It took a little more than four hours to reach the outskirts of Seattle, and I used that pleasant autumn drive to bring Jan up to speed on what I knew of Charley Delp and Chloe Middleton.
“Charley must be 63 years old. When I met him he was about 6-feet tall; 200 pounds or so; looked a little soft but not obese. He was a good athlete, too, but mostly he was full of Irish good nature.
“Like I said, we met when we both worked for competing newspapers in Upstate New York. Neither of us was native to the Finger Lakes region, and we became good friends because we shared a love for the outdoors.”
“Where did he come from?” Jan asked.
“Charley was always vague about his childhood and early years. His family was from the City, but he never talked much about them. He met Chloe at Dartmouth College. She was a senior, planning on graduating with a degree in psychology. He was a sophomore, majoring in draft dodging. Then, in the dead of winter as only New Hampshire knows it, Charley found that he was unfit for military service because of an almost total inability to hear high-pitched frequencies.”
“How did that happen?”
“The way Chloe tells it is the only version I know. It goes like this:
“Charley had crashed this hoity-toity party in a private room at the Hanover Inn – very posh and all – and everyone at the party knew instantly that he didn’t belong there; everybody but Charley that is. Anyway, Hendrix playing the National Anthem breaks out on the sound system, and everybody stops talking and listens in awe. Everybody but Charley, that is. He takes a look around and asks out loud, ‘What’s the matter with all of you?’
“A couple of people tried to shush him, Chloe always gets animated and laughing when she tells this part. Some of them actually hissed. Chloe admits she actually put her finger to her lips and scowled at him, but he didn’t seem to understand. He started to say something and she spat at him, ‘Shut up, you ass; it’s Jimi Hendrix!’
“She said he smirked and carried on, ‘I’ve never heard what you all think is so great about that guy; most of the time, I think he’s playing a one-string guitar, and backwards at that.’
“She said everybody ignored him for the rest of the song, but then one of the guys at the party turned to Charley and said, ‘If you can’t dig Hendrix, you don’t belong here at all,’ while pointing at the door, but then another guy, she recalled him as Robby somebody – he was pre-med, and was already talking about being an ENT specialist – he stepped between them. Chloe has two special voices for these guys, ‘It’s Charley, right?’ Robbie asked. Charley nodded, and Robbie started nodding. The other guy reached out to grab Charley’s arm, as if to escort him out of there, but Robbie knocked his hand away. ‘Our friend here didn’t say he didn’t like Hendrix, he said he couldn’t hear him the way we do. I think that’s probably true.’
“He turned back to Charley, ‘Ever hear a train whistle while walking to class?’ Charley thought for a second, ‘Hear trains all the time, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard ’em whistle.’ ‘Ever hear the ambulance come on campus?’ Charley shook his head, looking around, and she said she could see him smiling in that smirky, embarrassed way he always had, then he says, ‘No; never.’
“Robbie turned to the rest of them with a big smile, ‘Folks, I could be wrong, but I believe what you see here is a very, very fortunate man who will never serve one minute with Uncle Sam’s conscripted minions.’
“She said they were all surprised, but he continued talking while shaking Charley’s hand, ‘Congrats, pal; I suggest you take yourself to the campus infirmary first thing Monday and ask to have your hearing tested. I think you are insensitive to high-frequency noise, and that’s a guaranteed pass to a life without military service!’”
“Really?” Jan asked.
“That’s the way she told it. I heard the story several times with Charley in the room, and he never complained or cried foul.”
“What a story. Were they a fun couple?”
“Yes, but I never understood how he operated the way he did. It seemed to me that everything came too easy for him. He seemed to become bored with success, almost disdainful, and then he was ready to move on to something new.
“Chloe told me that once the threat of Vietnam disappeared so did Charley’s interest in the classroom. They both left Dartmouth that spring; her for grad school with Charley in tow. He started selling ads for a small newspaper in Boston while she was at Harvard. When she moved to practice clinical work in Syracuse, he followed and found a job with a newspaper there.”
“When did they marry?” Jan asked. “It was pretty rare in those days for a woman to retain her maiden name.”
“Oh, they never married as far as I know. Chloe told Sandy that he must’ve asked her to marry him a hundred times in the early years, but she couldn’t say yes.”
“But she was always with him?” Jan asked.
“Oh, loved him like the devil, no doubt, but, the way she explained it, she knew if she ever said ‘yes’ to that proposal she’d become just like everything else he’d ever solved or figured out. He would’ve dropped her like the proverbial hot rock.”
“Wow, ain’t love grand?” Jan said with awe and a bit of irony in her voice.
“Conquers all, I’ve heard.”
“So what did they do after you and Sandy left?”
“Oh, we kept in touch; the women did, really, with annual Christmas letters and an occasional update, like when one or the other of us moved.
“Charley was a natural in advertising sales, and he had the kind of charisma that attracted co-workers like moths to a porch light. By the time I met him, he was the retail advertising manager for another family-owned paper in the region.
“I had heard about him for months before our paths crossed, and while I had a natural distrust for competitors, Charley’s good nature and warmth burnt that away like morning mist.”
“He must have been charming,” Jan said with a cocked eyebrow. “You and distrust don’t part company easily.”
“That charm didn’t work on everyone. Cecily, the advertising manager at our paper, and several business owners with stores in both markets, were less appreciative of Charley’s demeanor. Some went so far as to question his ethics, but from what they all told me he never cheated. He never lied or made promises he couldn’t keep. What Cecily and those business owners couldn’t warm to was his stark honesty.
“He told me once, over cocktails after a Syracuse Press Club meeting, that he told people the truth all the time, confident they wouldn’t believe him. ‘Stanton, my lad,’ he’d go into this W.C. Fields-like pontification voice when he was like that, ‘Stanton, my lad, there is no greater asset in a lie than the bald-faced truth.’”
“So what then?”
“I know from those annual holiday updates that Charley had tried his hand at insurance after he abandoned advertising, and then he went on to finance, where he became filthy rich in the booming ’90s.”
“And then?”
“The annual updates stopped after Sandy’s death; I couldn’t be counted on to reciprocate. As the years passed, I often found myself recalling the days when we had shared a duck blind, hunted grouse in the hills around the Finger Lakes, or just met up for some earnest talk about the world we lived in.
“In those years I seemed to burn through friends like I thought there’d never be a shortage.”
“They’re a long time gone,” Jan said, and then let the silence wrap around us for the rest of the drive.