As Darla approaches she is surprised to find her own body trilling a little at the longings signified in the part of the sculpture hidden behind the crown of the magnolia. But even with her empathy already engaged, in the next few moments, as the centerpiece of the memorial becomes visible, it is difficult for her to see the thing in terms other than those that make for easy, companionable, derisive twenty-first-century laughter: a monumental shaft rises long and straight there, condomed in a Confederate battle flag, showing itself to her suddenly from behind the tree like a Johnny Reb dropping his pants, his man-part ready for action, its condition even captioned in marble at the base: ERECTED 1899. Erected still, a hundred and fifteen years later, in perpetual frustration.
She draws near the monument.
She grows still inside.
This is not just about facile Freudianism.
The frustration commemorated here is real and deep and human. It is not simply the outcome of a failed political cause but of failed human connection. These were women trapped in a male-driven time and culture that both inflamed and suppressed their passions, intellectual and physical. Inflamed and suppressed and thus redirected and inflated them.
And these were women whose men were savaged and broken and traumatized and distorted and reinvented by war. It is not lost on Darla, as she stands before the western face of the monument, that she is herself part of just such a generation of women.
And without votes, without clear forms of influence, but in bodies and minds roiling with nascent independent identities and with passions that cried out for self-driven expression, these nineteenth-century Southern women created clubs. Became clubwomen. To think and feel and organize together. History clubs and travel clubs and library clubs. Improvement clubs and betterment clubs and advancement clubs. A Ladies’ Memorial Association. The Daughters of the Confederacy. And in this town, as in almost every other town, a literary club. Darla could see the women of the Jefferson Country Literary Club convening in the parlor of one of their Carpenter Classic homes on a weekday afternoon, just the women, in shirtwaists and Newport knots, sitting together, dreaming together, creating words together, writing them down, these purplish, engorged, sublimating words before which she now stood.
Let this testimonial of woman’s deathless fidelity to man’s imperishable valor speak to the sons and daughters of this Southland for all time to come.
Darla stops reading.
She sits up and it is very dark. She and Robert have been living together for less than a week. He is beside her in the bed. She struggles to disentangle her mind from a trivial dream and to animate her sleep-heavy limbs, but her hearing is fully awake and she recognizes a snubbing of sobs in him and then a strangled gasping and then a wrenching in the dark and his body moving. The sounds that woke her dissipate, and only a heavy, trembling breathing remains. She can make out Robert’s body, sitting now, turned with his back to her.
She lifts her hand, hesitates, moves it to him, touches his shoulder.
He starts.
“Sorry,” she whispers.
He stands abruptly.
But he does not move off.
He breathes heavily, and then not at all, and then a little less heavily, making an effort to control himself.
He lies back down.
He does not explain, not even to say he’s had a bad dream.
Not on this night, not ever in the decades to come, does he speak of the nightmares of their first couple of years together.
She’s not supposed to be party to them. But surely she knows them well enough. They are of Vietnam. They are of what he has seen, what he has done.
This first time, he’s been out of the army for barely four months. Is she moved on that night to think of his imperishable valor? No. Right and wrong are clear to her at age twenty-three: Perhaps he stood against the horrors he faced in Vietnam; perhaps he did not run. But for this to be achieved in service to a cause not only lost but utterly wrong, the act would be stripped of anything she’d call courage. His true valor could be found in his having marched with her against their own government. But in her growing fidelity to Robert Quinlan, when he dreams and awakens to his guilt, to his shame, how is she to help him? He has already done whatever it is he has done. She wrestles with all this and then with a rush she has an answer: His valor, expressed by protesting in the streets of Baton Rouge, is even greater for its first having been challenged and wrecked in this unholy war. The longhairs who duck all that and hide and then prance their own righteousness are not half so brave as he.
Darla blinks her way back to Monticello.
The longhairs. Her father’s phrase.
She does not want to consider her father.
She concentrates on the text of the monument.
Let this mute but eloquent marble testify to the enduring hardness of that living human wall of Florida soldiery that stood during four long years of pitiless war — a barrier between our homes and an invading foe.
She is making a familiar argument to her father. “You talk like Ho Chi Minh is threatening to invade Ithaca and march up our shore and into our parlor,” she says. The two of them are sitting on wicker chairs on their front veranda overlooking Cayuga Lake.
Resisting still, Darla turns from the Confederate monument and walks a few yards away, stops beneath a cabbage palm, its lower fronds burnt brown by last week’s freeze.
Her father is here too.
He’s blathering about the domino theory.
Why does she even bother arguing?
As he goes on, she continues for now to accede to the family tradition for discussions: You at least pretend to look at each other. But she can’t believe he’s insulting her intelligence by spouting this nonsense. Demanding she believe that when Vietnam turns communist it will immediately topple to Chinese control and then Cambodia will fall and then Laos and on and on.
She’s heard enough. She says, “Our country is totally ignorant about who it’s dealing with.” This much she says to his face. She is ready to make the case. But the face is so familiar. Once, she voraciously studied every twitch and glint and moue of it for approval. But now Darla’s First Law of Parental Physics has prevailed: Every obsessive daughterly action to find her identity through her father will eventually result in an equal and opposite reaction. The idea of speaking to this face repulses her. And his eyes make it worse. They are the blue of a clear sky starting to go dim on a late-autumn afternoon. They are her eyes.
So on this day, sitting on the veranda of their upstate Queen Anne with a man who is used to being the patriarchal boss, who won’t listen to reason, who spews the domino theory to justify a country gone mad, she breaks with the family tradition.
She lowers her face a bit without taking her eyes off his, just to signal that what she is about to do is conscious and meaningful, and then she turns her head away. She even shifts her shoulder a little in the same direction, to make both points: She is enlightening him and she is turning her back on him. And then, as if to the forest of hemlock and sugar maple that surrounds their house, she says, “Virtually every city and town in Vietnam has a statue of a hero. They all have one thing in common. They honor Vietnamese heroes who threw the invading Chinese out of their country. It’s preposterous to argue that a unified Vietnam will turn into a puppet state for the Chinese. They have two thousand years of invasion and resistance between them.”
Markus Kallas, Darla’s father, grew up in Hell’s Kitchen. As a teenager he helped his storefront-butcher father create and market a sideline of Estonian blood sausage. As a twenty-three-year-old, with his father’s death, he took over the business. As a thirty-year-old he began making his fortune by canning meat and finding a better way to keep it moist through the heat processing. He is old-country, old-school, and self-made. However, with Darla’s words, Markus Kallas — who finds the showing of strong feelings to be unseemly in such a man as he — even Markus Kallas cannot hide an involuntary softening and beaming in his face. In spite of his daughter’s odd and insulting gesture of talking as if to the trees. She’s not like all the rest of that hippie crowd. She has done her homework. She even has the right kind of backbone, stiffened by study and thought. She is old-school. His political opinion does not change because of her reasoning, for he did not reason himself into the opinion, but his feeling for his daughter, in some fundamental way, does. Moments later he layers over his newly altered feeling with the seemly reserve he is devoted to, though the feeling itself will abide till his death on the Taconic Parkway.