The boy’s great-grandfather did not look at the camera, and his grandfather looked stiff and uncomfortable. Only Auntie Jo, whom the boy had visited just twice over the course of his nineteen years in her stale condo in Florida, entertained the camera with a scrunched nose and a toothless, listless smile. The boy thought warmly of Auntie Jo, who had a boy’s name and who had once looked at him in the midst of a grown-up conversation and winked at him from across the room, with a look in her eye that told him the two of them were sharing a secret joke that none of the adults in the room understood; a look with such trust and complicity that he knew he would never need to tell anyone that thing that they shared, whatever it was, that it was enough simply that they could know it, and know each other by it.
This was the first the boy had ever seen of his great-grandfather. His grandmother remarked that it was one of the only photos they had of him, and certainly the clearest. From the style of the suits and Auntie Jo’s curved glasses, the boy placed the scene in the 1950s or 60s. Other tables settled into the background of the photo, but no other clues could be deciphered from the other people and table settings.
“When was grandpa born?” asked the boy.
“1926, four years after I was, on December 7th, the day of Pearl Harbor.”
Through a series of guesses and cross-references the grandmother established that the photo must have been taken before their marriage in 1952, and that – though it was unclear how such a photo could exist at all given the troubled history between Charles Edwards and his father – the formal clothing and table settings seemed to place the photo incontrovertibly at a wedding. “Maybe your Auntie Jo’s wedding,” said the grandmother in passing. But of course, as the boy worriedly reminded her, this was nonsensical, as Auntie Jo was not wearing a wedding dress in the photo and had also never gotten married, was still unmarried, had endured decades living in that discomfiting state of neglectful isolation that used to be called spinsterhood.
“That’s right,” the grandmother said, accepting with a shameless smile the loss of memory that accompanied her age and failing, as the boy set the photo in the pile and moved on to the next one, to relate the history it held.
*****
The photo was taken not at a wedding but at the reception following a funeral. Charles Edwards, who was then called Chase, attended the funeral of his grandmother as a hard-won favor to his sister Josephine, who felt deeply convicted of the rightness of attending the funeral but without her brother lacked the courage. Charles Edwards’s father, who was also named Charles but called Chuck, served as black sheep in a deeply Catholic family of twelve children; he had not attended his mother’s funeral ceremony that morning, nor her interment, which forced Father Shaw to join his five brothers in accompanying the casket down the central aisle of Saint Joseph’s parish and lift it into the hearse.
“She was a saint,” everyone said of the deceased. Charles Edwards’s grandmother had raised twelve children to be honest and hard-working with little help from her husband Theodore, who had never risen above the office of what was called in those days a ne’er-do-well. She attended daily mass and for forty-nine years played the organ for Sunday service until she was disqualified by arthritis. The most vivid memory Chuck Edwards would ever recall with any warmth from his boyhood was clinging to his mother’s left leg under the piano bench while she practiced, her right leg working the pedals, the rapture of his mother’s soft singing mingling with the great striking thunder of the hammers on the thick, low piano strings as Chuck and the rest of his eleven siblings evaded the wrathful, drunken eye of their father.
Their father’s funeral, fifteen years before, had been a much smaller affair with a great deal more tension. Their mother’s, the happy passage of a saint into heaven, provided the twelve siblings dispersed across the country one of the few opportunities they would have in life to process the layered emotions of their too-cramped and abusive childhood. There was no way for the twelve children to eulogize or even happily remember their mother without placing her memory constantly up against that of her iniquitous husband, her husband who had forced the responsibility of keeping food on the table onto his sons and then, in retirement, squandered their small savings in a pattern of uncontrollably impulsive behavior that a doctor would eventually deem “certifiable.” After Theodore Edwards was dead and buried, the children spent the rest of their lives attempting to forget him, and their seraphic mother obliged them by declining precipitously into a benignly beatific old age that would only at the point of autopsy be diagnosed as a complete, almost vegetative progression of Alzheimer’s disease.
It was the death of this tragic saint that drew all twelve children together for the first time since their father’s funeral – all twelve except Chuck Edwards. Despite her father’s unexpected absence, daughter Josephine, who at that time went by Josey, had insisted that she and her brother attend the funeral and accompany their mother. After the rainy interment, the three sat together at the white linen-clad table of the reception, which was held at the country club where Theodore Edwards had evaded family life by playing golf and racking up gambling debts in the cigar room, and where several of his more upright sons still paid dues.
Charles and Josephine sat with their mother at a corner table for dinner. Both had reached the age after adolescence but before adulthood where one begins to see one’s parents as individuals who had made choices rather than figures who had always existed, and it was this expanding sense of family history that had made them sit up during the funeral and begin to take interest in their father’s siblings for the children they had once been, the alliances that had been formed and dissolved. Despite this growing interest, Charles and Josephine resented their father’s family its dysfunction, and seated as they were at the corner table, they enjoyed a peaceful neglect from aunts and uncles who did not know how to broach the subject of their father’s scandalous absence and thus pretended not to notice them.
Chuck Edwards was in fact present at the reception – he arrived drunk midway through dinner – and the fact was known by his two children but ignored by his eleven siblings. Chuck, who had been unthinkingly bequeathed his father’s drunkenness (along with two or three of the other siblings), slept around and generally spent as little time at home with his wife as possible. He had evidently spent the duration of the wake, funeral, and interment at the tavern across the street from the country club, as no one had seen a taximeter cab pull up and he had arrived at the reception too drunk to have taken his own car.
Chuck Edwards’s wife Shelly, the mother of Charles and Josephine, was a portly woman with a soft voice who wept easily and kept lemon drops in her purse in case she could give one to a young child. Shelly employed the stealth that long-suffering women acquire to take refuge from her husband’s presence in a long and life-giving dialogue with Aunt Ruth, the one of her husband’s eleven siblings who most closely imitated her mother’s saintliness and who had earned the admiration of the entire gathering at the funeral for tirelessly caretaking the deceased during her final decade of life, which included the brutally depersonalizing depths of her illness. Shelly’s fear of her husband made her want to hide, and she was afraid of taking Ruth away from the rest of her family. She didn’t know that Ruth, in her great humility, preferred to be sequestered thus in conversation, as it prevented her from receiving the many well-wishes of acquaintances and the stunted, guilt-ridden tributes of her siblings, who, toward the end, could no longer freely visit nor really communicate at all with their demented mother, and so whose love for her had needed to be expressed either by Ruth’s accommodation or through Ruth’s actions themselves.
So it was that Charles and Josephine Edwards sat alone in the corner table of the great room. In their near vicinity sat distant relations who posed no threat of engaging them in conversation and who provided them a layer of insulation, frightened as they were of the scene their father would make if he were to join them at the table. Before the meal, waiters dressed in white tuxedos had circulated with appetizers of bacon-wrapped water chestnuts and toothpick-stuck cubes of white and yellow cheese, but the meal itself had been served in the style of a buffet, with six or seven of the same circular tables bedecked with entrées. Both brother and sister felt their nerves on edge, Charles resentful of having been forced to attend the funeral by his sister, Josephine anxious for her dutiful attendance to be noticed and held to her credit – and both fearful of their father. The energy of the moment made them grateful for the free-flowing prosecco delivered by a waiter with a white towel draped on his sleeve, and multiple times their conversation bubbled over into a fit of barely-contained laughter as they made the trip – together, always together – from their corner table to the buffet tables, playing a game they’d invented in childhood that involved counting out the letters of the names of things and people around them.
Neither Charles nor Josephine had much appetite and their mother had not eaten anything at all. When the two became aware that their father had arrived at the reception, both stopped eating and merely pecked at their plates, moving around red potatoes and green beans with their forks. Their game-playing and nervous laughter was followed by a serious discussion of their parents’ situation in the same way the appetizers had been followed by the entrées; Charles and Josephine had been unwittingly trained to ignore and repress family problems, so the rare opportunities they took to talk about their father felt urgent and made the time pass quickly in the same way as had their game-playing.
“I don’t like you living in that house,” said Charles with a stern clench of his jaw.
Charles had inherited his mother’s bones: he was not tall but was sturdy and well-built. Though he’d not been eligible to join the army until the war was nearing its end and had spent his few months of service loading supply trucks and polishing his boots in an allied encampment near the French Riviera, he’d kept the straight posture, military haircut, and fierce pride he’d received in the service, and was all too eager to provide his rank and the name of his company when asked.
“Where would you have me go?” said Josephine with a bitter laugh. “I’m not a man like you, Chase; I can’t very well set out on my own.”
“Then marry,” said Charles. “That Williamson has been calling on you since we got back from the war – he was in the Fifteenth Field Artillery, I served not far from him in France.”
“Culver Williamson is a forty-year old fool,” said Josephine, “and I will never marry him.”
She said this last quietly, almost in secret, and pushed her glasses up from her nose in a familiar gesture. Her gaze down, shoulders hunched over her plate, she felt a swell of courage from having said something for the first time aloud that she had long confided only in her diary. The transformation went unnoticed by her brother, who took the comment no differently than he had any of her previous refusals.
Josephine had the same eyes and diminutive stature as her grandmother, the deceased, and glanced constantly up over her glasses – a gesture that most took as a nervous tic – to examine the patterns worn by her five aunts, all of whom had her same slight bust and narrow hips. It had been her mother’s pregnancy with Charles, when Josephine was four years old – the enormity of the portly Shelly Edwards’s stomach and bosom, the screams and blood-stained linens of the home birth, the strangeness of seeing her mother nurse – that had first lodged into the dark recesses of memory to later manifest as a nameless fear of the world of conjugality. Later, in school age, this amorphous fear (combined with a meek plainness that made her easily ignored by boys) fueled a bookish independence that would never become caustic, seasoned, as it was, with its own constant self-renewal in the tempering effect of great literature.
Charles and Josephine’s disagreement centered around Josephine’s occupying the second floor of their parents’ house. Josephine had slept in the same room since childhood, though she had been able after Charles’ departure for the war to convert his room into a study. Later in life, she would develop an intense, almost spiritual identification with Emily Dickinson, though at this time the poet had yet to receive the waves of posthumous popularization that would bring her to Josephine’s attention. At this time, Josephine still felt beleaguered by her unmarried status, still took it as a deficiency, and agonized for many pages over each new proposal by Culver Williamson. “You’re becoming an old maid,” Charles often said to her, unfeeling of how deeply this cut.
“Tell me this,” said Charles, knowing his sister was not bold enough to keep secrets from him. “How much do you make a week at the typist office?”
“Thirty-seven fifty,” said Josephine.
“Now that’s a respectable wage for a woman,” said Charles. “How much of that do you keep?”
“Why of course I don’t know what you mean. I don’t keep any of it, Chase. It goes to sustain the household.”
“And how much does Charles Edwards” (Charles referred to his father by his full name in a sort of ironical insult, having himself the same name) “bring home from the foundry on Fridays?”
Josephine said nothing. She looked down at her plate.
“He doesn’t bring home a dime, does he,” said Charles, leaning his straight spine against the seatback in amazement before suddenly leaning forward again, to catch his sister’s downturned eye. “He doesn’t bring home a dime because he’s stumbling home drunk the next morning, every cent of it gone to Seagram’s.”
Josephine returned what she felt was Charles’s hotheaded disrespect without looking him in the eyes. “Father is under a lot of pressure,” she said. They began to talk over each other, Josephine offering platitudinous excuses and Charles mentioning again how their father had not even fought in the war.
The arrival of a waiter offering to clear their half-full plates and refill their empty glasses silenced the two siblings. Josephine crossed her arms on the table, sighed, and again sunk her head between her shoulders, looking down at the now-empty space where the plate had been. Charles was struck with the rare impression, out-of-place in the midst of his anger, that his sister really was beautiful; that the paradoxical combination of meekness and boldness came to a sort of bizarre unity in her that was unique among other women he had known; that it was a bothersome wall composed of both long-standing traits and unfortunate circumstances that would keep her from the happiness he could so easily imagine for her in married life.
Underneath their disagreement was an unbridgeable difference in value between the two siblings. It was a difference that they were not yet aware enough to understand; something that Josephine would not pen in her diary until many years later and that she would never get the chance to share with her brother.
The difference was in fact congenital. Charles felt the simple voiceless anger of twenty-five years spent trying to prove he was more than his father; Josephine, with the help of her reading and her additional four years of accumulated wisdom, keenly felt the burden of her father’s wretchedness through an empathic identification with her mother, and bore it with the same self-denying asceticism in which she framed her solitude.
Neither Charles nor Josephine were aware that the core of their conflict arose from a contradiction in the heart of their father: Josephine’s fealty to the family office was a trait she had received from her father, arising from the great love he bore his saintly mother; Charles’s combative urge to get out from under the shadow of the family and prove he was more than his good-for-nothing father was the same urge that Chuck Edwards himself had felt toward his own father.
In the heart of Chuck Edwards, this contradiction resolved itself not in an integrated unity but in a disintegrated failure: Chuck Edwards denied the reality of his mother’s unconditional love for him by burying it under the shame he heaped on himself in assuming his father’s mantle of drunken depravity. And both Chuck Edwards and his son Charles would die without knowing that this unresolved contradiction fueled the core difference in value between Charles and Josephine.
The difference – between Josephine’s loyalty and Charles’s belligerence – was in fact two divergent expressions of the capital vice of pride. Josephine’s dignified sense of duty was not altogether absent from Charles’s experience fighting in the war, while Charles’s pretentious self-importance formed part of the seed that grew into Josephine’s fiercely independent singleness. When matched together, the two siblings complemented each other perfectly, with Josephine giving dutifully the respect that Charles felt he was owed. The great tragedy of their future years, as yet unknown to them, was how beautifully their relationship would have blossomed as the one continued to influence the other, Josephine’s respectful temperance softening Charles’s tempestuous feelings of inadequacy just as Charles’s dissident self-assurance helped to lift Josephine’s burdensome isolation. Also unknown to them was the fact that the events of this day, this unhappy funeral reception, marked the first steps down the road to that tragedy.
*****
During the course of their conversation about their father, Charles and Josephine had steadily examined the crowd for any sign of him, Josephine looking over her glasses in the same way she had studied her aunts’ dresses. A few times they had seen him in a distant corner of the great room, in rousing drunken discussion with old friends and distant relatives.
Their discussion had come to a point, as it had in each of the other few times they’d gone this deep into discussing their parents’ affairs, but this time felt somehow different, more definite.
Charles entrenched his position on the point of Josephine’s accepting the proposal of Culver Williamson, who was a kind, brave man, a widower whose lovely wife had been snuffed out by pneumonia while he had been away for the war. The sad man had a sufficient income to guarantee Josephine’s opportunity to return from the workforce, now that the war was long over, to her place in the home, and to spend her days reading and childrearing. Josephine responded to Charles’s push with a pull of her own, stating in her matter-of-fact way that if Charles moved back into their parents’ house the two of them could pool their incomes and, with the money he would save on rent, buy the family a second automobile that they could use to commute.
Josephine was dimly aware that her offer sounded pathetically uninteresting to Charles, that in fact it represented the exact opposite of what he envisioned for his chosen future and betrayed all the ways in which that future defined him as a man. Nonetheless, Josephine persisted – less out of a suspicion that she would win her brother over to the logic of her position and more out of a sort of exhortatory moral fervor, as if by the mere strength and clarity of her position she could teach him to wise up beyond his years and choose the same self-denying path she had chosen. Charles, for his part, could not fathom why Josephine would not want to marry Culver Williamson, and was totally unaware of the fact that his offer sounded just as pathetically uninteresting to Josephine as hers did to him.
Unlike past times when they had both stated their respective cases, this time Charles approached the matter with more specific ideas, and a great deal more insistence.
“Culver Williamson works at the agency just down the block from mine. I see him at events for the American Legion. I’ve played cards with him several times, here, at this very club. He’s a neat conversationalist with not a few stories.”
Charles went on to outline, in halting strokes that forced Josephine to fill in many of the details, a domestic life for himself and for her out from under the weight of their father, she settled in house and home with him soon to follow (once he found a wife). Charles, in his mind, was guided primarily by a simple numeric fear. He had always assumed that it would be the approach of her thirtieth birthday that would make his sister warm to the idea of marriage, that it would be the escalated scandal of an unmarried woman in her thirties that would do her in. He had in fact told Custer Williamson this, multiple times, on those occasions when the older man sought him out to play cards and to divine his sister’s mind. Of course, both men underestimated the strength of Josephine’s commitment, and so the the burden of her approaching thirtieth birthday fell more on Charles than on she herself.
Josephine, in her great sensitivity, understood much more deeply than Charles himself did why Charles needed her to accept his plan for her marriage. In the life of her twenty-five-year-old brother, still more a man in word than in deed, there remained after the war only one fear, one part of his world that was not under his control – the connection to their father. Josephine viewed Charles, in his unceasing attempts to distance himself from their father, like a man trying to outrun his own shadow. She even saw, with a perspicacity she’d gained after many years of quiet conversation with their forbearing mother, the mute affection Charles demonstrated toward her, his only sister. She saw the tenderness in his attempts to drag her onto the ship with him that would sail them away from the pain of their childhood and the infamy of their family history, assembled around them so poignantly at this funeral.
And so what had begun, in conversations past, as a cool, easily shaken desire for Josephine to come along with Charles and abandon their father to the consequences of his own fate had transformed in the tense atmosphere of the funeral into a demand – that she get on board now or be left behind.
“Culver won’t ask again, Josey.” Charles said, almost pleadingly.
Josephine brought her hands to her face to brush tears out of the corners of both eyes. Her brother, who would never have admitted to needing anyone, was telling her, in the only way he could, that he needed her.
It was at this moment that Chuck Edwards arrived at the table. Charles and Josephine, in the intensity of their discussion, had stopped scanning the room to look for their father and felt their surprise in the explosion, at his arrival, of their already-quick-beating hearts. He stood above his two children with his hands gripping a chairback and a misplaced grin on his face, one that didn’t reach his eyes. He shuffled on his feet, drunk and unsure whether to sit or to stand.
“Hello father,” said Josephine, putting on a smile. She slid demurely out of her chair to stand and plant a kiss on her father’s cheek. Charles, at first making the effort to rise, sat back down, finding himself stuck under the table in his chair and ultimately deciding his father did not deserve the tribute.
“My children,” said Chuck Edwards, with a possessive, almost feudal smile.
“Your grandmother was a great woman,” Chuck continued, and began to regale them with empty banalities about his dead mother, as if he were not her son but simply an interested onlooker, as if it had been he who had attended the funeral where all of these things had already been said, and they who had not.
To anyone glancing at the reunion of Chuck Edwards with Charles and Josephine, it would have appeared that both children were simply giving him their attention, calm as they were, with their faces turned to him demurely. In reality, it was Josephine who was calm and demure, settling into a well-trained pattern of dutiful self-denial that composed the dominant mood of her life in the same house as her father and mother. Charles, meanwhile, composed himself physically out of sheer military discipline, while his blood began to roil and rage at each minute criticism he discovered for his father: the disorder of his clothing, the reek of alcohol, how he had failed to do his duty to his mother just as he had failed to do his duty to his country.
Chuck Edwards, in the charming haze of delirium he occupied much of the time, must have seen his son’s ballooning malice in his eyes, for during the entire length of the interview he never looked away from those eyes for more than a second, and, when he did drop his gaze, it was not out of the shame that Charles was trying to instill in his father, but rather out of an unconscious physical relaxation of the eye muscles in the disorientation of drunkenness. Every time Charles saw his father’s eyes falter in this way, he recriminated him anew in a fresh eddy of rage, fanning the fire of his gaze as if to say, “look me in the eyes, like a man.” It had been over a year since the two had last spoken.
“Anyway, as I’ve been saying,” Chuck continued, apropos of nothing and having never voiced the idea to anyone before that moment, “I’m intending to have the house sold by Christmas.”
Charles looked immediately at his sister’s face and saw the shock register there, not in anger but in simple surprise. This, her room, her home all her life, was the one thing Josephine had never once dreamed of losing; the one thing she had not been prepared to give up. Charles spoke for his sister in stifled, gasping wheezes, knowing that she would be unable to react at all in the paralysis of her shock.
“Where do you intend to go?” Charles demanded of his father.
“We can only afford what we can afford,” said Chuck. “We’ll take someplace smaller, one story,” his gaze flitted briefly to Josephine for the first time. “Maybe we’ll rent. With the salary your sister commands we can manage a small place – we’ve no need for so many rooms now that you kids are gone into the city and after all a house that size is too much for your mother to keep up, lazy sow that she is, it’s drafty and dusty and I need the money from the sale for collectors.”
Charles’s hands were white as he pressed his palms flat into the table. He remained seated, his head slightly bowed, and he looked straight ahead, through his sister, who shook slightly with silent tears and who felt every word that would come out of her brother’s mouth as a victory inside of herself.
“You forget yourself,” Charles said in a low tone. “And you forget my sister. You are the pig, you break your house with your evil vice. And do not speak about my mother that way ever again.”
Chuck wavered slightly on his feet, as if the words deserved no more attention than at any other point in the conversation. At the movement, Charles looked up at his father and was infuriated at the sight of his uncomprehending gaze.
“What do you imagine-” but at the moment that Charles set to continue his diatribe Chuck Edwards tripped on a heavy foot as he tried to shift back nearer to his son and began to tip over backwards, his hands coming out in front of him as he fell.
With a reflexive gesture reminiscent of the physical power he’d demonstrated at certain times in the war, Charles shot out a quick hand and grabbed his father’s tie, yanked it forward, pulled him back upright just as he stood himself, now face-to-face with his father. They were the exact same height.
All the more rageful at having his words neglected in the interruption of the fall, Charles found himself clawing at the lapels of his father’s coat, attempting to tighten the tie to the point of suffocation in as quietly constrained a motion of physical violence that a room full of people would allow. He shook his father, who had brought his own hands up to his throat to try and extricate himself; he shook his father as if he could somehow physically expel the demon of his worthlessness, as if he could stave off the inevitability of everything that had been caused and determined long ago by the simple force of will.
“Enough,” said Chuck Edwards.
“ENOUGH.”
The father threw down his son’s hands and at the cry several people at neighboring tables turned their heads to see the two men who stood so close to each other before turning back around in deliberate avoidance of the scene. Chuck Edwards looked at his son with a gaze made suddenly lucid from the vertigo of his near-fall. This close to his father’s face, Charles could smell the mint skin bracer underneath the reek of alcohol; he could see the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, the patches of stubble the older man had failed to shave, the deep, small blue of his irises, those twin portals that had followed Charles over all his years, that somehow could not excite fear and hate and rage without simultaneously betraying a complication of warmth and the other unnamable emotions that were bound up in love.
Charles saw no indication that his father would press the advantage of his newfound lucidity by attempting to speak, and so the two men stood there, separated by the space of only a few inches, in the thick heat that follows a moment of violence. Charles spoke first, regaining his composure with effort. In an instant so fleeting it could not even be examined, Charles had both felt and set aside a tiny fear – a fear that he would give in to pity, that he would succumb to his sister’s womanly appeals to charity for their father. He moved past his fear in the pattern he’d learned in the war, by leaning forward, by creating of himself a danger that would menace an enemy.
“You will not crush my sister under the weight of your iniquity,” he said, pointing one finger into his father’s chest. “She honors her mother, whom you treat like dirt, more than you ever honored your own mother, you failure, you coward. Josephine is leaving you; leaving you to your fate. She marries. She comes to the city to raise a home and a family, and she will never-“
Here Charles was forced to stop by a cold touch on his hand, which was closed into a fist. It was his sister, leaning over in her chair. Both father and son looked down to her, she who had gone through the full range of human ecstasies in the short few moments of their altercation and who had emerged, in the end, with the same pained yet beatific smile that registered somewhere far back in the mind of Chuck Edwards as being reproduced exactly from the face of his mother, the deceased, the only person he had truly loved – so exactly that he felt, in an instant, no sooner felt than lost, that he was in fact looking at his own, living mother, and that he should weep.
Josephine wrapped her brother’s fist in her small hand. “I do not marry,” was all she said. And then, with a shake of her head, sinking back into her chair with a weight, she repeated, “I do not marry.”
Charles looked at his sister, tried to meet her eyes, his jaw clenching and unclenching, lips working around in spasms, but Josephine stared blankly past the table through the wall into the great wide charitable world, with a sort of inspired brokenness, like she had passed through a trial at great cost.
His gaze was broken by a touch on his neck. His father, still inches from him, cupped his neck in one hand with the warm, familiar pressure of his thick workman’s fingers. Charles turned to stare back into his father’s ice-blue eyes, which had somehow acquired some of the same infinite calm of his sister’s, like the quiet fear one feels standing in front of a void.
“When your mother doesn’t remember you,” said Chuck Edwards, “she is already dead.”
With the back of one hand Charles tried to push off the hand of his father, who only brought up his other hand to cup the other side of Charles’s neck, and now held him in full grasp.
“When your own mother – who raised you, nursed you, saved you – can look you in the eyes and see a stranger, she has been buried long ago.”
With a violent surge, Charles flung himself out of his father’s grasp and strode across the room. The edges of his field of vision blurred and he heard and felt nothing of the people and the chatter around him. He spied a partially-secluded antechamber with no guests where the tuxedo-clad servers were arranging desserts. He meandered inside and took a post by the window, centering himself as he had learned in the war by looking at things – a tree, a sand trap, the line in the horizon where the line of rainclouds met the forest. Charles also saw, in the same vague middle distance, his sister’s point of view about their father. After long moments of recovery, he paced around the room and nabbed chocolates from the table, where they were quickly replaced by the white-gloved hands of the servers, who made no acknowledgement of his presence.
In exploring the other side of the room, away from the windows, Charles happened to place himself in line with the hiding place still occupied by his mother and Aunt Ruth, who looked up as if alarmed to have been interrupted, and quietly intuited by Charles’s body language that he was in pain. Upset at having betrayed his emotional tumult to his mother and to his aunt, that holy stranger, Charles vented his anger, as he had learned in the war, into a mask of cruel self-control, and strode back toward the dinner buffet tables, where, to cover over the oddness of his movements, he mimed interest in additional helpings despite the fact that no one was still eating dinner and the food was mostly spent, dishes cleared.
As Charles explored the tables with his eyes, harvesting with a tiny fork from the near-empty skin of a desecrated salmon, he spotted his father and Josephine seated together at the table, in the same positions the two of them had been sitting, as well as an aunt, the youngest of his father’s many siblings, who, with good-natured and only mild inappropriateness, was patrolling from table to table taking photographs with a new portable camera that attached below the sail of a large round flashbulb. The Aunt was in fact nearing the table where Chuck Edwards sat with his daughter Josephine, and Charles, with a tightening in his stomach, foresaw what was about to happen.
The youngest aunt kissed her brother Chuck hesitantly, the blandness of her attempt to cover over his absence at the funeral overcome by her false joviality and her insistence on taking a photograph of every table. By interpreting the gestures and body language, Charles could tell that his father and sister were being solicited for a photograph, bade to stand, that they needed him to complete the photograph. He was easily found, and with a fake, dejected smile his sister was gesturing for him to return to the table while his aunt looked expectantly, her too-pink lipstick failing to hide the age betrayed by her wrinkled lips and sunken cheeks.
Charles glanced at the exit of the country club and stood hesitantly, almost losing his balance as he took a step forward in neither direction. He looked at his sister and saw the same steely eyes that she’d worn on their way to the funeral, the gaze that looked toward duty being fulfilled. Charles clenched his teeth and joined his sister, who stood between the two Charles Edwards, a head shorter than both. Despite himself, Charles’s hand on his sister’s hip tightened into a sort of a squeeze, all the solidarity he was capable of showing in that moment.
“No no,” said the young aunt. “Chuck, you get between them.”
The flashbulb captured them, Chuck looking ahead, above the camera, Charles tense and uncomfortable, with no arm around his father and resenting his father’s arm around him. Only Josephine scrunched her face with a lipless smile in her infinite resignation.
After the removal of the aunt, Charles excused himself from the company of his father and sister and smoked cigarettes with one of the servants out on the covered patio, turning up his collar against the cold, until Josephine found him and they made their exit amongst the first guests to leave the reception.
The two did not speak on the drive home, and in fact never again renewed their attempts to influence each other’s fate. They enjoyed only brief instants of happiness when Josephine was allowed, as a matter of course, to participate in her brother’s wedding and the births and major milestones in the early lives of his children, but effectively obstructed, in their lifelong refusals and regrets, the work that fate had done to pair the two so effectively, and to enable – until that day – the two to bring back together in a unity what had been disintegrated by their father.
*****
Later on, after the boy and his grandmother had finished going through the numerous stacks of rubber-bound pictures contained in the box and the stack of “good ones” had reached its terminal height, the photograph announced itself again from the stack, the black-and-white wedding picture, only picture of the boy’s grandfather and great-grandfather. Sensing somehow that the picture contained some secret depth of feeling that he could not penetrate, the boy once again engaged his grandmother, trying as he often did to entrap her into revealing something new about his long-dead grandfather – something that he did not already know.
“Was my great-grandfather also named Charles?” asked the boy.
“No,” said the grandmother, but then trailed off when she attempted to remember her father-in-law’s name.
“Well he must have been,” said the boy. “If I’m Charles Edwards the fourth, then my father is the third, Grandpa Charles is the second, and so his father must have been the first.”
“Well, I suppose you’re right.”
“When did he die?”
“Your grandfather?”
“No, great-grandpa Charles – the first.”
His grandmother squinted. “Well, it was a year to the day before my sister-in-law sold their house and moved to Florida.”
“Auntie Jo lived with her father?”
“That’s right, after my mother-in-law died. She lived with him for…twenty-four years.”
Through additional probing the boy determined that his great-grandmother, Shelly Edwards, had died of congestive heart failure in 1963, “the same year they shot Jack Kennedy,” and that his Auntie Jo had cared for her father until he died in 1987, the very year of the boy’s birth. The patterns that the boy seemed to find in the numbers consumed him and drove his interest back to the picture, where he became increasingly convinced that it was the scrunched, sparkling eyes of his great-aunt that held the secret – whatever it was – the same secret they had shared all those years ago, in her condo, the walls lined with books, when she’d somehow passed on, through her conspiratorial wink, some numinous particle of the family, something that connected him to her, and to her father, and to his father, and so on through the generations.
But despite the puzzling-through of dates and the feeling of chronology gained from simple arithmetic, the boy would grow and eventually bury his own grandmother, whom he so dutifully queried about old things, without ever being able to name the debts he owed his antecedents. The boy would grow up willful, headstrong, proud, would raise independent daughters and vigorous, enterprising sons. But whatever particle of family wisdom Auntie Jo had imparted to him, whatever she had learned would remain a mystery, as the next time the boy saw her in the flesh was at her funeral (a small affair on account of being in Florida), which the boy – unmarried and in his twenties, at the time – made a point to attend. He looked at his aunt’s frail body in the open casket, looked to the unfamiliar attendees, looked, looked though he did not know why, looked for the same indefinable reason he had stared for so long at the photograph.
