So what he found was what he should have expected to find — a Tuesday afternoon like a lesson in the usual, a child by the Coke machine, nurses on pay phones, a distant relation bored in the waiting room on a worn leather cushion, his behind on the smooth front cover of a newsmagazine, someone sucking on a cigarette he hardly knew was in his mouth, patting his pockets for a match for a stranger, getting the time in return.
Yet the woman was dead. Her uncle stepped from the room and came into the corridor to embrace Mary, his gravity and the soured aromatics of his cologne and wrinkled linen giving it away, the distant early warning signs of worry and death. (This is how the rich attend their dead, Mills thought. Trailing some spoor of the bedside. Come from a deathbed as from a battle in a boardroom. But how had his clothes been mussed? How had his beard grown so fast?) All over her with apologies and explanations, including Mills even.
“Oh,” Harry said, “Good. You got my message. I thought I’d missed you. I had you paged, but when you didn’t come to the phone I thought perhaps you’d taken Mary sightseeing. This is her first time in Mexico and she’s an alert little girl. We even checked with the rental car people to see if you’d returned the car. It crossed my mind that you’d gone to the pictures. I was going to go out looking for you myself, but Señor Merchant advised me to wait another half-hour. It’s fortunate he did. It would have been awful if you’d come back to the hospital and found Mother’s room empty.”
“A small precaution,” Father Merchant said.
“They never paged us,” Mills said. “There was no message. We were by the pool a couple of hours.”
“Two hours? The child could have been badly burned. This is the tropics. Don’t you know what our sun can do?” Father Merchant turned to the girl. “You expose yourself the first day fifteen minutes tops.”
“I was covered up with towels,” Mary said.
“Towels. Oh, that’s all right then. Towels. You showed good sense. I hope they were white towels. White towels reflect the sun.”
“Mama’s dead?”
“Well you knew Mother’s convictions, sweetheart. She was a very spiritual woman. I guess in a sense you could say she’s dead, but she’ll always be with us. She was tired, sweetheart. She was all worn out, dear. She was so glad she’d seen you. It’s all she was waiting for. You remember that, darling. You made it easier for her. Didn’t she, Father Merchant?”
“She was a tonic. That’s my opinion,” said the tout.
“See?” said her uncle. “Even he thinks so.”
“She didn’t see Milly,” Mary said. “She didn’t see Daddy.”
“That would have been too hard, honey. That would have been so hard. Seeing all the people she loved would have upset her too much. Would you have wanted her to pass away while she was so sad? She left messages for everyone. She was at peace when she left us.”
“I want to see my mother.”
“Well, sweetheart, that wouldn’t be best just now. The doctors have to do certain things, the nurses do. And we’ve got to get ready to meet that plane. It was a darn good idea for Father Merchant to make arrangements to keep the room an extra few hours. You can change in there. You can use Mother’s shower.”
The old man nodded. “The c’s for caliente. Caliente means hot. Just turn it lightly. You don’t want to scald.”
“Scald?”
“Mexico is an oil-rich country. Its hot water is its pride.”
“Have I got time to freshen up?” the uncle asked.
“It isn’t a question of time,” Father Merchant said. “Flight 272 doesn’t arrive till six. It will still be rush hour. I’d give you a special map I’ve drawn up, I’d tell you directions, shortcuts, which lane to be in when you’re stopped at the border. You could leave at five-thirty and still meet the plane. But it isn’t a question of time. It’s a question of signs, what you look like to Sam when he gets off the plane, the signals he picks up. Go as you are. That’s my advice.”
Which, of course, he followed, looking, George thought, more the traveler than Sam, sending soiled semaphore, bereavement in the hang of his suit, the limp, creased cotton, got up like an actor in his tropical grief, his etched stubble. Merchant was right. Harry didn’t have to say a word to Sam or the little girl, Mrs. Glazer’s fate perfectly legible to them in Harry’s solemn, lingering handshake, his wordless hugs. It was Mary who spoke.
“I haven’t taken it all in, Daddy. I may be in shock. Feel my head. You think I have temperature? I was out in the sun. Maybe I burned. It could be a fever. It could be shock fever. They made me shower in Mommy’s bathroom ’cause I was still in my bathing suit and we had to meet your plane. It was creepy, Daddy. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to shower again. I’ll take baths and I’ll douche but I won’t ever shower.”
There was no need to return to the hospital and on the way back to Harry’s hotel Mills heard the brother-in-law tell Sam that they would all be flying back again in the morning, that Father Merchant, who’d been very useful, had made the arrangements, first class for Harry, Sam and the two girls, Mills in tourist. The old man had even returned Harry’s rental car, since they were getting a rate, Merchant explained, on Mrs. Glazer’s. He’d given the Mexican, Harry said, a hundred dollars. They probably wouldn’t be needing the car that night but he didn’t think they ought to be stuck in a third world country without one. The girls were tired, Milly had had a long day. They all had. Would George mind getting back to his motel on his own? Harry’d be happy to pay for the taxi.
Father Merchant was waiting for Mills outside his motel room.
“I could have been mugged waiting for that cab,” George Mills said.
“No no,” Father Merchant said, “everyone knows you’re under my protection. Nothin’ could have happen to you.” Mills opened the door and Merchant followed him inside. “Did anythin’ happened to you when you was flashin’ the lady’s money an’ she was tryin’ to get you both killed?”
“Was that you?” Mills asked without interest.
“I put in a word,” Father Merchant said modestly.
George started to undress. “Aren’t you tired?” George asked Merchant who was seated in the room’s single chair. “All that running around you did today?”
“Yellow,” Merchant said, “yellow? Yellow is for fairies. A man like you wants a dark blue bathing costume. Why should I be tired? I’m used to it. Anyway, I pace myself.”