A Calling for Charlie Barnes Read online

  Charley Proffit was active and engaged everywhere she went, a fresh peach riding along on a bike or standing on the pitcher’s mound at Douglas Park. A leader of young ladies in dugout chants, she would march along the first-base line rattling the chain link to rouse the fans to their feet.

  “I don’t know but I been told!”

  “I don’t know but I been told.”

  “You’re down by one and your pitching’s gone cold.”

  “You’re down by one and your pitching’s gone cold.”

  “Two, four, six, eight. Who Is Coming to Home Plate? NAN-CY! NAN-CY!”

  Then the capper, which she alone knew: that snatch of Steam’s popular refrain from 1969, ubiquitous twenty years later in every stadium and arena:

  “Nah-nah-nah-nah … hey hey hey … goodbye!”

  She was a romantic, always running late. She loved fifties pop songs, the sock hop and soda fountain, and the movies of Doris Day. The work she did, however, less to earn a living than to serve her God, was poised at the opposite end from the romantic on the spectrum of life: she investigated child abuse and neglect for the state of Illinois. It was a rare temperament that could do that job; she dressed sensibly, in slacks and flats. Charley Proffit did not know David Lynch, who was just then beginning to film his surreal masterpiece, Eraserhead, in Philadelphia, but she and Lynch had much in common—or so Chuck would observe to me in passing years later, after a screening of Mulholland Drive. That is, only a film by Lynch might hope to contain Charley’s contradictions, her Technicolor personality and its sudden switch. (A tendency later pathologized in Marcy.) I have mentioned her resemblance to Mary Tyler Moore; unmask the Moore facade and what resided underneath, in Lynchian revelation, was no freak, criminal, or alien being, but the sworn enemy of those things, and something more terrible still: a born Puritan. All lightness in one scene, all song, all open-window carefree car ride and laughter, at her mineral core she was less forgiving than the judges at Salem and more fire and brimstone than Jonathan Edwards. Charley Proffit could rescue children from unimaginable circumstances and hold on to her sanity during her off-hours only by means of this bifurcated soul, but it did not make for easy domesticity. Her first two attempts at marriage swiftly ended in disaster. She was twenty-five years old.

  Charlie was thirty-two that night. It was open tryouts, mid-February, 6:30 p.m. Stalking the house seats, already looking pained, he rolled still tighter an old script in his two hands while scrutinizing those auditioning for him. His charisma as a director was of the negative variety: by assuming the role of agony itself, he enlisted in his discontent those who longed for his praise and would work doubly hard to realize their native talents if it were on behalf of Charlie Barnes. Fortunately, he always had one ace in the hole, and that was Alfreda Sneed. He found Freya doing laps in the Danville talent pool while everyone else was either dog-paddling or drowning outright. He had directed her in the previous year’s production of No Sex Please, We’re British opposite a serviceable Glen Glamour, the fine-art appraiser. That star turn earned her her first Katy, “Danville’s Oscar.” She went on to portray a steamy Blanche opposite his own manly Stanley in summer rep’s well-received Streetcar, for which they both took home statuettes. He was just then considering how wonderful Freya would be as Maria von Trapp when Charley Proffit appeared. Despite the dim light, he did a double take, and his heart fell out of its socket. He’d never beheld beauty until that night. With her short chestnut bob and stardust freckles, a simple gold cross at her neck, it was as if she had arrived fresh from the very same convent from which Maria herself departs at the start of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.

  Alfreda, in the middle of her audition, paused. The pause turned to a full stop as her distracted director began to rummage through the shadows, ignoring her. What was he doing? The unfathomable: showing a newbie where the sign-in sheet was. A minute later, Charlie returned down the aisle. “I’m sorry, Freya. Please continue,” he said, wondering suddenly if Ms. Sneed might not be more suited for Mother Superior this time around.

  “And where are you from, Charley?” he asked when the newbie took the stage for her audition.

  “I’m from Peoria,” Charley said.

  “Ah, Peoria!” he cried, as he gazed off into the middle distance. “The fields of Peoria.”

  He had said it with such grandeur she wasn’t sure what it meant. The fields of Peoria … was that something famous, something she should know about? She laughed just in case. Charlie, meanwhile, proceeded to slap himself mentally. The fields of Peoria, Chuck?

  After auditions, he invited her to join him at 810 Tap, where they discovered they had four failed marriages between them. And that they had Old Poor Farm in common. He worked in the east wing for Big Brothers, she in the west wing for the Department of Children and Family Services. She stopped by his office the next day.

  “So it’s true! You do work here.”

  “Did you take me for a liar?”

  She gave that some consideration. “I took you for a performer,” she said, and they laughed.

  “Come in, come in,” he urged.

  She was pretty even under the bureaucratic light that plagued Old Poor Farm. Bearded Steady Boy, a landlocked sea captain, was dressed that day in a black blazer with gold buttons and pristine white trousers. As executive director, he spent his time pairing at-risk kids with members of the community, organizing charitable events, and walking in parades. Charley, by contrast, went into homes where hell was unfolding, found children chained to U pipes by parents attempting to potty train, took Polaroids of their black eyes and filthy bedrooms, their louse bites, and documented all this in her loop-de-loop script inside official case files. She carried five or six such files everywhere she went, including, that day, into Charlie’s office, where one slipped from her grasp. Forensic Polaroids fanned out across the floor. He bent down to help collect them—and was taken aback. It was a disorienting thirty seconds: there she was, youth and beauty itself, and there that was, snapshots of pure evil—bruises, open sores. Jesus Christ, what had they done to that child? He looked over at the young lady responsible for confronting such violence. He’d fallen in love the day before. Now he was in awe. If he didn’t believe in God, he did believe in those who did His work. She thanked him, and they stood.

  “I’m just about to commence a case in Fair Oaks,” she said. “Care to tag along?”

  She drove a green Pinto. He lit a cigarette without asking if he could smoke. No one answered at the row house in Fair Oaks. She was leaving behind a business card when the door opened and a man appeared. He quickly retreated back into the darkness. Charley called after him. When he failed to reply, she stepped inside. “Hey, you sure—” Steady Boy began. Personally he wanted the hell out of there and was ready to plead executive-director duties back at Old Poor Farm. But in the end he, too, entered. The stench hit him like a fist. Charley Proffit tried the lights—no luck. They made do with what leaked in through the distant windows. They reencountered the man in no time. In his forties, he was sitting on the toilet, fully dressed, reading a comic book. He was mentally handicapped and couldn’t explain himself. In the kitchen, the refrigerator hung open. Some sauce or gravy had hit every shelf on its way down. The warm milk carton looked ready to explode. A foul juice leaked from trash bags piled in a corner. On the countertop, brazen roaches fed on cubes of what looked like stew meat. They did not scurry away even as she clapped her hands over them. Charlie’s mind went briefly to the shanty in Westville where he grew up. So hell gets worse. Now he knew how.

  A woman lay unconscious under the kitchen table, nude pantyhose rolled down to her ankles. Somehow Charley Proffit knew she was drunk, not dead. She proceeded to the bedroom. He was in over his head, but he’d gone too far to back out. The room was dark, the curtain drawn. He stood in the doorway—and knew they were not alone. It was an uncanny feeling. Charley walked to the window and opened the blind. The crepitations were coming from a bassinet in the fa
r corner. He was happy to let her have the first look.

  The executive director had never seen a child failing to thrive before. The dirty light and the birth defect combined with a distended belly and a visible rib cage to make the listless thing laboring to breathe appear less than human, but the dark swirl of down on top of his head was unmistakable—and how Charlie knew he was looking at a newborn baby. Without that, he might have known, but he might not have wanted it to live. Upon noticing the dark down, he would have done anything for him.

  “Do we pick him up, Charley?”

  “Do not pick him up, you’re likely to tear the skin. This baby needs … listen to me,” she said. “I need you to look at me. I have to be sure you register what I’m about to tell you.”

  “I’m registering.”

  “Find a phone. Do not stop until you do. Call 911. Have police and an ambulance come to 1639 Fairchild. What is that address?”

  “Sixteen thirty-nine Fairchild,” he said.

  What a first date! In point of fact, it was their second: only the night before, they were sitting in 810 Tap getting to know each other. I bring that rendezvous up once again in connection with the woman passed out on the kitchen floor, the birth mother with the taste for drink. Soon, Charlie would recall how he knew her: she was a regular barfly at that Danville watering hole, with its stuffed pheasants and fish lining the wood-paneled walls; indeed, if memory serves, and why should it, but here it must, as it often will, despite its being a Barnes memory, that very woman was sitting at the far end of the bar when Charlie and Charley entered for a drink after leaving Red Mask at the conclusion of auditions. That would mean, then, while the new mother was tying one on, downing boilermakers at a mean clip, and the two romantic hopefuls were nursing their gin and tonics in a booth in back, that baby was slowly starving to death in the Fair Oaks row house at 1639 Fairchild, where all three of them would convene the following day—an irony never lost on Marcy, who found this bit of family lore darkly amusing, illustrative of the compromise that would inevitably follow any attempt by her hapless parents to repair the world.

  But for all her cynicism, Marcy can’t deny that an innocent life was saved that day, and during a pretty singular second date. Boy, did they have a story to tell at mixers and fondue nights! They had saved a baby. Nothing half so momentous had marked earlier courtships, and it made this one feel like kismet. What was next for this crusading couple? The child, whose medical fate they carefully tracked, was transferred to the university hospital in Champaign-Urbana, where he slowly recovered and began to thrive despite severe malnutrition and a foreshortened limb—a “flipper arm.” He was released from the hospital and placed in foster care. Charlie gave Charley the lead in the play. They were engaged to be married by the time she went off book.

  The spring production of The Sound of Music at the Red Mask theater was a rousing success. The director received a standing ovation, the star two dozen roses. The cast party, a drunken sing-along on shag carpeting, was full of bawdry and torch songs. Striking the set a day later, their tears turned nostalgic. The following weekend, they drove to Peoria to marry, which they did in the backyard of the house in High Point that belonged to her aunt and uncle. The wedding bower overlooked a majestic view of the forest preserve.

  “Look, Charley,” he said to his bride during their reception, gesturing out at the beautiful green valley stretching below them and the river that ran through it. “The fields of Peoria.”

  They honeymooned in Chicago at the Drake Hotel. She bought him a wedding gift of a red velvet robe and a matching pair of travel slippers. They returned to Danville and began their life together. They had just signed the mortgage for the house on Vermilion Street when he suggested a road trip.

  “A road trip?”

  “Let’s take a look at California,” he said.

  “Take a look at it?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Hollywood. Why not?”

  “Chuck, have you lost your mind? We have jobs. We can’t just up and leave for California.”

  “We’ll tell them something.”

  “Tell them something? You mean … lie?”

  “I mean we’ll give them a good excuse. Look, Charles”—he loved to call her Charles—“we won’t be gone long. A month or two at most.”

  “A month!”

  “Three weeks, then. Come on, don’t worry. Our jobs will be waiting for us when we get back.”

  They stayed with his cousin Noreen in a rented bungalow off La Brea. Charley would wake in the night with morning sickness, crawl to the bathroom and hug the porcelain, and wonder what in hell she was doing newly married, abruptly pregnant, and emptying her stomach into another woman’s toilet in the state of California. Her new husband, meanwhile, was going on auditions. Over a hundred in twelve days, according to his own estimate thirty-five years later. Navigating blind with the Thomas Guide, scrounging under the seats for gas money, Steady Boy was trying to make it in Hollywood. Blame “Danville’s Oscar,” wig glue, the standing ovations. He believed he owed it to himself.

  Things soured quickly with his cousin. Noreen liked to drink and entertain men, and Charley, who was chronically ill her first trimester, longed for silence and rest. The two women quarreled. After another long day of demoralizing cattle calls, Charlie arrived home to all-out war. Untethered and unhappy, his new wife finally demanded they cut the trip short.

  Oh, well. Can you blame a man for trying? But here’s the thing: on the drive home, blame himself he did. Stupid, stupid, stupid Steady Boy! It was the same old shit, the very same pie-in-the-sky nonsense that had gotten him into such trouble with his first two wives. How many pipe dreams needed to burst before he reconciled himself to a fate that—oh, hell, didn’t even look half bad: a beauty on his arm, a new family on its way, a home on Vermilion Street all his own, and renown within the local community as a man who knew how to stage a good show? Why must there be more, huh? Looking for more had been, so far, just a guaranteed way of losing it all.

  “I just realized something,” he said, as they hit evening traffic outside Denver on the drive home. “It should have been you.”

  They hadn’t spoken for two hundred miles. “Me what?”

  “On those auditions,” he said. “Of the two of us, Charles, you’re the star. Not me. If someone had a shot, it was you.”

  “But I don’t give a damn about that stuff, Charlie,” she said. “There are children suffering out there.”

  To his great relief, their jobs were indeed waiting for them on their return, as he had promised, and now, to himself, he resolved never to pull a stunt like that ever again. What a damned dumb thing to do! Looking back—like a man on death row given a last-minute reprieve—he was overjoyed to be home, to be married, the recent past dead and buried, and forgiven another unaccountable … swerve, temporarily saved from his own worst self.

  But howsoever correctly he judged Charley to have more talent, it was equally true that he was a poor judge of his own. Some time after their return, he got a call from his cousin. Newly sober because newly pregnant, Noreen was contrite and hoped to make amends. She gave him the phone messages that, for the last seven days of their twelve-day visit, she had withheld from him out of spite: one from this talent scout and another from that. Eight in all. The parts had been cast, the projects finished or set aside. He was months too late.

  “You came in with an army cap,” one casting director recalled when, one by one, Charlie returned those eight messages. “I remember you well—I liked your smile. Why don’t you come in and read for me this Thursday? I have something that might be perfect for you.”

  “But I’m in Danville,” Charlie said, bottle-feeding the new baby.

  “Where’s that?”

  “Illinois.”

  “Oh,” the woman said. “What are you doing all the way out there?”

  Almost immediately, they had a hard time getting by on two state salaries. The economy wasn’t so great in 1974; there were fuel sho
rtages and sudden price hikes. The house on Vermilion came with a stiff monthly mortgage. It was fifty years old and in need of repair. His Newport kept breaking down, which was a happier fate than the engine fire that put her Pinto out of commission on the corner of Logan and Clay. They survived with only one car for the rest of the year—until the following April, in fact, when they got a little back in taxes, just in time for the roof to cave in. He hated living paycheck to paycheck, hated the chipped tableware they put out for guests, the threadbare towels on the bathroom hooks, the mismatched bed linens, the secondhand furniture, the stains in the carpets in every room …

  And yet, what was the cause of this unaccountable happiness?

  From the beginning, there was a quality to their lovemaking that resisted the old associations and terms. It had been a barnyard urge. So what, exactly, was … this? Among his kin, those country bumpkins, and as a young boy running around tin shacks, and later, as a man among men on sales floors, he came to know the crudest, vilest expressions for what a man did to a woman. Often enough in those few words and phrases, the woman did not so much as even factor in: some penetrating violence was aimed at a void and the man was pleasured—that was the sum of the sex act and how the world taught Charlie to regard it. With Charley Proffit, he began to think for himself: that sort of talk was not just ugly but inaccurate, as disrespectful as it was dead wrong. He had no words for what he and Charley did. By some physical process rooted, he supposed, in the same old body as he’d always had, its senses, receptors, instincts, the pulse quickening as before, the identical perspiring skin and dilating pupils, the endorphins coursing through selfsame veins, he locked eyes with her and entered a trance unlike any before it, entraining their heartbeats, rhythms, blood flow, their animal bodies becoming one … and pure transcendent devotion took hold. It was predicated on stuff outside the bedroom: her work with kids, her conviction, how she stalked a first-base line. It was a martyring, unmanning, dispossessing devotion. All that folktale and matinee-movie stuff he confused for entertainment turned out to be true to life, for this was as close as he’d come to a hero’s tale and storybook romance, even as the house came crumbling down around their garden.