A Matter of Honor

Chapter Thirty-two

The courtyard, widened and paved, was flanked by towering junipers. There was no trace of the muddy potholes or rutted cart tracks, the icy ridges crusted like iron, through which Scotty Weir and his comrades had trudged that night so long ago. The old farm buildings, sheds and barn stood as before, but in excellent repair, and a new, rambling wing with bright blue shutters had been added to the main lodgings.

As Weir left the Mercedes the house door opened and Marta Tranchet came running down the steps toward him, a trim, middle-aged woman in tweeds and yellow sweater, arms in an open embrace, face tight with emotion. When the general became aware of the tears streaming down her cheeks, he turned quickly to the car, took from the back seat a bouquet of crimson tulips he had bought in Liege and filled her open arms with the flowers. Marta hid her face in the blossoms, then said, “It’s over, Scotty dear. Forgive me. Those were my tears for Mark. I couldn’t help it — the sight of you again.”

In the fireplace in the dining room logs were lit and the table was set for two.

“Emile is so sorry to have missed you,” Marta said, as she arranged the tulips in a crystal vase and put them in the window next to the tea set. “We had your cable from the States, of course, but until you called yesterday we didn’t know when to expect you. He is in Antwerp at a distributors’ meeting, very important to him.”

“There will be another time, Marta.”

“Shall we have sherry first and then our lunch before you tell what it is you need, Scotty? And it would make me less sad for you if you told me about Mark yourself. To think, we both had sons, and now there is just one between us...”

Weir held the sherry glass in one hand, letting the firelight play through the amber liquid as he talked. He had never told Marta of his estrangement from his son and he did not mention it to her now. He kept his voice low and calm, and he tried to speak without thinking too deeply, so he would not get tom on the shards of his emotions. He told her what he thought she wanted to hear: a loyal father, good son, family devotion, a life too short but well-lived. Details, an honor guard on motorcycle, condolence calls from the United States Army, burial in ground reserved for fellow police officers and the funeral on television... That had startled and intrigued her, not the kind of thing one would do in Belgium, she said.

The general felt he was operating on two levels — one the old comrade, benevolent but sorrowing, speaking of his dead son; the other the real Scotty Weir, an angry, agitated and determined man who was willing to play any role to get what he wanted.

He knew the observer at the Greenbrier would have long since decided that he was not out on some distant fairway, chipping balls, and that Laura Devers was, indeed, waiting in the guest cottage alone. At Philo Park, he knew Tarbert Weir had been taped and under surveillance, as well as the morose and stubborn Private Jackson. There had been a blond youth, too, neither quite German nor American, the general had remembered, sitting in the hotel lobby in Heidelberg sipping an aperitif and once again, briefly, at the airport, both places he might or might not have a perfect right to be.

Marta watched his rugged face, aware of the silence. “Poor dear Scotty,” she said, “always so brave and now to be brave alone...”

They lunched on an omelette with cepes, green salad and home-canned blue plums, all foods from the farm, Marta told him. There was a greenhouse off the old kitchen for a salad garden, everyone had them now, she said. Weir had turned down her suggestion that they share a bottle of Beaujolais with lunch.

“I understand,” she said. “We aren’t celebrating.” She poured herself a second sherry and sipped it through lunch.

After coffee Marta Tranchet-LeRoi went to a hall phone and put through a call to her son, Captain Alain Tranchet-LeRoi, on assignment with NATO outside Kassel, West Germany. Weir heard a brief murmur of voices and when she came back into the room, she said, “He asked me to call him when he is off duty, after five o’clock. I have a private number.”

“Good,” Weir said.

She hesitated a moment and then asked, “Can you do what is necessary without Alain’s help, Scotty?”

“The captain can make it easier,” he said. “I will tell him as little as possible, so he won’t be compromised.”

She sighed and her eyes were shining, as if her thoughts were full of tears. “You saved me, Scotty. I thought of that so often when I was growing up, when I married, and I thought of it when Alain was born. Whether it was fate’s accident or divine design, Private Weir was not just a part of my life, he was the reason for it. He let me live.”

“Then here are the things I would like Captain Alain to arrange for me,” Scotty Weir said, and handed her a sheet of Lufthansa stationery on which he had written his requests. “You can tell him I’ll be at his headquarters in Kassel by noontime tomorrow.”

Marta Tranchet read the short list in silence, folded the paper and put it in her sweater pocket. “Perhaps it would be better if we walked now, Scotty. We have always done that. You will hardly know the place.”

Outside General Weir turned up his coat collar and jammed his hands into his pockets, surprised by the sharp chill in the afternoon air. The sky had turned dark, as if it might snow or send down a cold rain, and the wind had the bite of late frost. When they left the graveled walks around the farmhouse and cut out across the plowed fields, Weir could feel his shoes break the crust of ice on the loamy soil and sink almost to the shoelaces.

Marta had put on a quilted down jacket, headscarf and rubber boots, and she strode along beside him in silence, her bowed head barely reaching his shoulder. She had lived most of her life on this farm, but she kept her head down, watching her footsteps as they walked, almost seeming to count and measure the distance.

“When we first married I wanted to put some kind of marker out here,” she said finally. “Something in stone and brass, just a few words, but permanent.” She laughed. “Emile has always been the practical one. He said that if memory is in our hearts, it needs no marker.”

After a half hour’s walk (had he really once crossed these fields in minutes?), they came to the place where Private Weir’s grenades had destroyed the lives of twenty German soldiers and left their armored tank a twist of rubble. The area seemed small now, peacefully rural, neatly fenced. The stand of locust trees, shattered and uprooted that night, had reseeded themselves into a tidy grove. The deep crater left by his grenades still showed in the earth, the sides and floors marked with the curves of contour plowing, the edges of the furrows marked by snow.

When Marta Tranchet spoke, her voice was so low, so dreamlike and detached, that Scotty Weir wondered if she had forgotten he was there, or if this was a trip she often made in sadness, and alone.

“Your face was smudged with dirt that night,” she said. “It made your eyes so white, so staring. There was a rip in your canvas jacket, I remember that, a big, loose tear that went right through to your backbone. One could have touched your skin. It looked warm to me, but I was too cold to move. And your boots were muddy.”

Weir’s cheekbones felt chapped by the raw wind and he sensed the beginning of a roughness in his throat. The sticky loam had covered his shoes and now added damp and weight to the cuffs of his trousers every time he moved. He took a package of the mints he’d bought at the airport and put two under his tongue.

“Yes, we were a pretty beat up bunch of sad sacks that night, Marta.”

“No, no, don’t say that! You looked like knights in shining armor to me and my family, don’t you know that? You were like white lights, like saviors, and you were that thing I had never known in my young life — a man without fear.”

“Then we put up a pretty good front, Marta.”

She smiled, slipped off a glove and touched his bare wrist. “You were just children yourselves, what were you, Scotty — eighteen? A child-man, and for your courage, I thought you were a god...”

He took her hand in his big one and rubbed it gently. “Don’t talk yourself into anything now because of something that happened way back then, Marta.”

She shook her head. “No, no,” she said. “I will make the call.”

Back at the farmhouse she gave him dry socks and a pair of Emile’s slippers while she scraped the mud from his shoes and set them on the hearth. She put the decanter of sherry on the table between them but Weir shook his head when she asked to fill his glass.

“I want a clear head for the trip back to Liege. Those roads weren’t quite as familiar as I thought they’d be.”

Marta poured herself a sherry. “It is like a holiday for me, Scotty, having you here.”

They spent the rest of the afternoon in front of the fire as the apple logs burned down to fragrant ash and the stormy skies turned dark over the countryside. A digital clock, incongruous on the century-old mantelpiece, clicked the numbers rhythmically until the dial showed 4:45. Tarbert Weir forced himself to talk with his old friend, but he was conscious of the growing tension in her manner, the slur to her carefully worded English.

“I wonder, my cher ami Americain,” she burst out suddenly, “do you know how frightened we are here in Europe? Do even the Russians understand that? More and more of those missiles, hundreds at first, now thousands. They circle our borders and cities, they can be fired from the ground, from cannons on moving railroad trains. The North Sea to the Mediterranean, giant warheads everywhere, ready to fire.” She sat rocking back and forth, hugging her breasts. “Poor little Belgium, only ten million souls, all of us. We offer so little, we live on our exports, no natural resources. So what can we give you? Industrial diamonds, a little steel. No, you love us for the pastries we export, our chocolate and hams... and space to put your weapons.

“Must we be the prize in your contest for power? We march, we protest, thousands of us in Europe, from Sicily to Amsterdam. In Bremen, there were night-long vigils, people by the hundreds, praying on their knees with candles. Millions marching for peace, that is the will of the people. But can we change the man in the White House? Or the Kremlin? What more is wanted of us?”

She had put down her glass and sat staring at him, hands clasped in her lap now, watching him as if she expected an answer. In the curves of her face, the color high with sherry and emotion, and beneath the coiffed cap of her hair, he saw that her eyes were again like an eight-year-old, pleading and frightened.

“Marta,” he said gently. “I will try to understand. You don’t want to make the call to Alain.”

“You are wrong,” she said, standing. “I will call him now. We Belgians are not without honor. If it weren’t for you, le monsieur Scotty, I wouldn’t have a son to be frightened for tonight.”

As Marta talked on the phone in the hall, Weir paced the floor of the dining room, trying to drown out the sound of her voice with the shuffle of his slippers. He did not want to overhear. But the loose velvet scuffs with their soft chamois soles made him feel irresolute, almost old. With a spasm of irritation he kicked them off and put on his own shoes, still feeling the stiff dampness as he tied the laces over Emile LeRoi’s fine cashmere socks.

He positioned himself at the bow window and looked out past the courtyard to the farm buildings. Through the dusk he saw the storm clouds had parted for a thin moon, a light that glinted on the hedges, the cobbled courtyard and the dark mass of the plum orchard. The barn was as he remembered it, but freshly roofed and tuck-pointed, and beside it the tall lilac bush, graceful and bare now, just as it had been that winter night decades ago.

Marta entered from the hallway and came to stand close to him at the window. Weir put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close to him, stooping to kiss the top of her hair. It smelled pleasantly of fresh air, wood smoke and sherry.

“I’m sorry for what I said a few moments ago,” she murmured. “Alain will be expecting you tomorrow, sometime before noon. He understands, he will be ready.”

Scotty Weir kissed her hair again and pulled her close to him, grateful for the warmth of human flesh. He felt a faint sexual desire, something he had never felt for Marta before, and he wondered if she sensed the shift in his mood.

“I was looking at our tree, the old lilac bush,” he said. “It is still where it should be. I have never forgotten it, Marta, but it’s strange how memory changes things. I had remembered the old bush as more full, and taller, reaching as high as the barn roof, in fact.”

He felt her intake of breath, then a tremor that passed through her body, an almost imperceptible drawing away from his embrace.

“I didn’t think you’d notice, Scotty,” she said. “It is a lilac tree, or bush. The first one, long ago, was a lilac vulgaris. My father told me it must be a sport, a stray seed that came in on the wind. He never remembered his parents planting it. It was just there.”

Weir stared through the darkness, straining for a better look at the tree. No, it was not as tall as it should be, and much slimmer than he remembered. Marta was saying, “I’m trying the species Leon Gambetta this time. It’s a double-flowered hybrid and does well in this part of the world.”

Weir withdrew his arm from her shoulders and turned her body so he was looking directly down into her eyes. “Let me understand you, Marta. Are you telling me that lilac bush out there is not the lilac bush we all looked at the night I killed the Germans?”

“It’s a lilac, but not the same lilac,” she said. “The genus Syringa is not all that hardy. Besides, lots of natural things have accidents.”

“What kind of accidents?”

“The first one broke apart when there was a sudden thaw one year and the snow fell off the barn roof. That was the winter mother died.”

“By ‘the first one,’ you mean our ‘miracle’ bush?”

“Yes,” she said. “The second one was doing very well, it had at least nine seasons. But it got a bacterial blight, little cankers that killed the stems. It’s a plant disease that begins with a P — Phytophthora is what I think the nursery man said.”

“You’re telling me now about a second lilac bush,” General Weir said carefully, his arms stiff at his sides. “I believe what you are saying is that we are not looking at the first lilac bush, nor are we looking at the second...”

“That’s right, Scotty.”

“And the winter I brought my wife here, when Mark had to stay in school, was that the original tree we looked at? Which lilac were we toasting when we all got drunk and sentimental and you brought out champagne?”

“What year was that?”

“You know goddamn well what year it was, Marta, and don’t give me any more double-talk about genus and blight spots. What tree was it?”

“That lilac was the third.”

“And this?”

She sighed. “Last spring and summer the flowers weren’t right. They’re supposed to grow in panicles, you know, almost like bunches of grapes, but there were just a few scattered flowers, pinkish, not lilac, and a really bad smell. There were little white meshes on the leaves, like tent caterpillars and...”

“Then this is the fourth lilac bush, a complete imposter plant, I’ve been looking at like a damned fool? And you let me make that jackass speech about ‘our talisman’?”

She shrugged and looked away from him. “I would have waited for spring, but when I got your letter that you were coming, I called a nurseryman in Liege. They cut down the diseased tree and softened the ground with steam hoses and things and planted the new lilac. In fact, they had to put it six feet back so it wouldn’t get tangled up with the sick roots. You’d never have noticed the change, Scotty, if it had been taller. It wasn’t a matter of money, believe me. That was the biggest lilac bush they had in the nursery.”

Tarbert Weir let his breath out hoping the release of pressure would soften the anger that seemed to be swelling in his chest.

“I don’t think I did wrong, Scotty,” Marta said softly.

He wanted to reach out to touch her cheek, to reassure her, to remember her as a treasured friend, but he felt dread at the thought of flesh on flesh. What else, Weir wondered, had they all been lying about...

“Of course you didn’t do wrong, Marta. It is a strange kind of falsehood you’ve kept alive over the years, but I love you for it. It’s what a frightened eight-year-old girl would do. It must have meant so much to you, that miracle tree.”

“Yes, yes, dear Scotty,” she said softly. “It did, it meant so much to me. But you — wasn’t it just everything for you?”