Robert Butler - Perfume River

It has another effect on Robert, a little to his surprise: He wants to slap the almonds from the man’s hand —eat them in the goddamn elevator on your way to the operating room if you must —and to grab him by the front of his scrubs and shout, Out with it.

Tyler says, “The statistics are not good. Of those who break a hip after the age of eighty, one in two will not live more than six months. And Mr. Quinlan has two complicating factors beyond the hip. His heart issues, of course. And unfortunately, the fall has broken his right wrist. This will make rehab very difficult. We can put the bones back together. But having a man his age on his back for an extended time can lead to fluid buildup, which can lead to complications, most commonly pneumonia or congestive heart failure. We will be vigilant. But you need to know the special risks.”

He is done. He takes more almonds. Robert and Peggy understand that he’s waiting for questions. Does he want them to ask the obvious one? So will he die now?

The doctor will evade.

But he has just said it.

Even Peggy knows this. Her question is simply, “When will we be able to see him?”

“It depends on how things progress this morning,” he says. “But understand he’ll be on morphine at least through tonight. He won’t be fully aware. You can go home and rest. Call us mid-afternoon.”

As if simultaneously hearing the same cue, they all rise.

They shake hands, and Doctor Tyler is gone.

Robert and Peggy do not move, do not speak. They struggle to absorb the official version of a prognosis they both already knew well enough, from common knowledge. Now it’s personal, however.

Finally Peggy says, “I came in a cab. Can you take me home?”

“Of course.”

Her eyes are full of tears and she steps to Robert and now the two of them hug with no bend at the waist, with quiet hands upon each other’s back, with no artifice or mulled memories or sense of family failures. They hold each other quietly, mother and son, and though Robert is a man capable of them, he finds he has no tears to shed.

At their kitchen table, Jimmy sits facing the window, the afternoon shadows bluing the snow. Behind him Linda is making chamomile tea. He stares at the darkening bluff of white pine. He’s also standing in the center of his parents’ kitchen in New Orleans. Robert is nearby, in his uniform, ready to go fight in an unholy war to please the man Jimmy’s been furiously arguing with about the issues of the United States’ bloody interference in Vietnam. An argument that has kept Robert in the room, their mother having fled, after taking care to turn off all the pots on the stove. Robert did not flee but he hasn’t said a word. He’s just standing there. If he’s ready to go kill for their father’s disastrously distorted patriotism, he should at least be ready to argue the justifications. He may have found some semblance of physical courage to decide to go — likely to vanish when the reality of the carnage is upon him — but he is an intellectual coward.

But no. That’s present-day thinking. At the time, Jimmy has some crazy little hope. He and his brother talked about these very issues a couple of hours ago. Just the two of them. In the midst now of the old man’s fury, Jimmy has a fragmentary hope about Robert’s silence, that their own discussion — civilized compared with this present one — had opened his brother’s mind.

Jimmy is weary from the fight. He is all shouted out. His father seems weary too. They have both suddenly fallen silent, standing nose to nose, breath to breath, but Jimmy finds one more point to make. Voice pitched low, the sudden quiet after all the noise making it seem even more emphatic, he says: “The real heroes in all this are the men and women who’ve said No to their country. Instead of becoming part of an illegal and murderous war, they’ve gone to jail or gone into exile. Those are the real heroes.”

The blow comes quick. Jimmy doesn’t even feel it the first time, not the slap itself, only a force, a pressure flipping his head to the side.

Though he knows what’s happened.

He brings his face back just as quick.

The eyes before him, his father’s eyes, are seething.

The next blow he feels, a flare of pain shooting up through his temples and down to the roots of his teeth, and his face turns and his brother appears and his brother’s eyes are upon him and upon this pain and upon their father and Jimmy’s eyes lock on Robert’s, and there is only quiet around them and there is only this moment of their eyes, holding, and Jimmy realizes that in spite of the clash of their philosophies and their politics, in spite of a childhood strewn with older-brother petty cruelties — he was himself guilty, after all, of younger-brother cruelty — in spite of one of them being not just the older but the favored son and one of them being the lesser son, the redundant son, in spite of all that, Jimmy finds he now expects something of his brother, expects the bond of shared blood and shared tribulation of family and zeitgeist to pull taut and to hold.

But these eyes. His brother’s eyes witnessing this defining moment with their shared father. These eyes are empty. They are dead. Behind them is nothing.

The clink now of cup and saucer before Jimmy. The smell of herb and steam and Linda. He is happy for the interruption. But he stares at the cup, decorated with roses, and he has let go of his brother’s eyes and he is facing his father once more and feeling empty himself now, wondering if there will be another blow from this man, but wondering this from a great distance, and his father’s mouth is moving, shaping words Jimmy does not hear.

Except for the final few: Then you are no son of mine.

Clarity.

The end.

“You okay?” Linda’s voice.

“I’m okay,” Jimmy says to Linda.

She sits at the table with her own cup of tea. Usually she sits opposite him. They have always looked unflinchingly into each other’s eyes to speak of important things. Now she sits to his right. Nearer to me , Jimmy thinks.

He appreciates this. He puts his hand on hers. She puts her free hand on top of his. But only for the briefest of moments. She rushes the gesture. She pats him there and takes both hands away, arranges her cup of tea into some imperceptibly precise position before her. She lifts the cup and sips.

Jimmy does not notice any of that. He’s standing at a pay phone outside a diner on Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo, New York. He and Linda have been handed off by the New Orleans Draft Resisters to the Buffalo Resistance and they are about to enter Canada forever. It is July of 1968. Jimmy graduated from Loyola in June. It has been five months since the North’s Tet Offensive showed Walter Cronkite and therefore American television and therefore, at last, any right-thinking Americans what was really happening in Vietnam. Jimmy’s student deferment is no longer renewable. His induction is imminent. He and Linda are ready to leave. They will go into Canada as visitors and stay as landed immigrants and eventually become Canadians and this is their last hour in the United States.

His parents will find out eventually, he supposes. He doesn’t give a damn how his father hears. But he gives a partial damn about his mother, enabler of William Quinlan though she be.

So Jimmy is dropping quarters into a phone and calling the house on Third Street.

His mother answers. He says what he must, and things clearly are hurtling toward a final good-bye. Before he realizes his mother has fallen silent not from lovingly conflicted emotion but for this other purpose, she has put his father on the phone and the man says, “Your mother is crying.”

“I’m sorry for that,” Jimmy says.