A Summer Place Page 9

  As she lay in bed the steady drum of the rain on the garage roof seemed ominous to Sylvia. Bart stirred drowsily and opened his eyes. He sat up, looked out the window, and lay down again. Obviously he was thinking the same thing. He closed his eyes, and twisted restlessly as he tried to go back to sleep.

  “Bart,” she said gently. “It’s eight o’clock.”

  “Hell with it,” he said.

  She got up and dressed. This apparently was going to be one of the days which Bart spent in bed—he had such days, a dozen or so a year. Looking into their rooms, she saw that the children were still asleep. With the sky so gray, they might sleep another couple of hours, she thought, and there was no use awakening them. Sylvia welcomed opportunities for a little privacy; they came seldom enough.

  She went to the room used as Bart’s office because it was the only place she could be alone, and she was inside it before she remembered that it had been where Ken Jorgenson had slept in the old days. The plaster was badly cracked, as it must have been even then. Sylvia stood at the window, looking through the rain-splattered panes at the gardens, now unkempt, because gardeners were almost impossible to get on the island any more, even if one could afford them. The hydrangeas were in full blossom and waved their leaves wildly in the storm. The formal garden, in which triangles and circles of snapdragons had grown, was now grassed over. The rose garden was a tangle of underbrush with a narrow swath cut through it by a power lawn mower, and with a patch of reasonably good lawn around the old fountain in the center. Snowberries, lilacs, and other flowering trees had gone untrimmed so long that they pressed their branches together, like a forlorn army closing ranks before attack.

  Down by the bay she could see the roofs of small houses which had been built by some of the children of the corporation members. The children of the association of householders were admitted automatically, which posed a problem, because many of them were poor and never made money. On their parents’ property they built cheap cottages which offended the eye, but one could not expel the children, even those who were now fifty years old. In spite of the bylaws established by the corporation of householders, Pine Island was changing, growing shabby, not what it used to be at all.

  Well, if Ken wanted revenge he got it, Sylvia thought. If he stood there on the beach seventeen years ago and placed a curse upon us, the curse worked. I wonder what he thought when he sailed into the harbor aboard his yacht and saw those shacks along the beach, the untended gardens, and found Bart with his hands already trembling a little when he lifts a glass. I would like to know, was he glad or sorry?

  What did he think of me, Sylvia thought; he must have been curious to see what kind of woman I became.

  The woman I became, she thought, and with sudden, horrified objectivity saw herself, her own personal history of the past years, as though for the first time.

  After marrying Bart she had thrown herself energetically into playing the role of the perfect wife, and she had succeeded, or at least that’s what everyone had said. Such a handsome couple, old ladies had exclaimed, and dear Sylvia is as smart as she is pretty, a brilliant organizer, really, and a person with great social sense. Oh, she had been a great organizer, all right. She had been a leader of the Junior League, and had started a crusade with the League of Women Voters to help clean Boston up. She had organized a book-review club devoted only to the most serious reading. She had been voted chairman of the arrangements committee at the country club, and had served as a patron of many dances. Even when Bart could no longer afford servants, and she had all the cooking and house cleaning to do for her husband and two children, she had been chairman of a half-dozen committees. She was an absolute wonder, everybody had said; there never had been anyone with so much energy and so much charm.

  Soon after her marriage, she had become afflicted with asthma, and had spent many sleepless nights with her breath rasping as though she had just run a long race. There had been allergy tests and special bedding to be bought. A specialist had seriously told her that her house should be vacuum cleaned twice every day, that she should wear no cotton and no wool, and that she should avoid a list of foods which contained almost every dish she liked. All this she had tried to do, but the asthma had continued. Slowly the fear had mounted in her that her breath might start coming short during one of the speeches she had to give at the book-report club or before the League of Women Voters, that she would be left gasping in public, unable even to apologize to her audience. Acute stage fright had overtaken her, and she had been so nervous before standing up to chair a meeting that she had occasionally feared she would faint. Still, she had persisted in accepting new “community responsibilities,” and the telephone had rung in their house from early morning until eleven o’clock at night. “I love to keep busy,” she had said. “A woman just stagnates, sitting around the house all day long.”

  The asthma had not been her only trouble. She was, Bart had remarked bitterly, the most aching person he had ever met. Before her monthly periods, she had suffered severe stomach cramps. Her breasts often were sore; she had occasional attacks of bursitis in her left shoulder and recurrent “sick headaches.” On waking in the morning, she often suffered from a sore throat. The joints of her fingers pained her so that she had been examined to see if she had arthritis. Her eyes often ached, and she was surprised when an oculist told her she needed no glasses.

  During the years she had lived in Boston, courage had come to seem to her to be the only meaningful word in life. In spite of her aches, and in spite of her “full schedule of community activities,” she had been a model mother, everyone said. Immediately upon becoming pregnant for the first time, she acquired many volumes of books on child care. She nursed her children until her breasts became abscessed; she saved special hours in her day to kiss and fondle the babies. She read aloud to them when her head throbbed so she could hardly remain erect in the chair; she had taken school clothes from the dryer and pressed them at two in the morning.

  And she had been a good wife too, even Bart had admitted. Hardly ever had she refused her attentions to him, even when she was most exhausted. When he complained that she did not seem to appreciate the pleasures of the bed with much intensity, she had tried hard to drive herself into some simulation of what he considered passion. The possibility that she was frigid had terrified her. Often she had caught herself remembering a long-ago night on the beach with Ken Jorgenson as dim proof that she was not, and once she had bewildered Bart by asking him to take her forcibly, begging him not to mind if she appeared to struggle against him, saying there was something abnormal in her perhaps, but that she needed the sensation of trying to resist. She had cried when that strange pantomime had produced nothing in her but frustration and weariness.

  Added to her other troubles had been a growing conviction that in spite of her most determined efforts, she was turning out to be a ruinous mother. Her despondency had showed, no matter how hard she tried to conceal it. “Mother, are you all right?” Johnny as a small boy often had asked her. “Why do you look so sad?”

  “I’m not sad,” she had replied, forcing herself to smile. “I’m perfectly fine!” Often she had become so preoccupied with her worries that the children had difficulty in penetrating her consciousness at all. Once Carla had screamed at her, “Mother, Mother! Why don’t you answer me?”

  “I didn’t hear you, dear,” Sylvia had replied.

  “You never hear!” Carla had retorted, her face red with rage. “You never do!”

  Oh, she had been a great mother, with her habit of brooding about herself, and the indefinable apprehension raging within her, until the children began imagining disaster on all sides. Carla had gone through a stage of fearing the house was going to burn down, and at the age of six, John had often come to her in the middle of the night to ask her to put her hand upon his chest to see if his heart was beating all right. “Yes, darling,” Sylvia had said. “There’s nothing the matter with your heart!”

&n
bsp; “Are you sure?”

  “Of course.”

  “Is it beating the way it should?”

  “Of course it is!”

  “Exactly?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you,” John would say. “I’m sorry to bother you…”

  “It’s all right.”

  While Johnny ran back to his bed, Sylvia had lain with her own heart beating too rapidly, thinking that something must be terribly wrong with the whole household to produce children that fearful. A house without love, a house without hope —what kind of children could such a place be expected to produce? When the children fought together, as they often did, Sylvia occasionally startled them by hugging them and covering them with kisses, as though to prove with her intensity that there was enough affection to go around.

  Although Sylvia had not liked to admit it, she had been happier when Bart had been away during the war. She had worked hard at the Red Cross and had helped to organize a USO center. When Bart returned, however, the tension in the household had redoubled. Sylvia’s asthma had grown worse, and she had been seized by a sudden fear that she would burst into tears on the street, while answering the telephone, or while serving as chairman of one of her committee meetings. Once, when asked to stand and deliver a report, this fear had grown so acute that she pleaded sudden illness, and had gone home in confusion, attended by two solicitous friends.

  That night Bart had advised her to see a psychologist. In fear that she would be found mad, she had gone to a small office on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, and in a sudden torrent of words had told a small, bald, bespectacled man about her whole relationship with Ken Jorgenson, about the teasing, about undressing in front of the window, about the rape which was not a rape really, she had stammered out, no, not really, I always thought it was, but lately I’ve realized that it was not. His comments, delivered in a mild, dry, matter-of-fact voice had astonished her. “You must not forget,” he had said, “that such actions are not entirely unnatural, they are not wholly bad in motivation.” In most primitive societies, he had said, there are rituals provided with dances during which young women can flaunt their beauty before young men with the full approval of their elders.

  “There is nothing unhealthy about that,” he had said. “The difficulty always comes when these natural impulses collide with countercurrents within yourself and with society.”

  Oh, the psychologist had made everything as clear as day to her; she had seen him several times, paying ten dollars for each visit, money which she had hoped to spend for a summer camp for John, and the only trouble had been that the asthma had continued, and the fear of crying, the sensation that there was no joy in life, and the growing conviction that she was ruining her children.

  “What do I do?” she had asked the psychologist.

  For the immediate future a little rest would help, he had said; long walks in the country and some activity with her hands, such as weaving, would be more beneficial than committee meetings. In the long run, a complete psychoanalysis might help, he had said, and had recommended a doctor who was twice as expensive.

  She had dutifully followed directions and had started the analysis, but when Bart’s financial affairs had gone from bad to worse, she had stopped it. Courage, she had finally decided, had to be her answer; not lying on a couch and talking at a cost of a hundred dollars a week, but courage, only that and nothing else.

  The difficulty had been that taking care of her house and children, weaving and long walks in the country had not been enough to cure her restlessness. After having made the decision to give up her clubs and her “community activities,” she had grown so nervous that she could hardly remain seated for more than five minutes. Part of the trouble, she had decided, was Boston, a city which had seemed to her to personify false standards. The clubs which she had so eagerly joined had begun to appear to be the epitome of hypocrisy. Her old friends had seemed to act like marionettes pulled by complex strings of convention, never by their own emotions. Long before Bart’s business problems became acute, she had talked to him of pulling up stakes and moving to California, perhaps, or back to Chicago, where she still had distant relatives. When Bart suggested that they convert the old mansion on the island to a summer inn and live there the year around, she had agreed with enthusiasm. Indeed, she had egged him on, and had turned what had begun as a tentative proposal of his, little more than a dream, into reality. It would be so wonderful for the children, she had said.

  The decision to move permanently to the island had been hers as much as his: this she remembered now with grim self-criticism. It was not all his fault, she thought; those horrible winters were of my own making. Oh, she had had bright dreams of abandoning all convention, of walking naked on the beaches in the sunlight alone, of losing herself in some new, mystical union with nature. She had bought books on how to become self-supporting on one acre of land; she would abandon the phony and get back to essentials. They would weave their own clothes with wool from their own sheep, and make brandy from their own apples. They would grow potatoes and learn how to smoke fish, and the children would learn how to relax.

  Of course, she had not taken into account the almost constant weariness which plagued her, the lack of privacy caused by Todd Hasper’s ubiquitous presence on the island, and the depressive atmosphere which surrounded Bart after his business failure. But during that first fall on the island, in the false reassurance of Indian summer, she had achieved a few days of exaltation. Once she had gone to the end of the island alone, and slipping off her clothes, had lain on a warm granite rock, with the surf curling around her, and she had felt herself washed of years of falseness. Looking down at her body, still full-hipped and narrow-waisted, but with the skin on her belly striated by childbirth, and with her breasts beginning to sag a little, she had not felt old; she had had the curious sensation of ripening, of being far more beautiful than when she had stood tightly corseted before the ladies’ meetings with white gloves to her elbows, and more desirable for any man than when she had lain smugly on the beach in a black bathing suit and a fake mink coat. If Bart had not been drunk that night when she returned home, it might have been possible to achieve a new beginning.

  But, of course, he had been drunk, and the first snow had come a few days later, and the memory of that short period of exaltation had seemed like a dream. Grimly she had returned to her creed of courage. Meals had had to be cooked and clothes to be washed and bills to be paid, for Bart soon became upset at the very sight of a checkbook. There had been the children to teach and to comfort, with determination if not with joy. How efficient she was, Bart had said; how remarkable that she remained so young. An automaton held up by courage, living by rote: that was the kind of woman she had become.

  But not entirely, she thought now in the quiet of Ken’s old room. I’m lucky: I have a point of pride, unlike poor Bart. In spite of everything I’ve still got my vanity, I’ve aged no more than Ken, I’m no old lady yet, no bridge player, no longer a PTA—garden-club expert. By God, I’m still a woman, and that’s more than his wife can say.

  I shouldn’t admit this even to myself, she thought, but I’m glad he married an ugly woman. I shall not fool myself: in this I delight. I should be kind to her; I should feel sorry for her; I should try to help her out here on the island, her with her poor fluttery hands, and her nervous giggle, poor soul; but I’m still glad that she’s ugly, I’m still bitchy and honest enough to feel that.

  But all of this had little to do with Sylvia’s practical question of how to spend the day at hand. The rain was a problem for more reasons than the leaky roof. The guests at the inn would be confined to the living room and the glass porches. Instead of dispersing to the beaches and the gardens, and instead of taking walks, they would be gathered in the living room playing bridge and gossiping. Any uneasiness that she displayed with Ken would be much more closely scrutinized than it would be in sunny weather. Mrs. Hamble, the dean of all gossips, had said
she remembered Ken, but she hadn’t said how much she remembered. Probably it would turn out to be a lot. If Sylvia knew anything about Pine Island, the story of the tutor returning as a rich guest paying the son of his old employer to sleep in the master bedrooms of the old mansion, oh, Pine Island would make a lot of that. And if Mrs. Hamble’s memory were good enough to rake up the old rumors, the gossip of almost twenty years ago, why then the summer might not end up so dull after all.

  Maybe Bart was right when he instinctively felt we should turn Ken down, Sylvia thought. I did not think this through. I did not imagine that I could be robbed of my poise by any man; I did not know that he would look so nearly as he did, or that age can in so many ways improve as well as destroy.

  Sylvia’s eye was caught then by a figure moving in the rose garden. At that distance it was difficult to see who it was, but she knew. There were only two men who would put on a coat at eight-thirty in the morning to go striding around Pine Island in the rain, and this one didn’t have a dog. She watched him circle the inn. When he came to the courtyard which separated the garage from the old mansion, she stepped to one side of the window, behind the curtain. He stood there on the concrete driveway below staring up at his old room, with the rain splattering on the pavement around him and dripping off the brim of his felt hat into his face. For perhaps twenty seconds he stood there, then turned brusquely and stared up at the back of the inn, where the yellow draperies closed off the window of her old room. With both hands in his pockets, he turned impatiently and, with his feet splashing heedlessly in the puddles, headed down the path toward the beach where he had sat guarding children long ago.

  Chapter Eight

  THE THING TO DO is to keep busy, Sylvia thought as she put on her raincoat to dash across the courtyard to the inn. I shall count the sheets today, and take an inventory of the canned goods, and pay the bills. Letting herself through the kitchen door, she sat with Lillian, the Negro cook, at the old marble-topped table and drank coffee. After two cups she felt better and went to the living room, where the bridge games were already in progress. Helen Jorgenson had been included in one, and sat biting her lower lip as she studied her cards. In a corner Ken sat reading a large volume aloud to Molly, his voice little above a whisper. The child sat with a chair drawn tightly against his; she was leaning forward, and their faces were only about two feet apart. When Sylvia entered the room, everyone glanced up and perhaps Sylvia imagined that there was hostility in Molly’s look, something more than simple annoyance at being interrupted.