Full Dress Gray

by Lucian K. Truscott

  “I’m going to have to call in the SJA on this.”

  “Do you want me to report to him like I did before, sir? This DNA stuff is pretty complicated.”

  “That won’t be necessary. I’ll go see him myself. You are to put your autopsy on hold until I get back to you, is that clear?”

  “Yes sir.”

  Percival pushed his chair back from his desk. “All right then . . .”

  “Sir, there’s one other thing. Considering the nature of this issue, I think it would enhance our ability to conclude the investigation satisfactorily if knowledge of the DNA results were limited to myself, you, Colonel Lombardi, and the Superintendent.”

  “Are you trying to tell me how to do my job, Major?”

  “No sir. I am merely suggesting that if word gets out that we can identify the individuals who had sex with Miss Hamner, it will give them an advantage if we reach the point where we call them in for questioning, sir.”

  “I am aware of that possibility, Major, I assure you.”

  “Thank you, sir, that’s all I have.”

  “You are dismissed.”

  Downstairs, Major Vernon got into her car and pulled out of her parking space. Percival’s reaction to the DNA news had been hostile. He had cut her out of the loop by not sending her to report to Colonel Lombardi, and she didn’t like being told to put her investigation “on hold.” When it came right down to it, she didn’t trust Percival. At the stop sign, she had a crazy thought.

  Why don’t I follow him, see if he goes to see Lombardi like he said?

  She looked in her rearview mirror. Percival was coming out of the Provost Marshal’s building, heading for his car. Major Vernon turned right and pulled her car around the corner of a building. By leaning out of her window, she could see him get into his car in the parking lot. He backed out and pulled up to the stop sign. Instead of turning left, toward the SJA’s office, he turned right. She waited until he reached the corner and pulled in behind him. She checked her watch. There was a chance he was going to lunch, but somehow she doubted it.

  She watched from a spot next to Clinton Field as Percival pulled into visitor parking across from the Officers’ Club. He got out of his car. Instead of walking across Cullum Road to the club, he continued down Cullum Road toward the library. She cut her engine and followed him on foot. Percival passed the library and crossed Thayer Road, entering Central Area. She walked to the corner of Pershing Barracks and watched as he entered Washington Hall at the entrance that led to the Commandant’s office.

  She knew from the short time it took him to reach his car that he had not bothered to call Lombardi. Now here he was, going straight to the Com with everything she’d just told him about the DNA results from the autopsy. She racked her brain, trying to recall how the Commandant fit into the chain of command.

  He didn't.

  The chain of command held that Percival was supposed to report to Lombardi, the SJA, and Lombardi was supposed to report directly to the Superintendent. But Percival wasn’t going through the chain of command, he was going around it.

  CHAPTER 24

  * * *

  SLAIGHT HAD spent most of the week on the mundane matters of Academy life. The investigation of Dorothy Hamner’s death seemed to be stalled. Gibson wasn’t misbehaving in any manner that was visible. The Corps of Cadets was caught up in the excitement of a winning football season. West Point’s Black Knights hadn’t lost once in four weeks. The only thing that hung over the head of the Superintendent was the visit of Congressman Thrunstone the next day.

  As they finished a soup-and-salad lunch on the back porch, Sam noticed that he was staring out across the backyard without seeing. “Looking forward to the weekend?” she joked.

  He nodded absently. “In a big way.”

  “You’ll figure something out. Didn’t Leroy give you some help?”

  “Lots.”

  “What did he tell you? Watch and listen? That would be so like Leroy.”

  “That, and he filled me in on Thrunstone’s whole story. He’s a piece of work.”

  “So what are you going to do? Just between you and me, I don’t see you keeping your mouth shut all day tomorrow.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve got to think about it.” He pushed his chair back from the table and kissed her. “I’d better get going. Supes aren’t supposed to take two-hour lunches.”

  “Hell, you’re the boss now. You can do what you want,” she teased.

  “Within reason. Thanks for the feast, doll.” He grabbed his cap and headed for the front door. Outside, the day was brisk and the trees around Trophy Point had begun to change colors. He started down the stairs and turned around and went back inside.

  “Sam?” he called from the door. She appeared at the end of the hall. “Do me a favor, will you? Call Melissa and tell her I’ve gone for a walk.”

  Sam smiled and gave him a wave that said she’d known all along what he’d do.

  Slaight headed down the steps of Quarters 100 once again, this time turning north toward the cemetery.

  The West Point Cemetery was located behind the Old Cadet Chapel, about a half mile up Washington Road from Trophy Point. Slaight had an affection for the Old Cadet Chapel that dated to his days as a cadet, when, even though he was a nondenominational Protestant, he had opted to be on what was quaintly referred to as “the Jewish Chapel Squad.” This was back in the days of mandatory chapel, when all cadets, whatever their faith, were compelled to attend one of three churches each and every Sunday of their lives at West Point: Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish. It was claimed that the services in the Old Cadet Chapel were nondenominational Protestant, but in fact they reflected the very conservative religious and political beliefs of the Lutheran minister who was then Cadet Chaplain and whose sermons reflected a belief that God was most certainly a capitalist, most probably an American, and possibly Republican. The Jewish services, on the other hand, were of the Reform variety. Once a month a rabbi drove up to the Academy from Great Neck in his Ferrari. He was of the opinion that God, while probably a capitalist, was most certainly a Democrat. On the other three weeks of the month, cadets themselves gave the service, complete with the mellifluous vocal tones of the Jewish Chapel Choir, of which Slaight was a member in good standing. That the Jewish Chapel Squad attended services on the Christian sabbath rather than on the Jewish sabbath reflected the strictures of mandatory chapel, which held that at West Point, the Academy’s rules prevailed over those of God.

  It was after Jewish Chapel Squad services on Sunday mornings that Slaight had discovered the cemetery. He used to wander back there among the headstones, reading the names of graduates, thinking back over the long, bloody history of the United States that had brought so many of them to this place on the Hudson River first as eager boys, and finally as dead bodies.

  One Thursday afternoon during the fall of his plebe year, he had come face-to-face with the process by which Academy graduates found their final resting place at West Point. His Tactical Officer called him to his office and informed him in very disapproving tones that he was to be excused from all duties for the next two days so he could escort the widow of a West Point graduate who had recently been killed in Vietnam. The Tactical Officer was of the opinion that plebes, like children, were best seen and not heard, and he would much rather have provided a first-classman, a cadet captain, to escort the widow. That she had specifically asked for Slaight had not made the Tactical Officer happy at all, but she had insisted, and so against his better judgment the Tac had sprung Slaight loose with a long and very profane admonition that he’d better not fuck up and bring discredit upon the Corps.

  Slaight was instructed to meet the widow the next morning, Friday, at the Thayer Hotel, and attend to her needs until the funeral was over on Saturday and she had departed the Academy.

  As General Slaight entered the cemetery on a crisp fall afteroon as Superintendent, he recalled that he had stood in the office of his Tactical Officer wondering who h
e could have known in his short life who would call upon him at a time like this. Then the Tac told him that her name was Virginia Parker Connolly.

  Cadet Slaight remembered Virginia Parker. As a ninth-grader, she had been his ballroom dancing teacher when he was in the seventh grade. He had had a massive crush on her, which he had imagined she reciprocated, but the two-year age difference in junior high school was an insurmountable obstacle that neither of them dared cross. Now, apparently, she remembered him, too.

  It seemed like meeting her in the Thayer Hotel had happened yesterday. The lobby had a high, wood-beamed ceiling and a mezzanine running around its perimeter. On that Friday morning, with most of the Corps of Cadets in class and their dates for the weekend still hours away from arrival at the hotel, the lobby was a silent, churchlike space. He found Virginia waiting for him on one of the sofas across from the reception desk. He remembered being struck by the fact that she had hardly changed, forgetting that only four years had passed since they had first met. She stood as he approached, and they embraced. He remembered being frightened of being written up for Public Display of Affection, because no cadet, under any circumstances, was supposed to touch a female in public, except to offer her his arm. But the violation went blessedly unreported and, slightly more confidently, he held her hand as she told him of being notified by a ring of her doorbell and the presence of an Army captain that her husband, Walker Connolly, a lieutenant just a year out of West Point, had been killed in action in Vietnam. They had been married at the West Point Chapel the week after he had graduated, and with his duty assignments at Ranger School and Airborne School, they had spent only eight months together before he left for Vietnam.

  Slaight the plebe had the odd impression that her grief was tempered by the short time she had known her husband. As she spoke of him, it seemed as if they had barely known each other, and it turned out to be true. They had started dating when he was a firstie, and had married a few months later. Her anguish was sudden and hot and angry and very youthful, like that of a child whose doll had been lost and could not be recovered. He guessed that there would always be a part of her that would never understand why this had happened to her. Why me? Why now? To these tormented questions, he had no answer. All he could do was listen.

  Her parents were not due to arrive at the Academy until that evening, and her husband’s parents were coming from Hawaii and wouldn’t get there until the next morning. As far as she knew, only a few of his classmates would be able to make the funeral. Many were in Vietnam, and the rest were scattered widely around the world at their first duty assignments. Few of them, as second lieutenants, had the kind of money or time it then took to travel long distances by air. The funeral was scheduled for the next afternoon, and so, for the time being, they were on their own.

  Cadet Slaight asked her if she wanted to see where her husband would be buried, and lacking transportation, all they could do was walk the two miles to the cemetery. So, offering her his arm in the prescribed cadet manner, he led her off down Thayer Road.

  The trees were turning, the air crisp, the sky the color of faded blue denim. As they walked, she told him that she had arranged to arrive at the Academy a day early so she could get her bearings before relatives and friends arrived. He suspected that she also wanted someone to talk to—someone she knew, someone she could trust and yet in whom she had relatively little invested emotionally. There were questions she had already begun to ask, and she had others. Long silences were interrupted by awkward inquiries about West Point, which he tried to answer bravely, so as not to disturb any memories she had of her husband’s experiences there. But he soon realized that she knew the score. Her husband had despised his four years at West Point, and yet he had marched off to the sound of the guns ten thousand miles away, as any honorable officer would, and this was the thing that confused her. How could you hate West Point, hate being a cadet, hate Army training like Ranger School and Airborne School so much, and yet give your life for it?

  He struggled for an answer. West Point was not a place you were supposed to enjoy in the way that students enjoyed colleges like Princeton or Vassar. It was a place that trained warriors, and the training was unpleasant and hard and often just plain ugly. Knowing his own father and grandfather while not quite knowing himself, he realized that you didn’t have to love either West Point or the Army to love and want to serve your country.

  They walked along Thayer Road and the river glistened bluish-gray below them. In the distance, the Hudson Valley seemed to stretch northward forever. He knew that she was asking deeply painful questions, and he was mouthing abstract and probably patently stupid answers, but she did not protest. It seemed as if the process itself was enough.

  The walk up Thayer Road . . . the brooding questions and the hesitant answers . . . her hand grasping the rough wool of his dress gray jacket . . . the incredible aloneness of having known each other when they were so young and now enduring together what for each of them, but most especially for her, were terribly adult moments . . . all of it came flooding back as the Superintendent walked once again among the graves of the West Point Cemetery. General Slaight reached a little hill toward the back of the cemetery and turned to look south.

  He remembered that as he walked down Thayer Road with Virginia on his arm, he felt lost, as if he didn’t know which way to go. She seemed to have sensed this: He felt her hand grip his arm more tightly, she moved closer to him, and the feeling passed. He pulled himself together and held his head high, and he noticed that reaching the area of barracks she did the same, and together they walked past Grant Hall and Thayer Hall and Central Area, crossed the Plain, passed the Dean’s Quarters, continued north along Washington Road to the Old Cadet Chapel, turned into its circular drive, and walked around the west side of the old stone structure into the West Point Cemetery itself. They passed the graves of those who were killed in World War II, and then those killed in Korea, and then they entered a part of the cemetery that had yet to be filled with headstones. It was as if a part of the grounds of West Point had been reserved for the next war, and that war was here now, in Vietnam, and men were dying once again in a faraway land, and there at the end of an empty row was a freshly dug grave, its reddish-brown dirt piled high and uncovered next to it.

  They walked the final steps to her husband’s grave site, and Virginia stood at its edge and looked down. “This is where he is always going to be,” she said in a very matter-of-fact voice that betrayed neither sorrow nor pride. Actually seeing the hole in the ground had made real something that for her had been only an idea until then, and for reasons Slaight could not fathom, it comforted her that if she hadn’t known where he had been for the last few months, or exactly where he had died, at least she would know forever and for certain where she could find him now.

  He asked her if she wanted to see the inside of the Old Cadet Chapel, and she said no, that would come soon enough. And so with seemingly nothing else to do, they started the long walk back to the Thayer Hotel. This time, when they passed the area of barracks, cadets were crossing Thayer Road, returning to their rooms from class. As they passed Grant Hall, one of the upperclass cadets in Slaight’s company caught sight of him walking down the sidewalk with Virginia on his arm. He turned and marched toward them.

  “Halt, mister!” he commanded. They stopped, still arm-in-arm. “Plebes are not permitted to escort females on weekdays! Drive yourself up to my room immediately, mister!

  “Sir, I am escorting Mrs. Connolly under orders of the Tactical Officer. Her husband was killed in action in Vietnam two weeks ago, sir.”

  The upperclassman stood there on Thayer Road realizing that he had been caught in a moment of foolish impertinence, and not knowing quite what to do, his eyes wandered for a moment, from Virginia to Slaight and back to Virginia. Then she touched him lightly on the shoulder and said, “It’s okay. I understand. It’s just . . . West Point.” The upperclassman mouthed silently the words, “I’m sorry,” and turned up th
e ramp to the barracks.

  When Slaight and Virginia had passed the old hospital and were back on the part of Thayer Road that passed the stately old quarters of the staff and faculty, she turned to him and said, “You know, it’s funny, but he reminded me a lot of my husband.”

  The next day, Slaight accompanied Virginia and her parents in the staff car from the Thayer Hotel to the Old Cadet Chapel. His parents had been friends for many years with hers, but there was little to talk about during the drive down Thayer Road. When the service was over, he walked with her arm-in-arm behind her husband’s casket as it was carried from the Chapel to the grave site. He stood to one side of Virginia, with her father and mother on the other, during the graveside service. When the Color Guard had finished folding the American flag into its traditional triangle, it was to Slaight that the captain in charge of the Color Guard passed the flag. He in turn handed the flag to Virginia, and the gathering of maybe two dozen parents and soldiers and cadets from Walker Connolly’s old company stood silently as taps was sounded and a team of riflemen fired a final salute.

  Later that night, Virginia called Slaight’s company. The Charge of Quarters rushed up to Slaight’s room, and he raced downstairs to the Orderly Room to take the call. She was down at Grant Hall and wanted to see him before she left early the next morning. Slaight raced back to his room and put on his dress gray uniform and hurried down the ramp from the barracks to Grant Hall. He found her sitting in one of the alcoves, under a photograph of General Robert E. Lee. She patted the sofa next to her and he sat down.