Bodark Creek - 29. Chapter 29

After the war, Charley’s problems weren’t limited to finding new teeth. All those girlfriends he never sent us pictures of seemed to come back. But that turned out to be the easy part. The hard one was that he’d left his wife.

“She was too young for me,” he wrote, and I knew he wasn’t happy about having to explain. None of my brothers liked doing that. “And I was too young. And I was always being sent somewhere else.”

He didn’t say all these things at once. They came in pieces, in letters with the larger parts telling us less important things.

“I got promoted again. And I got a couple more medals from the war. And it looks like I’m staying in, though I haven’t really re-upped.”

“That’s great,” Rosalind said, skipping through the letter. “But what’s he say about Marion?”

“It’s on the last page.”

“And she never wrote me the way you do,” Charley went on. “She mostly sent postcards with, ‘I love you. I miss you. Hurry home.’”

“What’s wrong with that?” Rosalind asked.

“Keep reading.”

“So I could never figure out what she was thinking,” Charley continued. “I’d ask, but she wouldn’t say. And taking care of the babies really changed her. She was always so busy, even when I was in port, that I never felt like we were a family.”

“That’s a shame,” Rosalind said. “Marion should’ve done better.”

“She was very young.”

“We all are at first.”

“And I’ve changed,” Charley wrote. “I’ve changed a lot. You can’t imagine what the war’s done to all of us.”

We couldn’t, really. We saw a little of it when the men came home, especially with Earl, who probably saw the worst of the fighting.

“It was only three years ago he left,” Sonny said about his son-in-law. “Now he seems ten years older.”

“I like him this way,” Sonny’s daughter admitted. “He’s much more sure of himself.”

Charley told us all these things, and we passed his letters around, talking about them as we did. We all felt sorry for him, as well as for Marion and their daughters. But while we were sure everything Charley wrote us was true, we also knew something else was going on.

That’s where Charley’s other girlfriends came in. As soon as he reached Los Angeles, he was named in two paternity suits.

“I guess we should be happy it’s only two,” Sonny said when we found out. “The way Charley talked, he never spent a night in port alone.”

“I could see this coming,” Dougie agreed, though he didn’t seem any more upset about it than Sonny. Charley was still a hero to them. He’d fought in the Pacific. He’d almost been at Pearl Harbor. And he’d snatched not only one blonde beauty, but now it seemed at least several others.

“None of these children are mine,” Charley swore, both to us and to several judges. “And I’ll take every blood test they have to prove it. If there’s one thing Dock taught me, it was how not to have babies.”

Dock? A teacher? Now that was a surprise. And suddenly my brothers looked at him in new ways.

“Where’d you learn about all that?” I heard Dougie ask.

“Well, I kinda had to,” Dock said. “After Albie.”

“Yeah, but where did you learn?”

“Anyone can read,” Dock pointed out, grinning.

The news also meant that Charley’s first daughter hadn’t been an accident.

“Whatever made you think that?” he wrote. “I absolutely loved Marion. The first time I saw her, I wanted to give her children.”

“That, I believe,” Dougie joked.

Marion was only sixteen when she met Charley. They had to wait a year to get married because her parents insisted she finish school. Even then, she went on living at home, and Charley moved in when he wasn’t at sea.

“That was another problem,” he wrote. “We never had a place of our own. So we never had any real privacy. It might’ve made all the difference.”

“Why should I move?” Marion had asked. “My mother’s here, and my sisters are. And they all love the girls. They love you, too, Charley. But you’re never around.”

“There is this war,” he reminded her.

“I know that. And we’re really proud of you. But this is easier.”

“What about now?” I’d written. “With the war over? Couldn’t you be stationed in Los Angeles?”

“Some of the time,” Charley allowed. “But you can’t predict these things. You can only request them. And they don’t always come through.”

“But if they did? Could you stay with Marion?”

He never answered, maybe because the divorce wasn’t completely his choice. Both the women who were suing Charley had their babies well after he got married.

“Maybe Dock didn’t teach him so well,” Dougie considered. “Maybe he gave Charley the wrong idea.”

It took a year and a lot of tests to clear up the paternity suits. As promised, Charley wasn’t the father of any more children. But the fights told everyone far more about his life than he was comfortable with.

“It’s awful,” he wrote. “All these people know where I was. And who I was with. And what we were doing. And the lawyers make me say things out loud that I don’t even want to remember.”

“He should’ve thought of that before,” Sonny commented.

“Would you have?” Dougie asked.

“I’d never be in his place to start with.”

“But if you were?”

“I wouldn’t be. It could never happen.”

“You can never be sure.”

After the lawsuits came the divorce, which Charley tried to make easier by not denying anything.

“How could I?” he wrote. “I already admitted it all under oath.”

“Maybe he shouldn’t have done that,” Dougie said.

“He had no choice,” Sonny argued.

“There could be another way.”

“No. There’s no good way. No decent way out of this.”

“But the worst part,” Charley wrote, “is I can hardly see my daughters. Marion and her family are furious, and the judge is right behind them.”

“Well, you knew she’d get custody,” I said.

“But to almost never see my daughters? All because I was stupid? That can’t be legal.”

“They haven’t cut him off entirely,” Sonny pointed out. “You’ll notice he’ll be paying for everything for the next twelve years. Till the youngest one’s eighteen.”

“Bad luck,” Dougie agreed.

“No, they’re really sweet,” Charley wrote. “I hate that I won’t be seeing them grow up.”

Marion kept custody in Los Angeles, while Charley was quickly reassigned to Philadelphia.

“Are you ever going to leave the Navy?” I wrote. “You’ve almost done your time.”

“Go to college,” Rosalind suggested. “The government will pay.”

“I’d have to finish high school first,” Charley said. “And I only have two years till my pension.”

His expenses were cut in half, a bit over a year later, when Marion married again. Soon afterwards, Charley left the Navy.

“Free,” he said. “Kind of.” But he didn’t seem happy. I thought part of it was because, for the first time in twenty years, he had to plan his own life.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

At first, he didn’t answer.

“What do you want to do?”

He needed to think. Finally, he said, “I don’t know.”

He did know he wanted more children. And he’d met a woman in Philadelphia who knew all about Marion and Charley’s daughters, but still fell in love.

“Are you in the movies?” my son Neal asked Faye, the first time she and Charley came to the farm. “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

Faye had the good manners not to tell my twelve-year-old how rude he was being. He’d accidentally insulted every other woman we knew. Maybe that’s why I liked her so easily, and why I was able to forgive Charley. Still, for a second time, he told me a baby was coming before he ever told me he’d gotten married.

“Oh, yeah. We did that right after my final papers came through. I didn’t want to make a big thing of it ‘cause of Walter.”

That was thoughtful. Because while Charley was working through his lawsuits, Walter was having his own problems. Just after his fifty-first birthday, he announced to everyone that he was getting divorced.