Empire Falls

whether he was there or not, he resolved to marry her if she would have him .
    Well, as it turned out, she would. They were wed in September, leaving C. B. Whiting the rest of his days on earth to try to remember what exactly it was about the look of Francine Robideaux that had so appealed to him in the soft light of the lawyers’ offices. In natural light she looked rather pinched, and in the manner of a great many women of French Canadian ancestry, she lacked a chin, as if someone had already pinched her there. He also came to understand that marrying Francine Robideaux would not answer as conclusively as he’d hoped the question of whether or not he was actually in the room. On that late afternoon in August when he lit a cigar in celebration, his wife-to-be at his side, C. B. Whiting studied his fiancée carefully. Whiting men, all of whom seemed to be born with sound business sense, each invariably gravitated, like moths to a flame, toward the one woman in the world who would regard making them utterly miserable as her life’s noble endeavor, a woman who would remain bound to her husband with the same grim tenacity that bound nuns to the suffering Christ. Fully cognizant of his family history, C.B. had been understandably wary of matrimony. From time to time his father would remind him that he would have need of an heir , but then C.B. regarded his father and grandfather and wasn’t so sure. Why not put an end to the awful cycle of misery right there? What was the purpose of producing more Whiting males if they were predestined to lives of marital torment?
    And so C. B. Whiting scrutinized Francine Robideaux, trying to envision some future day when he might want to beat her to death with a shovel. Thankfully, he was unable to call such a scene into vivid imaginative life. About the best he could do was contemplate the possibility that it had been unwise to go to war with God. If He could deliver unto you an unwanted moose, what was to prevent Him from delivering something even worse. Say, for instance, an unwanted woman. This would have been a worrisome contemplation had he not wanted this woman. But he did want her. He was almost sure of it .
    His bride-to-be had other thoughts. “That would be a fine place for a gazebo, Charlie,” she observed, indicating with her thin index finger a spot halfway down the bank. When Charles Beaumont Whiting did not immediately respond, Francine Robideaux repeated her observation, and this time her future husband thought he detected a slight edge to her tone. “Did you hear what I said, Charlie?”
    He had. In truth, though he had no objection to gazebos in general, he was not entirely taken with the idea of erecting one as an architectural companion to a hacienda. This aesthetic reservation was not, however, the cause of his hesitation. No, the reason he hadn’t responded was that no one had ever called him Charlie. From boyhood he had always been Charles, and his mother in particular had been adamant that the fine name she’d given him was not to be corrupted with more common nicknames, like Charlie or, even worse, Chuck. For a brief time, in college, his friends had called him Beaumont, and in Mexico he’d been Beau. More recently, his business acquaintances mostly referred to him as C.B., but they did so reverentially and would never have presumed to address him as Charlie .
    Clearly, the time to set the record straight was now, but as he considered how best to suggest his preference for Charles over Charlie, he became aware that “now” had already passed into “then.” Strange. Had anyone else called him Charlie, he’d have corrected that person before his or her voice had a chance to fall, but for some reason, with this woman whom he had asked on bended knee to be his bride, he’d delayed. A beat passed, and then another and another, until Charles Beaumont Whiting realized that he was mute with a new emotion. At first he noted only its unpleasant sensation, but eventually he identified it. The emotion was fear .
    “I said …” his wife-to-be began a third time .
    “Yes, dear. An excellent idea,” Charles Beaumont Whiting agreed and in that fateful moment became Charlie Whiting. Later in life, he was fond of remarking, rather ruefully, that he always had the last word in all differences of opinion with his wife, and that—two words, actually—was, “Yes, dear.” Had he known how many times he would repeat that phrase to this woman, how it would