The Man in the Tree (23 page)

"Ray was your husband?"
"My second. He died on Christmas Day, nineteen seventy-six. Heart attack."
"I'm sorry."
"That's all right. He was a real bastard. Speaking of Christmas," Irma
said, "we have a rule here that you don't give anybody anything made
by a machine. If you can make your own presents, Gene would like that,
or if you can't, find something that was hand made by some one person."
"I see."
Irma gave her a bright glance. "Do you? Look, if you give him something
that anybody can buy in a store, even if it costs five hundred dollars,
that's like giving him money. He wants something he hasn't got." She
lifted a heap of material from a workbasket beside her chair. "Like,
I'm making him this quilt. The damn thing is ten feet long. Pongo will
probably make him a belt or something -- he does leatherwork."
Margaret bent to examine the unfinished quilt, diamonds and stars of pale
rose, blue, white, corn yellow. "Oh, this is beautiful. But I couldn't
do anything like that."
"You never know till you try," Irma said. She stood up. "Let's go
on back -- Pongo will be wanting to make his post-office run. Are you
through for the day?"
"I guess so, there's nothing more on my desk. Oh, I forgot to look in
his out basket."
"That's all right, I did. You go on home and relax."
The next day there were paintings hanging all along the balcony wall;
Anderson was putting one up in the living room when she arrived. She
found a disk in his out-basket upstairs, and several letters marked
in his meticulous handwriting, "Tell him no." After some hesitation,
she translated this into: "Mr. Anderson has asked me to acknowledge
your letter of and to tell you how sorry he is that under
present circumstances he does not feel able to accept your interesting
proposal." She signed these letters; "Margaret W. Morrow, Secretary to
Mr. Anderson."
"I thought it would be better, more of a polite brushoff, if these came
from me," she explained at lunch. "And it's less work for you; is that
all right?"
"Fine, Maggie. A little more polite than I would have been, but okay."
Pongo served another incredible meal: lemon soup, turtle steak, shrimp
in mustard sauce, and a huge Greek salad with anchovies, black olives,
and feta cheese, all in addition to Anderson's porterhouse. Margaret
began to wonder what Pongo's dinners were like; if this kept on, she
would have to start thinking about a diet.
After lunch Anderson went back to his picture hanging, refusing Margaret's
offer of help. "You're not dressed for it," he said, "and anyhow it's a
one-man job." Margaret typed two more letters, left them in Anderson's
in-basket, tidied her desk.
On her way out she asked Irma, "Would it be all right if I walk around
outside a little before I go home7"
"Sure it would. You'd better wear a hat, though. That sun is fierce,
and you're burned already."
Margaret put on her dark glasses and went out into the glare. She got
her wide-brimmed hat from the car, then strolled up past the garage and
the storeroom. Above her the hill began, planted in ferns and flowering
shrubs. On a tree with pale bark and narrow boat-shaped leaves she saw
a brown lizard with a startling orange throat-pouch. The pouch swelled
like a balloon, disappeared; the lizard bobbed its narrow head three
times, then the pouch swelled again. It seemed to pay no attention to
her until she was almost near enough to touch it; then it whirled and
flicked out of sight around the branch.
The driveway curved off to the left and disappeared around the shoulder
of the hill. Beyond it, a winding path covered with bark mulch led
upward between waist-high shrubs. When she had climbed a few yards,
she turned for a better view of the house. It was U-shaped around the
garden, thirty feet tall except at the far end, where a sort of tower
rose another twenty feet. The roofs were all of Spanish tile, and the
house looked vaguely Spanish, with its wrought-iron balconies, except
for the modern gleam of the glass doors that opened into the living room.
She went on into the cool shadow of the trees. First they were birches
and maples, then young oaks, then pines of an unfamiliar variety, and
some other trees that she could not identify. Moss and ferns grew thickly
between the trunks; the bark-mulch was gone now and she was walking on a
narrow dirt path; she might have been in a northern forest, except that
everything was too perfect, too beautifully cared for.
Around the next bend she came upon an old man on his knees beside a
wheelbarrow full of bulbs. He had been digging with a trowel near the
trunk of a maple; he looked up alertly under the brim of his shapeless
hat. "Afternoon."
"Hello," Margaret said.
"Visiting, are you?".
"No, I'm Mr. Anderson's new secretary. Margaret Morrow."
"Glen Hoke is my name. I put in all this here." He waved the trowel
vaguely at the forest around them.
"You mean, the ferns, and flowers?"
"No, I mean the whole thing. Been working here a year. He's a crazy
man. He built this hill, you know."
"He
built
the hill?"
"Sure. There's no hill like this in Florida. Brought in crushed rock
and bulldozers, then topsoil. Must of been near ten thousand yards of
topsoil. Then trees, and all the rest of it. You know what it cost him
for this one tree?" He slapped the trunk of the maple beside him. "Seven
hundred dollars. That's one tree."
"I didn't even know you could transplant a tree that big."
"You can, if you want to pay for it. The brook over there, have you
seen that?"
"No."
"Drilled six hundred feet, put in a pump, dug a channel and lined it
with rock. There's your brook. Seems like you could build a house where
there
was
a brook."
"You don't really mean you did all this by yourself, do you, Mr. Hoke?"
"No, no." He looked impatient. "I had a whole crew in here, twenty men
at one time. I'm a contractor, but hell, he pays me enough, and I take
an interest."
"You say the brook is over that way?"
"Just follow the path. Nice meeting you, Miss."
The trail forked, and forked again; Margaret took the downhill branch
both times, and presently found herself descending into a ravine cool
with willows. She heard the brook before she saw it: it ran bright and
transparent over red stones. It was narrow enough, almost, to jump
over, but a little farther down there was a little Japanese footbridge,
sunbleached and sturdy, looking as if it had been there forever.
After another few yards she heard the water change its tone, and saw
that it fell over a miniature precipice into a thirty-foot pool, deep
enough for diving at one end. Beside the pool, in a shaded grassy place,
something white hung from a limb. When she came near enough, she saw
that it was a towel.
Chapter Nineteen
Margaret stayed in the cabin at Site O'Sea until the end of the week,
partly because she had paid in advance and partly out of a superstitious
feeling that her job was too good to last. On Friday, when Irma handed
her a check and said nothing but "Have a good weekend, honey," she began
to believe in her luck. She went househunting over the weekend and found
a furnished two-room apartment in Madeira Beach, overlooking the bay. She
also found time to shop for clothes: modest, well-tailored sundresses,
skirts and blouses in unobtrusive pale colors, several pairs of shoes
and sandals, and two linen dusters with vast pockets.
When she came to work on Monday, she knew she had been right to wear
a duster when she glanced through the open door of the library and saw
Anderson on his knees beside an open carton, pulling books out in handfuls
and looking at them. "Moldy," he said to her, holding one up to show
her the pale corruption that had spread across the cover. He brushed
his hand over it, and when he put it down, by some trick of the light,
it looked better. "The whole carton is, not worth the trouble."
"I could get something from the kitchen and wipe them off."
"Okay."
She came back with a rag and a bowl of water in which, on Irma's advice,
she had mixed a couple of tablespoons of vinegar.
"If I put these on the table," Anderson said, "could you make a list of
the titles and authors?"
"Sure." Margaret found a normal-sized chair, pulled it up to the table
and sat down. "Where have they been, to get like this?"
"In storage in Europe, some of them as long as fifteen years." He put
a stack of books on the table. "Dirty work."
"It's okay, I'm dressed for it." She held up the book she was looking
at. "This is so beautiful. Is it a book about the Tarot?"
"Not exactly. It's a novel, but the Italian edition has these tipped-in
reproductions of fifteenth-century Tarot cards. They are beautiful, aren't
they? Nobody does that kind of work in this country."
Anderson went back to the cartons, stacked more books, and finally sat
back on his haunches with a discouraged expression. After a moment she
said, "Moving is awful."
"It isn't that, but I think I've bitten off more than I can chew. I'm
no librarian; I'm going to have to hire somebody."
"To shelve the books, and catalog them? I could do that."
He turnedand gave her a skeptical look. "Do you know the Dewey Decimal
System?"
"They don't use that anymore, it's all the Library of Congress System
now. No, I don't know either one, but neither do you, so what good would
it be? What you want is a system you can understand, so you can find a
book when you want it."
"So?"
"So, novels in one place, art books in another, biography, science,
whatever. I'll put labels on the shelves, and each book will have a
sticker to show where it belongs. Books you're through with, that you
want reshelved, you can put at one end of the table and I'll take care
of them. Yes?"
"Yes, Maggie. Do it."
"And, books in foreign languages, I'll put on another part of the table
with little slips of paper in them. And you can write on each one what
kind of book it is, and then I'll know."
"Okay."
Every day, seeing Gene was almost like seeing him for the first time:
there was a shock of wrongness, as if someone had come through a
magnifying glass. His hands fascinated her; they were tanned, shapely,
unscarred, with neatly trimmed nails, and they were twelve inches long
from wrist to fingertip. Since the first day, when they shook hands,
he had not touched her. She found herself wondering what it would be like.
Gene's habits were regular. He spent his mornings in the workshop, where
he was fitting together an intricate inlaid tabletop. In the afternoon,
he read his mail and dictated replies or annotated the letters for
Margaret's attention. Most of his mail orders now were for books, some
new, some from collector's catalogs.
Every afternoon Margaret worked on cataloging the books. Gene was impatient
to get them on the shelves, but he understood that it would save time
to do the cataloging first. When she realized how long a job it was
going to be she began working straight through to dinnertime. Pongo's
dinners were even more amazing than his lunches: one day it would be
turkey mole with guacamole and corn fritters, the next coq au vin and
carrot soufflé, the next a Middle Eastern lamb and apricot stew, with
chickpeas and olive oil flavored with garlic.
The first time she went back to the library for another hour's work
after dinner, Irma gave her a curious ironic smile.
The house was even bigger than she had realized. There was a dining room,
never used so far, with a table that would seat twenty. Under the back
stairway was a room fitted out with a huge reclining chair that could
be used for haircuts or dentistry. There was a central music system with
outlets all over the house; you could play any record or tape by looking
it up in the catalog and punching in the number.
Books with slips of paper in them began to appear in Gene's out-basket.
The slips marked pages on which passages had been outlined in pencil; some
were annotated in Gene's precise tiny hand. Guessing at his intention,
Margaret typed the passages single-spaced, one to a page even if it
was short, and indented Gene's commentary. All he said was, "Maggie,
I forgot to tell you these ought to be punched for a ring binder.'
Punch them, will you, and after this use binder paper."
She could not discern any pattern in the things he was reading. Most
were popular works on science or quasi-science; evolutionary theory,
genetics, psychology, sociology, history. In one book he had written:
"Is the problem that the gene's selfishness is not enlightened?"
At the end of the second week she made a down payment on a car, a
three-year-old red Datsun. On the following Wednesday, after dinner,
when Pongo had gone back to his cottage and Anderson had disappeared
for the night, Irma said to her, "Gene thinks there's no point in your
driving back and forth every day when we've got so much room here. If
you want to move into one of the cottages, or upstairs, it's okay."
"That's incredibly generous," Margaret said. She tried not to show
what she knew: this meant that she had been accepted as a member of
the household.
"Maybe not," Irma said with a faint smile. "It probably means he'll get
more work out of you. Go upstairs if you want, look in the empty rooms
and see if you find one you like. Then I'll give you the cottage keys
and you can go back and look them over before you make up your mind."
The upstairs apartments were like Irma's, each with a sitting room,
bedroom, kitchenette, and bath. Each one was furnished in a different
style, some formal, some cozy.
In the cool evening she walked back to the cottages. There were three,
well separated and screened by hedges; the first had lighted windows, the
others were dark. She opened the door of the middle cottage and went in.
"Cottage" was a misnomer. The living room was forty feet long and had a
twenty-foot cathedral ceiling; it was luxuriously furnished, and so were
the four bedrooms, one downstairs, three up, each with its private bath.
As she walked back, the door of Pongo's cottage opened and the beam
of a flashlight hit her in the face. It dropped immediately. "Sorry,"
said Pongo's voice. "Didn't know it was you." He was in the darkness
beside the open door; she could barely make him out.