Sweetheart,” she gasped, her thoughts scattered, “I didn’t expect to speak to you for…”
“I’m in DC,” Walter Brenckmann told his wife.
“Oh, my God!” She’d stopped watching NBC’s grainy coverage of the abomination going on four hundred miles away in the nation’s capital earlier that afternoon. It was too…monstrous. Then one of the kids — she still thought about her grown up sons as ‘kids’ — had turned on the radiogram in the lounge and she’d caught more snippets of the horror. If she hadn’t had two of her ‘boys’ at home she’d have got nervous, started watching people on the street, bolted her doors. Notwithstanding the anarchy that seemed to have taken over capital, Boston was calm, oddly normal.
Joanne had imagined that the next time she talked to her husband of over twenty-nine years she’d tell him about the house and how the three ‘boys’ were getting on. She and her eldest two ‘boys’ had painted all the upstairs rooms and she’d trawled the local marts for throws and quilts for the beds, and rugs and carpets for the floors. The boys had cleared the yard, cut back the trees and removed all the branches cracked and bent by last year’s the blast wave… She still shuddered to think about that night thirteen-and-a-half months ago. Although the house was finally back to the way it was before the war she was saddened by the patchwork of ruined and empty buildings disfiguring the surrounding blocks, soon those lots would be overgrown. She despised the way some people had just given up, even in a community like Cambridge so close to the revitalised, thriving Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus. But there was no accounting for people and she could understand that some of her old neighbours would never again feel safe living in a big city or close to a so-called ‘strategically important target’; like MIT.
“I’m okay,” her husband reassured Joanne. “I came back from England yesterday with a British delegation. It is a long story, but I’m okay. I’m at the White House.”
“The White House?”
“Like I said, it’s a long story.”
Joanne Brenckmann shivered. There was something awful in her husband’s tone. Fear mingling with loss and a thing she’d never heard in his voice in all their years together, despair. Her husband had lost his hope.
“Walter, you sound…”
“Sorry, honey, it’s just that…”
Joanne was disturbed by a sound at her shoulder.
“You okay, Mom?” Asked the lean, grey-eyed man in the uniform of a Lieutenant (Senior Grade) in the United States Navy. He’d been packing his kit upstairs in his old bedroom when the phone had rung down in the lounge. He had wondered if it was a call from Norfolk notifying him of some last minute change in his movement orders. Given what was going on in Washington he’d been a little surprised not to be called back to Norfolk earlier. He’d reported for duty at the Navy Office in downtown Boston yesterday; explained that he wasn’t due to report for duty again for another few days and put himself at the disposal of the local Naval District ‘for service in the current emergency’. The men in the Navy Office had eyed his gleaming submariner’s dolphin thoughtfully before refusing his offer. He’d left his contact number and address at the Navy Office, just in case.
Joanne put her hand over the handset.
“It’s your father.”
“Look,” Walter Brenckmann said, his voice faltering. “Look, the thing is…”
“What is it, sweetheart?” Joanne was terrified now. Sensing his mother’s near panic her eldest son put his arm around her shoulders. “You’re frightening me, Walter.”
“It is…”
“What is it? What has happened?”
“The Scorpion is,” a moment’s dreadful hesitation, “missing…”
“Oh, God!” Joanne was a Navy wife and mother and knew that when a submarine went missing it, and every man onboard, was gone.
“It happened a few hours ago. The circumstances are still, confused…”
Joanne knew her husband was crying. Not so anybody watching would know. Inwardly, he was sobbing like a baby. She ached to hold him.
“That’s, bad,” she stuttered.
“What is it, Mom?” Her son asked again.
Without putting her hand over the receiver she explained: “It is the Scorpion, Junior,” even though her son was the most grown up of young men well on the way to thirty, he’d always be ‘Junior’ in the family, “something’s happened. She’s missing.”
“Jo,” Walter Brenckmann asked, “is somebody with you?”
“Yes.” The mother sniffed a proud sniff and glanced up at her worried son’s face. He was so like his father at his age… Except unlike his father Walter Junior could have been born to wear the crisp Lieutenant’s uniform with the submariner’s dolphin badge. His father wore his uniform like the Boston lawyer he’d always be. “Junior’s with me. He’ll be real cut up about this.” She quirked a sad, tight-lipped grimace at her eldest son. “Your father says the Scorpion’s down, Junior.”
Walter Brenckmann didn’t believe his ears for a moment.
“Junior’s with you in Boston?” He blurted loudly.
Joanne joined up the dots in a mad rush.
“Oh, God! You wouldn’t have heard! I’m so sorry, sweetheart! I should have guessed! Junior transferred off the Scorpion before her last cruise. He’s been posted to Groton, Connecticut ahead of his joining his new boat… Hey, he can tell you better than me…”
Joanne pressed the handset into her son’s hands and ran into the kitchen fumbling for her handkerchief. Her husband had thought his son was dead and she couldn’t begin to imagine how dreadful that must have been.
“Pa,” Walter Brenckmann, junior, murmured into the handset. “Pa, are you okay?”
The younger man was shocked to realise that his father was sobbing uncontrollably at the other end of the line.
Chapter 47
Bobby Kennedy’s jacket was crumpled and a little dusty. He’d washed his face and combed his hair, his complexion was less ashen, his gaze was steady and in that curious way of his, convincingly empathetic. Even in the bunker twenty feet beneath the shrapnel-strewn grounds of the White House the stink of burning tainted the atmosphere and lay upon them all like a curse.
“My boy wasn’t on the Scorpion,” the older man said dully. “He was standing right beside my wife in Cambridge just now.”
The Attorney General had come into the room carrying a half-empty bottle of Kentucky bourbon and two cut glass tumblers. He chuckled wearily, popped the cork from the bottle and poured two generous slugs of amber fluid into the glasses.
“That,” he decided, “it a Helluva thing!”
“Isn’t it just,” the older man agreed as he accepted one of the glasses. “I don’t usually drink on duty, but…”
Both men drank deep.
“Walter Junior was called off the Scorpion twenty-four hours before she sailed. He’s pulled instructor duty at Groton pending joining his next boat in April. He was on furlough in Cambridge. He was helping his mother and his younger brother, Dan, paint the goddammed house!” He sighed long and hard. “Dan’s just finished law school. Yale,” he added. And then, unable to stop talking went on: “he’s doing a six-month internship with the DA’s office in Boston. I always hoped he’d pick up my old practice when Joanne and me kicked over the traces and headed down to the Florida Keys…”