Robert Butler - Perfume River

Ah, Freud. The young men gazing upon the monumental shaft of their fathers. Encouraged to do so by their mothers and their grandmothers. The ladies of the club. Darla will certainly elicit laughs at the Semiotic Society of America annual meeting. What will the laughter of those mostly male semioticians signify? The following year she might do a paper on that. But her very purpose, in the paper and on this day, is to find and speak the significance of this monument that brooks no laughter.

Darla closes her eyes and listens. Listens to the overwrought voice of these women, their prose bepurpled with passion for their men. In the parlor that Darla imagines, where the Literary Club of Monticello crafts this prose, most of the women are Darla’s age. Their men are dead. Their husbands. Dead from the war. But dead even if they survived. Even if they still sleep beside these women each night, three decades later. For the men have grown small. The cause in them has been lost to self-pity and pettiness, to meanness and an oppression of their women. Or even simply lost to a quotidian life after the war was over, a life of bricklayer or cabinetmaker, mule driver or lumberjack, haberdasher or druggist or barber. Or teacher.

And Darla asks: How did these women, fair and faithful, preserve their passion?

Not just preserve. Amplify.

And she knows. Their passion was for the dead. And being dead, those men could never disappoint.

On this night, at his insistence, Robert and Darla go to their studies and work, he being all right, his father being eighty-nine after all, his mother bearing up just fine. Darla appreciates the chance to massage her notes from the day. They act as if this were any other evening. But when they finally enter their bed, neither of them picks up a Kindle from a nightstand, and she forgoes her iPod as well. And as soon as they are arranged in their places — side by side with a forearm-length space between them in the king bed — as if on cue, they both stretch up and turn off their lamps and lie back.

The room is still but for a faint buzz from an LED electric clock, a relic of their first year in this house, preserved by Darla on her side of the bed.

After a time, he says, “The children.”

“I called them,” she says.

“You did?”

“I did.”

“Good,” he says. “It only just occurred to me.”

“I called them,” she says.

“When?”

“This morning. While you were at the hospital.”

A beat of silence.

She asks, “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m okay,” he says.

“If you’re not, I hope you’d say so.”

“I would.”

A few beats more.

Then Robert asks, “How did things go in Monticello?”

“Fine.”

“Did you think like them?”

“The ladies?”

“Yes,” he says. “The Daughters.”

“The daughters?”

“Of the Confederacy. Did you get inside their heads? Like you wanted?”

“Yes,” she says.

“What was it like?”

One more beat.

“Passionate,” she says.

And now their last waking silence of the day begins.

Darla does not linger with the Confederate women. Her fading consciousness somehow veers to her grandson, Jacob, who answered the phone this morning when she sought Kevin, mistakenly dialing her son’s home number rather than work.

She recognizes the boy’s voice, though it sounds different to her. It’s been nearly a year since she spoke with him. He was skiing somewhere at Christmas. He’s twenty. Not a boy. His voice surely hasn’t changed from nineteen. But there’s something in him that’s new. Maturity maybe.

“Is that you, Jake?” she says.

“Grandma?”

“Yes.”

“How are you? I’ve been meaning to call Granddad.” She hears him pause a beat, catching himself. “Call you both.” She smiles. Jake’s a good young man, not wanting to hurt her feelings.

“I wish I could put him on the phone,” she says. “But he’s at the hospital up in Thomasville. It’s Grandpa Bill. He’s fallen and broken a hip.”

“Oh fuck.” Jake catches himself in the curse but, in doing so, utters an almost inaudible Oh shit. Almost.

Darla smiles. He’s still a boy.

“Sorry, Grandma,” he says.

“It’s okay.”

“I’m just shocked, you know?” he says. “Jeez. I’ve been wanting to talk with him too.”

“Honey, you’ll have a chance. I’m sure he’ll be all right.”

“Both of them,” Jake says. “You know?”

For a moment she doesn’t know. Then: Bill and Robert both. Jake’s been thinking of them, wanting to talk with them. While there’s time.

“They’re both fine,” she says.

Fine. One has a broken hip at nearly ninety. The other has turned seventy. But fine. They’re fine. Her mind is slowing now. Lugubrious , she’d say about her mind. The word lugubrious presents itself to her as a little surprise from someone. She thinks: I’m falling asleep.

She turns onto her side, and the movement stirs one last moment of clarity in her. The conversation with Jake was not a veer from Monticello. Robert’s mortality is a matter of someone’s active concern. Robert could vanish in a moment, this man who she met, who became a part of her life, only because he went to war. She is sitting at a desk, rather like her desk downstairs, but it sits in the middle of a parlor in Monticello, with her ladies of the Literary Club gathered around. She holds a quill pen over a blank sheet of paper. Motionless. She can think of no words to write, though she clearly understands she must compose a tribute to her dead husband, the Southron Robert Quinlan, veteran of a lost war, who is dead.

For Robert, as well, this silence is a waking silence. The past courses through him as spontaneously as if it were the dream imagery of incipient sleep.

Lien stands in a bower of blooming flame trees on the bank of the Perfume River, waiting for him. It’s June, a rare cloudless day, fiercely hot. On Le Loi Street along the river, Operation Recovery has expunged the rubble of razed buildings and the bodies of the dead. The trees are splashed with flowers the color of arterial blood.

She vanished with the Tet Offensive. Word of mass graves of civilians was spreading through the city and it was understood what sort of people were slaughtered by the North in Hue: government officials, freethinking university teachers and students, those who could identify the embedded Viet Cong, those who had worked with and those who had lain with the enemy Americans. Bargirls. Girlfriends. Robert feared Lien was dead.

When restrictions eased and he could leave the MACV compound, he went at once to the site of the tailor shop. The building survived but the shop was closed and boarded up. When the sampan community near the central market reassembled, he walked its banks over and over, searching for Lien’s uncle, trying to remember the man’s face, hoping he would himself be recognized by the man.

And then, one afternoon, an old woman stopped him outside the MACV compound and said Lien’s name to him and told him a day and a time and this place, and he approaches her now.

She wears a white ao dai , the tight-bodiced Vietnamese silk dress with its skirt split up the sides from feet to waist, revealing black pantaloons beneath, a dress she has, on special nights, worn privately for him without the pantaloons, naked beneath it from waist to feet.

He holds a brown paper parcel tied in hemp cord.

She turns her face at the sound of his approach, comes forward. She makes no move to touch him but explains this with her first words. “I do not touch you like I wish from people that see us.”

“I understand,” he says.