Fiction

He didn’t know, he would never know. The cake twisted and curved, the icing like caterpillars squirming around the edges. Charles’s wife would never know either. She preferred the heroics, the stories of the march down the Champs Elysée as the whole army followed a glimpse of De Gaulle’s head, and best of all, the sight of Charles in uniform on his way to her house. Charles had left De Gaulle’s near assassination out of stories for her sake since she loved that man in all his exoticism. Yet she loved Charles, more than heroics, and so she stuck her square hand behind his back, pulling him towards her. They agreed with the first stiff swing of the hammock that they would get married. Many years later, yards from that hammock, their house sheltered four boys, named after his brothers and himself (Mike, Matt, Frank, and Charlie).

All four sat across from him now, tossing their fingers across the wood table, watching the cake and their father’s eyes glittering. He smiled at the mark of life in each candle.

“Make a wish. Need help blowing out the candles?”

Matt had always been the sensitive one.

“He’ll be fine.”

Mike denied things (he still refused to accept that his first girlfriend dumped him and not the other way around).

“I’m going to count to three and then I’ll take a picture.”

Frank wanted memories in all forms except those that were permanent inside his head.

It was Charlie’s turn to offer a word of gratitude or forecast the impending happiness for the next year of his father’s life. Instead Charlie sank in his chair, silent, his brown eyes forced further back. He remembered the vestiges of love. The memory appeared to him, initially, unfocused, like the clutter of Uncle Mike’s house. None of the uncles had children to share except Uncle Mike, who had only one child of his own, a woman in her early thirties who worked as an accountant in Colorado. The only time Charlie saw her was at Uncle Mike’s house on the day of Grandpa Heller’s funeral. Her mahogany hair, trimmed into a combed pixie cut, reminded Charlie of old black and white movies. This sole cousin skated out of the house before any deeper knowledge could come of the experience. The rest of the kids were left to scavenge for themselves. His brothers’ whereabouts could not be determined (it was probably the night of their first real drink, a stolen trip to a curb a block away with other equally rebellious mourners and a cup of vodka to share).

During the funeral reception, Mom and Dad separated at first to deal out sympathies to relatives who could barely remember their faces, but they drifted back to each other within half an hour. Standing on her toes, Mom raised her long makeup-less face to Dad’s black collar. He allowed her to whisper a comment directly into his ear, words that required a close proximity due to their inappropriate nature. As Mom crushed her block of yellow hair, biting her natural lips into color, Dad laughed privately with his hands in his pockets, diving his head down in shame to smother the noise. Charlie’s imagination tossed possible conversations:

“Aunt Virginia’s skirt is see-through. She’s on your left. Don’t be obvious. I’ll look right and you get a quick look.”

“Why do I need to see this?”

Then the laughter.

Or: “I need a fucking drink. I mentioned us living together before we were married to Great-Aunt Emma.”

“You didn’t see her giant cross? She’s 90 pounds. It takes up her entire body.”

“I was too distracted by her death stare. I didn’t see it until after the fact.”

Then the laughter.

The vestiges of love—not marked by the quasi-religious symbolism of a ring on a finger or children resembling both of them. Charlie had basked in the attention as he nibbled on a ham sandwich and leaned against the couch, which scratched his back. There was a tide of comfort, like the tucking in of sheets, that set in with the apparent happiness of his parents. Actually, they never tucked him in except when he ordered them one night to do so, and even then he received blank eyes and scrunched noses. Dad trod solemnly to Charlie’s bed as if he was performing a coronation under order of death. Mom hung on the other side, angular hands intertwined, her almond eyes half shut to strategize the next movement. No one needed to talk; they would build on each others’ silence like the creation of a story passed along the campfire. Charlie’s covers mummified him; Dad ensured any mobility impossible, including the ability to unravel in the shiftless morning. Charlie exempted them from further ceremonies, insisting it was the best for all of them—including the covers.

The family gathered, tucking themselves nearer around the table. He didn’t know, he would never know, Charlie thought as he eyed his father, a laughing mop of wrinkles. Vietnam. Saigon. The search for his hometown friend, ending, as always, in vain—he’d searched every shrub, every place a friend could be hidden except under the ground. His father blew out the candles, sputtering a cold breath across the table towards his sons. He enjoyed this moment between the wish and the cutting of the cake; Charles would always belong to the era of birthday parties, Truman and Normandy (a won battle, all of them). His was the generation that built tanks from melted spoons—or so Charlie dreamed when he was a boy overhearing war stories from everybody but his father. Outside, a bird chirred, gravely alone. The veterans had warned him: “Every time you hear a bird chirp and leaves rustle…” But Charlie had told them, “I’m a different breed.” What did he think he was, a golden retriever? Ten years later, he still sunk lower in his chair whenever he heard a damn bird.

“Who wants a piece?” the wife and mother asked, holding the knife above the cake in the art of surgery. It was a beautiful cake. It danced. They would all eat it, fall under its spell, and talk again like before wars and attrition. She had packed away the hammock (its skeleton was weaker than hers), but she would put it up tomorrow. Perhaps all by herself, she might make it a surprise for all of them, waking in their old beds, restored, a hammock waiting outside for them to sleep or read on.

He didn’t know, he would never know; the father complied, recalling the Champs Elysée and the German snipers nesting above in the grooved, ancient rooftops. The Vichy collaborators shot, as many as the candles, hurling upwards in smoke. Charles and Charlie stared across the table, silent against the chatter that sounded around them. But, as Charles accepted a piece of cake with a nod, that would be all right.