John MacDonald - The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

He shed his lightweight sports jacket and pulled his tie off, and Biddy took them from him and carried them into the house. With a tired smile he said, “I’ve been worrying all morning about how Maureen would react to you. It can be very good or very bad, and no way to tell in advance. Biddy says it’s been fine so far.”

“She looks great.”

“Sure. I know. Dammit, it makes me feel... so disloyal to have to act as if Biddy and I were keeping some kind of defective chained up in the cellar. But too much exposure to outsiders shakes her up.” His quick smile was bitter and inverted. “And when she gets upset, you can be very very sure she’s going to upset the outsider, one way or another. She’s going to find her way out of the thicket. Someday. Somehow.”

“It must be pretty rough in the meanwhile, Tom.”

“And there’s another reason I feel guilty. Because most of it lands right on Biddy. I’m out of here all day working. We’ve tried and tried to find somebody to come in and help out, somebody kind and patient and well-trained. We’ve interviewed dozens. But when they find out the trouble is maybe in some psychiatric area, they back away.”

Biddy had returned and was busying herself with the food. I asked what luck they were having with the doctors. He shrugged. “They raise your hopes, then say sorry. One recent diagnosis was that a calcium deposit was diminishing the flow of blood to the brain. A series of tests, and then he says sorry, it isn’t that at all. The symptoms just don’t fit anything in their books. But I have some people who keep checking, writing letters.”

“Excuse a painful question, Tom. Is she deteriorating?”

“I keep wondering about that. I just don’t know. All we can do is wait and watch. And hope.”

Maurie stopped swimming, put her palms flat on the dock, and came vaulting up, turning in the air to sit on the edge, lithe as a seal. She got up and smiled up the slope at us. She used the short robe to pat her legs dry, then put it on, pulled her swim cap off, and shoved it into the robe pocket, shaking her hair out as she walked. As she approached Tom Pike her slow, floating assurance seemed to desert her. She came to him with downcast eyes, shoulders slightly hunched, her welcome smile nervous, her walk constricted. She made me think of a very good dog aware of having disobeyed her master and hoping to be so engaging and obedient that the infraction will be forgiven and forgotten. He kissed her briefly and casually and patted her shoulder and asked her if she had been a good girl. She said shyly that she had been good. It was a most plausible attitude and reaction. She was the wife and no matter how lost she had become, she could not help knowing that she no longer measured up to what they both expected of her. It seemed more an awareness of inadequacy than a conscious guilt.

Mosquitoes were beginning to regroup under the banyan shade. Tom went and got the little electric fogger and plugged it into a socket on one of the flood lamps and killed them off, commenting to me when he was finished that he hated to use it because it was so unselective. “When I was a kid, we’d sit on the screened porch on a summer evening and see clouds of mosquito hawks — dragonflies — darting and swooping, eating their weight. Then the bats would begin when the sun went down. So we’ve killed off the mosquito hawks with the spray and we’ve killed the other bugs the bats ate, and now there’s nothing left but billions of mosquitoes and gnats, and we have to keep changing the spray as they get immune.”

“You grew up around here?”

“In the general area. Here and there. We moved around a lot. Steaks ready, Bid? Time for one more drink, then, Trav. Let me fix it for you. Maurie, darling, you are supposed to be tossing the salad, not sampling it.”

She hunched herself. “I didn’t mean... I wasn’t—”

“It’s all right, darling.”

At one point while we were eating, one scene, like a frozen frame, like a color still, underlined the strange flavor of the relationships, of the ménage. Maurie and I were on the same bench on one side of the picnic table, Maurie on my left. Biddy was across from me. Maurie was eating very politely and properly, and I glanced over and saw the two of them watching her. Husband and kid sister, looking at the wife with the same intent, nervous approval, as a couple might watch their only child plodding through a simple piano solo for visiting relatives. Then the frozen frame moved once again as Biddy lifted the poised fork to her lips and as Tom Pike began chewing again.

Later, as Biddy was saying something to me, Tom’s low voice in a sound of warning, saying merely “Darling!” made Biddy stop abruptly and look quickly at Maureen. I turned and looked at her and saw that she had hunched herself over her plate, head low, had picked up her steak in a greedy fist, and was tearing and gobbling at it. She dropped it back onto her plate and sat, eyes downcast, while under the shelter of the edge of the table she wiped her greasy fingers on the top of her bare thigh, leaving streaks of sheen across the firm brown.

“You forgot again, dear,” Tom said in a gentle voice.

Maurie began to tremble visibly.

“Don’t get upset, honey,” Biddy said.

But suddenly she wrenched herself up and away, striking the edge of the table so solidly with her hip that drinks and coffee slopped out of the glasses and cups. She ran toward the house, sobbing audibly in her blundering, hopeless flight. Tom called sharply to her, but she did not look back or slow down. Biddy got up quickly and hurried after her.

“Sorry,” Tom said. “I guess you can see why we don’t... Biddy will get her settled down and...” He pushed his plate away and said, “Ah, the hell with it!” and got up and walked down toward the lakeshore.

He was still there when Biddy came walking back out. She sat opposite me. “She’s resting now. In a little while she won’t remember what happened. I want to have Tom look at her and see if he thinks she needs a shot. Is... is he all right?”

“He acted upset.”

“It’s because she was doing so well.”

She stared down toward the silent figure by the lakeshore. I was at an angle to her that gave me a chance to see more than she would have wanted me to see. Her face had a soft and brooding look, lips parted. It was adoration, worship, hopeless helpless yearning love. I knew why she had started to go to pieces in the cocktail lounge. It was a situation nicely calculated to fray her to the breaking point, to have been for a year in this house with the deteriorating wife, the concerned and suffering husband. Loyalty to the big sister. And a humble self-sacrificing love for the husband.

After a little while we all went inside. Tom went up and looked at her and came back and said she was sleeping. He sat for a moment, glancing at his watch.

“Nice to meet you, Travis. Just... sorry that it had to be... to be...” His voice thickened and his mouth twisted, and he suddenly buried his face in his hands. Biddy hurried to him and shyly, hesitantly, put her hand on his shoulder.

“Tom. Please, Tom. It will work out.”

He sighed and straightened up and dug in his pocket for a handkerchief. His eyes still streaming, he said in a husky voice, “Sure, honey. It will all be peachy dandy by and by.” He mopped his eyes and blew his nose. “I apologize for myself too. See you around.” She followed him out and I heard him saying something about getting home late. The car door slammed. He drove out. She came back into the two-level living room. Her eyes looked moist.

“He’s... quite a guy, Travis.”

“Little tough to go back to the office and sell stocks and bonds, I guess.”

“What? Oh, he hasn’t done that in a long time now. Over two years. He started his own company.”