The Favorite Hour

By Meredith Suter-Wadley

I. A pleasant evening

Cool, post-rain gusts blew off the Lake of Zurich. Olivia, heading home from work, paused at an art gallery window. The glass reflected the tree-lined street’s confetti of leaflitter, their greens, gray-greens, ochres, and rusts plastered to the sidewalk—but the colors weren’t reflections, after all. The colors came from behind the glass, where were twelve unframed paintings, dreamlike landscapes brushed onto the rough sides of pressboards, hung three down and four across.
She lingered. If she missed the next tram, no worries. No one waited for her at home, the husband an ex, the son grown. When, actually, was the last time she’d had Pascal, her son, over?
She held up her phone to photograph the paintings, thinking they might inspire something. But phone screens altered images. Where a moment ago, she saw through the reflections to see paintings, now she saw reflections of the languid current of pedestrians, a cyclist spiriting past, and the street’s London plane trees sparkling in a rogue shaft of sunlight.
Leaves shimmered. Drops of water pattered the sidewalk behind her. She lowered her phone and stepped inside.
The gallerist, a young woman, sat behind a large wooden table in the corner farthest from the door, her face half-hidden by a tearful sweep of pink orchid blossoms.
“Gruetze,” Olivia said in greeting. An American graphic designer nearly thirty years living in Zurich, she spoke it dialect, Züriitüütsch, and dressed Swiss-like; today, mustard suede mules—impractical for the rain—black three-quarter cashmere slacks and knitted duster over a pressed white shirt. Staying in dialect, she asked to photograph the paintings.
“Bitte schön,” the gallerist said. The room’s parsimony amplified her soft voice, and she added that this hour was her favorite in the gallery; the evening light. She moved to the front of the table and half-sat upon it. Dressed in an elegant navy A-line dress, powder-blue felt bobbles, and a severe chignon, she looked ready to join a cocktail party. “The artist worked from film footage he found on YouTube. Home movies American soldiers in Vietnam had taken in the sixties.”
Taken aback, Olivia lowered her phone. Vietnam, here. What place could be more removed from her childhood experiences of Vietnam than a gallery in Zurich, Switzerland? She narrowed her eyes, trying to make sense of the paintings’ blurred landscapes, and unwittingly mumbled in English, “The war.”
“Oh, you are American?” the gallerist asked, switching into English herself.
Olivia nodded.
She’d grown up military, and when she was eight, her daddy had spent a year in Vietnam. Not that she remembered much about the absence, really. There’d been so many antecedents to it—days, weeks, months when he’d been gone. That year had been marked by postcards and packages arriving from Saigon and her grandparents coming to babysit so her parents could spend a week together in Hawaii. As she recalled it, where they’d lived at the time, in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on their street even, his absence wasn’t the only absence that was, had been, or would be. Plenty of fathers in the neighborhood had gone to work in uniform.
The gallerist now stood next to her. “Julian—the artist—would stop frames to paint, which is why they are all out of focus. It’s a lovely effect.”
They reminded of news footage she’d seen on their TV nightly, sandbags and explosions, green jungles and muddy rivers. Shoulder-high grasses and wounded soldiers being loaded onto helicopters.
“Here,” the gallerist said, “um—what’s it called, eine Sprengung?”
“A detonation.”
“Yes?”
Olivia resisted the urge to touch the painting, its showers of reddish browns.
On the tram, trundling homewards, a memory emerged, of watching coverage of an attack on an airfield, dirt and debris showering a C-123. Her mother had covered her mouth as the plane had begun—sloth-like—to back from the edge of the blast hole.
The tram slowed, and she understood now the gasp her mother had made: Daddy had piloted a C-123—General Westmoreland’s—and they might have been watching him under fire.

II. Unwrapped

Olivia mounted a walnut picture-rail. On it, she set her trio of paintings and began trawling YouTube to locate each exact frame depicted, the hurling wind of a Huey’s liftoff, an explosive dispersion of sand and gravel, and a red-clay airstrip with sentinel landing signals, round and faceless.
Filled with a predator’s tingle of game and play, she wondered if these very places might have been familiar to Daddy. Success baited her pleasure as she found one image after the other but being alone dampened her mood somewhat. She thought of Pascal, but ever mind her son being with her. She wouldn’t have known how to explain the quiescent emotions the paintings awakened or the thrill of pinpointing each image’s source. She’d rarely spoken of the war or her military upbringing to him, after all—what was Vietnam to a Swiss kid?
Four months before Olivia’s departure for Switzerland, newly married and carrying Pascal, cancer had taken her daddy. He’d never spoken about his experiences and never asked about hers.
Closing the tab on YouTube, she thought of Lisa, her best friend from those Fayetteville days. Their daddies being in Vietnam at the same time, the girls had bonded; never mind that Olivia’s daddy had well out-ranked Lisa’s, the two had sat together on the school bus, played together at each other’s houses, and had sleepovers, not paying attention to the war coverage on each other’s TV, giggling and joking until shushed by one or the other of their anxious mothers.
The friendship had not survived the death of Lisa’s daddy. The military kids on their street and school bus had bullied Lisa—as if her loss were a personal weakness or a character flaw or a contagion—and Olivia, lacking the skills and courage to interfere, had withdrawn. Somehow, the experience had cost Olivia her carefree self.
What was it, old friends had remarked about her having a “bombproof remoteness?” What Pascal’s father had called an “impenetrable indifference?” Well, she supposed there were things in her life she avoided examining. Unraveling. Recovering from. Perhaps her ex should see her now, in possession of something to share, anxious, and flushed.
She touched the brush of ochre on one of the boards as if touching her Daddy’s cheek and decided to reach out to her son. To a photograph of the picture rail and paintings, she added a voice message, “Stop by this weekend? These have a story I want to share with you. And I miss you.”

III. The bridge

Olivia and Pascal sat at her dining table. It’s center Advent’s wreath, four candles burning, gave off a pine scent, and the fresh tea in their mugs added undertones of apples and spices.
Through the living room’s balcony doors, the December afternoon’s soft light seeped, her view of the lake and Alps a foggy distance. She’d shared much about Daddy, Pascal patiently listening and asking questions, and perhaps it was too much, sharing the events following his kidney failure—many years after his retirement from service—but she couldn’t help herself, and Pascal hadn’t stop her.
“The chemo had knocked out a kidney. The oncologists hoped the big hospital could save the surviving kidney; surgery wasn’t an option.” An ambulance was due to transfer him, and Oliva was there to take along his personal effects.
“He suffered delusions. Transfixed by a cheesy print of a weeping willow and an arched wooden bridge that hung on the wall, he babbled nonsense about the ‘Wheel of Life.’”
Curled, fetal-like, in his bed, he quivered, his forehead hot, his skin as soft and dry as a moth’s wing. When Olivia tried covering him with a sheet or blanket, he’d bark about the pain of being touched.
“How old was he?” Pascal asked.
“Sixty. But he looked ninety, his leathery face as creased and bristled as Peat Bog Man. I was half his age and had just met your dad.”
Pascal’s dad had excited her like a new destination could, and she thought he’d be the one she wouldn’t tire of or drift from—she’d gone through relationships like the family had gone through transfers, averaging eighteen months before moving on. Ironic, then, that her ex had been the one to drift, drawn to living deep within the Alps; Olivia still preferred seeing the mountains from a distance.
“He’d also say, ‘We have no business being there,’ meaning Vietnam. God knows what he was wrestling with.”
Pascal stood. “I’m listening,” he said, picking up an ashtray and a packet of cigarettes. He opened the balcony door and stepped outside. Cold air swept around the loft. The ornaments on Olivia’s Christmas tree tinkled, and the flames on her advent wreath blew out.
Between her phone message to Pascal about the paintings and this post-Christmas visit, several weeks had passed. He’d spent the holiday with his dad and Swiss relations. And he’d offered to spend Silvester with her, but he was better off with friends, so she’d turned him down.
“Go on,” he said.
“Two paramedics arrived,” she said, her voice raised. “They tried disconnecting Daddy’s drip and removing his clamps, but he yelled at them to leave him alone.” Disease had reduced him to a child, allowing him no dignity. “I’d never seen him so vulnerable.”
Except she had, during the first church services with Daddy after his return from Vietnam. He’d wept in silence. When Olivia nudged her mom, she was cautioned to “leave him alone.” Now, the recollection of that moment on the pew and her confusion silenced her.
Pascal stepped back inside. A slipstream of fog followed him, dissolving immediately. He poured fresh tea and relit the candles.
“Daddy started shouting, ‘They’re killing our children!’ and one of the paramedics raised his hands as if being mugged. I tried calming him down; I knew exactly what he meant.”
She asked if Pascal knew about the Kent State shootings. “When the National Guard open-fired on students protesting the invasion of Cambodia?”
“Yes.”
“We were living in Ohio then, actually, a few hours’ drive south of the campus. We’d moved there just after Daddy got back from Vietnam. He was so angry about the war—would say we had no business being over there—and the students’ anti-war rallies really got his attention.”
“He sided with them?”
“Said the real purpose of our involvement was so top brass could climb the ranks.”
She gripped her teacup. “We were watching the protest coverage together, Daddy perched on his recliner. Tense. The news footage captured students and guardsmen milling about—and then teargas, crack, crack, crack, and screaming, scattering students. Daddy jumped to his feet. Shouted, ‘Now they’re killing our children!’”
“How old were you?” Pascal asked.
“Almost ten.”
“Did he frighten you?”
“Yes. I think he did. But I wasn’t feeling fear in the hospital room—I was just anxious for those poor paramedics. Every time they tried lifting the corners of Daddy’s bedsheet to shift him, he’d yell and swat at them—despite the effort being clearly very painful. Finally I said, ‘Daddy, these men are following orders. It’s their duty to get you onto the gurney.
“One said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and saluted.
“That got Daddy’s attention. He looked at the men and then at me, the whites of his eyes piss yellow. God, he was sick, yet in that moment, lucid. ‘Men,’ he said with an officer’s nod. And that was that.”
“He survived the kidney failure.”
“But not the cancer. Six months later, he was dead.”
Pascal glanced at the paintings. “I like them, their colors, and how the evening light fames them. The one with rounded forms—it’s a bridge?”
“An airstrip.”
“I appreciate knowing the context.”
“Someday they’ll be yours, I guess.”
“Not soon, I hope.” Pascal smiled.
“I’m the age Daddy was when he died.”
Her son reached for her hands and held them.
“You have his smile, you know,” Olivia said.
In the darkening room, her son’s eyes reflected the flickers of the Advent candleflames. She glanced at the paintings. They had found her. Found her for a reason.

END

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Meredith Wadley is an Air Force brat who lives and works in a small medieval town on the Swiss side of the Rhine River. Her most recent fiction is published or forthcoming in Bartleby Snopes, upstreet thirteen, Collateral, Gone Lawn, JMWW, Lammergeier, Lunate Fiction, and Orca Lit. Her work can be found at www.meredithwadley.com.