A Summer Place Read online

  Still, such a man could hardly be called an old friend. An old enemy perhaps, for though there had never been any real display of resentment, Bart could still remember the dogged, almost desperate way Ken had played tennis with him.

  That had been a curious thing. Bart had never been an athlete, not a professional, practically, like Ken. But tennis had been Bart’s game, and Ken had hardly ever seen a court until he came to Harvard. Bart had been sixty pounds lighter than Ken in those days and five inches shorter, but he had always been able to beat the big man effortlessly at tennis, at least the first year.

  Ken had grinned good-naturedly during these contests, but every month or so he had renewed them, charging around the court like a bull, and occasionally tripping over himself so awkwardly that it was hard not to laugh.

  Toward the middle of Ken’s second year on the island, he had defeated Bart for the first time at tennis, and his face had betrayed a glimmer of something, not a smirk, for Ken had been careful to be gracious, but a shadow of something that had nothing to do with playing games. The realization that some obscurely important issue was at stake inspired Bart to greater efforts the next time they played, and he could still remember the look in Ken’s eyes when the big man had been beaten three straight sets. After that, Bart declined to play with him. As he said to Sylvia, no gentleman should make an issue of winning, and Sylvia agreed.

  Ken Jorgenson, the Beast—how the name brought back the atmosphere of those distant summers, and how appalling they were in retrospect! At sixteen, seventeen and eighteen, Bart and Sylvia and the others had been drinking cocktails and smoking incessantly. Ken had seemed ridiculously unsophisticated. He did not disapprove of smoking and drinking on moral grounds, he explained, but he had to keep in training. Somehow Ken Jorgenson had acquired no glamour from being a football player; instead he had made the game appear to be only a dull, practical business for the poor.

  “The trouble with you is that you have no sense of humor,” Sylvia had said to Ken once on the swimming dock when Ken had soberly reproved Roger for putting water wings on his chest and strutting up and down in full view of a staid and overly buxom old woman.

  “I know,” Ken replied seriously, “but it’s a hard thing to develop.” Shortly afterward he began to tell jokes, apparently memorized from some anthology of humor. The trouble had been that he became embarrassed before finishing, and usually delivered the punch line in a monotone. Sylvia had been addicted to puns, and she had come up with one which Bart and the others had thought hilarious: “Beast is Beast and Jest is Jest,” she had said, “and never the twain shall meet.”

  Oh, those had been funny years. And now it was really funny to think that Ken Jorgenson was coming back to the island a rich man. Now Ken would not sleep over the garage. No, Bart and Sylvia were living there with their children; that was the amusing, the really killing part of the whole situation. It was hilarious to anyone with a sense of humor, for Ken Jorgenson and his family would have to be given the two master bedrooms in the big house if he were to have the accommodations he asked for in his letter. He would have to be given the very rooms that had been Bart’s and Sylvia’s.

  I shouldn’t mind a reversal like that, Bart thought. I should be a good sport, I should have a sense of humor, and, more than that, I should be philosophical. Democracy in action, it is; this is what I fought the war for. For five minutes Bart continued to pace. There is something unhealthy and sinister in all this, he thought. Why is the Beast coming back?

  Good Lord, he thought, I’ve got to stop thinking of him as that. Why is Ken Jorgenson—Mr. Jorgenson, he may want to be called by an innkeeper—ha! Look at the way he started his letter, “Dear Barton Hunter.” What lack of ease is shown there! But why is he coming back?

  This isn’t the kind of place he’d pick ordinarily, Bart thought. These Middle Western get-rich-quick fellows like fancy hotels with a bar and an orchestra and all that. Why would he be coming here?

  To gloat I suppose, Bart thought, and there is something especially hideous about that. The son-of-a-bitch hears I was wiped out, and that I’m running this place as an inn, and he says to himself, By God, I think I’ll go and stay there. Maybe old Bart Hunter will carry my bags, and I’ll give him a tip.

  So he’s going to have his triumph, Bart thought; he is coming back in his splendor to visit us in our defeat. He grinned wryly as he remembered two sentences from Ken’s letter: “We are chartering a schooner for the month of July and will be cruising up the Maine coast. August we would like to spend with you, and the captain could let us off before taking the boat back.”

  How nicely it was worked in, the mention of a yacht! And what a dramatic entrance a big schooner would make for the Beast. He could sail right up to the dock where he once had sat watching the children swim, and he could step ashore in white flannels probably, for God’s sake, and a blue coat with brass buttons and yachting cap; that’s the way those Middle Westerners usually got themselves up when they went aboard a boat.

  The fact is, this is going to be horrible, Bart thought. For an entire month I shall have to endure being triumphed over. He considered writing Ken that the inn was full. That would be fine, except…

  Barton Hunter did not enjoy thinking of himself as a snob. He was self-conscious about it; he fought snobbery the way he fought drunkenness, disliking both and capitulating to both. In an agony of indecision he went to the kitchen, where Sylvia was leaning over a table helping the cook to bake pies. “Sylvia,” he said, “do you remember that fellow named Ken Jorgenson?”

  Sylvia turned toward him; she almost wheeled. As Bart had observed, her nerves had been getting pretty jumpy lately. She put her hand up and brushed her hair back from her forehead, leaving a streak of flour on her face. At thirty-five, Sylvia was an unusually handsome woman, with a full, still narrow-waisted figure, and a face which was youthful except when she was tired, as she was most of the time. “Ken Jorgenson!” she said. “Whatever made you think of him?”

  “He wants to come here. He wants two rooms for August.” Bart’s voice was a little querulous. “That’s funny,” Sylvia said.

  “I thought it might be wise to turn him down,” Bart replied, testing her and himself.

  “Why?” Sylvia’s eyes could turn curiously opaque sometimes, and they were that way now. It was impossible for Bart to tell what she was thinking.

  “Sylvia, you’re so damn insensitive! Don’t you remember him?”

  “I do.”

  “Well, it’s kind of ugly, his coming back here, don’t you think? Any amateur student of psychology could tell you why a man like that—”

  “If I hear that word ‘psychology’ again, I’ll scream,” Sylvia said. “I mean that literally, not as a figure of speech.”

  “All right, but…”

  Lillian, the Negro cook, came in with a bag of sugar.

  “Let’s talk this over in our room, Bart,” Sylvia said.

  He followed her to their room over the garage, a small chamber which had been built for a chauffeur and wife. The walls were covered with a pale green paper now discolored by smoke from the new kerosene space heater which made the place habitable in winter. Because all the good furnishings had been needed for the other rooms, almost everything here was defective: the water pitcher was chipped, the rug had an inkstain on it, and even the chair Bart sat on had a rudely mended arm.

  “Now listen,” Sylvia said. “We’re running an inn. A man wants two rooms, and we have them. It’s as simple as that.”

  “He may give us a hard time…”

  “So what?” Sylvia retorted. “So what, Bart? We’re in business, aren’t we? This isn’t a hobby any more. We need the money. If it makes it any easier for you, think of it like that.”

  “Just because we lost our money doesn’t mean we have to lose our dignity.”

  “Dignity!” Sylvia said. “The wharf is rotting, we’ve got leaks in the roof, and you want to turn down money fo
r dignity. We’re fighting for our lives, Bart! You never seem to realize that.”

  In the hall outside, their son, John Hunter, a handsome, unusually mature boy of fourteen, stood listening. He had been unable to find his tennis shoes, and he was sure his mother would know where they were, but long experience had taught him not to interrupt his parents while they were fighting. Most of what he heard as he waited for the argument to stop made no sense to him, but it was clear that an emergency of some kind existed. John fondled a Boy Scout knife in his pocket, and imagined himself saving his mother from an army of ruffians. With his back against the door, he stood like a sentry braced to meet all comers.

  Chapter Three

  WHEN SHE LEFT the bedroom, Sylvia met her son in the hall, and went to his room with him in search of tennis shoes. Patiently she examined the floor and the shelf in the closet; she looked behind the door and finally found the shoes under the bed. “Here,” she said with a weary smile. “When are you going to learn to use the eyes in your own head?”

  John grinned. “Thanks!” he said, and taking the shoes, dashed off.

  Sylvia had intended to return to the kitchen, but she felt suddenly tired and sank down on her son’s bed. Ken Jorgenson—whoever would have thought he’d come back? It will be hard to face him again, but that is ridiculous; there is no need to be ashamed, she thought. Every woman and every man has someone like that in the past, some memory to make the blood rush to the face at midnight when sleep won’t come. I am not unusual in that. Think of the women who have had many lovers, a whole parade of men to recall, perhaps with pleasure and not embarrassment. Why now, after all these years, she thought, putting her hands up to her face, why now does the very mention of his name make me begin to blush?

  The trouble is, the thing between us was not a love affair; there was something incredibly ugly in the way I acted with him. No, this is not like remembering a love affair; it is like remembering an act of perversion, and that is why I blush.

  Yet it was not all my fault, she thought. There are always excuses to be made, explanations, but beyond that…

  It was in 1934 that Sylvia, at sixteen, first visited the island with her parents, the Raymonds, who wanted to build a summer place there. Danton Raymond, her father, was a business associate of old John Hunter, Bart’s father, and the Raymonds stayed at the Hunters’ house. Although it was never expressly stated, the purpose of the visit was to enable the other Islanders to look the Raymonds over, and to decide whether to admit them to the corporation of householders. The Raymonds had two strikes against them because they came from Chicago, and, as old John Hunter said, not long before he died, they were “part organ-grinder Italian, part Mick Irish, and God knows what else.” The Islanders often formed close business ties with people they did not consider socially acceptable, and it was always more tactful to make believe that one really wanted these people on the island oneself, but that the others—well, that was a matter which no one person could control, because people were admitted to the corporation by unanimous vote only. The Raymonds were on trial on Pine Island that summer and they knew it.

  Sylvia, at sixteen, seemed to the Islanders to be an almost indecently beautiful young woman, and nothing more. Old John Hunter, seeing her in a bathing suit, said that no real Yankee ever had such a figure, and his wife, Martha, replied dryly that perhaps the girl should be run in for disturbing the peace. It was not socially acceptable to be that pretty, really. Chorus girls and models and hat-check girls had figures of that sort, but nice girls, the ones nice people knew, were too fat or too thin, or had bad skin or thick ankles, or some defect.

  Really beautiful girls were the stuff that dreams are made of, movie stars, and such nonsense. A girl like Sylvia appearing in the flesh on Pine Island was startling. There was a lushness about her, a sensuousness inherent in her body, in her innocently downturned eyes, in little mannerisms she had, such as flicking the end of her tongue over her lips; there was that about her which immediately made people interested in knowing whether she was chaste. That summer a lot of people watched Sylvia closely, trying to divine the answer to that question. Old ladies peered at her sharply over their knitting, middle-aged men stared at her musingly, and the mothers of errant boys worried. She couldn’t be chaste and look like that and walk like that, yet good heavens, the poor child was only sixteen, and there was no real reason to doubt her innocence.

  Such beauty was a serious liability. Other girls her age became distant. They did not like to go swimming with Sylvia or play tennis with her or be seen near her at dances. Even the boys shied away, some of them; the timid ones, the modest ones with no high opinion of their own ability as suitors, the humble ugly ones and short ones, these were afraid of Sylvia, for it would be so easy to fall in love with her and to lose her to someone else. Sylvia’s appearance exercised a terrible selection on the people who became her friends. She got those with self-confidence, the honestly assured, but also the braggarts, the self-styled Romeos, the self-assertive, and the clowns. Someone was always splashing water on her at the beach, or trying to put sand down the back of her bathing suit, or walking on his hands in front of her. It was all rather confusing to a girl who only two years before, even a year before, had been nothing but a child to whom no one paid much attention.

  Still, there were advantages. It was interesting to find that if she stared at almost any of her father’s friends for more than a second, they started squirming on their chairs, even the most dignified-looking ones. It was encouraging to discover that the boys who seemed distant and unfriendly became enthusiastic friends if she went out of her way just a little to encourage them. If she just said good morning, for instance, in a cheerful way to a boy, he was almost sure to tag along, trying desperately to develop a conversation.

  No one on the island penetrated the disguise of Sylvia’s beauty, no one except Ken Jorgenson, who, for a little while at least, had an instinctive understanding of her. She was frightened. The Islanders seemed hostile and superior to her. Her parents did not dress correctly, she was sure; they did not speak properly. Her father talked too much about money. She found she was terrifyingly ignorant of important subjects of conversation on the island, such as Miss Winsor’s School in Boston, the Eliot House dances and S. S. Pierce’s grocery store where, she imagined, only a select few were permitted to buy food. She felt herself to be an outcast, as she had all her life, even in Chicago, where her family had changed houses almost every other year.

  Sylvia had been born in a two-family house in a section of Chicago only a little better than the slums, and the first move had taken place when she was two years old. Her childhood came back to her in memory as a series of houses, each a little better than the last, and each with a different set of neighbors and customs with which to become acquainted. By the time she was ten, the houses had large lawns around them, and her mother was employing a teacher of diction for the entire family. There was always a battle to be fought each time a new house was acquired, parties to be given with infinite worry over details of dress, menu and decoration, club memberships to be sought, inner circles to be penetrated.

  Sylvia was always “the new girl,” for by the time she began to feel at home in any neighborhood or school, her family moved up again. At parties she usually sat quietly with her hands folded in her lap, hoping only to be inconspicuous. When, at fourteen, she was first sent to a private school, she obeyed her mother’s instructions not to talk about schools she had attended before. At fourteen she already felt her past to be cause for deep shame, and she blushed when on a drive through the city her father pointed out to her the house where she had been born.

  When Sylvia first arrived on Pine Island, she interpreted the coldness of the people she met not as envy of her looks, but as scorn. When she first saw Ken Jorgenson striding along the beach in his swimming trunks, she admired his strength, and she was both astonished and flattered to find that he obviously liked her. On the first day they met, he offered
to give her swimming lessons, and very gravely, as he did everything, he held her in the water. Suddenly the youngsters all around them began to giggle, and that afternoon they kidded her about Ken Jorgenson; oh you and Ken, they said, and they laughed, but at first she didn’t mind.

  The third night she spent on the island Ken Jorgenson took her rowing around the edge of the harbor. She sat in the stern of the boat trailing one hand in the water, watching his powerful shoulders outlined against the sky, and feeling an unaccustomed sense of peace. It was as though she had fought a battle alone since childhood, and had suddenly, without words, found herself to have acquired a mysteriously loyal and powerful ally. When they returned to the wharf, Ken kissed her as he helped her out of the boat, a shy and gentle kiss upon her lips, and they were both confused when without explanation she broke into tears. He held her tightly against him until the sobs stopped, and then with clumsy gallantry escorted her to the house without trying to kiss her again.

  No one saw that kiss, but it was soon assumed by almost everyone on Pine Island that she was having an affair with Ken. One reason was, of course, that they looked as though they belonged together. They both had that irritating superiority of physique—a match between them was good casting. Ken, who was blond and big and “charming until he talked,” old John Hunter said, appeared at first glance to answer the question in the minds of many, of what kind of a man would eventually get a girl who looked like that. There was a sort of inevitability about it. Beyond that, of course, there was the way he looked at her, his lack of ease in her presence, and perhaps, a little, the way she looked at him. It was a dull summer on the island, with many people giving up their boats for economy, and it was fun to have something to gossip about, to have a scandal, perhaps. Some of the girls found it comforting to write Sylvia off as competition, and some of the men felt it almost a relief to believe that Sylvia was not available, even if they had the courage to try. Within a month it was being widely said that this new tutor, Ken Jorgenson, was sleeping with the Raymond girl, and the atmosphere, whenever they met at an island get-together, became charged with excitement; the tempo of conversation audibly changed, and old ladies scowled with delight.