A Calling for Charlie Barnes Page 21

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “Does it matter if I have money or not? I’m here. One way or the other, we’re about to find out what she’s made of.”

  “She will never kick you out,” I said. “She loves him too much.”

  “Oh?” he said. “Have you started calling her Mom yet?”

  I laughed. This light little ribbing, part of the casual exchange between two brothers as they passed each other on the stairs, was a breath of fresh air in that house of slumber and death. He retreated to Troy’s old room like a surly teenager and I resumed cleaning the bathrooms and doing the laundry.

  I might have returned to Rome once Jerry came to live in the house on Rust Road. Charlie didn’t need two sons scrambling his eggs and driving him to his chemo sessions. But I stuck around. I liked the fact of the three of us under the same roof again, Father and Sons taking advantage of an unorthodox time to enjoy one another’s company. I wouldn’t have traded that for Rome or the Cotswolds or anywhere else in the world.

  If this section of my tale begins to feel sentimental, workman-like in its efforts to memorialize, that is because I strain to capture the competing agendas and mind-sets of that difficult time: Charlie slogging through chemo; Jerry humiliated and thrown back on his father and his fourth—fourth!—stepmother; Barbara desperate to be done with him (and me) and to return to her simple life in her simple home, going to work and doing crossword puzzles with her silver fox on Sundays and fooling herself that it could go on like that forever; and me. And me! What did I want? I called Marcy in Deer Park to give her the latest.

  “The chemo’s killing him,” I said. “It’s going after everything, right down to his eyebrows. It’s the old story of the cure being worse than the disease.”

  I could not say how I knew, I just knew: the Marcy I got that day was not in the mood and didn’t give a damn.

  “What do you want from me, Jake?” she asked.

  “Pay him a little visit,” I said. “It would do him a lot of good. He needs reasons to go on right now.”

  “And why do I care if he goes on?”

  “He’s your dad.”

  “He doesn’t have any money.”

  There was a long pause.

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “A good dad does all he can to leave behind a little something for his children after he dies, does he not?”

  “Jesus, Marcy. The man’s fighting for his life over here.”

  “What’s that to you, Jake? What business is it of yours if I ever come home again? He hasn’t earned this kind of slavish devotion from you, has he? A deluded old man, a man who dropped you—”

  “He never dropped me.”

  “—a man who’s been dishonest his whole life, desperate to be loved by everyone, but more than happy to let his dick call the shots.”

  “Not so much anymore,” I said. “He can’t do half the things he used to do as a younger man.”

  “So I should forgive him, I should fly home and cheer him on, because he can’t fuck anymore?” There was a long pause. “What’s really going on here, Jake?”

  What was really going on was something I would no sooner share with her than Charlie would have shared his most delicate dream with his devouring younger brother. The energetic young father showing Jerry squirrels outside the window; a laundry-draped bathroom as in the house on Vermilion; jars of sun tea baking on the back porch stairs; softball games in Douglas Park; potlucks and backyard BBQs; Happy Necker manning a grill in argyle and plaid, picnic blankets, casks of cheap wine, a transistor radio playing AM standards from 1979; all the old friends, and all the old songs, and all the old feeling this family had before it went to shit … why couldn’t we remake a little of all that right here on Rust Road?

  “Why do you care so much? Why is this so important to you?”

  I knew my answer wouldn’t satisfy her.

  “Because I love you guys.”

  “That’s nice of you,” she said. “You’re a really nice guy, Jake. But I’m going to say this once, okay, and never again? Butt the fuck out.”

  50

  The news that day was unbelievable. The one bank, the one estimable institution to have emerged unscathed from the subprime mortgage mess—Wells Fargo—caught red-handed creating fraudulent accounts. Well, Charlie thought, folding up his newspaper. The rat fink bastards were back at it again.

  It was September of 2016. Almost eight years to the day had passed since his Whipple procedure, and three years since he was declared cancer-free.

  He kicked the footrest to the floor. The living room, with its large square footage, stylish new furnishings and tall, tall ceiling, stared back at him (down at him, too, discerning the full return of his organic gray locks), though he hardly noticed, so lost in thought was he. It had been but a blink of the eye since Bear Stearns went down in flames. Lehman, too, went down. America itself damn near went down. Billions of dollars gone, millions of jobs shed—not to mention all the people who lost their homes. If there was one white hat in the whole damn stickup, it was Wells—but turns out they, too, knew how to screw the pooch.

  He stood, and what he mistook for his imminent demise turned out to be just a minor backache. At the sun-drenched breakfast nook (a major selling feature of the new house) he sliced a grapefruit and sugared over the first of its open halves. Then he set about extracting its pink meat from nature’s neat honeycomb with a serrated spoon while delving deeper into the whys and wherefores of the fraud at Wells Fargo. Soon his mouth went slack, his sharp spoon sat stilled in midair, and all that moved were his pale blue eyes as they flitted across the page. Under terrific pressure to fill quotas, the bank had opened thousands of unauthorized accounts, charging millions in clandestine fees. There the story ended, his fever broke, and he sat back and shook his head in dismay.

  With a jolt upright, he recalled that he knew somebody who worked at Wells: his old friend Larry Stoval. Larry had worked there back in ’08, anyway, when Bear went kaput, a cold snap hit credit markets, and Charlie was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Taking up his mug of tea, he walked under the exposed oak rafters past the formal dining room and the wood-paneled library and descended the stairs to the basement office. There, waiting for him inside his old battered Rolodex next to the rapier-style letter opener—holdovers from the house on Rust Road—was the most current number he had on file for Larry Stoval. He returned up the stairs with both the number and the cordless so that he might place his phone call in the heavenly sunlight saturating the breakfast nook that so made his old bones shiver and thrive.

  “Wells Fargo.”

  “Good morning,” he said. “Charlie Barnes calling for Larry Stoval.”

  “I’m afraid Larry hasn’t made it in this morning,” the woman said. “May I take a message?”

  “Old Larry,” he said.

  The woman made no reply.

  “I was just reading about the scandal over there at Wells,” he said, “when I was reminded of Larry. He and I worked at Bear Stearns together a hundred years ago. I don’t know if you remember Bear. No reason you should. It was a ship full of rat bastards back in ’08 and sure enough it sank, damn near taking the rest of us down with it. Anyway, Larry and I had worked for a guy named … guy named, uh … little guy, not much to look at … oh, good Lord,” he said. “What was his name?”

  Now, that was odd. He had thought about that guy day and night at one point in time, saying his name in praise or blame to anyone who would listen, and now he couldn’t recall it to save his life. He could bring to mind what he looked like (not much), recall his affection for cigars and curse words, his ten-thousand-dollar golf games, and how he led Bear Stearns into receivership while demanding a ransom from the American people, but he was blanking on his damn name.

  “Larry would remember,” he said.

  It sure did suck, seeing your mind go. But it wasn’t just age. Charlie Barnes simply had no need to think so often of Jimmy Cayne
anymore.

  “Would you like to leave a message for Larry?” the woman asked.

  “Last time I left a message for Larry,” he said, “it was eight years ago and I never heard back.”

  There was no immediate reply.

  “I called to let him know I had pancreatic cancer. I have no idea how familiar you might be with that kind of cancer, but it almost always spells a swift end. Well, I defied the odds. I’ve made it eight years. I have a new car now. I bought a new house. I even have a new job. But I should be dead.”

  “Well, how wonderful,” the woman said. “You never know what life has in store, do you?”

  “Unless it’s death,” he said.

  There was a long pause.

  “Right,” she said. “Is … that the message you’d like me to leave for Larry today?”

  In the lull that followed, he allowed himself to observe, with profitless abandon, the devastated grapefruit rind on the breakfast table, its cowlicked look when viewed at a distance, while up close it resembled one of those saturated landscapes in ruin after the water recedes, after the sun comes out and an eerie peace descends. He lost himself momentarily inside its fibrous and fascinating swales.

  “Sir?”

  “Sorry,” he said. “Zoned out for a minute there.”

  “Would you like to leave a message for Larry?”

  It was a real damn mess, the last time he left messages for Larry Stoval. A total of four, maybe five, each one contradicting the last, until it must have seemed to Larry a great farce. It was, too—those messages, and that day, and his life back then.

  “Thank you, no,” he said. “No message.”

  He hung up.

  The house on Harmony Drive came up for sale just last year, in 2015. Built at the turn of the new century, it had five bedrooms and four baths, and at four thousand square feet was twice the size of the house on Rust Road. He and Barbara had been flirting with the luxury tower downtown called the Legacy at Millennium Park, with its doormanned extravagance and floorto-ceiling views of Lake Michigan, but for some reason they drove to Oak Park one breezy Sunday in spring to have a look at 906 Harmony Drive.

  Potential buyers were always struck by the solemnity of the high ceilings. Also unique were the eye-popping barnyard doors, sourced from Vermont, which opened onto the ground-floor library. Having mentally made the move downtown, they coolly appraised the rooms until Barbara walked into the kitchen and said, “Oh, Charlie, would you look …” and they both just knew. This was in fact every inch the paradise he dreamed of providing for her one day. Perhaps they weren’t tower people, after all, but heart-and-soul suburbanites—make of that what you will—with an affection for lawns and neighbors. The breakfast nook, still lively with sunlight at noon, was set apart by delicate panes of glass with glazed mullions behind which the beautiful hedgerows bloomed. The real estate agent, a Dallas native in pearls and slacks, informed them that the empty lot next door was also for sale. They paid cash for that, planted bamboo for privacy at the landscaper’s recommendation, and installed a pergola and birdbath. Charlie liked to take a glass of wine out there toward the end of the day. They parked what they still called Rabineau’s Porsche, after the late mechanic, in the three-car garage. A mere thirty or so suburban miles from their former home, this new one combined the opulence of an Italian palazzo with the peace and quiet of a Zen garden.

  But he just couldn’t lose the landline. Despite all the modern amenities, the app-adjusted lighting and centrally cooled air, he remained attached to his relics: his landline, his cable box, his TV remotes, his recliner, his VHS player, his home-delivered newspaper, and his basement office. He also retained his desk calendar from 1991, his roller chair and his monkey-paw back scratcher, although he did manage to ditch the sheet of stamped plastic specifically designed to facilitate the easy rolling of roller chairs in challenging terrain.

  Jerry was calling him.

  “How’s tricks, my boy?”

  They fell to talking about a legal dilemma facing the company: an account creator out of Norway, having chipped in the equivalent of two hundred US dollars toward the infinity ring his girlfriend coveted but which the young man alone could not afford, had recently had his heart broken by the girl and withdrawn his money—minus the penalty forfeited to Chippin’ In (per the user agreement) for withdrawal from an “unconsummated campaign.” Now he was bringing legal action against the website with help from other “chippers” similarly penalized and, of course, a team of Delaware lawyers. Charlie was apprised of all this and then weighed his options.

  “Let’s give him his money back,” he said.

  “Too late for that, Pop. They’ve filed a class-action.”

  “So let’s settle.”

  “And let the ambulance chasers win?”

  “What if we—”

  “Look, Pop, these guys don’t have a leg to stand on,” Jerry argued. “We’re up front on the home page about fees and penalties. They have to agree to them again when they establish an account, and then every time they ‘chip in.’ We can’t just let them wreak havoc with the revenue model. We run that model, we depend on it, we profit from it. Should we do away with the model and run a charity instead?”

  “Okay,” he said. “Put Einsohn on it.”

  “Einsohn,” Jerry said, with a verbal roll of the eyes.

  But Charlie, who always knew when he was in the wrong, had been in the wrong about Einsohn. He only had to come out from under his debts, real and psychic, to admit it freely. The failure of his dear TTAA was one of poor planning and misallocated resources, not bad legal advice from the man out in Aurora. Had he simply not rented quite so many billboards, had he not ordered so many brochures, TTAA might not have failed. When it did fail, he needed someone to blame. Charlie now had a little insight into the legal profession: you might hire a lawyer, but you always fire a fall guy. Now, in 2016, eight years older than he had any right to be, he would not blame Einsohn.

  “We have our pick of litigators from here to Silicon Valley, and you like this two-bit Einsohn. I just don’t get it.”

  “I gave Einsohn a hard time a hundred years ago for something that wasn’t really his fault. I feel bad about that now and I’d like to make up for it. Do you see? Give it to Einsohn.”

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ll give it to Einsohn. And while we’re at it, we’ve had other news. Facebook improved their offer.”

  “You buried the lede, Jerry.”

  “It’s a better offer,” he said. “As in a much better offer.”

  There was a long pause.

  “We’re talking a lot of damn money here, Pop.”

  It was such a curious thing, life, you simply couldn’t predict it. The anticorporate proselytizer was now working night and day for a for-profit enterprise, while the born adherent and lifelong striver had his scruples and doubts, as anyone will after making a break with a cult. For damn near a lifetime, Charlie Barnes had proved easy enough to brainwash: his elders and betters had only to repeat the phrase self-made man enough times to convince him there was no other way to make it in America, and anything short of that was weak commie failure. The self-made man got no assists, enjoyed no preexisting network or infrastructure, took comfort in no collective, and owed no one an apology for his trampling and rough treatment. He simply sprang from the godhead with his native genius and oaken strength and immediately set forth clearing, herding, stamping, exploiting, acquiring, colonizing, and finally buying his way into office. These elders of his, these peddlers of fantasy, with their dear dead narratives, pretty much guaranteed that, until the day he got sick, he would not come into possession of a single original thought. It was all propaganda and petrified national myth. When sickness swept that away, when it left him vulnerable, when it freed up his mind to think for itself, an idea of his own came dimly into view … but he thought, that can’t be right, can it? It was so obvious an idea, so modest in scope, essentially so dull, that he failed to see how it might be revolut
ionary. No, not Chippin’ In. That idea came to him much earlier. (And, as the article in Kiplinger’s pointed out, predated Kickstarter’s April 2009 launch by one month while doing something distinct from it, namely, combining crowd-funding with gift registry.) It had made him a small fortune. It was no sweat off his back. No, he had in mind something else entirely: his calling, that tailor-made thing that was less revelation than resignation to who he was and always must be: Charles A. Barnes of Danville, Illinois, the man that was Steady Boy. His goddamn calling was a pain in the ass and cost him what remained of his strength, but that was the nature of bargains. If you’re looking for a few good years, sell your soul to the devil. Want to save your soul? Give your life away.

  “Answer’s still no, Jerry,” he said after giving it some thought. “I like us the way we are.”

  “Small and scrappy?”

  “Unexploited,” he said. “It was an idea I had once. Now it employs a few people. Shouldn’t that be enough?”

  “Don’t you at least want to hear the number?”

  His son, meanwhile—what a trajectory Jerry had had! The one-time commuter and company man turned Noam Chomsky acolyte … now contrite, and recommitted to the bottom line.

  After coming to live with Charlie, he did what he could to reenter the workforce. He applied day and night. He expressed a willingness to relocate. He would have happily been lowballed. But his timing was bad. The economy had tanked. And he’d been out of the workforce by then for three full years. Prospective employers looked askance at him. His résumé had this glaring hole in it and he got very few callbacks. On the rare occasion he was invited to interview, he would bring up Krishnamurti or go on a mini rant about neoliberalism and blow it. Or HR would take a quick look at his Facebook posts. Or he would tell the truth about why he spent three years out of the workforce. Three became four, then four became five, six, and seven. He lived at 105 Rust Road for four years. This is why I would say Jerry was a lucky man. He needed Charlie at fifteen and he needed him at fifty, and both times Charlie was there for him. You can’t buy that in life. You have to luck into it.