The End of the Point (35 page)

One day, after a particularly loud rant from his mother, he looked up “Silva” in the phone book, thinking to call Jerry’s mother and drop the animal off, but if his fear hadn’t stopped him (Are you the boy who put our boy in jail?), the sheer number of Silvas in the phone book would have. A few days after his first visit to the Ash Street Jail, he had gone back, but Jerry was gone by then, moved to Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, a good hour north. He’d thought of writing a letter telling Jerry that he was caring for the cat, but he never did, too afraid of tying his own name to Jerry’s, which would make it harder to deny the whole story if it ever came out.

As for himself, he was doing a little better now. He started running again, with shoes. He still took his pills. His jaw, when he let it go slack, still went on overdrive, his teeth chattering, his face with a life of its own. He still avoided people in general and his mother in particular, and lived in fear (hope?) that Holly would bring back Melanie, but with Holly or Rusty, with Jane or Gaga or on a sailboat or underwater, he was, some days, quite okay. There were blackberries on the paths; he ate until his legs were scratched, his tongue purple and belly full. Underwater, he dove and blindly dug until his fingers closed around littleneck clams, or put on his mask and watched the murky weavings of the water world. There were sorrel leaves to pick; there were lamb’s-quarters, oyster mushrooms, black chanterelles, boletes. He gathered and wandered, writing down lists of birds and flowers in his notebook, recording the weather. This was, perhaps, the greatest blessing of Ashaunt (a mixed blessing, his mother would insist, or even a curse): How it could fill you, without effort, with itself.

One day, when he put out food and called the cat, she did not appear. He tried again later, and again at bedtime, then gave up. Animals wandered; she’d return, but the next day, she still wasn’t there. Charlie looked a little harder and asked around as he rode his bike, but the cat didn’t come back that day or the next, which was when he and Rusty took the Beetle Cat to Cuttyhunk Island and slept in the harbor in the wide cockpit, the boat rocking, the sky full of stars, and in the morning they ate breakfast at Bosworth House and explored the island, with its carless lanes, one-room schoolhouse and paths, on foot. They might have been back in time, a century or more, except for the explosions they saw from afar, Otis Air Force Base testing bombs at No Man’s Land (even the fighter planes, in formation, seemed archaic, small, black and formal, like the model WWII ones he used to make). They dug, smashed open and ate an unhealthy number of raw clams. They talked, for the first time all summer, about how they both were doing—not in any major way, just a little here and there, and Charlie told Rusty about Jerry and what had happened, trusting him to never tell a soul.

When, upon their return, Charlie tried to enter the Red House to use the toilet (he felt a diarrhea attack coming on), he found, as in no other time in his memory, the front door locked. Rusty had gone home. Charlie’s mother’s car was not parked on the lawn. He jiggled the handle—did a key even exist?—and when it didn’t budge, hurried around to the kitchen door to find it also locked. So too the door on the porch. Finally he gave up, pulled off his shorts, and squatted in the bushes, wiping himself with leaves.

He should, he realized later, have given more thought to where the cars were and why the doors were locked. But he was sunburned, depleted, his gut in a cramp. People did things all the time that made no sense to him. He was dozing naked in the cabin when his mother burst in. He sat up and pulled his sleeping bag up around his waist.

“Where the hell have you been?” she asked.

Charlie blinked. “Sailing with Rusty. To Cuttyhunk.”

She covered her face with her hands.

“What?” he asked. “Is everything all right?”

She lowered her hands and looked at him, and it was then that he saw her bug-eyed rage. “No. No, Charlie, it’s not. Absolutely not. I was at the police station.”

“Jesus. Why? What happened?”

“What did you do with that wretched cat?”

“The
cat
? I don’t know. It’s around, I think. Why? What happened, Mom?”

“Call me
Mummy
, like everyone else does,” his mother said through gritted teeth. “Some crazy man, some
friend
of yours, came looking for that cat. A criminal, it turned out. He marched right into the house like he owned it. I was napping. Do you have any idea what it’s like to be a woman alone in the house and have a crazed criminal walk into your bedroom and loom over your bed? Do you have even the foggiest idea?”

“No. God, I’m really sorry.”

“At first I couldn’t understand a word he said, but then he said you were taking care of his cat while he was in jail. How charitable of you, Charlie. How very open-minded. This is your old friend from St. Mark’s, off for a sail, or did you mean jail? He was going on about . . . I don’t even know—private property and Marx and the meek shall inherit. He knew my
name!
Is this what you’ve been doing here, hanging around with lunatics? I should have known. He wouldn’t leave, I had to talk him into leaving—”

“How?” he asked, impressed.

“What?”

“How did you talk him into leaving?”

His mother began to circle the tiny space that was the inside of the cabin. “I told him I’d seen the cat on Little River Road, but that wasn’t enough, so I told him he looked like he could use a good meal, and then I offered him ten dollars if he’d vacate the premises and not come back, and off he went.” She couldn’t keep the pride from her voice. “Money well spent.”

Charlie laughed.

“Don’t laugh! He could have raped or murdered me! As soon as he left, I called the police and they arrested him. It turns out they knew about him and his prior history with the law. Then I had to go to the station to identify him, which I could have done by his stench alone.”

“Arrested him for what?”

“Let’s see . . . Breaking and entering? Trespassing? Threatening? Attempted rape or murder? Being a member of a terrorist group? I didn’t get the whole list. He’s got charges pending for trying to blow up a bulldozer.”

Charlie blanched. “He didn’t break and enter—the door’s never locked. And Jerry wouldn’t rape or murder.” He felt the briefest flash of doubt. “He’s sick—he was in Vietnam.”

“Is he a Weatherman? Does he sell you drugs, or vice versa? Or are you a homosexual, Charlie? Is that what this is about?”

“No.” Her barrage of questions, delivered too fast for him to answer them, brought him to the brink of laughter, but he knew better than to show it.

“No to which?”

“All of the above.”

“You owe me an explanation.” She sat down again in his bentwood rocking chair, which tipped back, causing her to gasp. Then she found her balance, planted her feet. “Go on,” she swatted in his direction. “Explain.”

“I don’t know where to start.”

“Start at the beginning,” his mother said.

AND SO IT WAS THAT
he told her almost everything—not, as he might have expected, as if she were pulling teeth, but in a long stream of detail—first, answering her questions (no, he was not in trouble with the police, nor did Jerry, as far as he knew, belong to a larger group). Then he told her about giving Jerry rides, the books they both read, how it was unclear, at first, where Jerry lived, how he wanted to protect his family’s farm from encroachment by a new golf course and keep it free of herbicides, how he’d sprayed—at least Charlie thought so—Agent Orange in Vietnam. How yes, Jerry was crazy, pretty badly messed up, psychotic, maybe schizophrenic—and no, Charlie hadn’t realized just how messed up until it was too late—but still, Dossy was crazy sometimes, so were lots of people, was it a reason to dismiss them? Dossy, his mother said, is wonderful, and she didn’t break the law. Okay, said Charlie, but Jerry only broke the law because he cared.

As he went on, she asked questions, almost none of which Charlie could answer and some of which he’d never even thought to ask: What do you know about his family? Why did he have the
Social Register
in his house? How long was he at war? How did he walk into the house knowing her name? For a while the story, or maybe Jerry himself, got the better of them both. At one point, it struck Charlie: they were talking. Not about his own troubles or how he had messed up. Not about his mother and her discontents. Was Jerry unstable before Vietnam, his mother asked, or did the war drive him crazy? Did he ever apply to college? What do you think he saw in you? Then they reached the part about the fencing. Charlie was talking loosely by then, his defenses down.

“You were part of this! I knew it!” She stood up, sounding triumphant. “I told Daddy something like this was going on.” She flung out one thin, tanned arm, and for a moment he was afraid she would grab the sleeping bag, leaving him exposed. “Keep going.”

“There’s not much to say. I helped him buy some fencing. That’s all.”

“You’ve always been a terrible liar. Look at me. Meet my eyes.”

He could not.

“What else did you do? Tell the truth.”

“I don’t have to tell you anything.”

“I’ll call the police,” she said fiercely. “I’ll tell them you were an accomplice to a crime—or a full partner. You’d better tell me
precisely
what happened that night.”

“You’re blackmailing me?”

“Oh, you have a lot of nerve! I’m requiring you to tell the truth.”

“We put up some fencing and made signs,” he said. “I bought supplies with my birthday money from Gaga. He went crazy on me then, okay? He just—he’d been drinking and he went nuts—it was like he was still at war. I tried to stop him, but I couldn’t. I—” Tears pricked his eyes. “I screwed up, I wanted to help him, Mummy. He’s a good person and, like, really sensitive—he’s just been horribly unlucky.”

“Like you?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Good. Because he’s not like you. You’ve been given everything, and you’ve squandered it. You made your own bed. You did drugs, dropped out, whatever they call it—” She shuddered. “Checked out.”

“Okay, so I screwed up! Do you want me to shout it?
I screwed
—”

“Stop it,” she hissed. “Who knows about this?”

“No one. Just Rusty, but he’d never tell.”

“And Jerry, who’s a verbal diarrhea machine. Remember, I saw him in action. This could ruin your future, you know.”

“
And he was such a shining star
,” Charlie muttered, but he was trembling, his shame its own motor, his anger at his mother too, and all the more troubling because he couldn’t get a handle on where, in her stream of words, she was right or wrong.

“Don’t mock me!” Now she was screaming. “You
do
nothing! You waste your life and other people’s money, you nearly got me killed, you sit around sullen and cynical, wasting your talents, taking part in violence, and now mocking me! I can tell you this, Charlie: your father and I are done bankrolling you, and so is Gaga. You’ll get a job and earn back that money from Gaga and donate it to a reputable and
moderate
good cause. And you’ll find some other meaningful way to make up for what you’ve done. Really, you should pay for the damage you caused. I should probably report you. Don’t expect us to bail you out if you get arrested. You’re”—she struggled for words—“expelled from this family. Kicked out. Do you understand?”

He nodded.

Good-bye, he wanted to say. Fuck you. Good-bye.

Also: I’m sorry.

Also: for how long? (Fuck you, good-bye.)

IT TURNED OUT THAT IT
was hard to get expelled from his family. His mother didn’t talk to him for a week or so, but his father tried to: You make a big effort, Charlie, and she will be okay with it; just say you’re sorry, to fix things up. Charlie was, in fact, sorry, but in no simple way, and he couldn’t say so to his mother. She consulted a lawyer, who said he could spin the story into one of double mental illness and poor judgment to protect Charlie if the law came calling (upon hearing this, he felt both sickened and relieved). On Labor Day, as with every Labor Day, Gaga had a photographer come to take the Grandchildren Photo, and when Charlie didn’t show at the scheduled time, she sent Will to look for him, and when Charlie said he couldn’t come, he’d been expelled from the family, Gaga walked down to the beach and told him not to be ridiculous, to come to the porch for the photo: It’s an historical record; I have one from every year!

There were twelve grandchildren in the picture—his mother’s four children, Dossy’s two, Jane’s six. It was the second year without Grampa. Gaga stood at the center in a flowered dress. The younger children had been spruced up a little, hair combed, dresses put on some of the girls. Holly wore a bikini top and cutoffs. Charlie stood next to her, off to one side, in paint-spattered cut-offs. As the photographer arranged them, Maddie started toddling away. From the lawn, Jane said, “Escapee! Catch her!” and it was Charlie who seized his cousin’s plump arm, so that in the final picture (the one Gaga displayed beside the other Grandchildren Photos in the Big House front hall), Maddie was in Charlie’s grip, mad and squirming, and Charlie was looking down at her, amused, long hair covering his eyes.

Not only did he not get kicked out of the family, but his parents even let him stay in the cabin through the fall. He’d been cleaning the Red House and clearing the land to make a better view, not as much as his mother wanted, but more than he did. When it became evident that she was no longer paying him for his work, he drove into town and asked around for jobs: at the Village Market (not hiring); at the boat dock (ditto); finally at the library, where he was hired part-time at low wages, but he didn’t mind—he liked the work, ordering and stacking, dusty shafts of sunlight coming down. When his parents asked about college, he said maybe in January, and when they suggested he come home to Bernardsville, it was clearly a halfhearted request. Everyone except Percy would be going off to school that year, though his sister would last only a month at boarding school. Finally, an almost empty nest, his mother free to spread her wings. She seemed to forget about her plan to make him donate money to a cause, though he did save up the fifty dollars eventually and, without telling her, make an anonymous donation to the Sierra Club. Her voice on the phone was distant and distracted. She would not go to great lengths to get him back.