Memorial Bridge (63 page)

"Oh, Christ, Cass."

"No, really." Cass looked quickly around, shocked to realize they were arguing in public. They had not actually raised their voices, but crushed napkins sat on both their plates, and beside those plates their fists were clenched. Cass noted with relief that the subdued diners around them seemed intent on their meals, as uninterested either in speaking or listening as Sean and Cass themselves had been only moments before.

Sean leaned back abruptly to break their mood. He took out his cigarettes and lit up. Cass joined him in a rare smoke of her own.

He said quietly, wanting to disarm her, "I admit to being afraid for our country."

"I was just thinking of you." She leaned across to him, to touch his hand. "I think you are making things worse on yourself than they need be."

"What are you talking about?" He was sure that she was going to say Richard.

She said, "Mr. Crocker, I'm talking about Mr. Crocker."

He looked away.

"I want you to come with me, Sean. You should come with me."

Dillon inhaled his cigarette, then raised a finger at a waiter for the check.

"Sean, it's been more than a month. His condition is worsening. He would recognize you, Sean. He recognizes me, I'm sure of it. It would mean—"

"Cass, please, Cass. Take my word for it, Randall Crocker does not want to see me. It would be no kindness to him."

"But I've told you what the doctor said. His behavior toward you was almost certainly part of the effect of the undetected strokes he'd been having for months, the lashing out, the hostility, the paranoia. His brain was affected. Men in his law firm had their troubles with him too. You're wrong to take it personally, or to think that now—"

"It is not a matter of my taking it personally," he said, irritated. "We have a seriously divided government. I am totally identified with one side, he was—"

"Sean, he's sick." Cass leaned toward him again, but for the control it gave her. If she was speaking in a whisper, it was a venomous one. "And now he's alone. No one visits him but me. He has no family, Sean. He has no friends, not here anyway, this damn, heartless city."

"I'm glad you go to see him, Cass."

"His eyes move, Sean. When I read to him he nods at what he likes. I've been reading James Bond novels to him, Sean. You should be doing that, not me. You owe him more than I do."

"Maybe we owe him, both of us, more than you think."

His bitterness tipped her. "You can't blame him for Richard. Stop blaming Mr. Crocker for that. Richard made his own choices, and if he found someone he could talk them over with in Mr. Crocker, that's all the more we owe him."

"I don't see it that way."

"You don't see anything anymore. You make a judgment and then refuse to change it."

"Once you admired that in me. Once, Mr. Crocker did."

"I'm not talking about gangsters in Chicago or Raymond Buckley—"

She stopped. Suddenly her hands fluttered with nervousness. It was the first time either of them had mentioned Buckley in years. The name hung between them in the air like some foul word, some curse.

Dillon could not look at her. He dropped his eyes to her hands, which, as if independent of her, were compulsively twisting around each other. He noticed that her hands were not beautiful any longer. Rheumatism had knotted her long, tapering fingers.

"I just mean," she continued, "that now you might be wrong in your judgment, Sean. The judgment you want to stick by. You might be wrong about everything. Has that occurred to you?"

"Everything?" he asked, and waited with gathering intensity for her to answer. When she said nothing, he repeated, "Everything?"

She clamped her hands together, stopping them.

"You mean the war, don't you?"

She was startled by his accusation and her face showed it.

"You mean the war," he repeated. "Are you going to start in on the war? Is that your point? Now you can join the line of experts on Vietnam. Everybody in this town knows what to do in Vietnam except those of us charged with doing it. Including you. Well, yes, Cass, it has occurred to me that I'm wrong. I've been wrong. And boys have died as a result! Is that your point?"

"I didn't mean the war," she said, but in a detached, impersonal tone. The war, like the riots in Washington, was an agony beyond her.

But Sean went on as if he hadn't heard. "But what if I am mistaken? I still have to act. Don't you understand that? I still have responsibility."

Cass shook her head. "I know nothing of that, Sean. But I do know this"—she indicated the two of them, their family—"and from what I see, you do not act, and you do not accept responsibility, and for all I know, it's the same in the Pentagon. What I see is a man who is only waiting, waiting for something awful to happen. Like your son to reject what you stand for, or your oldest, dearest friend to do that too. To me, you're like Mayor Daley, just wanting to strike out! Once you hated men like him. Now you defend him. Shoot to kill—that's not responsibility, and if that's all we're doing in Vietnam now, well then..." Her antagonism shocked even her, and she had to stop. With a shift back to the impersonal, she said, "I don't know anything about Vietnam. I deliberately refuse to think about it. But I know about you. And what I see from beginning to end when I look at you now is a man who has become paralyzed. You're stuck, Sean. You're as paralyzed in your way as Mr. Crocker is in his. But at least when he moves his eyes or squeezes my hand I get the feeling that he's still alive inside. I'm not sure if that's true of you anymore, Sean. I'm really not."

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 if 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.