A Summer Place Page 12

  “Now let’s see,” Ken said to Helen one night, ticking off the taboos on his fingers, “we are seeking a neighborhood where there are no Jews, no Polish people, no Italians, no Negroes, no children, no Catholics. Do I have the list right?”

  “Don’t be mean,” Helen said.

  “I’m just trying to get this straight. You know, out in Nebraska when I was a kid, us Swedes weren’t held in too high repute. Do they mind Swedes here?”

  “Of course not! What’s getting into you, Ken? You’ve never been so mean!”

  Although Ken stopped talking about it, the compiling of the list of Margaret’s dislikes became an obsession with him. When she refused to patronize a Chinese laundry, he learned that she was against the Chinese and, it seemed, all Orientals. The Russians she hated with patriotic zeal. The English she thought snobbish, the French immoral, the Germans brutal, and all South Americans lazy. Category by category, she closed humanity out.

  At first Ken thought the Carters simply wanted to move into as expensive and genteel a neighborhood as possible, but that proved incorrect. They rejected a rich neighborhood because they said the residents were “too snooty,” so Ken added the rich to his list. Other neighborhoods were rejected because they were too poor. Ken finally concluded that Margaret and Helen were simply anti-people, or anti-life, and fantastic though it sounded, every bit of evidence seemed to lead to this conclusion. Added to the desexing of everything, which seemed a logical part of it, was an anti-food prejudice. Although no one who saw Margaret and Helen cleaning the house all day long could accuse them of being lazy, their chief interest in shopping for groceries was to buy things which could be quickly prepared. The kitchen was full of minute mixes and instant powders of all kinds, and a huge deep freeze chest was devoted entirely to products which could be stuck into boiling water or put on a griddle and served within five minutes. There was a great rush wherever food was concerned in the Carter household. No dish had sauces, nor any of the savor that slow cooking produced. Meat often was served with ice crystals at its center. After considerable reflection, Ken decided that the lust for cleanliness helped to produce this phenomenon. The Carters hated cooking because it messed up the kitchen, and they got it over with as speedily as possible, so they could fall to rubbing the counters and the dishes again. And of course, food gave life, and was therefore disgusting.

  Ken’s theory of the anti-people people was borne out by Bruce’s political tastes, which favored preventive war, capital punishment, and clapping strikers in prison, and by Margaret’s literary taste for blood. The converse of Jorgenson’s theory, as Ken termed it, was obviously that people who don’t like people or life become pro-death.

  These thoughts made Ken no happier when he reflected that a divorce would undoubtedly hand Molly to Margaret Carter, for Helen just adored her mother, as she said, and couldn’t bear to live alone. He tried to tell himself he was too bitter, that he should be compassionate toward Helen and Margaret, that he should regard them as poor lost souls, the product of their own undoubtedly horrible parents. He also tried to tell himself that he had to take more responsibility for Helen, that if he had really cared enough, he might have succeeded better in weaning her from her mother, that he had abandoned her too readily. These thoughts did not help. Regardless of the reasons, Helen and Margaret had ended up as they were, and he did not want Molly to be subject to them.

  The house the Carters finally selected was in a neighborhood much like the one they were leaving: a poor suburban street, where one large California ranch house had been built on a double lot. It was by far the biggest and most expensive building on the block. In fact, it looked so out of place that it had been difficult to sell, and the contractor had reduced his price from sixty to forty thousand dollars. After thorough investigation, old Bruce found that there were few Catholics and Jews nearby. At least the postman, a small dark man of indeterminate ancestry, said that, and he ought to know. The postmen are a great help when you’re buying a house, Bruce said; for five dollars they’ll tell you almost anything. The names the city directory listed in that block were not Polish or Italian, and no Negroes could be seen walking about. No school was within a mile, and fortunately, Margaret said, there was no land in the neighborhood where one could be built. It was easy to see from the threadbare lawns of the neighbors that they wouldn’t be snooty. The house, in fact, made the neighbors look poor and rendered them miserable. It was, Margaret exclaimed, “exactly right!”

  At dawn on the morning after the “exactly right” house had been discovered, Molly stole out of her cot in her mother’s room in the Carters’ old house, and down the stairs to the living room, where her father was sleeping. In her nightdress and kimono, she perched on the foot of his sofa bed. He opened his eyes and smiled when he saw her.

  “I didn’t mean to wake you up,” she said.

  “I was already awake. Want to come under the covers?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you have a nightmare?” he asked when she was lying beside him.

  “No. I just wanted to be with you.”

  He hugged her and she hugged him back, as she had so often when she crawled into bed with him after a bad dream. Since babyhood Molly had had a marvelous capacity for warmth, Ken thought. At the age of seven she had put her arms around his neck, her small face full of adoration, and had asked him to marry her. Now she snuggled against him, completely unself-conscious about being a woman, but full of small sighs of contentment, and wiggles that were as unabashedly sensual as they were virginal. He brushed her hair with his lips. “Glad to be back in Buffalo?” he asked.

  “Not very.”

  “Why not?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Too flat,” she said. “I like the mountains and the sea.”

  “So do I.”

  “Are we going back to the island next year?”

  “I hope so.”

  “It was a funny summer,” she said.

  “Did you have a good time?”

  “I didn’t like the boat.”

  “And the island?”

  “I liked that,” she said, but her big eyes looked troubled. “Daddy, can we talk? Like we used to, I mean. Serious.”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, Johnny Hunter kissed me, and I kissed him back. Do you think I should have?”

  “Do you like him?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Then I think it was all right for you to kiss him back. I wouldn’t let that kind of thing go too far, though. It’s a little early yet.”

  “He didn’t try to do anything bad. It was just that last day, before we went down to the boat to go. He asked me to go for a walk with him, and he said he thought I was a keen girl, and he kept saying that, and then all of a sudden he kissed me—here.” Molly touched a delicate forefinger to her lips.

  Ken smiled at her.

  “Then he apologized, and he seemed, I don’t know, so kind of desperate; so I kissed him back.”

  “I’m glad you did,” Ken said.

  “And then he asked if we could write letters this winter. They get mail once a week on the island, except when the ice gets too bad, he says. He asked me if I would write, and I said I would.”

  “That’ll be fun.”

  “Do you think Mother will mind?”

  “I don’t see why she should.”

  Molly sighed and stretched. “Gee, I love you, Daddy,” she said. “I better go upstairs now, or Granny will murder me.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m supposed to make my bed before leaving the room—it’s always been her rule, as though it were written down in the Bible or something, and Granny gets very upset if people don’t obey—anyway, that’s what Mother said.”

  “Sounds terrible,” Ken replied, giving her a glance of mock ferociousness. “You better obey.”

  Molly grinned and jumped from the bed. As she disappeared up the stairs, her laughter, kept muted to avoid waking peopl
e up, was low and throaty.

  Ken lay looking out the window of the living room at the flat suburban landscape. If I leave Molly with those two, he thought, what chance will she have? They’d spay her. They’d spay her, just the way they spay the cats, and by the time she was twenty, she’d be just like them. Ken doubled up his fist and brought it down hard in the palm of his hand. The people who concentrate their love on automobiles and lawns, he thought bitterly—at least they have easier problems than this!

  The next day Ken got a bad cold which turned into bronchitis. He lay in the sofa bed with his legs awkwardly curled, and morosely coughed. Winter came early, even for Buffalo, that year, and in mid-September there was a brief flurry of snow. Ken wondered whether it was snowing on Pine Island, and how Sylvia was. He could picture her standing nervously, while Bart went through the mail, waiting for the letter Ken had promised to write.

  The bronchitis lingered, and Margaret didn’t like the sofa bed lying open in the daytime. It looked terrible, she said, yet no woman or girl could give up her room to sleep in the living room because there were no shades on the windows, and anyone might look in. Old Bruce offered his bedroom as a sick chamber, but to reach it, one had to go through Margaret’s room, and Ken declined. Molly put a pillow on an armchair in such a way that he could stick his feet out straight.

  “Maybe you could go to the hospital,” Margaret said hopefully. “With a cough like that…”

  “I’m not going to the hospital!” Ken thundered.

  “But Mother and I have to start packing to get ready to move into the new house,” Helen said. “We’re going to be awfully busy…”

  “You go ahead,” Molly said. “I’ll take care of Daddy.”

  For two days Molly kept a precise chart of Ken’s temperature, which varied from normal to a hundred and one and back again, and gave him his medicines on the very minute the doctor had prescribed. She brought him books from the library, astonishing him by selecting volumes which really interested him.

  “How did you know I’d like this?” he asked her, holding up a new novel, a newspaper review of which he had recently torn out and placed in his wallet.

  Molly looked pleased. “I just guessed,” she said.

  On the third day of her ministrations Molly herself came down with a sore throat, and was confined to her cot upstairs. Margaret and Helen, who were busily wrapping each of seemingly numberless teacups in paper and packing them in barrels of excelsior, looked harried. “I don’t know what we are going to do!” Margaret said. “It isn’t sanitary to have two sick people here. Really, Ken, it’s silly not to go to the hospital.”

  “I can get up now,” Ken said. “I’ll take my turn as nurse.”

  Ken was sitting on the foot of Molly’s cot reading to her later that morning when Helen came in. “You’ve got a letter, Molly,” she said, and handed her a square cream-colored envelope.

  Molly took it and gravely opened it. Helen stood watching her.

  “Come on, Helen,” Ken said. “I’ll bring in some more barrels for you now if you want.”

  On the stairway Helen said, “That was a letter from John Hunter that Molly got.”

  “Oh?”

  “Do you think she should be getting letters from boys at her age?”

  “Why not?”

  “Mother doesn’t think it’s right.”

  “Sometimes,” Ken said, “I would like to crumple your mother up into a small ball and pack her in one of her teacups.”

  “Ken! Keep your voice down! This is a small house!”

  At that moment Margaret came out of the kitchen, looking tired, with pieces of excelsior stuck in her gray hair. Her lips were pursed tightly. Ken went to the cellar, where the barrels for the china had been stored, and brought one up. As he approached the dining room with it, he heard Margaret say, “I’d talk to her anyway, dear. You can’t take chances with things like that.”

  “Talk to who?” Ken thundered, and dropped the barrel with a bang.

  Margaret put her hand up to her hair.

  “Mother was talking to me, dear,” Helen said.

  “Were you talking about Molly’s letter?”

  “It was a private conversation,” Helen said.

  “Private or not, I’m telling you here and now not to mention it to the child!”

  Helen put on her virtuous look, which meant that she tilted her chin up and half closed her eyes. “Ken, don’t be rude to Mother!” she said.

  “I’m not being rude! I’m just setting a rule concerning the upbringing of my daughter!”

  “She’s my daughter too,” Helen said.

  “Of course. And please make decisions about her with your husband!”

  Margaret bent over and took a teacup from the table where they were stacked. “I’m just thinking of the child’s own good,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, Mother,” Ken replied, “but that’s up to us.”

  “Boys and girls that age get into trouble all the time,” Margaret continued. “Just read the paper.”

  “That has nothing to do with this!”

  “Well, I didn’t mean to butt in. Bruce always left the upbringing of my daughter to me.”

  “Families do things differently,” Ken said, regaining his patience. “Now, if you don’t mind I’m going to take a glass of milk up to Molly, and then I’m going to take a nap.”

  With the milk in hand, he started to walk through the living room, and it was then he got his idea. In her room he found Molly reading a book. The letter was not in sight, and he was careful not to mention it. She smiled at him, but also said nothing about her mail.

  “Honey, do you feel well enough for a plane ride?” he asked.

  “Sure! Where we going?”

  “I thought it might be a good idea to go down to Florida and bake these colds out. Just you and I.”

  Her eyes widened with wonder. “That would be marvelous.”

  “I haven’t talked it over with your mother yet, but we’ll see.” He went downstairs, and going through the living room, decided that the proper stage setting for the conversation he was planning would help. Briskly he unfolded the sofa bed. After taking his pants off, he hung them quite artistically, he thought, from a doorknob. His shirt he left over the back of a reproduction of a Chippendale chair, and he put his shoes and socks on a window sill where some of Margaret’s best teacups had reposed to be admired by passers-by. Stretching out in his underclothes, he pulled a blanket up to his waist, and surveyed the disarray with pleasure. “Helen,” he called. “Could I talk to you a minute?”

  “Can’t you come in here?” Helen asked.

  Wrapping a blanket around him like a toga, but leaving large portions of hairy leg exposed, Ken went to the dining room, where he appeared like an apparition, Margaret told her friends afterward; really, it was hard to say what that man did look like.

  “This cold seems to have jumped up in me again,” he said, hawking elaborately. Picking up a cup, he added, “Is it all right to spit in this?”

  “No!” both women said in horror.

  “Where do you want me to spit?”

  “I’ll get you some Kleenex and a paper bag,” Helen said. “Are you really sick?”

  “Feel pretty weak. I’ll be in the living room lying down.”

  When Helen returned with the paper bag and the Kleenex, he was rolled up in the blanket on the sofa bed with his big, naked feet sticking out grotesquely. She gave him her burden, and he spat explosively.

  “I may have to stay in bed here some time,” he began. “A couple of weeks.”

  “I’m sorry you’re not feeling well,” Helen said, and her eyes traveled around the disordered room.

  “Maybe I ought to go to Florida,” Ken continued. “Molly’s cold seems worse too—it would do us both good to bake out in the sun.”

  “I can’t leave now! Mother needs me to help with the moving!”

  “I know she does,
” Ken said sympathetically. “Why don’t you stay here and get her straightened out? You can join Molly and me later.”

  “Well…”

  “This is no place for us to be sick.”

  “No. But who’ll take care of you?”

  “We’ll take care of each other, and the sun will cure us in no time.”

  Helen’s eyes came to rest on the shoes on the window sill. “If you’re sure you’re well enough, that would be fine.”

  “We’ll leave tonight,” Ken said.

  When they took off from the airport six hours later, Molly, who had never before flown, held tight to his hand. The engines thundered and vibrated as the heavy plane strained upward. Beneath them the multicolored lights of Buffalo stretched like a sea of jewels, beautiful in the distance. “This is fun,” Molly said.

  Chapter Eleven

  IT WAS a blustery October afternoon in 1953 when the schooner Mary Anne put into the harbor at Pine Island to deliver the mail. On the end of the rickety wharf in front of the Island Inn, John Hunter, a strong, dark-haired boy, waited. Dressed in frayed skiing pants which Sylvia had made for him out of a pair she had had as a girl, and a heavy Navy raincoat Bart had had in the war, John stood bracing himself against the wind as the old vessel battered her way up the bay. When Herb Andrews, her captain, brought her alongside the wharf, John leaned far out over the water and accepted the limp mailbag Claude, Herb’s brother, held out to him. “Hi there, Johnny!” Herb called. “What happened to Hasper?”

  “I told him I’d get the mail.”

  “You must have a girl! Or are you expecting something from the catalogue?”

  John grinned. “The catalogue!” he called, and as the schooner spun on her heel and headed out to sea, he ran with the mailbag up the hill.

  Snow already covered the island, and the trees gnashed their bare branches together in the wind. John went to the small room over the garage which served as his father’s office. Bart was sitting there reading, a pale man now dressed in a worn lieutenant-commander’s uniform. He had taken to wearing his old uniforms during the winter and fall because, as he said, there was no one on the island to give a damn, and it was a shame to let warm clothing go to waste. The ribbons over his left breast showed he had served in the North Atlantic, the European theater, and the South Pacific. He had three battle stars and the Navy Cross. The two and a half gold stripes on his sleeves were worn to the color of silver, and as was usually true, he was a little drunk. Starting promptly at noon, Bart began to drink from a bottle of California port he kept in the icebox. At five the cocktail hour started, and he drank Martinis until seven. The highballs began at eight-thirty and lasted until one in the morning, when Bart was able to go to sleep. He wasn’t a truly vicious alcoholic, as he analyzed himself aloud to Sylvia quite often. Only rarely was he stumbling, or thick-speeched or abusive. Usually he spaced his drinks pretty well, and was able to maintain an edge of saintly beatitude. Now there was a serene smile on his face when his son arrived with the mail. “Right on time, eh, Johnny?” he said, and from a hook on the wall took a key, which, after considerable fumbling, he inserted in the padlock at the neck of the mailbag. Lifting the bag higher than necessary, he spilled the mail on the floor.