A Calling for Charlie Barnes Read online

  “Astonishing,” he said.

  “What’s astonishing?”

  “You’ve had that book two days and you’re almost done with it.”

  “It’s a quick read.”

  “For you, maybe. For me, a climb up the Himalayas.”

  She smiled before resuming.

  “Young lady?”

  She looked up again. He had taken the seat across the table from her.

  “It ain’t gonna happen, my dear—my little dream of returning to school to get my degree.”

  “Why not?”

  He told her of how little appetite he had for reading anything but the newspaper. “But you know who does like to read?” He pointed across the table at her. “I want you to go back to school for me.”

  “But I have my degree, young man.”

  “I mean medical school,” he said.

  At these words, she carefully closed up her book. She moved it aside and took off her reading glasses and folded them and brought her hands together. She made herself small, he thought, as if trying to disappear, and did not respond.

  “You don’t like the idea?”

  “I’m forty-nine years old,” she said.

  “People go back to school at that age.”

  “We can’t afford medical school.”

  “We’ll take out a few credit cards,” he said, quoting her. “You were prepared to do it for me. Why not for yourself?”

  “That’s not what I do, Charlie.”

  “Not what you do?”

  “I don’t …”

  “What?”

  “Dare,” she said. “Dream.”

  He nodded.

  “Okay,” he said. “But I do. Look, is it a stretch? Probably. But is it completely irrational?”

  “Probably,” she said.

  “Fine. Then tell me the great advantage to being fucking rational. Rational is the fact of death. Rational is chemo in response to cancer. Rational is sleeping all day long in the hopes of surviving until I’ve slept my life away. I am sick and tired of being rational. I want to dream again, Barbara. But I’m old. And I’ve failed too often. But you, young lady … you …”

  He couldn’t finish the thought.

  A lifetime ago, when he was married to a local beauty dedicated to a life of social work, he took a job with Waukegan Title. His pride prevented him from admitting to Charley Proffit his reason for doing so: she pursued a calling in life as he knew he never would. He lacked her passion, her single-mindedness. The least he could do, he believed, was pull in a few extra bucks every month to better support her. God knows he wasn’t doing it because Waukegan Title was his dream job. It lacked glamour. No one would adore him for it. He did it for her. But then he couldn’t disclose that because he was the man, and the man was supposed to have the calling.

  He had no such compunction anymore. He would have happily worked for Archie Baker, he would have shined Archie’s shoes and washed Archie’s car, then turned to every man in the joint to announce that he was doing it all for a woman, the amateur oncologist moonlighting as his wife.

  “I want you to take the entrance exam for medical school,” he said. “Will you do that for me?”

  “How can we afford medical school, Charlie?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” he admitted. “That I don’t know.”

  “What would be the point?”

  “Hope,” he said. “And change. Something other than this goddamn dreary chemo and the constant talk of cancer.”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  He was the live wire, the pursuer of dreams; she was the steady, inscrutable one. But she could also read a thousand words a minute. She had a photographic memory for symptoms and procedures. She had learned Spanish simply by overhearing exchanges in the ER, and she required no more than four hours of sleep at night. What did she have to lose? he asked her. He urged her: What’s one exam? They returned to the bookstore for an exam-prep book. Then she began waking before dawn to put in a few hours of study before her shift at the hospital, and when she came home at night she put in a few more hours.

  She took the exam in June. She was at work when the results arrived in the mail. She forbade Charlie from opening them. She alone would know how badly she had failed. Then she would quietly deposit that letter in the garbage and put the whole mortifying episode behind her. And in fact, when she came home that night and tore open the letter and read the test results, she retreated from the room without a single word. But she didn’t toss the letter. She left it on the table. When he picked it up and made sense of it, he climbed the stairs and found her lying on the bed in the dark, still dressed in her scrubs and staring up at the ceiling. He lay next to her without a word, wanting her to say whatever was on her mind, though his heart was full and beating fast.

  “Why did you make me take that test?” she asked him. “Why, Charlie?”

  “Honey,” he said.

  “How could we afford it?”

  “I don’t know yet,” he said.

  At last, she turned to him.

  “I could do this,” she said, going on record for the first time, because committing to anything before that letter arrived with its good news would have left her vulnerable, beholden to a pipe dream she would have left for dead had Charlie not drawn it out of her.

  “Yes,” he said. “I believe you could.”

  53

  In a private moment of self-reflection, a man confronts the farce that he is. All his worst instincts, habits of mind, predictable appetites and easily parodied past actions crystallize in that moment into a punch line that prevails above all his refinements and respectability. He is a human exaggeration—if not to his associates or loved ones, then to himself. Then the moment passes. He ceases looking at himself in the mirror, turns on the tap and splashes water on his face. He returns to flesh and blood, to power incarnate, to possibility. He washes his hands of the past and leaves that temporary station where he was briefly nothing but a joke and walks out again, into the future.

  He came out of the bathroom at the Starbucks on Golf Road where he and I had gone for an afternoon latte. He wanted to talk about what he might do, now that he was almost finished with chemo, to raise money so that Barbara could reduce her hours at the hospital and return to school. We sat at a table in the window puzzling it out. His money-management fees were way down; Chippin’ In hadn’t taken off; he didn’t have many options. He started telling me about the Lamplighter Inn. The Lamplighter was the Danville supper club and entertainment venue located on Perrysville Road where, in 1961, he took a job washing dishes in back with the firm belief that—

  “Within two years, I’d be the MC.”

  “The MC?”

  “The crooner onstage, you know. In the bow tie. The one cracking wise.”

  I got an image of the Lamplighter Inn—round tables and cocktails, women in sequins and men in white dinner jackets, all the biggest shakes in a small town.

  “From dishwasher to Dean Martin,” I said.

  “That’s right, Jake. Dean Martin—why not? All they had to do was discover me.”

  “And did they?”

  “What they discovered was how little interest I had in actually washing dishes, so they fired me.”

  We walked out of the Starbucks and into a bright summer’s day. He was no closer to knowing what he was going to do. He only knew what he couldn’t do. He couldn’t dream big again, not even one last time, and go off half-cocked. He couldn’t start something with the goal of franchising it. He couldn’t come up with the tagline, print the brochure, hire an engineer, partner with the banks, or write letters to captains of industry pleading for capital funding. His days of expanding out to the coasts were over.

  When we got inside the car, he looked tired and old. I put the car in Reverse; he reached out and touched my hand. “Pull back in,” he said. I did as he asked. He unbuckled and said he’d be right back. He returned to the car a minute later with a job application. The manager o
f the Starbucks said that while they weren’t hiring at the moment, she would keep his application on file and contact him if a position opened up. As we left the Starbucks, he asked me to drive him to Staples, the office supply store, where he purchased a file folder and a box of pens. Before departing, he asked the kid at the register for a job application. In the car again, he placed both the Starbucks application and the one for Staples in the file folder, then he asked me to drive him to the Sears in the Woodfield Mall. There he asked to speak to a manager; he told that woman his name and asked if they were hiring. He asked the same of managers at Nordstrom, JCPenney, Macy’s, and Things Remembered. We left the Woodfield Mall and drove down Golf Road, then East Higgins, then Meacham and Algonquin, stopping at places like the Hyatt, the Dollar Tree, and the Hobby Lobby, collecting applications at each of them. Then we returned to the car and he carefully placed them in the file folder, filling them out later that night at the kitchen table in the house on Rust Road. He had an exacting hand, went slowly, and did not permit a mistake.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Jerry asked one morning when we met in the kitchen as the old man showered upstairs.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s filling out applications for entry-level jobs,” he said. “What’s that all about?”

  “He’s feeling better,” I said.

  “Feeling better? He’s out of his mind again.”

  It was hard for Jerry to wrap his head around it. There were certain points of pride from which he never imagined Steady Boy might retreat. Since he first put on a suit and tie, in 1963, it was suit-and-tie work for Charlie Barnes from then on, or work be damned. He traded in hourly pay for the yearly salary and would never go back. It would be shameful to go back. So what the hell was he doing applying at the Home Depot?

  Charlie paid a visit to European Motors that day. His appearance had changed considerably for the worse in six months’ time: the surgery and chemo had bent him and hollowed out his eyes so much so that Rabineau, the old mechanic, didn’t recognize him at first. When at last it clicked, he was confused. For fifteen years, Charlie Barnes had arrived in his waiting room in jacket and tie, or button-down and slacks, or jazzy sweater and pressed trousers: the image of the American businessman. Now he was asking to sweep the garage floor?

  “Sweep, scrub, be a gofer, whatever you need. I don’t know too much about tools, though.”

  Rabineau shook his head. Times were hard and he wasn’t hiring. Then something occurred to him and he shot up an inky digit.

  “Can you balance the books?”

  Steady Boy had long feared such an unglamorous fate. Not only would he fail to make a killing, but some fall from grace or bankruptcy would also send him back to the days of just scraping by on some job site or sales floor, and premonitions of the boredom together with the bad pay would turn him electric with dread. But then he saw how different it might be if he returned to the earliest days of his professional life of his own accord, yet on behalf of someone other than himself. With that simple shift in perspective, he had more equanimity busting his hump than he ever had as a younger man. It was not all that different from the moment he realized that he didn’t mind mowing the lawn so long as it was on behalf of Charley Proffit. I remember thinking how unlikely it was that two weeks after his final chemo infusion, two short weeks after all that television, a mere two weeks after he was unable to make a sandwich for himself, he was waking at seven to shower and leaving the house by eight. Well, why not? The Whipple was a success. Chemo was over. His counts were holding steady. So while Barbara was applying to the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, he was applying to Costco. While she applied to the University of Chicago, he submitted an application to Bed Bath & Beyond. And while he was speaking to a manager at Luna Flooring Gallery on Golf Road about an opening in their sales department, she was applying to the Stritch School of Medicine at Loyola University.

  He worked at the Walmart on Roselle Road for a total of five days. He worked at the Target down the street for no more than two months. He stepped out of a Lowe’s vest and into a Best Buy polo and exchanged a Panera visor for a Wendy’s cap. He treated these franchises and chain outfits in the same fashion as they tended to treat people like him: as something to chew up and spit out. He leaped from $8.15 an hour at PetSmart to $9.65 an hour at Petco after working at PetSmart a single day. It was practically a full-time job just seizing opportunities like this one, dropping off his résumé with a dose of charm and asking for more money everywhere he went, from Applebee’s to GameStop and from GameStop to Zales.

  The money this patchwork of gigs and hustles provided (until Chippin’ In took off) was just enough to pay the bills and stay current on the mortgage while also allowing Barbara to pull back at First Baptist. He took his half hour at noon and his fifteen at two thirty, clocking in and out. There were many shifts when he did not go that extra mile but merely offered up a warm body so that no one took off with the store. It was here his particular genius resided, for if anyone knew how to cut corners, fly under the radar, and play fast and loose with the demands of a dress code, it was that original son of Danville, Steady Boy Barnes. Working for the man was my father’s calling.

  Throughout this final career swerve, he never stopped working for Rabineau. He balanced the man’s books, did his taxes, and made sense of his inventory, all while paying attention to the mechanics at their work. When he identified his first master-cylinder problem in a 1982 Porsche 911, the pleasure he carried home to Barbara was all the evidence she needed to know that he wasn’t fibbing: he was out there busting his hump for his own sake, too. It brought him the greatest satisfaction to repair a preexisting thing. Some years later, Rabineau attended the housewarming party on Harmony Drive. The old mechanic didn’t look well that day. There was no early detection in his case, no surgical option, no time to set things right. He just died. By then, Charlie had Chippin’ In money. He bought European Motors and the Porsche that came with it.

  54

  I flew down one last time to Deer Park to try my best to convince Marcy that her father, one year after his initial diagnosis, had turned his life around and deserved her forgiveness. I had little hope of getting very far: she had told me repeatedly to butt out and fuck off, blocked my calls and texts, and refused to see me outright on two earlier occasions when, like some tool on a business trip, I’d flown in and out again without accomplishing much. This final time, I resorted to writing her a letter, which I made sure to post a week before my arrival, informing her of the exact day I would be in town and when she could expect me to be at the sports bar where she and I had previously met. The last thing I anticipated was to find her waiting for me in the lobby of the hotel where I tended to stay whenever in “The Park,” or to watch her rise out of a rose-patterned wingback chair and come forward in order to put her arms around me. I dropped my bag and put my arm around her. When our embrace ended, she looked at me with her big hazel eyes full of stardust and thanked me for all I’d done for Daddy over the course of the year, the sacrifices I’d made, the love and loyalty I’d shown.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Thank you for never giving up on us, Jake. We can be a pretty crazy bunch, I know.”

  I was eager to sit down with her to explain all the many changes under way at the house on Rust Road, but I didn’t manage to say much before she cut me off.

  “Is Daddy really working at Best Buy?”

  “And at the Menards in Hanover Park—but that’s only part-time. If he gets between forty-eight and fifty-two hours of work every week between the two, then he thinks he should be able to cover the monthly expenses.”

  “And why is he doing this?”

  “So that Barbara can go back to school and get her medical degree.”

  “He’s doing it for Barbara?”

  “I know you don’t like her, Marcy, and it’s true she’s strange, a damned strange woman, but you should have seen her nurse him back t
o health when he got sick. I promised him I’d tell each of you how devoted she was to his care and how tenderly she treated him. Honestly, I think we’ve sold her short.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Best Buy?” she said. “Jake, this isn’t some kind of joke, is it?”

  “You just have to see it with your own two eyes, Marcy. What do you say? I know he’d love to see you.”

  I couldn’t believe it. She was actually giving it some thought.

  “When do you leave?” she asked.

  I worried that between parting that night and our plans to meet up again twelve hours later, changeable Marcy would reconsider her options, or suffer a manic episode, or recall her past delight at toying with me and simply not show, but there she was in the lobby the next morning at the appointed hour, ready to depart for Houston and O’Hare. It was curious to me how the chief complaint against Marcy was that she was constantly changing, while the chief complaint against Charlie was that he never changed. He was Steady Boy through and through. We wanted opposite things from the two of them: Marcy to iron out her inconsistencies, Charlie to surprise us with his sudden rectitude and dependability. Well, live long enough, it seems, and you might just get your wish at least once.

  It isn’t typical to land at O’Hare and drive straight to a bigbox retailer, but that’s what Marcy and I did that morning. We walked in through the automated doors and looked around for him under the industrial rafters, and when at last we spotted him in the distance under that deathly light, I witnessed her shock at the physical changes in him. That man so memorable for his muttonchops and curls, his strong push-off before a hook shot and his big bear hugs, and for the alacrity with which he fell to all fours to give an instep a squeeze, was for Marcy on that day the same man I saw emerge from the Whipple. It did more to move her than all my trips to Deer Park. I thought back on my years of envy, the dumb luck that gave her a dad and me a mere surrogate, always tenuous, and I realized that in fact it was tenuous for everyone always, the fortunate no less than the fostered, because in time the world makes orphans of us all.