Duma Key(117)

"Yes."

"I'm goddam sorry to hear it. I got the more lurid details of the Dave Davis story from her, you know. In better days. I used to see her all the time, on the circuit. And I interviewed most of the artists who stayed at Salmon Point. Only you call it something else, don't you?"

"Big Pink."

She smiled. "I knew it was something cute."

"How many artists stayed there?"

"Lots. They came to lecture in Sarasota or Venice, and perhaps to paint for awhile although those who stayed at Salmon Point did precious little of that. For most of Elizabeth's guests, their time on Duma Key amounted to little more than a free vacation."

"She provided the place gratis?"

"Oh, yes," she said, smiling rather ironically. "The Sarasota Arts Council paid the honoraria for their lectures, and Elizabeth usually provided the lodging Big Pink, n e Salmon Point. But you didn't get that deal, did you? Perhaps next time. Especially since you actually work there. I could name half a dozen artists who stayed in your house and never so much as wet a brush." She marched to the sofa, lifted her glass, and had a sip. No a swallow.

"Elizabeth has a Dal sketch that was done at Big Pink," I said. "That I saw with my own eyes."

Mary's eyes gleamed. "Oh, yes, well. Dal . Dal loved it there, but not even he stayed long... although before he left, the son of a bitch goosed me. Do you know what Elizabeth told me after he left?"

I shook my head. Of course I didn't, but I wanted to hear.

"He said it was 'too rich.' Does that strike a chord with you, Edgar?"

I smiled. "Why do you suppose Elizabeth turned Big Pink into an artist's retreat? Was she always a patron of the arts?"

She looked surprised. "Your friend didn't tell you? Perhaps he doesn't know. According to local legend, Elizabeth was once an artist of some note herself."

"What do you mean, according to local legend?"

"There's a story for all I know it's pure myth that she was a child prodigy. That she painted beautifully, while very young, and then just stopped."

"Did you ever ask her?"

"Of course, silly man. Asking people things is what I do." She was swaying a bit on her feet now, the Sophia Loren eyes noticeably bloodshot.

"What did she say?"

"That there was nothing to it. She said, 'Those who can, do. And those who can't support those who can. Like us, Mary.'"

"Sounds good to me," I said.

"Yes, it did to me, too," Mary said, taking another sip from her Waterford tumbler. "The only problem I had with it was I didn't believe it."

"Why not?"

"I don't know, I just didn't. I had an old friend named Aggie Winterborn who used to do the advice-to-the-lovelorn column in the Tampa Trib, and I happened to mention the story once to her. This was around the time Dal was favoring the Suncoast with his presence, maybe 1980. We were in a bar somewhere in those days we were always in a bar somewhere and the conversation had turned to how legends are built. I mentioned the story of how Elizabeth had supposedly been a baby Rembrandt as an example of that, and Aggie long dead, God rest her said she didn't think that was a legend, she thought it was the truth, or a version of it. She said she'd seen a newspaper story about it."

"Did you ever check?" I asked.

"Of course I did. I don't write everything I know" she tipped me a wink "but I like to know everything."

"What did you find?"

"Nothing. Not in the Tribune, not in the Sarasota or Venice papers, either. So maybe it was just a story. Hell, maybe all that stuff about her father storing Dave Davis's whiskey on Duma Key was just a story, too. But... I'd've bet money on Aggie Winterborn's memory. And Elizabeth had a look on her face when I asked her about it."

"What kind of look?"

"An I'm- not-telling-you look. But all that's a long time ago, much booze under the bridge since, and you can't ask her about it now, can you? Not if she's as bad as you say."

"No, but maybe she'll come back. Wireman says she has before."

"We'll hope," Mary said. "She's a rarity, you know. Florida's full of old people they don't call it God's waiting room for nothing but precious few of em grew up here. The Suncoast Elizabeth remembers remembered really was another Florida. Not the hurry-scurry sprawl we have now, with the domed stadiums and the turnpikes going everywhere, and not the one I grew up in, either. Mine was the John D. MacDonald Florida, back when people in Sarasota still knew their neighbors and the Tamiami Trail was a honky-tonk. Back then people sometimes still came home from church to find alligators in their swimming pools and bobcats rooting in their trash."

She was actually very drunk, I realized... but that didn't make her uninteresting.

"The Florida Elizabeth and her sisters grew up in was the one that existed after the Indians were gone but before old Mr. White Man had fully conshol... consolidated his hold. Your little island would have looked very different to you. I've seen the pictures. It was cabbage palms covered in strangler fig and gumbo limbo and slash pine inland; it was liveoak and mangrove in the few places the ground was wet. There was Cherokee bean and inkberry low on the ground, but none of that jungle shit that's growing out there now. The beaches are the only thing that's the same, and the sea oats, of course... like the hem of a skirt. The drawbridge was there at the north end, but there was just one house."