Philipp Meyer - The Son

JONAS MISSED THE burial but came home from Germany anyway, where the war, for all practical purposes, was over. She practically smothered him when she picked him up; she was not sure what to expect — a thousand-yard stare, deep scars, a limp — but he looked fit and healthy and had a confident stride.

The first thing he said, when he walked into the house, their steps loud in the cavernous great room, with its stone walls and thirty-foot ceilings, was, “We need to get you the hell out of here. You won’t have a normal life. The war will be over in a few weeks and I could get a job for you in Berlin. It would probably be as a typist or something but we could live together.”

She was not sure how to respond — it was appealing but also entirely wrong — she was not going to be a typist. It was her brother who ought to be coming home, not her going to some foreign country.

“Or hell,” he was saying. “We’ve got money. You don’t have to work at all, just come live.”

“How is it there?”

He shrugged.

“I guess you’ve seen terrible things?”

“No worse than others.”

She wanted to ask if he had shot anyone, or seen anyone shot, but he seemed to sense the question was coming and stood abruptly, walking to the other end of the room, looking at the old drawings, the marble statues and figurines, shaking his head, picking things up and putting them down.

“Would you like something to eat?” she called.

“We probably better go to the grave. I can’t stay long.”

This didn’t make any sense — he had traveled a week to get there — and she decided to ignore it, not being sure he was in his right mind.

“Do you want to drive or ride?”

“Let’s ride. It’s four years since I’ve been on a horse.”

OVER SUPPER, WHICH he was now calling dinner, he had asked, in a way that struck her as too direct: “Are there any men around here you like?”

No. In fact the year before there had been another vaquero, less handsome than the others, with a squishy sort of nose; they had kissed behind one of the brush corrals and later lain together by the springs at the old Garcia place. He had been more aggressive than she wanted — the few men left seemed to get their way far too quickly — but that night, when she was reflecting on it alone, she was sorry she’d stopped his hands. These chances only seemed to come at great intervals, and so a few days later, when they agreed to meet again, she had carried an ancient condom — found in Clint’s room, of course — tucked into a pocket in her dress. She had waited an hour, then two, lying by herself under the trees, in the soft grass overlooking the old church.

Her vaquero had not shown up. Again it was no mystery what had happened: the young man’s friends, afraid of her father, afraid for their own jobs, had warned him off. She had cried for days — even for this man, whom (snobbishly, she knew now) she had considered below her, she was not good enough. She had always thought herself a prize: blond, petite, not as shapely as some but certainly with a woman’s shape; her button nose had straightened out, her eyes had gotten bigger, and in a certain light she wondered if she might be beautiful. But most of the time she was at least pretty, far above average, and while it was true that there was a Mexican girl in Carrizo who was prettier, that girl was very poor.

And yet… she was nearly twenty, she was supposed to be out living, she was supposed to have suitors and she did not, with the exception of a few men from town who may have thought they were courting her, but, so far as she was concerned, weren’t. She did not think of herself as rich, but she knew that other people did; she did not trust any of the whites from town; they saw her in the wrong way. The vaqueros she knew and trusted well enough — it was against their interest to damage her reputation — though apparently they did not trust her, or they did not respect her, or perhaps they sensed her desperation.

As for Jonas, she barely recognized him. His face had filled out, his frame as well; there was no longer anything of the boy. He spoke too fast, like someone raised in the North, and he cursed constantly, like someone raised in the North; he seemed entirely too sure of himself. Over dinner he got drunk on whiskey and they talked and built an enormous fire, of the sort their father would have found wasteful, but when they finally decided to go to sleep, Jonas refused to go up to his old room — making a show, she thought — and instead he took a blanket to a couch near the fire. She went to her bedroom and as she sat there in her nightgown, she knew she would be responsible for losing everything. Jonas had absolved himself — he cared nothing for the house or their legacy. Though of course he had been cut out of much of it. It must have stung him, their father’s final insult, though he had still left Jonas half his minerals, which, in the end, mattered more to her brother than the land ever could have.

The next morning they took their breakfast in the great room, where they could listen to the radio.

“Will you stay here until the fighting is done?”

He shook his head. “I remember Daddy turning that off every time FDR came on.” Pointing to the radio.

She wondered if she would have to defend her father for the entire visit. Though as it turned out, it was for the rest of their lives. “He didn’t do that once the war started,” she said. “On D-day he let everyone off and we all sat here and listened, and he drew a big map, and he would say that is Paul’s division, the Eighty-Second Airborne, who have landed there, and that is Jonas’s division. He made all these notes for everyone to see. He was proud of you.”

“Well, he was wrong because I didn’t land until the second day. And Paul didn’t land on a beach at all, he dropped in by parachute in the middle of all the Germans.”

“I don’t remember all the details,” she admitted.

“Do you remember him saying that FDR’s election was the end of American democracy? Or that the Dust Bowl was a communist invention?” He shook his head. “I don’t know how we came from him.”

“He wasn’t so bad.” She had not remembered her brother as so cold, but then maybe she had never really known him. She closed her eyes.

“I remember him saying that we lived on the Frontier,” Jonas continued, “Frontier with a capital F . I told him the frontier had closed before he was even born, and then he would lecture me about the tradition we were carrying on. I would tell him there was no tradition, there could be no tradition for a thing that had lasted only twenty years. Anyway… I don’t know what this place will become, but right now I can’t see the point. It’s not settled enough to have any culture, but it’s not wild enough to be interesting. It’s just a province.”

She didn’t answer.

“You should sell it. Keep the minerals but make a clean break. We could get you into Barnard easy as that.”

“I’m not moving to the North,” she said quietly.

“You were a kid then.”

“I’m happier here.”

“Jeannie.” He put his hand to his forehead as if what she had said was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. “Everything we were taught was either a lie or a bad joke. It was always Yankees this or that, the worst sort of people, all full of shit, and then one day it occurred to me that if Daddy hated them so much, that was probably where I belonged. Meanwhile he was worse than anyone I met at Princeton, born into money but always complaining about how poor and put-upon he was. And the way he was with the Mexicans?”

She didn’t say anything.

His eyes were closed. “I was so fucking stupid when I got there.”