Last Resort

by Alison Lurie

  “Oh, Perry darling,” she gasped as he set her down gently. “I was so scared you wouldn’t be here.”

  “Of course I’m here,” Jacko said, unruffled. His mother did not know that he was ill, or had been in the hospital, but sometimes she appeared to know things she had not been told. It was also characteristic of her to express small, senseless fears.

  “It’s just that so much can go wrong, you know, with airplanes. Oh, thank you. Barbie’s got my little bag—” She gestured.

  Jacko turned. Behind him stood a large, fair, sturdy young woman in an unbecoming powder pink quilted raincoat, whom he recognized with surprise and without pleasure as his cousin, Barbie Mumpson Hickock.

  “Hi, Perry. Uh—I came too. Mom wanted me to kinda, you know, look after Aunt Dorrie. I mean, she thought—It was sorta a last-minute thing, see?”

  “Yeah, I see.” Jacko hardly smiled. “Well, welcome to Key West.”

  There was no point in protesting now, he thought as he led his relatives through the crowd to the baggage area, or asking why he hadn’t been informed earlier. His aunt Myra, his mother’s awful sister, had sent her daughter here deliberately. And not at the last minute either, whatever Barbie thought.

  Again, as so often in the past, Aunt Myra had managed to off-load Jacko’s boring girl cousin on him. His childhood memories were full of such incidents: scenes in which Barbie Mumpson, two years younger than he and congenitally clumsy, had cluttered up his life. Stumbling after him and his friends on hikes; getting in everyone’s way in volleyball; and striking out on his team at family reunion baseball games. Through the years, her sad round face had been preserved at various ages in his mother’s photograph album: often streaked with tears, or marred by mosquito bites, poison ivy, or acne.

  “Now, Perry, you look after your cousin Barbie.” That irritating command had echoed through the first ten years of his life, and the next ten were worse. As soon as he was in junior high Aunt Myra began demanding that Jacko partner Barbie at dancing school and take her to movies and the prom. Later he was pressured to invite his cousin to college basketball and football games and introduce her to eligible men from his fraternity.

  “It’s not really much to ask, darling,” his mother (weakly parroting Aunt Myra) would say. “It’s not as if you had a steady girlfriend.”

  Though Jacko liked or at least tolerated most people, this long forced association had turned him against Barbie Mumpson, especially after he began to suspect, in his last year of college, that Aunt Myra was scheming to marry them off. The idea terrified him, not least because he knew from experience that Aunt Myra usually got what she set her mind on. The dread of her somehow succeeding was one of the things that had driven him to leave Tulsa and move to Key West.

  “So where are you staying?” Jacko asked Barbie as they waited by the baggage inlet.

  “Gee, Perry, I d’know. Mom figured you could put both of us up in this house Aunt Dorrie says you’ve like inherited. I’m sorry.”

  “Well, I’m sorry too,” Jacko lied. “I’m living in the gardener’s cottage, same as always. Alvin’s house is rented until April.”

  “Aw, I didn’t know—” Barbie’s voice trailed off, or was drowned in the sound of baggage being thrown into the luggage trough. “Maybe I can find a room somewhere. I don’t need anything fancy; I can sleep on somebody’s sofa—”

  You’re not going to sleep on my sofa, Jacko swore to himself as he carried his mother’s two small bags toward his truck, leaving Barbie to drag her big one across the parking lot. I’ve got to have some privacy, for Christ’s sake. Jacko’s cottage contained only one large room, with an open sleeping loft above the far end and a kitchenette and bath below. Though he never shared it with anyone for long, he had occasional overnight or weekend guests.

  Okay, Jacko told himself. You’ll have to find someplace for Barbie to stay. Maybe Lee has a vacancy. His spirits sank as he contemplated the unlikelihood of this at the height of the season; the unlikelihood of finding a reasonable rental anywhere in Key West at eight-thirty on a weekend night. And if he couldn’t find any place, tomorrow he’d have to buy a bed and move it into the other dressing room of the pool house.

  Could it be that after all this time Aunt Myra was still scheming to throw him and Barbie together? She had known for fifteen years that he was gay, but Myra Mumpson often refused to recognize facts that did not fit into her system. No, he remembered with a sigh of relief, Barbie was married now; she’d been married for at least two years to some politician. His mother sometimes sent him clippings from the Tulsa newspaper showing Barbie and her husband campaigning or at official functions.

  But if not that, what? Aunt Myra hadn’t sent Barbie here just to look after his mother, for sure. Mumsie wasn’t as hideously efficient as her sister, but she was certainly capable of flying to Florida on her own. So what the hell was his cousin doing in Key West?

  Late the following morning Barbie Mumpson wandered out of the guest room of Molly Hopkins’s Victorian gingerbread house in Key West, looking blurred and untidy, but better than she had the night before when Molly had taken her in. The weather had turned damp and drizzly, and the accompanying humidity had already given Barbie’s blonde curls more bounce; her face, scrubbed of its chalky foundation, was agreeably freckled. Instead of the hideous beige polyester suit and spectator pumps in which she had arrived, she wore a plain pink gingham dress and sandals. Why, she’s really quite pretty, Molly thought.

  “Oh, hello. I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “I guess I overslept.”

  “That’s quite all right.” Molly suppressed a sigh that was almost a yawn. She was tired and painfully stiff this morning—the result, no doubt, of having stayed up past her usual bedtime to wait for Jacko and Barbie. At her age, loss of sleep told on one. “Would you like breakfast?”

  “Oh, yeah, sure. I mean, if it’s no trouble.”

  “It won’t be any trouble,” Molly said. “You can make it yourself. I’ll show you where things are.”

  “I’m sorry.” Barbie trailed after her into the kitchen. “All I need really is a cup of coffee. And maybe some cornflakes or something?”

  “There are no cornflakes,” said Molly, who detested dry cereals of all types. “But there’s coffee already made, and bread for toast in the fridge, here.”

  “Oh, thank you. I’m sorry, I’m so stupid. I meant to get up earlier, honestly.”

  “Why?” Molly asked, wishing her guest would stop apologizing. “You’re here on vacation, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah—No—” Barbie took a loaf of raisin bread and a butter dish out of the refrigerator. “Well, I guess I am, sorta. But really I’m supposed to be thinking things over.”

  “Ah.” Molly recalled what Jacko had said over the phone last night: “Hey, it’s really great that you can put her up. But listen, I should warn you: Cousin Barbie can be a real drag. My whole life, till I got out of Tulsa, she was following me around whining. Everything always goes wrong for her, and if you give her the slightest encouragement she’ll tell you all about it.”

  “It’s, well, my marriage,” Barbie continued without further prompting.

  “Ah.” In spite, or perhaps because of Jacko’s warning, Molly felt a flicker of interest. “Would you like some juice?”

  “Oh yeah. Thank you.” Barbie poured, spilling a little, and drank, leaving an orange rim around her soft, rather large mouth.

  “Here.” Molly held out a paper napkin.

  “Oh, thanks. I’m sorry. I’m not usually this helpless, really. It’s just that I’m kinda in a state about Bob and everything. I mean, like Mom says, it’s a serious responsibility.”

  “Marriage can be difficult,” Molly remarked neutrally, though she had not found it so; rather, she and her husband had regarded it as a happy alliance against the world.

  “Yeah—No—I mean, sure, I guess it is for everybody. But for me it’s a public responsibility too. I mean, my husband is Bob Hickock.” She paused, obviou
sly waiting for recognition. “Wild Bob Hickock, they call him.”

  Molly frowned. A country-rock star? A sports figure?

  “Wild Bob Hickock the congressman,” Barbie explained. “He’s only in his first term in Washington, but he’s already making a big name for himself. I kinda thought everybody—”

  “I don’t really follow politics these days,” Molly said, suppressing the additional phrase Thank God. Not having to read the Times seven days a week, with emphasis on the editorial and op-ed pages, was for her one of the very few (perhaps the only) positive results of Howard’s death.

  “See, Bob’s going on to big things. That’s what Mom says, and she knows, ’cause her family has been in politics for like forever. Bob could go real far, she says. He’s a natural. When he gets in front of an audience, they just about love him to death.”

  “Really.”

  “Everybody. Businessmen, or Boy Scouts, or old folks in a nursing home, or whatever.” Barbie, who was still holding two pieces of raisin bread, looked round dimly.

  “The toaster’s over there.”

  “Oh, thanks.” She fumbled with the controls. “See, the thing about Bob is, he’s really good looking. Six-five, and he’s got this great deep voice. And real curly hair and these sexy eyebrows, sorta like two blond caterpillars. That sounds dumb. I mean, caterpillars aren’t sexy, but you know, on Bob they are, believe me.”

  “I believe you,” Molly said, though unconvinced.

  “Mom told him she thought he should get them trimmed before he went on television, but Bob wouldn’t. He really loves his eyebrows. Sometimes he kinda pets them, like this.” As she demonstrated, Molly observed that Barbie’s own blonde eyebrows were more or less vestigial.

  “Well, it must be nice to be married to someone like that,” Molly said, thinking how little she herself would have enjoyed it.

  “I d’know. The thing is, I keep letting him down. I don’t mean to, really, but—” The toast snapped up: she started, flushed.

  “Here.” Molly slid the butter toward Barbie.

  “It’s—Well, like there’s this thing with food,” Barbie went on. “See, when I was about fourteen I stopped eating meat. I’ve always loved animals, and it just like didn’t seem right anymore, you know? But then about a month after we were married, we were at a thousand-dollar-a-plate barbecue, and this journalist asked if something was wrong with my steak, why wasn’t I eating it? So I told her why, and she put it into her newspaper. Mom was furious. She said, why couldn’t you just have said you weren’t hungry, or you were on a diet?” Holding the lid of the English china butter dish, which had a cow on it, she looked at Molly helplessly.

  “Why should you have done that?” she asked. “There’s nothing wrong with being a vegetarian.”

  “Well, but there is sometimes, sorta. I mean, for a lot of people, in cattle country especially, if you don’t eat beef it’s an insult. It’s sorta like, unpatriotic.” Barbie giggled sadly. “The trouble is, when anybody asks me something, I don’t think first, I just kinda tell the truth, you know?”

  “I can see that might be a handicap for a politician’s wife,” Molly said. Becoming impatient, she took the two slices of toast away from Barbie, buttered them, and set them on a plate.

  “Oh, thanks. I’m sorry, I’m so stupid today—”

  “Why don’t you pour yourself some coffee?” Molly suggested, pointing to the electric pot, which was more than half full. When her arthritis was bad, as it was this morning, she didn’t try to lift the heavy, slippery glass container, but scooped the hot liquid out with a soup ladle. She was reluctant to demonstrate her method in front of strangers, even as inept a stranger as Barbie Mumpson.

  “Oh, thanks.” Barbie poured, then sat down heavily at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee to which she had added large measures of sugar and half and half. “Hey, this toast is yummy.”

  A child, that’s what you are, Molly thought. “Maybe you should learn to tell an occasional white lie,” she suggested in a neutral voice.

  “Yeah, that’s what everybody says.” Barbie sighed. “Only I mostly can’t think of any. But it’s not just that.”

  “Mm.” Molly lowered herself into a chair.

  “It’s—” Barbie chewed toast. “The thing is, everybody loves Bob so much, so naturally he just has all these opportunities.”

  He cheats on you, Molly translated. “I see.”

  “So then these things happen. Mom says it’s my own fault. She says I don’t know how to hold my husband’s interest.”

  “Really.”

  “I’ve tried, honestly. I read all these kinda weird books, and I went to Dallas and bought this silver lace camisole and panties set that the saleswoman at Neiman-Marcus swore was the latest thing. You wouldn’t believe what they cost. Only when Bob saw me he went into a laughing fit and said it looked like I got myself caught in a spiderweb.”

  “That wasn’t very nice,” Molly said, making an effort not to laugh herself, or even smile.

  “No,” Barbie said, as if surprised. “I guess it wasn’t.” She blinked fast, as if there were something in her eye, then swallowed. “What it is, see, there’s this person called Laverna he knows. She’s very glamorous, she used to be a showgirl in Las Vegas. When Bob was running for Congress he swore it was all over, and we were going to start a new life together in Washington. But then last month I found out Laverna was in Washington too, because I called up the number he left with his receptionist and she answered.”

  “Ah,” Molly said, this time more sympathetically.

  “Bob said it wasn’t like that. He said, didn’t I think Laverna had a right to visit our nation’s capital, like any other patriotic American? I said yeah, okay, but what was he doing at her place at ten o’clock at night? Then I started to cry, and he said, ‘Baby, you’re hysterical. Why don’t you go back to Tulsa for a while, get ahold of yourself?’ So I bought a plane ticket and went on home.”

  “Mm.”

  “I was crying the whole time, the flight attendant kept bringing me Kleenex. I told Mom it wasn’t any use, I wanted a divorce. But she says I should think it over for a while. And she thought I should get out of town, because she didn’t trust me not to break down and blab to some journalist, like I keep doing. And besides, then there would be somebody to come to Florida with Aunt Dorrie. It was sorta killing two birds with one shot. Mom likes that kind of thing.”

  “She likes to kill birds,” said Molly, who had begun to form a negative opinion of Barbie’s mother.

  “Yeah—What? No, it’s a, what do you call it, a proverb.”

  “Really,” Molly said, managing to keep her voice neutral.

  “So what do you think I should do?” Barbie gazed wide-eyed at her.

  “Well.” Molly paused. For most of her life she had been considered an artistic and delightful lightweight, and people seldom asked for her opinion on serious matters. But once she became elderly, she was assumed to be wise—perhaps a survival from an earlier age, when simply to live into old age suggested that you were both shrewd and lucky.

  “Mom said before I do anything drastic I’d better be sure. She says most men are like Bob. Eventually they run around on their wives, if they get the chance. She says I should think about my future, what it would be like without him. And there’s no guarantee I would do any better next time, at my age.”

  “Really,” said Molly, to whom Barbie seemed scarcely out of adolescence. “What is your age?”

  “I’m thirty-six. And it’s probably true what Mom says. I mean, if I leave Bob I can forget about ever living in Washington again and being the wife of a prominent person.”

  “If that’s what you want from life,” Molly said. Barbie, staring into space, did not respond. “So what will you do now?” she asked, as mildly as possible.

  “I d’know. I’ve got to think about it. Mom says if I decide to stay with Bob, she’ll tell him he has to treat me right.”

  “You think that’d ha
ve any effect?”

  “Yeah, maybe. After all, Bob owes her. Once we were engaged, Mom got behind him in a big way. She raised a lot of money for his campaign, and got him some real professional staff and advance people.”

  “I see.”

  “Anyhow, she says we’ve got the upper hand now, because if people find out about Laverna it could really hurt Bob’s career, especially on account of he has a lot of born-again-type constituents.”

  “You mean she would threaten to tell his constituents about Laverna,” asked Molly, in whose mind a less and less favorable picture of Myra was taking shape.

  “Yeah. Well, probably she’d just tell the media, that’d be faster. But she says if Bob listens to reason, she’ll get rid of Laverna for good.”

  “Really? How could she do that?”

  “I d’know. But I guess she could if she wanted to. She knows people who can do things for her. She probably knows some even in Washington.”

  Molly stared at her guest. Was it possible that this naïve young woman was talking about the planning of a murder? “People who do what kind of thing?”

  “Well, you know.” Barbie chomped on her raisin toast. “I mean, it doesn’t hafta be like something drastic,” she added, finally registering Molly’s tone and expression. “Mom says, with somebody from that kinda background, there’s always a charge against them on the books somewhere, or something in their past they don’t want to have come out.”

  “Really.”

  “Yeah. Like drugs maybe. Or Laverna could have been a hooker once, Mom thinks. Anyhow, she isn’t the kind of person a congressman could marry, even if he wanted to. See, in politics you need a wife with a good reputation and the right connections.”

  “Like you,” Molly said. She swallowed another sigh.

  “Well, sorta. Except I keep doing things wrong, like I told you.”

  “It sounds as if your mother wants you to stay married,” Molly suggested.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Barbie admitted. “She said, if I wasn’t sure, I could tell myself I was doing it for Oklahoma.”