Robert Butler - Perfume River

Robert releases his cup of coffee, rises.

He crosses the kitchen, feeling he’s moving too slowly. He’s adjusting to this thing. His father turned eighty-nine in November. He’s had trouble with his heart. A broken hip is bad.

His mother has gone silent.

He reaches the kitchen door, and just before the machine cuts her off, his mother says, “Okay. Call me as soon as you get this. I need you, Robert.”

His parents are less than an hour away, forty miles north, in assisted living in Thomasville, Georgia.

He enters the hallway, passing Darla’s study, glancing through the open door to the empty desk across the room, the oak tree beyond, and he stops at the telephone table opposite the vestibule.

He picks up the phone and dials his mother’s cell.

“Thank God,” she says. “Where were you?”

“How is he?”

“Not good, honey. Not good. The doctor is very concerned.”

“We’ll talk when I get there,” Robert says. “You’re at Archbold?”

His mother does not reply. Then her beat of silence turns into a choked-back “Yes” and she begins to cry.

“It’s all right, Mom. He’s a tough guy. I’ll be there.”

“Hurry,” she says.

And Robert does. He pours his coffee into a thermos and dresses and writes a note to Darla. He tapes it to the front door: My father has broken his hip. I’m in Thomasville. Don’t worry. Work well.

He turns onto Apalachee Parkway.

His mind roils with anticipated scenes at the hospital and he cuts each one off, tries to think of things he can manage. Like whether and how to make the connection, in his paper, between John Kenneth Turner’s partisanship in the Mexican civil war and factions of the Vietnam antiwar movement siding with the North and lionizing Ho Chi Minh. Easy things like that. Things not having to do with family.

In this struggle of mind, Robert seeks distraction, so he turns his eyes to the Blood of the Lamb Full Gospel Church, which he is approaching. Here he routinely finds ironic amusement on a marquee that presumably intends to persuade the fallen to enter therein and learn the absolute truths of the universe, but doing so with messages that veer in tone between fortune cookies and one-liners from a born-again Milton Berle. But this morning his eyes slide past the new message to a Leon County EMS ambulance parked in front of the church, and then to a pair of white-coated men lifting a dark-clothed blur of a third man from a wheelchair into the back of the vehicle, and then past them to a fourth man, tall and nattily topcoated and standing stiffly upright, watching nearby and seeming, given the context, to be the pastor himself, the benighted editor in chief of that marquee.

And the church has passed and Robert thinks of his father, how he would share his son’s amused disdain for the man in the topcoat, how his disdain, unamused, extended as well to Mama’s priests. Robert wondered if that would be so even now, as his father finds himself on the cusp of some absolute truth of the universe, a truth you could learn for certain only by dying.

In a room over a clothing and leather goods shop on Baldwin Street in Toronto, Canada, Robert’s brother Jimmy is waking. He lies on his side, at the edge of his bed. The panes of the window before him are groved in fern frost. He owns the building, has owned it for thirty years. The shop is his. These winters are his, finally, more or less. The room is cold but he’s been sleeping with the covers sloughed down to his chest.

He pulls them up now to cover his arms, his mind filling: windowpanes overgrown with ice; an upstairs room in a two-story brick row house; he and Linda clinging close in a sleeping bag on a futon, the ice lit by the streetlight on McCaul. This was their first winter in Canada, spent only a few blocks from where he now lies thinking. The house was rented by an earlier wave of American resisters and deserters and the women who fled with them. They’d turned it into a commune and a crash pad for other exiles newly arrived. He and Linda had crashed there the previous summer but were permanent by that winter night, the night they celebrated the occasion of their meeting, eighteen months earlier. They had done so with a sweet lovemaking — slow and quiet, as there were two other couples asleep in this room — and with a trembling from the cold that never quite stopped, even after they’d spent themselves and lay clinging.

Jimmy blinks at the daylight brightness of this ice before him now.

He closes his eyes.

He thinks: That was the closest we have ever been. In that moment.

This is perhaps true.

His mind declines to fill with details of subsequent events, from only a few weeks later: Linda’s hand on the commune founder’s arm, sounds behind a closed door, the smell of him on her skin. Nor with the subsequent principled conversation he and Linda calmly had, after a few hours of shouting, about the liberated soul, male and female, alike and equal, about a new age and a new culture and the freedom of love. Which was like their principled conversation in San Francisco during the Summer of Love, about war. And like their principled decision, as his student deferment expired the following spring, for them to begin anew together in this place. This cold place.

All of that so long ago.

They’ve stuck to their principles.

He is weary now. In the legs, in the hips, in the groin, in the chest. In the eyes.

He opens his eyes once more to the ice on the window.

And he sees only the floaters. The lifelong accumulation of all the little crap between him and the world. Sometimes he can see through them as if they aren’t there. Sometimes they are all he can see.

He is glad he will be with Linda tomorrow in their home on Twelve Mile Bay. Next month they will have been married twenty-four years, at last for more than the number of years they were together unwed.

He hunches his shoulders and draws the covers closer.

He owns the building but the room is cold.

He’ll have Heather call someone to look at the furnace. And he sees her now, sees not floaters, not ice, not the scenes of principled compromise between him and his wife, but sees Heather sitting before the iMac in the back room downstairs, just yesterday morning. He stepped into the doorway from the front of the shop and she realized he was there and he could see a little smile come to her face. A smile because he was there, because it was him. And she did not care if he could see. She smiled to her own purpose, her own intentions, her own unvoiced willingness, before she let him know she knew he was there.

Then she touched command-S and swiveled in her chair, and her skin was as white as a new snowdrift, though the smile she gave him directly was meltingly warm, and her usually heavy-lidded dark eyes widened with the smile. She was somewhere in her thirties, a single mother of an early-teenage girl, but his head filled with the talk of Heather Blake: how she thought it was very cool, very very cool he’d been a hippie; how her benighted parents had despised the hippies but she longed for that life, because as free as things seemed to be in her generation — and God help us how free it was for teenagers today — it was free only in blow jobs and loose talk; how the spirit wasn’t free, how it took an old spirit to be free, a mature spirit, like his. All of which talk had accreted over the couple of months she’d worked for him. Never a pointed discussion. But bit by bit. Yesterday morning, confronting Heather’s smile and the history of this talk, he sagged heavily against the doorjamb. But he simply asked, How’s the website going? She laughed. As if she read his mind. As if she were saying, How silly you are. But she said, It’ll be back up within the hour.