What drives a man to suicide? Twenty years before, at the time of Forrestal's, Dillon could not imagine. Suicide, he'd thought then, could only be the act of a deranged mind, but now he felt differently, far less smug and sure. Had Forrestal simply perceived something more sharply than others had? What if, in looking back on the arc of his life, public or private, a man saw only a bending sequence of grave mistakes? What if the end product of a life was itself seen to be a grave mistake? Sean Dillon knew that Randall Crocker and others like him had become so enraged in the argument over Vietnam because to them the war called into question the real character of the postwar American order, the creation of which was the climactic labor of their lives. Dillon had had
no such experience regarding Vietnam—the order held for him, indeed he was defending it, but he felt no smugness in that either. The truth was he had not dared to look at the arc of his own life with a view to judging it, and the two who had done precisely that, Crocker and Richard, he had completely shunned.
He turned and walked back along the corridor to Crocker's room, stopping once more in the doorway. He was fully aware what a grave mistake it would be now, whatever came of his fugitive son, if he were to let Randall Crocker die without knowing how much he loved him.
Cass sensed his arrival this time. She stood and came to the threshold. She took Sean's hand and led him to Crocker's bedside. The old man's eyes were open. Cass joined their hands. The pressure of the grip with which they held each other turned their fingers white.
"Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live."
The gold-edged pages of his prayer book fluttered in the hot breath of the wind, costing him his place, but it had been decades since the old minister had needed text for this service. He folded the book into his arms, and his eyes moved to the coffin in front of him, the chasm below.
"He cometh up and is cut down like a flower, he fleeth as it were a shadow and never continueth in one stay."
A few feet away, in front of felt-covered folding chairs, Cass clutched at Sean's arm, staring hard at the flag-draped box, the end with stars. Behind them was a group of several hundred. Many of the men, like Sean, were in uniform. Cass's face was darkened by a veiling lace mantilla that made her look like a Spanish lady. Rosary beads slipped through the fingers of her free hand.
"In the midst of life we are in death; of whom may we seek for succor but of thee, O Lord?"
Without a cue from the minister, or an evident order from their officer, a squad of soldiers stepped forward for the flag. With rigid solemnity they uncovered the casket, folding the flag back into the traditional three-sided bundle. They passed it to their officer, who held it before his face, unmoving.
The minister took a small handful of dirt from the acolyte's tray and
began to sprinkle it, rubrically, on the lacquered wood. "Unto God's gracious mercy and protection we commit you, Randall..."
When the prayer was finished, the officer crossed to Cass and Sean. With the stilted precision of a wind-up doll, he presented the flag to her. She pressed the thing against her bosom, as if damming a hole. Randall Crocker had expressly indicated that the flag be presented to her, as she knew, but still, it was a shock, one last loving gesture from a man who, despite all that made such a thing unthinkable, had become her one true father.
And not only hers.
The honor guard officer saluted.
Dillon returned the salute. He stood holding his breath, his face squared against the sky and shining trees. He had never seemed more the hard, spare man. The morning light glinted off the silver stars on his epaulets.
The rifle squad stood at a distance, and its first volley made the people jump.
Dillon stared hard across the river valley as the sound of the guns boomed across to the marble city. Three volleys of gunshot signified, originally, that the bodies of the fallen had been retrieved, and now the battle could resume. It was June 1, 1968.
They were gathered on an Arlington knoll two hundred yards south of the Lee mansion. Some of the mourners were of Crocker's generation—Harriman was present, in from Paris where the peace talks had just begun, and Acheson and William O. Douglas. The disgraced McNamara was here, and his replacement at Defense, Clark Clifford. So were Rusk and Rostow, the Joint Chiefs resplendent in their stars and ribbons, and two dozen other generals, especially of the air force. An exhausted-looking Hubert Humphrey stood on the other side of Cass. He had come in from California for this funeral, though he would go right back because of the campaign.
A lone bugler on a distant hillside began to play.
Fades the light...
Those sweet notes unlocked the last corner in which the sadness of all those men and women had been sealed. Cass had known better than to wear makeup on such a morning. Sean put his blue arm around her shoulder, but it braced him as much as her. The last mournful notes of "Taps"—
Leadeth all I To their rest
—floated into the air above them.
Most of the military men, unlike the civilians, stood at perfect attention, staring blindly. Their faces seemed dead. This was part of what they'd been trained to do. Their young colleagues died all the time and they had developed a system of their own—soldiers and fliers lived by systems and died by them—for dealing with a destiny that had become as mundane as it was tragic. They were
listening,
actively, intently. They were listening past the bugle for another sound, a sound of theirs.
It came at first as a faint low roar funneling at them from the south, up the river valley from Alexandria, from the mouth of the great Potomac. As the last echo of "Taps" faded, the roar grew quickly louder. The mourners turned toward what had become a screech, and saw swooping down from the blue yonder, wheeling in a wide arc away from the Jefferson Memorial and the Washington Monument, a flight of sleek fighter planes, four of them, with long thin fuselages, sharp as arrows, maneuvering on clipped wings, heading right at Randall Crocker's grave.
The missing-plane flyover was taken to be an honor, and Crocker was a rare civilian to receive it. But what those particular dignitaries recognized in the screaming airplanes was rage. Wouldn't those pilots see in the tormented, ineffectual government elite the enemy they could never see in fleeing, naked, almond-eyed children—that emblazoned, forever-photographed girl-child on the road, her Munch shriek—whose skin they'd bubbled with their napalm? The four Thunderchiefs pulled out of their dive at the last second, and as they passed perhaps three hundred feet above the hilltop, they rolled slightly in a perfectly synchronized wing dip.
When the planes had gone, climbing away into the Virginia sky, Dillon looked around and saw that he was the only man in uniform not saluting. His right arm still encircled his wife's shoulders, which moved gently with emotion.
The flag in front of Lee's mansion was being lowered to half-mast in strict silence. Every military eye was fixed upon it, as required. The flag at such a moment was the nation.
Dillon, even to offer the homage he most believed in, did not remove his arm from her. Instead, he pressed the woman of his life closer as softly, softly, the flag fell on its pole. He saw the other flag, the one she held against her breast, and he realized with a sharp, fresh pain that she was cradling it as if the flag were her baby.
Her baby. His. He thought again of their son, who didn't even know that Crocker had died. He remembered carrying Rickie in his arms like
that, not a flag, a football. How he had loved to tuck the boy into his side and run. Now Richard did his running alone. He had been in Canada for months.
Then the ceremony was over, and Cass was clinging to her husband, whispering, "Oh, Sean!" Her mantilla rippled in the summer wind that snapped across the hillside, as if the backwash of the fighter planes had sucked it up from the languid river. Dillon felt he had an exotic dark flower in his arms, felt for the first time in years that he could hurt her if he pressed too hard—the black petals crumbling on one another—which was ridiculous. His wife was stronger than he was.
"You're a good woman, Cass."
She pulled back to look him in the eye. "He was a good man. He loved you."
Dillon wanted to say, I loved him too, but the old wall of his reticence stopped him. She settled into his embrace once more. He stroked her shoulder.
But suddenly he tensed. A human cry pierced the air from the valley behind them, and he heard it at once as having meaning for him.
The cry again. A man. A second man. Then, "Stop! Stop!"
The burial-truce was over, and instinctively Dillon thought again about Richard.
"Stop, you!"
"That's him!"
The others, like sleepwalkers, only turned their heads to look, but Sean began to move, leaving his wife's arms, walking down into the grave-littered hillside. In the valley, plainly visible, figures in dark suits were cutting between and around the line of blue and black staff cars that awaited the dignitaries. Four men, five, no, six. The military drivers, at ease by their fenders, were too surprised to join them. The men in suits, with a cry of "There!," broke out running onto the far hillside, a strike across the tombstones. Eight, nine of them spread out like a stain through the rows of white markers.
Then Dillon saw whom they were chasing. He knew his son at once, despite the distance: the lanky boniness, how his arms flailed as he ran, the way he clambered up the hill with the spunk and eagerness that had marked him since early childhood. The flying, wild hair was still unfamiliar, but it wasn't new.
His son, astray in the grass of Arlington, must have planted himself
behind some tombstone, hoping to share, even that way, the obsequies of the old man he loved. But agents had stalked Richard even here, and now they were going to arrest him.
Cass began moving too, watching with horror as she realized what was happening.
The agents closed in on Richard before he reached the crest of the far hill. They seized him roughly, yanked his hands behind his back and handcuffed him. Then, on him like beetles, they began dragging him back through the tombstones, down the hill to the valley road where their cars too had pulled into line.
Cass began to run. Her mantilla fell from her head and she had to clutch at it. She threw herself recklessly down the hill, well behind Sean.
Their son stumbled, but his captors hauled him up in a hurry, dragging him toward the road.
One agent had his gun drawn.
A second slapped Richard on the back of his head, to make him move faster.
Dillon was running hard; his outrage filled the air. "Stop! Stop!"
Richard fell across a tombstone as his father arrived, confronting the agent with the gun. "Holster that," he ordered. "Holster it now!"
The agent backed away, glancing at a colleague, who nodded. The agent put his pistol into the holster on his hip.
Dillon turned on the second agent. "Are you in charge?"
The agent reached into his coat pocket.
"What is the meaning of this? Don't you see what this is?"
The agent had his credentials folder out, but before he could open it, Cass stormed between them and slapped the thing out of his hand. She did not wait for the agent's reaction, but crossed to her handcuffed, bloodied son and embraced him.
"This is a funeral!" Dillon declared.
"We are apprehending a fugitive," the agent said coldly.
"With guns?" Cass charged. "He's a pacifist."
Dillon ignored his wife, and he had yet to look directly at his son. "We are burying a loved one up there. But you know that, don't you?"
Was it possible? He had been an FBI agent himself once. Could he have done such a thing as this? In the transformation of his roles, had he forgotten something? He had known what it was to spring a trap around
a point of human need, but had he ever crudely exploited human grief to make an arrest?
"Does Hoover know you're doing this?"
The agent flinched, recognizing the question as a statement of the general's intent to
tell
Hoover.
The agent stooped for his credentials. He looked back at his colleagues, surrounding the kid with the long brown hair, the wire-rims, the faded brown shirt and blue jeans. "Move the woman away," he said. "Read the boy his rights."
"No. Leave him alone!" Cass clung to her son. She looked helplessly up at her husband. "Make them leave us alone."
The agent faced Dillon again. "He's in our custody. We're going now."
Another agent read from his Miranda card.
Dillon's inability to move, or even to look down at the rapt pietà of his wife and son, could only seem a stark refusal.
"Sean!" she said, glaring at him.
Still he did not look at them. Instead, he asked the agent, "What's your name?"
"Sawyer."
All this bickering over their son as if he were a child. He was a twenty-three-year-old man. He had been living with the consequences of his cruel conscience for a long time now. It was crueler to him than to anyone else. Richard said softly, "Let go, Mom." With his hands cuffed he was powerless to move his mother away. He had a signifying mind, and that display of her paralyzing maternal love must have been unbearable.
Neither of the nearest agents moved against her.
"Really, Mom." His voice was weak, a hint of whine in it.
She took his face between her hands. "Are you all right?"
Richard nodded. If his hands had been free, he'd have pushed the lock of hair away from his eyes, a characteristic tic, a way of keeping his fierce emotions at bay.
He said, "I was all right until I heard about Mr. Crocker." He stopped, choked. "I'm so sorry, Mom," he said, as if he had caused Randall Crocker's death. With a bird-like, darting movement of his head, he looked up at his father. "Dad?"
Instead of answering, Dillon stared across at the orderly hillside.
Tombstones made it orderly; the dead were well behaved; cadavers never needed haircuts. The mystery of Sean Dillon's sorrow, what kept him from even the smallest expression of acceptance of his only son, was impenetrable. He was at a limit, that was all. For the first time in his life, there was simply nothing he could do or say.