“I am not concerned exclusively with what people know they know, Mrs. Geis. From what Heidi told me, you were getting along with the Doctor better than his own children. So you saw him oftener. So you could have pertinent knowledge you don’t realize is pertinent.”
“Are you some kind of a detective?”
“Me? No. Just a friend of Glory’s. You come in from the outside, sometimes it’s easier to see the shape of things. You must have had some guess as to why Fort did what he did.”
Her mouth firmed up. “Mr. McGee, the only thing I can tell you is what I have told my husband. And though I do not think it good taste to tell this to a stranger, Roger and I have come closer to… very real trouble in our marriage over this than anything. Heidi is in no financial pain. Neither are we. Gloria is the worst off, but if people would just leave her alone, I think she’d be quite content. We’re not close friends. We don’t have enough in common. But I realize how good she was for Fort. And certainly she’ll marry again, and she should be able to marry quite well. She has a special style of her own, and a capacity for loyalty, and a very personal kind of warmth, and the urge to take care of a man and please him. I have told Roger that I think it is shameful and vulgar and disgraceful to keep prodding at this whole thing. It isn’t a financial motive at all, really. It took me a long time to understand it. Foriner Geis was a very strong personality. When his wife died, he lost himself in his work. Roger and Heidi thought he.was rejecting them. It turned them into emotionally insecure people. Heidi is a crashing neurotic. I’ve had to work twice as hard as anybody knows to make this marriage of mine work. I think that all the time they hoped that one day he would… accept and cherish them. What happened? An affair with a nurse that lasted for years. That was a rejection. Then, after they learned he had a fatal illness, he came back here from vacation with a bride. That hurt them. It was a symbolic rejection when he changed his estate arrangements. in her favor. They hate her. The final rejection was to find that he had somehow arranged to leave them nothing. They talk about money but they are really looking for some proof of love. Heidi is far worse than Roger, God knows why. I feel this way. Fortner Geis must have had a very sound and good reason for not telling Gloria and Heidi and Roger what he was doing and why he was doing it. To me that -means that if they do ever find out, it might be worse than not ever knowing. They should trust him, accept it, forget it.”
Had I not seen the earlier and more extreme reaction, I might have missed this one. It was just a hair too much intensity, too much edge in that hoarse social voice.
“Did you make any guesses why he did it?”
“It doesn’t matter to me why he did it.”
“You liked him?”
“I think… he was the finest man I’ve known.”
“But he fouled up his kids, didn’t he?”
“Did he? Maybe their mother did. They were eleven and seven when she died. She had enough time. And, believe me, I have heard far too much talk from Heidi and Roger about how sweet and brave and noble she was. She’s assumed the stature of a mythological being, Mr. McGee. She’s hard to believe in.”
“Mrs. Geis, I’m a little puzzled by one thing. Who did you think I was when I stopped you and said I wanted to talk about money?”
“I had no idea who you were.”
“Then why were you terrified?”
She frowned and smiled at the same time. “Terrified? Oh come now, really! Why should I… Oh!”
“Oh what?”
The green dress made her fine green eyes greener. Though they had shifted about during all the previous conversation, now they were very steady on mine, and she had widened them a little bit. “They kept us on the run for two long sets, trying to wear the old man down. When I stopped to talk to you, I suddenly felt quite faint. The world had a swimmy look and my ears were ringing, and then it went away; or I would have had to sit down right in the middle of the walk.”
“Son of a gun!” I said. “That must have been it.” It was more gallant than telling the lady she was a lousy liar. “I guess I should tell Gloria she shouldn’t let all this bother her so much. Having Fort’s children hate and resent her so much confuses her She’s one of those people without malice. Did you ever tell her your rejection theory?”
“Yes. She seemed to understand how it could be that way”
Night had come: The lights were on. She craned her neck to look at the clock over the bar. I walked her out to the parking lot to her car. After she got in, she looked out at me and said, “I think it would do Gloria a lot of good to get away now. Maybe she could go back to Florida with you, Mr. McGee. You’d be doing her more good that way than by… trying to find out why the Doctor did what he did.”
“It’s an idea,” I said.
I found my way, after several wrong turns, to Lake Pointe, the handsome house, snap and hiss of logs aflame, chunky glass in my hand, Glory Doyle Geis in wine slacks and white sweater sitting on a cushion on the raised hearth, dainty, bitter-sweet, semi-sad in the firelight.
“Not so good of a day for me,” she said, “and I don’t really know why. I couldn’t settle down to anything. Kept roaming. I’m supposed to be inventorying the books. They go to the university library. What did you do? Who did you talk to?”
“Heidi. And Mark Avanyan. And a fat boy named Kirstarian. Jeanie Geis. I saw the happiest girl in Chicago, but I didn’t meet her. I busted hell out of some very advanced sculpture. I nearly ran over a black cat wearing a red collar.”
“Tell me all!” she cried, her face lighting up.
“First you tell me about Janice Stanyard.”
She studied me for a few moments. “You mean you’re annoyed I didn’t tell you about her before?”
“Didn’t you think it was pertinent?”
“Not particularly”
“You sound as frosty as Miss Heidi.”
She looked dismayed, then grinned. “I didn’t know I could. Anyway, when I tell you you’ll understand. Fort told me about her while we were still on our wedding trip, before we came back to Chicago. We were talking about different kinds of love. And he just sort of casually mentioned he’d had a long affair with a nurse. He said it started a year after his wife died. And it ended two years before he met me. When I realized that was nearly eleven years, I was furious! And he laughed at me. He didn’t explain for a while because he said he wanted to prolong the pleasure of having me so jealous of another woman. He said it was marvelously flattering at his age. But when he saw I was really getting upset, he told me just how it was.”
About her husband’s accident and the little boy drowning?“
“Yes. He said she had worked with him long enough by that time so that she was like an extension of himself, like having another pair of hands. She knew his procedures, knew the instruments he would want at each stage, and also knew what to have ready to hand him when things went wrong this way or that way. She did not disturb his concentration the way other surgical nurses did. He said she seemed glad to share the enormous work load he had shouldered after Glenna died. After a year had gone by he knew he was changing in some way he did not like. He was thirty-six. He had not been with a woman for a year. He was putting so much of his total energy into his work he did not feel any particular tension because of physical desire. As a doctor he knew that continence does an adult no particular physical harm. He told me that the idea of regular sex as a necessity for health is something young men use as part of their persuasion technique. Fort told me he began to feel remote. He said that was the best word for it. He had less feeling of involvement with his patients, less triumph when things went well, less regret when they didn’t. He couldn’t chew out people who made foolish errors the way he used to. It didn’t seem worth the effort somehow. And he knew his praise was becoming half-hearted, which is worse than no praise at all.