A Calling for Charlie Barnes Read online

  “Just so we are clear,” she said.

  It was a rare instance of eye contact, very unsettling. She usually kept me in the periphery and preferred me in the third person.

  “Should anything happen to him, moving forward, there will be no more talk about you know who.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “I think you know.”

  “I don’t think I do.”

  Then it dawned on me: Evangeline. If he were to die, she did not want any mention of the wife that preceded her at his memorial service, in his obituary, in any remembrance whatsoever.

  “The three of you—”

  “Who?”

  “You and your siblings,” she said.

  “There are four of us,” I said.

  “You tease him. You treat it like it’s all just a big joke. Well, it’s not a joke to me, and I don’t find it funny.”

  “No one thinks of Evangeline as a joke,” I said.

  She looked directly at me again—twice in one day!

  “I’m not talking about Evangeline.”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “The one you call by my own name. His ‘second’ wife.”

  “Barbara Lefurst?”

  “There is no such person as Barbara Lefurst,” she declared, “and you damn well know it.”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “There is no ‘other’ Barbara! That is a fiction.”

  As in the cartoon in which the cat, primed for resentment, pulls from some hidden pocket a long, sharp pin in the presence of a balloon that, in the next frame, transforms into the revolving blue world, casting a shadow of doubt across the cat’s brow even as the pin brightens, I was presented with a fiendish choice: drop it, or destroy the world.

  “You’ve made her up to taunt me, the three of you.”

  “There are four of us,” I said.

  “You knew it would play on my vulnerabilities.”

  “As far as anyone knows, Barbara, you have no vulnerabilities.”

  That put an end to that.

  His second wife a fiction! Had he failed to mention her? Had he selectively omitted, conveniently edited out, the original Barbara in conversation with the new one? He might have wanted to spare them both a little embarrassment, make his past a bit more palatable. Five is a large figure where wives are concerned. I wouldn’t have put it past him. What’s more, I wasn’t sure I could blame him. We all need our little white lies. I would leave it to Jerry to stand on the street corner, stomping his rod of iron and crying, “Truth! Truth!”

  “Okay,” I said. “There was no Barbara Lefurst. I made her up. We all did. A little inside joke at the old man’s expense. We didn’t mean any harm by it—”

  “I don’t believe that for a second.”

  “But you won’t hear me say another word about it for as long as I live.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  She would have done us all in, I think: not just his second wife, the very real Barbara Lefurst, and the other wife she had been whitewashing for years, sweet Evangeline, but his first and third wives, too, and the children he bore, their pets and addresses and childhood interests, the afternoons in the park, the opening nights at Red Mask, the endearments, the snapshots, the road trips, the potlucks—everything that predated her and diminished the dream.

  All we had to defend against this was memory. It was a sunset memory of bountiful, heartfelt Danville, Illinois, as much as it was of any one man. It was a memory of the house on Vermilion, the bunk beds, the foster kids, the man outside mowing the lawn. It was a memory of his headbands and wristbands and the hook shots he took on afternoons at the Y, and a memory of his Chrysler Newport, an old beater that Barbara never knew, but I did. What pleasure there was seeing him pull in again on another Saturday when he had kept his promise. Later, in transit, I would watch the road going by from within those shamrocks of rust in the floorboards at our feet. It was a memory of Kickapoo State Park and its picnic tables and our card games and of how, in one of those sweet surfeits of time, we sat around comparing the size of our hands. Finally, it was a memory of a rented motel room on New Year’s Eve, an occasion he made special by buying a bottle of cider champagne and putting it on ice in the bathroom sink. We had every intention of popping the cork at the stroke of midnight, only we got caught up in a TV movie instead, a Jon Voight vehicle called The Champ, in which a father and son stick together through good times and bad, only to be separated by death in the end. Believe it or not, extensive academic study has determined in some scientific way that The Champ is the saddest movie ever made, provoking more tears from the unsuspecting than either Bambi or Terms of Endearment. It’s not a tearjerker so much as a finely honed torture device. Well, we hardly needed the academy to confirm for us our feelings. “You’re going to die!” I cried, clinging to him, and the only way he knew to redeem that holiday was to pop the cork early on our ice-cold cider.

  I was a lifetime removed from these memories, and presently hostage to a dull mauve waiting room that drained the human soul of its magnificent contents and replaced them with seven generic watercolors and six rows of chairs. If you believe, as I do, in the mind’s need to be out from under anxiety to approach even the borders of the past, to say nothing of its campfires and lakesides and sudden stunning views, inside that drab and sanitized room I should have shut down completely. I was under duress. A dear man’s life was on the line, and my companion was Barbara. It was all the more surprising, then, that another, still more elemental memory came to me unbidden. I was in the bathtub. Steady Boy was at the mirror, shaving. Charley Proffit had been coming and going for ten minutes: swooping down on a used towel, pausing to comb her bob, climbing into a pair of slacks, popping back in to retrieve her hot tea. A red hair dryer, dangling down the wall by its tangled cord, came to rest an inch off the floor. Elsewhere, hand towels, tube socks, bikini underwear, softball jerseys, and a hundred other stiff and limp things from life in midaction hung from mismatching hooks and bars. The tub was lined with traction strips and was gritty from an old scouring agent. Just over the ledge sat a pink bath mat permanently branded by the tapering half of a hot iron. When I hung my arm over, issuing military instructions to those action figures holding down a remote base camp there, I soaked the floor, that rug, eventually their fresh socks. Presently, however, he was still shaving at the mirror when that foster parent extraordinaire, Charley Profitt of Peoria, Illinois, reappeared in her morning hurry, the frantic general to his ever-patient sapper, to issue another round of instructions: out! School in twenty minutes, and I still had to eat breakfast. I objected, conscientiously if not outright. Getting dressed, going to school—what were those things compared to the war of good and evil being waged in every corner of that tub? My Luke Skywalker, missing his left arm, which I tore from its socket with my teeth, was being swallowed up by the blind snout of the faucet. My G.I. Joe was done, swept up inside a lunar volcano, while green plastic soldiers paraded in formation across the slick ledge. Snoopy dangled over the lip in the hopes of being rescued by the Man of Steel. This ragtag team of playthings was all a jumble. I knew nothing of timelines or toy lines or the dictates of corporate branding. That’s right: back then, I loved a blended family! These good and bad guys, supplemented by a silver bowl, a chipped mug, a plastic flute, and a powerfully squirting bottle of Pantene, as essential to bath time as the water itself, defied gravity, violated the laws of physics, and skirted death at my whim. Was that whimsy, that magic, at a time when Charlie was in such peril, the cause of the return of that particular memory?

  Whatever the reason, there was simply no denying it: before the nurse at First Baptist, before Dickie Dickerdick and the Florida Keys, there was Charley and Charlie of Danville, Illinois. The one was a case worker at Old Poor Farm, the other an insurance salesman. They had a dog named Thumper. They had a boy named Jake. We had picnics at Kickapoo State Park and went to church on Sundays. And just be
fore she left the bathroom for good that morning, before he put on a fine suit and tie and disappeared down the drive on his way to the office, and before divorce blew our little family to smithereens, Charley put her finger to her lips to let me know we were conspiring, then reached out and pinched his butt. She goosed him, and always game, he jumped, he hooted, he shimmied, he marched up and down like a toy soldier.

  I had one task that day at the hospital, and as time wound down I began to fixate on it. I had promised him that I would find his dentures and return them to his mouth when the operation was over. I got fidgety around five, ten full hours after the operation began. By seven, when there was still no sign of the surgical team, I began to pace.

  “What is taking so long?” I asked.

  Finally the nurse appeared. Surely that meant he was out at last and we would be taken straight to him. But I didn’t have the damn things yet and tried to stall.

  “If both of you will please just go back to your seats,” the nurse said, “someone will be out to give you an update shortly.”

  “May I speak to you in private?”

  “What for?” Barbara asked.

  I turned to her. “I would like a word with the nurse, that’s all.”

  “Are you looking for these?” she asked. From her purse, she pulled the blue container in which he kept his dental plates. She had them? But how? She rattled them in the air as I fell silent.

  “Oh, don’t be a fool,” she said, and took up her seat again as the nurse had requested.

  She knew, of course, and loved him all the same.

  Fiction, or 906 Harmony Drive

  Chippin’ In

  43

  He came out of surgery gray, half dead. What was meant to heal him was, for me, the start of his dying. That man, that immortal, my father, a fairly standard midcentury model, Updikean in his defects and indulgences, besotted by the American dream and completely unkillable, with at least a dozen second acts already behind him, was gone. In place of the unique article was an imitation. He had not undergone some lifesaving surgery but an experimental whole-body transplant into somebody half his size. He writhed around, looked bothered by the light. He appeared to have an allergy to his own skin.

  The morning after surgery, he came to feeling for his teeth. Finding them in place, he swooned again. Two days later, he could sit up. The doctor encouraged him to sip water, then to fast, then to sip again, to test the new seals on his old pipes. They took: no leaks, thank God. Days 4 and 5, he was urged to get out of bed. Slowly, he learned how to drag the IV pole down the hall and back; it later doubled in his dreams as an old-fashioned anatomy skeleton that graded, with dream speed, into the long and lanky figure of his mother. She was still alive, somehow—they had longevity, the Barneses—still wrestling with restless leg, and at last, he was her age: ancient, that is, and easy prey for self-pity.

  Three tender trips to and from the commode to void urine were celebrated among the medical staff as passionately as any performed by a potty-training toddler. His daily walks were extended, his palate further expanded; on the tenth day, they told him to take a deep breath while they pulled the gastric drain from his abdominal wall. He was coming along like a model patient; was discharged; was monitored remotely until it was time to remove his staples, after which Barbara, taking time off work to see him through, applied aloe and vitamin E to the chapped ridges of his poor wound.

  Her purse, a leather octopus, lay sprawled on a chair whenever I arrived at the hospital. Her black trench coat, which might come off in a moment of panic, would fall across the floor like a foreshortened shadow while she attended to some oversight, and the nurse on duty, suddenly superfluous, was left to pick it up and hang it from the door. I would nearly collide with her rounding the bend into his room as she was on her way out—not to grab a bite, as I had just done, or to catch up on her sleep, but to summon someone, to make a small adjustment to my father’s care. And on that rare occasion when I entered and saw no sign of her, a second later the toilet would roar and out she would come drying her hands, dressed in the same scrubs she wore to work. Her famously cool disposition, the haughtiness that endeared her to absolutely no one, became, in a hospital setting and in service to him, a breathtaking display of devotion—and a special rebuke to my siblings, for whom the fifth in his line of wives was the worst of the bunch, and another reason to hate him.

  “We’ve done her a disservice,” I was saying to him by day 3 or 4, during one of his lucid spells. “She really loves you, Pop.”

  Tears came to his eyes. “Tell that to the others, will you?”

  “I can try.”

  But they didn’t care to hear it from me.

  When it came time to wheel him out of the hospital and drive him home, it was Barbara who eased over the speed bumps and potholes, avoiding them altogether when possible, so that his delicate reconfigured center, an animal caught in a snare, would not jostle unnecessarily.

  44

  So he was home, so he would live … so what? The poor man had no appetite for food, for the newspaper, for telephone calls—and what was life without appetite? He subsisted on black coffee and protein shakes, mortally afraid of moving and tearing internally something he couldn’t name but knew he needed. Regrets played on a loop. Depression, that still beast, came to roost. Depression laid its black eggs in him, which hatched, howled for food, and grew stronger on dark thoughts. It was not the cancer, but the reckoning, that came close to killing him.

  To get up in the morning with a big gash in your side; to sweat through breakfast; to tremble; to feel tired and weak; to crawl from spot to spot; to endure—nothing more—and to go on enduring because it beats the alternative, is to confront the day with a lot of willpower. That was not my father.

  He sat, did nothing, “healed,” while time—as changing headlines, turning seasons—continued unabated. His surgeon, a lifesaver and a straightforwardly factual man, stated that the surgical team got clean margins and chemo was very good at taking care of the rest, but the patient had to eat or he would not live. The patient just shrugged. What was food to him?

  Then one morning I set down before him a plate of eggs that I scrambled with whole milk and butter, and that did the trick. He scarfed it down. He wanted nothing but eggs after that, prepared just that way, three at a time, salted and piping hot. It was that perfect meal one goes chasing for years afterward, the rekindling of an appetite given up for dead, a rebirth … and for an entire month, he ate three meals a day of three eggs apiece and nothing more.

  We watched more TV than you could possibly imagine, more even than when I was in high school and living with him and Evangeline in Downers Grove. Back then, we had a thirty-two-inch Sony Trinitron console set in solid oak, which he worked from his recliner by the luxury of remote control. I was sixteen when I bought a replica of that remote at a Radio Shack in the mall and synced it to the television. On nights I was bored, I would climb from my window and stand outside the house on Benton Avenue moving the volume subtly up and down. Sometimes I changed the channel. Steady Boy liked channel 7. I liked channel 9. He would look up from his newspaper (he was never in front of the television without his newspaper) confounded by the sudden change. It seemed to have taken place entirely by some occult power. He reached for his remote on the TV tray and restored order before going back to his newspaper. I would let maybe a minute pass before changing it back to 9. He looked up, very solemn … I still have my regrets about this. I had not yet emerged from my punk-ass-bitch phase. What reason did I have to believe Charlie wouldn’t abruptly change his mind and send me back to Florida—or to foster care? I just wasn’t convinced that I deserved the fighting chance he was giving me. I was still smoking, too, and lifting the occasional greeting card. But back to him in that recliner, mouth gone slack in mystification: What the hell is going on with my television? He got to his feet and pulled the curtain back. Insecure Steady Boy was the first to believe that someone might be toying with him as he peered
angrily out at the night. A veteran delinquent, I was well hidden, but silently shaking with laughter because I could still see him. On a different night, he simply stood up and started banging on the television, as if that ever works. Well, why shouldn’t it? I correlated one of those bangs with a channel change, then another, then another and another, until he had every reason to believe that his Sony was obeying him in this crudest of manners, appeasing an angry god, and when at last it could be trusted that channel 7 would hold, he carefully withdrew, picking across the carpet backward and reaching out with a blind hand for his recliner, keeping his eyes glued to the screen until he was seated again, this time demurely, on the lip of the thing, as if fully occupying it might tempt fate. How carefully he sat there! I gave it a full two minutes before returning it to channel 9.

  I can’t tell you how often he would resort during this mind-boggling episode to that impotent hope of the layman: unplugging the TV from the wall socket and plugging it back in again. One night, he even dragged poor drowsy Evangeline out of bed just to have someone stand witness to his going mad. Of course, with the two of them in the middle of the room at the stroke of midnight holding their breath waiting for something to happen, I didn’t do a thing. Remember that old Merrie Melodies cartoon about the frog with the golden voice who eventually drives his promoter insane because the beast will sing only for him? That TV went haywire only for Charlie Barnes. I found this amusing, as any teenager might, in the twilight of my not giving a shit, before I came to believe in that house and my place in it. Finally, he took the TV in to have it repaired, but they sent it right back for no charge because there was nothing wrong with it. My poor pop. In time, I stopped torturing him like this because I really did think he was going to lose his mind, and because I lost interest. He loved me.