“Fort and I talked over what if anything he ought to do. In the end he got in touch with Gretchen and told her that if she stopped gambling, all her kids would be better off, and he had no intention of giving her any money. Then he had the same investigators get word to Susan that if any emergency ever came up that she couldn’t handle, she was to contact them, but it would be best not to tell her mother about it. We wondered what we should try to do when Susan became eighteen and began getting her own money directly. We talked about it as if… Fort would still be around. She’ll be eighteen next year. We wanted to make sure she’d go to college and not get cheated out of it by having to look after the other kids. She certainly wasn’t any threat-Gretchen wasn’t-to Fort. It was just sort of dreary and sad. I’d half decided that after Fort died, I’d go to Susan and explain everything and see if I could sort of… look after her. After all, I guess I’m only a couple of years too young to be her mother. So that’s all it was. Look how long it took me to tell it. That’s what comes from living alone. Dinner now?”
“Unless you want to see a grown man cry.”
When we were eating I asked her if Anna knew about Gretchen’s attempted shakedown. She said Fort hadn’t told Anna about it, but he had told her about Gretchen being in town with five children. At first Anna hadn’t wanted to do anything about it, but Fort had sensed it was pride and bullheadedness. She had visited once when Gretchen was there and it had ended very badly, so from then on she had visited when she knew the kids would be there and Gretchen would be working.“
“Did you go see Susan yourself?”
“I waited too long. I had… a sentimental idea, Trav. I thought I would find out very carefully if she knew Fort was her father. If she did, I wanted to find out if she had any bad feeling about him. If she did, I was going to try to make her see how it was, how it happened, how Fort had done what he could, and then, if she was willing, bring her out here to see him. I know he wanted to see her. I mean from the report I guess he had the feeling he had fathered at least one pretty good kid. But he had felt reluctant to upset whatever adjustment the girl had made. I went there in September and they were gone. They’d been gone a couple of weeks. I asked Anna about it. She looked pretty bleak. She said that if she’d known I was going there, she would have told me they were gone. She said it was her idea Gretchen didn’t want Anna buttering up the kids, so she just moved, maybe somewhere else in the city, maybe out of town. No forwarding address. Probably some new man, Anna said, looking as if she wanted to spit.”
“Glory, have you got that investigator’s report?”
“No. I thought they’d find it when they went through everything. But I guess Fort destroyed it.”
“I wonder why he’d do that?”
“I guess he had a good reason. Trav, Fort had a lot of… wisdom. I guess that’s the word. He thought things out and did what he felt would be best for everyone. Like when…”
“When what?”
“Nothing.”
“From the expression on your face when you stopped yourself, it wasn’t exactly nothing, girl.”
“It was just a personal thing, between Fort and me.”
“And has nothing to do with anything else?”
“Nothing.”
But I knew she was troubled, and so I decided not to take her off the hook. Again I went to the kitchen with her while she stowed the dishes. Again we had a nightcap by the last small tongues of flame in the glowing bed of embers. She talked trivia, and kept lapsing into silence, and finally out of a silence she said a bad word.
“Hmmm?” I said.
“Okay, okay, okay. That personal thing. Maybe it does have something to do with something. Trav, Fort and I had kind of let ourselves drift into a fool’s paradise. We’d begun to believe it wouldn’t end, and then the pains began. And when they did, neither of us were as good about it as we thought we were going to be. We disappointed ourselves. Depression and irritability and restlessness. It looked as if it was going to be totally lousy from then on in. We just didn’t seem to be able to handle it… and get any good out of the time we had left. So Fort got something from a friend of his. Dr. Hayes Wyatt. He’d told Fort one time about the good results he’d been having with terminal patients using psychedelics. As Fort explained it to me, when there is pain, after a while the patients begin to identify the pain with death. Then the pain becomes like something that’s after them, trying to take them away, and that makes the pain worse because there’s fear there too. So he talked our problem over with Hayes Wyatt and Hayes thought it would be a good idea for both of us and told Fort what kind of a procedure might work best, and gave Fort a tiny little vial of it. LSD-25. Do you know about it?”
I did not tell her how it could still give me the night sweats to remember one Doctor Varn and the Toll Valley Hospital where they had varied the basic compound and boosted the dosage to where they could not only guarantee you a bad trip, they could pop you permanently loose from reality if you had any potential fracture line anywhere in your psyche. As a part of mending the damage they did to me, a bright doctor gave me some good trips and had given me in that special way the ability to comprehend what had happened in my head during the bad ones.
“I’ve been there,” I told her.
She lighted up. “Then you know! You can’t tell anybody what it’s like.”
“I haven’t taken the social trips with a batch of acid heads who want to freak around. It was a medical thing, controlled.”
“Oh, it has to be!” she said. “Fort measured the dosages onto little wads of surgical cotton. He gave me four hundred micrograms the first time, and stayed with me. It took about eight hours before it began to wear off. I watched over him after he took five hundred micrograms. It’s spooky you know. It was much too much to get the kind of good out of it we wanted. It took us too far to let us make any good bridge between here and there. But then we knew: And then, twice, we took a little less than a hundred micrograms at the same time. We could talk. We could talk with a closeness we never had before, and we’d thought we were as close as two people could get. What you learn is that you are… just one part of the whole human experience, part of a great rhythm of life and death, and when you have that insight, there’s no fear. I knew the ways we would always be together, and I knew the ways we would have to part and I could accept that. Twice was all we needed. It gave us peace. It gave us a special happiness, not more than we had before, but different. It made us able to understand and accept… our identities.”
“And you found out why you were so badly racked up when I found you on the beach?”
“Of course! Because I was wishing he’d die without letting myself know I was wishing it. And when he died and the kids died with him so horribly, losing the kids was the penalty I had to pay for wishing him dead. And Fort, to his utter astonishment, found out that he had secretly resented Glenna. She was one of those terribly terribly sweet women who never raise their voices, and who are fantastically strong and tough and aggressive underneath. He discovered that he had pretended love and created a myth-woman to fit that love, and that underneath she was maybe not a nice person at all. So he could not ever let himself comprehend he was glad she was dying. Accepting Gretchen’s silliness gave him a guilt he could admit.”
“So after the LSD, you both could handle the situation.”
“He died damned well, and I helped him die well, and… those insights are still with me, Trav, still helping me. But I had never thought of how… it could relate to the money. Psychedelics give you an acceptance of inevitable things. Sort of-‘so be it.’ It would have given him the chance to weigh the difference in importance between death and money, and money is so… kind of insipid compared to true identity. Without that experience, Trav, I couldn’t stay here. It would smash me to stay here. Now I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”