The Man in the Tree

Chapter Eighteen

When she arrived at the house the next morning, she found the gate open. Up by the kitchen door three black women in maids' uniforms were getting into a station wagon, and beyond that was a huge delivery van. Margaret pulled over to make room for the station wagon; the driver, a black man, gave her an expressionless glance as he drove past.

She parked her rented Mazda in the garage; Pongo's Lincoln was not there, but there were two other cars, a black Mercedes and a green BMW station wagon, plus a vast cream-colored motor home.

At the back of the house, two men in blue work clothes were carrying a crate from the moving van through an open doorway. A metallic screech came from somewhere inside, then another. She peered in and saw Anderson, bare-chested as before, surrounded by crates, with a wrecking bar in his hand. He waved when he saw her. "Margaret, I've got my hands full this morning. If you can go on and get started by yourself, I'll be able to talk to you later."

"That'll be fine," she said, and retreated around the corner to the kitchen door.

Irma Hartz covered the telephone mouthpiece with her hand when Margaret went in. "Can't talk now," she said. "Go on in, honey, and if you have any problems, punch number five on the intercom." As Margaret left, she was saying in a steady voice, "I understand all that, Mr. Galloway, but Mr. Anderson prefers to handle his business affairs through an agent."

Margaret put her bag on the desk and sat down. The intercom on the wall had a great many buttons. There was a whisper of air conditioning; she felt the sweat drying on her forearms.

The disk was still in the machine. She rolled paper and carbons into the typewriter and began the first letter. Like the one she had typed yesterday, it was an order for items from a catalog, and so was the next. The third was a personal letter to someone named Justin, full of names she was not sure how to spell. She looked them all up in the rotary file, found only one. The fourth was a business letter about investments, and that was all. She turned the disk over, but got nothing but a hiss.

In the basket behind the dictation machine there was a disorderly stack of papers. Margaret lifted them out and began to sort them. There was a click from the intercom, and Mrs. Hartz's voice said, "Maggie, everything okay?"

"Yes," she answered, startled. "Good," said the voice, and the intercom clicked off.

The file folders in the drawers were neatly labeled, but there did not seem to be files for about a third of the letters she had. She filed what she could, put the others aside, and began to make a list of the file headings. She was typing it when the intercom clicked again and Mrs. Hartz's voice said, "Lunch in fifteen minutes, Maggie. In the kitchen."

"All right, thank you." She looked at her watch; it was a quarter after twelve. She finished the list, combed her hair, and put the finished letters into a folder.

Mrs. Hartz was sitting at the kitchen table; Pongo was doing something at the counter beside the stove. "Sit here, honey," said Mrs. Hartz. "Do you like this kitchen?"

"It's beautiful," said Margaret, and in fact, whether it was because the table was set with napkins and china, or because she had got the job and felt she was not quite a stranger here any longer, the room had a quiet beauty that she had not noticed before. The floor was red Spanish tile with a dull sheen, the walls cream-colored; black hand-hewn beams supported the ceiling. Copper and iron pots hung on either side of the stoves -- two of them, side by side, each bigger than any kitchen range Margaret had ever seen before. Gadgets were lined up at one end of the counter -- a Cuisinart, an espresso machine, two little convection ovens, and others that she did not recognize.

"I always wanted a big kitchen," said Irma Hartz. "It you knew how many meals I've cooked in the back of a trailer."

"Not enough cabinets," said Pongo. He put a little pastry shell filled with something pink at each place, sat down, and picked up his fork.

"Mm, this is great," said Irma with her mouth full. "What's in it?"

Margaret tried a bite; it was shrimp in some kind of sauce, meltingly delicious; the pastry was light as air.

"Shrimp," said Pongo, "truffles, shrimp butter." He swallowed a mouthful and looked meditative. "Could use more tarragon."

Gene Anderson came in quietly and sat down at the end of the table. He was wearing a short-sleeved white cotton shirt and white trousers. The plate and silverware in front of him looked of ordinary size until Margaret compared them with the others, and then she saw that they were a third again as large; the heavy silver knife was almost a foot long.

Pongo, who had got up when Anderson came in, put down a much bigger pastry in front of him. He poured wine from a chilled bottle and slipped away again; in a moment Margaret heard the sizzle of meat on the grill.

Anderson had already finished half his pastry. "Maggie, did you have any problems?" He pointed with his fork to the folder beside her on the table.

"Yes, a few. There's one letter that has names in it I'm not sure how to spell. I typed it anyhow, and I thought you could look it over -- "

"Okay, let's do that right after lunch."

Pongo was up again, turning the meat on the grill, then collecting their plates. He put fresh ones down, went to the oven and came back with a steaming platter. "Red snapper," he said. "Irma, you want to serve it?"

The fish, of a kind unfamiliar to Margaret, had a delicate flavor of garlic and thyme. "Mr. Richards, where did you learn to cook like this?"

"Here and there," said Pongo. "Mostly there," He was up again, bringing an enormous steak from the grill.

"He's a sea cook," said Irma. "Call him Pongo, or he'll think you're mad at him."

"Wait till you see what he can do when he makes an effort," said Anderson. "Who'd like some of this steak?"

No one replied; Anderson put the steak on his plate and proceeded to cut it up and eat it. Margaret tried not to watch him, but she could not help being fascinated by the unhurried way he made the food disappear. He forked up a bleeding chunk, his strong jaws chewed it, and he was ready for another. When the steak was gone, he took a helping of fish and ate that.

"Sit still, Pongo, I'll bring the dessert," said Irma. She took their plates, brought a cool green mousse, and served coffee. Anderson's mousse was the same size as the others; he ate it in two bites and said," Let's see that letter, Maggie."

She brought it to him and handed him a pencil from the counter; it looked like a dance-card pencil in his fingers. "This is all right," he said, "this is wrong, and this one." He crossed out two names and corrected them.

A bell sounded; Irma swiveled her chair to the intercom panel, glanced at the screen. "Expecting anybody?" she said to the room. No one replied.

"Yes, can I help you?" she said to the microphone. In the screen, Margaret could see a man in the open window of a car. A voice said, "Ma'am, I'm J. A. Coburn, of Smith and Barrows, here to see Mr. Anderson."

"Mr. Anderson doesn't see anybody without an appointment."

"Well, ma'am, I did write asking for an appointment, but unfortunately I didn't get an answer, so I just figured -- "

"I'm sorry your letter wasn't answered. If you'll just go home and be patient, we'll take care of that as soon as we can." She turned off the microphone.

"Was there anything from him in that stack?" she asked Margaret.

"No."

"This whole county is full of people that would just love to sell Gene something. We try to stay out of sight, but you can't hide a place like this. People will talk. There's the builder and all the contractors, the cleaning women, the lawyers -- "

"Irma, try to keep that damn gate closed, too, will you?" Anderson's hand was clenched around his napkin. "I know it's hard, when people are going in and out, but I hate to think somebody could just walk in here."

"Yes, sir," said Irma, in a tone nicely balanced between respect and irony.

Anderson got up. "See you all later." He walked out.

Pongo asked, "More coffee?"

Margaret took the misspelled letter back to her office and retyped it. When she was finished, she put the new copy in the folder with the other letters and carried it back to the kitchen. Irma was at the table as usual; Pongo was banging pots in the sink.

"Irma, I forgot to ask you where to put these letters when I'm done -- back in the office?"

"Oh. I never told you, did I. Come on, I might as well give you the fifty-cent tour while I'm at it. Pongo, you going to be here for a while?"

"Sure, go ahead."

In the hallway, Irma gestured toward the stairway with its wrought-iron railing that led up to the back of the house. "Here's where you go upstairs, if you don't like ramps. It brings you out on the balcony up there, but we'll go the other way." They walked through the living room to the corridor and passed Margaret's office. Irma opened the next door. "Library."

It was a big room paneled in walnut, with a fireplace, a long table in the center with a few stacks of books on it, and empty shelves all around. "Books haven't come yet," Irma said. "That'll be a job." She closed the door. "The rest of these rooms down here are empty."

Next came a ramp, like the one in the living room but much narrower. As they started up, Margaret was thinking with respect of the architect who had designed this house. He had had an impossible problem and had solved it beautifully: the sunken areas in the kitchen and living room that made it possible for Anderson to talk face to face with normal people; the ramps, because he couldn't use an ordinary staircase. To Anderson, she thought, this must be like living in a house built partly for dolls. "Munchkins," she said aloud.

"What?"

"I was just thinking. The Munchkins -- you know, the little people in 'The Wizard of Oz.'"

"Oh."

The door at the end of the balcony opened onto a study. All the furniture here was scaled to Anderson's dimensions, the desk, drawing table, couch, chairs, coffee table. The room was almost as big as the kitchen, but it looked much smaller because of the ramp that rose around two sides.

"This part is all Gene's," said Irma. "This is his study, or den, or whatever you want to call it, and in there is his sitting room." Through the open doorway Margaret could see a huge cushioned Morris chair with a shelf on either side, on which books and papers were stacked, and a sort of tilted lapboard on a swivel which held an open dictionary. "What he likes is for you to come when he's not here, put the letters on the desk for him to sign, pick up anything in his out basket. When he's here, he hates to be disturbed, so always make sure before you go up. You can go in the sitting room, too, if you have a reason. Up there is his bedroom, and that's out of bounds. He even cleans it himself."

"That sounds awfully lonely," Margaret said after a moment.

"Maybe so." Irma led her back to the balcony and through a doorway into a long passage that ran the width of the house. "Most of these rooms are empty," she said. "Here's mine. Come in and sit down awhile -- Pongo will mind the store."

They were in a cheerful living room with floral covers on the furniture, flowers in a vase, a huge TV screen. In one corner, over a little desk, was a duplicate of the intercom system in the kitchen. "Excuse me a minute," Irma said. She went to the intercom, pushed a putton. "Pongo ?"

"Yeah."

"We're in my room. If you want to go somewhere before we get back, push the slave button."

"Okay."

Irma sat down opposite Margaret and put her feet up on a hassock. "Now let's talk," she said. "Anything you're wondering about -- any questions?"

"I don't understand why he doesn't hire more people. You work so hard, and Pongo -- does he do all the cooking?"

"And the marketing, and goes to the post office every day, and so on. I know what you're saying. Gene could have a staff of servants in here, security guards and all that, but he can't bear having anybody around that he doesn't know. He's spooky about intruders -- you saw that. There isn't even a fire escape to his apartment up there. Building code says you have to have one, so he had it built, waited till after inspection, then tore it down and hauled it away."

"Doesn't he have any family, or friends, I mean besides you and Pongo?"

"He knows a few people here. He was out of the country for twenty years; when he got back he put a little ad in 'Amusement Business,' but I was the only one that answered it. All the people he used to know in the carnival are dead and gone, or else scattered who knows where."

"You were in the carnival?"

"Carnival, and then in the circus. My husband and I had a juggling act -- the Amazing Raimondis. Ray left me a little money when he died. I didn't have anything else to do, so I came down here to work for Gene."

"Ray was your husband?"

"My second. He died on Christmas Day, nineteen seventy-six. Heart attack."

"I'm sorry."

"That's all right. He was a real bastard. Speaking of Christmas," Irma said, "we have a rule here that you don't give anybody anything made by a machine. If you can make your own presents, Gene would like that, or if you can't, find something that was hand made by some one person."

"I see."

Irma gave her a bright glance. "Do you? Look, if you give him something that anybody can buy in a store, even if it costs five hundred dollars, that's like giving him money. He wants something he hasn't got." She lifted a heap of material from a workbasket beside her chair. "Like, I'm making him this quilt. The damn thing is ten feet long. Pongo will probably make him a belt or something -- he does leatherwork."

Margaret bent to examine the unfinished quilt, diamonds and stars of pale rose, blue, white, corn yellow. "Oh, this is beautiful. But I couldn't do anything like that."

"You never know till you try," Irma said. She stood up. "Let's go on back -- Pongo will be wanting to make his post-office run. Are you through for the day?"

"I guess so, there's nothing more on my desk. Oh, I forgot to look in his out basket."

"That's all right, I did. You go on home and relax."

The next day there were paintings hanging all along the balcony wall; Anderson was putting one up in the living room when she arrived. She found a disk in his out-basket upstairs, and several letters marked in his meticulous handwriting, "Tell him no." After some hesitation, she translated this into: "Mr. Anderson has asked me to acknowledge your letter of and to tell you how sorry he is that under present circumstances he does not feel able to accept your interesting proposal." She signed these letters; "Margaret W. Morrow, Secretary to Mr. Anderson."

"I thought it would be better, more of a polite brushoff, if these came from me," she explained at lunch. "And it's less work for you; is that all right?"

"Fine, Maggie. A little more polite than I would have been, but okay."

Pongo served another incredible meal: lemon soup, turtle steak, shrimp in mustard sauce, and a huge Greek salad with anchovies, black olives, and feta cheese, all in addition to Anderson's porterhouse. Margaret began to wonder what Pongo's dinners were like; if this kept on, she would have to start thinking about a diet.

After lunch Anderson went back to his picture hanging, refusing Margaret's offer of help. "You're not dressed for it," he said, "and anyhow it's a one-man job." Margaret typed two more letters, left them in Anderson's in-basket, tidied her desk.

On her way out she asked Irma, "Would it be all right if I walk around outside a little before I go home?"

"Sure it would. You'd better wear a hat, though. That sun is fierce, and you're burned already."

Margaret put on her dark glasses and went out into the glare. She got her wide-brimmed hat from the car, then strolled up past the garage and the storeroom. Above her the hill began, planted in ferns and flowering shrubs. On a tree with pale bark and narrow boat-shaped leaves she saw a brown lizard with a startling orange throat-pouch. The pouch swelled like a balloon, disappeared; the lizard bobbed its narrow head three times, then the pouch swelled again. It seemed to pay no attention to her until she was almost near enough to touch it; then it whirled and flicked out of sight around the branch.

The driveway curved off to the left and disappeared around the shoulder of the hill. Beyond it, a winding path covered with bark mulch led upward between waist-high shrubs. When she had climbed a few yards, she turned for a better view of the house. It was U-shaped around the garden, thirty feet tall except at the far end, where a sort of tower rose another twenty feet. The roofs were all of Spanish tile, and the house looked vaguely Spanish, with its wrought-iron balconies, except for the modern gleam of the glass doors that opened into the living room.

She went on into the cool shadow of the trees. First they were birches and maples, then young oaks, then pines of an unfamiliar variety, and some other trees that she could not identify. Moss and ferns grew thickly between the trunks; the bark-mulch was gone now and she was walking on a narrow dirt path; she might have been in a northern forest, except that everything was too perfect, too beautifully cared for.

Around the next bend she came upon an old man on his knees beside a wheelbarrow full of bulbs. He had been digging with a trowel near the trunk of a maple; he looked up alertly under the brim of his shapeless hat. "Afternoon."

"Hello," Margaret said.

"Visiting, are you?".

"No, I'm Mr. Anderson's new secretary. Margaret Morrow."

"Glen Hoke is my name. I put in all this here." He waved the trowel vaguely at the forest around them.

"You mean, the ferns, and flowers?"

"No, I mean the whole thing. Been working here a year. He's a crazy man. He built this hill, you know."

"He built the hill?"

"Sure. There's no hill like this in Florida. Brought in crushed rock and bulldozers, then topsoil. Must of been near ten thousand yards of topsoil. Then trees, and all the rest of it. You know what it cost him for this one tree?" He slapped the trunk of the maple beside him. "Seven hundred dollars. That's one tree."

"I didn't even know you could transplant a tree that big."

"You can, if you want to pay for it. The brook over there, have you seen that?"

"No."

"Drilled six hundred feet, put in a pump, dug a channel and lined it with rock. There's your brook. Seems like you could build a house where there was a brook."

"You don't really mean you did all this by yourself, do you, Mr. Hoke?"

"No, no." He looked impatient. "I had a whole crew in here, twenty men at one time. I'm a contractor, but hell, he pays me enough, and I take an interest."

"You say the brook is over that way?"

"Just follow the path. Nice meeting you, Miss."

The trail forked, and forked again; Margaret took the downhill branch both times, and presently found herself descending into a ravine cool with willows. She heard the brook before she saw it: it ran bright and transparent over red stones. It was narrow enough, almost, to jump over, but a little farther down there was a little Japanese footbridge, sunbleached and sturdy, looking as if it had been there forever.

After another few yards she heard the water change its tone, and saw that it fell over a miniature precipice into a thirty-foot pool, deep enough for diving at one end. Beside the pool, in a shaded grassy place, something white hung from a limb. When she came near enough, she saw that it was a towel.