A Calling for Charlie Barnes Read online

  “You’ve never liked her,” I said.

  “No, I never have.”

  “And me?” I asked.

  She made no reply.

  I was no fool. I didn’t press her. It was her house, her husband. I was at her mercy. Marcy in Deer Park, Jerry on Western Avenue, Evangeline in New Port Richey … not much of a family to speak of without Steady Boy.

  “No one thinks of you,” she said, almost as an afterthought.

  We were driving through the night. Dawn broke as we arrived at the hospital in Champaign-Urbana where he had been taken for medical evaluation and where I, too, had spent some time as a newborn. Barbara killed the ignition and was reaching for the door when I caught her arm.

  “I screwed up,” I said. “Give me another chance.”

  She paused before answering. “There are times when I honestly don’t know who you are or why you’re here,” she said.

  She got out of the car. She would later apologize.

  He was transferred to First Baptist, where he was treated for psychosis with lithium and a second antipsychotic. It was less than ideal. He badly needed to seize that particular moment in time to start chemo, but he was too weak and weighed too little and was out of his mind anyway. It would have to wait. One of the doctors on his tumor board alerted Barbara to a case study from 1998 in which a patient who underwent a Whipple procedure became convinced some six weeks later that he was Bill Clinton. The trauma of that particular operation could produce a break with reality similar to the one experienced by soldiers on a battlefield.

  With help from the medication, he had admirable recall of these events and detailed them for me with a bafflement that rivaled my own. There had been other occasions in which the power had gone out and he hadn’t left the house to confirm a world overrun by extraterrestrials. What was different this time? It was, he thought, the result of an estrangement from all that he knew and loved on account of his compromised body. A world in which he had no appetite for a glass of cold milk, a tub of buttered popcorn, or a fresh sports page no longer made sense as the world.

  46

  There had been a brief window, between that first serving of scrambled eggs and his kind of losing his mind there, when he and I (between episodes of TV) resumed debating back and forth as we had been doing my entire life. The object of our debates had never mattered much. As inveterate gamblers never care about the nature of the contest upon which they lay down their money, as old addicts never mind what gets them high, chronic and incorrigible debaters like me and Chuck happily went at it over anything and everything: the pros and cons of a packet of salt, the performance of an orphaned earplug. It was our way of paying a compliment to the richness of the world and of each other’s minds. We debated in private, on road trips and in restaurants, and we debated in mixed company until everyone else got drowned out and grew bored stiff. We didn’t know when to quit: just as the birthday cake was coming out, as heads were bowing for prayer, as the final strains of the national anthem were sending shivers down the collective spine, on we went, eager to make one last point in a low murmuring aside, neither one willing to concede defeat. Was grunge the equal of opera? Could concentration camps take root here in America? Was a poet a salesman when he published his chapbook or by nature something more pure? Some of our debating was downright dull and gave even me a headache, but it was our sport, our bond, an expression of love and measure of our mutual respect.

  Only now we debated how he might repair his relationship with his daughter.

  “Does she really hate me?”

  “I don’t think she hates you, no. She’s just angry.”

  “She won’t call, Jake, she won’t pay me a visit. She knows the cancer’s real. I’ve apologized for the lie. What more can I do?”

  Marcy had every right to be angry with Charlie. She’d been manipulated the day of his diagnosis, quit her job to fly to Chicago, had to learn from Jerry that her father had lied, and then had to maintain her resolve to make him pay a price for all this bad behavior even as he was put under and cut open and so vastly diminished that he was almost unrecognizable. I’d flown down to … where was it, again? Oh, yes, Deer Park, Texas. I’d flown to Texas to encourage her to join us in the waiting room on the day of his surgery, had even purchased an airline ticket for her to this end, but she could not be persuaded. She had made up her mind: her father was a con man, and nothing—not pancreatic cancer or the Whipple procedure or a daily dose of antipsychotics—was ever going to make him get real. It wasn’t lost on me that when Charlie momentarily broke with reality, he conceived of himself as the genuine article in a world of fakes and impostors. It was never his aim to live life as a farce. His every harebrained scheme was intended to make him more real in the eyes of the world, and in his daughter’s.

  He had to shoulder responsibility for his trouble with Marcy, but there was also at play here a legacy of the past. As a younger, more impressionable person, Marcy had been heavily influenced by her mother’s poor opinion of her father. A divorce didn’t seem sufficient for Charley Proffit in her repudiation of her ex-husband. Falling in love with Charlie, marrying him, having his children—all that mortified her. She had been tricked by his full beard. When she found the man she was looking for in Dickie Dickerdick, she needed not merely to put Charlie in the past; she wanted to erase him from the historical record. To that end, she turned Dickie into Dad. “Ask your father,” she’d say, in reference not to the man we’d grown up with from time immemorial, but to the virtual stranger who had driven us to Florida for a sun-kissed fresh start. “Let’s give your father a call.” “What would your dad say?” “Wait until your father gets home.” Dickie wasn’t our dad—and he was a far cry from fatherly—but he was very convenient as a shiny decoy in the systematic whitewashing of Charlie Barnes. Saying Charlie’s name in earshot of Charley Proffit became almost as awkward and ultimately forbidden as the conjuring of Evangeline Barnes would be years later in the company of Barbara Ledeux. It was really impressive, the genius these people had for ghost stories.

  I knew my task in Deer Park was a tall one, but no one else could afford to fly down there and plead his case in person, which was what he deserved. I rented a car and booked a room, then called her to let her know I’d arrived.

  “Arrived where?” she asked.

  “The hotel,” I said. “The place I stayed last time.”

  “Hold on,” she said. “You’re back in Deer Park?”

  “Yes, Deer Park.”

  “What the hell! Jake, you can’t just keep popping up in Texas,” she said. “Don’t you know I live here for a reason?”

  “What reason is that?”

  “To be as far away from you people as possible.”

  “I was hoping we could get another drink,” I said.

  “You don’t drink.”

  “Dinner, then.”

  “I’ve eaten.”

  “It’s noon.”

  She agreed to meet at the sports bar where we’d met previously. I caught her up on his so-called recovery, his brief break with reality and how it forced the delay of urgently needed chemotherapy. I don’t know that any of it did much good. Since his operation, she’d played things close to the vest. No flowers. No get-well cards. No texts or emails. No fruit baskets. No curiosity, it would seem, for how the old man was faring in the fight for his life. But that was Marcy, wasn’t it? A mystery, a kind of split personality. You just never knew from day to day which one you were going to get. I made a final case for why he deserved a little mercy, then I went silent. She looked off. When she turned back, she had tears in her eyes.

  “Is he dying?”

  “He might be. I don’t know.”

  “He’s hurting?”

  “He’s very definitely hurting.”

  “Because of me?”

  “Because he is who he is,” I said, “and because he wishes to be someone better.”

  “Who doesn’t?” she asked. “Except for maybe you, Jake.” />
  “Oh, don’t be so sure,” I said. “I’m full of surprises.”

  “Why are you here?” she asked. “Have you really come all the way to Texas just to repair his relationship with me?”

  “I owe him,” I said.

  “You could have called.”

  I nodded.

  “If I were you, I wouldn’t have come,” she said. “I would have fled this family a long time ago and never looked back.”

  “I like you guys.”

  “You like him.”

  “I love him,” I said.

  She looked off again.

  “Okay,” she said. “Let me give it some thought.”

  It was about as much as I could hope for, and I flew back to Chicago the next day.

  47

  Christmas on Rust Road was a subdued affair: sugar cookies in tins and an artificial tree. Barbara’s spinster sister, the mysteriously named Darge, came with her irrepressible nervous tic: the animatronic need to rotate her head sixty degrees to the right every ten seconds or so. She weighed ninety pounds and wore a Christmas sweater. Barbara’s children—Troy Ledeux, on leave from the army, and Tory, a tire saleswoman for Pirelli—had developed in their adult years a curious sibling connection despite their difference in age. When in the comforts of home, their hair down and feet bare, my stepsiblings became preoccupied by their persistent little teases, hem pullings, back massages, high private squeals of laughter, impromptu wrestling matches that drove them out of the kitchen and into the living room, and finally those settled, languid moments when, as decaf brewed after the holiday dinner, the sister sat on the brother’s lap and idly began petting the hair on his arm.

  “Tory and Troy are awfully close,” I whispered to Charlie in a private moment on Christmas Day. “What’s that about?”

  “I make no inquiries into that relationship, Jake.”

  “But you agree it’s odd?”

  “I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” he said with a shit-eating grin.

  His first post-Whipple Christmas, when his most ardent wish had been to celebrate in the company of loved ones the additional time he had been granted, was instead a thunderous rebuke to the life that had preceded the Whipple, because his children refused to participate. When Jerry, who lived all of twenty miles away, declined to stop by, he had to contend with the clearest evidence yet of a perfectly failed life. In fact I fix the date of the first steps he took to change that life to the day after Christmas, when, early in the morning, I returned to the house on Rust Road with bags of salt for deicing the driveway to find the television off and the old man in his recliner … reading a book.

  “He’s up already,” I said, “and reading the Bhagavad Gita?”

  He half shrugged as I resumed my place on the end of the sofa nearest him. I’d taken off my shoes before entering Barbara’s house, of course, a rule I’d been following for fifteen years. “It renders death meaningless, apparently,” he said.

  “Hey, we should all be reading it.”

  “Jerry thinks so. This is his favorite thing.”

  “Oh,” I said. “You don’t say.”

  The mention of Jerry brought back his absence the day before, and Charlie looked downcast.

  “I’m determined to make it through this time, Jake.”

  “To edify your soul, or to please Jerry?”

  “I would like to please Jerry,” he said. “But I’d better say the soul part, or he’ll tell me I’m reading it all wrong.”

  “You can’t read a book wrong anymore, Chuck. Not in the age of Amazon reviews.”

  “Tell me something, Jake,” he said. “What’s dharma?”

  I have always consigned the desiderata of religious concepts, with their dry abstractions and dubious utilities, to a junk drawer of the mind, where inevitably they went to get all jumbled up and die of unholy neglect. I rummaged around now for dharma but came up empty-handed.

  “Do you want the Buddhist’s use of the term or the Hindu’s?”

  He looked uncertain.

  “Joking,” I said. “I don’t actually know the difference. I run Literature 101, remember? Jerry’s in charge of Advanced Religion.”

  “I’ll tell you what I think it is,” he said. “I think it means a calling in life, the one thing you were meant to do—you and you alone. Your duty, I guess. Almost a holy duty.”

  “For me,” I said, “that would be taking care of you, Chuck.”

  “For you,” he replied, correcting me, “it would be writing books. I’ve always admired that about you, Jake. Your determination. You’ve known you were a writer since you read Hemingway. How old were you when you first read Hemingway?”

  “It was Dostoyevsky,” I said, “and I was twelve.”

  “Twelve years old and reading Hemingway.”

  “It was Dostoyevsky.”

  “I never did anything like that. I don’t do anything like it now. Sixty-nine years old, son, and not likely to live all that much longer—”

  “Don’t say that, Pops. Don’t even think it.”

  “—and I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. What is it, Jake? What’s my duty? What’s my dharma?”

  Was he asking rhetorically?

  “Financial planning,” I said.

  He dismissed that with a wave of the hand.

  “What about Chippin’ In?”

  The look he returned was so curious—curiosity itself.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  “Chippin’ In?”

  His eyes had brightened.

  “I know that, don’t I? What is that?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “Tell me what that is. I know I know it.”

  He had no recollection! His dear idea, his million-dollar delight, had been rubbed out, effaced from the poor man’s memory by his pancreatic ordeal. The only commercial concept ever endorsed by his stingy brother, Rudy, the hotshot—the bastard who, when his brother fell ill, couldn’t be bothered to visit him over the holiday, despite my efforts to get him on the phone and plead with him. Charlie had clung to Chippin’ In, prior to surgery, as his last best hope, only to wake Whippled and wiped clean.

  But that, too, by God, yes, even that!—here his buoyant voice can’t help but break through in memory—had its upside, for suddenly he found himself in one of those time-traveling, role-swapping, richly ironic scenarios that he and I knew so well from our hours of television viewing, in which he could have his own idea pitched to him by a cosmic surrogate. Would it warp the space-time continuum? Would it (more unlikely still) measure up? The minute I began to explain the concept, it came back to him, of course, but he insisted I revive every detail. When I finished doing so, I watched him closely for his reaction.

  Suddenly, he sprang forward on his recliner, collapsing the footrest in a fit that made the whole thing ring, and seized upon my knee with a strong hand, just as he would have done in his days before the Whipple. “Not too shabby an idea, my boy!”

  I loved him. The Gita, I remember, had fallen between the chair and the footrest before the latter came thundering down, and so was swallowed up.

  On the first Monday of the new year, he clopped into the kitchen in suit and tie, his old perfumed and polished self. Our plan was to hit the banks.

  In his day, a proper bank had pillars and vaults, and echoes ringing in the airy halls, and gentlemen bankers in three-piece suits whose Rolodexes would unlock at the sound of a good idea … but times had changed. The suburban branches of those Wall Street banks that we paid visits to that day, from Roselle Road to Route 53, to pitch Chippin’ In, were as close to the halls of power as K was to the castle. We began with one bank in particular whose corporate parent, he believed, would be the quickest to see the synergies between his brainchild and their mission statement. But where he hoped to find venture capital, there were only padded armchairs and free peppermints and a branch manager busy converting an old lady’s loose change into dollar bills, and we
left that glass box with little more than brochures.

  The mood of the financial markets in that winter of our Great Recession was grim. No one had any business asking anyone else for money unless that money was already theirs, and even then it wasn’t a sure thing. I did take heart, however, as we went from bank to bank, at seeing a tie knotted at his neck again. Though pinning an old wattle in place, it restored his youthful vigor. He was jazzed again. He had purpose that morning. If he was also taking catnaps between our destinations, at least he was back out there, making an effort. Of course, he looked like hell warmed over. And by then he hated bankers. From their branches hung too many sour grapes. More revelations about Bear Stearns had come to light, Lehman had failed the previous September, and the mortgage mess was in full swing; his faith in a fair game was gone, and he took to calling the banks “the Five Families.”

  In practical terms, the day was a bust. The recent college grads manning the teller windows didn’t know what to do with him, while their betters in the open plans had little to offer beyond a business card. Upon saying the words Chippin’ In, he might as well have been standing there in loincloth and sandals with a cow on a leash. This was the glad-handing Charlie Barnes that Jerry most despised; he would have had no appetite for it. Dropping in unannounced on playacting bankers in glorified ATMs to discuss the funding of a goofy idea would have put the lie to more than the American dream; it would have stripped away the illusions necessary for maintaining life itself, and Jerry would have retreated behind a potted plant. Steady Boy’s brash self-confidence when a good idea graced his pocket, despite the hundred others now tarnished and parked in some coffee can, clung to Jerry, as the father’s iniquities are said to cling unto the third and fourth generations. Even I was a little embarrassed on Chuck’s behalf. I loved him and wanted to help, but did he really believe he’d start inking contracts at the Schaumburg Citibank? What self-deceptions we require to get out of bed in the morning. The Clown in Your Town, the Original Doolander, TTAA, now Chippin’ In … I was so moved by this pitiable string of failed campaigns that I parked and ran around my rental to the passenger-side door before he could even reach for the handle. I opened the door to the bank for him, too. I watched in dread as he pitched his idea to a teenager in suit and tie. And I walked defeated through the parking lot with him on our return to the car.