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Synopsis
When Mike Rodenska, a former journalist and recent widower, visits his old friend Troy Jamison in Florida, he's shocked at what he finds. For despite the parties, the shapely women, the devil-may-care air that surrounds Troy and his friends, Mike can see a life slowly coming apart. The only question is: why?
Putting together the pieces of his friend's life - and downfall - turns an ordinary visit into a mystery that Mike Rodenska is compelled to solve ...
Release date: January 14, 2014
Publisher: Random House
Print pages: 288
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Slam the Big Door
John D. MacDonald
NOVELISTS CREATE HORRID SPECTACLES when they write introductions to their own books. At one extreme is the loftiness of academic arrogance, and at the
other the scuffing of the shy foot and the “aw shucks” commentary.
This novel was not published in hardcover in the United States. You should be told why. The reason has nothing to do with the merit of the work itself. It went into original paperback
publication due to my own indignation at publishing policy, seasoned with a dash of greed. I wrote this novel in 1959 for publication in 1960. At that time the publishing industry was still
insisting on having fifty percent of softcover royalties go to the hardcover house. I suspected at the time that the agents of some famous novelists were sidestepping that exercise in larceny, but
I did not have the clout to make them break their rule.
At that time I had been a successful freelance writer for twelve years. I had published hardcover books and paperback books. I had built up a sizable newsstand audience, readers who looked for
my work and would buy it. My MBA from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration led me to believe that hardcover publishers who claimed they could not survive without tapping into
fifty percent of my newsstand royalties, were either liars or incompetents.
I had a fine working relationship with Fawcett Publications. They did not ask for slices of my income from any other sources, and they were willing to pay royalties on the basis of print orders
rather than on copies sold. And so when Slam the Big Door was finished, my agent knew that it could be placed with a hardcover house or with a paperback publisher. I told him I wanted it to
go to Fawcett.
Perhaps I am telling you more than you care to know about publishing, but it is necessary to explain the appearance now of this book in hardcover, so long after the fact.
There is a general feeling that publication in hardcover is necessary if a book is to have any cachet of importance. It is the class act, mollifying the snob in every writer. I do not really
know why this should be so. Perhaps long ago the artists’ works were chiseled in stone and the hacks had to make do with papyrus. Maybe in the not so distant future the important writings
will be distributed on germanium chips and the entertainers will have to make do with silicon. I have always believed that the package does not make that much difference. The idea should be to get
the work out to where people can buy it or borrow it and read it. If it is published on Kleenex or forty pound rag bond is not as important as its accessibility.
Now I have been asked if I would like to have some of the old paperback originals reissued in first class hardcover editions. Of course I would! It signals the kind of acceptance I did not have
at the time I wrote the books. Find me a writer who resents being stroked. I am fatuously pleased by this attention.
There have been very few years since the original Fawcett publication when Slam the Big Door has been out of print. The most recent reissue was in January of 1985. It is not difficult for
me to remember the where and the when of it. I began it at our camp in Piseco, New York in the late summer of 1959 and brought the manuscript back to our home on Point Crisp Road on Siesta Key in
Sarasota and finished it there a few weeks before Christmas. It was published in 1960, the year my father died, and at this writing I am but two years younger than he was when he died.
I have just finished rereading the book. I had not read it for many years. Once I have finished the final draft of a book I have very little desire to read it again. The writer will understand
this feeling. During the writing of a book you read it over and over and over, especially when it is not going well. It is my habit to go back and try to detect that point where a book has begun to
go sour. This is a very subjective exercise, inhibited by my realization that my objectivity is going to be flawed no matter what I do.
So when it is finished, there is the final draft to do, and then more corrections and then the copy editing and then the galley proofs and finally the feeling that you never want to see or hear
those characters in the book. You do not want to go back into that artificial world you created with such great care, striving to give it the taste and the feel and the look of reality.
And now, blushing of course, I must say some nice things about it. It is not as dated as I thought it would be. The small community of the Northerners who had moved down to West Coast Florida is
an accurate depiction of a transplanted culture, as usable today as it was twenty-seven years ago. The politics and the politicians have changed, but the environmental problems are merely of
smaller scale.
What pleased me most of all was to find that it stands up both as a novel of suspense and a novel of morals and manners in a specific setting. The anti-hero, Mike Rodenska, is three
dimensional.
Now for the bad stuff. Some of the characters are a tad overdrawn, doubtless in too great a striving for melodrama. I did not need as much action as was inserted. And, at times, I got a little
too cute for my own good. I might do that again, of course, but not as obviously.
I hope that you will enjoy it and I hope that it will look as good on your shelf as it will on mine. If this experiment is successful, there are three more from the old days which I hope will be
considered for first hardcover printing. As with this book, they are the ones which came reasonably close to what I had intended to write.
John D. MacDonald
Aboard the Sagafjord
En route to Hawaii—1986
THE BIG HOUSE—the home of Troy and Mary Jamison—was of stone and slate and glass and redwood—with contrived tiltings and flarings of
its egret-white roof. It stood on the bay side of the north end of Riley Key, overlooking the Florida Gulf, partially screened from occasional slow traffic on the lumpy sand-and-shell road that ran
the seven-mile length of the key by a grove of ancient live oaks, so gnarled and twisted, so picturesquely hung with fright-wigs of Spanish moss that Mike Rodenska, walking across to the Gulf Beach
in the sunlight of an early April Sunday morning, had the pleasant fancy that the oaks had been designed by the same architect who had contributed the light and spaciousness and a certain
indefinable self-consciousness to the Jamison home. The architect had drawn the trees and subcontracted them to an artistic oak-gnarler.
There was a shell path leading from the sleeping house to the road edge where a big rural-delivery box, lacquered pale blue, stood solidly on a redwood post. Aluminum letters, slotted along the
top of the box, spelled out D. Troy Jamison.
All these years of knowing the guy, Rodenska thought, seventeen years of war and peace, and I never knew about that “D” until it popped up on a baby-blue mailbox.
The dulled edges of the broken white shell bit into the tender soles of his feet, and he walked gingerly. He wore dark blue swim trunks with a wide white stripe down the sides, carried a big
white beach towel, a cigar case and tarnished lighter.
He was a sturdy man, Mike Rodenska, who couldn’t stop lying a little bit about his height, and felt disappointed in himself whenever he caught himself in the lie, because he despised all
forms of deceit. He was half-bald, with a fleshy nose and a solid thrust of jaw. There was a wryness and a gentleness about him, particularly evident in the brown eyes, deeply set under a grizzle
of brow. He had been Troy and Mary Jamison’s house-guest for the past five days of perfect Florida weather, and he had used the beach opposite the house with such diligence that the new deep
red-brown tan over a natural swarthiness disguised the softness of all his years of newspaper work.
Beyond the road there was a path through small creeping plants and taller sea oats down to the wide beach. The path curved and he started to walk across the plants, winced and hobbled back to
the path, sat down, pulled his left foot up onto his knee and picked three sand spurs from the sole of his foot.
A very bright man, he said to himself. You learn easy, Rodenska. Before, you wore shoes. These are the things that stuck to your socks yesterday, boy. They have a place, a destiny. They stick to
you, they get farther from mother, then they settle down and raise baby sand spurs. Nature’s devices.
He got up and followed the path down to the beach. The morning sun was low behind him, so the Gulf was not yet a vivid blue. It was gray and there was a silence about it, a long slow wait
between the small lazy nibblings of immature waves against the flat wet sand left by the outgoing tide.
A flock of short-legged sandpipers ran south along the beach, pausing to stab needle bills into the wet sand, eating things too small to be seen, their legs a comic and frantic blur—a
batch of tiny men grabbing breakfast on the way to work.
“Eat well,” he said. “Be my guest.”
He spread his white towel. Nine pelicans in single file flew north, a hundred feet off the beach, beating slow wings in unison, stopping at the same moment to glide long and sure, an inch above
the grayness of the water, full of a banker’s dignity and memories of prehistory.
“The loan committee,” said Mike Rodenska. “Renew my note, hey?”
The Jamison cabaña, of enduring tidewater cypress, weathered to a silver gray, stood on thick stubby pilings just above the three-foot drop where the big storms had cut into the beach far
above the high-tide line. He could see glasses standing on the porch railing, glinting in sunlight, a few with an inch of amber in the bottom, stale forgotten liquor from last night’s
party.
He walked along the beach, wet sand cool on the soles of his feet, and came suddenly upon a line of footprints that led directly into the water—narrow feet with high arches. Feminine. He
looked up and down the beach and saw no evidence of her return, and he suddenly felt very alert and apprehensive about the whole thing. Some of the ladies last night could have . . . but logic came
quickly. Wet sand. Outgoing tide. And with the last footprint so close to the lethargic suds it had to be a recent thing. He looked up and saw a towel and beach bag on the cabaña steps, then
he stared out and at last spotted, at an angle to the south, the tiny white dot of a swim cap over a half mile out.
He waded in and swam, making a great splashing and snorting, losing his wind with a quickness that hurt his pride. He floated on his back, gasping, and as his breathing became easier he was
pleasantly conscious of the almost imperceptible lift and fall of the swell. He winded himself again in a grim sprint toward the beach, and had a fit of coughing as he walked up to his towel. When
he looked for her again he saw her about two hundred yards out, coming in, using a slow and effortless crawl, rolling on the beat for air, snaking her brown arms into the water. He took pleasure in
watching her. She stood up and waded ashore, and he admired the width of shoulder and slenderness of waist before—as she took off her white cap and fluffed that coarse black, white-streaked
hair—he realized it was Mary Jamison. She wore a gray sheath swim suit with some pale blue here and there, and as she walked up to him the sun touched droplets on her thighs and face and
shoulders, turning them to mercury.
“Good morning, Mike.”
“What year was it you won the Olympics?”
“Oh, pooh! What would you expect? I could swim as soon as I could walk. That makes forty-one years of practice.”
“You do this every morning?”
“When it gets too cold I use the pool.”
“You looked so alone ’way out there, Mary.”
“That’s the good part of it,” she said, and added quickly, “How does coffee sound?”
“Hot and black? Like a special miracle, but you shouldn’t go all the way back . . .”
“Just to the cabaña.”
“Oh, I keep forgetting the conveniences around here.”
“Sugar?”
“Maybe half a teaspoon, thanks,” he said: “Help you?”
“Stay in the sun, Mike.”
He watched her walk up to the cabaña. A little heaviness in hips and thighs. A little softness in upper arms and shoulders. Otherwise, a girl’s body. Make them all swim, he thought.
For forty-one years. What if I’d had that routine? With me it would be forty. Thirty-nine, starting at one year. Rodenska—beach boy. Flat belly. Good wind. All I needed was money. Does
swimming keep your hair? Are there any bald beach boys? In Hawaii, no.
Troy’s letter hadn’t said much. But the inference was he had landed neatly on his feet in this marriage. “Mary and I want you to come down, Mike. We’ve got a beach place
with plenty of room. We built it three years ago. You can stay just as long as you want.”
And so, Mike had been prepared for a younger Mary, a second-marriage type, golden and loaded. Not this gracious woman who had greeted him with a genuine warmth when they arrived, after Troy had
driven all the way up to Tampa in the big Chrysler to pick him up and bring him to Riley Key. She was obviously the same age as Troy or a little older, with strong features—a hawk nose, flat
cheeks, wide mouth, dark eyes that held yours steadily, rosettes of white in her curly black hair. She had such a special poise and dignity that, after the first ten minutes with her, Mike could
not imagine her doing any crude or unkind thing. He found himself thinking—not without a twinge of guilt for the implied disloyalty—that Troy had received better than he deserved.
She came down from the cabaña with a tin tray, quilted in the Mexican manner, with fat white beanwagon mugs of steaming coffee, a battered pewter bowl full of Triscuits, and big soft
paper napkins weighted down with her cigarettes and lighter. She had brushed her hair, put on lipstick and sunglasses with red frames.
As she put the tray on the sand in front of the towel and sat beside him, she said, “I took a chance you might share one of my vices. There’s just a dash of Irish in the coffee,
Mike.”
He grinned at her. “I’ll force myself.”
“What did you think of the party?”
“I was supposed to bring it up first and say thanks. Thanks. I got names and faces all screwed up. I got sorting to do.”
“The party was too big.”
“No, Mary. I like a big party. You know, you get a sort of privacy in a big party. You can do more looking. I’m a people-watcher. Like a hobby. No binoculars, like with birds. I got
an hour to kill, I sit in a bus station.”
“Maybe I can help you do some sorting.”
“A pink-faced joker, sixtyish, in Bermuda shorts, with a political voice. Taps you—or at least me—on the chest to make his point. Soon as he found out I was newspaper—or
ex-newspaper, or whatever the hell I am—he cornered me and made oratory.”
“That one is easy. Jack Connorly.” He saw her make a face.
“No like?”
“I guess you could say he’s trying to be Mister Republican in the county, but he’s about fifth or sixth in line, I’d say. He’s been after Troy to run for the County
Commission.”
“Troy!”
She giggled. “That’s my reaction too.”
“My God, will he?”
“Honestly, Mike, I don’t know. He won’t say yes and he won’t say no.”
“So that’s why Connorly was bugging me about the duty of the citizen and all that jazz. I’ll have to have a little chat with our boy.”
“Jack’s wife is the little dark jumpy-looking one. He’s in real estate.”
“Now how about the blonde on the aluminum crutches?”
“Beth Jordan. She chopped herself to ribbons last year. She ran her Porsche under the back of a truck. They didn’t expect her to live, but now they think she’ll be off the
crutches in a few more months. Did you notice the scars?”
“It was too dark.”
“They’ve spent thousands on plastic surgery.”
“Just one more for now, Mary. The kid with your daughter.”
“With Debbie Ann? Oh, that was Rob Raines, a local lawyer. They practically grew up together.”
“You notice lawyers get younger every year? Doctors too. You want old guys, full of dignity and wisdom. So you get a kid looks like a bat boy, and how can he have had time to learn enough?
There was one guy who treated Buttons . . .”
A familiar bitter twisting of his heart stopped him, and he sipped the coffee, chewed savagely on a Triscuit, and outstared an optimistic gull who was walking back and forth ten feet away with
all the assurance of a city pigeon, staring at him with alternate eyes.
“You try to be casual and it doesn’t work,” she said gently.
He could not look at her. “Also,” he said, “you don’t expect anybody to understand at all. And when they do, just a little, you resent them, maybe. The special arrogance
of grief, Mary. You know, I hurt worse than anybody ever did.”
“Mike, I wanted you to come down, very much. Troy and I talked it over. There was never any question. But I don’t want you to think that I expect that you have to . . . sing for your
supper by talking about private things. But if you ever want to talk . . .”
He overrode her with a heavy insistence. “I was talking about the one guy that treated her. A kid, you would think. But old around the eyes in the special way the good ones have. And he
leveled with me. I appreciated that. None of that mighty-mystery-of-medicine jazz. He gave me time to brace myself by saying—no hope. And I never could lie to her and get away with it, so she
got the message too, and had time to brace herself, so toward the end in that hospital—well, like a big airline terminal where the flight is a couple weeks late and you got time for ways to
say good-bye in all the little ways, and nobody is too surprised when they announce the flight.”
“Mike,” she said.
He could look at her then, and see tears standing in her fine dark eyes and manufacture a fake Hemingway grin and say, “Knock it off, lady.”
“Mike, it fades. It really does. Oh, it always comes back, but not as sharp.”
“They keep telling me that. How long ago was it for you?”
“Seven years. 1952. I was thirty-five and Debbie Ann was sixteen. Haven’t you got a boy about that age?”
“Close. Micky is seventeen and Tommy is fifteen. And three years later you married Troy?”
“Yes. And we’ve had four wonderful years.”
He stared at her until her chin came up a little, in a small motion of pride and defiance, and then he said, “Until when?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Mary, Mary. I know the guy. Five years I didn’t see him. Does he turn into somebody else? I’m not so wrapped up in my own sorrow I suddenly get dense about people.”
“It has nothing to do with you. Excuse me, but it has nothing to do with you. You’re here because you’re Troy’s best friend. And because it’s good for you to be
here at this time.”
“You said to me if I ever want to talk . . . Okay, I give you the same deal.”
She looked angry for a moment, then suddenly smiled. “All right, Mike.” Just then an old car came clanking and chattering up the key from the south and turned into the Jamison drive.
Mary stood up and shaded her eyes against the sun. “That’s Durelda already. Oscar brings her. She works a half day on Sunday. I should go up and get her straightened away on the food.
Sunday is a vague day around here, Mike. People come and go, and pick their own indoor and outdoor sports. I do absolutely no hostessing. The only standard item is a big brunch-lunch-buffet deal by
the patio pool, from noon to three. Eat when you please and make your own drinks. Introduce yourself to anybody who looks interesting. When you’re finished would you put the tray in the
cottage?”
“Sure.”
She walked toward the house, pausing to pick up her towel and beach bag from the cabaña steps.
Mike was left alone in the morning sun, thinking about Troy’s second wife, and Troy’s first wife, and how you always knew when the flavor of marriage was not just right. This one was
not just right, and it could be permanent wrong or temporary wrong. He hoped it was temporary. They can’t fool you. Not with the love words and the affectionate gestures, because
there’s always that bitter aura, that little stink of coldness, the tension-edge of love gone awry.
A hundred feet offshore a black monster, flat as a plate, burst high out of the water, seemed to pause at the top of the leap, then fell back with a resonant crack of leathery wings against the
water. Taken completely by surprise, Mike’s first thought was, I’ll tell Buttons about that.
And he knew immediately that Buttons had been in the ground since the second day of March. Something happened inside him that was like tumbling down stairs, and he caught up a fistful of sand
and squeezed it until his knuckles popped.
Who do you tell?
The coffee was gone. He carried the tray into the cabaña and placed it on the countertop beside the sink and rinsed the cups.
He went out and swam again, . . .
other the scuffing of the shy foot and the “aw shucks” commentary.
This novel was not published in hardcover in the United States. You should be told why. The reason has nothing to do with the merit of the work itself. It went into original paperback
publication due to my own indignation at publishing policy, seasoned with a dash of greed. I wrote this novel in 1959 for publication in 1960. At that time the publishing industry was still
insisting on having fifty percent of softcover royalties go to the hardcover house. I suspected at the time that the agents of some famous novelists were sidestepping that exercise in larceny, but
I did not have the clout to make them break their rule.
At that time I had been a successful freelance writer for twelve years. I had published hardcover books and paperback books. I had built up a sizable newsstand audience, readers who looked for
my work and would buy it. My MBA from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration led me to believe that hardcover publishers who claimed they could not survive without tapping into
fifty percent of my newsstand royalties, were either liars or incompetents.
I had a fine working relationship with Fawcett Publications. They did not ask for slices of my income from any other sources, and they were willing to pay royalties on the basis of print orders
rather than on copies sold. And so when Slam the Big Door was finished, my agent knew that it could be placed with a hardcover house or with a paperback publisher. I told him I wanted it to
go to Fawcett.
Perhaps I am telling you more than you care to know about publishing, but it is necessary to explain the appearance now of this book in hardcover, so long after the fact.
There is a general feeling that publication in hardcover is necessary if a book is to have any cachet of importance. It is the class act, mollifying the snob in every writer. I do not really
know why this should be so. Perhaps long ago the artists’ works were chiseled in stone and the hacks had to make do with papyrus. Maybe in the not so distant future the important writings
will be distributed on germanium chips and the entertainers will have to make do with silicon. I have always believed that the package does not make that much difference. The idea should be to get
the work out to where people can buy it or borrow it and read it. If it is published on Kleenex or forty pound rag bond is not as important as its accessibility.
Now I have been asked if I would like to have some of the old paperback originals reissued in first class hardcover editions. Of course I would! It signals the kind of acceptance I did not have
at the time I wrote the books. Find me a writer who resents being stroked. I am fatuously pleased by this attention.
There have been very few years since the original Fawcett publication when Slam the Big Door has been out of print. The most recent reissue was in January of 1985. It is not difficult for
me to remember the where and the when of it. I began it at our camp in Piseco, New York in the late summer of 1959 and brought the manuscript back to our home on Point Crisp Road on Siesta Key in
Sarasota and finished it there a few weeks before Christmas. It was published in 1960, the year my father died, and at this writing I am but two years younger than he was when he died.
I have just finished rereading the book. I had not read it for many years. Once I have finished the final draft of a book I have very little desire to read it again. The writer will understand
this feeling. During the writing of a book you read it over and over and over, especially when it is not going well. It is my habit to go back and try to detect that point where a book has begun to
go sour. This is a very subjective exercise, inhibited by my realization that my objectivity is going to be flawed no matter what I do.
So when it is finished, there is the final draft to do, and then more corrections and then the copy editing and then the galley proofs and finally the feeling that you never want to see or hear
those characters in the book. You do not want to go back into that artificial world you created with such great care, striving to give it the taste and the feel and the look of reality.
And now, blushing of course, I must say some nice things about it. It is not as dated as I thought it would be. The small community of the Northerners who had moved down to West Coast Florida is
an accurate depiction of a transplanted culture, as usable today as it was twenty-seven years ago. The politics and the politicians have changed, but the environmental problems are merely of
smaller scale.
What pleased me most of all was to find that it stands up both as a novel of suspense and a novel of morals and manners in a specific setting. The anti-hero, Mike Rodenska, is three
dimensional.
Now for the bad stuff. Some of the characters are a tad overdrawn, doubtless in too great a striving for melodrama. I did not need as much action as was inserted. And, at times, I got a little
too cute for my own good. I might do that again, of course, but not as obviously.
I hope that you will enjoy it and I hope that it will look as good on your shelf as it will on mine. If this experiment is successful, there are three more from the old days which I hope will be
considered for first hardcover printing. As with this book, they are the ones which came reasonably close to what I had intended to write.
John D. MacDonald
Aboard the Sagafjord
En route to Hawaii—1986
THE BIG HOUSE—the home of Troy and Mary Jamison—was of stone and slate and glass and redwood—with contrived tiltings and flarings of
its egret-white roof. It stood on the bay side of the north end of Riley Key, overlooking the Florida Gulf, partially screened from occasional slow traffic on the lumpy sand-and-shell road that ran
the seven-mile length of the key by a grove of ancient live oaks, so gnarled and twisted, so picturesquely hung with fright-wigs of Spanish moss that Mike Rodenska, walking across to the Gulf Beach
in the sunlight of an early April Sunday morning, had the pleasant fancy that the oaks had been designed by the same architect who had contributed the light and spaciousness and a certain
indefinable self-consciousness to the Jamison home. The architect had drawn the trees and subcontracted them to an artistic oak-gnarler.
There was a shell path leading from the sleeping house to the road edge where a big rural-delivery box, lacquered pale blue, stood solidly on a redwood post. Aluminum letters, slotted along the
top of the box, spelled out D. Troy Jamison.
All these years of knowing the guy, Rodenska thought, seventeen years of war and peace, and I never knew about that “D” until it popped up on a baby-blue mailbox.
The dulled edges of the broken white shell bit into the tender soles of his feet, and he walked gingerly. He wore dark blue swim trunks with a wide white stripe down the sides, carried a big
white beach towel, a cigar case and tarnished lighter.
He was a sturdy man, Mike Rodenska, who couldn’t stop lying a little bit about his height, and felt disappointed in himself whenever he caught himself in the lie, because he despised all
forms of deceit. He was half-bald, with a fleshy nose and a solid thrust of jaw. There was a wryness and a gentleness about him, particularly evident in the brown eyes, deeply set under a grizzle
of brow. He had been Troy and Mary Jamison’s house-guest for the past five days of perfect Florida weather, and he had used the beach opposite the house with such diligence that the new deep
red-brown tan over a natural swarthiness disguised the softness of all his years of newspaper work.
Beyond the road there was a path through small creeping plants and taller sea oats down to the wide beach. The path curved and he started to walk across the plants, winced and hobbled back to
the path, sat down, pulled his left foot up onto his knee and picked three sand spurs from the sole of his foot.
A very bright man, he said to himself. You learn easy, Rodenska. Before, you wore shoes. These are the things that stuck to your socks yesterday, boy. They have a place, a destiny. They stick to
you, they get farther from mother, then they settle down and raise baby sand spurs. Nature’s devices.
He got up and followed the path down to the beach. The morning sun was low behind him, so the Gulf was not yet a vivid blue. It was gray and there was a silence about it, a long slow wait
between the small lazy nibblings of immature waves against the flat wet sand left by the outgoing tide.
A flock of short-legged sandpipers ran south along the beach, pausing to stab needle bills into the wet sand, eating things too small to be seen, their legs a comic and frantic blur—a
batch of tiny men grabbing breakfast on the way to work.
“Eat well,” he said. “Be my guest.”
He spread his white towel. Nine pelicans in single file flew north, a hundred feet off the beach, beating slow wings in unison, stopping at the same moment to glide long and sure, an inch above
the grayness of the water, full of a banker’s dignity and memories of prehistory.
“The loan committee,” said Mike Rodenska. “Renew my note, hey?”
The Jamison cabaña, of enduring tidewater cypress, weathered to a silver gray, stood on thick stubby pilings just above the three-foot drop where the big storms had cut into the beach far
above the high-tide line. He could see glasses standing on the porch railing, glinting in sunlight, a few with an inch of amber in the bottom, stale forgotten liquor from last night’s
party.
He walked along the beach, wet sand cool on the soles of his feet, and came suddenly upon a line of footprints that led directly into the water—narrow feet with high arches. Feminine. He
looked up and down the beach and saw no evidence of her return, and he suddenly felt very alert and apprehensive about the whole thing. Some of the ladies last night could have . . . but logic came
quickly. Wet sand. Outgoing tide. And with the last footprint so close to the lethargic suds it had to be a recent thing. He looked up and saw a towel and beach bag on the cabaña steps, then
he stared out and at last spotted, at an angle to the south, the tiny white dot of a swim cap over a half mile out.
He waded in and swam, making a great splashing and snorting, losing his wind with a quickness that hurt his pride. He floated on his back, gasping, and as his breathing became easier he was
pleasantly conscious of the almost imperceptible lift and fall of the swell. He winded himself again in a grim sprint toward the beach, and had a fit of coughing as he walked up to his towel. When
he looked for her again he saw her about two hundred yards out, coming in, using a slow and effortless crawl, rolling on the beat for air, snaking her brown arms into the water. He took pleasure in
watching her. She stood up and waded ashore, and he admired the width of shoulder and slenderness of waist before—as she took off her white cap and fluffed that coarse black, white-streaked
hair—he realized it was Mary Jamison. She wore a gray sheath swim suit with some pale blue here and there, and as she walked up to him the sun touched droplets on her thighs and face and
shoulders, turning them to mercury.
“Good morning, Mike.”
“What year was it you won the Olympics?”
“Oh, pooh! What would you expect? I could swim as soon as I could walk. That makes forty-one years of practice.”
“You do this every morning?”
“When it gets too cold I use the pool.”
“You looked so alone ’way out there, Mary.”
“That’s the good part of it,” she said, and added quickly, “How does coffee sound?”
“Hot and black? Like a special miracle, but you shouldn’t go all the way back . . .”
“Just to the cabaña.”
“Oh, I keep forgetting the conveniences around here.”
“Sugar?”
“Maybe half a teaspoon, thanks,” he said: “Help you?”
“Stay in the sun, Mike.”
He watched her walk up to the cabaña. A little heaviness in hips and thighs. A little softness in upper arms and shoulders. Otherwise, a girl’s body. Make them all swim, he thought.
For forty-one years. What if I’d had that routine? With me it would be forty. Thirty-nine, starting at one year. Rodenska—beach boy. Flat belly. Good wind. All I needed was money. Does
swimming keep your hair? Are there any bald beach boys? In Hawaii, no.
Troy’s letter hadn’t said much. But the inference was he had landed neatly on his feet in this marriage. “Mary and I want you to come down, Mike. We’ve got a beach place
with plenty of room. We built it three years ago. You can stay just as long as you want.”
And so, Mike had been prepared for a younger Mary, a second-marriage type, golden and loaded. Not this gracious woman who had greeted him with a genuine warmth when they arrived, after Troy had
driven all the way up to Tampa in the big Chrysler to pick him up and bring him to Riley Key. She was obviously the same age as Troy or a little older, with strong features—a hawk nose, flat
cheeks, wide mouth, dark eyes that held yours steadily, rosettes of white in her curly black hair. She had such a special poise and dignity that, after the first ten minutes with her, Mike could
not imagine her doing any crude or unkind thing. He found himself thinking—not without a twinge of guilt for the implied disloyalty—that Troy had received better than he deserved.
She came down from the cabaña with a tin tray, quilted in the Mexican manner, with fat white beanwagon mugs of steaming coffee, a battered pewter bowl full of Triscuits, and big soft
paper napkins weighted down with her cigarettes and lighter. She had brushed her hair, put on lipstick and sunglasses with red frames.
As she put the tray on the sand in front of the towel and sat beside him, she said, “I took a chance you might share one of my vices. There’s just a dash of Irish in the coffee,
Mike.”
He grinned at her. “I’ll force myself.”
“What did you think of the party?”
“I was supposed to bring it up first and say thanks. Thanks. I got names and faces all screwed up. I got sorting to do.”
“The party was too big.”
“No, Mary. I like a big party. You know, you get a sort of privacy in a big party. You can do more looking. I’m a people-watcher. Like a hobby. No binoculars, like with birds. I got
an hour to kill, I sit in a bus station.”
“Maybe I can help you do some sorting.”
“A pink-faced joker, sixtyish, in Bermuda shorts, with a political voice. Taps you—or at least me—on the chest to make his point. Soon as he found out I was newspaper—or
ex-newspaper, or whatever the hell I am—he cornered me and made oratory.”
“That one is easy. Jack Connorly.” He saw her make a face.
“No like?”
“I guess you could say he’s trying to be Mister Republican in the county, but he’s about fifth or sixth in line, I’d say. He’s been after Troy to run for the County
Commission.”
“Troy!”
She giggled. “That’s my reaction too.”
“My God, will he?”
“Honestly, Mike, I don’t know. He won’t say yes and he won’t say no.”
“So that’s why Connorly was bugging me about the duty of the citizen and all that jazz. I’ll have to have a little chat with our boy.”
“Jack’s wife is the little dark jumpy-looking one. He’s in real estate.”
“Now how about the blonde on the aluminum crutches?”
“Beth Jordan. She chopped herself to ribbons last year. She ran her Porsche under the back of a truck. They didn’t expect her to live, but now they think she’ll be off the
crutches in a few more months. Did you notice the scars?”
“It was too dark.”
“They’ve spent thousands on plastic surgery.”
“Just one more for now, Mary. The kid with your daughter.”
“With Debbie Ann? Oh, that was Rob Raines, a local lawyer. They practically grew up together.”
“You notice lawyers get younger every year? Doctors too. You want old guys, full of dignity and wisdom. So you get a kid looks like a bat boy, and how can he have had time to learn enough?
There was one guy who treated Buttons . . .”
A familiar bitter twisting of his heart stopped him, and he sipped the coffee, chewed savagely on a Triscuit, and outstared an optimistic gull who was walking back and forth ten feet away with
all the assurance of a city pigeon, staring at him with alternate eyes.
“You try to be casual and it doesn’t work,” she said gently.
He could not look at her. “Also,” he said, “you don’t expect anybody to understand at all. And when they do, just a little, you resent them, maybe. The special arrogance
of grief, Mary. You know, I hurt worse than anybody ever did.”
“Mike, I wanted you to come down, very much. Troy and I talked it over. There was never any question. But I don’t want you to think that I expect that you have to . . . sing for your
supper by talking about private things. But if you ever want to talk . . .”
He overrode her with a heavy insistence. “I was talking about the one guy that treated her. A kid, you would think. But old around the eyes in the special way the good ones have. And he
leveled with me. I appreciated that. None of that mighty-mystery-of-medicine jazz. He gave me time to brace myself by saying—no hope. And I never could lie to her and get away with it, so she
got the message too, and had time to brace herself, so toward the end in that hospital—well, like a big airline terminal where the flight is a couple weeks late and you got time for ways to
say good-bye in all the little ways, and nobody is too surprised when they announce the flight.”
“Mike,” she said.
He could look at her then, and see tears standing in her fine dark eyes and manufacture a fake Hemingway grin and say, “Knock it off, lady.”
“Mike, it fades. It really does. Oh, it always comes back, but not as sharp.”
“They keep telling me that. How long ago was it for you?”
“Seven years. 1952. I was thirty-five and Debbie Ann was sixteen. Haven’t you got a boy about that age?”
“Close. Micky is seventeen and Tommy is fifteen. And three years later you married Troy?”
“Yes. And we’ve had four wonderful years.”
He stared at her until her chin came up a little, in a small motion of pride and defiance, and then he said, “Until when?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Mary, Mary. I know the guy. Five years I didn’t see him. Does he turn into somebody else? I’m not so wrapped up in my own sorrow I suddenly get dense about people.”
“It has nothing to do with you. Excuse me, but it has nothing to do with you. You’re here because you’re Troy’s best friend. And because it’s good for you to be
here at this time.”
“You said to me if I ever want to talk . . . Okay, I give you the same deal.”
She looked angry for a moment, then suddenly smiled. “All right, Mike.” Just then an old car came clanking and chattering up the key from the south and turned into the Jamison drive.
Mary stood up and shaded her eyes against the sun. “That’s Durelda already. Oscar brings her. She works a half day on Sunday. I should go up and get her straightened away on the food.
Sunday is a vague day around here, Mike. People come and go, and pick their own indoor and outdoor sports. I do absolutely no hostessing. The only standard item is a big brunch-lunch-buffet deal by
the patio pool, from noon to three. Eat when you please and make your own drinks. Introduce yourself to anybody who looks interesting. When you’re finished would you put the tray in the
cottage?”
“Sure.”
She walked toward the house, pausing to pick up her towel and beach bag from the cabaña steps.
Mike was left alone in the morning sun, thinking about Troy’s second wife, and Troy’s first wife, and how you always knew when the flavor of marriage was not just right. This one was
not just right, and it could be permanent wrong or temporary wrong. He hoped it was temporary. They can’t fool you. Not with the love words and the affectionate gestures, because
there’s always that bitter aura, that little stink of coldness, the tension-edge of love gone awry.
A hundred feet offshore a black monster, flat as a plate, burst high out of the water, seemed to pause at the top of the leap, then fell back with a resonant crack of leathery wings against the
water. Taken completely by surprise, Mike’s first thought was, I’ll tell Buttons about that.
And he knew immediately that Buttons had been in the ground since the second day of March. Something happened inside him that was like tumbling down stairs, and he caught up a fistful of sand
and squeezed it until his knuckles popped.
Who do you tell?
The coffee was gone. He carried the tray into the cabaña and placed it on the countertop beside the sink and rinsed the cups.
He went out and swam again, . . .
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Slam the Big Door
John D. MacDonald
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