Great Circle: A Novel

by Conrad Aiken

  ———the night when Uncle Tom and Aunt Norah had gone to the Yacht Club to see the fireworks, riding on their bicycles, with the little lamps lighted, the red jewel at one side and the green at the other, and the smell of hot kerosene, we watched the little wobbling arcs of light moving away along the sand-ruts, and I pointed out to Susan the stars in Cassiopeia’s Chair, standing on the tennis court. Mother and Uncle David were talking on the porch, each in a different hammock, slapping at mosquitoes and laughing, for they had decided to stay at home and watch the fireworks from the Point. We sat down on the edge of the porch and looked at the Plymouth lights and waited for the fireworks, but they didn’t come. Perhaps they would be later. Mother was lying back in her hammock, with her hands under her head and her white elbows lifted and Uncle David was smoking a cigarette. When he drew in his breath, the end of the cigarette glowed and lit up his face, and he was always looking downward at the floor and frowning.

  —Susan, darling, how did all that water get there on the floor.

  —It was Porper, Mother, he was blowing soap bubbles before supper.

  —Will one of you please clean it up. Andy, will you get a mop or a cloth from the kitchen and wipe it up. You’re the porch cleaner, aren’t you.

  —Oh, Mother, I’ll have to sweep it in the morning anyway——

  —But it doesn’t look nice. Run along. Perhaps afterward you and Susan would like to have a game of croquinole together.

  —Could we go out for a row in the dory.

  —If it’s a very short one. You must have Susan back in time for her bedtime.

  In the kitchen, I stood by the sink and looked out of the window at the back, and saw someone carrying a lighted lamp across one of the windows in the Wardman house. Molly and Margaret were talking to a man in the darkness on the back porch, probably the chauffeur from the Tuppers, who was always hanging around them. I didn’t either. You did too. I didn’t either. You did too. You’re crazy to say such a thing you ought to know better than that I never said any such thing to him in my life, not me. I only said I saw them on the beach. I wouldn’t say more than that. What were they talking about? I listened, but they must have known I was there, for they lowered their voices, and I couldn’t make out anything else, especially as the windmill was pumping, and I could hear the groan of the rod and the regular gush of water into the cistern. I went out into the pantry to get the mop, went down the three wooden steps to the earthen floor, and stood there in the nice smell of potatoes and squashes and green corn and damp smell of earth, watching the indicator on the cistern, the little lead weight jiggling lower and lower against the pine boards as the water raised the float. Last year we had to pump all the water by hand. A hundred strokes without stopping. I rolled up my sleeves, and always felt my muscles when I had finished, to see how hard they were. Why was Mother always trying to get rid of us like this. With Father it was different, he always wanted to do things with us in the holidays. Like last year, when he gave me the camera and took me on walks and showed me how to take pictures, and I got the picture of the beach-plum dyke all crooked, so that it looked like a wave of cobblestones. And I took the Horse Monument, but it was out of focus, or light-struck, or something. But I had fifteen blueprints that were quite good.

  When I got back to the porch Susan was alone.

  —Where have they gone.

  —Oh, down to the front beach or something.

  —They make me sick always going off like that.

  —Andy, you shouldn’t talk like that.

  —Well, they do. I bet they’ve gone out in the motorboat, that’s what they’ve done, and without inviting us.

  —They don’t have to invite us every time they go, do they?

  —No, but they might invite us sometimes. Come on, we’ll go out in the dory, and I don’t care if we never get back.

  —But we won’t see the fireworks, Andy.

  —Who wants to see the fireworks, besides we could row around to this side of the Point, couldn’t we? Don’t be a twit.

  We walked down across the humped grass to the Point, in the dark, the blades of the oars clacking together as I carried them over my shoulder, the rowlocks jingling in Susan’s hand. It was warm and the crickets were chirping. Susan was ahead of me when we got to the bluff, I watched her white dress vanish down the sandy path to the beach, and then I looked out at the water and saw a light in the cabin of Uncle David’s motorboat. It looked far out, because the tide was high, almost up to the foot of the bluff. Susan was already sitting in the stern of the dory, hanging her hands in the water, the ripples were slapping against the sides, and I pulled the anchor out of the bayberry bush and got in. Ought I to tell Susan what I was going to do, or not. If I didn’t, she might talk, and spoil everything. If I did, she might not want to, and besides we might see something——

  —I tell you what we’ll do, we’ll pretend we’re spies, and row right around them. I’ll row around them so close we could touch them, and they won’t hear a sound.

  —But, Andy——

  —Shut up, will you?

  I pushed the blade of the oar into the sand and shoved off with two shoves and then began rowing very softly, rowing backwards, so that I could face toward the motorboat. Why was I frightened. What was there to be frightened of. It was only like playing the Indian scouting game. It was only like the guerrilla war in the Pembroke Woods. How could they possibly hear us anyway, with the ripples washing against the Osprey, making that hollow coppery sound that you heard when you were down in the cabin. And they couldn’t see us, because the little yellow curtains were drawn across the two cabin portholes. I backed out till we were past the white bow, which looked very high, and then shipped my oars and let the tide take us slowly alongside. We could hear them talking. The tender, which was tied with too short a painter, was bumping against the port side of the stern, and in the cabin there was a thump as if something had been dropped on the floor.

  —Come on, Doris, let’s have another.

  —Oh, no, let’s——

  —Oh, come on, the night is young.

  —I don’t like it, David.

  —What’s wrong with it? Are you getting a conscience or something?

  —Oh, no, but if they thought——

  —Thought what.

  —Oh, you know as well as I do.

  —Let them think. Here, try this——

  —Please, David——

  I gave a push with my hand against the brass corner of the stern plate and we just barely cleared the gunwale of the tender, which was swinging across. They were drinking, Uncle David must be trying to make Mother drunk, that was it, perhaps the thump was a bottle falling on the floor of the cabin. I let the tide carry us a little way toward the bridge, where I could see the high wooden piers of the draw, and then I shipped my oars and began to row.

  —We’ll go through the draw, and then across to the outer beach. Then we’ll walk along the beach to the dunes and watch the fireworks.

  —Andy, what were they saying, what was Mother saying.

  —I couldn’t hear. Was the cabin door open or shut?

  —It was shut.

  I shot the dory through the draw, where the tide was swift, the deep eddies sucking and chuckling at the foot of the tall piles, and felt my face hot, and I wanted to do something, to go back there, to bank at the side of the Osprey, to shout. But what was the use.

  ———particularly always, too, the hour after lunch, the hot and peaceful hour, the sleepy hour, when Susan and Porper always had to have naps upstairs, and Mother and Aunt Norah stretched themselves out in hammocks on the porch, and Uncle David went into his room to read, and Uncle Tom wrote letters on the dining-room table, or painted screens on the grass in front of the house, the screens supported on wooden horses. What would we do later. Would we be sent to the playhouse for the whole afternoon, or would we go clam-digging, or take a walk to the cove, or would Sanford come to tell me that there was a baseball game at the Peters’
. I went down to the playhouse by myself, it was very hot and smelt of new wood, greenhead flies were on the insides of the screens, and I thought it would be a good chance to see if I could take off the handle bars of Aunt Norah’s new Columbia bicycle, so I stood on the table, the one we played Gonko on, and hauled myself up to the top of the wooden partition, and dropped over into the bicycle shed. This business of taking naps after lunch. This hammock business. Mother’s hand lying over the edge of the yellow striped hammock, the fringe of long yellow strings rippling in the southwest wind, her book fallen to the veranda floor, the opened pages fluttering. Susan, pretending to take a nap in her room, but really reading. Uncle David pretending to take a nap, but really drinking out of one of those bottles, using the tumbler on the washstand, which always smelt like bay rum. I took the monkey wrench out of the little cylindrical tool kit under the saddle and got the handlebars off easily enough, but I was worried for fear I wouldn’t get them back on again at the same height and angle, and sweated at the thought that Aunt Norah might notice it. It was a Columbia Chainless, and what I really wanted to do was to open the gearbox and look at the gears, but the nuts were too tight, and I was afraid. Besides, somebody might come—Uncle Tom might take it into his head to come down looking for me, maybe to ask me to go on a wildflower hunt, and I wouldn’t have time to get it together again. I climbed back into the playhouse, and then I went outside and crawled under the floor and got some more shingles, with crickets walking on them, and took them into the playhouse to make some new Gonko rackets. We would need some more Ping-pong balls. Porper was always losing them or stepping on them. He kept throwing them into the bed of poison ivy at the foot of the hill, by the stone wall. That was where all the golf balls used to go when Uncle Tom and Father played golf. I looked at my shin to see if the little blue map of the golf ball was still there, and it was almost gone.

  I walked down the lane as far as the Horse Monument, went back into the pine woods for a minute, near our houses, thinking about Gay, and then about Gwendolyn, and wondered what she would think if she knew I played house in the woods with my sister, like a little sissy. When I got to the hotel I went first out on to the stone wharf, and watched a tug towing a barge across the bay. Some of the maids from the hotel were in bathing suits, sitting on the stone edge of the wharf, and when they saw me they began laughing. I walked back to the hotel and went along the edge of the golf course, toward the Point Road. There was nobody playing golf, it was too early. Too hot. The sheep were all lying under a tree chewing their cuds. I threw acorns at them and made them get up, and then I was ashamed and went up between the houses and through the small oak woods to the Company Camp. The Peters were there, and Sanford, and Warren, and Frank Tupper, but not Gwendolyn. They were lying in the grass. What were we going to do. Should we go and play in the hayloft, dive down through the chute, slide down the rope.

  —Andy’s got a sweetheart.

  —Where’s Gwendolyn, Andy?

  —Shut up.

  Frank Tupper looked at me and then got up and walked to the Company hut. He went in, and in a minute came out again holding up a baseball bat.

  —Scrub one, he said.

  —Scrub two.

  —Three.

  —Four.

  —Five.

  We played baseball till Gwendolyn came, and then we took turns standing under the overflow of the windmill and letting the water splash on our heads. I turned my face up, and let the water spout out of my mouth.

  —He thinks he’s smart.

  —Rats live on no evil star.

  —What do you mean by that?

  —Just what I say. Rats live on no evil star.

  Frank Tupper spat in his baseball glove.

  —That’s an old one. A palindrome.

  —A what?

  —It spells the same thing backward.

  Susan came running across the field and fell down and began to cry. I walked home with her, and we sat on Plymouth Rock Junior under the cherry tree, and she said that Mother and Aunt Norah were quarreling upstairs in Aunt Norah’s room, and Uncle Tom and Uncle David had gone off for a walk not saying a word, and Porper was all alone with the maids, sitting in the soapbox sailboat—and Molly with an earache——

  ———lying awake, too, with the wind singing through the wire screens, and the soft muslin curtains sucking and fluttering against the screens, and the sea-moon shining through them on to the floor and across the foot of my bed, and the crickets chirping like mad, the mosquitoes, too, humming so loudly outside the window that they sounded as if they were in the room. What was that they had said at supper. When Aunt Norah was pouring the cocoa out of the jug. It should have been here this evening. Who was it that got the mail. It was Smiley that brought it. Why didn’t Andy go. Well, anyway it didn’t come. Mother was humming as she buttered more bread for Porper; Uncle Tom tapped with his fingers on the bare edge of the table as if he were playing a tune on a piano. What letter was it that hadn’t come. Was it from Father. Were they expecting Father. What fun that would be. He would get out the cameras, and he would teach me how to pitch an out-drop. And now the two sets of voices downstairs—Molly and Margaret, at the back of the house, murmuring and giggling secretly, slyly, insinuatingly, and the others on the front porch, a little farther off, more intermittent, now and then more loudly, and Uncle David’s deep laugh which always sounded a little angry. Andy’s got a sweetheart. What did they mean by that. Had Gwendolyn told everybody about it, or was it perhaps Frank who had first found the box of candy. Perhaps he had found it and had never given it to Gwendolyn. Shame on Andy, shame on Andy. Let them say it. I would row right round Clark’s Island, taking all day if necessary, and find my way at low tide through the channels, counting the seals on the mud flats. I would row to Plymouth. I would borrow Mr. Dearing’s knockabout and sail right out past Plymouth Beach into Massachusetts Bay, and watch the Plymouth steamer going past on its way to Boston. I would swim across from the Point to the Long Beach. I would dive off the pier of the draw on the long bridge, twenty-feet down into the swift current of the tide. I would strike out Frank Tupper every time he came to bat. And I wouldn’t say a word to Gwen-dolyn, not another word all summer.

  They were beginning to sing. It was always Uncle David who started them on that, he had a swelled head about his voice, and always sang when he was hoeing the tennis-court with us. Oh, you beautiful doll, you great big beautiful doll.

  Margaret was talking to a man under my back window.

  —Quit it.

  —I will not.

  —I said quit it, will you?

  I got quickly out of bed and went to the window to see what they were doing, but I was too late, they had gone round the corner of the house into the shadow, to get out of the moonlight. I waited, listening, but they didn’t come back. He must have been kissing her. I would keep awake until they came to bed. Watch them through the hole by the washstand. It would be dark on my side of the wall, I would stand very still in bare feet, get back into bed without a sound, they would never suspect that I was watching them. Should I go to bed now or stay up. Better stay up, and watch the flies in the flytrap with the electric flashlight. I got the flashlight and looked at the flies. They were all asleep, standing upside down under the roof of screen wire, their white bellies turned towards the light. I ought to let them go, Uncle David was beginning to suspect why I kept them. Perhaps I had better give him one of my arrowheads. What mischief have you fellows been up to. Uncle David, I thought you might like to have one of my arrowheads, it’s a quartz one.

  I went to the side window, beside the tennis court, to hear them singing. They were singing the song that Uncle David had made up. When I slap on the kalsomine I think about those gals o’ mine way down in old Kentucky where the moon is shining bright. When I slap on the Reckitts blue I think about the thickets through the mountains of Virginia where I walked with them at night. Walls and ceilings have their feelings the same as you and me. I’m only a paper hang
er, but my heart is pure as mud. When they had finished it, they all laughed in the silly way they always did, the laughter rising and falling, mixing and unmixing, but I could make out Mother’s and Uncle David’s, particularly at the end, when Mother’s went up and Uncle David’s went down. The twits. The nitwits. But what about the letter, and why, come to think of it, hadn’t I been sent for the evening mail, as usual. Instead, I had been sent to the playhouse with Porper, and when I brought him back, I had to sail him in the soapbox sailboat.

  Footsteps were coming up the stairs, candlelight wavered on the rough, pine beams of the unfinished roof; it was Molly and Margaret coming up to bed, and I tiptoed with cold, naked feet on the bare floor and stood by the washstand, hardly breathing, and waited.

  ———the dust, too, as the stage coach rattled past me and turned up King Caesar’s Road, to go to Powder Point Hall, skewing a little, the rear wheels slewing in the sandy ruts as Smiley touched up the old horses, the whole thing like Buffalo Bill. I looked through the packet of letters again, to make sure that there was none from Father. Harvard University. Jordan Marsh. Acme Cleaning Company. A small blue envelope, addressed in small handwriting, to Mother. Another, in the same handwriting, to Aunt Norah. Both postmarked Plymouth. Nothing that looked as if it might be from Father. By this time the train would be at Kingston. Or maybe at the Cordage. The people in the train would see the back of the Standish Monument, which I had seen only once, when we went to Plymouth to see the Plymouth Rock. We had lunch at that old house with four English elms in front of it, which Captain Something-or-Other had brought back from England in 1750.