Signed with a scrawled “H.” They keep emptying out the world. The good ones stand on trap doors so perfectly fitted into the floor you can’t see the carpentry. And they keep pulling those lousy trip cords.
So do your blinking, swallowing, sickening, ol’ Trav, and phone the place. The girl said that Mr. Hardahee had left for lunch, and then she said he hadn’t quite, and maybe she could catch him, and she asked was it important, and I said with a terrible accuracy that it was a matter of life and death. D. Wintin Hardahee had a purry little voice, useful for imparting top-secret information. “Ah, yes. Yes, of course. Ah… Mrs. Trescott passed away last Thursday evening… ah… after the operation… in the recovery room. A very gallant woman. Ah… I count it a privilege to have made her acquaintance, Mr. McGee.”
He said there had been a brief memorial service yesterday, Sunday.
There have been worse Mondays, I am sure.
Name three.
. Helena, dammit, this is not one of your better ideas. This Maureen of yours is getting devoted attention from people who love her. Maybe she just doesn’t like it here. And anybody could make out a pretty long list of contemporary defects. Am I supposed to be the kindly old philosopher, woman, and go set on her porch, and spit and whittle and pat her on the hand and tell her life can be beautiful? Hang around, kid. See what’s going to happen next.
I remember your daughters, but not too distinctly, because it was five years ago. Tallish, both slender-lithe blondes with the long smooth hanging sheath of hair, blunt-featured, a bit impassive with all that necessity for total cool that makes them look and act like aliens observing the quaint rites of earthlings. The infrequent blink is when the gray-blue eyes take pictures with hidden cameras. A considerable length of sea-brown legs and arms protruding from the boat clothes, resort clothes. Reservedly polite, quick-moving to go perform the requested errand or favor, a habit of standing close together and murmuring comments to each other, barely moving the shape of the unmadeup girl mouths.
What the hell makes you think-made you think-I could communicate with either of them on any level, Helena Pearson Trescot? I am not as much older than your elder daughter than you were older than I, but it is a large gap. Don’t trust anybody over thirty? Hell, I don’t trust anybody under thirty or over thirty until events prove otherwise, and some of my best friends are white Anglo-Saxon Protestant beach girls.
Helena, I think slaying oneself is a nasty little private, self-involved habit and, when successful, the residual flavor is a kind of sickly embarrassment rather than a sense of high tragedy. What is it you want of me? I am not suited to the role of going around selling the life-can-be-beautiful idea. It can be, indeed. But you don’t buy the concept from your friendly door-to-door lecture salesman.
No thanks. Husband Tommy and sister Biddy can cope. Besides, what in the world would I say to the three of them? Helena sent me?
Besides, dear lady, you left me the out. “You will if you want to and you won’t if you don’t. It is that simple.”
I don’t.
Tell you what I will do, though. Just to play fair. I’ll take a little run up there, for some reason or other I’ll dream up, and prove to both of us just how bad your suggestion is. Let’s say we’ll both sleep better. Okay? Fair to all?
5
COURTNEY COUNTY: Pop. 91,312. County Seat: Incorporated municipality of Fort Courtney. Pop. 24,808. Gently rolling country. Acres and acres of citrus groves, so lushly productive the green leaves on the citrus trees look like dark green plastic, the profusion of fruit like decorative wax. Ranchland in the southern part of the county. Black angus. White fences. Horse breeding as a sideline. An industrial park, a couple of nice clean operations making fragments of the computer technology, one a branch of Litton Industries, one spawned by Westinghouse, and one called Bruxtyn Devices, Inc., which had not yet been gobbled up by anybody.