Robert Butler - Perfume River

And William says, “So I’ve held my tongue. But the truth is you didn’t go to war. You went through the motions. But you turned it into graduate school. You contrived a comfortable place on the edge of the action to go study. You didn’t even let the army decide your fate. You wangled your safe little job with a pre-enlistment deal and avoided the real thing. You told all the others who manned up, ‘Better you do the dirty work, not me. Better your blood than mine.’”

Robert falls back in his chair in enervated stillness. He would rise, he would go, but he remains.

His father says, “And look where you put me. What could I have said to you? How could I argue for my son to risk death? How could I do that to your mother? And what would it say about you, that I should have to talk you into it? You already chose.”

William stops talking.

He keeps his eyes on Robert.

Robert is looking at the distant tops of the pines.

“I probably should have taken this to my grave,” William says.

Robert does not reply. He thinks he sees the trees quaking. Even from this distance. The wind must be strong today.

“It’s all over anyway,” William says.

Robert turns to his father. “I’m sorry I disappointed you.”

He regrets saying this. He should argue the point. Or he should rise and go without speaking. He should not give a damn what his father thinks. They are both old men. But he has said it. And now, though he regrets this even more, he waits for his father to dispute him: No, Robert. No not at all. I’m not disappointed. I’ve come to be glad. Glad you’re alive. Your brother’s act is my only shame. You did go to Vietnam, after all. I’m proud of you.

But his father says nothing of the sort. He has already made himself clear.

Tet comes to mind.

But Robert has never said a word about what haunts him. His father would only be critical of that. Of course the scholar, having tried to create his comfortable little place, would be haunted by an act that any real soldier, any real man, would have understood as necessary, inevitable, righteous. Would have done proudly.

When Hue was secure and the men queued through one long night for a phone call home, Robert told his parents only that he was okay. MACV was not overrun. He was safe.

And later, when the family was safely reunited in America, there were no Vietnam war stories. None offered. None sought. As it had been, mostly, for his father and his war. Robert convinced himself that his own silence was another thing that bound him to his father, that made the man proud.

And now Robert’s words hang in the air between them. Robert looks away from this man. Back to the trees, the sky.

William isn’t speaking.

Robert finally looks at him.

His father’s eyes are squeezed shut. He is writhing minutely in physical pain. Silently.

“I’ll get the nurse,” Robert says.

He rises. He walks out of the room. He stops at the nurses’ station and tells the first nurse who looks at him that William Quinlan is hurting.

Then he goes down in the elevator and crosses the lobby and pushes through the door and finds his car and gets in.

He sits for a moment quaking like the tops of the pines all around him.

And he drives away.

Darla sits at her desk, fingers poising over her keyboard and then falling away, again and again, trying to signify with her words what it was that she felt before the Confederate monument yesterday, what it was that she understood; but trying first to distinguish her understanding from her feeling; and as she fails at that, trying to decide whether trying to distinguish understanding from feeling isn’t, in fact, a fallacy, whether the very act of intellectualizing what was signified by the monument doesn’t, in fact, miss the whole point. Which brings her to the kiss. The kiss she gave her husband this morning.

She parted her lips to him. But she placed the kiss on his cheek. Would she have preferred his lips? Yes. Is that preference associated with her fingertips poised but inoperative once again over the keyboard? Perhaps. Yes. After her communion yesterday with the fair and faithful ladies of nineteenth-century Florida, the ardor of her lips longed this morning for Robert’s mouth. But she understood him: With his father on his mind, it was hardly the right moment. Her thought trumped her feeling.

Her hands fall.

Still, if she’d kissed him on the lips would she have the right words now for this thing her ladies built?

She lifts her hands once more, curls her fingers over the keys.

The front door latch clacks. He’s home.

She has left her office door open for this. An invitation to him.

The rustle of him now in the foyer.

She puts her hands on the desktop.

She waits.

She hears nothing.

She turns in her chair.

He has not silently appeared. Perhaps he assumed the open door of her office meant that she was elsewhere.

Or perhaps he needs to be alone. This is an interpretation she expects to wish to be true. She shouldn’t want to hear about his hospitalized father, a man she has always found insufferable. But, in fact, she wishes Robert had understood the open door and rushed to it.

He has done no such thing.

And her mind, following along in its own path, yields this: William Quinlan is the product of a victorious army, its monuments boilerplated with conventional self-congratulation.

She turns back to her computer. But she looks beyond its monitor, through the window, out to the live oak. This tree was already massive when her ladies were composing their words. She invites them. She arranges them beneath her oak, their skirts spread out around them, basket lunches at hand.

Unexpectedly, they turn their faces to her.

And she rises to look for her husband. She steps from her office. She moves along the hallway, past the foyer, and she stops at the bottom of the staircase. She listens upward.

But the sound that catches her attention is the ricochet chirp of a cardinal. Distant, but not a sound to be heard from where she is standing.

She steps into the living room.

At the far end a French door is open. Robert is framed there, his back to her. He stands very still, looking out to the oak.

She remains still as well. She watches him for what feels like a long time.

Then his head dips abruptly down. Something has finished in him. He turns and starts at her presence.

“Sorry,” she says, moving toward him.

He steps in. “I didn’t know where you were,” he says.

They approach each other but stop short, not touching for a moment as she tries to read him and he tries to collect himself. She looks him carefully in the eyes, his green eyes, which she resolved to do night before last in the bed, in the dark, drawn into a long-set-aside memory. How deep their color seemed to her when they first met, but they are paler to her now, green but not Monet green at all. Were they ever? Have they diminished over the years, gradually, she simply never noticing? Were they never what she thought? Or is this grief she sees in them?

She steps into her husband, putting her arms around him, turning her face and laying her head against his shoulder, telling the ladies beneath the oak to hush.

He pulls her gently close.

The two of them say nothing till they pull apart just as gently.

She looks again into his eyes. They are saturated but unblinking, refusing to express a tear.

“What’s happened?” she asks, instead of asking more directly, Has he died?

Robert’s eyes stay fixed on hers but his head twitches ever so slightly to the right. She takes this as: Happened? He broke his hip is what happened. What he’s really thought does not, of course, occur to Darla: Happened? How do you know? Has he said these things about me to you?