Somehow you can tell the real crazies from the broken birds. This one was pure bird. She’d had just a little more than she could handle. She had to have somebody to hang onto, somebody who could make her see that her disaster was as much her fault as is that cyclone or flood or fire which takes all but one of a family. Her nerves were shredded, digestion shot, disposition vile. She was without hope or purpose, and she had gone a dangerous distance along the path toward despising herself. But in the end it was her sense of humor which saved her. There was a compulsive clown carefully hidden away, who had almost forgotten tricks and jokes and absurdities. When I got her weary enough and healthy enough, the clown part began to make tentative appearances, and the good mending started.
After it had turned into a physical affair between us, another danger arose. She began to become too emotionally dependent on me. She was a very affectionate woman, needing and giving the casual touches and pats which to her were as necessary a part of communication as words. I felt too fatuously delighted with myself for bringing her back into reality to let her slip into another kind of fantasy. So, after helping her get a job as a diningroom hostess in a Fort Lauderdale hotel on the beach, I firmly, gently, carefully disentangled myself.
It was through her job she met Dr. Fortner Geis. He was staying alone at the hotel.
A log shifted in the fire. She sighed audibly. The music ended and she went over and punched the button to reverse it, so that it would play the other half of the tape.
“I loved this house,” she said.
I looked at a large painting on the opposite wall, the colors vividly alive, the composition very strong. A small gallery spot shone on it. I got up and went halfway to it, and then made out the artist’s signature and went back to the chair.
“An incredible old man,” I said.
“Fort and I picked that out in New York three years ago. It had just come into the gallery. Fort met Hans Hoffinan once, years ago. He told me that Hoffman had such an almost childlike quality of enthusiasm, that youthfulness that comes from being eternally inquisitive. I told Fort he had exactly the same thing. He looked so startled I had to laugh at him. Golly I’m going to miss that painting.”
“Do you have to sell it?”
“In November, two weeks after Fort died, a very polite and considerate man showed up with a perfectly legitimate bill of sale for that Hoffman. He’s a Chicago collector, and he paid Fort seven thousand five for it. He said that he had added it to his fine arts rider on his insurance policy, and he insisted on leaving it here until I decide what I’m going to do. It wasn’t a shock, Trav. Not by then. By then I knew I couldn’t consider anything mine. Not even the house.”
“I don’t understand.”
She took my empty glass and said, “The lady yelled help. Remember?”
TWO
I KNEW SHE must have planned how she would tell me, but when she started, I could see that it seemed wrong to her. She stopped and hopped up and began pacing around.
At last she stopped in front of me and said, “Okay. Look at it this way. Look at me and Fort from the outside, the way his son and daughter saw us. Their mother, Glenna, died eighteen years ago, when Roger was eleven and Heidi was seven. So they were the privileged children of Dr. Fortner Geis. Money and prestige. Money in the family from their mother’s side, plus what Fort added to it by becoming a great neurosurgeon-and the prestige of being the children of a man who’d made himself an international reputation. Fort told me he’d made a lot of mistakes in his life, but the worst one of all was the one he made five years ago, after the diagnosis was absolutely certain, after the prognosis was definite, deciding to tell Roger and Heidi that he probably had not more than three more years left. Damn it, Trav, he wasn’t looking for sympathy or being dramatic. He was a doctor. He knew a fact pertinent to their lives. So he told them. He’d always worked too long and too hard for the relationship with his kids to be terribly close. They set up a death watch, practically. They started dropping in on him, full of brave and noble cheer. And it started depressing him to the point where finally he had to get away by himself. He canceled out everything for a month and came down to Fort Lauderdale and didn’t let anybody know where they could find him. He told me he had some adjusting to do. He said he had been too busy to think about dying. And if a man was going to die, he should have some time for contemplation, so he wouldn’t die without coming to any decision about what it had all meant. He wanted to walk on the beach, look at the birds, read something other than medical journals. And he started coming into the dining room at odd times for coffee when I could sit with him and we could talk. Dammit, Trav, I had no idea he was important. I knew he was a doctor. I knew he was a widower. He said he was taking his first vacation in twenty-five years. There was that wonderful… simplicity about him.”
“I know,” I said. “That long nobbly face and the spaniel eyes and the slow grin.”
“Loneliness,” she said. “Both of us. We never talked trivia. We started talking from the heart right off. He’d loved Glenna deeply. He still missed her. And when we finally had a date, he told me what was wrong with him, and how long he probably could keep operating, and how soon he would die. We’d each taken our lumps. I told him… what had nearly sunk me without a trace. He was fifty, Travis. I was twenty-nine. Something in us responded to each other. He said it was because we knew what some things cost, and why other things were worthless, and too many people never found out. Then he asked me to marry him, and he said that if I felt squeamish about his being sick, I’d better not, because he desired me, and that was the kind of marriage he wanted with me, along with being friends and in love. He said he would have two years anyway before there was any outward sign or feeling, and it would get bad, but not too bad, when the medication stopped working. So I thought it over for two days, and knew I wanted him, and proved there was no squeamishness, and married him with the idea we’d be going back to some sort of old frame house with a downstairs office and waiting room in front, and some old dragon of a nurse. We had three and a half good years, Travis. We laughed a lot. I tell you, we laughed a hell of a lot. The pain started last April, but it didn’t get as bad as he thought it was going to. And in September, he just started… dwindling away. Very quietly.”