Vigil for a Stranger Read Free Page A

shabby little town.
    Charlie was still in New Haven, living in the Orange Street apartment he had shared with Pierce, doing what I don’t remember—working at Sterling Library, I think. He drove all the way down to tell me in person. He’d seen it on television—a tragedy so spectacular it might have made the news even if Pierce hadn’t been a local boy. Charlie knew I didn’t have a television. He showed up at my apartment—an odd little place in the back of an old gabled house, up a flight of rickety outside steps. He stood at my kitchen door, looking at me through the screen. I hadn’t heard him approach: I had my noisy fan on, it was a hot night. He said, “Christine,” and I looked up and ran to let him in.
    I hadn’t seen him in months. He cried in my arms for a long time before he could tell me. I kept saying, “Charlie, what is it, what is it?”—terrified. I was afraid, for some reason, that he had done something awful—murdered someone, been involved in a hit-and run. I have no idea why I thought that. Charlie was a model citizen, he was sober, he was serious, he was controlled—that was his self, and that was also his curious, reassuring charm (that and his Huck Finn looks). He was a relentlessly good person, who had never done a mean or violent or even thoughtless thing in his life—maybe that was why my first thought was that he finally had. Seeing him cry was so horrible that it seemed anything could have happened—as if a building that’s stood for centuries (Chartres, Windsor Castle) should suddenly crumble, and collapse with a sigh that sounded human.
    Finally, of course, he stopped crying. He blew his nose, went to the sink, washed his face and dried it on a dishtowel. I gave him a beer. He said, “Maybe you’d better have one too,” and then he sat down across the kitchen table and said, “Pierce is dead. I heard it on the news.”
    Charlie and Pierce and I became friends in college. We were all from small towns—Pierce from a shoreline town in Connecticut, Charlie from eastern Pennsylvania, me from upstate New York. That was our bond at Oberlin, a small-town school where everyone else seemed to be from Manhattan or Chicago. Most of the other people we knew were going quietly crazy in Oberlin, Ohio, a dry town with a two-block main drag. There were a lot of desperate trips to Cleveland, all-night drives to Chicago, a lot of transferring out. Charlie and Pierce and I were perfectly content with the town, with our lives—most of the time with each other. The three of us were inseparable, especially during our last two years when so many of our friends had left.
    Technically, I suppose I was Charlie’s girlfriend, but Pierce and I were best friends, together more than Charlie and I were, or Pierce and anybody else, any of his dozens of girls. And though we both loved Charlie—oh God, I did love him, Charlie and his red curls, his long legs, his sweet mouth—the truth was that we often considered him a third wheel. He didn’t get our jokes, he was always deadly earnest, and he used to suffer intensely when Pierce put on the old blues records he and I were both crazy about.
    The only kind of music Charlie could stand was the rock and roll of his high school days, especially anything by the Everly Brothers. Neat music , he called it, and meant it literally: Pierce’s heroes (Big Bill Broonzy, Little Brother Montgomery, Otis Spann, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee) represented messy music , rambling and guttural, raucous, mumbling, full of extempore piano runs and guitars pushed to their breaking point with bottlenecks and tricky fingering, full of sex and booze and bad trouble. Charlie found the easy harmonies, the polished voices, the tidy a-a-b-a form of the Everly Brothers’ songs soothing, and the point of music was to soothe, he said. We could never talk him out of it.
    One of his great