“No one’s going to ask you for papers, Charles. We have day trips all the time.”
“Humor me.”
“I am,” he said as he flourished his signature and pushed the paper across the desk. He held it in place with his fingertips when I tried to pull it closer. “Just because you were raised in insanity, doesn’t make you insane, Charles. You can overcome these years. You’re still young and this is only your first step toward a new life.”
A life of solitude I wanted to inform him, but I only nodded and followed him to the outpatient wing of the hospital. From there we went to the parking lot and stood waiting in the February air for my father.
A long black limo pulled up, its tires crunching last week’s snow, the only sound penetrating the otherwise silent day. The smell of its exhaust seemed an echo of a far distant memory, one not quite strong enough to dislodge the snow from the limbs of the black winter-hard trees. Odd.
A chauffeur came around to open the door for me and I saw my father’s head poke out from the interior, his hand motioning me to him.
“Courtesy of the funeral home,” he told me as I climbed in and settled across from him. “There’ll just be the service and the casket. He won’t actually be buried until spring.”
I nodded; Caufield and I had discussed this over the past week. The service would be held in the cemetery with a non-denominational minister and some workers from the funeral home to act as pall bearers. As far as I knew, Henry and I would be the only people attending.
To his credit, Henry didn’t try to press conversation on me; though Caufield had informed me that he was eager to get me released and become a part of my life. Whether this was for my benefit or his own (with the proximity of his impending death) Caufield wouldn’t say. But maybe it was the mutual need Caufield saw in us that prompted him to push us together.
When we arrived the cemetery was as grey and cold and bleak as the dark shadow under Death’s wing. The only color on the entire landscape was Snow’s rose colored casket; a smidgen of pink unlife in the causeway of death. His body was not there but I immediately fell into a vision of his open casket.
The minister would pause in mid-sentence as I moved in and asked that they open the casket.
“Please. I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye,” I would say.
Snow would be pale. He would still look fragile; a bird fresh from the egg, all the short years of worry and inner torment finally bled free from his features. I would realize that he would be the last; that his memory, along with that of Robert and Bruce, would move inside me; jostle my mind to a new froth whenever my ire began to abate. Together they would hook the bone; slip inside and claw at the marrow each time I thought about forgiving my family for what they had done to me, to us.
I would take a single rose from the wreath that had been sent in my name and put it in his hands. From beyond the area they had cleared for this solemn occasion, I would take a handful of snow and sprinkled a few flakes across his lips with my fingertips before I leaned in close.
“I love you.” I would have told him.
I stood before the service was finished, took one last look, and walked back to the limo. This was useless; the casket was as empty as our lives had been. It was time to leave the Birch Building. Nothing there had value anymore. I would leave and travel; my wake affecting only that to which I clung. Holding nothing, I could affect nothing, and thereby be affected by nothing. Within that void I could husband my misery and turn it to malevolence; my passions becoming like the river Styx, wide and deep and dismal. The desiccated corpses of my previous lovers popping up from time to time to bob in the black spume of hate and rejection; reminding me of my self-conscripted mission.
Chapter Eight
February 1991
“Hell is a lonely place, isn’t it Charles?” Charlotte asked as I stared out the window, unconsciously attempting to compute the worth of the snow-baked fog outside. It involved an entire logarithm; too much air, not enough water…
“You’ll know soon enough,” I answered as I turned around. I was alone with her again. Sylvia had left to comfort the familiar sobs of her husband.
Charlotte grunted. “Give me another cigarette.”
I walked over, put one in her mouth, and sat down in the chair next to her as she composed herself within her pillows. Once settled, she sat puffing in silence.
I watched her watching me. She had a disdainful Rita Heyworth way of puffing and flicking that I remembered from my earliest childhood. I figured she must have mimed it because of the air of command it gave Rita without all those verbose bits of unwanted dialogue.
“You need to leave here, Charles. You’ve underestimated me. Even on my deathbed, you’re no match for me. I’m a lady of Southern aristocracy and I don’t wilt easily under strain.”
I cocked my head to the side and looked at her profile. “Charlotte, you’re a vindictive, simple minded whore and nothing more.”
Her eyes narrowed as she snarled and clutched at her sheets. I was not the naïve little boy she sent away. I was probably neurotic, maybe slightly psychotic, and in all likelihood still stuck at the emotional age of fourteen, but in spite of that, or maybe because of it, I had learned and fought to survive. She had no idea what strain was.
“What’s the value of rain, Charlotte?”
“Rain?” She seemed confused. “It’s nothing more than the devil pissing on the world.” She laughed suddenly. “Is that what you thought about all those years? The rain?” She cackled.
Yes, it was true. I spent many a year looking out the nearest window trying desperately to wipe the same grin she now wore from the interior of my eyelids. I don’t know what I was looking for beyond the window frame. Maybe it just kept me from looking in.
“I told you that your little cocksucker friend died, didn’t I, Charles? What was his name… Robert, wasn’t it?”
I curled forward on Charlotte’s chair and put my face in my hands, rubbing it vigorously to keep the turmoil of my emotions from falling out in a phlegmatic mass on Charlotte’s carpet. Had I been able to keep my memories of Robert at a distance, even for a moment, then things between Charlotte and I might have been different, maybe. But in twenty years Robert had never been distant, not once. Not him, or the others. They were always up close, poking at my shoulder, nudging my fear that the world would close in on me and tighten itself around my neck like Charlotte’s own personal noose of rejection. I’d become so dependent on Robert’s memory that I’d spent my life trying to find anything or anyone to fill the black cavity his absence left in my heart. It didn’t matter if it was sex, pity, or empathy. And even with this knowledge burned into me, I always knew that there was no one and nothing that could replace him. So I had let those emotions flow in their own convoluted circle, running my life while I looked regretfully, yet impassively, on.
It was foolish I knew, but I had thought that my pain would make people fear me; the beacon of my rage shining as a bright light of warning. Instead, people seemed drawn to me, pulled in and too ready to be sacrificed like a moth in my flame.
So naïve. I laughed at myself and wept on Charlotte’s carpet as she continued her rant.
“ The one and only piece of ass you bet your life on took a rope, snapped his own pathetic little neck and forgot all about you,” Charlotte crooned, scooting herself up with her arms so she could lean forward and slap me with her words.
I glanced up at her. She thought… I don’t know what she thought. I never have. Her comments weren’t about the still exposed nerve of Robert, but about my sexuality, and how she couldn’t understand it. How she loathed it.
Or was I wrong in that too? Maybe she saw it as a mad testament to the superiority of women and the malleable inferiority of men. Either way, I could not forgive her complicity in Robert’s demise. She had helped choreograph my disappearance from his life and he from mine, and she could not be forgiven.
“Why’d you have Jarrel molested, Charlotte?” I asked
her.
She froze momentarily, but it was enough to tell me that the allegation was true. I should have known though; to Charlotte there was no family except her.
I stood, finding it impossible to hide my contempt, and went to the window to light another cigarette.
“What made you Charlotte? What kind of twisted fuck made you?” I shook my head; I couldn’t even conceptualize what had created her. She wasn’t abused. She wasn’t raped. She wasn’t beaten. She had a doting, loving mother, and a father whom I had always seen as lovable. She wasn’t rich, but she’d never been dirt poor either. So what the hell could create this kind of monster?
Penny came bustling in and pulled herself up short as she looked at us warily. She appeared to have forgotten why she came in.
“What has she done since I’ve been gone Penny?” I asked to her surprise.
“Huh?”
“What has she done? To you.” I asked again. “Don’t look at her!” I screamed as Penny licked her upper lip nervously.”She’s going to be dead in less than a week, let’s get all this out in the open right now.”
“Nothing,” Penny stuttered. “She hasn’t done anything.”
“Liar!”
Charlotte chuckled. “Yes, Happenstance, tell him what a bad mother I’ve been.” Charlotte said, a rigid grin stretched across her face. Here was a person she had total control over.
“Better yet, tell him how your uncle used to drive you passed Sanctuary on the way to Robert’s grave so you could put flowers down. Tell him how he fucked you in the car afterwards,” Charlotte spat.
Penny became completely still, staring out at the icy fog behind me.
“I’ll kill him.”
“For what?” Charlotte asked. “The little whore seduced him. Then she started fucking some nigger up in Barnesville. You were in the Birch Building then.” Charlotte said as she sharpened her gaze on Penny. “Stupid whore,” Charlotte added as she shifted her eyes back to me. “She thought she could beat me, Charles. Me!” she said with scorn. “But we took care of that little problem, didn’t we Happenstance?”
I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. “What’d she do, Penny?”
She didn’t move; she didn’t even shift her eyes from the window. “She had them give me a hysterectomy,” Penny said flatly.
“You let them?” I asked her.
She glanced at me. “She told me I was going in to see if I was pregnant.” She looked back to the empty window, a dry humorless laugh coming from somewhere within her. “I didn’t know any better. I believed her.”
“No abominations and no nigger kids,” Charlotte said, voicing her satisfaction with her actions.
“Everything changed after you left,” Penny continued in a dazed voice. “The whole house was this big empty space you left behind. And me in it.”She added quietly. Her face whispered a sign of resignation, but her eyes remained glued to the window. “She told me you left because I was stupid and fat,” Penny added.
She looked at me directly. “Jarrel was the one that finally told me the truth.”
“Did he tell you he put me there?” I asked her.
“No, not at first,” she said as she wandered over to the window and closed it, busying her idle hands. “He didn’t tell me that until about a year after you got out.”
She splayed her hand against the window and leaned her head on its frame as she stared outside. “You never wrote,” she said.
“I… I,” I hadn’t. In truth, I hadn’t even thought of it. Even though the letters would surely have been intercepted, it was not an excuse. I had doted on Penny, played with her and filled in all the holes Charlotte had dug in our lives. She was just a child when they put me away, but I hadn’t thought of it. I… I had no excuse.
“It doesn’t matter though,” Penny said as she turned around.”You’re right. She’ll be dead within the week, and none of this will mean shit anymore.”
“I’m sorry Penny.” I said suddenly.
She smiled vacantly. “Don’t be. I was just collateral damage.” She paused and chuckled lightly. “I used to have this hope that we’d celebrate her death by opening a public outhouse over her remains. But now, I don’t even care.”
She unwound herself from the window and made her way back across the room, pausing at the door. “Do you remember Penelope?” she asked me.
“The doll?”
She nodded. “I’ve still got it.”
“What doll?” Charlotte asked when we were alone again.
I sat back in the chair and looked up at the ceiling. “I gave it to her for her birthday.” I told Charlotte. “I told her to treat it like she wanted to be treated, and not how you treated her.”
“I threw that away,” Charlotte said dismissively.
“Obviously not,” I answered. “Did she really put flowers on Robert’s grave?” I asked after a few moments silence.
Charlotte waved me to silence. She didn’t want to discuss it anymore. But in that silence I could feel the sturdy weight of sadness Penny had in her eyes; the heft of the cool demanding home I had left behind. Her happiness would have prostrated itself to the necessity of silence; a muffling that would be echoed, in some odd fashion, by the laughter she would never utter as a woman. She had lived in the maze of Charlotte’s thumbprint and she had not survived.
“What the fuck have you done, you psychotic twat?”
“What I had to,” Charlotte answered without even a hint of regret.
I was on her throat before she even finished, and there was no one in the room to stop me, not even myself.
Chapter Nine
March 1981
Henry collected me on the first of March, six years and three days after I entered the Birch Building. Caufield stood beside me outside the entrance. My hand was knotted around the small bag containing my meager belongings, and a hot pang of trepidation burned in my gut. Caufield was enjoying the unusual warmth that had run up the coast from the south.
“They call this a blackberry winter where I’m from,” Caufield said as we waited. “Of course, that’s usually much earlier in the season, but…,” he shrugged, trying to ease my anxiety.
“He’s late,” I said, oblivious to the weather. “Maybe he’s not coming.”
“He’s coming,” Caufield replied.
“He might have changed his mind. I couldn’t blame him if he did; not really.” I looked away, troubled by the thought that his second abandonment would probably not be nearly as hard as the first.
“Look,” Caufield pointed as Henry turned into the parking lot and began threading his way through the slender slotted rows. “You have my number in case of an emergency, and I’ll be calling you at least once a week to make sure everything’s going okay. Right?” Caufield asked.
I looked at him. “But what if I am that crazy fag that he’s afraid of? Christ, I’ve spent ten years denying it and now I’m afraid it might be true. I’m mentally fucked up!”
“You’re not, Charles. And Henry is not your mother.”
“He’s… family.”
“Henry’s part of a larger world Charles. Give him a chance. Give yourself one.”
I nodded as he embraced me.
“Now go on, I’ll call you in a week,” he said.
I turned to walk to the car but stopped suddenly and looked back at him. By law, it had been a panel of three that had allowed me my freedom. Caufield had been but one on that panel. “The other two, what’d you offer them?”
“Only you,” he answered before he turned back into the building.
I sighed, whether that was true or not, there was no going back. I slipped into the car with Henry’s big grin and slight handshake and we were off.
*****
The ride was short and very quiet. Henry and I sat with the heavy weight of unfamiliarity sulking between us. Henry broke the silence first by giving me an oral tour of the points of interest as we wove through Providence. There was Brown University, the first Baptist Church,
and the capital which, he said, boasted an unsupported circular marble dome beaten in size only by St Pete’s Church in Rome.
I sat with my hand in my lap and glanced about me, hoping that my lack of expression hid the clench of tension flipping around inside of me.
We pulled up to a modest brick house surrounded by bare red maples and small dunes of melting snow. It looked lonely and unadorned except for the few darkened strands of Christmas lights still woven around the roof like sagging cobwebs. I thought it seemed the perfect accompaniment to the solitary man beside me.
“It’s not much,” Henry said, “but it’s served its purpose.”
He took several minutes trying to extricate himself from the car before I realized how much of an effort the small trip had been for him. When I went around to his side of the car to help him out he looked up at me panting for breath.
“Not much time left, Charles.”
I squatted down and looked up at him, the swollen and rheumy orbs of aged despair staring back at me. “I am so sorry,” he said. He had not known about me, and there was little I could do to relieve the pain of his loneliness or his ignorance.
“That’s past,” I said. I put my arm out and we made our way up the sagging, concrete steps and into a living room thick with a lifelong bachelor’s touch. The furniture was dark and hard; chiseled wood and burnt metals. The curtains were thick, long and masculine, holding the sun on early mornings and keeping the moon at bay on lonely nights. It appeared a dim unfrequented cell lacking only cinderblocks and mortar.
At Henry’s request, I helped him into his room, removed his shoes, and hung up his jacket and tie as he lay down. He invited me to look around and help myself to lunch, or he promised, if I wanted we could eat out later. I watched him sink into a quick sleep and listened to his labored breathing before I went to the phone we passed in the living room and called Caufield.
The Value Of Rain Page 7