Robert Butler - Perfume River

Robert waits for a dramatic sound on the other end of the phone. A stricken word. A sob even. But there’s only silence.

This troubles Robert more than her usual emoting. Better for her to be angry. She needs to be fighting. He says, “We’re still toxic to him.”

“Did he say that?” This comes out sharply. Her dukes are up. Good.

“No,” Robert says. “Not those words.”

“What words?”

“I’m not going to be his proxy in an argument with you, Mom. I’ll see you in an hour.”

“Toxic,” she says.

“Listen. The only way this thing could have been made right was for Pops to reach out. Not Jimmy. Years ago. At the latest when Carter gave the amnesty. Pops should have told Jimmy to come home. Told him — God forbid — that he understood, that he didn’t condemn him.”

Robert has said all he intended to, and Peggy delays only long enough to draw a breath. She says, “I am so sick and tired of the men in this family.”

Robert lets her have her big curtain line unchallenged.

But she stays on the phone.

So does he, though she’s no longer on his mind. He wonders at Jimmy, at how firmly he grasped his own life and held it close all these years.

“Are you still there?” Peggy finally asks.

“Yes.”

“Why? Come up here to me.”

And a short time later he is passing the Blood of the Lamb Full Gospel Church. He turns his face to it, puzzles over what that was all about yesterday morning. A man in coveralls is carrying a ladder along the side of the church building.

And then the church vanishes with a run of pine along Apalachee Parkway.

Peggy is waiting for Robert in the hallway outside his father’s room. She steps toward him.

“Have you been waiting out here all this time?” he says.

“No,” Peggy says, keeping her voice hushed and flapping her hand at him to do the same. “It’s been an hour. You’ve always been punctual.”

“Is he still awake?” Robert accepts her tone, has kept his own voice low. A private conversation in the hall would cause an argument for her and Pops.

“ Fully awake,” she says.

They’ve already been arguing.

Robert says, “So what do you need to say on the sly?”

Peggy’s head snaps ever so slightly. It always comes as a surprise, that he sees through her.

“Yes, well,” she says, “I just wanted to remind you he’s in a delicate state.”

“Of course.”

“Not just in his body. His mind. He’s lost his mind.”

“The drugs,” Robert says.

“He’s lucid,” Peggy says. “Just mad.”

“Let me guess. He doesn’t want a priest to come visit.”

“I won’t even tell you how he put it,” she says.

“It’s his choice,” Robert says.

“So please don’t let him get worked up about anything.”

“I’ll do what I can.”

Peggy clutches Robert’s hand. Somehow it feels real, this gesture. “I know you will.”

He takes both her hands in his.

She says, “I’m just so afraid I’m going to lose him now.”

“He’s a tough guy. He can beat the odds.”

“God knows I’ll miss him,” she says. “Even at his worst.”

Especially at his worst , Robert thinks. His worst has kept you happily energized. But he gently compresses her hands and says, “The best thing is for you to go on downstairs and get some coffee and a Danish. Linger over them. I can handle Pops better if it’s just the two of us.”

Peggy searches her son’s face, seems to reassure herself about something, and then nods.

They let go of each other, and without another word Peggy is gone.

Robert approaches his father’s hospital door.

He steps in.

At first the only sound he recognizes in the room is his father’s heart, digitized into a soft monitor beep. And now the faint hiss of the air flowing from the wall into his father’s lungs. Pops lies in his bed, his torso angled upward, his arms laid out on top of the blanket, the left one wrapped thickly from hand to elbow. He is watching out the window: the bright afternoon sky and the distant tops of longleaf pines.

Robert hesitates. His father keeps his watch. Always clean-shaven, as if he were standing for inspection by Patton himself, his cheeks and chin are covered now in dark scruff.

Robert says, “Pops.”

William turns his face abruptly to his son. “Sorry,” he says. “I thought you were Mother.”

Robert approaches the bed, wondering briefly if his father’s mind has indeed gone wrong, if he was expecting his own mother, the long-dead Grandma Quinlan. But of course he meant Peggy.

“I sent her away for coffee and pastry,” Robert says.

“Good,” William says. And then his eyes wander off, as if the exchange has set him thinking.

Why does Robert have the immediate impression he knows what’s on Pops’s mind? Perhaps it’s the recent, vivid reminder of the daily struggle between his father and mother. That and the coffee and pastry. These stir the past in him, not as recollections, but enough to give him his impression as he arrives at his father’s bedside.

What has worked covertly in Robert are two events. In one of them, a decade ago, on an otherwise routine phone call from New Orleans, his mother suddenly sounded real, sounded vulnerable in a way unalloyed with dramatic artifice. Robert had just casually mentioned that Darla was at school for the afternoon.

“She has a class?” Peggy asked.

“No.”

“For what then?”

“Whatever.”

“She’s often away.”

“Away?”

“At school.”

“Of course.”

And Peggy’s voice shifted now to that authentic-seeming place, though he didn’t pick up on it yet. “Does it bother you sometimes, this regular separation, when you’re so close to someone? When you don’t really know what’s going on in their life? What they’re doing?”

“Oh, I can easily guess,” he said. The tangle of students and colleagues and papers and bureaucracy.

“Your father goes off every afternoon like that,” Peggy said. Her tone pitched downward, inward. “He’s done it every day for years. Ever since he retired. No one’s around to notice but me.”

She paused.

Robert was clearly aware now of the authenticity of this riff.

She went on, trying to figure it out as she’d apparently been doing for some time. “He loves to drive his car, it’s true. He’s always loved to drive his cars. He’s driven since he was eleven, after all. There were no licenses back then. This love grew with his bones. I understand. But it’s more than that. He’s going for a little drive, he says. He’s going for coffee, he says. Every day. He goes away for hours. I understand I can be a burden. Just to be around me. He wants to escape. But I wonder how much coffee you can drink. I wonder if he’s alone.”

Now a long silence. In moments like this, Robert usually knew when she was waiting for him to give her something back. But this silence felt different.

Then she said, very softly, “I sometimes wonder if he has a woman.”

Another silence.

To his surprise, the notion of Pops carrying on a flirtatious friendship at his age did not strike Robert as ridiculous. So although a laugh would have sufficed, he felt the need to deny this. He began to shape a reply.

But she said, “You wouldn’t know.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t,” Robert said.

“No one would know.”

Robert tried to find more words.

But she intervened, her tone breaching into avid reassurance, “Not that I’m suggesting anything about Darla.”

“I didn’t think …”

“You’ve got a peach there, Bobby boy. You better take good care of her or you’ll have to answer to me.” And Peggy laughed a loud, sharp laugh.