The Incredible Charlie Carewe

by Mary Astor

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah,” he laughed, “I’m always waiting for it to blow shut and bang and wake me up, so I can’t get to sleep.”

  Gregg closed the door behind him softly. He felt relieved and secure in the knowledge that the resilience of the very young was one of the things that was most dependable about them.

  He was sure that in later years John would understand better why “nobody told me.” Charlie had to happen to a person, he thought. You couldn’t isolate him and say anything about him to anyone that would be sufficient warning. John had had his firsthand shock and would recover. It was up to him and Virginia to see to it that he learned from the experience—to be wary and on guard. For if he recovered with the idea that he had simply expected too much of his father, that his boy’s idealizing of another human being was the thing that was at fault, and not Charlie himself . . . Gregg rubbed the back of his neck, realizing he was full of tensions. He started upstairs to his room. It had been a long day, and he wanted a bath and solitude, he was behind on his work—worst of all, his feelings for Virginia were becoming intolerable.

  It had begun secretly, silently, and somewhat shamefully the day after Jeff’s and Alma’s funeral. He had been so absorbed in his concern for Virginia—she had been so tense and still and white through it all. And his own inner rage with Charlie had almost completely masked a feeling that was demanding attention. When it finally surfaced, he was overwhelmed at the realization. There was no impediment, nothing to bar him from loving her openly, and he could begin to wait.

  It was John who had brought them unexpectedly closer in their relationship. He seemed like a child they might have had. His care was divided between them, and they were bonded to protect him. In the brief time he had been at Nelson he had become a part of them, and automatically it was Gregg to whom he looked for discipline and Virginia for a Band-aid. It was Virginia whom he hugged good night, it was Gregg whom he consulted about the gear chain on his bike. They sought each other’s faces when he accomplished something, and together they commended him. They suffered together in his short absence, and when he was safely home, for the first time, Virginia had impulsively thrown her arms around Gregg, burying her face on his shoulder in relief. For a long moment he had held her quietly, feeling her hair against his lips, feeling her body against his, and suddenly his arms locked around her, and just as suddenly he let her go before there was a possibility that she might protest.

  Sometimes he hated himself for his caution, his distrust of spontaneous expression. The men of his platoon in the Army had thought of him as a cold fish, he knew. All his life he had been the spectator, the listener; learning and absorbing and weighing. It was the basis of his friendship with Walter, because he understood Walter’s hesitancy and delicacy about participating too deeply in the lives of others. It was not a lack of warmth, as some thought, it was a regard for the rights and differences and opinions of others which so many people stereotyped as the “cold New England type.”

  Occasionally he entertained romantic notions of leaving Nelson, of wrapping Virginia up in possessive isolation from all memories of Jeff, from the family home, from her constant concern and fear of Charlie, even from John. It was foolishness of course. It was just as foolish to think of himself in any way as not “part of the family.” Even in the lonely years before the war, living in New York, teaching at a private school, he had never completely lost contact. Walter and Beatrice had always welcomed him affectionately when he went to stay for a week or so during vacations. In New York he often dropped in for an evening of good talk with Virginia and Jeff—and he kept Charlie constantly in a corner of his eye. And Nelson had been a haven of peace and comfort after the war. A place to work quietly, and to achieve no small measure of accomplishment; his analysis and commentaries on world affairs were seriously read and quoted, and Walter’s pride and esteem and understanding of his achievements were deeply gratifying.

  But it was the years-old role of the family friend that was the real basis of his caution. He was afraid to jar it in any way; it was safe and familiar and comfortable. He was afraid if he revealed himself to Virginia, revealed his emotions and need for her, she would recoil as from a stranger. It was a battle, the outcome of which he could not predict. In the meantime, his nerves were making it difficult to live with the situation, and he thought as he stood in the doorway of his room that perhaps it might be a good thing if he went away for a while after John was safely installed in school in September. There was a job in Washington . . .

  Suddenly he remembered that Virginia must be waiting for him. He must tell her that John had been in a better frame of mind when he left. He shook his head, wondering at the train of his thoughts, nervous, defensive thinking, which he was unused to, and which made him as uncomfortable as if a spotlight had suddenly been turned onto himself.

  He found her in the library, alone. There was a small fire going in the fireplace, the logs singing their dampness. Occasionally through the dense mist outside came the doleful note of a foghorn.

  Virginia looked up from her book, slipping her reading glasses up above the peak of her hairline.

  “Well, that was a long time—is he all right?”

  Gregg let himself down into the wing chair opposite her, sighing in fatigue. “Yes, he’s fine. I told him long boring stories of my own childhood—enough to put anybody to sleep. Walter gone up to bed?”

  “Yes, he said that Charlie, as usual, had put him in a filthy mood. I tried to talk to him about other things, but it was no use. Poor Dad!”

  Gregg watched the simmering logs while he filled a pipe in silence. He was exasperated with the fact that his own thoughts had taken up every corner of his mind; his own problems had pushed everything else aside so completely that he felt not only indifferent but irritated that other matters might have a call on his attention.

  Virginia thumbed a few pages of her novel and then tossed it over to the leather couch in disgust. “Really, I must be getting very old!”

  “How so?” Gregg asked around his pipe.

  She flipped her fingers at the book, which had slipped from its bright dust jacket and landed face down on its rumpled pages. “Because I remember when they used to use asterisks.”

  “Asterisks?” Gregg frowned.

  “Yes, and so do you—remember, I mean. When the lovers were in each other’s arms, an author might take them into the bedroom, but then he’d put down a row of asterisks and his next word about the subject would be ‘Afterward——’ It seems nowadays that every popular novel contains a detailed description of the sexual act at least once every ten pages.”

  Gregg chuckled. “It’s what’s called the realistic approach. You don’t care for it?” He felt a dull burning warmth rising to his face. He thought, “Oh, God, let’s not talk about sex—even about sex in books——”

  “Well, to me,” Virginia said in answer to his question, “it’s like this: you might write that your character took a delicious mouthful of steak, ‘chewing it hungrily.’ But I doubt if you’d go on and tell how it slipped down the esophagus and joined other partially digested matter in the stomach, and finally in pulsating rhythms,” she began to intone, “all the fibers, the residue, that which was unwanted, unloved, unneeded, found its way into the transverse colon, where it lay exhausted until the more vigorous bulk of a portion of celery nudged and cajoled and pushed it onward into the darkness!”

  Gregg had squinted his eyes from the smoke, watching her with a gentle smile of amusement. “How discreetly the years are treating her,” he thought. “How beautiful she is!”

  “Not funny?” Virginia shook her head at him, her eyebrows raised. “No, I suppose not.” She shrugged, and lifting her glasses from her hair, she folded them, and sighing a little, leaned her head back against the chair, watching the fire.

  “Has the idea of sex become something merely functional to you?” asked Gregg. “Damn,” he thought, “I’m becoming compulsive.”

 
“No. I just don’t like to see it, the act itself, all spread out in print, I guess. Sex is something so—so wordless, something that only the finest writers can achieve—abstractly, evocatively.”

  She looked at him with a pleasant, flat, impersonal expression; quite aware of the growing electricity. She was startled by her own response to it. Gregg! Of all people. Dear, sweet, dull—no, not dull, she amended. That was the description most people applied to him, only because he didn’t talk very much. She had merely picked it up, imitatively.

  She glanced back to the fireplace as a log slipped and began to burn brightly, realizing that the movement had not distracted Gregg. She was aware that he was watching her through the swirl of his tobacco smoke, and she felt a wash of caressing warmth pour over her, then automatically it stopped and she shivered a little. The conditioning of years of denial was not to be undone in a moment.

  She rose and stood over him, tall, serene. His face was unmasked completely, tears stood in his eyes. She cupped his chin in her palm tenderly and, stooping, kissed him quietly.

  “Not yet. Not yet—please?” she said gently. And as she left the library, she closed the door and whispered to herself, “Not—ever, I’m afraid.”

  As though he had heard, Gregg, still sitting motionlessly, still feeling her kiss, groaned a little, thinking, “I know, I know—probably not ever!”

  “But, darling, how dull!” screamed Kay Orcutt, sympathetically. She usually screamed. She had to, to be heard over the clamor and clank of the small fortune in bangles and charms and golden chains which hung from her arms; and over the yapping of Too-too, a large exquisite black male poodle, equally bedecked with sound effects: a tiny cluster of East Indian bells fastened to his coifed topknot, and around his shining throat a collar studded with rhinestones—and more bells. They were devoted to each other, rarely separated, and never more than momentarily unaware of one another’s whereabouts in the combination apartment-shop.

  On the floor of the display window was a small card announcing in lower-case letters: “kay orcutt—interiors”—which humbly gave the spotlight to a Calder mobile suspended in front of a blue-black flocked background. The area was stunningly lighted, so that the mobile seemed to float in pure, limitless atmosphere; the window was canted forward, and no mundane reflections betrayed a barrier. The display said no to the budget-minded, it said yes to those who were willing to “Just let Kay take over, darling, she’ll really do something for you,” even though it meant a reconstruction job and a six-month wait for hand-crafting. The reception room was paneled and furnished like a small sitting room, hushed with carpeting and deep chairs, decorated with one blazing Miró and a wall of leather-bound portfolios. There was a desk in the corner, piled high with papers, orders, clip boards, samples, and swatch cards, over which presided an elderly woman who looked like someone’s Aunt Josephine, who calmly answered the phone, and as calmly refused to be disturbed by Kay’s screaming or the disorder of the desk to which Kay constantly contributed. To the rear were Kay’s living quarters, a squirrel nest of all her years of collecting furnishings, fabrics, works of art, people, and things. She was served by a heavy-set, swarthy gentleman who looked like an aging gangster but who was “perfectly sweet” and a “heavenly cook,” and who was luckily immaculate and tireless.

  She and Charlie were seated in the “functional area” of the terrace. Comfortable but anachronistic platinum and chrome furnishings jarred the studied serenity of what Kay called “my monastery garden.” Nearby, quite nearby, a bell in a cathedral sonorously tolled the hour.

  “Five o’clock! For Christ’s sake, Josef, hurry it up! We’re dying of thirst!” she yelled. Not unkindly, but her voice echoed from the dark stone walls where a fountain spoke gently to the ancient bronze figure of a robed saint. Only a single shaft of hot sunlight managed to squeeze between the buildings and then was broken in the branches of a twisted olive tree, but Kay mopped her face with Charlie’s handkerchief.

  “Poor baby!” she said to Charlie. “What do they do—just sit on all that money?” She was concealing the fact that she had just had quite a shock. Charlie had tapped her for a loan, out of all limits for even her generous checkbook. No longer attractive, Kay was willing to pay for her amusement, to lavish quite nice presents on young men in return for having them sit at her feet, take her to the theater and/or to bed. She had been proud of what she thought was a real catch. “Not so damn young, darling,” she had said about him, “someone who looks like he might like old Kaysie for herself alone, and he’s got simply pots!” Now it was apparent that the pots were quite empty, but because he was fun company and “divine in the hay” she was stalling.

  “I think I met your sister once—years ago. I had a consultation with her husband—Shelley, wasn’t it? Yes, that’s right. Crippled, poor dear, but a fine artist—I did the penthouse offices for his Stapleton building job—— Ah! Here we are! Not too sweet now, I hope, Josef? Skoal!”

  Charlie was looking moody. He was feeling the pinch badly. For a while—a year or so—people had lent him money with a “Think nothing of it, old boy,” but when time passed and it was not returned, the word got around fast. He had tried once to bounce a check back on his father, but it hadn’t worked; he’d kept his word, the damned skinflint, and Charlie had to borrow to cover it.

  Kay was brand-new material, although so unattractive it made him want to laugh. She had very strong prominent teeth and rather thin lips, which gave her a candid, smiling, jolly look. But kissing her was a strange experience, and somewhat dangerous. It was a little like kissing the side of a broken teacup, and so usually he would slide his lips down and around to the softer plumpness of her second chin.

  Now he sat on a plastic cushion at her feet, holding one of her palms up to his cheek. That way the bangles would drop out of the way.

  “Kay, I honestly think I’ll kill myself. . . . No, I’m not kidding,” as she protested, “if I have to go back and live in that stuffy little town of old fogies, just to survive!”

  “Well, don’t you have any friends of your own—there are some divine people I know who always go up for the summer at least—I just don’t understand you, Charlie darling. It looks to me as though you were in clover, compared to some of the boys I know.” She drew back to look at him. “Or is it—maybe your family doesn’t want you around, is that it? Maybe you disturb the so-called even tenor of their ways?”

  “Oh, God, no!” Charlie protested. “On the contrary, Mum says they come to life when I’m there, she has begged me to stay, especially since my wife died.”

  “What about the others? What about ‘the creep’ as you call him—Gregg something?”

  The mention of Gregg’s name set up a new pattern in Charlie’s mind, and his face was blank for a moment. Gregg—Gregg and Larry Payne—hey! Why hadn’t he thought of that before?

  Assuming his expression to be one of discreet silence, Kay chuckled. “Ah, that’s it, isn’t it? He’s moved in, hasn’t he? Taken over your rightful position. Sucking up to the old folks, brother, I know the type! You’re just too much of a gent, that’s the trouble with you—why don’t you just kick the son of a bitch out of there. . . .”

  “He’s in Washington now. Can’t kick him out when he’s not there,” said Charlie vaguely.

  “Well . . .” Kay pushed her heavily corseted hips out of the chair, and stood up impatiently. “Christ, Charlie—you’ve got to solve your own problems! I can’t do it for you. Nor do you get much sympathy from me, when you’ve got a heavenly place like that to live. I’d give anything to get a peek at some of the furnishings!”

  Charlie rose to his feet with alacrity. It wouldn’t do to have Kay sore at him. The place was a lot better than a hotel, and all his things were spread around. It would be a major job—and probably an emotional one—if he moved out now.

  “Now, now, now,” he spoke soothingly, “I’m sorry I even mentioned my troubles. I should have kept them to myself, I know. I feel like hell, askin
g you this, but I’m so damned stymied, it’s embarrassing.” He dug his hands into his pockets and, stepping off the terrace, he strode out to the fountain, where he dipped his fingers into the water and idly flicked drops into the contemplative face of the saint.

  Kay teetered after him on needlepoint heels, all her bangles clashing and jingling. It was her turn to be soothing. She came up behind him and put her plump arms around his waist, holding him firmly.

  “My poor baby darling—I hate to see you so down. Come on now, sweetie, we’ve got to get changed. Liz and R.D. are coming over for dinner and Steve and Binnie later.”

  She loosed her viselike grip on him and turned him around by his shoulders to look at his sulky face. “Shall we eat out here, or do you think it would be cooler in the dining room? You need a shave, darling. Wow, you get black in this hot weather.” She rubbed his beard with her fingers, making little appreciative noises about his masculinity. “Mmm, I love it—but we must bow to convention, mustn’t we!”

  He looked down at her with his quick-change trick of adoring warmth. “Let me have a thousand, just for the moment, Kay-day? I feel naked with empty pockets.”

  Kay was still smiling apparently—at least her lips were spread in the shape of a smile and her teeth were dazzling. “Well,” she said, “that’s quite a comedown from a couple of hours ago, isn’t it? Do you expect to start with a thousand and work up?”

  With that he picked her up by her elbows to meet his height, took a chance with the teeth, and began to whirl her around the garden, till she was squealing and laughing.

  He was in enormous good humor the rest of the evening, playing the perfect host, helping Josef with drinks, keeping the record player stacked; and his habit of laughing in a kind of astonishment at anyone’s jokes was intoxicating to the one relating them. He would say, choking, “I never heard that—it’s heaven!” and search the speaker’s face in amazement, as though he were the discovery of the year from an amusement standpoint.