I wonder who has her now. I wonder what she’s called. Helena came over on a hot July day. She was of that particular breed which has always made me feel inade-quate. Tallish, so slender as to be almost, but not quite, gaunt. The bones that happen after a few centuries of careful breeding. Blond-gray hair, sun-streaked, casual, dry-textured, like the face, throat, backs of the hands, by the sun and wind of the games they play. Theirs is not the kind of cool that is an artifice, designed as a chal-lenge. It is natural, impenetrable, and terribly polite. They move well in their simple, unassuming little two-hundred-dollar cotton dresses, because long ago at Miss Somebody’s Country Day School they were so thoroughly taught that their grace is automatic and ineradicable. There are no girl-tricks with eyes and mouth. They are merely there, looking out at you, totally composed, in al-most exactly the way they look out of the newspaper pic-tures of social events.
I asked about her daughters, and she told me that they had gone off on a two-month student tour of Italy, Greece and the Greek Islands, conducted by old friends on the faculty of Wellesley.
“Travis, I never thanked you properly for all the help you gave us. It was… a most difficult time.”
“I’m glad I could help.”
“It was more than just… helping with the details. Mick told me he had asked you to… do a special favor. He told me he thought you had a talent for discre-tion. I wanted those people… caught and punished. But I kept remembering that Mick would not have wanted that kind of international incident and notoriety. To him it was all some kind of… gigantic casino. When you won or you lost, it wasn’t… a personal thing. So I am grateful that you didn’t… that you had the instinct to keep from… making yourself important by giving out-any statements about what happened.”
“I had to tell you I’d caught up with them, Helena. I was afraid you’d want me to blow the whistle. If you had, I was going to try to talk you out of it. The day I get my name and face all over the newspapers and newscasts, I’d better look for some other line of work.”
She made a sour mouth and said, “My people were so certain that Michael Pearson was some kind of romantic infatuation, we had to go away together to be married. He was too old for me, they said. He was an adventurer. He had no roots. I was too young to know my own mind. The usual thing. They wanted to save me for some nice earnest young man in investment banking.” She looked more directly at me, her eyes narrow and bright with anger. “And one of them, after Mick was dead, had the damned blind arrogant gall to try to say: I told you so! After twenty-one years and a bit with Mick! After having our two girls, who loved him so. After sharing a life that…”
She stopped herself and said, with a wan smile, “Sorry. I got off the track. I wanted to say thank you and I want to apologize for being stupid about something, Travis. I never asked, before I left, what sort of… arrangement you had with Mick. I know he had the habit of paying well for special favors. Had he paid you?”
I “No.”
“Was an amount agreed upon?”
“For what I had thought I was going to do. Yes.”
“Then did you take it out of the cash before you gave me the rest of it, the cash that had been in the safe?”
“No. I took out five hundred for a special expense and two hundred and fifty for a rental of a boat and some in-cidental expenses.”
“What was the agreed amount?”
“Five thousand.”
“But you did much much more than what he… asked you to do. I am going to give you twenty thousand, and tell you that it isn’t as much as it should be.”
“No. I did what I did because I wanted to do it. I won’t even take the five.”
She studied me in silence and finally said, “We are not going to have one of those silly squabbles, like over a restaurant check. You will take the five because it is a mat-:r of personal honor to me to take on any obligation Mick made to anyone. I do not think that your appreciation of yourself as terribly sentimental and generous about widows and orphans should take priority over my sense of obligation.”