The Incredible Charlie Carewe (32 page)

“Come here, boy; hyuh, boy,” he whispered, and the small black dachshund puppy yipped in a vigorous whisper, bouncing over to the bed and, placing two forepaws on the edge, begged to be taken up.

John hugged him and scratched the velvet ears, and found the tag hanging from a chain on his neck.

“What’s your name, fellow, huh—what’s your name? Hold still, what’s this say—’D—E—I—N—O—S’ Dynuss?” The dog wagged his tail vigorously and licked his face. “Deenuss?” Again the tail beat ecstatically. “Well, no matter, it’s a pretty fancy name, Deany, old boy.” The dog yelped and John shushed him, tumbling out of the bed. Pawing through the closet, he found his dark blue jeans hanging neatly on a pants hanger, alongside his new clothes. And in one of the drawers he found his red turtle-neck pullover. They would do for now, he thought, and somebody would tell him what he should wear later. Cautiously the boy walked down the hall, with Deimos running ahead and down the stairs, delirious with the fun of having a playmate.

The house stunned him with awe, even at this second look, but he postponed the examination of every inch of it.

The air was brisk and chilly, but there was already a warm caress from the sun, which had cleared the low streak of purple clouds on the horizon.

Deimos galloped around him and he yielded and together they had a soul-lifting run down the beach. They found shells, and played with ropes of seaweed. They dug for the little sand crabs that burrowed deeper—they piled up mounds of damp sand, and John tasted his sandy fingers, thinking, “It’s not
exactly
salty, it’s like something that’s so salty that it isn’t——”

And then he heard the sound of a bell clanging in a twangy dingdong, and looked toward the house to see Aunt Virginia waving him to come in. He ran up the beach to the low wall, taking it in a jump as though it were three feet high, the dog scrambling and panting after him.

“Well, good morning, John. You’re an early bird! I see you and Deinos have met.”

“Good morning, Aunt Virginia. Yeah, is that the way you pronounce his name? He’s a wonderful dog. Does he belong to my father?”

Virginia put an arm around his shoulder. “Well, he’s just one of a long line of dachsies—we’ve always had one or two around as long as I can remember. This fellow’s a bit of a wanderer; if you like, you can call him yours, and feed him and take care of him. Maybe with you around he won’t run away all the time.”

“Oh boy! Can I? Really?”

She steered him to the washroom in the front hall, where he kept up a running conversation with her while he washed the sand from his fists, and Virginia smiled and shook her head in the effort to clear it of a mirage: herself at the same age and her brother, pushing and shoving and laughing over this same washbowl, washing up for breakfast in the sunroom.

He was relieved at the informality at breakfast. Gregg was also in dark jeans and a dark blue pullover, even Virginia’s plain green wool dress was simple enough. Only Grandmother looked like something out of a storybook. She was all laces and ruffles and her white hair was piled high with a comb in the back, and she took his hand as he came into the room, and pulled him to have him kiss her cheek. He felt tight with shyness all of a sudden, but mumbled as well as he could, “Good morning, Grand-mère—uh—I mean Grandmother, I hope you slept well last night.” She seemed even older than Grand-mère, who was his
great
-grandmother. She was like tissue paper, and her skin felt dry and soft like a bird’s wing.

But everybody smiled and talked and made him feel comfortable. Grandfather heaped his plate with sausage and eggs, laughing and saying, “I know boys of your age are always hungry, you’ll find this sea air will make you even hungrier!”

He sneaked a bit of sausage to Deinos and Smitty, who were looking at him longingly beside his chair, and then looked at Gregg. “Is it all right? To give them nibbles?”

Gregg said, “We make firm rules about never feeding the dogs in the house, and then everybody breaks them, because nobody lives who can resist a dachshund’s desperate eyes!”

John laughed and said, “What does the puppy’s name mean? It looks Latin to me—or Greek.”

“
Does
it now?” said Gregg, raising an eyebrow. “Oh, forgive me, I forgot you’re a student of Homer. Well, it’s Greek and it means ‘terrible.’ ”

“ ‘Terrible’!” exclaimed John. “Why’d you call him ‘Terrible’?”

“Just because he isn’t. It’s a trope, an antiphrasis, which is Greek for a word meaning the opposite of what you really mean.”

“How, Gregg?”

“Well, suppose you did something stupid—real stupid—and I said, ‘That was clever!’ You’d know what I meant, wouldn’t you?”

“Sure, I get it now, like ‘irony’.”

“Not quite, John.”

Walter groaned and turned to the others. “Always the schoolmaster! Virginia, let’s talk about the weather, shall we—and give me some marmalade, please.”

But John’s eyes were waiting for an answer. Gregg thought, “How like, and how different!” Never had Charlie looked at him like that. Charlie’s eyes had always been flat and vague. But these, with the same color and faintly uptilted shape, bored into him with a thousand questions. With a happy sigh he started, “Well, you see, John, irony is more a tone of voice . . .”

Presently John said, “Are you going to teach me Greek and Latin later on?”

Virginia said, “Is that you, purring, Gregg? I can hear it clear over here!”

Gregg smiled. “That’s right, Virginia—now the pitcher is
really
full!” He turned back to John. “Tell you what. I’ll teach you Greek, so that you can read your
Iliad
and
Odyssey
in the original, if you will correct my French idiom and accent. It will take us both about an equal length of time, I should think.”

John blushed. “Oh, I didn’t mean anything when I said you had a funny accent—it’s just that it sounds like it’s coming out of a book.” And everybody laughed and Deinos barked and John said, “You know, I feel terrible—that’s a
trope
, son!” and grinned, and thought he’d never been so happy in his whole life.

Within two weeks, John felt that he’d lived there all his life, and Clarke Falls slipped into the background of his mind like a memory of the cradle. His own room, still smelling of paint and new linoleum, was thrillingly his own domain. It was on the third floor, beyond the stair well on the northeast side. Empty for many years, since Doreen and Kitty and the gardener had fine quarters over the garage, the old, boxlike servants’ rooms, three of them, had been made into one room and a new bath. What pleased him most was that Grandfather and the others had actually
prepared
for him, as though they expected him to be part of the family; oh, he’d be spending some time back at home, but there were no dire threats of “being sent back if you don’t behave,” as Grand-mère had implied.

There were bright Hudson’s Bay blanket rugs on the linoleum, sailcloth hung at the windows, and the big bouncy bed was covered with tan corduroy; there were shelves and closets and a real workbench at one end of the room where he could build his airplane models. There was little furniture, giving a boy a chance to breathe and move freely. The low window sills asked for elbows to lean and dream at glimpses of the meadow and the river through the near top branches of an elm. And on the east the view of the Point and the sea and Deinos chasing sea gulls, which was the best of all. And all of it seemed to John just to be waiting for the day when his father would arrive. He asked questions of everyone, direct and indirect, but nobody would come to the point.

Kitty said, “I have never met Mr. Charles, I’ve only been with the family for six months.” Doreen said, “When I was young, like Kitty here, Cook used to always make two batches of cookies—one for your father to think he was swiping from, and the other to keep ‘on hand.’ ” Grandmother was no help at all. She had long stories about his father when he was a “darling little boy,” and how he used to sit on her lap while she told him stories. He kept from squirming in boredom, because his father as a little boy was just not interesting to him.

Mr. Simmons, the gardener, was no better. John made himself useful and helped Simmons with the wheelbarrow, hauling away cuttings and weeds, hoping for just one beaming look that said, “Your father? A fine man!” but instead Simmons confined himself to grumbling. “Time was, we had two other part-time fellers around. Place was kept shipshape, you might say. Nobody cares much n’more. Missus used to like to fool around with bulbs, and now the Mister, he says, ‘Don’t fuss.’ I do m’best, but can’t keep it shipshape. Ay-uh, I do m’best.”

One didn’t bother Grandfather with questions, and he just couldn’t ask Gregg and Aunt Virginia to repeat what they had already told him: “As soon as he can, he said. . . .”

Sometimes his impatience put a band around his chest. He had completed a fine solid scale model of a B-29, so that he’d have it ready to show his father. He’d taught Deinos a couple of tricks, to “play dead” and to jump through the hoop of his arm. He’d gone through his childish collection of treasures that he’d saved back in Clarke Falls to show him, and kept only the medal for swimming—the rest was just silly, now.

It was only during “school hours” that he was more at peace. Gregg was the best teacher he’d ever had, he thought; even better than Grand-mère. He took it slow and easy with him, he didn’t make him learn a lot of stuff by rote memorizing. They didn’t try to cover pages and pages of stuff. Sometimes they spent the whole time in trying to understand just one paragraph—of history for instance. John would be quite sure he understood and then Gregg would start his “whys?” “Why do you suppose he decided to do that?” and at first John replied, “I don’t know, he just did.” But then they would, as Gregg said, “Dig it out,” and they’d get into a fine discussion. “Maybe he was greedy and wanted to kind of have everybody thinking he was important.” Or—and then a light would go on—“Maybe he felt that if somebody didn’t stir them up, why, things would go on as before!”

Once he blurted out, without thinking, “Why are you going to all this trouble? Did my father ask you to? Was he afraid I wouldn’t be good enough for the schools back here?”

Gregg considered his question carefully before answering. “I was a teacher first, and became a friend. Now I am a friend who happens to be a teacher. You are more than ‘good enough’ for the schools back here, even though they may place different emphasis on certain subjects. And believe me, John, it is no ‘trouble’ because we learn from each other. Why, do you remember the other day, you brought out the point that . . .”

His answer pleased John, but he felt, somehow, that his question hadn’t been answered.

Gregg had wheeled the big Webster dictionary and its stand into John’s room, as he wanted John to look up every word he read that he couldn’t define. He couldn’t get away with “I know what it means, but I just can’t put it into other words.”

So it was, one day, when he was looking up the meaning of the word “ambiguous,” that he had his back to the door and someone said, “John?” He answered, “Yes?” without turning. A fraction of a second later he realized the voice was not a familiar one and wheeled around as Charlie said:

“Well, hi there, John—I’m your father!”

He felt his jaw drop in silly shock—all the imagined words that had come so easily in anticipation of this moment—the feeling that his Adam’s apple had suddenly grown larger—it seemed an age, but lasted no longer than the quick intake of breath, for as he let out he said, “Well—hello, Father!”

Charlie looked around at the airy, bright room. “Looks like they’ve got you fixed up real nice, here. Did you get my presents?”

And in a flood of words, John thanked him with many “Gee’s” and “Oh boys” and “gashes”; proudly he showed him the airplane model, and the new one he was starting on. He showed him the closetful of slacks and sweaters and T-shirts, he said he’d never seen such a keen tennis racket, and would he teach him to play?

Charlie seemed to have little to say; he walked around with his hands in his pockets, nodding and smiling, but finally he said, as they stood in front of the window—John had been pointing out the high branch to which he had climbed—“It’s a damn shame, you know.”

John stopped a moment in his chatter, looked up at him, and said, “What is?”

“That you and I should have been kept apart all these years. How could they do it, son?”

“I don’t know, Father. Maybe it was because they thought you wouldn’t want me.”

Charlie pursed his lips as though he didn’t dare to comment on such a possibility. “Well,” he said, finally, “don’t you worry—we’ll make up for it. We’ll have the finest kind of life you can imagine.” He sat down on the bed and hooked up a knee in his clasped bands. John happily dropped to the floor where he could sit and look up at his father adoringly, listening to every word, learning the features of his face, the wonderful admirable relaxed manner.

“You know, son”—Charlie’s voice was low and confidential—“I’ll tell you the truth. A lot of this is my fault. I’ve always been kind of a wild character. I’ve done a lot of things I’m ashamed of—we all do, we’re only human. But I was deeply hurt when your mother ran out on me. I would have given her everything in the world.”

“Well, why did she?” John was eager, the mystery was about to unfold.

“I don’t know—I don’t know,” and Charlie’s expression seemed puzzled, bewildered.

“Well, don’t you worry.” John grinned at him. “One thing for sure, I’m not going to ‘run out’ on you.”

“You’d better not try it,” laughed Charlie, giving him a playful punch on the shoulder, “you’re my son—God, doesn’t that sound queer!—and I want you here, with me and my family. As a matter of fact, now that you are here, the place looks pretty attractive to me, and I expect I’ll be spending more time up here in Nelson. I’ve got my business well in hand and it doesn’t require so much of my attention as it has in the past.”

“Well, will I come to see you at your home in New York when you
are
there?”

Charlie hesitated. “Well—uh—I don’t have my apartment any more, since my wife died—Zoë, I mean. I expect you’ve been told about her.” John nodded. “I found it too full of happy memories, too full of ghosts. No, I gave it up—I just stay at the club or a hotel——” He sounded as though he must be terribly lonely and John determined to devote himself to making his father’s life a happier one, and, thinking about it, his heart seemed too big for his chest.