Memorial Bridge (38 page)

At precisely 0700 a line of more than twenty blue staff cars, each with its plate bearing one, two, three or four silver stars, cruised passed the Officers' Club onto Generals' Row. The filigreed branches of the bare elm trees laced the sky above the automobile procession like a long canopy. There was a car for each house, a driver for each general. By 0710 the generals had all come out and their cars were all under way again, now each with its lone backseat rider. Instead of proceeding off base through congested Washington, finally inching across the bridge to the Pentagon, the limousines drove directly to the far side of the flight line, to the riverbank and Boiling's one-wharf dock. There the generals left their cars and boarded a fifty-seven-foot-long teak-and-mahogany motor launch, the
Valkyrie,
which President Roosevelt had favored for twilight summer cruises down to Mount Vernon and back. In addition to staterooms below, the yacht featured a luxuriously appointed main salon where a crew of air force stewards waited to serve the generals their coffee and hot sweet rolls while the yacht purred upstream to the river entrance of the Pentagon.

From his first experience of it the previous summer, the Potomac River boat had seemed to Dillon a ludicrous way to commute. He much preferred the productive solitude of time in his car. He needed Hewitt and his car available to him at the Pentagon in any case, for the ride home hours after the other generals had departed on the late afternoon
launch, if not for one of his many trips into Washington, where the job of selling OSI to various government officials was never finished. The other generals regarded the boat as a perquisite, as did their wives, who, unlike Cass Dillon, had their husbands' staff cars and drivers at their disposal throughout the day. Dillon's intuition was that the members of the Air Staff prized the motor launch because, unconsciously, they too recognized that those who were at ease in and around boats were somehow better. In America farm boys, auto mechanics and simple tinkerers had become fliers, some had become war heroes and perhaps a few, even, air force generals. But only men of a certain background became admirals. In his time at the Pentagon Dillon had become a connoisseur of condescension, for he was an interloper on whom even a lowly ROTC-commissioned state-college graduate could look down. He had concluded that the argument between the air force and the navy drew its ferocious energy from the old conflict of class. Randall Crocker, as an Ivy League–educated New Deal lawyer known, despite his handicap, to be a successful skipper of racing sloops, was the great exception on the side of the air force, but the generals distrusted him anyway as a former Wall Street associate of Forrestal's. If they wanted proof that Crocker was out to undercut them, they had only to point to Dillon.

Morning after morning he had boarded the motor launch despite himself. This was his only informal contact with his new colleagues, and it was here that they had made their attitude toward him very clear. The OSI was Crocker's brainchild, but it remained an air force stepchild and they had simply not accepted it. Dillon himself, the instant general, was an affront to everything they had all achieved, whatever their backgrounds, and even as he implemented his charter, resolutely extending his authority to OSI field offices in every command, their equally resolute rejection of him was by now undermining his fledgling operation. Dillon knew that, behind his back, the brass referred to him contemptuously as "the cop." To his face they had not hesitated to turn down his various, regular requests for support. Time and again Dillon, to his own chagrin more than theirs, had had to call on Crocker to back him up in disputes with Eason and other commanders. He knew that every such victory over these men was, at a deeper level, a defeat. Their resentment of OSI was choking him. Even officers who had specialized in security and counterintelligence, men whom Dillon was sure he had
won over otherwise, understood soon enough that an assignment to his organization was a career killer. Not only were such men slow to volunteer for the OSI; many already assigned were requesting early transfers out.

"Good morning, Herb." Dillon took a chair next to Herb Dalby, another BG, the deputy for plans, just as the launch pulled away from the dock. Since they were of the same rank, Dillon's use of his first name was not an issue. He tucked his hat under his arm as if he'd been doing so for years, then looked directly at Dalby, forcing him to react. Dillon had decided months ago that he was not going to make it easy for these bastards. That was why he was here instead of in his quiet car. Day in and day out, he made them all do this to him.

Dalby grunted and snapped open his copy of the
Times Herald.

One of the white-haired senior generals, sitting with a cluster of his own peers, called back to Dalby with a generous camaraderie—a reward, no doubt, for his having efficiently snubbed Dillon. "Turn to page seven, Herb. See what Forrestal said yesterday."

The announcement caught the attention of most of the others, and they fell silent, looking toward Dalby, who scanned the paper until he found it. Aware of his audience, he read aloud, "The secretary of defense said, 'All Americans should be proud of what the air force is achieving in the western sector of Berlin.'"

"Hear! Hear!" a voice called, and another added, "Damn right!"

Dalby paused to grin at his fellows. Mostly they had remained silent, savvy and skeptical, and were now waiting for Dalby to read on, to tell them what
else
Forrestal had said. A steward carrying a tray of Danish had halted to listen too.

Dalby continued, building to a punch line. ". . .and what the airlift proves is that the air force is ideally suited to a primary mission of transport and supply."

Hoots then, groans and real curses. "Fuck Forrestal!" someone said loudly, an extreme expression even for them. It silenced the group for a moment.

A major general, a former bomber pilot named Spike Brown who was famous for his pearl-handled swagger stick, reached that stick across to lay it on Dalby's forearm. He said in a stage whisper, for Dillon's benefit, "And while you're at it, fuck Crocker too."

Dillon stood up, brushing General Brown's stick back. The boat
lurched and he grabbed an overhead rail, back for an instant to the Archer Avenue El careening down the slope into Canaryville. The jolt brought his face closer than he wanted to General Brown's. "Why not include the commander in chief, General? Fuck him too, 'while you're at it,' eh? And why not the U.S. Constitution for that matter?"

Later Dillon would chide himself for this—not the display, but the failure to defend Crocker explicitly. What were Truman's prerogatives to him, or the Constitution's? What angered him was the insult to Crocker, pure and simple.

Brown stared blankly at Dalby. "Do you smell something, Herb? Did someone fart?"

Dillon pushed Brown's stick against his chest and held it there. "What is this, high school?"

Brown slowly moved his eyes to Dillon's hand. "As you were, Mr. Dillon."

Dillon moved away from him.

Dalby raised his voice to read a further paragraph from the newspaper story. " 'The committee expects to hear testimony from General Mark Macauley, the much decorated head of the Strategic Air Command, who during the war led the night raids against Dresden.'" Dalby looked up. "It's about time. Mac will tell those bozos. If he can't tell them, no one can."

Dillon moved toward the salon door, through the various expressions of confidence in Macauley, a man whose gift Dillon remembered as more for bluster than for thought. No wonder these fools think well of him.

Just before he left the salon for the deck outside, Dillon's eye caught General Eason's. The chief was sitting alone at a small table in the forward port corner of the cabin, removed from the others, as if judging them. He watched Dillon's exit with cold detachment, and all at once Dillon realized what this room had just become to the others. It was the officers' mess of a combat air group, the place in which hyper pilots vent their anxiety in raucous irreverence—"Fuck Forrestal!"—before and after the most dangerous and destructive activity yet known to man. The gift for thought was not a virtue in such a room. Bluster was precisely what had gotten men like these—
these
men—through the worst nightmares it was possible to have outside sleep.

And who the hell are you, Dillon—here was Eason's question—to feel superior in this company?

The biting wind hit him as he stepped outside to the rails, and with it came a recognition. He had made a huge mistake in becoming vulnerable to such men. He knew he would never win them over. The wind in his face seemed to be blowing back on him from a time when he would remember this as the largest moment of his life, and also as the moment of his largest failure. The boat lurched again, and Dillon saw that their craft had just hit the wake of some bigger vessel which was as invisible to him, and as unsettling, as the future. His stomach jumped, pathetic landlubber that he was. The bile of coffee shot up into his throat, and he thought for a dread instant that he was going to vomit.

Cass Dillon came out of the house on Generals' Row shortly after her husband did, but she left on foot and alone, not in the parade of blue limousines. She blinked up at the slate November sky, trying to read it for rain. A shiver curled up her spine as she thought for the hundredth time how she hated the weather here. But she hated other things more. She decided not to go back inside for her coat because she would have to explain herself to Sergeant Jones, and Richard would start all over again his pleading to come with her.

She turned up the collar of her plain Donegal tweed suit. She wore a simple green hat. Her hair tickled the back of her neck and made her think how she hated that too. Her hair was at an awkward length, neither here nor there, because she was letting it grow out again, having made the mistake nearly two months before of listening to the girl at the base's beauty shop. "The New Look," the girl had said in a thick southern drawl. "I'll make you look like Paris. Paris, France." It was the way the girl had seemed to be responding to what Cass regarded as the secret of her unhappiness that had made Cass say yes. "The change will cheer you right up," the girl had said. By now, at age thirty-four, Cass's hair was the color—her own color—of burnished copper, and even bobbed—it looked like a Chicago flapper's hair to Cass, not some chic fashion model's—her hair was still her glory. But the hairdo had seemed to change her into someone else, as if even the gum-snapping beautician knew that the real Cass Dillon was not good enough for Generals' Row.

She pulled her gloves on and began to walk. She passed the houses of the other generals without seeming to see them, as if to look would turn her into a statue of salt. She refused to worry anymore who might be watching at those curtains as she strode the length of the tidy street. The
wives of the other generals had yet to extend an invitation.

It still stunned Cass that the main effect of Sean's sudden reception into the world of prestige and power had been to make her feel, for the first time in her entire life, inferior. In his Pentagon world, she knew, literally thousands of men owed Sean deference, but here, in her corner of Boiling, all of the women outranked her. She could identify the wives of General Eason, General Cabot, General Polk and a dozen others, having seen them at the swimming pool in the summer, at receptions in the O Club, coming and going on the shady street and in the park at the end of the Row, where Cass went with her son and where other women went, when their aides didn't, with their dogs. They acted not only like the wives of gods and heroes but like goddesses and heroines themselves. And to Cass's true horror, she had herself begun to think of those women that way, as if they had been born to a higher order.

Cass might have taken the initiative with some of the generals' wives herself—they were neighbors, weren't they?—but Sean had drilled her in the protocol that now was supposed to rule their lives. Juniors, he said, do not extend invitations to seniors. But Cass wondered, Was protocol his only inhibition? He never referred to it, but Cass knew very well that even if it was absurd to think the other women had been born to a higher order, they were still quite different from her. The pink-bordered roster of the Officers' Wives' Club, for example, listed its members not only with the ranks of their husbands in parentheses, but also in each case with another word that Cass had failed at first to understand, the name of the woman's school. The generals' wives seemed all to have attended Vassar, which she had heard of, or places called Briarcliff or Goucher, which she hadn't. Cass had pictured "St. Gabriel's" inside such parentheses, and at that had felt her lack of education not as a mere regret, but as a matter of shame. Was Sean ashamed of her too? That was a question past which she strode as if it were a blank-windowed officer's house.

Cass Dillon was no fool. She had known right off that she had to find a niche for herself in her husband's new world. She had wasted little energy bemoaning her background or lack of it, or waiting for the Mrs. Generals to call. Instead, she had instinctively pushed open the one door on the entire base that was locked to no one. She was on her way to open it again now. As she did every morning, once Sean had left, she was going to the chapel for Mass. Her devotion here was a measure not of her piety, but of her savvy intelligence.

She walked briskly out of the generals' enclave, past the club and its now tarp-covered swimming pool, down the hill to the corner on which the little wooden church sat with its unadorned steeple. The dozen entrance stairs were covered with cocoa matting. Instead of stone, the steps were of wood and made a hollow, muffled sound. As she took them she stifled the usual feeling of foreignness. This was still a Protestant church to her, not only its prim white exterior, but the interior too: its amber, unstained windows, its unornamented white walls, the bright mysterylessness of it. The pews were as white as the walls, and the carpet was the same pallid blue that covered the floor and chair cushions in the Officers' Club. Cass knew she would never forgive the place its lack of saints' statues—no Joseph, not even Mary—or the blankness of the walls where the Stations of the Cross should have hung.