A Calling for Charlie Barnes Read online

  “Yet it’s riddled with error and completely misses his essence.”

  That stung. Perhaps it was true. She knew the man. It was only fair to allow her to judge for herself. Yet I knew there were no errors and said as much.

  “I beg your pardon,” she said, “but he does not wear dentures.”

  There was a long pause. I recalled her rattling his dental plates in their plastic cup in the waiting room of Rush Memorial. Don’t be a fool, she had said to me. She personally returned those plates to his mouth.

  “You’re denying that?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but he does not have false teeth.”

  I knew that Barbara’s capacity for denying reality was pretty robust. For years, her cool detachment toward me, her speaking about me in the third person while I looked on, her pointed and habitual lack of eye contact, and her glossing over my presence in the living room and at the dinner table helped edit me out, if you will, of the scene. She pretended I wasn’t there, amended real life on a whim. But this was much bolder. This was a weird attack on the truth for reasons unknown. To save face? To defy me? I spoke slowly, clearly.

  “His parents never told him to brush,” I said, “so his teeth rotted. He was twenty-four years old and in extraordinary pain when he had them pulled. The dentist’s name was O’Rourke. The bill came to three hundred and fifty 1964 dollars. I got all that from him.”

  “Which one of us is his wife?” she asked. “I think his wife would know if he wore false teeth.”

  “If he doesn’t want me telling the world that he wears dentures because he is embarrassed—”

  “He doesn’t want you telling the world he wears dentures because he doesn’t wear them.”

  “But you know that he does.”

  “I know no such thing.”

  Only then did it occur to me that there was no way Charlie had withheld the Doolander from her. The prototype still had pride of place on the bookshelf in his basement office, and forty years after the fact he’d not hesitate to sell the uninitiated on its pleasures. What’s more, he’d learned what damage withholding does from his days with Charley Proffit. He was a wiser man. He had delved with Barbara. It was she who denied the Doolander, together with his other Barbara and now the dentures, because they were facts incompatible with her idea of Charlie, inconvenient and unpalatable facts—as his ex-wives were unpalatable, and his children.

  She checked her earring in the mirror, then violently flipped the visor back into place before turning to me.

  “You’re no longer welcome at this party,” she said.

  “Are you speaking for him when you say that?”

  “I have news for you. That’s my house, and you’re not welcome in it—not today, not ever.”

  She opened the door and stepped out. I did the same. She turned back when I called her name.

  “I stuck up for you,” I said. “No one else would. No one else likes you. No one can comprehend what a warm person like Charlie sees in you. Okay, you’re gifted, you’re disciplined, you’re everything he’s not, but at least he’s capable of love and affection.”

  She turned without a word and carried on up the drive.

  59

  Ban me from a foster home? That was no great loss to me, lady! I would be damned if I entered that house.

  But I would get an invitation. I would get a warm, welcoming, engraved invitation to join the man of the hour inside. Because it was his house, too. And I was his son. He loved me. It made no difference to him that I wasn’t his flesh and blood. He would want me there no less than he would his real kids.

  I called him. I called him again. No answer either time.

  I suppose I was hoping just to ignore what really sucked about Barbara—like her third-personing, her lack of eye contact—as well as ignore my suspicion that behind that cool exterior, which made her such a gifted clinician, there worked an almost sociopathic mind with heaps and heaps of damnation and scorn for Marcy, for Jerry, and for me. I could ignore this terrible reality no longer, nor could I remain neutral in the vain hope of family happiness. German fairy tales had nothing on the Barnes family chronicle in the age of Barbara Ledeux. I sided with Marcy.

  I tried Charlie again. On his cell phone. On his landline. Sent him a text. No answer. Naturally, I tried Marcy next.

  Marcy was still living in Deer Park but had flown into O’Hare for the occasion. What a strange occasion! A red balloon slowly floated over the house on Harmony Drive and up, up, and away.

  “Are you on your way to this party or what?”

  “I’m already here,” she said. “I’m inside the house.”

  “Well,” I said. “Wait till you get a load of this.”

  Pacing the sidewalk, I told her everything, including Barbara’s doozy about his dentures and her disinviting me. If there was one person primed to froth at these outrages, it was my fierce and reactionary older sister. When I had finished, I asked her to find Dad and put him on the phone or send him outside so that I could explain. I planned to remind him that he had requested I tell the truth if ever I chose to write about him. He wanted a factual account, which I had written. There was, I thought, a real long pause.

  “Dad?” she finally said.

  There was another long pause.

  “Chuck,” I said.

  “Jake, did you really think it was going to go over well, all this bad stuff you wrote about Daddy?”

  “What bad stuff?”

  “In that book of yours.”

  “Hold on,” I said. “How do you know about my book?”

  “I’ve read it, Jake.”

  “You have? You read it?”

  “Did you really need to be so …”

  “You’ve read it, Barbara’s read it … who else has read it?”

  “… descriptive?”

  There was a long pause.

  “Descriptive?” I said.

  “I don’t think Daddy … Daddy didn’t think so much about … or have as much … the whole sex thing, Jake. You’ve blown that way out of proportion. Haven’t you?”

  There was another long pause.

  “I hardly scratched the surface,” I said.

  “Daddy had … a libido?”

  “Your dad? Um, yeah, Marcy. A sizable one.”

  She didn’t immediately reply.

  “So he really liked to …”

  “Yes, he really liked to.”

  “That much?”

  “According to the man himself, yes.”

  There was another long delay.

  “I wish I didn’t know that,” she said. “Jake?”

  “Yes?”

  “Did Daddy really drop out of Michigan State?”

  What was going on here? Did these people not know the first thing about one another?

  “It’s a factual account, Marcy. I made nothing up.”

  “But it seems like you must have,” she said. “What about this suggestion that he called you first?”

  “Called me first?”

  “On the day of his diagnosis. You claim that he called Jerry, who he believed was in Belgium. Then, on his way up the driveway after getting his newspaper, you write that he called you next and got your voice mail.”

  “You really did read it, Marcy. You really did.”

  “Would he do that, Jake? Or would he call me first?”

  “Why does it matter who he called first?”

  “Maybe he was simply going down his list of contacts,” she said, “and because j appears before m alphabetically, he dialed you first. But in that case, he’d have called you before he called Jerry. And that’s not really how Daddy works. You know what I think? I think he called me first, and then maybe he called you.”

  “I present his entire life story,” I said. “I give you his history, his hopes and dreams, and a sense of his character, and you get all hung up on the sequential order of a few phone calls?”

  “It’s your claim that this is a factual account, Jake. Isn’t
that your claim?”

  “That’s my claim.”

  “Well, it’s also your claim that Daddy called Jerry first. That part kinda makes sense. Jerry’s the firstborn. Hi, Jerry. I have cancer, blah blah blah. Give me a call. But then you claim that he calls you next. How is it that you describe yourself? Oh, that’s right: his personal hope and change.”

  There was a long pause.

  “But why would he call his personal hope and change before he called me, his favorite child? I think we can both agree that I’m Daddy’s favorite child. And what are you again, technically? Aside from being hope and change.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I get the point.”

  “No, it’s important to say it, I think. If it’s really a factual account, Jake, you should come out and say it.”

  “I’m his son.”

  There was a long pause.

  “His foster son.”

  “Who would he call first?”

  “He would call you first.”

  “So you might want to fix that,” she said, “in this true account of yours.”

  She hung up.

  60

  After Marcy refused to put him on the phone, I called him directly. There was no answer. I called him two times more. The difference between a foster kid and an orphan is this: a foster kid might have someone to call. Yet he wasn’t picking up. Had I offended him with the truth? But he wanted the truth! I should not have told the truth. No one wants the truth, and no one should ever tell it.

  I didn’t know what to expect from the first annual Charlie Barnes Appreciation Day. Brats on a backyard deck? Dunk tanks? I snuck up the side to the backyard for a quick peek, despite being banished. The caterers were the farm-to-table kind, busy in their starched whites sautéing mushrooms and putting cold soup in shot glasses. In time these would be passed on silver trays. The yard was dominated by two white tents. There were linen tablecloths and tiki torches, and a DJ was setting up near the pool.

  Charlie’s guests began arriving. Little old ladies followed the Japanese lanterns up the driveway bearing gifts. A caterer greeted them and handed each newcomer a disposable camera from inside a wicker basket. A sudden peal of carburetor thunder concluded with a half dozen motorcyclists pulling to the curb and dethroning, men he must have known from Rabineau’s garage. Another set of men, hired help in white jumpsuits, arrived in a branded minivan from the local bakery. They threw open the back doors and unloaded a large sheet cake as if it were a light little love seat. Taking in this vibrant start, I thought: So much for brats on a back deck.

  Returning from the backyard, I skirted none other than J. Patrick Boyle, a pal of Charlie’s from his clowning days. I confess to always feeling a little uneasy around J. Patrick—receiving his self-printed business cards, listening to his vaguely hostile projections of all the great things just around the bend for him in the “pyrotechnic arts.” It was the same prediction he’d been making half his life, and always with one hand on the same unicycle seat. He was getting his act under way when I slipped past him unnoticed. For the next hour, I watched an uncertain crowd ask itself if the juggler in buttoned vest and bowler animating the driveway was a paid performer or a fellow guest. Not everyone could say for certain as late as the drive home.

  Cars crowded bumper to bumper around the circular drive, then along both sides of Harmony Drive, before I noticed that Charlie had someone parking cars for him. A skinny young lad in black jacket and bow tie taking keys at the foot of the cul-de-sac. First a party planner, now a valet! I couldn’t believe it: Steady Boy was a hirer of help and a friend to monied types. One pulled up just then in a vintage Mercedes convertible. The driver stepped out wearing a seersucker suit and carrying a silver trumpet—just the trick, when the time was right, to bray the gathered into a conga line. After the valet drove off with his car, he aimed his instrument at the sky and blew.

  I was standing on the sidewalk in the unseasonable heat wondering what to do next, hoping my dad would return my calls, when a man and his wife appeared with a potted orchid so red, so other, it might have been cultivated in the tropics of Andromeda. On their way by, they casually inquired: “Is this the party for Charlie Barnes?” I told them to follow the lanterns. They had started for the house again when the man turned back.

  “Are you his son?”

  Was he a distant cousin? One of the doctors who had saved his life?

  “The writer, am I right?”

  “That’s right.”

  Who was this guy? I knew everyone in his life by then. I could recognize anyone.

  He stepped forward with an outstretched hand. “Bruce Crowder,” he said.

  It was Evelyn Crowder’s son, the man who had demanded his mother’s money back in September of 2008. He was nothing at all like I had imagined him, the aging alpha male peering squint-eyed at all that might be out to screw him. Nor was he some impersonal force backing Charlie into a corner on the day of his diagnosis. He was about fifty, I would say, with a little gray in his hair and the eyeglasses of a biology professor. He shook my hand warmly as his clear blue eyes sought a connection with mine. I liked him immediately. His wife, too, had a ready smile that put me at ease as we said hello. I turned back to Bruce. The soft-spoken man I mistook for a bully, the guy I assumed had been a big dick to a good man, had probably only been beset by grief on that day long ago.

  “Boy, is your dad proud of you,” he said. “He tells me you had a book on the New York Times bestseller list. Is that true?”

  “A hundred years ago,” I said, repeating one of the old man’s favorite phrases.

  “Are you working on anything at the moment?”

  “An invitation to this party,” I said.

  Bruce laughed at this in a way that made me like him even more.

  “That shouldn’t be too hard to come by,” he said. “I can’t think of anyone who’s prouder of his son than your father is of you.”

  “Now, tell me, Bruce. Is that true?”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “And there’s no one I respect more than your father. He looked after my mother for twenty-three years before she died, and now he does the same for me. He doesn’t need to manage other people’s money anymore. He has enough to do just managing his own! He feels it’s his duty, I guess. Your father’s a loyal man.”

  “Tell me something else, Bruce. Did you ever get the ten thousand dollars he said he would return to you after your mom died?”

  Bruce looked taken aback by the question, as why should I know anything about that?

  “I did.”

  “All ten thousand? And within the time frame he promised it?”

  “If not sooner,” he said.

  “So he’s a man of his word.”

  “Your father? Absolutely.”

  Bruce said he hoped to see more of me on the inside, and he and his wife carried on to the house.

  Had I been, as a writer, an idealist, a reformer, or just a heartless bastard, I might have told the really awful truth about Steady Boy, the naked stuff he shared only with me late at night, and only in a whisper. He disclosed these episodes and inclinations to reassure me that I was not alone in my disgustingness, that I did not need to be separated from the human fold. Oh, boy! Then you would have seen Barbara run me right off the curb and out of Oak Park forever. Truth as true as that debases, it alienates, ultimately it renders us all animals. I might have gone on about the relentless fucking; the unbridgeable gap between him and greatness; his stubborn mineral selfishness; the sick thoughts; the perverse urges. I held back. I made it honest, but respectable.

  I won’t spare myself the same way. You want abject? I was mentally at the curb even in the midst of them, pestering someone to pick up, another to pay attention, a third to invite me in. They threw a good party, but old Jake knew he could always be sent back with the rented chairs.

  61

  The nut-brown muscle car, now a bona fide classic, that Jerry arrived in, fully restored on his own dime after he landed
on his feet courtesy of the old man, was a wild contrast to the unmarked white van he drove for years. It shifted my understanding of Jerry. That shift had, as its closest correlative in the material world, the clever little toy that had delighted my father as a boy whenever he dug it out of a Cracker Jack box, the 3-D lenticular portrait efficiently demonstrating (with a pivot of some twenty degrees) the kinetic potential of the subject at hand—the lion at rest now roaring, the slugger squared up now connecting with the ball—as well as the work of time: the glamour-puss aging into a spinster, the pirate degrading to a skull. The pitiless fate mankind was subject to in toys of this kind had, in Jerry, been reversed, and the rag-clad bum of recent memory, in denim cutoffs and stained T-shirt, replaced with the smiling, suntanned executive. It was a bit of beautiful magic.

  He handed the keys to the valet and with flowers in hand began heading up the drive.

  “Jerry!” I cried. “Come over here! Don’t go in the house just yet, Jerry. Come talk to me first.”

  He reversed his tracks and joined me at the curb.

  “What are you doing out here, Jake?”

  “Want a quick word,” I said. “Hop in the car.”

  “What for?”

  “A quick word. Hop in.”

  I smiled at him after we shut our doors.

  “Here we are,” I said. “A couple of truth tellers. Feels good to be out here, doesn’t it, away from all those phony steppeople?”

  “I’m kind of eager to get inside, actually.”

  “Do me a favor, would you, when you get there? Find Dad for me and ask him to come out. I’ll be right here, at the curb.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Dad?” he said.

  “Chuck,” I said. “Charlie.”

  “What are you doing out here at the curb, Jake?”

  “Barbara objected to something I did and now she’s banished me from the house.”

  “Is it that book you wrote?”

  There was another long pause.

  “What do you know about that?”

  “I’ll be honest with you, Jake. I’m not sure how I feel about being one of your characters.”