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?”
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.