Perfume River (21 page)

Bob understands. He finishes, declaratively: “… that will take a guy like me.” Before the other Bob can feel awkward for asking, Bob goes on, “Sure. You know the Prince Murat Motel?”

Through this day, from his awakening to the revelation of his father’s death to the hours with his mother to this unexpected dinner, Robert, unawares, has been winding tight inside. Now it all seems to snap loose and he nearly gasps with
relief as his safely scholarly mind seizes on something familiar. “I do,” he says, leaning toward Bob. “It’s my favorite business establishment in Tallahassee. Prince Achille Murat was a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte and the son of the King of Naples. He was exiled with his family to Vienna after Napoleon’s final defeat, and then he emigrated to Florida. By the age of twenty-four he was the mayor of Tallahassee. He was a Jacksonian Democrat, though he never really made much of a political career outside the area. He became a bosom pal of the young Ralph Waldo Emerson, who called Tallahassee in 1826 a ‘grotesque place,’ by the way. But Murat eventually was known mostly for his eccentricities.”

The first of these that comes to Robert’s mind is Murat’s reputation for washing his feet only after he wore out his shoes. Robert leaves this unspoken. He’s beginning to hear himself.

Bob has no idea what Robert is talking about. Bob has even begun to wonder if Robert has troubles like his own.

After a moment of silence between them, Robert says, as if to explain his little lecture, “I do know the Murat.”

Still silence.

“I teach history.”

“They’ll let me in there,” Bob says.

“Then it’s the Murat,” Robert says, and he says no more. What seemed to loosen in him is again wrung taut.

After Robert leaves his wife and mother on the day his father died, as the January late afternoon wanes into darkness and Darla works in the next room sorting through papers and arranging the wake, Peggy finds herself unable to sleep. She turns her face to the ribbon of parking lot light edging her window blind. She closes her eyes. And she is standing very still, trying not to sweat, not to swoon from all the cheap perfume—like hers—on all the bodies of all the girls as they wait—like her—along the platform of the inbound track, wait for the troop train, wait for the long wait to be over. Their men will return to them on this day. Bill will return. The rest of Peggy’s life will begin. She is wearing her daisy-print sundress. Her arms are bare, and her hair falls to her shoulders in long curls and mounts high above her forehead in a pompadour. Little Bobby is elsewhere. He is up and running already, at thirteen months, always running, and talking as well, babbling an hour at a time to a framed photo of his father, he and the image sitting together in the center of the living room floor, the glass perpetually smudged with Bobby’s fingerprints. He was conceived on Peggy and Bill’s wedding night, which was also their last night together. Bill has never seen his son. But he won’t see him on this night either. The boy is at Mama’s and Papa’s, where the four of them have lived these two years. And Uncle Joe is happy to go on a bender for a few days with his buddies at the Industrial Canal so Peggy and Bill can have some time alone in Joe’s shotgun on Constance Street. So they can make love for the second time.

Peggy opens her eyes. She has turned and is facing her husband’s empty bed, barely visible in the dim room, as if this is the memory and the train platform is her life in the moment.

She closes her eyes again. Briefly she watches the splash of phosphenes there, the color of street-light. Then there is only bright New Orleans sunlight beyond the shade of the railroad shed. And now cries at the far end of the platform. Someone sees the train. The bodies around her begin to move, to surge. She holds still. He will find her. She has always known he will return and he will find her.

And she says to her nineteen-year-old self:
Oh, baby, don’t get your hopes up. He’s been off fighting a holy war against the legions of evil, an evil so pitiless that it would have one day crossed the ocean and come to our own front porch. He has seen things and done things that required a bravery beyond your imagining. You have been faithful to him. You have trusted in the noble cause he fought for and you must make him feel how proud you are. You must try to hold him close. But don’t be surprised at the things you both have sacrificed. This night will be one of them. And the next. And the next. Try not to be disappointed in him.

Later this same evening, Jimmy turns off Harrison Trail and into his Twelve Mile Bay property. He has returned to pack his bags. He will stay in Toronto till the future is arranged with
Linda. Heather is beside him. She becomes abruptly quiet as they enter the half-mile approach to the house. In the city, when he told her he needed to come up here for his things and it was best to do it right away, she did not speak of the reason but she insisted on coming along. She stirs now, leans toward the lights they push before them.

“She won’t be here,” Jimmy says, offering a hand.

He has read her correctly. She grasps his, holds on tight.

They emerge from the pines. The house is lit by the moon. There are no lights within. No car in the driveway. Heather lets go of his hand.

Barely through the front door, she brings the two of them to a stop.

“Sorry,” she says.

“Why?”

“Cold feet.”

“No need …”

“I know the place is yours too,” she says. “But it feels like
her.
”

“Then you should wait. I have to go upstairs.”

She looks at him.

Outside it’s January in Canada.

Jimmy nods to the nearby door. “The parlor. You won’t find much of her there.”

Heather steps before him, squares him at the shoulders, pulls him to her. They kiss.

“Soon,” he says.

And soon he descends the stairs with two large leather Pullmans. By the time he reaches the bottom, Heather appears in the parlor doorway. She has not turned on the light.

She steps from the room as Jimmy approaches. He puts the suitcases on the floor.

“What?” she says.

“I just want to kiss you once more. The last thing I do in this house tonight.”

Before they can move, the phone rings.

They both look toward the parlor door, then back to each other.

“Do you think it’s her?” Heather says.

“No.”

“I want that kiss,” she says.

The phone rings again.

Jimmy starts to explain that it has an answering machine. That to do the kiss they will have to listen to whoever it is. But he does not have time even to shape the words. Apparently there is another message already on the machine because it kicks in now, after the second ring.

And a woman’s voice begins to speak in the parlor. “Hello, darling.”

Even before Heather can flinch, the voice says. “It’s your mother.”

Peggy pauses.

“Come on,” Jimmy says.

And Peggy says, “Your father died this morning.”

She pauses again.

Jimmy picks up his suitcases.

Heather touches him on the arm. “Wait, baby.” He explained his family to Heather last night, in the long rush of shared backstories between them.

Peggy says, “I know your feelings about him.”

She hesitates once more.

“At least listen,” Heather says.

“I don’t blame you,” Peggy says. “I’m free to say that now. I don’t blame you at all. For anything. You had to deal with his feelings about you.”

Jimmy sets the bags down.

“They weren’t
my
feelings. You have always been my son, who I love. You always will be. But I was married to your father, who I loved. I was his wife.”

Peggy begins to weep.

Her tears are for the man she loved, for his vanishing from this earth and from her life, for that loss. They are also in release—they are even in relief—at his vanishing from her life, for that loss. They are in guilt for that relief. The tears are also for the love of him, for the thrill that faded but never vanished at his unexpected smile and at the trailing of his fingertips along her neck whenever he passed unexpectedly behind her, though she always feigned a leap of ticklish discomfort, knowing that was necessary to induce him to continue the gesture through the years. The tears are for that necessity too. And the tears are from the belief that there is a next life as the Holy Catholic Church describes it and that he won’t do so well in that regard.
They are also for herself, for having to lie and manipulate to maintain the coherence and happiness of the family; for having to do these venial sins on so many occasions that she has consequently neglected to sufficiently acknowledge them, much less reconcile them, in the sacrament of confession; that she will not do so well herself, therefore, in the next life. The tears are for the possibility that in the place where those sins must be dealt with, she will find herself once again wed to William Quinlan, and the struggle will resume in much the same way. And the tears are for Jimmy as well. So he can understand that things have changed. That he can come home. That he has always been her son, whom she loves. Because she does truly love him. Which is to say, in part, that her happiness is not fully possible without his being happy, though she cannot rest assured he is happy unless it is in a way she herself can recognize. And manage. So as she weeps, she does not hang up. She does not take the phone away from her mouth. And she takes care to weep loudly enough that the phone message will not cut off.

Heather is moved by her tears. “Can’t you speak to her?” she says.

“No,” Jimmy says. Though he recognizes how drastically things have changed in the past thirty-six hours. How in this chosen country of his, a vast and leveling snow has fallen over his convictions about family, about connectedness. He awoke to that yesterday. He dreamt of it and he woke to it. Convictions constructed and refined again over five decades have been overwhelmed as if overnight. And a new conviction, seemingly as strong, has bloomed over the same night: his love for this
woman before him who was not even born when he exiled himself from the United States. He has either been something of a self-delusional fool through most of his life or he has suddenly become a fool of an old man; or both; or neither.

Heather says, “So many of her generation were loyal wives before everything else.”

Jimmy thinks:
So many of mine accept instant love. With no exclusions, age included.

He wants to hold Heather close.

Peggy’s tears are snubbing to a stop.

Jimmy opens his arms and Heather falls into them.

Peggy says, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. This is a difficult time. But if some good can come of this. If I could see you. Wouldn’t it be a closure for you as well? For us all.”

She pauses.

“Whatever you decide, my darling,” Heather says.

Jimmy does not move.

“Just in case,” Peggy says. “Tillotson’s Funeral Home in Tallahassee. The wake begins at six Monday evening. The funeral’s at ten on Tuesday morning. Please think about it.”

She pauses one last time.

Jimmy waits for more drama from his mother. More tears. Effusive avowals of love, in spite of her sticking by the man who rejected Jimmy to his dying day. But instead she says, “Let’s put him in the ground, my son. Together. We both need that.”

And she hangs up.

Peggy has made her phone call to Jimmy from the kitchen, with Darla sitting at the dining table beneath the pass-through. She’d emerged from the bedroom a few minutes before, after sleeping for several hours.

“I’m glad you could rest,” Darla said.

“I feel clearer about things,” Peggy said.

“I ordered Chinese while you were sleeping. Plenty of it. Can I warm some for you?”

“No, honey. I’m fine.”

“Tea?”

“I have a call to make before anything,” Peggy said. The second phone was in the bedroom from which she’d just emerged, but she moved past Darla and into the kitchen.

Darla handled the papers in front of her but did not see a thing. Naturally she listened. Till Peggy suggested to her long-lost son that they put William in the ground together and hung up.

Darla sets the papers down. No faking. She waits.

A cabinet door opens. Pots clatter. The door closes. Water runs. A pot lands on a metal stove burner. “I’ve changed my mind about tea,” Peggy says. “You want some?”

“Thanks,” Darla says. “Yes.”

A few minutes later Peggy emerges with a tea service on a tray and she leads Darla to the couch, putting the tray before them on the coffee table.

In this quotidian matter they are equally imprinted by the old school of female propriety, so they hold both saucer and cup to eliminate the unseemly stretch to the coffee table. They sip and sip again in silence.

Darla has never felt particularly close to Peggy. She has witnessed the woman’s poses and dramas—experienced them, indeed, as lies and manipulations—for as long as they’ve known each other. But Peggy’s words to Jimmy and her clear intention for Darla to overhear them and now simply her silence over tea somehow don’t feel like manipulations. This feels like a different Peggy.

So Darla puts her cup and saucer on the coffee table, and she says, “Why did you let me hear that conversation?”

As the woman’s face turns to her, Darla still expects the old Peggy. A look of faux surprise perhaps.
Did I? I’m so stricken I wasn’t even thinking.

Instead, Peggy offers Darla a quick but restrained smile. “I wanted to share my clarity with you,” she says.

Darla’s surprise is genuine. She masks it, and says nothing.

Peggy stretches to the coffee table, puts down her own cup and saucer, and sits back. She lays her hands side by side on her lap, as if this revelation was expected and what follows has been thought out.

She says, “I hope I didn’t sound harsh. I loved Bill. I’m going to cry over him again and again in the coming weeks. Please don’t doubt the sincerity of those tears. But Jimmy needed to hear this other part of it.”

“I understand,” Darla says.

“Men have their ways,” Peggy says. “How they communicate with each other. How they bond. My husband and yours, for instance. Their father-and-son bond was so strong. But after all, they both went to war. Is this why men make wars, do you suppose? To share something like that? Is it the only way they can truly feel close to each other?”