Turning from the window, she noted this. “I should put it somewhere, I know. But it’s so hard to accept what’s become of us.”
Sitting across from her, Terry reflected that he still kept an old picture in a drawer: his mother and father on either side of him, beaming after Paul’s first communion, no one but his father aware of what might come. “I understand,” he said. “Sometimes putting away pictures feels like letting go of a dream. You wish you were still in it.”
Rose tilted her head, giving Terry a slightly quizzical smile. “That’s almost poetic, Captain.”
“Everyone has dreams, Mrs. Gallagher. Or illusions.”
“Including us.” Rose turned to the photograph. “Now Joe’s dead; Kate’s a widow; Brian’s a shell; and Meg’s still looking after him. Only Tony has prospered, and not without a price—his wife’s suicide, his son’s tragedy.” Shaking her head, she added softly, “And, it seems, Kate and Brian were having an affair. God help us all.”
In a skeptical tone, Terry asked, “That really surprised you?”
Rose gave him a look of characteristic directness. “More than surprised. Shocked. About Brian more than Kate—his code of honor may be his own, but I’ve always been certain that he has one. Now I can only wonder what will happen to them both.”
“For Brian, nothing good. I’ve bought a few days from the prosecutor. But unless something changes, he’ll begin the process for court-martialing Brian on murder charges.” Seeing the shadow cross Rose’s face, he said, “As to Kate, the military can’t touch her. And whatever Flynn’s suspicions, I don’t think he can mount a case that she helped Brian plan a murder. The price she’ll pay, however painful, is more likely to be personal.”
Rose looked down. “Not just Kate—the children. I gather her admission tipped the balance.”
“The moral balance, certainly. That Brian was sleeping with Joe’s wife offends Flynn’s deepest beliefs about morality—military and familial. In Flynn’s mind, General McCarran would be the first to agree.”
Rose was quiet, her expression far away. “Poor Tony. He’ll soldier on—literally. That’s what a general does. But when I spoke to him after hearing about Kate and Brian, he never sounded so lost. Not even when Mary killed herself.”
Once again, Terry found himself wondering, as Meg did, about the history between her father and Rose Gallagher. In a neutral tone, he said, “It must help him that you’ve always been so close.”
As soon as she looked at him, the directness of her gaze disconcerting now, Terry grasped anew how acute this woman was. “Is that quite what you meant to say, Captain? For whatever reason, you’ve clearly spent some time reading our familial tea leaves. And not just with me.”
Cornered, Terry nodded. “True. But it’s hardly gratuitous, Mrs. Gallagher. I have a very troubled client whose psychology eludes me.”
“As well as a complicated co-counsel,” Rose amended. “I suspect Meg figures into this pursuit.”
The delphic remark did not quite ask whether Meg was a source of Terry’s understanding, or a reason why he wished for more. Mildly, he answered, “All of you do.”
“I can imagine,” Rose answered bluntly. “Meg always believed I wanted her father for myself.”
They were edging close, Terry realized, to the ambiguity surrounding Mary’s suicide. “Why do you think that?”
Rose clasped her hands. “Because I did,” she said at length. “Long before Jack died, when Tony was a cadet at West Point, I fell in love with him. But Tony was drawn by Mary’s incandescence. So I married Jack Gallagher instead.” Her handsome face held sadness and a trace of wonder. “Our greatest delusion, I think, is to believe that we’re deluding others.”
Terry had a sudden startling thought—that Rose had resisted imagining her daughter’s affair with Brian because Kate was also Tony McCarran’s daughter. But that required a lapse of piety and principle—on behalf of both Rose Gallagher and the general—not easy to square with how their families perceived them. Cautiously, Terry inquired, “May I ask you something, Mrs. Gallagher?”
Rose smiled faintly. “You already have. But go ahead, Captain. I can always refuse to answer.”
“After Mary’s death, why didn’t you and the general marry?”
Rose gave him a long, considering look. “How should I respond, I wonder. Perhaps it’s better to leave us as two middle-aged victims of repression. But why would you assume that Tony would have wanted that?”
Terry hesitated, uncertain of how far to probe. “Perhaps because Mary thought he did.”
The smile that played on Rose’s lips did not diminish the keenness of her gaze. “This is about Meg, isn’t it. And Mary’s note.”
Terry felt another jolt of surprise. “You saw it?”
“Are you saying Meg still doesn’t know that? My God, our silences are breathtaking.” Rose’s voice softened. “Of course Tony showed it to me—for both Meg’s sake and mine, he had to. I was speechless. How many times, I wondered, had I wished her dead. And now she was dead, leaving a note that exposed the darker crannies of my soul—and, I knew, her husband’s. Perhaps we deserved that. But not when Mary’s intended victims included her twelve-year-old daughter.”
Silent, Terry absorbed the way Mary McCarran had made her death into a tragedy, still resonant among the living. “It was a deliberate act of cruelty,” Rose went on, “designed by a woman who was selfish to her bitter end. She planned for Meg to find her in that bloody bathtub, but not before she found the note. Just as she knew that her poisoned chalice would pass from Meg to Tony to me. The only one she missed was Brian, and he still suffers from the aftershock.” For a moment, Rose’s voice roughened with anger. “She was the most toxic kind of parent, so consumed with her inner drama that she saw Meg as one more prop. She left it to the living to care if her daughter survived. Or if any of us survived.
“We barely did. Tony was tormented by guilt. So was I. There were times, God help me, when I wished that Meg had flushed that note down the toilet and never told a soul. There must be times she wishes that, too. Whatever else she feels, she surely wonders what would have happened if she had.”
Softly, Terry said, “But she was only twelve.”
“How well I know it. That’s not a choice an adolescent girl should ever have to make, or a burden she should bear alone.” Rose fell quiet, and then continued in a calmer tone: “You asked why Tony and I never married. He wanted to. And despite everything, I hoped that, over time, I could help Meg heal. But I couldn’t be a surrogate mother to Meg and a wife to her father. It would have confirmed what Mary wanted her to believe—that I had plotted to supplant her mother, and that her father and I had driven Mary to suicide.
“She had left me with a choice, as well. And choosing Tony, I was certain, would cost him a daughter and, in the end, tear us all apart. No matter how I felt for him, or how badly it hurt us both, that had to be my answer. We both lived with that as best we could. All we ever were—all we ever could be—was friends.”
Watching her face, Terry felt the depth of this woman’s sorrow and resolve. “I can’t imagine, Mrs. Gallagher, how hard that must have been.”
“Perhaps not. But try remembering yourself at twelve. The adults in your life owed you protection, not the other way around.” Rose’s tone was quiet but unflinching. “Guilt was also useful. I loved Tony when I married Jack, and I continued to love him through his marriage to Mary. Now Jack and Mary were both dead. In a terrible way, I felt as though I’d willed that. I may have learned something about psychology, but I’ve been Catholic all my life.”
Terry fell quiet. What struck him forcibly was the breadth of needs unspoken or denied, connections missed or misperceived, reverberating through this family in ways both subtle and profound. Yet each mischance, it seemed, bound its members to one another. Terry considered the woman across from him, who had wanted a man too soon, been loved by him too late, and who—because Mary McCarran had not been entirely wrong about
her—had forsaken her desires for the sake of children from whom, even as adults, she tried to conceal the depth of her sacrifice. “Were there other men in your life?” Terry inquired at length.
Rose considered a question that, for once, concerned no one but her. “There were,” she finally answered. “But there was always Tony and our children. I was raised in the military, and I thought I knew what everyone needed after Mary’s death. Perhaps I salved my guilt by making their needs my own.” Rose paused, then finished with quiet dispassion, as though pronouncing judgment on her life. “In Tony’s case, I succeeded where I could, and failed where I felt I had to. My failure with the children was far more comprehensive. As we’re now seeing.”
Though Terry could follow the threads of her sadness, her ultimate meaning eluded him still. “I don’t quite understand, Mrs. Gallagher. In every case, it seems you left the people in your life better off than you found them.”
Rose smiled a little. “That’s kind of you to say, Captain. Certainly I helped Tony realize his ambitions. In the army, single men rarely succeed; no single father I’ve ever known has risen as high as Tony McCarran. When Tony’s trajectory took him to Korea, Germany, and Iraq, I looked after Meg and Brian—sometimes with help from Kate—and tended to the unspoken aspects of an officer’s career.”
Terry nodded. “The politics, you mean.”
Rose smiled faintly. “I prefer to think of it as human resources work. Had Mary lived, and been more sane, her job would have been to make new friends among the wives, concerning herself with those aspects of army life that help a family succeed. I did that for Tony.” Her face became somber. “When his brigade took casualties in Iraq, I helped families where the soldier had been wounded or killed. I listened to people’s problems. As clearly and truthfully as I could, I helped Tony comprehend the lives of those for whom he bore responsibility. And Tony became known as the wise and compassionate man he very much wanted to be, though didn’t always know how.
“He remained hurt that I wouldn’t—or couldn’t—marry him. But he was grateful for what I was able to give him. We both knew that I’d helped him become General McCarran, as Mary never could have.”
“So how is that a failure?”
“I failed him in the way I failed myself,” Rose answered with resignation. “Tony McCarran is a profoundly lonely man. More and more, the McCarran heritage came to define him. Never having had a father, he never learned to be one. Vietnam not only cauterized him, but cost him his closest friend—my husband. All that you know. But the result after Mary died was that he couldn’t truly nurture his own children. And he knows that. He lives in fear of Meg’s judgment and, in different ways, of Brian’s.
“Aside from me, who can Tony turn to? Within the army he’s a hero, an almost legendary figure. And the higher an officer with Tony’s ambitions goes, the lonelier he gets, the more afraid of displaying some fatal weakness. Instead he keeps his own counsel, cautious of anyone or anything that could derail him.” She shook her head. “Now Tony is chief of staff of the army, and he can’t even help his own son, except to find Brian the best lawyer at Fort Bolton. And you’re leaving in a couple of weeks.”
With this, Terry thought of Meg. “As you say, Mrs. Gallagher, I’m just an interloper. But I can’t see how you failed either Meg or Brian.”
Though skeptical, Rose’s expression was not unkind. “Oh, I think you can, Captain. You strike me as a student of others, even a bit of an anthropologist. Had I been Tony’s wife—a day-to-day presence—I might have softened Tony’s influence on both children without diminishing their love for him. Brian might never have entered the academy, or become an officer at all. Who among us wouldn’t wish that now?” She looked at Terry keenly. “Then there’s Meg. In whom, I’ve begun to think, you take a considerable interest.”
Rose Gallagher, Terry thought again, was a very perceptive woman. “Let’s say I’ve begun to detect nuances in her character.”
“In other words,” Rose amended tartly, “you no longer think she’s devoid of human feeling.”
Terry smiled. “No. But I’m still working out exactly who she is.”
Rose studied him. “And that matters to you?”
Terry considered how to answer. “It’s begun to, yes. She’s complicated. But beneath the scar tissue, I think Meg has a far more complex emotional life than she allows herself to show. Perhaps even the capacity to trust.”
“You won’t find out in a week or two,” Rose admonished. “No doubt you appreciate the impact of the traumatic suicide of a mother who—aside from being an alcoholic—was the gold standard for maternal unreliability. Meg’s defense was to build a wall of self-reliance and self-protection, focusing on the needs of her family rather than her own. Which also impairs her relationships outside the McCarrans, especially with men.
“By now you can tick off the characteristics as well as I can. She can be wary and controlling, with a deep sense of responsibility for her brother and even her father, and an inability to trust anyone else to care for them—let alone for her. She’s living with a wellspring of hurt she can never acknowledge.” Rose’s voice held deep compassion. “At bottom, Captain Terry, she’s deeply afraid. And what frightens Meg more than anything is to face her own need. So she’s sublimated that in an intense attachment to her work. For her to face that squarely might be to fall apart.”
Terry thought of the night before. “I’m not sure,” he answered. “I’ve begun to think she sees herself more clearly than one might think.”
Rose gave him a curious look. “To what degree, I wonder? Brian may be a soldier, but Meg’s the one who’s made herself as tough as nails. Whether or not she knows it, Meg’s first and foremost a McCarran. She may have moved to California, but family is so engrained in her she never truly got away.” Her tone was quiet but emphatic. “That’s another of my regrets, Captain. I didn’t really change the lives of Tony’s children. I simply helped them become the best McCarrans they could be. Though that’s not the part that makes me saddest. There’s Kate.”
Terry had begun to understand this woman, and the reckoning she had come to with Joe D’Abruzzo’s death. “You say Meg takes too much on herself,” he said with gentle irony. “If so, she must have come to you for lessons.”
The glint of recognition in Rose’s eyes did not change her look of sadness. “Sometimes one simply sees the truth. Kate perceived me as a self-appointed plaster saint, so concerned with the McCarrans that I denied myself and, less forgivably, forgot that I was the only parent she’d ever had. So when her marriage became troubled, she didn’t turn to me. Instead, she reached out for the solace I refused myself: an affair with a man she’d always loved—Tony’s son.” Bowing her head, Rose finished softly: “Kate was the catalyst for the terrible things that followed. Because, like Meg, she couldn’t bear the thought of becoming her own mother.”
Feeling the weight of Rose’s grief, Terry perceived its ultimate cause—the belief that all she had done, or tried to do, had ended in a tragedy. And now, through her grandchildren, the damage would go on.
He sat with her awhile, neither speaking, before he thanked her for her time.
nine
THAT NIGHT TERRY SLEPT FITFULLY, THINKING OF LITTLE BUT the McCarrans and the Gallaghers, the threads of entwinement that helped define them all and into which, seemingly without much comprehension, Joe D’Abruzzo had been drawn. A death had resulted. Now the law would reduce this psychic web to one brutally simple question: Had Brian McCarran committed murder?
By now Terry had learned that a trial was less than a distillation of truth. He did not know why Brian had killed Joe D’Abruzzo; perhaps Brian did not know. But those assigned to judge him would know less: constrained by the rules of evidence, they would never learn the history Terry had only begun to grasp. Flynn would give them Brian as a calculating murderer; Brian’s lawyer would evoke a frightened man acting in self-defense. His peers would pick one version or another, and the actual Bria
n McCarran—still unknown to them—would go to prison or go free.
It was this that robbed Terry of sleep.
At two A.M., as he watched the red illuminated numbers of his alarm clock, his cell phone rang.
He sat bolt upright. A terrible thought pierced the barrier of his subconscious—that Brian had killed himself. Quickly, he snatched at the phone.
“Paul?” Meg said in a subdued tone. “I’m already sorry I did this.”
“Is Brian okay?”
For a moment, she was silent. “I was going to say, ‘Of course not.’ But I understand what you mean now. Do you worry about that, too?”
Terry inhaled, staring about him at the darkness. “I guess I do. Anyhow, I wasn’t sleeping.”
“Neither was I.” Meg paused again. “It’s like I’m watching a train heading straight toward Brian—he can’t move, and I can’t help him.”
Perhaps for Meg, as for Terry, helplessness fed a sense of dread that deepened in the night—when the world slept, time passed too slowly, and nothing could be done. It did not seem strange that they were talking.
“Do you want to come over?” Terry asked. “Maybe we can play backgammon.”
Meg laughed softly. “Is that what you do when you can’t sleep?” She paused again, then said in a lower voice, “I’m sick of this hotel room. It’s become a halfway house between the life I left and all that I’m afraid is coming.”
Instinct told Terry to just listen.
“I’ve been lying here thinking,” she ventured. “This is your last weekend at Fort Bolton. Would you like to go somewhere?”
Terry’s mood lightened at the surprise of feeling less alone. “Where?”
“Maybe Virginia Beach. A guy Dad served with rents out a cottage there.” She hesitated. “If we split the cost, it wouldn’t be that much.”
Terry smiled in the dark. “My treat,” he told her. “I still have a job.”
THE HOUSE WAS ON the Atlantic side of Sandbridge Beach, away from the boardwalk on a quiet stretch of white sand and tranquil waters. Their two-hour drive from Bolton had been quiet but companionable, both content with their own thoughts. On arriving, Meg settled a lingering question by following Terry to a bedroom and putting her suitcase next to his.
In the Name of Honor Page 17
