Charlie dropped his napkin on the table and quietly went upstairs. My mother insisted I follow him. “Go up and make sure he doesn’t take anything,” she whispered. All evening, she’d been trying to head off some imaginary disaster.
Reluctantly, I stood up and, to appease her, I followed Charlie upstairs. I remembered a Christmas long before when he’d been accused of stealing forty dollars from my grandmother’s purse. The family had made too big a deal out of it, talking in hushed voices about the pilfered money. He’d stolen from everyone else in the family as well, I knew, with the exception of perhaps me. From the very beginning, he’d always had my back.
As soon as I reached the top of the stairwell, I veered into my room.
Charlie had gone into Whitney’s room, where I knew some of his old clothes still hung in the closet, along with some World War II Russian uniforms Whitney had collected.
“Franny, do you think Whitney’ll mind if I take one of these shirts?” Charlie, who must have heard me, called out.
I walked through the shared bathroom into Whitney’s room, where Charlie held up a blue oxford shirt on a hanger.
“Why not? Those shirts have been there for years. Whitney has all his clothes down in Florida.”
“Okay, just checking.” He sniffed the shirt. “Boy, you’d think Mom might get ’em cleaned once in a while, though.”
I took the shirt and looked it over. “Maybe just keep it out overnight? The smell will go away.”
“So you’re staying here, huh?” he said without the slightest trace of resentment. “I’ll stay down at the River Place Inn.”
I pictured the shirt hanging off the bedpost in his hotel room, at Stroh River Place, the hotel that we’d developed, owned, and then lost in foreclosure, while Charlie slumbered underneath the sterile covers. “Yes,” I said. “But I never sleep well here.” I wished I could give him my room.
“Too bad. You could have joined me at the bar.”
“I know.” I hugged him. “Hey, I’ll see you in the morning, though, at the meeting.”
After Charlie left, Arkady and I cleared the table while my mother scrubbed the pots with a Brillo pad, steam rising around her exhausted face. The goose grease sat in a tomato-soup can by the sink.
“Make sure you never give Charlie anything for Christmas that he could sell for drugs,” she warned. “Remember the time Bill Penner sent him the big-screen TV? He’d wanted one so badly, and then he sold it within a week.” She shook her head sadly and went over to take a pie out of the oven. The party had broken up before dessert was even served.
I sat down at the kitchen table. “Obviously I’m going to send him a Christmas present,” I said.
“Socks or underwear, though. That’s what I do every year.” My mother gave me this same advice every so often. I had yet to follow it.
“Come on, Mom, realistically how many pairs of socks and underwear does he need?”
“At least he’ll know you were thinking of him.” She dropped the pie from her oven glove onto the counter, knocking off a bit of crust. “Poor Charlie. He was never as smart as the rest of you. I spent years helping him with his speech, helping him learn all the things that came naturally to you and Bobby, and Whitney. He got a great deal of attention. More than all the rest of you put together, in fact.”
“Yeah, well, Dad was pretty hard on him,” I said. I flashed to Charlie quickly gathering up all the Indian beads on the bed as my father’s footsteps came down the long hallway, toward his room.
“Genes play a much larger role in how we develop than environment. The more I look around, the more I see this.” My mother sliced the pie and brought two plates over to the kitchen table. “When Gari and John married Susie and Lou, there just wasn’t enough variety of genes.”
For as long as I could remember, I’d been hearing my mother say the Stroh family’s paltry gene pool came from those two brothers marrying two sisters—Susie and Lou, who drank martinis as if they were water. I myself leaned more toward the nurture side of the nature versus nurture debate.
“Dad picked on the defenseless ones, if you ask me,” I said. “Bobby and I turned out okay because he liked us better, don’t you think? I mean, we could stand up to him, for one thing.” Bobby had once told me a story about throwing a baked potato at my father in the course of an argument, which caused my father to back down with a sort of respect.
My mother chewed her pie. “I still think nearly all of it’s genes.”
“Genes are very important,” Arkady agreed. “They decide almost everything.”
I looked at my boyfriend as he loaded the dishwasher and for a moment wondered what planet he was from. Of course that’s what had attracted me to begin with—his utter certainty about things.
I took a bite of pie and thought about all the years of misplaced blame in our family. Whether it was the business going down the tubes or Charlie’s demise, no one wanted to take responsibility; even our genes seemed little more than convenient scapegoats.