A Matter of Honor

Chapter Thirteen

It had been a pleasant enough day, Tarbert Weir thought, even with Mark’s unexpected phone call and the puzzling request for help. Several times the general had tried to reconstruct that conversation, first in his head and later aloud to John Grimes.

“... all right, general, all right. What you’re telling me is that my problem isn’t your problem, there is nothing you can do.”

“... what I’m saying is that there is nothing I will do... there’s a difference.” General Weir was sure those were the words he’d used, but his son had interrupted abruptly, pained and angry, before he had had a chance to explain.

The sound of Mark’s voice, mature, vibrant, had unnerved the general and set loose a flood of memories.

He would have liked to talk longer, find out more about what was troubling Mark. He didn’t even have his son’s home phone number, but he supposed the lieutenant was listed. There couldn’t be more than one Mark Weir in the Chicago police department.

The six o’clock news had predicted rain, possibly turning to snow for the suburban areas, but here the night was clear with the pale winter moon in a windless sky.

General Weir stood on the porch of his farmhouse in Logan County, outside Springfield, and watched the shift of gray light over the cornfields. The stalks had been broken at almost uniform angles by the snow and looked to Scotty Weir like troops lined up in a ragged formation, stretching down to the small lake at the base of the meadow, a black flash of water rimmed by a stand of bare trees. A sparrowhawk circled toward its nest, wingtips white in the gathering darkness.

The general sipped his drink, trying to relish the bite of the whiskey with which he had become accustomed to ending his day. Usually the liquor brought with it a welcomed release, the knowledge that this day had few more hours to fill.

Early that morning he had helped the tenant farmer dig fence post holes and string new wire along the road at the side of the property. Weir expected to add two dozen new heifers to the milk herd in the spring. He had written out checks for winter feed bills, looked over the blueprints for the expansion of the new milking shed and run a personal check on the silo temperature of the field com and sorghum silage. Before lunch he fished for bluegills and pan bass through the soft lake ice near the springhouse, then took the new Irish setter for a run through the woods.

General Weir liked movement and speed and exercise, and he savored the rough, underfoot resilience of country terrain. It reminded him of army maneuvers, bivouacs in Germany and Korea, his basic training along the piny trails of Georgia. Now he tramped the farm woods in the new snow, even more than he did in the green of spring and summer or in the fall pheasant season. His wife had died because of his love for her, and of snow, but beneath the guilt and pain there was something soothing in remembering Maggie in the whiteness and silence and ecstasy of the last night they had ever spent together, in the lodge in the Bavarian Alps.

Grimes had cleaned and panfried the lake fish, bringing the general’s lunch on a tray to his study. Later Weir had driven to the country club where he won seventy dollars playing five card stud with Laura Devers. She’d asked if he’d like to go with her to look over a miniature Shetland she was thinking of purchasing for her granddaughter, but he declined. Mrs. Devers said she’d call about dinner.

He spent the rest of the daylight hours driving on backroads through the flat, snow-streaked Illinois countryside, trying to let the black and gray landscape soothe the unrest, the loneliness which, if uncontrolled, could grow and wrench through his insides like a twisting rasp. Damn Mark’s phone call...

He had been lonely and poor and hard-worked as a farm boy in this same country before he’d faked his age to join the Army at seventeen. The Army, its disciplines and rewards, had become his mentor and ultimately his life. As a teenager, he had been a quiet but brilliant student. In the Army he studied and broadened his horizons, taking advantage of every specialization program offered, from language school at Monterey through the Army College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and administration studies at Indianapolis. There had been deep satisfaction, a strong sense of accomplishment and pride as he worked his way through Army ranks from stripes to stars.

But the only pure joy he had ever experienced, Tarbert Weir believed, a happiness soaring out of the realm of ordinary human experience, had been in the years he was married to Maggie. His bitterness, his hardness after her death came from a conviction that he had been robbed by life, that he had not had her long enough.

As a soldier he had been exemplary, as an individual he had been a detached and introspective loner until Maggie came into his life. He had always felt that her love, her loyalty and the pleasure she gave him was curing him of some deficiency. It was her presence that made him feel complete, a full man, and her mortal absence left a void he refused to allow any other human being to fill.

After his wife’s death, a friend had suggested that then-Colonel Weir resign from the Army, find a career as a civilian, care for his young son. Weir had never even considered the suggestion. The Army and Maggie had been the centers of his life. With his wife gone he had accepted the military as a demanding mistress and chose to stay in service.

He could still keep a place in his heart for his young son, Colonel Weir had thought at the time, but there was no point in pretending they were still a family, that they had a home. He had tried for some closeness, summer vacations, weekends together whenever he was within flight distance, but Mark had spent most of his growing years first at boarding school in Germany, then at a military academy in Virginia, finally as a student at several Eastern colleges.

Tarbert Weir believed he was doing what was best for them both. And it was easier for him to love his son at a distance, when he could not see the distinctive bright eyes, the inherited mannerisms, the quick, eager smiles that reminded him so disturbingly of the boy’s mother.

Beyond explaining what the doctors at the Garmisch-Parten hospital had said and tried to do, Tarbert Weir had never been able to make himself talk much to his son about his mother’s death. It was John Grimes who was closest to the boy in the weeks afterward, held him when he cried, brought him warm milk in the night, but the older Weir had often wondered if he had been less selfish, if he had not insisted that Grimes should take the boy back to Frankfurt that winter Sunday, then Maggie Weir might be alive and standing with him on the veranda today.

“... what you’re telling me is that my problem isn’t your problem, there is nothing you can do.” It was the last few words that bothered Scotty Weir, His estrangement from his son had distressed him more than he cared to admit. And the phone call had taken him by surprise. He had been thinking more about Mark himself than the words the lieutenant was saying. Momentarily the general’s emotions had tricked him, he had spoken as if by rote, almost without thinking. But had not his son, out of the residue of bitterness over Vietnam, from his own strange interpretation of obligation and duty, made up his mind for him, articulated what the general had not truly decided to say?

The sights and sounds of the night, the whiskey, began to soothe him; the look of the lake in the semidarkness, water glinting like tarnished silver beyond the stubbled fields and the rustlings of nature, the frost creak of branches, the scuttle of rodents in underbrush. Headlights from a distant truck flared on the horizon and a jet was circling over Springfield to the south, the only movements disturbing the deep silence around the old farmhouse.

This was the home General Tarbert Weir and his wife had imagined and planned and drawn sketches of in half a dozen countries and many army posts, bundled up at a kitchen table during a Nebraska snowstorm or slapping at mosquitos on screened porches in Georgia and Tennessee and Texas. It was Maggie who suggested they try to purchase something in the area of his boyhood, so they could be together and happy in a place he had once been lonely.

Maggie had found this old house and bought the two hundred acres of farmland in Logan County, Illinois, while Scotty Weir was at a command post in South Korea. Mark had gone to first grade at a country school here while the house was tom apart and rebuilt over two years. But they had all lived together here for only one serene August before Scotty Weir, wearing the silver oak leaves of a light colonel, was transferred again to Germany and took his family with him.

One thing they had never included in their plans and sketches for this farm was the old, walled cemetery a short distance behind the house, with its moldered tombstones dating back to before the Civil War. During that hot August when they had lived here as a family, Scotty Weir had helped local masons mend the crumbling walls and right the slanting headstones, and had stripped to the waist and scythed back rye grass and clumps of wild and fragrant honeysuckle.

Colonel Weir was putting his land in order and wanted to show respect and honor for those neglected bits of human history who now rested within his boundaries. They were all strangers to him until he retired from the Army and returned to Illinois to make the farm his home. He knew he wanted Maggie with him then. He had her coffin removed from its burial site in Germany and sent to that little graveyard. Only Grimes stood with him as the men from a Springfield funeral home put Maggie Weir to rest for a second and final time. It had snowed later that day, too.

It had been because of a heavy, almost historic snowfall that German winter almost two decades earlier that the Weirs had decided to take a three-day winter vacation in the German Alps. Maggie had always wanted to show young Mark as much of Europe and its life as possible. The base school allowed students travel days in return for an essay about their experience.

On Saturday they had done some cross-country skiing, moving first over high Alpine meadows, then gliding in white silence through forests of fir, the feathered branches bent with snow. Near the end of the day, they’d skied holding hands. When they stopped to watch the sunset as it touched the highest peaks and ridged the snowdrifts with pink and coral, Colonel Weir was filled with an almost tangible sense of serenity.

Then something happened that touched first his thoughts, then his loins with a sexual stirring so deep that the quality of the arousal, and his determination to fulfill it, had never left his memory.

Just before dusk, not far from the lodge, Maggie had broken from them, pulled off her skis and shouted to young Mark, “Look, look! Mommy’s making angels!”

Then, neat and slim in a red ski suit, she had flung herself backwards onto a pristine snowbank, laughing and flailing her arms and legs in arcs on the snow, and when she rose the print of her body looked like a winged and flying angel.

Spurred by her son’s delight, Maggie tossed herself into fresh snow again and again, making a frenzy of angel imprints that lined the banks almost back to the hotel.

For Colonel Weir, the sudden, strange beauty of his wife’s body against the snow, her vitality, the grace and abandonment of her movements had acted as a new and powerful sexual spur.

That night he lay quietly beside her, awake long hours after his wife had fallen asleep, acutely aware of her presence and also of his son’s light breathing on the rollaway cot in a corner of the pine-walled room. His need for his wife was so strong that he forced himself to lie motionless, afraid to feel her warmth and softness with even the slightest touch.

Early the next morning he made a call from the hotel lobby to Corporal Grimes in Frankfurt, instructing him to take a military plane to Munich, then drive to the lodge to pick up young Mark. At breakfast the colonel told his son that a three-day vacation at this time would be a violation of responsibility, no matter what school rules allowed. Mark Weir would be back in school at the Frankfurt base on Monday morning.

That night the colonel and his wife were alone. From the very beginning, Maggie Weir’s sensuality, her pleasure in variations of lovemaking, had been a constant, goading pleasure. In the hotel dining room, over dinner and a fine bottle of Rheinhessen Liebfraumilch and an Eis Wein with dessert, Colonel Weir told her what he wanted.

Later they had showered together, embracing under jetting streams, lathering each other with pine-scented soap, leaving the shower door open till every bathroom mirror was misted over, closing them in a warm, muted world of sexual arousal.

Then Maggie had run naked to the snow-covered balcony outside their bedroom, thrown herself into the cold, white blanket, thrashing her arms and legs into sculpturing angels. Her husband followed. They went through this antic arousal half a dozen times before they Hung themselves into the bed and under quilted eiderdowns and between sips of warming brandy, made love with an intensity as hot and frenzied as the strange images their bodies had left on the snowy balcony.

When Weir woke in the morning to kiss his sleeping wife, her forehead was hot to his lips. By ten o’clock she had tried strong tea and aspirin but there was a glisten of fever in her eyes and two spots of unnaturally high color on her cheekbones. It was then that Colonel Weir called the lobby desk and ordered a cab to drive him and his wife to the local clinic.

Even excellent hospital care and the strength of Maggie Weir’s young body could not fight off the sudden, devastating pneumonia and subsequent lung collapse.

Three days later, when the colonel came back alone to the hotel room to pack their things, he noticed that a light snow had fallen but the deep curves of two bodies were still faintly outlined, almost as if traced in blue shadow, in the snow on the balcony.

The telephone in the study of the old farmhouse rang and the general carried his drink across the veranda and into the front hall. Laura Devers, he thought. She’ll be calling about dinner. Good friend that she was, Mrs. Devers didn’t understand, in fact, disapproved of the general’s need to spend so much time alone.

The phone was still ringing as the general walked into his study. Small logs crackled in the fireplace and the room was lit with light and shadow. The general waited as the phone rang a third and then a fourth time. His own voice sounded from the answering machine after the fourth ring. “This is Tarbert Weir. After the tone signal, would you please leave a message and your phone number. I’ll get back to you as soon as possible...”

The tone signal sounded and then a vaguely familiar voice came from the speaker. “General, this is Bonnie Caidin, an old friend of Mark’s. You may remember me. I’m trying to locate him and have a hunch he may have driven down there.” She seemed to hesitate a moment. “Tell him I’ve got to talk to him. It’s urgent. Something about George Jackson, that soldier. My number is 312-346-7077. And thank you, sir.” The tape clicked off and a message button at the base of the machine lit up red.

“... you may remember me,” Bonnie Caidin said. He’d met her once with Mark, after his son came back from Vietnam and before he began making his campus speeches, a tall girl, all white skin and freckles and soft, shining eyes. And so polite to him, the Army officer, the enemy, and yet the father of the man she was in love with. It had been so obvious to him that he’d felt a sharp pang of envy that hot afternoon. All three had crowded into a booth in the Pump Room, gin and tonics in frosted glasses for the gentlemen and a fresh limeade for little Miss Caidin, who couldn’t have been more than seventeen or eighteen, sitting so close to his son, her hand touching Mark’s broad, brown one on the starched tablecloth. Their eager sensuality and animal warmth was so palpable that General Weir, much sooner than he’d planned, called for the check and said goodbye.

Tarbert Weir had walked with long strides down the three blocks to Michigan Avenue, then zigzagged through rows of heavy traffic to reach the beach walk along Lake Michigan. He positioned himself at the edge of the cement block breakwater, standing close so that the spray of crashing waves cooled his face, soothing his rage and finally admitting, with some generosity, that every man had a right to be loved that way, even his own son.

Little Bonnie Caidin... he had thought that was over a long, long time ago, and, yes, Miss Caidin, I do remember you.

Grimes appeared then, backing his way in against the study door, two logs cradled in his arms. He put one piece of wood on the fire and the other on the hearthstone. He pulled off his gloves and plaid jacket and said, “I thought I heard the phone ringing, general, somebody leave you a message.”

The general switched on the desk lamp. “It rang and somebody did.”

“It could have been for me, you know,” Grimes said. “I still got some old pals and lady friends who like to keep in touch.”

Grimes was short and thickly built, forty-nine, eight years the general’s junior, with a head as round and solid as a bowling ball and a complexion weathered a dark brown in all seasons. His eyes were small and blue and he wore his black hair in a crewcut, the same style that had been popular when he was an enlisted man almost thirty years before, assigned for the first time to the same unit as Lieutenant Tarbert Weir.

“It wasn’t for you, corporal,” Scotty Weir said. “I didn’t answer it, but I listened to the message.” Grimes waited, studying the general’s quiet, thoughtful face.

“Let me fix that drink for you, sir,” Grimes said, “and then you can tell me whatever you feel you want to tell me.” He took the crystal whiskey glass from the desk and went out toward the kitchen.

John Grimes had asked for and received an honorable discharge as a corporal, his rank for fifteen years, the same month as the general left the Army. Grimes’ last commanding officer had offered him sergeant’s stripes in his last month in service, a customary promotion among long-termers to insure additional pension benefits and privileges. But taking his lead from General Weir, Grimes declined it.

When he decided to retire early, Tarbert Weir had refused to accept a token physical disability on his record, a popular practice among officers to increase retirement benefits and other perks.

Weir would have found it repugnant to go along with that deceit, with its implication that he had performed at only twenty-five percent of his maximum efficiency. He had enlisted at seventeen, a rugged, determined farm boy in one hundred percent shape, and he insisted on being separated from the service in the same condition he’d entered it.

From the kitchen he could hear Grimes washing the crystal glass under running water, then cracking ice cubes from a tray. It was typical of the man, Weir knew, to wash and shine the glass before making a fresh drink. But Grimes was not always an automaton, the perfect corporal.

Firelight flickered in three empty, glass-fronted cabinets built flush into the study walls, designed and placed on the house plans by Maggie. In one corner of the study stood an old Army footlocker, brass corners gleaming. It had once been Mark’s toy box, and they had carried it, filled with trains and dump trucks and tattered children’s books, from one post to another. In later years the locker was used to store things Maggie had saved and planned to display as General Weir’s career memorabilia — medals, campaign ribbons, newspaper clippings, foreign decorations, letters of recommendation. If she had lived, they might all be displayed now in the empty cabinets.

Once, some years ago, Weir had asked Grimes to consult a local carpenter about removing the glass doors and widening the shelves to hold books, but the corporal had never got around to it. Nor had he gone through the items in the locker, as requested, to arrange them according to dates and places and actions, so they could at least be put away in a closet or storeroom. The collection was still a jumbled mass of colored ribbon and inscribed metal and folds of yellowing paper piled into an old trunk without lock or key.

His son would have little interest in the footlocker’s contents, General Weir was sure of that, but if there were grandchildren they might like to look at it some day, not as mementos of blood and glory, but as part of an historical record. General Weir himself was still acutely aware of every decision, every conviction, every ultimate action behind that collection of honors, but more and more, since the break with Mark, he had begun to feel detached and inoperative, a military statistic, an outdated cipher.

One special medal was not in the clutter of the toy box, the one with scattered stars on a blue field, the head of Lady Liberty and the single word: Valor. General Weir kept that hidden in a zippered compartment of his wallet, along with a medallion picture of Maggie and the two initial beads, an M and a W, from the identity bracelet snapped on Mark Weir’s wrist in the Paris hospital only moments after his birth.

Tarbert Weir stood and almost reflexively touched the hip pocket of his corduroys to feel the familiar outline of the wallet. Then he walked to the windows, looking out at the darkness through the fire-flecked panes. His hands were clasped behind his back and he was frowning. Although he was standing perfectly still, there was a restless tension about him.

He heard Grimes’ footsteps and said, without turning, “Just put the drink on the desk, Grimes. I want you to listen to the phone tape. You’ll remember the lady, I told you about her.”

He’d help his boy, General Weir was thinking. Mark had called him, he had even told his lady friend he might drive down. He had thought of his father, sought him out and that was the important thing. They were both men now.

The general waited as Grimes switched on the phone tape and listened to Bonnie Caidin’s message, once, then a second and a third time.

He had a past, too, Weir thought almost defiantly. Since seventeen, he had lived and learned and believed in the lessons taught by the Army — loyalty, love of country, dedication to other men in uniform, a demanding dictum. Was that code of behavior always wrong?

Weir picked up the glass from the desk and drank it back almost to the ice cubes. Was there anything, he thought, new or revealing about war or life that Napoleon could tell a West Point cadet today? If Hannibal were alive, would he be a man of vision and courage or would he be working in an elephant act at Ringling’s?

The general asked telephone information in Chicago for his son’s home phone number. When he dialed it he let the phone ring six times before hanging up. Then he called the number Bonnie Caidin had left on his phone tape. That line was busy.

“Grimes,” he said. “I want to talk to Mark again. I’d like to find out if he trusts me. I can’t really help him unless he does.”

“I think you can depend on him,” Grimes said obliquely. “You’re more alike than you know, sir. A homicide detective in one of the toughest combat zones in the country, that’s the duty Mark’s pulling, general.”

Weir shrugged. “I was never the father that boy wanted to believe in. I was a human being, full of flaws. That’s always fatal for true believers. The Army taught me a man has to turn his back on troops to lead them. Mark never understood that, and now I wonder if we couldn’t have walked side by side at least part of the way.” He glanced at a wall clock. “Call Mrs. Devers and tell her I can’t make dinner tonight.”

“She’ll want details, sir.”

“Goddammit, Grimes, you know how an officer puts up a tent, he asks a sergeant. Well, I’m asking a corporal. You tell Laura anything, tell her I’ll talk with her tomorrow. I want the lines clear when I try to locate Buck Stigmuller.”

Grimes said, “After Mrs. Devers, you want me to bring down the correspondence with Marta Tranchet? You still keep it in the map-case?”

The General looked at the stocky corporal with frank admiration and said, “Dammit, Grimes, you should be in plans and strategy in the Pentagon. You’re right. If General Stigmuller can’t help us, then the problem could be in Europe. Young Tranchet-LeRoi got promoted, he’s with NATO in Kassell. Marta told me the last time she wrote.”

Scotty Weir reached for the phone and said, “First, let me dial that Caidin lady one more time.”

Both men waited until a busy signal sounded on the line. The general broke the connection and held up his glass. “Call Mrs. Devers on the kitchen phone, will you, so I don’t have to hear your lies. And fill this up, if you please, Grimes. I didn’t even taste the last one.”