A Calling for Charlie Barnes

by Joshua Ferris

  “Oh, honey,” he said. “How much better I feel now. Thank you.”

  “Do you forgive me?”

  “Of course I forgive you, sweetheart. Do you forgive me?”

  “But you did nothing wrong, Daddy. I had no right to doubt you, and no reason to, either. A few past scares should never be held against anyone. The good Lord knows I’ve had one or two of my own. It was just so dumb. And of course I’ll fly home, Daddy. Of course I’ll help you.”

  Her devotion as a little girl, her large and trusting eyes, and how she reached for his hand. It was enough.

  “Thank you, honey. That’s so wonderful to hear. And so generous of you, too. However—”

  He was cut off.

  “So I’ve just gone ahead and done it, Daddy. I’m flying in tomorrow at nine a.m.”

  “Hold on,” he said. “Flying in where?”

  “Chicago,” she said. “I’m only sorry I didn’t do it sooner.”

  There was a long pause.

  “You bought a ticket and everything?”

  “Don’t ask me what it cost, okay, Daddy? They really gouge you when you fly next day.”

  “Jeez,” he said. “You paid extra?”

  “It’s just money,” she said.

  “I’m touched,” he said. “But I have to be honest, Marcy. I really wasn’t expecting you to come through. Just how expensive was the ticket?”

  “It was massive, Daddy. And I had to quit my job.”

  “You had to what?”

  “That had nothing to do with you,” she said. “It was a long time coming. My boss is an ass. I’ve been fed up forever. This was just the last straw. I even tried explaining to him about pancreatic cancer, how awful it is—”

  “Did you read up on pancreatic cancer?”

  “Of course I did, Daddy. You asked me to.”

  “I wasn’t sure you would take the time.”

  “Of course I took the time. Why wouldn’t I take the time?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “That was kind of you, anyway.”

  “It’s awful,” she said. “It’s just an awful disease.”

  “It is awful.”

  “It moves really fast,” she said. “So I was like, ‘Look, here are the facts, this is my father, I have to go,’ and he was like, ‘Not so fast,’ so I was like, ‘Well, then, go screw yourself. I quit.’”

  “You quit your job just to come see me?”

  “Well, no,” she said. “I quit because I’m fed up, my boss is an ass, and to come see you.”

  “I’m really very touched,” he said.

  “Hold on a second, Dad. Someone’s calling me on the other line.” She paused. “Wow, that’s weird,” she said. “That’s Jerry calling. Jerry never calls me. Isn’t that weird?”

  “Jerry’s calling you?”

  “I should go. I should see what he wants.”

  “No, don’t go, Marcy. Don’t talk to Jerry right now. Talk to me.”

  “But I have to go anyway, Dad. I still have to clean out my desk and get ready for tomorrow.”

  “Let him call back, sweetheart. Let Jerry call you back tomorrow, or next week.”

  “I’ll send you an email with all my flight information and I’ll see you tomorrow. Oh, and Daddy?”

  “Don’t talk to Jerry, Marcy.”

  “You’re going to beat it. I just know you are.”

  She hung up.

  31

  He pocketed his cell phone and walked over to the plate-glass window where, for a calm moment, he watched the mechanics at their work. He knew nothing about cars. How to turn a key, how to pop the trunk—that was about it. Now he marveled at how these bantering, hammering, cheery men knew by heart how to diagnose and repair big machines. They were playing their humble part, participating … he used to look down his nose at guys like this. Coming of age in a heartland full of gearheads and drag racers, he wanted no part of life in a garage. He wanted an office with a desk and a Rolodex and a gold nameplate. Now he wondered if the simple satisfaction of making an engine run smoothly again might be worth all the money and status imaginable. What had he been grasping for all these years when a wrench was within reach the whole time? He was on the brink of an even greater revelation about real value in the world when his cell phone began to ring.

  “Well, well, well.”

  It was his kid brother, Rudy.

  “Calls frantically all morning long … by the afternoon, you can’t find hide nor hair of him.”

  “Sorry, Rudy,” he said. “Busy day here.”

  “Chippin’ In,” Rudy said. “You want my gut, or what?”

  He’d been ignoring his brother’s calls since hanging up on him. Now he knew it was time to face the music, as he would live and not die—might just live forever. Chippin’ In had to stand up to scrutiny if he hoped to make it a reality … and who better to tear it to pieces (as your potential investor might) than Rudy Barnes, peddler of dog pills and skeptic of practically everything else?

  “You think you can kill me, Rudy?” he said. “Nothing can kill me, man. Go on, give it your best shot.”

  “Who’s trying to kill you, Charlie?” he asked. “Charlie, you feeling okay?”

  “Give it to me, Rudy. Come on.”

  There was a long pause.

  “I love it, Charlie.”

  “You love it?” he said. “My Chippin’ In?”

  “It has enormous promise.”

  He couldn’t believe it. Rudy never liked his ideas. He was a tough critic. But there was a reason his vitamin empire employed over two hundred and twenty people and had recently gone public, making its founder a millionaire, and why he continued to serve VitaSource as its CEO and sat on the boards of Whole Foods and PepsiCo: Rudy knew a good idea when he saw one.

  “Hold on,” he said. “Rudy, have you spoken to Mom today?”

  “To Mom?”

  “Lives in Peoria? Suffers from restless leg?”

  “Is there a reason you think I might have spoken to Mom?”

  But why spoil the moment? The man’s encouragement was so rare. And disillusionment was so dreary. Here was a dream to live by. Was Rudy’s polite deceit really something he should probe and puncture, just to be free of illusion?

  “You know what?” he said. “Never mind. Forget I asked. Glad you liked it.”

  “Charlie,” Rudy said. “Are you sick?”

  “Sick? No. Why do you ask?”

  “Are you sure?”

  There was a long pause.

  “If I was, Rudy, would that change your opinion of Chippin’ In?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  There was another long pause.

  “Then no,” he said, “I’m not sick. I had a scare recently, which I might have mentioned to Mom, but that’s over with now, and I’m feeling better than ever.”

  “That’s good news,” Rudy said. “That’s very good.”

  “Any second thoughts, then, before we wrap this up? Snide qualifiers? Totally undermining last-minute reversals?”

  “I mean it, Charlie,” Rudy said. “Go forth and conquer. It’s a great idea.”

  32

  Suspended, suddenly, in a mental bubble of well-being, Steady Boy tried returning to his paper, but he had too much to do now and could no longer sit still. There was the logo, the trademark, the color palette, the marketing plan, and the angel investors.

  “Pierre!” he cried, knocking twice on the plate-glass window overlooking the garage and beckoning into the office the owner and head mechanic of European Motors.

  Pierre Rabineau was a pale-blond, pear-shaped Frenchman of sixty or so, possessed of a notable limp and a walrus mustache, who had been working on Charlie’s Saab for the past fifteen years. Together, they treated the old car like their delicate and ailing ward, two solicitous guardians of the Scandinavian machine on behalf of a god who loves antiques. Rabineau swung the door open and limped into the waiting room,
cleaning his fingers with an inky rag. In that single gesture, there were implied other rags, other garages, and piles of manuals, and the history of engines, and dreams of heirlooms rescued from junkyards, and the Alsatian père who held Rabineau’s hand while heroes zipped by in prototypes on a Paris-to-Brest road race and the zinc bars served cold lager.

  “Pierre, I’m afraid I have to leave.”

  “But your car, it is not fixed.”

  “How much longer?”

  Still moving the grease around his fingers and rag, the Frenchman replied, vaguely but with a sense of magnitude, “You have an engine problem.”

  “Right,” he said.

  He didn’t care at all for what he was about to do next—and neither do I.

  It is an admirable impulse to want a man near and dear to the heart to do the right thing, and equally admirable to want to spare him censure for doing the wrong thing. I still recall being eight years old and vaguely sensing that other men might not regard Charlie Barnes with the same admiration I did, as when he ran for public office and placed fourth out of four, or got lectured at by a man in the hardware store, or declined a fistfight in the YMCA parking lot, and on each of these occasions I was sad for him and angry for us both. I wanted to knock his detractors out cold. Likewise, now, I hate to think that you might be losing patience with him because he is failing his best self, or makes a poor ideal for mankind, or simply isn’t worth your time and attention. I owe this man my life. I owe him everything. But I owe you the truth: he lied to Rabineau. He admitted as much to me personally. Am I at liberty to workshop away all that was unpalatable about my father, white-out his mistakes, in an effort to make merely likable a man I loved?

  “Let me ask you a question, Pierre,” he said. “How much do you know about pancreatic cancer?”

  Pierre Rabineau, who lost an aunt in Cassis to pancreatic cancer, expressed outrage at cancer in general before issuing a small, silent gesture with his blackened finger. He led Steady Boy through the garage and out back where, with a flourish, he presented a white Porsche parked in high contrast against a red brick wall: a loaner, if he wanted it.

  “This thing? For me?”

  “Take it. Drive it. Enjoy.”

  In his defense, Charlie didn’t expect his lie to result in a loaner like this. He just wanted his Saab back. But if this fine car were really on offer … Rabineau opened the door for him. Guiltily but gingerly, he climbed in. Then Rabineau shot his inky digit into the air once more.

  “I forget the key.”

  While Rabineau returned to the front office, Charlie surveyed the beautiful analog dashboard, the steering wheel coiled as tight as a Luger and, just past the space-age contouring of the windshield, the Porsche chevron, a pricey blaze at the edge of the hood. Feeling lucky and full of good will, he took out his phone and called Marcy in Deer Park.

  “Kinder Morgan, Bethany speaking.”

  “Good afternoon, Bethany. Charlie Barnes calling for my daughter Marcy. We spoke earlier. I know she’s quit, but I was hoping I might still catch her—or, rather, that I could leave a message with you and that you might catch her.”

  “Would you prefer her direct line?”

  “Well, no,” he said. “No, I think it would be better if you just told Marcy that, as it turns out, I don’t have pancreatic cancer after all. I have a clean bill of health, which, if we think about it, is actually cause for celebration. But just because I don’t need Marcy to fly in doesn’t mean I don’t want her to. I would love to see Marcy. We don’t get together nearly often enough. So would you please tell her that I plan on picking her up at O’Hare tomorrow no differently than I would have if I was dying of cancer and taking her to lunch? Great benefit here being I’m not dying. I’ll even be able to eat a meal with her. What else? No, I think that about covers it.”

  There was a long pause.

  “She’s standing right here,” Bethany said. “Would you like to speak to her directly?”

  Before he could reply, Marcy had taken the phone from Bethany. “What could you possibly have to say to me right now that would justify the lies you’ve told today?” she asked him.

  Fierce, harsh, unforgiving: gone, again, was any hint of sympathy, any sweetly calling him Daddy. He could tell the change from her tone of voice. It was all accusation and blame, as her mother’s had been. These Jekyll-and-Hyde types—they turn on you in an instant.

  “I gather you talked to Jerry,” he said. “Well, good news: I don’t have pancreatic cancer.”

  Rabineau reappeared with the key to the Porsche, and Charlie quickly changed his expression to that of one recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

  “What comes over you?” she asked. “What prompts something like this?”

  “I was reading the internet wrong.”

  “Do you know what Mom used to say about you, Dad?”

  “Your mom used to say a lot of things about me, Marcy.”

  “She said she married a con man.”

  Rabineau handed him the key, which he accepted with a sobriety befitting the occasion.

  “And I would stick up for you. I would stick up for you and stick up for you. But that’s what you are, Dad. You’re a con man, and you’re a fraud.”

  “Oh, come on, Marcy. Don’t say that!”

  Bruce Crowder would have agreed. So would Jerry. But he had improved Bruce’s mother’s holdings by 400 percent. And Einsohn had screwed him. But he was probably doomed from the start: his mother, his teeth. Now his son felt free to lie to him, while Larry Stoval, a good friend from long ago, couldn’t be bothered to call him back. But Rudy liked his Chippin’ In. And he had Barbara. Charlie looked up at Rabineau, frowned on account of his illness, and turned the engine over. Its roar was pure romance.

  “You should try telling the truth for once in your life,” Marcy said.

  She hung up.

  33

  He had tried telling the truth once, in what was probably his finest hour. He believed, by coming clean, he would end the pretense and fakery and be real at last—at least before the woman he loved. He had no idea he was doomed.

  That woman was Marcy’s mother.

  At the time they met, Steady Boy was working at Old Poor Farm, a relic of the sixties and a real do-gooder’s delight. The physical structure was an unlikely brick manor on seventy acres of farmland, entirely reminiscent of a sanitarium. An incongruity among the distant red barns and silos, the main building sat front and center along the Catlin-Tilton Road, showcasing a dozen Doric columns and flanked by east and west wings. From proper poor farm during the Great Depression to private nursing home throughout the forties and fifties, the building had returned to the county’s possession by 1960, when it began housing every last state agency and charitable organization in Vermilion County. Welfare was on the ground floor, as was Public Aid, Head Start, the Job Corps—any number of state-funded acts of kindness that, in the era of Jimmy Cayne, just sound utterly fantastical. Union chapters, Catholic charities, prevention leagues, agencies for affordable housing and economic opportunity, consumer protections, land conservancy, clean water … please pardon Charlie Barnes as he drifts off, on his drive to First Baptist in a borrowed Porsche, into a reverie about Lyndon Johnson.

  Old Poor Farm, then, was not just a physical address but also a local designation for the helping hand. In 1973, the year Charlie and Charley met, the political concept known as inevitable need had not yet undergone its public-relations decay into tax burden by canny operators on the right. When it did, around the time of Reagan’s triumph, the state’s helping hand closed up its fingers—and became a fist. Old Poor Farm dissolved as a concept and died out as a destination vital to the public welfare. But before that could happen, all sorts of folks found their purpose out on the Catlin-Tilton Road: social workers, educators, feminists, EST adherents, bleeding hearts in bell-bottom jeans, self-described bull dykes prone to organizing softball tournaments, early adopters of carob bars and the five-mile jog, and other a
ssorted Corn Belt misfits drawing a government salary in the name of a better world. Charlie served as the executive director of the Vermilion County chapter of Big Brothers Big Sisters, the mentorship program.

  Now, you might be saying to yourself, the executive director of a mentorship program … this is Steady Boy we’re talking about, right? The onetime clown, would-be franchiser, inventor of the Doolander and Endopalm-T, and the commissioned salesman working all the angles at Jonart’s and Sears—when, and how, had he so pivoted that, by 1973, he was out of the corporate game and earning a living doing social work?

  No doubt it would be easier to maintain the illusion that he hungered after profit all his days, a wannabe Warren Buffett cluttering the margins of the American marketplace with his schemes and knockoffs. But there was always this side to my father, the do-gooder side. It was the Doolander versus the dogooder, his heart divided between the chamber of commerce and the March of Dimes. It was there from the beginning. While a bid for fame and fortune, the Clown in Your Town™ had its roots in his affection for children. He hoped to help his paying customers at Jonart’s as much as he would later enjoy their commissions. When he founded TTAA, he was bringing together these two sides of himself, the black-hatted hope to make a killing alongside the white-shoe promise of fairness and probity. It should surprise no one that he gave himself over for a time to the kind of work that was Charley Proffit’s only calling in life.

  But Charlie & Charley did not meet at Old Poor Farm. They met at Red Mask.

  A Danville institution and art lover’s delight, the Red Mask Players was an amateur troupe founded in 1936. The theater itself, a former Presbyterian church, was an old brick structure with an ivy-covered turret that suggested a medieval fairy tale unfolding inside. Its modest lobby was carpeted in plush red, its walls draped in folds of red velvet. One bobbed through it all dreamily as if on a princess’s pincushion. Dust as ancient as a Greek chorus swirled in the spotlights, and the musty odor of antique costumes hung in the air backstage. Charlie could still reconstruct on his retinas, forty years later, the sharp negative of the makeup mirror lights, the hot blinding lights of the main stage, and those gentle pools of blue light backstage that cut the sacred darkness on nervy opening nights. The thick clotting smell of pancake makeup and the toxic catch of wig glue in the dressing rooms were, back then, all he required to become drunk with excitement. But it was his ears that best recalled the delicate magic of Red Mask: the whispers of jitters backstage, the sudden shushes, the rude crashes, the soft murmur from the house before curtain, the roar of shared impressions during intermission, and the muted laughter behind the stage doors while outside the wash of oblivious traffic continued in a steady rain—there was simply nothing to compare to it even now. The dramatics club he exchanged for basketball had delivered Charlie to Red Mask, and only upon standing on its stage did he feel himself equal to life. He took bit parts after high school, had his first star turn in a production of Blithe Spirit, and pretty much ran the place after that, directing, producing, even doing a little light choreography.