Last Resort (27 page)

“Maybe you still could,” Lee suggested.

“Naw. It’s too late. I might not look it, but I’m sixty-five.”

“Really?” Lee reexamined Myra’s appearance: the upright posture, square jaw, tight skin, helmet of reddish-brown hair. She had estimated Jacko’s aunt as at least ten years younger.

“I should’ve gone to law school, but nice Christian girls didn’t do that back in the fifties. The Fudd women mostly got married right from college. Before graduation sometimes, like I did. After that they didn’t work outside the home, that was the idea, though my aunt Sophie ran a two-thousand-acre ranch. I was brainwashed, like those crazy feminists say. They’re not so dumb sometimes.”

“No,” Lee said. Again she felt some sympathy, and had to remind herself that if Myra Mumpson had gone into politics she would have been against everything Lee was for. She would have been anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-affirmative action. It was one of the things that had made Lee give up therapy: the realization that half the time she was helping people she didn’t like to become strong and confident enough to do things she didn’t like, such as write deceptive advertising and sell jerry-built condos.

“I have to plan my schedule for the next couple of months now,” she announced, assuming that Myra would take this broad hint and shut up.

But apparently the hint was not broad enough. “Never a letup in the hotel business,” Myra said. “I know. I have a friend back home, she runs a B and B too. You wouldn’t believe the thefts, the damage, the last-minute cancellations—Well, I guess you would. Except you’ve probably got it easier. That was a smart notion of yours, only renting to women. Cuts down on wear and tear, I bet.”

“Mm,” Lee agreed, bending over a full-page calendar for the third week of April.

“I guess you get some homosexual couples, too,” Myra continued.

“Yeah,” Lee almost growled. You give people the wrong impression, she told herself; you look too straight. But what the hell was she supposed to do about that? Should she wear overalls and heavy leather boots, and get a crew cut? But an outfit like that would be intolerably hot in Key West; besides, Lee liked her long, thick, near-black gypsy hair, and so did other women. For instance, Jenny—

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you should turn them away,” Myra said, apparently registering Lee’s angry inward expression. “After all, it’s good business. And just between ourselves, I don’t see the harm.” She rocked more slowly. “Not like with the men. The things they get up to, I don’t even want to think about. Disgusting.” She gave a little shudder.

“Women, that’s different,” Myra continued. “My aunt Sophie Fudd, that I mentioned to you before, she never married. Lived most all her life in a big bungalow out on the ranch with her best friend, Rose, who taught fifth grade in town. There was some talk now and then, jokes about old maids. But they were respected. And the way I see it, if they did cuddle a little and make each other happy, what was the harm, right?”

“Yeah,” Lee agreed, recognizing what Jacko had meant when he described his aunt as “steamrollering you with her opinions.” With a conscious sense of resisting heavy road machinery, she added: “Matter of fact, I’m that way myself.”

“That so?” Myra gave Lee a long, interested look that made her wonder if she was about to make a similar declaration. “Well, live and let live is what I say.” She rocked back and forth, then consulted an expensive watch. “What’s the matter with Perry and Sis? They should’ve been here half an hour ago. Didn’t you hear me tell him we have to catch a five-thirty plane?”

“I heard you,” Lee admitted.

Myra stopped rocking. “Well, I’m not going to hang around waiting any longer,” she announced. “I’m going back to the hotel. You tell Perry when he gets here, I expect them to be there at four o’clock. Sharp. And the same for Barbie, if she turns up.”

For ten minutes, Lee worked on her schedule uninterrupted. Then, far more quietly than her sister had left, Dorrie Jackson drifted up the steps. She was wearing a faded oversized white shirt that had belonged to Jacko, and her floppy green hat.

“Perry’s dropping off some orchids,” she explained. “He’ll be back soon. Where’s Myra and Barbie?”

“They left.” Lee decided not to go into details. “Myra got tired of waiting.”

“Oh, dear,” Dorrie squeaked, apparently not deceived by Lee’s softening of this message. “Was Myra awfully cross?”

“No, not really. She said he was supposed to meet them at the hotel at four.”

“Oh, Perry knows that. Is it all right if I wait for him here?”

“Yeah, of course.”

Like her sister, Dorrie chose the rocker; but she settled back fully onto the handwoven purple cushion, and the motion and sound she produced were minimal.

“You’ve been a real good friend to Perry; he told me so,” she murmured presently. “I’m so glad of that. And acourse you don’t hold it against him that he’s the way he is.”

“No, of course not,” Lee said, realizing that Dorrie Jackson, unlike her sister, did not assume that she was straight.

“He’s a good boy,” Dorrie continued. “I don’t believe it’s a judgment, his sickness, the way Myra does. God isn’t like that. Back home, you know, I stopped going to First Methodist after the minister said all these mean things about boys like Perry. I got really cross. I told him, God knows our hearts, and he knows Perry’s heart is good.”

“Mm-hm,” Lee remarked, thinking that if there was a God, he presumably did know this.

“Acourse everyone starts out good,” Dorrie said several moments later. “We’re all born innocent; only we’re weak, so we go wrong. The wrong sorts of people and things come into our lives, and we can’t fight them off.”

“Yeah.” Lee thought of some of the wrong people and things she had known.

“Like with Barbie’s husband, Bob Hickock. He was just a poor hometown boy with a law degree from State, working in the district attorney’s office. But Sis saw his potential. She started asking him to events and having him over to the house. Then after he and Barbie were engaged she got behind him in a big way. And acourse now he’s real successful, even kinda famous. But I liked him better when he first came into the family. He was a real sweet boy then, with such nice shy manners. Only you could see he was always going to draw the girls like molasses draws flies.”

Dorrie rocked quietly for a few minutes. Then she asked, “Did Barbie go back to the hotel with Sis?”

“Uh, no,” Lee said. “I don’t think so.”

“No? Where is she, then?”

“I don’t know. But I guess if she doesn’t turn up pretty soon she’ll miss that plane.”

“Oh, I just hope to the Lord she does miss it,” Dorrie said.

Surprised, Lee looked up. But though the chair was still rocking slightly, Jacko’s mother had closed her eyes.

I
N THE SHADOWY SITTING
room of the house on Hibiscus Street, Jenny sat on a slippery orange leather sofa, nervously knitting a gray cotton chenille sweater for her husband, and waiting for him to wake. He was upstairs now, sleeping off the events of the last twenty-four hours. On the drive home this morning he had been silent except for some irritable comments about the routine of the ward and the stupidity of nurses. Though more alert than he’d been last night, Wilkie was no more friendly or communicative. But he hadn’t been that for months, she thought: he had been changing, rejecting her, choosing someone else all along.

And she was different too, Jenny thought. Especially since yesterday, when everything in her life had turned upside down. She had lain in Lee’s arms and been warmly, deeply happy. Then she had gone home and found the house strangely empty, with a half-eaten sandwich on the kitchen counter and two kitchen stools overturned. Before she could figure out what it meant, there was that awful phone call from Barbie Mumpson. Finally she had seen the cold, withdrawn person who used to be Wilkie Walker, her loving husband, in the hospital on Stock Island.

As if her unconscious knew what was coming, Jenny had been apprehensive as she walked the hospital corridors, clutching an L.L. Bean canvas bag to her chest. In the bag were Wilkie Walker’s pajamas and bathrobe and toothbrush, and the library books he had demanded that she bring. Three of them, though the doctor had assured her over the phone that he was recovering well and could go home tomorrow. The request hadn’t surprised her: it was typical of Wilkie to fortify himself with reading matter even on a trip to the dentist.

What Jenny had feared as she followed the corridor was not the distressing sight of her husband in a hospital bed, but an interrogation. Why hadn’t she been there when he was taken ill? Why had she got home so late?

By the time she reached Wilkie’s room Jenny was breathing hard and trembling slightly. She looked at the hospital-green metal door and imagined her husband behind it, sitting stiffly up in bed as he always did when not sleeping, fixing her with a scowl as if she were a bad specimen. Jenny had never seen Wilkie direct that look at her—but she had seen it directed at others. In her mind she heard the words that would come out of his mouth if he knew what she’d been doing when she should have been with him: how she had broken down and sobbed in Lee’s arms, accusing him of adultery and revealing things that should always remain private between a married couple. If he knew about that, Jenny thought as she stood in the wide corridor, which smelled strongly of disinfectant, Wilkie would use words like “disloyal” and “hysterical.” “I am disappointed in you,” he would say, as he used to say sometimes to the children.

She pushed open the heavy door. There was a hospital bed in the bare room, and someone lying in it with the sheet pulled up over his face, as if he had died. Her heart gave a great lurch. Then she realized that the person in the bed was breathing, with a kind of half-snore that she recognized.

“Hello?” she uttered.

The figure in the bed turned over heavily, pulled the sheet down, and became a heavy elderly man with strong features, thinning hair, and a sour expression. He looked at her without apparent enthusiasm, blinking, not speaking.

“How are you?” she squeaked.

“Jenny,” the man said in a slurred version of Wilkie’s voice. His tone was neutral, as if identifying some object of no particular interest or attraction.

“I brought the things you wanted,” she said.

Wilkie did not speak.

“I’m so sorry I wasn’t home when you got sick,” she babbled on. “Lee was late getting back from the funeral, and then I had to drive to Searstown, to the supermarket—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Wilkie interrupted. “It wasn’t anything. I never was seriously ill, I only thought—”

“I know, Barbie Mumpson told me, you thought you were having a heart attack. That must have been awful.” Moved by duty and habit and good manners, Jenny approached the bed, leaned down, and with closed lips brushed the dry, puffy cheek of the man who lay there: an irritable, cold-hearted man who deceived his wife with silly young women.

“Yeah—No. I actually thought—” Wilkie swallowed. “It doesn’t matter now. I’m all right, just kind of knocked out by all those drugs they gave me.” He closed his eyes, then opened them again. “Did you bring the books I asked for?”

“Yes, they’re right here, on the table.”

“You’re a good woman.”

This was a statement Jenny had often heard from Wilkie before, though not for many months. Once she had acknowledged it with a glad private smile, and sometimes with the matching phrase: “And you’re a good man.” But now this phrase would be a lie. “Is there anything else I can do for you?” she asked instead.

“No thanks. That idiot doctor insists I have to spend the night. So he can charge our insurance for another day, I assume. Can you come tomorrow morning at nine and pick me up?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Right. You go on home now, get some rest. I might as well try to sleep some more. Have to take every chance you get in a hospital—wake you up every couple hours to take your temperature or some other damned nonsense.”

“I’ll come back this evening, after supper.”

“Don’t bother.” Wilkie gave his wife a weary, neutral look, then turned onto his other side, away from her.

If she were really a good woman, Jenny would have done what Wilkie told her and gone home. Instead, she’d driven straight to Artemis Lodge.

Lee had welcomed her, listened to her, comforted her; she had opened a bottle of Italian chianti, made fettuccine with tomato pesto and roasted peppers, followed by key lime sherbet.

Jenny’s guilt was wholly irrational, Lee had declared when her friend paused for breath. It wasn’t her fault that Barbie Mumpson had been there and she hadn’t. After all, hadn’t she said that Wilkie had continually told her to get out of the house and meet people? Evidently he hadn’t wanted her around.

Yes; it felt like that, Jenny said miserably.

And while she was out of the house, presumably, Lee went on, Wilkie Walker must have been sleeping with Barbie Mumpson. He didn’t care who knew it, either, or he wouldn’t have kissed her right out on the street where anyone, including Jenny, could see. Wilkie was the one who should feel guilty, Lee said. And it could be that he was already being punished, too. His attack, gallstone or heart or whatever it was, might have been the result of what was sometimes called “overexertion” with Barbie; you often read of such things in the newspapers.

As Lee spoke, angry, hopeless tears rose behind Jenny’s eyes, and overflowed into her bowl of lime sherbet. Lee rose and came round the table: she held her, kissed her gently, and stroked her hair. It was hard, she said. She knew that. But it was best to face these things. Jenny had to accept that her marriage was probably over.

“But that’s—” Jenny sobbed. “But I tried so hard. I did everything I should, for so many years.”

“Of course you did,” Lee agreed. “It’s not your fault, not in any way. Here, have some more wine.”

“But I’ve always done everything for him. Not just keeping house, but typing and researching his books, and writing parts of them, and the articles, and the lectures—I mean, that’s my job,” Jenny continued between bursts of sobbing. “If I’m not working with Wilkie, what am I supposed to do? I won’t know what to do. I won’t even know who I am.”