Chapter 75
The auditorium was packed.
Chuck Samson, sitting in the back row, had Wendy Tower on one side of him and his brother Stan on the other. He looked again at the program. It had a whale on the front, a drawing, and the whale was singing.
“It looks like opening night box office will be boffo,” Wendy said. Then added, “Why are you looking at me that way?”
“Remind me to tell you about Boffo the Clown,” Chuck said.
“This I’ve got to hear,” Wendy said.
“Oh yes, you do,” Chuck said. “How about at dinner tomorrow? The two of us?”
She smiled. “I can go for that.”
Stan leaned over to Chuck and whispered, “Are you going to hold her hand?”
Chuck gave his brother a gentle rap on the leg.
Stan giggled.
It was the way Stan used to giggle, at home, when he and Julia and Chuck had lived for a few brief months of happiness. Thinking of Julia then brought the same dull ache to his stomach, but it was not as bad now, not like when he’d first seen her in federal custody. He had gone to visit her once more, just before they shipped her off for a short prison run. She’d cooperated with the feds and her deal gave her two to four years.
He told her then the hardest thing he’d ever had to tell anyone, that she couldn’t be part of their lives anymore. That he would pray for her safety and her health and her ability to start a new life on her own. She looked hurt, even stunned. Maybe she’d hoped for too much.
Which stunned him, too.
He left her something, cleared with the detention unit. A paperback edition of the sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay.
He had looked up that one she mentioned. The one that started
This door you might not open, and you did; So enter now, and see for what slight thing you are betrayed.
He’d read the whole thing several times, and two other lines jumped out at him.
One was about the room that was uncovered behind the door. It held nothing. It was only “cobwebbed and comfortless.”
That was the room in Chuck’s mind where memories of Julia were shelved now.
And at the end, the poet says she seeks another place.
Both of them, Chuck and Julia, would not dance together again. They each had to find another place.
And for Chuck, it was right here, right now, at this school with the new name, next to his brother, and next to Wendy Tower.
The lights came down. The curtains parted and the crude set, made up to look something like a ship, appeared in all its handmade glory. The quest for the white whale was about to begin.
Chuck reached for Wendy’s hand.