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.
4
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 honey-moon 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 invisibil-ity. 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 get-ting the divorce in Nevada. When she had married, she had closed the house on Casey Key, had considered sell-ing it many times, but something had kept her from mak-ing 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 deli-riously 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 Uni-versity of Iowa so she could study with a painter she ad-mired 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 read- ing 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 Mu¤equita 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 flow-meters 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 paperclipped 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 cashier's 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
