Twilight Child

by Warren Adler

  “I don’t care about the money,” she had muttered. It had become her principal refrain by then.

  “You’re not going to ruin things on my last night, are you, Frances?”

  “Don’t go, Chuck,” she pleaded. “There’s still time.”

  “I’ve signed the papers. You can’t expect me to go back on my word.”

  “I don’t care about that.”

  “Well, I do. A man’s word is everything. Besides, I know it’s best, you’ll see.”

  “I love you, Chuck. I can’t bear to think about being alone. We’ve only been married four months. Doesn’t it bother you to leave me?”

  “Of course it does. You just don’t understand.” She saw him shift inwardly, saw his mood change. She had remembered his father’s words.

  “A man’s got to do what he’s got to do,” she mimicked.

  “Now you’ve got it.” He had failed to see the sarcasm. “I need to do this.”

  “Would you have done it if I had gotten rid of the baby?”

  “That’s bad talk, Frances,” he said with growing impatience. “It’s all set. You just handle it. I’ll be back before you can blink your eyes.”

  The memory disintegrated. She had been prescient, had seen a glimpse of the future. Even then she had known that he had left her forever. His death had merely been the signature on the writ of separation. But the old anger returned. He had deserted her. He hadn’t been there when Tray was born. And his contribution to his son’s welfare had been an occasional toy. As for the big money that foreign employment had promised, she had seen precious little of that, as well.

  “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.

  8

  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 en
ough 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 co
mmodities 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.

  The old sandlot where he had played first base was a Safeway by then, and the so-called lover’s lane a couple of miles from town, near the shore where, before the war, the kids went in their jalopies to neck, had become rows of fancy waterfront homes. They had had a good manly laugh about the necking, which was barely comprehensible to Chuck at that time.

  “We didn’t know much about sex then,” he had told Chuck, blushing to his roots, less from the explanation than because of the memory. Sexual prowess in those days was measured by a hand cupped around a breast on the outside of the brassiere. “For the real thing you went down the road to Maggie’s.” Chuck had nodded as if he had understood. It was in the telling that Charlie had found the real joy, the recounting that stimulated recall. It gave him the feeling that he was imparting secret knowledge to his son, his seed, passing coded information from one generation to the next.

  They had driven past where Maggie’s had been, along a road that was once a narrow two-laner and had become a four-lane highway. He knew the spot, almost by instinct. To his surprise, it had become a McDonald’s. Father and son got a kick out of that and had a Big Mac and a giggle to mark the occasion. On that day, he had also taken Chuck to all the best places where they had fished and hunted and played; and he had pointed out where his grandfather, who was a crab fisherman, had first taught him to sail a tiny skiff and where his father and he went clamming when his father got home from his traveling salesman chores.