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Adelaide or his daughters except for the canceled child-supportchecks. He had called Caroline in February and Cathy in March to be sure they had received their birthday presents, and the girls had said yes, thank you, but not much else. Charlie said that at Christmas the girls had been subdued, even timid with him, not touching, not talking, hanging back, but when he had gotten in the car to leave they had both burst into tears and little Cathy had run to him through the snow to throw her arms about him, to beg him not to go away again. Since then he had been eager for summer, to have his daughters with him for a long period of time, to reestablish the contact, to try to reaffirm his love.
    He was furious at Adelaide’s letter, and incredulous that she thought she could keep the girls from him, and hurt that she would want to do so. That night, full of righteous indignation, he called Adelaide on the phone. And got hit with a hurricane punch of hatred and fury.
    Of course, she was unhappy, and she was having problems. It is not easy to be divorced and alone with two small children and have to work when all you’ve ever wanted to do was to stay home and be a mother. Women’s lib came unfortunately late for Adelaide. That summer her closest friends were moving away and she had not yet met a man she liked who liked her, and all in all, it was one of those years when nothing, nothing was going right. As she said, the girls were all she had; how could Charlie take them from her when she needed them so?
    Charlie was unprepared for the fury and the noise and the grief. He sat stunned, saying into the phone, “But—but—but—” I sat next to him, fascinated. I had never seen anything like it except for comic routines on television, where the comedian makes a face and holds the phone away from his ear and a high, shrill, senseless voice babbles on and on and on.
    The gist of it was: if Charlie really loved Caroline and Cathy, he wouldn’t have left them in the first place. Since he had left them, he didn’t love them. She, Adelaide, had done her very best to help the girls realize that their father did not love them and that they would be happier without him, just as he was so happy without them. They had managed to start a new life with new friends, and it was absolutely evil of him to try to take the little girls away from a house where they finally felt secure and loved, from a place where they had friends. The little girls had gone through enough pain andheartbreak, they didn’t need any more. The three of them were happy together, a real family, and it wasn’t fair for him to separate them.
    Charlie said, when he could find a space, that he loved the girls and he wanted them to be with him as arranged and he would call his lawyer. He hung up the phone.
    Five minutes later it rang. When Charlie answered it, Caroline, his older daughter, was on the line. She was sobbing.
    “Daddy,” she cried, “please don’t take us away from Mommy. We can’t live without Mommy. Mommy can’t live without us. Please don’t make us go there. We don’t want to live with you and that lady. We want to stay with Mommy.”
    And before Charlie could respond, Adelaide was on the phone again. “See! See what I mean! That was your own daughter begging you to leave her alone. I know you don’t care what I want, but surely your own daughters’ feelings mean something, that is if you love them at all. And poor little Cathy’s right here next to me crying her eyes out; she can’t even talk she’s so upset—”
    “Adelaide,” Charlie said, “I want my girls to spend two months with me this summer. I’m going to hang up now and call my lawyer.”
    And he did.
    Two weeks and two hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of lawyer’s fees and long-distance phone calls and registered letters later his girls arrived.
    Those two weeks were a strange and wonderful and terrible time for me. Charlie confided to me things I had never known before