Because of his unhappy childhood and his lonely growing-up years, Charlie's personal tragedy was in many ways more poignant than most. By one of those Godsent miracles of circumstance and fate, Charlie had met and married at the age of 31 a handsome and hardworking lady schoolteacher from Beverly; and although she had suffered two anguished years of gynecological complications, she had at last given him a son, Neil. However, the doctors had warned the Manzis that any more pregnancies would kill Mrs Manzi, and so Neil would have to remain their only child.
They had brought Neil up with a care and a love that, according to Jane, had been the talk of Granitehead. 'If they spoil that boy any more, they'll ruin him for good,' old Thomas Essex had remarked. And, sure enough, on the brand-new 500 cc motorcycle which his doting parents had bought him for his eighteenth birthday, Neil had skidded one wet afternoon on Bridge Street, in Salem, and hurtled headfirst into the side of a passing panel van. Massive cranial injuries, dead in fifteen minutes.
Charlie's hard-won paradise had collapsed after that. His wife had left him, unable to cope with his obsessive preoccupation with Neil's death; or with her own inability to give him another child. He had been left with nothing but his store, his customers, and his memories.
Charlie and I often talked about our bereavement. Sometimes, when he thought I was looking particularly down, he would invite me into the small office at the back of the store, hung with lists of wholesale orders and sexy Japanese calendars, and he would pour me a couple of shots of whisky and give me a lecture on what he had felt like when he had heard that Neil had been killed, telling me how to manage, how to come to terms with it, and how to learn to live my life again. 'Don't let anyone tell you that it ain't hard, or miserable, because it is. Don't let anyone tell you that it's easier to forget about someone who's dead rather than someone who's simply left you, because that ain't so, either.' And I had those very words in mind as I stood wet and chilled in his store that stormy March evening.
'What are you looking for, Mr Trenton?' he asked me, as he measured out coffee beans for Jack Williams, from the Granitehead Gas Station.
'Liquor, mainly. My outside's drowned, I thought I might as well drown my inside as well.'
'Well,' said Charlie, pointing down the aisle with his coffee scoop, 'you know where it is.'
I bought a bottle of Chivas, two bottles of Stonegate Pinot Noir, the very best, and some Perrier. At the freezer, I collected a lasagna dinner, a frozen lobster-tail, and a couple of packs of mixed vegetables. By the counter, I picked up half a pecan pie.
That it?' asked Charlie.
'That's it,' I nodded.
He began to punch out the prices on the cash register. 'You know something,' he said, 'you should eat better. You're losing weight and it doesn't suit you. You look like Gene Kelly's walking-stick after he'd been singing in the rain.'
'How much did you lose?' I asked him. I didn't have to say when.
He smiled. 'I didn't lose nothing. Not a single pound. In fact, I put twelve pounds on. Whenever I felt low, I cooked myself up a big plate of fettuccine and clam sauce.'
He shook out two brown-paper sacks, and began to pack away my liquor and groceries. Tat?' he said. 'You should have seen me. Charlie the Great.'
I stood there for a while, watching him put everything away. Then I said, 'Charlie, do you mind if I ask you a question?'
'Depends what it is.'
'Well, let me ask you this. Did you ever get the feeling, after what happened with Neil — '
Charlie looked at me carefully, but he didn't say anything. He waited while I tried to put into words what had happened to me up at Quaker Lane Cottage, while I tried to find some plausible way of asking if I was hallucinating, or if I was going crazy, or if I was simply experiencing the exaggerated effects of withdrawal and loss.
'Let me put it this way,' I said. 'Do you ever get the feeling that Neil is still here?’
He licked his lips, as if they tasted of salt. Then he said, 'That's your question?'
'Well, I guess it's half question and half statement. But did you ever feel anything which led you to believe that — well, what I'm trying to say is, did you at any time think that he might not be completely — '
Charlie kept on staring at me for what seemed like a very long time. But at last he lowered his eyes, and then his head, and looked down at his meaty hands resting on the counter.
'You see these hands?' he said, without looking up.
'Sure. I see them. They're good hands. Strong.'
He lifted them up, both of them, big red joints of bacon with calloused fingers. 'I could cut them off, these fucking hands,' he said. It was the first time I had ever heard him swear, and it gave me a prickling feeling at the back of my neck. 'Everything these hands ever touched turned to shit. King Midas in reverse. Wasn't that a song? "I'm King Midas, in reverse." '
'If it was, I never heard it.'
'Still, it's true. These hands, look at them.'
'Strong,' I repeated. 'Capable, too.'
'Oh yes, sure. Strong, and capable. But not strong enough to bring my wife back to me; and not capable of resurrecting my son.'
'No,' I said, oddly aware that this was the second time in a single day that 'resurrection' had been mentioned. It wasn't, after all, a concept you heard about too frequently, except on Sunday morning television. 'Resurrection' always reminded me of fear, and of the smell of shoe-leather, because my father used to lecture me about the two resurrections when I was helping him out in the shoe store. Resurrection into Heaven for those who were good; resurrection to judgement for those who were evil. For a long time, when I was a boy, I used to mix up 'souls' with 'soles', because of the way my father tried to educate me as a Christian when I was at work with him. 'Don't you ever let me catch you being resurrected to judgement,' he used to warn me. ‘I’ll tan your hide.'
I was silent for a moment, and then I said to Charlie, 'You never feel that — I mean, you never feel that Neil comes back to you in any way? Talks to you? I'm only asking because I've had feelings like that myself, and I was just wondering if — '
'Comes back to me?' asked Charlie. His voice was very soft. 'Well, now. Comes back to me.'
'Listen,' I said, 'I don't know whether I'm going crazy or not, but I keep hearing somebody whispering to me, whispering my name, and it sounds like Jane. There's a kind of feeling in the house, like there's somebody there. It's hard to explain it. And last night, I could have sworn I heard her singing. Do you think that's normal? I mean, did it happen to you? Did you ever hear Neil?'
Charlie looked at me as if he were about to say something for a moment; his expression seemed to be congested with unexpressed anxieties. But then he suddenly pushed my sacks of groceries towards me, and smiled, and shook his head, and said, 'Nobody comes back, Mr. Trenton. That's the really hard lesson you have to learn when you lose someone you love. They just don't come back.'
'Sure,' I said, nodding. 'Thanks for listening, anyway. It always helps to have people to talk to.'
'You're tired, that's all,' said Charlie. 'You're imagining things. Why don't I sell you some Nytol, just to get you off to sleep?'
'I still have the Nembutal tablets that Dr Rosen gave me.'
'Well, take them, and make sure you eat good. Any more of these TV dinners and your skin is going to start breaking out in separate compartments.'