“Didn’t you already try to find his phone number?”
“Years ago. But this time, there he was. Not in Toronto anymore. A town called MacTier. It was his voice. I recognized his voice on the answering machine.”
“So you didn’t talk to him directly?”
“No.”
“When did you call him?”
“This morning, though I’ve had the number for a little while. I knew how losing Jimmy continued to hurt your father. Even if he wasn’t talking about it.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“I don’t expect him to call me back. At the end I was too much on your father’s side. How could I not be? But it wasn’t so bad between the two of you, was it?”
“Bad enough.”
“Still.” Peggy picks up her purse from beside her and opens it and draws out an index card. She offers it to Robert.
He lets it hang there between them.
“Please,” she says. “His number. He may listen to you.”
“I’m not sure it’s a good thing, even if Dad wants it.”
“For me then.” The throb in her voice sounds genuine.
Still Robert doesn’t take the card.
A figure appears in Robert’s periphery.
“Mrs. Quinlan.” A baritone, but not as warm as you’d expect from the pitch. A scalpel-edged voice. Robert turns to it. A man in blue scrubs, young-seeming somehow but with his managed scruff turning gray and with wrinkling at brow and eyes.
Robert and Peggy rise.
She uses the moment to thrust the index card into Robert’s hand.
He pockets it.
“Dr. Tyler,” Peggy says, “this is my son, Robert.”
He shakes the man’s hand. It feels faintly oily.
“Please sit,” the doctor says.
They do, and Tyler perches on the front edge of a chair set at a right angle to Peggy’s end of the couch.
Robert sees now that Tyler holds a plastic ziplock bag of almonds in the palm of his left hand. The man dips in and takes a few and chews them as he speaks. He lifts the bag a little, to draw attention to it. “Forgive me,” he says. “These are part of my prep. Good protein and good magnesium. To be at my best for Mr. Quinlan.”
Peggy gives him a nod of permission, not that he was asking. “Go right ahead.”
“I have to tell you honestly,” he says, drawing the sentence out slightly so he can look both Robert and his mother in the eyes as he speaks it. He pauses briefly, chewing his almonds, swallowing his almonds, though presumably the intent of the pause is to let these two family members have a moment to prepare themselves for the implied bad news.
It has another effect on Robert, a little to his surprise: He wants to slap the almonds from the man’s hand—eat them in the goddamn elevator on your way to the operating room if you must—and to grab him by the front of his scrubs and shout, Out with it.
Tyler says, “The statistics are not good. Of those who break a hip after the age of eighty, one in two will not live more than six months. And Mr. Quinlan has two complicating factors beyond the hip. His heart issues, of course. And unfortunately, the fall has broken his right wrist. This will make rehab very difficult. We can put the bones back together. But having a man his age on his back for an extended time can lead to fluid buildup, which can lead to complications, most commonly pneumonia or congestive heart failure. We will be vigilant. But you need to know the special risks.”
He is done. He takes more almonds. Robert and Peggy understand that he’s waiting for questions. Does he want them to ask the obvious one? So will he die now?
The doctor will evade.
But he has just said it.
Even Peggy knows this. Her question is simply, “When will we be able to see him?”
“It depends on how things progress this morning,” he says. “But understand he’ll be on morphine at least through tonight. He won’t be fully aware. You can go home and rest. Call us mid-afternoon.”
As if simultaneously hearing the same cue, they all rise.
They shake hands, and Doctor Tyler is gone.
Robert and Peggy do not move, do not speak. They struggle to absorb the official version of a prognosis they both already knew well enough, from common knowledge. Now it’s personal, however.
Finally Peggy says, “I came in a cab. Can you take me home?”
“Of course.”
Her eyes are full of tears and she steps to Robert and now the two of them hug with no bend at the waist, with quiet hands upon each other’s back, with no artifice or mulled memories or sense of family failures. They hold each other quietly, mother and son, and though Robert is a man capable of them, he finds he has no tears to shed.
At their kitchen table, Jimmy sits facing the window, the afternoon shadows bluing the snow. Behind him Linda is making chamomile tea. He stares at the darkening bluff of white pine. He’s also standing in the center of his parents’ kitchen in New Orleans. Robert is nearby, in his uniform, ready to go fight in an unholy war to please the man Jimmy’s been furiously arguing with about the issues of the United States’ bloody interference in Vietnam. An argument that has kept Robert in the room, their mother having fled, after taking care to turn off all the pots on the stove. Robert did not flee but he hasn’t said a word. He’s just standing there. If he’s ready to go kill for their father’s disastrously distorted patriotism, he should at least be ready to argue the justifications. He may have found some semblance of physical courage to decide to go — likely to vanish when the reality of the carnage is upon him — but he is an intellectual coward.
But no. That’s present-day thinking. At the time, Jimmy has some crazy little hope. He and his brother talked about these very issues a couple of hours ago. Just the two of them. In the midst now of the old man’s fury, Jimmy has a fragmentary hope about Robert’s silence, that their own discussion — civilized compared with this present one — had opened his brother’s mind.
Jimmy is weary from the fight. He is all shouted out. His father seems weary too. They have both suddenly fallen silent, standing nose to nose, breath to breath, but Jimmy finds one more point to make. Voice pitched low, the sudden quiet after all the noise making it seem even more emphatic, he says: “The real heroes in all this are the men and women who’ve said No to their country. Instead of becoming part of an illegal and murderous war, they’ve gone to jail or gone into exile. Those are the real heroes.”
The blow comes quick. Jimmy doesn’t even feel it the first time, not the slap itself, only a force, a pressure flipping his head to the side.
Though he knows what’s happened.
He brings his face back just as quick.
The eyes before him, his father’s eyes, are seething.
The next blow he feels, a flare of pain shooting up through his temples and down to the roots of his teeth, and his face turns and his brother appears and his brother’s eyes are upon him and upon this pain and upon their father and Jimmy’s eyes lock on Robert’s, and there is only quiet around them and there is only this moment of their eyes, holding, and Jimmy realizes that in spite of the clash of their philosophies and their politics, in spite of a childhood strewn with older-brother petty cruelties — he was himself guilty, after all, of younger-brother cruelty — in spite of one of them being not just the older but the favored son and one of them being the lesser son, the redundant son, in spite of all that, Jimmy finds he now expects something of his brother, expects the bond of shared blood and shared tribulation of family and zeitgeist to pull taut and to hold.
But these eyes. His brother’s eyes witnessing this defining moment with their shared father. These eyes are empty. They are dead. Behind them is nothing.
The clink now of cup and saucer before Jimmy. The smell of herb and steam and Linda. He is happy for the interruption. But he stares at the cup, decorated with roses, and he has let go of his brother’s eyes and he is facing his father once more and feeling empty himself now, wondering if there will be another blow from this man, but wondering this from a great distance, and his father’s mouth is moving, shaping words Jimmy does not hear.