Perfume River (26 page)

“Mom,” he says. “I’m so sorry. I should have told you sooner. But it wasn’t so long ago I found out. All those afternoons, for all those years, that he drove off on his own in New Orleans: It wasn’t a woman. It was guys like those you met tonight. It was Dad and his army buddies doing beignets and chicory coffee.”

Peggy’s face goes blank. Then she blinks, and for a few moments more she shows nothing. And a few more.

Robert doesn’t understand.

So he says, “He loved you.”

She blinks again. Then she begins to cry.

Oh shit
: Robert should have told her long ago. Or he should have figured out a better way to tell her now.

He lifts his hand to touch her shoulder, perhaps pull her to him.

She catches his hand in hers, lifts it, and squeezes it.

“Are you sure?” she says.

“I’m sure.”

“It’s time for me to cry a while,” she says. “Thanks for this.”

“I’m really sorry,” he says. “I should have told you at once.”

Peggy struggles to manage her voice, hold off the tears. “You were caught between us. I totally understand, sweetheart. You loved your father too.”

She looks around, lets go of Robert’s hand, sits down on an overstuffed chair beneath the torchiere. “I’ll be in soon,” she says.

Robert stands over her for a moment more, but she has lowered her face to weep.

He turns and moves along the hallway.

He pauses between the two sets of doors.

He thinks to head outside, to get away from all of this.

He faces the porte cochere exit. His hands go to the push bar.

Beneath the tree Bob’s eyes are open again. The whining has been fading. It’s almost gone. The numbers are gone. He’s done these countings before. He wishes he could decide when they happen, could make them happen. The whine, the numbers are better than the voice and the words.
Hello, Private Weber. Let’s talk.

Robert’s hand is on the push bar.

But he knows this is futile. There will be no escape tonight.

He looks back down the hallway to his mother, her torso, in profile, bent forward, her head bowed, her hands clasped, resting on her knees.

He turns around, crosses to the doors into the visitation room, pushes through.

Darla appears before him.

“Hey,” she says. She must have been standing nearby, expecting him.

“Hey.”

Darla glances over his shoulder, sees that Peggy isn’t appearing. “Is she okay?”

“She’s crying alone for a while,” Robert says.

“That’s good.”

“I hope.”

“I saw you two go out.”

“There isn’t much privacy at a thing like this.”

“It’s what a wake’s for. So you’re not alone.”

“What have you been doing?”

“Serving food.”

“Is it going over?”

“The Irish stew is a big hit.”

“That’ll please her.”

“So it will.”

Robert looks away, into the room, whose numbers seem to have increased since he stepped out. Not that he sees anyone in particular. They are all blurring together now.

Darla says, “Can I make a suggestion?”

“Sure.”

“I never saw my own dad after he died. Did I ever tell you that?”

He looks at her. “No.”

“Well. I didn’t. It was a closed casket. I needed to look at him. It’s a good way to get things straight in your head so he won’t hang around in there.”

Robert tries to take this in. He’s not sure. He stalls by quibbling.

“Still waiting for the suggestion,” he says.

“You weren’t with him at the casket for very long,” she says. “Just make sure you did enough tonight.”

Robert looks off in the direction of the far wall. In the middle of the room, a clump of assisted living visitors with plates of Irish stew blocks his view of the casket beyond. But he’s thinking Darla may be right.

She says, “It’s not about good guys. I had as much trouble with my dad as you did with yours. More.”

“Okay,” he says. “You’re right.”

Robert and Darla would both agree: This is one of the paradigms of the two of them at their intellectual best with each other. A difference. A discussion. Patience over a semantic quibble. One sees the other’s point. And concurs. Sealed with a moment of contented silence.

That moment ends, but before they part she says, “Does she need me, do you think?”

“Mom?”

“Yes.”

“Not right now. I think she needs to be alone.”

“I’ll go dip some stew.”

“I think you’re starting to like it.”

“Please,” she says.

She begins to turn away.

Robert puts his hand on her arm. “Hey.”

She looks back at him.

“Thanks,” he says.

She nods.

He heads off toward the wall with the casket.

She moves in the other direction, toward the buffet room. But she puts only a few steps of separation between her and the back door of the visitation room before her department chair intercepts her and hugs her as if the dead father were Darla’s own. Darla figures the warmth is mostly about department politics, which means a conversation is imminent. She gives up the hope of hiding immediately behind the stew.

Robert veers wide around the group of old women in hats and old men in wide ties from Longleaf Village. He keeps his face averted; he’s met a couple of them and this is not a time to chat.

He’s past them now and he looks toward the casket.

A man is standing there, his back to Robert.

Robert does not recognize him.

Just a man. A lanky man wearing a leather jacket, his hands clasped behind him, his pewter-gray hair thick-curled and shaggy at the collar.

Robert stops. He’ll wait till the man moves off.

Robert looks about to see if anyone else is waiting to view the body.

A few steps off to the left is a pretty, pale-skinned woman, her dark hair spilling from beneath a knit cap. He takes her for an art theory student of Darla’s. Perhaps she has a concealed sketchbook, waiting to capture a dead man.

Robert thinks to walk away now.

But he returns his gaze to the man.

He has not moved.

Well, yes. His hands, in their clasp, have begun to twist, have grown fretful.

And now Robert has a thought. This man is not from FSU. Not from assisted living. Not one of Bill’s generation. Wearing leather at a funeral home visitation, he’s not from Peggy’s church. Robert looks at the woman again. Her gaze is fixed on the man. They are here together. And she’s older than he thought at first glance. Robert looks closely at her jaw, looking for his father’s, his own, his brother’s. Looks at her eyes. He’s not recognizing a Quinlan, but he’s never met Linda. This woman’s features could be from Linda’s genes. He follows her eyes back to the casket. The man’s hands cling to each other to quell their restlessness. Robert suspects his own hands were just as restless when he stood there.
It’s him.

Jimmy has not been here for long. He is still breathless, standing in the presence of death. Not realizing, not quite yet, that its immanence in this casket is a major reason why he’s here. All he presently understands is that the face of his dead father
is largely an unrecognizable face. Not a man at all. Not even a good caricature. All the features are bloated and blurred and slathered over. Features he last saw forty-six years ago. Features that would have been nearly as unrecognizable last week, when Bill was still walking around, unawares, in death’s anteroom. Jimmy once more asks himself the basic question:
What the hell am I doing here?
And since the dead body is not providing an answer at the moment, Jimmy works his way along.
Closure. Sure. But I’m here because Linda left me. I’m here because I found Heather. Here because I found her only very recently and she’s not yet enough. Blood ties are overrated. But that’s about the inefficacy of blood, not about the need for ties to something. The something was once Linda and Canada. I still have Canada. Oh Canada. Unarmed, universally doctored, killingly polite Canada; grumbling-not-hating Canada; minding-its-own-fucking-business-in-the-community-of-nations Canada. Tolerant, come-find-a-refuge-and-your-own-identity-here Canada. Not enough. I know that. Canada and Heather may eventually be enough. But for some reason I had to come stand here before this man. Only blood connected us. Not part of the real equation. I did dream of him. And my mother. And my brother. But you can dream about an old girlfriend or a high school teacher or a crooked auto mechanic and it doesn’t mean you need to seek them out before they go into the ground. Still I came to this man, his corpse waiting to rot. Because he’s dead; he’s dead so he knows something important, something no one alive knows. Right now. What is it? Is he wedged into the dark matter, pressing his face against mine? Has he run off to be someone else, somewhere else? Or maybe he’s nothing at all. Or just made new. Maybe death is like when they knock you out for a colonoscopy. You’re counting backwards one second and awake the next
and they tell you it’s all done and you don’t remember a thing. Maybe you die and you wake and this life you lived is utterly forgotten like that lost hour. Life in the USA and life in Canada. Life on planet Earth. Life is just the camera up your ass that you won’t even remember. So what actually happens after death is fucking academic. If there’s nothing afterward or if it’s something that you’ll totally forget, then it’s all the same. Okay. What the hell am I doing here? I’m here to look at the bag of bones my father has become so maybe I can stop thinking about this thing I can’t stop thinking about. I came to face death.

Another thought, flowing from these, begins to shape itself. About his brother.

And someone is standing next to him.

“Hello, Jimmy.”

Jimmy turns to his brother. Jimmy’s impulsive few nights of Googling—yielding images of Dr. Robert Quinlan at academic conferences, on a book dust jacket, from the university website—have prepared him only a little for the changes of nearly five decades. The abrupt, palpable presence of Robert’s graying and slackening and weathering, his leap from twenty-three years old to seventy: These twist the knife of mortality in Jimmy’s brain. His own face in the mirror each day is much the same as this one. But even as he’s struggled with the thoughts of death, he could look in the mirror and convince himself,
I’m pretty good for my age. I can put off dying.
But he got to that understanding of his own face gently, gradually. Jimmy regards this man before him, this man of Jimmy’s blood, this man in the same pretty good shape as he, and sees him as mortally old.

“Hello, Robert,” he says.

“I didn’t expect you.”

“It was last-minute.”

They need a little break from each other already.

They have a corpse for that.

They both look in its direction.

All the possible small talk coming to Robert’s head sounds potentially touchy or argumentative:
So what changed your mind? Mom will be very pleased. Is Linda with you? Who’s the woman? Well, there he is. Was it worth the trip?

He resists all of these.

And perhaps for that very reason, perhaps because he refuses to choose one of these superficial, calculated things, what he does say is from quite a different part of him. “If you want to slap him across the face, feel free.”

They turn and goggle at each other.

Neither can think of a thing to say.

They look back to William.

Robert reboots. “Well, there he is.”

“There he is.”

“Was it worth the trip?”

“Not yet.”

“Is there anything I can do?” Robert asks this with a little surge of animation, a vague impulse, which he stifles to offer forward his hands. He even finds himself about to say,
I’m glad you came
, but he doesn’t want to stir up Jimmy’s scorn. He’s lived with a bellyful of scorn these past few days and he wants to keep things calm with his brother.

Jimmy says, “Answer a question if you can, without looking around.”

“All right.”

“Where’s our mother?”

“She’s taking a few minutes alone. I can get her. She’d be only too glad …”

“No.” Jimmy says it sharply. He softens his tone but with it justifies his sharpness: “That’s why I didn’t want you to look around.”

“So
there’s
something I can do,” Robert says. “Help you slip out unnoticed.”

The words could be construed as sarcastic. Would have been in the life they lived together before each went away. But Robert has also softened his tone.

“I haven’t decided yet,” Jimmy says. “I may.”

Still another matter of tone. This fastidious one in Jimmy makes a warmth rise in Robert, from his cheeks and into his temples, replacing sympathy with pissoffedness.

“Look, Jimmy,” he says, but quietly, calmly. “Why don’t
I
just slip away and let you do what you need to do. If Mom appears I’ll run interference for you. Distract her so you can get the hell away.”

Jimmy sucks a breath, pulls back ever so slightly.

Robert thinks:
It was the ‘get the hell away.’ All right. All right. I’m not in the mood. Let’s get it on, brother.

But Jimmy says, “I’m sorry. I sounded arrogant. I’m here because I want to be here. But it’s complicated.”

Robert feels animated again. He may need to slip away for his own sake, just to stop the mood swings. He says, “I get it. Not a problem. It’s always been complicated.”

He looks at William. It wasn’t such a crazy thing to say. About the slap. It was Jimmy’s fretfully clasped hands. He says, “Not long before you appeared, I stood here and I thought about him waking up and daring me to punch him in the face.”

“Did you do it?”

“No.”

“Not even in your head?”

A beat of silence between them now. And another.

“No,” Robert says. “Wish I could’ve. But it’s just a corpse.”

Another silence.

But brief. For Jimmy, this too is spoken from an impulse. “We should make a pact,” he says. “We’ll fight no fights from the past. If we get angry at each other it needs to be about something right in front of us.”

“Man, I agree with that,” Robert says. “But the past is all you and I have. If we’re going to speak at all, things may come up. But not to argue them.”