CHAPTER 48

Love is the cause of his sickness.

Martin Luther

Dear Rosie,
Charley’s vocabulary is larger every day. He says guck for truck and Aree for Charley. That’s ten words altogether.

Actually it was eleven, but Alan didn’t add the eleventh, which was Daddy. Without thinking about it, he had begun saying, “Give it to Daddy,” and “Daddy wants you to go to sleep now,” so it wasn’t surprising that Charley picked it up. But it would be presumptuous and embarrassing to write about it in a letter to Charley’s mother.

Alan sat at the counter in Rosie’s kitchen and looked up through the south window at the Baptist church across the street. The trumpeting angels on the corners of the tower were blowing up a wind that tossed the leafy branches of the trees in the park. Cars drifted silently past, heading west. Oates would be getting home any minute. Alan’s peaceful communion with Rosie would be over. Hastily he went on writing:

I can’t bring him here any more, not with Harold Oates living here now. I’ve been taking him to my place on Russell Street. Charley doesn’t seem to mind. The poor kid doesn’t know the difference between splendor and squalor.

Oates’s key was rattling in the lock. Swiftly Alan scrawled three foolish words at the bottom of the page. Then he slapped the notebook shut and jumped up and shut it in the desk drawer.

Oates came in, his thin hair windblown, his eyes watering from the blustering wind. He looked keenly at Alan, and then at the desk drawer, as if he knew every word Alan had been writing to his fried girlfriend.

Alan retreated innocently from the desk. “How was the concert at the Church of the Covenant?”

Oates snorted. “They fell on their knees, naturally. They slaughtered lambs and laid them before me as bloody sacrifices. It was fine.”

Charley Hall woke up in his crib in Deborah Buffington’s apartment on Bowdoin Street. Afternoon sunlight slanted through the window and lay in splashes on the floor.

There were noises in the next room. Charley rolled over on his back and looked across at Wanda, napping beside him in the next crib. Her eyes were closed, her mouth open, her pale hair frowzy around her face.

He craned his neck as someone pushed open the door and hurried to him across the room. “Mama,” whispered Charley.

Rosie swept him up and held him close. “Oh, Charley, you’re so big. Oh, Charley, Charley.”