The Value Of Rain Page 8

  “He’s dying,” I said as soon as Caufield picked up. “I mean like right now.”

  “This instant?” Caufield asked with alarm. “Call an ambulance!”

  “No, I mean he’s dying Caufield. How the hell am I supposed to handle that?” I hadn’t really considered it before I left; only my freedom had seemed important at the time.

  He was quiet for a moment. “You can’t have already forgotten that Snow died alone, Charles. The most ardent passions a man finds within himself is in those moments when he realizes he’s dying. Stay with him. You owe him that at least, and you might learn something too.”

  “That’s a low blow, Caufield.” I answered.

  “No, it’s a reality check. Henry’s been alone his entire life. I doubt very much that he wants to die that way.”

  “But what am I supposed to do? I don’t know how to care for him.”

  “He’s got a caretaker and a house keeper. Both of them know who you are.”

  “They know I came from the nut house? That’s an introduction!”

  “No, they only know that you and your father hadn’t known of each other before now.” Caufield answered.

  “So, what do I do?”

  “Just be there, Charles. Open yourself up. Trust him. You might be surprised.”

  I hung up and stared at the phone. “Yeah, easy to say.”

  *****

  We sat on the back porch, a deceiving expanse of green hidden behind his little house. The warmth of the late April was still holding, and Henry, refreshed after a few weeks of serious rest, was holding with it.

  “How’d you meet Charlotte?” I asked him. Our conversations had grown cordial, the ghosts of our own reserve diminishing as the weeks passed. We had talked of many things since my arrival, but had never gotten up the nerve to talk past the mundane. My sudden question changed that.

  He smiled slightly. “On a dare from one of my drinking buddies. They bet me a case of beer that I couldn’t get a date with the ‘Ice Princess’. That’s what they called her; said she was a beautiful cold bitch.”

  “Was she?” I asked, mesmerized that his friends had met the same person I knew as mother all those years before my existence.

  His eyes went off to the distance. “At first, no. She warmed right up to me. It only took us a few weeks before we were married.”

  “She told me you were a nigger lover and a whore monger.”

  His head jerked in my direction in surprise. He looked at me and blinked. “She said that?”

  I nodded. “But my grandfather said you were more honest than Charlotte could tolerate. Honest enough that you knew that you would never survive at her side.”

  Henry nodded. “Francois was pretty sharp. After New Orleans your mother changed. Or maybe it was her true personality that emerged, I’m not sure really. I just knew I couldn’t live like that.”

  “Would it have changed anything if you had known about me?”

  He looked out over the yard, listening to the birds trill in the spring sunshine. “I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “Your mother was a very bitter woman just then. I don’t know that she would have allowed us a relationship even if I had known.”

  Something here didn’t make sense to me. Charlotte had just gotten married and gone on her honeymoon; what did she have to be bitter about. “What changed her in New Orleans?” I asked.

  He continued looking out over the freshly mown grass, intent on not hearing my question. “Dr. Smith told me you had a sister.”

  “Mmm,” I nodded. “Her name is Happenstance, but she goes by Penny. I don’t know her now. The last time I saw her she was just a kid and I was on my way to the nuthouse.”

  “Who’s her father?” he asked.

  “Don’t know. Charlotte refused to tell me anything about you, so I expect she did the same with Penny. I do know she hated being pregnant.”

  He glanced over at me, asking for more information with his eyes. I got the distinct impression that he still had feelings for Charlotte, but refused to admit them, even to himself. I wondered if it was those same feelings that had kept him alone all his life and prevented him from discussing New Orleans with me all these years later.

  “Well, she didn’t have that soft full look of a contented pregnancy, I can tell you that much. She wore Penny like a hard piece of lard hanging off of her.” I chuckled. “Her pregnancy looked like a polyp. Charlotte knew that and hated it.”

  “Why’d she get pregnant then?” Henry asked.

  I shrugged, unknowing.

  “She didn’t remarry then?”

  I stretched my memory. Penny’s father was a vague shadow in my mind. All I remember of the situation was that Charlotte’s idea of marital harmony was a pouch in which her partner would be smothered and segregated from the rest of society. His one and only breath was to be used to manifest his total devotion. I don’t think the guy had the same idea. He disappeared just as Henry had.

  “Do you regret it?” I asked after I explained.

  “What?”

  “Leaving.”

  He looked up at the sky and I watched him follow the horizon from one side of his yard to the other. “For you, yes. There was nothing more for Charlotte and me though.”

  “She killed the marriage,” I said; half question, half statement.

  “Yes,” his eyebrows did a quick jump but his gaze remained distant. “She killed it.”

  “Because of New Orleans?” I pressed.

  He turned and looked at me with silent regard. “I won’t discuss that Charles. It was between your mother and me,” he answered. “Unfortunately, one never gets to know all the secrets and motivations of one’s parents. Whether they are good or bad, the privacy of their lives is best left to them. Usually they’re trying to shield you or themselves from some kind of pain. And our secrets are the one thing we’re allowed to die with,” he said brusquely before he tottered into the house on his newly acquired walker.

  I watched him through the screen as he faded into the interior.

  “Huh.” I said to myself, turning back to the lawn that I had mowed and raked this morning.

  It was odd that Henry kept pushing me to understand Charlotte, but yet could never fully explain the snippet of conniving silence he had about the dark brevity of their own relationship.

  I wondered if, since he had married her so late in life, he had thought that a woman would make him more complete. He probably didn’t realize that he had married her to avoid a late middle age worry of purposelessness until they were on their way back from New Orleans.

  But something happened in New Orleans; something significant. It was important enough that it forced an aging man concerned about how the thread of his life was going to be woven to suddenly drop that thread and hack off the small knot he had made in it with his marriage. Something Charlotte had done, or said….

  I watched a squirrel scamper across the yard, wondering what it could be.

  *****

  The mailbox was screwed into the wall right next to the front door. From the kitchen I heard the rattle of its metal cover and then the receding footsteps of the mailman. When I thought it was clear, I poked my head around the door and looked through the living room to the front porch, hesitating only slightly as I went to retrieve it.

  Prod me as Henry might, I had not yet ventured any further than the mailbox. The lack of solid walls around me was too unnerving. Ten years of reinforced concrete and razor wire has that affect, no matter how adjustable Caufield considered me. And with the housekeeper and the caregiver visiting us, there was really no need for me to leave. So why do it?

  I unlatched the screen snatched the mail out and latched the door before I turned around. Henry was leaning on his walker watching me. I jumped at the sight of him, and handed him the mail with a sheepish grin.

  He nodded toward the end table for the mail and sighed. “Sit,” he directed me as he ambled over to the couch and sat down. “Have you talked with Caufield abo
ut this?” he asked, nodding towards the door.

  Henry had begun calling Caufield by his first name because I always looked at him like a confused puppy when he said Dr. Smith. He had also insisted that I ask Caufield about my agoraphobia.

  “He said it will pass,” I told Henry.

  He made a frown of disbelief but settled back into the couch as he acquiesced to the professional opinion he’d asked me to seek.

  But I hadn’t asked Caufield anything. I didn’t want him to think that I was failing at life, and, more importantly, I didn’t know how to explain that tight crinkly feeling of having cobwebs stretched across my face every time I stepped out the door.

  It wasn’t just that I felt uncomfortable in Providence; I never fit back in Potsham either. Maybe it was another of Charlotte’s compunctions handed down to me. She hadn’t fit in Potsham at all. Her and her aspirations of a trap rock house and her ridiculous half-baked claims of descending from Southern aristocracy only fueled the pretentious arrogance of the multitude of New Yorkers who had retired there. No matter how many French antiques she’d collected; no matter how many vases she filled with pussy willows and lilacs; no matter that she could find the best bull rushes, the prettiest dogwoods, the sweetest apples, she still lived in a broken down house on the wrong side of the tracks. And for the imported wealth misers who had retired in the grand Connecticut country manner, this would never do. They had an enforced social status; a minted New York heritage that far outweighed the worth of some traipsing Southern belle.

  The fables Charlotte voiced only cinched their hands tighter and made their eyes warble in suspicion. It didn’t take long for their intense scrutiny and constant search for flaws to leave her uneasy and fearful of ridicule and exposure. (Though I was sure she’d garnered much of that attention long before I came along.)

  But that was the shadow I had grown up in; a deer waiting for one of the true aristocracy of Potsham to shine me and post my head above their mantle. How could I have known that the beam would be held in the hands of my own family? Or that Charlotte would turn into mother Rimbaud after my disgraceful banishment?

  How could I ever begin to explain this to Henry and Caufield?

  I watched Henry as he collected pillows and propped them around himself. I couldn’t call him father or dad or pop; he simply wasn’t. He was just Henry; an insistent, persistent man who tenaciously argued that Charlotte gave me my hate in order to ensure her own emotional survival. He postulated that I was the one that kept her manacle bolted to my leg; that it was I who insisted on furrowing the ground with that hard ball of malice I dragged behind me.

  When he positioned himself to his liking, I gathered, rightly, that this was to be another conversation of the same sort.

  “What do you plan on doing when I’m dead, Charles? I’m asking because it will probably be sooner than either of us would like, and I don’t think you’re ready to survive on your own,” Henry said.

  I stared at him, suddenly petrified that it could happen at any moment. He’d never spoken so openly about it before. “I … I don’t know,” I told him.

  He waved his hand around at our surroundings. “The house and everything else will be yours, Charles. But what are you going to do, Charles? You can’t hide behind these walls forever. When I die our help leaves with me.” He meant the housekeeper, of course; that wonderful old woman who spoiled me with Greek cookies and baklava.

  I shook my head. I didn’t know what I would do. We’d gone over his finances, so I knew I’d be financially secure, but he wasn’t talking about that. He was talking about life; about living; about all those crazy dreams I’d had before my release. For ten years I’d been unable to caress nature; deprived of the tart weedy scent of dandelions; bereft of the purr of honeybees. I had touched upon all that in his back yard, but that wasn’t living either.

  “Charles, you’re the most guarded and withdrawn person I’ve ever known. With cause, but that still doesn’t stop you from craving love,” he said. “It is okay, you know. It’s a normal human craving. But I think you’re afraid to give love back, Charles. Whether that’s Charlotte’s fault, I don’t know. But there are some things about her that you need to understand in order for you to be able to step out that door,” he said as he nodded toward the screen.

  “You’ve talked to her?” I asked.

  “No.”

  I sensed something in his voice. Was it regret; defeat? I let it go.”Tell me.”

  “Your commitment was her defeat, Charles. She acquiesced, true, but that was her limit. After time it was a decision she was stuck with; one that gave her little to rest on except bitterness and anger. She’s still dependant on your betrayal for her life, Charles. It’s the only anchor she has, and you’re feeding right into keeping her, and it, alive.”

  I exploded from my chair. “My name isn’t a joke! It’s a declaration of antipathy. How the fuck do you explain that?” I demanded at the top of my lungs.

  “But you haven’t changed it,” Henry said calmly, looking up at me.

  I gaped at him and sat back down. Charlotte could manipulate anything and anyone. She had a shrewd smooth polish that had always kept her thinking of an angle while staying at least two steps removed from the people she abused and the situations she created. Henry was right; I hadn’t changed my name, even though it had been one of the first things I had planned on doing upon my release.

  “She seeks your hate, Charles. It keeps her alive. She settles for it because she can’t tolerate the thought of your love. Not after all these years. Love is too heavy with need and expectation. She needs hate to keep her from going crazy with the idea of the person she is verses the person she could have been. Do you understand this? If you release that hate, you’ve relinquished her grip forever.”

  Bullshit, I thought, but I nodded contemplatively for his sake. Henry didn’t know Charlotte and couldn’t fathom her. It seemed to me that he had some kind of bizarre dream of me reuniting with my family. But I simply couldn’t picture it; I couldn’t overcome the feeling of required civility it would entail. In every scene I envisioned I saw that nobody wanted to be there. Yet Henry made it preposterous by pretending the opposite. I had to refrain from asking him whether the family in his vision fully detested me or if they simply had no idea how to welcome me and suppress all their useless, though well earned guilt.

  “I’m trying, Henry,” I offered him.

  “Have you considered paying your respects at Robert’s grave?” he asked.

  It was an innocent question, but I wanted to leap across the room and rip his heart out. “I can’t. Not yet. I’m afraid that if I find it, that I’ll bash my brains out on the stone below his epitaph.”

  “He’s been dead ten years, Charles, almost eleven.”

  “I know,” I said, my voice very tight. “I spent four years at Sanctuary and another six at the Birch Building thinking about it. I know very well how long he’s been dead.”

  Robert had died for love; my love. And a part of me had died with him. It was not a small part either; it was hope and courage and joy. It was the unrealized fulfillment of need; the crisp unfolded leaf of desire; the flatness of pain. What the fuck did this man know about any of that?

  “You’re angry,” Henry said. “I’m sorry Charles. I didn’t mean to make you angry. I just want you to be ready for my death.”

  “You expect it soon?” I asked him.

  He looked down at the carpet. “Yes,” he answered quietly, “I do.”

  My anger evaporated in an instant. “Henry…”

  “I’m old, Charles. I don’t know how much longer I can hold out. If it hadn’t been for you, I would have let it all go some time back. I’m hanging on by a thread.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  He smiled slightly and nodded. “Free yourself from Charlotte. If nothing else, do that.”

  I watched him get up and make his way back to his bedroom. I said nothing because there was nothing I could say. My
hate would not evaporate with his mere wishes; even his death wish wasn’t strong enough to curb it. Charlotte viewed me as something akin to syphilis; creeping its way into the brain and bringing with it blindness, disability, and ultimately death. I could not forgive her for it, and I could not promise Henry I would.

  Two months later disease had sculpted Henry’s cheeks flat and hollow and had given him the bitter coppery odor of fading marigolds. He lay in his bed almost inert; a slight breathy voice, moving eyes and the hesitating movement of his hand his only communication.

  He had refused the ambulance, the doctor, and the hospital and banished his nurse to the living room. He wanted dignity and privacy, and he wanted me there with him when he went. I was terrified.

  “How old are you now, Charles? Twenty four, twenty five?”

  “Twenty five, next month.”

  “You can still have a life Charles. You’re still young.” His voice was nothing more than a whisper.

  “I can’t even get passed the damned porch, Henry.”

  He smiled. “But you will.”

  I nodded hesitantly. I could do it. I’d been to Snow’s funeral only last year and had no problems. I could do it again. If I had to.

  “Don’t let yourself be like me, Charles. Don’t sit around regretting the past and reducing yourself to living on what could have been. That’s not living; it’s avoidance. If you need to, go someplace that has no connection; somewhere where there’s no potential for attachment and betrayal. That’s what you’re really afraid of Charles. Isn’t it?”

  I nodded, and he nodded with me.

  “You let your fears rule your life and you’ll end up like me. Constantly if, if, if…”

  “Even with Charlotte there’s an if?” I asked him.

  “That’s the biggest if of all, Charles.”

  “New Orleans?” I asked him.

  He nodded again. “If…” He frowned at the thought and winced at some internal pain.

  I took his hand and leaned forward in my chair as his breath grew shallow. Please, I thought, don’t leave me now. Not now.