“What the hell’re you doin here?” he demanded with hatred in every syllable.
“Looks like the Argonne the day after,” Keegan said softly.
“You was there, at the Argonne?”
Keegan nodded.
“No worse than this,” the man croaked bitterly.
He started to babble, his sentences running together almost incoherently. “We fit with honor there, this is our shame, they’s dishonored the flag and the army, that fat pig in the White House and his pimp, MacArthur. It’s a parade! m’boy Tommy says this afternoon and we all goes up there to Pennsylvania Avenue and we’re standin’ there watchin’ the army paradin’ down the street, some of us even cheerin them. . . then. . . then they come down on us, they come down on us, cavalry, a whole battalion of machine gunners. I seen the standard of the 34th Infantry, too, my very outfit and them with their bayonets pulled, oh goddamn, can you believe it, we all thought it was some kind of parade, the army was comin’ out to support us, some of us cheerin’ like that. Jesus, man, we don’t have guns, we don’t have bayonets or horses, for God’s sake they had tanks.
He wandered off through the haze, still babbling, breaking the monotone of his outraged dialogue occasionally to call after his wife and child.
The blue haze of tear gas now stung Keegan’s eyes and the skin on his arms. Framed against the sky’s orange glow, he saw Patton, a block away, astride his white horse, leading it through the destruction, stopping occasionally to praise his marauders with a “Well done” or “Good show.” Keegan stumbled back through the battlefield to the car where Jocko Nayles was leaning against the front fender, tears gushing from his good eye.
“I don’t believe this,” he said. “We fought side by side with some of these boys, Frank.”
“I know, I know,” Keegan had answered, trying to regain some semblance of composure. “Let’s get out of here, Jocko.”
They had gone back to the hotel, slept fitfully and left before dawn for the two-day drive back to Boston. By the first light of dawn, the main highway leading from Washington had looked like the aftermath of Gettysburg or Atlanta. Women, children, tattered men, confused and lost, straggling like robots along the two-lane blacktop highway, a vagabond population with no place to live, nothing to eat and no hope in their tortured eyes on an aimless pilgrimage to nowhere, for they had no homes to return to. Under every bridge and beside every railroad crossing were ragged Hoovervilles, tent cities filled with decent men who rode the rails from one desperate camp to the next in search of hope; men who had lost faith in their institutions, the banks, the manufacturers, the insurance companies, their leaders.
They stopped for gas and Keegan had bought a morning paper, hoping to get the same sense of the tragic sweep of the night’s events that once he had gotten from Bert Rudman’s story of Belleau Wood, yearning to know what misguided insanity had sent an army against these men who had once faced death for their flag. But the stories were fragmented, inconclusive, inaccurate. On the front page, Hoover praised MacArthur for “delivering us from the siege of Washington” and later in the story:
“Beware the crowd—it destroys, it consumes, it hates—but it never builds.”
Keegan crushed the paper and threw it on the floor.
“When we got to New York we drove up to Roosevelt’s campaign headquarters and I wrote him a check for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It wasn’t just that, it was a lot of things, that just brought it all to a head. Anyway, a week later I left and I’ve been here ever since.” He- stopped for a moment, watching a group of swans paddling down the estuary toward them.
“And now you miss it and you want to go home,” she said. “You have not given up on America. Some of us have not given up on Germany either.”
He nodded slowly. “You made your point,” he said. “But Jen, you have to go on living. People still fall in love and get married, have kids. Hitler can’t stop that. Politics and love don’t have anything to do with each other. That’s oil and water. Sure, things are bad, that’s even more reason to get out. Marry me, darling. Come to America. Give it a chance. When things settle down here, we’ll come back.”
“I love you desperately,” she stammered, “but I. . . I..
She stopped, trying to sort out all the threads of the dilemma, and sensing her dismay he reached up and laid his hand on her cheek.
“Hey,” he said tenderly, “forget it for now. Look at the swans.”
The swans moved slowly past, drifting aimlessly with the current.
“Did you know the only time swans titter a sound is when they’re making love and when they die?”
“Oh, you made that up,” she said.
“Absolutely true,” he said, placing his hand over his heart. “That’s why they call a dying man’s last words his swan song.”
She laid her hand on his chest and fear flickered momentarily across her face. He leaned over and kissed her. Her lips, soft and full, parted slowly and her tongue caressed his lower lip.
“Never fear,” he whispered. “There’ll be no swan songs for us.
