Raskob’s squat figure was somewhat reminiscent of La Guardia and Raskob played on the similarity. He wore a wide-brimmed fedora hat and when he made speeches he constantly banged the fedora against the podium. Whenever he spoke before a foreign-speaking group he had at least a few lines which he could render in the language of the group. In the wealthy part of his constituency his speeches were calm, deliberate, short, and concerned with the future. In the working-class district he was more flamboyant and talked of pay checks and pork chops. In hard fact his voting record was almost straight Democratic but few in his district knew that. Nor did they care. Raskob was a personality.
“Where are you from, son?” Raskob asked Colonel Cascio. His eyes were still peering, not yet adjusted to the thin light. His words were an automatic political response to fill vacant time.
“New York City, sir,” Colonel Cascio said.
Raskob’s head swung around and he stared at Colonel Cascio. His interest now was real.
“What part of the city?” Raskob asked.
Colonel Casdo hesitated a moment. “Central Park West,” he said, “in the Seventies,”
“Probably in the Twentieth District,” Raskob said speculatively. “You’re getting some Puerto Ricans in there now. It’s one of those swing districts. Might go either Democrat or Republican. In a few years it will be solidly Democratic.”
“Actually, Congressman Raskob, my family moved over to the East Side some years ago,” Colonel Cascio said. He turned his head sideways and glanced quickly at General Bogan. Then he added as an afterthought, “As a military man I really don’t follow politics very closely.”
General Bogan felt a slight sense of unrest, a barely recognizable sense of protectiveness. Then he recalled the carefully buried memory. It was during one of the frequent visits that General Bogan and Colonel Casdo made to New York City. One night General Bogan had been called and told that SAC was staging one of its endless surprise drills. He must be back in Omaha by morning. An Air Force car was already outside of his hotel and General Bogan ordered it to the address where Colonel Cascio was “visiting his family.”
The address was an old apartment house, aged with wind and soot, but respectable. There was, however, no cascio on the long line of door bells. Impatiently General Bogan pushed the MANAGER button and a neat, hard-faced and stocky woman appeared at the door.
“I’m looking for the Cascio apartment,” General Bogan said. “It’s rather urgent.”
“He in trouble again?” the woman asked. “You from the police?”
She squinted, made her watery blue eyes come to a focus, but could not distinguish the uniform.
“Casdo’s got no apartment here,” she said. “He lives in the janitor’s quarters down the steps to the left. If it’s a police thing you can tell him for me it’s the last time. He can just dear out.” She leaned forward, sharing a confidence in a faintly whining voice. “Officer, I’d of fired the sonofabitch a long time ago, but janitors are hard to keep.”
General Bogan went down the steps two at a time and rapped on the door at the bottom. There was a shuffle inside and he heard a Southern-accented voice say, “You got no right, son, to barge in and start in on us like this. Damn it, I won’t stand for it.”
The door swung open and the light from four naked bulbs in an old brass chandelier caught everything in the room in a pitiless and hard illumination.
The man at the door was unquestionably Cascio’s father, they had the same features. But the man was drunk, his face slack, his eyes bloodshot, his pants baggy. He had the pinched, furtive, crabbed look of the long-time drunkard. He looked like an older, ruined version of his son.
Colonel Cascio was sitting behind a table covered with a linoleum cloth. He sat straight in the chair, an untouched plate of barbecued spare ribs and black beans in front of him. Leaning against a stove was Colonel Cascio’s mother. She had a waspish look and was very thin and wore an old cotton dress and black felt slippers which were too large for her. General Bogan realized that she also was a drunkard… and not only because she held a pint of muscatel in her hand. It had to do with the posture, the beaten face, the suspicious eyes.
“Sir, I am General Bogan and I am calling for Colonel Cascio,” General Bogan said. Standing in darkness he realized that his aide had not yet recognized him. At his words Colonel Cascio came half out of his chair, a look of pure agony on his face.
“Let the gennelmun in, Walt,” Colonel Cascio’s mother said. Her face spread into a mask of welcome, so broad it was grotesque. She stepped toward the door, her feet spread, balancing carefully. An amber thread of muscatel flowed from the bottle onto the floor.
The father, cued on some deep level, bowed to General Bogan. He muttered some extravagant words of welcome. “Son always speaks well of you, sir… honored have ya’ eat with us… or anything… just anything.”
There was a long moment of silence, a moment in which General Bogan understood something which he had never bothered to analyze before. Colonel Cascio’s parents had Tennessee accents; they were hill people who never adjusted to the city life. And they were the reason that Colonel Casdo never spoke with a Southern accent, never drank, and was unmarried. His military career was everything.
Colonel Casdo had broken the squalid tableau. He stood straight, walked to the doorway and saluted General Bogan.
“Yes, sir,” he said, and he was under perfect control. “I gather we’re needed for a drill.”
“That’s it, Colonel Sorry to break up your time at home.”
Colonel Cascio smiled thinly at him. He turned and, deliberately and heavily, as if he were swinging shut a bank vault, dosed the door. Behind the thin panels his father’s voice yelped, “Ungrateful damned snot-nosed kid. So damned uppity.”
They got quietly in the car and neither of them had ever spoken of the episode.
General Bogan himself came from a Tennessee family with a strong military tradition. They had always lived in the high hills of Tennessee and the land had never been able to support all of the sons. The milltary had been the only acceptable nonfarsning occupation for Bogan’s family. Ever since colonial days at least one Bogan had been in the armed forces of the United States. Some had been enlisted men, some officers. During the Civil War, Bogans had fought on both sides. Bogan’s grandfather had been a naval captain and an aide to Admiral Mahan. His father had been a sergeant in the infantry and had been decorated twice in World War I with the Silver Star. General Grant Lee Bogan’s first and middle names came to him, not because his father had a sense of humor, but because he thought that General Grant and General Lee were the greatest generals in American history. The fact that they had fought on opposite sides did not appear to him to be ironic. Grant Lee Bogan was the first of the Bogans to be a general officer.