"Yes. He said she had worked with him long enough by that time so that she was like an extension of himself, like having another pair of hands. She knew his procedures, knew the instruments he would want at each stage, and also knew what to have ready to hand him when things went wrong this way or that way. She did not disturb his concentration the way other surgical nurses did. He said she seemed glad to share the enormous work load he had shouldered after Glenna died. After a year had gone by he knew he was changing in some way he did not like. He was thirty-six. He had not been with a woman for a year. He was putting so much of his total energy into his work he did not feel any particular tension because of physical desire. As a doctor he knew that continence does an adult no particular physical harm. He told me that the idea of regular sex as a necessity for health is something young men use as part of their persuasion technique. Fort told me he began to feel remote. He said that was the best word for it. He had less feeling of involvement with his patients, less triumph when things went well, less regret when they didn't. He couldn't chew out people who made foolish errors the way he used to. It didn't seem worth the effort somehow. And he knew his praise was becoming half-hearted, which is worse than no praise at all.
"So he went to his friend Doctor Hayes Wyatt with the problem. Dr. Wyatt gave him a complete physical, and then listened to Fort describe the remoteness. Then he told Fort that no matter how much he might try to deny it or ignore it, he was still a mammal. By questioning him, Dr. Wyatt showed how much warmth there had been in Fort's childhood. He'd been breast-fed, hugged, patted, cuddled, kissed, spanked. People with austere childhoods could adjust to the life Fort was living. But for Fort, some essential assurance-area was being starved. He felt remote because his body, untouched, was beginning to doubt the reality of its own existence. Hayes Wyatt told Fort that casual sex relationships would not do very much to help him. He said Fort should marry an affectionate and demonstrative woman."
"Like Glory Doyle."
"Sure. What was I then? About fifteen? Great. Fort didn't want marriage; not then. For weeks he wondered what he was supposed to do, what would be best for him. One day, after they scrubbed, there was a long delay in setting up the proper anaesthesia for a complicated spinal disc operation, and he realized that Janice Stanyard was once again talking about her two Siamese cats, and it was a little bit too much like the way people talk about their children. He watched her and thought about her for days. He knew she admired and respected him, and he knew they liked each other. She was twentyseven, nearly twenty-eight. He said he would like to meet those most unusual cats. He went to her apartment a few times. One night, like a fatuous pretentious damned fool-Fort said-he asked her what she thought about the sort of 'arrangement' he had in mind.
"She was puzzled, hurt, offended. She still loved Charles and always would. It was ugly to think they could enter into that kind of thing without love. It would not hurt anybody else, she agreed, but it would cheapen both of them. A month later they were in Atlanta on an emergency, a small-caliber bullet lodged in the frontal lobe of a young girl, pressing against the optic nerve. It was long and precarious, and it went well. They had dinner together at their hotel, with wine, feeling good about the day's work. He seduced her that evening in her room. He spent the night in her bed. When he awoke in the morning he found himself looking into her sleeping face not a foot away. Her arm rested on him. Her round knee was against his thigh. Fort said he had a terrible sinking of heart, a dread about the inevitable scene when she awakened. He remembered all the tears, the protestations, and even, after she had been at last aroused, the small dead voice in which she had begged him not to. He said her face looked as calm and unreadable as the face of a statue. Her slow warm exhala
tions brushed against his lips. At last she stirred and her eyes opened. At first they were blank and unfocused. Then they focused on him and she gave a great start and pulled her arm back. She looked, into his eyes, half-frowning, and he told her that it was a mistake, all a mistake, and he was sorry. He said the corners of her mouth turned up, she stretched and yawned, then put her arm around him, hitched close, put her face in his throat, made kind of a little purring sound of contentment and in moments went back to sleep. Fort said it was a kind of love, always gentle, always placid, always kind. He said that the sexual release was less important to them than the nearness of someone, the warm flesh and the breathing and the beating of the nearby heart when you woke up in the night. Once it had begun, he said she accepted it undemandingly, and with the enormous practicality of which most women seem capable. He said they tried to be discreet, taking the chances which came along rather than trying to make chances. Remoteness went away. As a team they functioned as perfectly as before, no better and no worse. He said that once again his work came alive, and the intense involvement with it returned. So, I'm grateful to her, Trav. She kept him whole and alive for all those middle years of his life. He said there wasn't any decision to end it. They just seemed to need each other less often and finally not at all, without jealousy or suspicion or regret. He said that it was an affair without the words people say during affairs. When they were together, when they talked, it was oot about their work, or about Glenna or his children, or her husband. It was easy, homely talk, he said, about the cafeteria coffee, and if it was the right time for her to trade her car, and what the cleaner was doing to his suits, and how she had, liked Kup's show the other night, and who to vote for this time, and how the weather was hotter or colder than usual. That's what is was, Trav. An arrangement. It was a good thing for them. Heidi told you about her?"
"To say it would have been bad enough if he'd married that nurse person, but it would have been better than marrying you."
"What a disastrous marriage!" she said bitterly. "I made the poor man so miserable. Damn her!" "Don't let it get to you. She isn't worth it. Did you ever meet Janice Stanyard?"
"Oh yes. While Fort was still operating. She must be about forty-five now. She is... attractive in her own way. You don't see it at first. She grows on you, sort of. You see, she knew Fort's bad prognosis before his children did. He handed her the results of the tests moments after he read them. Then when he came back from Florida married to me, the first time I met her was in the staff lounge at Methodist. Fort introduced us and then made out like there was something he had to go and do. She wasn't antagonistic, just very curious about me, about what sort of person I am. Finally she decided in my favor. We were sitting on a couch. She took hold of my hand and held it so tightly it went numb. She told me to help him. I knew what she meant. She said he was great and good, but he might be scared. I said I loved him with all my heart. And so we sat there with goofy smiles and the tears running down our faces. She's nice, Trav. She came here a few times toward the end. She was at the funeral. We had a few minutes alone, afterward. She hugged me and said nothing better could have happened to him than me. I haven't seen her since."
"And it didn't occur to you, Glory, that if he had a very tough decision to make, if he was in a real bind, he might go to the person he had worked with for years, whom he liked and respected and trusted, and to whom in a strange way he had been in effect married."
After a few moments of round eyes and parted lips, she said, "But he was closer to me!"
"Which could have been his reason for not bringing you into it."
"What do you mean by that?"
"I don't know yet. Maybe he said nothing to her. Maybe she knows the whole thing. I have to talk to her."
"Of course."
"So call her and I'll get on an extension."
But when nine rings brought no answer, as we went back to our places by the hearth, Anna came in and said proudly that the kidney mutton chops she had were so thick, maybe she should start them now. I knew that with absolutely no trouble at all, Anna could balloon me-up to a mighty two fifty, and it would take me months to fit back into my clothes. When I said I hadn't planned to stay to dinner, she said with a kind of contemptuous sadness
that if I hadn't stopped by, Miss Glory would have insisted on some cold cereal and a piece of dry toast.
With icy gin replenished I told Glory about the rest of my day. I pointed out the significance of learning that Fort had taken direct steps to improve the terms of Heidi's divorce. "He'd already started liquidating the previous July. He knew Roger was pretty well set. He knew then he wasn't going to be able to leave them anything, so he made sure Heidi got some security out of Trumbill's money."
"Which didn't exactly pinch Gadge Trumbill," Glory said. "He had an ancestor who homesteaded two hundred and forty acres. The Chicago Civic Center is right smack in the middle of it, and the old -boy believed in leasing instead of selling."
"Next item. Neither Heidi nor Jeanie brought up the Gretchen thing. And they had their chance." "They never knew about that."
"Now to get back to Jeanie Geis. She was terrified, and then she lied about it. Why?"
"I think I can answer that, Trav" She explained that nearly two years back, when their eldest child was five, there had been an attempt to kidnap him. The boy, Branton Fortner Geis, named after both grandfathers, had actually been taken, but the kidnapper had evidently lost his nerve because after he had driven the boy all the way into the city, he
. had abandoned him in Grant Park near the fountain. The boy had been driven around for some time, because it gave his parents about three hours of terror before a park policeman took him in and he was identified.
"Since then it has been a thing with Jeanie. She takes the kids wherever she can, and doesn't let them out of her sight. She even got a pistol permit, and she spent hours and hours on the police range; and she's an expert now. Their home has all kinds of burglar alarms and floodlights, and their sitter is a retired cop. He has a license to carry a gun too, and he takes them back and forth to school. I think she goes a little too far. I don't think it's what you could call a normal childhood for them. Roger is just sort of... tolerant of Jeanie's precautions. I guess you can't blame her too much. But it's such a twitch with her, I guess that's the first thing that would enter her mind if you walked up to her and said you wanted to talk about money. You aren't exactly a clerical type, Mister McGee. You are huge and it is obvious you have been whacked upon, and you look as though you damn well enjoyed returning the favor."
"An obvious criminal type?"
"To - Jeanie, for a couple of seconds. Until her mind went to work on it, and she got a better look at you. ø Nobody would walk up to her in broad daylight with all those people around and say Lady I got one of your kids."
"So why did she lie later?"
"A white lie, dear, to avoid telling you what she thought you were. It wouldn't be terribly flattering. Besides, she's a little punchy about the precautions. She gets a certain amount of snide comment from the other mothers."
"It explains why the maid wouldn't unchain the door or answer questions. But, baby, it does not explain her earnest sales talk about let's all forget the whole thing. Why don't you take Glory to Florida, and so forth and so forth."
"How do you explain it then?"
"I don't know. When I get reactions I don't understand it's like an itch I can't reach. I have to make the logical or illogical connection between six hundred thousand gone into thin air and somebody being kidnapped. When did the boy get grabbed?"
"Let me think. I have to remember what we were... oh, we'd just come back from New York Fort read a paper at a medical convention. It was quite warm.... May. That was it. A year ago last May."
"Two months later Fort started cashing in his securities. What about this? Suppose somebody got a message to Jeanie. Come up with lots of cash or we'll take one of your kids. So she comes running to Fort. And... No, there's two big holes in that."
"Like what?"
"One. She'd tell Roger. He'd know that's where the money went, and he wouldn't be making such a jackass of himself about it. Two. Fort was certainly smart enough to know it would be an awful lot cheaper to get Jeanie and the kids out of reach. Fly them to Switzerland for example, and put the cops to work on the problem. I suppose the kid was too little to give any description of the person or persons who took him riding, or the car they took him in."
"Branty said it was a nice man who sang a lot." "That doesn't sound like a nervous type." "Somebody saw the car driving away. They said it was a blue Dodge. I think it was about a week later they found what could have been the same car, but they couldn't be sure. It had been stolen from a shopping center the morning of the day the boy was taken, and they found it in a big used-car lot out near Midway Airport with no plates on it, and no fingerprints or anything. Nobody could say how long it had been there."
"It doesn't fit." "What doesn't?"
"The car is clouted in a very professional way, from the kind of place where the pros work, and it is unloaded in a very professional way, as if it had been iron they'd used in a bank job. But the man gets nervous and changes his mind and leaves the kid off. It couldn't have been the same car, Glory. That's the only thing that makes any sense."
Her mouth trembled for a moment and then she smiled. Her eyes were shiny. "We better face it, McGee. Nothing about this whole thing is ever going to make any sense, and for the rest of my life people are going to keep an eye on me, just in case.
At quarter to ten after Glory had stashed the dishes, we tried Janice Stanyard again. She picked up the phone on the first ring.
"Janice? This is Gloria Geis."
"Hello! I've been wondering about you, dear. I was wondering if I should ask you to come in and have lunch with me some day."
"I'd like that, I really would. I tried to get you earlier."
"Today? I was over in Elgin."
"How is he?"
"Fine. He had a bad cold but it's nearly gone now. What did you call me about, dear?"
"Well... I want to introduce you to a friend of mine from Florida. He's on the line too. Travis McGee. Janice Stanyard."
"Hello, Mrs. Stanyard."
"How do you do, Mr. McGee." Her voice sounded puzzled. It was a good voice, a firm and nicely articulated contralto.
"Trav would like to come and talk to you, Janice."
"He would? What about?"
Gloria started to explain, but I broke in and said, "It's just a little confusion about Doctor Geis' estate, and Glory thinks you might have some answers." "But I wouldn't know a thing about that!" "Sometimes the way these things work out, Mrs. Stanyard, you can help out without realizing you can. I'd just like to drop by anytime tomorrow at your convenience for a few minutes."
"But..."
"We'd both be very grateful to you."
"Well... would three tomorrow afternoon be all right?"
"Just fine."
"Will you come too, Gloria?" she asked.
"Just me," I said quickly, "and now I'll hang up and let you people fix up that lunch date."
As I was leaving, I remembered my other question. I asked Glory who had done the investigation work for Fort when Gretchen had asked him for more money. "He dealt with a Mr. Smith. But I don't know the name of the company." We went to his study and looked up Smith in his address book and found a Francisco Smith, hyphen, Allied Services, in the Monadnock Block on West Jackson. I checked the yellow pages and found Allied Services under Investigators.
A funny thing happened to me on the way to the hotel room. I was a long way from the elevators. When I approached the last right-angle turn before my room, I came upon a couple standing and talk ing in low tones. I heard her say in wheedling tones, "Whey ya yuh room key, honeh? It hey-yuv the nummah onto it."
He peered at me and said, in surprisingly articulate tones, slightly Bostonian, "Sir, I have a distressing concept worthy of scholarly research, and it should appeal to anyone of conjectural turn of mind. Have you a moment?"
I stopped and said, "Conjecture away, friend." "Is there a sense of entrapment in being locked into your own century without chance of escape? What is the effect on the psyche? Those of us bor
n in the first two decades of this century are subliminally aware, my good sir, of that marker on the grave which will say nineteen hundred and this to nineteen hundred and that. Do you follow me?" He was fifty-something, excellent suit, topcoat, shoes, hat, shirt. But the hat was dented and sat askew, stubble on the jowls, necktie awry. His face had the slack sweatiness of heavy drinking, and he had trouble focusing his eyes on me.
And he was being tugged this way and that way by the girl who was going through his pockets with great energy, muttering about the room key and saying, "You wah somepin, honeh. Somepin for shu-wah."
"I follow you," I said.
"But this lovely child is going to break through into the next century, at exactly the age I am now, and the prospect makes me desperately envious. You, sir, could well manage it too, I suspect, but in the fullness of your years and with dimming..."
With a little squeal of satisfaction she yanked the key out of one of his pockets, stared at the tag, then looked at the nearby room numbers. She wore a bright red cloth coat over a very short white dress that was cleft almost to the navel. Her pouty, saucy, cheap little face peeked out from between the two heavy wings of white-blonde hair that hung straight from center part to collarbone.
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