A Summer Place

by Sloan Wilson

  “Well, it’s absolutely fantastic,” Helen said. “I couldn’t believe it at first. I mean, last summer there was a lot of talk, but you know, he’s never been the type.”

  “Does he know that you know it?”

  “Not yet.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “Well, it was strange! Last Sunday he told me he was going fishing. He’s been doing that a lot lately, and I thought it was queer, because you know in Buffalo he never did it—he never thought of going fishing. Well, he went off with his pole and his bait and all that, the way he always does down here, and Minnie Apton saw them.”

  “Who’s Minnie Apton?”

  “You know, she’s that nice woman I wrote you about, the president of the Garden Club.” “Would she act as a witness?”

  “Gosh, I don’t know. I never thought of that. Anyway, she and Jack—that’s her husband—and their children wanted to go swimming, some place away from the crowds. There’s an awfully trashy element coming in down here now, you know—sometimes it’s just disgusting on the beach. Well, anyway, Minnie and Jack decided to go way north, about a mile from here, where they could have some privacy, and she saw Ken. He was with her. They were behind the dunes, mind you, not on the beach.”

  “What were they doing?”

  “Oh, they were just talking.”

  “Oh.” Margaret’s disappointment was clear.

  “But you know what that means. When he came home, I asked him how the fishing was, and he said he didn’t have much luck. I mean, if he weren’t having an affair with her, why would he lie to me?”

  “Of course he’s having an affair with her! But to get a divorce, you’ve got to catch them doing more than talking.”

  “He’d give me a divorce, Mother, if I asked him. I told you that.”

  “Now don’t start that again. Your father has talked to a lawyer, and we have to be very careful. If it ever appeared that it was you who wanted the divorce, we wouldn’t get half as much, not a third.”

  “But he never has been bad about money. All right, operator, I don’t care—I’ve got plenty of change here.”

  “What’s that, dear?” Margaret asked.

  “The operator said the three minutes are up. Now, Mother, I think I should just tell him. I don’t think he’d even deny it, and then it would be just the same for the lawyers as if we caught them.”

  “But you can’t be sure!” Margaret said in exasperation. “I’m telling you, dear, the lawyer said men act differently in circumstances like these than at any other time. He might deny it, and if you told him you knew, you would be giving him warning, and they’d be much harder to catch. They might even break off altogether for a long time.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” Helen said.

  “Does he still want to—you know—with you?”

  “No!” Helen said. “He hasn’t for ages.”

  “Well, don’t refuse him. The lawyer says you have to be willing to be his wife, to avoid a nasty countersuit.”

  “Mother! You didn’t talk about that!” Helen sounded aghast.

  “Why, dear, that’s what lawyers are for. They’re like doctors.”

  “I’d be so embarrassed if I met him!”

  “You have nothing to be embarrassed about. You are the one who is innocent.”

  “I know. But even talking about it!”

  “Lawyers hear that sort of thing often. And he said that in Florida that might be grounds for divorce. I mean Ken might be able to get one from you, for refusing for a long time, if it all came out in the courts, and you might not be able to get anything from him. It could be very dirty. And if Molly said she wanted to stay with him, I mean a girl that age, why they even might let her!”

  There was a brief but pregnant silence.

  “I can see we have to be careful,” Helen said.

  “But you mustn’t refuse him any more! I know it sounds terrible, but it’s important!”

  “Mother!”

  “Well, there’s no way around it. It’s the law. If you’re a man’s wife…”

  “Mother! We don’t have to talk about it, anyway. He never asks me any more.”

  “You could try…”

  “Mother!”

  “Well, a great deal is at stake here, dear. If you could prove that you’d been willing… But, of course, if we could catch them and had a witness, none of that would have to come up. He could bring countersuit, but the lawyer says he wouldn’t have a chance. We’ve got to catch them.”

  “How?”

  “Now listen, dear. Your father and I have been talking. How would you like us to come down and help you out?”

  “But Daddy’s job!”

  “He’s almost ready to retire anyway, and he has a month’s vacation due. We’d be willing if you want us.”

  “Of course, I’d love it!” Helen said.

  “We could help you. This can be a nasty business: hiring detectives and all that. You need our help.”

  “Yes,” Helen said. “Mother, you’re a wonder!”

  “We’ll start driving down Saturday,” Margaret said. “By the way, how’s Molly?”

  “She’s still seeing that boy all the time. That’s another fantastic part of this. Ken seems to think I’m wicked when I try to warn her, or keep her home.”

  “It’s fantastic, all right,” Margaret replied. “But if we play our cards right, we won’t have to worry. See you Wednesday, about noon. Will he mind our coming?”

  “Oh, I can handle him,” Helen said.

  They said goodbye with great affection, and Margaret hung up. It took quite a long while to feed the machine enough quarters and dimes.

  Chapter Fourteen

  PALM RIVER, Florida, was a paradise for bicycle riders. A bankrupt real-estate development called Garden Heights, which had been started in 1927, stretched through the palmetto jungles, the concrete roads crumbling and split by weeds, but still passable. There were almost eight miles of roads crisscrossing each other in the wilderness with lamp posts and fire hydrants regularly spaced, but few houses, no traffic and no people. The reason was that the Garden Heights Development Corporation had gone broke in 1929, and had traveled through so many bankruptcy courts, inheritance squabbles, attachments, and other legal entanglements that it was cheaper for later-day real-estate speculators to clear the almost limitless palmetto scrub land with bulldozers and start afresh than to bring to realization the tarnished dreams of their predecessors. These old roads usually began at a fancy gate with an arch of rusting iron proudly proclaiming Hillside Avenue or Oceanview Terrace and they ran through acres of pine and palmetto waste across the flat Florida landscape, where the buzzards perched solemnly in the few tall trees and the quail whistled in the underbrush. Rattlesnakes and an occasional coral snake sunned themselves on the warm concrete, and mourning doves cooed from the crossbars of rotting telephone posts. Down these empty roads with tall, bright-blossomed weeds growing in the cracks, Molly and John at the ages of fourteen and fifteen sped on bicycles as though they were the only two people left in the world.

  Some of the lamp posts had had ornate shades of milk glass, but most of these had been broken by boys with slingshots, and presented only jagged edges to the sky. In a clearing choked with high grass they came upon an old mansion built as a sample and abandoned by its owners. Too isolated, too big and too dilapidated to be reconditioned, it had been rotting for years. Feeling that eyes were upon them, they pried open a broken window, crawled in and wandered through the dusty rooms. In a bureau drawer John found an old golf ball with the white cover brittle and cracked, and they marveled at the tightly wound rubber inside, an elastic a thousand miles long, they guessed, if it could only be stretched out without being broken. On a window sill near an old-fashioned mahogany table Molly spied a lizard, a perfect alligator in miniature, only sleek and striped with green and brown, crouched to gobble flies caught in spiderwebs.

  In the
cellar they found a tattered pool table and attempted a game, with the brightly colored balls leaving tracks on the dusty, disintegrating felt.

  Tiring of this, they fished from the bridges which crossed the inland water route to Miami, in which Palm River formed a link. Negroes in faded blue shirts fished for their dinner beside them. Occasionally there was a loud blare from an air horn, three blasts in succession, and the bridges opened to allow a stately yacht from Detroit or Chicago, New York or Boston to pass. The children and the Negroes on the bridge usually waved at the people on the yachts, and the yachtsmen often waved back.

  Some of the yachts tied up at the Palm River Municipal Docks, where Molly and John often went. Aboard one shiny houseboat lived a beautiful woman with her hair dyed lavender and a lavender wolfhound to match. She walked her dog along a path beside the river every evening, sometimes accompanied by a fat old man with a yachting cap and a cigar. Molly and John met them several times and accepted them as a matter of course.

  Oh, there were all kinds of things to be seen at the Municipal Docks. There was a man living with his wife and two children aboard a dwarfed four-masted schooner he had built himself in Ohio and had trucked to the nearest water, in hopes of sailing around the world. He started every month on his magnificent voyage but invariably ran aground or broke down before leaving the inland waterway, and had to put back for repairs.

  There was an old man with a grand piano built into his tiny motor cruiser, taking up the whole cabin, with a bunk on top of it, and storage lockers under it, but just the piano in the cabin, and no room for anything around it. This man lived on top of his piano and under it, and he anchored out in the river alone playing Beethoven sonatas late at night. He said he lived on a dollar a day sent to him by his daughter, and the fish he could catch, and that he had enough cash left over to send his grandchildren Christmas presents every year. He liked to talk to Molly and John and told them to be sure to learn to play a musical instrument, there was nothing more important in life. John delighted him by playing his piano well.

  On the beach in downtown Palm River were great hotels with floor shows brought in from New York and kidney-shaped swimming pools lying jade in the sun, but John and Molly rarely saw those. They rode their bicycles in the depression-haunted jungles, and they explored the river in an old Barnegat Bay sneakbox that Ken bought to teach his daughter how to sail, because he said he thought that was a skill all children should acquire young. The Oyster was the boat’s name, and they thought her prettier even than the big schooner, the Fairy Queen, aboard which John had first seen Molly. At first Ken and Sylvia were very careful about allowing the children to use the boat. They were permitted to sail only in the narrow part of the river, within sight of the boat-house, and a servant from Molly’s household was posted to keep an eye on them. When they demonstrated their competence, however, the watch was relaxed, and they were allowed to go around the bend, where the river offered more room for sailing. There was, as Ken pointed out to Helen, little danger for, outside the dredged channel, Palm River was shallow, and if they capsized, all they would have to do was to hang onto the boat until she drifted to a place where they could crawl through the mud and get ashore. Even this freedom, however, did not satisfy them. There was always another bend in the river which they wanted to see around; the curiosity of explorers got into them. They had never seen a chart and were only dimly aware that such things existed. The river was as new to them as though it had never been sailed before, and as far as they were concerned, anything could exist beyond the place where they could see.

  It is conceivable that the trouble might never have happened if Ken had not bought the boat, or if he had not, above the violent objections of his wife and her parents, been adamant in giving the children permission to go on an all-day exploration and picnic. Old Bruce Carter, who spent most of his days in Florida silently rubbing his car in the driveway of Ken’s house, was convinced that the river was a place of great danger, full of alligators, sharks and God knew what else, including sewage and germs of all kinds, and as he told Ken, he washed his hands of the situation. Margaret, his wife, said that she might be old-fashioned, and she didn’t want to be a prying mother-in-law, but in her day, fourteen-year-old girls weren’t allowed to spend the day with boys in boats without chaperones. “They’re old enough,” she said several times. “You’ve got to remember that they’re old enough to get in all kinds of trouble.” Helen echoed her parents’ sentiments. As far as she could see, Ken was subjecting Molly to a variety of perils that defied the imagination, but he was so stubborn, he had always had that mulelike streak in him, and he wouldn’t pay a bit of attention to a word they said. So late in December the permission was given, and the day was set to take advantage of the New Year holiday from school.

  The trouble might have been less if Ken had not had to go to Paris. That was coincidence, of course—a circumstance that could have happened at any time, but that happened then. Bernie Anderson’s plans for a new development corporation were proceeding faster than he had anticipated. He had met businessmen in Paris who were willing to invest money in it as a sideline; the deal was going to be a spare-time project for everyone concerned except a small staff which was to be hired, and Bernie himself. Some of the prospective investors wanted to take advantage of the long New Year weekend to bring together a lot of busy people from New York who might be interested, and Bernie wanted Ken to fly to Paris for the meeting. There didn’t seem to be any reason why he should not go, so Ken agreed. Before he left, he told Molly to be careful on the voyage, and to remember all the details so she could tell him when he got back.

  The Saturday for which the children’s expedition had been planned dawned clear and, for Florida, quite cold. A “norther” was blowing, but in the narrow part of the river near the boathouse its weight was not fully felt. At eight in the morning Molly and John stowed their picnic boxes under the deck, hoisted the sail, and went flying down the channel dead before the wind, with the boat rolling and tossing her boom up in perfect expression of their exhilaration. Within an hour they reached the bend around which they had never seen. As the familiar landmarks dropped astern, they observed that the river ahead of them became narrower and more crooked. The water was interlaced with small marsh islands, and swampy areas where white herons fished in the tall green grass and alligators lay looking dead in the sun. A flock of red-winged blackbirds scattered like a handful of stones before the boat. Although the wind blew harder as the day wore on, the surface of the river lay black in the confinement of the marsh, and as they rushed along, their wake stretched out astern like a path of suds. At ten in the morning they came upon a drawbridge, and exercising the right of all craft, however small, they bravely blew three blasts on a mouth horn and forced an old man to labor mightily on a huge crank to open it. He stood staring mournfully down at them as they swept majestically through, and squirted a brown stream of tobacco juice into their wake.

  They had planned to turn back at noon, but at eleven-thirty they sailed into a broad estuary, across which land could be only dimly seen. “I think there are big islands over there,” John said.

  “We ought to start home,” Molly replied.

  “I’d just like to sail out enough to make sure what’s on the other side.”

  “All right,” she said.

  On they went with the seas becoming larger as they drew away from the shore. The old sneakbox rolled wildly, and it took an alert eye and both hands on the tiller to prevent her from jibing. When they were about a quarter of the way across the bay, the islands ahead seemed to materialize into a headland, but it was hard to be sure. Plunging down an especially high wave, the sneakbox dug her blunt bow under, and shoveled a bucketful of water into the cockpit.

  “I think we ought to go back,” Molly said nervously. Her shirt was wet with spray, and she looked cold.

  “Just a minute,” John said. “I can almost see…”

  They passed a channel post and noticed t
hat a strong tide was running with the wind. It’s going to be tough to beat back against this, he thought, but was stubborn and held on.

  Ahead of them stretched more channel posts, between some of which were sand islets cast up by the dredge which had deepened the channel, low and without vegetation. On they rushed until they could see clearly that a big point of land cut across the estuary ahead of them.

  “I wonder what’s on the other side of that,” John said.

  “I don’t know,” she replied, glancing worriedly at the sky. “It’s getting cloudy, and I think we ought to start home.”

  Reluctantly he agreed. They came about, and immediately found that running before it, they had underestimated the force of the gale. On the wind, the old sneakbox lay pounding heavily. John started the sheet and left the mainsail almost empty. Spray drenched them, and in spite of all they could do, enough water slopped into the cockpit to keep Molly busy with a bucket. She glanced over her shoulder at him, and he saw that her face was pinched with fear.

  “We’ll be all right,” he said, but as they sailed by a channel marker, he noticed that the tide was sweeping them sideways, and that they were making little progress. For perhaps an hour they tacked back and forth near the same channel marker, while the sun grew lower in the sky and the clouds grew darker. The water became roiled with mud, and in the worst puffs of wind, the surface of the waves took on a curiously tawny color. The luffing sail made an ominous thundering noise. At about four in the afternoon a gust flattened them, and they capsized, suddenly finding themselves clinging to the overturned boat with the water up to their necks. The old sneakbox floated like a low-lying raft.

  “Now what do we do?” Molly asked breathlessly. With the sail in the water it seemed strangely quiet. The waves slopped against the hull, and the water was warmer than the air.

  “We hang on,” John said grimly. “We mustn’t try to swim to shore.”

  “We couldn’t,” she said, staring around wildly. The shore looked very far away, barely visible.