A Calling for Charlie Barnes

by Joshua Ferris

  Julius Necker died in Palm Springs in 1999. And if that dog had been the one I dumbly mistook it for, the mutt that caught Happy’s toupee at Kickapoo State Park, in dog years it would have been two hundred and forty years old.

  65

  … when all at once, I recalled Karen. We were over an hour into the party by then. The flurry of traffic had died down and now it was just me and the valet kid idling around each other near the curb. I watched him pull a sandwich from his front pocket and consume it, except for the crusts, which he returned to his pocket. Ten minutes later, a barbershop quartet arrived on foot in matching silver vests and straw hats and marched up the drive. Strains of their harmonizing soon drifted out to us.

  I didn’t like asking Karen for favors, or putting myself at her marcy—mercy, I mean. I never wanted to be at Karen’s mercy. I recently claimed that Rudy was my least favorite Barnes, but that was true only if you didn’t take into account Marcy—I keep calling her Marcy. Forgive me. It gets confusing, even for me. There is Marcy, of course, my older sister, or foster sister, who lives in Deer Park, Texas, the one who—well, you know Marcy. Then there is Karen, our younger sister—that is, Marcy’s full sister, Jerry’s half sister, and the second of my foster sisters—whom I haven’t mentioned as much. Karen is the second and final child born to Charlie & Charley. How baroque the Barnes clan is when you really delve! I had hoped to smooth a lot of this out, spare the reader these blended-family confusions, the arch genealogies and branching family trees, by taking some of the customary liberties of a true account, like a memoir—in this instance, presenting two people as one and calling that hybrid creature “Marcy.” In that spirit, I sometimes made Marcy a little meaner than she might have normally been, with a fouler mouth, having blended in a bit of Karen. For efficiency’s sake, I was hoping to keep Karen out entirely, but then the old man wasn’t picking up, Marcy refused to put him on the line, and Jerry was mad about Vermilion Street. Karen answered on the first ring.

  “What’s up, Flip?”

  Karen called me Flip.

  “Hey,” I said, “can you find Dad for me and—”

  “Dad,” she said.

  “Can you find Chuck for me and—”

  “Hey, where am I in this book of yours?”

  “Hold on,” I said. “You’re reading it, too, Karen—really? You?”

  “I know, hard to believe, right? I don’t usually read books. Good books, sure—but not stupid bullshit books like the kind you usually write.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “That’s very encouraging.”

  “I hear you’re calling it a factual account. But it’s the funniest thing, Jake. I can’t seem to find myself in it anywhere.”

  “It’s unfinished,” I said. “And it was really only meant for Chuck.”

  “Jerry’s in there. Marcy’s in there. Even Darge Ledeux gets a little cameo. But Karen Barnes has gone completely missing.”

  “Not completely.”

  “I flicker in and out of this fucking thing like a hologram!” she cried. “You’ve effectively erased me from my own fucking life. What are you calling it, Jake? The Son Also Lies?”

  “Do you have any idea how hard it is to write a book?” I asked her. “You have to make a million decisions, be absolutely ruthless. Inevitably, certain things end up on the cutting-room floor.”

  “An entire daughter?”

  “If you don’t like my account, you can always go write your own.”

  “Oh, sure—let me just whip up a book real fast. I don’t know how to write a book, Flip. I didn’t go to some stupid pointless writers workshop like you did.”

  I know it’s a lot to throw at you, here at the eleventh hour—the fact of Karen. I know it’s a lot to process. I probably should have involved her more from the very beginning. She could be abrasive, is all: vindictive, unyielding, and cruel. I’m pretty sure she hated me. She would have preferred a childhood that did not have me in it. For the record, any curse that issued from Marcy’s mouth in this account very likely came from Karen’s.

  “If only I could write a book, Flip,” she continued. “I’d tell the whole world what a creepy fucking kid you were—and what a furtive little thing you are now.”

  “Okay, what do you want, Karen? Want to be the hero like Jerry? Should I make you suffer from cancer, too? How about I make you his only daughter? Better yet, his only child! Why don’t I call it the Book of Karen?”

  “No, none of that,” she said. “But it would be nice if you said a thing or two about the time you punched me. Remember that, Flip? Sure, I held you down, but you punched me, hard as you could, with your one good arm, right when I wasn’t looking. Who does that? Who coldcocks a little girl?”

  “I don’t remember that,” I said.

  “Oh, sure you don’t,” she said. “Listen, you wanna know what I think? I think you cut me out of this little book of yours because that’s how you’ve always wanted it. You’ve never wanted to share Charlie Barnes with the rest of us any more than Barbara has. But I feel the need to remind you: I am the blood relative here. I’m an actual biological child. While you, my friend, you are a little leech with nowhere better to be.”

  “Please find Chuck for me and put him on the line.”

  “I was with you in that bathtub in the house on Vermilion Street, playing with those toys when she goosed him. I was with you on the front staircase when he showed up with two hundred dollars from the Palmer Bank. And I was with you on New Year’s Eve when we watched The Champ and everybody cried and we drank sparkling cider. How could you leave me out of all that?”

  “You were with us the night we watched The Champ?”

  “I was seven years old. It was New Year’s Eve. Where else would I have been?”

  “I’m sorry, Karen. I honestly don’t remember you being there that night.”

  “I am the reason he drove back to Danville every weekend,” she said. “Not you. You were included, but only because you had to be. He came back for me. You just happened to be there.”

  “I don’t believe that,” I said.

  “You think he would have made that drive for a foster kid? The very same kid he forgot about when you were living on the streets in Key West?”

  “He didn’t forget about me. He was broke. He was getting back on his feet in Chicago.”

  “Right. Keep telling yourself that.”

  “Besides, I ran away. He didn’t forget about me.”

  “He sure as hell knew where Marcy was. He knew where I was. He didn’t know where you were until you got arrested and he had to take you in.”

  “He didn’t have to take me in. He wanted to take me in.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “Because it just wouldn’t be a family without Jake Barnes, would it, Flip? You know what? Give us a second, and we’ll all join you down at the curb.”

  She hung up.

  66

  In one of my earlier books, a character quotes frequently from Ralph Waldo Emerson, but here I do so as myself: “It often appears in a family, as if all the qualities of the progenitors were potted in several jars,—some ruling quality in each son or daughter of the house,—and sometimes the unmixed temperament, the rank unmitigated elixir, the family vice, is drawn off in a separate individual, and the others are proportionally relieved.”

  Karen was our rank unmitigated elixir. She did more than hold me down. She spat on my face. She called me names. Thirty years later, she was still calling me names. Perhaps I did punch her once, when I was eleven—but only a glancing blow, and only after she had strangled my hamster. Now, as an adult, she shut me out of family games, excluded me from get-togethers. Everything had to be all about her. Her money-making schemes were like Charlie’s, only intentionally criminal. Her inventions were debasing and cruel. She angled. She conspired. She lurked around bedrooms for jewelry and passwords. You could never trust her with your mail, you could never invite her to crash for the night. She brought ruin everywhere she went. If she dated a poli
tician, he went to jail. If she was seeing a Russian, he ended up dead. She was hollow, too, a moral vacuum. She prayed and read the Bible and wore a cross at her neck, but it was all just another frightening tactic. She had the mentality of a born mobster, and my aversion to her was so profound, my hands trembled in her presence. They were trembling when she ended our call.

  It may seem disingenuous at this late date, but part of me just hoped to spare the reader our Karen. And the other part of me—well, it’s true, I guess, what she said. That part of me just wanted him all to myself.

  I crashed the party after that. I had no choice. I was a wreck. He wasn’t calling me back. He always called. He loved a phone call. There was nothing the man loved more. And to talk to him meant the world to me. It meant I had the ground beneath my feet. Without his voice on the other end I was in free fall. I had to take my chances, with or without an invitation, Barbara be damned. It seemed that my unfinished book had done what not even pancreatic cancer had managed to achieve: it had united the Ledeuxs and the Barneses. But I still had not heard a word from the man himself. I walked up the circular drive and around the house to the backyard.

  As befitted that fine house, the yard was expansive, well-groomed, and tiered: a taste of manor life I hadn’t seen since my time in the Cotswolds with the McEwans. Oh, who am I kidding? I don’t hang out with the McEwans in the Cotswolds. But I have seen pictures of their place online, and this was not unlike that. The acre of backyard was more like a meadow brightly ringed by late-blooming gardens. Just beyond that began the local forest preserve, an ancient remnant of hickories, hop sedge, and fern populated by owls, muskrats, elk—yes, even elk—and many other becalming woodland creatures. This rustic reminder, forming the far border of the yard, could make you forget you were in the suburbs. The pool and bathhouse were off to my right, in what was once an empty lot. You might think it was evening. It wasn’t. The water glittered gorgeously, like cut diamonds. The absolute centerpiece of this wonderland, however, was the cherrywood gazebo. Old men and new mothers chatted there, denim butts leaning against the banisters. Nearer the house itself, there was an ivy-laced pergola where dappled sunlight fell over still more of the gathered. They milled under the tents, too, and occupied the many little tables. Slices of cake had joined the passed hors d’oeuvres and flutes of champagne. I stood off to the side, taking it all in. I looked around for my dad. He was, by then, keen on pleated peach trousers, a collared shirt, white suede shoes, and a gold herringbone chain, plus the charcoal-heather cap for his head, but saw no sign of him. Someone walking by me was devouring a shish kebab with both hands; he fluttered three fingers in hello.

  The many children in attendance had found one another by then and were running around in little packs. One kid was dressed as a ballerina, another in his tae kwon do uniform, a third as a princess in halter top and tiara, and as I watched them and their friends and enemies take sides, plop down on the grass, wrap their arms around one another and lift with all their might, leap from the tree swing and dart off in all directions, only to reassemble a minute later to gossip and conspire, I was reminded of how little I thought of their adult counterparts. Grown-ups comprise the ultimate secret society to which is automatically admitted every liar, cheat, and scumbag and yet to whom is owed, perversely, unaccountably, the respect and submission of every single child out there. Great souls in their childish guise are the temporary slaves of sadists and misers. And the only way they have of freeing themselves is to become grown-ups themselves, no doubt diminishing, dimming—damning—those souls in the process. I was sorry for what was about to hit those kids: the dawning of adulthood, that rude awakening into the longest-running hypocrisy in human affairs, and there was nothing I could do to soften the blow but urge them from afar to keep playing, play until you are no longer free.

  I flung myself off the sidelines and into the crowd. I said hello to those I knew and introduced myself to those I didn’t. I came first upon Barbara’s sister Darge, still in her Christmas sweater, discharging her nervous tic and talking to Frank Santacroce, the grocer’s son, Charlie’s oldest pal in the world. In every crowd, there is always that one leftie who eagerly throws his hand out before he catches on, and I’m forced to take it and to shake it the only way I can, watching half amused as his mortification at my birth defect blooms. That crowd included old title insurance salesmen, desk traders and stockbrokers from his Dean Witter and Bear Stearns days, and fellow members of the Danville High dramatics club, all old now and enjoying a kind of reunion. The Jonarts were there, as were their rivals the Mossers: members of the dueling shoe dynasties of Danville, Illinois. I didn’t expect to see Evangeline, and sadly I did not, but I did glimpse in the far distance Charlie’s first wife, Sue Starter, together with her “new” husband, Marshall Giacone.

  Noreen, Charlie’s cousin from LA, came up to me to explain that one of the people who left a message for Charlie during his short-lived stint in Hollywood was Marion Dougherty, the casting agent who discovered Al Pacino and Warren Beatty. A woman carrying an ostrich-hide purse informed me that my dad looked great even in a bycoket. Some old Red Mask players had come up from Danville for the occasion. In homage to Charlie, they were dressed as popular types from the era of his reign, so that in among the contemporary guests you would suddenly find yourself face-to-face with the housewife in bell-bottom blue jeans, the wheelchair-bound war vet with shaggy hair, and the horndog pitcher for the Danville Keggers who, in pinstripes and sideburns, made beer spit fly from a pull-tab can.

  Delwina Barnes poked me in the arm with her cane as I was making my way toward the house. She was on her feet and taller than I remembered.

  “I will have you know, young man,” she said, “that Charlie’s father and I did not meet in a cornfield. We met in the pews of the Church of the Nazarene!”

  I was eager to get away. Swiveling around to the first available person, I found myself standing before Stan Butkus, the Danville coach with the fused spine, and Dr. Paul O’Rourke, the Danville dentist who pulled out all of Charlie’s teeth. There must have been two hundred years on earth between them. I didn’t know either well enough to greet them by name, but I nodded and they nodded and I moved on again.

  I made it to the big back deck, where a clown was making balloon animals for the kids. Long before it was my turn, he handed me a pink dachshund. I admired its taut twists and plump limbs. “Say, what’s your name?” I asked him.

  “Name’s Jolly Cholly!” he cried, giving his red nose a honk. The kids loved it.

  “No,” I whispered, “your real name.”

  Out of the corner of his mouth, he told me it was Carl Wabanski, that he was the man out of Moline and that he did it all: the bunny out of the hat, the magic penny behind the ear. Then he slipped me a business card without anyone being the wiser. It read: CARL WABANSKI. THE CLOWN IN YOUR TOWN™, MOLINE, IL.

  I stood on the deck a moment and took in that party, the whole resounding significance of the day. Off in the distance, near the giant oak, I caught two freckled schoolboys in shirtsleeves flying the Doolander—not the original model or the Moon-Lander Doolander from ’79 but the catch-and-toss version with the Super-Stick Grip. They were having a grand old time. Someone nudged me on the arm: it was Sue Starter.

  “Jake, I had the pleasure of reading that book you wrote. I found a lot to admire. It’s true, I was young once, and a ravishing beauty. But I can assure you that while Charlie was smooching floozies in the back seat of his Newport, Marshall and I were not carrying on.”

  “Oh, leave the boy alone, Mother,” Marshall said. “It was forty-five years ago. Who cares?”

  We conversed amiably enough until it came time for me to brave the stephouse. On my way in, I ran into Larry Stoval. “If we’re being honest,” he said to me, “I never liked him.” He was leaving with my biological mother—who was drunk, of course. She was hanging all over the “deacon of Oak Brook.” She didn’t even say hello. As far as I knew, she was my only living relati
ve.

  Inside the house, the caterers were cleaning up in the kitchen. I went past them and down the hall. There were streamers in every room, abandoned slices of cake. I worried I was too late, he was too big, too popular, he wouldn’t even recognize me. No wonder he wasn’t picking up! He was a long-term survivor of pancreatic cancer. That alone warranted local news stories and viral fame. Add to that the sudden swank estate in Oak Park, the internet fortune, the doctor wife, and the natural charisma unleashed at last, now that he was free to no longer give a damn. He had named a day after himself.

  I still hadn’t seen any sign of him when I arrived at the front room that overlooked the street. I planted my knees on the olive-green love seat and peered out the picture window. After a while, a car went by, but it wasn’t his. I could hear her voice from behind me, coming in loud and clear from a hundred years ago.

  “He’s never going to show.”

  “He is going to show.”

  “I was married to him, Jake. I should know.”

  “Well, he’s my dad, so I should know even better than you.”

  “Suit yourself. But you’re letting a perfectly good day go to waste.”

  I wondered where Karen was. I thought if I found Karen and we waited for him together, he would show that much faster, so I got off the love seat to look for her. But then it came to me. I knew where he was. Of course I did. It was a no-brainer.

  I found the stairs to the basement in that stephouse, and sure enough he was down there having a little nap. It was his superpower and a natural wonder of the world, the impossible circumstances under which Steady Boy could drop off for twenty minutes and wake refreshed. I might have let him go on sleeping had it not been for the extraordinary number of guests in his house. I hovered over him, gently nudging.