It was Monday when we decided we should leave. By Tuesday afternoon we were out at the airport, only of course by then Mr. Manny had decided he couldn't leave his work. Now that he has quit his law firm and gotten into environmental work he is a worse workaholic than he was when he was only doing it to make money. He is fighting to save the wetlands and has almost completely stopped wearing ties.
So it was only Miss Crystal and Crystal Anne and myself who were boarding the plane. Crystal Anne and I sat together and Miss Crystal sat across the aisle reading a
Vogue
magazine and stopping every few minutes to blow her nose. “We will be there in two hours,” I told her several times. “Buck up your courage. We have solved worse problems than this.”
“You're right,” Miss Crystal answered. “This is a very small problem. A problem we can fix.”
“I was going to be the lilac fairy in the school play,” Crystal Anne noted for the third time. “I'll never get to be the lilac fairy again.”
“You are going to Florida instead,” I told her. “Many little girls would give their eyeteeth for a week off from school to see the ocean.”
We arrived in Saint Petersburg in the middle of the afternoon and a van from the hotel picked us up and carried us into town. It is a very spread-out city and quite clean and the hotel Mr. Manny had gotten for us was this very swanky hotel on the beach with an indoor pool and one outside near the ocean. Crystal Anne loves pools, although she also likes to swim in the ocean. Personally I do not like water that has chlorine in it. It reminds me too much of washday down in Boutte when my auntee would have water boiling with so much bleach in it the smell would fill the town.
We settled down in two rooms with a door that opened between them. There were balconies that looked out onto the beach and the Gulf of Mexico. Crystal Anne was enchanted by the balconies and kept going from one to the other putting her dolls on the chairs and making little nests for them overlooking the sea. She is eight years old now, just as sweet as an angel, which she has been ever since the day that she was born. Born sweet and stayed sweet. Also, she has a very fine brain and she knows how to use it. She is like Mr. Manny in that. She does not let outside influences change the way she sees things. If she has a flaw, it is that she is very rigid about her likes and dislikes. If she likes someone, she will stick up for them no matter what. If she takes a dislike to them, watch out. Well, she took a dislike to Mr. Hotchkiss, which Miss Lydia later said only proved once again that a little child should lead us.
But we had barely arrived and Mr. Hotchkiss had not showed up yet and so we took off our traveling clothes and went down to the pool to let Crystal Anne practice swimming.
The people around the pool were very friendly. There was a couple from Maine who had met each other at a support meeting they went to after their spouses died. His had died and hers had died so they got together and have lived happily ever after for two years. They each talked a lot about the people they used to be married to. It seemed that was most of their conversation, plus some jokes he was making about the fact that she was fifteen years younger than he was and other jokes about the fact that she smoked. She mostly talked about sailing the British Virgin Islands with her dead husband who was her age and what a good sailor he was and their narrow escapes.
I began to get the picture. Her on the sailboat with her young good-looking husband, the two of them tanned and sort of devil-may-care and smoking all the time. Him in a nice house with the mother of his children. Both of them happy and content and him never giving a thought to a younger woman until his wife died and forced him into it. He was very fat and jolly and glad to talk, and she was not pretty but she was vivacious and I began to take to her.
Another woman who said she was forty-eight was lying on a deck chair and she got into our conversation and began to tell all about her young husband and how her mother pretended not to know she was married to a man half her age and was supporting him. I really liked this woman a lot. Miss Martha Ann Hamblin from Saint Louis, Missouri. She was a snowbird, which means she goes to Florida to get away from snowstorms. Her husband was with her on the trip but he was off somewhere shopping for clothes. She was very vivacious too and had a pretty face. She kept laughing when she'd tell things about herself and she and Miss Crystal were establishing a rapport.
There weren't many other children at the pool. Just a fat girl about eight and another girl maybe twelve years old. Crystal Anne tried to make friends with the fat girl but the fat girl only wanted to play in her water wings and wouldn't dive or swim laps. I feel a great sympathy for fat children and always want to take over and change their diet although my niece Andria tells me that psychiatrists say many fat children are born to be that way and have a slow metabolism and should not be made fun of or have people always after them trying to change their diet.
We spent most of the afternoon by the pool or walking down to the ocean and back. Miss Crystal said she felt like a new woman from breathing the salt air. Crystal Anne was trying to get in one hundred laps before the sun went down. She was up to seventy-six when we made her give up and went up to our rooms to dress for dinner. The air down here in Florida is soft and fine and full of salt. So puffy and romantic. It is easy to see why all these people from up north come down here and decide to stay. Balmy is the word I'm searching for. Balmy is the only word for it.
There were two dining rooms in the hotel. The Palm Court, which is the finest one, and a more casual area called Sixteen Palms. We tossed a coin and the Palm Court won, so we dressed up in our best clothes and put the heated rollers on Crystal Anne's hair and dressed her in her new pink linen dress and down we went to have our first resort meal. There weren't too many people in the Palm Court when we got there, so we took a seat at the best table looking out toward the sea and began to talk about the salt air and why it always seems to mend anything that is wrong with you. We were laughing and carrying on and making fun of the menu when this very handsome man with black hair came in and took a seat at a small table facing us. He was very elegant, tall and thin and wearing a white linen suit like you see in movies set in Europe. He had on these little wire spectacles that made him look even more distinguished. While he was studying the menu the headwaiter came over and told him there was a telephone call for him and would he like a phone, but he said no, he wouldn't take it, he was eating dinner and would the headwaiter take a message.
Our dinner had been served but Miss Crystal had lost all interest in food. She started sitting up very straight in her chair and asking Crystal Anne things that I know couldn't really be of any interest to her. Also, she had taken off her glasses.
I have seen Miss Crystal get that way before, like she has seen a way out of a tunnel that she thought had no end. Like she had been asleep for days and all of a sudden woke up and started blinking.
She was not looking at him. Although by now he was occasionally raising his eyes above the little glasses and looking at her. That was about all that happened that night, except that he finished dinner before we did and passed by our table on his way to go stand on the patio and drink a brandy. “What a lovely child,” he said, as he passed our table, this very cultured accent like he was from Boston or England or somewhere far away. Miss Crystal blushed and Crystal Anne bristled like he had said she was ugly. “I hate it when people do that,” she said. “It's rude to act like children don't know you are talking about them.”
The next morning, no sooner had we gone down to the beach and gotten settled on our striped beach chairs, when he came walking down to the water's edge. He had on a pair of blue jeans and a starched white shirt and some leather handmade sandals. In the morning light he looked even handsomer than he had the night before. He walked past us and stood a long time at the water's edge, letting us admire his back.
I should stop here and tell you something about Miss Crystal that you might miss if you only heard me tell the things she says and does. She is very lovely to look at. Not just the features of her face. She has a kind of glow about her, something coming from deep within that draws people to her. Everything she does has a kind of gracefulness and charm. I do not love her for nothing. It is because she has this glow of kindness, from the inside going out and it has always reached out to me. She does not think of me as a maid or a servant and I do not think of her as my employer. Not to mention that I have always been the highest-paid housekeeper in New Orleans and I have never had to ask for a raise. For a while there it looked as if Miss Crystal and Mr. Manny were in a race to see which one could pay more money to anyone who works for them. When Miss Crystal gave me the down payment for a house, Mr. Manny went right out and bought the gardener a pickup truck. Andria has paced up and down my living room a dozen times telling me this is a bad thing and we are all living in a fool's paradise but I do not care. Andria has set her sights on being a television anchorwoman and so it is necessary that she see everything in the most cynical light.
Back to Florida and the scene on the beach when Mr. William Hotchkiss from Atlanta, Georgia, showed up and went to stand at the water's edge looking out. We did not know at the time that it was Crystal Anne who was making him sad. It turned out he had a small daughter who had died several years before, carrying with her to the grave half his liver, which had failed to save her life. He had lain down beside her on a table at Mayo's Clinic and let them take out half his liver and stuff as much as they could fit into her tiny, sick body. After she died, his wife went completely crazy and started sleeping with everyone in sight and it ended in divorce. Now he was on a leave of absence from his job and was traveling around the country trying to find a place to think straight. He had come to Saint Petersburg because once, as a young man, he had sailed from there in an old patched-up sailboat with two other young men and made it to the Virgin Islands after having to build a de-salinater for water and making a rudder out of a dinghy seat. All of this came out later in conversation. For now, Miss Crystal was sitting up straight in her beach chair, Crystal Anne was getting nervous, and I was doing my usual thing, which is watch and reserve judgment until more information comes in. I have learned this counseling teenagers at my church.
“I'm not perfect,” Miss Crystal says, meeting my eyes. “Life is short, Traceleen. Whatever winter offers, I will take.”
“I see you're feeling better,” is all I would say to that.
“I feel terrific, to tell the truth.” She stood up and put her baby blue beach coat on over her suit. “I think I'll take a swim. The Gulf of Mexico, think about it, connecting to the Atlantic Ocean, the deep blue sea.” She walked over in the direction of Mr. Hotchkiss, and I guess she must have said hello, or, Haven't we met somewhere before? or, Isn't it a nice day? because in a few minutes they were walking along the water's edge like they were old friends. She was telling him about her allergies, I suppose, because he was nodding his head.
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I should stop and tell you something about this day. It was paradisical. Balmy and blue, soft, soft air, brilliant sun, low clouds on the horizon and everywhere the sound of the sea lapping on the sandy shores. My powers of observation fail me. Silk is the only word that fits this day.
Crystal Anne noticed her mother talking to Mr. Hotchkiss and she came out of the water and walked back over to me. About that time a man from the hotel came along and asked if we wouldn't like an umbrella and I said yes and he began to set up this very large green-and-white-striped umbrella above our heads. “Who is Momma talking to?” Crystal Anne asked. “Is she going to start flirting with men again?”
“Would you care to play tic-tac-toe?” I answered. “I brought a pad and pencils in case you'd like to play some games.”
“Is that the man we saw last night at dinner?”
“I think so. Yes, I think it's the same man. He must be lonely. Down here at a hotel all by himself.”
“If she starts flirting with men, I'm going home.” Crystal Anne put on her hooded beach coat and pulled the hood up over her hair. “Why does she always have to do that?”
“Play me some games,” I answered. “Leave your momma alone. Your momma is only talking to that man.”
That night they started dancing. It was in the Palm Court again. There was a band playing South American dance music and Mr. Hotchkiss came to our table while we were waiting for the main course and asked Miss Crystal if she'd like to dance. They went out onto the dance floor and started dancing like they'd been dancing together all their lives. By now Miss Crystal had heard most of his story and her interest in him was furthered by sympathy.
She was wearing blue again, a long blue silk sheath with a little jacket. I had on my cerise cotton suit and Crystal Anne was wearing white with a pink sash, looking exactly like an angel.
That night she insisted on sleeping in my room with me. “I don't like Mr. Hotchkiss,” she said, when we had turned off the lights and said our prayers. “I don't like the way he looks at me.”
“He came down here because his little girl died and his wife went crazy on him. It won't hurt us to be nice to him.”
“She's going to let him go to Disney World with us. Just because his little girl died doesn't mean he ought to dance with Momma all the time. If he goes to Disney World, I won't go.” She rolled over with her face to the wall and put a pillow over her head and held it there.
“Go to sleep, honey. We're not in charge of everything that happens.”
“We're on a planet,” she said, rolling back over and throwing the pillow on the floor. “It's just a planet circling the sun. All around is darkest space.”