"Well, then,” Tremaine said smoothly, “if there are no further-"
"May I ask a question? If there's time?"
"Certainly, Shirley-I mean, Miz Yount,” he said with exaggerated emphasis and a resolutely gracious smile. He had called her “miss” on meeting her the evening before, and she had been quick to reprimand him in that twangy, chalk-on-blackboard voice of hers. Shirley Yount was the dead Jocelyn Yount's fraternal twin sister, a ropy, toothy woman of fifty-three with plucked eyebrows and upswept coppery hair straight out of the fifties. Here, too, the family resemblance was apparent, but once again the years had taken their depressing toll. Her sister had been a striking six-footer, dreamy, athletic, and sveltely seductive. Shirley, equally tall, was gawky and mannish. In the square neckline of her blouse her collarbones jutted out aggressively, and the deeply tanned skin on her flat chest was as coarse as pebbled cowhide.
What a difference: Jocelyn the svelte, leggy colt; Shirley the tough and sinewy old mare.
During dinner the evening before, she had wormed her way into sitting beside him and had yammered away endlessly, telling him at least three times how thrilled she was to meet him in person. (Was there another way to meet someone?) But of course Tremaine was used to this kind of cretinous gushing, and long resigned to it, particularly from middle-aged spinsters like Shirley Yount.
He was, however, irked by a side-of-the-mouth archness of manner, as if even her most vapid remarks-of which there were many-were really sly, private digs of wit and substance. Tremaine, who prided himself on his perceptiveness about such things, had been unable to decide whether there really was malice behind that tediously saucy facade. Or whether it was a facade at all. Either way, by now it had gotten well under his skin. (Considering that this was only Monday morning, there was quite a lot about this ill-assorted group that had already gotten under his skin.)
But what could she have to be hostile about? Here she was, an unattractive, unmarried department-store buyer in Cincinnati or Cleveland or some such place. Thanks to Tremaine's doing, she was enjoying the trip of a lifetime: an all-expenses-paid stay at the premier vacation destination of western Alaska. She would be talking about it-and about what M. Audley Tremaine was really like (in person)-for years at her mah-jongg meetings, or wherever such people gathered socially nowadays.
She leaned forward to frown through gargantuan, hexagonal glasses. “One thing I've always wondered is-oh, is it all right to ask something about the survey? Is that permitted?” There it was again; that annoying ability to make a seemingly innocuous question sound like a tongue-in-cheek insult. Our Miss Brooks getting ready to slip one to the high-school principal.
"Of course,” Tremaine said.
"Well, I can't help wondering why it was that Dr. Henckel and Dr. Judd weren't out there with everyone else that day at the glacier. I've always wondered about that. Or shouldn't I ask? If I shouldn't, I'll just shut up. I don't mean I wish they had been there, I just mean…” She trailed off, as she often did, into a macaw-like squawk. “Ha-HAH!"
Ah, was that what was bothering her? The fact that her sister had been cut off at twenty-five while an uncaring Providence had allowed these two overstuffed, middle-aged people who had played it safe to plod comfortably on with their lives? Fine, that was right with him. It was their problem; let them handle it.
As he expected, it was Walter who crumbled first. As all who knew him came sooner or later to learn, Walter's tugboat of a body; his jolly, chuckly, zesty air of enjoying life to the full; and his ruddy complexion (latently apoplectic, if you asked Tremaine) hid a constitution forged in tapioca.
"Well, now, I wouldn't exactly say I stayed behind," Walter said, chuckling on cue.
Tremaine shifted restlessly. Between Walter's chuckle and Shirley's squawk, it was not going to be an easy week. Almost equally irritating, Walter had become a belly flaunter in the years since Tremaine had last seen him. The way some men thrust out their chests, he joyfully displayed the blimp-like protuberance at his front. He wore his suspenders wide and his pants low, the better to accommodate it. If he wasn't patting it, he was rubbing it. If he wasn't rubbing it, he was tapping it with a rolled-up magazine, or a pen, or even a ring of keys.
"No,” Walter continued, setting his hands on that great belly and dosing his eyes, “the fact of the matter is that I flew out there with the others in the morning, fully intent on executing the commands of our glorious leader.” He opened his eyes. A jocular wiggle of tufted brows was directed toward Tremaine, but Tremaine, keen observer that he was, noted the accompanying tic just above Walter's padded jaw line. He smiled back coolly.
"However,” said Walter, “the Fates intervened.” He chuckled meaninglessly. “Or perhaps the Furies. A medical crisis developed shortly after we deplaned, and I was unable to continue.” He paused for a rumble of throaty, empty laughter. “Down for the count, so to speak. So I had to remain behind at the shore, where the plane would pick us up later."
"Yes, that's the part I'm not too clear on,” Shirley persisted with a smile that revealed rather too much wet, pink gum line. “The medical crisis.” She eyed him coyly, her long, purplish nose honed. “Or isn't it any of my business? I mean, I'm just curious, so tell me to shut up if…well… ha-HAH!"
"No, no, my dear lady-my dear Shirley, if I may-that's all right. As a matter of fact it was…” He leaned forward and paused theatrically, then finished in a stage whisper: “…a mosquito bite!"
The words appeared to penetrate Gerald Pratt's lethargy. "A mosquito bite, did he say?” The murmured question floated out of a haze of turgid brown smoke. “Is that right?"
"An infected mosquito bite,” Walter said, “despite which I was heroically bent on continuing my mission.” A pause for another forced chuckle. “But our glorious leader, in his greater wisdom, forbade it. I ask you: What could I do but submit as gracefully as I could?” He concluded this annoying performance with an exasperating tattoo played out on his abdomen.
How inexplicable were human emotions! Tremaine almost shook his head with wonderment. For almost three decades, it appeared, Walter had maintained this foolish resentment against him because-well, why? Because Tremaine had almost certainly kept him from being killed in the avalanche, wasn't that what it amounted to? Was that what the man would have preferred? Not that it wouldn't have been what he deserved, inasmuch as it was his fault they had to be out there in the first place.
In any case, Tremaine's insistence that he remain behind had surely been correct. The infected bite had been ugly, with long streaks of brilliant red radiating from the wrist almost to the armpit. Walter had been on penicillin for ten days afterward. With a condition like that, one remained quiet; one did not stimulate blood circulation by scrambling up and down glacial flows. Even if he had survived the avalanche, he would probably have come away with gangrene. Was that what he wanted?
And yet Tremaine sympathized to some extent. There was something undeniably absurd about being kept from a rendezvous with destiny by a mosquito bite. But then that was the sort of person Walter was; a man of limited scope and inconsequential vision, fated by a feeble character to be stymied by minor obstacles. He had hardly protested very vigorously that morning when Tremaine “forbade” him from continuing. What could Tremaine have done if this whale of a man had insisted on going with them? Clamped him in irons? But of course he hadn't insisted at all. He'd merely whined and submitted, as the manuscript made quite clear-one of several things poor Walter was not going to be very happy about.