A mosquito whined to a thirsty silence against his throat. He slapped it, started the car and drove slowly to Tamarinda Street. It was midnight. Number 27 was lighted. He parked several houses beyond it, and walked quietly back to it. He tried to remember the last time he had seen his sister, Laura, and could not recall. Eight months at least. She was his only blood relative left in the state, and she was seventeen years older than he. They had been close, a long time ago. But the relationship had not survived the loss of what she had wanted for herself and for him.
Laura lived with her invalid husband in a shabby little frame house. He went up onto the porch and looked through the living room window. She sat staring without expression at television turned so low he could barely hear the sound of it through the screen.
“Laura,” he said.
She gave a violent start and put her hand to her throat and stared round-eyed at the window.
“It’s Jimmy,” he said in the same tone.
She pushed herself up out of the chair, turned the set off, and let him in. She wore a green housecoat belted around her thick body. Her hair was sandy gray. She had his long narrow head, beaked fleshy nose, pale blue eyes. But her mouth was tiny, pinched, set in a mesh of lines radiating from it.
“What’s wrong?” she demanded in a low voice.
“Nothing. Nothing at all. I drove by to see if there was a light on. I just wondered how you are.”
She shrugged and went back to her chair. He sat on a lumpy daybed. The small room smelled of fly spray, boiled food and sickness.
“How do you think I am?” she asked. “I’m queen of the May. Tomorrow I’m going to the south of France in my private yacht.”
“How’s Sid?”
She shrugged again, gesturing toward the back of the house by tilting her head. “Sometimes bad and sometimes worse. But he had a pretty good day today. He ate good. But he gets terrible depressed. It’s eleven years now, and he was an active man. He’s getting so heavy lately, it’s almost more than I can do, getting him into the chair and back into bed.”
“You ought to have some help.”
“I don’t like to bother all the servants with little things like that. On the pension I keep so big a staff I can’t keep track.”
“Can’t Betty help out at all?”
She gave him a look of sad disgust. “Pregnant with her sixth? Three thousand miles away? A sixth grandchild I’ll never get to see. Except the pictures she sends. She looks so little and tired in the pictures, Jimmy. How can she help out? You knew what he was when she run off with him. We all did, and there wasn’t a damn thing we could do. He’s a factory hand out there. A big car and big cigars, six kids and time payments and broke by Wednesday every week. I’ll never see her again. They’ll never get far enough ahead to come this far, and I can’t leave Sid. What’s the matter with you? How do you expect her to help out?”
“Don’t get sore. I was just wondering.”
After a long silence she said, “Do you remember how everything used to be, Jimmy?”
“Yes.”
“I think a lot about how things went wrong for everybody, and I wonder why it had to be this way. I keep thinking of what Mom kept saying before she died. In those last weeks she got homesick for New York State, for the Cherry Valley, even though she hadn’t ever been back since the day she and Dad left, when she was a young girl. And she kept saying that things had gone wrong because they’d come down here. You know, nothing seemed wrong then. Nothing at all, except her having to die that way, hurting. How old were you when she died?”
“Thirteen.”
“That means Betty was six. Sid had a good job. Al was still alive. The family seemed to be doing pretty well. She made me and Al promise we’d help you get an education. We would have anyway. You know that. Already we knew you were the brightest of the three of us. We helped as much as we could.”
“I know.”
“It’s like she knew things were going to go bad for all of us. Funny, isn’t it? Sometimes I have a dream, and it’s always the same. I’m having a picnic with Betty, in a beautiful place. And she has a little baby in her arms. There’s sunshine and sort of music and we’re laughing about something. Then we see Sid walking toward us, as if nothing had ever happened to him. Then I realize we’re all at the Cherry Valley. I wake up smiling and crying. I’ve never seen the Cherry Valley.”
“I drove through there once.”
“Don’t tell me about it, Jimmy. You want anything? Ice tea? Beer?”
“No thanks.”
“How’s Gloria?”
“About the same.”
“When did you see her last?”
“Last month,” he lied.
“You should go up there more often, Jimmy.”
“What’s the point in it? She doesn’t know me. She hasn’t known anybody for two years.”
“But maybe she knows more than she seems to.”
“Laura, don’t for God’s sake try to turn it into a soap opera. There’s been a progressive deterioration of the brain cells, a physiological decay. Now they’re willing to admit that possibly all those series of shock treatments may have made the process a little faster. It’s something that destroys the actual brain cells. They talk about some kind of chemical imbalance or deficiency.”
“Big words,” she said. “Lots of big words.”
“Do you have to have it in little words? She wears diapers. They feed her with tubes into her nose. Her eyes don’t focus. They say it’s interesting. They think they may be learning something from her.”
“The big words help you, don’t they? You don’t have to think of her as being Gloria. And you don’t have to go see her.”
He stared across at her in vast burlesque surprise. “Where’d all this concern come from? Aren’t you my loving sister, the woman who celebrated my pending marriage by telling me I was throwing myself away by marrying a little Ybor City slut named Mendez? I was impairing my social standing, or something. And when we had that first trouble, you were plugging for a fast divorce, weren’t you?”
“We didn’t know she was sick then, Jimmy. And I got to like her. She’s still your wife.”
“She’s nothing, Laura. She’s breathing meat.”
“You’re cold as a stone.”
“I went through all the kinds of feeling there are. I used up all there was. What the hell do you expect of me?”
“Nobody expects much of you, Jimmy. Nobody.”
“That’s nice.”
“Maybe you got things just the way you want them. Kind of a litle frog in a little pond. I saw you two months ago. Downtown, just going into the Bay Restaurant. You looked a little tight. You were laughing and you were with the McClure woman. I guess that’s the kind of thing you like.”
“Mitchie is an old friend.”
“You don’t pick your friends very careful.”
“I’ve got a thousand friends, Sis.”
She shrugged. “It’s none of my damn business anyhow, I guess. You’re grown. But I raised you, Jimmy. You remember that. Nothing is the way I dreamed it would be. I saw you, and I was on my way back here. I hadn’t seen you in months, and then I saw you with that woman, and I was coming back here. The days go by so slow for me. They go slow for Sid too. I guess they’re worse for Sid. I should be glad you came by tonight, instead of nagging you like this every minute.”