Arthur Stanford just snapped. He turned on Charles, called him an ingrate. He then said that it was time for Charles to know the truth. “You’re not even our son. You’re adopted!” his father yelled at him. Just like that, in front of everyone in the family. The party stopped, and in the brittle silence that followed, Charles ran upstairs to his room. His father was right behind him. When they reached the top landing, Charles screamed, “It isn’t true! I know it isn’t true!”
Arthur Stanford had calmed some by now. “Believe me, Charles, I’m not your father. I’m youruncle,” he said. “Your father is my brother Ben. He got a girl pregnant, a little nobody from nowhere.”
“You’re l-l-lying,” Charles stammered pitifully.
“Go and ask your father then,” Arthur said. “It’s time you knew him anyway. The last I heard, he was working at the Murray Tap. It’s a gin mill in Milwaukee.” Then Arthur Stanford lowered his voice. “Caroline and I took you in. We’ve tried to love you, Charlie. We do our best.”
That night, when he was just sixteen, Charles went to the Wabash and Adams Street train station. He bought a dollar ticket and caught the North Shore Line to Milwaukee.
Inside our bedroom, Jennifer, passing headlights lit Charles’s face and I could see his eyes lit up in terrible pain. My heart went out to him. If I couldn’t completely forgive him for everything, at least I understood what had happened to make him so angry, and occasionally cruel.
Charles continued his story, and some of the words were so vivid that I can remember them to this day.
He told me that the train ride ended two hours later. His uncle’s phrase “a little nobody from nowhere” kept playing like a bad song in his head. He walked out onto Michigan Street at midnight. Two huge Milwaukee breweries were nearby, and the smothering smell of beer lay heavy in the air.
He asked directions, then walked east, until he found Murray Avenue. He almost passed the place he was looking for.
There was no sign out front, only a dirty window to the left of the door lit by a Miller High Life sign. Charles pulled on the creaking door and entered a barroom that was darker than the night outside. There was a long bar and a thick layer of smoke hovering over it.
Men who worked at the breweries and smelled like stale malt looked up at him. No one said anything or seemed to care that he was there.
When his eyes adjusted to the gloom, Charles climbed onto a covered stool. He sat in the shadows, taking in every detail: the dice cups on the bar—a few working men gambling for drinks—a sign that said
HOUSE SPECIALTY, PANTHER PISS.
Mostly he looked at the bartender, a rough-looking man with a scarred face but unmistakable Stanford features: the aristocratic, slightly crooked nose, the stuck-out ears. Charles told me, “The love I felt for him was almost painful.”
As he watched, he saw his father shortchange a customer and tell vulgar jokes about women, which made Charles’s face go red.
Finally his father wiped down the bar with a greasy rag, leaned into Charles’s face, and sneered. “Get the hell out of here, kid. Take a hike before I kick your ass across the river.”
Charles opened his mouth, but nothing came out. The terrifying moment dragged on. His face burned, but Charles couldn’t speak.
“A pansy,” his father said to loud laughter. “Kid’s a pansy. Now get the hell out of here!”
Shaking with emotion, Charles slid off the stool and left the bar. He never introduced himself to his father, never said a word. Not then, not ever.
I asked Charles, “How could you leave without talking to your father?” His voice got very flat, as if it hurt him to answer. He said that when he looked into his father’s face, he saw Arthur’s eyes—the same cold lack of feeling. And he knew that his own father had never loved him, and never would.
“I found him so easily,” Charles said. “Why hadn’t he ever found me?”
That night I took your grandfather in my arms, Jennifer. I understood that I was his only friend, whatever that meant to him. But as I pressed his head to my chest and smoothed his hair, I knew something else. I knew why Charles had married me. I was a little nobody from nowhere. Our marriage had been an act of defiance, Charles’s way of putting his thumb in the Stanford family eye.
I was twenty-two years old, but I felt that my life was over.
Sixteen
I WAS REELINGfrom Sam’s sad story about my grandfather. As much as I had adored him, something about it rang true. Though she’d asked me to read the letters slowly, I wanted to know more. How could she have stayed with Charles all those years?
I was sitting in the kitchen and had just opened the flap of the next envelope when I was startled by a movement out of the corner of my eye and the sound of footfalls on the grass outside.
A man rounded the side of the house. The odd thing was, I thought I knew him but I didn’t know from where. I went out onto the porch to see what he wanted.
His hair was light brown, with a soft tousled wave and a fiercely independent lock that sprang forward. He had very blue eyes.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.” Tentatively.
