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Perfume River: A Novel
Perfume River: A Novel
Perfume River: A Novel
Ebook268 pages

Perfume River: A Novel

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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A powerful novel of a family haunted by the aftershocks of the Vietnam War—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of a A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.
 
“You share a war in one way. You pass it on in another.” Passionate student activism brought Robert Quinlan together with his future wife during the tumultuous years of the Vietnam War.
But since then, the long-married Florida university professors have grown apart. Their crumbling relationship is mirrored by Robert’s estrangement from his brother . . . alienated by the same controversial war.
 
Now, with their father—a World War II veteran—lying close to death, the rift in the family is sorely tested when Robert’s brother refuses to put the past aside and return to say goodbye. And when Robert mistakes a homeless stranger for a fellow Vietnam veteran, his unstable presence in their lives will further stir the emotional scars that shattered the Quinlan men . . . and take its toll on those they love most.
 
“Butler’s Faulknerian shuttling back and forth across the decades has less to do with literary pyrotechnics than with cutting to the chase. Perfume River hits its marks with a high-stakes intensity . . . Butler’s prose is fluid, and his handling of his many time-shifts as lucid as it is urgent. His descriptive gifts don’t extend just to his characters’ traits or their Florida and New Orleans settings, but to the history he’s addressing.” —Michael Upchurch, New York Times Book Review
 
“Butler moves easily among his characters to create a composite portrait of a family that has been wrecked by choices made during the Vietnam War.” —Beth Nguyen, San Francisco Chronicle
 
“The story builds its force with great care . . . Its power is that we want to keep reading. The entire journey is masterfully rendered, Butler lighting a path back into the cave, completely unafraid.” —Benjamin Busch, Washington Post
 
“Butler greatly enlarges our sense of what the Vietnam War cost to a generation . . . Perfume River tells a human story that sums up an entire era of American life.” —Miami Herald
 
“Butler’s assured, elegant novel . . . speaks eloquently of the way the past bleeds into the present, history reverberates through individual lives, and mortality challenges our perceptions of ourselves and others.” —Publishers Weekly
 
“A heartbreaking story of fathers and sons and their expectations and disappointments . . . Perfume River is a powerful work that asks profound questions about betrayal and loyalty.” —BookPage
LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 6, 2016
ISBN9780802190109
Author

Robert Olen Butler

Robert Olen Butler is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of sixteen novels and six volumes of short fiction. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and received the 2013 F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for American Literature. He teaches creative writing at Florida State University.

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Rating: 3.9142857028571436 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I have read so many novels about mother, daughter relationships, a common enough theme in fiction, that it was a welcome change of pace to read one about the relationships of father and son. The Vietnam War is threaded throughout, Robert the son who went and committed an act he could never admit nor come to term with and Jimmy, the younger son, who chose to flee to Canada rather than fight in a war in which he did not believe. The story is narrated by Robert, now in his early seventies, his backstory, his marriage to Darla and his thoughts about his father. The father he had always tried to please and despite following in what he thought were his Father's footsteps, he never could. So fathers and sons and war experiences, but so wonderfully and clearly written. Wars which polarize and divide a family for over forty years. A mother who stands by her man at the expense of her sons. Common enough back then, women did this sort of thing, many probably still do. Hard choices. We learn of Jimmy's life in Canada, successful but now reaching a crisis point of its own. There is also another man, another Bob, a vagabond with his own experiences with a father who had been in the war. His story will become part of the others and his actions will effect them all.There was one line and a set of words in this novel that resonated. Emotionally obtuse, so applicable to my own husband's father, another father with two sons. I identified greatly with this novel because of the experiences of my husband and his brother, with a father set in his ways, unable to see outside himself to the damage he had wrought within his own family. So a personal read for me though I did not know that when I started. A story about the damages war can cause, not just on the battlefields but in the family itself.ARC from publisher.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I read this because my husband and I have planned a trip to Vietnam and his earlier book, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, was recommended as reading. So I was a bit disappointed more of this wasn't set in Vietnam - my problem not his!My husband is a Vietnam vet, so it was interesting to read accounts of how that now distant war affected the various characters. Very good writing; however his style, to me, grew a bit monotonous toward the end.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Perfume River - Robert Olen ButlerI have read three of Robert Olen Butler’s previous works and I enjoyed them immensely. But they were all Christopher Marlowe Cobb mysteries. They were deceptive works, easy accessible as historical novels of intrigue, war and adventure but written with an intelligence that I often feared might be overlooked. So I was delighted when Real Readers send me this copy of Mr. Butler’s new book. And it isn’t a Kit Cobb mystery which excited me even more. Butler takes themes partially explored in his previous works; relationships on several levels from filial, to lust, to love, to loyalty, to compassion and here they are developed with a more cerebral and philosophical style. War remains a kind of additional character, if you will. Here it is both the second World War and the Vietnam War. Possibly those aspects are more accessible if you are an American but that in no way dilutes the impact of the book for those of us of other nationalities.It is a poignant, sensitive tale centreing around Robert Quinlan and his wife Dorla. Their relationship is the catalyst to explore Robert’s family relationships and his past.There’s plenty here for people to identity with; guilt, regret, secrecy, anger, disappointment and resentment. I hesitate to comment on the Perfume River of the title as it could amount to a spoiler which is to do a disservice to the book.The characters are flawed and needy in some respects which allows the humanity of the book to shine through. The pace is languorous sometimes but it perfectly captures the way we sometimes hesitate in both our thoughts and our deeds. The writing style is competent and flowing. As a narrative it reminds one of a symphony where all the parts combine together as one for the finished work. The final denouement was not unexpected and I don’t think the writer intended it to be. All the clues were there. It was more of a case of how and when will this act occur.This is one of the books that can leave you thinking long after you’ve finished it. And in my book (no pun intended) it doesn’t get any better.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Perfume River – Another Modern American ClassicRobert Olen Butler in my mind is one of the best American authors of the moment, whose novels and short stories are second to none and easy to see why he is a Pulitzer Prize winner. Once again Olen Butler tackles a subject many would like to shy away from, our personal relationships, and especially amongst those in our own families. The reaction to a family member that you have not seen in nearly 50 years, with a background of the Vietnam War, that has torn your family apart.Robert Olen Butler has woven together a complex but beautiful story, where many years after the Vietnam War, along with the PTSD of the former combatants has caused a rift in the family. With an elderly parent dying one brother still refuses to come to his father’s bedside in his final hours. While at the same time a homeless man, with mental health issues, has a devastating impact upon the entire family.Robert Quinlan and his wife Darla both teach at Florida State University, is now starting to bear the scars of over 40 years of marriage, stuck in a rut and with their own separate studies in the house, things do not look good. Coupled with Robert’s flashbacks to the Vietnam war, his past always seems to disturb the present. Even though this is a short book, and some may say read quickly and easily, it is not an easy read as it is thought provoking, challenging. Our perception to war, how a family can divide over it, one going to war, the other escaping to Canada. How one child lives up to a father’s expectations and another does not attain the same level of respect in the father’s eyes.Some may say that this book is rather too melancholic but I think that adds to the atmosphere of the book. The book named after a river in Vietnam reflects the symbiotic relationship Americans have with the country, in part to the war and its legacy. It also questions the dysfunctionality of family, and that memories can be timeless whether we like them or not. A challenging and emotional book, and this is yet another book in the Vietnam related fiction, a welcome and fresh addition.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Perfume River is a completely different kettle of fish to the other Robert Olen Butler novels that I have read; namely the Christopher Marlowe Cobb thrillers. It took me a while to get comfortable with the rhythm and style of writing of this book which flits back and forth between thoughts and memories and deals with the issues of guilt and failure.The main theme of The Perfume River surrounds the Vietnam War and how its legacy still affects the leading Protagonist Robert Quinlan’s life, even after almost 50 years. It’s a book about familial relationships, the threads that link through generations, and also madness. Robert Quinlan is haunted by his experience in the Vietnam War and he mistakenly believes a homeless man he meets in a diner is a veteran soldier. Their lives interweave throughout the novel, both focusing strongly on their relationships with their fathers. The novel is well written and I feel that the author has captured the essence of the characters but I can’t altogether say that I actually enjoyed the book as such, although any book that makes you think has got to be a worthwhile read.Curiously at the end of the book (my copy was provided to review by Real Readers powered by Nudge) I thought the novel had ended as the last facing page was ‘About Us’ (the publishers) but when I turned this page over there was another three paragraphs of the story! I presume that the page has just been affixed the wrong way round but I have to admit I preferred the ending finishing where I had first thought it had!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An affecting novel that works its way gently along the fault lines between fathers and sons; between those who serve their country and those who choose not to; between the members of one generation and the ones that follow and the ones who came before. About learning new ways to reach each other and ways to resolve and reconcile, within ourselves and between ourselves and others. A touching read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Perfume River, Robert Olen Butler, author and narratorWhen the book opens, an older couple, Robert and Darla Quinlan are having dinner in the New Leaf Co-op. They are engaged in conversation and are quite comfortable in each other’s company. When a strange man enters who seems disheveled and obviously homeless, Robert Quinlan, aged 70, notices him. He thinks he might be a Vietnam War veteran, like himself, but he is not old enough. Coincidentally, this man and Robert, share the shortened version of the name Robert. The “out of place” man, Bob Weber, is not a veteran, but is the son of one. It was his father Calvin who served during the Vietnam War. Calvin was a stern, demanding man who had expected a certain kind of aggressive behavior from his son. His idea of what made a real man was not compatible with Bob’s personality. What made him most proud and happy about his son, was his prowess with a weapon. Bob’s interaction with his father had been conflicted and Bob was now quite disturbed. Because of therapy, Bob is sometimes able to cover up his difficulty in processing information properly. If he tries very hard and listens to the right voices in his head, the voices that calm him down, he sees reality and does not hear his angry father. His father’s voice incites him. For some reason, Robert finds himself drawn to Bob, and he wants to help him.Robert, 70, and his brother Jimmy, 68, had a fraught relationship with their father, too. Jimmy is a draft dodger who escaped to Canada with his girlfriend Linda when he was 21. He remains in Canada, the safe haven for those who wanted to avoid the much contested Vietnam War and has been estranged from his family ever since. He and his wife Linda have an open marriage which has gone through many stages. He has recently become involved with a girlfriend named Heather and Linda is involved with the husband of a friend, causing a crisis in that marriage. Heather is very young and seems more like his grandchild than his mate. Robert, in an effort to gain his father’s love and approval, enlisted in the service, but he intended to avoid the fighting with a desk job. He was sent to Vietnam where he became involved with Lien, a young Vietnamese woman. Their relationship had an enormous effect on him, and it has remained a secret for decades. Bob’s father William is 88 years old. He served during World War II and he, like Calvin, has particular ideas about how men should behave. He doesn’t give his love freely. He is disappointed with both of his son’s actions. Peggy, his wife, never shows outward disagreement with her husband, as was the custom of the times; she voices no reproach to him or her sons and does not defy William even when he causes his son Jimmy to abandon all of them. He demands courage from his sons. Although his mannerisms and expectations made it difficult for either of his sons to feel either approved of or well loved by him, the grandchildren and great grandchildren see him differently. Robert’s son Kevin loves his grandfather, as does Kevin’s 20 year old son Jake, William’s great grandchild. Jake brings the story to a conclusion that takes the story full circle back to its beginning in its theme of war.William has been injured very badly in a terrible fall. He is in the hospital in grave condition. Their mother Peggy thinks it is now time to reconcile the family, and she asks Robert to try and contact Jimmy. She has tried but has been unsuccessful in convincing him to return. Will Robert be able to find the courage to reach out to him across the years and miles? Will Jimmy be able to overlook the family’s history? Will he be able to forgive his father?As the story unravels, it revolves largely around the lives of Robert, Bob and Jimmy as they try to come to terms with their memories of their family life, the effects of war on their soldier fathers, and their relationship with others because of that upbringing. The difficulties they experienced are revealed through their memories of events and conversations with their spouses and others who interact with them. Each one’s life had been deeply affected by the politics of the times.Is war ever good? Is it sometimes necessary? What kind of person makes war possible? The effects of war on these men altered them so much. Those that returned were no longer the same person that left. It was difficult for them to acclimate to normal life. They are hardened and became secretive about what took place, sometimes ashamed of their behavior, sometimes confused by it. Some of the things they witnessed and or participated in were too difficult for them to discuss honestly with anyone, and continued to haunt them long after they returned home. The memories went on to have an often detrimental effect on their behavior and family relationships. In turn, their “sins” were then visited upon their children. Should a child please a parent or himself? Should a child become something else entirely to simply please a parent in order to feel loved by that parent?The relationship between father and son and sibling to sibling is deftly explored and contrasted through their thoughts and introspection as they try to solve their problems. Because there are so many underlying secrets slowly revealed, the behavior of a character is often misinterpreted. Incomplete information causes others to sometimes jump to uninformed conclusions and incorrect judgments. Only Bob, however, makes judgments that are completely irrational, at times, but all make faulty judgments at times. Bob is simply the compilation of all of the ideas the author presents. He expresses the results of those ideas in their most extreme form.The tale is dark and sometimes depressing, but it is very well written, and it inspires deep thought about war, military service and parental relationships. While it seems to be somewhat of an apology to the soldiers of the Vietnam War, on the one hand, those who were very much maligned for their service, it also obviously is a condemnation of war, since it illustrates the terrible effect it had on those involved and on those future generations that followed them, as well, even long after the war has ended.The novel has no chapter breaks and sometimes one characters voice fades into another’s. The narrative builds slowly to a crescendo at various points in the story but then descends again when the tension quickly eases. Each character suffers from conflicting emotions, some more intense than others. Each character seems to have unhealed, invisible wounds because of their paternal relationships. The old pain and grievances still have tremendous power over them. Each has a need to confess their perceived sins to someone, in order to be forgiven. Each wanted to be accepted and loved. Each has shut out painful thoughts or people from their lives. The war and military service, or lack thereof, has had a dark effect on each of them. Each has felt betrayed at some point. Although each of the main male characters questions his judgment, and often suffers from self-doubt and occasionally has mood swings, it is only Bob is noticeably disturbed and permanently damaged. Bob hears voices. Bob, who was the most indirectly involved in any war, is the one most injured by it. Bob is homeless, alone and somewhat lost as he tries to navigate down the road of his life in his deranged mental state.Each character experiences similar emotions but handles them uniquely. The book makes you think about the nature of war, what makes a hero and what makes a coward and even makes you consider whether or not a war is ever necessary. It makes you wonder how the negative effects of that kind of traumatic experience can be handled far better so it does not revisit future generations. Perhaps it is better to avoid war altogether, if ever possible. In the end, everyone discovers that unresolved issues remain unresolved after death. Can this premise bring them all back together again and reconcile their family relationships as their war wounds, emotional and physical, that have remained hidden for decades are now revealed? Secrets have separated them, will the truth reunite them? Is forgiveness possible?

Book preview

Perfume River - Robert Olen Butler

What are Robert Quinlan and his wife feebly arguing about when the homeless man slips quietly in? Moments later Robert could hardly have said. ObamaCare or quinoa or their granddaughter’s new boyfriend. Something. He and Darla are sitting at a table in the dining area of the New Leaf Co-op. Her back is to the man. Robert is facing him. He notices him instantly, though the man is making eye contact with none of the scattered few of them, the health-conscious members of the co-op, dining by the pound from the hot buffet. It’s a chilly North Florida January twilight, but he’s still clearly overbundled, perhaps from the cold drilling deeper into his bones because of a life lived mostly outside. Or perhaps he simply needs to carry all his clothes around with him.

Robert takes him for a veteran.

The man’s shoulder-length hair is shrapnel gray. His face is deep-creased and umbered by street life. But in spite of the immediately apparent state of his present situation, he stands straight with his shoulders squared.

He sits down at a table beside the partition doorway, which gapes into the crosswise aisle between checkout counters and front entrance. He slumps forward ever so slightly and puts both his clenched fists on the tabletop. He stares at them.

You should’ve put your curry on it, Darla says to Robert.

So it’s about quinoa, the argument.

Instead of rice, she says.

She has continued her insistent advocacy while his attention has drifted over her shoulder to the vet.

Robert brings his eyes back to her. He tries to remember if he has already cited the recent endorsement of white rice by some health journal or other.

All those famously healthy Japanese eat rice, he says.

She huffs.

He looks at his tofu curry on the biodegradable paper plate.

He looks back to the vet, who has opened one fist and is placing a small collection of coins on the table.

I’m just trying to keep you healthy, Darla says.

Which is why I am content to be here at all, Robert says, though he keeps his eyes on the vet.

The man opens the other fist and begins pushing the coins around. Sorting them. It is done in a small, quiet way. No show about it at all.

Thanks to their fish, she says.

Robert returns to Darla.

Her eyes are the cerulean blue of a Monet sky.

Fish? he asks. Uncomprehendingly.

Yes, she says. That’s the factor …

He leans toward her, perhaps a bit too abruptly. She stops her explanation and her blue eyes widen a little.

I should feed him, he says, low.

She blinks and gathers herself. Who?

He nods in the vet’s direction.

She peeks over her shoulder.

The man is still pushing his coins gently around.

She leans toward Robert, lowering her voice. I didn’t see him.

He just came in, Robert says.

Feed him quinoa, Darla says. She isn’t kidding.

Please, he says, rising.

She shrugs.

This isn’t a thing Robert often does. Never with money. He carries the reflex attitude, learned in childhood: You give a guy like this money and it will go for drink, which just perpetuates his problems; there are organizations he can find if he really wants to take care of himself.

Giving food is another matter, he figures, but to give food to somebody you encounter on the street, while rafting the momentum of your daily life—that’s usually an awkward thing to pull off. And so, in those rare cases when it wouldn’t be awkward, you can easily overlook the chance.

But here is a chance he’s noticed. And there’s something about this guy that continues to suggest veteran.

Which is to say a Vietnam veteran.

Something. He is of an age. Of a certain bearing. Of a field radio frequency that you are always tuned to in your head.

Robert is a veteran.

He doesn’t go straight for the vet’s table. He heads toward the doorway, which would bring him immediately alongside him.

He draws near. The man has finished arranging his coins but continues to ponder them. He does not look up. Then Robert is beside him, as if about to pass through the doorway. The vet has to be aware of him now. Still he does not look. He has no game going in order to get something, this man of needs. It has truly been about sorting the coins.

He smells a little musty but not overpoweringly so. He’s taking care of himself pretty well, considering. Or has done so recently, at least.

Robert stops.

The vet’s hair, which was a cowl of gray from across the room, up close has a seam of coal black running from crown to collar.

Robert puts his hand on the man’s shoulder. He bends near him.

The man is turning, lifting his face, and Robert says, Would you like some food?

Their eyes meet.

The furrows of the vet’s face at brow and cheek and jaw retain much of their first impression: deeply defined, from hard times and a hard life in the body. But his eyes seem clear, and they crimp now at the outer edges. Yes, he says. Do you have some?

I can get you some, Robert says.

That would be good, the man says. Yes.

What do you like? I think there was some chicken. Though he hasn’t invoked the preternaturally healthful quinoa, he catches himself trying to manage this guy’s nutrition, an impulse which feels uncomfortably familiar. He’s trying to get him healthy.

It needs to be soft, the man says. I don’t have very many teeth.

Why don’t you come with me, Robert says. You can choose.

The vet is quick to his feet. Thank you, he says. He offers a closed-mouth smile.

Standing with him now, about to walk with him, Robert recognizes something he’s neglected: This act is still blatant charity, condescending in its anonymity. So he offers his hand. And though he almost always calls himself—and always thinks of himself—as Robert, he says, Bob.

The vet hesitates.

The name alone seems to have thrown him. Robert clarifies. I’m Bob.

The man takes Robert’s hand and smiles again, more broadly this time, but struggling to keep his toothlessness from showing. I’m Bob, he says. And then, hastily, as if he’d be mistaken for simply, madly, parroting the name: "Too."

The handshake goes on. The vet has a firm grip. He further clarifies. "I’m also Bob."

It’s a good name, Robert says.

It’s okay.

Not as common as it used to be.

Bob looks at Robert for a moment, letting the handshake slow and stop. Robert senses a shifting of the man’s mind into a conversational gear that hasn’t been used in a while.

That’s true, Bob says.

Robert leads him through the doorway and along the partition, past the ten-items-only register, and into the buffet area. He stops at the soup warmers on the endcap, thinking of the man’s tooth problem, but Bob goes on ahead, and before Robert can make a suggestion, Bob says, They have beans and rice. This is good.

Robert steps beside him, and together they peer through the sneeze guard at a tub of pintos and a tub of brown rice. Good mess hall food, Robert thinks, though thinking of it that way jars with a reassessment going on in a corner of his mind.

Of no relevance to this present intention, however.

Bob declines any other food, and Robert piles one of the plastic dinner plates high with beans and rice while Bob finds a drink in the cooler. Robert waits for him and takes the bottle of lightly lemoned sparkling water from his hand and says, Why don’t you go ahead and sit.

Bob nods and slips away.

Robert steps to the nearby checkout station.

A young man, with a jugular sunburst tattoo and a silver ring pierced into his lip, totals up the food, and Robert lets his reassessment register in his mind: From the clues of age in face and hair, Robert realizes Bob is no Vietnam veteran. As old as the man is—perhaps fifty or fifty-five—he is still too young to have been in Vietnam. He missed it by a decade or so.

Robert pays.

The clerk gives him a small, understanding nod.

Do you know him? Robert asks.

He comes now and then, the young man says.

Beans and rice and fizzy lemon water in hand, Robert turns away.

He steps into the dining area and sets the plate and the can before Bob. The man has carefully laid out his napkin and plastic utensils and has put his coins away.

He squares around to look up at Robert.

He is not the man Robert first thought him to be.

Thank you, Bob says.

Robert knows nothing about him.

It’s a good meal, Bob says.

You bet, Robert says, and he moves off, thinking: It would have made no difference. I would have done this anyway.

He sits down before Darla.

She leans toward him and says softly, I’m glad you did that.

To her credit, she does not ask what he’s bought the man. She sits back.

Her plate, once featuring the spicy Thai quinoa salad, is empty. He looks at his remaining tofu curry. He picks up his fork and begins pushing it around.

She says something he does not quite hear.

He stops pushing.

There are other voices in the dining area. Conversations.

He thinks: Can it have been that long ago?

But of course it can. Even consciously thinking about it, Vietnam yields up no clear, individual memory. Images are there—faces and fields and a headquarters compound courtyard and a bar and a bed and a river—but they are like thumbnails of forgotten snaps on a cellphone screen.

More, Darla says. As part of other things she’s been saying, no doubt.

Robert looks at her.

She narrows her eyes at him.

It’s probably cold, she says, nodding at his food.

Probably, he says.

You can get some more, she says.

I don’t need anything, he says.

She shrugs. Shall we go?

Coffee, he says. The word is a nanosecond or so ahead of the conscious thought.

She cocks her head. He went back to the stuff a few months ago after she’d wrangled a year of abstinence from him. She was reconciled to it but the one-word announcement sounds like a taunt, he realizes.

Bob needs some coffee, he says.

Bob? She twists at the word in her snorty voice, assuming he’s referring to his coffee-seeking self in the third person. She occasionally calls him Bob when she thinks he’s behaving badly.

He doesn’t explain. He rises. He approaches Bob. The man is hunched over his food, wolfing it in.

Robert is beside him before he looks up.

You a coffee drinker, Bob?

I surely am, he says.

How do you take it?

With a splash of milk.

I’ll get you some.

I appreciate it, Bob, Bob says.

Near the buffet, Robert begins to fill a cup from a percolator urn. Framed in the center of the urn is the bag art for today’s brew. An upsweep of mountains dense with tropical forest, the vista framed in coffee trees.

Somewhere along the highway to Dak To, they’d laid out the beans to dry. He is passing in a jeep, heading to an assignment that will quickly be changed, sending him upcountry. A pretty-faced girl in a conical hat, leaning on her coffee rake, lifts her face to him. And he sweeps on past.

The cup is nearly full.

He flips up the handle.

He splashes in some milk.

He returns to Bob.

The man thanks him again, briefly cupping both hands around the coffee, taking in its warmth before setting it down.

You a Floridian, Bob? Robert asks.

I’m from Charleston, West Virginia, he says.

Good thing you’re not up there for the winter.

Bob nods a single, firm nod and looks away. I have to go back, he says.

Perhaps when things warm up.

No choice, he says. I’ve got responsibilities. His face remains averted. He isn’t elaborating. His beans and rice are getting cold.

Robert still has the urge to make this encounter count for something beyond a minor act of charity. Learn a bit more about him. Offer some advice. Whatever. And this is all he can think to ask: What sort of responsibilities, Bob?

Bob doesn’t look at him.

He doesn’t eat.

He doesn’t drink.

Robert has made the man go absolutely still. But Robert sloughs off the niggle of guilt, thinking: He’s probably been asserting these responsibilities to himself for the whole, long slide to where he is now, knowing there’s nothing left where he came from, knowing he’ll never go back.

Robert puts his hand on Bob’s shoulder for a moment and then moves away.

He does not sit down at their table. Darla looks up. She glances at his empty hands. No coffee?

He shrugs.

She nods and smiles. Finished with dinner?

Yes, he says.

She gathers her things and they put on their coats. She leads the way across the floor. Darla may well glance at Bob as she passes, ready to offer him an encouraging smile. She would do that. But Bob looks up only after she’s gone by.

He fixes his eyes on Robert’s and upticks his chin. He says, You know my old man, is that it?

Robert takes the odd abruptness of the question in stride, answering a passing No as he follows Darla out of the dining area.

And that is that.

Darla and Robert are finished in town, and he drives toward home on the parkway. The two of them do not speak. This is not uncommon after dining out.

They live east and south of the Tallahassee city limits, on an acre of garden and hardwood and a dozen more of softwood, and the quickest way carries them first along a commercial scroll of strip malls and chain eateries, lube joints and furniture stores, pharmacies and gas stations. Robert finds himself acutely aware of all this. He turns south at his first opportunity, and then, shortly, he turns east again, onto Old Saint Augustine Road.

Darla humphs, though for all their years together she has alternately used this dismissive sound as a sign of approval. It is up to him to know which humph is which.

Old Saint Augustine is easy to interpret. Canopied in live oaks and hiding its residences and smattering of service commerce behind sweet gums and hickories and tulip poplars, this is a road from the state’s past, a subject he occasionally teaches at the university and Darla occasionally is happy to hear him discourse upon. Though their silence persists tonight.

She switches on the university radio station.

This same ostinato of orchestral strings presses his face to a window on a TWA 707. The Rocky Mountains crawl beneath him. He is flying to Travis Air Force Base, north of San Francisco. From there he will go to war. And this music is playing in his head through a pneumatic headset. Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. The first movement has tripped and stomped and danced, making things large, as Beethoven can do, but confidently so, almost lightly so. A little bit of the summer pastoral spilling over from the Sixth Symphony. And now, in the second movement, the largeness of things is rendered into reassuring repetitions. Can Robert believe this of what lies ahead of him, this grave contentment the music would have him feel?

He is not to be a shooting soldier. He will do order-of-battle work, rather like research, rather like the things he learned to love in his recent four years at Tulane. Wherever they put him, he will be bunkered in at the core of a headquarters compound. It would take an unlikely military cataclysm—or a fluke, a twist of very bad luck, a defiance of an actuarial reality of warfare that is obscured by Cronkite’s nightly report—for him to die.

He is young enough to feel confident in that reasoning.

It is September of 1967. Four months before the military cataclysm of the coming Vietnamese New Year, Tet 1968.

And if he does survive, he believes he will earn a thing he has long yearned to earn, foreshadowed only a few days ago in a bar on Magazine Street. His father shed tears over his tenth farewell Dixie, Robert’s fourth. Silent tears. William Quinlan has always been a quiet drunk. A quiet man, about feelings he could not command, feelings better felt by women. Robert still thinks, as he flies away to music his father could never understand, that he knows what the tears were about.

In the car, however, this ostinato is solemn and insistent. More than solemn. It aches. He feels nothing like contentment as he races through the corridor of oaks. It is forty-seven years later.

He glances at Darla.

Her face is pressed against the window.

Down a pea gravel drive they emerge from a grove of pine and cedar. They stop before the house they built in 1983 from early-twentieth-century Craftsman plans, with a shed-dormered gable roof, a first floor of brick, and two upper floors of veneered stucco and half-timber. For a decade Darla’s parents withheld every penny of their considerable resources from the struggling young academic couple, disapproving of the politics that brought the two of them together, and then, upon their deaths, they surprised their daughter with a will that split the parental wealth in half between her and a brother as conservative as they. She got the sprawling Queen Anne estate on Cayuga Lake and enough money to keep it up, along with the expressed hope—just short of a mandate—that their daughter Darla and her family come home.

The parents’ death itself surprised her. It was by late-night car crash on the Taconic Parkway, both of them apparently drunk. Darla immediately sold the Queen Anne and she and Robert built this new house, to their shared taste, having lately taken their places at Florida State University. At the time, their son Kevin was eleven. Their daughter Kimberly was five.

Tonight, with Robert’s Clinton-era S-Class Mercedes sitting next to Darla’s new Prius, they enter the house and put away their coats and go to the kitchen and putter about, she heating water for her herbal tea and he grinding his Ethiopian beans to brew his coffee, and for a long while they say nothing, not uncommon for this early-evening ritual, which occasionally feels, for both of them, comfortable.

Then, when their cups are full and they are about to go off to their separate places in the house to do some end-of-evening work, Darla touches Robert’s arm, very briefly, though only as if to get his attention, and she says, What did you two talk about?

Who? he says, though he knows who she means.

The homeless man, she says.

The weather, he says.

She nods. Did he say how he copes?

We didn’t get into that.

I hate to shrug him off, she says, though in an intonation that mutes the hate and stresses the off. She therefore does not need to add but we must.

They say no more.

They are both on sabbatical this spring, and they go to what have been their separate studies ever since the house was finished.

Robert’s is on the third floor, where the Craftsman plans called for a gentleman’s billiard room. His desk faces the fireplace in the north gable, with its hammered copper hood. Dormers and window seats are to his right hand and his left. His books line the room in recessed shelves.

Early-twentieth-century American history is his specialty and he is writing a biography of a journalist, publisher, and agitator for pacifist and socialist causes, John Kenneth Turner. Tonight, he is working on a paper for a history conference. The Prototype of the Twentieth-Century Antiwar Movement in the U.S.: John Kenneth Turner, Woodrow Wilson, and the Mexican Invasion. A mouthful of a title that he sits for a time now trying to simplify.

Darla’s study is off the first-floor hallway between the living room and the dining room. Her desk looks west through the casement windows, across the veranda, and out to the massive live oak behind their house. She teaches art theory. By certain scholarly adversaries at other schools, her research is considered to be interdisciplinary to a fault. She is known for her book Public Monuments as Found Art: A Semiotic Revisioning. Tonight she is trying to finish the rough draft of a paper, which, indeed, she will present at a semiotics conference. Dead Soldiers and Sexual Longing: The Subtexts and Sculptural Tropes of the Daughters of the Confederacy Monuments. The title seems just right to her.

They are focused thinkers, Robert and Darla. They would, if pressed to consider the matter, attribute some of their focus to the mutual respect they have for each other’s work. They need give each other not a single thought once they are sitting in these long-familiar rooms.

But the last sip of Robert’s coffee is cold. And he thinks of Bob.

He wonders what the man is doing

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