John D MacDonald – Travis McGee 10 The Girl In The Plain Brown Wrapper

I began to tell her a lot of things, very significant and important and memorable things, and when I stopped, waiting for applause, I discovered she was asleep.

When the Likely Lady was back in a slip at Bahia Mar, she took one wistful walk around the deck and made a sour little smile and said, “Good-bye to this too. I’ll let the man who wants her pick her up here. Will you show him through her and explain everything?”

“Sure. Send him to me.”

When I had put her luggage in the trunk of the rental car, and kissed her good-bye, and she had gotten behind the wheel, she looked out at me, 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.

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