Robert Butler - Perfume River

And the second vet says, “But the little he did say … Well, we all understand the tough job and the short life span of infantry lieutenants in Vietnam.” He gives Robert a knowing nod and offers his hand for another shake. “Thank you for your service.”

Robert does not take the hand. If the refusal hurts the man’s feelings, it’s his donut buddy’s lying fucking fault. That wasn’t the service I rendered. I was a cowardly specialist fourth class hiding in a bunker counting beans.

But the man thinks he understands Robert’s hesitation. He straightens up, withdraws the offered shake, and turns it into a salute, holding a strack pose. “Sergeant Harlan Summerfield offers his gratitude, sir.”

Shit. Shit. Robert can’t keep up the rebuff. It’s not this man’s fault. But neither can he explain. So Robert returns the goddamn salute, forced to buy into the lie of his humiliated father, whose body Robert is suddenly, acutely aware of. It’s presently reduced to a chest-to-crotch view by the frame of intervening vets, laid out in his one wearable but outdated suit, a dark gray pinstripe with padded shoulders and wide lapels, his hands crossed over his bowels.

The two men pick up on the shift of Robert’s attention.

“We’ll leave you with him now,” the first one says.

“Just wanted to pay our respects,” the second one says.

Robert is clenching in the chest as if he were about to step out of a banyan tree in the dark.

“Good to meet you,” one or the other of them says.

And the two men step aside and vanish.

Robert moves forward into an aura of dry cleaner perc and mortuary pancake, and he stands alone now in front of his dead father.

Beneath the veneer of a Tillotson tan, William Quinlan’s dumb Sunday-doze face is fixed for eternity, the face that always seemed to Robert, in its own parsimonious way, to allow that nothing was terribly wrong between the two of them. The face that said, without actually saying it: Even though I don’t offer any details, you’re sufficiently okay by me that I can simply sleep in your presence in this apparently unperturbed way.

The old man sleeps that way now. Couched in that lie. But even if he were suddenly to wake, brought back for just a few climactic moments, and if he were to look Robert in the eyes and say to him, I know what you really want to do, so okay, go ahead, punch me in the face if you got the balls, take your best shot , Robert would not be able to lift an arm or make a fist, would not even be able to lift a lip into a sneer. All he has is a handful of words: Go back to sleep, Pops. Robert feels weary. Deeply weary. Simply weary. He feels seventy fucking years old. Go back to sleep.

A hand on his shoulder and he starts.

He’s done with the casket anyway.

He turns.

It’s his mother.

She opens her arms.

He is as little inclined to accept this gesture as he was Sergeant Summerfield’s salute. But he is even less capable of brushing it aside. He puts his arms around her, telling himself, This embrace isn’t about my feelings for him. It’s about her. It’s just for her. That’s her dead husband in the casket and she loved him, in her own way. In her own way she loved him very much, so I can hold her and kiss her now on the cheek. Which he does, and he says, “I’m so sorry, Mom.”

“I know,” she says.

She kisses his cheek in return. Then she brings her mouth very near his ear and whispers, “Who are those people?”

Robert whispers in return, “A couple of his World War Two buddies.”

“Really,” she says, with a thump of a tone, meaning How come he never mentioned them to me?

She lets Robert gently disengage the embrace.

“They’re casual coffee buddies,” he says.

Darla has drawn near.

Robert sees her over Peggy’s shoulder, turns his face to her.

Darla, however, is focused on her mother-in-law. The back of Peggy’s head; her ashen hair rolled plain and tight; her arms falling from the embrace of her son into a slump of her narrow shoulders; her usual wiry vigorousness transformed abruptly into a bony dwindling, like a twentysomething cat. And she thinks of all the recent mother-daughter words. All the grief words. And the riddance words. And the Irish food prep. These things suddenly signify for Darla. Signify in a way that can, in a century-old monument, elicit her compassion for women long dead. So why not here, for this flesh-and-blood woman?

“Peggy,” she says, the consideration of using Mom having flashed into her and out again in a nanosecond. Maybe another time.

Peggy turns to her, brightens, throws open her arms, embraces her, pats her.

“I’m so glad you’re with me tonight,” Peggy says.

“I am too,” Darla says.

“Can you help me greet people now and then? Not to monopolize you. Robert needs you too.”

“Of course,” Darla says.

Peggy lets go of Darla, pulls back a bit, looks her in the eyes. “Thank you,” she says. She lets that register, and then she says, “Would you like a few moments with Bill now?”

Peggy Peggy Peggy. How do I say No to that? You have a talent. Darla says, “Of course.”

Peggy nods, steps away, revealing Robert still stuck standing where he was, looking at his wife with one side of his mouth and the corresponding curve of his cheek clenched in irony. “I’ll give you a few moments,” he says, and he too moves away.

Darla wants to rap him in the arm with a knuckle as he passes. She wants simply to follow him.

But she steps forward.

Her father-in-law’s face is a crude likeness, molded in hand-puppet rubber. But it’s him. No doubt. The distortion is simply death. It’s the stuff he’s pumped full of instead of blood. It’s all the makeup. And yet: I envy Robert. This thought surprises her. She does envy him. Her own father went face forward through his windshield and into an overpass pier. Darla and her brother, far away from the bodies, made the decision by telephone. It was logical. Don’t wait for us. Close the caskets. Seal them up. We don’t need to see our parents in that state. I don’t need to see the wrecked face of my wrecked father. But she did. And she didn’t know it until now, as she looks at the face of this boring, emotionally obtuse, river-dock-macho, son-bullying, simplistically jingoistic man lying here dead. As altered as the man’s face is, this moment with William Quinlan still feels like a kind of existential intimacy, and much to her surprise and a little to her horror, she ardently wishes she’d had a chance for these concluding moments of closeness with her own father. As bullying and politically knuckleheaded as he could be. As passionate over sausages and conservatism but reticent over her. So why does she long for that lost opportunity, to see his final mask of reticence? Her mind replies: Perhaps because it would say to you: This is the ultimate him and so it was always him. A him apart from you. A him he would have arrived at whether he felt tenderly about you or not. Whether you ever existed or not. You did not create the chill in him. You did not earn it. If he could give no more in life, it was only because he was destined to die. That dark wind was already upon his face. If you’d had these final moments with him, perhaps you could have understood all that for yourself. More than understood. You could have actually felt it.

But as she stands before this other father, these are only thoughts.

And so she aches.

Her eyes fill with tears.

She rues them. Rues they’ll be construed as mourning William Quinlan. Rues they could not fall upon her own father’s face.

She waits for them to subside.