Charlie hung up. Gee-Gee must have heard the sound of his breathing and the baby crying, but Charlie had said nothing. He gave no explanation to the children, and they asked for none. They knew. His daughter went back to the piano, and when the telephone rang again and he did not answer it, no one questioned the ringing of the phone. They seemed happy and relieved when it stopped ringing, and they played Vivaldi until nine o’clock, when he sent them up to bed.
He made a drink to diminish the feeling that some emotional explosion had taken place, that some violence had shaken the air. He did not know what he had done or how to cope with his conscience. He would tell Martha about it when she came in, he thought. That would be a step toward comprehension. But when she returned he said nothing. He was afraid that if she brought her intelligence to the problem it would only confirm his guilt. “But why didn’t you telephone me at the Lissoms’?” she might have asked. “I could have come home and you could have gone over.” She was too compassionate a woman to accept passively, as he was doing, the thought of a friend, a neighbor, lying in agony. She went on upstairs. He poured some whiskey into his glass. If he had called the Lissoms’, if she had returned to care for the children and left him free to help Gee-Gee, would he have been able to make the return trip in the heavy snow? He could have put on chains, but where were the chains? Were they in the car or in the cellar? He didn’t know. He hadn’t used them that year. But perhaps by now the roads would have been plowed: Perhaps the storm was over. This last, distressing possibility made him feel sick. Had the sky betrayed him? He switched on the outside light and went hesitantly, unwillingly, toward the window.
The clean snow gave off an ingratiating sparkle, and the beam of light shone into empty and peaceful air. The snow must have stopped a few minutes after he had entered the house. But how could he have known? How could he be expected to take into consideration the caprices of the weather? And what about that look the children had given him?so stern, so clear, so like a declaration that his place at that hour was with them, and not with the succoring of drunkards who had forfeited the chance to be taken seriously?
Then the image of Gee-Gee returned, crushing in its misery, and he remembered Peaches standing in the hallway at the Watermans’ calling, “Come back! Come back!” She was calling back the youth that Charlie had never known, but it was easy to imagine what Gee-Gee must have been?fair, high-spirited, generous, and strong?and why had it all come to ruin? Come back! Come back! She seemed to call after the sweetness of a summer’s day?roses in bloom and all the doors and windows open on the garden. It was all there in her voice; it was like the illusion of an abandoned house in the last rays of the sun. A large place, falling to pieces, haunted for children and a headache for the police and fire departments, but, seeing it with its windows blazing in the sunset, one thinks that they have all come back. Cook is in the kitchen rolling pastry. The smell of chicken rises up the back stairs. The front rooms are ready for the children and their many friends. A coal fire burns in the grate. Then as the light goes off the windows, the true ugliness of the place scowls into the dusk with redoubled force, as, when the notes of that long-ago summer left Peaches’ voice, one saw the finality and confusion of despair in her innocent face. Come back! Come back! He poured himself some more whiskey, and as he raised the glass to his mouth he heard the wind change and saw?the outside light was still on?the snow begin to spin down again, with the vindictive swirl of a blizzard. The road was impassable; he could not have made the trip. The change in the weather had given him sweet absolution, and he watched the snow with a smile of love, but he stayed up until three in the morning with the bottle.
He was red-eyed and shaken the next morning, and ducked out of his office at eleven and drank two Martinis. He had two more before lunch and another at four and two on the train, and came reeling home for supper. The clinical details of heavy drinking are familiar to all of us; it is only the human picture that concerns us here, and Martha was finally driven to speak to him. She spoke most gently.
“You’re drinking too much, darling,” she said. “You’ve been drinking too much for three weeks.”
“My drinking,” he said, “is my own Goddamned business. You mind your business and I’ll mind mine.”
It got worse and worse, and she had to do something. She finally went to their rector?a good- looking young bachelor who practiced both psychology and liturgy?for advice. He listened sympathetically. “I stopped at the rectory this afternoon,” she said when she got home that night, “and I talked with Father Hemming. He wonders why you haven’t been in church, and he wants to talk to you. He’s such a good-looking man,” she added, trying to make what she had just said sound less like a planned speech, “that I wonder why he’s never married.” Charlie?drunk, as usual?went to the telephone and called the rectory. “Look, Father,” he said. “My wife tells me that you’ve been entertaining her in the afternoons. Well, I don’t like it. You keep your hands off my wife. You hear me? That damned black suit you wear doesn’t cut any ice with me. You keep your hands off my wife or I’ll bust your pretty little nose.”
In the end, he lost his job, and they had to move, and began their wanderings, like Gee-Gee and Peaches, in the scarlet-and-gold van.
AND WHAT HAPPENED to Gee-Gee?whatever became of him? That boozy guardian angel, her hair disheveled and the strings of her harp broken, still seemed to hover over where he lay. After telephoning Charlie that night, he telephoned the fire department. They were there in eight minutes flat, with bells ringing and sirens blowing. They got him into bed, made him a fresh drink, and one of the firemen, who had nothing better to do, stayed on until Peaches got back from Nassau. They had a fine time, eating all the steaks in the deep freeze and drinking a quart of bourbon every day. Gee-Gee could walk by the time Peaches and the children got back, and he took up that disorderly life for which he seemed so much better equipped than his neighbor, but they had to move at the end of the year, and, like the Folkestones, vanished from the hill towns.
JUST TELL ME WHO IT WAS
William Pym was a self-made man; that is, he had started his adult life without a nickel or a
