It was a long drive, and halfway there Charlie wondered why he had undertaken it. Y_______ was several cuts below B_______. The house was in a development, and the builder had not stopped at mere ugliness; he had constructed a community that looked, with its rectilinear windows, like a penal colony. The streets were named after universities?Princeton Street, Yale Street, Rutgers Street, and so forth. Only a few of the houses had been sold, and Gee-Gee’s house was surrounded by empty dwellings. Charlie rang the bell and heard Gee-Gee shouting for him to come in. The house was a mess, and as he was taking his coat off, Gee-Gee came slowly down the hall half riding in a child’s wagon, which he propelled by pushing a crutch. His right hip and leg were encased in a massive cast.
“Where’s Peaches?” Charlie asked.
“She’s in Nassau. She and the children went to Nassau for Christmas.”
“And left you alone?”
“I wanted them to go. I made them go. Nothing can be done for me. I get along all right on this wagon. When I’m hungry, I make a sandwich. I wanted them to go. I made them go. Peaches needed a vacation, and I like being alone. Come on into the living room and make me a drink. I can’t get the ice trays out?that’s about the only thing I can’t do. I can shave and get into bed and so forth, but I can’t get the ice trays out.”
Charlie got some ice. He was glad to have something to do. The image of Gee-Gee in his wagon had shocked him, and he felt a terrifying stillness over the place. Out of the kitchen window he could see row upon row of ugly, empty houses. He felt as if some hideous melodrama were approaching its climax. But in the living room Gee-Gee was his most charming, and his smile and his voice gave the afternoon a momentary equilibrium. Charlie asked if Gee-Gee couldn’t get a nurse to stay with him. Couldn’t someone be found to stay with him? Couldn’t he at least rent a wheelchair? Gee-Gee laughed away all these suggestions. He was contented. Peaches had written him from Nassau. They were having a marvelous time.
Charlie believed that Gee-Gee had made them go. It was this detail, above everything else, that gave the situation its horror. Peaches would have liked, naturally enough, to go to Nassau, but she never would have insisted. She was much too innocent to have any envious dreams of travel. Gee-Gee would have insisted that she go; he would have made the trip so tempting that she could not, in her innocence, resist it. Did he wish to be left alone, drunken and crippled, in an isolated house? Did he need to feel abused? It seemed so. The disorder of the house and the image of his wife and children running, running, running on some coral beach seemed like a successful contrivance?a kind of triumph.
Gee-Gee lit a cigarette and, forgetting about it, lit another, and fumbled so clumsily with the matches that Charlie saw that he might easily burn to death. Hoisting himself from the wagon to the chair, he nearly fell, and, if he were alone and fell, he could easily die of hunger and thirst on his own rug. But there might be some drunken cunning in his clumsiness, his playing with fire. He smiled slyly when he saw the look on Charlie’s face. “Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I’ll be all right. I have my guardian angel.”
“That’s what everybody thinks,” Charlie said.
“Oh, but I have.”
Outside, it had begun to snow. The winter sky was overcast, and it would soon be dark. Charlie said that he had to go. “Sit down,” Gee-Gee said. “Sit down and have another drink.” Charlie’s conscience held him there a few moments longer. How could he openly abandon a friend?a neighbor, at least?to the peril of death? But he had no choice; his family was waiting and he had to go. “Don’t worry about me,” Gee-Gee said when Charlie was putting on his coat. “I have my angel.”
It was later than Charlie had realized. The snow was heavy now, and he had a two-hour drive, on winding back roads. There was a little rise going out of Y_______, and the new snow was so slick that he had trouble making the hill. There were steeper hills ahead of him. Only one of his windshield wipers worked, and the snow quickly covered the glass and left him with one small aperture onto the world. The snow sped into the headlights at a dizzying rate, and at one place where the road was narrow the car slid off onto the shoulder and he had to race the motor for ten minutes in order to get back onto the hard surface. It was a lonely stretch there?miles from any house?and he would have had a sloppy walk in his loafers. The car skidded and weaved up every hill, and it seemed that he reached the top by the thinnest margin of luck.
After driving for two hours, he was still far from home. The snow was so deep that guiding the car was like the trickiest kind of navigation. It took him three hours to get back, and he was tired when he drove into the darkness and peace of his own garage?tired and infinitely grateful. Martha and the children had eaten their supper, and she wanted to go over to the Lissoms’ and discuss some school-board business. He told her that the driving was bad, and since it was such a short distance, she decided to walk. He lit a fire and made a drink, and the children sat at the table with him while he ate his supper. After supper on Sunday nights, the Folkestones played, or tried to play, trios. Charlie played the clarinet, his daughter played the piano, and his older son had a tenor recorder. The baby wandered around underfoot. This Sunday night they played simple arrangements of eighteenth-century music in the pleasantest family atmosphere?complimenting themselves when they squeezed through a difficult passage, and extending into the music what was best in their relationship. They were playing a Vivaldi sonata when the telephone rang. Charlie knew immediately who it was.
“Charlie, Charlie,” Gee-Gee said. “Jesus. I’m in hot water. Right after you left I fell out of the Goddamned wagon. It took me two hours to get to the telephone. You’ve got to get over. There’s nobody else. You’re my only friend. You’ve got to get over here. Charlie? You hear me?” It must have been the strangeness of the look on Charlie’s face that made the baby scream. The little girl picked him up in her arms, and stared, as did the other boy, at their father. They seemed to know the whole picture, every detail of it, and they looked at him calmly, as if they were expecting him to make some decision that had nothing to do with the continuing of a pleasant evening in a snowbound house?but a decision that would have a profound effect on their knowledge of him and on their final happiness. Their looks were, he thought, clear and appealing, and whatever he did would be final.
“You hear me, Charlie? You hear me?” Gee-Gee asked. “It took me damned near two hours to crawl over to the telephone. You’ve got to help me. No one else will come.”
