Alison Lurie - Last Resort

Like almost everyone in Convers, Dr. Felch was somewhat in awe of Wilkie Walker, the town’s most famous citizen. More for Jenny’s sake than his patient’s, perhaps, he wrote a prescription for what he called a “muscle relaxant,” which Wilkie afterward refused to take. The trouble with most people today, he told his wife, was that their muscles were too relaxed, not to say atrophied.

Though Wilkie seemed to have forgotten the whole episode, one phrase Dr. Felch had used kept running through Jenny’s head: “a man of his age.” Wilkie’s age was now seventy. Not for the first time, she recalled the uncomfortable conversation she had had when she first brought him home to meet her parents. Wilkie clearly hadn’t noticed the slight hesitation in their welcome, and would have been surprised to hear what was said when his wife-to-be confronted her mother later in the kitchen.

“Darling, I do like him,” Jenny’s mother had insisted. “And of course I realize he’s brilliant. He was wonderfully interesting about those South American bats. And I can see he really loves you. But—” She turned on the water in the sink, sloshing away the rest of the sentence, if any.

“But what?”

“Well. He has been married twice before, that always ... Under Jenny’s hurt, resentful stare, her voice faltered. “And then ... the age difference. You’re barely twenty-one, and Wilkie Walker is forty-six, almost my age. I always think of what my mother said once: If you marry someone much older, you don’t ever quite grow up. And when you’re forty-six, Wilkie will be seventy. An old man.”

Jenny refused to listen. Wilkie Walker was not like other people, she declared. He had more energy and endurance and enthusiasm than most of her college friends.

Her mother, for whom tact was almost a religion, never brought up the subject again. But her comments continued to swim in the weedy depths of Jenny’s mind, occasionally surfacing in a sharklike manner. “You see, you were quite wrong,” she had felt like telling her mother on several occasions, the latest being her own forty-sixth birthday last spring. “Wilkie hasn’t become an old man at all. When we were on that walking tour in Greece last month nobody could keep up with him except the tour guide.” She did not say this only because, though her mother was still in excellent health, her father was now, after two heart attacks, all too evidently an old man at seventy-four: stoop-shouldered and short of breath, slow-speaking and slow-moving.

Remembering all this, Jenny lay listening to the wind scratch at the glass, recalling recent conversations with her two grown children over Thanksgiving vacation.

“I tell you what it is, Mom,” Ellen had said as they were washing the dishes. “I think Dad has got a clinical depression.”

Since her daughter was now a medical student, and like many such students given to scattershot diagnoses, Jenny both believed her and did not believe her. “Oh, darling,” she temporized. “I don’t know.”

“That’s what I think,” Ellen repeated. “I’m surprised his doctor isn’t more concerned.”

“Dr. Felch is concerned. He admires Wilkie very much.”

“Everyone admires him very much,” Ellen said. “That’s not the point.”

Billy (Wilkie Walker Jr.) was as usual less definite, but no more reassuring. “Yeah, I sort of agree with Ellen,” he admitted the next day in answer to his mother’s question. “Something’s wrong. Dad seems to be moving around less, you know? Like he wouldn’t come for a walk yesterday because it was too cold? I never heard that before; he was always dragging us out in the goddamnedest freezing snowstorms. Maybe you should go somewhere warmer this winter.”

“Somewhere warmer?”

“Like, I don’t know. Florida, for instance.”

“Oh, darling. Your father would hate Florida.” A glaring panorama of pink beach hotels and condominiums trimmed in neon and surrounded by artificial neon-green turf rose in Jenny’s mind.

“I know, Mom. But you could try Key West. It’s different from the rest of Florida. Sort of like Cape Cod with palms, that’s what my roommate said when we were there on spring break last year. And there’s supposed to be lots of writers and artists around that Dad could talk to.”

Jenny lay in bed rehearing these voices, wondering if she ought to go downstairs, fearing that if she did Wilkie would not be pleased to see her. For a while she distracted herself from this anxiety with familiar, less pressing anxieties about her two beautiful and brilliant children. She pictured Ellen, who so much resembled Wilkie: tall, ruddy, and broad-shouldered—and also, since early childhood, always so sure of herself. Sometimes lately Jenny was almost frightened of her daughter. I wouldn’t like to be Ellen’s patient when she becomes a doctor, she thought: she’d be so sure she knew what was wrong with me. Then in the dark she blushed, ashamed of this disloyalty.

She imagined Billy, who had been such a beautiful, affectionate little boy, and now seemed somehow subdued and uncertain. Both of them were doing well professionally, but Jenny sometimes worried that Billy, isolated in the nearly all-male world of computer hardware, would never meet a nice young woman, and that Ellen would scare nice young men off. Then they would never marry and have children Jenny could love.

Jenny marveled at people who desired expensive manufactured objects like an indoor swimming pool or a Mercedes. She already had too many such objects to take care of. What she longed for no money could buy: at least one grandchild. And now, for Wilkie to be himself again.

Downstairs a thin, icy wind rattled the antique bubbled panes of the windows and sliced its way into the family room, but Wilkie Walker did not adjust the thermostat. He remained huddled in his forest-green L.L. Bean bathrobe in a corner of the sofa, watching the weather channel with the sound turned off and thinking about death.

Death was what Wilkie thought about most of the time these days. The death, over the past few years, of two close friends and colleagues; the slow, lingering death of the natural environment. The progressive destruction of the ozone layer, the slashing and burning of tropical forests, the poisoning of oceans, wars and assassinations in Africa and Asia, terrorist bombings, drug wars in great cities, the scummy sulfurous yellow-gray foam on Baird Creek behind his house, the raccoon he saw smashed on the road as he was driving home yesterday afternoon, and his own regress toward extinction.

If they could have heard his thoughts, Wilkie’s thousands of fans and many of his remaining friends and colleagues would no doubt have shared his shock and sorrow, except for the last item. What was he complaining about, for God’s sake? they might have said. For a seventy-year-old man he was in good shape. He was also a famous, perhaps the most famous popular naturalist of his generation: the most eloquent among those who had called public attention to our wanton destruction of the earth and its flora and fauna. His best-known and best-loved book, The Last Salt Marsh Mouse, had never been out of print, and there was hardly a schoolchild in America who had not read its famous first paragraph:

It is the year 2000. In the Zoological Gardens of a great city, a small furry pale-brown, bright-eyed creature clings to a dry stalk in a clump of artificial reeds and stares at the passing humans. A sign stapled to the other side of the wire identifies him as

Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse,

Reithrodontomys raviventris

“SALTY”

Salty is alone in his cage, though once he shared it with his parents and four older siblings. As far as anyone knows, he is the last of his family, the last of his race: the sole surviving salt marsh mouse on this earth.