Twilight Child (15 page)

 “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
something 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 when
he
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.

 “Why can't
you just have fun for a few years? Play around. There's a million fish in the
sea.”

 “He's going
to do it anyway, Charlie. You might as well throw in the sponge.”

 “You got it,
Mom.”

 “But it's
dumb. Establish yourself a little first. Get a financial head start. If this is
the girl you want, what's wrong with a long engagement? But make sure it's what
you want.”

 “I am sure.
And we've known each other three months.”

 “A lifetime,
right? Next thing you know, you'll have a kid. With that will come more
financial pressure.”

 “And
grandchildren,” Molly interjected.

 “I'm too
young for that,” Charlie had answered.

 They had
haggled for another hour until it became apparent that nothing was going to
change Chuck's mind.

 “You're doing
your thinking with your crotch.”

 Molly had finally
interposed.

 “That's not
the issue in today's world, Charlie. Let's face it, Chuck has every right to
make this decision. It's not like he's completing an education. He has a job.
Marriage might give him a focus, stability. Certainly security.”

 “The voice of
cool reason,” he had commented, but by then he had surrendered. Fresh young
love was too powerful to be stopped. So he'd sit on the sidelines and watch it
grow stale, see who got the last laugh. Could it be that he was arguing with
himself, dredging up the old worry that what he and Molly had would one day
grow stale? Odd, he thought suddenly, that he had never outgrown that fear.

 Leaving
Chuck's door, he flapped around upstairs for a while, then came back down to
the kitchen and made himself another cup of instant coffee. He stood by the
sink as he sipped it, watching the sodden gloom that the rain had cast over the
yard. He glanced at the clock. It was ten. Forte probably wouldn't get to the
office until about now, he assured himself. Then he made a conscious effort to
catalogue the chores he would do in the yard once the rain stopped, which did
not look likely.

 But it did
postpone confronting another point on his checklist, the crucial point: freedom
from Tray, from imagining Tray, worrying about Tray, from missing Tray.

 Chuck's death
had thrown a lifeline between them. Before that, he had been your ordinary
run-of-the-mill doting Grampa, and Molly had been Gramma. But there was still
the sense for all of them that Chuck was merely “away” and not gone forever.
They baby-sat on the evenings when Frances took courses, and had her over with
the boy on weekends. Charlie had taken Tray to the local carnivals and to fish
on the banks of the nearby creeks. Molly, of course, was more interested in
improving his mind and had read to him from the many children's books she had
taken from the school library. He was still too young for the real
give-and-take of manly communication. But Charlie had looked forward to the day
when that moment would arrive.

 Of course, by
that time he had had to be more than just Grampa. He had to be the lost Dad as
well, and that had gone a long way to simmer down the gnawing grief over
Chuck's death. He had thought, at first, that Frances had fully accepted this
new role for him, encouraging the relationship by letting Tray spend more and
more time with Molly and him. After all, they were the only set of grandparents
the boy had. Later, in retrospect, he decided that she welcomed the idea of
Tray spending so much time with them because it gave her more time to quickly
scout out a replacement for Chuck. More than anything, that memory brought back
the terrible pain of what she had done to Tray and to them. It had been a
deliberate act of betrayal. Pure and simple. Underneath it all, she was
hard-hearted and selfish, interested only in herself. As for that Peter, he was
beneath contempt.

 Some things
they had done were, he was convinced, beyond the pale of decent human behavior.
Like that first Christmas when he and Molly had sent Tray his Christmas gifts.
They were, of course, handicapped by not being able to find out from Tray what
he wanted. The truth was, they had been afraid to call for fear Frances would
forbid it absolutely. So they had shopped the stores, piling up gifts, mostly
toys and games, since Molly was no longer sure of Tray's clothes sizes. They
had had the stores send out the gifts, along with the usual handwritten cards,
especially poignant because of the conditions imposed on them as absentee
grandparents. The cards had not been easy to write, he remembered.

 Foolishly, he
had set up his own tree in the living room as he had done every year since
Chuck was born. As usual, they had loaded the base of the tree with gifts from
each other. It wasn't much fun dressing and lighting the tree, but they seemed
to carry it out by habit, and Charlie had done everything he could to hide his
tears and force his smiles. Molly, of course, did the same.

 They had
gotten it into their heads that Christmas, being a time of family gatherings
and reconciliations, might be the moment when Frances and Peter would relent,
realize the stupidity and selfishness of their actions, and pull things
together again.

 “Don't put
too much trust in it, Charlie,” Molly had warned.

 “Where's that
old Christmas spirit?”

 “You tell
me.”

 When the
packages arrived from the store, they were certain that their dreams had come
true. That is, until they opened the note attached to one of the packages.

 “Dear Molly
and Charlie,” the note began. “There is no easy way to do this.” Charlie had
tossed the letter away without reading further. But Molly had picked it up and
read aloud, with her clear teacher's reading voice, making a superhuman effort
to hide the emotion with sarcasm. “We know your heart is in the right place.
But, at least for this Christmas, while Tray adjusts to his new conditions, we
thought it best that we return your gifts. We're not being Scrooge, but if only
you could both leave Tray be for awhile until he gets his sea legs in his new
situation, we think everyone would be the better for it. We hope this finds you
both in good health. And, of course, Merry Christmas. Frances and Peter.”

 They had both
looked dumbly at the packages. Then Charlie picked them up and took them out to
the yard, where he dumped them in the big metal can in which he burned the
trash, doused them with kerosene, and set them ablaze. Later, he dismantled the
tree, chain-sawed it into manageable chunks, and tossed them into the fire.

 They spent
that Christmas Eve hiding their tears in the darkness. Christmas Day was worse.
On the following Christmas, they spared themselves the pain, treating the
holiday as just another day. It was not a very pleasant way to live.

 Anger stirred
him, and he went to the phone and called the lawyer. By the second ring, he got
cold feet and quickly put the phone down. Hadn't Molly warned him to be cool?
All temporary, she had assured him. He cursed under his breath and in the
mirror's reflection discovered that his lips were moving silently. Story of his
life, he decided, the silent curse. In his mind, he tore the checklist from the
pad, crumpled it up in his hand, and flung it into the garbage. He wasn't a
damned inspector anymore.

 That had been
another unexpected blow, robbing him of whatever hope his sixtieth birthday
might have promised, which wasn't very much in the first place. But he had
never expected it to be the worst day of his life.

 Not that it
had started badly. It was a Thursday, December 6, twenty-four hours short of
the official Pearl Harbor Day. How did he know he was about to have his own day
of infamy?

 Molly had
awakened him in a special, loving way. Recent events hadn't exactly done
wonders for his libido, but Molly's sweet patience had done the trick, and he
had been grateful for both the effort and her own response.

 “Not bad for
an old duffer of sixty.”

 Actually,
years of activity had kept him in fair shape, although his gut wasn't as flat
as it might have been.

 “The Waterses
wear well,” he had said, embracing her still-tight haunches. “So do their
women.”

 “I can't
believe it. Where did all the years go?”

 “Down the
tube.”

 “Just you and
me, guy.”

 “Me and you,
babe.”

 They had just
pulled each other through months of loss and despair, and this event in their
bed had struck Charlie as perhaps the beginning of yet another chapter in their
marriage. They had always been close in ways that they had never articulated to
each other. There had, of course, been ups and downs, periods of doubts and reassurances,
but the bond itself, the commitment, had never been in danger. It had, of
course, occurred to him to be unfaithful, more as a test of manly power than
anything more romantic, but he had never taken the plunge. He was dead certain
she hadn't. The bottom line in marriage was trust. One might say that their
marriage had evolved into a true and loving friendship. By this time, it had
even transcended habit.

 “You're
everything to me, Molly,” he had confided solemnly. It was something he could
do only in the extreme intimacy of a loving embrace in their bed.

 “And you to
me.”

 “At least we
did one thing right.”

 She had
dressed quickly and made him a big breakfast.

 “Orange juice
tastes funny,” he had said.

 “It's the
champagne.”

 “Pulling out
all the stops, eh babe?”

 “We're
marking the end of the sixth decade. That deserves some attention.”

 “Real class.”
He had smacked his lips. He had always been proud of her refinements. “Think
you'll ever get me to cross over the border from redneck land?” It was not
really a big bone of contention between them. They knew who they were and where
they had come from.

 “Tonight
we're going to the Chesapeake for dinner,” she had promised. It was one of
Baltimore's most popular restaurants.

 “I'll go on
one condition.”

 “What's
that?”

 “That you
don't have those idiot waiters and waitresses sing me happy birthday. And no
candles.”

 “You think I
want people to know I live with an old duffer?”

 “You're right
behind me, wise guy.” She was only two years younger.