I remember how she became, for the whole ten days we remained at anchor in the cove at Shroud Cay, like a kid beginning vacation. A drifting guilt, a sadness about Mick—these made her pleasure the sweeter. There was no cloying kittenishness about her, as that was a style that would not have suited her—or me. She was proud of herself and as bold, jaunty, direct, and demanding as a bawdy young boy, chuckling her pleasures, full of a sweet wildness in the afternoon bunk with the heavy rain roaring on the decks over us, so totally unselfconscious about trying this and that and the other, first this way and that way and the other way, so frankly and uncomplicatedly greedy for joy that in arrangements that could easily have made another woman look vulgarly grotesque she never lost her flavor of grace and elegance.
For that brief time we were totally, compulsively involved with the flesh, pagans whose only clock was that of our revived desires, learning each other so completely that, in consort, we could direct ourselves, joined or unjoined, as though we were a single octopoidal creature with four eyes, twenty fingers, and three famished mouths. When we raised anchor and moved on, the tempo diminished, and the affair became a more sedate and comfortable and cozy arrangement, with ritual supplanting invention, with morning kisses that could be affection without any overtone of demand, with waking in the broad bunk to feel the heated length of her asleep, spoon style, against my back, and be content she was there, and be content to drowse off again.
The last day of August was our last day in the islands and we spent the night anchored wide of the Cat Cay channel, and would cross the Stream the next day. She was solemn and thoughtful at dinner. We made love most gently and tenderly, and afterward when I held her in my arms, both of us on the edge of sleep, she said, “You understood that it was our last time, dear?”
“A way to say good-bye. A good way.”
She sighed. “I had twenty-one years with Mick. I’ll never be … a whole person without him. But you did some mending, Travis. I know that … I can stumble through the rest of my life and accept what I’ve got left, live with less. Make do. I wish I could be in love with you. I would never let you go. I would be your old, old wife. I think I would dye your hair gray and have my face lifted and lie about my age. I’d never let you get away, you know.”
I began to tell her a lot of things, very significant and important and memorable things, and when I stopped, waiting for applause, I discovered she was asleep.
When the Likely Lady was back in a slip at Bahia Mar, she took one wistful walk around the deck and made a sour little smile and said, “Good-bye to this too. I’ll let the man who wants her pick her up here. Will you show him through her and explain everything?”
“Sure. Send him to me.”
When I had put her luggage in the trunk of the rental car, and kissed her good-bye, and she had gotten behind the wheel, she looked out at me, frowning, and said, “If you ever need anything, darling, anything I can give you, even if I have to steal to get it …”
“And if you start coming unglued, lady …”
“Let’s keep in touch,” she said, blinked her eyes very rapidly, grinned, gunned the engine, and scratched off with a reckless shriek of rubber, lady in total command of the car, hands high on the wheel, chin up, and I never saw her again.
Four
Forget the lady Helena and get some sleep. Stop damning Meyer for bringing up that trip to Bimini and thus opening up that particular little corner of the attic in the back of my head.
She had married the sweet guy, had invited me, but I had been away when the invitation came. Then postcards from the Greek Islands, or Spain, or some such honeymoon place. Then nothing until a letter three years ago, a dozen pages at least, apologizing for using me once again as a foil, clarifying her own thoughts by writing to me.
She was divorcing Teddy. He was a sweet, nice, thoughtful man who, quite weak to begin with, had been literally overwhelmed and devoured by her strength. He had diminished, she said, almost to the point of invisibility. All you could see was his pleasant uncertain smile. She admitted that she kept prodding him, pushing at him, hoping for that ultimate masculine reaction that would suddenly fight back and take over the chore of running a marriage. Maybe, she wrote, living with a dutiful creature on an invisible leash was preferable to being alone but not for her. Not when she could see herself becoming more domineering, unpleasant, and more shrill—week by week, month by month. So she was cutting him loose while he could still feed and bathe himself. She was getting the divorce in Nevada. When she had married, she had closed the house on Casey Key, had considered selling it many times, but something had kept her from making a final decision. Now she was glad. She would go back there and see if she could recover what some people had once thought a pleasant disposition.
She said that her elder daughter, Maurie, had been married for six months to a very bright and personable young man in the brokerage business, and seemed deliciously happy. She said they were living in the city of Fort Courtney, Florida, about a hundred miles northeast of Casey Key, and it seemed a workable distance for a mother-in-law to be. She reported that Bridget, known as Biddy—and nineteen at the time she wrote to me three years ago—had transferred from Bryn Mawr to the University of Iowa so she could study with a painter she admired extravagantly, and had changed her major to Fine Arts.
Though it had dealt with personal, family matters, it had not been a particularly intimate letter. No one reading it could have ever guessed at the relationship we’d had on that lazy long cruise of the Likely Lady through the Bahamas.
She asked me to stop and see her the next time I was over in the Sarasota area. I never did.
I had thought of her a few times. Something would remind me of her, the look of a boat under sail, or the sound of hard rain, or a scent like that of the small pink flowers that grew out of the stony soil of the Exumas, and she would be in and out of my thoughts for a week or so. Now it had happened again, thanks to Meyer, and I would be remembering Helena Pearson for a few days or a few weeks. It had been one of those relationships you cannot really pin down. To the average outsider it would have been something to smirk about. The older woman, half a year widowed, who sends her daughters away so that she can go cruising with a man young enough to be the son of her dead husband, a new consort of considerable size, obviously fit and durable and competent and discreet, and obviously uninterested in any kind of permanent relationship.
Yet I was quite certain that it had not been a situation she had planned. It had arisen through two sets of rationalizations, hers and mine, and the truth of it was perhaps something quite different from what we suspected. For her perhaps it was the affirmation of being still alive after the intense emotional focus of her life was gone forever. Maybe it had been something the body had created in the mind, just for its own survival, because with her perhaps a sexual continence would have been a progressive thing, parching and drying her, month by month, until all need would have been prematurely ended. My own supercilious little rationalization had been, in the beginning of it, that it would have been both cruel and stuffy to have failed to respond when she began her tentative invitations, to have let her know through my lack of response that the age differential did indeed put me off, and that I felt both clumsy and self-conscious in the role of the available younger man in a kind of floating bedroom farce. The least I could do would be to respond with as much forced enthusiasm as I could manage. But a sweet and immediate reality of the flesh had erased the reasons and the rationalizations. She was all limber girl in the half-light, slenderly, elegantly voluptuous, so consistently determined to never take more pleasure than she was able to give that she made a few intervening women seem dreary indeed.
At last I was able to dim the vivid qualities of the memory and slide away into the earned sleep …
Sunday, October sixth, was still and gray and breathlessly muggy. Bobby Guthrie’s wife came for him at ten in the morning and they gave Joe Palacio a ride back into Miami. Monday they would get
the Merrill-Stevens appraisals and estimates, based on detailed inspections. Meyer and I got the Flush out into the channel and headed north for Lauderdale at about eleven, with the Muñequita in tow and a pale sun beginning to burn through the overcast. The Busted Flush was still burdened with the gear and goop of Floatation Associates. Meyer assured me that as soon as the partnership had turned the ’Bama Gal into money, they would move their stuff over onto the work boat Bobby had located, which they could buy at the right price.
“Bobby will build special chemical tanks right into the work boat and rig up some automatic pumps with flowmeters so that one man can handle the flow of the stuff down to the job.”
“That’s nice.”
“After another good piece of salvage, we’re going to install the same kind of a setup, but smaller, on a truck, and put a good winch on it. It will make it easy to pick automobiles out of the canals.”
“That’s nice.”
“Am I boring you or something, McGee?”
“If I was all hot to get tangled up in a nice profitable little business with three nice people, I’d probably be chuckling and dancing and singing. Lots of luck, Meyer.”
He stared at me, shrugged, and went below to start taking the cameras and reels apart to see if the rinsing in fresh water had made them salvageable. He was in one of his mother hen periods, but this time he was taking care of Guthrie and Palacio instead of McGee. They were in good hands. But Meyer was going to be a bore until the little business was safely launched.
I had no plans. I felt mildly restless. I decided I would help the trio get their work boat set up and then maybe I would round up a batch of amiable folk and cruise on up the waterway, maybe as far as Jax. In another month or so I would have to start looking for a client so whipped-down he would snap at my kind of salvage, at my fifty-percent fee. Meanwhile, some fun and games, a little action, some laughs.
There was a note in my post office box about something I had to sign for, so I didn’t get Helena’s letter until Monday, a little before noon.
First there was a crisp white envelope with the return address in raised black letters: FOLMER, HARDAHEE, AND KRANZ, ATTORNEYS AT LAW. There was a cashier’s check for $25,000 paper-clipped to the letter signed by one D. Wintin Hardahee in tiny little purple script. The letter was dated Sept 28th, and the check was dated Sept 27th.
My dear Mr. McGee:
Pursuant to the wishes of Mrs. Helena Trescott …
[The Trescott put me off the track for a moment, and then I remembered the wedding I had missed, when she had married a Theodore Trescott.]
I am herewith enclosing a cashier’s check in the amount of twenty-five thousand dollars ($25,000.00) along with a letter which Mrs. Trescott asked me to mail with the certified check.
She has explained to me that this sum is in payment of an obligation of several years’ standing, and because it does not seem probable that she will survive her present critical illness, she wished to save you the trouble of presenting a claim against her estate.
If you have any questions about this matter, you can reach me at the address and telephone number given above.
Yours very truly,
The law firm was in Fort Courtney, Florida. Her letter was thick, sealed in a separate envelope, and addressed to me. I walked back to the Flush and put it, unopened, on the desk in the lounge. I took one of the big glasses and laid an impressive belt of Plymouth atop the cubes, and then roamed about, sipping at it, continually catching a glimpse of the letter out of the corner of my eye. The eerie coincidence of not having thought of her for maybe almost a year, then having such vivid memories just one week after the letter had been mailed, gave me a hollow feeling in the middle.
But it had to be read and the gin wasn’t going to make it any easier.
Travis, my darling,
I won’t bore you with clinical details—but oh I am so sick of being sick it is almost a relief to be able to see in their eyes that they do not expect me to make it … sick unto death of being sick—a bad joke I guess. Remember the day at Darby Island when we had a contest to see who could invent the worst joke? And finally declared it a draw? I’m not very brave. I’m scared witless. Dying is so damned absolute—and today I hurt like hell because I made them cut way down on the junk they are giving me so I could have a clear head to write to you … Forgive lousy handwriting, dear. Scared, yes, and also quite vain, so vain I would not look forward to walking out of this place—tottering out, a gray little old lady, all bones and parchment.
Up until a year ago, dear, I looked very much as I looked that marvelous summer we had together, and might look almost as well this year too, except for a little problem known familiarly as Big C. A year ago they thought they took it all out, but then they used cobalt, and then they went in again, and everything was supposed to be fine, but it popped up in two more places, and Thursday they are going to do another radical, which they are now building me up for, and I think Dr. Bill Dyckes is actually, though maybe he wouldn’t even admit it to himself, letting me leave this way instead of the long lousy way that I can expect if they don’t operate.
I said I wasn’t going to bore you! I’m tempted to tear this up and start again, but I think that one letter is about all I can manage. About the check Mr. Hardahee arranged for, and which you will get with this letter, please don’t get stuffy about it. Actually, practically by accident, I became medium rich—an old friend of Mick’s took over the investment thing shortly after Mick died. He is very clever and in the business of managing money for people. For the last five and a half years he has been buying funny little stocks for my account, things I never heard of before, and some of them are never heard of again, but a lot of them go up and up and up, and he smiles and smiles and smiles. But lately, of course, he has been changing everything around so that it will all be neat for the estate taxes. Don’t have strange ideas about you getting money that should go to my girls, because they will be getting enough. Anyway, the money is sort of a fee …
It’s about my big daughter, Travis. Maureen. She’s practically twenty-six. She’s been married to Tom Pike for three and a half years now. They have no children. She’s had two miscarriages. Maurie is a stunning-looking young woman. When she had her second miscarriage, a year ago, she was quite sick. I would have been able to take care of her, but at about that time I was in the hospital for my first operation—Gad, talk about soap operas!… Bridget had come down to help out, and Biddy is still here, because things are a Godawful mess. You see, I always thought that Maurie was the solid-as-a-rock one, and Biddy—she’s twenty-three now—would be the one who’d manage to mess herself up because she is sort of dreamy and unreal and not in touch. But Biddy has had to hang around not only on account of me but because Maurie has tried three times to kill herself. It seems even more unreal to me when I see my hand write the words on this paper—kill herself—such a stupid and frightening waste. Tom Pike is a darling. He could not be nicer. He and Biddy are trying as hard as they can to bring Maurie out of it, but she just doesn’t seem right to me. As if she can’t really be reached. Tom has tried all kinds of professional care and advice, and they have been trying to make me believe that her troubles are over now. But I can’t believe it. And I certainly can’t get up out of this damned bed and take charge. Let us just say I am not likely to ever get up out of this damned bed.
Remember on our cruise when you told me how you live, what you do? Maybe I am stretching the definition, but in this situation my elder is trying to steal her own life. Do you ever operate on a preventative basis? I want you to try to keep her from stealing her life away. I don’t have any idea how you would go about it, or whether anything you could do would be of any use at all. Certainly fifty percent of Maurie’s life would be worth far more than twenty-five thousand.
I have been thinking of you these past days, finally deciding there is no one else I could ask this of, and no one else I would trust to be able to do anything to help. You are so darn shrew
d and knowing about people, Travis. I know that you put a raggedy widow-lady back together again with great skill and taste and loving kindness. In my memories of that summer you are two people, you know. One was a young man so much younger than I that at times, when we were having fun and you seemed particularly boyish, you made me feel like a depraved and evil old hag. At other times there was something so … kind of ancient and knowledgeable about you, you made me feel like a dumb young girl. Had it not been for the time we had together, I might have been able to adjust to spending the rest of my life with Teddy Trescott … Anyway, my lasting impression was that there cannot be too many things in this world you would not be able to cope with. And I don’t mean just muscle and reflex … I mean in the gentle art of maneuvering people, as I think Maurie needs to be maneuvered. Can’t she comprehend how valuable life is? I certainly can, right now more than ever.
Believe me, darling, I am very tempted to drop one of those horrid death-bed demands upon you—Save my daughter’s life! But I cannot bring myself to the point of such dramatic corn. You will if you want to and you won’t if you don’t. It is that simple.
The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper Page 4