Kings of the Sea

by Van Every Frost, Joan

  “The writer makes his point pretty clear, wouldn’t you say?” she managed finally.

  “I’ve been wondering when you’d have trouble with the neighbors,” he said. “We’ll take a house somewhere else for when we’re together, in Roxbury maybe, where you aren’t known.”

  “But I don’t even know my neighbors here,” she protested. “I nod and smile and that’s the size of it. Mostly I haven’t even any idea what their names are. Why would anyone do such a thing?”

  He held her against him. “It’s only a crank,” he soothed her. “Some people have a peg loose, though you’d never know it to look at them. No one normal would ever have done that drawing.”

  “It makes me feel sick,” she said, “like lifting up a stone and finding those awful white slugs underneath. I didn’t know people like that existed.”

  “I’ll look for another place today.”

  She moved back so that she could see him. “No, Gideon. I won’t be made to run away. It will be the same wherever we go, you know, and periodic absences from this house aren’t going to fool anybody. No, this is simply one of the prices we’re going to have to pay for being together.”

  “Price be damned! I can’t have you subjected to this kind of thing, Elisabeth.”

  “But I will be subjected to it, and so will you, my dear. I’m willing to pay the price if you are. The only price I’m not willing to pay is to hurt someone, and the neighbors and even Malcolm aren’t being hurt. After all, I turned Malcolm down before I ever met you. But should the time come that our love has to be built on someone else’s pain, then we’ll have to deny ourselves.” She didn’t come out and say whom she really had in mind, but Emily floated like a specter between them. They stood there in the quiet house staring at each other wordlessly.

  In April, Gideon brought a laden basket to the library when he came for her, and they had a picnic on the Common.

  “If I did what I really wanted to do with you right now,” he said, laughing, “we’d be the talk of the town all right.” They had a wonderful time, but they never did have another picnic on the Common.

  It was also in April that they put the boat in the water again. The Spray’s hull and mast were now a bright blue, and she looked very sprightly with her clean suit of white sails. There were cracks between the boards in the boathouse, and a stray beam of sunlight shot through and struck the water, reflecting pale shimmers of light across Gideon’s face as he started to say something to her.

  “What was it?” she asked. “What were you going to say?”

  “I’ve forgotten,” he answered slowly and pulled her to him.

  That golden afternoon they sailed for hours until they were both exhausted and soaking wet. As they walked up the street toward her house, they were shivering in the chill late-afternoon breeze off the river. She blew up the embers in the stove and heated several buckets of water for their baths while he stood about in a blanket and nothing else. During the cold weather their life in the house centered around the kitchen and the hot stove that made the room comfortably warm and fuggy, as Gideon put it. When the water was hot, they argued amicably over who would bathe first, and in the end they went in together, the two of them barely fitting in the metal tub with its clawed feet even though they sat face to face.

  “Be nice to me and I’ll soap your back,” Gideon said.

  “Oh kind sir,” she begged facetiously, “I’d give the jewels of my kingdom if you would be so gallant.”

  He had to give up trying to reach her back from that position and settled instead for the front of her. He kissed her as his hand slid slippery over her soapy skin.

  “Christ but you’ve got beautiful breasts.”

  “I’m glad. I think you’re beautiful all over. I know you aren’t supposed to say men are beautiful, but you are.”

  “I love you, Elisabeth Bowman,” he said as he slowly leaned down and kissed first one breast and then the other while she cradled his wet head in her arms.

  The next note arrived when Gideon was gone. “The fires of Hell will consume those who lust after another’s body,” it said, “and they not joined in holy matrimony. Repent ye before it is too late.” Once again there was a crude drawing and this time the figures in it were switched head to foot with painstaking detail as to where their mouths were placed. The genitals were grossly exaggerated and lovingly detailed, the faces almost blanks. She shivered. What evil kind of mind would take the act of love and debase it so?

  This time she wasn’t to be let off so easily, however. As she came home from work, the one small child on the street, a little girl of about eight, was jumping rope on the uneven sidewalk. Her foot caught in a crack and she measured her length with a thump, followed by a wail of anguish. Elisabeth hurried over and picked her up, for she had often given her cookies and lemonade.

  Laurie gave a sly look at Elisabeth as she was being brushed off. “What’s a whore?” she asked.

  Elisabeth froze. “That’s not a nice word, Laurie. Where did you hear it?”

  “My mama and my papa were fighting, and my mama said you were a whore and my papa said to hush, that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, whatever that means.” The child ran her words together in a triumphant rush that made her difficult to understand.

  “Laurie! Come here this minute!” It was Laurie’s mother, a blowsy woman in her middle thirties and already gone to fat.

  Elisabeth looked up at the woman who was standing on her front porch scowling. “I’m sorry I kept her,” Elisabeth said sweetly. “Laurie asked and I was about to explain the word ‘whore’ to her. However, I’m sure you can explain it far better than I at that.” She walked on, leaving the woman speechless.

  God in heaven, why were people so impossible? Here were these moral holier-than-thous fighting with each other in front of the child and obviously not mincing words. She supposed she ought to feel shamed, but somehow she didn’t. It was obvious, though, that the entire neighborhood had observed Gideon’s comings and goings, and suddenly she felt as if she were being watched by a thousand eyes behind all those blank house windows with their drawn curtains. She hurried into the house and slammed the door behind her, leaning back on it in relief while Horatio rubbed against her legs as usual, meowing hoarsely for his dinner.

  The next day she felt tense and nervous as she walked down the street on her way to work. Rather to her surprise, she was greeted by Mr. Moss, a conductor on one of the horse-drawn streetcars, as he began his own walk to work.

  “I was wondering,” he said diffidently. “You sail, and I thought perhaps you’d show me about scraping and repainting our boat ourselves instead of paying a boatyard a fortune to do it.”

  “When do you want to do it?” she asked.

  “What about this afternoon? I’m off at three.”

  They met at the rented boathouse that housed his little thirty-foot sloop that could sleep four. The boat was in terrible shape, the paint blistered and peeling, the bottom encrusted. She wondered how he had gotten the money for such a boat; streetcar conductors surely didn’t make that kind of money.

  As if he had read her mind, he said, “My sister’s husband was quite a yachtsman. When he upped and died suddenly of some stomach complaint, she gave me the boat. Said she didn’t know what to do with it.”

  “I’m surprised your sister didn’t sell her. She’s worth quite a bit of money even in this shape.”

  “Well,” Mr. Moss said nervously, “we was always close, and she came into a bit of money besides. She knew I’d always dreamed of having the kind of boat you could cruise in, so she lent it to me permanent-like.” He shrugged ruefully. “And now I don’t know what to do with her. She was fine last year, but look at her, she’s a mess. I wouldn’t know where to start, and that’s a fact.”

  What a nice little man, she thought. There weren’t many who would admit their ignorance so ingenuously. She told him the materials he would have to get and how much they would cost. “Can you manage
all that?” she asked, worried about his finances.

  “Oh yes,” he said readily, fidgeting about as if there were something he wanted to do but didn’t know how to go about it. “My sister will help out. After all, it’s to her interest to keep the boat in shape in case she decides to sell her later.”

  “All right, the day after tomorrow. I’ll get you started, anyway.”

  The next day at work she was telling Malcolm about Mr. Moss. “If he doesn’t know any more about taking care of a boat than that, I can’t think how he sailed her all last season without running her aground.”

  “God takes care of drunks and fools.” Malcolm smiled. “By the way, there’s a letter here for you from a Nathaniel Hayward. Wasn’t he one of your rubber experts?”

  “Oh my goodness,” she exclaimed excitedly, Moss and his sloop completely forgotten. “Where is it?”

  Dear Mrs. Bowman,

  I have in truth been experimenting on the hardening of rubber (India-rubber), but I have to confess that the results thus far have been only partially successful. I have tried impregnating heat-softened rubber with various materials, of which sulphur seems to offer the best results, but from what you say, I don’t think that the resulting mixture would solve your problem. Should my experiments lead to a more successful conclusion in the future, I shall be happy to communicate this to you at once.

  Your humble servant, NATHANIEL HAYWARD

  “Oh damn!” Elisabeth exclaimed.

  “What’s the matter?” Malcolm asked, interested.

  “There goes what I think may be my last chance to track down a material to put between wood and iron on a ship.”

  “Poor dear,” Malcolm said, quite off the subject. “You’ve got it bad, haven’t you?”

  She gave him a sad smile. “I’m only beginning to find out how bad.”

  May was beautiful as only a spring in a cold country could be. The promise of April was reaped in full, and everything seemed to burst forth in rich bloom. The new green leaves on the trees were thick now and the grass on the Common a solid green carpet. In all she saw Gideon only six days, but later on as she looked back it seemed as if she had spent the entire month with him. The warning notes, to which she no longer paid much attention, continued, always now when Gideon was not there, and no one in the neighborhood except Mr. Moss spoke to her.

  An unusual two-day visit on Gideon’s part made her cancel her arrangement with Mr. Moss, and then for several weeks Moss worked in the afternoons, so it must have been the third week of May before they were in the shadowy boathouse once more.

  “You take this rough sandpaper first — by the way, you’ll need lots more of it — and sand right down to the wood, like this, and then you take the finer sandpaper and smooth it off. One of the reasons this paint has bubbled so is that the wood wasn’t properly finished before the undercoat went on.”

  He was standing right behind her, and she could feel his breath on her neck.

  “Here, you try it.” She turned to hand him the sandpaper and found herself face to face only inches away from him.

  To her complete astonishment he suddenly grabbed her and put his mustached mouth against hers, his tongue trying to force itself between her lips. She didn’t even stop to think. Taken utterly by surprise, she reflexively drew back and landed a resounding slap on the side of his face, leaving an angry red mark on his cheek. He stepped hastily back and eyed her warily.

  “You had no call to do that,” he said reproachfully.

  “You just try that again and you’ll get another,” she snapped. “Whatever got into you?”

  “You give it to everybody else,” he replied resentfully. “I don’t see why you shouldn’t give some to me.”

  She began to shake. Oh my God, she thought, what am I to do? Why can’t people leave Gideon and me alone to love? We haven’t hurt anyone. Why do they keep after us like this?

  She saw that people like Laurie’s mother and Mr. Moss and the writer of the notes were going to grind her down among them until there was nothing left. She couldn’t even go to Gideon for comfort, because she didn’t want him to know about it.

  “That boat never belonged to you or to your sister either, did it?”

  He shook his head mournfully. “It belongs to a man named Harry Ansel. He’s paid me to watch his house and boat and take care of the garden while he and his wife visit her folks in England. He bought the boat for a song because she was in such bad shape.”

  “How will you explain this?” She pointed to the patch of raw wood they had sanded on the hull.

  He shrugged helplessly. “Tell ’em I had an expert to explain how it should be done, I guess.”

  “Goodbye then, Mr. Moss. It’s been very instructive knowing you.”

  “Aw, don’t be like that,” he wheedled as she walked out of the boathouse into the bright sunlight outside. As she was almost out of earshot, he yelled after her, “You’ll wish you hadn’t acted like that, you sorry bitch!”

  The next afternoon she came back from sailing to find that someone had painted WHORE across the front of the house. It was done in broad daylight, too, because it hadn’t been there when she had come home to change her clothes. Which no doubt meant that the neighborhood tacitly approved, she thought wearily. She walked the half mile back to the boathouse and got the paint and brushes left over from painting the boat. It was dark by the time she finished painting the front of the house bright blue, though now at the end of May the light lasted until well after eight. She was too tired and dispirited to eat, and fell into bed exhausted, with Horatio purring as usual by her feet.

  This couldn’t go on much longer, she knew. She had thought that they would tire of pushing her and finally accept the situation, but she had reckoned without the threat that these people had all felt against their own lives. If she could get away with this for so long, what would happen to them? Had they given up their own freedom of action for nothing? Would their fragile ties of marriage and family dissolve in the acid of the example of her heresy? Yes, she could move into another neighborhood, but how long before this or something only a little more subtle would start up all over again? Society could not tolerate rebels, because they threatened the very structure of their world. If there had been an end in sight, however distant, she could have borne anything, but now these torments stretched before her into an endless future when she and Gideon would at last be broken on the wheel of convention.

  Except for the notes, which continued, nothing happened for several weeks, and she began to wonder if the campaign had been abandoned. Malcolm invited her to dinner one night at the house of friends, a young doctor and his wife, the Fitzgeralds. She found herself having a grand time: she could relax and not have to wonder who was watching her, who might recognize Gideon and feel inspired to inform his wife, and she could feel that these lively young people approved of her, even enjoyed her. This was yet another thing she would never have with Gideon. She determined that for this one evening at least she was going to forget even Gideon and enjoy herself.

  “Goodness, Malcolm,” she said as they walked through the mild spring night to her house, “I don’t know when I’ve had such a good time. Perhaps we can invite them over one day?”

  “Not without having it appear that we’re living together,” he said and laughed.

  “Would that be so bad? Surely people like Bob and Evvie wouldn’t mind.”

  “You know,” he said slowly, “I can’t say whether they would or they wouldn’t. People are funny about illicit love affairs. They don’t know quite how to go about dealing with them.”

  She stopped suddenly. “Why, there’s a light on in the house!” she exclaimed. “Gideon must be there!” She turned to Malcolm. “If you’d rather not see me to the door, I’ll understand.”

  “Of course I’ll see you to the door,” he insisted stubbornly. “I don’t mind Gideon’s knowing you went out to dinner with me if you don’t mind.”

  She laughed. “Of course I don�
�t mind. Come on!”

  They walked rapidly up to the porch. “That’s strange. The front door is locked.”

  Malcolm took the key from her and unlocked the door, then tried to stand in front of her as he saw what was inside. The lamp was sitting on the table in the parlor, the light shining into the little entrance hall. The hall itself was cluttered with what looked like torn pieces of paper, and the parlor was a shambles of broken shells and chessmen, books pulled from the shelves and lying every which way on the floor, smashed crockery, and the whole splattered with the remains of the blue paint she had used for the front of the house. Only the stuffed seagull remained untouched.

  In silence they went to the kitchen, where the damage consisted only of pots and pans thrown about and flour and sugar all over the floor. In the bedroom, however, the mattress and sheets had been slit wildly by a knife, and her clothes had all been piled in the middle of the floor and obviously urinated upon. She and Malcolm looked at each other, speechless.

  It was then they heard the yowls from the wardrobe. Elisabeth opened the door to find Horatio crouched weakly snarling in one comer, his mouth and chest and front paws covered with blood. As she gently tried to soothe him into a state where she could discover what was wrong with him, she could feel him trembling violently. At last she half-coaxed, half-carried him out of the closet and up on the bed, though he moaned piteously. Malcolm helped hold him as she felt his paws gently, thinking that the blood had perhaps come from his licking them.

  “I’m afraid he’s got broken ribs,” she began to say, then stopped. “Someone pulled out his claws!” she said in an unbelieving voice. Then seeing that he was drooling blood and saliva beyond what the paws would account for, she pried open his mouth. “Oh God, they’ve cut out his tongue!” Her voice was anguished, and she began to cry.

  Chapter III

  Malcolm put his arms around her, “There, there, my darling. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” He held her and talked to her for a time until she got herself under control. Horatio gave a strangled yowl and vomited blood.