in seemingly perfect health and secure in his job as a millwright at GEFFCo, the principal industry in Ilium, and with the Kiwanis giving her a banquet and a plaque celebrating her twenty-five years of distinguished teaching, and the students naming her the most popular teacher for the twelfth year in a row.
At the start of 1986, she said, “Oh, Roy—we have so much to be thankful for: we’re so lucky compared to most people. I could cry for happiness.”
And he said, putting his arms around her, “Well now, you just go ahead and cry.” She was fifty-one and he was fifty-nine, and they were great lovers of the out-of-doors, hiking and skiing and mountain-climbing and canoeing and running and bicycling and swimming, so they both had lean and youthful bodies. They did not smoke or drink, and they ate mostly fresh fruits and vegetables, with a little fish from time to time.
They had also handled their money well, giving their savings, in financial terms, the same sort of sensible nourishment and exercise that they gave themselves.
The tale of fiscal wisdom which Mary could tell about herself and Roy, of course, would be a thrill to James Wait.
And, yes, Wait, that eviscerator of widows, was speculating about Mary Hepburn as he sat in the bar of the El Dorado, although he had not met her yet, nor learned for certain how well fixed she was. He had seen her name on the hotel register, and had asked the young manager about her.
Wait liked what little the manager was able to tell him. This shy and lonesome schoolteacher upstairs, although younger than any of the wives he had ruined so far, sounded to him like his natural prey. He would stalk her at leisure during “the Nature Cruise of the Century.”
If I may insert a personal note at this point: When I was alive, I often received advice from my own big brain which, in terms of my own survival, or the survival of the human race, for that matter, can be charitably described as questionable. Example: It had me join the United States Marines and go fight in Vietnam.
Thanks a lot, big brain.
7
THE NATIONAL CURRENCIES of all six guests at the El Dorado, the four Americans, one claiming to be a Canadian, and the two Japanese, were still as good as gold everywhere on the planet. Again: The value of their money was imaginary. Like the nature of the universe itself, the desirability of their American dollars and yen was all in people’s heads.
And if Wait, who did not even know that there was a financial crisis going on, had carried out his masquerade as a Canadian to the extent of bringing Canadian dollars into Ecuador, he would not have been as well received as he was. Although Canada had not gone bankrupt, people’s imaginations in more and more places, including Canada itself, were making them unhappy about trading anything really useful for Canadian dollars anymore.
A similar decay in imagined value was happening to the British pound and the French and Swiss francs and the West German mark. The Ecuadorian sucre, meanwhile, named in honor of Antonio José de Sucre (1795–1830), a national hero, had come to be worth less than a banana peel.
• • •
Up in her room, Mary Hepburn was wondering if she had a brain tumor, and that was why her brain was giving her the worst possible advice all the time. It was a natural thing for her to suspect, since it was a brain tumor which had killed her husband Roy only three months before. It hadn’t been enough for the tumor to kill him, either. It had to addle his memory and destroy his judgment first.
She had to wonder, too, when his tumor had begun to do that to him—whether it wasn’t the tumor which had made him sign them up for “the Nature Cruise of the Century” in the promising January of that ultimately horrible year.
Here was how she found out he had signed them up for the cruise: She came home from work one afternoon, expecting Roy still to be at GEFFCo. He got off work an hour later than she did. But there Roy was, already, home, and it turned out that he had quit at noon. This was a man who adored the work he did with machinery, and who had never taken off so much as an hour from his job during his twenty-nine years with GEFFCo—not for sickness,