A Calling for Charlie Barnes Read online

  He stood and answered the phone.

  This was without a doubt what I admired most about Steady Boy in his decline: he did not quit. And look: we see how he flirted just now with madness, how little that appealed to him in the end, how he stood to participate still more in the game of life in spite of its promise to reveal its most demanding rigor yet. He would not bow out, go nuts. And yet, by the popular definition of that state of mind—doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result—Charlie had been effectively insane since about 1960, when he first began making cold calls, licking envelopes, registering trademarks, handing out business cards, drawing up marketing plans, and giving it his all according to his lights—yet never making any progress that he could discern. Let me tell you something about this man: he had heart.

  “Dr. Skinaman?” he asked timidly upon answering the phone.

  A woman’s voice replied, “No.”

  He was instantly relieved. “Oh, thank God,” he said. He didn’t really have any desire to hear from the doctor who would be calling, or any doctor, ever, about his condition, the future, anything, and breathed easy again.

  “I’m calling for Charles Barnes,” said the voice.

  “Speaking.”

  “This is Sophie Crowder, Charles. I’m Evelyn Crowder’s daughter-in-law. I’m afraid I have some bad news,” she said. “Evelyn passed away in the night.”

  A name, a mere name to you and me, but to Charlie, a client of twenty-three years and the representative figure of his change in fortune when at last he came north to Chicago and took a job with Dean Witter, Bear’s precursor, and started realizing some of his potential in life. A short, sweet old lady without an ounce of investing acumen, Evelyn had appeared before the Dean Witter kiosk inside a Sears anchor store in the Oakbrook mall, where she removed one stiff green hundred-dollar bill after another—for a total of twenty-seven thousand dollars—from her ostrich-hide purse, inquiring if there might be some better way of keeping it safe. In the intervening years, he had grown Evelyn Crowder’s twenty-seven thousand dollars to a wisely allocated one hundred and thirty grand.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “This is terrible. This is terrible.”

  “Charles?”

  “This is terrible,” he repeated. “What happened?”

  “We believe it was a heart attack.”

  He squatted down with the phone at his ear. Had to seek a lower center of gravity at the dizzying news. Death. Poor Evelyn, poor human being. The tears were spontaneous and unexpected. He had loved her. Always an old lady, heavily rouged and scented, clueless and far too trusting, but entirely innocent, beautiful and lovable. Poor thing. Had to have been scared, late at night, dying alone. “Call me night or day,” he tended to say upon ending a phone call with a client. Had she tried to call? “Charlie, I think I might be dying.” Without knowing it, he took up a bit of the cracked egg noodle near at hand, close as he was to the floor, and worried it between his fingers as he tried to fix his mind on the elusive fact. It ends. It all ends. Unimaginable.

  “This is a complete shock,” he said. “I really loved your mother-in-law. She’s been a loyal client of mine for years.”

  “It’s a shock for us, too,” she said. “Can I ask you to hold on a second, Charles?”

  When she returned a minute later, she gave him the name of a funeral home and the date and time of the service before quickly getting off the phone. He collected himself and stood. His head was spinning.

  13

  As it happened, he would not make it to Evelyn Crowder’s funeral. As more pressing concerns, private disasters moved in, Evelyn Crowder would slip from his mind. In the meantime, there was sadness, there was reflection … and there was panic. Evelyn’s money would likely go away now, dispersed among her heirs, and with it Charlie’s custodial fees. And hers was not the only account he had lost of late. His clients were restless. Their holdings were down. Some were ill-advisedly pulling their assets and in the process destroying his business. He hated 105 Rust Road, but it did not follow that he wished to be evicted from its scuffed and tired walls. Even with pancreatic cancer, they weren’t going to let him live! He would be homeless. He would come to nothing as he had always feared and die on the streets in disgrace. Sixty-eight years old … this goddamn life!

  I have failed to mention that while Charlie was outside pacing during an earlier moment of panic, forced by the neighbor’s gaze to feign a search of his mailbox, he expected to find in that silver tomb with the tight-fitting lid nothing at all, since he diligently collected the mail at the same time every day. And if initially I suggested that he did find nothing and walked back inside empty-handed, that was only to instill in the reader right now the same surprise Charlie experienced back then at finding, in fact, a single white, mildly weathered item deposited the night before by a neighbor who had received it by accident—the only time I intend to be playful in this otherwise true account. It was a payment-due notice from a Dallas collection agency addressed to Charles Barnes. He had torn into it, and it made him mad: a misbegotten charge for a trial period he never canceled, for a service he never used. He tossed it in the trash and planned to ignore it. But then news of Evelyn’s death sent his fearful heart dominoing from one worry to the next, culminating now in his pulling the letter from the can, brushing off the cereal and the coffee grounds, picking up the phone he cradled only a minute earlier, and dialing the toll-free number—

  “Credence Credit.”

  “You people have a lot of nerve,” he began.

  “Name, please.”

  Name, case number and a long wait later, he was finally transferred to his case manager, to whom he tried to explain why he didn’t owe upwards of three hundred and forty dollars to Platinum Warranty, Inc., or its agents at Credence Credit Corp.

  “Why don’t you take a deep breath, sir?” the debt collector suggested.

  “Don’t you dare tell me to take a deep breath. You’re not the one facing eviction and death here!”

  “Eviction and death?”

  “That’s right, asshole—your three hundred bucks adds up. And I have pancreatic cancer! Know anything about that? Don’t imagine you do. It starves you, then it wastes you, then it drowns you. Sound familiar? It sure should, because you are the pancreatic cancer of the capitalist system! You offer no warning, no appeal, no logic, no fairness, no mercy—just ultimatums and punishment! Do you think I have time for this? But here I am, forced to spend my precious few remaining—”

  He was getting another call.

  “Can I ask you to hold, please?”

  “Sure.”

  He clicked over.

  “Charles Barnes?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Nurse Keeler calling from Dr. Skinaman’s office.”

  His heart instantly kicked, the dizzy spell returned.

  “How are you this morning?”

  “Fine,” he said, in a voice far less confident than the one he had just deployed to curse out his case manager. “I guess.”

  “We have received your test results, and the doctor has had a chance to look them over.”

  “Okay.”

  “Your scans are clean. Your numbers look great! The doctor was very pleased.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “No need for a follow-up.”

  “Hold on,” he said. “What are you saying—that I don’t have … pancreatic cancer?”

  “You don’t have cancer of any kind,” the nurse said.

  There was another long pause.

  “You’re clean as a whistle.”

  “But the weight loss,” he said.

  “The what?”

  “The weight loss?”

  “Oh,” the nurse said. “Who knows? That could be anything.”

  He made good on his wife’s request that he take down the raw numbers on the test results, which he did on the first thing at hand—a little white napkin.

&n
bsp; 14

  It was the fucking internet! Barbara, who knew better, had told him to steer clear of that goddamn thing. Had he listened? No! In the disquieting days following his appointment with Dr. Skinaman and his battery of tests, he’d lost all perspective and given way to fear. He went on that machine day and night, read every last user post and grim prognostication, and every symptom described him to a tee. Pancreatic cancer, c’est moi!

  Boy, was he relieved. But he was also a little … well, embarrassed, now, for having told a few select people that he was as good as dead, basically, goddamn it. He thought he should probably call Jerry back, and Marcy, too, and maybe a few others, and tell them the good news. But the phone was already ringing.

  “Hello?”

  “You were saying, Mr. Barnes?”

  It was his case manager from the collection agency. It appeared their connection had never been broken.

  “You again,” he said.

  He liked it better when he had pancreatic cancer. Not really, of course. That was absurd. But he did enjoy the clarity it gave him. A deadly cancer like that will put things in perspective and everyone in their place. Now he had to go back to being just another everyday schlub paying down debts from a basement office. Who cared about that guy? In this world, a perfectly healthy man could either make ends meet, or fuck off and die.

  “I’m going to have to call you back,” he said.

  He hung up.

  One thing you have to keep in mind about Steady Boy. If my father was something of a joke, he was also a fucking colossus. There was no bringing him down, no killing him off. Recall the gods that dwelled upon Mount Olympus. They, too, could be easily mocked by the poets and their lives described in terms of farce, because they were immortal.

  15

  He had a seat at the kitchen table to gather his wits. So he would not die. He would live, forced by good health to continue to participate sanely in all of life’s ways. Try again. Fail? That, too, probably, if history were any guide. It had been, he supposed, kind of nice to think it was all over with, briefly, his ongoing effort. Now he had a lot of time on his hands … a whole lotta time. What to do with it? Turn everything around, of course. Yes, success. There was always that. The second act. Getting the hell out of that basement office and buying the nurse at First Baptist, who deserved better, a new house, something befitting the high regard in which he held them both.

  The power returned, and with it the kitchen light, the radio, the microwave display, now blinking, the hum of the refrigerator, and a palpably renewed sense of animation, of life, that was somehow greater than the sum of its parts … but Charlie himself didn’t brighten. He had begged the power to come back on when it seemed to be staging a dress rehearsal for biting the big one. Now there was too much light shining down on the old dull things: the kitchen in need of renovating, the house he would never escape, the narrowness of a life that was incomplete at sixty-eight but that could not be changed or improved no matter the effort he made. He would die in that house. The phone began to ring again. It was his kid brother, Rudy.

  “Just finished my joe, Charlie, and been reading over that document you sent me.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Your Chippin’ In.”

  “Right,” he said.

  “You asked me to give you my gut.”

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  There was a long pause.

  “What’s wrong, Charlie? You sound low.”

  Dumb move, to hand that man a dream. If Charlie—who would live now, not die, and who needed a dream to live by—had to hear (even from a know-nothing peddler of dog pills like his brother) that his Chippin’ In was bad, it was doomed, it would go to hell like his other ideas, he might really go nuts indeed, take matters into his own hands and make the quick death that was pancreatic cancer look like a protracted war by putting a gun to his head and blowing his fucking brains out. He couldn’t risk that. So when his poor brother, put upon all morning, began to speak … Charlie quietly hung up on him.

  How I might wish it were otherwise—that this man, whom I loved, possessed the strength of character to always hear the truth. But who doesn’t turn away from the truth now and again? In any event, the facts as he dictated them to me plainly state that he poured himself a fourth bowl of cereal that morning and drank a fifth cup of coffee while ignoring the ringing phone. Then he drifted through the house he dreaded, feeling wiped. He thought a nap might dispel his dark mood, but when he looked at his watch, it was only ten fifteen.

  16

  Who was I to judge his sad case? Steady Boy’s mother, Delwina, the naive girl with the ugly name, didn’t have a clue how to raise a child. Her mother, a pious hypocrite, was no help to her, nor was the man who’d gotten her into trouble; he never once lent a hand. From the moment Charlie came home from the hospital, she was at a loss. The baby never slept. He cried night and day. And her breasts were open sores. She was just about to go stark raving mad when her fat Aunt Cessarine climbed the five stairs to the shanty porch and knocked at the front door.

  In a moment, I will retell the story Chuck always urged on me of how his parents met and married. This other story, of how his Great-Aunt Cess nearly destroyed him, he told me only once, in passing, but it strikes me as the more interesting of the two, and the more revealing. She was an enormous woman—three hundred pounds, even allowing for the boutonniere. The majority of that weight resided in her elephantine hips, while her upper body remained as lithe as a little girl’s. Taking a fresh pass through family photos, Chuck once joked to me that his great-aunt was all bird above, brontosaurus below. Eternally old, she was born around the time of the Civil War, hit middle age at the turn of the century, and was still alive in 1940, at which point she appeared on Delwina’s porch possessed of an absolute authority. Her niece invited her in, and Cess lowered her immense carriage onto the divan.

  “Do you always go to the child the minute he starts crying?” her interrogation began.

  “I always try to, Aunt Cess. That very minute.”

  “Even when it’s just a whimper?”

  “Even when I’m asleep. I just bolt upright. He means the world to me.”

  “And do you pick the child up? Do you soothe him, comfort him?”

  “I do try. I don’t always know how. He’s so unhappy sometimes it just breaks my heart. But I do go to him, I hold him, I kiss him, I do everything I can to make it better.”

  “Then you are ruining him,” Cess declared.

  She then presented his mother with a book called Care for the New Baby, which, as far as I can tell, probably determined Steady … Charles Barnes’s fate more than any other single factor—genetic, environmental, you name it.

  “What do you know about nervous spoilage?” Cess asked his mother.

  Delwina admitted that she knew nothing at all about nervous spoilage.

  “That’s just as I supposed.” Cess shook her head in dismay and added, “You are an ignorant girl.”

  For the next hour, she tutored Delwina on the mortal dangers of nervous spoilage. It was now scientifically proven: there should be no rushing to the baby’s side, no picking the baby up with the intention of dispelling a nightmare, no unnecessary holding, pampering, or excessive admiration of the baby. According to Care for the New Baby, those were surefire ways to produce morally weak men.

  “This is common knowledge, young lady. Get with the times, or that child will be lost.”

  “Thank you, Aunt Cess.”

  “Do not dally, girl,” she demanded. “Your child’s very soul hangs in the balance.”

  In over her head from day one, Delwina was saved by her aunt’s visit and the book she left behind: at last, something to guide her. She began to read Care for the New Baby that very day, and though it was over four hundred pages long, and though she was exhausted and had no gift for study, she finished it within the month. It was nothing short of a revelation. She no longer picked Charlie up unnecessarily. She certainly did not hug
or kiss him. She did not let his little hand curl over her index finger—the most wonderful sensation of her young life and a major cause of nervous spoilage. She was instructed to let him cry, and cry he did. Through a bad case of whooping cough, through the high fever that accompanied the measles, through rubella and a flu that almost killed him, he lay alone in his crib, crying for hours. Through the cold nights of his first full winter, when the wind sailed straight through the leaky Westville shanty, he cried. He cried to be cleaned, to be fed, to be held, to be soothed back to sleep. In keeping with the scientific evidence compiled in Care for the New Baby, she did not touch him to excess, or sing or coo when bathing him, or indulge in baby talk. When feeding him, she did not look him in the eye. As the toddler was learning to walk, she did not run to his aid when he fell. Resisting the temptation to weaken his moral character, she turned her back on him and carried on with whatever she was doing.

  Later she would tell him how hard it had been. Tormented by his faintest whimpering, she was left brokenhearted, driven nearly insane by his open-throated bawling, and wasn’t sure she would survive. Charlie’s father woke at dawn, put on his boots and left for work, and was never any help at all. She was alone with Charlie throughout the long day and had to pinch and strike herself so as not to rush immediately to his aid and love him to pieces. Once, a neighbor, the wife of a sharecropper, long compelled by racist hate to mind her own business where white mothers were concerned, nevertheless climbed the shanty steps and knocked at the front door. Was the baby okay? Did the mother need help? Delwina might have simply said no, but she felt it necessary to explain herself. In the absence of Aunt Cess, however, whose conviction she lacked, the lessons imparted by Care of the New Baby slipped her mind entirely, and for a brief, terrible moment she could not recall the book’s logic. She, too, wondered how on earth she could stand by and let a little baby cry. Only after the neighbor was gone did it all come back to her: she was instilling moral character in the child and guaranteeing his future success.