Twilight Child (20 page)

 “What do you
do with it?” she had asked him once on his infrequent and indifferent returns.

 “Living is
expensive in those places,” he had explained. She suspected how most of it was
spent.

 “Are you all
right?”

 It was
Peter's voice. She had put the baby back in his crib and fallen asleep, and was
surprised at suddenly seeing Peter's face loom in front of her. She felt the
breeze of his breath.

 “I couldn't
concentrate. So I decided to knock off for the rest of the day.” He lay down
beside her, and they embraced. “You are first in my life, darling. Anything
that troubles you troubles me. I just want to be sure.”

 “About what?”

 “That we're
doing the right thing for you. For us.”

 She knew
exactly what he meant.

 “We decided
that from the beginning, didn't we, Peter?”

 “I hadn't
realized . . .” He kissed her hair and reached over her to touch
the sleeping baby. “I wanted to draw a circle around us, to protect us.” She
felt his breath flutter against her cheeks.

 “Well, you
have. And it's worked.”

 “That it
has.”

 He caressed
the baby's bare arms, then moved lower and laid his head against her belly. She
gathered his head in her arms and pressed him to her.

 “You've been
fabulous, Peter. I've never been happier. And I don't want anything to spoil
it.”

 She held him
against her, her heart full of gratitude and contentment. Anything, any force,
that endangered this bond was the enemy, she thought. And her ex-in-laws could
be a destructive force. Not with evil intent, she told herself quickly. But
intent didn't matter. Their presence was simply not required. Not by Tray and
not by her.

 “They're not
necessary, Peter,” Frances whispered. “Not to us. We have to stand up to them.
It's our choice, not theirs.”

 “Of course I
agree. I just want to be sure you're up to it.”

 She sensed
her rising militancy. Drawing Peter up, she looked at his face, then kissed him
deeply.

 “As long as
you're beside me, I'm up to anything,” she whispered.

 His hands
moved over her body, and she reached out to return his caresses in kind.

 “Especially
now,” she said.

 CHARLIE
hadn't told Molly that he intended to spend the day in Crisfield.
She would have been curious, of course, and might have suggested that he wait
for the weekend so that they both could go. He did not want her to go with him.
This was something he had to do by himself. Nor did he care to worry her any
more than she already was about his state of mind.

 But suddenly
he had gotten it into his head that it was important for him to go back to the
little town on the bay where he had been born and raised. He supposed it was
not uncommon for a man to go back to his roots when life in the outside world
got too rough to handle. Once, he couldn't wait to get away from Crisfield, the
tight little world of familiar faces and predictable happenings. Had it been a
wrong turn in the road? Was there something he had left there that he needed
now? He wasn't sure. In fact, he wasn't sure about anything.

 Standing now
on the municipal dock in the diamond-bright November sun, which bounced spears
of blinding light off the choppy gray bay waters, he was sorry he had come.
Where once he had worn the comforting label of being one of the Waters boys,
the little one, now he was just another expatriate who had come back to mourn
for the sweet old times, savor youthful memories, and bathe in sentiment and
nostalgia.

 It was not
exactly the idea he had had in mind. He had expected to be replenished, spiritually
rejuvenated, as he had been that day years ago when Chuck and he had roamed the
town and he had pointed out the physical landmarks of his youth. In recalling
the experience that morning, he had decided that it was one of the most
delicious moments of his life, to be ranked with the time that Molly had
confessed that their love was mutual, and with that first day when he had come
home from the war.

 What he had
been doing for the past few weeks was to collect these good moments, hoping
that happy memories might chase away the gloom and depression that had taken
hold of him and, according to Molly, were damaging his judgment and behavior.

 “Stop
dwelling on all the hurts, Charlie,” she had pleaded with him. “You'll ruin any
chance we have of winning our case. And Tray.”

 It had become
the central theme of her campaign to shake him out of his depression. And she
did not have to expand very much on the threat. He had already made an ass of
himself with his lawyer, with Frances, and with Tray.

 “Maybe we
should dump the idea?”

 “Give up all
hope of seeing Tray?”

 She seemed to
have gained the steadiness that he had lost.

 “Maybe if we
stop pressing her, she'll come around.”

 “That's what
I thought, remember?” She had paused thoughtfully. “I don't think so now.”

 “What changed
your mind?” he asked, with a deliberate touch of sarcasm.

 “The facts.
It's been two years, now. She's moving farther and farther away from us. Tray,
too. Another year or so and he might forget what we look like. Instead of getting
used to it, Charlie, it's beginning to hurt more.”

 “I'll agree
with you there. But suppose we lose? That's it. We might as well face that
fact. Tray will be lost to us forever.”

 “And suppose
we win?”

 “But suppose
we lose because of me, because of something stupid that I do?”

 “Well then,
don't do anything stupid.”

 “I'll try.”

 He
was
trying. Visiting Crisfield was part of trying. Everything was part of trying.
It absorbed his life now. He had made a couple of stabs at looking for a job,
but as soon as an interview was arranged, he invariably got cold feet and
canceled the appointment with one excuse or another. Odd, he thought, he did
have the sense of anticipation, all the symptoms and signs of the will to
fight, but little of the spirit. During the war, he might have thought himself
a coward. Where was that old marine sense of “go”? he wondered. It went, he
told himself, although he tried to hide it from Molly.

 “You'll never
find a job that way,” Molly had rebuked him gently. When she appeared to be
invoking undue pressure, she usually backed off, which only exacerbated
Charlie's condition. It told him that she was really afraid that she might nag
him just enough to push him over the brink. It was an idea that had taken hold,
and it frightened him.

 “Where have
they all gone?”

 Standing on
the municipal dock like some invisible alien, he heard the harsh sound of his
voice float into the crisp air. He looked around, wondering if anyone had
heard. But the dock was deserted, the boats in the inlet rocking emptily in the
choppy waters. A few steps off was a telephone booth. A thin telephone book
hung from a rusted chain beside it. Putting on his glasses, he thumbed through
the Crisfield names, some of which seemed vaguely familiar. He was sure that
with a little effort he might find some old school chum; someone still alive
who had affected him, perhaps profoundly, in his youth; someone who could offer
him that special solace that was his present need.

 There were
still other Waterses around, blood kin. His maiden Aunt Meg, whom he hadn't
seen in five or six years, still lived someplace in the town, and there were
certain to be second and third cousins, featureless images that danced weakly
in his mind. Absence made strangers of everybody. The idea brought back the
memory of Tray's face in the school corridor, tentative and unsure, as the boy
confronted the reality of his grandfather's fading identity.

 Fading
identities were what plagued Charlie at this very moment, as he tried to
conjure up the emotion of the old life and all the complicated ties of blood
relationships. There had been a time when everyone who had ever lived and
mattered was alive, his grandparents on both sides, his father and mother, his
brother, Ned, aunts, uncles, cousins; even relatives who were beyond the
circumscribed world of Crisfield, who sent messages via the mail and called
occasionally from wherever they had settled.

 Once, this
extended family and their activities had been his entire world and, such was
his childish concept of time, he had taken for granted that it would continue
on into infinity. It had lasted with all the longevity of the blink of an eye.
An eye? From the swirl of memory came an odd feeling of panic, as this concrete
image burst into his reverie.

 He had been
playing at the bay's edge, throwing pebbles into the water with other children,
and one had been misthrown into his eye. The pain had exploded in his head and
he had run, panicked and screaming, back to his house, which was empty. Mother
was probably at the market; his father, surely on the road; his brother, Ned,
at school. He had felt momentarily forlorn and deserted in his agony, a feeling
replicated in present time with all the original passion and intensity. Inside
of him, he now felt the same futility and despair as he had in that long-ago
moment. When no solace had been available at his house, he had run as fast as
his feet could carry him around the corner to Grampa and Granny Harper's house,
only to find that empty as well. The horror of this awesome desertion
escalated, and he ran screaming for still another block to the home of Grampa
and Granny Waters. Even now, the familiar banging of the kitchen screen door
often set his teeth ajar with the frantic memory of that ancient hurt. Thank
the Lord, Granny had been in the kitchen, her soft, all-encompassing, ample
figure wrapped in its perpetual pink apron, her arms ready, reaching out to
gather him into the billowy cloud of her soothing presence. The pain, most of
it psychic by then, receded under her careful ministrations. He was safe at
last, engulfed and forever protected by her warm and wonderful aura.

 Granny
Waters, where are you now? he cried within himself. I need you. Nor did the cry
in his heart apply specifically to Granny Waters. Any one of the others would
do equally well. The backup system of familial protection was an infallible
part of his Crisfield childhood and early youth. In those days, no hurt went
untended. Arms and chests and soft lips were available in abundance to diminish
pain and panic and grief and anguish. Remembering this, he knew what folly it
was to come back to this place so late. There was no solace available from
inanimate old landmarks and strangers.

 Once, it had
seemed to him that those he had left behind were the dregs caught at the bottom
of the cup after the best of the beverage had been drunk. Over the years the
gulf had widened. To them, he had become city folk, a city slicker. Even as his
immediate family aged and died, his sense of loss had its roots in another
time, as if the town and everything in it had remained forever frozen in the
first two decades of his life.

 When Charlie
had first felt this difference, it had troubled him. He had no right to feel
superior to the people with whom he had grown up, the people who loved him. He
had wondered if he truly loved them as much as they loved him, and it had made
him feel guilty to discover that distance and time might have diluted such
emotions.

 His
grandparents seemed to have been swept away by some terrible plague during the
first ten years of his life. His mother had died a few years after the war. But
his father had hung on to the middle seventies. In later years it became
something of a chore to visit the old man. He spent most of his time sitting on
the porch of their old clapboard house, in good weather and bad, watching the
waters of the bay through rheumy, bloodshot eyes. By then he had become merely
the symbol of the person who was once Charlie's father, like a painted balloon
in which the air had slowly escaped.

 But he hadn't
stopped taking Chuck on his regular visits, which had become a monthly ritual.
Chuck was little then, but somewhat fascinated by the old drummer with his
toothless mouth and his penchant for repeating stories of Depression days. Odd,
how people who lived through that bad time always remembered it with pride and
intensity.

 “Couldn't
stand still in troubled times,” the old man would tell them. “Go out and make
it. There's adventure in it, too, for a man. I had them, I can tell you.”

 “Like what,
Grampa?” Chuck would ask.

 “You're too
young to know about them, sonny.” The old man would croak out a wet toothless
laugh and slap his thigh. Charlie's attention would invariably drift off. He
had, of course, heard the old stories time and time again. But to Chuck they
were still fresh and strange enough to hold his interest. How dearly and deeply
he had loved that restless man who had been the first to break the mold of the
long string of Waterses who had made their living from the bay.

 “Got to get
away from this place, son,” he had once told Charlie. “It's the only way I can
really love it when I get home.” He was, of course, the first to applaud his
sons' leaving town, first Ned, then Charlie. His mother had been less
forthcoming.

 “Just like
your Dad. Too good for little Crisfield. That's why families break up and
disappear.” She was right, of course, and he had known it then. But they went
anyway.

 “I'm not sure
it was the right thing to do,” he had told his father one day much later,
sitting on the porch in the dead of summer, sipping soda pop. Chuck sat quietly
beside them, listening. “I mean there's dough in it. We have all the material
comforts. There's lots going on. On the surface it's damned good, Pop. Damned
good.”

 “Sounds good
to me,” his father had replied, his eyes roaming the bay waters, his shrunken
body gently rocking in the rickety cushioned rocker that had worn a recess in
the plank porch floor.

 “It was good
growing up here, Pop. The best.”

 “For growing
up and dyin', son,” his father had said. “It's the in-between part that needs
correctin'.” He seemed slightly bemused by the weight of his thoughts. “A man
should find it near the place in which he's born ‘stead of searching all to
hell and gone. What the devil are we all lookin' for, Charlie? Whatever it was,
I never found it.”

 “Well, I'm
still looking,” Charlie had replied cheerfully.

 And so he
was.

 Only, so far
that morning in Crisfield, it was nowhere to be found. Not a hint of it. He wondered
if he should go by the old house and if that rocker was still there. He would
sit in it and look at things with his own eyes and review what his own life
amounted to. Maybe that was what Chuck was looking for when he found the hard
bottom of an offshore rig. Maybe the reason it couldn't be found was because it
didn't exist. He shivered at the thought, since it meant that hope and optimism
were also dead in the water.

 Once he had
had those two commodities in great abundance. Were they also fixed in time,
somewhere back before the war? Were they in Crisfield? It suddenly occurred to
him that he had been looking for whatever it was for a long, long time.

 Years ago,
after his father had died, Charlie had taken Chuck on a tour of the landmarks
of his past. He had gone down to settle things after his father had died and
had felt the urge to pass along the heritage of memory. That was part of the
meaning of fatherhood, wasn't it? He took the boy past the old schoolhouse, to
the spot on the shore where they skinny-dipped as kids in June before the first
nettles came, to one more stop at the old clapboard family house, unpainted and
groaning with time, where Aunt Meg still lived. Because she had taken care of
his father in his later years, the old man had willed her the house, which she
had sold years later.