Alison Lurie - Last Resort

“No, of course not,” Lee said, realizing that Dorrie Jackson, unlike her sister, did not assume that she was straight.

“He’s a good boy,” Dorrie continued. “I don’t believe it’s a judgment, his sickness, the way Myra does. God isn’t like that. Back home, you know, I stopped going to First Methodist after the minister said all these mean things about boys like Perry. I got really cross. I told him, God knows our hearts, and he knows Perry’s heart is good.”

“Mm-hm,” Lee remarked, thinking that if there was a God, he presumably did know this.

“Acourse everyone starts out good,” Dorrie said several moments later. “We’re all born innocent; only we’re weak, so we go wrong. The wrong sorts of people and things come into our lives, and we can’t fight them off.”

“Yeah.” Lee thought of some of the wrong people and things she had known.

“Like with Barbie’s husband, Bob Hickock. He was just a poor hometown boy with a law degree from State, working in the district attorney’s office. But Sis saw his potential. She started asking him to events and having him over to the house. Then after he and Barbie were engaged she got behind him in a big way. And acourse now he’s real successful, even kinda famous. But I liked him better when he first came into the family. He was a real sweet boy then, with such nice shy manners. Only you could see he was always going to draw the girls like molasses draws flies.”

Dorrie rocked quietly for a few minutes. Then she asked, “Did Barbie go back to the hotel with Sis?”

“Uh, no,” Lee said. “I don’t think so.”

“No? Where is she, then?”

“I don’t know. But I guess if she doesn’t turn up pretty soon she’ll miss that plane.”

“Oh, I just hope to the Lord she does miss it,” Dorrie said.

Surprised, Lee looked up. But though the chair was still rocking slightly, Jacko’s mother had closed her eyes.

14

IN THE SHADOWY SITTING room of the house on Hibiscus Street, Jenny sat on a slippery orange leather sofa, nervously knitting a gray cotton chenille sweater for her husband, and waiting for him to wake. He was upstairs now, sleeping off the events of the last twenty-four hours. On the drive home this morning he had been silent except for some irritable comments about the routine of the ward and the stupidity of nurses. Though more alert than he’d been last night, Wilkie was no more friendly or communicative. But he hadn’t been that for months, she thought: he had been changing, rejecting her, choosing someone else all along.

And she was different too, Jenny thought. Especially since yesterday, when everything in her life had turned upside down. She had lain in Lee’s arms and been warmly, deeply happy. Then she had gone home and found the house strangely empty, with a half-eaten sandwich on the kitchen counter and two kitchen stools overturned. Before she could figure out what it meant, there was that awful phone call from Barbie Mumpson. Finally she had seen the cold, withdrawn person who used to be Wilkie Walker, her loving husband, in the hospital on Stock Island.

As if her unconscious knew what was coming, Jenny had been apprehensive as she walked the hospital corridors, clutching an L.L. Bean canvas bag to her chest. In the bag were Wilkie Walker’s pajamas and bathrobe and toothbrush, and the library books he had demanded that she bring. Three of them, though the doctor had assured her over the phone that he was recovering well and could go home tomorrow. The request hadn’t surprised her: it was typical of Wilkie to fortify himself with reading matter even on a trip to the dentist.

What Jenny had feared as she followed the corridor was not the distressing sight of her husband in a hospital bed, but an interrogation. Why hadn’t she been there when he was taken ill? Why had she got home so late?

By the time she reached Wilkie’s room Jenny was breathing hard and trembling slightly. She looked at the hospital-green metal door and imagined her husband behind it, sitting stiffly up in bed as he always did when not sleeping, fixing her with a scowl as if she were a bad specimen. Jenny had never seen Wilkie direct that look at her—but she had seen it directed at others. In her mind she heard the words that would come out of his mouth if he knew what she’d been doing when she should have been with him: how she had broken down and sobbed in Lee’s arms, accusing him of adultery and revealing things that should always remain private between a married couple. If he knew about that, Jenny thought as she stood in the wide corridor, which smelled strongly of disinfectant, Wilkie would use words like “disloyal” and “hysterical.” “I am disappointed in you,” he would say, as he used to say sometimes to the children.

She pushed open the heavy door. There was a hospital bed in the bare room, and someone lying in it with the sheet pulled up over his face, as if he had died. Her heart gave a great lurch. Then she realized that the person in the bed was breathing, with a kind of half-snore that she recognized.

“Hello?” she uttered.

The figure in the bed turned over heavily, pulled the sheet down, and became a heavy elderly man with strong features, thinning hair, and a sour expression. He looked at her without apparent enthusiasm, blinking, not speaking.

“How are you?” she squeaked.

“Jenny,” the man said in a slurred version of Wilkie’s voice. His tone was neutral, as if identifying some object of no particular interest or attraction.

“I brought the things you wanted,” she said.

Wilkie did not speak.

“I’m so sorry I wasn’t home when you got sick,” she babbled on. “Lee was late getting back from the funeral, and then I had to drive to Searstown, to the supermarket—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Wilkie interrupted. “It wasn’t anything. I never was seriously ill, I only thought—”

“I know, Barbie Mumpson told me, you thought you were having a heart attack. That must have been awful.” Moved by duty and habit and good manners, Jenny approached the bed, leaned down, and with closed lips brushed the dry, puffy cheek of the man who lay there: an irritable, cold-hearted man who deceived his wife with silly young women.

“Yeah—No. I actually thought—” Wilkie swallowed. “It doesn’t matter now. I’m all right, just kind of knocked out by all those drugs they gave me.” He closed his eyes, then opened them again. “Did you bring the books I asked for?”

“Yes, they’re right here, on the table.”

“You’re a good woman.”

This was a statement Jenny had often heard from Wilkie before, though not for many months. Once she had acknowledged it with a glad private smile, and sometimes with the matching phrase: “And you’re a good man.” But now this phrase would be a lie. “Is there anything else I can do for you?” she asked instead.

“No thanks. That idiot doctor insists I have to spend the night. So he can charge our insurance for another day, I assume. Can you come tomorrow morning at nine and pick me up?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Right. You go on home now, get some rest. I might as well try to sleep some more. Have to take every chance you get in a hospital—wake you up every couple hours to take your temperature or some other damned nonsense.”

“I’ll come back this evening, after supper.”

“Don’t bother.” Wilkie gave his wife a weary, neutral look, then turned onto his other side, away from her.

If she were really a good woman, Jenny would have done what Wilkie told her and gone home. Instead, she’d driven straight to Artemis Lodge.

Lee had welcomed her, listened to her, comforted her; she had opened a bottle of Italian chianti, made fettuccine with tomato pesto and roasted peppers, followed by key lime sherbet.