The Last Resort
A Novel
Alison Lurie
Manatees are slow-moving creatures that feed on aquatic vegetation in shallow coastal waters, estuaries, and slow-flowing rivers. They live singly or in small family groups... . Members of a group frequently communicate by muzzle-to-muzzle contact and, when alarmed, by chirplike squeaking... . All three species are declining in population.
—
15th edition
But there’s a tree, of many one,
A single field which I have looked upon, Both of them speak of something that is gone.
—Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
A Biography of Alison Lurie
1
AT THREE A. M. on a windy late-November night, Jenny Walker woke in her historic house in an historic New England town, and sensed from the slope of the mattress and the chill of the flowered percale sheets that Wilkie Walker, the world-famous writer and naturalist, was not in bed beside her.
Often now Jenny woke to this absence. The first time, after lying half awake for twenty minutes, she tiptoed downstairs and found her husband sitting in the kitchen with a mug of tea. Wilkie smiled briefly and replied to her questions that of course he was all right, that everything was all right. “Go back to bed, darling,” he told her, and Jenny followed his instructions, just as she had done for a quarter century.
After that night she didn’t go to look for him, but now and then she would mention his absence the next morning. Wilkie would say that he’d had a little indigestion and needed a glass of soda water, or wanted to write down an idea.
There was no reason to be concerned about him, his tone implied. Indeed her concern was unwelcome, possibly even irritating.But since the day they met, Jenny had been more concerned about Wilkie Walker than anyone or anything in the world. He had come into the University Housing Office at UCLA where she was working after graduation while she waited to see what would happen next in her life. It was a misty, hot summer morning when Wilkie appeared: the most interesting-looking older man Jenny had ever seen, with his broad height, his full explorer’s mustache; his shock of blond-brown hair, steel-blue eyes, and sudden dazzling smile. Dazzled, she heard him ask about sabbatical sublets for the fall. He wanted somewhere quiet with a garden—he liked to work out of doors if he could, he explained—but he also hoped to be within a half-hour’s walk of the university. Which no doubt wasn’t possible, he added with another radiant smile.
But Jenny was able to assure him that she knew just the place. And two days later, while she was still dreaming of Wilkie’s visit and wondering if she could get leave to audit his lectures, he reappeared to thank her and ask her to have lunch with him.
It was only later that Jenny realized how unusual that had been, because at the time Wilkie Walker was extremely wary of all women. He had been married twice, both times briefly and disastrously (“I get on well with most mammals, but I seem to have difficulty with our species”). First to a sweet and graceful but totally impractical girl whom he compared to a highbred Persian cat (“all cashmere fur and huge sky-blue eyes and special diet, but she always had a slight cold, couldn’t hike more than a mile without collapsing, and was terrified of most other animals”).