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politspeak that goes on and on.
    Until abruptly the voices cease.
    For a moment the room rings with silence.
    Robert takes notice.
    Jimmy and Pops are standing close, facing each other.
    And then Jimmy begins to speak, but softly.
    Robert listens. He misses some of the words, but he gets the gist. It’s about a murderous war. It’s about those who defy their country. Then Jimmy’s voice rises and Robert hears clearly: “Those are the real heroes.”
    And William raises his right hand and slaps his son across the face. Jimmy’s face jerks away from Robert’s view.
    The gesture has been flash-powder fast and William’s hand has vanished. Robert’s mind is lagging way behind. He saw what happened, recognized it. But Jimmy has quickly brought his face back to his father’s, and for a moment Robert doubts his senses, wonders if he saw correctly. For all his bluster and working-class manliness, Pops has almost never used his hands on his sons.
    And it happens again. Robert sees a movement at William’s left shoulder and hears a sharp sound and Jimmy’s facejerks this way, showing itself to Robert. Pops has struck him with his other hand, and he barks a single word: “Cowards.”
    Robert’s body is startled into immobility while his mind revs up to understand. And it comes to him: It’s General George Patton, Pops’s beloved high commander. It’s Patton’s infamous gesture in a field hospital in Sicily in 1943, slapping a shell-shocked soldier across the face as a cowardly malingerer. The press got hold of it and Eisenhower stepped in, reprimanded Patton, took him out of combat command for a crucial year. Pops has spoken more than once about the bum deal this war hero got for a righteous act. Pops absorbed this gesture over the years. His muscles memorized it. And finally what seemed a familiar circumstance reflexed it.
    All this tumbles through Robert’s head as more words are spoken from across the room, as Jimmy then moves away, as he passes Robert, whose body is still inert. Nothing in Robert’s thoughtful understanding of the situation suggests what action his body might take.
    Jimmy is gone from the room. He will continue out of the house. He will not return.
    It’s all over. The end.
    But for Robert in his father’s kitchen, and for Robert in his own bedroom, what ended was simply that Labor Day in 1967. Jimmy would go on to his senior year at Loyola. It would be ten months before he’d go to Canada.
    What Robert does not see at the time and what he does not see now is Jimmy’s face after the second slap. The blow brought Jimmy’s eyes to Robert’s. But at that moment Robertwas seeing only what was in his own head: an imagined image of Patton slapping a mind-blasted soldier in a hospital ward; Pops sitting somewhere with a beer, bemoaning Patton’s unfair fall from grace.
    Robert missed Jimmy’s eyes fixed on him, missed what they asked.
    And so he puts the incident away, as he always has: Everything happened very quickly; there was nothing to be done; it was all about these other two men anyway.
    Robert rises from the bed.
    Soon, in the kitchen, ready for the morning in khakis and cardigan, Robert burr-grinds his coffee beans, trying to return fully to this house, to the winter morning, to a day of work ahead in an America of a century ago. To do so he considers this Ethiopian he is grinding as if he were a Starbucks Foundation Endowed Professor of Coffee writing a monograph on these complex beans, washed and sun-dried in a cooperative in the village of Biloya, grown in deep shade more than a mile high in the surrounding mountains by a thousand farmers on less than two acres each, a coffee comprised of a dozen heirloom varieties, Kurume and Wolisho and Dega and more. Roasted last week in Durham, North Carolina, just a little past medium, the beans just beginning to turn dark.
    As he waits for the water to pass through the filter of his Technivorm Moccamaster at exactly two hundred degrees, however,