Robert left money on the table and went out into the street, thinking: No. That’s the stuff he and his pals take for granted. Bingen was a story made for fucking with the minds of a couple of little boys.
You share a war in one way. You pass it on in another.
All this swifts through Robert, though in his father’s room at Archbold Memorial Hospital he is washed by its wake.
But small talk prevails for the moment. He says, “How do you feel?”
William snorts. “Better a few hours ago.” He groans and gingerly shifts his shattered arm, which lies between them. “For the first time in my life I’m beginning to understand drug addicts.”
“Impossible,” Robert says, and he hears a taint of anger in this. He softens his voice. “How’d that come about?”
“Twenty-four hours on morphine and four hours off it,” his father says.
Robert has had, for some years, two modes of conversation with his father. Most of the time he listens, unchallenging, serious of manner, letting his father set the conversational agenda and its tone. Or, occasionally, when he reaches his limit of tolerance for the man’s hypertraditional thinking and right-veering politics and blue-collar attitudinizing, Robert becomes ironic, contrapuntal, engaging with his father but in a manner that tugs at the man’s points as if he could be pulled to the left.
Robert knows he should let this conversation roll out in the most comfortable way for a very old man in a hospital bed with a broken hip and a shattered arm. But he does not. He says, “A little morphine in all the air. It would be wonderfully refreshing for everyone.”
“Are you quoting or just selfishly getting sassy with a badly injured old man?”
“D. H. Lawrence.”
“Was he an addict?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I was always an addict,” his father says. “For the caffeine and the sugar.”
Robert is a little surprised to hear this admission in those terms, even if his father is in a mood to sling the irony back at him. “That’s a serious confession.”
William snorts at this. “Don’t be flip about that. Your mother wanted to get a goddamn priest in here.”
“I take it you said no.” Robert tries to twinkle this. Not very successfully.
William looks at him as if he’s being goaded. Which is closer to the truth. “I told her if she let one in, I’d beat him to death with my cast.”
At this he tries to gesture with his broken arm and barks in pain and then coughs deeply and grindingly, which clenches his body, which further agitates his arm and now even his hip.
Robert puts his hand on his father’s shoulder. “Easy,” he says. The gesture is futile and the coughing and clenching go on, though Robert keeps his hand where it is. “It’ll pass,” he says. “You’re a tough guy,” he says. And finally, “Should I get the nurse?”
William manages a sharp shake of the head. No.
Finally the coughing stops. His body calms. Tears are streaming down William’s face.
He seems unaware of them.
“Fuck,” he says.
Robert finds his hand still on his father’s shoulder. He gives him a gentle squeeze there and withdraws.
“I wouldn’t even be able do it,” his father says. “Goddamn cast isn’t hard enough.”
Things shift in Robert. But to a complicated place. Not to banter. Not to an encouragement to rest. Not to soothing palaver. His father is indeed a tough guy. That Robert believes. But his father may soon be dead.
Robert sits back in his chair.
William is quiet now. He blinks his eyes. His good hand comes up quickly to his face and wipes at the tears. He sees Robert noticing. “From the pain,” he says.
“You shouldn’t let yourself get worked up over her.”
“That’s our life.”
“She’s probably going to try again to get the priest in here.”
“She thinks I’m going to die,” William says, but almost gently. “She says she won’t know who she is without me.”
“Are you beginning to understand her?”
“Drug addicts are easier.” William turns his face away, toward the window.
Then he turns back.
He holds his gaze steadily on Robert. His eyes seem heavy-lidded, as if he’s struggling to keep them open. But the impression is not weariness. These strike Robert as the heavy eyes of sadness. And he feels himself to be the object of the look.
Robert does not ask what’s behind this. Instead, he says, “Were you still a Catholic in Germany?”
William snorts softly. His eyes relax. “You mean, ‘There are no atheists in foxholes’?”
“Something like that.”
“Whoever thought that up was full of shit. Either they were never in a war or were in the priest’s pocket to start with.” William begins carefully to rearrange himself at the shoulders. “Not that I’m an atheist. That’s just another religion.”
He stops arranging. He sucks up the pain.
“Should I get a nurse?” Robert says.
William shakes his head sharply No. He takes a deep breath, and pulling from the shoulder he adjusts his broken arm just a little. He closes his eyes to the pain.
Robert stifles his hands, his voice. He will offer no help. Pops has to be Pops.
When the pain has passed, his father says, “What was it for, my Good War? And what was our national humiliation for?”
He means, by the latter, Robert’s Bad War.
William says, “It only brought us to this fucking world.”
Robert says, softly, “There it is.” The phrase catches him by surprise. He hasn’t used it in decades. It was a meme among the enlisted men in Vietnam. Its meaning slid upon a long continuum from I am content to We’re all fucked. In this case: You said it, brother.
William begins to cough again.
But he stops it. With a sharp intake of breath and a brief flinch of his body and a sneer. A sneer at the cough and at the pain. He takes a moment to let out the breath, fight off a little after-tremor of hacking, and he says, “Who wouldn’t be happy to die tonight? Give me the political wars of the twentieth century any old day. At least your communist or your fascist gave a shit about this present life. The religious wars are going to take us all down. Behead the other guys and blow yourselves up. Sure. If you really read the holy book they believe in — that we all supposedly believe in; the first part of it for all of us is the same book—then what they’re doing makes perfect sense. That book’s full of genocide, on direct order from the Commander in Chief in the Sky. With Moses himself leading the dirty work. Every holy battle gets around to it. Not just by the punks in the ski masks. Even the New Testament believers get around to it. The Catholics and the Pilgrims both had the stake and the torch.”
William falls silent.
Robert has never heard any of this from his father. Was it new? Did it take the breaking of his body for him to come to this? Or did his little band of brothers look up over their coffee and beignets one afternoon and know?
Robert has to work hard now not to put his hand on his father’s hand. The man wouldn’t recognize the gesture, so he dare not. But Pops’s words have fallen upon Robert like a shared thing. Like an understanding between them. Even like a backdoor expression of fatherly pride. Pops went to war. Robert went to war. Both of them came to this.