Please Write for Details

by John D. MacDonald

  “I couldn’t tell. We’ll find out tomorrow.”

  “I don’t see what the good is in owning part of a business when you work like some old spooky slave.”

  “I am a spooky slave. Go take some more nap.”

  “I don’t feel like it.”

  “How do you feel, darling?”

  “I keep telling you that all day long I feel fabulously good. It’s just that going woops in the morning gets tiresome. All the time I have a beautiful old lazy kind of feeling.”

  “Four months to go. There ought to be a faster way.”

  She giggled. “Like that joke about the Martian.”

  “Love you,” he said.

  She made a small kissing sound in the mouthpiece. “Love you extremely much. Hurry on home, hear? Bye.”

  After he hung up Park sat wearing a fatuous smile for a few moments, and then began to look over the sketches one of the kids had turned out, sketches of a little man for possible television animation in the local area to advertise a local chain of appliance stores.

  At five-thirty on that December Thursday when Barbara Kilmer came home from her factory job, her mother said, “Hello, dear. My, it’s getting dark so early. There’s another letter from him, Barbie. I put it in your room.”

  She hurried upstairs after she had taken off her coat, and snatched up the letter, turned on her bed lamp, lay across her bed to read it. She read it slowly and carefully, half smiling as she did so. She sang softly to herself as she took her shower. When she was in her robe, she stretched out on the bed again and read it through.

  “… a client who looks like he could be an older brother of Gloria Garvey. Quite a majestic type, who finds it necessary to keep informing me of how busy he is, how many other earth-shaking projects he has on the fire. Yet he does find time to pester me constantly about when he can see preliminary sketches. The curious shape of the available piece of land had me stymied for quite some time, but now I have a solution which pleases me, but will quite probably enrage him. Once I have finished this letter to you, I will go back to my sketches. When my work is going well it is like a disease with me. It becomes too enjoyable to set aside.

  “Please write often, as you have been doing. I feel that I am coming to know you a little bit better with each letter, my darling. Your letters were so stiff at first. Now they are a delight, and more necessary to me than I can tell you.

  “Things here are coming along far better than I dared hope. Strickland is working out very well. He is no Jenningson, of course, but he has the capacity to be. I had a good letter from Kurt yesterday. He is now working for a firm in Los Angeles, and living in a small apartment hotel. He says that he is in at nine and out at five, and that it is refreshing not to have to worry about whether or not the business as a whole is making a profit. He said that he has taken Mary out to dinner several times and, the last time, they both were willing to admit the possibility of eventually being together again. I hope so. He is half a man without her. And that sorry state of affairs is something I am now better able to understand, Barbara.

  “I had thought of making a strong plea in this letter, asking you to permit me to fly up there over Christmas to see you. But that would be a violation of our solemn pact. I can safely say that by Christmas, and from then on, I will be able to get away from here with very little advance warning. And so all I can do is tell you once again that I love you, and that I am waiting for you to set a date for me to come to you.”

  And quite suddenly she knew when it would be. It would be in April, if she could wait that long.

  On that Thursday in December, at noon, Gam Torrigan decided that the painting on which he had worked with sustained creative energy for the past fifteen days was finished. He had worked with polymer tempera and casein on a huge rectangle of quarter-inch untempered Masonite.

  He leaned it against the front of the range cabin, in the cold watery sunlight. As he cleaned his equipment he would stop from time to time and go and glower at it from varying distances and angles. After he cleaned most of the stains from his hands, he stripped off his rough clothing and turned on the outside shower he had improvised. When he stepped under the icy gout of water, he pranced wildly and roared like a bear before he began scrubbing himself with yellow soap. His hair had grown long and his beard was untrimmed. In the middle of toweling himself, he went back to the picture and stood twenty feet from it, glaring at it, unmindful of the fifty-degree temperature and the chilly wind.

  A sudden big grin split the beard and he yelled, “You can paint, you son of a bitch! You can really paint!”

  The stentorian roar awakened the fat brown dog who had adopted him, and who had been sleeping in the sun on that side of the cabin that was out of the wind. She came apprehensively around the corner of the cabin, knees bent, and stopped to stare at him, her tail tucked under and moving tentatively.

  “Come here, old gal,” he said, and she came to him joyously to lean against his leg and be scratched. “See that painting, Mrs. Garvey? Look at it, gal. It jumps out at you and sings, doesn’t it?”

  She wagged her tail with more energy at the sound of her name, looking up at him with love.

  He suddenly realized how cold he was getting. He went in and dressed, fed himself and Mrs. Garvey, and then drove to town in the jeep for supplies and a haircut, Mrs. Garvey on the seat beside him. After he got back he put the painting up to dry in the racks he had built and took down another big square of Masonite.

  In Pasadena that Thursday afternoon, the South City Garden Club put on a reception and tea to open a one-man show of the Mexican paintings of Agnes Partridge Keeley. According to Agnes’ carefully kept records of her professional career, it was her twenty-seventh one-man show and, based on previous averages, out of the thirty-two paintings she could reasonably expect to sell from seven to ten during the week the show would be open. Agnes, in a pale lavender suit, white gloves, shoes and picture hat, had stationed herself near the tea table where she was the center of a constantly changing and shifting circle of admiring ladies. Her thanks were effusive when she was told how perfectly beautiful the paintings were, how they captured the real flavor of Mexico, all the charm and quaintness of the place.

  She consented, graciously, to lead a small group around the gallery and explain each picture. The women thought she had been terribly clever in the way she had captured those darling fuzzy little burros carrying those perfectly huge loads.

  On the first circuit only two paintings bore, on the frame, the little red star to indicate it had been sold. On the second circuit she was pleased to see that two more had been sold. One of the women, upon leaving, remarked to her friends, “I was in Mexico, you know, five years ago. And something seems strange to me. I just happened to notice it. There isn’t a single cactus in any one of her paintings. Not one. And Mexico is positively teeming with all kinds of cactus. Perhaps it’s very difficult to paint. Hundreds of flowers in her paintings, but no cactus at all.”

  During the evening of that same Thursday, Gil and Jeanie Wahl entertained the student and faculty members of the Spanish Club in the small frame house assigned to them on Faculty Row. Jeanie served cider and cookies. Each member who forgot and lapsed into English had to put a penny in the milk bottle in the middle of the table. And in Elmira, Ohio, Hildabeth McCaffrey gave the tenth public showing of the colored slides she had taken in Mexico to the Household Club at their December meeting in the basement of the Methodist church. Dotsy Winkler assisted with the refreshments and the slides. Hildabeth always needed help with the slides. When she did it herself she always managed, somehow, to get more than half of them into the projector sideways or upside down. After the slides, one of Hildabeth’s new paintings was auctioned off for the benefit of the club treasury. It brought in thirteen dollars and twenty-five cents. And that same night Colonel Hildebrandt stayed up until midnight doing research on the battles between the U.S. Army and the Plains Indians. He was not particularly enjoying this portion of his proje
ct. They had seemed to conduct too many of their battles on some damned dull terrain. Hardly enough contour to hide a gopher.

  On that Thursday morning at ten-thirty, Gloria Garvey had been sitting alone at a table in front of the Marik, with her Mexico City News and her Dos Equis, cold and dark in the bottle. It was a coolish morning and she wore one of the suits she had acquired during the Shane era. The color was a soft blue-gray. But there were spots on the left lapel, a split shoulder seam, a missing button. The skirt was thoroughly rump-sprung, and her white moccasins were run-over and grubby. She scratched her scalp through the wild mane of hair and shooed flies away from her glass.

  When Miles Drummond came and took one of the empty chairs she gave him an indifferent glance, mumbled a greeting, and kept on reading. Miles ordered coffee. He took off his rimless glasses and cleaned them on a spotless handkerchief.

  “When you’re through with the paper, I’d like to talk to you, Gloria.”

  “Talk away. I can read and listen.”

  “Well … I guess I told you before, the Cuernavaca Summer Workshop didn’t come out anywhere near as well as we hoped. According to my final figures, I made just nine hundred dollars. A little over eleven thousand pesos.”

  “Um.”

  “Expenses ran much, much higher than our estimates, Gloria. Of course it was your idea in the beginning, and I’m very grateful to you, but it didn’t … accomplish its objective.”

  “Um.”

  “I have been very, very busy lately, Gloria. And I would like to get your opinion on what I am doing.”

  She sighed and put the paper down. “All right, Drummy. All right. What are you doing?”

  He smiled proudly at her. “I was very green in the beginning. I actually dreaded it, you know. But as time went by last summer, I began to take hold. I do believe I have a certain … administrative ability.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “I’ve written to the students and the faculty. Except for Hildabeth McCaffrey and Dotsy Winkler, no one seems to be able to return.”

  “Return for what?”

  “Of the nine hundred dollars, Gloria, I have decided to use two hundred to help meet my living expenses this winter. And I shall invest the other seven hundred in supplies and promotion.”

  “Supplies and promotion for what, for God’s sake?”

  He straightened his small shoulders. “For the Second Cuernavaca Summer Workshop. Aren’t you astonished? It really makes a great deal of sense, Gloria. Last time we didn’t begin early enough. We didn’t even secure the proper permits. And the hotel staff was selected very, very carelessly, you must admit.”

  “Oh, my God!”

  “If I start earlier, I am certain I can get an enrollment of forty people instead of just thirteen. And I feel that the program should be expanded. We should have handicrafts. Pottery, perhaps.” He leaned toward her and said confidentially, “I’ve already entered into certain tentative negotiations for a faculty. And I might say I have gotten into contact with some people who look very promising. For example, there is a very competent woman named Wilmetta Longman. She has a little school of her own at St. Augustine, Florida. If I decide to include creative writing, a very talented instructor named Stanfield Henderson Dorn might be available. His poetry has been widely published. And, in painting, I can get Thorna Francine O’Day and possibly Jon August Anderson, both of them enormous talents, really.”

  “Have you flipped, Drummy? Have you lost your keys?”

  He laughed fondly and shook his finger at her. “You can’t discourage me, Gloria. I’ve been over this carefully. Very carefully. In black and white. I’ve been so terribly busy lately. You have no idea. I must get along to the post office. I’m expecting some important mail.”

  “Then you just trundle right along, Drummy.”

  He stood up. “I have big plans, Gloria. I’ll make a success of next summer. After it becomes a success, I think I may take a long-term lease on the building, a lease-purchase agreement, really.”

  “Buy that old horror?”

  “It is perfectly adequate. Doesn’t it make you feel a little bit glad that you are really the one who started all this?”

  She looked up at him and smiled. “All right, Drummy. I’ll feel a little bit glad.”

  He looked around in a conspiratorial way and then bent over, close to her. “If you promise not to tell, I’ll let you in on a secret. It came to me just the other afternoon. Out of the blue. While I was playing chess as a matter of fact. It’s an idea so simple and so … dramatic that you will wonder why you didn’t think of it first. It’s for the future, of course. But not the very remote future, believe me. And, combined with your idea, it will put me on the threshold of great things, Gloria. I feel like a young man again. You’ll never guess what I’m planning.”

  “I have the feeling that I’d better not try.”

  He leaned a few inches closer and whispered, “The Cuernavaca Winter Workshop.” He screwed half his face into a tremendous wink, and turned and walked rapidly away toward the post office.

  Gloria stared after him. She shook her leonine head and shrugged her big handsome shoulders. To all students, past and future, she said to herself, to you a message. Forgive me please.

  About the Author

  John D. MacDonald was an American novelist and short story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel The Executioners, which was adapted into the film Cape Fear. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980 he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.