Memorial Bridge (68 page)

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.

It was embarrassing. All around her, uniformed young men and women paraded by while she had to stand at the guard's table as he telephoned. Someone had to come down from Sean's office and sign her in. She waited.

At last Michael Packard came. The sight of his bright, smiling face relieved her, and when he opened his arms, she went into them as if that hallway were the platform of a train station. How did he know she needed to be welcomed? For twenty-five years Michael had been their friend, obviously far more Sean's than hers, but Cass felt a rare dose of her fondness for him. She had an impulse to confide in him, but she
instantly recognized it for what it was—a wish to recruit Michael as her ally.

"What's wrong?" Packard asked after signing her in and while leading her into the Pentagon.

"I have to see Sean right away."

"About Richard?"

"Yes. I've just come from Occoquan."

"Is he all right?"

"How could he be? That place is a dungeon."

"So is this place, Cass." Packard said this without slowing down. He had Cass fiercely by the elbow. "The President finally replaced Westmoreland. They just announced it. He'll be coming home week after next—but guess what? He's the new chairman."

"What?"

"That's right. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Westmoreland! After Khe Sanh!"

The siege of Khe Sanh, begun at Tet, had gone on until April. Five thousand bombs a day had been dropped around Khe Sanh, "the most concentrated bombing in the history of warfare," as Westmoreland put it. For two miles in every direction the once lovely hills had become a moonscape. When at last the enemy had lifted the siege, Westmoreland had stunned every man in the American military by ordering the "anchor base" abandoned—the base for which more than ten thousand men had died. To civilians Tet had revealed the absurdity of the war, but to soldiers Khe Sanh had.

But Cass was not thinking of Khe Sanh. "Westmoreland? But the war goes worse than ever. There are a thousand men a month being killed now."

"You know your numbers, Cass."

"Every mother knows them."

Packard stopped her. Military men continued to flow past them, parting slightly, like a current of water around an obstacle. "The war is not my point just now, Cass. I'm talking about Sean. I wouldn't have brought it up to you but, well, here you are. McNamara is gone. Clifford has no interest in defending DIA against other agencies that have been trying to kill it since the beginning. And add to that Westmoreland, who will be Sean's direct superior now, after what they've been through."

"You want me to worry about Sean? Is that why you're telling me
this? How can you expect me to worry about Sean?"

"Somebody has to. They're going to scapegoat him, Cass. The Tet postmortems landed on military intelligence as the key failure, Sean's failure. Not Westmoreland's. Not Johnson's. As if Sean hadn't continually raised questions and sounded warnings."

"I think Sean accepts his part of the responsibility."

"That's my point. Everybody is covering his ass except Sean. He's the only one not desperately trying to protect himself. And so he's vulnerable. Between CIA and JCS they're going to eat him alive, and OSD, under Clark Clifford, will let them. Sean is alone here now. Totally alone."

"Here? Here? He has you, Michael, doesn't he?"

"Until the finish, yes. But I'm just—"

"Then he has more than some others I could name."

"You mean Richard?"

"For one." If they stood there, a pair of stanchions in the stream of humans, for a hundred years, she would not have added, "And for another, me." But also, for a hundred years—an eon of self-pity—she would have thought it.

At Sean's office Packard opened the door for her, but he remained outside. Two other officers, who'd been looking at charts spread on the conference table, took their cue from Sean's dismissing toss of the head and left. When the door closed it was just the two of them.

"I've seen Richard," she said.

Sean came around the table to pull a pair of chairs together. He held one for her and she sat. Then he sat next to her, away from his desk and away from the table. At their feet, woven into the rich blue rug, was the DIA seal: the earth, the torch of knowledge, the two atomic ellipses and the olive branch for peace.

Sean asked quietly, "He agreed to see you?"

Cass nodded.

Sean, waiting for her to explain, lit a cigarette.

She said, "Aren't you going to ask how he is?"

"How is he?"

"He's good. He's better than I thought he'd be."

"I'm glad."

"You don't seem it. You don't act like he's anything to do with you."

"Look, Cass, you arrive at my office unannounced, I automatically
assume there's something wrong. I'm waiting for you to tell me what it is."

"Richard sent me here to ask you something."

"What?"

"He wants to see you. He asked me to tell you that he needs you."

Whatever Sean's reaction was, he hid it by putting his cigarette to his mouth. The smoke obscured him further.

"Well?"

"What do you mean 'well,' Cass? What can I possibly say to that?"

"You can say, 'My son needs me. I'll go to him.'"

"But you know better than anyone how impossible that would be."

"Your only son is in a terrible jail, and the rest of his life depends on how his trouble is resolved, and he's asking you to help him. Which is impossible. Everything is impossible, Sean. Don't you see? Which means now you can do what you want to do."

"You're talking nonsense, Cass." Dillon stood abruptly, crossed to his desk and leaned to his intercom. "Send in some coffee, Jane, would you please?"

Cass watched him as he went to the window, to stand there looking out, his back resolutely toward her. To his left was a gold-tipped flagstaff from which hung the blue and silver flag of his rank. In another age that flag would have followed him into battle. She waited.

The secretary entered with the coffee service, placed it on the conference table and, with no direction from either Sean or Cass, left.

Sean ignored the coffee.

Cass stood, crossed to it and poured. She carried his cup and hers over to the window. Without a word she handed him his.

They stood side by side, looking silently out the window, toward the river and Memorial Bridge. Cass, speaking almost absently, said, "Before we ever came here, you did something that was against your conscience. I never asked you to do it and we never talked about it, but you did it for me."

"You mean Buckley, the lies I told to get him."

"Of course."

"This is different, Cass."

"I know. You don't have to arrange someone's imprisonment this time. Quite the opposite."

But Sean was shaking his head. "By my lights Richard is giving aid
and comfort to the enemy. Until he's prepared to renounce his association with people who are helping Hanoi, I can't have anything to do with him."

Cass put her cup onto her saucer. The clink of the china resounded, aural punctuation. "Then I've been wrong all these years."

"What?"

"About you. I've been wrong. I've thought you acted against Buckley for me because of what he had done to my uncle. But now I see you did it for yourself. You lied to the priest. You used my illegal transcripts. You manipulated the law. But it wasn't for me. You did it for yourself."