One Fearful Yellow Eye Read Free Page A

play the other half of the tape.
    "I loved this house," she said.
    I looked at a large painting on the opposite wall, the colors vividly alive, the composition very strong. A small gallery spot shone on it. I got up and went halfway to it, and then made out the artist's signature and went back to the chair.
    "An incredible old man," I said.
    "Fort and I picked that out in New York three years ago. It had just come into the gallery. Fort met Hans Hoffinan once, years ago. He told me that Hoffman had such an almost childlike quality of enthusiasm, that youthfulness that comes from being eternally inquisitive. I told Fort he had exactly the same thing. He looked so startled I had to laugh at him. Golly I'm going to miss that painting."
    "Do you have to sell it?"
    "In November, two weeks after Fort died, a very polite and considerate man showed up with a perfectly legitimate bill of sale for that Hoffman. He's a Chicago collector, and he paid Fort seven thousand five for it. He said that he had added it to his fine arts rider on his insurance policy, and he insisted on leaving it here until I decide what I'm going to do. It wasn't a shock, Trav. Not by then. By then I knew I couldn't consider anything mine. Not even the house."
    "I don't understand."
    She took my empty glass and said, "The lady yelled help. Remember?"
    TWO
    I KNEW SHE must have planned how she would tell me, but when she started, I could see that it seemed wrong to her. She stopped and hopped up and began pacing around.
    At last she stopped in front of me and said, "Okay. Look at it this way. Look at me and Fort from the outside, the way his son and daughter saw us. Their mother, Glenna, died eighteen years ago, when Roger was eleven and Heidi was seven. So they were the privileged children of Dr. Fortner Geis. Money and prestige. Money in the family from their mother's side, plus what Fort added to it by becoming a great neurosurgeon-and the prestige of being the children of a man who'd made himself an international reputation. Fort told me he'd made a lot of mistakes in his life, but the worst one of all was the one he made five years ago, after the diagnosis was absolutely certain, after the prognosis was definite, deciding to tell Roger and Heidi that he probably had not more than three more years left. Damn it, Trav, he wasn't looking for sympathy or being dramatic. He was a doctor. He knew a fact pertinent to their lives. So he told them. He'd always worked too long and too hard for the relationship with his kids to be terribly close. They set up a death watch, practically. They started dropping in on him, full of brave and noble cheer. And it started depressing him to the point where finally he had to get away by himself. He canceled out everything for a month and came down to Fort Lauderdale and didn't Page 7

    let anybody know where they could find him. He told me he had some adjusting to do. He said he had been too busy to think about dying. And if a man was going to die, he should have some time for contemplation, so he wouldn't die without coming to any decision about what it had all meant. He wanted to walk on the beach, look at the birds, read something other than medical journals. And he started coming into the dining room at odd times for coffee when I could sit with him and we could talk. Dammit, Trav, I had no idea he was important. I knew he was a doctor. I knew he was a widower. He said he was taking his first vacation in twenty-five years.
    There was that wonderful... simplicity about him."
    "I know," I said. "That long nobbly face and the spaniel eyes and the slow grin."
    "Loneliness," she said. "Both of us. We never talked trivia. We started talking from the heart right off. He'd loved Glenna deeply. He still missed her. And when we finally had a date, he told me what was wrong with him, and how long he probably could keep operating, and how soon he would die. We'd each taken our lumps. I told him... what had nearly sunk me without a