Collected Stories, page 7
“I’d not like to,” Mr. Palmer said, and shook his head. Across the lane the placid scene had not changed, except that Mrs. Kendall had let Tommy toddle fifteen feet out from the wall, where he was picking up clusters of dry pine needles and throwing them into the air.
The figures were very clean, sharp-edged in the clear air against the blue backdrop of sea. An Attic grace informed all of them: the girl stooping above the long-eared red setter, the child with his hands in the air, tossing brown needles in a shower, the curving seated forms of the women on the wall. To Mr. Palmer’s momentarily tranced eyes they seemed to freeze in attitudes of flowing motion like figures on a vase, cameo-clear in the clear air under the noble trees, with the quiet ocean of their watchfulness stretching blue to the misty edge. Like figures on a Grecian urn they curved in high relief above the white molding of the wall, and a drift of indescribable melancholy washed across the point and pricked goose-pimples on Mr. Palmer’s arms. “It’s sad,” he said, opening the door and stepping down. “The whole thing is very sad.”
With the intention of leaving he put his hand on the door and pushed it shut, thinking that he did not want to stay longer and hear Mrs. Corson’s bitter tongue and watch the women on the wall. Their waiting now, with the momentary trance broken and the momentary lovely group dispersed in motion, seemed to him a monstrous aberration, their patience a deathly apathy, their hope an obscene self-delusion.
He was filled with a sense of the loveliness of the white paper and the cleanly sharpened pencils, the notebooks and the quiet and the sense of purpose that waited in his study. Most of all the sense of purpose, the thing to be done that would have an ending and a result.
“It’s been very pleasant,” he said automatically. At that moment there came a yowl from the point.
He turned. Apparently Anne, romping with the dog, had bumped Tommy and knocked him down. He sat among the pine needles in his blue play-suit and squalled, and Mrs. Kendall came swiftly out from the wall and took Anne by the arm, shaking her.
“You careless child!” she said. “Watch what you’re doing!”
Instantly Mrs. Corson was out of the car. Mr. Palmer saw her start for the point, her lips puckered, and was reminded of some mechanical toy tightly wound and tearing erratically around a room giving off sparks of ratchety noise. When she was twenty feet from Mrs. Kendall she shouted hoarsely, “Let go of that child!”
Mrs. Kendall’s heavy gingham body turned. Her plain face, the mouth stiff with anger, confronted Mrs. Corson. Her hand still held Anne’s arm. “It’s possible to train children …” she said.
“Yes, and it’s possible to mistreat them,” Mrs. Corson said. “Let go of her.”
For a moment neither moved. Then Mrs. Corson’s hands darted down, caught Mrs. Kendall’s wrist, and tore her hold from Anne’s arm. Even across the lane, fifty feet away, Mr. Palmer could see the white fury in their faces as they confronted each other.
“If I had the bringing up of that child … !” Mrs. Kendall said. “I’d …”
“You’d tie her to your apron strings like you’ve tied your own,” Mrs. Corson said. “Like you tie up a dog and expect it to get used to three feet of space. My God, a child’s a little animal. He’s got to run!”
“And knock other children down, I suppose.”
“Oh, my God!” Mrs. Corson said, and turned her thin face skyward as if to ask God to witness. She was shaking all over; Mr. Palmer could see the trembling of her dress. “Listen!” she said, “I don’t know what’s the matter with you, and why you can’t stand nakedness, and why you think a bastard child is something holier than a legitimate one, and why you hang on to that child as if he was worth his weight in diamonds. But you keep your claws off mine, and if your little bastard can’t get out of the way, you can just …”
Mrs. Kendall’s face was convulsed. She raised both hands above her head, stuttering for words. From the side the pregnant girl slipped in quietly, and Mr. Palmer, rooted uneasily across the lane, heard her quiet voice. “You’re beginning to draw a crowd,” she said. “For the love of Mike, turn it down.”
Mrs. Corson swung on her. Her trembling had become an ecstasy. When she spoke she chewed loudly on her words, mangling them almost beyond recognition. “You keep out of this, you pregnant bitch,” she said. “Any time I want advice on how to raise love-children, I’ll come to you too, but right now I haven’t got any love-children, and I’m raising what I’ve got my own way.”
A window had gone up in the house next to Mr. Palmer’s, and three boys were drifting curiously down the street, their pants sagging with the weight of armament they carried. Without hesitating more than a moment, Mr. Palmer crossed the street and cut them off. “I think you’d better beat it,” he said, and pushed his hands in the air as if shooing chickens. The boys stopped and eyed him suspiciously, then began edging around the side. It was clear that in any contest of speed, agility, endurance, or anything else Mr. Palmer was no match for them. He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out some change. The boys stopped. Behind him Mr. Palmer heard the saw-edged voice of Mrs. Corson. “I’m not the kind of person that’ll stand it, by God! If you want to …”
“Here,” Mr. Palmer said. “Here’s a quarter apiece if you light out and forget anything you saw.”
“Okay!” they said, and stepped up one by one and got their quarters and retreated, their heads together and their armed hips clanking together and their faces turning once, together, to stare back at the arguing women on the point. Up the street Mr. Palmer saw a woman and three small children standing in the road craning. Mrs. Corson’s voice carried for half a mile.
In the hope that his own presence would bring her to reason, Mr. Palmer walked across the lane. Mrs. Corson’s puckered, furious face was thrust into Mrs. Kendall’s, and she was saying, “Just tell me to my face I don’t raise my child right! Go on, tell me so. Tell me what you told Margy, that Anne’s too dirty for your bastard to play with. Tell me, I dare you, and I’ll tear your tongue out!”
Mr. Palmer found himself standing next to Mrs. Vaughn. He glanced at her once and shook his head and cleared his throat. Mrs. Corson continued to glare into the pale flat face before her. When Mrs. Kendall turned heavily and walked toward the wall, the wrenlike woman skipped nimbly around her and confronted her from the other side. “You’ve got a lot of things to criticize in me!” she said. Her voice, suddenly, was so hoarse it was hardly more than a whisper. “Let’s hear you say them to my face. I’ve heard them behind my back too long. Let’s hear you say them!”
“Couldn’t we get her into the house?” Mr. Palmer said to the pregnant girl. “She’ll raise the whole neighborhood.”
“Let her disgrace herself,” Mrs. Vaughn said, and shrugged.
“But you don’t understand,” Mr. Palmer said. “She had a beer or so downtown, and I think that, that and the heat …”
The girl looked at him with wide brown eyes in which doubt and contempt and something like mirth moved like shadows on water. “I guess you don’t understand,” she said. “She isn’t drunk. She’s hopped.”
“Hopped?”
“I thought you went downtown with her.”
“I did.”
“Did she leave you at the pony track?”
“Yes, for a few minutes.”
“She goes to a joint down there,” Mrs. Vaughn said. “Fortune telling in the front, goofballs and reefers in the rear. She’s a sucker for all three.”
“Goofballs?” Mr. Palmer said. “Reefers?”
“Phenobarb,” Mrs. Vaughn said. “Marijuana. Anything. She doesn’t care, long as she gets high. She’s high as a kite now. Didn’t you notice her eyes?”
Mrs. Kendall had got her boy by the hand. She was heavily ignoring Mrs. Corson. Now she lifted the child in her arms and turned sideways, like a cow ducking to the side to slip around a herder, and headed for the stone wall. Mrs. Corson whipped around her flanks, first on one side, then on the other, her hoarse whisper a continuing horror in Mr. Palmer’s ears.
“What I ought to do,” Mrs. Corson said, “is forbid Anne to even speak to that bastard of yours.”
Mrs. Kendall bent and put the child on the ground and stood up. “Don’t you call him that!” she shouted. “Oh, you vulgar, vicious, drunken, depraved woman! Leave me alone! Leave me alone, can’t you?”
She burst into passionate tears. For a moment Mr. Palmer was terrified that they would come to blows and have to be pulled apart. He started forward, intending to take Mrs. Corson by the arm and lead her, forcefully if necessary, to the house. This disgraceful exhibition had gone on long enough. But the pregnant girl was ahead of him.
She walked past the glaring women and said over her shoulder, carelessly, “Mail’s here.”
Mr. Palmer caught his cue. He put out his hand to Anne, and walked her down across the mouth of the lane. He did not look back, but his ears were sharp for a renewal of the cat-fight. None came. By the time the man in gray had distributed the papers and magazines to all the battery of boxes, and was unstrapping the pack of letters, Mr. Palmer was aware without turning that both Mrs. Corson and Mrs. Kendall were in the background by the gray car, waiting quietly.
Balance his, Swing Yours
The ping of tennis rackets was a warm, summer-afternoon sound in the air as Mr. Hart came up through the hedge. He stopped to survey the grounds, the red roof of the hotel, the fans of coco palms graceful beyond the white wall. Past the wall the coral rock broke off in ledges to the beach, and beyond the sand was the incredible peacock water of the Gulf.
February. It was hard to imagine, with that sun, the brown skins of the bathers between the palms, the ping of rackets. The whole place, to Mr. Hart’s Colorado eyes, was fantastic—hibiscus and bougainvillea and night-blooming jasmine. He squirmed his shoulders against the itching warmth of his first sunburn, caught the previous afternoon, and ruminated on the hardly believable thought that to many people this summer-in-February paradise was a commonplace thing.
The sound of tennis led him past the shuffleboard courts and around a backstop cascading with scarlet bougainvillea. A girl was playing with the pro, and beyond the court, in lawn chairs, lay two of the three people Mr. Hart had so far met. His reaction was immediate. Good. Good it was the two boys, not the impossible Englishman who had descended on him at breakfast. He cut across the lawn toward them.
The young men in the chairs, one very blond, one dark and impressively profiled, did not stir. They lay in their swimming trunks, inert and sprawling, and when Mr. Hart asked, “Were you saving these other chairs?” they looked up indolently, two loafing demigods with mahogany hides. The blond one lifted his towel out of a chair, and Mr. Hart sat down with a sigh.
“What a place!” he said.
The blond one—Thomas, Mr. Hart remembered—turned his head. He seemed a pleasant sort of boy. “Like it?” he said.
Mr. Hart lifted his hands. “It’s incredible. I had no idea—I’ve never been down before. Even the fishing boats coming in in the evening are a nice institution. Have you tried the fishing?”
“Once or twice,” Thomas said. He slumped further down in his chair. Mr. Hart found a pack of cigarettes, stretched to pass them over Thomas’ body. He got a shake of the head, no thanks, from the dark one, Tenney, but Thomas took one.
“I’ve been thinking I might hook up with a party,” Mr. Hart said. “This water fascinates me. The water and these silly little mangrove islands. I’ve read about mangroves all my life—never saw one. Now I find they’re not islands at all, not a spoonful of dirt in them, just clumps of ocean-going shrubs.”
“Yeah,” Thomas said. He lay with the cigarette between his lips, his eyes lidded like a lizard’s against the sun. Tenney seemed to sleep.
“I guess I interrupted your siesta,” Hart said. “I just can’t get over this place. I’ll keep quiet now.”
“Not at all,” Thomas said, but Mr. Hart leaned back and watched the tennis. He had no desire to intrude on people. And it was good tennis to watch, he admitted. But Eastern tennis, the rhythmical and somehow mechanical tennis of people who learned the game as a social accomplishment. In an obscure way he felt superior to it. He had learned in a different school, municipal hard courts, worn balls. Still, he felt he could lick three out of four of these mechanical marvels.
His eye was caught by Tenney’s feet, big naked feet, arched like the feet of a statued Mercury and brown as stained wood, the leather thongs of the sandals coming up between great and second toes. They struck him as arrogant feet. The boy had a lordly air, sure enough. There was something really admirable in the way he and his companion lolled. This was their birthright, and their arrogance was simply acceptance of something perfectly natural and right.
The blond youth turned, and Mr. Hart nodded toward the court. “The girl has nice shots.”
“One of these tennis drunkards,” Thomas said. “Lives tennis twenty-four hours a day.”
“I like to see that,” Mr. Hart said. “I like to see people simply dissolve themselves in the thing that interests them. I can remember when I was that way about tennis myself.”
“Oh,” Thomas said. “You’re a tennis player.”
Mr. Hart shrugged deprecatingly. “Used to be, in a way. Haven’t done much with it since college, just a game now and then.”
“What college?”
“I grew up in the West,” Mr. Hart said. “Went to the local cow college.”
Tenney leaned toward them. “I hate to interrupt,” he said, “but look what’s bearing down on us.”
He jerked a thumb. The impossible little Englishman, in his pink polo shirt, was walking springily on the balls of his feet down the path from the cocktail garden. “Oh, my God,” Hart said.
The two were both looking at him. “Has he got to you, too?” Tenney said. His look of distaste had dissolved into cynical amusement.
“For an hour at breakfast,” Hart said. “Why can’t people like that go to Miami, where they belong? Maybe we ought to run.”
They smiled their relaxed, indolent smiles. “Lie and take it,” Thomas said. “That’s the least painful way.”
Mr. Hart slid down in his chair and prepared his muscles for the relaxed indifference with which this interloper would have to be met. “But what a blowhard!” he said. “Did you know he was being bombarded from all sides to write a play for Cornell? My God.”
He shut up abruptly. In a moment the British voice—vulgar British voice, Mr. Hart thought—was right above him. “Ah,” it said. “Taking a little sun?”
“Hello,” Thomas said, pleasantly enough. Tenney looked up and nodded. So did Mr. Hart. It was a cool reception, but it wasn’t cool enough, Mr. Hart thought, for this rhinoceros to feel it.
“Topping day for it,” the Englishman said. He sat down and took out his pipe, watching the tennis game while he filled and lighted. His fingers, holding the blown-out match, waved gently back and forth.
“She’s not bad, you know,” he said conversationally. “Pity she doesn’t have a sounder backhand.”
Mr. Hart regarded him coldly. “What’s wrong with her backhand?” he said.
“Not enough follow-through,” the Englishman said. “And she’s hitting it too much on the rise.”
Tenney said, grunting from his slumped chest. “She ought to be told.”
The Englishman took his pipe from his mouth. “Eh?”
“You ought to put her right,” said Mr. Hart.
All he got was a grin and wag of the head. “Not in front of these pros, you know. The beggars think they know it all.”
Mr. Hart impatiently recrossed his neatly creased legs. “You sound as if you were an expert,” he said, with just the suggestion of a slur. It was exactly the right tone, ambiguous without being insulting. Sooner or later anybody, confronted by that tone, would begin to wonder if he were wanted.
“Know a bit about it,” the Englishman said. He waved his pipe at the court, talking too loud. “Watch her forehand, too. She’s cocking her racket up too much at right angles with her wrist.” His head moved back and forth, following a fast rally. “So’s the pro,” he cackled. “So’s the pro, swelp me. Look at ’im!”
“The ball,” said Mr. Hart, “seems to be going back and forth pretty fast.”
“Ping-Pong,” the Englishman said. “Anybody who hit it instead of slapping it that way would have put it away by now.”
Tenney was lying back staring at the sky, where a man-o’-war hawk alternately soared and sped on dark, bent wings. Tenney was like a hawk himself, Mr. Hart thought. Dark and built for speed. The Mercury foot, and the arrogance to go with it. He was built to run down little web-footed gulls like this Englishman and take their fish away from them. But all he did was stare at the sky and wag one foot over the footrest. Thomas, ordinarily more talkative, now seemed to be asleep. Mr. Hart simmered. It had been very pleasant, very quiet, very friendly, till this terrier with the big yap butted in.
“… thing I miss in America,” the Englishman was saying. “Never can get up a good game. Any public-school boy in England plays a good game as a matter of course. Here nobody seems to.”
The idea came gently to Mr. Hart’s door, and he opened to it. It might boomerang, but he thought not. His mind went scornful. Pestered to write a play for Cornell. Like hell. Bothered to do articles for the Britannica. My Aunt Annica. Aldington wanting him to come in on an anthology. In a pig’s physiology. British public school likewise. Tennis as well.
“It is hard to get a game, sometimes,” he said. “If I wasn’t afraid of getting out of my class I’d suggest we play.”
“Yes,” the Englishman said cordially. “Have to do that.”
“How about this afternoon, now?”
Tenney started to whistle lightly. The whistle was encouraging to Mr. Hart. It said, Go ahead, pin his ears down.
“This weather might not last, even here,” Hart said. “Little exercise’d do us good. That is, if you’d step down to my level.”
“Oh, step down!” the Englishman said. “Not at all!”
