The Value Of Rain (10 page)

My father had been many things to me over the years, but at the moment I could not think of one of them. The number of times my imagination had honed him into the molds of hero and villain and back again were beyond count. Thus, my fear was that if I looked upon him he would forever be cemented into one of the arduous and implacable castes I had designed for him.

When he sat in the chair beside me I began to feel his gaze hot on my skin. Assessing me, analyzing, with his naïve eye, the tics and marks my commitment had left upon me; this dirty crazy fag in the green jumpsuit beside him.

“Charles?” Caufield queried with an irritated eye motion toward my father.

I turned only my head. “Do you think rain has any value?” I asked him.

I thought he would take a quick what-the fuck-is-this look at Caufield and shorten his stay down to a few brief moments, but he didn’t. He glanced past me at the falling snow outside Caufield’s window.

“Do you mean besides its inherent beauty and cleansing properties or as a mere monetary valuation?”

Caufield smiled at his response, his look of angry disappointment at my question fading with the realization that my father would not be so easily maneuvered.

I turned and looked at him fully now. Henry Rathborne was old. Very old, it seemed to me; too old to be my biological father. He was short and stooped and handling a cane that I had not heard thumping against the floor when he came in. His hair was sparse and white and his skin was aged with wrinkles. But his eyes were young and they sparkled like sapphires in shallow caves.

“Cancer,” he told me after searching out the question in my face. “Dr. Smith told me you lost a friend yesterday. I’m very sorry.”

I looked at Caufield hatefully before I turned back to my father. “He was a lover, not just a friend.”

The shock I intended didn’t seem to faze him any. “A lover, or a loved one?” he asked closely, pushing for a change of rhythm in our conversation.

I looked down at the hands he had steepled on his cane and began a study of his well manicured nails. Was I trying to vilify this man for his abandonment or to make myself more easily rejectable?

“A loved one,” I admitted quietly.

He watched me silently for a moment. “I arranged for a funeral. It seems he had no family.”

“That cared,” I snarled.

My comment seemed to embarrass him somewhat. “But you cared, wouldn’t you like to attend?”

“What’s your interest in this?” I demanded, suddenly pissed off at his interference.

“You’re my son.”

“And after twenty fucking years you’ve suddenly decided to take an interest?” I barked.

He blanched and glanced at Caufield. “I didn’t know,” he said to me. “Charlotte never said a word. We were only married a few weeks when I realized what a mistake I’d made. She changed so fast after the ceremony it was like I’d married the evil twin by mistake. I couldn’t stay. I…”

He stopped and looked down at his hands, knuckles white around the cane like a driver on the verge of misfortune. I followed his gaze and met the same sight; my mind’s eye contemplating him as an engineer, the long slow bridge beneath him crumbling into a ditch of moving filth. A sign, miles back, would have read: Charlotte’s Bridge Works: Under perpetual destruction.

My grandfather’s description of Henry came to mind and I thanked him for the invitation before I jumped up and walked out. My first trip to the outside world would be to attend the funeral of the latest victim of my love. The final one.

*****

A week later I had a pass in my pocket, clutching to it like an elementary student on an emergency run to the bathroom. Caufield had laughed when I asked for one, claiming it unnecessary, but had finally acquiesced when I became demanding. He wrote it on a piece of plain cream colored stationary, the Birch Building logo stenciled on top.

“No one’s going to ask you for papers, Charles. We have day trips all the time.”

“Humor me.”

“I am,” he said as he flourished his signature and pushed the paper across the desk. He held it in place with his fingertips when I tried to pull it closer. “Just because you were raised in insanity, doesn’t make you insane, Charles. You can overcome these years. You’re still young and this is only your first step toward a new life.”

A life of solitude I wanted to inform him, but I only nodded and followed him to the outpatient wing of the hospital. From there we went to the parking lot and stood waiting in the February air for my father.

A long black limo pulled up, its tires crunching last week’s snow, the only sound penetrating the otherwise silent day. The smell of its exhaust seemed an echo of a far distant memory, one not quite strong enough to dislodge the snow from the limbs of the black winter-hard trees. Odd.

A chauffeur came around to open the door for me and I saw my father’s head poke out from the interior, his hand motioning me to him.

“Courtesy of the funeral home,” he told me as I climbed in and settled across from him. “There’ll just be the service and the casket. He won’t actually be buried until spring.”

I nodded; Caufield and I had discussed this over the past week. The service would be held in the cemetery with a non-denominational minister and some workers from the funeral home to act as pall bearers. As far as I knew, Henry and I would be the only people attending.

To his credit, Henry didn’t try to press conversation on me; though Caufield had informed me that he was eager to get me released and become a part of my life. Whether this was for my benefit or his own (with the proximity of his impending death) Caufield wouldn’t say. But maybe it was the mutual need Caufield saw in us that prompted him to push us together.

When we arrived the cemetery was as grey and cold and bleak as the dark shadow under Death’s wing. The only color on the entire landscape was Snow’s rose colored casket; a smidgen of pink unlife in the causeway of death. His body was not there but I immediately fell into a vision of his open casket.

The minister would pause in mid-sentence as I moved in and asked that they open the casket.

“Please. I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye,” I would say.

Snow would be pale. He would still look fragile; a bird fresh from the egg, all the short years of worry and inner torment finally bled free from his features. I would realize that he would be the last; that his memory, along with that of Robert and Bruce, would move inside me; jostle my mind to a new froth whenever my ire began to abate. Together they would hook the bone; slip inside and claw at the marrow each time I thought about forgiving my family for what they had done to me, to us.

I would take a single rose from the wreath that had been sent in my name and put it in his hands. From beyond the area they had cleared for this solemn occasion, I would take a handful of snow and sprinkled a few flakes across his lips with my fingertips before I leaned in close.

“I love you.” I would have told him.

I stood before the service was finished, took one last look, and walked back to the limo. This was useless; the casket was as empty as our lives had been. It was time to leave the Birch Building. Nothing there had value anymore. I would leave and travel; my wake affecting only that to which I clung. Holding nothing, I could affect nothing, and thereby be affected by nothing. Within that void I could husband my misery and turn it to malevolence; my passions becoming like the river Styx, wide and deep and dismal. The desiccated corpses of my previous lovers popping up from time to time to bob in the black spume of hate and rejection; reminding me of my self-conscripted mission.

“Hell is a lonely place, isn’t it Charles?” Charlotte asked as I stared out the window, unconsciously attempting to compute the worth of the snow-baked fog outside. It involved an entire logarithm; too much air, not enough water…

“You’ll know soon enough,” I answered as I turned around. I was alone with her again. Sylvia had left to comfort the familiar sobs of her husband.

Charlotte grunted. “Give me another cigarette.”

I walked over, put one in her mouth, and sat down in the chair next to her as she composed herself within her pillows. Once settled, she sat puffing in silence.

I watched her watching me. She had a disdainful Rita Heyworth way of puffing and flicking that I remembered from my earliest childhood. I figured she must have mimed it because of the air of command it gave Rita without all those verbose bits of unwanted dialogue.

“You need to leave here, Charles. You’ve underestimated me. Even on my deathbed, you’re no match for me. I’m a lady of Southern aristocracy and I don’t wilt easily under strain.”

I cocked my head to the side and looked at her profile. “Charlotte, you’re a vindictive, simple minded whore and nothing more.”

Her eyes narrowed as she snarled and clutched at her sheets. I was not the naïve little boy she sent away. I was probably neurotic, maybe slightly psychotic, and in all likelihood still stuck at the emotional age of fourteen, but in spite of that, or maybe because of it, I had learned and fought to survive. She had no idea what strain was.

“What’s the value of rain, Charlotte?”

“Rain?” She seemed confused. “It’s nothing more than the devil pissing on the world.” She laughed suddenly. “Is that what you thought about all those years? The rain?” She cackled.

Yes, it was true. I spent many a year looking out the nearest window trying desperately to wipe the same grin she now wore from the interior of my eyelids. I don’t know what I was looking for beyond the window frame. Maybe it just kept me from looking in.

“I told you that your little cocksucker friend died, didn’t I, Charles? What was his name… Robert, wasn’t it?”

I curled forward on Charlotte’s chair and put my face in my hands, rubbing it vigorously to keep the turmoil of my emotions from falling out in a phlegmatic mass on Charlotte’s carpet. Had I been able to keep my memories of Robert at a distance, even for a moment, then things between Charlotte and I might have been different, maybe. But in twenty years Robert had never been distant, not once. Not him, or the others. They were always up close, poking at my shoulder, nudging my fear that the world would close in on me and tighten itself around my neck like Charlotte’s own personal noose of rejection. I’d become so dependent on Robert’s memory that I’d spent my life trying to find anything or anyone to fill the black cavity his absence left in my heart. It didn’t matter if it was sex, pity, or empathy. And even with this knowledge burned into me, I always knew that there was no one and nothing that could replace him. So I had let those emotions flow in their own convoluted circle, running my life while I looked regretfully, yet impassively, on.

It was foolish I knew, but I had thought that my pain would make people fear me; the beacon of my rage shining as a bright light of warning. Instead, people seemed drawn to me, pulled in and too ready to be sacrificed like a moth in my flame.

So naïve. I laughed at myself and wept on Charlotte’s carpet as she continued her rant.

“ The one and only piece of ass you bet your life on took a rope, snapped his own pathetic little neck and forgot all about you,” Charlotte crooned, scooting herself up with her arms so she could lean forward and slap me with her words.

I glanced up at her. She thought… I don’t know what she thought. I never have. Her comments weren’t about the still exposed nerve of Robert, but about my sexuality, and how she couldn’t understand it. How she loathed it.

Or was I wrong in that too? Maybe she saw it as a mad testament to the superiority of women and the malleable inferiority of men. Either way, I could not forgive her complicity in Robert’s demise. She had helped choreograph my disappearance from his life and he from mine, and she could not be forgiven.

“Why’d you have Jarrel molested, Charlotte?” I asked her.

She froze momentarily, but it was enough to tell me that the allegation was true. I should have known though; to Charlotte there was no family except her.

I stood, finding it impossible to hide my contempt, and went to the window to light another cigarette.

“What made you Charlotte? What kind of twisted fuck made you?” I shook my head; I couldn’t even conceptualize what had created her. She wasn’t abused. She wasn’t raped. She wasn’t beaten. She had a doting, loving mother, and a father whom I had always seen as lovable. She wasn’t rich, but she’d never been dirt poor either. So what the hell could create this kind of monster?