doesn’t beat all.”
“Good for them.”
When we reached the Marcus Center, we parked in a lot on Water Street and hurried inside. The ushers were closing the doors of the theater, but we were able to slip in and take our seats as the lights went down. I had never seen
and I thought it was quite good—the actress playing Madame Arkadina was superb. It was not until the second act that I was overtaken by an uneasy feeling. Where
Charlie? Was it safe to assume he was at the baseball game, or could he be somewhere else entirely?
At intermission, I found a pay phone in the lobby, but again there was no answer at his office, and at home, Shannon said she hadn’t heard from him. I hovered between irritation and anxiety. The fact was, I had more reason to think he’d simply forgotten about the play, or even purposely avoided it, than I did to think something was wrong. In the last few months, Charlie had accompanied me to the theater increasingly grudgingly, and sometimes we skipped events altogether when I didn’t want to see a performance enough to try persuading him. The truth of our lives was that for close to two years, he had been in a bad mood; he was almost always restless and disagreeable.
To a certain extent, Charlie had been restless since I’d met him—he drummed his fingers on the table when he felt we’d stayed too long at a dinner party, he’d murmur to me, “I bet even God has fallen asleep” during sermons at church—but in the past, it had been a restlessness that was physical, situational, rather than existential. His bad mood was different. It wasn’t directed
me, but it had become such a constant that the times when he wasn’t in its grip were the exceptions.
I’d tried to pinpoint when it had all started, and it seemed to have been around the time he turned forty, in March 1986. To my surprise, he had not wanted a party—he, Ella, and I had celebrated with hamburgers and carrot cake at home—and in the months before and after his birthday, Charlie talked often about his legacy. He’d say, “I just have to wonder what kind of mark I’ll make. By the time Granddad Blackwell was my age, he’d founded a company with three dozen employees, and by the time Dad was forty, he’d gone from being the state attorney general to being governor.” If I were to be completely candid, I would make the following admission: There were many things about Charlie that I knew other people might imagine I’d find irritating—his crudeness, his healthy ego, his general squirminess—and I didn’t. But his fixation with his legacy (I even grew to hate the word) I found intolerable. It seemed so indulgent, so silly, so
I have never, ever heard a woman muse on her legacy, and I certainly have never heard a woman panic about it. I once, in the most delicate manner possible, expressed this observation about gender to Charlie, and he said, “It’s because you’re the ones who give birth.” I did not find this answer satisfying.
Whatever the source of Charlie’s discontent, in late 1986 and the first half of 1987, it had been exacerbated by three quarters in a row of declining profits at Blackwell Meats. There ensued a many-months-long debate about taking the company public, an idea Charlie favored, and his brother John, who was still the CEO, opposed. The five other members of the company’s board of directors were Arthur, Harold, Harold’s brother, the brother’s son, and Harold’s sister’s husband, and their votes were evenly split, with Harold siding with John. This meant the decision came down to Arthur, who, after much back-and-forth, voted with John and against Charlie. Charlie spared his father and Arthur and saved his anger for John, and the previous November, we’d all experienced a rather strained Thanksgiving, with Priscilla seating John and Charlie as far apart as possible. Although the chill seemed to have thawed in the six months since—John and Charlie saw each other every day at work, after all—Charlie still privately seethed about what he saw as John’s ignorance (a particularly sore spot for Charlie was that John had never attended business school), and the rancor was a vivid reminder that if someone else criticized a Blackwell, it wasn’t acceptable, but a Blackwell criticizing a Blackwell was just fine. Meanwhile, I had tried not to let the conflict affect my relationship with John’s wife, Nan—I invited her to lunch more often than usual, or I’d suggest we drive together to Junior League meetings—and Ella, with no idea that her father and uncle were sparring, was worshipful of her girl cousins: Liza, who had taught me string figures during my first visit to Halcyon, was now twenty and finishing her junior year at Princeton, and Margaret was seventeen and would enter Princeton in the fall.
But Charlie was less and less inclined to participate in family gatherings—he certainly didn’t initiate any—and he could be guaranteed to show up for a Blackwell brunch or dinner only if his parents were in town, which wasn’t more often than every six weeks. A month before, in April, John and Nan had bought a table for eight at a benefit for the art museum and invited us to sit with them, and Charlie hadn’t gone at the last minute; it was a Saturday evening, he’d been drinking heavily while watching a baseball game in the den, and when he came upstairs and saw that I’d hung his tuxedo on the back of our bedroom door, he said, “No way I’m putting on that monkey suit.”
“Charlie, it’s blacktie,” I said, and he said, “Tough titty. I’m wearing what I have on, or you can go without me.” I had thought at first that he was kidding, but he’d maintained his refusal to change clothes, which was the same as refusing to go. When I’d asked what I was supposed to tell John and Nan—I knew they’d paid a hundred dollars a plate—he shrugged. “Tell ’em the truth.” Instead, I said he’d come down with the stomach flu. When I got home that night, he was still watching television—some police drama—and he smiled impishly and said, “Do you forgive your scoundrel husband?” Because it wasn’t worth it not to, I did, but that Monday, I ordered pamphlets from two treatment facilities for alcoholics, one local and one in Chicago. When I showed the pamphlets to Charlie, he said angrily, “Because I didn’t want to change my clothes the other night? Are you kidding me? Lindy, get a fucking grip.”
At some point during the spring, Charlie’s malaise had expanded to include not just his brothers but also his upcoming twentieth reunion at Princeton, which would occur in early June. In advance of the event, he’d received a bonded leather book in which alumni provided updates about their professional and personal lives, and before bed, he’d taken to reading aloud from it in tones of scorn and disbelief: “ ‘Having made partner at Ellis, Hoblitz, and Carson was an achievement outmatched only by the indescribable pleasure of seeing the sunrise over Maui’s Haleakala Crater as Cynthia and I celebrated fifteen years of marriage . . . ’ I’m telling you, this guy didn’t know his asshole from his elbow in college. Oh,
a good one: ‘I find it humbling to think that my oncology research literally saves lives . . . ’ We all knew O’Brien was a homo.” I did not find these excerpts or Charlie’s editorializing enjoyable, mostly because I’d be trying to read my own book, and they were interruptions. We didn’t have to go to the reunion, I pointed out once, eliciting a snappish rebuttal: Of course we had to go! What kind of chump skipped Reunions? (That was what Princetonians called the event—not
