Robert needs to get this out of the way before all the others begin to arrive. He turns toward the left-hand wall, where Corinthian half columns flank the casket and ceiling spotlights shine softly down on its contents in what the Tillotsons no doubt have in mind as the gaze from Heaven. The contents at six o’clock, however, are presently blocked from view by the backs of two old men in dark suits. Not Quinlans. Not likely to be Tillotsons. Still. So be it. Get it over with.
Robert touches Darla on the arm. “Give me a minute,” he says.
“Of course,” she says.
He moves off in the direction of the casket, and as he approaches, the two men begin to turn. He realizes who they must be. These veteran faces are different in detail from the beignet boys, but they are the same in wizened ethos. These are Bill’s coffee buddies from the Thomasville chapter of the Greatest Generation.
“You must be his son,” one of them says.
Robert takes the man’s offered hand and says, “Yes, Robert,” thinking, He didn’t say “One of his sons.” Of course not. Jimmy never existed.
But it surprises him that his father acknowledged his existence to these men, given the recent revelation.
He has missed hearing the name of the first veteran and finds himself shaking the hand of the second as the man finishes the last couple of syllables of his. “… field.”
The first vet says, “Harley and me served on the Western Front the same time your dad did.”
“We all had coffee and Dunkin’ Donuts pretty near every week,” Harley says.
“In Thomasville?”
“Yep. He loved his Glazed and his Original Joe.”
“He was very proud of you,” the first man says.
This flips Robert’s face sharply back to him.
Confident he understands the look in Robert’s eyes, the man says: “Not that he said much about your experience. He respected your silence.”
And the second vet says, “But the little he did say … Well, we all understand the tough job and the short life span of infantry lieutenants in Vietnam.” He gives Robert a knowing nod and offers his hand for another shake. “Thank you for your service.”
Robert does not take the hand. If the refusal hurts the man’s feelings, it’s his donut buddy’s lying fucking fault. That wasn’t the service I rendered. I was a cowardly specialist fourth class hiding in a bunker counting beans.
But the man thinks he understands Robert’s hesitation. He straightens up, withdraws the offered shake, and turns it into a salute, holding a strack pose. “Sergeant Harlan Summerfield offers his gratitude, sir.”
Shit. Shit. Robert can’t keep up the rebuff. It’s not this man’s fault. But neither can he explain. So Robert returns the goddamn salute, forced to buy into the lie of his humiliated father, whose body Robert is suddenly, acutely aware of. It’s presently reduced to a chest-to-crotch view by the frame of intervening vets, laid out in his one wearable but outdated suit, a dark gray pinstripe with padded shoulders and wide lapels, his hands crossed over his bowels.
The two men pick up on the shift of Robert’s attention.
“We’ll leave you with him now,” the first one says.
“Just wanted to pay our respects,” the second one says.
Robert is clenching in the chest as if he were about to step out of a banyan tree in the dark.
“Good to meet you,” one or the other of them says.
And the two men step aside and vanish.
Robert moves forward into an aura of dry cleaner perc and mortuary pancake, and he stands alone now in front of his dead father.
Beneath the veneer of a Tillotson tan, William Quinlan’s dumb Sunday-doze face is fixed for eternity, the face that always seemed to Robert, in its own parsimonious way, to allow that nothing was terribly wrong between the two of them. The face that said, without actually saying it: Even though I don’t offer any details, you’re sufficiently okay by me that I can simply sleep in your presence in this apparently unperturbed way.
The old man sleeps that way now. Couched in that lie. But even if he were suddenly to wake, brought back for just a few climactic moments, and if he were to look Robert in the eyes and say to him, I know what you really want to do, so okay, go ahead, punch me in the face if you got the balls, take your best shot, Robert would not be able to lift an arm or make a fist, would not even be able to lift a lip into a sneer. All he has is a handful of words: Go back to sleep, Pops. Robert feels weary. Deeply weary. Simply weary. He feels seventy fucking years old. Go back to sleep.
A hand on his shoulder and he starts.
He’s done with the casket anyway.
He turns.
It’s his mother.
She opens her arms.
He is as little inclined to accept this gesture as he was Sergeant Summerfield’s salute. But he is even less capable of brushing it aside. He puts his arms around her, telling himself, This embrace isn’t about my feelings for him. It’s about her. It’s just for her. That’s her dead husband in the casket and she loved him, in her own way. In her own way she loved him very much, so I can hold her and kiss her now on the cheek. Which he does, and he says, “I’m so sorry, Mom.”
“I know,” she says.
She kisses his cheek in return. Then she brings her mouth very near his ear and whispers, “Who are those people?”
Robert whispers in return, “A couple of his World War Two buddies.”
“Really,” she says, with a thump of a tone, meaning How come he never mentioned them to me?
She lets Robert gently disengage the embrace.
“They’re casual coffee buddies,” he says.
Darla has drawn near.
Robert sees her over Peggy’s shoulder, turns his face to her.
Darla, however, is focused on her mother-in-law. The back of Peggy’s head; her ashen hair rolled plain and tight; her arms falling from the embrace of her son into a slump of her narrow shoulders; her usual wiry vigorousness transformed abruptly into a bony dwindling, like a twentysomething cat. And she thinks of all the recent mother-daughter words. All the grief words. And the riddance words. And the Irish food prep. These things suddenly signify for Darla. Signify in a way that can, in a century-old monument, elicit her compassion for women long dead. So why not here, for this flesh-and-blood woman?
“Peggy,” she says, the consideration of using Mom having flashed into her and out again in a nanosecond. Maybe another time.
Peggy turns to her, brightens, throws open her arms, embraces her, pats her.