— Anybody know? Bressi said. Lee’s greatest tactical commander.
— Shot by his own men, Newell said, almost inaudibly.
— Mistakenly.
— At Chancellorsville, in the dusk.
— It’s not far from here, about thirty miles, Bressi said. He had been first in military history. He glanced in the rearview mirror. How did you happen to know that? Where did you stand in military history?
Newell didn’t answer.
No one spoke.
There was a long line of cars moving slowly, going into the cemetery. People who had already parked walked alongside them. There were more gravestones than one could believe.
Bressi extended an arm and, waving lightly toward an area, said something Newell could not hear. Thill is in that section somewhere, Bressi had said, referring to a Medal of Honor winner.
They walked with many others, toward the end drawn by faint music as if coming from the ancient river itself, the last river, the boatman waiting. The band, in dark blue uniforms, had formed in a small valley. It was playing “Wagon Wheels,” Carry me home. . The grave was nearby, the fresh earth under a green tarpaulin.
Newell walked as if in a dream. He knew the men around him, but not really. He stopped at a gravestone for Westerveldt’s father and mother, died thirty years apart, buried side by side.
There were faces he thought he recognized during the proceedings, which were long. A thick, folded flag was given to what must have been the widow and her children. Carrying yellow flowers with long stems they filed past the coffin, the family and also others. On an impulse, Newell followed them.
Volleys were being fired. A lone bugle, silvery and pure, began to play taps, the sound drifting over the hills. The retired generals and colonels stood, each with a hand held over his heart. They had served everywhere, though none of them had served time in prison as Newell had. The rape charge against Dardy had been dropped after an investigation, and with Westerveldt’s help Newell had been transferred so he could make another start. Then Jana’s parents in Czechoslovakia needed help and Newell, still a first lieutenant, finally managed to get the money to send to them. Her gratitude was heartfelt.
— Oh, God. I love you! she said.
Naked she sat astride him and, caressing her own buttocks as he lay nearly fainting, began to ride. A night he would never forget. Later there was the charge of having sold radios taken from supply. He was silent at the court-martial. Above all he wished he hadn’t had to be there in uniform, it was like a crown of thorns. He had traded it and the silver bars and class ring to possess her. Of the three letters to the court appealing for leniency and attesting to his character, one was from Westerveldt.
Though the sentence was only a year, Jana did not wait for him. She went off with a man named Rodriguez who owned some beauty parlors. She was still young, she said.
The woman Newell later married knew nothing of all that or almost nothing. She was older than he was with two grown children and bad feet, she could walk only short distances, from the car to the supermarket. She knew he had been in the army — there were some photographs of him in uniform, taken years before,
— This is you, she said. So, what were you?
Newell hadn’t walked back with the others, He had no excuse to do that. This was Arlington and here they all lay, formed up for the last time. He could almost hear the distant notes of adjutant’s call. He walked in the direction of the road they had come in on. With a sound at first faint but then clopping rhythmically he heard the hooves of horses, a team of six black horses with three erect riders and the now-empty caisson that had carried the coffin, the large spoked wheels rattling on the road. The riders, in their dark caps, did not look at him. The gravestones in dense, unbroken lines curved along the hillsides and down toward the river, as far as he could see, all the same height with here and there a larger, gray stone like an officer, mounted, amid the ranks. In the fading light they seemed to be waiting, fateful, massed as if for some great assault. For a moment he felt exalted by it, by the thought of all these dead, the history of the nation, its people. It was hard to get into Arlington. He would never lie there; he had given that up long ago. He would never know the days with Jana again, either. He remembered her at that moment as she had been, when she was so slender and young. He was loyal to her. It was one-sided, but that was enough.
When at the end they had all stood with their hands over their hearts, Newell was to one side, alone, resolutely saluting, faithful, like the fool he had always been.
Last Night
WALTER SUCH was a translator. He liked to write with a green fountain pen that he had a habit of raising in the air slightly after each sentence, almost as if his hand were a mechanical device. He could recite lines of Blok in Russian and then give Rilke’s translation of them in German, pointing out their beauty. He was a sociable but also sometimes prickly man, who stuttered a little at first and who lived with his wife in a manner they liked. But Marit, his wife, was ill.
He was sitting with Susanna, a family friend. Finally, they heard Marit on the stairs, and she came into the room. She was wearing a red silk dress in which she had always been seductive, with her loose breasts and sleek, dark hair. In the white wire baskets in her closet were stacks of folded clothes, underwear, sport things, nightgowns, the shoes jumbled beneath on the floor. Things she would never again need. Also jewelry, bracelets and necklaces, and a lacquer box with all her rings. She had looked through the lacquer box at length and picked several. She didn’t want her fingers, bony now, to be naked.
— You look re-really nice, her husband said.
— I feel as if it’s my first date or something. Are you having a drink?
— Yes.
— I think I’ll have one. Lots of ice, she said.
She sat down.
— I have no energy, she said, that’s the most terrible part. It’s gone. It doesn’t come back. I don’t even like to get up and walk around.
— It must be very difficult, Susanna said.
— You have no idea.
Walter came back with the drink and handed it to his wife.
— Well, happy days, she said. Then, as if suddenly remembering, she smiled at them. A frightening smile. It seemed to mean just the opposite.
It was the night they had decided would be the one. On a saucer in the refrigerator, the syringe lay. Her doctor had supplied the contents. But a farewell dinner first, if she were able. It should not be just the two of them, Marit had said. Her instinct. They had asked Susanna rather than someone closer and grief-filled, Marit’s sister, for example, with whom she was not on good terms, anyway, or older friends. Susanna was younger. She had a wide face and high, pure forehead. She looked like the daughter of a professor or banker, slightly errant. Dirty girl, one of their friends had commented about her, with a degree of admiration.
Susanna, sitting in a short skirt, was already a little nervous. It was hard to pretend it would be just an ordinary dinner. It would be hard to be offhanded and herself. She had come as dusk was falling. The house with its lighted windows — every room seemed to be lit — had stood out from all the others like a place in which something festive was happening.
Marit gazed at things in the room, the photographs with their silver frames, the lamps, the large books on Surrealism, landscape design, or country houses that she had always meant to sit down with and read, the chairs, even the rug with its beautiful faded color. She looked at it all as if she were somehow noting it, when in fact it all meant nothing. Susanna’s long hair and freshness meant something, though she was not sure what.