'She's not on display? Right? Okay. She was twenty. She took that ugly business about Mick with a great deal of class and control. I knew how much she adored her father. Look, I didn't ask to be let in on all the family secrets. But I was. I'd like to see what she's like. Maybe you're too close to it. Maybe she's better than you think she is. Or worse. Can you think of anybody else who hasn't seen her since she was twenty?'
'N-No. Suppose I ask Tom what he thinks. And phone you here either later this evening or in the morning.'
When she finished her drink, I walked her out to her little red Falcon wagon. She thanked me for the drinks and apologized for being so tired and cross and edgy, and drove off.
She phoned in the morning and invited me to lunch at the house. She said Maurie was looking forward to seeing me again, and that Tom would join us for lunch if he could get away.
6
BRIDGET PEARSON apparently heard the sound of tires on the driveway pebbles and appeared from behind the house, on the lake side. She wore yellow shorts and a white sleeveless top and had her hair tied back with yellow yarn. Her sunglasses were huge and very black.
'So glad you could make it! We're out back. Come along. Tommy fogged the yard before he went to work, and there's hardly a bug. He should be along any minute.'
She kept chattering away, slightly nervous, as I followed her out to the slope of lawn overlooking the lake-shore. Tall hedges of closely planted punk trees shielded the area from the neighboring houses. There was a redwood table and benches under a shade tree, a flourishing banyan. The two- story boathouse was an attractive piece of architecture, in keeping with the house. There was a T-shaped dock, iron lawn furniture painted white, a sunfish hauled up onto the grass, a little runabout tethered at the dock. The makings of the picnic lunch were stacked on one end of the redwood table. A charcoal fire was smoking in a hibachi. She pointed out the pitcher of fresh orange juice, the ice bucket, the glasses, the vodka bottle, and told me to make myself a drink while she went to tell Maurie I'd arrived.
In a few moments Maureen came out through the screened door of the patio, moving down across the yard toward me, smiling. Her dead mother had written me that she was stunning. In truth she was magnificent. Her presence dimmed the look of Biddy, as if the younger sister were a poor color print, overexposed and hastily developed. Maude's blond hair was longer and richer and paler. Her eyes were a deeper, more intense blue. Her skin was flawlessly tanned, an even gold that looked theatrical and implausible. Her figure was far more rich and abundant and had she not stood so tall, she would have seemed overweight. She wore a short open beach robe in broad orange and white stripes over a snug blue swimsuit. She moved toward me without haste, and reached and took my hands. Her grasp was solid and dry and warm.
'Travis McGee. I've thought of you a thousand times.' Her voice was slow, like her smile and her walk. 'Thank you for coming to see us. You were so good to us a long time ago.' She turned and looked over her shoulder toward Biddy and said, 'You're right. He isn't as old as I thought he'd be either.' She stretched up and kissed me lightly on the corner of the mouth and squeezed my hands hard and released them. 'Excuse me, Travis dear, while I go do my laps. I've missed them for a few days, and if I stop for any length of time, I get all saggy and soft and nasty.'
She walked out to the crossbar of the T and tugged a swimcap on, dropped the robe on the boards and dived in with the abrupt efficiency of the expert. She began to swim back and forth, the length of the crossbar, so concealed by the dock that all we could see were the slow and graceful lift and reach of her tanned arms.
'Well?' Biddy asked, standing at my elbow.
'Pretty overwhelming.'
'But different?'
'Yes.'
'How? Can you put your finger on it?'
'Maybe she seems as if she's dreaming the whole scene. She sort of... floats. Is she on anything?'
'Like drugs? Oh, no. Well, when she gets jumpy, we give her a shot. It's sort of a long-lasting tranquilizer. Tom learned from one of the doctors and taught me how.'
I watched the slow and apparently tireless swimming and moved to the table to finish making my drink. 'There's nothing vague or dazed about her eyes. But she gives me a funny kind of feeling, Biddy. A kind of caution. As if there's no possible way of guessing just what she might do next.'
'Whatever comes into her head. Nothing violent. But she is just... as primitive and natural as a small child. Wherever she itches, she'll scratch, no matter where she is. Her table manners are... pretty damned direct. They get the job done and in a hurry. And she says whatever she happens to be thinking, and it can get pretty... personal. Then if Tom or I jump on her about it, she gets confused and upset. Her face screws up and her hands start shaking and she goes running off to her bedroom usually. But she can talk painting or politics or books... just so long as it's things she learned over a year ago. She hasn't added anything new this year.'
We heard another car on the pebbles and she went hurrying off around the corner of the house. She reappeared, talking rapidly and earnestly to the man walking slowly beside her. A certain tension seemed to be going out of his posture and expression, and he began to smile. She brought him over and introduced him.
He was tall and wiry, dark hair, dark eyes, a face that had mobility and sensitivity, and might have been too handsome without a certain irregularity about his features, a suggestion of a cowlicky, lumpy, aw shucks, ear-ly-jimmy-stewart flavor. His voice did not have the thin country whine of Mr. Stewart, however. It was surprisingly deep, rich, resonant, a basso semi-profundo. Mr. Tom Pike had exceptional presence. It is a rare attribute. It is not so much the product of strength and drive as it is a kind of quality of attention and awareness. It has always puzzled and intrigued me. People who without any self-conscious posturing, any training in those Be Likable and Make Friends courses, are immediately aware of you, and curious about you, and genuinely anxious to learn your opinions have this special quality of being able to somehow dominate a room, a dinner table, or a backyard. Meyer has it.
He shed his lightweight sports jacket and pulled his tie off, and Biddy took them from him and carried them into the house. With a tired smile he said, 'I've been worrying all morning about how Maureen would react to you. It can be very good or very bad, and no way to tell in advance. Biddy says it's been fine so far.'
'She looks great.'
'Sure. I know. Dammit, it makes me feel... so disloyal to have to act as if Biddy and I were keeping some kind of defective chained up in the cellar. But too much exposure to outsiders shakes her up.' His quick smile was bitter and inverted. 'And when she gets upset, you can be very very sure she's going to upset the outsider, one way or another. She's going to find her way out of the thicket. Someday. Somehow.'
'It must be pretty rough in the meanwhile, Tom.'
'And there's another reason I feel guilty. Because most of it lands right on Biddy. I'm out of here all day working. We've tried and tried to find somebody to come in and help out, somebody kind and patient and well-trained. We've interviewed dozens. But when they find out the trouble is maybe in some psychiatric area, they back away.'
Biddy had returned and was busying herself with the food. I asked what luck they were having with the doctors. He shrugged. 'They raise your hopes, then say sorry. One recent diagnosis was that a calcium deposit was diminishing the flow of blood to the brain. A series of tests, and then he says sorry, it isn't that at all. The symptoms just don't fit anything in their books. But I have some people who keep checking, writing letters.'
'Excuse a painful question, Tom. Is she deteriorating?'
'I keep wondering about that. I just don't know. All we can do is wait and watch. And hope.'
Maurie stopped swimming, put her palms flat on the dock, and came vaulting up, turning in the air to sit on the edge, lithe as a seal. She got up and smiled up the slope at us. She used the short robe to pat her legs dry, then put it on, pulled her swimcap off, and shoved it into the robe pocket, shaking her hair out as she walked. As she approached Tom Pike her slow, floating assurance seemed to desert her. She came to him with downcast eyes, shoulders slightly hunched, her welcome smile nervous, her walk constricted. She made me think of a very good dog aware of having disobeyed her master and hoping to be so engaging and obedient that the infraction will be forgiven and forgotten. He kissed her briefly and casually and patted her shoulder and asked her if she had been a good girl. She said shyly that she had been good. It was a most plausible attitude and reaction. She was the wife and no matter how lost she had become, she could not help knowing that she no longer measured up to what they both expected of her. It seemed more an awareness of inadequacy than a conscious guilt.
Mosquitoes were beginning to regroup under the banyan shade. Tom went and got the little electric fogger and plugged it into a socket on one of the flood lamps and killed them off, commenting to me when he was finished that he hated to use it because it was so unselective. 'When I was a kid, we'd sit on the screened porch on a summer evening and see clouds of mosquito hawks-dragonflies-darting and swooping, eating their weight. Then the bats would begin when the sun went down. So we've killed off the mosquito hawks with the spray and we've killed the other bugs the bats ate, and now there's nothing left but billions of mosquitoes and gnats, and we have to keep changing the spray as they get
