“Welcome,” he said, smiling wildly. “Welcome to the Palmetto Grove.”
Tom looked at Sara and knew that they could not leave. Not now.
Meecham said, drawing himself up, “Now some sad truths. No pool. The filtration unit is somewhere between here and Detroit. Next week they will install the ranges in the kitchen. We have a bar-lounge, sort of, but there’s been a hitch in the liquor license. The lawyers are ironing it out, they say. I am proud to announce that the Gulf of Mexico is over there somewhere. Only because nobody could figure how to make it unavailable. What else? The air conditioning. Yes. Air conditioning by Mother Nature. Little men come around and thump on the ducts and go away, shaking their heads. I will help you with your luggage. And then I too will go away. The night watchman comes on duty at dusk. I believe there is mathematically a very small chance that before morning the entire enterprise will be washed out into the Gulf.”
After dinner in Sarasota, they drove back to the Palmetto Grove. Fifty feet inside the entrance Tom put the rented car firmly into the mud up to the hubcaps. It had started to rain again, hard. He carried Sara across the mud flats. They sat in the room and listened to the rain. The lights flickered and went out. Meecham had told them where the candles were. Tom read the brochure by candlelight.
“Dance to the music of the Harmonaires in the bar-lounge. Watch sunset over the Gulf from the promenade deck. Breakfast in bed? Phone for room service.”
Sara began to laugh. It was too close to hysteria. They broke open the champagne. Tom looked at her across the candle flame. She was very lovely indeed.
“So is it so terrible?” he said. “Champagne and candlelight? I guess it’s — sort of an adventure.”
“A damp one,” she said, and glowed at him. A fine girl and a fine glow. In a moment of revelation Tom suddenly understood that things were just fine. The awkward hiatus of formal politeness, of being strangers to each other, was gone. And he knew it had fled much more quickly than if they had walked into the glamour world of the brochure.
In the gray dawn a fire fight started in the Korean hills. Tom sat bolt upright, trembling and sweaty. The fire fight of his dream turned into the reality of simultaneous revving up of bulldozers, power saws, mechanical staplers and nailing devices, pipe threaders, cement mixers, riveting guns. Plumbers beat on pipes: plasterers plastered; carpenters whonked nails home; electricians clanked about. And all of them bellowed at one another over the din in hearty, early-morning voices.
Sara’s first home-cooked meal as Mrs. Tom Browning was marred by their having to yell at each other to be heard. As they were having coffee a huge man with a ginger beard and a crate of tools lumbered in, nodded gravely and began taking the cupboard doors off. When queried he said, “Hung wrong. Take ’em off. Rehang ’em. That’s the system around here. Do everything twice.”
After Sara washed their dishes, they took a turn around the property. The sun was bright and hot. Standing water was gone and the mud was turning to dust. They watched an irritable man painting a mural in the lobby. They watched some even more irritable men laying tile. Meecham appeared beside them and yelled over the noise, “Crash priority. Every day a mob scene — until the rain starts. Then they go home. Rained every day for the last twenty-one days. You wake up early?”
“Yes!” Tom shouted.
“Good thing. If you hadn’t, the noise would have waked you up. Got to go see the man about the greeves.”
He went away. They changed to swim suits and went onto the beach. They swam. They found shells and small black sharks’ teeth. They stretched out on a blanket on the highest slope of the beach. Sara was thoughtful. Finally she said, “Darling, did he say greeves?”
“I think so.”
“Well, what are greeves?”
“Just — plain old greeves. You know.”
And she had that glowing look again, and he looked at her shining eyes and long legs, and he kissed her there on the honeymoon beach, a long, sunbaked kiss, until a voice said, “I dowanna bust this up, folks, but we gotta put in a coconut palm right where you got your blanket.”
So they drove to St. Armand’s Key and bought some groceries. Sara fixed lunch, and during the noontime lull she said, “Darling, this is a strange sink. Cold comes out the hot and hot comes out the cold, all of a sudden.”
A small man in smudgy white overalls, half a sandwich in his cheek, appeared in the screened doorway and said, “Lady, you got it good. Upstairs, hot comes out both. You two going to work the front or the restaurant?”
“We’re guests,” Sara said with dignity and curious pride. “The very first ones.”
He stopped chewing. “You’re paying for this?”
Tom nodded.
The little man shrugged, tapped his temple, and went away.
Rain didn’t fall again that day, or the next or the next. The work progressed with astonishing speed. They asked Meecham about greeves. He said the only thing he knew about them was that they had to have them and they hadn’t come yet. When they came he’d tell them what they were, if he could find out. And if they came. The manager’s apartment was finished and the Meechams moved in. Tom and Sara agreed that they felt slightly put out at having to share the Palmetto Grove. It had been cozy with just the two of them and the watchman after dark.
They had begun to feel proprietary about it. Tom kept track of work accomplished. They made tours of inspection. After he had, in a sense, supervised the installation of the filtration unit for the pool, the crew chief handed him the bill. Tom took it to Meecham. Sara got into a spirited hassle with the architect over colors. She won her point by saying, “It is very demoralizing for a woman to get her first look at her face in the bathroom mirror in the morning and find it all blue-green from the reflection.”
Several more units were completed. Sara and Tom came back from grocery shopping one day to find a Minnesota car parked at the Palmetto Grove. They were very annoyed.
“Can’t those fools see it isn’t finished yet?” Sara said.
“What kind of fathead would try to move in so soon?” They looked at each other and exchanged a most comfortable smile.
That evening the bar-lounge opened, without furniture. Meecham bought them a stand-up drink and they took the second one out to the pool. In the morning Tom saw the couple from Minnesota checking out. The man was banging the counter with his fist and yelling, but there was too much noise to hear what he said. Three more groups checked in that day.
On the next day the restaurant opened in a minor and plaintive key of confusion. And the bar-lounge furniture came. And more units were completed.
Finally, forlornly, it was the very last day of their honeymoon. They lay side by side on sun cots by the pool. They held hands comfortably and inconspicuously. There was a throng of sun-browned people grouped picturesquely around the blue pool. A waiter in a white coat brought a tray of tinkling glasses to a party on the far side of the pool.
“It’s getting like the brochure,” Sara sighed.
“Well, nearly,” Tom said. The major sounds of construction were over.
“So tonight,” she said, “I wear something rustly and we dance.”
“To the Harmonaires.”
“They’ll be better tonight, I think. After all, last night was the first time they’d ever played together. That’s what the little one said.”