Perfume River (22 page)

Peggy pauses, as if she wants Darla’s opinion on this. Darla sees her Confederate men sitting around the barbershop through a long, hot summer afternoon, getting drunk on Old Forester and war stories, as their women sit in a parlor, sipping blueberry shrub and writing their impassioned prose.

But before Darla can say
Yes, you may be right
, Peggy says, “Jimmy never had that. As a man, he had to know instinctively what he was giving up when he went to Canada. That may have been the hardest thing about what he did. I feel free now to fully respect him. For his courage to walk away from what sons usually want.”

This all strikes Darla as sincere. She covers one of Peggy’s hands with her own.

Peggy looks Darla in the eyes, holds the gaze quietly. Then she says, “I feel like I’ve always been held back from you as well. You’re my daughter. Truly you are.”

Even as the woman invokes a newly liberated self, a frank and direct self, Darla hears this as the old Peggy, hears a lie crafted to serve a false image of the family. A newly revised, freshly reconstructed image, sans patriarch. But then she thinks
No.
Peggy’s eyes do not waver in the following silence. The woman may well feel this way about her. But to Darla, Peggy
has never felt like a mother. Not even close. And now Peggy’s unwavering eyes themselves—the very sincerity of them, if sincere they be—seem like a mode of manipulation. These eyes expect Darla to proclaim a corresponding daughterly feeling about her. Even if it’s a lie.

Darla does find this to say about her daughterhood: “I intend to be a good one.” Not that this isn’t also more or less a lie, knowing, as she does, Peggy’s standards for a good daughter.

Peggy turns her hand to Darla’s, palm to palm, meshes their fingers. She chuckles. A willed chuckle, brittle with rue. And she says, “Why did God choose to surround me with men all my life? Gracious me. I would have been such a good mother to a daughter.” She lets that sit between them for a moment. Then she gently squeezes their entwined hands and says, “I feel ever so close to you, my dear.”

Darla has exerted her own will to keep from imagining a lifetime as Peggy’s actual daughter. And she doesn’t believe this climactic declaration for a moment. But she accepts it with her own little squeeze.

Peggy doesn’t need belief, doesn’t even try to assess that. Acceptance of her assertion is all she seeks. But she does hear the plunk of one more venial sin dropping into her bucket.
Ah well
, she thinks.
It can’t be helped.

When Darla finds Robert, he is sitting in his office, in his desk chair, before his computer showing an Apple icon doing an endless Pong bounce. After calling for him from the foyer and hearing his answer from up here, she has approached quietly. His door was open. Before he knows she’s there, she stands for a long moment, feeling tender about the back of his head, his overcast-gray hair going shaggy at the collar.

Finally, she says, “Hey.”

He looks over his shoulder, turns a little in his swivel chair. “Hey. How is she?”

Darla crosses to him.

He stays seated.

“She’s doing remarkably well,” she says.

“Good.”

She nods at the screen saver. “You’ve been like this for a while.”

He turns back to the bounce of the bitten apple, as if to confirm what she’s said. “It’s been a long day.”

He stares for a few more moments.

“I’m so sorry,” she says.

She lays her hand on his shoulder.

“Thanks,” he says.

He doesn’t move.

“Better to sleep in bed,” she says. “With your eyes closed.”

He rises.

They say little else until they are beside each other beneath the covers.

No Kindle.

No iPod.

Darla’s lingering tenderness for Robert stops the grating in her, leads her quickly to the cusp of sleep. As her longing drifts into vagueness on its way to unconsciousness, it offers a final, spoken “If there’s anything I can do” even as she sees her own dead father’s face pause over his lifted soup spoon, his vast and shaggy brows rising, and he says,
You will grow old simply canvassing for Democrats and bloviating at dinner parties, doing far less for the world than the manufacture of a fine sausage
, and she remains mute before him, mute but eloquent on the red fields of sausage, a woman fair and faithful, and Robert, his head shaved into whitewalls, takes her in his arms for the first time and there are so many things she does not know about him, so many things she need not know in order to love him.

“You’ve already done it,” Robert says, in answer to her sleepy-voiced offer. “Thank you.” And he turns onto his side, away from his wife, falling toward sleep himself, and the homeless man sits across the table and he asks,
Did you go to war
, and Robert answers,
I went to Vietnam
, and the man says,
Show me your scars
, and Robert raises his hand to his forehead and he finds a bandage there and he works his fingertips under its edge and he rips it away.

The handouts bite Bob on the ass. That and the Murat being closed for refurbishing into a Budgetel. The other Vietnam vet had to put him in The Sojourner, near the bus station, a sizable step down from the Murat, it being the only other place that would take him. Which might’ve been okay, for the sake of warmth and a sure bed, except for the handouts. Only yesterday Bob acquired new blood-of-the-lamb clothes from skin outward and a full-gospel shower and even a coating of goddamn talcum powder, so after he walks into this room and hangs up his Goodwill coat and sweater on the clothes rack and places his Glock on the nightstand and stacks the pillows for his head and takes off his shoes and lies down beside the pistol and looks up at the ceiling, Bob discovers that the shower and the clothes and the talcum have separated him from his own stink sufficiently so he can smell the stink of the motel—the musty smell of roaches and air conditioner mold in the air, and a couple decades of cigarette smoke and spilled food and spilled spunk and women smells in the carpet and drapes and bedspreads—and all this puts him in another motel room and he’s sixteen years old and he’s traveling with his father because his mother has had enough, which she’s had a couple of times already, and she’s gone off to Wheeling to see her sister for an indefinite period and Calvin has decided he and Private Weber need to get out of town, need to go hunting up in the mountains, and on the way they find this cheap motel room, but it’s got one beat-up luxury, a television, and Calvin makes the mistake of turning it on. A big
mistake, because it’s April 30, 1975. The picture flickers and flips into focus just in time for Harry Reasoner to say,
The Viet Cong flag is flying over the Presidential Palace in Saigon today just a few hours after the South Vietnamese government announced its unconditional surrender.
And Calvin jumps up from where he’s sitting on the foot of the bed and he says, just once, real low:
Motherfuck.
After that he’s just pacing and glancing at the screen and not making a sound, which backs Bob up against the headboard and tucks him tight and scares the shit out of him more than if his old man was raging full-voiced, because once more it’s all about the things he’s not saying, the things he knows that men have to face down, and Bob understands that it’s got to do with killing and being killed and your buddies being killed, of course, but it’s not that simple and maybe what makes it complicated
can’t
be said,
has
to stay a secret, so it’s forever a black hole you carry in the center of you, swallowing everything, not just the killing and the being killed but the living on, swallowing your whole fucking life as well, it’s about voices and laughter through a wall when you damn well know there’s nothing to laugh about and there are no words to say, and so the old man is pacing back and forth saying nothing while on the TV Americans in civvies and Vietnamese with their women and children are crowding into buses and then running to helicopters and then a door gunner on a chopper is looking down on the roofs of Saigon and then it’s roofs along a beach and then it’s the sea and a voice on the TV is saying,
The helicopter passed
over small fleets of boats leaving the coastal city of Vung Tau
and Calvin stops pacing abruptly at this and whirls to the screen and then he backs away from it and now he’s across the room and he’s got his Winchester 70 and he squares around to the TV and it’s nighttime on the screen and a tall man in a suit and sunglasses with his hair flying shakes hands with admirals in ball caps and the voice is saying it’s Ambassador Graham Martin stepping from a Marine helicopter onto the deck of the command ship
Blue Ridge
and he’s closing the final chapter on America in Vietnam and Calvin works the bolt on his Winchester, chambering a round, and the voice from the TV says,
When this correspondent asked what his feelings were, Martin would only say that he was hungry
, and Calvin whips the rifle up on his shoulder and Bob turns his face away and the room explodes. And how long does he go on after that, the old man? A little over two years. Quieter than ever, even when drunk. So quiet that Bob’s mother, who’s come back, seems almost happy. So quiet that Bob feels it’s okay to slip out one night and hit the road and end up in Texas for day labor and landscaping and restaurant work, okay to be a West Virginia wetback. And one night the old man himself slips out. He heads into the pines behind the trailer park and chambers a round in his Winchester and sticks the muzzle in his mouth and blows off the back of his head and all his secrets with it.

Framed tastefully in brick and Portland pilasters, Tillotson Funeral Home’s floodlit marquee beacons into the evening dark:

William Quinlan
Husband, Father, Veteran
Visitation 6 to 9 PM

Two hundred feet away, up the landscaped parking lot, Tillotson’s wide, double-winged, hip-roofed Georgian house is similarly lit. In the front foyer a grandfather clock begins to strike six.

As it does: In the visitation extension behind the main house, Peggy is alone at last. She stands before the buffet table, the caterers for casseroles and cold cuts just departed through the rear porte cochere, and her church-lady friends busy cleaning up out of sight in the Tillotson kitchen. They have chatteringly helped her with the Irish stew and the Irish potato soup, which steam now in their own special row of food warmers. Peggy thanks Mary the Holy Mother of God for this moment of quiet. Robert and Darla turn in at the marquee. Darla thinks of those very women—Peggy and her friends from church—and that very row of food warmers, with Peggy putting on her
birth-name-is-Pegeen
persona to make Irish food; and she thinks how much Peggy wanted her to be part of that project, the two of them bonding in the Quinlan family’s reconfiguration, with the church ladies as witness; and Darla thinks how she should probably feel guilty at having declined Peggy’s invitation but
how, in fact, she does not. Not in the least. Robert focuses his thoughts on the Georgian house itself, built in 1922 by Horace Naylor in the Great Florida Land Boom, lost by Horace Naylor in 1926 in the Great Florida Land Bust, restored for the benefit of the dead and their kin by Howard Tillotson in 1934, and repeatedly expanded and modernized by two generations of Tillotsons to follow. Robert is, of course, a historian. And he happens to live in the middle of a city that sits in the middle of many of his interests. But even as he sees the personal excesses of the house’s speculator builder in the half dozen two-story Corinthian front columns, Robert recognizes that his mind is simply trying to avoid his father’s face as it waits for him in an open casket inside. A mile away, heading east on Apalachee Parkway, Jimmy is driving a rented Impala to the funeral home from a room in the downtown DoubleTree. Heather is beside him. Just before stepping out of their hotel room, Jimmy stopped Heather and suggested they simply close the door, have an ironic night of sex and HBO, and then go back to Canada; and Heather reminded Jimmy of the conclusion they’d struggled to together in Toronto, that he’s seeking closure not renewal and if things go badly they can escape at any time. Jimmy knows that conclusion was grossly oversimplified, but he can’t begin to say what the full truth is, except that even though it brought him here, it is now urging him to turn around and go home. They have been silent in the car. Heather lays her hand on Jimmy’s thigh. He puts his hand on top of hers. And they pass Bob, a dark and bundled figure striding along the sidewalk, also heading east, silhouetted against the
neon of a liquor store. Sometime in the deep predawn dark of this morning Tallahassee turned cold, and it’s been cold all day long, and it is cold tonight, and Bob has a score to settle. So he pushes his aching knees and he accepts the radiating pain from knee to back to mouth, his remaining teeth throbbing with each step. He accepts this pain on the way to the Blood of the Lamb Full Gospel Church, accepts it because he wants to be waiting in the groundskeeper’s storage room when the nameless faceless coward returns. Bob has something more effective than a garden tool for him. Bob touches just below and to the side of his heart, touches his coat where, inside, his Glock waits.

Robert and Darla step between the center columns, past Cracker Barrel rockers deployed along the portico right and left, through the front doors, and into the hushed, condoling greeting of two black-suited Tillotsons tanned like winter corpses. One of them breaks off and leads Robert and Darla across the welcome foyer, past a spiral staircase, through a doorway, and into the visitation room foyer. Here they cross a dense Oriental rug toward an open double-wide doorway as William Quinlan floats brightly, unsettlingly out of the dark at Jimmy, who averts his eyes. He steadies himself in the empty lane ahead of him and then glances up the long, dim expanse of parking lot to the funeral home. There seem to be very few cars. He does not pull in but accelerates past.

“We’re too early,” he says. “I don’t want to be the center of attention.”

“That’ll be hard to avoid,” Heather says.

“Not in a crowd.”

“So we’ll take a little drive,” she says.