“Not really. I end up eating alone too often at the end of the day. Many friends meet me for lunch. But I’m not quite as welcome for dinner with the wives.” He gave a terse smile that was a little too pained to be fully humorous. “Besides, I like lawyers, Mr. Ten Boom.”
“You don’t hear that said very often, General.”
“My grandfather was the chief judge of the Military Court of Appeals. He was a very honorable man. Perhaps it’s his influence, but I’m engaged by the way lawyers think, in part because it is so different from the way a soldier views problems. You reason your way to core principles. We concern ourselves most with effects.
“I guarantee,” he added, “that our interview ended when we walked out of the Bosnian Embassy, just as the law requires. And I assure you I don’t dine grandly enough to constitute a bribe.”
I laughed. “No, General, the Roma advocate already paid for my dinner last month.”
“Would that be Ms. Czarni? Is that her name? Then clearly you owe me the same opportunity. Although from what I’m told, I won’t be quite as compelling.”
“She’s very attractive, if that’s what you mean, General. And very, very smart. And quite determined.” I experienced a familiar trill of feeling in speaking of Esma. “She’s a five-tool player, if you know that term.”
He laughed out loud for the first time.
“I do indeed. I love baseball. So we won’t be hard-pressed for conversation. We can talk about the prospects for this season. Any dietary restrictions?”
“I only eat what’s dead. I draw the line at slaughter. Otherwise, I’m a lifelong member of the Clean Plate Club.”
He smiled again and said, “Seven?” He gave me the address before walking off.
7.
Dining
The general’s place was at the vast white Watergate complex, and he greeted me at the door to his sixth-floor apartment. Merriwell had removed his jacket but was still in his white shirt and his tie, with a half-consumed whiskey in his left hand.
While Merriwell was hanging my suit jacket, I heard a clatter from the kitchen. My first thought was that he was living with someone, but then I remembered his remark about eating alone. A servant appeared in an instant, a small Asian man in a white coat, to offer a drink. The general introduced him as Paul and explained that the general’s older brother, a Marine officer, had gotten Paul out of Saigon as a young man.
“He has four children now,” said Merriwell. “The youngest just graduated from Easton Law. That’s where you met Roger, isn’t it?” The general still had a fond hand on Paul’s shoulder. “We have a great country, Mr. Ten Boom,” he said.
I held a native suspicion of American jingoism, but a month and a half away from the US had enhanced my appreciation for our country, and I experienced an emotional surge with the general’s remark. In this nation, we did a lot of very big things far better than anyone else.
Paul returned with my drink, and a second for the general, then Merriwell showed me around the apartment. The decoration was sparse. The attractions were out the long windows. He had a fine view of the Potomac and the monuments. But the real treasury turned out to be his study. The room had a precise order I found intimidating, since I couldn’t keep a space as small as my briefcase that well organized. Merriwell had a collection of Army relics—the insignia of the units he’d served with and the ranks he’d passed through—and a wall of signed photos that made what I’d once been proud of in my office silly by comparison. Layton Merriwell had met virtually everyone in power in Washington in his time. He was pictured beside each president going back to Reagan, often with the incumbent secretary of defense and the leaders of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. Colin Powell was in a number of pictures. All 8-by-10s, the photographs were arranged evenly on one wall from ceiling to floor, except for a blank spot in the lower right corner.
“And who goes there?” I pointed. He opened his top drawer and removed an autographed picture of himself shaking with Alex Rodriguez, the Yankees star who was coming off a year’s suspension for using various performance-enhancing chemicals.
“I’ve just reacquired this, Bill. Is ‘Bill’ all right now that we’re off duty?”
“I answer more quickly to ‘Boom.’”
“‘Merry,’” he said, tapping his shirt. I suspected his nickname had been awarded in the same spirit of adolescent irony as mine. Then again, he might have been far more cheerful years ago.
He said, “It only took eighteen months of negotiations between the lawyers to get a few things from my study at home. You’ve been down this road, Roger tells me.”
I instantly understood the true motive for my dinner invitation. Divorce after a long marriage is not an isolated phenomenon, but you join a minority for whom there are limited sympathizers.
“At any rate, Paul’s just finished rearranging all the photographs so we can hang up Mr. Rodriguez tomorrow.”
I laughed because I’d misunderstood. “I thought you’d just taken it down.”
“Not at all. People who live in glass houses,” said the general. “I can’t imagine how many photos of me came off of walls in this city, Boom.”
He forced up a game little smile and replaced the picture in the open drawer, but when he turned back his look was unfocused and he remained quiet for a second, staring at the blank spot on the wall. Unexpectedly, I felt full flush the magnitude of the general’s shame, far more poignantly than I had up until now. Layton Merriwell had been figuratively marched naked down Pennsylvania Avenue in front of a jeering throng. The major papers had been too decorous to publish most of his plaintive e-mails to his former mistress, but the lurid Internet sites that reveled in that sort of thing trotted out every word—angry, tormented, beseeching, and all too often, pornographic. He’d endured having all the teeming internal stuff most of us never share displayed to the entire world, knowing it would always come to mind with his name.
I was saved from attempting a comforting remark, because Paul announced dinner. A bowl of crab soup was curling steam on the old mahogany table.
The general proved to be a fine raconteur. As he’d promised, we talked about baseball. Merry had plenty of stories, insider stuff garnered from his relationships with a number of team owners and general managers. The anecdotes were funny, or more often inspirational, about the athletes who responded to their great success with unusual humility or generosity. Merriwell also possessed a remarkable memory for statistics. He had high hopes for the Yankees this year. Coming from Kindle County, a lifelong Trappers fan, I had no hope at all.
When Paul removed the dinner plates, the general waved me back down the hall to his study, where he asked me to hold his scotch—the fourth, by my count—while he used a mahogany library stool to reach the top of a closed cabinet. He climbed down balancing two huge leather display cases with silver latches. He opened them both on his desk to reveal a remarkable collection of autographed baseballs. In every velvet-lined square compartment, the balls were turned precisely to reveal the signatures across their equators by the greats of the game going back to Napoleon Lajoie, who became a star near the end of the nineteenth century. He had signed balls from Honus Wagner, whose career statistics I’d known since I was a boy, as well as record-breaking hitters like Ty Cobb and Rogers Hornsby. Merriwell’s second case was devoted solely to Yankee stars of the last century—Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle, Dickey, Reggie Jackson, Dave Winfield, Jeter, and A-Rod.
I wowed for several seconds, while the general extracted a pair of white livery gloves from a drawer. He put on one and used it to remove the Gehrig ball. Merry offered me the other, and then the baseball. Struck with ALS, Lou Gehrig had declared himself “the luckiest man in the world” on the day he retired. He, clearly, was the kind of guy a soldier would admire.
“I have been all over the world in temporary quarters,” Merriwell said, “where I had nothing besides my uniforms. So I was surprised how much I missed these things. Of course, I still don’t have what I wanted most.”