Twilight Child

by Warren Adler

  “You can’t wait?” Charlie said with an air of helpless pleading.

  “There’s no point in that. We’re together now anyway. Why not get on with our lives?”

  “I think it’s disgusting,” Charlie hissed, obviously making a great effort to repress an outburst. “My son’s barely cold.”

  “It’s best, Charlie,” Frances whispered.

  “Best for who?” Charlie snapped. “It’s an insult to my son’s memory. Why can’t you see that? Doesn’t his life stand for anything?”

  “You’re being very irrational about this, Waters,” Peter said. It was adding fuel to the fire, Frances saw, but there was little that could be done. Not now. Her gaze met Molly’s. We have to stop this, her mother-in-law’s eyes implored.

  “You’re humiliating us,” Charlie said. “That’s what you’re doing. He was a good boy, my Chuck. Maybe he wasn’t perfect, but nobody is. A good husband. A good provider. A good father.”

  None of those, Frances thought, but she kept her silence. Peter looked at her and shrugged.

  “You’re defaming his memory.” He looked at Molly. “That’s what they’re doing, babe. It’s selfish and inhuman.” Charlie pointed a finger at Frances, but still did not raise his voice. Then he turned again to Frances. “Someday you’ll pay for this.” His voice broke, and he cleared his throat. “Tray will grow up and he’ll want to know why you couldn’t wait, why you didn’t respect his father’s memory.” Eyes narrowing, his face seemed to contort as if he were suffering some terrible physical pain. “Didn’t my boy mean anything to you? Anything at all?”

  “I think this is going too far, Charlie,” Molly said, getting up from her chair. “Let’s all have dinner and discuss it sanely.”

  “There’s nothing to discuss,” Peter said. He looked at Frances. “I don’t need or want your stamp of approval. I also don’t want to deliberately hurt you. But I really don’t think we have to take this.”

  “Please, Peter,” Frances said. “We mustn’t make it worse.”

  “I think we’ve given them the courtesy of informing them about our plans. We’ve invited them to the wedding. What more is there to say?”

  “You can’t be serious about me coming to your wedding?” Charlie muttered.

  “No need to make that decision now,” Molly said.

  “I’ve made it,” Charlie snapped.

  “Why don’t we just have dinner?” Molly asked.

  “I’m really not sure . . .” Peter said, looking at his watch.

  “We’d love to,” Frances said, throwing Peter a look of rebuke.

  “I’m not hungry,” Charlie said.

  “You’ll see the food, you’ll get hungry,” Molly said. She went up to the kitchen. Charlie slumped deeper into his chair and said nothing. Peter looked around the den. There was an awkward moment of silence.

  “Nice room you have here,” Peter observed. His comment sounded hollow, designed merely to fill the silence.

  “Charlie built it himself,” Frances said, desperately trying to find a common ground.

  “Boy was good with his hands,” Charlie muttered, shaking his head. He seemed to have shrunk in the last few moments. “He was a good husband and a good father. He doesn’t deserve this treatment.”

  “Not again, Charlie. Please,” Frances said. It had become a litany, a litany of lies. He knew little about the real facts of her marriage, the loneliness and indifference.

  “Well, he was,” Charlie persisted.

  “I’m not denying it,” Frances said quickly, biting her lip. She did not want Peter to see her agitation.

  “Why must you deny it, Frances?” Peter said. “Tell him the truth.” He looked pointedly at Charlie. “She had a terrible time.”

  “She’s a liar,” Charlie shouted. Molly rushed down the short flight of stairs wiping her hands on her apron.

  “I think you’re going a bit far, Waters,” Peter said. His tone was calm, placating.

  “Not far enough,” Charlie mumbled.

  “I can only apologize for him, Peter,” Molly said. “He’s still very distraught.”

  “Damned straight I am,” Charlie fumed. “And when I see this—you and her—with him hardly gone four months—what am I supposed to think?” He turned toward Molly. “And stop apologizing for me. Chuck was your son, too.”

  “You’re way out of line, Waters,” Peter said. Frances had already observed that instead of becoming openly angry, Peter became deliberate, calculating.

  “Maybe I am. The thing is that without respect, there can be no decency, and respect for the dead is sacred. Didn’t my son stand for anything? Or are we supposed to throw away his memory, too, like some piece of trash, as if he never existed? I mean, what’s it all about? I have a right to be angry, a right to be disgusted—” He seemed too overcome to continue.

  Frances felt Peter’s intense gaze, but she was too upset to react.

  “Before you say something you’re going to regret—” Peter began calmly.

  “I’ll regret nothing. You people don’t understand the meaning of honor. In the Marine Corps we knew about honor. We understood a man’s dignity. Take away a man’s honor, dead or alive, and you destroy his—well—manhood. I think this woman has committed an unpardonable sin. She has shown disrespect for my dead boy. She has dishonored him—”

  “This woman?” Molly said. “Now really, Charlie—”

  “It’s all right,” Peter said, his voice raised, commanding authority. “You’re creating a myth. She has not dishonored anyone. Certainly not your son. In fact, you dishonor her by questioning her motives.” He looked directly at Charlie. “But none of that is relevant to us. What is important is that we’re getting married.”

  Charlie’s pallor grew ashen. He stood up, breathing hard, almost gasping with anger.

  “You never loved him. You drove him away,” he said to Frances. Then he turned to Peter. “She’ll do the same to you. History repeats.”

  Frances reached out for Peter’s hand. It was too awful, too humiliating. She began to shake all over. She felt Peter return the pressure on her hand, then bend over and kiss her forehead.

  “Easy, baby,” he whispered. He was calm, deliberate, and although Charlie stood menacingly over him, he looked up at him with steady eyes. “I suppose I can’t really understand your pain. I’m sorry about your son, your grief. I’m sure it hurts. But that doesn’t mean you have to strike out at others who are innocent of any wrongdoing whatsoever. Your sense of time is purely arbitrary. I’m sorry about that. The world is for the living. Always was. Frances has accepted my offer in good faith. We care a great deal about each other. She is entitled to get on with her life. Both of us are. Frankly, I don’t care what you think about it. Nor does it matter if we ever see you again.”

  The sense of menace disappeared. Charlie seemed shattered, defeated. Tears of frustration filled his eyes. He turned and walked slowly up the stairs.

  “He’ll get over it,” Molly said when he had left.

  “That’s his problem,” Peter said, standing up. Frances felt herself gently lifted.

  “What can I say?” Molly began, swallowing to hold down the emotion in her voice. “You know how he was about Chuck. You can understand that. Can’t you, Frances?”

  “I understand that. Unfortunately, we can’t stop living because Chuck is gone.”

  “You’ll see. He’ll get over it,” Molly said, her tone pleading.

  “I’m trying to do it the best way I can, Molly,” Frances said. “I have no desire to hurt you. Either of you.”

  “I know that, dear.”

  “I have to think of what’s best for Tray and Peter and myself.”

  “Of course you do.” Molly paused. “He’s really the salt of the earth, you know,” she said.

  Frances didn’t answer. Whatever Charlie’s intrinsic goodness, he had never been her ally, but always a thorn in her side. She let it pass.

  “We’d better get going,” Peter said. />
  “But dinner is warming—”

  “We’ll get something later. Please. I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s better that we be off.”

  Frances nodded, resisting the urge to embrace Molly. She went up the stairs and called Tray in from the yard.

  “We’re going to eat out,” Frances said.

  “But I thought—” Tray began.

  “Plans changed,” Frances said firmly, taking the boy by the hand. Molly embraced the boy and kissed his head.

  “Where’s Grampa?” Tray asked.

  “Grampa’s tired,” Frances assured him. After a while, Molly released the boy, and Frances, followed by Peter, led him out the door.

  They stopped at McDonald’s, ate rubbery hamburgers, and drove back to her apartment in Dundalk.

  “I don’t think it’s going to work,” Peter said after they had put Tray to bed.

  “Us?” She felt a sudden sense of panic.

  “Us? Not a chance. We’ll work. It’s them. Him. Who needs that pressure? The man is totally beyond logic, caught in an emotional grid-lock. He will never accept us as a couple. And there’s so much resentment. He can only make us miserable. And that can’t be good for Tray.” He stroked Frances’s arm. “I’m just not going to let him do it to us. I know what outside circumstances can do to a marriage.”

  “Time will heal everything, I’m sure,” Frances said.

  “And in the meantime? Why should we have to compromise our own lives for his grief? I’d say it’s his problem, not ours.”

  His words sounded cruel, but there was a lot of truth in his assumptions, she agreed. Why couldn’t Charlie understand? It occurred to her suddenly as she realized that she was concerned with Charlie and Molly’s feelings more than her own and Peter’s. What, after all, did she owe them? Charlie had never given up one iota of his influence over his beloved prince. Frances had been a mere appendage, her needs always secondary to Chuck’s. And Charlie’s. The memory of her powerlessness over events in her early life triggered her even deeper resentment. I am free of them now, she assured herself.

  “How dare he,” she said with a flash of anger. But it quickly dissipated. “I wish it were otherwise.”

  “But it’s not. We have to accept life in the real world.”

  She nodded, well on the road to conviction.

  “The man will only make trouble. Tray will be pushed and pulled and confused.” He sighed and shook his head. “He won’t ever give it up. He’ll never accept me. Never. Molly’s okay, but she’s committed to him. She says she understands. But what can she do about it? It’s sad.”

  “Maybe in time . . .”

  “Maybe. But who needs the aggravation? We’re just starting out, Frances. We need the running room, free from that kind of pressure.” His eyes wandered around the room as if he was visiting it for the first time. Actually, he had been there twice before.

  “So this is what he gave you?”

  “Awful, isn’t it?” Yet she could remember when she had thought it was lovely, a feeling that might have lasted all of two months. She felt ashamed to have settled for so little.

  “You’ll never have to go back to this again, darling. That I promise.” He took her in his arms and kissed her.

  “I don’t want anything to come between us, Peter. To spoil our happiness.”

  “Nothing will.”

  He held her at arm’s length and looked into her eyes. “I’m afraid we’re just going to have to erase them from our lives. At least for now.”

  “I wish there were another way.” A brief tug of uncertainty nagged at her. She knew what it meant to lose people you love. “But I’m afraid it will be a problem.”

  “Which could tear us apart. I’ve been through it, and I don’t ever want it to happen again.” He held her close, and she felt a tremor pass through him.

  “Tray will just have to adjust,” she said firmly, after he had relaxed.

  “Kids are adaptable.”

  “I don’t want anything to come between us,” Frances said emphatically.

  “Listen, I’m going to be the greatest daddy in the world. And my parents will be the most wonderful grandparents in the world. It’s time we started to think about us.”

  Again he kissed her, for a long moment.

  “We’re entitled to start fresh. The hell with the past,” he said, and she felt his hand stroke her hair. “It wasn’t so hot anyhow.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” she agreed, beginning to feel better, more confident.

  “And we have our lives to live. I promise it will be the best, the very best. And I’ll love that child in there with as much feeling and devotion as I love his mother. I know it’s the right thing to do, Frances.”

  “I agree, darling,” she said.

  She felt suddenly as if a great weight had been lifted from her shoulders. She wanted to cry, but she held back her tears.

  3

  WOOD everywhere, Charlie thought, as his gaze circled like a floodlight around the reception room: polished oak with indented panels not unlike those on the walls of the sprawling old Eastern shore mansions that dotted the points around Crisfield. He’d seen them only because as a boy he had been Big Ed’s helper on his chimney sweep rounds back before the war.

  Reminders like that plagued him now, not because they didn’t comfort him in his daydreams, but because they inevitably ended in the present. He shuddered and lit a cigarette. Beside him, Molly looked up from House and Garden to offer a snappish look of disapproval. He had taken up smoking again eighteen months ago, six months after Tray had gone. “No more need to set examples,” he had told her then, lighting up an old-fashioned Camel, unfiltered, the real thing, then inhaling all the way down and exhaling through the nose like in his marine days.

  He might have said “Mind if I smoke?” if the receptionist had been less disdainful. She was young and pretty and sat discreetly behind an antique desk, ignoring them as she answered the phone with cloying ingratiation. “Banks, Pepper and Forte.” It was Forte they had come to see.

  “Smells like money,” he whispered to Molly, waving the smoke away as he bent toward her.

  “It won’t be cheap,” Molly said, watching him over her half-glasses, her blue eyes still cobalt, like Chuck’s, but more watery now than they had been. There were more wrinkles when she smiled, but her figure hadn’t gone to seed. “Fifty-eight and still my girl. You and me, babe.” It was a thought Charlie often voiced, especially in those harsh, fearsome moments in the dead of night when his rabid and unsleeping mind dwelt on the dead Chuck and the missing Tray and the cruel Frances. Thankfully, they had slept like spoons since the beginning of their marriage, which somehow always managed to bring him through the darkness.

  “Nothing cheap wins the day,” he murmured, satisfied that these lawyers were used to winning.

  “They get paid either way,” Molly said, breaking the whispering pattern. It was just like Molly to offer the balanced view, he thought, wishing for more bias on her part.

  “We should have never let it happen in the first place,” Charlie said. The admonition had become the opening of a nasty game between them. She sighed her usual defense.

  “Did we let it happen?” Molly wondered aloud. “How could we have foreseen that it would go on this long? Two years.” She shook her head and pursed her lips. Like him, she was still puzzled and confused.

  “We were suckers. We could have nipped it in the bud.”

  “We had no choice. None at all,” Molly said, removing her half-glasses and closing the magazine, offering the words by rote.

  “You said she would come around in time.” He took a deep drag of smoke, then turned away to expel it, with the words, “Two damned years,” a bit louder than he would have liked. The receptionist smiled thinly. He stared at her without acknowledgment. A tough one to read, he thought. It was hard enough understanding the old ones. The young ones were impossible.

  “Problem is, we haven’t got all that much time.”


  “I hoped she would change her mind,” Molly said gently. After all, it was her defeat as well. He took her hand and patted it. “It seemed so logical. They needed time to adjust. All right. We gave them that. Not this. Not forever. Not for all time.”

  “I know, babe.” They were in this together, weren’t they?

  Seeking legal means just to see their own grandchild, their own flesh and blood. The idea of it was gross; it went against nature. Easy, Charlie, he told himself, trying to stave off a full head of steam. He punched out his cigarette in the ashtray and stood up. Molly’s gaze followed him. He looked at his watch again, which stimulated the old demon, his sense of inferior position. Once again, he must wait, always waiting his turn, never important enough to be seen on time. He hated that feeling. Now it was complicated by a retrospective on a failed life. It wasn’t long ago when he felt things were pretty good. He had a decent job. Paid-up house. Loving wife, a schoolteacher. A helluva son, Chuck, a helluva son. And little Tray, Charles III. He was beautiful, the image of Chuck. A sob bubbled deep in his chest. He masked it with a cough.

  “Sit down, Charlie,” Molly said.

  “I’m sure Mr. Forte won’t be much longer,” the receptionist said, softening somewhat as if she sensed their anguish.

  “Not as easy as I thought.”

  “It’ll only get worse,” Molly said. It was her oblique way of joking.

  “Can’t understand her attitude,” Charlie muttered. When he thought of Frances his midsection tightened up. “Both of them. It makes me so damned angry.”

  “That won’t do us much good.”

  “It’s what I feel.”

  It annoyed him to see Molly always poised at a lesser degree of indignation.

  “I know how you feel. I’m only saying that getting all riled up seems like the wrong strategy.”

  “Next thing you’ll be telling me the bit about catching more flies with honey.”

  “Might be a good idea for a change.”

  “In the end you still have to answer to yourself.”

  “Pretty lonely stuff—answering just to yourself.”

  “I have to say what I mean. Be what I am.”