Perfume River (11 page)

Darla blinks her way back to Monticello.

The longhairs.
Her father’s phrase.

She does not want to consider her father.

She concentrates on the text of the monument.

Let this mute but eloquent marble testify to the enduring hardness of that living human wall of Florida soldiery that stood during four long years of pitiless war – a barrier between our homes and an invading foe.

She is making a familiar argument to her father. “You talk like Ho Chi Minh is threatening to invade Ithaca and march up our shore and into our parlor,” she says. The two of them are sitting on wicker chairs on their front veranda overlooking Cayuga Lake.

Resisting still, Darla turns from the Confederate monument and walks a few yards away, stops beneath a cabbage palm, its lower fronds burnt brown by last week’s freeze.

Her father is here too.

He’s blathering about the domino theory.

Why does she even bother arguing?

As he goes on, she continues for now to accede to the family tradition for discussions: You at least pretend to look at each other. But she can’t believe he’s insulting her intelligence
by spouting this nonsense. Demanding she believe that when Vietnam turns communist it will immediately topple to Chinese control and then Cambodia will fall and then Laos and on and on.

She’s heard enough. She says, “Our country is totally ignorant about who it’s dealing with.” This much she says to his face. She is ready to make the case. But the face is so familiar. Once, she voraciously studied every twitch and glint and moue of it for approval. But now Darla’s First Law of Parental Physics has prevailed: Every obsessive daughterly action to find her identity through her father will eventually result in an equal and opposite reaction. The idea of speaking to this face repulses her. And his eyes make it worse. They are the blue of a clear sky starting to go dim on a late-autumn afternoon. They are
her
eyes.

So on this day, sitting on the veranda of their upstate Queen Anne with a man who is used to being the patriarchal boss, who won’t listen to reason, who spews the domino theory to justify a country gone mad, she breaks with the family tradition.

She lowers her face a bit without taking her eyes off his, just to signal that what she is about to do is conscious and meaningful, and then she turns her head away. She even shifts her shoulder a little in the same direction, to make both points: She is enlightening him and she is turning her back on him. And then, as if to the forest of hemlock and sugar maple that surrounds their house, she says, “Virtually every city and town in Vietnam has a statue of a hero. They all have one thing
in common. They honor Vietnamese heroes who threw the invading Chinese out of their country. It’s preposterous to argue that a unified Vietnam will turn into a puppet state for the Chinese. They have two thousand years of invasion and resistance between them.”

Markus Kallas, Darla’s father, grew up in Hell’s Kitchen. As a teenager he helped his storefront-butcher father create and market a sideline of Estonian blood sausage. As a twenty-three-year-old, with his father’s death, he took over the business. As a thirty-year-old he began making his fortune by canning meat and finding a better way to keep it moist through the heat processing. He is old-country, old-school, and self-made. However, with Darla’s words, Markus Kallas—who finds the showing of strong feelings to be unseemly in such a man as he—even Markus Kallas cannot hide an involuntary softening and beaming in his face. In spite of his daughter’s odd and insulting gesture of talking as if to the trees. She’s not like all the rest of that hippie crowd. She has done her homework. She even has the right kind of backbone, stiffened by study and thought. She is old-school. His political opinion does not change because of her reasoning, for he did not reason himself into the opinion, but his feeling for his daughter, in some fundamental way, does. Moments later he layers over his newly altered feeling with the seemly reserve he is devoted to, though the feeling itself will abide till his death on the Taconic Parkway.

What will abide in Darla, however, is an unaltered feeling about him, for in those few moments she was looking into the trees and she did not see what was briefly evident in his face.

So she returns to the shadow of a cabbage palm four decades later with this thought, directed specifically to her father:
After Vietnam was unified it took only three years to prove me right. The first war they fought was in Cambodia, where they kicked out a genocidal communist regime supported by the Chinese. The second war they fought was on their own northern border with the Chinese themselves. You never understood a thing.

The veranda and the house on Cayuga Lake linger in Darla’s head even as she reflexively pulls back from a road tractor wheezing its way past in the traffic circle, its semitrailer stacked with pine tree trunks. She cannot imagine her father’s leaving her the Queen Anne in his will as anything but a ploy. As an effort, even from beyond the grave, to bend her to his will, his way of life, his way of thinking.

The semi is gone. The smell of pine lingers. She rouses herself. She moves back to the Confederate monument.
Focus
, she thinks. Focus.

Let the young Southron, as he gazes upon this shaft, remember how gloriously Florida’s sons illustrated their sunny land on the red fields of carnage, and how woman—fair and faithful—freshens the glory of their fame.

Ah, Freud. The young men gazing upon the monumental shaft of their fathers. Encouraged to do so by their mothers and their grandmothers. The ladies of the club. Darla will certainly elicit laughs at the Semiotic Society of America annual meeting. What will the laughter of those mostly male semioticians signify? The following year she might do a paper on
that.
But her very purpose, in the paper and on this day,
is to find and speak the significance of this monument that brooks no laughter.

Darla closes her eyes and listens. Listens to the overwrought voice of these women, their prose bepurpled with passion for their men. In the parlor that Darla imagines, where the Literary Club of Monticello crafts this prose, most of the women are Darla’s age. Their men are dead. Their husbands. Dead from the war. But dead even if they survived. Even if they still sleep beside these women each night, three decades later. For the men have grown small. The cause in them has been lost to self-pity and pettiness, to meanness and an oppression of their women. Or even simply lost to a quotidian life after the war was over, a life of bricklayer or cabinetmaker, mule driver or lumberjack, haberdasher or druggist or barber. Or teacher.

And Darla asks:
How did these women, fair and faithful, preserve their passion?

Not just preserve. Amplify.

And she knows. Their passion was for the dead. And being dead, those men could never disappoint.

On this night, at his insistence, Robert and Darla go to their studies and work, he being all right, his father being eighty-nine after all, his mother bearing up just fine. Darla appreciates the chance to massage her notes from the day. They act as if this were any other evening. But when they finally enter their bed,
neither of them picks up a Kindle from a nightstand, and she forgoes her iPod as well. And as soon as they are arranged in their places—side by side with a forearm-length space between them in the king bed—as if on cue, they both stretch up and turn off their lamps and lie back.

The room is still but for a faint buzz from an LED electric clock, a relic of their first year in this house, preserved by Darla on her side of the bed.

After a time, he says, “The children.”

“I called them,” she says.

“You did?”

“I did.”

“Good,” he says. “It only just occurred to me.”

“I called them,” she says.

“When?”

“This morning. While you were at the hospital.”

A beat of silence.

She asks, “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m okay,” he says.

“If you’re not, I hope you’d say so.”

“I would.”

A few beats more.

Then Robert asks, “How did things go in Monticello?”

“Fine.”

“Did you think like them?”

“The ladies?”

“Yes,” he says. “The Daughters.”

“The daughters?”

“Of the Confederacy. Did you get inside their heads? Like you wanted?”

“Yes,” she says.

“What was it like?”

One more beat.

“Passionate,” she says.

And now their last waking silence of the day begins.

Darla does not linger with the Confederate women. Her fading consciousness somehow veers to her grandson, Jacob, who answered the phone this morning when she sought Kevin, mistakenly dialing her son’s home number rather than work.

She recognizes the boy’s voice, though it sounds different to her. It’s been nearly a year since she spoke with him. He was skiing somewhere at Christmas. He’s twenty. Not a boy. His voice surely hasn’t changed from nineteen. But there’s something in him that’s new. Maturity maybe.

“Is that you, Jake?” she says.

“Grandma?”

“Yes.”

“How are you? I’ve been meaning to call Granddad.” She hears him pause a beat, catching himself. “Call you both.” She smiles. Jake’s a good young man, not wanting to hurt her feelings.

“I wish I could put him on the phone,” she says. “But he’s at the hospital up in Thomasville. It’s Grandpa Bill. He’s fallen and broken a hip.”

“Oh fuck.” Jake catches himself in the curse but, in doing so, utters an almost inaudible
Oh shit.
Almost.

Darla smiles. He’s still a boy.

“Sorry, Grandma,” he says.

“It’s okay.”

“I’m just shocked, you know?” he says. “Jeez. I’ve been wanting to talk with him too.”

“Honey, you’ll have a chance. I’m sure he’ll be all right.”

“Both of them,” Jake says. “You know?”

For a moment she doesn’t know. Then: Bill and Robert both. Jake’s been thinking of them, wanting to talk with them. While there’s time.

“They’re both fine,” she says.

Fine. One has a broken hip at nearly ninety. The other has turned seventy. But fine. They’re fine. Her mind is slowing now.
Lugubrious
, she’d say about her mind. The word
lugubrious
presents itself to her as a little surprise from someone. She thinks:
I’m falling asleep.

She turns onto her side, and the movement stirs one last moment of clarity in her. The conversation with Jake was not a veer from Monticello. Robert’s mortality is a matter of someone’s active concern. Robert could vanish in a moment, this man who she met, who became a part of her life, only because he went to war. She is sitting at a desk, rather like her desk downstairs, but it sits in the middle of a parlor in Monticello, with her ladies of the Literary Club gathered around. She holds a quill pen over a blank sheet of paper. Motionless. She can think of no words to write, though she clearly understands she must compose a tribute to her dead husband, the Southron Robert Quinlan, veteran of a lost war, who is dead.

For Robert, as well, this silence is a waking silence. The past courses through him as spontaneously as if it were the dream imagery of incipient sleep.

Lien stands in a bower of blooming flame trees on the bank of the Perfume River, waiting for him. It’s June, a rare cloudless day, fiercely hot. On Le Loi Street along the river, Operation Recovery has expunged the rubble of razed buildings and the bodies of the dead. The trees are splashed with flowers the color of arterial blood.

She vanished with the Tet Offensive. Word of mass graves of civilians was spreading through the city and it was understood what sort of people were slaughtered by the North in Hue: government officials, freethinking university teachers and students, those who could identify the embedded Viet Cong, those who had worked with and those who had lain with the enemy Americans. Bargirls. Girlfriends. Robert feared Lien was dead.

When restrictions eased and he could leave the MACV compound, he went at once to the site of the tailor shop. The building survived but the shop was closed and boarded up. When the sampan community near the central market reassembled, he walked its banks over and over, searching for Lien’s uncle, trying to remember the man’s face, hoping he would himself be recognized by the man.

And then, one afternoon, an old woman stopped him outside the MACV compound and said Lien’s name to him and told him a day and a time and this place, and he approaches her now.

She wears a white
ao dai
, the tight-bodiced Vietnamese silk dress with its skirt split up the sides from feet to waist, revealing black pantaloons beneath, a dress she has, on special nights, worn privately for him without the pantaloons, naked beneath it from waist to feet.

He holds a brown paper parcel tied in hemp cord.

She turns her face at the sound of his approach, comes forward. She makes no move to touch him but explains this with her first words. “I do not touch you like I wish from people that see us.”

“I understand,” he says.

Her dark eyes focus on his, but dartingly: his right, his left, back and forth, as if she does not believe the one and seeks something in the other, then seeks it in the first again, hoping what she saw a moment ago has changed. Or has not changed.
Her
eyes seem anxious. Only that. Their lids are rounded some by French blood. He longs to ask her to close her eyes for him to kiss her there. Surely she can read in him the feelings that produce this longing. But he senses already he will never kiss her again.

“I was afraid they killed you,” he says.

“I hide,” she says. “I have one place to hide and then I run away.”

“When did you return?”

“Few days before now,” she says. She seems to begin to say more—a taking of a breath, a lift of her chest—but she lets it go, does not speak.

He does not dare to ask the questions flaring in his head. Will she stay? Can they be together? Instead he feels the weight in his hand.

“I brought your father’s pistol,” he says.