Go to the Widow-Maker

by James Jones

  The Grand Hotel Crount at the time he and Lucky arrived to stay in it was probably the chicest hotel in the whole of the Caribbean. Grant of course, the Indianapolis hick, had never heard of it but Lucky had stayed there quite a lot with Raoul, her rich South American. The day before they arrived John Gielgud had departed for New York after a two-week stay, and Charlie Addams the cartoonist was due to arrive in a week for an even longer stay. Residing in one of the hotel’s suites at the moment was a famous Broadway musical comedy writer with her husband, and in another a very famous conductor with his wife. Peter Lawford the actor and his wife had wired for reservations in April. Travel writers for just about every publication that hired travel writers had been writing it up for a couple of years as the chicest and the hippest place to go in the Caribbean. All of this fame, fortune, publicity, income and happiness was due to the shrewd ministrations of one man, Lucky’s old friend and the Crount’s owner and manager, René Halder, and his wife whose name was Lisa and who was herself Jamaican.

  Halder, a French Jew who had been one of the top American movie-cameramen overseas during the war, and whose name everybody automatically pronounced “Al-dare”, was an ebullient fizzing bubbling little man who had met his wife in New York where she was studying dance and after encountering color discrimination there because of their marriage, had removed with her to Jamaica and bought the Crount from the heirs of an old British Navy seacaptain. And that had been the seacaptain’s name: Crount.

  When asked by Grant—as he admitted he usually was asked by almost everybody—why he had not changed the name, he grinned his tubby little smile and shrugged. “W’y shange heem, Ronnie? ’Ees got mahzel. ’Ee ees so ’orrible I tink I like it. And he canfuse ever’-body so much when ’e try to say Crownt, instead of Croont. So I leave him.”

  Old Captain Crount had apparently built his small hotel both to take care of him and support him in his old age, and to at the same time allow him to be close to the sea. Apparently he had been given some kind of grant of government land for services rendered the Navy, and he had chosen to take his land out along the seaward side of the long sand spit known as the Palisadoes which encloses Kingston Harbor and terminates in the old pirate town of Port Royal. Here he built his small place, low and heavy and of stone on the ground floor because of storms, cheap and of wood and corrugated tin on the second floor so it would be easy to replace if blown away, all of it together constituting just enough rooms to let him live out his life and keep him in whiskey. Situated a mile and a quarter east of Port Royal village and three miles west of Kingston’s International Airport on the Palisadoes spit, it perched or rather squatted on the sandy beach staring out south over the sparkling sea with nothing around it except sand, scrub, a few brackish ponds, and the blacktop road. And mosquitoes.

  But René and his personality and his ideas made up for all of that that might have looked so unprepossessing. By some dubious and marvelous chicanery which he never explained, René was able to take over the old Captain’s grant, which should normally have reverted to the government which had given it to him, and by buying out—or paying off—the heirs, take over these rights himself. He had added onto the small place, keeping the same outlandish architecture as being too beautifully ugly to change or demolish, building along the seafront and in an L back toward the road enough new rooms and suites to make him capable of taking care of thirty clients, or couples. Getting his money whenever and wherever he could, usually from acquaintances in the swiftly widening circle of friends among his clients, he did all this, planted more palm trees all around, built a small swimming pool in the angle of the L, added three small cottages, and managed to pay the whole thing off in the six years he had had it, especially in the last two years of its new notoriety. Now just about all the young executives and editors along Madison Avenue were clamoring for winter, and even summer, reservations, and most of them getting turned down for simple lack of space. The main lot of these that he did accept René relegated to the long L back toward the road which he had added, and which he called “Purgatory,” saving his suites and rooms along the seafront for his more celebrated clients. This was not so much because he catered to celebrities, he explained to Grant in his strange Jewish-French accent on the first day he met him, as that generally he found celebrities or people who had made their mark on the world more interesting and amusing and more fun for him to be around. And that was all he cared about. This was not to say that an occasional celebrity of unpleasant personality (such as the famous conductor who with his wife was at this moment staying in the hotel, for example) did not find himself relegated to “Purgatory,” as indeed Grant found the conductor was (“I ’ate ze pederasts,” René grinned), but in general the celebrities were better to talk to. And René loved to talk. More than that, he could on occasion even listen.

  René had met them at the airport in the hotel’s pink and white striped jeep with the fringed top. He took to Grant immediately. He had read all of his plays and stories and had even seen two of the plays, while on trips to New York. And he had always loved Lucky, from the very first time she had stayed in his place three years ago. He was, clearly, just the man to further, to throw himself into furthering, Lucky’s underhanded and chicanerous plans for marriage. And with his quiet but immensely efficacious wife Lisa on her side too, Grant really had no chance from the start, but then, as he had been telling himself for about two weeks now, he was not so sure he wanted a chance. If he had really wanted a chance, if he had really fought it, not even René and Lisa running in tandem alongside of Lucky could have cornered him.

  Lisa, who though quiet could also be a hell of a talker every now and then when she got started, and who apparently loved Lucky as much as René did, occupied herself with arranging and organizing the marriage, which was why it was accomplished in five days. And she as much as told Grant, half-laughing, that she was going to do so. And yet Grant did nothing. He certainly would not have organized it himself, the marriage (and probably Lucky wouldn’t have either), but he did nothing to stop Lisa doing it. He did protest a little, and look shamefaced, as becomes a male, as males are expected to do, but that was all. He guessed half of him didn’t believe she could really accomplish it.

  Lisa, who was half Haitian, had a friend, a long-lined, long-necked, small-headed, beautifully curved, coalblack-African beauty of a Haitian girl named Paule Gordon who had left Haiti when the troubles started and now lived with them in the hotel, and she turned all of the legwork duty of arranging the marriage over to Paule since she herself could not be absent from running the hotel now during the height of their season. Every evening just before cocktail hour descended on them, in the dim cool uninhabited bar the three women would hold a progress-report conference huddled at a corner table (while René engaged Grant in conversation and bought him drinks at the bar itself) discussing such interesting items as the fact that yes, they could get a civil servant to come to the hotel to perform the ceremony or the fact that yes, the American consul would validate the marriage for American law with an official paper from his office. The date for the ceremony was set for Wednesday next, at five o’clock at the hotel. And still Grant did nothing.

  It was all half a joke, of course, and all not half a joke. Everybody laughed and kidded about the forthcoming tying of Grant’s knot, including Grant. But at the same time he was in a strange benumbed half-functioning state during those five days. And only a small part of it was due to drinking. He did not know if Lucky sensed this. If she did she did not say so. It was easy enough for all of them, and easy enough for her too. She had damn little to lose when you looked right at it, only Leslie and half a tiny rented apartment, and a life of doing TV and movie jobs she hated. Whereas he would be changing his whole life. His whole life pattern he had set up over a number of years. He didn’t even know if he had enough money to do it, thanks to goddamned Carol Abernathy. For example, should he take her back out to Indianapolis to live? Or should he not? (She had said she was willing to
go. But wouldn’t it be an awful dirty trick to take her out there to live across the street from Carol Abernathy?) And if he shouldn’t, where the hell was he going to take her to live, and where get the money to do it on? Maybe he should tell her the truth, all of it, right now before the marriage. That would be the honorable thing to do. But he was sure, in his guilt, that if he did tell her now, she wouldn’t marry him at all. And he needed her. In fact, now, after that time away from her, then getting her back so marvelously, he felt that he literally could not live without her, and at the same time he hated himself for feeling that way because he felt it was unmanly. A man should be able to live without any damned woman. So he vacillated. And the three inexorable women moved on like the three inexorable Fates. Christ, even René, a man, wasn’t on his side.

  Christ, if only they could wait till the fall, see how the new play made out, or at least give him time to settle up out there, sell the house maybe, he wanted to tell her that, but he couldn’t tell her that, because she didn’t care, she was willing to go out there, Oh Christ.

  And all this time, every day, except the actual day of the marriage itself, he had been diving with Jim Grointon.

  Jim Grointon it turned out, Jim Grointon with whom he had flown to Grand Bank and whose six-foot ten-inch ground shark he had envied, was as much a fixture at the Grand Hotel Crount as the Negro doorman René kept standing by the main entrance stairs in a Haitian general’s uniform. He spent about half his spare time there, and drew about a third of his business from René’s clients. His steel and glass catamaran was docked at an anchorage around on the other side of the spit near the garrison wharf not far from Port Royal village, and he could have it around to the Crount on call in less than an hour. And in fact, during good weather, he half the time left it anchored right out in front of the hotel just off the beach. Grant learned all this the very first day when, after he inquired about diving facilities, and while the women were already huddled together in their first marriage consultation, René called up Grointon to come over and meet him.

  “Usu-ally,” René said, “Jeem leave zat boat right out een frawnt ’ere,” and swept an arm toward the empty beach beyond the veranda where some paying guests swam in the heavy quiet noonday sun. “W’enhever zay clients want to go diving I call Jeem. ’Ee ees a real ganzer macher. ’Ee make plenty beesness off me.”

  Grant explained how he had already met Jim Grointon. Five minutes later the stocky sandy-haired Irish-cop-looking diver pulled in in his battered old jeep.

  “Bes’ diver een Kingstone,” René grinned after the other two had shaken hands. “But you got to watch heem, Ronnie. Rarely does ’ee teach a man how to dive without ’ee teach ze man’s wife something too! Eet’s a shande. ’Ee ees ze biggest Don Huan between ’ere and ze Windward Road. Eef not een ze ’ole Kingstone.”

  “He’s flatterin me,” Jim Grointon grinned with his pale strange lashes, and slapped René on the back with the familiarity of a comrade. “I’m not quite that good. So! I’m glad you finally got down. When do you want to go out?”

  “Anytime.”

  “Then we’ll go right now. This afternoon.”

  “Fine. Come on over and I’ll introduce you to my uh—”

  “Hees wife,” René said.

  For just a second Grointon gave Grant a look from behind his pale lashes. “Sure. Glad to meet her.”

  “She wasn’t with me when I went to Grand Bank,” Grant felt called upon to explain. “She came down after. And she’s not my wife, she’s my girl.”

  “She weel be,” René grinned. “Do not to worry. She weel be. When zos t’ree get ze ’eads together.” And he bobbed his head toward the table.

  “Will she be going out with us?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll ask her. She doesn’t dive but maybe she’ll want to go along.”

  She did. “I’m not letting this guy out of my sight for the next two weeks or whatever it takes if I can possibly help it,” she grinned. And thus began their daily, day-by-day exodus and return out to the reefs. There were quite a number of them within a radius of four miles from the hotel. The nearest of these, Gun Cay and Lime Cay, which were about a mile away and a mile from each other, they visited first and then slowly branched out day by day among the others: Rackhams Cay, Maiden Cay, Drunkenmans Cay, West Middle Rock, West Middle Shoal, East Middle Ground, Turtle Head Shoal, South Cay, South East Cay. Only a few were actually visible from the surface, so that if you did not know where they were you would not have found them. They averaged in depth from two or three fathoms shading off down to ten or twelve. They were not very interesting diving really, but in spite of that they managed to keep themselves in enough fish for eating. A couple of days the musical comedy writer and her husband went out with them. One day the famous fag conductor and his wife went out, but they did not go again. This was just as well. Grant did not like the conductor, and the conductor equally disliked him. Jim Grointon had a small air compressor at his anchorage with which he could refill Grant’s tanks and he was willing as he was with any other client to do all the dirty work, but Grant did not like this. He was a do-it-yourself-and-learn man. So he spent a good deal of time over at the anchorage with Jim, cleaning and filling and repairing, and even helping with the chores of the boat.

  The weather held fine. Each day they went out shortly before noon, taking sandwiches and beer, baking in the heavy sun on the near-windless sparkling sea until with the tans they already had Lucky and Grant were soon almost black, darker than the freckled Grointon. The catamaran was perfect for this kind of sailing. With its twin steel hulls, airtight and sealed, its big retractable waterglass-box, powered by two enormous outboard motors, it was comfortable and about impossible to scuttle, turn over or sink. On a framework of pipes a tarpaulin was stretched overhead to make shade, running between the two masts fore and aft, because not even Lucky with her ivory, easy-tanning Italian skin could stand all that sun all day long. The two men were in the water most of the time, and Grant discovered he got sunburned only on the back of his neck and his shoulders which floated free, and on the backs of his knees even though they remained a foot or so under. He was using the aqualung less and less, though they always carried a couple, and was free-diving more and more. Jim Grointon never used one, since a man who could free-dive a hundred and ten, hundred and twenty feet had no trouble free-diving ten or twelve fathoms. Lucky had taken to him in a way she had never taken to Big Al Bonham so that there were no currents of antagonism on the boat, and the long days out on the water were great fun and marvelous even though she still refused to try to dive. She soon discovered that Jim despite his surname was Irish after all, and that however much the “Don Juan” he was and however brave and tough he was underwater, he was still easily shocked and considerably embarrassed by her New York female’s outspokenness. A number of native fishermen worked the cays and shoals during the good weather, poling in shallow water or rowing in deep water their little homemade boats. Invariably they worked totally naked, standing tall and lean in their skiffs, and almost invariably there dangled from their groins the longest and largest penises Grant anyway had ever seen. Only when the catamaran came close enough for them to see there was a woman aboard would they duck down and come up wearing a garment looking like a cross between a priest’s cassock and a woman’s pullover cotton dress, smiling in terrible embarrassment. So Lucky took to carrying a pair of highpowered binoculars borrowed from René. With these she was able to study their unbelievably large penises from afar without embarrassing them, and this became (she claimed) her “pastime” and her “hobby” while the two men were out in the water, diving, and when they would return to the boat after a dive she would hold up her hands grinning and measuring what she had seen, or thought she had seen, this time: ten inches, a foot, a foot and a half; with some such comment as: “Oh, those beautiful big long chocolate things! Yum!” at which Jim Grointon would retire to the stern with a strained grin to start the motors, his freckled ears red under
his tan. Invariably when they returned to the hotel where Jim left the boat now every night, René would chortle and holler, “Et alors! What you ’ave seen how big today?” Grant knew that at least two-thirds of her little routine was done to shock Grointon (and any other prudes who might be around the hotel), while almost all of the other third was simply pure iconoclasm, and he would catch Jim looking at her with confused and embarrassed wonderment, and perhaps admiration, whenever he thought no one was watching. And so the marvelous, laughter-making, fun days passed. The only day that they did not go out was the Wednesday, the day that they were married.

  But in spite of the fun and laughter, the further laughter and drinking and repartee in the bar and on the big porch at night, in all of which Grant joined lustily enough, the only times Grant felt himself to be fully functioning and not numb were those times when he was actually in the water diving. Only then could he completely forget his problem, his marriage problem about which he was doing nothing. Even out in the catamaran, out on the sparkling, always-heaving, never-quiet, sunburnt splendor of the sea, when he would climb back in and strip off his gear, sometimes the lung but more usually now only snorkel, mask, flippers and gun, it was as if some switch would click off, some curtain would fall, in his mind and he would again be facing his problem that he knew he had to solve but which he could not begin the solving of. Should he? Shouldn’t he? He preferred to stay in the water. And as a result his diving, which he hated to leave even for a moment now, progressed enormously and by the day of his wedding he was free-diving fifty feet quite easily. But all the rest of this twosome vacation was all truly only half alive, benumbed.

  Then too, as if the rest were not enough, his jealousy had come back, and come back with an incredible vengeance, an unbelievable force. He had had it for her all that time in New York, and strongly. But he hadn’t had it since she came down to meet him in Montego Bay. Now he had it again. This had happened on the third day when Lucky introduced him to her old, two-year-old, two-and-a-half-year old (time, distance in time, became very important now) Jamaican lover.