eighteen years before. Eighteen years that seem like a heartbeat, and yet here they all are.
The kettle whistles behind her on the stove, and she realizes that chairs are pushing away from the table as breakfast finishes. Charley leans back with a pick in his teeth, and pats his stomach with a sigh, content. “Thank the Lord for that small morsel. Many a poor divil would call it a meal.”
Charley Beck’s Happenstance
Charley Beck cracks himself up. He is perhaps the funniest person he knows. It doesn’t matter that his grandkids don’t always appreciate the humor of jokes they have heard practically every day of their lives. These days, Charley saves time by skipping over the buildup and going straight to the punch line; it’s just as funny that way anyway. His all-time favorite comes from one of the Nativity minstrel shows he, Ferd, and the other fellows used to put on to raise money for the parish. Charley, in blackface, tells jokes and sings comedic songs. One year there is a courtroom scene that sticks with him such that, almost every night at supper and at dinner on Sundays, he declaims the final line: “Your Honor, he sopped his bread in my gravy, and I hit him!” This invariably causes him to laugh so hard that he leaks tears and sometimes spittle. Then, more dependable than grace, he finishes his supper with a sigh and says, “Thank the Lord for that small morsel. Many a poor divil would call it a meal.”
A slightly built, sinewy man with a permanent walrus mustache, he is both quick and surprisingly strong, his grip impressive, even in an affable handshake. Charley is everyone’s friend and nobody’s enemy, and he is a wizard when it comes to building and fixing things. There is nothing he can’t make out of concrete, and the house and yard at 741 is the proof of it: ponds, fountains, retaining walls, the foundations for the pump house and barn, the floor for the garages he rents out to the apartment dwellers across the road who have no other place to park their cars. At home, if Charley Beck isn’t reading the newspaper, he is working in the garden; if he’s not in the garden, he’s building something new or fixing something that’s broken. If he is doing none of these things, he is rubbing under his battered fedora at the divot in the back of his neck, considering what to do next. A born farmer, a natural mechanic, and a modern-day homesteader, Charley Beck is a self-taught Renaissance man.
There are a thousand stories of Charley Beck, worn smooth as river stones from the telling. Legendary is the time that he, working down in the cellar to coax a flywheel back into operation, finds himself stumped by its unwillingness to function. But what seems like reluctance on the part of the flywheel reveals itself to be pure meanness when, on finally unclenching, it bites the end off Charley’s little finger, right up to the joint. Not one to hold a grudge, Charley admires the ragged wreckage of bone, skin, and blood, opens the grate to the furnace, kisses the fingertip and tosses it into the flame, saying, “So long, you son of a bitch, you’re no good to me now!”
When he retires from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in 1935, Charley receives a small corked ceramic bottle containing 52 shiny new pennies, one for each year of his employment. On more than one occasion thereafter, he remarks with a chuckle that he is surprised and touched by this outpouring of generosity by the U. S. Government. In contrast, the Voith children are always able to count on Charley Beck’s largesse. He is forever a soft touch when one of them needs a penny, a nickel, even—if the situation demands it—a quarter, and he is never without change in his pocket. Any time he misplaces his pocketknife, there is twenty-five cents in it for the lucky finder. When Charley Boy once asks how he seemingly has an endless supply of change, he winks. “Why, at the end of the workday, I just sweep up the leavings,” which causes him a good laugh at his own joke, since, of course, the Bureau doesn’t mint coins. The youngest ones are stumped when he teases, “Got a hot date?” as he reaches into his pocket, but he often succeeds in making the older ones blush as they head out to the movies or the soda fountain.
Deaf as a block later in life, he mortifies the teenage boys when they go with him to Mass: as he marches up the center aisle between the seated parishioners, heading for the front while they hang back, he hollers, “Get on up here! No use dawdling!” Charley, of course, has no idea he is shouting in church. Nor does he understand that a comfortable volume for him on the big console radio next to his favorite chair means that neighbors three doors down are treated to Eddie Cantor or Ed Wynn whenever the windows are open. As they grow, and his deafness deepens, the kids adapt, standing close and bellowing to get his attention, keeping a hand against the closer ear when studying or reading in the parlor during Charley Beck’s favorite programs.
Charley adapts too. Having raised only one child himself, he is bemused to find himself now surrounded by nine grandchildren, to the point that it is a puzzle to figure on where to put them all. He leaves that challenge to the women. Charley is one of a large brood himself, the product of another three-generation household, but those eons ago, he was one of the ones causing the bedlam, not ministering to it. The twenty-some years he and Emma spend in the big house with just Mary Miller, Lillie, and a nurse or maid effectively wash away the memory of what it means to pack that many bodies into what feels like a shrinking space. But these children have snuck into the house gradually over the years, so that Charley finds it something of a surprise when he considers the total numbers, though it’s a hard thing by now to remember what the house was like without them. He finds it convenient that his deafness increases along with the family population: the chaos of the household typically reaches him as a low hum, a sort of pleasant background music, though admittedly punctuated every so often by a crash or a shriek.
Watching from behind the newspaper, he often wonders at Lillie’s abilities as a mother to so many, herself an only child. From the beginning, it seems the most natural thing in the world to her, as though she has been practicing her whole life. She has an innate grace and cheerfulness that she’s never lost, but that belie the strength and steadfastness that allow her to keep the machinery of the household running, and to keep the children from turning feral. He imagines that she has inherited the cheerfulness from him, the iron will from her mother.
cd
It’s mid-winter of 1893 when he first sees her in Rock Creek Park, that huge green swath of paths, gardens, parkland, and wilderness that runs like a backbone down the center of Washington City. He loves exploring different parts of the park during his free time away from Engraving. Even if he walks the same path every day, there is always something new to see. This particular Saturday afternoon, enjoying the unseasonably mild February weather that has coaxed early narcissus to poke up through the leaf litter, he finds himself near the stables. Here are some other folks taking in the lovely day. A party of five or six people appear to be readying for a trail ride, men in boots and jodhpurs, women in long black skirts and riding hats. Charley folds his arms on the top of the rail fence to watch as the men joke among themselves and the women fuss about in preparation for mounting.
Then he notices one other woman, who holds herself separate from the others. While the rest of the party has clearly left the dirty work of preparation to the stable hands, this woman is doing her own final checks of the saddle, bridle, and stirrups. He smiles to himself when he sees that she knows the trick the horses like to play on an unsuspecting rider, of taking in air as he buckles the saddle strap, then exhaling after the rider mounts to loosen the saddle. Charley has seen novices slide completely underneath their horses after falling for that trick. This woman knows to wait until the very end of her preparation, after the horse has relaxed, to do a final quick cinch on the strap, catching the horse unawares.
It is not until the larger party is finally mounted and sauntering out of the fenced barn area that he’s sure she isn’t with them. Though she has done her own tack work, he senses that she is somehow of a higher social status and breeding than the rest of the riders, as though she has been raised to know the intrinsic value of doing some things for herself, a trait he sometimes observes in people who come from old money. She carries herself with a self-assuredness that gives her movements both grace and focus, but with a firm and unsmiling expression that makes her fully unapproachable.
