It Takes a Worried Man

by Tracy Daugherty

  They’ve seen the haunted people in our town (we’ve used the word haunted in front of them instead of damaged, retarded, or disabled, to soften the impact), and long before Janet got pregnant again, they’ve had questions. Why does Mr. Charters talk to himself and walk bent, like a chimp? Why does Mrs. Wellston wear an overcoat in the summer? Janet and I agreed: too young to understand. So we passed along the community legends, the pretty things we all tell ourselves to keep from saying what there really is to tell. Mr. Charters, the grown son of the Baptist church’s regular Sunday organist—the most devout woman in town—wrestled with an angel one morning outside the Buy-Rite and twisted his spine. Mrs. Wellston grew up in the Klondike and never lost the chill (actually, I hear she’s from moneyed Houston, up the road, whose social life looks awfully chilly to me, from recent visits we’ve made to the big-city doctors—all that scrambling after oil shares, property, prestige).

  But Down’s syndrome, we decided, can’t be gussied up in any way. Or maybe Janet and I just don’t have the starch anymore to be evasive with the boys, not on something this important, which of course affects them too. Nor did I know how devout Janet herself could be until we discussed, and she rejected, rejecting the baby. I’m wrestling an angel, I thought, alternately warmed and chilled, unsure of my own feelings, watching her lovely face those tense late-nights.

  Last winter, when Dr. Evans told her she was expecting again, we’d both just turned forty-three. We’d gotten careless, believing we were too old to have an accident.

  Anyway, Suzanne, I say. The boys twist in their chairs. Just as I did with you guys, my daddy had taught me to make a wish when I first saw the star—

  It’s not—

  —the planet, whatever. Birth and death, he used to say, and in between it’s only wishes. Naturally, I was worried about him that night, the night he spent in the hospital. I’d seen him early in the morning, before he left for his law office, clutching his shirt and vest, looking muddled and tired, jabbering under his breath, pale as a hard-boiled egg. He was young—my age now (genetics and age, Dr. Evans has been educating us lately; nothing happens by accident). My mother was staying with him, so I had a babysitter. I was standing in the driveway, wishing, just before going inside to get my pj’s on and finish my homework. I heard a rattle behind me and a little rubber screech, turned and saw the girl. She had stopped at the driveway’s end again, and stood there gripping her handlebars, shivering a bit in her sweater. The evening was cool. Goosebumps splashed my arms. What’s your name? I asked her. Her hair looked lopsided, tossed around by the wind as she rode. Stepping closer, I smelled something like yeast, or oven-fresh bread. I don’t know if the odor came from her skin or her clothes, or where it came from. I’m Tom, I said. She smiled, then nodded up at the … at Venus, where she’d seen me staring a few seconds before. I wish I may, I wish I might, I said to her.

  Wish? she said.

  Yes, I said.

  Suzanne! her mother called, rounding the corner a few yards away—that’s how I learned her name—and the girl, startled, fumbled for the pedals with her feet. As she passed, the mother scowled at me like an old dog that doesn’t want to be messed with any more.

  Did you like your babysitter? Seth asks. Was she good as Cathy? I bet she wasn’t good as Cathy. Cathy’s a high school girl whose family lives across the alley from us, and who is Seth’s favorite sitter. He may be seeing a lot of her soon, we’ve told him—the only thing that pleases him in this whole dizzying deal.

  She was okay. But the important thing is, I got my wish. Temporarily, I think. My dad came home the next night. He had some pills to take, but otherwise he said he was fine. He promised he’d never again go away. Together we wished on the star, and he said how the sun is always out, on the other side of the world, even when we can’t see it. It’s always got its headlights on, he said.

  Suzanne didn’t stop for several weeks after that. Her mother rode closer to her for a while, and I’d see them as I clomped around the driveway on my stilts, or shot baskets. I pretended not to glance Suzanne’s way, less shy of her than afraid of her mom.

  Did you like Suzanne? Jesse asks.

  I was curious about her, the way you’re curious about Mr. Charters and Mrs. Wellston, the way you’ll puzzle over your sister.

  They’re different.

  They are, and it’s okay to wonder about that, even to be a little afraid of it. We can’t help feeling scared. But you know what? One night, a couple of months after she’d stopped to look at the sky with me, Suzanne pulled her bike up in the driveway. Her mother had fallen behind, I guess. I didn’t see her. I was standing next to my father’s golf clubs, thinking about taking a practice swing with his driver. He’d been polishing them earlier in the evening—he and his law partners always had a big weekend round, as I do now—and he’d left them in the drive to take a phone call inside. So, as I say, I was standing there when Suzanne stopped, shoestrings flopping all over the concrete—

  Head so humongous she couldn’t hold it up! Jesse laughs.

  Not true, not true. Are you listening? Are you getting the point of my story? What is the point of my story? I think. She stared at my father’s bag and I said, Golf clubs.

  Goff? she said.

  Golf.

  The mother, prompts Jesse. Right?

  Right. You knew she couldn’t be too far behind, eh?

  Scowling.

  Scowling, exactly. The scary arrival. But this time she spoke to me. Sweating a little, from trying to catch her kid. Swaying on her bike. She said, Suzanne is a special child and she’s not ready for playmates. Do you understand? I didn’t understand.

  Especially boys. We need to get our exercise in the evening, but you have to understand, she can’t stop and play. Okay?

  Okay, I said.

  It’s sad, Seth says.

  I did feel sad, and I didn’t know why, really.

  Because you were starting to make friends, Seth insists, hopeful again.

  Maybe. Maybe we were. I didn’t see her after that. She quit coming around.

  Her mother made her stay home, Jesse says triumphantly.

  Wherever I was hoping to lead the boys, Seth has come closest to getting there, I think. I feel tired. The same age as my father. Is that why I’m muddled, nostalgic, trying to make a point? Maybe it’s best to stick with legends. The truth seems harder to fix, somehow.

  Yes, her mother had snatched her out of reach, I say.

  Can we go outside now and make a wish?

  Sure, Seth.

  Jesse leads us out to the drive, from where we see Venus just topping our roof’s jagged peak. The driveway is spotted from an oil leak in Janet’s Jetta. I check my watch. She’ll be home from the clinic in twenty minutes or so, but it’s too late now to run the car to Jiffy Lube. Tomorrow.

  I remember her face, earlier, as she was leaving, tight, pale, worried, and realize now part of the point of my story. Suzanne’s mother’s scowl.

  Yes ma’am. Yes ma’am. A special child. I understand now.

  Seth jams his hands in his pockets and whispers:

  Star light, star bright

  first star I see tonight

  I can guess his wish; Jesse’s too. But as we stand here watching the evening light disappear, as I remember my father’s driveway, years ago, and Suzanne—her haunting smile, her sorry, too-big shoes, her hushed Goff?—I want to tell the boys that scary as differences are sometimes, they’re not always what we have to fear most.

  My daddy’s heart stopped in a sand trap two months after he assured me the sun’s light never wavers. His pitching wedge fell to the ground, and according to one of his friends, he stood stunned for just a moment, as though he’d holed-in-one, then he crumpled joint-by-joint, an accordion.

  Now, Jesse’s pointing wildly at the sky. There’s Mars and Jupiter and Antares, the scorpion’s heart, see how red it is? Only the brightest ones come out before the sun’s gone—

  I’d tell him, if he weren�
�t too young to understand: Pay attention. Here. Your neighborhood. Yours—for now. Look around. We were starting to make friends.

  —later, Sirius, the dog star, will show up over there, and the Seven Sisters—

  Sis? Seth shouts, following his brother’s pointing finger. Where?

  A car turns a nearby corner; headlights brush the boys’ legs.

  Okay guys, you still have homework to do, I say.

  No!

  Yes. I promise them strawberry ice cream and fifteen minutes of TV if they’ll get their pj’s on and finish their chores before eight.

  Geez, Dad, give us a break.

  Daddy, I wished that Mama will be okay.

  Me too, Seth.

  And our baby sister.

  Birth and death, and in between … Maybe we’ll call her Goff, I say. It’s a pretty word. What do you think?

  Da-ad, Jesse groans.

  Together we march back inside, in the dusty sunset’s crimson glow.

  The Leavings of Panic

  At the moment Pearl Harbor was attacked, my father was fumbling with a pack of cigarettes in an Oklahoma movie house. A blind girl had just handed Charlie Chaplin a flower, and my father, the projectionist, was supposed to switch reels. As he reached for a film canister, he dropped a lit match. Within minutes, flames wrapped the tiny projection booth. He stumbled out, yelling, “Fire! Fire!” People hustled from the theater. They stood across the street, watching the building collapse.

  Hours later, when the streets were dark, my father returned to the theater’s ruins. He’d lost his watch getting out and thought he might find it among the charred and crumbling bricks. It had been an early Christmas present from his own father and losing it, he knew, was a greater reason for alarm than the property damage he’d caused. He was seventeen, still a minor, insolvent; besides, the theater was insured against accidents. The watch was the only loss his father would have to cover.

  By now the news of Pearl Harbor had spread. He heard talk on the street, in front of a market—some old men of the town wondered if America would enter the war. He was approaching draft age; these somber speculations must have troubled him. But he was, that evening, preoccupied with his watch.

  The fire marshal had cordoned off the theater’s remains with a thin white rope, but when my father arrived, no one was guarding the smoldering pile of wood and steel and stone. The toes of a woman’s shoes poked through the rubble. He noticed cups and tattered popcorn buckets, the leavings of panic: a jacket, a glove, a still-smoking scarf, a sketchpad and a broken pencil. He ducked beneath the rope, kicked through ashen bricks, and bending down, injured his arm so severely on a hot piece of metal, he was later kept out of the army.

  He always claimed to hate the movies, but whenever I heard him tell this story, he relied on a kind of Hollywood melodrama.

  My mother was a nurse in the Oklahoma City hospital he went to for his burns. He fell in love with her during his brief recuperation. “While my friends were dying on the battlefields of Europe,” he’d say, “I was having my arm bathed by a beautiful woman. Just think. If I hadn’t hurt myself, I would have missed the great romance of my life.”

  As I grew older, and learned about the Second World War, his time frame seemed terribly wrong to me—several months passed, I read, between Pearl Harbor and American troop deployments in Europe—but no matter. His tale was wonderfully dramatic. When he got to the hospital scenes, he’d always raise his shirt sleeve and show his listeners the scar on his arm. Then he’d hug my mother.

  For me, the important part of the story was his father’s reaction to the loss of the watch. My grandfather, a grave Methodist minister, was easily disgruntled. He never forgave my father’s negligence. It was, to him, a sign of moral laziness. “If you can’t take care of a simple object,” my father remembered him shouting, the night the theater burned, “how can you be trusted with matters of conscience, matters of the soul?”

  It’s incredible to anyone who ever heard Dad talk about all this that the old man was less concerned about Dad’s arm than he was about the watch, but I always believed it. As a child, I saw Grandfather Darnell’s obsession with nice things—jewelry, shoes, belts and ties, furniture for the church and the house. Many times I witnessed him belittling my father’s character. Often I heard him say that marrying my mother was the only smart thing my father ever did.

  My parents’ marriage has always baffled me. Now more than ever I want to comprehend it because next week the woman I hope to marry will move her things into the small house I’m renting. She’ll bring her daughter with her—if she can—an eight-year-old named Cassie.

  “Mommy!” Cassie calls to Sharon now. “Watch me do a cartwheel!”

  Sharon’s husband chuckles, sitting next to her, next to me, on the cool grass. He has no clue what will happen on Monday (“He hasn’t had a clue about me in years,” Sharon insists). He doesn’t see me yet as the man who wrecked his life by falling in love with his wife. Tonight, I’m just a good friend, sitting with his family on this dusty old baseball diamond, in the heat of south Texas, watching the Fourth of July fireworks.

  Dozens of other families crowd around us, on blankets, in lawn chairs, eating potato chips, swigging Cokes, keeping an eye on the sky. Several yards away, behind a chain-link fence, golfers knock balls into the dark on a dimly lit driving range.

  Cassie and about half a dozen other girls cartwheel near the pitcher’s mound. Sharon claps. So does her husband, Clay. So do I.

  I’m aware that I’m about to do something my father would never have dreamed of. I’m about to violate the sanctity of marriage, what he called the “great romance.” More to the point, perhaps, I’m about to take decisive action. That, more than anything, is what he never dreamed of. At least until the end. If even then.

  On the other hand, my mother might appreciate what I’m going to do, and why. I haven’t spoken to her in nearly five years, so I can’t say for sure. I have only the past, my parents’ puzzling dance, as an answer to my questions.

  Decisive action Mom understood—though she considered me, like Dad, woefully incapable of it (the way Sharon apparently sees Clay).

  The sanctity of her marriage to my father Mom understood as a useful fiction, I think, until something better came along.

  “Ta-da!” Cassie shouts, coming out of a cartwheel. She raises her arms, then bows.

  My mother’s family was rich, descendants of the first Irish blacksmiths in Oklahoma City. Her maiden name was Kelly, also Grandfather Darnell’s Christian name. When I arrived on the scene, I was christened Kelly, in his honor.

  In the mid-fifties, around the time I was born, my mother’s father, already flush with real estate and oil, established a chain of department stores called Duffy’s, in Oklahoma City. Duffy’s sold kaleidoscopes, hula hoops, 3-D glasses, baseball cards, cheap crystal goblets, Christmas lights filled with bubbling water. I loved these stores. The salesclerks were friendly, easygoing; they’d let you dawdle in the big, wide aisles as long as you wanted, a strategy that usually seduced customers into buying at least one useless item before they left.

  My father’s father ran up enormous bills with the clerks. Rings and bracelets for his wife. Lawn furniture, an outdoor grill. Seat cushions for the pews in his church. It seemed to me, when I was old enough to understand the concept, that he had a limitless charge account with Duffy’s.

  In time, Dad referred to the stores, and to all of my mother’s relatives, as “Duffers”—a disparaging term he’d picked up from his golfing buddies, I learned in later years. It meant someone who couldn’t hit the ball well. At some point, the word became, for Dad, an all-purpose insult. “That old duffer shouldn’t be allowed on the road!” he’d say of a man who cut him off in traffic. Listening to the State of the Union speech on television, he’d grouse about the President, “This duffer’s bound to raise our taxes.”

  In his view (for reasons cloudy to me at first), the biggest duffers on the planet were my mother’s
folks and her sisters.

  “You’re just jealous of their assets,” she’d tell him. She hated it when he twisted the sounds of words.

  “Assets? You mean the stuff they sell? Half-assed is more like it.” Always, he offered his comments good-naturedly, with a disarming, just-a-joke offhandedness. But he’d rarely go shopping in the stores. Mom and I went alone, often, to one Duffy’s or another, buying crayons, Elmer’s glue, or panty hose and eyeliner.

  Usually I’d find something—a flashlight, a package of nails, a box of Titleist golf balls—to take back to Dad. If he’d been particularly sardonic that day, kidding Mom about her family, she wouldn’t let me get him anything, and I’d cry.

  I remember standing with her one cold, misty evening in front of the flagship store, in downtown Oklahoma City. “Confidence,” she told me. I was eight or nine years old. “When you’re grown, you want to be successful like your grandfathers, don’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, noting the way she’d skipped over Dad, a silence she fully intended me to grasp.

  “All right, then. Confidence—and ease.” She squeezed my shoulders and made me stand up straight. “Ease with people, with business, yourself. Look over there. See our Duffy’s sign?”

  She pointed out the “warmth” of its curly red letters, the U’s “friendly” scoop, the “comfortable” Fs. My father could scoff all he wanted, but she made it clear that the name itself—down-to-earth, intimate, firm—was a big reason for the stores’ success. “My father was a genius to think of it. He knew the sound of it was right. Can you hear it?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I had no idea what she was talking about.

  “Straightforwardness, without apology. People want that. They respond to openness. See what I mean?”

  “I guess so,” I said. Why did she sound so angry?

  “Good.” She licked her thumb and smoothed my curly hair. “Don’t let your father kid you. There’s a lot to be learned from that sign.”

  “You mean I should imitate it?”