by Sloan Wilson
“You and I,” Barton gasped, holding himself erect with sudden dignity.
“Yes.”
“We’re self…”
There was a pause during which Barton appeared to be meditating deeply. “We’re self…” he repeated, “we’re self-sufficient.”
“Yes,” John said.
His father turned and stretched out on his back on the bed. “Don’t need a woman,” he said. “No,” John replied.
“No more arguments,” Barton continued. “No fights. No more being a goddamn cuckold. Do you know what that is?” Barton put his fingers up to his head like a devil’s horns.
“No,” John said.
“You shouldn’t know. Not at your age.” John said nothing.
His father sighed. “Things happen to people, Johnny,” he said. “Even nice people. Someday you’ll find out.” John did not answer. “Do you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Sylvia used to be a nice woman. I lost the money—all the goddamn money. Winner takes all, losers weepers.”
“I guess so,” John said.
“You can’t keep a woman like that without money. Poverty is against her nature. She goes to the highest bidder.” No reply came from John.
“Always plenty of takers for a woman like that,” Barton said. “Odd man out.”
“Out,” John repeated without knowing what he was saying.
“Shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations,” Bart said. “That’s me. You’re lucky. You can start all over again.”
“Yes.”
“Start up the ladder, boy. From the bottom up, not the top down. No, sir. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” John repeated.
“Good. But that’s not the point. The main point is…”
Barton struggled to sit up on the bed. “The point is,” he said again, “the point is that you and I don’t have to worry. No worries. That’s absolutely final.” Swinging his legs over the side of the bed, he tried to stand up, but sank back again. “Give me a hand, will you, Son?” he asked.
John gave him a hand. He gripped his father’s arm and found it shockingly thin and weak. Barton struggled to his feet, slack-boned, leaning on his son’s shoulder, and said, “Thanks, Son. Mustn’t think I’m a drunk, understand. Unusual circumstances tonight. Very unusual circumstances. Just give me a steer down the hall, and I’ll be all right.”
Teetering down the hall with his father leaning upon him, John was astonished at his own strength. Always before he had imagined his father to be big, but now he found he could almost carry him like a baby. Upon reaching his room, Barton staggered toward his bed and, without undressing, collapsed. His face lying on the white lace counterpane was gray with the bones showing clearly through it, almost in the outline of a skull. His cheeks were still wet with tears. John covered him with a blanket, then put out the light and returned quietly to his own room.
An hour later he heard his father get up and stumble to the office down the hall where he kept his liquor, but John didn’t try to help him.
Just before dawn John awoke, shivering violently. The room was very cold, and there was no sound but the steady sighing of the wind, the distant surf, and the whimper of Hasper’s dog. He went to Bart’s room and saw his father lying motionless and uncovered, with both arms flung back, and his mouth open. A quart bottle of whisky lay beside him, leaving the sheet stained where it had spilled. Stricken with the fear that his father was dead, John stood stock-still, listening, hoping desperately to catch the sound of his breath, but there was nothing that could be heard above the sound of the wind and the dog. “Dad!” he said, flinging himself in panic upon Bart. “Dad! Wake up!”
Bart remained inert, but he groaned, and grateful for even that sign of life, John gave up trying to arouse him. After covering his father with a quilt, he stood at the foot of his mother’s empty bed, shivering. Of course, he thought, the heater must have gone out, that is why it is so cold. Finding some matches on the bedside table, he tried to light the stove again, but the wick wouldn’t catch. Discovering that the tank was empty, John went outside, pushing the door open against the wind, and got a five-gallon tin of kerosene from the bottom section of the garage. When he came back to his father’s room, he found Bart lying with his position unchanged. John stared hard at his chest, and was relieved to see that he was breathing. After getting the stove going, he went back to his room and fell asleep.
It was almost noon when John awoke, but the light in the room was dim, and sleet was rattling against the window-panes. Running to his father’s room, he saw that Bart had turned over in the night, and was now lying on his stomach with his face in the pillow, so that there was no way to tell if he was alive.
“Dad!” he called. “Dad! It’s time to wake up!”
Bart didn’t stir. John seized his shoulders and turned him over. Bart opened his eyes, and his head lolled back weakly. “Let alone,” he said thickly, and groped for the bottle. Finding it was empty, he produced a full one from beneath the covers.
John went to the kitchen, where he cooked himself toast and bacon, and drank a glass of milk. He cleaned up after himself carefully before returning to his room, where he lay on his bed all day reading his Tarzan books. Every hour or so he checked on his father, but Bart had apparently fallen into a coma.
Shortly after six o’clock John heard his father groan. Running to his room, he saw that Bart had vomited, and that his eyelids were fluttering oddly. In panic John rushed outside to get Todd Hasper. It was bitter cold, and he clutched the collar of his coat around his neck as he ran.
The sleet had left a brittle crust over the snow, which cracked like glass as John ran over it. Smoke was coming from the chimney of Hasper’s cottage, he was glad to see—he had had a dread that on this day of nightmares even Hasper would be dead or missing. When he pounded on the door there was no answer. He opened it, and suddenly the dog was upon him, knocking him to the ground. Todd Hasper, dressed only in long woolen underwear, appeared simultaneously and dragged the dog back. John stood up, trembling, with his collar and coat badly ripped. “Dad’s sick,” he said.
“Ha!” Hasper retorted. “You hurt?” He chained the dog to a ring in the wall at the far side of the room.
“No, but hurry!”
“He’ll still be there,” Hasper said, drawing on his trousers. “He ain’t going no place.”
On the way to the garage Hasper refused to run, and they trudged slowly over the splitting ice crust. The odor in Bart’s room was sickening. Hasper leaned over Bart and turned him on his back. Bart opened his eyes, which looked yellow, and made an effort to smile. “Sick,” he said, his voice barely audible.
“We’ll get the Coast Guard and send him to the hospital,” Hasper said to John in matter-of-fact tones. “You can stay with me.”
“No,” Bart whispered. “Johnny.”
John bent over, with his face only a few inches from his father’s. “Go to your mother, address and money in my office.”
“I want to help you!”
“Hospital. Go to Mother. Come back later, when I’m better.”
With Hasper, John drove in the old Ford to the south end of the island. Balancing themselves carefully on the icy ground, they carried two five-gallon cans of kerosene to a finger of rock extending into the bay nearest the mainland. They wet down a space about fifty feet square with the kerosene, and standing back, Todd casually lit a ball of paper with a match and tossed it into the center of the area. There was a flash, and for about five minutes the flames burned brightly. When they went out, Todd stared into the darkness toward the mainland where only a few dim lights could be seen. Without comment, he went back to the car and got more kerosene. They had to repeat the performance twice before a signal light blinked on Harvesport Point. “They see us,” Hasper said, and they returned to the garage.
Three hours later a Coast Guard picket boat arrived, and two cheerful young bluejackets,
their faces full of concern, put Bart on a stretcher and loaded him aboard. John accompanied his father to the doors of the hospital. Bart was able to smile when he left and to say, “Don’t worry about me —Navy will take care.”
From Harvesport John telephoned his mother, reaching her soon after she arrived at the Seaside Motel in Palm River. In rigidly calm, almost formal tones, he told her what had happened. “Oh, Johnny!” she said. “I’ll come get you!”
“I can come alone!”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course,” he said, and his high boy’s voice was curiously stern.
“Johnny, are you all right?” she asked hoarsely, and he was filled with the sudden horror that he was going to cry there over the telephone, that he was going to sound as though he were crawling, coming on his belly to his mother who had abandoned him, and he said, “Yes, I’m all right! I’m just coming to you to get money!”
When John got off the plane at Palm River twelve hours later, Sylvia ran to embrace him, but he stood stiffly as a soldier at attention, and he did not kiss her back. “Oh, Johnny!” she said, stroking his cheek with her hand. “Don’t be like that!”
A muscle under the skin of his cheek flickered. “I’m glad to see you, Mother,” he said, his voice tightly controlled. “I’m sorry that I have to bother you like this.”
Wearily she turned, and gripping his hand tightly, led him to her car, a new Ford Ken had had waiting at the motel for her. When they got in it, she put both hands around John’s neck and tried to pull his face down on her shoulder, but he reared back violently with his eyes blazing and said, “No!”
“You don’t have to hate me,” she said in a soft voice. “That doesn’t do any good.”
“I want to go to boarding school,” he said, his fists clenched.
“You can if you want. But there’s a good school here I’d like you to attend for a while first.”
“Have it your way!” he said, and bending over, averted his face because the tears were beginning to come. He crouched there in the car covering his face with his hands, but when she tried to comfort him he turned on her in agony and said, “Leave me alone! All I want is to be left alone!”
A stout woman leading a child by the hand peered into the car curiously as she passed. Sylvia started the engine and drove slowly to the Seaside Motel, a small barrackslike building of white stucco on the beach. She parked by the manager’s apartment and went in. Carrying his suitcase, John followed her. Carla was helping a colored maid to fold newly ironed sheets. When she saw John she ran toward him with her chubby arms out, but he turned away from her, too, this girl whom his mother had preferred to him. “Nice to see you, Carla,” he said, his voice bitter. “How have you been?”
“All right,” she said, letting her arms fall to her sides. “What’s the matter, Johnny? Are you mad at me?”
“No!” he said. “Nothing’s the matter! Nothing, nothing, nothing!” Tears were starting to come again. Leaving his suitcase in the middle of the room, he bolted out the door.
The dry sand near the dunes was soft, and the wind sent it up like puffs of smoke from his feet. Possessed, he ran as fast as he could, zigzagging in crazy pursuit of sea gulls, waving his arms wildly in vain attempts to catch them and perhaps rend them as they wheeled past his shoulders. Exhausted, he finally sank down on a log and sat there with his breath rasping out in hot gasps. The wind from the sea was strong, and the breakers curled in endless rows flashing in the sun. He rested for ten minutes and then for the first time stood up and looked around. The Seaside Motel stood alone on the dunes beyond the city boundaries of Palm River. To the south of it, several houses had recently been built a thousand yards up the beach, and beyond them an almost unbroken row of cottages began. In the other direction, the beach and dunes were deserted, all the way to the inlet, which was now barely visible in a blaze of reflected sun. John put his hand to his eyes and it was then he saw a girl walking down the beach toward him, barefoot at the very edge of the sea, a slender girl in blue dungarees rolled up to the knees and a fresh white shirt that fluttered in the wind. She was leaning forward with her eyes cast down, and she was walking slowly, looking forlorn against the background of the pounding surf. Although they did not recognize each other, there was a feeling inherent in the wind on that barren beach which drew them together as though they had met on a desert, and she changed her direction toward him as he started walking to her. When John got about a hundred feet from her, he realized she was Molly, and he stopped, suddenly confused.
“Hello, Molly,” he said.
She was hurt because he did not seem more glad to see her, and the memory of the letters they had exchanged suddenly embarrassed her; perhaps he thought she had been trying to write him love letters, or something. “Hello,” she said in guarded tones. “I heard you were coming.”
“Where do you live?” he asked.
She gestured down the beach toward one of the houses which had just been built, but she kept her eyes cast downward. The wind was whipping her long dark hair, and she brushed it back impatiently. Her face was tan, and so were her arms, her long, coltish legs, and her feet. Suddenly she bent over, darted a hand into the sand, and picked up a dark brown object, shiny as a chestnut, but flatter and larger.
“What’s that?” John asked.
“A sea heart,” she said, turning it over in her hand. “I am collecting them.”
“May I see it?”
She handed it to him and he inspected it with interest. It was as smooth as though it had been varnished, and was indeed shaped roughly like a heart.
“Do they grow in the sea?” he asked.
“No,” she said seriously. “Daddy says they grow in Africa or South America or some place and float over.” The wind blew a strand of dark hair across her lips, and she brushed it away.
He returned the sea heart to her and she polished it on the rolled-up sleeve of her shirt. “I collect all kinds of things on the beach,” she said, her voice sounding almost academic. “Coquina shells make good necklaces—they come in every shade of every color. There are even striped ones. Look!”
She darted her hand into the sand again, and came up with a pale-pink shell shaped like a fan. “I don’t know what this one is yet, but I can look it up in a book.”
“It’s a nice one,” John said. “I’d like to learn about shells.”
“There are more than shells to find,” she said. “There are sea beans, some brown, some gray. There are things that fall overboard from ships. Daddy heard of somebody once who found a bottle with a message in it.”
“It would be fun to find a bottle with a message,” John said enthusiastically.
“But you have to watch out,” Molly continued. “My mother says you have to be terribly careful on the beach.”
“Why?”
“There are jellyfish and Portuguese men of war which sting. They look like little blue balloons, but they have poison in them, and long tentacles which float out all around them, and if you touch one in the water, you might drown.”
“I’ll stay away from them,” John said.
“Then of course there’s the sun,” she continued, speaking faster, but still looking down. “People die from sunburn sometimes. And there’s the undertow—several people are drowned on this beach every year. There are sharks and barracuda in the water, and don’t go near the coral reef, because the Moray eels live there.”
“What are they?” John asked in astonishment.
“Big eels with teeth,” she said. “Their bite is poisonous or something. And there are sting rays with poisonous tails.”
“I won’t go near the reef,” John said.
Suddenly Molly glanced up at him and he found himself looking directly into her startlingly light blue eyes. “They always try to scare people about the beach,” she said. “Daddy says that whenever anybody new comes, the old ones try to scare him. We don’t know why.”
“I’m
not scared,” John said.
Molly smiled. “I’ve got to get home now,” she said, and before he could reply she stepped quickly past him and started running along the very edge of the sea toward her house, with the surf reaching up and erasing her footprints behind her, so that she appeared to be skimming six inches above the earth, leaving no trace of her passage. In front of her the sandpipers scattered, and gulls wheeled around her head. John watched her out of sight. Then he glanced down and saw that she had dropped the sea heart at his feet.
Chapter Thirteen
HELEN JORGENSON, looking thinner than usual in a severe white linen dress with a low-cut back which exposed too much of her spine, clearly outlined beneath her tanned skin, walked into the drugstore in the shopping center near her house, and giving the clerk a twenty-dollar bill, asked to have it broken into quarters and dimes. “All of it?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I have to make a long-distance phone call.”
Going to a telephone booth, she inserted a dime from her purse, and dialed the operator. “I want to place a long distance call to Buffalo, New York,” she said, and gave the number.
It took ten minutes to get the call through, and the telephone booth was hot with the door shut. Finally she heard a buzzing, and her mother’s voice said, “Hello?”
“Mother!” Helen said.
“Helen, dear, is everything all right?”
“It’s about Ken. You know, Mother, you were right. He is having an affair with her. You were absolutely right!”
“I knew that from the beginning,” Margaret snapped. “As soon as you told me he was having her down there, I knew it.”
