“I sent her away for coffee and pastry,” Robert says.
“Good,” William says. And then his eyes wander off, as if the exchange has set him thinking.
Why does Robert have the immediate impression he knows what’s on Pops’s mind? Perhaps it’s the recent, vivid reminder of the daily struggle between his father and mother. That and the coffee and pastry. These stir the past in him, not as recollections, but enough to give him his impression as he arrives at his father’s bedside.
What has worked covertly in Robert are two events. In one of them, a decade ago, on an otherwise routine phone call from New Orleans, his mother suddenly sounded real, sounded vulnerable in a way unalloyed with dramatic artifice. Robert had just casually mentioned that Darla was at school for the afternoon.
“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.