Alison Lurie: Last Resort

“I tell you what, though, Molly,” she added, laughing more easily. “Maybe you could get rid of them, the way you did with Seymour.”

“Really, Lee,” Molly said. “Who says I got rid of Mr. Seymour?”

“Hell, I don’t know,” Lee replied. “Everybody. They say you scared him out of town somehow.”

“It wasn’t like that at all.” Molly giggled slightly. “I only gave him a little push.”

“She told him the tap water was full of poisonous chemicals,” Jacko volunteered from the porch railing, where he had assumed a graceful, watchful pose which echoed that of his cat. “All sweet and concerned, she was. She explained that it didn’t bother her that chemical poisons were slowly building up in her body, because she wouldn’t be around for long, but she thought he ought to know.”

“That wouldn’t work with Wilkie Walker,” Lee said. “Where the environment is concerned, he’s probably convinced he’s the expert. Nothing anybody else says would make a dent in his mind.” She scowled. “So how long are they staying?”

“It’s not settled. Two, maybe three months.”

“Ugh, really? Isn’t Alvin coming down this winter?”

For a long moment, Jacko didn’t answer. He shifted his posture and rubbed his sea-green eyes. “I don’t know,” he said slowly, and then in a rush, “I don’t see why it has to be such a fucking big secret. Alvin is—He’s in the hospital with a stroke; he might be dying, that’s what his secretary said when she called this morning, and please don’t tell anybody.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Molly and Lee exclaimed simultaneously. Neither of them liked Alvin, but he was a Key West institution, and they were unsettled, as they would have been by the sudden demolition of an ugly but historic local landmark.

“It just doesn’t seem right,” Molly added with a helpless gesture.

“Yeah.” Jacko glanced from one to the other, registering their embarrassed inability to express real sorrow. “It’s rough. I’m going to miss him. Well, I guess I’ll start on those aralias.”

As Jacko disappeared around the side of the guest house, carrying a pair of clippers and a trash can, Molly and Lee looked at each other.

“Alvin isn’t all bad,” Lee declared finally. “He always writes a check for AIDS Help, even though it’s never for much, considering the kind of money he has.”

“He gave a hundred to the Everglades Fund last year,” Molly said. “A lot of rich people who come here don’t even do that.”

Having discharged the obligation to speak only good of the dying, they turned to more pressing matters.

“Yeah,” Lee said. “But the real question is, suppose Alvin does die, what happens to his property?”

“I think he has relatives,” Molly offered. “There’s a brother, or maybe it’s a sister. They’ve never been down here, though, as far as I know.”

“If they sell the place, they could get a lot for it,” Lee suggested. “Or somebody could buy it for a condo development. There’s the big house, with that separate apartment over the garage, and Jacko’s cottage. And you could make over the pool house; it already has two dressing rooms and bathrooms and a wet bar.”

“Maybe whoever buys the property will keep Jacko on as caretaker,” Molly suggested.

“Well, hell, they should,” Lee said. “He practically created that fantastic garden out of crabgrass and marl.” She lowered her voice. “But what happens if Jacko gets sick?”

“When.”

“What?”

“Not if,” Molly said wearily. “When.”

“I suppose so. What a bitch,” Lee muttered. “You know Jacko has no health insurance,” she added. “He was joking about it last fall; he said it brought on trouble, made you careless. He said that after his friends signed up they fell off ladders or got ringworm. Talk about stupid.”

“Probably he couldn’t afford health insurance,” Molly suggested.

“Yeah. Probably not.” Lee picked up her glass, in which the ice had now melted. “He never got himself tested for HIV, you know,” she said. “They did it without asking when he cut his arm replacing a window in Alvin’s greenhouse.”

“I know.” Molly sighed.

“I can’t relate to that,” Lee said. “I couldn’t take not knowing. Hell, it’d be on your mind the whole time, right?”

“I suppose it would,” Molly said. The knowledge of approaching illness and death was often on her mind, though as seldom as she could manage. Think positive thoughts, she kept telling herself. Concentrate on the things you can like and enjoy.

For a few moments they were silent. Molly observed the warm wind as it ruffled the trumpet vine; she heard birds trill and insects buzz in the tall poinciana tree that shaded the street in front of Artemis Lodge with its sprays of delicate leaves.

“It’s so pleasant in Key West,” she sighed. “It doesn’t seem as if anything really awful could ever happen here.”

“I know,” Lee replied. “That’s what I used to think too.”

3

IN MIDAFTERNOON THE OVERSIZED pool behind the oversized house shimmered turquoise in the January sun. Since it had been built in the 1940s, before Mosquito Control, the pool and its adjoining pool house were enclosed in a giant cage of wire netting. Many tropical flowering plants and white-painted metal chairs with tropical-flowering cushions shared the enclosure, and mango and orange trees provided a lush, jeweled shade at one side.

Jenny Walker lay in one of the double-width lounge chairs, laxly turning the pages of Harper’s, at loose ends. The phrase was her grandmother’s, and was associated in Jenny’s mind with a sense of guilt and with her grandmother’s cream paisley shawl, its fading, mystically patterned cashmere unraveling into long tangled fringe.

At home Jenny was never at loose ends. Even when she wasn’t working with Wilkie, there was the house and three acres of lawn and garden and woods to look after. There was shopping, cooking, mending, errands, letters to write; people coming for lunch, tea, and dinner, and to interview Wilkie; the cleaning lady and the gardener; the bills and investments. And, whenever there was time, her sewing and knitting and weaving and tapestry projects.

But here, after the initial flurry of unpacking, stocking the refrigerator and pantry, and getting the computer, printer, fax, and answering machine set up, suddenly there was almost nothing for her to do. The caretaker, a pleasant young man called Jacko who lived in a cottage on the property, cleaned the house and tended the exotic flowers and shrubbery. She had no loom or sewing machine here, and it was far too hot to work on the tapestry cushion she had brought, or the Kaffe-Fasset wool sweater. And often she didn’t even have to shop or cook because they were eating out.

What was most disturbing was that for the first time Jenny was also free of her real task in life. For years, whenever anyone asked her what she “did,” she had replied patiently: “I help Wilkie with his work.” “Our work,” she might have said if she were less modest, for Wilkie’s books were full of sentences, and even paragraphs, that she had composed. In The Copper Beech, for example, much of the chapter on the uses of beechwood and beechnuts had been transcribed verbatim from her research notes.

Wilkie recognized the importance of her contribution: every preface he had written from The Salt Marsh Mouse on ended with a warm tribute to “my wife, Jenny, without whom this book could never have been written.” Occasionally other people recognized the literal truth of this statement: the copy editor of Wolves of the West, for instance, had declared at one point that Jenny’s name ought to be on the title page with her husband’s, not just in the preface. If Jenny agreed, this rather angry young woman had said, she was going to tell Wilkie and his editor so. “Oh, please don’t do that,” Jenny had exclaimed. “I don’t want it, really. Besides, even if the research is mine, most of the ideas in the book are Wilkie’s.”