John MacDonald - The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

I have been thinking of you these past days, finally deciding there is no one else I could ask this of, and no one else I would trust to be able to do anything to help. You are so darn shrewd and knowing about people, Travis. I know that you put a raggedy widow-lady back together again with great skill and taste and loving kindness. In my memories of that summer you are two people, you know. One was a young man so much younger than I that at times, when we were having fun and you seemed particularly boyish, you made me feel like a depraved and evil old hag. At other times there was something so... kind of ancient and knowledgeable about you, you made me feel like a dumb young girl. Had it not been for the time we had together, I might have been able to adjust to spending the rest of my life with Teddy Trescott... Anyway, my lasting impression was that there cannot be too many things in this world you would not be able to cope with. And I don’t mean just muscle and reflex... I mean in the gentle art of maneuvering people, as I think Maurie needs to be maneuvered. Can’t she comprehend how valuable life is? I certainly can, right now more than ever .

Believe me, darling, I am very tempted to drop one of those horrid death-bed demands upon you — Save my daughter’s life! But I cannot bring myself to the point of such dramatic corn. You will if you want to and you won’t if you don’t. It is that simple .

I just had a couple of bad ones and couldn’t keep my jaw shut tight enough and so I humiliated myself by squealing loud enough to bring the nurse scuttling in, and so they gave me a shot and things are beginning to get a little vague and swimmy. I will hang on long enough to sign this and seal it, but it might get to sounding a little drunky before I do... I wrote about you being two people to me... I am two people to myself... Do you know how strangely young the heart stays, no matter what? One of me is this wretched husk here in the electric bed, all tubes and bad smells and hurt and the scars that didn’t do much good, except for a little while... the other me is caught back there aboard the Lady in Shroud Cay, and the other me is being your bounding, greedy hoyden, romping and teasing in the nakedy bed, such a shameless widow-wench indeed, totally preoccupied with our finding, over and over, that endless endless little time when it was all like deep hot engines running together... the heart stays young... so damnably yearningly unforgivably young... and O my darling hold that other me back there long ago far away hold her tightly and do not let her fade away, because...

Signed with a scrawled “H.” They keep emptying out the world. The good ones stand on trapdoors 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 unmade-up girl mouths.

What the hell makes you think — made you think — I could communicate with either of them on any level, Helena Pearson Trescott? 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?

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. Ranch land 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.

Lakes amid the rolling land, some natural and some created by the horrendous mating dance of bulldozer and land developer. Golf clubs, retirement communities, Mid-Florida Junior College.

No boom land this. No pageants, gator farms, Africa-lands, shell factories, orchid jungles. Solid, cautious growth, based on third- and fourth-generation money and control — which in Florida is akin to a heritage going back to the fourteenth century.

My afternoon flight on that Thursday a week after Helena’s death, wing-dipped into the final leg of the landing pattern, giving me a sweeping look at downtown, half shielded by more trees than usual, at peripheral shopping plazas, at a leafy residential area with curving roads, with the multiple geometry of private swimming pools, and then a hot shimmering winking of acres of cars in a parking area by one of the industrial plants, and then we came down, squeak-bounce-squeak-bounce, and the reverse roar of slowing to taxi speed.

I had decided against arriving in my vivid blue Rolls pickup of ancient vintage. Miss Agnes makes one both conspicuous and memorable. I certainly was not on any secret mission, but I did not want to be labeled eccentric. I had a mild and plausible cover story and I was going to be very straight-arrow about the whole thing. I just couldn’t barge in and say, “Your mother asked me to see if I could get you to stop killing yourself, kid.”