Robert embraces this understanding. And with it returns the moment at a corner table in the bar on Magazine Street when it was late enough and they both were lubricated enough and the lights in the place were localized enough and dim enough that he and his father seemed all alone in a dark recess, but there was still enough light from somewhere that when his father turned his face slightly, Robert saw the man’s eyes beginning to fill and he thought to reassure him, even though Pops surely understood already, from his own war and from what Robert had just said about his job and duties in Vietnam, but Robert was moved by his father’s worry, and he added, “It’s all right. I’ve got a job inside the wire. I’ll be safe in Vietnam. It’ll be like research. I’ll get home safe.” His father did not speak, did not turn back to him, and the tears that had come to his eyes began to fall. Robert had never seen his father weep. Robert could easily have wept then as well, but he was keenly aware that the pride and appreciation in his father’s tears would be diminished by tears of his own. Robert needed to maintain the composure of a soldier. And he did. He cut the tears off, and he waited for his father to be himself again. Which, slowly, silently, the man became, and they drank some more and then some more, and they did not speak to each other again of war. Not on that evening. Not ever. Not about their personal experience of it.
But now.
As a seventy-year-old Robert finds himself as needy and eager to please this man as an adolescent. So he edges his chair as close to the bed as he can. He leans toward his father. He says, “Whether it’s over politics or over religion, it all comes down to whatever nasty gene humans carry that makes us go to war. But once a war’s on, it takes warfare to stop it. From a distance both sides on a battlefield look alike. That doesn’t mean one of them isn’t justified in being there.”
Though animated by his teenage self, Robert has spoken in the voice of the man he is. And he has heard himself. He thinks: I don’t believe half of that. Not in the way it came out. And his fuller belief hurtles through him, that the very waging of a righteous war, even the very winning of that war, can trigger the dark gene. So the winners go on to fight unrighteous wars. And maybe that’s the real gene that causes all the trouble. The one encoded for righteousness. Politics and religion and just the pure waging and winning of wars all share that.
But it makes no difference. The Robert who edged his chair toward his father didn’t want to make a nuanced point. His intention was deeper and simpler. Two men. Sharing what they did, what they are. That Robert finds his voice now: “Pops, it’s okay. For us both. We had to go to war. You and I did what we could.”
And this turns Pops’s face back to him.
They look at each other.
Robert waits.
William struggles with something. Then he says, “I’ve held this inside for a long time.”
He pauses.
Robert quickens.
And William says, “I lost one son utterly.”
Jimmy.
Robert regrets that it has to be in contrast to his brother, but he longs for what’s next so much that he puts this regret aside. He even draws a good breath now at how Jimmy has made him even more important to his father.
And William says, “So I’ve held my tongue. But the truth is you didn’t go to war. You went through the motions. But you turned it into graduate school. You contrived a comfortable place on the edge of the action to go study. You didn’t even let the army decide your fate. You wangled your safe little job with a pre-enlistment deal and avoided the real thing. You told all the others who manned up, ‘Better you do the dirty work, not me. Better your blood than mine.’”
Robert falls back in his chair in enervated stillness. He would rise, he would go, but he remains.
His father says, “And look where you put me. What could I have said to you? How could I argue for my son to risk death? How could I do that to your mother? And what would it say about you, that I should have to talk you into it? You already chose.”
William stops talking.
He keeps his eyes on Robert.
Robert is looking at the distant tops of the pines.
“I probably should have taken this to my grave,” William says.
Robert does not reply. He thinks he sees the trees quaking. Even from this distance. The wind must be strong today.
“It’s all over anyway,” William says.
Robert turns to his father. “I’m sorry I disappointed you.”
He regrets saying this. He should argue the point. Or he should rise and go without speaking. He should not give a damn what his father thinks. They are both old men. But he has said it. And now, though he regrets this even more, he waits for his father to dispute him: No, Robert. No not at all. I’m not disappointed. I’ve come to be glad. Glad you’re alive. Your brother’s act is my only shame. You did go to Vietnam, after all. I’m proud of you.
But his father says nothing of the sort. He has already made himself clear.
Tet comes to mind.
But Robert has never said a word about what haunts him. His father would only be critical of that. Of course the scholar, having tried to create his comfortable little place, would be haunted by an act that any real soldier, any real man, would have understood as necessary, inevitable, righteous. Would have done proudly.
When Hue was secure and the men queued through one long night for a phone call home, Robert told his parents only that he was okay. MACV was not overrun. He was safe.
And later, when the family was safely reunited in America, there were no Vietnam war stories. None offered. None sought. As it had been, mostly, for his father and his war. Robert convinced himself that his own silence was another thing that bound him to his father, that made the man proud.
And now Robert’s words hang in the air between them. Robert looks away from this man. Back to the trees, the sky.
William isn’t speaking.
Robert finally looks at him.
His father’s eyes are squeezed shut. He is writhing minutely in physical pain. Silently.
“I’ll get the nurse,” Robert says.
He rises. He walks out of the room. He stops at the nurses’ station and tells the first nurse who looks at him that William Quinlan is hurting.
Then he goes down in the elevator and crosses the lobby and pushes through the door and finds his car and gets in.
He sits for a moment quaking like the tops of the pines all around him.
And he drives away.
Darla sits at her desk, fingers poising over her keyboard and then falling away, again and again, trying to signify with her words what it was that she felt before the Confederate monument yesterday, what it was that she understood; but trying first to distinguish her understanding from her feeling; and as she fails at that, trying to decide whether trying to distinguish understanding from feeling isn’t, in fact, a fallacy, whether the very act of intellectualizing what was signified by the monument doesn’t, in fact, miss the whole point. Which brings her to the kiss. The kiss she gave her husband this morning.
She parted her lips to him. But she placed the kiss on his cheek. Would she have preferred his lips? Yes. Is that preference associated with her fingertips poised but inoperative once again over the keyboard? Perhaps. Yes. After her communion yesterday with the fair and faithful ladies of nineteenth-century Florida, the ardor of her lips longed this morning for Robert’s mouth. But she understood him: With his father on his mind, it was hardly the right moment. Her thought trumped her feeling.
Her hands fall.
Still, if she’d kissed him on the lips would she have the right words now for this thing her ladies built?