In a strangled, deadly voice Mary said, “There is just one little thing you don’t know, Stonebulger. I happen to be—”
“For example,” he said. His huge paw dipped into a box of drawing materials and then moved so quickly to the drawing on her table that I did not see that he had selected a fat stub of charcoal. There was nothing tentative about his approach or hesitant about the lines he drew. You can never fail to recognize the peak of professional excellence when you see it, whether it is displayed by a diver, a skier, a shortstop or a mountainous man making marks on a piece of paper. “We eliminate this rather horrid and pointless bulge, balance this line, widen the base and at the same time give it more of a look of grace and delicacy...”
Mary Dawes made a weak, hollow sound. She was trembling. She reached to stop him, but he had moved over to the wall. He went from one sketch to the next, making his dark, firm, flowing lines without the slightest hesitation, talking softly about what he was doing, why he was doing it. Then he tossed the remaining fragment of charcoal into the box, wiped his fingertips on a rag, smiled and nodded at Mary and said, “Now you’ll have good starting places, my dear. Just restrain yourself from adding little vulgarities. But when you attempt to market these, I must ask you not to trade on my name — which is Stonebarger, by the way, not Stonebulger.”
“You idiot!” she yelled. “You... you egomaniac!” She braced for a major effort and cried. “Get out of here!”
He looked startled. He picked up his suitcase and topcoat and beckoned to me. I followed him out onto the porch.
“I believe I’ve actually upset her,” he said. “Maybe when she quiets down you might let her know that I would charge ten thousand dollars to a commercial enterprise for that amount of consultant design service.”
“I’m sure that will straighten her right out,” I told him.
He stared at me. “You people have a curious attitude down here. I have some work with me, so please bring my dinner over whenever it’s convenient. Nothing fried, please. And no potatoes in any form. For breakfast I’ll want juice, a three-minute egg, three strips of crisp bacon, two slices of buttered toast and a pot of coffee. And if you’ll get your dinghy in the water in the morning, I’d like you to take me on a circuit of the island right after breakfast.”
“You would? Gee, I hope you give me time to rig a canopy and chill the wine.”
He stared at me. “You people really have a most unusual sense of humor. It’s more difficult for me than it would be for most people, I imagine — I’ve been told that I have no sense of humor at all. Perhaps that is correct. So you will just have to be patient if I fail to laugh in the right places.” He walked off toward the small cabin.
When I went back into the living room Mary was staring at her drafting table. I walked over and stood beside her.
“No fried foods,” I said. “No potatoes in any form. And he wants it brought to him.”
“What?” She looked at me in a confused way and I saw tears running down her face. I started to repeat it all, but she wheeled, ran to her bedroom and slammed the door behind her.
In a little while I lighted the kerosene lamps. I went and tapped on her door and she told me to go away. I sat and read a magazine. I ran down through the mosquitoes and checked the lines on the boat, grabbed my toilet articles and ran back. I tapped on her door again. Same result.
Before I became too weak I foraged in the kitchen and cooked enough dinner for four. I ran two portions over to the cabin. Morgan Stonebarger sat in a white robe at a table covered with some sort of work sheets, his back to the door.
He moved the papers and made room for the tray. “Ah, thank you, Wescott. Is Dawes all right now?”
“Dawes is fine. Every once in a while she bangs her head on the wall and mentions her sister. Otherwise she’s feeling pretty chipper.”
He nodded at me. “Good night, Wescott.”
I galloped moodily back through the mosquitoes. I found Mary sitting on the living-room floor in a welter of ancient magazines. As I came in she thrust one toward me. Her face was tragic. “Read it.”
I sat and turned the page toward one of the lamps. It was the beginning of a big, glowing article entitled “The Genius of Morgan Stonebarger.” I learned he was ten years older than my maximum estimate. And I looked at some startling color plates of his work — two United States embassies in far places, a resort hotel in Puerto Rico, office buildings in Dallas and Montevideo, a church in Genoa, an auditorium in Atlanta.
“Yes, indeed,” I said.
“He‘s a great man,” Mary said in an awed voice.
“He won’t eat fried foods.”
“And the poor, poor darling has slipped a ratchet. Liz knew he had to get away. But she could have told me, couldn’t she? Don’t you understand it all, Barney?”
“Understand what?”
“He’s always been so dreadfully important, he just can’t adjust to being — incompetent. He has this persistent delusion he’s still working. He has to act as if he’s here to work instead of rest, because it’s a sort of defense mechanism for him. It saves his pride.”
“So I have to save his pride tomorrow morning by rowing him all over creation in my dinghy?”
“If that’s what he wants, Barney, that’s what you do.”
I reheated our dinner and she said it was fine. She ate like a wolf. She told me that crying always made her ravenous. It made me feel dizzy with pleasure and pride to be able to please her in any small way. I wanted to make a career out of pleasing this woman.
After we finished cleaning up, she took a lamp back to her work alcove and stood silent, looking at what he had done.
“But he’s right,” she said in a small, lost voice. “So right. Barney, I have all the willingness and all the diligence in the world. But I don’t have a single crumb of real talent. I’ve been kidding myself for years. I’m — meager, Barney. And vulgar and pretentious and—” she turned toward me, her fine face all squinched — “and so darned self-important!” she howled, and fell into my arms.
I held her and soothed her and patted her and thought up fifty ways of telling her that she was superb on all counts and Stonebarger was in no condition to judge anybody’s work. Yet I had the sinking feeling a man gets when he hears himself talking himself out of a promotion and can’t stop.
When she had finally let me talk her out of it, I felt cheated. She became practically festive. We sat on the couch where I would sleep. “The poor, dear genius,” she said. “I didn’t know Liz knew any really impressive people.”
I tried to express something that had been bothering me. “Mary, honey, a guy like this Stonebarger — wouldn’t he be sort of an industry in himself?”
“What do you mean?”
“He’d be a fine living to a whole battalion of people, wouldn’t he? So if he happened to get a little — confused, say, wouldn’t they be getting him the world’s finest and fastest treatment? Would they let him come stumbling down here alone? Would they let him get mixed up with your sister?”
“What’s wrong with my sister?”
“Now, don’t get irritable. If I’ve heard you say it once, I’ve heard you say it forty times. Your sister lives in a welter of spongers, nuts and artistic phonies.”
“Are you trying to tell me Liz couldn’t become a friend of a man like Morgan Stonebarger?”
“He doesn’t seem to try to win friends, Mary. Anyway, skip it. Tomorrow I’ll take him his breakfast, row him all over Pine Island Sound and salute him.”
And row him I did. He brought along a sketch pad and a notebook. We were sitting only three feet apart, but he gave the orders with hand signals — right, left, keep going, stop.