For several days, Jeff stayed around the shell of the house, venturing up across what must once have been a well-kept lawn, where bushlike trees were overgrown with vines and the Spanish moss on the live oaks grew down to the earth like old men’s beards.
Gradually, hampered by the occasional day of rain, Jeff explored inland, along a double rutted path he found leading away from the house. The tangled woods closed in over him, low myrtle bushes, palmettos at various stages of their life cycle, honeysuckle, pines. These days he wore jeans over his swimming trunks and a long-sleeved shirt, because the mosquitos bit mercilessly in the dense woods. He left his hat at the boat — the sun couldn’t penetrate much into the semitropical growth. He walked along cautiously, a dead branch in his hand, and his fear at the strangeness and solitude never entirely left him.
He discovered a pond, a long, narrow pond so large it might have been considered a lake. Sitting at its side to watch a chameleon, his hand waving away clusters of gnats, Jeff saw a log moving on the shallow bank opposite: an alligator, as brown as the mud beneath the grasses, slipped into the water.
Jeff leaped to his feet and ran, thundering along the now familiar path. Heedless of the noise he was making, he ran until he had climbed back into the safety of his boat. An alligator!
He sat on the wooden board, his head held in shaking hands. An al-ligator. He was sweating. His chest heaved. He’d never been so frightened in his life.
After a while, the sun made him so hot he stripped off his shirt and shoes, then his trousers. He lowered himself gently over the side of the boat, paddled for a minute, carefully keeping his feet from touching whatever might be on the bottom of the creek, and then hauled himself back up over the side, cooled.
An alligator. Gees. He’d never thought — He’d thought of spiders and snakes and even snapping turtles, but never alligators.
One of the songs he’d heard the woman in the cabins singing had an alligator in it: “When a gator hollers, folks say it’s gwina rain.” Jeff ate lunch in the boat that day and then rowed to the dock. He got back to the city in time to look up alligators at the library, to see how much the appearance of the creatures might curtail his exploration of the island.
He should have gone straight to Gambo’s, as it turned out, because Melody was there. He didn’t know that at first, entering the cool hallway and picking up the Friday note from the Professor. He didn’t hear her voice, just the television. He opened the note, read a postcard from Brother Thomas about brass rubbings, unfolded the sheet of yellow legal paper, and pocketed the ten dollar bill. This note was longer, three lines of bold, slanted script. “I expect you in a couple of weeks. Let me know the day and time. Sold a book — imagine that — I’ll tell you about it.”
Only a couple of weeks. Jeff guessed he could manage that, and he thought he would feel easier once he got back to Baltimore. At that thought, the spacious indifference of Gambo’s house to his presence started to swell out from his belly and threatened to take him over. “Sold a book,” he said loudly within his own brain, “I wonder what that means.” The Professor sounded excited, for him. Jeff thought maybe he would write the Professor a postcard and ask. He thought maybe he would go out right then and get one to send. And a stamp, he reminded himself, feeling his tension abate as he planned out where he would go to get them.
But just then Melody came to the head of the stairs. “Jeffie?”
Jeff didn’t have the power to just get out. When she stood there, so close, her voice unsure and asking him, her hair curled around her beautiful face, it took all of his strength not to run up the stairs and throw his arms around her. “Hello,” he said.
“Come on up, Jeffie. I want to talk to you. Privately.”
She went into Jeff’s room, where only the brush and comb on the bureau and the picture of himself stuck into the edge of the mirror showed that anyone lived there. He had put the picture up to remind himself — of what, he did not know, but when he looked at it the cold, wet feeling inside him froze to ice and was easier to handle. Melody sat cross-legged on his bed. She spread her skirt over her knees and patted the space beside her. Hating himself for his inability to resist her and to resist an insistently happy feeling, Jeff sat down. But he wouldn’t look at her.
“Oh Jeffie.” She put her hand under his chin and turned his face toward hers. “It hasn’t been the way you wanted it to be, has it.”
“It doesn’t make any difference,” Jeff said. All he had to do was remember how badly she had hurt him and he would be all right.
“And I’m going away again tomorrow, and you’ll be gone before I get back,” she said, her voice sad.
Jeff couldn’t stop himself from asking. “Do you have to?”
“Yes, of course; would I go if I didn’t have to? Max is going to do an article on an Appalachian community, on rural poverty — but don’t tell Gambo that” — she smiled into his eyes, mischievously — “she think’s I’m the one doing it. What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her. But what have you been doing? Oh, I’ve missed you and thought about you all the time,” she said.
Jeff knew he couldn’t believe her, but he wanted to believe her so badly that he did. “I could take you out to dinner, just the two of us.”
At that she laughed and hugged him, pleased. “You do love me, despite it all. But we can’t. It would hurt Gambo’s feelings. You don’t want to do that, do you? She has only us, you know that.”
Jeff nodded.
“So we have to stick around here tonight, even though it would be good to have just the two of us, just this once. But what have you been doing all this time? Miss Opal tells me you’re out of the house and she doesn’t set your place for dinner unless she’s seen you. You’re not getting into trouble, are you?”
“No,” Jeff said. He opened his mouth to tell her about the island and the boat and the black families in their houses beside the back creek.
“You should have come with us.” She didn’t give him time to speak. “We were up in the mountains — well, the foothills — and it’s a wonderful countryside. The pueblos are a disgrace, outhouses, garbage. Whole families live in one room where the smoke isn’t ventilated. When I think what we’ve done to the Indians.” She went on and on about New Mexico and what to do about the Indians out there, how much help they needed; Jeff listened and did not let himself think. Because she didn’t even mean her questions to him. At last, she wound down. “Are you awfully sad to be going back to Baltimore?” she asked. “I always was.”
Jeff looked over at the picture on his mirror.
“No,” he said.
“Jeffie, what a terrible thing to say — after all everybody’s done for you. I hope you don’t talk to Gambo like that, it would break her heart. It breaks my heart a little, truth be told.”
Something burst inside Jeff. “Don’t lie to me,” he said to his mother. “I don’t believe you. If you really cared you’d have stayed here, and you wouldn’t be going away tomorrow and lying to Gambo about it, and — ” He was making her angry, he could see that. But he couldn’t stop. “And I don’t like the way you lie. You make it sound like the Professor is so terrible, but you’re terrible yourself. What you do to people,” he said. “Lying to them so you’ll get what you want.”
Big tears rolled down Melody’s cheeks. Jeff didn’t mind that. He got off the bed and went to stand by the window.
“I’ve made you unhappy,” Melody said. “I’m so sorry, Jeffie.”
“I’m not unhappy,” Jeff lied. “I just don’t care.”
“Like your father.”
“Don’t say that. Don’t say it that way just when you want to criticize me. He’s not so bad.”
“Well, what do you think of a man who lets you nearly die of pneumonia because he just doesn’t notice.”
“Bronchial pneumonia.”
“Bronchial pneumonia, plain pneumonia, what’s the difference? I don’t know how you can stick up for him. It just goes to show — ”
“Show how men always take their own side. I should have known better than to try to get you down here, but I felt so sorry for you — stuck with him and sick and nobody noticed, I cried myself to sleep when I first heard. I thought I could at least help you a little — but men always stick to their side.”
“That’s stupid,” Jeff said. His voice was loud in his ears.
She jumped off the bed and stood with her hands on her hips. “Are you calling me stupid? You don’t know anything, do you? You don’t know anything about the world; he hasn’t taught you anything up there in his ivory tower, safe and secure, not about the dangers or what really goes on, not about the way some people have to live or what we’re doing to the world — and you call me stupid. Well maybe I am, I was surely stupid to marry him, that was about the stupidest thing I ever did. Unless having a boy wins the prize. I wanted a girl. You didn’t know that, did you; but you should have figured it out. If you’re so smart. If you’d been a girl I’d have taken you with me when I walked out on him. I thought you were a girl when I got pregnant, I was sure of it.”
“Oh yeah?” Jeff answered right back. He didn’t know what to say to show her that he knew she wanted to break him into pieces. And he could see that; she wanted to hurt him, as badly as she could. Then he thought of something. “Well, Max told me why you got married, because you had to. So don’t go blaming me for anything. You probably lied to the Professor too, he probably isn’t even my father.”
Jeff wondered where that idea had come from, where in the icy black spaces inside of him that idea had been hiding.
Melody’s hand went to her throat. Her eyes were huge and gray. “That he is,” she said, her voice cold. She wasn’t saying it to make Jeff feel better, he knew that. So he knew what she was saying was true. “I’d never had married him otherwise, if I hadn’t had to. You can bet your boots on that.”
Jeff said the only thing he could. “Go away. Please, go away.”
She went. Jeff stood at the window for a long time, so angry he felt he was shaking, all the little pieces of himself he had so carefully tried to put together broken again and rattling around inside him. Sorrow welled up in him again, and he was frightened. He had thought if he could just say what he thought, if he was just strong enough to do that, then he’d be all right. But he wasn’t.
But he made himself go down to dinner, because Gambo might have her feelings hurt, and there was no reason for him to do that. He figured he could get through dinner with Melody, somehow. Nobody noticed much about him anyway; they’d probably miss noticing how upset he was.
But at the table Melody pretended nothing had happened. She sat next to him and kept trying to hold his hand as if nothing had changed between them. She was putting on an act for Gambo, about how much she loved Jeff and how much he loved her.
Jeff felt broken and bruised. When he looked at her, she smiled right into his eyes, so he tried not to look at her. He’d thought he wasn’t really vulnerable any more and maybe not even angry now that he’d let some of his feelings steam out. But there was some feeling like anger in him. He hated her, he thought, and he knew it was true when she left the table to answer the phone and came back to say she’d been invited to a party; nobody minded if she went, did they? She kissed Gambo’s head when she asked permission and then kissed Jeff too, on the top of his head, with her perfume in the air all around him.
He thought: alligators stayed near water, if he kept well away from that inland pond he’d be able to continue exploring the island. And what did it matter if an alligator got him, anyway; at least it would hurt so much he wouldn’t be able to think about Melody. Because he was beginning to hate himself for being so fragile, so easy for her to break.
CHAPTER 6THE DAY BEFORE he was due to leave Charleston, Jeff crossed over the top of a low, sandy dune, overgrown with scrub bushes. He saw the beach stretching away to the south; the ocean stretching out to the endless east; the line of waves breaking on the shore; sandpipers in nervous bands fishing the waves’ edge; three pelicans flying in a line over the surface of the water. He breathed in the salty air, the wind against his face. He saw a world in which he was the only human inhabitant.
It was midmorning and hot. Jeff ran down the dune and across to the water. To the north, he saw a narrow spit of land and a turbulence of waves where the tip of the island made currents, marking the entrance of the creek into the ocean. To the south lay an unbroken distance of beach, thirty feet wide, sandy white. Jeff ran south. He had to run, he didn’t know what else to do to celebrate what he had come to find here. And found. Sandpipers and gulls fled from his approach, circled and landed again behind him. When he had run himself out, he walked, mile after empty mile. The waves broke beside him, and he succumbed to the temptation to walk among them. When he realized how hungry he was, he turned around and walked the long miles back to where he had dropped his brown paper bag full of food on the duneside.
The afternoon flowed over him. He sat at the water’s edge, watching. Watching the birds, the waves, and once the gliding backs of porpoises cutting arcs through the ocean in front of him. He took off his clothes and waded out into the water to swim. He lay down to bake dry on the fine sand, first on his stomach, then on his back, soaking in the tireless whispering of the wind, the dry warmth of the sand, the heat of the sun, the spacious solitude all around him.
When the shadows grew longer and the temperature started to drop, he knew he ought to cross back, return to the boat. But he couldn’t do that. He made no decision to stay the night, but he couldn’t make himself leave the beach. Gradually, he understood that he would miss the last bus. That made no difference.
Jeff walked the beach again, this time picking up sand dollars, which lay flat and bleached white on the mudflats, and whorled conch shells. He made a pile of them by his empty paper bag and folded clothes. Then, sitting at the very edge of the waves, he discovered how the little pastel plaid cochinas tumbled down from the sides of pools his fingers dug. A shower of fragile mollusks poured down with the water that came to fill up the pools.
At his back the sun went down. The sky’s colors, reflected by the ocean, went from orange to pink to velvet blue to midnight blue and then black. Stars — millions of stars — came out. The moon rose, just past the full, and shone down with its sad face. The path the moon made on the water glowed silver.
Jeff slept on the beach hungry, but that made no difference. He awoke to a sky the color of thick smoke. All the stars had faded but one: Venus, the morning star, low on the eastern horizon, large and white; it too shone bright enough here to make its own narrow silver path on the water. Jeff sat up and watched, watched light and sunrise. During the night the wind had shifted to the west and blew into his ears from behind, heated by the closer air of the inner island. He saw fishing boats hundreds of yards off shore, so distant they looked like toys. All morning long he walked, through puddles between sandflats left by the receding tide, until he came to the southern tip of the island. Then he turned to go back.
He felt — washed clean, healed. He felt if he could just live here he would be all right. He felt as if he had never been alive before. He felt at ease with himself and as if he had come home to a place where he could be himself, without hiding anything, without pretending even to himself. He felt, thinking his way back up the beach, as if his brain had just woken up from some long sleep, and it wanted to run along beside the waves, to see how far and fast it could go.
When he returned to where he had left his clothes, he put them on. He picked out one perfect sand dollar from his collection of shells, then walked back to toss the rest gently into the waves, returning them. He jammed the paper bag into the back pocket of his jeans and carried the sand dollar tenderly in his hand.
At the top of the dunes, under a blazing noon sun, Jeff turned to take a last look. He drank in the scene with his eyes,
to be able to carry it away with him. The empty beach, the line of breaking waves groping up onto the sand, the restless ocean.
He crossed the island as quickly as he dared, giving the alligator pond a wide berth. When he came to the driveway leading to the burned-out house, he began to jog; his plane left at eight; he’d have to pack and get a cab. But when he sat in the rowboat again, the oars ready but not yet dipped into the water to take him away from the island, Jeff looked back. He didn’t see the busy land crabs nor the overgrown interior; he saw the beach, knowing it was there just beyond sight, keeping the sight of it clear in his inner eye. He splashed the oars into the water. Behind him, a great blue squawked — Jeff turned his head quickly.
The heron rose up from the marsh grass, croaking its displeasure at the disturbance, at Jeff, at all of the world. Its legs dragged briefly in the water before it rose free to swoop over Jeff’s head with a whirring of powerful wings. It landed again on the far side of the ruined dock, to stand on stiltlike legs with its long beak pointed toward the water. Just leave me alone, the heron seemed to be saying. Jeff rowed away, down the quiet creek. The bird did not watch him go.
PART
TWO
CHAPTER 7THE PROFESSOR stood waiting among the throng of people at Friendship Airport. He was taller than most of them, and the first thing Jeff saw was his glasses. Then the Professor raised one hand. Jeff made his way over to his father.
The Professor’s brown seersucker suit was rumpled. He didn’t wear a tie. He looked at Jeff as if he hadn’t seen him for so long he needed to be reminded of what Jeff looked like. But Jeff had made himself a place, inside himself, a kind of tower room, round, without any windows. In that room, he had locked his memory of the beach on the island, all the memories from the day hours and from the night hours. He had discovered how to step inside that room and slide the curved door closed and bolt it across.
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