“Let’s say good-bye to him,” I finally said, halfway out of my seat.
My mother’s hand clenched my forearm. “No, Frances. I can’t take anything more. Please. Just . . . let him go.”
I turned my head, stricken, and watched Charlie wander off to his gate, disappearing into the crowd. He glanced our way but his eye never caught mine. Had he seen us? Perhaps it didn’t matter. The moment was lost. I gathered my purse, boarded my flight, and just before takeoff vomited in the jet’s toilet.
It was the last time we ever saw him.
Flowers
CHARLIE STROH, 1970
(by Eric Stroh)
San Francisco, 2003
The phone rang out into the sun-filled room and I answered quickly, taking care not to disturb the baby next to me on the sofa. It was Charlie’s voice on the line.
“Franny! I’m at the Hyatt in Dallas,” he said. “With my new lady friend. Here—talk to her.”
I lay on my side with the phone balanced at my ear. My tiny, blue-veined son slept in the hollow of my armpit. Suddenly, an unfamiliar female voice greeted me, and we exchanged friendly words before Charlie returned to the line. “Her old man’s threatening to kill me,” he said with an unmistakable thrill in his voice. “He’s circling the parking lot in a Hummer—with a shotgun in the front seat.”
“Maybe you should call the police,” I said, my body tensing. Mishka squirmed in the crease of my arm and began to cry. I wondered if Charlie was just high, or whether there was in fact a real threat. Arkady was cooking borscht in the kitchen, and I nearly called out to him.
“Did you get the flowers?” Charlie suddenly asked. “Those were Roxanne’s idea.”
I looked over at the flowers sitting on a table, a mélange of pink roses, baby’s breath, and daffodils. “I love them,” I told him. “You’re the only one who sent me flowers.”
“Yeah? Well, I can’t wait to meet my nephew,” said Charlie, his voice bursting with pride. “I’ll come visit you in June. I promise.”
Though Charlie had never come to see me in San Francisco, we talked on the phone reasonably often. A few years before I moved here, he told me, he’d taken a floor of rooms at the Fairmont Hotel and thrown a raging party. Good times.
“I’m going to hold you to that, Charlie,” I said, before getting off the phone, almost believing he would come. “Okay? So I’ll see you in June, then.”
Charlie had taken to migrating from one Dallas hotel to the next, moving on when he’d worn out his welcome. Bill Penner, who by now had become a father figure for him, not only paying the bills but also offering him much-needed guidance, was the only one who knew his whereabouts on a consistent basis.
“Charlie’s a damn nice guy,” Bill would say to me over the phone when I’d call him to check on Charlie. “Shame he doesn’t have a better relationship with your dad.”
My father’s attitude toward Charlie had only further soured over the years. In his mind, this second-born son seemed to represent all his own failures as a human being. “I wish I could push a button and just make him disappear,” my father said more than once.
Both my parents had completely detached themselves from Charlie. “I had to create distance,” my mother said. “It’s the only way I can live.” It was three years since she’d spoken with him—since the family meeting.
June came and went in a blur of sleepless nights, with Mishka feeding every two hours. In my delirium I would flash to his April birth, the midwife coaxing me out of our bathtub and onto the bed as I labored, coaching me in her heavy German accent to push. Arkady brought aromatic herbs and berries from the kitchen, distracting me from the agony. And the breaks between contractions had felt glorious, an intense endorphin high—what I imagined heroin must be like.
When Mishka arrived, Arkady and I looked at each other and laughed out loud, then cried. The midwife placed our baby’s body on my stomach, and my love flared, fierce and unconditional. Then she sewed me up by the light of our living room lamp with the shade removed while Mishka blindly navigated my chest.
I never remembered to call Charlie about his visit; maybe I’d never really believed it would happen. We could go years, after all, without seeing each other. The distance had come to feel . . . normal.
And then, one windswept day in July, the phone rang. All day something had felt off—a weight, a fatigue, something beyond the usual. Mishka was napping in the bedroom, so I picked up in my writing office.
“Frances,” said my mother, her voice tight. “How are you?” It wasn’t a question.
“Fine,” I said.
Then she told me, her voice artificially calm, matter-of-fact, that Charlie was dead.