Charlie cut him off with: “Thank you.” He was slumped forward in the wheelchair, and his head was bent forward, and he looked up at Mr. Almost A. Doctor with as malevolent a look as he could muster.

  “I don’t mean to be out of line,” the man said, beginning to look flustered.

  “Thank you,” said an utterly unsmiling Charlie, and the man with the mismatched mustache beat a retreat out the front door.

  The hell of it was, he knew the man was right. But what difference did it make? Recuperate for—what? Why do a lot of exercises and put yourself through a lot of pain as if you’re building toward some sort of future—when you know very well there is no future?

  The depressed man realizes that all daily routines imply a belief in Tomorrow and are cruel jokes since of course tomorrow no longer exists.

  As Jarmaine pushed him toward the library, Charlie became suddenly aware of the fortune—not just in money but also in time and care—that had gone into the first floor of this house. Godalmighty. His eyes roamed. Jarmaine was saying something, and Nina was hovering, as only she could hover, but Charlie paid no attention to either of them. He felt enormously sorry for himself … an old man being trundled in a wheelchair to a bed in his library. A sorry old man letting his eyes wander helplessly over his worldly goods … Oh Lord, the amboyna-wood breakfront, the eighteenth-century grandfather’s clock that didn’t come from any grandfather of either of them but cost more than either of his grandfathers had made in a lifetime of jookin’ at the jook houses and swamp-rattin’ in the swamps in Baker County, the—how was it pronounced—fautooies?—the fauteuils, the fabrics from whatever-those-thieves-in-New-York-were-called, the lamps from that place in Nebraska, the cabinets—commodes Bombay—was that what Serena called them? … all of these names came flooding back into the brain of the poor old hulk as he was being wheeled across a stretch of carpet, which was another wildly expensive item introduced to North Georgia by Ronald Vine, the decorator. Serena had been experiencing for the first time the ecstasy of having an unlimited budget with which to buy … things … objects … fabulous stuff … And what nonsense it all was! How vain and petty it all was, all this exulting over … things! One day—soon enough!—we’ll all be gone, and there’ll be people rooting through all this … stuff … like maggots … What are antiques, after all, but objects other maggots went over before you? And what is this whole house … in the sacred Buckhead … but a place he was renting until the next group of renters, as desperate to live in Buckhead as he was, took over … Merely renting! Of course, we think we’ve bought these things, we think we own them. What a marvelous piece of self-deception! If you add up the cost of maintaining a place like this plus the interest lost through tying up two or three million dollars in the so-called purchase, then there’s your rent. You’re only in here for a short time. You’re only occupying the space until your mortal hide becomes hopelessly decrepit. Your children aren’t going to keep the marvelous old place going. Don’t kid yourself! They’ll be off living with some dreadful creatures of their own generation in some hovel in Old Town in Chicago or North Beach in San Francisco or TriBeCa in New York or Coral Gables … They won’t waste two tears thinking about the old manse with all its … things … except to get their hands on the money that flows from all the new maggots rooting through the remains. He should apprise Wally of all this, tell him how life is actually put together … He should … but he had the terrible feeling that the breach between him and Wally was already too great. They had long since passed the point when he could have put his arm around Wally’s shoulders and had a man-to-man talk. It was this damnable boarding school Martha had packed him off to, Trinian. They stuff these poor kids full of political correctness, and they end up pussies. His own son! Christ, at Turpmtine the other weekend Wally was as … big a pussy … as Herb Richman. He looks at me as if I’m some sort of … barbarian … These children have no standards. They only know what they choose to be contemptuous of—

  “Mr. Croker, you go to bed now?” It was Jarmaine. She had pushed Charlie’s wheelchair as far as the bed in the library. The bed really looked terrible in here. The library looked gloomy enough to start with (a thought that had never occurred to him before), what with all this dark carved wood, and now here’s this musty old bed with a painted metal bedstead … Christ … made him think of Jim Bowie on his deathbed just before the Mexicans ventilated him with their bayonets … Not only that, there were a couple of things he had failed to figure out when he gave instructions about putting the bed down here on the first floor. The only toilet was the powder room, a staggeringly expensive little piece of nothing Ronald had fashioned out of marble, enamel, and brass. It was dazzling—and didn’t have a shower or tub or even enough shelf space to line up all the vials of pills Emmo had burdened him with, much less anything else. Then there was no place to hang anything, such as a bathrobe or any other article of clothing he might want to wear … But what other article of clothing would he want to wear? No other. He was an invalid, an invalid for the duration. He had a nurse’s assistant, whatever that was, coming in to do all the physical chores he was too crippled to perform himself. The nurse’s assistant could hang up the goddamned bathrobe.

  For the time being, he was going to sit in that big leather easy chair. He didn’t feel like having Jarmaine or Nina watch him struggle out of his clothes and into pajamas. So they helped him out of the wheelchair, and he sank way back into the easy chair and stared at the library shelves with a hopeless, distracted gaze. The truth was, his knee scarcely hurt at this moment. But it would! It would! It was his screen against the world!

  Such were his sentiments when Serena arrived. He could hear her saying something to Jarmaine or Nina, although he couldn’t tell what, and then he could hear the high heels of her shoes clack clack clacking across the marble floor of the entry hall. And now she appeared in the doorway of the library and stopped and put her hands on her hips. Charlie lowered his head like a guilty child who knows he’s in for it.

  “Charlie! For God’s sake! What do you think you’re doing? You haven’t walked one step since you got home. I was just talking to Nina. She said you went straight from the wheelchair to that easy chair. You know what Emmo told you! You know what the therapists told you!”

  What Charlie was thinking about had nothing to do with what she had just said. He could only think of how … young … she was. Because there was more light in the hall behind her than here in the library, she existed mainly as a silhouette, a silhouette of Youth … the wild corona of hair … the long, straight narrow neck … the wide shoulders … the tiny waist … the little silk dress that stopped a good six inches above her knees in a fashion only a young woman with perfect legs would ever dare attempt … and hers were indeed perfect in every detail, even in the athletic way her thighs tapered down to where they inserted into the knees … the jaunty set of her hips … the curves the calves of her legs made … the tiny knobs of her ankles … He couldn’t really see her breasts, because the light was behind her, but he knew very well they were perfect, too … He knew it, but he didn’t feel it, not for a moment. He knew very well that he was impotent and had been for a while. He had made sure he never had to put it to the test, but he knew it was so … an old, decrepit carcass was what he was … He was moldering but he hadn’t even had the decency to die yet. I’m rotting flesh—and she is the very picture of Youth! And she’ll never nurse me. Oh no.

  “Charlie, are you with us? Are you listening to me?” The flawless silhouette rearranged its arms akimbo upon the sprockets of its perfect hips.

  “Yes,” said Charlie, “I was just—just—just a little … fatigued … after that ride.” The penitent child drew his chin in even closer to his collarbone. He no longer thought about his own rule: viz., that a leader never explains to his followers or to women. He was a child enjoying poor health.

  “Fatigued?” said the silhouette. “From what? You haven’t moved a muscle all morning! Charlie—you’ve got to get going! You can’t do this to yourself!”

  Charlie didn’t say anything. He knew he could ride this storm out. Serena would get tired of the Invalid, no matter what he did. In minutes, not days. She would persuade herself that it was utterly essential to go shopping, whether he flexed his miserable knee or didn’t.

  The front doorbell rang, and Serena immediately wheeled about and marched into the entry hall to answer it. See? She doesn’t wait for Jarmaine or Nina. She answers it herself. Any excuse to get away from the Invalid.

  He could hear her in conversation with someone, but he couldn’t make out what she was saying, except for “Come in.”

  Conrad was stunned. She was the most gorgeous woman he had ever seen and not much older than himself, if at all. She wore an apple-green dress with swirling floral patterns in it, a dress of such a light filmy material and so short, it seemed like nothing more than a mist hiding, but only halfway, a lissome young body. Her mouth had an oddly playful smile. Playful about what?

  He became terribly self-conscious. What an insignificant mortal he was, standing before this house and this beautiful woman in his Carter Home Care getup, his white polo shirt with the green Carter logo on the breast pocket, his white duck pants with the green piping down the side of each leg, the fake-leather white shoes.

  “Hello, I’m Con—” He hesitated. He had come close to saying “Conrad.” “I’m Connie DeCasi. I’m from Carter Home Care.”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Come in.” She opened the screen door, and he had taken two or three steps inside when she added, “I’m Serena Croker.”

  Conrad assumed she was the old man’s daughter or daughter-in-law. He looked back to acknowledge her introduction, then looked away immediately, for fear of seeming to want to stare at her, which he did. The entry hall where he stood was enormous.

  The beautiful young woman indicated that he should follow her. She led him to a doorway off the entry gallery and, just before entering, said, “My husband will be staying in here temporarily.”

  My husband—should he take that to mean that this gorgeous young woman was the wife of the sixty-year-old man named Croker?

  All at once she raised her hand in the gesture that means “Stop” and then motioned to indicate that he should move away from the doorway. In a hushed voice she said:

  “The most important thing you can do for my husband is stay nearby and keep an eye on him and help him if he wants to move around or take a shower or whatever. He has his moods. Right now he’s pretty low. He doesn’t want to move at all, not even for therapy. But he’s headstrong. The next thing you know, he’s going to want to go charging up and down the stairs. The stairs and the shower are what worry me most. I don’t want him to fall. Right now he doesn’t even have access to a shower. I told him not to set up a bed in the library. There’s no shower and no tub down here. But he’s headstrong. If he hasn’t changed his mind by this evening, I’ll be surprised.”

  “I see,” said Conrad. He was very much aware of the young woman’s perfume.

  “One other thing,” she said. “If he gets obstreperous and tries to do something foolish, bark at him. That’s the only thing he’ll pay attention to. There’s no use trying logical persuasion.”

  “I’ll do my best,” said Conrad. Somehow he didn’t dare look her in the eye. He kept his gaze on the zone of her mouth and her nose.

  She beckoned him back to the doorway. Everywhere you looked … stately, lugubrious panels, shelves, and moldings of mahogany, and matching leather-bound books that seemed to have been bought by the yard. There was an enormous waist-high globe, supported by a dark wooden cradle inlaid with some other kind of wood that was lighter. In the next instant Conrad saw the bed, set up awkwardly in the middle of the room. Only then did he see the big old man. He was slumped back in a leather easy chair. The old man didn’t even look at him until his young wife went over to him and said, “Charlie, here’s the, uh, the young man from the Carter people—you remember that? He’s come to help out.”

  Then she looked at Conrad in a rather anxious way. It took a moment before he realized that she hadn’t caught his name.

  “I’m Connie DeCasi, Mr. Croker,” he said. “But please call me Connie.”

  Nothing. The old man was staring between his knees at the floor, apparently thinking of something unpleasant and a thousand miles away. Conrad thought he must be senile. But then he looked up slowly and said:

  “Well, Connie, I’m going to bed. Maybe you can help me with that.”

  “Certainly.”

  “Please, Charlie,” said his wife, “don’t just go from a bed in the hospital to a bed here. You’re supposed to exercise your knee. You know that.”

  “I know something else, too. I’m tired.” Came out closer to tarred than tired.

  “Well, I’m afraid my husband’s in a mood to be difficult, Connie. I wish you good luck.” She tried to make it light without succeeding a hundred percent.

  “Who’s had the knee operation around here?” said Charlie Croker, also with a pretense of keeping it light, although anybody could see how much he was fuming.

  Serena Croker departed the room, and now there were just the two of them.

  “Help me up out of this chair, son,” said the old man. “This knee a mine hurts like a sonofabitch.”

  “Which knee is it?” asked Conrad.

  “The right one.”

  “Okay,” said Conrad, standing to the old man’s left, “I’m going to put both hands under this arm”—the old man’s left arm—“and you take hold of my arm here”—Conrad indicated his left forearm—“with your other hand, and on three we’ll both pull up.”

  The old man hooked his hand over Conrad’s forearm, and then Conrad said, “One, two … three.”

  The old man rose, wincing in pain from the stiffness of his knee. Conrad supported him until he got his balance, and then said, “Put your arm around my shoulder. That’ll take the weight off your right leg, and we’ll walk over to the bed”—which was all of three steps away.

  As the old man leaned against Conrad and hobbled, he said, “I didn’t think you could do it.”

  “Do what, sir?”

  “Pull me up. I weigh 235 pounds. You must have a lot of arm strength.”

  “You did half the pulling, Mr. Croker, don’t forget that.”

  With considerable puffing and groaning, plus Conrad’s help, Mr. Croker managed to get into bed. He sighed profoundly and sank back into the pillow with his chin up in the air.

  “Sir,” said Conrad, “you want me to bring you the newspaper or anything?”

  A long-drawn-out “Nooooooo.” The old man’s eyes were closed. Conrad had no idea how little interest a depressed man has in the daily newspaper.

  “Well, I’ll be here when you need me, Mr. Croker,” said Conrad. No reply.

  Conrad sat down in a straight-backed chair near the doorway, where he could steal enough light from the entry gallery to read, and opened The Stoics.

  Epictetus says, “Your poor body, then, is it slavish or free?”

  One of his students says, “We know not.”

  “Do you not know that it is a slave to fever, gout, ophthalmia, dysentery, the tyrant, fire, sword, everything stronger than itself?”

  “Yes, it is a slave.”

  “How then can any part of the body be still free from hindrance? How can that which is naturally dead—earth and clay—be great or precious? What then? Have you no element of freedom?”

  “Perhaps none.”

  “Why, who can compel you to assent to what appears false?”

  “No one.”

  “And who to refuse assent to what appears true?”

  “No one.”

  “Here, too, then you have free and unhindered action. Miserable men, develop this, set your minds on this, seek your good here.”

  Conrad cast a glance at old Mr. Croker. He would love to read to him what he had just read. The body! A slave to all sorts of things, including surgeons and their knives! How can that which is naturally dead—earth and clay—be great or precious? But he would resist that impulse. What could the wisdom of Epictetus possibly mean to a hard-bitten old real estate developer?

  Charlie opened his eyes into slits just big enough to survey the library and make out its occupants. Serena was gone. Good. Nina and Jarmaine were gone. Also good. Only the boy from the home-care service was here. That was fine. The boy didn’t know him and had no way of passing judgment on him for “not being himself.” The boy was sitting close to the doorway, bathed by the light from the hall, reading a book.

  What a pair of arms the kid has! His forearms are huge; his forearms and his hands. Kid pulled me right up out of the chair … What a time it is when you’re that age—what?—twenty?—twenty-one?—and you can build yourself up like an ox … like a Jersey bull … . But this kid, he doesn’t look like a bodybuilder. He looks like he got his muscles from work. What’s that on the ring finger of his left hand? Like a crevice. Something really bit into the flesh. A ring? A wedding ring? What’s it matter? It don’t matter. He’s polite, and he don’t riddle you with questions.

  Charlie was curious, in spite of himself. What brought a young man to a job like this?

  He turned his head toward the boy, opened his eyes, and said, “Well … whattaya reading?”

  “Sir?” The boy looked startled and closed the book.

  “Whattaya reading?” His voice was so tired.

  “It’s a book called The Stoics, Mr. Croker.”

  “I see … What’s it about?”

  “It’s everything the Stoic philosophers wrote, or everything they said that was written down by other people. Both.”

  “Hmmmm. Is it interesting?”

  “It is to me, Mr. Croker.”

  “What’s the interesting part?”

  “Well, most philosophies—or from what I know about them—and I don’t know much, Mr. Croker … sure you want me to go into all this?”