Spring Green

And on the third night of his stay Marie-Claire slipped quietly up the stairs into the little attic room where Addington lay, and she did not leave until the morning skies called for her.

+++++

21 April 2005

We walked down to the river and Bertand showed me the spot where that last battle had taken place. In the new cement tow-path that lined the river, brass shell-casings had been carefully placed along the edges, perhaps as a kind of memorial. Whether officially placed there or not, these casings had become a part of the town's fabric too, a proof that the town's mythology was not mere fantasy. A Mustang's wing was nearby, to remind one and all that an American had once been among them, that he had fallen from the sky in their hour of darkest need, and that this stranger stood with them shoulder to shoulder and fought to save their history from the ravages of thoughtless men.

And so Spring Green was everywhere, life was everywhere, life nurtured by the blood of patriots. The field that had been a killing ground was alive; the river was full of life, all was just as nature intended. The seasons come and go, yet there is always the spring, this one season of renewal to hold on to.

To sustain the living...

I saw the boat through budding trees and white flowers; she was warped to a jetty along the river's edge, and she screamed at me: 'I am life! Take me! Let us run together again.'

The area was lined with chunky white powerboats -- hired out for week-long holidays, the mayor told us -- and Uncle Chuck's sleek, blue-hulled sailboat looked like a hooker in a convent.

But she gleamed. The Baby Ruth was radiant, as gorgeous as the day she was launched.

Even from a hundred yards it was apparent every square centimeter had been polished to within an inch of it's life. Dappled, water-borne sunlight reflected off the hull, starbursts flashed from polished chrome and her freshly varnished teak. I smiled at the latent possibility coiled up in the boat, at memories she'd help fashion from the raw stone of life. She had her own mythology now, too; she was a part of the town, and she always would be.

And, there was a man standing on her deck, apparently waiting for us to arrive, and as we approached I felt more and more that he looked familiar to me. The man watched us all the way, never took his eyes from me even as I walked up to boat, then he hopped down onto the wooden quay and stood resolutely in place, as if blocking my way. It was my father! My father dead and gone for years had been reborn and given a new life to squander!

Holy shit!

Maddie of course had not the slightest clue; she'd never met my old man. The Mayor and Yves Bertand were by my side, however, and I waited for them to smash me over the head with this latest revelation.

The stranger held out his hand and I took it.

"You must be William," he said to me, and then: "My name is Charles. Charles Bertand Addington."

"Fudge!" Maddie said. I was tempted to say something, anything, but I was speechless. Not so long ago I had been alone in the world; now it seemed I was positively awash in relatives.

"Well, Piffle!" I think I said -- eventually. "Don't that beat all."

For a Puritan, ole Chuck sure got around.

+++++

I take it Chuck hung around Dole a few weeks after his private war, until a group of British Army Pathfinders stopped by anyway, and then he was gone as quickly as he'd come. Swooped down from the beanstalk and saved the village from a big, mean giant, then just up and ran away. That was Chuck. And ever the honorable man he returned to the woman he always knew he was destined to love. And he did, too, in the end.

And yet I thought he must have never returned to Dole during all those intervening years, and once again Chuck proved me wrong. He slipped away from time to time, Yves told us, and came back to this other world, to his other family, and none of us in Boston ever suspected a thing. Business trips, I guess, can cover a multitude of sins.

So, when all was said and done, when I thought of Chuck as this poor old man -- and all alone in the world -- well, little did I know.

His affinity for France? Perhaps it was a genetic predisposition, perhaps it was his life having been subtly woven into the fabric of a faraway history that called out to him from time to time, but whatever the reason, he came to die with his family, to be with those who loved him most of all, with the other woman into whose sheltering arms he had once fallen.

There is a certain gravity, you see, to the footsteps we follow.

+++++

Charles had a fat envelope for me, along with instructions from Chuck to hand the package to me, and to me alone. We were sitting on the boat, in the cockpit when he gave it to me, and everyone seemed to read the storm clouds boiling over my head and moved off a discreet distance. Even Maddie, bless her heart, didn't quite know what to do.

There was a letter on top of his Last Will and Testament, all stapled to a pile of important documents. His handwriting seemed at once so familiar, so comforting, and yet almost alien now -- like it too was just another tool deployed over the years to hide his carefully maintained duplicities.

I'll spare you the details and get to the point.

Near the end of his covering letter I came upon a couple of paragraphs that seemed so startlingly like Chuck, yet so different from the man I knew:

"I know, Bill, in your own smart-assed way you'll find these facts hard to stomach, that you'll struggle to reconcile what you've learned here today with what you thought you knew yesterday, and you'll be tempted to say to yourself that you never really knew me. I hope you prove me wrong. I've tried to warn these people here, my family, my friends, that you have a dangerous side, a callous side, but I've asked them not to judge you too quickly, or too harshly. I think you always wanted your father to be one thing, probably more like me, and you'd have liked it if I'd been more like your father. You've never been an accepting person, you've always seemed to me to be afraid of change, afraid of anything that might upset the order you established to control your world. Now, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask something of you that will be terribly hard for you; I'm going to have to ask that today, right where you sit, that you sit up and take stock of your life. The time has come: you're going to have to grow up. Yes, grow up, William. Accept the world as it is, not as you'd like it to be. Accept my family, William, your new family, because beyond all your posturing and intellectual bullshit, you need them. You need them more than you can imagine, more than you'll ever know. And you just might find that they need you too.

"We made a journey together, you and I, and I loved you as much as, I believe, I would have loved my own boy -- because I was able to accept you as you were. You were an important part of my life, and watching you walk away from the marina in Paris last year was the hardest moment of my life. I wanted so much to tell you everything, but I don't think I could have gone through what I think you'd have put me through. So I've left you the boat and a few other things, but it is about the boat I need to talk about now. I didn't put this in the Will, and so will have to trust you to do this for me. I know you'll be tempted to put this letter away and not show anyone, but please William, don't do that. Don't end our journey together, not yet.

"When the dust settles, I want you and Charles to get the boat ready, and I want Maddie along, if that's possible, and I want you to take the boat down to the Mediterranean through the canals, then I'd like you to take her back to America. The three of you. I want you to close the circle, William, this circle of life that was our journey together. And I want you to accept my love, and my family's love, as a part of that journey."

So, there you have it. The rest was about the disposition of his estate, some instructions about who to contact in the States for this and that. The sun was low in the afternoon sky and I think I might have been aware of it -- but I doubt it.

Had I really been such an asshole? So unaccepting, so apparently afraid of Change? Why had he thought I'd try to get out of making the trip he suggested? What did he know about me that I, apparently, did not? Or was he simply wrong?

But Chuck had rarely been wrong, not about the important stuff, anyway.

He had been presented with an impossible dilemma, and in his indomitable way, rather than submit to the inevitable he had fashioned a compromise, and he'd done all he could to make it work. And in the process he did his level best to spare Ruth any pain, even my father. He'd fallen in love with his secretary somewhere along the way because he was a human being, because he had no illusions about human perfection, yet when what was done was done he picked up the pieces and made it as right as he could -- and he spared the woman he loved -- above all other considerations -- the pain of his own resilient humanity.

Was he wrong? You can best decide that for yourself, but be honest with yourself.

I found it hard to do, myself.

+++++

Charles, Maddie and I sat in the cockpit as the moon rose, the town by our side. I read them Chuck's letter, the part about his wanting us to finish the circle. Maddie smiled at nothing in particular, Charles looked away, wiped a tear from his face.

"I'm in!" Maddie said without hesitation.

"What about Stephen?" Charles asked.

"I think he left earlier this afternoon," she said. "We weren't his cup of tea, I think he said, or words to that effect."

"Ah," this new cousin said as he smiled. "William? What about you?"

"What do you mean: 'What about you?'"

"I have always heard his stories of the sea, but we never had the opportunity. Of course I will go."

"Oh."

"Oh? You do not like his idea, then?"

"No, Chuck, I do. I think it might be a good idea...what? Why are you smiling at me like that?"

"You called me Chuck, William. You called me Chuck."

"So I did."

Yes, so I did. I did because he was Chuck, just as I was Chuck, and Maddie was, too. The town was Chuck's, and so was this night. We lived in a world of his creation, and we were all the better for it.

We went to dinner later that evening, when the moon was high in the sky, at a little place in the shadows up a narrow alley alive with flickering gas light. It was quietly gay, alive with a sense of place, of purpose. There was a waitress there, a woman about my age, a widow. Very pretty, gorgeous, really. I looked at her, and she looked at me.

"Where is Marie-Claire?" I asked, and Chuck just shook his head. What else was there to say? I wish I'd met her.

Chuck slapped me on the back when I asked about waitress. "She's just your type, too!" he said.

"What? Moody? Pensive? A know it all?"

Maddie laughed at that, and I loved her for it.

"Maybe a little, Bill, maybe." Then he looked at me with eyes I'd known all my life, and I knew him now. I knew who's blood ran through his veins. "But she has a good heart, this woman. She knows how to love."

Chuck turned out to be right about her, too, and a lot of other things. I found out all about love in the weeks and months ahead, on the journey we continued together, but that's another story altogether.

©4/25/09-4/25/16 | Adrian Leverkühn | abw | this is a work of fiction, all the characters too, though some are more fictitious than others. Hope you enjoyed this retelling...