The Deep Blue Good-Bye

Cinco

THE DOCTOR’S name was Ramirez. He looked like a Swede. He spent a long time with her. Then he came out and sat at the breakfast bar to drink some of the bad coffee I’d made. “How is she?”

“Where do you fit in this, McGee?”

“I just stopped to ask her some questions and she fell apart.”

He stirred his coffee. “Samaritan, eh?”

“I suppose so.”

“Her family should be notified.”

“Suppose there isn’t any?”

“Then she should be institutionalized. What’s the financial situation?”

“I haven’t any idea.”

“Nice house. Nice car.”

“Doctor, what’s her condition?”

“Several things. Malnutrition. That plus a degree of saturation with alcohol so she’s been having auditory hallucinations. But severe emotional shock is the background for both the other manifestations.”

“Prognosis?”

He gave me a shrewd glance. “Fair. A little bit of nerve, a tiny bit of pride, that’s all she has left. Keep her tranquilized. Build her up with foods as rich as she can take. Lots of sleep. And keep her away from whomever got her into such a condition.”

“A man could do that to a woman?”

“Given a certain type of man and that type of woman, yes. A man like the man who was living with her.”

“Did you know him?”

“No. I heard about him. First he was with Catherine Kerr, then with this one. A different social level, eh?”

“Should she talk about Allen?”

“If she’s willing to. If she can trust anybody enough, it might be good for her.”

“I wonder what happened.”

“Things she could not accept. Things she could not live with.”

“Not live with?”

“McGee, I do not think it is too dramatic to say you saved her life.”

“But she might not trust me.”

“Or anyone, ever. That too is a mental disorder. I don’t think it’s good for her to stay here.”

“When can she leave?”

“I will stop by the same time tomorrow. I can tell you then. Give her one of these every four hours. You can stay here?”

“Yes.”

“Eggnogs, rich soups, a little at a time, as much as she can hold down. If she gets very agitated, give her one of these. Encourage her to sleep. And talk. Tomorrow we will talk about a nurse. I think she has been physically abused, but I think she has a good constitution.”

“Will anybody make any trouble about my staying here?”

“You are adults. You don’t look like a fool, McGee. You don’t have the look of the kind of murderous fool who’d try to make love to her in her condition. I take you on faith. It saves time. And if anybody does not like this temporary arrangement, I recommended it.”

“I’ll be too busy with the housework.”

“She is exhausted. I think she will sleep a long time now. But it would be nice to be there when she wakes up.”

While she was in deep sleep, I collected all the soiled clothing and bedding. I took it into town and dropped it off. I bought supplies. When I got back she was still in almost the same position, making small snores, evenly spaced, barely audible. It took me until dusk to polish the big house. I kept looking in at her.

Then I went in and she made a sound like a whispered scream. She was sitting up. I turned the lights on. Her eyes were huge and vague.

I stayed a cautious ten feet from her and said, “I am Trav McGee. You’ve been sick. Dr. Ramirez was here. He’ll be back tomorrow. I’ll stay in the house, so you’ll be completely safe.”

“I feel so far away. I didn’t have any dreams. Unless… unless this is one.”

“I’m going to go fix you some soup. And bring you a pill.”

“I don’t want anything.”

I arranged more agreeable lighting. She watched me. I had checked where things were kept. I found a sedate nightgown, a robe of Hong Kong silk, tossed them on the foot of the bed.

“If you’re strong enough, Lois, get ready for bed while I fix the soup. The bathroom is clean now.”

“What is going on? Who are you?”

“Mother McGee. Don’t ask questions. Just accept.”

I heated the canned soup, strengthened it with cream, fixed her one slice of toast with butter. When I came back she was propped up in bed. She was wearing the nightgown and a bed jacket. She had tied her tousled dark hair back, rubbed away the last trace of lipstick.

“I’m wobbly” she said in a small shy voice. “Can I have a drink?”

“That depends on how you do with the soup and toast.”

“Soup maybe. Toast no.”

“Can you feed yourself`?”

“Of course.”

“Take the pill.”

“What is it?”

“Dr. Ramirez called it a mild tranquilizer.”

I sat nearby. She spooned the soup up. Her hand trembled. Her nails were clean and broken. There was an old bruise, saffroned, on the side of her slender throat. She was too aware of my watching her and so I tried some mild chatter. Abstract theory by McGee. My tourist theory. Any Ohioan crossing the state line into Florida should be fitted with a metal box that rests against the small of the back. Every ninety seconds a bell rings and a dollar bill emerges part way from a slot in the top of the box. The nearest native removes it. That would take care of the tipping problem. At places where hundreds of them flock together, the ringing of bells would be continuous.

It was difficult to amuse her. She was too close to being broken. The best I could achieve was a very small quick smile. She managed two thirds of the soup and two bites of toast. I set them aside. She slid down a little and yawned.

“My drink?”

“In a little while.”

She started to speak. Her eyes blurred and closed. In a few moments her mouth sagged open and she slept. In sleep the intense strain was gone and she looked younger. I turned the bedroom lights out. An hour later the phone rang. Someone wanted to sell us an attractive building lot at Marathon Heights.

As she slept I searched for the personal data. I finally found the traditional steel box behind books in the living room. It opened readily with a bent paper clip. Birth certificate, marriage license, divorce decree, keys to a safedeposit box, miscellany of family materials, income statements. I spread it out and pieced together her current status. She had accepted a settlement at the time of divorce three years ago. The house was a part of it. Her income was from a trust account in a bank in Hartford, Connecticut, a family trust setup whereby she received a little over seven hundred dollars a month and could not touch the principal amount. Her maiden name was Fairlea. There was an elder brother in New Haven.

D. Harper Fairlea. On her hall table was a great stack of unopened mail. I checked it over and found that people were clamoring to have their bills paid, and in the stack I found her trust income checks, unopened, for May June and July. Her personal checkbook was in the top drawer of the living-room desk, a built-in affair. She had not balanced it in some time, and I estimated she had a couple of hundred dollars in her account.

At nine-thirty I called D. Harper Fairlea in New Haven. They said he was ill and could not come to the phone. I asked to talk to his wife. She had a soft, pleasant voice.

“Mr. McGee, surely Lois could tell you that Harp had a severe heart attack some months ago. He’s been home a few weeks now, and it is going to be a long haul. Really I thought the very least she could do was come up here. He is her only blood relative, you know. And I have been wondering why we haven’t heard from her. If she is in some sort of trouble and needs help, about all we can say is that we hope things will work out for her. We really can’t give her any kind of assistance right now. We have three children in school, Mr. McGee. I don’t even want to tell Harp about this. I don’t want to give him something else to fret about. I’ve been inventing imaginary phone calls from Lois, inventing concern and telling him she is fine.”

“I’ll know better in a few days how she is, and what will have to be done.”

“I understood she has some nice friends down there.”

“Not lately.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“I think she gave up her nice friends.”

“Please have her phone me when she’s able. I’m going to worry about her. But there’s just nothing I can do. I can’t leave Harp now, and I just don’t see how I could take her in.”

No help there. She hadn’t seemed very concerned about who I might be. I sensed that the two sisters-in-law had not gotten along too well. So it was no longer a case of waiting for somebody to come and take over. I was stuck, temporarily.

I made up a bed in the bedroom next to hers. I left my door and her door open. In the middle of the night I was awakened by the sound of glass breaking. I pulled my pants on and went looking. Her bed was empty. The nightgown and bed jacket were on the floor beside the bed. The nightgown was ripped.

I found her in the kitchen alcove, fumbling with the bottles. I turned on the white blaze of fluorescence and she squinted toward me, standing naked in spilled liquor and broken glass. She looked at me but I do not think she knew me. “Where is Fancha?” she yelled. “Where is that bitch? I hear her singing.”

She was beautifully made, but far too thin. Her bones were sharp against the smoothness of her, her ribs visible. Except in the meagerness of hips and breasts, all the fatty tissue had been burned away, and her belly had the slight bloat that indicates starvation. I got her away from there. Miraculously, she had not cut her feet. She squirmed with surprising strength, whining, trying to scratch and bite. I got her back into her bed, and when she stopped fighting me, I got one of the other pills down her. Soon it began to take effect. I put the lights out. I sat by her. She held my wrist very tightly, and fought against the effects of the pill. She would start to slide away and then struggle back to semi-consciousness. I did not understand a lot of her mumbling. Sometimes she seemed to be talking to me, and at other times she was back in her immediate past.

Once, with great clarity, with a mature and stately indignation she said, “I will not do that!” Moments later she repeated it, but this time in the lisping narrow voice of a scared young child. “Oh, I will not do that!” The contrast came close to breaking my heart.

And then at last she slept. I cleaned up, hid the remaining liquor and went back to bed.

In the morning she was rational, and even a bit hungry. She ate eggs scrambled with butter and cream, and had a slice of toast. She napped for a little while, arid then she wanted to talk.

“It was such a stupid thing, in the beginning,” she said. “You live here all year around, and you want the natives to like you. You try to be pleasant. It’s a small community, after all. He was at the gas station. And terribly cheerful and agreeable. And just a little bit fresh. If I’d stopped him right in the beginning… But I’m not very good about that sort of thing. I guess I’ve always been shy. I don’t like to complain about people. People who are very confident, I guess I don’t really know how to handle the situations as they come up. It was just things he said, and the way he looked at me, and then one time at the gas station, I had the top down, he stood by the door on the driver’s side and put his hand on my shoulder. Nobody could see him doing it. He just held his hand there and I asked him please not to do that and he laughed and took his hand away. Then he got more fresh, after that. But I hadn’t reported him before, and I decided I would stop trading there, and I did. Then one day I was at the market and when I came out, he was sitting in my car and he asked me very politely if I could drop him off at the station. I said of course. I expected him to do something. I didn’t know what. And if he did anything, I was going to stop the car and order him to get out. After all, it was broad daylight. The moment I got in and shut the door and began to start the car, he just reached over and… put his hand on me. And he was grinning at me. It was such… such an unthinkable thing, Trav, so horrible and unexpected that it paralyzed me. I thought I would faint. People were walking by, but they couldn’t see. I couldn’t move or speak, or even think what I should do. People like me react too violently when they do react, I guess. I shoved him away and shouted at him and ordered him out of the car. He took his time getting out, never stopping his smile. Then he leaned into the car and said something about how I’d give him better treatment if he was rich. I told him there was not that much money in the world. You know, there is something sickening about that curly white hair and that brown face and those little blue eyes. He said that when he made his fortune he would come back and see how I reacted, something like that, some remark like that.”

The orderliness of that portion of the account was an exception. For the rest of it, her mind was less disciplined, her account more random. But it was a good mind. It had insight. Once, as she was getting sleepy, she looked somberly at me and said, “I guess there are a lot of people like me. We react too soon or too late or not at all. We’re jumpy people, and we don’t seem to belong here. We’re victims, maybe. The Junior Allens are so sure of themselves and so sure of us. They know how to use us, how to take us further than we wish before we know what to do about it.” She frowned. “And they seem to know by instinct exactly how to trade upon our concealed desire to accept that kind of domination. I wanted to make a life down here, Trav. I was lonely. I was trying to be friendly. I was trying to be a part of something.”

Ramirez came in the early afternoon just after I had teased her into eating more than she thought she could. He checked her over.

He said to me, “Not so close to hysteria now. A complex and involved organism, McGee. All physical resource was gone. And just the nerves left, and those about played out. Maybe we can rest them a little now. You wouldn’t think it, but there’s an awesome vitality there.”

I told him of my contact with the family, and of the wrestling match in the middle of the night.

“She may become agitated again, maybe not so much next time.”

“How about a rest home?”

He shrugged. “If you’ve had enough, yes. But this is better for her. I think she can come back quicker this way. But she can become emotionally dependent upon you, particularly if she learns to talk it out, to you.”

“She’s been talking.”

He stared at me. “Strange you should do all this for her.”

“Pity, I guess.”

“One of the worst traps of all, McGee.”

“What can I expect?”

“I think as she gets further back from the edge she will become placid, listless, somnolent. And dependent.”

“You said to get her away from here.”

“I’ll take a look at her tomorrow.”

The thunderheads built high that Thursday afternoon, and after a long hot silence, the winds came and the rain roared down. The sound of the rain terrified her. She could hear, in the sound of the rain, a hundred people all laughing and talking at once, as though a huge cocktail party filled all the other rooms of the sterile house.

She became so agitated I had to give her the second one of the quieting pills. She awakened after dark, and she had soaked the sheets and mattress pad with sweat. She said she felt strong enough to take a shower while I changed the bed for her. I had found one last set of clean sheets. I heard her call me, her voice faint. She was crouched on the bathroom floor, wet and naked and sallow as death. I bundled her into a big yellow terry robe and rubbed her warm and dry and got her into bed. Her teeth chattered. I brought her warm milk. It took her a long time to get warm. Her breath had a sour odor of illness. She slept until eleven and then ate a little and then talked some more. She wanted the light out when she talked, and wanted her hand in mine. A closeness. A comfort.

I heard more of it then. A vague outline. She had thought Junior Allen gone forever, and he had come back in the shining cruiser, wearing his brand-new resort clothes, curiously humble and apologetic and anxious for her esteem. He had tied up at her dock, just across the road from the house.

She had told him to go away. She kept looking out the windows and saw him sitting disconsolate in his new boat in his new clothes, and at dusk she had gone out onto the dock, endured another profuse apology, then gone aboard for a tour of the cruiser.

Once he had her aboard, had her below decks, he was the smiler again, crude and forceful, and he had taken her. She fought him for a long time, but he had been patient. There was no one to hear her. Finally in a kind of terrorized lethargy, she had endured him, knowing he was not quite sane, and thinking this would be the end of it. But it was not. He had kept her aboard with him for two days and two nights, and when he had sensed that she was too dazed and too exhausted and too confused to make even a token resistance, he had moved into the house with her.

“I can’t really explain it,” she whispered in the darkness. “There was just nothing that had gone before. The only past I knew was him. And he filled the present, and there wasn’t any future. I didn’t even feel revulsion toward him. Or think of him as a person. He was a force I had to accept. And somehow it began to be terribly important to please him-with the food I cooked for him, the drinks I made for him, the clothes I washed, the continual sex. It was easier to stay a little bit drunk. If I kept him pleased, even that kind of life was endurable.

“He turned me into an anxious thing, watching him every minute to be certain I was doing what he wanted me to do. I guess that is a kind of physical response to him, not pleasure. A kind of horrid release, a breaking. He learned how to make that happen sometimes, and he’d laugh at me. Then he would go away on that boat and it would be the same, and come back here and it would be the same. I didn’t even think of it ever ending. I was too busy getting through each hour as it came along.”

She slept then. I went out into the night. The tropical earth was steamy-fresh, bugs chirring and tree toads yelping, and the bay a moony mirror. I sat on the end of her dock and blew smoke at the mosquitoes and wondered why I should be so cynical about her.

It was true that she was a sensitive and introspective woman, and equally true that Junior Allen was a cruel crude bastard, but I could not quite comprehend how his use of her could have brought her to such a state. In the Victorian tradition, it was the fate worse than death, but she was an adult female, and regardless of the method of approach, he had become her lover and had, in time, induced sensuous response in her. I thought of the failure of her marriage and wondered if perhaps she was merely a neurotic headed for breakdown anyway, and Junior Allen had merely hastened the process.

I watched the running lights of a boat heading down the channel, and I heard the grotesque yammering of one of the night birds, and the faraway sobbing of a lovelorn cat.

I went in and checked her in her deep sleep, and went to bed in the neighboring room.