A Calling for Charlie Barnes Read online

  “Look who it is,” he said, as the tears hung in his eyes and the man opened his arms.

  “Oh, Daddy,” she said, and they embraced among the electronics.

  “My dear heart, my dear, dear heart.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner, Daddy.”

  “You have made me so very, very happy.”

  And that was that. He took his thirty-minute break next door at the Starbucks, where he initiated a conversation with his daughter that continues to this day, as he approaches eighty-one. They didn’t touch upon what happened when her mother made Dickie into “Dad,” or what transpired the summer of her eighth-grade year. All that would come later. They talked instead about the cancer and the chemo, the enzymes he was forced to take with every meal, the diabetes he had to manage and the kidney stones he had to watch, and then he hung up. I mean, returned to work. At the Best Buy. Where he sold televisions for $8.85 an hour.

  The following morning, Barbara was sitting at the kitchen table in the house on Rust Road in her reading glasses and scrubs poring over a textbook, while next to her, out of those dumb cutoffs at last and in khakis and a button-down, Jerry sat looking silently at job leads on an ancient laptop. The old man was there, too, reading the sports page and eating a grapefruit and two boiled eggs. He looked up from his paper when I entered and asked if I’d like some coffee. He poured me a cup. Jerry passed me the milk. I asked for a section of the paper. A companionable silence held for another ten minutes or so until Marcy rang the doorbell and everyone greeted her, including Barbara. It was possible to imagine that with a medical degree in hand one day, Charlie’s brittle bride wouldn’t be quite so insecure but would accept us, or them, at least, as unconditional objects of a father’s love and decent enough people to have around. In the meantime, before she arrived, we ate, sipped, read, the four members of a very odd little family enjoying a bit of calm before the day’s storm.

  I had seen a little world go kablooey in Danville, another do the same in Key West, and a third in Downers Grove, and it seemed likely to happen a fourth time in the house on Rust Road. But it didn’t. Charlie lucked out. Barbara returned to school. Jerry fell and was caught. Marcy came around. It was time for me to fly back to Rome. Barbara stopped me on my way out to my rental car on my return to the airport.

  “You have been a great help to us, Jake,” she said. “I didn’t understand why you were here at first—”

  “I wanted to be here,” I said.

  “Right, but why? Well, now I know. You love that man. You love him like I do. He couldn’t have done this—we couldn’t have done it—without you. You have a big heart, Jake, and you are a good son, and I love you like my own.”

  She’d never said so many words aloud to me ever, yet her eyes never wavered from mine. She pulled me in for a hug, and a year’s worth of emptiness and terror and hope got jarred loose in me, and for what felt like a full day outside the house on Rust Road, I cried like a baby in that woman’s arms.

  55

  He was long retired from the Best Buy and the other penny-ante gigs when, in 2016, he read the news about Wells Fargo and made one final attempt to get in touch with Larry Stoval. Then he spoke with Jerry about the future of Chippin’ In, and then, believe it or not, he moved a little money around on behalf of those clients he retained from his days as CEO and sole employee of TTAA, to which he remained sentimentally attached. Then, with the newspaper in one hand and the cordless in the other, he climbed the basement stairs and collapsed in his recliner with every intention of taking a nap. In a few short weeks, he would turn another year older—on Election Day, in point of fact. He had had eight years of hope and change. Never had he had more hope. And in no other eight-year period of time had he undergone such change.

  You believe in change, don’t you? That a man need not be mired hopelessly in himself, confined to his appetites and checked by his limits, bound for the grave much as he came into the world, making promises he would never keep and fooling himself every step of the way?

  When he woke from his nap an hour later, it was not where he remembered having nodded off, on the recliner in the front room, but under the ivy-laced pergola in his backyard. Sunlight played over his outstretched legs. He was preparing to return inside when the cordless began to ring. It was Dr. Clement, his oncologist at First Baptist.

  “How about that wife of yours?” Clement remarked right out of the gate. “Our finest nurse, and now our newest resident!”

  “She’s so pleased to be back at First Baptist,” Charlie assured him.

  “We’re lucky to have her. How she made it through medical school in such record time, I will never know.”

  “She’s a quick study,” he said. “But I don’t imagine you’re calling just to sing Barbara’s praises.”

  “That’s true,” the doctor said. “Charlie, your test results have come in.”

  He had forgone regular testing in recent years, finding the wait for numbers every three months a morbid drumroll and a major fetter on his freedom, much as the full-time job had been before he found his calling. But in recent weeks there was no denying the persistence of his new cough or his need some days for supplemental oxygen. He had a little tank for that purpose, which he rolled around on two wheels but which didn’t always fill his lungs as he might have wished, and which, on those days, he referred to as his moxygen tank, because it seemed to do little more than mock him.

  “I’m afraid it’s back, Charlie. It’s in your liver, lungs, and spine.”

  He cleared his throat.

  “I see,” he said. “And my prognosis?”

  “I’ll be honest, Charlie, it’s not great. But there are some experimental treatments out there and a clinical trial or two that might be worth looking into. It’s a bit of a long shot, but hey, you’ve done an extraordinary job of beating the odds thus far. What do you say we make an appointment for some time next week, and you and Barbara and I sit down and discuss your options?”

  “That sounds fine,” he said.

  After making that appointment with the nurse, he got off the phone and sat very still awhile, lost in thought. He knew he should call Barbara, and his children, too, and break the news. He had been so eager to do just that eight years earlier, before the doctor had even confirmed a diagnosis. How pathetic he was back then, he thought now, longing for an incontrovertible source of pity, like pancreatic cancer, to share with others, so that they might think upon him as tenderly as he did himself.

  He deferred making those calls, set the cordless down, and went inside. He returned to the pergola with an old book his son had given him. He took up the chair again and resumed where he had left off in the book some years earlier, it must be said, not far from the end, though not quite there yet. The book had been swallowed up by his recliner and forgotten about just before his life got busy again. Now he read until he reached the end. Then he closed the book, knowing that his professor in Advanced Religion would be pleased. He had finished the Gita before dying.

  Searching for Steady Boy

  56

  It was Charlie Barnes Appreciation Day, the first annual, which in subsequent years always fell on the Saturday closest to the anniversary of his diagnosis. A catered event with balloons and speeches, followed by cake, it took place on Harmony Drive in Oak Park. The inaugural theme: “Forgive Skinaman.”

  As he approached ninety, and especially round, golden one hundred, the event grew more elaborate and all-purpose, thriving in direct proportion to his decline, until by some gravitational pull all its own it detached itself from its humble origins and became the beloved local holiday it is today, between Harlem and North Oak Park Avenues on Lake Street, pink and gray the official CBAD colors.

  57

  I have no really vivid memories prior to coming to live with Charlie and Charley at the house on Vermilion Street, only vague ones of being lower to the ground and of moving around a lot. I recall a black-and-white selection of dead birds in a shoe box, swapping b
utthole odors with a much older delinquent named Kyle, and more than one humorless minder from Vermilion County foster care, all of whom might have been abandoned or abused in their time.

  With Charlie and Charley began all things colorful: bedtime stories, nursery rhymes, rides on horsey’s knee, snowy fields before sunsets, the crunch of deadfall underfoot, pumpkin goop on newspaper during our annual carvings, and other bright and surprising developments. Charlie, squatting, catches me coming down the slide. Puckering, he judges among many doughnuts. Calibrating, he corrects the rearview mirror. He dims the bedroom light and says good night.

  They may have intended to adopt me, I don’t know. I have two theories about that. One is that the divorce interfered, as it did with so much. And the second theory is that Charley Proffit, discovering on the eve of delivering her second child that the man she married was not as advertised, could not bring herself to commit to yet one more bond between them, legal or otherwise, and allowed the status quo to carry the day until Florida beckoned and it all dissolved. I know none of that for a fact. I only know that one day when Marcy was a baby, they chanced to recall another baby, this one left for dead in the Fair Oaks row house. They made inquiries and discovered that he was still living in foster care, still making the rounds, and they took me in. Then eight or nine years later, when our fresh start in Florida soured, they let me go again.

  I must have observed enough that troubled me before the time I came to live in the house on Vermilion to always approach a new home with trepidation. This primal urge to flee only strengthened after the divorces and their sudden shocks to the sleeping arrangements, a serial misery that even an honorary member of the Barnes clan such as I was forced to endure over the years. The house on Vermilion Street, the house on Cudjoe Key, the balm of open Florida breezes, the cottage in the village of Downers Grove, the hot dog between the sofa cushions in the house on Rust Road … if Charlie wished to root his life in something worthwhile and meaningful before dying, I simply wished to root. But there was yet one more: the house on Harmony Drive.

  On the first annual Charlie Barnes Appreciation Day, I pulled up to the curb. I peered out from my rental. I immediately wanted to return to the airport. I called Charlie for encouragement. He didn’t answer.

  That is to say, I loved my dad, his children, that family, but the new house changed the dynamic. It was kind of an estate. It was perched on a sort of hill. The driveway inclined up and around, encircling a magical little copse of birch trees, those peeling, leaning sticks that appear wintry in all seasons. The picture window reflected the blue sky in monochrome and reduced the plump three-dimensional clouds to UFO wafers. Someone, a party planner, perhaps—was it possible that the one-time nurse and basement stockbroker hired party planners now?—had lined the path along the drive with shepherd’s crooks, those Bo-peep items from which red and blue Japanese lanterns glowed dimly in the daylight, guiding partygoers toward the house. I found all this intimidating, and I have not yet said just how fancy that house was. I recoil from such fine places when they are full of people I’m madly in love with. I loved the Barneses, all of them, almost, with the exception of one or two. I only ever wanted to be loved in return, treated like a son and brother. It was impossible. I was too anxious. Was I really welcome there? Was I wanted? What should my name be? Where did I belong? Who was I?

  There was also that distaste, shared by my foster siblings, for reencountering the awkward and the alien in every new home—what for their sake might be called a stephome. There was too little warmth in stephomes, no feeling at ease there, no making yourself comfortable on the stepfurniture in the stepden, and never any peace of mind when taking a shower. Someone unknown might suddenly open the door by accident. A group of them might be standing right outside, overhearing your every disgusting noise. The steptoilet belonged to other butts, the shower curtain was poxed by the mold of a different clan, and the soap, a sliver of stepsoap reduced to the size of a guitar pick, invariably hosted a dark hair or two that everyone took for granted should be easy to overcome now that we were all one big happy family. The instant you walk into these foster homes and stephomes, you are expected to break bread with second cousins and their girlfriends, guys named Ron: people who come out of the woodwork and look pulled off a lineup. These weirdos and psychopaths get woven into your most intimate celebrations and the most vital days of the year. I would include among them all the Glamours, Dickerdicks, and Ledeuxs. I did not want to get out of that car.

  But then I could, and did, because I recalled that Barbara and I had grown close, Barbara and I together had nursed him back to health. Barbara and I had hugged.

  I was halfway up the drive in chinos and a sport jacket, a small gift in hand and all ready with a little speech, when she came out of the house dressed to the nines, affixing a final earring. She must have seen me from an upper-floor window and hurried down. She broke off from this difficult accessorizing long enough to firmly, brusquely point: away!

  “Go back,” she demanded.

  “Back?”

  She succeeded in pinning the earring in place just as she went past me. When I didn’t follow, she turned and beckoned. Then she led me in fury down the circular drive.

  58

  The pages I emailed to Charlie Barnes a week earlier, the pages I ill-advisedly gave an elderly man about his youthful self before a festive occasion as a gesture of love and honor, were not yet labeled “Farce, or 105 Rust Road,” as nothing about them was intended to be farcical. That is still the case. The words remain the same; only the name of that section has changed. However, it was then, and is now … a strictly factual account of the day of his diagnosis.

  Was it brave of me, or just downright dumb, to give Chuck the first half of this book? It had taken me years to write, years and years, much longer than a work of make-believe might have, and included in it the true story of his parents’ assignation in a cornfield and the crude wedding that followed. What is now labeled farce was (and is!) the true and accurate retelling of a single day in a confused man’s life as he faces the prospect of a deadly disease, his dreams thwarted and his delusions intact, his contradictions thriving, his children mad at him and his debtors in hot pursuit—and zero resolution for any of it on the horizon.

  Barbara took the liberty to climb uninvited into my rental, a cheap compact thing completely denuded of character, and slammed the door behind her before I even had the chance to walk around the rear and get in. That she knew which car was mine confirmed my suspicion that she’d been tracking my arrival. Now, the car filled with her perfume and rage, Barbara Ledeux fixed me with one of her rare hard stares from the far corner of her seat.

  “Just who the fuck do you think you are?”

  I was stunned, and didn’t reply.

  “Just when I was coming around to you, too.”

  “Have I done something wrong?”

  “It’s a shame, because you and I have something in common. You and I can see his children for who they really are. Hateful little bitches. You will never catch me saying that to him, and I will deny up and down ever saying it to you, but that is what they are. Hateful. Little. Bitches. If it wouldn’t destroy Chuck, I’d want them dead. They serve no purpose and they bring no joy. But,” she said, “this book of yours—”

  “Hold on,” I said. “What do you know about that?”

  “—takes the cake.”

  There was a long pause.

  “It’s only half a book,” I said. “It’s unfinished, and I sent it to him, not you. Have you read it?”

  “What is all this preposterous shit about a flying wig?”

  It took me a moment to realize that she was referring to the Doolander, the novelty item Chuck hoped to commercialize after his friend Happy Necker peeled off his hairpiece at a picnic forty years earlier and used it to play fetch with a stray dog.

  “So I take it you’ve read it.”

  “Is that just pure invention on your part?”

  “I did
n’t make up the Doolander,” I said. “He invented the Doolander in the 1970s.”

  I didn’t know how else to respond. This was the same woman who had denied there was an earlier, different Barbara in his life—the result, I believed at the time, of his omitting that bride from his biography. He told a forgivable little fib meant to reduce by one his total number of past wives, and that one an especially uncomfortable precursor on account of a common name. Maybe the Doolander was another tender source of youthful folly for him, one he preferred to forget, and his wife was simply telling the only truth she knew.

  “You don’t seem to know the first thing about him, judging from what you wrote. You have a completely warped impression of him.”

  “I have the warped impression?”

  “You turned him into a clown!”

  “Well, Barbara, he was a clown, for a time there. A lot of other things, too. That’s kinda the point. He’s lived a full life. He has a complicated past. He’s far from perfect. A man, he’s just a man.”

  “He is not just a man. He is the best man.”

  “I agree!”

  “And you’ve made him into a farce.”

  “There’s not much I can do if the facts end up reading like a parody. Some people’s lives just look like farces. That’s who he was that day—by his own admission. There’s nothing in there that isn’t true.”

  “Nobody wants to hear it,” she said. “But you have written it down. Why have you written it down?”

  “Everything in there is based in fact,” I said. “I got it straight from him. I just listened and took notes.”