rise slowly from his bed and say, “Well, I guess we had better gather up the coins and get them counted.” He loved counting the change, then writing on the front of the bag how much it all came to. He loved telling me how much I was worth.
Charles took a broom from the closet and swept the coins into a spectacular pile in the middle of the room, where we sat down and started counting or, actually, he counted aloud and I listened because I couldn’t keep up with him and made mistakes. He thought it would make more sense—just this once, since the booty was so big—if he handled the arithmetic. “Two thousand ducats,” Charles said. No, of course Charles didn’t say that, but he should have, sitting cross-legged on the floor, happy atop the pile of petty cash. He’d just separated the coins into homogeneous groups and counted a few dollars when his mother knocked on the door, entered the room upon receiving no response, and said, “Charles, dear, your father and I are correcting galleys in the living room. Will you and your friend be so kind as to keep it down?” Mrs. Ellenboegen always talked like that. She was very formal and dignified, even though she was only managing editor of
Fire Wheel
.
“Okay, Mom,” he said. “We’ll keep it down.” As a parody of cooperation, he started whispering each number while counting the pennies. I laughed at first, because that’s what Charles wanted me to do, but also because there was something very funny about the sudden transition from loud broadcast to low hush. After just a few minutes, though, I was in rapture over that whisper. I lost all comprehension of sense—Charles could have been counting backwards from a thousand, for all I knew or cared—and listened only to sound: the incessant scrape of copper sliding across wood and clinking in his hands; the unnecessary and thus incantatory repetition of “Three dollars and sixty-three cents, three dollars and sixty-four cents, three dollars and sixty-five cents, three dollars and sixty-six cents, three dollars and sixty-seven cents”; but most especially the beginning of my best friend’s baritone: the still small voice of a seven-year-old boy, the faint tone in which secrets are told.
It’s difficult to describe a whisper. Sandra says it’s “sibilant speech with little or no vibration of the vocal cords.” I love the scientific way she has with words, but she doesn’t do much to explain why a shiver shot across my back when Charles started whispering, or why I still get the chills whenever I hear a man lower his voice. It’s the closest I come to inversion, this worship I have of soft masculine sounds, and it’s probably why I spend so much time in Powell Library: in the fourth-floor stacks, the only acceptable mode of discourse is the dead hush. For other people it’s the cadenza of a concerto, the longest line in a letter, the love scene from a sentimental movie, the final stanza of a perfect poem. It’s not as if I’m incapable of responding to such stimuli, but for me the only surefire trigger of electric needles down the spine is a man’s whisper.
Charles kept asking me to go into the kitchen and bring back a glass of water for his throat, which was parched from smoking so many cigarettes. I did what he said, but I knew what was going on. Every time I left the room and returned, the stack of quarters seemed slightly smaller until, at the end of the day, I could practically count the quarters at sight. I didn’t care, though. That’s the thing. I honestly didn’t care. Charles could have deposited all the quarters and the silver dollars, too, in a long-term savings account, and I still would have brought him a tall glass of ice water—I would have brought him a bottle of
Château Margaux
’ 52 , if that had been what he wanted—just to keep him talking in that soft voice that was tickling my ears and making my body tingle all over.
He finished counting the change, tying the drawstring,