Page 12 of The Life of Chuck

As he passes the place where Jared set up his drums, those two questions recur: Why did you stop to listen, and why did you start to dance? He doesn’t know, and would answers make a good thing better?

Later he will lose the ability to walk, never mind dancing with little sister on Boylston Street. Later he will lose the ability to chew food, and his meals will come from a blender. Later he will lose his grip on the difference between waking and sleeping and enter a land of pain so great that he will wonder why God made the world. Later he will forget his wife’sname. What he will remember—occasionally—is how he stopped, and dropped his briefcase, and began to move his hips to the beat of the drums, and he will think that is why God made the world. Just that.

ACT II CONTAIN MULTITUDES

1

Chuck was looking forward to having a baby sister. His mother promised he could hold her if he was very careful. Of course he was also looking forward to having parents, but none of that worked out thanks to an icy patch on an I-95 overpass. Much later, in college, he would tell a girlfriend that there were all sorts of novels, movies, and TV shows where a main character’s parents died in a car crash, but he was the only person he knew who’d had that happen in real life.

The girlfriend thought this over, then rendered her verdict. “I’m sure it happens all the time, although parents can also be taken in housefires, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, and avalanches while on ski vacations. To name only a few of the possibilities. And what makes you think you’re a main character in anything but your own mind?”

She was a poet and sort of a nihilist. The relationship only lasted a semester.

Chuck wasn’t in the car when it went flying upside-down from the turnpike overpass because his parents were having a dinner date and he was being babysat by his grandparents, who at that time he was still calling Zaydee and Bubbie (this mostly ended in the third grade, when kids made fun of him and he reverted to the more all-American Grandma and Grandpa). Albie and Sarah Krantz lived just a mile down the road, and it was natural enough for them to raise him after the accident when he became what he first believed to be an orphant. He was seven.

For a year—maybe a year and a half—that was a house of unadulterated sadness. The Krantzes had not only lost their son and daughter-in-law, they had lost the granddaughter who would have been born just three months later. The name had already been picked out: Alyssa. When Chuck said that sounded to him like rain, his mother had laughed and cried at the same time.

He never forgot that.

He knew his other grandparents of course, there were visits every summer, but they were basically strangers to him. They called a lot after he became an orphant, your basic how-are-you-doing-how’s-school calls, and the summer visits continued; Sarah (aka Bubbie, aka Grandma) took him on the plane. But his mother’s parents remained strangers, living in the foreign land of Omaha. They sent him presents on his birthday and at Christmas—the latter especially nice since Grandma and Grandpa didn’t “do” Christmas—but otherwise he continued to think of them as outliers, like the teachers who were left behind as he moved up through the grades.

Chuck began to slip his metaphorical mourning garments first, necessarily pulling his grandparents (old, yeah, but notancient) out of their own grief. There came a time, when Chuck was ten, that they took the boy to Disney World. They had adjoining rooms at the Swan Resort, the door between the rooms kept open at night, and Chuck only heard his grandma crying once. Mostly, they had fun.

Some of that good feeling came back home with them. Chuck sometimes heard Grandma humming in the kitchen, or singing along with the radio. There had been lots of take-out meals after the accident (and whole recyclable bins full of Grandpa’s Budweiser bottles), but in the year after Disney World, Grandma began cooking again. Good meals that put weight on a formerly skinny boy.

She liked rock and roll while she was cooking, music Chuck would have thought much too young for her, but which she clearly enjoyed. If Chuck wandered into the kitchen looking for a cookie or maybe hoping to make a brown-sugar roll-up with a slice of Wonder Bread, Grandma was apt to hold out her hands to him and start snapping her fingers. “Dance with me, Henry,” she’d say.

His name was Chuck, not Henry, but he usually took her up on it. She taught him jitterbug steps and a couple of crossover moves. She told him there were more, but her back was too creaky to attempt them. “I can show you, though,” she said, and one Saturday brought back a stack of videotapes from the Blockbuster store. There wasSwing Time, withFred Astaire and Ginger Rogers,West Side Story, and Chuck’s favorite,Singin’ in the Rain, where Gene Kelly danced with a lamppost.

“You could learn those moves,” she said. “You’re a natural, kiddo.”

He asked her once, when they were drinking iced tea after an especially strenuous go to Jackie Wilson’s “Higher and Higher,” what she had been like in high school.

“I was akusit,” she said. “But don’t tell your zaydee I said that. He’s old-school, that one.”

Chuck never told.

And he never went in the cupola.

Not then.

He asked about it, of course, and more than once. What was up there, what you could see from the high window, why the room was locked. Grandma said it was because the floor wasn’t safe and he might go right through it. Grandpa said the same thing, that there was nothing up there because of the rotten floor, and the only thing you could see from those windows was a shopping center, big deal. He said that until one night, just before Chuck’seleventh birthday, when he told at least part of the truth.

2

Drinking is not good for secrets, everybody knows that, and after the death of his son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter-to-be (Alyssa, sounds like rain), Albie Krantz drank a great deal. He should have bought stock in Anheuser-Busch, that was how much he drank. He could do it because he was retired, and comfortably off, and very depressed.

After the trip to Disney World the drinking tapered off to a glass of wine with dinner or a beer in front of a baseball game. Mostly. Once in awhile—every month at first, every couple of months later on—Chuck’s grandpa tied one on. Always at home, and never making any fuss about it. The next day he would move slowly and eat little until afternoon, then he was back to normal.

One night while watching the Red Sox get thumped by the Yankees, when Albie was well intohis second sixpack of Bud, Chuck once more raised the subject of the cupola. Mostly just to have something to talk about. With the Sox down by nine, the game wasn’t exactly holding his attention.

“I bet you can see way past the Westford Mall,” Chuck said.

Grandpa considered this, then pushed the mute button on the TV controller, silencing an ad for Ford Truck Month. (Grandpa said Ford stood for Fix Or Repair Daily.) “If you went up there you might see a lot more than you wanted,” he said. “That’s why it’s locked, boychick.”

Chuck felt a small and not entirely unpleasurable chill go through him, and his mind immediately flashed to Scooby-Doo and his friends, chasing down spooks in the Mystery Machine. He wanted to ask what Grandpa meant, but the adult part of him—not there in person, no, not at ten, but something that had begun to speak on rare occasions—told him to be quiet. Be quiet and wait.

“Do you know what style this house is, Chucky?”

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