Twilight Child

by Warren Adler

  “I didn’t mean that, Molly.”

  “All this me, my, I. Remember, I was there, too.”

  He shook his head and frowned.

  “I guess I’m not myself.”

  “There it is again. I. My.”

  He got up from the table and paced around the den, stopping in front of the gun cabinet.

  “I really miss that kid,” he said. She wondered whom he meant, Chuck or Tray. He had used the singular. She refused to probe, sure he meant both, as she did in her mind. In a way, it would be the weakest part of their case, although they had not yet fully explored the issue. Was Tray merely the surrogate for their lost son? That would underline their selfishness, in legal terms. She was sure of it.

  “You think Forte will advise that we wait a few more days?” Charlie asked, turning suddenly.

  “I doubt it.”

  “Then he should hop right on it first thing in the morning. File papers or something.”

  “I guess that’s what he intends to do.”

  “And you’re ready? Come what may?”

  “What else have I got to do?” she said. Deliberately, she pushed the papers aside, softening the sarcasm, sorry the words had popped out in that way.

  “I want to go all the way. No matter how weak he says the case is. To the end.” She could see a flush begin along the sides of his neck and it alarmed her. He slipped into silence again.

  “Doesn’t look too good, does it, babe? Them not even answering.”

  “Pessimism won’t help,” she said.

  “It’s these damned Sundays,” he muttered.

  “Tomorrow’s Monday.”

  “That’s something,” he said, throwing his cigarette butt into the coffee dregs. “Maybe I need a good fight. I was always good in the clutch.”

  Was it really a flicker of the old courage? Or an illusion? It was not the fight itself she feared. It was a question of how many times he could rise from the floor.

  6

  CHARLIE had, he assured himself, deliberately cut short clearing the fall debris in the yard so that he would have something to do on Monday. He knew it was an illusion, but it was better than waking up to no expectations whatsoever. The idea was to rake out the dead brush and break up the fallen tree branches for the winter’s fireplace tinder.

  On Monday it rained, but not before the tension of the uncertain weather had already destroyed any hopefulness the day might bring.

  Since the two weeks given for Frances’s response were now officially over, he did expect the lawyer’s call, which was a purposeful excuse to hang around the house. After the yard work, he had planned to make a few phone calls, feelers for jobs. With winter coming on, he had a compelling need to fill his time. In fact, the need had little to do with the seasons. Now, of course, he’d have to postpone his calls, since he did not want to tie up the line.

  After Molly left for school and he had assured himself that the rain would continue, he toyed with the urge to go back to bed. But he was afraid he wouldn’t be able, or lucky enough, to sleep. As if to underline the assumption, he had a fourth cup of coffee while he tried to interest himself in the gothic theatrics of Baltimore politics described luridly in the second section of the Baltimore Sun. The articles quickly became incomprehensible, and he turned to the obituaries, where the deaths reported were people he had never heard of. He checked their ages. Most were in their seventies and eighties, which ordinarily might have been reassuring. Now it merely emphasized how much time still had to be filled. Not much comfort in that, he decided, refolding the paper.

  In bathrobe and backless slippers, he roamed the house trying to focus on something that would thwart his aimlessness. Thirty-five years he and Molly had lived here. The rooms and objects in this house had once defined their lives. Now they were taking on the aspect of a prison. And yet, all of it was paid for, which was supposed to signify freedom.

  “From what?” he heard himself ask aloud. He pictured in his mind a checklist, possibly from years of occupational habit. A quality control inspector was a living checklist. From economic worry? The Depression scars that had marked his parents’ lives had long since faded. In Crisfield, and later when he and Molly were first married, being worried about money was a way of life. It wasn’t the specter of starvation that caused the fear, but rather the terror of losing one’s self-respect and social dignity.

  Retirement had, indeed, freed him from economic worry for the rest of his life. Counting what he and Molly had put away, and with the retirement checks rolling in month after month, and with Molly’s salary and impending retirement pension, they were financially secure forever. In all the working years of his life, his focus had been on financial security, something that had always eluded his own parents. Not that he hadn’t bitched about his job. The worst part had always been brown-nosing incompetent superiors. But then, he had been brown-nosed by those under his authority. He was damned competent, and that fact had been underscored by raises and promotions.

  Yet, in truth, he had fantasized about retirement. The yoke would at last be lifted from the ox. Time would be his alone. He would be free from rigid schedules, deadlines, and brown-nosing. He’d done his time. The moment had come to reap the rewards. As he passed the hall mirror, his reflection sailed past him, unshaven, hair mussed, coffee stains on his robe. Free at last. Free at last, he muttered. God, did he miss that job. The clatter and noise of steel, rolling, sliced, welded, always moving; the voices of men shouting above the din; the smells and dust and confusion and aggravations, the great joy of doing, of work itself.

  The humiliating rationalization was wearing thin. As for taking early retirement in the first place, they hadn’t given him a choice. But in the rigid terms of the checklist, he was, indeed, free of economic insecurity.

  Which brought him to the next question. Was he free from worrying about his family? What family? he sighed. It was no coincidence that he had come to Chuck’s room, although he could not find the courage today to turn the doorknob. Unfortunately, the room’s layout was indelible in his mind, the solid maple furniture that he had carted himself in a rented trailer from the furniture store; the striped bedspreads that Molly had made; the rock star posters and team banners tacked to the wall, now curling at the edges; the drawers full of clothes and souvenirs of a boy’s life—a boy who, in that room, had moved from cradle to manhood. Actually only the furniture was still there, the rest banished on the scrap heap of material history. Charlie stood before the door, then turned and leaned his head against it as if the immutable wood might reincarnate as the flesh of the lost boy.

  The lost boy!

  In fact, the boy was not lost. He was still in Charlie’s living memory, each moment of intimacy and passage engraved indelibly in his mind by constant replay.

  He could remember Molly in her hospital bed unwrapping the swaddling clothes and undiapering the pink-fleshed doll to reveal every living millimeter of what they had created.

  “Look how perfect, Charlie,” she had said. “Not a flaw.” He had stuck his rough forefinger into the child’s hand, which had closed around it automatically.

  “Strong, too,” he had said, feeling that first flush of a father’s pride, the great baggage of hopes and aspirations that filled his heart with joy and delight. “Mine,” he had whispered.

  “Ours,” she had corrected, her eyes feasting on the tiny human replica that had come out of her womb. Then she had smiled and offered a sly wink. “A perfect specimen. Just like his old man.”

  He remembered blushing, although it was a matter of masculine pride that the boy was well made there as well.

  “Thank you, God,” Molly had said, while their hands smoothed and inspected their creation. Little wells of tears spilled onto her cheeks, tears of joy and thanks. And of relief. The little tyke had been ten years in the making.

  “It’s been a rough haul, babe.”

  “That’s why I want him to have your name, Charlie.”

  “Charlie?”r />
  “No. Charles, Jr. But we won’t call him junior.”

  “Chuck. In the marines they called me Chuck.” He wasn’t sure how he had lost the name. Molly always called him Charlie, which had become his monicker at the plant as well.

  “It’ll be the beginning of a long line of Charlies,” Molly had whispered as he had bent down to kiss her lips. It was the caboose for them, and they both knew it. The doctor had warned that there was no sense in taking chances anymore and had tied her tubes.

  “Looks like he’s pretty well-equipped for production,” Charlie had joked.

  “We’ll make it up in grandchildren.” She kissed the baby’s chest. “Won’t we, Chuckie?”

  “Better believe,” Charlie said, jiggling the baby’s hand with his finger.

  “I’m so happy he’s a boy,” Molly had said.

  “A girl like you wouldn’t have been so bad either.” He had meant it, of course. But he had been certain it would be a boy.

  It was a dream a long time coming, he had thought. Out there in the mosquito swamps of Guadalcanal, he had lived with the idea that he was making the world safe for his unborn children. With death all around, it was not an uncommon prayer in the dank and lonely foxholes. What was the killing all about if not for that? So the fathering of Chuck had taken on a mystical quality long before the baby had arrived. The fact that he was a replication of himself, a man, merely confirmed the symbolism. The boy had taken his time about it because he had had to fight his way into life, and now that he was here he had to be carefully nurtured and initiated into the exclusive mysteries of manliness.

  “We’ve got great hopes for you, fella,” Molly had said, kissing the baby’s forehead.

  “Better believe.”

  The memory strangled on its own pain.

  Back in Crisfield, the tiny town that hugged the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay and was home to the Waterses for a hundred years, fathers passed the essence of manhood from one generation to the next in the same time-honored ways. Even though Charlie’s own father had chosen not to seek his living from harvesting the bay, it did not mean that he was absolved from instructing his son in the outdoor arts—fishing, hunting, and sailing—and the ways in which indigenous foods such as crabs were prepared. That, too, along with bull roasts and barbecues, was man’s work.

  Charlie’s old man had been a traveling salesman in ladies’ ready-to-wear, albeit a lousy one; but when he was home, he was a good dad, and sitting with him in a duck blind shivering in the icy dawn was as near to paradise as Charlie ever thought he might get. And when his dad was on the road, there were grandfathers on both sides who shared the chores of manly instruction. Not that his mother and grandmothers were to be ignored, nor all the aunts and uncles and others that weren’t blood kin, but who seemed so. In those days a man’s role and obligation to his male child were clearly defined, a path to be followed generation after generation.

  Charlie had taken Chuck down to Crisfield when his dad was still alive, and it was good to fish with three generations off the sailing boats of wood that were traditional to the area. A man had to know his roots. Well, he had shown Chuck his. Each generation, of course, refines the tradition, and Charlie was no exception. Having survived the big one, WWII, he was able to cast himself in the role of hero. Nothing like having a genuine war hero for a dad.

  That meant telling Chuck what it was like being a marine, about Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal and Kwajalein, and how men lived and died in comradeship and courage, and how the greatest virtue was to be brave and the greatest goal was glory. Nor did he paint the pain out of the stories, although he sometimes did eliminate the sense of fear and he may have romanticized danger a bit; but those who lived through these events were certainly entitled to a little editorial license, especially when passing them along to their sons. He had seen more death and dying before he was twenty than many men had seen in their lifetimes. Had he been a touch too graphic in his portrayal, he wondered, making Chuck feel somehow deprived so that he went out to seek danger himself? Well, he had one-upped old Charlie there. When death put out its hand, the boy had reached out and grabbed for it.

  Bits and pieces of flashing imagery cascaded in memory as if the wood of the door to Chuck’s room was a mysterious transmitting device. Chuck laughing, his body nearly supine against the air as the sailboat heeled at the maximum angle. Chuck up on that top branch of the big tulip oak in the yard, long since gone.

  “Get down from there this minute,” Molly had screamed, dashing from the kitchen, shielding her eyes from the sun.

  “Leave him,” Charlie had commanded. “He’ll be all right.”

  “He’ll fall.”

  “Only if he becomes afraid.”

  Charlie had believed that with all his heart. Not being afraid was important in the rites of passage. Fear was an acquired emotions, Charlie taught his son. Fear was nothing to be ashamed of, something to be conquered. Hadn’t he conquered it himself on those crazy-named Pacific islands?

  Winters they hunted in the Maryland hills, stalking deer in the delicious cold. What he taught Chuck then was the value of patience, of aiming only when you were sure the bullet would bring death to the animal in the most painless way. When Chuck was twelve, he bagged his first big-horned stag with a single shot, a direct hit into the animal’s heart.

  They had crept close to the dead animal, awestruck at its size, Chuck shouting with excitement and shedding tears of joy at the sight.

  “That’s one head to be stuffed,” Charlie had promised. For years it had hung in the den, until Chuck’s death had made it unbearable to view and it had been squirreled away in the attic. It was not the act of killing that made it painful to remember, but the aftermath.

  They had slept in one bed in the little cabin in the mountains that had been rented for the weekend, and Chuck had rolled over toward him that night just as Charlie crept in beside him.

  “I did good, Dad, didn’t I?”

  “Great.”

  “I’m something, eh, Dad.”

  “The best.”

  “I love you, Dad.”

  The boy had kissed his father’s cheek with fervor, and Charlie had returned the offer in kind. It was the last time they would kiss in that way. It would no longer be the manly thing between father and son.

  As he was growing up, Chuck was beautiful to watch with his golden hair and his burgeoning physique. Girls were quick to discover his beauty.

  “Love ’em and leave ’em, kid,” was the way he tried to take the seriousness out of it.

  “You wouldn’t say that if you had a daughter,” Molly had rebuked.

  “But I don’t.”

  “You’ll make him a heartbreaker.”

  “Same as me.”

  For some reason, Chuck had lost interest in school by the tenth grade, and no amount of tutoring could make the information sink in. Not that he was stupid. He just wasn’t interested. Sports and girls mattered, not school. Charlie had tried his best to persuade the boy otherwise.

  “You won’t go to college, son.”

  “You didn’t, and you did okay.”

  “The war took that away.”

  “You didn’t have to tell him that.” Molly had overheard. She had tried her best before handing over the problem to him.

  “What was I supposed to tell him? That I got married and had to support a wife?”

  “You didn’t have to support me. There was the GI Bill. I was working.”

  “I didn’t want you to work, remember? It wasn’t exactly the thing to do.”

  “And I didn’t care if you liked it or not.”

  But Charlie had gotten himself a damned good job at Bethlehem. Everything was booming then, and there was money to be made. There was no point in college.

  “We’ve got one degree in the family. That’s a pretty good batting average. Five hundred,” he had told her then.

  Of course, he could have his regrets now, savor the stink of recrimination. Blame was some
thing you could hold onto, whip yourself with. An independent observer might say that he had made Chuck too self-reliant, too courageous, too freedom-loving. But, hell, there had been no independent observer around whenhe was growing up. Maybe if there had been, Charlie thought, he might have prodded me to make the kid more of a scholar and kick his butt into college, which might have stopped him from getting married at twenty and going off to die at twenty-five.

  “You’re too damned young,” he had railed when Chuck had brought home the news. “If she’s pregnant, there are ways you can take care of it.”

  “She’s not pregnant.”

  “You just started a new job.” Chuck had just joined a firm that checked for structural defects in radio towers. Molly had argued against it as too dangerous, but Charlie had defended it.

  “A little danger makes a person more cautious,” he had argued. The remark, of course, had come back to haunt him. But hadn’t he tried to get Chuck on at the plant? By then, the recession and Japanese competition were really biting, and all hiring had stopped.

  “I love her, Dad.”

  “She’s eighteen. You’re twenty. What do either of you know about love?”

  “Mom says Romeo and Juliet were fourteen.”

  “Look what happened to them.”

  “I’m going to do it, permission or not.”

  “Why can’t you wait until you’ve got some money in the bank?”

  “Well, now I’ll have something to save for.”

  “Marriage is forever, son. And forever is a long time.”

  In retrospect it was an odd observation. But divorce was not a regular occurrence in his perspective. In his experience, marriage was forever. Didn’t the vows say “till death do us part”?

  “I only know that I love her. And she loves me,” Chuck persisted.

  “Big deal.”

  “It is to me.”

  The harangue had seemed to go on endlessly that summer night. It had to be summer, since the fireflies were lighting up the night and they were sitting on the back patio. Molly had been to a PTA meeting and had come home late to find her two men still locked in combat.