Nine Women (10 page)

“Slightly after four this morning.”

“You could put an outboard on that dinghy, you know, and save yourself a lot of trouble.”

“Ah, yes,” he said.

But of course he didn’t. None of his boats had motors. And he had a lot of them over the years, he kept changing—three or four different dinghies, a Flying Scot, an old Herreshoff. And the others: dory and pirogue. First the pirogue. He found someone who made them in the old Indian way, burning and hollowing a cypress log. He took quite a while learning to paddle that, I can tell you, and spent more time in the water than in the pirogue. Finally he got the hang of it so that he could hop in like a boy and use slow even strokes to skim lightly across the very top of the water.

He sold the pirogue and bought a beautiful little rowing dory. Rowing must have hurt his back, though, or maybe it just wasn’t as pleasurable as he thought it would be, because after a few months he no longer used it. He didn’t sell it either, just kept it at his dock. It was that pretty. And then he discovered catamarans. His first was small and yellow and white with a silly flower design on the sail; he got it from a Sears catalogue or some such place. He followed that with a battered secondhand Tornado Cat and then a brand-new eighteen-foot Hobie, one with a centerboard in each hull. “I have entered my second childhood,” he told me. “I delight in the whistling banshee sound of the rigging as I speed around like a hot-rodding teenager.”

It was only a matter of time before he decided that sailing wasn’t enough for him. He had to design and build boats too. That’s when he met Claude Roberts, who worked as a carpenter at his grandfather’s boatyard in Annandale. Old Roberts had started that yard back in the forties and they did a lot of hauling out and repairing, but they weren’t builders. Not until Claude came home from the service and got in his head that he wanted to design and build catamarans. He built just exactly two, before his money ran out. They looked like Hobies, only he’d added a kind of little low cabin and called them cruising overnighters. Of course nobody wanted to sleep in such tight little holes, and the catamarans stayed on the beach, only occasionally renting out by the day. That was the end of Claude’s career as a naval architect, until Dr. Hollisher came along.

He rented one of the vacant sheds at the boatyard and he and Claude began work on their boat.

After that Dr. Hollisher couldn’t seem to think of anything else. Books and plans and blueprints—he’d leave them all around the house, tossed in a corner when he’d decided they weren’t what he needed. He didn’t seem to care about neatness any more. Each day the mail would bring him more books and more papers. He set up a draftsman’s table in his living room so that he could work comfortably at night.

And he just forgot about everything else. He never looked at his camellias, even though he’d spent years on some of the hybridizing attempts. (I tried to keep some of them; I was curious, you know. I got only one bloom and that was pretty ordinary looking.) I don’t think he even set foot in the study where he kept his chessboards. Once I moved all the pieces around, just to see if he’d notice; he didn’t. And he never touched his radio any more. He even stopped complaining about the antenna. Matter of fact, Belters Electronics was so surprised by his silence that they telephoned one day to see if the thing was working properly at last. Dr. Hollisher still had his card-playing evenings, but you could see that his heart wasn’t in it. Occasionally he even forgot to call the caterer about the food for his bridge group, and I had to buy cheese and sausage trays from the grocery, frozen brownies and the like. “Get whatever white wine they have,” he said. “We seem to be running low.” If they only had Gallo Sauterne, he didn’t care. Not any more.

The only important thing was that boat. He had me change my hours and come at eight o’clock so he could get an early start. (He had to wait for me. All the years I’d been there I’d never had a key to the house.) And every morning he’d be waiting for me, walking impatiently up and down. He couldn’t even wait long enough to tell me what to do that day; he’d write it out and leave it on the kitchen counter. Sometimes when they worked late, Claude would spend the night, and then I’d have two of them pacing up and down, staring at their watches if I was so much as five minutes late.

Well, after a year or so of that kind of work they finally launched their boat. It was a weird-looking thing, a kind of lopsided catamaran, with hulls of uneven sizes, one little, one big. On the side in large letters they’d painted the name
PROA,
I suppose so people would stop asking what it was, and maybe stop making jokes about the mismatched hulls.
PROA I
, it said, as if they were expecting it to be the first of many.

Like I said, it was a strange-looking boat. The fiberglass hulls were finished so roughly that the whole thing looked fuzzy and out of focus, a bit like a sweater that had started to pill. And the thing didn’t sail, at least not very well it didn’t. I forget the details, but something was wrong with the steering and with the rigging, and the boat kept capsizing. They worked on it, hard, month after month. They moved the mast and then they shortened it; they changed the rigging and they got a different cut of sail. Nothing helped, nothing worked.

Finally Dr. Hollisher brought it to his pier and anchored it there. Every time I looked out the window I’d see it, and every time I did, I’d think: stray kitten. That’s exactly what it looked like. You know how sometimes a stray cat will come to you and have her kittens at the front steps, all dead but one and that one sick and misformed and sure to die in a day or so.… That’s what the
PROA
looked like.

Claude went back to his old job as carpenter at the yard; he did come every weekend to tinker with the boat (though they didn’t try to sail it any more) and take new measurements and draw new plans. Because Dr. Hollisher was planning another boat. There was a file rack on the living room coffee table; the folder headings said Hull Dynamics, Rigging Stress, Function Variables, and things like that. The planning went slowly and finally just about stopped. Claude still came over every weekend, but now he amused himself rowing Dr. Hollisher’s little dory up and down the coast, having a wonderful time with it. As for Dr. Hollisher, he went back to his fishing. He still had quite a lot of gear neatly packed away from years before, but none of that would do. He insisted on beginning all over again, with new equipment. He started this time with half a dozen books on fly-fishing and surf casting. He even bought a copy of
The Compleat Angler,
but he didn’t finish it. I guess it wasn’t practical enough for him. He joined some sort of club and went on a fishing vacation in eastern Canada. When he came back, he took down all his chessboards and set up a long neat workbench. With the help of a book or two, he began tying his own flies. And he spent hours of every day practicing his cast. Over and over, making notes about the equipment and his progress. He was always very thorough.

The time came when I had to tell him I would be leaving. I hated to do it. I knew just how upset he would be. At first you could see that he didn’t believe me, then he looked shocked, and finally angry.

“Why? Is it a question of money? Am I so difficult?”

“No,” I told him, “I’m going to get married.”

“You are going to do what?”

“I am going to be married in November.”

“What does this gentleman do—or what did he do?”

It was my turn to be surprised. Dr. Hollisher had never been curious about anything before.

“He’s a retired electrical engineer, his name is Alfred Morton, and he spends the winter at the Riviera Hotel. I’ve known him for four years.”

“You are in no hurry to marry? At your age how much time is there left?”

“Quite enough.”

He seemed puzzled by the sharpness of my tone; he frowned and hesitated. I was annoyed at myself; he was a very eccentric man but he certainly didn’t mean any harm. Trying to be polite, I said, “I met Alfred when he backed into the side of my car at the Sungate Shopping Mall. He lent me his car while mine was being fixed.”

“I met my wife in a hospital emergency room,” Dr. Hollisher said abruptly. “Her father had just died in a car accident.”

I didn’t know whether to congratulate him on the marriage or commiserate with him on the funeral. So I didn’t say anything. After all, I remembered, the marriage had died too.

As things turned out, I was able to find a wonderful housekeeper for him: Enid Waterson, her husband had a navy disability pension so she needed extra money and Dr. Hollisher paid very well. I went with her the first few times, to show her exactly how things were done, so that there wouldn’t be the slightest change to upset him.

I got married. My children were there and Alfred’s and all the grandchildren, every one.

Truth is, I’d never liked living alone, I was used to having a man to take care of. Alfred and I got on very well together, our new life seemed to suit both of us. We visited his daughter in Chicago for a month or so in May, then we’d take a long summer vacation somewhere, and by September we’d be back here in my house for the winter. I’d see Enid Waterson at church now and then, and she’d tell me how fine everything was with Dr. Hollisher. And occasionally, more often than I would have expected, I’d see Dr. Hollisher himself—most often in the Sungate Mall, where I’d met Alfred. (We always parked in the exact same spot: a silly old people’s joke.) Sometimes Dr. Hollisher would see me and wave, and sometimes he’d be walking along, so busy he wouldn’t see me at all. Once I saw him looking at the cars in the Ford dealer’s lot and once I saw him coming out of the Main Street Bank, which wasn’t the bank where he had his account. And once Alfred and I saw him at a movie. I was just getting up to say hello to him when the lights went off and the film started. When it was over, he was gone. He hadn’t stayed for the whole show.

I didn’t think of him very much. I was busy. We always seemed to have company coming, people who needed to be fed and entertained.

That last April morning was sunny and beautiful; the first magnolias were blooming, the ones at the very top of the trees. I’d just invited Alfred’s youngest daughter to spend the weekend—she’d been visiting her child in college in Florida—and I was wondering what to have for dinner. I’d begun my shopping list when Enid Waterson knocked on the kitchen door. What should she do? she asked. Dr. Hollisher didn’t answer his bell, the door was locked and she couldn’t get in. (Like me she didn’t have a key.) Should she call the police? I said: No, I’ll go back with you. So off we went, leaving a note for Alfred, who was just around the corner helping one of the neighbors with plans for a swimming pool.

The back door was locked, just like Enid said. So we walked around the house and there was the front door standing wide open. We tiptoed in carefully, not knowing what to expect. And found nothing at all.

The lights were still on. A book called
Maigret Takes a Vacation
was face down on the coffee table, like he’d just put it there. Next to it, a highball, ice melted and overflowing the coaster to stain the wood. And a chicken sandwich, untouched, the neatly trimmed white bread beginning to dry and shrivel at the edges.

I called the police. They looked for signs of forcible entry or violence, or other evidence left by the perpetrators, so they said. There wasn’t any. There wasn’t anything missing, not the expensive electronic equipment, not his car, not anything.

After the first excitement, the police seemed to lose interest. Maybe he went off visiting, they said, doesn’t he have a family? Yes, I said, a daughter. Well now, they told me, he’s just taken it into his head to go see her. Call her if you’re worried about him.

But how could I? I only knew that her name was Judy.

I took Dr. Hollisher’s address book and called every number in it, starting with his card-playing friends. None of them had seen him since their last game, and they didn’t know he had a daughter, he’d never mentioned her. After that I called all the business numbers, the plumber, the electrician, the man who’d repaired the roof last month, the painters, Belters Electronics, hoping he’d said something to them. He hadn’t. I called his travel agent, who told me that in just a little over a month Dr. Hollisher was scheduled to go fishing in Colorado. I called the registrars of the three schools he’d attended over the years; I called two professors: one had moved away and the other only remembered something about hybridizing camellias years ago. I called old Mr. Roberts at the Annandale Shipyards; he hadn’t seen Dr. Hollisher for months. Young Claude wasn’t even there; he’d taken a seasonal job at a Carolina coast resort, they thought.

There was nothing else we could do. I found an extra key (it was neatly labeled in a box in his desk), and Enid and I locked the door behind us.

I went about my business, doing the shopping for dinner. All the same I felt restless and out of sorts: something was wrong, I knew it and I couldn’t think of it.

It wasn’t until late afternoon that I got my thoughts in order and remembered that something was missing at Dr. Hollisher’s house. I closed my eyes to make the picture clearer: I was standing on Dr. Hollisher’s front porch, looking off across the bay. I could see the stretch of clipped green St. Augustine grass sloping down to the whitish-yellow sand and beyond it the little pier like thin black lines drawn on the grayish blue water. The misshapen
PROA
was there, wallowing uncertainly in the small swells. The dory was gone.

Alfred came with me this time, and we walked all around the house, searching carefully. As if a dory could be hidden behind an azalea bush. Eventually we found ourselves standing at the very end of the pier, staring down at the water. It was full of seaweed; the reddish air bladders decorated the surface like faded Christmas holly.

“Well,” Alfred said, “that’s where he went. With the dory.” So I called the police again and the Coast Guard and told them that Dr. Hollisher and his boat were both missing.

A week or so later they found the dory; a charter fishing boat brought it in. It was five or six miles offshore and far to the west, the way the currents ran. They never found Dr. Hollisher.