The Generals (19 page)

(One)
Washington, D.C.
7 June 1969

Kildar Street in Alexandria, Virginia, is laid out like a snake through what was once a sixty-acre cornfield. On either side of the road, odd numbers to the right, even to the left, are what the developer called “town houses.” Each town house consists of a living room (with dining area), an entrance foyer, a den, a half-bath, and a kitchen on the first floor, and three rooms (a master bedroom with private bath; two bedrooms with a shared bath) on the second. A pull-down ladder in the upstairs hall gives access to the attic. In many of the town houses, the attics have been finished, thus providing an extra room either for storage or as a bedroom or recreation room.

The town houses do not form a solid, monolithic wall. The front of every other town house is closer to the street than its immediate neighbors. This staggered arrangement is not only pleasing to the eye, but gives each house a view out the side that would not be possible otherwise. And fences or shrubbery that would obstruct the view up or down Kildar Street are prohibited. Fences or shrubbery in backyards or “patios,” however, while not required, are encouraged.

The houses that are close to Kildar Street are seen to be more desirable than the others. They provide both a pleasant, unbroken view of lawn from their fronts, and the privacy of the patio to the rear.

Most desirable of all, it is generally conceded, are the town houses that are not only close to Kildar Street, but that are also at the point where undulation of the snake itself (imagine an “S” on its side) is at its apogee.

There is a much better view from such houses, and they also catch whatever breeze there might be on a hot summer Virginia afternoon or evening.

2301 Kildar Street not only extended closer to the street than its neighbors, but it was at the absolute apogee of the snake. It was owned and occupied by Sharon and Sanford T. Felter and their three children, Sanford, Jr., Craig, and Sarah.

Sharon Felter was both surprised and pleased, but also a little worried, to see Sandy’s dirty-gray, battered Volkswagen putt-putting up Kildar Street at half past two in the afternoon. He should not be home at this time. She had done the laundry, and pressed several blouses for Sarah. And now, because she was baking, she had been sweating. She was a mess—or at least she felt that way. She didn’t like Sandy to see her when she was like that.

She was kneading dough. The Eppes-Essen Delicatessen in the shopping center charged almost a dollar for a loaf of Jewish Rye bread. Highway robbery. She would have made her own bread if she had to knead it by hand (she knew how; she came from a family of bakers) rather than give them that kind of money. Sharon Felter had a machine to knead the bread, and Anna Felter got her fifty-pound bags of the special rye flour at wholesale whenever they went home to Jersey. Sharon made her own bread for about a quarter a loaf.

She even sold some of it to her neighbors. She didn’t like to do that, but she didn’t know how to say no, and she wasn’t going to give it to them.

As she was washing her hands Sandy parked the Volkswagen by the curb. Through the curtains she could see that he was carrying a briefcase, which meant that he was bringing work home from the office. She didn’t like that, either. Sandy worked too hard. Sandy had worked too hard as long as she had known him, and she had known him all of her life.

He got to the door and was inside before she had finished drying her hands and taking the apron off.

“I’m in the kitchen, honey!” Sharon called.

“Stay there,” he called. “I’m sweaty. I need a bath!” He smiled at her as he walked past the kitchen and started up the stairs.

An absolutely wicked thought popped into Sharon’s head. The boys wouldn’t be home until supper, and Sarah was doing something after school and had asked permission not to come home until half past five.

Sharon looked at the dough in the mixer. All she had to do was put a damp cloth on top of the bowl and let it rise on the windowsill instead of in the oven. It would take another thirty, forty minutes to rise that way; and that as all the time they would need.

She locked the front door and the side door, and hooked the hook on the sliding glass door off the living room. God spare me from sociable neighbors, she thought, and then she went up the stairs to her husband.

And now she knew that something was wrong.

Sandy had taken off his suit coat. The briefcase was on their bed. The harness—plastic-coated, multistrand steel cable, running around both shoulders and then down the sleeve of his coat—was still dangling from his sweat-soaked shirt. In the small of his back was a Colt .45 automatic pistol. It wasn’t the regular .45 automatic that the Army issued. It had been cut down to make it smaller and more concealable. Instead of the usual seven, it held only five rounds, but it was a .45; and Sandy trusted the .45.

Most disturbing of all was what lay next to the briefcase on the bed. A clothing bag. Light blue. She’d bought it years ago in a sale at Montgomery Ward’s. It had not been out of the closet for almost three years, because it held Sandy’s class “A” winter and summer uniforms, and for almost three years Sandy hadn’t had to wear his uniforms.

He looked at her and met her eyes and gave her a little smile.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” he said. “I’m just—”

The telephone rang. They both looked at it. Mounted unobtrusively on the base of the telephones in their bedroom and the den (telephones the children were forbidden to use) were small illuminated buttons. If one of these lit up, it was a call on the scrambled line. In the basement mounted against the rafters were two small, blank, steel boxes with scramblers. Pushing the button made the connection and activated the scrambler on the “regular” phones. The second scrambler in the basement was connected to the “other” telephones, one inside the bedside table, the other in a drawer of the desk in the den. They were connected to the White House switchboard, and they were permanently attached to the scrambler.

If the light didn’t blink when the phone rang, then it was someone calling the number listed for
Felter, S.T. 2301 Kildar Alxdr
. The light was not blinking. What bothered Sharon was that she could see on Sandy’s face that he had expected it to be blinking.

“Darn,” Sharon said, and went to it and picked it up. “Hello?”

“Sharon? Sharon, is that you, honey? This is Roxy.”

Roxy? It took Sharon a moment to connect the vaguely remembered voice and that funny name.
Roxy?
What in the world can she want?

“Hello, Roxy,” Sharon said. “It’s nice to hear your voice.”

Sharon saw that the interest in Sandy’s face was mixed with annoyance.

“Yours too,” Roxy MacMillan said. “Listen, honey, the reason I called. I wanted to call before Sandy did something silly like renting a motel or something. You’re going to stay with us. We’ve got room for you. And all the kids.”

“Roxy, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sharon said.

“You haven’t seen the Mouse in the last couple of hours?” Roxy asked.

I really loathe her when she calls Sandy that, Sharon thought. It may be a sign of lasting endearment from old friends, tried and true, but I don’t like anyone calling him that.

“I expect him any time, now,” Sharon said.

“Well, if you don’t know, then I better not tell you,” Roxy said, half giggling. “You wait until he tells you, and then you tell him what I said. It’s too good an opportunity to pass up, and I won’t take no for an answer.”

“I really don’t know what to say, Roxy,” Sharon said.

“Don’t say anything,” Roxy said. “Just tell the Mouse what I said, and that I’ll never forgive him otherwise. He’ll know what I mean.”

“All right,” Sharon said. “I’ll tell him what you said.”

“See you real soon, honey,” Roxy MacMillan said. “Tootel-oo.”

“Good-bye, Roxy. It was nice to hear your voice.” Sharon put the handset into the cradle. “Roxy MacMillan,” Sharon said to her husband. “I’m to tell you not to rent a motel or anything else silly.”

“That’s astonishing,” Sandy said. “I just find that hard to believe. Unless Mac walked right out of the meeting and went to the nearest pay phone and called her, I can’t believe it.”

“Is there something you can tell me?” Sharon asked, forcing a smile on her face.

“Well, I have to go to Fort Bragg,” Sandy said.

“Can I ask what He’s going to do at Fort Bragg?” Sharon asked.

This
He
was the President of the United States, Richard Milhous Nixon. Sharon always thought of Him and what He did in capital letters. Sharon, who had known four Presidents, had not lost much of her awe for them. She had been most comfortable with Dwight Eisenhower, who had treated her as a junior officer’s wife is treated by a commanding officer. When He had promoted Sandy to lieutenant colonel, He’d even had a little party for them, complete to artillery punch.

President Kennedy, may He rest in peace, may God look after the children, had been the friendliest, even though He never had gotten her name right and usually called her “Shirley.”

She had always been more than a little afraid of Lyndon Baines Johnson, even though whenever she had been with Him, He had put His arms around her, called her “Honey,” and otherwise acted as if He was her uncle. Just before He left office, He had sent Sandy’s name to the Senate for Colonel.

Sandy had been pretty sure that when President Nixon took office, he could finally go back to the Army, because President Nixon liked to have His own people around him—political people—but he was wrong about that. Secretary of State Kissinger probably had something to do with it. In Sharon’s hearing, he had once made a joke to the President about how he and Sandy were the Jewish Wing of the Holabird High Old Boy Network.

“Holabird High” was what people called the Army Counterintelligence Corps School at Camp Holabird in Baltimore. Secretary Kissinger had a staff sergeant in the CIC. Sandy had also started out in Intelligence in the CIC. And then, too, when He had been President Eisenhower’s Vice President, President Nixon had known Sandy, and He remembered that. President Nixon was pretty cold, Sharon thought, but she liked Mrs. Nixon very much.

“He’s not going,” Sandy said. “I’m going alone. I’ll be there a while, two, three weeks, maybe a month.”

“In uniform?” Sharon asked, gesturing toward the clothing bag. Colonel Sanford T. Felter, Infantry, Detailed, General Staff Corps, rarely wore his uniform. Most people thought he was retired.

“Uh-huh,” Sandy said. “Presuming I can still get in a uniform.”

That was one of those remarks Sharon knew was just noise to fill an empty space. Sandy weighed within five pounds of what he’d weighed when he first put on a second lieutenant’s uniform. His only noticeable physical change since then was that he was now quite bald.

She did not reply to the un-talk.

“I’ve been appointed liaison officer for a project down there,” Sandy said.

That was more un-talk. Unlike the remark about the uniform still fitting, this un-talk was meant to explain without explaining. “Liaison officer” and “project” could have a thousand different meanings. And again she didn’t reply.

“There’s no reason you couldn’t go down there,” Sandy said. “None at all. I think it would be fun for you.”

“How could I do that?”

He smiled at her. “You will find boxlike objects with handles in the attic,” he said. “You open them, you put extra clothes in them, and then you carry them onto an airplane.”

“And the children?”

“Oy vay, a Yiddishe mama yet!” He was smiling at her, a surprisingly warm, happy smile.

“What about them?” she asked, as sternly as she could.

“I can see no reason why a seventeen-year-old girl cannot be adequately chaperoned by two healthy old-enough-to-vote brothers,” he said. “It would be good for them, and it would be good for you. Get you out of the house.”

“It would cost a fortune,” she said.

“You’re going,” he said. “You make the arrangements, and you come down tomorrow.”

“I can’t come tomorrow,” she said. “Don’t be silly. I have things to do.”

“Suit yourself,” he said. “Just remember that while you’re here up to your ears in laundry and bread dough, I will be in Fort Bragg in my paratrooper suit. And you know how irresistible I am in my paratrooper suit.”

“You really want me to go, Sandy?” she asked.

“Yeah. It will be good for you. Old Home Week. Bob Bellmon’s the XVIII Airborne Corps commander. You can see Barbara.”

“What would I do all the time?” she asked. “If she’s the general’s wife, she’ll be too busy to entertain me.”

“And Craig will be there,” Sandy said, ignoring the objection.

Craig W. Lowell was Sandy Felter’s best and oldest friend. They had been in Greece together as young lieutenants. Felter had saved Lowell’s life in Greece, and Lowell had repaid the favor years later by snatching Sandy from the Bay of Pigs when the invasion went sour.

Sharon thought only she understood their friendship. Everyone else was baffled by it, for the two were opposites in just about everything. But they had literally put their lives up for the other—not once, but often. When Sandy’s airplane had been reported shot down at Dien Bien Phu, Sharon had had to comfort Craig Lowell while he wept like a child.

Sharon loved Craig Lowell because she knew he loved her husband. There were times when she didn’t
like
Craig, but that was because he was more like a brother than a friend. Brothers are often annoying, but you don’t stop loving them.

Lowell had gone to Vietnam with the First Cavalry Division, and surprising almost nobody, had returned with a colonel’s eagle. It was also no surprise that there was a cloud of whispered stories that he had called a general officer a “despicable glory-hunting sonofabitch” and dared him to court-martial him.

He hadn’t been court-martialed, but he had just about kissed off his chances to become a general. He was now deputy president of the Army Aviation Board at Fort Rucker.

Felter saw that Sharon’s eyes lit up on hearing that Lowell was going to be at Bragg. He had known they would. And he saw too that she wanted desperately to ask what was going on. But, she knew the rule: “No questions. If I can tell you, I will.” And she was going to abide by it.