Last Resort

by Alison Lurie

  “I can’t, not yet,” Jenny had half wailed, half whispered. “I have to stay here, in case Wilkie wakes up and wants me.”

  Why should he want you now, he hasn’t wanted you in months, Lee had thought but not said.

  She knew she had to be patient. Apparently whatever had been the matter with Wilkie Walker wasn’t serious. A gallstone, Jenny had said: that made sense—from what she’d heard, he was probably full of gall and bile. He had been released from the hospital that morning, and soon enough he would be back to his usual disagreeable normality.

  Suppose it had been serious, Lee thought. Suppose Wilkie Walker were really ill; suppose he got worse and worse, suppose he died. That would be no loss, because what use was he anyhow? All he’d ever done was to write pompous articles and give poisonous advice and make the woman she loved deeply unhappy.

  But whether he was ill or not, soon Jenny would be here; Lee would hold her again, comfort her, kiss her, feel her softening and warming.

  Right now, though, she had to stop fantasizing and get back to the schedule for April and May. Lee bent over her desk again, but almost immediately she was distracted, not by internal clamor now but by an external one: the sound of Myra Mumpson and her daughter quarreling on the front porch, where they were waiting for Jacko and his mother. Some of this quarrel was inaudible, but the tone was familiar: Lee had heard it often in couples who came to stay at her guest house in a last-ditch effort to repair a long-term relationship.

  “You’re making a big mistake,” Myra said in a voice that had some of the characteristics of a leaf-shredder. “If you really want to save manatees you can do it much more effectively in Washington.”

  “There are no manatees in Washington,” Barbie said weakly but stubbornly.

  “Don’t be stupid, darling. If you’re sincere about helping those peculiar animals you’re so interested in, you have to be where the power is. In Washington. You could accomplish something there, God willing. It could even become your specialty, endangered species, why not?” Her tone modulated from leaf-shredder to lawn mower and became speculative. “I could get you the help of experts. Trained lobbyists, and a good publicist. Bob might even sponsor a little bill in Congress eventually.”

  There was a reply from Barbie, inaudible except for the words “spotted owl.”

  “Of course he wouldn’t support anything that interferes with productivity and threatens jobs. But there must be lots of other endangered animals. You could do so much for them in Washington, with your connections.” Myra’s voice was now almost a purr. “But in this backwater, one inexperienced girl, what can you accomplish? Nothing really.”

  Her daughter muttered a few words.

  “They sound like a bunch of amateur crackpots to me. Besides, if you were here I’d worry about you all the time. Key West looks like a pretty resort town, but underneath it’s a corrupt, godless place, full of bums and drunks and perverts. And how would you support yourself, have you thought about that, honey? You’re used to a very comfortable life. You’ve never had to think about money for one single second.”

  Again, Barbie’s reply was inaudible, but the mulish tone of it was clear.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Myra declared, turning on the leaf-shredder again. “You have no retail experience, and you can’t even type. You’ve got to come to your senses, darling.”

  A second of silence; then Lee heard Barbie cry, “No, I don’t!” and the sound of a porch chair scraped back and falling over.

  “Where in God’s name do you think you’re going?” There was no answer, only the thump of feet descending the front steps.

  “My poor hysterical daughter’s run off,” Myra announced a few moments later, letting the screen door crash behind her. “She went to some meeting last night, and now she’s suddenly got this dumb idea in her head about staying in Key West.”

  “Oh, yeah?” said Lee neutrally.

  “Yeah.” Myra began to pace back and forth. “And what I say is, let her try it. She’ll come running home soon enough. This is an expensive town. Barbie won’t be able to pay her way here for a week. And I don’t think Perry will feel like paying for her.”

  You’re right about that, Lee thought, but she made no comment.

  Myra positioned herself on the edge of a rattan rocker and set it lurching noisily back and forth. She was wearing an outfit suitable for first-class air travel: an expensive lime-green polyester blazer and tailored pants, matching lace-up shoes, and a shiny silk shirt hung with gold chains. She looked extremely out of place among Lee’s handwoven fabrics, Haitian paintings, and disheveled tropical plants.

  “Spoiled,” she told Lee, rocking. “Her father spoiled her rotten. Spoiled both of them really. Not like my pa, he was the other way. Couldn’t hardly please him whatever you did.”

  “Mh.” Lee raised her head only briefly.

  “He was weak,” Myra continued, undiscouraged. “A pushover for anyone with a sob story, not just his own kids. If something in the house wasn’t nailed down, he’d give it away; you know the type.”

  “Mf,” muttered Lee, who had been accused of being this type herself.

  “I made a big mistake when I married him. I told myself he was bound to succeed in politics, because he was smart, and everybody liked him. He was the best-looking man I’d ever seen, too, and the sweetest, underneath. Too sweet for real life. You have to look soft and be hard, right?”

  “Mh,” Lee said. If she didn’t look directly at Myra, and spoke only in monosyllables, maybe the woman would shut up and go away.

  “Trouble was, he didn’t have the God-given ambition you need in politics. Didn’t have much ambition for anything, if you want to know the truth. Or sense. Couldn’t see ahead. Last thing he ever did in his life, he went on this real strenuous tour of England, looking for his ancestors, even though he knew he had a bad heart. Not thinking once of his Christian duty to his family, what would happen to us if he passed on. Selfish it was, really.”

  “Mm.” Lee frowned. Her attempts to discourage Myra were having the opposite effect: her muttered interjections, like the neutral murmurs of the therapist she had once been, invited confidences.

  “Course, it takes a special kind of gift to make it in politics,” Myra continued, almost to herself. “You have to have the personality, and you have to have the know-how. Now my son, Gary, he’s smart enough, but he doesn’t have the personality. He isn’t likable. Sometimes I don’t even like him myself.” She rocked even faster, shaking her head in time with the swings.

  “Gary’s good with money, up to a point,” she added. “But he takes bad risks. Some shyster lawyer he met at the gym got him to go in on this funny-sounding land purchase. Gary should’ve smelled a rat. Lord God, the signs were there—the deal was full of rats. I could have told him that, if he’d had the sense to ask. But the money was too good and he got greedy.”

  “Yeah?” Lee said, becoming interested in spite of herself. “So what happened?”

  “Aw, not much in the end, thank the Lord. Most of the charges were dismissed, and they settled out of court. Except Gary was finished as far as public life went. I could see that right away, though it about broke my heart. But you have to be a realist, right?”

  “I guess so,” said Lee, who considered herself one.

  “Like with Barbie’s husband, Bob Hickock. Potentially, he’s a winner, but he’s got a wild streak. Impulsive. He doesn’t care anything about money; he’s not going to get into that kind of trouble. But he’s a hot-blooded bastard, excuse the language. Back when he was in the statehouse I realized what the score was. I told him straight out. Listen here, boy, I said, if you feel like fooling around behind my daughter’s back again, you go out of state. And you pay for it up front; none of this messing around with party workers that could fall for you and make a scandal, or get themselves pregnant and blab to the media. Go to Dallas, I told him. Ask somebody you can trust for a phone number.” Myra sighed.

  “Acourse Bob d
idn’t take my advice,” she added. “So pretty soon this over-the-hill ex-Vegas showgirl got her claws into him. I figured it’d run its course, but he’s still nuts about her. Out of his mind. I phoned him day before yesterday, said would he please call my poor Barbie, and ask her real sweet to come back. She’s just waiting to hear from you, I said. Tell her you’ve given up what’s-her-name. Laverna, yeah. I told him, listen, buddy, Laverna is professional suicide. Her history and some of her old photos get in the papers, you’ll be dead politically.”

  “And what’d he say?”

  “Aw, he was totally unreasonable. He said maybe that’d be better than the way he was living now. Told me he wished to God he’d stayed in North Gulch and just practiced law. Maybe he’d resign his seat and go back there, he said. They were decent people, they’d like Laverna, they’d accept her. In a pig’s eye.” Myra laughed sourly. “I know those small towns.

  “Course, Bob was just bluffing,” she added. “He’ll calm down in a while, see reason. If he wants to stay in Congress he’ll do what I tell him in the end, ’cause I’ve got too much dirt on him. But there’s no use talking to him again until Barbie comes to her senses.”

  “Mh,” Lee uttered.

  “Lord God, the whole thing makes me sick sometimes.” Myra stopped rocking and stared out the window at the pale-green palms blowing in the warm green wind. “I look back over my life, y’know, and I see what I did wrong so clear. All that time I wasted trying to get some man elected. Standing behind some dope who couldn’t learn what we had to teach him, didn’t appreciate the time and, Holy Jesus, the money we put into his campaign. If I’d seen the light sooner, I would have run for office myself years ago. I figure I could have made it to the state senate at least. Maybe further.”

  “Maybe you still could,” Lee suggested.

  “Naw. It’s too late. I might not look it, but I’m sixty-five.”

  “Really?” Lee reexamined Myra’s appearance: the upright posture, square jaw, tight skin, helmet of reddish-brown hair. She had estimated Jacko’s aunt as at least ten years younger.

  “I should’ve gone to law school, but nice Christian girls didn’t do that back in the fifties. The Fudd women mostly got married right from college. Before graduation sometimes, like I did. After that they didn’t work outside the home, that was the idea, though my aunt Sophie ran a two-thousand-acre ranch. I was brainwashed, like those crazy feminists say. They’re not so dumb sometimes.”

  “No,” Lee said. Again she felt some sympathy, and had to remind herself that if Myra Mumpson had gone into politics she would have been against everything Lee was for. She would have been anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-affirmative action. It was one of the things that had made Lee give up therapy: the realization that half the time she was helping people she didn’t like to become strong and confident enough to do things she didn’t like, such as write deceptive advertising and sell jerry-built condos.

  “I have to plan my schedule for the next couple of months now,” she announced, assuming that Myra would take this broad hint and shut up.

  But apparently the hint was not broad enough. “Never a letup in the hotel business,” Myra said. “I know. I have a friend back home, she runs a B and B too. You wouldn’t believe the thefts, the damage, the last-minute cancellations—Well, I guess you would. Except you’ve probably got it easier. That was a smart notion of yours, only renting to women. Cuts down on wear and tear, I bet.”

  “Mm,” Lee agreed, bending over a full-page calendar for the third week of April.

  “I guess you get some homosexual couples, too,” Myra continued.

  “Yeah,” Lee almost growled. You give people the wrong impression, she told herself; you look too straight. But what the hell was she supposed to do about that? Should she wear overalls and heavy leather boots, and get a crew cut? But an outfit like that would be intolerably hot in Key West; besides, Lee liked her long, thick, near-black gypsy hair, and so did other women. For instance, Jenny—

  “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you should turn them away,” Myra said, apparently registering Lee’s angry inward expression. “After all, it’s good business. And just between ourselves, I don’t see the harm.” She rocked more slowly. “Not like with the men. The things they get up to, I don’t even want to think about. Disgusting.” She gave a little shudder.

  “Women, that’s different,” Myra continued. “My aunt Sophie Fudd, that I mentioned to you before, she never married. Lived most all her life in a big bungalow out on the ranch with her best friend, Rose, who taught fifth grade in town. There was some talk now and then, jokes about old maids. But they were respected. And the way I see it, if they did cuddle a little and make each other happy, what was the harm, right?”

  “Yeah,” Lee agreed, recognizing what Jacko had meant when he described his aunt as “steamrollering you with her opinions.” With a conscious sense of resisting heavy road machinery, she added: “Matter of fact, I’m that way myself.”

  “That so?” Myra gave Lee a long, interested look that made her wonder if she was about to make a similar declaration. “Well, live and let live is what I say.” She rocked back and forth, then consulted an expensive watch. “What’s the matter with Perry and Sis? They should’ve been here half an hour ago. Didn’t you hear me tell him we have to catch a five-thirty plane?”

  “I heard you,” Lee admitted.

  Myra stopped rocking. “Well, I’m not going to hang around waiting any longer,” she announced. “I’m going back to the hotel. You tell Perry when he gets here, I expect them to be there at four o’clock. Sharp. And the same for Barbie, if she turns up.”

  For ten minutes, Lee worked on her schedule uninterrupted. Then, far more quietly than her sister had left, Dorrie Jackson drifted up the steps. She was wearing a faded oversized white shirt that had belonged to Jacko, and her floppy green hat.

  “Perry’s dropping off some orchids,” she explained. “He’ll be back soon. Where’s Myra and Barbie?”

  “They left.” Lee decided not to go into details. “Myra got tired of waiting.”

  “Oh, dear,” Dorrie squeaked, apparently not deceived by Lee’s softening of this message. “Was Myra awfully cross?”

  “No, not really. She said he was supposed to meet them at the hotel at four.”

  “Oh, Perry knows that. Is it all right if I wait for him here?”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  Like her sister, Dorrie chose the rocker; but she settled back fully onto the handwoven purple cushion, and the motion and sound she produced were minimal.

  “You’ve been a real good friend to Perry; he told me so,” she murmured presently. “I’m so glad of that. And acourse you don’t hold it against him that he’s the way he is.”

  “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.