by Whit Burnett
It was a complete cure. Never once did the strange malady
return. But to this day John Duffy's brother starts at the rumble
of a train in the LUfey tunnel and stands rooted to the road
when he comes suddenly on a level crossing-silent, so to
speak, upon a peak in Darien.
FELICIA GI ZYCKA
FOREVER FLORIDA
UNDER this same palm tree, season after season, they took the sunshine together in their bathing suits.
Every day, when he was well enough, they came out of their
cottage, walking very slowly, as if they, too, were old. She
waited patiently while he came, dragging his legs, and thrusting
his canes ahead of him as though he were driving stakes into
the beautiful white sand.
Mark and Olivia Davidson. When the young couple appeared on the beach all the old people smiled. When they settled under their palm tree, people came over to say hello.
The gray and snow-white. beads, the men in their little canvas
bats, the wives in their modest bathing suits.
,
This was Lemon Grove, an old people's paradise, a suburb
by the sea. It was quiet with restrictions, beautiful with gardens, and tiny stucco houses of many pale and different colors.
Here old husbands and wives bad come to rest at last and spend
the long wonderful years in sunshine. Everybody went to the
beach in the morning, chatted in their gardens at teatime,
visited back and forth in the evenings. The wives went to lectures in nearby Tampa. Everybody went to bed at nine o'clock, or ten. A lot of problems solved, a lot of problems buried as
unsolvable. All passion spent.
When the Davidson's came they poured a little life into
Lemon Grove. They were young, so very young. He was forty,
and she, in spite of a dried and maidenisb look, was still in her
thirties. They were both chatty and gay, and he laughed and
joked about his pain. They made other people laugh. They
made other people say, "Our lot is not so hard. Look at the
Davidsons, young and with their lives blighted. So devoted.
So unflinching! y devoted."
The Davidsons were their children, come here to stay for-
189
190 • Nineteen Tales of Terror
ever. Not like one's own children up North who were neglectful, busy with their own full, healthy lives. And secretly the Davidsons meant something else to the old people-something that was neither defined nor understood but which gave them excited pleasure, romantic and a little cruel. It was as
though something lovely and airborne had fallen among them.
A wounded swallow, a crippled butterfly, hopeless and beautiful, and theirs forever.
So that when Olivia Davidson did get away, when she up and
ran away in the middle of the night, Lemon Grove was shocked
and wounded in a way which went beyond mere scandal. The
unforeseeable had happened, the impossible had occurred.
The old people searched their minds for an answer, and they
could find none. Thus their anger against her did not cease.
Their commiseration with Mark was endlessly exaggerated and
prolonged. Mark, poor Mark. With that shocked white face,
those legs, dragging again. After he had been walking so well.
And it seemed he'd left Doctor Spreckels and gone to another
doctor. And the rumor went around the beach that Doctor
Spreckels was somehow involved in it all.
Everybody kept making Mrs. Swanson tell them the story
over and over; the circumstances of that Wednesday night. She
was the neighbor who heard the Davidsons' front door slamming, and Olivia's steps running on the walk.
She was their friend, knowing them the best of anyone. She
ran out into the cool night, without bothering to put on a coat,
because she heard the car starting up.
"I thought Mark was sick," she told everyone. "I called to
her, 'Olivia. Is there anything I can do?' The car was there, with
the door open, and the motor running. Then she was coming
out of the house again, dressed for the train and carrying a
suitcase and a coat. 'I really didn't take it in,' " she said to
people. "And I'm afraid I said, 'Why, Olivia, where are you
going?' And she smiled at me, sort of excited, the way people
do when something's wrong. And she said, 'Well, if you want to
know, I'm leaving.'
"I just stood there. I said, 'Well, I declare!'
"She put the suitcase in the car and said, 'Good-bye, Amelia,'
just like that. Just as if she were going off for the week-end.
" 'But where are you going?' I said.
" 'To Tampa,' she said. 'Up to Tampa.'
" 'My dear, why don't you come to my house?' I said. 'Why
don't you just spend the night with me?'
"She was in the car just waiting for me to finish so she could
drive off. She said, 'Thank you, Amelia. You're very sweet. But
I'm getting out of town.'
.
" 'But only this afternoon in my house,' I said to her, 'you
Forever Florida • 1 9 1
were having such fun! You i n your new pink hat, and Mark
walking without his canes, and watching you enjoying yourself.
Why, I thought of it as a celebration for you two. And you were
laughing and talking,' I said to her. 'Looking so happy. And
Mark watching you.' But she gave me another queer, excited
smile.
"She said, 'Good-bye Amelia. I'll be taking a train from
Tampa, back to Cleveland. You know that's where I grew up.
My sister still lives there. Well then, you know that my life is in
Cleveland. I have to go back there.'
" 'I'm very sorry,' I said, 'to hear that you haven't been
happy in Lemon Grove.' I guess I sounded put out.
"And then she leaned over, and actually gave me a little push.
'I'm going before Mark comes out,' she said. 'You've been a
swell neighbor, Amelia. But I never want to see Lemon Grove
again. And I never will. Here comes Mark now.'
"She started off just as Mark came out of the house. He was
in his pajamas and still without his canes. He stood watching
the car go off, and I don't think he saw or noticed me.
" 'Is there anything I can do, Mark?' I said.
"And then he saw me. He looked at me, and said, 'My wife
has left me. She's going to get a divorce.'
" 'But surely,' I said, 'she can't be serious,' and I walked over
to him. Oh, I just wanted to take him in my arms and hug him!
He looked so distracted."
And everybody listening to the story could see little Mrs.
Swanson, kind-hearted and chatty and good and now utterly
bewildered, and with nothing to hold on to, no conclusion to
draw in this awful state of confusion, standing there in her pale
cotton dress in the cold ( enough to give one a heart attack) .
And chatting away to Mark Davidson, saying a whole lot of
kind and jumbled things in a sudden flood.
"He just shook his head at me,'' she told people. "He went
right back in the house and shut the door. It was sort of final.
He looked final," she said, trying to make a special word to
suit the occasion.
"If she doesn't stop running around the Grove, talking," people said, "she's going to have another heart attack. That'll be two things on
Olivia's conscience.''
"But people keep asking her to tell it,'' someone said.
"How do you know Olivia has a conscience?" someone
asked.
And then people took that up, and said she had no eonscience, none at all. Going off into the night smiling· and gay, leaving a deathly sick husband. Had anyone wired to tell her
he'd had a relapse? That he won't talk to anyone except his new
doctor? Thus they chatted on, and their anger against Olivia,
192
Nineteen Tales of Terror
•
caused by their terrible sense of loss, lasted as long as they did.
Olivia Davidson ran away on a Wednesday night. On Wednesday morning, the old people had looked down the beach, and seen her sitting with Mark, under that same palm tree
near their house. They looked just the same as always, quietly
together. It was true that at lunchtime, Olivia had gone right
back to the house instead of walking down the beach with Mark
to say hello. But that was such a little thing.
Besides, Mark had said, "My wife wants me to show off. She
says I'm a big boy now." And he had smiled that sweet smile
of his.
They had congratulated him with pride and affection. Their
darling, their young and handsome sweet and good darling,
who was getting well and strong, though never strong enough
to really leave them. How could they know that this was the
beginning of the end? And that the end would come that very
night?
Olivia sat there with Mark, under that palm tree. The black
palm shadows fell like great black hands stretching for an oc-tave. He and she were like two muted keys, pressed down together into the white-hot antiseptic, everlasting sand. Here was this morning, dissolved and motionless among a thousand
mornings. Here was the sky, forever the same, fiat and shallow
and endlesssly, tropically blue.
She leaned against the palm trunk sewing in the white brilliance and the black shadow, and Mark lay beside her, his poor legs stretched into the sun. They would stay here forever and
ever. In Florida, in this fake landscape. Man-made white
beaches and the polite water, so flat and pale as if inviting
you to walk upon it. So deadly underneath, teeming with vivid
devouring things. These polite flower gardens with the brilliant
and vicious colors, and palms groomed especially for tourists,
and everything potted and tended, planted and watered, to turn
your eyes away from the sick interior, the dying palms, the rotting swamps, the miles of dry-sucked land with everything half dead upon it. She and Mark had no money to go away in
the summer like most of the old people. They were imprisoned
here forever, summer and winter, chained up together, man
and wife.
But ah, this morning there was this little difference. This
little hope. It was as Doctor Spreckles had said. "You can be
free now, by his side."
Here was this tiny clue, his canes, lying on the sand. They did
not lie within his reach but several yards away, and he could
get up without them and walk without them, and feel no pain
at all. And she stared at this space between him and his canes,
Forever Florida
193
•
the way a prisoner might look at a ray of light from an opening
door.
He lay pretending to be asleep. The little white canvas hat
covered his face. Nevertheless he was watching her. He had the
kind of clever peephole that you couldn't see, made with the
cunning of the professional invalid, and the tyrant. At night he
put his head under the bedclothes, and she could never see the
little place he made. But the door had to be open into the living
room, and she had to sit in that chair, under that certain lamp.
So that in the morning he was able to say, "You did not read
last night, B eloved. Your mind was far away."
"I thought you were asleep," she would always say, feeling
her face go stiff.
"My Darling Dear, I was watching you. I watched your
thoughts. I could see every one of your little thoughts. "
Now his voice came gently, but suddenly from under the
little white hat. "Your sewing has dropped in your lap," he said.
"Are you up to some mischief?"
She felt her face stiffening. I must get out of the habit of
fear, she told herself. Her eyes swept over to his canes lying
way off there in the sand, and she let her face relax and go soft,
almost expressionless. Then she smiled carefully, the way she
smiled for the old folks.
"You'll have to stop peeking at me," she said, and she accented the word peeking, making it arch and cute. "You're a big boy now," she said.
He sat up, and the hat fell. He looked at her, and she saw that
he was actually surprised. He had a powerful torso, down to
the waist. Filled out and powerful from dragging himself on
crutches and canes for five years. His face was powerful, also,
but long and sad, filled with the martyred lines of sickness.
She looked right at him. "I was just sitting here thinking
how you're going to be all well soon. Almost as good as new."
He gave her the sickle-shaped smile which was always his
answer. "Yes, My Love," he said tenderly. "Yes, I am getting
well."
"You haven't had a bit of pain for a month," she said.
"No, Darling, I haven't," he said.
She got up and stood there. "I'm going to wade down the
beach and go on home," she said. "You come along when
you're ready."
For the second time he was caught off guard, surprised.
"Aren't you going down the beach with me, to say hello, and
show me off?"
She stood with her back to the sun, her sewing clutched
tight in her hand. And although her face was strained and
drawn, with her brunette even-featured good looks faded and
1 94 • Nineteen Tales ot Terror
aged, even so her body was still smooth and young. Young and
slim in the waist and tight in the breasts.
"It's no news that you're getting well," she said. "But you'll
make quite a little stir, Dear, if you go walking around by yourself. That'll really show them."
"And you'll make quite a little stir yourself, walking along in
that bathing suit," he said. "You'll be really showing them,
too." He reached his hand out to her, to help him up.
She did not take his hand. She turned her back, and took off
her sandals. "If you don't like this suit, why didn't you say so
before?" she asked.
He stood up slowly and on his face now was that plaintive
gentle whimpering look.
"Oh Darling, don't be mean just before lunch," he said. "In
half an hour we'll have our lunch, and I won't be able to eat."
"Well, neither will I, so let's cut it out," she said. Astonishment filled her. She was holding out against him right to the end of this round. She smiled, waved her hand, and turned
away from him.
Down the beach she went, like some wild animal long caged,
now loose. It would take a long time for her to get completely
free. To live by his side, in her new freedom. She would have to
lift her mind out of this dismal, single groove. This mind enslaved to please, th
is night-and-day nurse mind. In the beginning she had tried to read to him and play good music to him, and once she had taken him to the theatre in a wheelchair,
only to have him collapse later and lie weak and sick in bed.
Everything that was not his particular way of thinking
promptly made him very ill. He had a successful business mind
and all else gave him pain. Thus she had narrowed her vision
for him, tamed down everything to a postqud stillness.
But now she would speak out and keep speaking out and go
to the concerts and plays down here, whether he liked it or not.
"You can live by his side and be free," Doctor Spreckels said.
"It's hard," he'd said. "But it can be done."
She looked at the beach as she waded along. Really, it was a
lovely day, with brown and golden children swimming and playing in the sand. A few young local mothers. No young tourists yet, it was too early. The young ones worked up North in the
cold till some of them twisted up in sorrow and agony and
crawled down here. Always, where the gaps were left each
year some newcomer arrived, palsied in a chair, hobbling on
a cane. The wife, the mother, pushing the chair, handing the
crutches, with a carefully stiffened expression. Are they guilty,
too? she asked herself. Guilty as I was?
"Mrs. Davidson, just what gave your husband arthritis in the
first place?"
Forever Florida • 195
That from Doctor Spreckels, sitting there in his little surgery.
His kind old horny face like a horse and buggy doctor's, his
steel-rimmed specs. The question had felt exactly like a knife
going into her. And yet it was the kind of thing, the right thing,
for it open.ed up the hideous secret place and made her talk, and
talk, and tell everything at last. So that he, Doctor Spreckels,
was able to tell her the things she needed to know.
I must not feel guilt, she told herself now. And she almost
ran through the water feeling so light and free. Feeling, indeed,
at this moment that all punishment for siil was ended. That
now she had but to start her new life, her own inner feeling.
"The drug is working wonderfully," Doctor Spreckels said.
"I doubt if he ever has another twinge."
