Chapter Seven, part one

When Charlie reached the carport, silence echoed off the walls of the house. The hubbub was already gone, off to the yacht club. He stood in the doorway, hand gripping the frame, as his heart sank toward his feet.

“Pardon, sir.”

It was a man’s voice. Charlie checked his memory. It was Henry, the chauffeur.

“Yes, hello, Henry. It sounds as if they’ve gone?”

“Indeed, sir. Would you like to take a drive? The others wanted to take their own motorcars, so I’m at liberty.”

The natural thing would have been to say no. Charlie hadn’t left the house since the day he’d arrived, and for 1,439 minutes of every day, he had absolutely no intention of altering that routine. But a bird started singing somewhere close by, its voice full of gusto, and Charlie realized that this was the odd one minute when a contrary whim could carry the day.

“I would enjoy a ride. Thank you, Henry. Only I don’t have my hat.” He turned back toward the house, painfully aware of how long it would take him to reach his room, locate his hat, and return.

“Allow me, sir,” Henry said. Charlie felt the brush of air as Henry dashed past him. Ten minutes later, they were in the Rolls Royce, rumbling down the road.

“Where to, sir?” Henry asked.

“It hardly matters. I can’t see where we are, anyway. You could drive me down an airstrip and it would all be the same to me.” He settled his back against the seat. “Do you enjoy driving?”

“I do,” Henry answered. “I’m grateful every day that I wasn’t born twenty years earlier. Horses and I don’t get along. Give me a nice engine any day.”

Yes, Charlie thought, a nice engine. Good night, how he’d loved to drive. The way the car answered his every request, circling potholes at his command. Even in France, where driving was a dance between life and death, there had sometimes been periods when he was ten or more miles from the action, when the sky burst and flashed like heat lightning, and the noise of battle was soft, like a murmur. Driving in those moments was an act of magic, he’d always thought. Lucky moments.

Close to battle, everything was noise. He was still surprised that it was his sight he’d lost in France, not his hearing. Because the sounds—the thunder of the earth ripping open, the whines of shells, the rat-a-tat of rocks and metal raining down—were enough to smother a person.

The speed of change took his breath away. Where a little hamlet stood one day, an upended heap of rubble lay the next. Farm houses turned into garbage mounds. When he went to the front, the Poste de Secours—the aid station, his staging location for wounded men—was inevitably located in the cellar of one of these buildings, shored up with jury-rigged timbers and sandbags. The wounded would straggle there in ones and twos, sometimes drenched, sometimes dry. Charlie would take as many as he could. His ambulance could carry two on stretchers, plus men crammed into seats or huddled on the metal floor wherever he could fit them.

Then he would hold his breath the entire way back, praying that no shell would obliterate them all, that he wouldn’t drive into a crater in the road that hadn’t been there five minutes before.

Charlie grasped the armrest on the door of the Rolls-Royce and commanded himself to exhale. He wasn’t there now. He was home. There was no shelling, and the road was smooth. He would never drive again, but he was alive. Safe. Lucky. He never forgot for a moment that the shelling was still going, twenty-four hours a day. That other drivers were taking other men away on stretchers, holding their breaths as they drove.

He gave his body a shake, like a dog coming out of a creek. “Could we stop somewhere?” he called to Henry. “Somewhere in the sun?”

A few minutes later, Henry brought the car to a stop. “This is the yacht club,” he said. “I thought you might want to see if the others have headed out for their cruise.”

Violet flashed into Charlie’s mind. Her voice had sounded so bright when she’d asked him to come along. He hated the thought that she was speaking in that cozy voice, even now, with other young men, and he was missing it. Not that he wanted to be on a yacht. Every slant of the deck would feel like an earthquake. The terror level would be intolerable. What if something happened? Sighted people could swim to floating bits of wreckage, but he’d be left to tread water until his legs gave out. No. No yachts. No yachts, no golf, no tennis, no driving.

Henry had exited the vehicle. A moment later, he opened Charlie’s door. “Would you like me to see if they’ve sailed already?”

“Sure,” Charlie answered, though he knew the only circumstance that would matter was if Violet had decided not to go after all. He just wanted to stand a moment with his back to the car and the sun on his face.

Five minutes later, he and Henry were back in the car, heading away from the yacht club. The group had reached the yacht, Henry had reported, and were preparing to set sail. Charlie was glad that they hadn’t seen him watching them like a boy outside a candy store. He let his body sink into the seat. Life was so cushy, here at home. Sometimes it disgusted him. Sometimes he gloried in it.

Henry slowed the car to a crawl.

“What is it?” Charlie asked.

“There’s a fellow on crutches going down the road. I didn’t want to spook him. He’s got an old Army cap on. Looks like he’s had a hard road.”

Charlie felt a surge in his chest. “Pull over,” he said. “Let’s talk to him. Which side?”

The left, Henry said, so Charlie scooted across the backseat and rolled down the window. Henry, in front, did the same.

“Hello there,” Henry called. “You have far to go?”

“Plenty far,” a voice responded. His voice had the weary undertone of men in the field hospital, or men who’ve made it back from the front alive, like they’d travelled across the world and back. Charlie put his face out the window.

“Where are you headed?”

There was a pause. “I don’t rightly know. I had thought people here, being rich, might help me. But I reckon a fellow like me ain’t so welcome.”

“Are you wounded?”

“Yessir. I was in the fighting in Cuba, aboard the Maine.”

Charlie had been a baby during the Spanish-American war, but everyone knew the motto from when the Maine sank: Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain! He scooted away from the window.

“Come on,” he called. “We can take you as far as Portsmouth, can’t we, Henry? There must be a Saint Vincent de Paul’s or something there. They’ll find you a bed and a hot meal. They may even have work. You won’t make it far on foot.”

Henry’s door popped open, and a second later there was a shuffle and the scent of dust from the road, and Henry offering to put the man’s crutches in the trunk. Then the sound of wheezy breathing as the man settled himself in the backseat. He smelled like days upon days of sweating in the same clothes. Charlie thought of his shaving help and color-sorted suits and swallowed. This could be him in twenty years—or tomorrow—if he weren’t lucky enough to have his name, his family, his family’s money.

“I can’t thank you enough,” the man began in his raspy voice. “My sister and her husband let me live in their place for some years when I first got back, but they’ve both passed on now. I thought I’d best hit the road. Only I ain’t so mobile, as it happens, and it’s hard to find a place to settle.”

Charlie’s imagination darted through the man’s life. He must be sleeping on park benches, rustling through trash cans. Eating things other people had thrown away.

“Is there no work that you could manage?”

“I used to mend shoes, at my sister’s. But you need a place to work for that, and someone to go out and look for customers. I’ve sold my tools now.”

Charlie felt an urge to explain to the man that this wasn’t his car. That Henry wasn’t his chauffeur. But what was the point? He was still eating three square meals and sleeping on a cotton mattress. This man probably made do on twenty-five cents a day.

“I was blinded in the war in Europe,” he blurted instead. “A gas attack.”

“Blinded?”

Charlie nodded. Telling people about his injury was exhausting. It was something this man probably understood.

“That’s rough for a young fellow.”

“You were young when you were injured.”

“Well, that’s true. I was.” There was a silence, and then, “I spent a few years feeling sorry for myself. I wish I had that time back now.”

Charlie ducked his chin to his chest. “How did you stop? Feeling sorry for yourself?”

“I got plain sick of it,” the man answered. “Gave myself a stiff talking to. I’m luckier than thousands, thousands who never came back or came back in worse shape than me. So what’ve I got to complain about?”

Henry had to ask around to find the Saint Vincent de Paul’s, but they found it at last. As the man was exiting the car and Henry was getting his crutches from the trunk, Charlie pulled out his money clip. The bills were in order—he’d had his mother help him arrange them that way before he left home—so he pulled out the one from the back and handed it toward the door.

“Good luck to you,” he said, holding the bill out, wondering if he was waving it at empty air.

There was a pause, and Charlie felt his face growing hot. Was he not going to take it? Was something wrong?

“I don’t want your pity.” The man’s voice was sandpaper thick. “Just because you’re in a fancy car.”

Charlie relaxed his arm but didn’t withdraw the bill. “This isn’t my car, and I don’t pity you,” he said honestly. “I’m only doing for you what I hope someone would do for me. We must stick together, don’t you agree? And help each other when we can.”

More silence followed, then a hand grasped the other end of the bill. A second hand, warm and calloused, clapped over the top of Charlie’s.

“I do at that. God bless you, sir.”

“Take care of yourself,” Charlie said, a pinch in his throat. The hand moved away, and he leaned back into the luxury of the car, while the man set forth with his pride and little else.

They pulled away. Without his sister, without family, what would happen if the veteran’s legs got worse? If he lost his memory or fell ill? Charlie’s mother used to hold teas and luncheons to benefit Saint Vincent de Paul, and before he’d always thought of it as an excuse to socialize with her friends. But causes like this, he suddenly saw, delivered oxygen to the drowning. Next time he saw his mother, he would have to thank her.