Perfume River (15 page)

“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.

And then, a few years ago, Robert and Darla drove the six hours together to New Orleans for a semiotics conference. While Darla did her panels, Robert went off to see his parents. This was a last-minute decision. William and Peggy had visited Florida the previous month. There would be no sustainable small talk left between them for a while. But Robert felt guilty to be this close and not spend a few hours. He would surprise them. If they were out, at least he’d tried.

It was a quarter to two on a Friday afternoon when he turned onto Third Street from Magazine and crossed Annunciation into his parents’ block. Up ahead he saw Dad’s Impala pulling away from the curb. The afternoon vanishing act. Robert could simply take his father’s place at the curb and visit his mother. Or he could follow his father.

At the foot of Third, William turned uptown. Robert stayed close, not taking any chances of losing him. Over the intervening years Robert had given very little thought to his conversation with his mother about all this, other than to conclude she’d never have said those things to him in person. The disembodiment of the phone had put her into a deep-seated Catholic frame of mind, as if she were in a confessional booth, speaking to an invisible priest.

This was probably quite simple. It was about coffee and a chance to escape the bickering. But if Dad was having an
octogenarian tryst, Robert wanted to get a glimpse of the woman in the affair. Mom would never need to know.

William stayed on Tchoupitoulas for as long as he could, for the whole length of the river docks, till the street ended at the zoo. This he skirted, and then he followed the levee into Carrollton, turning onto the area’s eponymous main drag. He drove only a short distance farther and turned into a strip-mall parking lot.

Robert pulled into a spot down the row and watched his father get out of his car. If Dad had bothered to look around he would have seen Robert’s head and shoulders among the car tops down the way, but he did not look, was not the least bit furtive. He did not move to the sidewalk along Carrollton Avenue, but struck out along the parking lot lane toward the side street.

Robert followed his father.

He was impressed by the man’s vigorous stride. Perhaps the stride of a man meeting a woman. Certainly the stride of a father who, from this distance, seemed not to be aging. Who might live forever.

He crossed the side street and turned away from Carrollton. A couple of doors up was a coffee shop. Chicory Dickory, Coffee and Beignets. At least the coffee part of Dad’s story was true: he went in.

Robert neared the shop, slowed drastically, approached carefully, and paused in the doorway. His father’s back was to him. He was standing before a table with three other men who were standing as well, their chairs pushed away as if they’d just
risen. They were all of them old. Their right arms and hands were frozen in a sharp military salute, and they were swiveling slightly at the hips so that each could direct his gesture to each of the others.

They sat.

The clock on the wall said precisely two o’clock.

Immediately a waitress arrived with a tray of beignets and coffee for four. She lowered the tray and they all served themselves from it, making small talk with her, calling her by name. These guys were regulars.

Robert pulls a chair to his father’s hospital bedside. He’s aware now of how he knows what his father was thinking. Coffee and pastry and the irony of Peggy getting away from him for that. Coffee and pastry and the company of men, and how those things are likely gone forever. Till yesterday his father was still driving. He’d surely found a coffee shop in Thomasville. Did he find a new band of veterans as well? Robert hopes so. He kept his father’s actual secret through the years. Peggy would have nagged a stop to those afternoons as surely as if they’d been filled with a mistress.

Seated now, he leans toward his father. The initial covert working of the past in him—the phone conversation with Peggy and his shadowing of his father—is done. But the memory of the New Orleans coffee shop emanates on. As Robert stood in the doorway, he thought to turn and vanish. Simply, quietly.

But instead he stepped in and sat down at a table near the four men, with his father’s back still to him. Robert ordered a coffee with chicory and sipped at it, hearing fragments of their
talk. They spoke of the weather and the Saints and their aching joints and Obama and al-Qaeda and eventually they arrived at Patton and Eisenhower and at how they lost the peace by letting the Russians into Berlin. And then Robert’s coffee was gone and he’d pushed his luck already, not really wanting his father to catch him here, and not really wanting an answer to the question that had lately gnawed its way into the center of his brain. Which was: Would his father get around to the story of a small, doomed house in Bingen? Robert’s thoughts were getting ragged enough for him even to wonder if Dad would have his Good War cronies start counting,
One Mississippi, Two Mississippi.

Robert left money on the table and went out into the street, thinking:
No. That’s the stuff he and his pals take for granted. Bingen was a story made for fucking with the minds of a couple of little boys.

You share a war in one way. You pass it on in another.

All this swifts through Robert, though in his father’s room at Archbold Memorial Hospital he is washed by its wake.

But small talk prevails for the moment. He says, “How do you feel?”

William snorts. “Better a few hours ago.” He groans and gingerly shifts his shattered arm, which lies between them. “For the first time in my life I’m beginning to understand drug addicts.”

“Impossible,” Robert says, and he hears a taint of anger in this. He softens his voice. “How’d that come about?”

“Twenty-four hours on morphine and four hours off it,” his father says.

Robert has had, for some years, two modes of conversation with his father. Most of the time he listens, unchallenging, serious of manner, letting his father set the conversational agenda and its tone. Or, occasionally, when he reaches his limit of tolerance for the man’s hypertraditional thinking and right-veering politics and blue-collar attitudinizing, Robert becomes ironic, contrapuntal, engaging with his father but in a manner that tugs at the man’s points as if he could be pulled to the left.

Robert knows he should let this conversation roll out in the most comfortable way for a very old man in a hospital bed with a broken hip and a shattered arm. But he does not. He says, “A little morphine in all the air. It would be wonderfully refreshing for everyone.”

“Are you quoting or just selfishly getting sassy with a badly injured old man?”

“D. H. Lawrence.”

“Was he an addict?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I was always an addict,” his father says. “For the caffeine and the sugar.”

Robert is a little surprised to hear this admission in those terms, even if his father is in a mood to sling the irony back at him. “That’s a serious confession.”

William snorts at this. “Don’t be flip about that. Your mother wanted to get a goddamn priest in here.”

“I take it you said no.” Robert tries to twinkle this. Not very successfully.

William looks at him as if he’s being goaded. Which is closer to the truth. “I told her if she let one in, I’d beat him to death with my cast.”

At this he tries to gesture with his broken arm and barks in pain and then coughs deeply and grindingly, which clenches his body, which further agitates his arm and now even his hip.

Robert puts his hand on his father’s shoulder. “Easy,” he says. The gesture is futile and the coughing and clenching go on, though Robert keeps his hand where it is. “It’ll pass,” he says. “You’re a tough guy,” he says. And finally, “Should I get the nurse?”

William manages a sharp shake of the head.
No.

Finally the coughing stops. His body calms. Tears are streaming down William’s face.

He seems unaware of them.

“Fuck,” he says.

Robert finds his hand still on his father’s shoulder. He gives him a gentle squeeze there and withdraws.

“I wouldn’t even be able do it,” his father says. “Goddamn cast isn’t hard enough.”

Things shift in Robert. But to a complicated place. Not to banter. Not to an encouragement to rest. Not to soothing palaver. His father is indeed a tough guy. That Robert believes. But his father may soon be dead.

Robert sits back in his chair.

William is quiet now. He blinks his eyes. His good hand comes up quickly to his face and wipes at the tears. He sees Robert noticing. “From the pain,” he says.

“You shouldn’t let yourself get worked up over her.”

“That’s our life.”

“She’s probably going to try again to get the priest in here.”

“She thinks I’m going to die,” William says, but almost gently. “She says she won’t know who she is without me.”

“Are you beginning to understand her?”

“Drug addicts are easier.” William turns his face away, toward the window.

Then he turns back.

He holds his gaze steadily on Robert. His eyes seem heavy-lidded, as if he’s struggling to keep them open. But the impression is not weariness. These strike Robert as the heavy eyes of sadness. And he feels himself to be the object of the look.

Robert does not ask what’s behind this. Instead, he says, “Were you still a Catholic in Germany?”

William snorts softly. His eyes relax. “You mean, ‘There are no atheists in foxholes’?”

“Something like that.”

“Whoever thought that up was full of shit. Either they were never in a war or were in the priest’s pocket to start with.” William begins carefully to rearrange himself at the shoulders. “Not that I’m an atheist. That’s just another religion.”

He stops arranging. He sucks up the pain.

“Should I get a nurse?” Robert says.

William shakes his head sharply
No.
He takes a deep breath, and pulling from the shoulder he adjusts his broken arm just a little. He closes his eyes to the pain.

Robert stifles his hands, his voice. He will offer no help. Pops has to be Pops.

When the pain has passed, his father says, “What was it for, my Good War? And what was our national humiliation for?”

He means, by the latter, Robert’s Bad War.

William says, “It only brought us to this fucking world.”

Robert says, softly, “There it is.” The phrase catches him by surprise. He hasn’t used it in decades. It was a meme among the enlisted men in Vietnam. Its meaning slid upon a long continuum from
I am content
to
We’re all fucked.
In this case:
You said it, brother.

William begins to cough again.

But he stops it. With a sharp intake of breath and a brief flinch of his body and a sneer. A sneer at the cough and at the pain. He takes a moment to let out the breath, fight off a little after-tremor of hacking, and he says, “Who wouldn’t be happy to die tonight? Give me the political wars of the twentieth century any old day. At least your communist or your fascist gave a shit about this present life. The religious wars are going to take us all down. Behead the other guys and blow yourselves up. Sure. If you really read the holy book they believe in—that we
all
supposedly believe in; the first part of it for all of us is the
same book
—then what they’re doing makes perfect sense. That book’s full of genocide, on direct order from the
Commander in Chief in the Sky. With Moses himself leading the dirty work. Every holy battle gets around to it. Not just by the punks in the ski masks. Even the New Testament believers get around to it. The Catholics and the Pilgrims both had the stake and the torch.”

William falls silent.

Robert has never heard any of this from his father. Was it new? Did it take the breaking of his body for him to come to this? Or did his little band of brothers look up over their coffee and beignets one afternoon and know?