austere white-steepled church at Boiling Air Force Base, where this personal history began. My family assembled in the little church with a hundred others—friends, neighbors, a few of Dad's retired colleagues, former golfing partners, several dozen uniformed military officials, and an assistant director of the FBI. Lexa, Lizzy, and Pat sat together in the second row.

  As the ceremony was about to start, I stood outside with my brothers under the chapel awning. It was a bitterly cold day. We were five six-footers, dressed alike in dark suits and topcoats. We were bareheaded, and the crystal cold displayed us to one another. When our eyes flicked over each other's faces, we saw how time had boiled our features down to what made us alike—the same knobby chin, our mother's nose, and our father's forehead. Each of us was losing his hair according to the same pattern, and it was turning gray.

  Joe, now a senior psychology professor at the University of Puerto Rico, had made a career of caring for the disabled. At Boston's Perkins Institute for the Blind once, a doctor told me Joe was well known as an advocate for blind, deaf, and crippled students. Joe had named his two children for our parents. He was first in the pallbearers' line, partnered with me. He stood half straight, leaning on his cane.

  Dennis's hair was long, well over the collar of his coat. On his lapel he wore a large button, a flowered portrait of a Hindu deity. After his CO days, he had gone on to be a permanent student until, lo and behold, he'd emerged from the academic cocoon with a Ph.D. in biochemistry. He had distinguished himself as a bench scientist at James Watson's laboratories. By now he was a senior USAID health official, overseeing efforts to combat tropical diseases like malaria and river blindness in the poorest nations of the world. With his wire-rim glasses he still looked like John Lennon.

  Kevin was a social worker in Massachusetts. Beginning as an undergraduate volunteer working in an orphanage, he had spent his adult life rescuing children from abusive situations, trying to help stressed families find ways to stay together, and protecting vulnerable members when families broke apart. His open-hearted presence calmed fears, dampened conflict, put families back in touch with basic affection—all services he had performed, unsung, for us.

  Brian was the baldest of us, and the best looking—our own Sean Connery. When an FBI agent retires, he turns in his gun and badge, which are then passed on to a new agent. Brian had tracked down Dad's badge, and traded for it. Now he carries that badge, doing the same work in Chicago that Dad had done. He was our father's dream son, and, amazingly for the age, our dream brother.

  Standing with us, also as pallbearers, were a former FBI colleague of Dad's and two dignitaries: the current directors of DIA and OSI in their general's uniforms. We were lined up as if we would carry Dad's casket, although according to military protocol, only the young airmen of the honor guard would actually lift him. I had no idea whether that bothered anyone but me.

  We huddled near the chapel doorway, puffs of breath at our mouths, while the Air Force Band, playing the funeral march, inched toward us. Behind the band came fifty members of an Air Force honor guard, ahead of a horse-drawn caisson on which Dad's casket rode. Next to the caisson, a stiff, marching handler led the riderless horse, an Army symbol of a fallen general, but which, for my generation, always evokes the. memory of the dead John F. Kennedy.

  "Excuse us, sirs!" Two captains in silver-edged dress uniforms suddenly appeared among us. They were addressing the generals. "Did anyone leave a black attaché case under the second pew?"

  "What, Captain?"

  "A briefcase, sir." He turned and pointed into the church. "Under the second pew."

  I went inside and looked with the others. Unclaimed briefcase: ominous words, and despite the captains' rigid control, enough to set off alarms in each of us—a shrieking alarm in me. Then I saw it, the thin black box under the very pew in which my beloved Lexa, Lizzy, and Pat were sitting. I pictured the chapel being blown to smithereens—that devious fucker Saddam, what a brilliant stroke! I saw the bricks, the molding and lintels, the columns, the lumber of the pews, the needlepoint cushions, and the limbs of all those people tumbling in slow motion in the air, debris and blood, splinters, dust and shards of glass, the pure anarchy of attack.

  The DIA general had read our reactions. "No, Captain, the briefcase is not ours."

  Of the two honor guard officers, one went to halt the caisson, the other went into the chapel. He walked down the center aisle, leaned into the second pew, genuflecting neatly. Without a break in his posture, he had the briefcase in his hands, in front of his face as if it were the Word of God. He walked into the sanctuary and disappeared through the door from which the priest was about to come.

  My brothers and I, the generals, and the former FBI man had all watched the captain until he and the briefcase were gone. Then we exchanged
glances, the secret of our relief.

  "You can stay nervous," my father had said. Dutiful son to the end, I did.

  After the Mass, the honor guard put his casket back on the caisson. My brothers and I, with the generals, fell into rank behind the horses. Brian had the proper bearing of an agent. Dennis, with his hair brushing the collar of his overcoat, a distinguished scientist now, but still a hippie. Kevin, his face tear-streaked, broken by grief, working to keep his shoulders still. Because of his limp, Joe could not stay with us for the walk behind the caisson. As I watched him climb into the first car, I wanted to call out to him with what I suddenly recognized as my oldest wish: Carry me, Joe! Carry me!

  The muffled drums began, and we marched like soldiers through the snow-covered hills of the cemetery. Dad was the one who'd died, so why was I the one whose life flashed before his eyes? The life I have reported here. From the hills of Arlington, one can see the spire of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, where I'd sung as a seminarian; the tower of the National Cathedral, where I heard Martin Luther King preach the week before he died; the swath of Pennsylvania Avenue on which I'd stood for eight inaugurations and a funeral; the Pentagon, to which I'd driven the Lincoln and to which I'd marched; and the Lincoln Memorial, which broods above the black wall of the war. And one can see to the distant hills of Maryland, site of Andrews Air Force Base where, in November 1995, as I am finishing this book, the United States Air Force would name the OSI building in honor of my father.

  The reason I felt so relieved to reach his grave was that at last I could rejoin Lexa and Lizzy and Pat. They held me, just in time. Once the priest finished the traditional words, which I confess had never seemed so empty, the freezing air above us split with the sound of guns. Boom, bolt action, boom, bolt action, boom! The twenty-one-gun salute. Patrick clung to me, afraid. Afraid like me.

  Afraid, for another thing, of what my once beloved airplanes were raining down on the heads of men, women, and children in the streets of Baghdad. On that very afternoon, January 25, 1991—the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul—thousands of peace demonstrators were heading for Washington, below this hill. The only sizable protest of the Gulf War, seventy thousand strong, was to take place on the Mall the next day. Weeks before, I had helped begin to organize the Boston contingent. But now, it never crossed my mind to stay. As soon as the funeral was over, Lexa, Pat, Lizzy, and I were going home.