by Belva Plain
I must have something for myself, he repeated.
By the time the city woke, when the sounds of the knife-grinder and the old-clothes man were heard in the street below, he had laid his plans.
Far out on the Island, he found an old house. It was a little place, a Cape Cod cottage, in need of much repair. Five acres of windblown scrub pine, sedge grass, and bluff and dune went with it. The nearest neighbor on this promontory, reached by the sandy road that paralleled the shore, was a lighthouse, a Victorian structure with gingerbread carving on the eaves below the tower. Its light would be a comfort on some pitch-black night during a summer storm.
The real estate broker, obviously overjoyed at Paul’s quick decision and afraid to upset it, went outdoors, leaving him alone to walk through the little rooms and climb the stairs, as steep as a ladder, to the pair of tiny bedrooms under the eaves. Plain whitewashed walls, he was thinking. A rag rug, so your feet won’t get cold when you step out of bed. Bare windows, so you can look straight down to the bright little beach, or in the other direction to the solitary oak, now rosy red as a Bordeaux in an old bottle. No decorations, except a few pictures like that primitive he’d seen last week, a stiff early-American patriarch with his hand on a globe. Maybe he’d find a child somewhere, a dark-haired little girl holding a cat.
When he came home and told her about the place, Marian made comment. “It’s an awfully long drive and terribly lonesome, the way you describe it.” And when he had refuted neither of these objections, she had said, “Well, it’s your decision. You’ve been generous to me with the Florida place, so it’s only fair for you to take your turn.”
Hennie, frugal as always, was cautious. “Hadn’t you better ask Alfie about it? After all, he does know real estate.”
“No. Maybe it’s a bad investment, but I don’t care. I want it.”
Right after the closing, on a brilliant windy day in November, he suggested a picnic to celebrate.
“It will be freezing at the shore,” protested Marian.
He had expected her not to want to go. But he persisted, as he knew he was expected to persist. “Don’t you even want to see the place?”
“But it’s not as if I hadn’t seen it once.”
They had taken a ride there some weeks before and, although she had obviously not been enchanted as he had been, she had been kind enough to pronounce the house “very sweet.” It was clear that she had no intention of spending much time in it.
“Well, all right. Then I’ll take Hennie and Dan and maybe Hank. They’ll enjoy the day.”
“As long as you’re back in time for dinner.”
He made an early start. He had a new car, a Renault which, according to Hank anyway, looked as if someone had flattened its nose. But there was always a gala feeling about a new car and Paul, looking up at the encouraging sky, a bright dry blue, was in high spirits. Leah—it occurred to him that, for some odd reason, he hadn’t mentioned that she was coming too—brought a picnic basket, along with the dachshund, Strudel the Second; at the age of twelve, he was still in good condition and went everywhere with her. They all climbed in and rolled off to Long Island. Leah and Hank sang part-songs. Hennie and Dan just sat back to enjoy the rare pleasure of a ride into the country. And nobody complained about anything.
The only remark that came anywhere close to a complaint was from Dan.
Paul had pointed out a great mansion surrounded with lawns and greenhouses. “It belongs to a client of mine. It’s a middle-sized Versailles.”
“Greenhouses?” Dan almost spluttered. “What for?”
Paul, explaining that the main house would require fresh flowers every day, expected Dan’s reaction. “Revolting display! Immoral!”
A socialist to the end! Paul had to chuckle to himself.
“We’re almost there,” he said as they bumped down the lane that led from the main road. “I warned you all, it’s not a fashionable neighborhood. No greenhouse, Dan.”
“Good,” Hennie said.
He drew the car up behind the house. They all got out and following him to the beach, stood in silence before the immense sparkle of the Sound. There were no waves; it was absolutely quiet, nothing moved except for a solitary sail far out on the horizon.
Paul broke the silence. “There’s nothing to do here. Just a little clamming and fishing. It hasn’t changed in two hundred years. Let me show you the house. And after that, how about some food?”
He had expected Hennie and Dan to approve of the house for no other reason than its simplicity. He was surprised, though, when Leah made comment.
“I don’t know what your plans are, Paul. But if this were my place, I wouldn’t do anything more than clean it up. I wouldn’t even curtain the upstairs windows. Nobody can look in, and I’d want to look at the world that’s out there.”
“I do want to build a little dock and a boathouse,” he observed, when they had spread their blankets on the shaggy grass. “I’d like to teach you to sail, Hank. It beats a motorboat all hollow. With sail, you’re really one with the sea.”
Leah unpacked the basket, which was expensively fitted with proper napkins and cloth, glasses and utensils.
“Here’s pâté—I was feeling French today—and French bread. Feel, it’s still warm. Three different cheeses, take your pick. There’s soup in the thermos.”
Neatly and deftly, she spread the meal, roast chicken, little sausages, fruit, and cake. “Oh, if we were in France—how I loved France—we’d have wine; even you would, Hank, you’d have yours watered. But as long as we’re here, we’ll have coffee instead and fruit punch for you.”
It was a pleasure to watch her, Paul thought; she wasn’t tired, she didn’t have a headache, and she ate with appetite, chewing the chicken down to the bone, sucking the last juice from the orange.
When they had finished, Hennie wanted to help clean up, but Leah would have none of it.
“No, no. Hank and Dan want to take a walk toward the lighthouse. Go along. It’ll do you good.”
She put a cigarette into her long, black lacquered holder and leaned back, sighing, “Oh, that was delicious.” She had wrapped herself warmly in a wine-colored wool cloak, simple and perfect for the time and the place, over her brown woolen skirt. She looked like herself again, recovered from grief and horror.
“I want to thank you for being so good to Hank,” Leah said. “Spending time with him. It’s meant so much to him and to me.”
“It’s not been difficult.”
“You’ve gone to a lot of trouble, taking him to science museums and working on his chemistry set, which I know nothing about.”
“I assure you I know very little myself. Hank knows more than I do; he tells me about prehistoric brain development and I listen. I have a hunch he’ll be a doctor. Anyway, things are finally returning to normal for you both,” Paul finished.
“Yes,” she said. “It was that or go mad. I’ve had to look at the truth.” She seemed to be making a confession. “Ben was guilty, as guilty as Donal, the politicians and all the bluebloods who are making their fortunes out of the same pot. So his end could have been predicted. His end was written in his beginning.”
“Donal’s end, too, you’re saying.”
“Who can tell?” She was silent a moment, watching the trail of smoke from the cigarette. “But in the meantime, it’s Meg I care about.”
“I don’t see her much, I’m sorry to say, except at duty affairs like Alfie and Emily’s anniversary.”
“I don’t see her that much either, although they keep inviting us to use the pool or to spend Sunday with them. But Hank absolutely hates to go. I can’t understand why he makes such a fuss. Can you?”
“No,” Paul said.
“Look, Paul, they were in a rotten, risky business, but I can’t blame Donal because some thugs tried to rob my husband and shot him. Right?”
“Right,” Paul said.
“Personally, I enjoy myself whenever we go. It’s lively, Meg’s in much better spirits tha
n she used to be, and the kids are adorable.”
Paul, wanting to leave the subject of Donal, remarked, “She hasn’t had a baby lately. Isn’t it time for another?”
Leah made a face. “There isn’t going to be another. That’s why she’s in good spirits. I made her get a diaphragm.”
“You did? You?”
“Yes, I. She was falling apart. And he wanted nine children or more. Imagine forcing a woman like that, against her will! So I sent her to a doctor, with Donal none the wiser.” And Leah grinned her satisfaction.
Paul thought irrelevantly, Imagine Marian talking to a man about diaphragms! But plenty of women today were as free in their speech as only men would have been before the war. Now everybody talked about sex. Women drank; women used lipstick and rouge; only prostitutes had done that before the war. And he glanced at Leah’s nails, which were the same bright rose as her lips, and very becoming, too.
The walkers returned. “It was a bit far for Dan,” Hennie reported. “Perhaps he shouldn’t have gone walking on the sand, although Hank helped him.”
“It’s time to go home anyway,” Leah said.
“Who’ll race me to the end of the lane and back to the car?” asked Hank.
His mother made the offer. Hennie and Dan climbed into the car, Paul turned it about, and they all watched the race between the boy and the woman, with the old dog lagging behind. The wind raised Leah’s short skirt, exposing her strong thighs. Hard flesh, Paul thought; she would be hard, and soft in the right places.
What was the matter with him? You’d think it was spring, the time when a man was expected to have aberrant thoughts, when the earth was rich, sap rising, and the air so soft on the skin after the long, dry winter. Now here was the long, dry winter about to begin, he having springtime reactions and in the presence of Leah. Of all people, Leah!
They had turned and were running toward the car, with the boy only a little ahead of his mother, who was running fast, with her cloak flying and her sumptuous hair bouncing. Nearing the car, she dropped her purse and as she stooped to pick it up, he saw a thin gold chain between her breasts. It held a plump gold locket. The sight of it puzzled him, staying with him even as he put the car in gear and rolled away.
After a while it came to him: Anna had had a locket like that. Not that there was anything unusual about it, but yes, Anna had worn one under her blouse, under the ruffles. It was all so confusing, enough to make the mind reel, that anything, even a common object worn by a woman he didn’t care about, could return him to Anna.…
As usual, the desk was piled with mail when some months later, Paul walked into his office. Miss Briggs put his personal mail on the blotter. Although Joachim’s letters with the foreign stamp were never marked “Personal,” she knew that they were. Joachim was still an ostrich.
I would say that things, at least for me, are rather better than they have been in a long time. True, the anti-Jewish propaganda continues, but economically there has been a real upsurge. Business is booming so much that I believe the Jewish problem will die a natural death. When money jingles in their pockets, people are happy, and they don’t have the wish to hate. At the bottom of the letter, surely written without Joachim’s knowledge, Elisabeth had added a tiny postscript.
I want us to leave. I am terribly frightened, even though Joachim isn’t.
The postscript was a faint whisper. He could hear Elisabeth’s voice as clearly as if she had been standing there, pulling at his sleeve.
He got up again and walked to the window. A thin rain was falling; the tops of cars crawling beneath him shone like beetles. Scraps of tinsel from discarded Christmas trees, the remnant of the year’s last office parties, blew on the sidewalks. It was a good day to be indoors out of the wind, and because there was no inducement to go out, a good day to accomplish a lot of work. But he was still restless. He had been working steadily, he realized, since the summer, without a break. He was always so busy … and why? Surely it was not to lay aside a fortune for a family. He wasn’t even free to buy a chocolate bar for the one child he had.
He went back to the desk and turned over some papers, a proposition for a buy-out of a machine tool factory in Illinois. It seemed to be a profitable venture, a rarity in these years that were still lean in spite of the New Deal. If Alfie had money to invest, it might be a good thing for him. Hank’s funds, he thought sourly, were doing well in Hitler’s Germany, thanks to Donal Powers’s manipulation.
The restlessness grew. It grew into a tremendous desire, pulling at him as it had done only once before, in the time of the stillborn baby and all the trauma that came after, when he had gotten on the ship and sailed away.
And then he remembered the talk he had had with the rabbi some months before. He picked up the telephone.
“I’m going to Europe, Rabbi,” he said. “To Germany. Is there anything you want me to do, anyone you want me to see?”
The old voice crackled. “You’re not going inside Germany?”
“Yes, I’ll be safe enough.”
“I don’t know,” The voice was doubtful.
“I’ve made up my mind.”
“Well, then, I’ll get some letters and notes together for you. When are you planning to leave?”
He hadn’t planned. It was all coming together while he spoke.
“As soon as I can get passage. It shouldn’t be hard this time of year. I’ll be going to England first. Do you remember what you were telling me about the Palestine situation? I’ve got clients in England too. Important political people. Money talks, Rabbi. Even though they don’t give a damn about getting refugees to Palestine, money talks.”
“Unfortunately yes. Well, come in and talk to me. Any morning this week. I’m at your service.”
“I want to get all your thoughts about the Balfour Declaration. I know the theory, of course, a homeland for the Jews, but I’ll want to know facts and figures. What arguments to present, and a pile of information that I know you must have at the tips of your fingers.”
“I’ll give you the best I can … Paul?”
“Yes, Rabbi?”
“God bless you.”
He rang for Miss Briggs. “Will you find out now when the Normandie sails again? I want passage for England.”
“For one, Mr. Werner?”
“For one. I have to see the Morehouse brothers in London.” And he added, feeling at the same time foolish for making any explanation, “Mrs. Werner will be going to Florida.”
“If there’s an earlier sailing instead of the Normandie, shall I book that?”
“No, I’ll wait for the Normandie.”
She was only a year old, a fabulous ship, he had heard. There was nothing else like it on the high seas. He might as well have some excitement while he was at it.
When he called her later in the day, Marian complained, “Why do you always have to go to Europe in the middle of winter?”
“Not always. This is only the second time.”
Her sigh almost blew across the telephone wire. “Well, if you have to. Business is business, I suppose.”
“It surely is, my dear. Besides, you’re leaving for Florida next week, so what difference does it make?”
“That’s true. While you’re in London, perhaps you can get a few pieces of our Royal Crown Derby. That clumsy girl just broke another cup last week.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Also, while you’re there, you might get yourself some sweaters. Yours are too worn. They all have pills on the sleeves.”
Pills on the sleeves? For a moment he didn’t understand what she was talking about. “Yes, yes. Anything else?”
“Oh, I’ll have to think. I’ll make you a list.”
Yes, and it would be a mile long. He didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything except that he was going.
The sense of adventure remained with him and he was filled with the joyous expectation that he would have said, only a few days earlier, he would probably never feel again
. He had not realized how “down” he had been.
When the taxi deposited him and his bags at the pier, the ship loomed like a mountain alongside. He strode into the cavernous, echoing building and got in line with his ticket and passport. It was foggy, damp and cold; horns honked out on the street, men shouted each other out of the way as they trundled trunks, a brassy woman, probably a movie star, carried a yelping poodle under her arm and fought her way to the front of the line ahead of Paul, who didn’t mind. He was loving it, loving every hectic second of it.
There was no great crowd, with mountains of luggage, as there would have been in a clement vacation season. There were obvious business travelers like himself, for whom weather could be no impediment. But the others, bound on a stormy crossing toward Europe’s frozen winter, set his imagination to work. He fancied that they were people running toward new loves on the other side of the ocean, or away from lost loves, or maybe they were fleeing from embezzlement or some other crime. Romantic fancies! So he amused himself.
Then he went up the gangplank and stepped on board. Had he been on a Cunard ship, an officer would have been there to greet him by name, but he liked the feeling of newness now, of being alone in a new place.
He decided to tour the ship. It was surely different from the others that he had known so well. It had vast spaces, vistas and sweeping stairs: a palace plan. The dining room glittered like Versailles; the ceiling was glass and the glass columns, he saw now in the wintry afternoon, were illuminated. The chandeliers blazed. He recognized an abundance of Lalique crystal.
There were no tables for one, so he reserved a small table for two, for he had no wish to take chances with a table full of strangers. This time he would simply relax and observe the scene.
Continuing his inspection, he saw the gymnasium, the blue mosaic swimming pool and the winter garden, a splendor of foliage, a tropical enclave of blooming flowers, with twittering budgerigars in enormous cages. Bemused by this superfluous luxury, he shook his head. Admittedly, though, he would enjoy it!
Then he went to seek the deck steward to reserve a chair on the promenade deck on the starboard side, which would be sunny, if by some chance there should be any sun. When he came downstairs, the chimes were ringing the last call for going ashore. The ship blasted its long, mournful warning note of departure. The sound was always thrilling, sending a shiver down the spine. And if I should go a hundred times, he thought, it would still send a shiver down my spine.
