Memorial Bridge (29 page)

Dillon watched him in silence.

Crocker went on casually, "What are your plans?"

"I'm sony, sir?"

"After the war."

"Which war? As I was telling you, it seems to some of us another war is almost under way."

Crocker shook his head. "You have a narrow view. I don't dispute what you report or underestimate its meaning, not at all. But it's only one piece. There are other things you don't know about. We're not going to war with the Soviets. They're destroyed. Their industrial base is gone. And the Japs will settle before the summer is out. The war is over, and we won. We won it all. You can think of yourself for a change." When he noticed Dillon glance back toward the bunker-church, Crocker added, "You can think of them."

Sean nodded as if he knew only too well.

"You'd best get back to them." The men shook hands. "File what I'm saying for later. When the war ends I want you to consider coming to work with me."

"Sir?"

"At my firm in New York. Crocker, Wells. Look it up."

Sean did not have to look it up. He found it impossible to answer.

"It's a new ball game in this country, Sean. The war will at least have done this for us: taught us how to value each other for something besides who our father's tailor was."

Sean laughed. "My Pa's tailor was Montgomery Ward."

Crocker squeezed Dillon's hand one final time. "I want you in New York as one of my lawyers."

"Sir, I..."

"Just think about it, will you?"

The word "No" formed itself in his mouth, as his tongue went flat against his upper teeth. But why? "No" was the word around which he had built his life: "No" to Canaryville, "No" to the Church, "No" to Lambert, Rowe in Chicago. To his horror he saw that now his entire future involved a new kind of "No" to Cass. Renunciation, he'd been taught to believe, was the way to salvation.

But did he believe that now? He didn't want to. No? He threw the word back on itself. "Thank you, sir," he said. "I will think about it. Yes."

"Are you awake, sweetheart?"

"Yes, I'm just lying here."

"Me too."

"I think I'm waiting for the baby to start again." Gass laughed. "This is one way to avoid being wakened in the night. Just never go to sleep." She turned on her side toward him. When he opened his arm, she went inside. "What about you?"

"I've been watching the car lights flashing on the ceiling, how they come and go. Like sparrows, I was thinking."

"Sparrows?"

"Do you remember Father Ferrick?"

"At Loyola."

"He told me a story once about a sparrow's coming into a great hall, flying through it, then going out."

Cass hadn't a clue what he was talking about. "Are you sure you're awake?"

He laughed and squeezed her. "I'm a pompous fool, aren't I?"

"Not pompous."

But he'd been pompous with Crocker. "I was thinking about the last time I saw my father. It was that morning when he left for work. He had a hard-boiled egg swelling his cheek when he left the kitchen." Dillon took Cass's hand. "But then I stop seeing my father and I see someone else."

Cass thought he was going to say their little boy. In place of his father, his son.

But instead he said, "I see Mr. Crocker."

"In place of your father?"

"I guess so, yes."

"Why?"

"He encouraged me today to think about after the war, what we would do."

"What do you mean?"

"If we didn't stay in Washington."

"Not stay in Washington?" Cass was so surprised she sat up, adjusting her nightgown as she did. In the dark she could not see what was written on his face. "I don't understand."

"Mr. Crocker offered me a job in his law firm."

"In Chicago?" Cass grasped Sean's hand with an unprecedented burst of joy, and in those two words the entire landscape of what separated them, a flash in the dark, seemed illuminated.

Sean pulled his hand back from her, and he sat up too, against the
headboard. He leaned across to the bedside table and snapped on the light to wash out what, with stark clarity, each had already seen.

When he looked at her, she was surprised at how obviously startled
he
was.

"Chicago?" he asked. "Who said anything about Chicago?"

"I thought you did."

"No, New York. Mr. Crocker's firm is on Wall Street. Wall Street, Cass!"

"Oh." She was so deflated—and he so charged with pleasure—that she had to face away. Wall Street? How could her Sean have anything to do with Wall Street?

Perversely, Sean's mind tossed up an image of Sylvia Yergin in that exact posture, that same place on the edge of a bed, the same feeling of disappointment in a thick-skulled man. But Sylvia Yergin was a whore. It shamed him to think of her here. To shut that image off, he touched Cass's shoulder, turning her toward him once more. "You want to go back to Chicago?" he asked with amazement.

"I wouldn't have ever brought it up to you."

"But you do?"

She nodded. Unable to look at him, she dropped her eyes to her hands.

"God, Cass, I had no idea." He leaned forward and took her in his arms. "Is it your mother's being here, and your Aunt Flo's, that brings this feeling up?" If so, he could understand her emotion, he could outlast it.

"Yes," Cass shuddered. "They've both gotten so old." Cass hesitated, then felt obliged to add, "But it isn't just them. Even more, it's our baby, Sean. I don't want to raise him here. We're too..." She did not mean to include Sean in her "we," and that, for her, was a summary of the problem. "...alone."

"But we're not alone. We have friends. What about the Packards?"

"I love Ellie and Mike, you know I do. But they're Mormons."

"Mormons! What does that have to do with it?"

"Nothing! It has nothing to do with it!" She pulled away as her anger flared. "You asked me about feeling alone. And this is what I mean! Not even you understand. I try to explain, and you make what I say seem silly. Ellie and Mike are Mormons, and so we can't ask them to be Richard's godparents. That's what it has to do with it. We have to ask
Molly and my brother Jerry, who can't even get here, so we have a godfather in absentia. In absentia! That's what it has to do with it. And that lovely Mr. Crocker, when he came today, it made me cry because the most thoughtful, sensitive gift to our new baby, to
us,
should have come from a complete stranger."

"He's not a stranger to me."

"Well, he is to me, and that's the difference. You were asking about how I felt. How I feel counts!"

"I know it does."

"Nobody knows each other here. Nobody talks to each other at the Laundromat. I've been shopping at the same IGA for three years, and they still don't know my name. The grocer doesn't bother to learn it because he thinks when the war ends, all of his customers are going to go home, and most of them are."

Dillon could not think what to say. It was like being brought to the top of a mountain renowned for its view of a lush green valley, but seeing instead a vast desert.

"I don't want to go to New York," Cass said. "And I don't want to stay here."

He stared at her, the only view there was. He was amazed at the directness of her statement. What had they been to each other all this time? Why had she never talked like this before?

"I never thought we'd be going back to Chicago," he said.

"I didn't either." Cass leaned against him again. "It feels like a defeat."

"Chicago's not what it was, and neither are we." Even as he said that, he heard the cry of something dying. Not him, not her, but what they might have been together. Already he understood that their baby had replaced him in the center of her heart, and though he would not have said so, he felt relieved.

She raised her face to him. "Do you mean...?"

"The grocer is right. When the war ends, everybody will be making new decisions. We can too."

"Would the Bureau let you go back?"

"If we decide to go back, they'll have to, won't they?" Sean smiled. He pictured himself announcing his decision to Mr. Hoover. He felt a rare relief, a freedom. The director would fire him on the spot for arrogance, or think more of him than ever. Either would be all right. As
for New York, so what? Sean Dillon was not fated to wear three-piece suits, a watch fob and English cordovans. And the truth was, that relieved him too. Maybe all he really wanted—what else could the sudden inner peace he felt mean?—was to pay attention at last to the miracle of what had just happened to them. Their child had made them into a family. Cass was healthy. And now she was asking for something from him that he could give her.

"The day the war ends finally, Cass"—this was a vow, as if sworn upon the Bible Randall Crocker had brought to their son—"you tell me what you want, and that is what we'll do."

She pressed herself against him, gratefully holding on. She already knew what she would say. This place will do something awful to us if we stay. I want to go home, which is not Canaryville but anywhere we ourselves can shape what we become.

Dillon wanted to bury his nostrils in that bright auburn hair, inhaling her scent. He wanted to blank his mind out with the feel of her satin nightgown bunched in his hands, of her naked breast against his, of her legs wrapping his hips.

But he checked himself. Now his love for Cass precluded that expression of it. Was he a priest at last? Whatever in him had prompted the early choice of celibacy—would it haunt him forever? Had he leapt too quickly to this solution? Was he really doing this for her? But he was, of course he was. He had left the renunciations of the Church behind. This was not about renunciation, but love. Or was—

Dillon cut short his rumination and simply moved away from her, stifling his impulse, but also shuddering at the prospect, whatever its cause, of a lifetime of such frustration. What will
this
do to us?

He felt her reluctance to let him go, but also sensed it when her fingers lifted from his skin, then closed, without touching him, into fists.

Two and a half years later, Dillon looked out the airplane as it angled down along the Potomac River, beginning its sharp descent above Chain Bridge, bringing him back to Washington. Directly below were the autumn reds and golds of the rolling wooded hills, Maryland on one side, Virginia on the other. From the air that landscape of colored leaves achieved a cushion-like suppleness on which Dillon had let his eyes rest unseeing for most of an hour. But when the plane banked and his gaze was drawn ahead to the gleaming city, he felt a jolt in his stomach akin to the sinking sensation of the swooping finish of the flight. He came alert.

He saw the monument in the distance, the white needle shimmering in the late morning light. He glimpsed the rooflines of the marble enclave, the Archives, the Federal Triangle and the Capitol dome itself, before the wing came up to block his view of the city.

Twisting with the river, the airplane banked and turned again, and now Dillon saw immediately below the tidy campus of Georgetown University, with its observatory and its playing fields, its old stone buildings squared around a quadrangle, its neatly lined tennis courts and its boat house on the river. But above all, the dark Gothic spire of the central building loomed like a black-robed missionary. Dillon was struck as never from the ground by the gritty solidity of that granite spire, how it
contrasted with the pristine limestone and marble edifices that came once more into view just then as the plane wheeled. Georgetown slipped under the wing, disappearing, but not before it had reminded Dillon of what made him different here. He had had to leave Washington to understand what it had begun to do to him, and he sensed that a Jesuit dark tower on the margin of that clipped skyline, in contrast especially with the white Masonic monument at the center of it, was the perfect emblem of his former alienation. He had lived in this city as a professional outsider, after all, a man whose role had been not to affect persons and events but only to watch them. He did not know yet what circumstance had led to his being summoned back here now, but he knew he would never willingly become again what wartime Washington had once made him.

The angle of the airplane's glide path did not become constant until it came to the point where the river finally straightened out to run like a highway toward Alexandria and the great bay beyond. But then, dropping into the last phase of its approach, the airplane seemed to pick up speed, and Dillon became all too aware of the water itself rising to meet him. He saw its currents swirling a range of blues and the whitecaps flecking the surface. He had not flown enough, certainly not into airports on the spits of rivers, to feel blasé.

To take his mind off the hazard of landing, he stared across the river toward the imposing pillared dome of the Army War College at Fort McNair. Lining the open green in front of it was a long row of elegant brick mansions, generals' houses, from the backs of which tidy lawns sloped down to the walled bank of the river itself. A beautiful, enchanted place, Dillon thought, a realm of the army romance. It struck him that from the grounds of Lee's mansion at Arlington, their cemetery, to the Pentagon, to McNair and beyond, the military occupied the best land on the river. At the point where the Anacostia flowed into the Potomac—that junction had been the reason George Washington chose this spot for his city—half a dozen decommissioned submarines were gammed at the piers of the Anacostia Naval Station. Below that was Boiling Field, a broad stretch of grass and runways bordered by Quonset hangars and rows of whitewashed barracks buildings. Dozens of airplanes were lined up three deep on the infield between runways. Some of the planes had the protruding igloo-like gun turrets and double fin tails of the workhorse B-29s that had won the war.

Even before he'd become aware of the land below, the plane jolted
down, slamming the solid ground. The tires squealed as the pilot applied the brakes. The engines revved so furiously that Dillon braced himself. This is like landing on a damn aircraft carrier, he thought. A moment later it shamed him to realize that his hands were curled into fists, and, when he opened them, that his palms were wet.