Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

“Deep down,” she said, “he loves us.”

“No, he doesn’t.”

She lowered her voice. Pleading. “If I leave, he won’t have anybody.”

“He doesn’t deserve anybody.”

She took his hand, then. “You don’t have to be hard,” she said, “just because the world is.”

No? he thought. Because he’d come to the exact opposite conclusion. America would soon be at war, and he would be in it. Hard would be what was called for, he knew that much. Which was why he’d kissed her goodbye that morning but left without so much as glancing into the front room, already the kind of hard his mother hoped he wouldn’t become.

It wasn’t, unfortunately, the kind that would have allowed him to slip out of town without saying goodbye to Miss Beryl. He thought about it, though. Unlike her husband, she hadn’t been enthusiastic when she learned Sully had enlisted. When he asked her why, whether she thought the coming war was wrong, she’d replied that all wars were, to one degree or another, but it wasn’t that, not really. And while she feared he might be killed, this wasn’t it, either. What truly frightened her, she explained, was the violence he would be doing to himself. He wasn’t just placing himself at risk; he was putting his self at risk, the same self that Thoreau thought was worth defending and protecting, the self whose primacy Emerson had argued for. (They’d read “Civil Disobedience” and “Self-Reliance” in her eighth-grade class.) The young, she claimed, were always being asked to risk who they really were, deep down, before they’d even had the opportunity to become acquainted. In her view it was wrong to ask them to gamble something they didn’t even know they possessed, much less what it might be worth. “Also,” she added, “I fear you may have enlisted for the wrong reasons.”

“Why do you think I did?” he asked, curious as to how well she understood him.

“I suspect”—she sighed—“because you’re young and you didn’t know what else to do.”

Though he was young, he hadn’t liked being reminded of it, and he enjoyed even less that this tiny, bent woman who’d been so kind to him should also be so wise and, not just wise, but wise to him as well. Somehow she always managed to outflank him, which gave him little choice but to retreat into youthful bravado he didn’t really feel. “I just think,” he told her, “that somebody needs to hand Adolf his hat.” In response, she’d given him that kind, knowing smile of hers, the one that said she understood him perfectly, as always.

All that had been the week before he left. Now, when he arrived at their house, Coach Peoples was sitting on the porch reading the newspaper. Setting down his duffel, Sully climbed the porch steps and they shook hands.

“So you’re off, then,” the coach said, prolonging the handshake.

“Yes, sir.” Sully nodded.

“Off to hand Adolf his hat.”

Which made Sully smile. Miss Beryl had repeated what he’d said to her, and not unkindly, he felt certain.

“She’s inside, Sully,” Clive Sr. told him, giving him a look that said all too clearly that he understood how difficult — okay, impossible — this goodbye was going to be, that women in general and this one in particular wanted not just everything you had but also, and especially, what you didn’t have and never would. And in return they’d offer what you didn’t want or had no use for or, even worse, was good for you. Which was precisely what Miss Beryl did when she looked up and saw him standing there in the kitchen doorway. “Might I entice you with a cup of tea?” she said, as if young men his age had a long, storied history of being so enticed.

“I hate tea,” he told her for the umpteenth time, but then, not wanting to hurt her feelings on this special occasion, he relented. “Okay, maybe just this once.”

It did seem to cheer her, that and the fact that he took a seat at the kitchen table. “Cream and sugar?”

“Will that make it taste like beer?”

“Donald,” she said, setting the steaming cup down in front of him. “How I hate to see you go.”

“I know. You said.”

“I’m sorry. I had no business trying to talk you out of your decision. I’d forgotten how stubborn you are.”

No point arguing that, so he didn’t. He took a sip of tea, made a face and pushed the cup away. “Good God.”

But she was serious now. “You must tell me. How did you leave things at home?”

He looked around the kitchen. “This is more my home than that place,” he said.

“Oh, your poor mother,” she said.

“I would never say that to her,” Sully assured her.

“I know, Donald, but if you think it, she feels it. Don’t you know that?”

“How can I not feel what I do feel?”

“You have a point there.”

He smiled. “I do?”

“You do,” she said. “You often do. That doesn’t mean I have to agree with it. Dare I ask how you parted with your father?”

“With him in one room and me in another.”

She gave him a puzzled look. “Do you understand forgiveness?”

“The concept, I guess.”

“I mean how it works.”

“Somebody’s an asshole and you tell him it’s okay?”

“That’s a willful misrepresentation.”

“As in untrue?”

“As in half true.”

“Well, at least I got half. Why are you smiling like that?”

“Because I’m going to miss your company,” she said.

“I’ll miss yours, too,” he told her. “And Coach’s.”

“But mine a bit more.”

He turned to look over his shoulder, to make sure the man was still out on the porch and not standing behind him, awaiting his answer. “I guess,” he said, surprised to realize it was true and a little ashamed for what felt like a betrayal of a man who’d treated him more like a son than his own father ever had.

“We don’t forgive people because they deserve it,” she said. “We forgive them because we deserve it.”

“I guess that’s something I don’t understand.”

She shrugged. “Guess what? I don’t, either. It’s true, though.”

“Maybe I’ll feel more forgiving when I get back.”

“You do know that there’s such a thing as being too late?”

He did, but with a young man’s comprehension, confident but incomplete. “You’re smiling again,” he told her.

She pointed at his cup. “You drank your tea.”

It was true. He didn’t remember doing so, nothing beyond that first awful taste, but the cup was empty, and in his chest there was now a warm glow.

“One day you’ll know yourself,” she predicted. “Your self, I mean to say.”

“You think so?”

“Yes,” she said, gathering their cups. “I do.”

She was releasing him, he realized with a shock, to the looming war. Was it her affection, he wondered, that made him feel afraid for the first time? That made him want to stay here in her warm kitchen? He couldn’t, of course, and they both knew it. The die had been cast, and he himself had rolled it.

Word of his father’s death came when he was in England during the final days of preparation before Normandy. News of his mother’s didn’t reach him until Paris. When he returned stateside, what seemed like a hundred years later, he’d visited their side-by-side graves. Just the once, though. Because standing there in Hilldale he’d felt nothing, which meant, he supposed, that Miss Beryl had been right; there was indeed such a thing as being too late. Normandy, the hedgerows, the Hürtgen Forest, the camps and finally Berlin…they all added up to this: too late. Had he found himself in war, as young men were often thought to do? Perhaps. He’d acquitted himself well in battle, proven competent in the face of fear. But had he also lost something he wasn’t sure he possessed to begin with? Had his self, the one Miss Beryl was worried about, been harmed? He remembered the look on her face when she first saw him again, an expression comprising relief and the old affection, but also a recognition that the boy who’d gone away to war both was and wasn’t the man who returned from it.