He resists all of these.
And perhaps for that very reason, perhaps because he refuses to choose one of these superficial, calculated things, what he does say is from quite a different part of him. “If you want to slap him across the face, feel free.”
They turn and goggle at each other.
Neither can think of a thing to say.
They look back to William.
Robert reboots. “Well, there he is.”
“There he is.”
“Was it worth the trip?”
“Not yet.”
“Is there anything I can do?” Robert asks this with a little surge of animation, a vague impulse, which he stifles to offer forward his hands. He even finds himself about to say, I’m glad you came, but he doesn’t want to stir up Jimmy’s scorn. He’s lived with a bellyful of scorn these past few days and he wants to keep things calm with his brother.
Jimmy says, “Answer a question if you can, without looking around.”
“All right.”
“Where’s our mother?”
“She’s taking a few minutes alone. I can get her. She’d be only too glad …”
“No.” Jimmy says it sharply. He softens his tone but with it justifies his sharpness: “That’s why I didn’t want you to look around.”
“So there’s something I can do,” Robert says. “Help you slip out unnoticed.”
The words could be construed as sarcastic. Would have been in the life they lived together before each went away. But Robert has also softened his tone.
“I haven’t decided yet,” Jimmy says. “I may.”
Still another matter of tone. This fastidious one in Jimmy makes a warmth rise in Robert, from his cheeks and into his temples, replacing sympathy with pissoffedness.
“Look, Jimmy,” he says, but quietly, calmly. “Why don’t I just slip away and let you do what you need to do. If Mom appears I’ll run interference for you. Distract her so you can get the hell away.”
Jimmy sucks a breath, pulls back ever so slightly.
Robert thinks: It was the ‘get the hell away.’ All right. All right. I’m not in the mood. Let’s get it on, brother.
But Jimmy says, “I’m sorry. I sounded arrogant. I’m here because I want to be here. But it’s complicated.”
Robert feels animated again. He may need to slip away for his own sake, just to stop the mood swings. He says, “I get it. Not a problem. It’s always been complicated.”
He looks at William. It wasn’t such a crazy thing to say. About the slap. It was Jimmy’s fretfully clasped hands. He says, “Not long before you appeared, I stood here and I thought about him waking up and daring me to punch him in the face.”
“Did you do it?”
“No.”
“Not even in your head?”
A beat of silence between them now. And another.
“No,” Robert says. “Wish I could’ve. But it’s just a corpse.”
Another silence.
But brief. For Jimmy, this too is spoken from an impulse. “We should make a pact,” he says. “We’ll fight no fights from the past. If we get angry at each other it needs to be about something right in front of us.”
“Man, I agree with that,” Robert says. “But the past is all you and I have. If we’re going to speak at all, things may come up. But not to argue them.”
“Fair enough,” Jimmy says. “And this can’t be a sentimental agreement. It’s not mindless make-nice. You know what I mean?”
“I do.” Robert offers his hand.
Jimmy takes the hand.
They shake.
The thought of adding their other hands to the ones shaking occurs to both men but only in the abstract, only to be recognized as sentimental and set aside.
When they let go of their hands, Jimmy says, “I’m going to test our pact right away. I came here because of a dead father. But it’s not just about him. Maybe not about him very much at all anymore.”
Jimmy hesitates. He hasn’t planned this. Never imagined relating it to his brother. But he’s glad for the chance. He says, “You were precocious when we were kids. And I think you had something dark in you. Can I ask? Did you go off to Vietnam to face death? Did you have to get into the very presence of death to figure it out? Is that what I didn’t recognize about what you did?”
This is not the question Robert expected. He wants the answer to be Yes. To square himself with Jimmy. To put his motives beyond the criticism of his father, who would never understand such a thing. But the answer isn’t yes. Isn’t even partially yes. He says, “Since we’ve agreed not to argue the past, is it possible for us also to be entirely honest?”
Jimmy waggles his head a little at this sudden complexity. “Good question. At least we need to try. Otherwise you might as well just go ahead and help me get the hell out of here. But perhaps we can have it both ways, eh?”
“Perhaps,” Robert says. “So then. No. I didn’t go off to face death. Not at all.”
And he thinks: Simply that much honesty may not result in an argument, but it will preserve, everlastingly, the estrangement between us. And he knows: I can say the thing that the man lying next to us nearly took to his grave. A thing Robert would just as soon take to his. Do I want a brother? If Robert says no more, he will lose Jimmy forever. If he speaks fully, Jimmy might have a way to understand him, even in light of his own drastic deed of the sixties. Do I want this man for my brother?
Perhaps.
Robert says, “You were right long ago. It was all about Pops. About winning his love. You were smart to give up trying. I can see that now. I didn’t go to Vietnam to confront death. I did everything I could to avoid it. Not to see it. Certainly not to inflict it. I voluntarily enlisted so I could choose an army job. A deep-in-a-hole faux research job. And in doing that, I destroyed the thing I wanted most from Pops. I got its opposite. He’d expected me to go off eagerly to the killing, as he had. So he despised me for the rest of his life. Silently. I never knew. Not till he told me himself the afternoon before he died.”
Robert finds himself relieved not to take that to his own grave. Even if Jimmy doesn’t get it.
Robert turns his face away, in the only direction possible. To his father. To the death mask of his father. Concerning his brother, Robert thinks, I don’t trust him. But he’s the only person alive who can possibly understand. The only other son of my only father.
“Bobby.”
Robert looks back to his brother. Jimmy stopped calling him that before they were teenagers.
For Jimmy, though what seems to be happening here is new to him, though the army part mitigates his worst assumptions about Robert, his mind could easily swirl on now in its accustomed way. With no mitigations possible once you become part of the war machine. With the established legacy of his father’s blows and Robert’s silence. But the other part of all this surges in him: their shared father, who betrayed them both. And Jimmy thinks: Do I want a brother?
And he says, “I didn’t know any of that. Never imagined.”
Then a pause between them.
Long enough for Robert to turn a corner in his head and find another abyss to leap across. But I did confront death: I inflicted it.
This he cannot tell his brother.
Jimmy says, “If I were you — if I were the big brother — I probably would’ve courted the old man the same way. At least you kept the blood off your hands. I hope I would’ve been smart enough to do it the way you did.”