“Since the twenties, I suppose,” Billy said, not getting it.
“Forever,” Dennis told him.
But Billy got it later, after they’d found a restaurant in East Hampton for dinner and then, because neither of them had been here before and because the charm of the village gave them the sense that the roads that led from it offered something more, they toured the place in Holtzman’s car. It had all been here. The elegant trees that lined the broad streets, the great green lawns that grew, even as they were slowly passing, greener and deeper in the twilight so you could almost make yourself believe that night was seeping in through their roots, not moving across the sky above them. The houses—when had they ever seen such houses, how was it they hadn’t known they were out here? Grand and complex palaces, cottages wood-shingled or white, with gazebos in their gardens and great pillared porches that curved like bows and widow’s walks and gabled attic rooms from which you could probably glimpse both the silver spires of the city and the black ocean edge of the earth.
They moaned to see the darkened places that had not yet been opened for the season—“No one even there”—and whispered, “Take a look at that,” when one was lit like a steamship from stem to stern. But what killed them, what really killed them, were the houses that looked out over the ocean, that had for their front or back yards a dark lush carpet of beautifully mown grass and then, running down from the other side, as if front and back had been built on different planets, magnificent dunes, sea grass, white beach and sea.
“Leave me there when I’m dead,” Billy said of one of them—a large house on a wide lawn with a starry backdrop of sky that even in near darkness seemed to contain the reflected sound and sparkle of the ocean. “Prop me up on the porch with a pitcher of martinis and a plate of oysters on the half shell and I’ll be at peace for all eternity. Amen.”
They made their way home in darkness, under the thick leaves along Main Street and out toward the sandier and less elegant regions of the Springs and Three Mile Harbor. They made several wrong turns and even in the driveway sat squinting at the little house for a few minutes before they decided it was the right place, after all.
They agreed to sleep in the car that night, since the mattresses were mildewed and the mice well ensconced. With GI resourcefulness they hung T-shirts over the opened windows and secured the edges with electrical tape in order to keep out most of the bugs.
They smoked for half an hour, Dennis in the front seat, Billy in back. “I never knew,” Billy said at one point, his glasses in his hand, his hand resting on his forehead, “I never knew what it was like out here.” It was what he would write on his postcards tomorrow, creating artifacts. “Isn’t that something? I had no idea those places were out here.”
“It’s something,” Dennis said. “Bridie was here once,” he added. “She came out to Southampton with someone. She said it was really something.”
“It is,” Billy said. He paused. “It almost makes you wonder what else you don’t know about yet.”
Dennis frowned for a moment and then said, “Plenty,” with a laugh. But although Billy looked the part he was no poet or scholar and could not explain: what else did he not know about yet that would strike him as the village tonight had struck him—strike him in that very first moment of apprehending, of seeing and smelling and tasting, as something he could not, from that moment on, get enough of and could never ever again live without.
By the end of their first week they had a routine and a sufficient knowledge of the roads to find the dump and the bay beach, the cheaper restaurants and the hardware stores. They did the heaviest work early in the morning and then ducked inside before noon to wire and paint and plaster. Around four or five, when the sunlight began to edge from white to yellow, they took their towels from the clothesline they had rigged between two trees out back and walked with them draped around their necks the mile and a half to the bay. They cleared a shortcut with Holtzman’s scythe. The beach there was rocky at the shoreline, littered with shells, but the water was warmer than the ocean, and since neither of them was much of a swimmer, they both welcomed the chance to just float and dive and touch their toes to the bottom at will.
Some nights they stopped into a bar off the Springs road. They both drank too much the first and second time, but only Billy, engaged in long conversation with the bartender and an ugly old Bonacker who could not hear enough about the war, drank too much the third and fourth.
Billy drunk, in those days, was charming and sentimental. He spoke quietly, one hand in his pocket and the other around his glass, his glass more often than not pressed to his heart. There was tremendous affection in Billy’s eyes, or at least they held a tremendous offer of affection, a tremendous willingness to find whomever he was talking to bright and witty and better than most. Dennis came to believe in those days that you could measure a person’s vanity simply by watching how long it took him to catch on to the fact that Billy hadn’t recognized his inherent and long-underappreciated charm, he’d drawn it out with his own great expectations or simply imagined it, whole cloth.
They talked about the war: the characters in their divisions, Midwesterners always the crudest, didn’t you notice, something to do with living around farm animals, no doubt; the officers good and bad, the morning just before they returned, when a group coming out of first mess claimed they were serving cake for breakfast, which turned out to be only bread, fresh bread. The tar-paper shack Dennis and two other fellows had constructed, warmer than the tents, the Pilsen Hilton. Their luck in avoiding the Pacific. Their quests for souvenirs. Patton and Ike and F. D. R., the lying old smoothy. The kids begging chocolate and chewing gum. The French girls, all of them beautiful, one coming to Switching Central in Metz, where Billy was operating near the end, to ask if a message could be sent to her fiancé, another GI gone north. She said she even knew his code name, Vampire, which made two or three of the other boys laugh out loud. She was a dark-haired girl with great big dark eyes. She wore a white handkerchief knotted around her neck, as lovely as diamonds. The message she asked Billy to send was simply: “I am still here.”
Their shoulders and arms and the backs of their necks burned and freckled and peeled, and after dinner each evening they walked through the village with toothpicks in their mouths or drove past the great houses on the surrounding streets, noticing the changes in them, how they looked in the rain, in clear twilight, how well they bore even the oppressive air of the hotter days and marveling, marveling still, that this Eden was here, at the other end of the same island on which they had spent their lives.
One afternoon just before VJ Day a family was spread across a blanket on the widest crescent of bay beach—at least they thought it was a family as they approached from the road. But as they dropped their towels and bent to unlace their already loosely laced boots, to slip off the socks they wore under them and the pants they wore over their swim trunks, they quickly changed their assessment. Six children, the oldest no more than nine, and two women, girls, actually, who were not old enough to be mothers to them all.
They nodded a greeting to the girls and the children as they made their way to the water and then, swimming out with as much form as they had ever shown for as much distance as they dared to go, floated a bit under the paling sky, glancing as they did, in subtle, sidelong glances, at the group on the shore, at the girls especially, one standing now at the water’s edge, a pail and shovel in her hand and two little ones at her feet. The other, only a little plumper, on the blanket still and wearing an old-fashioned swim cap over her curly hair that from the water’s distance—at least for Billy, whose glasses were in his pants pocket on the sand—seemed like an aura of royal-blue light.
Five of the children were knee-deep in the water now, dipping their outspread hands just as the one girl was instructing them to do, fingers splayed like starfish, washing off the sand. Then one of the children, the tallest boy, stepped out of the water with his splayed hands held high, as if he were a
surgeon, as if the sand might leap up at any minute and cover them again and called, “Eva,” toward the blanket, “Eva,” although it was impossible to tell if he meant the girl in the swim cap or the sixth child, who sat beside her, because at that moment a huge black touring car pulled up from the road and in a sudden gathering of pails and shovels and shells and picnic baskets and cover-ups and blankets—a sudden momentum that died the minute everything was off the sand and they made, in incredibly slow motion, the trek from beach to car—they were gone.
The two swam a little closer, to a shallower, more comfortable distance from the shore, and then climbed out of the water completely. They reached their towels and in an economy of terry cloth that they had learned in the service dried face and arms and shoulders with one end, chest and legs with the other, and then sat on the dry middle on the sand to smoke a cigarette and then, flicking their feet with one sock and then the other, put on socks and boots for the walk home.
The road was hot and Dennis had both his pants and his towel draped over his shoulders to protect his latest burn. He could feel as he walked the salt drying on his legs and on his face and arms. He could see a line of it on the pale hair of his cousin’s calf.
They were virgins, both of them. Before the war, all the girls they’d known had seemed to be another cousin’s schoolmate or the daughter of an aunt’s best friend, and while desire had presented itself often enough, the tight quarters and the rigorous decorum of that time and place had failed to offer opportunity for more than an accidental brush or a chaste kiss. And later, when opportunity did abound, when they were handsome in their uniforms and perfectly fit, they were only weeks or days away from shipping out and the looming possibility of their own deaths made even the desire to commit, at this late date, that kind of mortal sin seem as foolish and as fleeting as the mad longing to hurl yourself, willy-nilly, from some great height—the parachute jump at Coney Island, for instance, or the observation deck of the Empire State Building—or to raise your head from the mud during a live ammo drill at boot camp, just because you had the urge.
They had bruised girls’ lips with kisses then, had learned the pleasure of encircling a waist or running a hand along a stockinged leg, of feeling a heartbeat behind a breast, but the Paulist Fathers had gotten them at an early age and they had studied heaven and hell long before they knew that at the top of a stocking there was only bare flesh, and boys they had known from the basketball court or the K. of C. had already gone over and lost their lives. And even in Manhattan, at midnight, in uniform and as drunk as the girls on their knees, they saw through the bold music and the laughter and the smoky air their foreshortened lives, the nearness of eternity, and so always rode the subway home alone, reeling and laughing and helped by the hands of innumerable smiling strangers, to sleep it off under their mothers’ own roof.
The next afternoon the two girls and their six charges were there again, the thinner one in the same dark blue bathing suit that cut squarely across the top of her thighs in the front but in the back relented a little and followed the sweet lines of her bottom; the other in yet another swim cap, a pale yellow one this time, a halo now as Billy squinted at her from across the sand. They had a beach umbrella with them today, green with yellow stripes, and in its shade they had both a lunch hamper and a wicker laundry basket.
The children were in the water already when the two of them arrived, the younger ones equipped today with red and blue inner tubes, and so it was easy enough, after they had shed their boots and their socks and their khaki pants, to nod at the ladies once more and then to say to the children as they walked past them into the gently lapping surf, “The water’s very wet today, don’t you think?”
There was a pause of children’s stares.
Billy winked. “It wasn’t quite as wet yesterday, was it?”
The four children gazed at them, four towheads with bluegreen eyes and a red bandage of sun across each nose. “No,” one of them, the tallest girl, said. “It couldn’t be.”
“Sure,” Billy told them. He rubbed some water between thumb and forefinger as if he were feeling cloth. “And one day last week it was hardly wet at all.”
“Didn’t need a towel,” Dennis said.
“Didn’t need a towel,” Billy agreed. “Went in for half an hour and came out dry as a bone.”
The older girl was still looking at them skeptically, but the younger ones had begun to giggle, the laughter bobbing up to their throats much as they were bobbing inside their swim tubes. “No,” they said. “You’re making that up.”
“It’s the truth,” Dennis said indignantly, and then Billy pointed to the smallest girl, who, because she could not touch the bottom, moved with more abandon as she laughed.
“Look at this little one here,” Billy said. “She looks like a buoy.”
Dennis shook his head gravely. “No, she’s a girl.”
The little one looked to her bigger sister and the sister said, “She’s a girl.”
“But she looks like a buoy,” Billy said again. “A buoy, a buoy.” He pointed out to the bay, to the black buoys that dotted the horizon until the children saw what he meant and began shouting, “A buoy, a boo-eee, one of those.”
But Dennis continued to shake his head. “How could she be a boy with all that hair piled up on top of her head? You’re a girl, aren’t you?”
And the little one, uncertain of the joke but delighted by the attention, merely giggled and bobbed and let the other three cry for her, “Yes, she’s a girl, but he means a buoy, a buoy.”
The commotion had the desired effect (blessed, blessed children) and slowly, the young woman in the navy-blue suit sauntered toward the water with a toddler on her hip, a smile beginning, Dennis was certain, if she would only raise that coyly bent head.
This she did as she entered the water and with her free hand splashed some of it on the baby’s plump leg. “Hello,” she said, meeting their eyes just long enough to show that hers were gray and darkly lashed.
“Hello,” they said, one after the other, with as much gallantry and graciousness as they could, being bare-chested and thigh-high in water. Had they been wearing hats, they would have tipped them.
“Isn’t the water wet today, Mary?” the older girl asked.
Mary continued to sweep up water languidly with her fingertips and to brush it onto the child’s legs. “Yes, isn’t it?” she said. The poor child looking down into the bay with something nearing terror, clinging to her shoulder and the neck of her suit, pulling it down just that much to show an inch of pure white flesh just below a delicate suntan. “Wetter than yesterday, I think,” she said.
And there it was.
“You’re Irish,” Dennis said, and Billy asked, “Where from?” at the ready with the information that his own father was from Cork and his mother Donegal.
She was from a place in County Wicklow, although she’d been over here since before the war. Since before Jonathan, the oldest boy, who was now stretched out under the umbrella with a magazine and an apple, was born. And of course, looking up at Jonathan on the blanket, they could not help but see the other girl, too (although Billy saw her as a mirage of smeared color, pink legs and a dark suit, pink shoulders and arms and face, and a yellow cap like a low flame, a mirage that perhaps only wild hope and great imagination could form into a solid woman).
“That’s Eva, my sister,” Mary said. “She’s only visiting. She’s on her way home.”
The family they worked for had a place on Park Avenue and a house in East Hampton and money, Dennis gathered, that poured down like sunlight. The man of the house had spent the war in Washington, D.C., but not so much of it that the babies ever stopped coming, all six of them born in the past decade, and the seventh, the newest, now asleep in the wicker basket.
“It was really too much for me,” Mary said. “So I asked if my sister could come for the summer. She’d been with a family in Chicago. She’ll be going home in the fall.”
Billy squinte
d and nodded and stirred the water around him with his hands. It might have been quicksand, he seemed, at the moment, so mired in it. It was not that Mary herself wasn’t pretty enough, with her gray eyes and her dark hair and her boyish and direct way, but Dennis already had the greater part in the conversation and she herself seemed to like it that way. And he wanted to swear no allegiance until he had considered both options carefully, and he sensed, perhaps because she was still a blur of colored light, that the girl on the blanket was the one for him.
But how to get to her? How to end this conversation here (he and Dennis, after all, hadn’t even swum yet) and get up on the shore and near enough to the blanket where she sat in the partial shade of the umbrella to say, “Well, hello, Eva.”
And then the infant in the basket began to cry. At first he thought it was the cry of a gull and he looked toward the sky, but then he saw her kneeling beside the basket and lifting the child—another blur—to her shoulder, then standing, rocking, beginning to pace. The other children were oblivious to the crying, as no doubt they had to be in a family where year after year another baby arrives to bump them that much further into adulthood, but Mary and Dennis were oblivious, too, talking now, just the two of them, about certain lucky investors who had done nothing but profit from the war.
Billy walked past them, through the water and over the rocky edge of the shore. He had not swum and so only his trunks and legs were wet and even his hands seemed to dry as he made his way toward her. The baby was crying full blast now, hot and sleepy and desperate against her shoulder. She had a hand behind its head and was hushing and clucking, but as soon as he was close enough to see her better, he knew she’d had her eyes on him all along. The boy with the magazine turned his slim back to them, as befit a magnate’s son.
Charming Billy Page 7
