Alison Lurie - Last Resort

Lee laughed. “So who else is on the panel with you?”

“Well, there’s Wilkie Walker, the Friend of the Salt Marsh Mouse, and all our other little furry friends.” (Lee opened her mouth to make some equally negative comment, then closed it.) “And Dolly Acker, of course, author of Whale Music, the most famous nature writer of her generation, according to the brochure.”

“It sounds as if you don’t care for her,” Lee said.

“Not all that much, no. I don’t like beautiful women who prefer fish to me. If I get lucky, I can make her cry. I’m looking forward to that.”

Lee laughed again. “If you make Dolly Acker cry, that audience will lynch you.”

“You think so?” Lennie raised his heavy eyebrows. “But you’ll protect me, won’t you, Lelia? You’ll charge onto the stage and fight the assailants off with your umbrella, like you used to when you and Cousin Roger were playing Robin Hood and the Dragons, or whatever it was.”

Below the porch a car pulled into Lee’s driveway. Jenny Walker got out, slammed the door ineffectively, and ran up the steps. Her long pale hair was loose over a gray cotton dress printed with paler gray bamboo leaves, and she looked flushed, anxious, and very pretty.

“Oh, Lee!” she cried in a tremulous rush. “I’m so glad you’re here. I just can’t make it tonight, Wilkie’s changed his mind, he says we have to go to the art opening, and the dinner tomorrow too. I can’t possibly see you until Sunday. I know that’s awful. But I’ve got good news too: we’re going to stay through April, and we’re probably coming back in October. So you’ll forgive me, won’t you?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Lee said awkwardly. “Jenny, this is my cousin Lennie Zimmern, that I’ve told you about. Jenny Walker.”

“What?” Jenny gasped. “Oh, hello, I didn’t see you.” She took a breath and shifted with evident strain into a social manner. “I mean of course I knew you were coming, I saw your name in the program. But you weren’t at the lunch today at the Rusty Anchor.”

“No,” Lennie agreed. “I make a point of never eating at restaurants with cute names.”

“And are you enjoying Key West?”

“I can’t say yet.”

“Oh, you’ll like it, I’m sure. Everyone does. Well, I must dash.” With a brief helpless glance at Lee, she ran down the steps.

“Well,” Lennie said, as Jenny’s car pulled out of the driveway. “What was all that about? No, on second thought, don’t tell me, let me guess. You’re in love.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Lee said rather tensely. “Jenny’s just a little frantic and overextended now, because of the conference. She gets like that sometimes.”

“Come on, Lelia. I’ve seen Jenny Walker for years at Academy dinners, and I’ve never seen her like that. She’s always been the perfect lady. Calm and cool and collected.”

“That doesn’t prove—” Lee, who detested lies, lied with difficulty. “It’s not what you think.”

Lennie looked at her, frowning a little, then smiled. “Come on, Lelia,” he repeated. “You ought to realize by now that I won’t tell on you. Shit, it’s been nearly fifty years, and I’m still the only person that knows who broke the bathroom window in your aunt’s house in Queens.

“I should congratulate you,” he added, when Lee said nothing. “She’s a very attractive woman. Beautiful, even. Maybe a little flavorless for my taste.”

“Jenny is not flavorless,” Lee heard herself protest against her better judgment, in a voice that, she realized too late, gave everything away.

“No? Well, you know best.” Lennie allowed himself an aggravating smile. “I’ve never tasted her myself.”

“She’s too good, that’s all,” Lee said, ignoring this smile and trying to speak casually. “The trouble is, she wants to make everyone happy, including her husband, who’s a complete egotist and MCP.”

“Really.”

“He thinks he loves her, but he has no consideration for her. Treats her as if she were his secretary, even though he couldn’t write his books without her. But she won’t leave him.”

“No, I can understand that. After all, who would she be if she weren’t Mrs. Wilkie Walker?”

Lee sighed, but managed to say nothing, though she couldn’t help remembering what Jenny had whispered to her only yesterday: Yes, of course I love you. But Wilkie’s work is my life. Anyhow, it’s what I can do for the world, you know?

“She seems to be a popular item,” Lennie remarked. “I have the impression that Gerry Grass has a crush on her too. When he was reading this rather obvious poem about lost white birds and lost white-skinned women at the symposium this morning he kept gawking at her.”

“He hasn’t got a chance,” Lee said.

“Glad to hear it.” Lennie smiled. “But you know, Wilkie Walker might not be around forever. Gerry told me last night that he was in the hospital here a couple of weeks ago.”

“Yeah. But it wasn’t anything. He had some sort of intestinal attack. Nerves I think it was.”

“Could be. I have to say that he still puts up a good show in public, though. Father Nature, all wise and kind. You should go and hear him sometime this weekend, see what you’re up against.”

“No thanks,” Lee said. Last night, at the opening reception of the conference, she had met Wilkie Walker for the first, and she hoped the last, time. As she’d expected, he had been both polite and patronizing, recognizing her as Jenny’s friend, but showing no wish to know her better himself.

What had surprised Lee was Wilkie’s appearance.

Nothing that Jenny had said, and none of the magazine or book-jacket photographs, had prepared her for his being so heavy, gray, worn, and slow-moving. Why, he’s an old man, she had thought, and an inconvenient flood of compassion had sloshed over her. No wonder he’d believed he was ill, dying even.

Lennie’s right, she thought now. Wilkie won’t be around forever. But whether or not he was around, Jenny would be determined to get his book into publishable shape. There was no point in trying to fight that, because in Jenny’s mind it was her book too. When he and the manuscript went north she would go with them. And though she and Lee might manage to meet somehow, somewhere, this summer, she would be gone for the next half-year.

But that wasn’t going to happen just yet. Lee remembered something she had read once, that as you grow older and the future shrinks, you have only two choices: you can live in the fading past, or, like children do, in the bright full present.

Jenny would be here for nearly two more months—the rest of March and all April. Spring was Lee’s favorite season in Key West: by early April most of the tourists would be gone, as well as the college students who had made the town noisy and dangerous with their rented mopeds and riotous intoxication.

The weather would be perfect: the nights warm and romantic. Almost every day, as soon as the conference was over, Jenny would come to the guest house, and sometimes late at night too, after Wilkie was asleep—as she had already done several times.

They would be together often as the island became steadily quieter, more beautiful, and more overgrown with flowers. Together they would watch the purple and white orchid trees unfold into bloom; they would see the stubby spread hands of the frangipani put out their pink and white and golden velvet whorls of petals, and the poinciana explode slowly overhead in drifts of scarlet confetti.

A Biography of Alison Lurie

Alison Lurie (b. 1926) is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author of fiction and nonfiction. Born in Chicago and raised in White Plains, New York, she grew up in a family of storytellers. Her father was a sociology professor and later the head of a social work agency; her mother was a former journalist. Lurie graduated from Radcliffe College, and in 1969 joined the English department at Cornell University, where she taught courses on children’s literature, among others.