John D. MacDonald
The Obvious Woman
He walked all the way down the beach as far as the inlet, wearing his old tweed jacket, wondering how long it would be before the three of them — his wife, Mary Agnes, and his son, Jimmy, and the girl Jimmy was going to marry — would notice that he was gone.
The sea wind was cold and carried gray scud low over the coast. The three-day blow had scrubbed the stones and the brown sand clean, and he saw one Sunday surf caster, hardy and remote, in the distance. Terns huddled inshore against the wind, and the sea came smashing in.
At the inlet he wandered back toward Rickevy’s Boat Yard and stood out of the wind in the shelter of a shed and lighted a cigarette. He looked at the Gay Lady. She was winter-stored on the old timber cradle, the slicks out of her — forty years old and more, broad and heavy in the beam, mahogany and teak and white oak, with enough auxiliary power and fuel capacity to be almost a motor sailer.
Then he saw the ladder against her and the power cable running aboard. He frowned and looked toward the parking area. Gretchen Barker’s little green car was there. His impulse was to go right back to the empty beach. But he had to face Gretchen sooner or later, and this might be the best lime and the best place.
He walked through the yard to the Gay Lady and rapped on the hull. Gretchen came out of the cabin and looked down at him and said, with no expression on her face, “As I live and breathe.”
“How you, Gretch?”
“Come aboard.”
He climbed the ladder and stepped over the rail and followed her below. She wore a gray sweater. Her jeans were bleached by sea and sun, shaped to the roundness of her young figure. Her hair was smooth and tan, an odd shade not quite like sand, not quite like coffee with cream. Her face was slightly weathered, as befits a blue-water girl.
She had a small heater rigged in the cabin. Drawers and cupboards were open, cardboard cartons strewn around. He sat on a bunk. She sat on her heels beside the litter and pushed her hair back and looked at him with a kind of mocking defiance. “This old crock,” she said. “It’s like an attic. It’s like emptying out an attic.”
“A sudden urge to be neat?”
“I’m selling her.”
“Gretch!” he said, dismayed.
She stared at him. “What concern is it of yours, Mr. Robbins? I’m selling her because I don’t need her.” She turned back to her cartons for a moment and then gave him a tired smile and said, “I’m sorry. Why should I take it out on you?”
“I wish you would. I wish you could, Gretchen. I swear we didn’t know it had happened. I saw you on the street a few times. I thought you acted odd, but I didn’t know anything about it, and neither did Mary Agnes until Jimmy brought this girl home to meet us.”
She pulled an old shoe out of a drawer and looked at it. “One TopSider, faded and raggedy. Would fit a twelve-year-old girl. Not much utility here, friend. Out you go. Boyd, I grew up on this old crock. According to legend I was nearly born aboard her, but Daddy brought her in through a heavy fog.”
“That’s the way it was.”
She pushed her hair back again. “She was my inheritance, in lieu of money. I guess my family had a lot of things in lieu of money.” She stared at him thoughtfully. “I’m glad you didn’t know. I couldn’t have stood the idea of Mary Agnes going around saying her precious son had finally broken off with that obvious and unsuitable Barker female. He did it four months ago. In November. With two terribly reasonable letters and a very calm and reasonable phone call. From me he got hysterical letters and frantic phone calls. I didn’t handle it very well, Boyd.”
“I wish I’d known you were having such a lousy winter, Gretch.”
“What could you do? I got very Camille for a while. It works better than a diet. Then I got indignant at myself. And energetic. Aunt Tildy must have thought I’d lost my mind. Likewise Doctor Traub. I reorganized his whole filing-and-billing system. I cleaned the cellar and the attic and painted the spare room, started a night course in astronomy and joined a bowling league.” She made a face. “Therapy.”
She look some charts out of a drawer and reached in again and found a sealed bottle. “What do you know! Barbancourt. A liqueur rum, it says. Haiti. It’s been aboard at least twelve years.”
“Don’t mind if I do,” he said. She broke the seal, got stainless-steel cups and poured a few ounces in each. She sat opposite him on the other bunk. They smiled and clanked the cups together. A gust of March wind made the old hull of the Gay Lady creak.
She smiled and said it was fine rum, and then her eyes went strange and she said, “What’s she like?”
“Nancy? She’s a girl. Pretty, Southern-social, rich and, I suspect, very well organized. I don’t know her very well, and I have the feeling I never will.”
“It’s set for June?”
“A high noon in June. In Atlanta. One of those dynastic affairs.”
“You don’t have to look so jumpy, Boyd Robbins. I’m not going to break into tears. Golly, when I think of that three-day argument we all had. over two years ago, I almost want to laugh. Remember?”
He remembered. Jimmy and Gretchen had a thousand dollars saved. Jimmy was twenty and Gretchen was twenty-two. They wanted to get married and take off for a year in the Gay Lady, down the Waterway and across to the sunshine islands of the Caribbean. Boyd had been in favor of it. Mary Agnes had fought it. certain that if Jimmy took a year off he would never go back and get his law degree. She thought it a stupid, romantic dream and was certain Gretchen had talked Jimmy into it. After two days Boyd had slopped trying to change his wife’s mind. And then Jimmy had quit, and that meant Gretchen had to give up too.
“Now that you’re a venerable twenty-four, Gretch, would it have been such a good idea, really?”
She looked at him calmly. “I could have made him do it, you know, in spite of Mary Agnes. And I should have. Forgive me, Boyd, but it was the last chance in this world your son had to escape being a stuffed shirt.”
“Do you still love him?”
She scowled into her drink, then looked abruptly at him. “No. I’ve done a lot of thinking. I loved what he was and what I thought he could become. But he isn’t what he used to be, and he isn’t going to become what I thought he could be. Oh, he’s an adequate human being, and he’ll be a fine lawyer, I’m sure. But somewhere he stopped being the guy for me to spend my life with. Fair enough?”
“Fair enough, Gretch.”
“Do you think we should have had that year?”
He leaned back a little, out of the glow of the overhead light. “There isn’t enough magic to go around these days. I wanted you for a daughter. You kids should have had that year. You should have taken that chance.”
She propped her small, firm chin on her fist and stared at him. “Do you want to really know why Mary Agnes fought it so hard?”
“I guess because you never quite fit her image of a—”
“Boyd, it was you and me. We always got along too well, right from the very beginning, when I was a little kid coming over to play. You never patronized me. There was a lot of closeness and a lot of trust. Sometimes it was as if it was you and me against Jimmy and Mary Agnes. She knew that if I married Jimmy it would be three against one. She’s strong and clever and selfish, Boyd. I hate her!”
“Now, really—”
“Two jolts of this here fine rum. sir, and I can say some things I probably shouldn’t say, if you’ll let me. I respect you for being loyal to Mary Agnes, of course. But wouldn’t you say you are… well, a very successful man?”
“I’ve been lucky.”