by Sloan Wilson
The climax came a year later on the twelfth of August during another visit Sylvia was paying the Hunters. When she stepped off the schooner, the Mary Anne, at the small wharf in front of the old mansion, Ken, as well as Bart, was there to meet her. She threw her arms around Bart and gave him a welcoming kiss of unusual warmth. Turning to Ken, she held her hand out and said, “Oh, hello! It’s nice to see you again.”
“Hello,” Ken said, and he seemed as ill at ease as the first time they had met.
There was a dance that night at the Hunters’ house, and Japanese lanterns were strung all around the wide veranda. The guests came in cruisers and motorboats from other parts of the island and from the mainland. At ten-thirty in the evening everyone gathered at the wharf and Bart fired some skyrockets he had saved from the Fourth of July. He said it was much better to shoot them on August twelfth. There must be all kinds of things which had happened on August twelfth that never got celebrated, and he was righting a great wrong.
“Like what?” Roger, his younger brother, asked solemnly, weaving a little from side to side. That was the first night Roger ever got drunk; he had always been pretty good before.
Ignoring him, Bart turned to Sylvia and said, “Let’s get engaged. We’ve got the skyrockets to celebrate, so why not?”
“Now don’t get serious,” Sylvia said.
“Who’s serious?” Bart replied. “I just want to get engaged. You don’t want to waste skyrockets, do you?”
“I’m yours,” Sylvia said, and the assembled guests laughed.
Bart touched her ceremoniously on the forehead with a skyrocket and said, “I dub thee mine.” Then, putting two skyrockets in the wooden trough which had been built as a launching platform, he solemnly said, “Stand back! This is going to be a very symbolic ceremony. Two skyrockets are going up together, representing two souls beginning their journey into eternity together. This is a great tradition, a famous nuptial rite practiced by the wild Hunter tribe of Pine Island, ever since they invented gunpowder in the year ten, antedating the Chinese discovery by many centuries.”
“Hear, hear,” Roger said in his high voice. He was only sixteen that year, and fairly fat. Looking like a little old man, he stood and clapped his hands. “Hear, hear,” the others chanted, while Bart lit a sparkler with which to ignite the rockets.
Out of the crowd came Ken. “You’re not really going to try to fire those rockets together, are you?” he asked.
“Sure,” Bart said. “Stand back, slave!”
“It’s dangerous,” Ken said. “The chute isn’t made for…”
“Are you questioning the judgment of the tribal prince?” Bart asked, and standing very erect at the end of the wharf holding a blazing sparkler aloft, he did look oddly noble and savage.
“They’ll go wild!” Ken said, stepping forward, but he was too late. Bart stooped and touched off the two rockets. A fountain of sparks spurted. One rocket soared into the sky, but the other jumped the chute and turned toward the crowd, a wailing banshee trailing fire, twisting and turning erratically, exploding finally with a crash against a window high up in the attic of the house. Speechless, the crowd stood looking up, and there was the pungent smell of gunpowder, the sound of falling glass. Smoke floated from the window. Ken was the first to speak. “We better get water up there,” he said. “It’s started a fire.”
Fifteen of the young men raced into the kitchen and carried pans full of water up the four flights of stairs to the attic, where a small fire had been started, all right. It was soon extinguished, and they all trooped back to the kitchen, laughing together. The only damage was a broken window and a lot of water slopped on the attic floor and in the kitchen, where Roger had slipped with a whole dishpan full, so the episode could hardly be called a tragedy. In fact, it was good to have some excitement for a change. Old John Hunter, who was both sick and a little drunk, said it was nothing to worry about. “Strike up the band!” he said. “Strike up the band!” He kept repeating that until someone turned the electric phonograph up a little louder. That was the first year the Hunters didn’t have an orchestra come over from the mainland.
For an hour the excitement over the rockets killed the party. When the water on the kitchen floor had been wiped up, people divided into small groups talking seriously, but then Bart brought out a whole case of bourbon and some salt fish he had bought in Harvesport, which produced a fierce thirst. By midnight things were really rolling. Bart’s father, who was sixty-two years old, staggered out on the floor in spite of his bad heart and tried to do a tap dance before he was hustled off to bed by his wife. A half hour later he appeared at the foot of the stairs dressed in his pajamas and a bathrobe, clamoring for a drink. “I’m not a party pooper,” he said.
Sylvia was dancing with Bart when Ken put a heavy hand on his shoulder. She was surprised, because he rarely cut in on her; he usually went to his room to read when the dancing started. “Go ‘way, Beast,” Bart said. “I am dancing with my fancy, I mean my fiancée, and…”
He never finished the sentence, because Ken pushed him away with one swipe of his arm, and Sylvia felt herself crushed against Ken’s massive chest. If Bart had been sober, he might have resented it. He was far smaller than Ken, but no one had ever accused him of lacking physical courage. As things were, he shrugged in a debonair way, and walked to the table where the liquor was.
Ken danced without talking, and was even clumsier than he usually was. Sylvia realized gradually and with great astonishment that he was drunk; she had never seen him touch liquor before.
“Breaking training?” she asked mockingly, and was sorry, because the reply was a bear’s hug that almost broke her ribs.
It must have been about three in the morning that everyone decided to go swimming.
“But I didn’t bring a bathing suit!” a girl from the mainland cried.
Laughter followed. “Your bathing suit is the night,” Bart said, and bowed in what he felt was just tribute to his own poetic eloquence.
Old John Hunter in his bathrobe pulled himself up to a sitting position on the couch where he had been dozing. “Drunken swimming very dangerous,” he said, holding out his hand with the forefinger extended, and looking very much like the poster with the caption, “Uncle Sam Wants You.”
“We’re not really drunk, Dad,” Bart said.
“Take Mr. Jorgenson,” old John Hunter said. “You’ll need a lifeguard. Knew a girl who drowned once like this.”
“All right,” Bart said. “Ken, you come along.”
Ken thought they made a sad procession in the moonlight, the girls in their pastel summer evening gowns and the men in their white dinner coats, as they headed for the beach. Some of them weaved a little, and many of them bent their faces downward. They looked oddly like people in deep grief, and for Ken, whom the liquor was depressing, there was the sudden sensation of walking in a funeral march. With incongruous giggling, the girls gathered behind a clump of pines to take off their clothes, while the men disrobed brazenly on the beach. Quickly the men rushed into the water, and swam in circles waiting for the women.
The girls came running in a group from behind the pines, their bodies white and lovely in the moonlight. They were visible only for a few seconds before they plunged into the water. Ken swam slowly toward them, looking for Sylvia. He found her twenty yards apart from the others, apparently swimming straight out to sea. Her face and shoulders were white in the moonlight. He kissed her, and they sank, coming to the surface in an explosion of spray, gasping for breath. “Don’t!” she said. “Do you want to drown me?”
“Yes,” he said.
“You son-of-a-bitch!” she retorted, and started swimming as fast as she could toward the shore. He swam easily beside her, shouldering her to the south, so that when she reached the beach, it was a good hundred yards from the others. As their feet touched bottom, he grabbed her and carried her across the beach toward the grove of pines. “Let me go!” she said fiercely be
tween clenched teeth. “Put me down!”
“Scream if you want,” he said.
She hit him in the face with her clenched fists; she made his nose bleed, and battered his eyes before he succeeded in pinning her arms behind her, but she didn’t scream. Their battle was silent and deadly. He put her down on the pine needles, and when her struggles turned into the motions of love, the world seemed his. Afterward there was a moment of peace during which they lay on their backs, with her head on his shoulder. The tops of the pine trees looked black against the sky. He turned to caress her and was bewildered when she started to struggle away from him again. Imprisoning her with one huge arm, he kissed her and said, “I want to marry you.”
“You bastard!” she replied with venom.
He rolled over and pressed her shoulders down with both hands. “Why not? We love each other.”
She called him everything she could think of then to hurt him. He was a vile Swede, a boor, an idiot, a pauper, she said, and she concluded with the simple statement that she wanted to marry a gentleman, not a beast. In reply, he took her again, finding that she did not give in this time, that she fought him to the end. When he was through he held her cradled in his arms, struggling to a sitting position and rocking her back and forth in a strange combination of passion and grief. Her mouth was clenched so tightly shut that he could not kiss her. The wind in the pine trees rustled. Seemingly far away, there was the sound of laughter and shouts. Suddenly, above the other voices, was the question in Roger’s high, panic-stricken soprano: “Where are Sylvia and Ken?”
In reply there was a babble, broken by Bart’s clear tenor voice drunkenly singing, “Who is Sylvia? What is she?”
Laughter followed. Suddenly Ken released her. “You can go back,” he said.
She stood up, quick to jump away from him, but he lay there, stretched on his back, like a naked corpse in the moonlight. She looked down at him.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Call the pack.”
Whirling, she ran, plunging into the water, swimming fast to rejoin the others. There was still a chance, she thought, that her absence could be joked away.
The next morning Ken appeared on the beach in his bathing trunks and a garish sports shirt, because her fingernails had raked his back. He did not blush when he saw her; he just turned away. That night he told old John Hunter that his mother was ill, and he would have to return to Nebraska right away. To Sylvia he said no goodbyes.
For a ridiculously long while, Sylvia feared that she was pregnant, but that did not happen. After all, she concluded, nothing had occurred which she could not forget. Convinced that she was doing the right thing, she married Bart not long afterward. Soon the Raymonds were offered admittance to the Pine Island Corporation, but her father’s business was falling off by that time and they had to decline.
I wonder what Ken Jorgenson will look like now, Sylvia thought as she lay on her son’s bed seventeen years later. I think I have been imagining him returning exactly as he was, the young athlete with brooding eyes, striding along the beach. He probably will be fat and will smoke cigars. It would be absurd for me to apologize now, she thought. It would be ridiculous for me to point out the obvious fact that in a thousand ways I’ve been proved wrong. He probably will be kind; he usually was. There is no reason for me to be afraid to see him again.
Chapter Four
THAT SUMMER Ken Jorgenson, at the age of twenty-two, returned to Boston after quitting Pine Island and got a job with a construction firm until it was time to resume his studies. In former years he had worked hard and had spent his few spare hours dreaming foolishly of marrying Sylvia, but there was not that any more. Everything seemed dreary. Talk of war in Europe was increasing. The whole world seemed to be gradually disintegrating. In the back of his mind was the fear that Sylvia would find she was pregnant, or was it a hope? Probably she wouldn’t come to him even if she was—she would prefer an abortion to marrying a beast, he thought.
Ken labored hard as a carpenter’s helper for a month, helping to build a warehouse. It was dull work. He was glad when college started, but the long evenings of Indian summer in the dormitory also palled. Chemistry, his major subject, was the only thing that made any sense, a rational analysis of the physical world, the neat symbols on the printed page, the experiments that could be controlled. Whenever Ken saw a sex crime in the newspapers, he had a certain sympathy for the offender. Us rapists should form a union, he thought, and laughed at himself, but there it was; he had committed rape, hadn’t he?
During football practice that fall, the coach had to warn Ken that, after all, the purpose of the game was not to kill. He became a much better player than he ever had been, and was given considerable publicity in the Boston Herald, which nominated him for All-American. Invitations to cocktail parties poured in, and at last he was put on the list of people asked to the debutante parties. He went to a few, but the girls had small appeal for him. In comparison to Sylvia even the few really pretty ones looked to him like shadows.
Sylvia, he decided after much reflection, was a form of mental illness for him. After all, she was not really more beautiful than any one of thousands of women. She wasn’t stupid, but she had a lazy, uncultivated mind. She was a snob without being an aristocrat. A petty bourgeois, he enjoyed calling her in his thoughts, a sloppy little strainer, trying to marry her way up. She had no soul, and he was well quit of her. Certainly he was clever enough to recognize an illusion when he saw it, and to steer clear.
Still, he could not get her out of his mind. Occasionally he caught sight of other women on the street who, from a distance, looked like her, and once he ran for a full block to make sure it was not she. When the telephone rang, he imagined it might be she, and he always jumped to answer it. Folly, he knew, perhaps insanity—he certainly was old enough to understand when a thing was hopeless, but still he thumbed through his mail each morning feverishly, imagining there might be a letter from her saying she was pregnant and asking him to marry her.
Another woman, he decided, was necessary to expunge her from his mind. He disliked the idea of setting out for deliberate conquest, but it was foolish to stay obsessed by a girl beyond his reach. Debating this, he spent most of his time moodily pacing his room.
One night in early December his telephone rang, and he leaped to answer it as he always did. “Is this Ken Jorgenson?” an elaborately seductive woman’s voice asked.
“Yes.”
“I’ve heard so much about you, and I think it would be fun if we could meet,” the woman said. “I live at 29 Easterton Avenue. Would you care to come up for a cocktail?”
“What’s your name?”
“Catherine Gray,” the woman said.
Ken had heard of her. She was a nymphomaniac who used the Harvard yearbooks as Sears, Roebuck catalogues, telephoning the young men whose pictures she liked, and paying special attention to the members of the football team. As a matter of fact, she had called him before, and he had politely refused. But now, why not? Some of his friends had told him she wasn’t bad. “I feel like a cocktail right now,” he said. “Wait for me.”
She turned out to be an overly plump divorcee with greedy eyes, and with a photograph of her mother and father hung over her bed. It was this picture which bothered Ken, as much as anything: the picture of a kindly old man sitting beside his sweet-faced wife, her hand locked in his. The experience was small pleasure, and he hurriedly left, hoping he could forget the name, “Catherine Gray,” which was of course false, but still indelibly fixed in his mind.
Ken tried a variety of brothels next. The thought of them had always disgusted him, but most of his friends talked of visiting them, and why not? A man was a fool to allow the body of a foolish girl to obsess him. Perhaps it was time to learn that the net value of a well-made body without a mind and soul was in the neighborhood of twenty dollars. A girl fully as symmetrical as Sylvia could be had for that, and one looking as Sylvia would in a few years could b
e had for much less.
The brothels were curious places, some of them like clubs for the unhappy, the possessed. The girls laughed too high and too loud. In their eyes was not so much the look of tragedy as of mania. In one establishment which he frequented for a few months, two girls tried to commit suicide, one by leaping from a window and the other by swallowing hot coals from a fireplace. She ate them greedily, the madam told Ken in awe. She crawled into the fireplace on her hands and knees and gobbled them up, burning her legs and her fingers and her lips and tongue and throat horribly, but surviving to be placed in a mental hospital.
The customers were not much better. In the kitchen of one small Negro establishment, Ken saw an honors student from the law school bare his arm and smile while, for a fee, a naked brown girl burned her professional name into his skin with a series of lighted cigarettes. The cigarettes kept going out, and the girl repeatedly asked the madam for a light. “Don’t go,” the honors student begged Ken, and during the whole operation there was a look of serenity on his face. When it was over the madam bandaged the man’s arm, but underneath the gauze there was the whore’s name, burned in rough letters: “Cindy.”
After that, Ken lost his taste for brothels. A friend took him to a fireman’s ball in Salem, where he met a seventeen-year-old Polish girl who responded avidly when he kissed her, but suddenly Ken realized that she was in love with him, and he felt no love for her at all. Victimizing her seemed even more obscene than the brothels, so Ken left her without fully seducing her, and hardened his heart when she cried.
At about this time he read the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, who recommended that a sensible young man find an older woman, who would be grateful for his attentions without either suffering or causing trouble. The difficulty was, he couldn’t find any. In search of one, he started haunting night clubs and bars, buying one bottle of beer in each place, to keep the bill down. It was important to save money, because his marks were suffering. There was some danger of losing his academic scholarships, and in graduate school football would not pay the bills.
