A Calling for Charlie Barnes

by Joshua Ferris

“Hey, Pop,” I said. “Dad.”

  He came to. He looked brittle, as one does after a nap: slits for eyes, and in the eyes, confusion. It took him a moment. He sat up, cleared his throat. Then he smiled.

  “What a nap,” he said. “Jake, what a nap. I love a good nap. Before the nap, life’s hell on earth. After, by God, there’s nothing you can’t do.”

  “Don’t you want to join your guests?”

  “No, I do not,” he said. “I want to be right where I am, doing what I’m doing.”

  “Are you mad at me?”

  “Mad at you? Son, why would I be mad at you?”

  “I tried calling,” I said. “You didn’t pick up. You always pick up.”

  “Hard to pick up when you’re conked out!”

  I nodded. I was relieved. I knew all this in my heart but it was nice to hear him say it.

  I realized he was in the old recliner, which had been consigned to the basement—it didn’t suit the fancy-house vibe. It was joined there by his roller chair and letter opener, his TV tray and its array of remotes, and his newspaper, ever near at hand. He had reconstructed the entirety of the house on Rust Road right here in the basement of the house on Harmony Drive.

  “So you can take the man out of Rust Road,” I said, “but you can’t take Rust Road …”

  I might have finished the formula, but I discovered in that instant the true cause of his deep and satisfying sleep: my half a book. It had snatched lucidity from him no less swiftly than a Western civ textbook had forty years earlier, or the Gita during his chemo days. What other Barneses had rapidly consumed, making a list of grievances along the way, was hard for him to get into, and the printout had fallen to the floor, where it fanned out in the direction of the TV. The few pages he did manage to finish were in a neat little stack on the arm of the recliner, facedown. I turned them over. He had made it to page 11.

  “I’m awfully sorry, Jake,” he said, acknowledging his failure. “I’ve been sneaking away all afternoon trying to crack it, but you know me. I get two pages in, literally the next thing I know I’m coming to and wondering what year it is. What year is it, son?”

  I told him what year it was, where he was, and all that had happened. He seemed genuinely delighted.

  “Now you don’t have to read it,” I said. “Which is probably all for the best. It’s made a few people mad.”

  “How come?”

  “I tell the truth. Sort of.”

  “Thank God for that, Jake!” he cried. “There’s nothing I hate more than these goddamn unlikely scenarios you fancy writers are always springing on regular folks like me. By God, write about real things—or don’t write at all! It’s important to focus on what matters in life, am I right? It’s important to be real! For instance,” he said, and finding himself getting all worked up, he thundered down the footrest and sat up straight. “For instance! Why not a man in his basement who has hopes and dreams, and fears and debts, and regrets, and a car in need of repair, and a whole lot of other things? But no, we get long dream sequences, and improbable circumstances, and fantastical episodes, and just a lot of crap, if you ask me. No, you have to write the truth, Jake, no matter who it might piss off. I just have one request.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That name!” he cried. “That goddamn name I’ve hated since the beginning of time.”

  “Do you mean—”

  “Don’t say it, Jake! You know how much I hate it. Listen, I don’t object to the facts. You’ve done a damn fine job. I did marry too young, I did divorce too often, and I told my share of lies, too. I made a hash of things, son. And I was embarrassed by my teeth. It’s all true. But shouldn’t that allow us to take a liberty or two? I’m just asking for a tweak here, Jake—and look, I have a ready-made alternative for you. Guy I used to work with at Sears called me this one day and I’ve never forgotten it. Friend of mine on the sales floor. I’ve probably told you this story a hundred times. But back then, you see, I had a real bad temper. Things didn’t always go my way and I’d get mad. I’d go around frustrated. I’d just fly right off the handle. So one day this guy, he says to me, he says, ‘Charlie, when people make you mad, I never seen anything like it.’ He used to call me Steady Boy, like what you’d say to a great stallion that’s about to rear up and let loose … ‘Okay—steady, boy’ … like that, like I was a real live wire. I didn’t mind that one bit. Made me feel feared, respected, a man to reckon with—all that. I loved it! Nothing could stop Steady Boy. Steady Boy will go far. He comes out of the gate and makes himself known. The man called Steady Boy will never die. How could he? What do you say, Jake?” he asked me. “Do you like it as much as I do? Does Steady Boy work for you?”

  The Facts

  67

  Then we came to the end of another dull and lurid book. Time to wrap things up, give thanks, move on. Important to move on. Fail to move on, you die. Wouldn’t want that. Wouldn’t want to linger or dwell. No living in the past, either. That’s right, let it go. If the past is full of bitterness, the future is always bright. Right? How good does this feel? Eh? Feels pretty good, am I right?

  I’m an amateur collector of authors’ notes. I like this one, from Lilian Pagnani’s Italian memoir, Master: “Names have been altered and characters combined. Some of the events described happened as related; others were expanded and changed.” And this one, from a classic of true crime: “Certain episodes are imaginative re-creations and are not intended to portray actual events.” And this one, from Lowry’s three-volume history of the Spanish Civil War: “Vicious contention between uncompromising factions marked the civil war in Spain. Why should its histories be any different?” And here is Nietzsche, in what amounts to an author’s note in the middle of Beyond Good and Evil: “What forces us at all to suppose that there is an essential opposition of ‘true’ and ‘false’? … Why couldn’t the world that concerns us—be a fiction?” And finally, here is CJ Allerd on her unauthorized biography of Elon Musk: “Everything I’ve written is 100 percent accurate and true … but then again, what is truth inside the simulation?”

  Every story we tell ourselves is some version of make-believe.

  In that spirit, then, my author’s note:

  Everything I’ve written here is 100 percent accurate and true. The experiences detailed are mine and mine alone. Names and other identifying characteristics have obviously been altered, and I have taken certain liberties with chronology. I should also add that I’ve changed the dialogue where I needed to; combined real people into composite characters as well as the magical inverse, ovipositing multiple characters from a single source—my soul—as if it were a clown car; embellished scenes for dramatic effect while eliding and omitting others; indulged in flights of fancy; willfully manipulated the truth; and let stand whole chapters fiercely refuted by members of my family.

  Larry Stoval is a composite. There is the original article, a Bear Stearns desk trader from Oak Park, Illinois, who withdrew his affection from my dad in his moment of need and who, in 2016, quit Wells Fargo to become national cochairman of Donald Trump’s presidential bid. A deacon at his local parish, he served as ambassador to Italy. Inside that Larry nestles, like a corrupt and incompetent Russian doll, Larry Kudlow, Bear’s chief economist until 1994, who once took Charlie to lunch, and within that Larry, smaller but no less bankrupt, is Kudlow’s successor at Bear, the wildly errant economist David Malpass, who was Trump’s undersecretary of the treasury for international affairs. (I write from Rome, some weeks after the 2020 election.) Malpass barely overlapped with my father at Bear but made a big impression on him as a kind of junior Jimmy Cayne, one who didn’t have a clue and didn’t give a damn. The tiniest doll of them all, P. Hartford Hurtneg, a onetime Republican operative and Charlie’s boss at Bear, was indicted in 2006 by the state of Illinois for an elaborate pay-to-play scheme. He currently works for a Chicago investment bank.

  Dismantling the constructions necessary to this book’s composition seems the least I can do
to settle accounts with Chuck, whose request that I tell the truth if I ever wrote about him I was unable to honor in the end. The Ledeux twins, presented here with a sizable age gap between them, have in fact one older brother, Letrois Ledeux, who threatened to sue me for libel if I dared mention him, despite the caveats and qualifications that typically accompany books of this kind. Buddy, as he’s referred to within the family, reviles his mother and wants no memorialization of his connection to her. I briefly considered respecting Buddy’s threat, but his vehement silence tells a compelling story all its own, and lawyers for Little, Brown assure me that he doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on. Hello from the outside, Letrois. Hope the medication is holding.

  Jimmy Cayne is alive and well and updates his Wikipedia page regularly to reflect his tournament wins at bridge. My Uncle Rudy died of complications from COVID-19 in May of 2020. Two months later, on July 1, Delwina Barnes turned one hundred and two.

  I have recovered from my panic attacks and no longer talk about suicide with that gentle giant Dr. Wolfson. A genius, a hero, a saint: he is the Freud of Deerfield, Illinois, who transformed my hysterical misery back into commonplace unhappiness. I had become disillusioned, which is no easier to overcome than grief. It is grief, in fact—not for the death of a loved one but for the death of a vibrant ideal. I believed that death would have something to teach me, that I would be enlightened by it rather than impoverished. “I grieve that grief can teach me nothing,” Emerson wrote at the sudden death of his beloved son, Waldo, age five—a much harder loss, no doubt, than that of some old dad, but the remark sums up my own experience. When Charlie died, I grew no closer to the astral plane, gleaned no hint of the beyond. The dying breathe their last and stay dead, end of story—a hard lesson to learn about the broader truth while you’re also trying to mourn a specific and immediate loss.

  Facts are full of dreary compromises and dead ends. Stare at them long enough and you’ll go insane. Charlie’s solution to this was to tinker, with headlamp and toolbox, in the workshop of the American dream, and to emerge sometime later with a diamond-cut hope that might make him a killing and redeem his lost time. This wasn’t easy to dismiss as child’s play or a variety of magical thinking; it was the most a man could be. He hated fiction when it was confined to a book, but out here, in real life, his fictions got him out of bed most mornings, and to take them away was to dim life, remove its color, silence its invigorating and melancholy score. He couldn’t do without them, much as his foster son couldn’t have done without this one.

  Progress is a myth I don’t know how to live without. It’s been thoroughly repudiated in one realm after another—ideological, ecological, political, generational, material, moral: is there anyone who believes in it anymore? Nevertheless, I keep inventing ways of carrying on. I’m good at tricking the mind. I believe it’s not just what I’ve been trained to do by reading and writing novels but also what humans intuitively do best. I fantasize about splitting open the round, ripe, real-life fictions that members of my family carry with them wherever they go and saying to them, “See? Look! I’m not the only one who still makes shit up! I just happen to get paid for it! I’ve professionalized the family curse!” They would deny I was family and take no more interest in my equivocations than they do my books.

  Lots of writers today spend time in writers’ workshop giving and receiving feedback as they pursue their craft and a master’s degree, and I was no exception. I’ve had a variety of teachers over the years. I’ve been taught by new drunks and old cranks, sat at the table with verifiable greats, later attended galas with Nobel laureates. I’ve learned from the best and know all the midlisters and second-rates, too. But none of them, absolutely no one, has taught me more about the centrality of fiction in our everyday lives than my former foster stepmother Barbara Ledeux, the nurse at First Baptist.

  68

  We were meeting that morning in advance of the memorial service to prepare a personal touch for Charlie amid the cold pomp of death. The idea was mine, actually, but the family ran with it as a way to honor the old man with something more than words.

  I had seen it done in good taste at the funeral of one who died too young, a man of middle age memorialized with a gallery of photographs affixed to poster boards and mounted on tripods, seven or eight panels lining the far wall of the outer parlor. Before entering that close and carpeted room where death reclined in a glossy cherrywood casket, his mourners could experience (or relive) the life now lost one snapshot at a time, a panoramic profusion that tricked the mind (by the third or fourth poster board) into perceiving wholeness, movement, resuscitation: much as a flipbook projects the pole vaulter into the air and over the bar, the illusion in this instance animated all the stages, ages, and awkward phases of a life in full, its growth spurts, bad fashions, changes in facial hair, kisses blown to anonymous lovers and goodbyes waved to friends unseen. The man flowered again in defiance of death’s best efforts to flatten him down to a single sorrowful fact in the adjacent room. I believed we should do the same for Charlie Barnes.

  I thought for sure Barbara would hate the idea, if only because it was mine, but she liked it best, and we were meeting that morning two hours before the funeral to curate that life for the benefit of his funeral guests.

  Turns out the task was done by the time we arrived at the house on Rust Road.

  I never entered that house without first removing my shoes as he had instructed me to do years earlier, when Yort the dog was still alive and Charlie was, too. Marcy, whom I picked up at the airport that morning, was in heels and didn’t bother; also, she was not as familiar with the rules of that house as I was.

  As I have mentioned, it was my dear hope to leave his least and last daughter out of this account, to eliminate Karen completely, but there’s nothing like the demands of narrative to make endless sport of your intentions, and sure enough there she was, waiting for us in the cramped front room where Charlie read his newspaper and kept his remote controls. There was really no avoiding her: she lived next door in Arlington Heights. She was in the waiting room during his surgery; she came to the chemo appointments; she was everywhere.

  Jerry was already present that day as well; his white van was parked at the curb. He was sitting in Charlie’s recliner when Marcy and I walked in. I took a seat on the sofa; Marcy sat next to me. Karen stood, pacing … we were all just sort of waiting around for Barbara to come downstairs so that we could start assembling the collage.

  “What’s taking that bitch so long?” Karen asked.

  Marcy, who adored her father but hated his foul mouth, as well as the one her younger sister had inherited, said, “Can we please try our best to—”

  “To what?”

  “Not call the widow a bitch?”

  “Is the widow not a fucking bitch, Marcy?”

  “And is that not beside the point on today of all days?”

  Karen, rolling her eyes, drifted away, into the dining room.

  Karen in black, Marcy in black, me in black suit and tie … Jerry alone was in street clothes, his denim cutoffs and soiled T-shirt. Perhaps he had plans to run home and change after our task was complete, but it remained an open question: Would he respect the custom of getting dressed up for the dead? Or would he flout that, too? Some people never change.

  He leaned forward and took up the crossword puzzle on the coffee table.

  “Experts at exports,” he said, reading one of the remaining clues out loud. “Could be ‘trade commissions.’ They have T-R-U-T-H, but it could be T-R-A-D-E. But then 96 Down couldn’t be ‘nuh-huh.’ What do you think?” he asked no one in particular. “‘Polite demurral.’ ‘Nuh-huh’?”

  He looked up. Karen had drifted back in.

  “Are you doing a fucking crossword puzzle right now?”

  He set the puzzle down.

  “Are you stoned?”

  “Of course I’m stoned,” he said. “I’m not coming over here sober.”

  “He’s dead, Jerry.” />
  “I know he’s dead, Karen. Thank you.”

  “He’s dead and you’re stoned.”

  “What does his being dead have to do with my being stoned?”

  She pointed at him and at Marcy. “Will you two come with me, please?”

  They stood, and the three of them retreated together into the adjacent room, leaving me behind with Troy Ledeux. He was there, for some reason, on leave, I guess, and being as quiet as a church mouse in the far corner. It was a common Karen tactic to divide real people from the foster siblings and steppeople, and I was unhappy being left behind. Troy moved into Charlie’s recliner and took up the crossword puzzle.

  “Could be ‘nodear,’” he said after a while.

  “Nodear?”

  “Ninety-six down,” he said. “‘Polite demurral.’ ‘No, dear.’”

  I got up and joined the others in the dining room.

  To my surprise, the photographs we were there to select, the images that would tell Charlie’s life story from start to finish, had been gathered in advance of our arrival and affixed to the poster boards laid out on the dining-room table.

  “… cannot fucking believe this,” Karen was saying.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “I’m not seeing a lot of me,” Marcy said, slowly circling the table, appraising the thing for a sense of the bigger picture. “And I’m not seeing a lot of you, Jerry.”

  “I don’t see any of us,” Jerry said.

  As Karen called up to Barbara to demand she come down, I took a look for myself.

  According to that display, Charles Barnes might have been delivered into the world fully formed as a fifty-two-year-old man, at the start of his affair with Barbara Ledeux. There were no pictures of baby Charles in his sailor’s outfit from Cramer & Norton’s. There were no shots of the boy with skinny limbs standing before the Westville shanty with his mother in black-and-white. None of the bow-tied soda-jerk Charlie from 1957 hanging with friends in the glee club. None of the clean-shaven new professional holding Jerry as a toddler. None of those dark carpeted interiors he haunted throughout the seventies, sprawling for naps on bad recliners in his groovy duds and muttonchops. None of him shirtless in cut-off jeans, basking in a kiddie pool with his foster son Jake in a backyard in Danville, Illinois. I don’t want to suggest that his children were completely absent. We were present just enough that our essential absence might have been inconspicuous to the casual observer. But set aside for the moment the outrage of such an edit. What violence had been done to the man himself! The farmhand and corn shucker, the shoe salesman, the clown-for-hire, the social worker, the inventor of the Doolander, the silver fox and stockbroker, the man who brought dignity to the hat—of that man in his totality there was scant evidence. “Steady Boy” had been erased, “Chuck” wiped clean. The hustler, the baritone, the ladies’ man—gone. I understood the need for abridgment. There was no room at a funeral where the widow would be weeping for a long detour into his prior marriages. But the man presented here had no flaw or limit, no origin story or parent, nothing mortal attaching to him, and no cause that came before Barbara. That man was a fiction. By contrast, those boards were filled from one edge to the next with pictures of Charlie and Barbara. Here the one and only couple stood before the Grand Canyon. Here they toasted each other on the deck of a cruise ship. Here they were at ball games and campgrounds and weddings. There were many pictures of Charlie and Troy, and of Charlie and Troy’s sister Tory, and of Charlie and Tory and Tory’s husband Ryan, and of Charlie and Tory and Ryan and their newborn … the list goes on. Extras and steppeople! It felt awful to see them, at the story’s end, take front and center. She had excised—redacted—his real children, their lives, and his life, too, from history.