John D MacDonald

An Island of Her Own

I was drowsing a hundred yards off the Boca Grande beach when I heard a female halloo above the gentle surf sound. I rolled off my back and squinted through the hot November sunlight. I didn’t recognize the girl on the beach until I saw the old red pickup parked next to my jeep, and then I knew it was Mary Dawes, so I swam in with more eagerness than I was willing to let her see.

She is one of those rangy redheads with a lot of drive and independence. She owns a swampy little twenty-acre island down in Pine Island Sound, with an ancient cottage on it and a slightly less elderly guest cottage. When her grandfather’s estate was divided among a whole platoon of heirs, she got the island. It has a good artesian well on it, but there’s no phone and no electricity, so it is more primitive than most people will put up with.

Mary is a junior partner in a New York industrial-design firm specializing in consumer packaging. It is a high-pressure operation and she is supposed to be good at it. A couple or three times a year she comes down to the island, where she can work without any interruption.

She stood with a poised impatience on the beach.

“Barney, do you have a charter tomorrow?” she demanded anxiously.

“Not until Friday, and even that seems too soon.”

“Well, you’ll have to figure out some kind of rate. My sister was coming down and she can’t make it. She collects hopeless idiots and they sponge off her shamefully, and she’s sending one down because his nerves are supposed to be unraveling, and I didn’t phone her in time to fend him off. Darn Liz anyway!”

“What’s this got to do with me, Mary?”

“He arrives today, in an hour. I brought the Beastie in early to get the motor fixed. It won’t be ready until tomorrow. So I wonder if you could...”

“Why the big buildup to ask me to run you out to the island? No charge for that.”

“I want you to stay over. I don’t want to be there alone with one of Liz’s wounded ducks.”

“What about Maudie?”

She looked at me with exasperation. “If Maudie were going to be there, I wouldn’t need you, would I? She had to go up to Naples three days ago to help her kid sister, who is having a baby. She’ll be back tomorrow afternoon.”

Maudie lives on an island near Mary’s. She looks a little bit like Tony Galento in his prime, but with longer hair. She checks on Mary’s place when Mary is away, and when Mary is in residence she lives on the island and does the cooking and cleaning.

“If I can decide right off he’s harmless, you won’t have to stay over, Barney. But I want to be ready in case he looks susceptible to tropical passion.”

“I thought you could handle anybody, girl.”

“Well, you were easy, Barney. But you don’t know Liz’s friends.”

I told her I was at her service and the fee would be payable in food, drink and conversation. It would work out fine. I could bring her back to the mainland the following afternoon in my Baylady II, and by then her Beastie would be running right and Maudie would be back from Naples and ready to return to the island. In a watery world you learn to kill nine birds per stone or you waste a lot of gas.

She went on back to the bar at the Pink Elephant, where she would meet the stranger, and I went aboard my Baylady and got dressed. Then I walked to the Pink Elephant, where I found Mary Dawes waiting alone at a table. As I sat down across from her she gave me a weary smile.

“I wouldn’t mind so much if I didn’t have such a lot of work piled up, Barney,” she said.

“I used to be full of guilt and anxiety too, honey.”

“Don’t be so smug!”

“Good old Five Hundred Fifth Avenue. Good old commuters’ train to Larchmont.”

She scowled at me in a questioning way. “Was there some sort of last straw that did it? You’ve never told me.”

“After Jeanie decided she’d been married long enough and took off. I put the house on the market. One evening a guy came to the door — I thought maybe he was a buyer. Instead he wanted to sell me a cemetery plot. I suddenly realized that somebody actually believed my ultimate destiny was a hole in the ground in Larchmont, and I had no good reason that he shouldn’t think so. So I took off for Florida the day I closed the deal on the house.”

“How about a hole in the ground in Boca Grande?”

“It’s just as final, but somehow it isn’t as distressing. And at least I’ll have a better tan.”

“How is it going, really?”

“If you mean money, I’ve actually got some in the bank, much to my astonishment. If you mean all the other aspects of it, I have a healed ulcer, enough muscles to gaff a green tarpon, an unclouded mind and a restful disposition.”

“No yen to set the world on fire?”

“I tried that, honey. With damp matches in a high wind.” I reached over and touched her lightly between the eyebrows with an index finger. “Last year those two up-and-down lines hardly showed at all.”

“Erosion, dear. I’m not exactly sub-deb, you know.” She glared toward the doorway. “Where is that idiot?”

“What does he look like? What does he do?”

“I have no idea.”

“What’s his name?”

“It was a bad connection. We were screaming at each other. But he’ll be looking for me, and you aren’t exactly foundering in tourists around here. If I know Liz, he’ll be terribly creative, vastly neurotic and totally unable to cope with a cruel, indifferent world.”

Just as she finished speaking an enormous man came in out of the sunlight. He wore a dark city suit and carried a topcoat and an aluminum suitcase. He looked young, benign and fat. He stared around vaguely and moved toward the bar.

“Go herd him this way, please, Barney,” Mary Dawes said.

I crossed the room and approached him. At close range he was not young, not benign and not fat — just extremely large. His blond brush cut was salted with gray. His eyes were cold, ceramic blue.

“Have a nice trip down from New York?” I asked merrily.

“Hardly,” he said. “Who are you?”

“Barney Wescott. Friend of Miss Dawes. She’s right over there.”

He nodded at me and repeated my name in a way that made it sound as if he had printed it on a card, slapped the card into a file and slammed the drawer.

“I didn’t catch your name,” I said.

I am sizable, but he looked down at me — with distaste and incredulity. “Stonebarger,” he snapped. “The architect.”

He followed me to the table and I introduced him to Mary. He did not acknowledge the introduction until he had placed his suitcase on an empty chair and put his folded topcoat over it. Then he gave her an abrupt nod, sat, turned to me and said, “Club soda, one cube, juice of half a fresh lemon, thank you.”

“Do you have a first name?” Mary asked owlishly. “We’re quite informal here.”

“Are you? I suppose you would be, at that, Morgan.”

“I may call you Morgan?” she asked, feigning anxiety.

“If it pleases you, my dear.”

“And how is Liz?”

“I despise that particular contraction. Miss Dawes. Elizabeth is in good health. She keeps very busy.”

“I’ve noticed that,” Mary said.

Morgan Stonebarger turned his massive head and looked at me without expression. “I’m really quite thirsty, Wescott, if you don’t mind.”

I broke out of my trance state and got him what he wanted. As I brought it back to the table Mary was saying: “...really very primitive on the island.”

“I did not know there were any existing structures.”

“Did you think I slept in a tree?” Mary said.

“Inasmuch as I didn’t know anyone lived on the island, Miss Dawes, I’d formed no opinions about where and how you might sleep. I shall be happy to stay on the island.”

“Thanks a lot!”

“You’re quite welcome, my dear.”

“We can leave anytime you’re ready,” Mary said, visibly calming herself.

“Are there just the two of you?” he asked.

“The mayor had other plans,” she said tartly, “and the brass band has disbanded.”

“There’s really no need for sarcasm,” he said quietly. “Actually, I prefer it this way.” He banged his empty glass down and stood up. “Let s be off, then.” He was almost at the door before we could get to our feet.

“The next time I get my hands on that sister of mine...” Mary muttered.

“I’d better stay over, don’t you think?”

“To keep me from killing him, if nothing else.”

Aboard the Baylady, Morgan Stonebarger settled himself in one of the fishing chairs immediately. Mary helped me cast off. He said, “Are you a charter fisherman, Wescott?”

“That’s right.”

“Before I go back I’ll take a day with you.”

“Sixty a day.”

He gave me a cold smile. “My dear fellow, if I were concerned about the rate, I would have asked about it.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Stonebarger, sir.”

“Both of you seem to have a talent for sarcasm,” he said, and swiveled the chair and sat looking out over the transom, presenting us with a huge expanse of excellently tailored back.

Mary came and stood close beside me at the wheel. “Stay alert,”’ she murmured. “The hack of your neck is so-o-o red, sweetie.”

“If I had five or six men here to hold him, I’d walk right up to him and I’d—”

“Uh-huh. This is as weird as Liz has ever got, bless her.”

“Cheer up, woman,” I said.

We were out of the inlet, rounding the entrance marker. I shoved the throttles up and my Baylady came sweetly alert, quartering across the choppy water of Charlotte Harbor. Mary swayed against me accidentally with the change in motion, and I took my right hand off the wheel and with an elaborate casualness put my arm around her waist. I thought for a little while she might endure an intimacy so harmless, but I soon felt the tensions and restraint build up. She moved away and I put both hands hack on the wheel.

There was a shared scene in our past and it always came between us. It happened two years ago. She was nearing the end of a two-month stay at her island, and between charters I’d used up all her time that she’d let me have. One day we took a sailboat out into the Gulf and beached it at high noon on La Costa Island. We swam, ate our sandwiches, sprawled on the sand. We kissed with increasing enthusiasm until she broke it up very abruptly, her eyes wide and startled.

“Why?” I demanded. That is ever the forlorn question of the spurned male. “Why, honey?”

“Because you are a sweet guy, Barney, a very simpático and amusing guy, and as I have just learned, a very exciting guy.”

“You’re reading the wrong lines. Those are mine.”

“And because I am not a random girl with random habits. I am a for-keeps girl, and it just isn’t in the cards.”

“Shuffle and deal again. Maybe it is.”

“No, Barney. I work at something I’m good at. I like to be good at things. I wouldn’t be good at all at being a wife. Everything I heat sticks to the pan. Children terrify me. And anyhow. I’d either have to drag you North or he a dead weight on you down here. So we stop right now, before we’ve done any kind of damage to anybody.”

“But—”

“We’ll be friends, the way we have been.”

“That isn’t exactly what I had in mind, miss.”

“That nice breeze is getting a little sickly, Captain. Let’s get hack while we can.”

Once the two of you have played that familiar scene, it leaves you in a kind of emotional limbo. You can’t get back to where you were and there’s no place else to go. In the two years since it happened I’ve found no one I could classify as a reasonably adequate facsimile, nobody with eyes so blue.

Some fifteen minutes later Mary’s little island began to emerge from the larger islands beyond it. As I slowed for her private channel marker Stonebarger came forward to stand behind me.

“This is it?” he asked with a flavor of incredulity.

“Your home away from home, Morgan,” she said.

“I was expecting something much larger.”

“We’ll get the dredges and drag lines working first thing in the morning,” Mary told him.

He looked at her with a ponderous vacuity. “Ho, ho,” he said. “More sarcasm. Slow it down, Wescott. I want to get a longer look at it from this angle. First impressions are important. Where’s the tide right now?”

“An hour off full, on the ebb,” I told him.

“Then those flats over there could he filled cheaply, I suppose.”

Mary stared at the flats and then turned and stared at him. “Nifty place for howling alleys,” she said.

“Ho, ho,” he replied with a certain dutifulness. “Is there high ground over there?”

“Indian mounds,” she said.

“Can I get back in there easily?”

“Not easily, but if you want to, you can make it. The bugs are fierce, though.”

“Um,” he said absently, staring with great intensity. “Okay, Wescott. You may take her in now.”

I hacked the Baylady into the covered slip where the ancient Beastie was usually moored. Stonebarger bounded up onto the dock. While Mary and I were making the lines fast, the scout mosquitoes whistled a billion of their compadres out of the swamps. We made a run for the house, prancing and slapping ourselves.

When we were inside. Stonebarger asked, “Will I be staying here?”

“No,” said Mary. “I will he staying here. And Barney will he staying here, on that couch. And you will he staying over in the cabin. It’s all ready for you. But I’d better come over with you and show you how to work the hot-water thing and the lamps.”

“If there’s anything beyond my ability, I’ll ask for help, Dawes.”

She stared at him. “Dawes?”

“Excuse me. I forgot your local custom, Mary. Is that more suitable, my dear?”

“Just who do you think—”

But he ignored her because he had spotted her work area in a large alcove off the living room. Still carrying his suitcase and topcoat, he walked by her and went to the big tilted drafting table. We both followed him. He looked at the nearly completed drawing pinned to the hoard. He turned and smiled at Mary Dawes. I had the curious feeling he was actually looking at her for the first time.

“A hobby, Mary?” he asked. “Or isn’t it yours?”

Her throat worked visibly as she swallowed. “It’s mine. A poor thing, but mine own. I prefer it to knitting.”

He looked at it again and put his coat and suitcase down. “Container for what?”

“A new hand lotion. Expensive.”

“The draftsmanship is fairly good,” he said, “but the conception is tasteless. It’s a fraudulent version of decent classic proportions. We call it Supermarket Moderne.”

“What?” she said. She looked stunned. “Who are you to— Listen, the market research behind that design is—”

“It will sell,” he said. “Of course it will sell. There is almost no limit to the ability of the American public to absorb contrived bad taste. But the true area of integrity in design is to create something that is clean and beautiful and also salable.” He looked around at her working sketches of other projects, taped to the alcove walls. “But you do not have that kind of talent, my dear. And don’t be upset. Few do.”

In a strangled, deadly voice Mary said, “There is just one little thing you don’t know, Stonebulger. I happen to be—”

“For example,” he said. His huge paw dipped into a box of drawing materials and then moved so quickly to the drawing on her table that I did not see that he had selected a fat stub of charcoal. There was nothing tentative about his approach or hesitant about the lines he drew. You can never fail to recognize the peak of professional excellence when you see it, whether it is displayed by a diver, a skier, a shortstop or a mountainous man making marks on a piece of paper. “We eliminate this rather horrid and pointless bulge, balance this line, widen the base and at the same time give it more of a look of grace and delicacy...”

Mary Dawes made a weak, hollow sound. She was trembling. She reached to stop him, but he had moved over to the wall. He went from one sketch to the next, making his dark, firm, flowing lines without the slightest hesitation, talking softly about what he was doing, why he was doing it. Then he tossed the remaining fragment of charcoal into the box, wiped his fingertips on a rag, smiled and nodded at Mary and said, “Now you’ll have good starting places, my dear. Just restrain yourself from adding little vulgarities. But when you attempt to market these, I must ask you not to trade on my name — which is Stonebarger, by the way, not Stonebulger.”

“You idiot!” she yelled. “You... you egomaniac!” She braced for a major effort and cried. “Get out of here!”

He looked startled. He picked up his suitcase and topcoat and beckoned to me. I followed him out onto the porch.

“I believe I’ve actually upset her,” he said. “Maybe when she quiets down you might let her know that I would charge ten thousand dollars to a commercial enterprise for that amount of consultant design service.”

“I’m sure that will straighten her right out,” I told him.

He stared at me. “You people have a curious attitude down here. I have some work with me, so please bring my dinner over whenever it’s convenient. Nothing fried, please. And no potatoes in any form. For breakfast I’ll want juice, a three-minute egg, three strips of crisp bacon, two slices of buttered toast and a pot of coffee. And if you’ll get your dinghy in the water in the morning, I’d like you to take me on a circuit of the island right after breakfast.”

“You would? Gee, I hope you give me time to rig a canopy and chill the wine.”

He stared at me. “You people really have a most unusual sense of humor. It’s more difficult for me than it would be for most people, I imagine — I’ve been told that I have no sense of humor at all. Perhaps that is correct. So you will just have to be patient if I fail to laugh in the right places.” He walked off toward the small cabin.

When I went back into the living room Mary was staring at her drafting table. I walked over and stood beside her.

“No fried foods,” I said. “No potatoes in any form. And he wants it brought to him.”

“What?” She looked at me in a confused way and I saw tears running down her face. I started to repeat it all, but she wheeled, ran to her bedroom and slammed the door behind her.

In a little while I lighted the kerosene lamps. I went and tapped on her door and she told me to go away. I sat and read a magazine. I ran down through the mosquitoes and checked the lines on the boat, grabbed my toilet articles and ran back. I tapped on her door again. Same result.

Before I became too weak I foraged in the kitchen and cooked enough dinner for four. I ran two portions over to the cabin. Morgan Stonebarger sat in a white robe at a table covered with some sort of work sheets, his back to the door.

He moved the papers and made room for the tray. “Ah, thank you, Wescott. Is Dawes all right now?”

“Dawes is fine. Every once in a while she bangs her head on the wall and mentions her sister. Otherwise she’s feeling pretty chipper.”

He nodded at me. “Good night, Wescott.”

I galloped moodily back through the mosquitoes. I found Mary sitting on the living-room floor in a welter of ancient magazines. As I came in she thrust one toward me. Her face was tragic. “Read it.”

I sat and turned the page toward one of the lamps. It was the beginning of a big, glowing article entitled “The Genius of Morgan Stonebarger.” I learned he was ten years older than my maximum estimate. And I looked at some startling color plates of his work — two United States embassies in far places, a resort hotel in Puerto Rico, office buildings in Dallas and Montevideo, a church in Genoa, an auditorium in Atlanta.

“Yes, indeed,” I said.

“He‘s a great man,” Mary said in an awed voice.

“He won’t eat fried foods.”

“And the poor, poor darling has slipped a ratchet. Liz knew he had to get away. But she could have told me, couldn’t she? Don’t you understand it all, Barney?”

“Understand what?”

“He’s always been so dreadfully important, he just can’t adjust to being — incompetent. He has this persistent delusion he’s still working. He has to act as if he’s here to work instead of rest, because it’s a sort of defense mechanism for him. It saves his pride.”

“So I have to save his pride tomorrow morning by rowing him all over creation in my dinghy?”

“If that’s what he wants, Barney, that’s what you do.”

I reheated our dinner and she said it was fine. She ate like a wolf. She told me that crying always made her ravenous. It made me feel dizzy with pleasure and pride to be able to please her in any small way. I wanted to make a career out of pleasing this woman.

After we finished cleaning up, she took a lamp back to her work alcove and stood silent, looking at what he had done.

“But he’s right,” she said in a small, lost voice. “So right. Barney, I have all the willingness and all the diligence in the world. But I don’t have a single crumb of real talent. I’ve been kidding myself for years. I’m — meager, Barney. And vulgar and pretentious and—” she turned toward me, her fine face all squinched — “and so darned self-important!” she howled, and fell into my arms.

I held her and soothed her and patted her and thought up fifty ways of telling her that she was superb on all counts and Stonebarger was in no condition to judge anybody’s work. Yet I had the sinking feeling a man gets when he hears himself talking himself out of a promotion and can’t stop.

When she had finally let me talk her out of it, I felt cheated. She became practically festive. We sat on the couch where I would sleep. “The poor, dear genius,” she said. “I didn’t know Liz knew any really impressive people.”

I tried to express something that had been bothering me. “Mary, honey, a guy like this Stonebarger — wouldn’t he be sort of an industry in himself?”

“What do you mean?”

“He’d be a fine living to a whole battalion of people, wouldn’t he? So if he happened to get a little — confused, say, wouldn’t they be getting him the world’s finest and fastest treatment? Would they let him come stumbling down here alone? Would they let him get mixed up with your sister?”

“What’s wrong with my sister?”

“Now, don’t get irritable. If I’ve heard you say it once, I’ve heard you say it forty times. Your sister lives in a welter of spongers, nuts and artistic phonies.”

“Are you trying to tell me Liz couldn’t become a friend of a man like Morgan Stonebarger?”

“He doesn’t seem to try to win friends, Mary. Anyway, skip it. Tomorrow I’ll take him his breakfast, row him all over Pine Island Sound and salute him.”

And row him I did. He brought along a sketch pad and a notebook. We were sitting only three feet apart, but he gave the orders with hand signals — right, left, keep going, stop.

It was nearly noon when he finally said, “Let’s go back in, Wescott.” I headed hack, favoring a new blister. “Quite a challenge,” he said. “Dreary little button of an island. Merge structure into environment when you have something dramatic to start with, and ignore it when you don’t. So I’ll just think of it as a platform.”

“Like a launching site, huh?”

“I’m thinking aloud, Wescott, not trying to elicit moronic comments.”

“Excuse me, indeed.”

“This afternoon, Wescott, we’ll be on foot. I’ll need your help in some measurements.”

“This afternoon, Stonebarger, you’ll be on foot.”

His neck grew visibly, from an estimated size eighteen to a twenty, but his voice became very soft. “I said I’ll need you, Wescott. All afternoon.”

“But I have to go back to—”

“I’ll need you.”

“Uh... okay.”

Mary was on the dock to meet us, her splendid legs agleam with insect repellent. “Have a happy morning, boys?” she sang out.

“Comfy,” I said with a certain moroseness.

“Tomorrow,” Stonebarger said, “I shall want the best botanist in the area. And I also want to talk to someone of reasonable intelligence who has spent his entire life on one of the islands in this area. I could also use a competent geologist, but that can come later. I want the first two here in the morning, as early as possible.”

“Of course you do,” Mary said soothingly, with a fond, warm smile.

I looked north toward the main channel and saw the distinctive how wave that only a big Huckins will make when it is at top cruising speed, really up and out and flying. A moment later I recognized it as being the Browdon cruiser, usually docked at Browdon Island, down below Captiva Pass.

She tilted around Mary’s channel marker, lugged down until she turned into a displacement hull and came burbling cautiously toward us. I hadn’t known any of the Browdons were down as yet, and I didn’t know any of them knew Mary.

She came in. I caught a line and made it fast. The hired captain. Albert Something-or-other, swung the stern in. The first onto the dock was the nervous little caretaker of Browdon Island, Mr. Weech. I’d seen him around Boca. He came trotting directly toward Stonebarger and stopped a cautious six feet away, wringing his hands. “Mr. Stonebarger!” he said. “Heavens, Mr. Stonebarger. I’ve been nearly out of my mind!” Several other men had climbed off the cruiser. They all were of that familiar breed of young accountants and young lawyers who act stark naked if they aren’t within a hundred feet of a city cab. They looked as if their sports shirts still had the pins in them.

“Who are you?” Stonebarger demanded.

“Mr. Weech! Mr. Weech! I was supposed to be there to meet you. We were late getting to the airport. You were gone. Dear heaven, I’ve been so upset. How did you get to Boca Grande?”

“I took a taxi, you idiot!”

“Exactly what is going on here?” Mary demanded in a loud, clear voice.

Weech spun around. “Oh, the Browdon family and some other people have bought Kimbrough Key — a lovely island, just lovely, utterly wild and deserted — and the famous Mr. Morgan Stonebarger has been commissioned to design a five-million-dollar resort project on it. He’s down here for his first look at it, for preliminary thinking, and we... we lost track of him. I couldn’t imagine what had happened until somebody said they saw—”

“Shut up, Weech,” Stonebarger said, with such a weary emphasis that all of us stood very still in the midday sun. Stonebarger took a long look at Mary’s island. “I despise childish jokes,” he said to her. “You could have told me this is not called Kimbrough Key.”

“You didn’t ask,” Mary said. She lifted her chin. “You are an arrogant fathead, Mr. Stonebarger. There was no joke.”

Weech moaned faintly. Stonebarger looked at Mary in a troubled way. “Just who are you, Miss Dawes?”

“I own this island. I’m a partner in a firm of industrial designers in New York. My sister was sending a friend down — I didn’t catch the name. I was supposed to meet him at the Pink Elephant. I... I even asked you about Liz. Remember? You claimed you knew her.”

“I know no one named Liz, believe me. My wife’s name is Elizabeth.”

“Just like it said in that article you showed me, Mary,” I said.

Stonebarger was not satisfied. “But why, Miss Dawes, why would you let me go through the motions of preliminary planning if you thought I was just a guest? I was told that the Browdon service staff and some people from their St. Louis office would be here to help me. Why did you let me make a fool of myself?”

“My sister’s friends are — quite unusual. That’s why I asked Barney to stay over, because you seemed like some kind of a nut.”

He swiveled his big head and peered at me. “You rowed me around for hours,” he said accusingly.

“I was humoring you.”

He snorted and went plunging off to the cabin.

Weech clapped his hands and said, “Run, Charlie! Run after Mr. Stonebarger and carry his things back down here for him.” Charlie took off like the favored greyhound in the daily double. “My word!” Mr. Weech said, “he’s masterful, isn’t he?” There was a trace of incipient hero worship in his voice.

“That’s one way of putting it,” Mary said.

Morgan Stonebarger came striding back down to the dock, Charlie a burdened and dutiful six feet behind him.

“Are we off?” Mr. Weech asked pertly.

“When I’m ready,” the great architect said.

He took my upper arm in one giant hand and Mary’s in the other and led us away from the others. He stopped, released us and said, “I was very rude about your work, Miss Dawes.”

“Maybe it was the kind of truth that—”

“I am a very rude man. I have consciously practiced rudeness for years. I have a lot of work to do in whatever time is left to me. I think it is important work. I think it is more important than sweet forbearance, which merely encourages people to waste your time with their nonsense. When they waste my time, they waste pieces of my life. So I have no time to be apologetic to you, Miss Dawes. Nor do I care to be so dishonest as to leave doubts in your mind. Your work is pedestrian. That is an expert opinion.”

“What gives you the right to—”

“But up until now you haven’t known it’s rather dull work, which is greatly in your favor. Self-deception is better than cynicism. Your commercial success is not satisfying to you.”

“Now, just a minute!”

He turned to me. “Is a one-day charter still possible, Barney?”

“While I was doing all that rowing, it went up to a hundred bucks, friend.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “I’ll let you know.” He grabbed my hand and chipped flakes off every knucklebone. “Bring your Miss Dawes along with us, Barney, and we’ll discuss art, life, purpose, destiny and — rude architects.”

We watched from the dock as the big cruiser swung south and disappeared beyond the fringe of Mary’s island. Stonebarger didn’t wave. He wasn’t the waving kind.

Mary frowned at me, reached out and squashed a mosquito against my forehead and said, “Is he one of the good guys or one of the bad guys?”

“He hasn’t had a chance to be either one. He’s one of the busy guys.” I smiled at her. “And you notice how bright he is, calling you my Miss Dawes?”

“Don’t get carried away.”

After a pickup lunch we went to Boca in the Baylady. Each time I glanced at Mary she looked better to me. She seemed broody. I spent a lot of time devising subtle plots. Good old Stonebarger had started a little constructive erosion. I could play it very cool, very safe, move very slowly. Sooner or later I’d get my chance to sell her my plan. I knew it would work. We’d live on the island full time. I’d work my charter-boat business out of there. I’d put up some more cottages. Maudie would be on hand full time. I’d work a package deal for the most dedicated fishermen, those who would go for the rustic, primitive island life. There would come the right moment and the right place, and I’d handle it just right this time.

Liz’s friend was in Boca, feeling rejected. He was a sad, sallow little man with a half bushel of lank hair, a battered violin case and a concerto half written. Questioning revealed that it had been half written as long ago as 1952. Maudie was back from Naples and ready to leave for the island. Even the Beastie was ready, her motor repaired.

I walked to dockside with them and helped stow the groceries aboard. Maudie was the most animated of the four of us. The violinist was sullen and my Mary had been growing ever more somber throughout the afternoon. For my part I was quietly, pleasantly thoughtful. I was making plans.

They went aboard. I was waiting to cast off the stern lines when Mary gave the word. She stood at the wheel with her back to me, but she did not start the Beastie s antique power plant. She turned and came back to the stern and stepped ashore.

I do not know what this next incident proves, unless it’s that the only thing you can count on is luck, or that nobody ever gets to know anybody else except in the most tentative way.

Mary tilted her head to one side, put her hands on my shoulders and looked into my eyes. I have never seen her eyes so blue. “If you’re ready, I’m ready, Wescott.”

“I... it... it can work out fine, Mary. I know just how we can—”

“Details, details,” she murmured, and her eyes and her mouth looked sleepy. “Make the deal. Draw the contract later. Kiss your commonplace girl, Wescott. Kiss your tiresome wife-to-be.”

When the world creaked back into its customary orbit, I released her.

“Tiresome, Dawes?” I said. “Commonplace?”

“Maybe I’m not so very,” Mary said. She beamed upon me. “I’ll probably be seeing you around.”

She boarded her craft, wobbling slightly on her way forward, and started the engine. I could not stop grinning. She put it in gear. Maudie came back, smirking, to free the stern lines. I was beyond figuring out why the Beastie wouldn’t move.

Mary waved all the way to the bridge. She’s the waving kind.

Content

John D MacDonald
An Island of Her Own