Chapter Eleven, part two

Charlie stood on the threshold of the lower-floor loggia, his heart pounding. He’d overheard Sadie’s whisper about his never going out, and it had struck a painful note of truth. He, who’d spent most of his boyhood outdoors, was now afraid of the open sky.

He’d once camped, all alone, for three days at Assateague Island. He and his brother had climbed all the peaks of the White Mountains before they turned twenty—his mother used to call them mountain men. Now his hands were always clean, his shoes polished. No wind touched his hair, no sun lit his face, and why? Because he was terrified. Terrified to be in darkness and full sunlight at the same time.

Running a hand along the exterior wall of the house, he made his way to the front of the loggia. Burbling water indicated the stone fountain beyond, after which, he’d been told, came a stretch of lawn edged by the cliff trail. After that came the drop-off to the beach, and then waves.

Why shouldn’t he walk out, just onto the lawn? Granted, there were no walls to follow. Yes, he could take a wrong turn and cross lawn after lawn after lawn or tumble to the beach. But surely, he could walk just five paces out, then five paces back. He could do that.

He drank in the air. The tide must be low—the briny, salt-smell was strong. It reminded him of his voyage home aboard the Campania, when he’d first realized how frightening it was to stand outside when blind.

Footsteps behind him made him turn—a wave of cigar smoke hinted that it was Reggie. The smoke stopped beside him.

“Nice day, uh?”

“Quite warm.” Charlie pressed his palm against the wall.

“So,” Reggie said slowly. “Alva tells me you were blinded in the war.”

Charlie nodded.

“Totally? Can’t see at all?”

“Not a lick.”

Reggie let out a slow whistle. “That’s a bad hand, pal. No cards, no driving. No polo.”

“Yeah. It’s a very long list of can’ts and a very short list of cans.”

“Hmm. There are still women. That’s something.”

“It is something. But how many girls want to go with a blind fellow?”

“Well, to go with, to marry,” Reggie paused. “Not so many, I guess. But I know some ladies in the city who are none too particular, long as your money’s green. Hell, for enough cash, you could move into their place and live out your days. There are worse lives, eh?”

Reggie laughed at that until he started coughing. Charlie tightened his grip on the corner of the loggia wall. “I don’t suppose you could do me a favor.”

“What is it? Though, I’ll tell you right now that I can’t have those ladies down here to the Breakers. Mother would skin me alive.”

“No, no. I wondered if you could tell me what the girls, the guests, here at the Breakers look like?”

“Oh, sure—you’ve no idea!”

“All I have to go on is their voices.”

“Ah. Well. Here’s my take. With women, there’s pretty and then there’s beautiful. Hear what I’m saying? Pretty girls, beautiful girls, and the girls with money.” He chuckled and the smell of his cigar bloomed in the air between them. “Those Worth girls, those are ‘girls with money.’ Long faces. Horsey. Then, in the pretty camp, there’s Sadie Van Waters, Pearl Wainwright. Sadie has good spunk and handsome style. Then for beautiful, I’d say Violet Van Waters and that Miss Abernathy who came today. Smashing girls.”

Charlie’s heart surged. “Thanks, that’s a big help.” He struggled to sound casual. “Violet Van Waters…light haired? Dark haired?”

“Ah, got a liking for Violet, eh? Hmm, yes. Dark. Dark hair, blue eyes. Alva calls her a classic beauty. When she plays the piano, she gets a pink flush on her face that’s beyond charming. She seems to like you. You should get her dancing.”

“I don’t know. Why would she want to dance with a blind fellow?”

Reggie grunted. “Pretty much everything fun is off for you, isn’t it? No shooting. No sailing. No tennis.”

“Not even golf.”

“No, not even. Well, you’d better take my cue on the ladies in the city. If I were in your shoes, if it weren’t for that, I’d want to shoot myself.”

Reggie clapped him on the back, hard enough that Charlie—not knowing it was coming—would have stumbled if he hadn’t been touching the wall. Reggie moved off, taking the sweet cigar smell with him, and Charlie was left remembering his own long stretches of wanting to kill himself.

The worst, and the first, had been on the steamship home.

When he’d first woken up in the French field hospital, hardly able to breathe from the shock of blindness, there had at least been those hand-holding nurses. They read to him sometimes, or to men nearby, and that gave anchor points to his days. Too, everyone around him was speaking French, so he had the mental exercise of planning out things to say and picking up idioms and slang. But when it became evident that his sight wasn’t coming back, the Service de Santé searched for ways to send him home.

It wasn’t easy. They couldn’t exactly send a blind man out to make his own way across the ocean. After weeks—during which he took up a lit d'hôpital that could have gone to another wounded man—a solution appeared. Paul Maynard, a volunteer driver from the University of Michigan, had taken massive shrapnel in his leg and spine and was heading home. Charlie could sail with him to New York where his parents could take over his care.

Their path across Europe was a scramble. Nearly every ocean liner on the Continent had been converted into a troop carrier or armed cruiser. He and Paul finally made it onto the Campania’s last civilian voyage and felt very lucky to be aboard.

Lucky and unlucky. Paul, who walked with a stick and was in almost constant pain, was as bearish as Charlie. They lay in their berths with nothing to say.

Charlie resented Paul’s being able to read; Paul resented Charlie’s lack of pain. Paul was also strapped for cash. He’d been a scholarship student and was using most of his Ambulance Field Service pay to cover this trip home. His worry over money made Charlie realize, for the first time, that all avenues of money-making were suddenly closed to him. If he couldn’t read, he couldn’t be in business, in law, in banking. Medicine was out. Investing was out. He would have to live off his parents for the rest of his life.

Suicide sparkled on the horizon like an oasis. He could erase all of his problems in one bold move. Throwing himself overboard was the obvious method, but there were logistical obstacles. He’d made it down the hall and had—after a long exploration—figured out how to open the door to the deck. But once there, with the salt wind pelting him in the face, he’d gone rigid at the thought of letting go of the ship to cross the deck to the rail. He had trouble with dizziness as it was, made far worse with the heaving of the deck. What if the rail wasn’t there? An absurd thought from a man who wanted to die, but still—he couldn’t shake it. And what if the rail wasn’t over open sea but over another deck? What if he finally summoned his nerve to jump and landed fifteen feet down, still alive, with a broken spine?

Even worse was the thought of success. Of leaping the rail and splashing into the Atlantic. The shock of cold forcing the air out of his lungs. The fight to breathe. The flailing. The struggle to swim when he was supposed to drown. The regret. Swimming, unspotted and unseen, in frigid water, hearing the rumble of the steamship as it moved farther and farther away.

No. He was too much of a chicken. Too craven to live and too much of a coward to end it all. He was a paper bird that couldn’t get wet, and he owed Paul more than grumbles and resentment.

When the two of them parted, he pressed thirty dollars into Paul’s hand as they shook goodbye and hoped that would ease some of the other man’s worries.

Now, a world away, Charlie stood at the edge of the loggia, contemplating the open lawn. He wasn’t Paul—he could dedicate his life to sampling gin fizzes and playing the clarinet, and no one would think less of him. He took a step backward, retreating into the safety of the loggia. He was lucky, with that family money. He should count his blessings, slide into the shadows, and accept a small and quiet life. It was far safer than leaping over a rail he couldn’t see. He edged back along the way he had come, back into the house, and went in search of a drink.