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affectation, a lie. It’s still a better way for them to talk, surely.
    Jimmy doesn’t answer. His cheeks twitch slightly and release, twitch and release. He’s grinding his teeth.
    If a woman is indeed gentling his brother down, the attitude deserves nurturing. So he makes himself a little vulnerable to his brother, offers an admission. “He isn’t showing it.”
    Jimmy stops working his jaw. “I don’t follow,” he says.
    “Pops,” Robert says. “His approval. He was never going to actually show it. We both know that.”
    Jimmy furrows again, briefly, and grunts a nod of sympathetic recognition.
    “My decision was my own,” Robert says.
    Jimmy nods again, in assent, looks away, beyond Robert to the square. They are silent for a few moments. Then Jimmy says, still looking into the distance, “She’s bringing it out in me.”
    Now Robert doesn’t follow.
    Jimmy turns his face to him, sees his puzzlement.
    “Gentleness,” Jimmy says. “She’s only bringing something out in me that’s already there.” He pauses, then adds, “And she’s not a flower child.” This last, however, comes out devoid of gentleness. Not quite angry, but sharply firm. Still, in an earlier time, Jimmy would be in full-flighted umbrage now.
    Robert says, “I didn’t mean to insult her.”
    “It wouldn’t be an insult anyway, if she were,” Jimmy says.
    Robert thinks:
If you didn’t take it as an insult, you wouldn’t have hardened up in the denial.
But he doesn’t let it out quite that way. He says, “I was just asking. Trying to assess what degree of criminal you both think I am by putting on this uniform.”
    “I thought you were asking to source my gentleness.”
    “Those two things often go together these days. The gentleness and the judgment.”
    “We’re judging a government.”
    “By embracing another,” Robert says. “North Vietnam’s oppressions are even institutionalized. Read a little history. No government, no country in this world has spotless hands.”
    A quick clench comes to Jimmy’s face, furrowing his brow and tightening the margins of his eyes. But he unloosens at once. His forehead stretches tight in willed calm.
    Robert finds this oddly touching. His brother is still working hard to please his girlfriend.
    “I won’t argue Vietnam with you,” Jimmy says. “Personally, I can’t stand the politspeak and jargon and sloganeering. I can’t stand the drug-addled vapidness either. But I’m sorry for the war coming to our family like this. I am.”
    “It will come to you, as well.” Robert says this softly, not as a willed effect but from an ache that he is surprised to feel this keenly. He has even brushed aside his brother’s implicit rebuke. Talk was starting that graduate school deferments were about to vanish. The war could come quite personally to his brother next May.
    Jimmy does not answer. But he does not look away. He and Robert hold their gaze for a long moment. Then, as if they’d spoken of it and agreed, the two of them turn and continue south on Third Street.
    They will not speak again about the war. Not on this day. Not, as it turns out, ever again.
    In his mind now, in his bed, Robert has had enough.
    The room is cold.
    He wants his first cup of coffee.
    He draws back the covers.
    He sits, puts his feet on the floor.
    But he has come this far on Labor Day, 1967, and the rest of it must play through him so he can drink his coffee with the past relegated once more to the past.
    Much of that final scene is a blur. It wasn’t about him, after all. He was simply a witness, standing apart. He’s not evensure where they all are in the house. He can see only Jimmy and Pops. They’re shouting at each other. Likely they’re in the kitchen, because Mom walks out, brushing past Robert. He should follow her. But he doesn’t.
    He stays, though for a long while only in body. He tunes out the words, as Jimmy is drawn by his father into the politspeak he said he despises. High-decibel