“Is Bill Cermak all right?”
Gladys’s mouth trembled. “Oh, yes,” she said, cutting the words off sharply. “Well, I suppose this means our dinnerdance is off… The Edsel Fords were coming.” “Hell, no, why not have it anyway? Yours truly can attend in a wheelchair. Say, they sure have got me in a straitjacket… I guess I busted some ribs.” Gladys nodded; her mouth was getting very small and thin. Then she suddenly began to cry.
The nurse came in and said reproachfully, “Oh, Mrs. Anderson.” Charley was just as glad when Gladys went out and left him alone with the nurse. “Say, nurse, get hold of the doctor, will you? Tell him I’m feeling fine and want to look over the extent of the damage.” “Mr. Anderson, you mustn’t have anything on your mind.” “I know, tell Mrs. Anderson I want her to get in touch with the office.” “But it’s Sunday, Mr. Anderson. A great many people have been downstairs but I don’t think the doctor is letting them up yet.” The nurse was a freshfaced girl with a slightly Scotch way of talking. “I bet you’re a Canadian,” said Charley. “Right that time,” said the nurse. “I knew a wonderful nurse who was a Canadian once. If I’d had any sense I’d have married her.”
The housephysician was a roundfaced man with a jovial smooth manner almost like a headwaiter at a big hotel. “Say, doc, ought my leg to hurt so damn much?” “You see we haven’t set it yet. You tried to puncture a lung but didn’t quite get away with it. We had to remove a few little splinters of rib” “Not from the lung…” “Luckily not.” “But why the hell didn’t you set the leg at the same time?” “Well, we’re waiting for Dr. Roberts to come on from New York… Mrs. Anderson insisted on him. Of course we are all very pleased, as he’s one of the most eminent men in his profession… It’ll be another little operation.”
It wasn’t until he’d come to from the second operation that they told him that Bill Cermak had died of a fractured skull.
Charley was in the hospital three months with his leg in a Balkan frame. The fractured ribs healed up fast, but he kept on having trouble with his breathing. Gladys handled all the house bills and came every afternoon for a minute. She was always in a hurry and always terribly worried. He had to turn over a power of attorney to Moe Frank his lawyer who used to come to see him a couple of times a week to talk things over. Charley couldn’t say much, he couldn’t say much to anybody he was in so much pain.
He liked it best when Gladys sent Wheatley to see him. Wheatley was three years old now and thought it was great in the hospital. He liked to see the nurse working all the little weights and pulleys of the frame the leg hung in. “Daddy’s living in a airplane,” was what he always said about it. He had tow hair and his nose was beginning to stick up and Charley thought he took after him.
Marguerite was still too little to be much fun. The one time Gladys had the governess bring her, she bawled so at the look of the scary-looking frame she had to be taken home. Gladys wouldn’t let her come again. Gladys and Charley had a bitter row about letting Wheatley come as she said she didn’t want the child to remember his father in the hospital. “But, Glad, he’ll have plenty of time to get over it, get over it a damn sight sooner than I will.” Gladys pursed her lips together and said nothing. When she’d gone Charley lay there hating her and wondering how they could ever have had children together.
Just about the time he began to see clearly that they all expected him to be a cripple the rest of his life he began to mend, but it was winter before he was able to go home on crutches. He still suffered sometimes from a sort of nervous difficulty in breathing. The house seemed strange as he dragged himself around in it. Gladys had had every room redecorated while he was away and all the servants were different. Charley didn’t feel it was his house at all. What he enjoyed best was the massage he had three times a week. He spent his days playing with the kids and talking to Miss Jarvis, their stiff and elderly English governess. After they’d gone to bed he’d sit in his sittingroom drinking scotch and soda and feeling puffy and nervous. God damn it, he was getting too fat. Gladys was always cool as a cucumber these days; even when he went into fits of temper and cursed at her, she’d stand there looking at him with a cold look of disgust on her carefully madeup face. She entertained a great deal but made the servants understand that Mr. Anderson wasn’t well enough to come down. He began to feel like a poor relation in his own house. Once when the Farrells were coming he put on his tuxedo and hobbled down to dinner on his crutches. There was no place set for him and everybody looked at him like he was a ghost.
“Thataboy,” shouted Farrell in his yapping voice. “I was expecting to come up and chin with you after dinner.” It turned out that what Farrell wanted to talk about was the suit for five hundred thousand some damn shyster had induced Cermak’s widow to bring against the company. Farrell had an idea that if Charley went and saw her he could induce her to be reasonable and settle for a small annuity. Charley said he’d be damned if he’d go. At dinner Charley got tight and upset the afterdinner coffeecups with his crutch and went off to bed in a rage.
What he enjoyed outside of playing with the kids was buying and selling stocks and talking to Nat over the longdistance. Nat kept telling him he was getting the feel of the market. Nat warned him and Charley knew damn well that he was slipping at Tern and that if he didn’t do something he’d be frozen out, but he felt too rotten to go to directors’ meetings; what he did do was to sell out about half his stocks in small parcels. Nat kept telling him if he’d only get a move on he could get control of the whole business before Andy Merritt pulled off his new reorganization, but he felt too damn nervous and miserable to make the effort. All he could seem to do was to grumble and call Julius Stauch and raise hell about details. Stauch had taken over his work on the new monoplane and turned out a little ship that had gone through all tests with flying colors. When he’d put down the receiver, Charley would pour himself a little scotch and settle back on the couch in his window and mutter to himself, “Well, you’re dished this time.”
One evening Farrell came around and had a long talk and said what Charley needed was a fishing trip, he’d never get well if he kept on this way. He said he’d been talking to Doc Thompson and that he recommended three months off and plenty of exercise if he ever expected to throw away his crutches.
Gladys couldn’t go because old Mrs. Wheatley was sick, so Charley got into the back of his Lincoln towncar alone with the chauffeur to drive him, and a lot of blankets to keep him warm, and a flask of whiskey and a thermosbottle of hot coffee, to go down all alone to Miami.
At Cincinnati he felt so bum he spent a whole day in bed in the hotel there. He got the chauffeur to get him booklets about Florida from a travel agency, and finally sent a wire to Nat Benton asking him to spend a week with him down at the Key Largo fishingcamp. Next morning he started off again early. He’d had a good night’s sleep and he felt better and began to enjoy the trip. But he felt a damn fool sitting there being driven like an old woman all bundled up in rugs. He was lonely too because the chauffeur wasn’t the kind of bird you could talk to. He was a sourlooking Canuck Gladys had hired because she thought it was classy to give her orders in French through the speakingtube; Charley was sure the bastard gypped him on the price of gas and oil and repairs along the road; that damn Lincoln was turning out a bottomless pit for gas and oil.
In Jacksonville the sun was shining. Charley gave himself the satisfaction of firing the chauffeur as soon as they’d driven up to the door of the hotel. Then he went to bed with a pint of bum corn the bellboy sold him and slept like a log.