“Cole?”
“Yes?”
“Frank Hebbery. We’re a little early.”
“Where are you?”
“Downstairs in the lobby. You dressed?”
“I am, but Eve isn’t.”
“Want to join the wife and I for a drink?”
“Just a minute.” He covered the mouthpiece. “Hebbery. Wants me to come down for a drink while you dress. Okay?”
“Sure.”
“Fine,” Larry said into the phone.
“We’ll be in the outdoor bar. Do you know it?”
“I’ll find it,” Larry said. “Give me a few minutes.”
Hebbery was a small, thin man with piercing brown eyes and lank brown hair. He wore a tan linen suit which was meticulously pressed, and he sported a neatly clipped mustache under his nose. He stood up the moment Larry entered the bar, and he walked toward him quickly.
“Cole?” he said.
“Hebbery?”
“Yes. Glad to know you. Come on over to the bar. How do you like Puerto Rico?”
“Fine, so far.”
“Bueno,” Hebbery said. “Come on, I’ll introduce you to the wife.”
They walked to the bar, an oval island in the center of the open patio. Easy chairs were pulled up to the bar, and the bar was of a height to permit comfortable drinking while seated in the low chairs. A plump brunette in a white dress sat at the bar toying with a Tom Collins. Hebbery walked directly to her and said, “Honey, this is Larry Cole. Mr. Cole, my wife Anne.”
“How do you do?” Anne said.
“Mrs. Hebbery,” Larry said.
“Oh, make it Anne.”
“Anne it is.”
“Bueno,” Hebbery said. “What are you drinking, Cole?”
“Make it Larry.”
“Bueno. And the drink?”
“Do martinis mix with the climate?”
“I wouldn’t.”
“Gin and tonic then.”
Larry pulled out one of the chairs and sat. Hebbery snapped his fingers at the bartender and said, “Mira, mira!”
“You must tell me all about New York,” Anne said. “I haven’t been there in ages.”
“How do you like Puerto Rico?” Hebbery asked. To the bartender he said, “Gin and tonic, por favor.”
“I like it fine,” Larry said. “I had a long talk today with—”
“You’ll love it,” Hebbery interrupted. “Once you’re here a while, you’ll love it. There’s no place on earth like it, believe me.”
“Well, we’ll only be staying a week.”
“That’s a shame. You hit a bad time, too. We’ve been having a little rain.”
“We’re always having a little rain,” Anne said.
Hebbery patted her knee. “Anne and I have been here for six years now. No place on earth like it.”
“Thank God,” Anne said.
“It seems very nice,” Larry said.
The bartender came over with a gin and tonic. He started to put it down before Hebbery, and Hebbery said, “No, no, alli,” and he pointed to Larry. The bartender put the drink down. “Muchas gracias,” Hebbery said, “a wonderful people here, Larry, wonderful, you can’t beat them. Poor, yes. But happy? Ah, you can’t beat them for happiness. Not anyplace on earth. How’s the drink?”
Larry tasted it. “Good,” he said.
“Bueno. You ready for another, Anne?”
“I’ll wait for Mrs. Cole. Larry, is New York—?”
“Bueno. Have you done any shopping, Larry?”
“Well, we went into San Juan yesterday.”
“Wonderful city, isn’t it? Old San Juan, I mean. Rio Piedras is another thing again. Beautiful, of course, but with none of San Juan’s charm. How did you like the old cobble-stoned streets?”
“They—”
“Built by the Spaniards, you know. Centuries ago. No automobiles then. Built for horses. Give the city an old-world flavor. Wouldn’t change it for all the tea in China. Can’t you just picture the conquistadores riding down those streets in full armor?”
“Well, I—”
“Have you been out to Morro?”
“No, we didn’t get—”
“You mustn’t miss El Morro,” Hebbery said. “A wonderful treat.”
“We’ll try not to—”
“Has Christmas shopping started in New York yet?” Anne asked.
“No, it’s a little early yet—”
“She talks as if we’re out in the middle of the Pacific someplace,” Hebbery said.
“No,” Anne replied, “we’re out in the middle of the Atlantic.”
“The Caribbean, honey,” Hebbery said. “The romantic Caribbean.”
“Yeah,” Anne said flatly.
“Here’s Eve now,” Larry said, rising and signaling to her.
She had come into the bar and paused, looking about her somewhat aloofly. He knew the manner was affected, but she nonetheless presented the portrait of a poised, self-sufficient, faintly bored young lady. She was wearing an ice-blue satin sheath, pearls at the throat.
“Excuse me,” he said, and he went to meet her. He took her hand and whispered, “Hi, beautiful.”
“Hi. Do I look all right?”
“You look very sweet.”
“That’s not what I want to hear.”
“No?”
“No. Tell me I look sexy.”
“Oh?”
“Mmm,” she said, and she smiled knowingly.
“Well! Well well.”
“Forewarned is forearmed,” Eve said. “How’s Hebbery?”
“Bueno,” he said.
“Huh?”
“Come on, we’ll join them.”
“It got nice and cool, didn’t it?” Eve said.
“Did it?” He grinned. “I thought it got warmer all at once.” He squeezed her hand and, both grinning, they walked to the bar.
9
Winter arrived on Sunday.
Like an old man coming home to die too early, it appeared grayly and suddenly on the horizon.
And while Eve and Larry Cole listened to an endless succession of “Buenos” from Frank Hebbery as he showed them through the Rain Forest in the Bosque National del Caribe, with the burning Puerto Rican sun shielded by the arch of trees; as they stood beside a cascading waterfall, the water leaping and rushing over a smooth sheer wall of rock; as they stood in the secret, shrouded silence of growth as old as time, confronted with the immensity of nature’s construction; as they stood in El Yunque on a tropical island, Margaret Gault sat in the kitchen of her Cape Cod development house 1,425 miles to the north and listened to her mother, and winter stared bleakly through the window-panes.
“I want to know what happened to you this summer,” Mrs. Wagner said.
They sat across from each other at the round pine-top kitchen table which Margaret had bought at an antique shop in New Jersey, the twenty-seven-year-old blonde, and the fifty-two-year-old blonde who was her mother.
The fifty-two-year-old blonde was a handsome woman with brown eyes that did not miss very much. She was somewhat plump, with the bosom of a matron, and there were age wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, and her chin was getting weak, and her neck was loosening in the dissolute pattern of age. But you could tell that Elizabeth Wagner had once been a beauty. You could know with certainty that she had danced the Charleston and the Bunny Hug, bound her breasts tightly in an era when boyishness was considered girlishness, so tightly that she’d almost damaged the supporting muscles but not quite, thankfully, so that they were still firm and rounded when girls got back to being girls.
Elizabeth Wagner no longer sported the natural ash-blonde hair which had been hers when she’d sampled gin from a bathtub at distillation parties, scooping it up in a teacup so that after the fourth cup the gin tasted mellowed and aged in the wood, even though it was the same horrible gut-rotting stuff which had been drunk hours before when the aging, mellowing process began. The hair now had expert care under the hands of a beautician and it combined with the brown eyes to lend a look of hardness to the woman.