Margaret slumped into a chair. “You are right,” she said desolately. “I was wrong.” She vented an exhausted sigh. To be in the right was Margaret’s consuming ambition, to which all meaner aims had been sacrificed. She was a sincerely moral person, as Pickles Callaway, who had no morals, was always discovering to his surprise. Poor Margaret (as he privately styled her) had been renowned as a big brain at college; she had inherited a tidy wad from a Massachusetts mill-owning family; she had a successful husband, three beautiful children, a knack for household management, troops of friends; two winters before, she had had a tremendous nervous breakdown, which was all that was needed, Pickles once remarked (in a jest oft repeated in Minster), to complete the picture of the all-round woman of the year. Yet her accomplishments and sensibilities galled her, like handicaps imposed in the race for perfection. Margaret was a thoroughbred, the grandmothers averred, and with her distant, alarmed gaze and flaring nostrils and restive gait, she had the strained look of a blood mare carrying extra weight. Like all the Minster matrons, she worried a great deal about her privileges, which obliged her, she knew, to make allowances for those who had not had them. At the same time, the shortcomings of others seemed to her a sort of unfairness, a drain on her resources of understanding that was bleeding her white. Her mind, Pickles complained, was like a civics textbook, and Minster had served her for a model of what she believed possible.
It was Margaret, preëminently, who had been the conscience of Poor Farm Pond, the watchdog of the genius loci. She had been outraged by the plan to buy the shore lot from old Mr. Bascomb; she had grown heated in defense of the granite workers who came to the pond on Sundays in trucks and cars that blocked the parking space. It was not much of a sacrifice, she pointed out, in her high-pitched Bostonian voice, for the summer people to give up Poor Farm Pond one day in the week to men who worked six days at heavy labor. The fact that she had voted Republican in the last two Presidential elections (in the interests of the national welfare and public harmony, relinquishing her own preference for the Democratic candidates) gave this pro-labor statement of hers an air of disinterested equity that silenced all opposition. Wives whose husbands flew up just for the weekend—unlike fortunate Pick, who took the summers off—were free, she cheerily suggested, to drive the extra miles to the waterfall, where they would be rewarded by a wonderful view. And to demonstrate the feasibility of this she had started a series of prodigious Sunday-lunch mountain picnics, to which everybody brought a covered dish.
And last year, when parties of high-school students from the state capital, twenty miles away, began to come to the pond on Saturday afternoons, late, and sometimes Sundays, too, and leave beer cans and paper plates and candy wrappers behind them, Margaret had remained staunch and organized a work detail with her children to clean up the beach on Monday mornings. The other mothers were grateful to Margaret’s superior energy; the fact that Margaret outdistanced them in her zeal for local democracy, as in everything else, allowed them to praise her without emulation. “She enjoys it; let her do it,” decreed the husbands when the other mothers voiced a qualm. But this, alas, was false. Margaret believed in the force of example and was always perplexed when other people did not follow her lead; she did not understand how anybody could see the right thing and not desire, urgently, to imitate or surpass it. She did not really enjoy the cleanup; picking up dirty papers with a pointed stick, she felt lonely and a little absurd, as if her friends’ absence were a subtle criticism. And the children, usually so compliant, hated this early-morning chore. Sometimes, too, they found things in the bushes that led them to ask premature questions. This, in turn, showed Margaret that she was making a grave mistake. The children were learning to hate the public-high students who left this jetsam behind them; she had perhaps found the surest way of turning her children into snobs and disgusting them with sex as well. Therefore, this year, every Monday, Margaret rose quietly, before the children were awake, and drove in her jeep down to the pond to clean the beach herself. Pickles Callaway, who once accompanied her, promptly declared that the whole idea was masochistic. “Delegate power, my dear,” he commanded. “Make the other gals help you. They swim here, too.”
But this was cavalier husband talk. Pick in his heart knew better: the other girls were not Margaret. Even her best friends, Ginny and Adelaide, after two Mondays of it, would be shirking and sending their husbands to try and overcome Mr. Bascomb with an offer of more money. If Margaret wished to preserve the tradition, she would have to clean the beach herself. There was no other solution, Pickles had to admit as he felt Margaret stir every Monday morning in the bed beside him. You could not get the town to clean the beach, because the town did not own it; you could not get old Mr. Bascomb to do it; and you could not leave it littered. You could set up a trash can with a sign, “Please dump here,” but this would invite the inference that the beach was public—an inference nobody, not even Margaret, wanted the community to draw, for despite everything, despite the weekend incursions and the trailer and old Mr. Bascomb’s attitude, the township itself still understood that this peninsula jutting into Poor Farm Pond “belonged” to the summer people who had brought the sand and the raft. The Minster youngsters used the swimming holes in the brooks and another part of Poor Farm Pond, a reedy shallow cove round the bend where a man had rowboats to rent. And when the granite workers came on Sunday—whole enormous families of them, with a long picnic table on their truck—they, too, understood that the place had a prior claim on it and treated it with respect. They were shy, nice, traditional people who sent to ask permission for their children to use the rowboats and always left them in good order, pulled up on the beach. Even the high-school students were well aware that this was the summer people’s preserve and never came when the young mothers were there but waited till the last station wagon had driven off before starting their parties. Sometimes, on a weekday, a pair of young lovers would come walking, hand in hand, up the road, carrying their bathing suits to change in the meadow, but lovers had special rights everywhere—the whole natural world “belonged” to them.
This was democracy, the summer colonists consoled themselves whenever they were tempted to look back with longing to a time when they had had the pond all to themselves. It was not ideal but it worked; given tact and mutual forbearance, you could always find a modus vivendi. And in dreamy moods, some of the mothers looked upon Poor Farm Pond as a sort of parable for today, the kind of thing you saw with pictures in the Sunday-magazine section: everybody pulling together—America. They had a lump in their throats when they thought of their own and everybody else’s goodness. That is, until now.
The republic had fallen. This, in effect, was the news the desolated young mothers carried home to their husbands that evening—carried, however, with a certain triumphant ceremony, as if on a flashing salver. Margaret and Ginny, Adelaide and Charlotte—they all marched into their dwellings and set down the news with a thud. The gentlest, softest, creamiest mother recounted the details of the invasion with a glittering intensity quite unlike her normal self. And each young woman had an air of speaking as a corporate body, attesting incontrovertible truths. When the puzzled husbands remarked, reasonably, that the psychiatrists were not likely to put in an appearance every day, the wives tossed their heads. Psychiatrists, they declared, were clock men; they would be there every afternoon, punctually, at two. Furthermore, they would summon their colleagues to share their discovery, this summer or the next. Psychiatrists vacationed in swarms, often surrounded by their patients; this was a well-known fact, and Ginny Marx could instance, from her own experience, a lonely beach in Massachusetts that had been completely taken over by them. Their profession had made them overbearing (of course, there were exceptions); they methodically pulped every experience like an orange-juice extractor. And they might as well be armadillos for all the feeling they had for the feelings of other people.
The husbands scratched their heads, astounded by the knowledge their wives appeared
to have of the characteristics of psychiatrists in general and by the wealth of simile and metaphor these particular psychiatrists had tapped. “They’re against Nature, Pick,” said Margaret Callaway, with a breathless seriousness, when the children had been tucked into bed, and the two sat, with the Silex between them, in the small, sparsely furnished sitting room. “The children felt it, I tell you. Jonathan stared at them as if they were some of the space people he sees in his comic books. That’s exactly how they looked in the water, with the black bathing cap and the inner tubes; they’re contrary to Nature. Everything about them is synthetic and sleazy, like some horrible new fabric. One of them has skin that looks like imitation crocodile leather.”
“They’re probably no more unsightly than some of the locals,” observed Pickles calmly. Margaret leaned forward and spoke almost in a whisper. “Pick, they’re different, I tell you. I’ve been thinking about it; I’m sure I’m right. They’ve chosen to look the way they do. I shouldn’t blame them for an accident or a deformity—you know that—but they’ve chosen to be ugly and dissonant.”
Pick blinked his light-green eyes. As a scientist of sorts, he was irked by positive assertions. He was a homely man himself—small, slight, lantern-jawed, with thick, rather sensual red lips and heavy black-rimmed glasses. Partly for business reasons, he had stylized himself as an impersonal, scientific observer and dressed the part, as he conceived it; in the country, he wore Bermuda shorts cut down from old flannels, ribbed, heavy knee socks, and a soft white shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbow, baring tan, wiry arms, on one of which flashed a very expensive French wristwatch that told the day of the week, and the month and year, and the moon phases, as well as the time of day. Out-of-doors, he carried a German camera and binoculars in leather cases on shoulder straps. To human life and technology, his subject, he had fashioned an attitude of strict, gloomy accuracy; his own bias was conservative, but he did not shirk the facts. To him, as he sometimes told his clients, man was chiefly an animal, obedient to certain biological and technological laws. At the same time, Pickles was a humorist, and the moral consciousness of Minster was a source of wry entertainment to him as he sat in his loge seat, watching, with a critical, erudite eye. Behind the mask of imperturbability, he was peppery and eccentric, like a boyish little old man—exactly the same now, said the grandmothers, as when Ginny’s brother had brought him home from prep school, a wizened State of Maine boy on a scholarship, bright as paint in his studies, full of the devil, and a convinced, logical tory even then.
For two summers now, detachedly, he had watched his wife fighting her anxious shadow-battle with the problem of Poor Farm Pond. It did not surprise him that she had finally reached the breaking point. He was not a heartless man, but he regarded Minster as a pocket of old-fashioned individualism that could not long resist the encroachments of mass society. Margaret’s “solutions,” he perceived, were typically anachronistic: she relinquished the pond on Sundays at a time when the forty-eight-hour week was already a thing of the past. She reckoned, as he could have told her, without the expansion of leisure, and supposed she could contain the problem within the limits of the region, though it was not a regional question, as he would presently seek to show her: mechanized man was leisured man, wherever you found him—the industrial revolution had unleashed the crowd. But it was interesting that she was now reacting, like all old cultures, with a violent xenophobia. The psychiatrists, as he saw them, advancing on Margaret’s pond, were the prophets of universal leisure, teaching the glad gospel of play, bidding nerves relax—their trademark, of course, was the couch. And nothing, he agreed, was more horrible to homo faber, that vanishing American, than the sight of other men sprawling, relaxed and unbuttoned, in a state of nature.
“Pick,” said Margaret, urgently, interrupting his thoughts. Pickles quirked an eyebrow. She laced her long fingers; two jagged lines of worry appeared between her dark, somewhat protruding eyes. “I’m afraid of myself,” she announced. “I didn’t know until this afternoon that I had so much hatred in me. Pick, such a power of hatred!” She raised her eyes and looked straight at him. “Pickman, I have to tell you. I wanted to kill those six people.” Pickles was shocked and irritated; it seemed to him she presumed on their marriage to make him such a grotesque and unseemly confidence. “And not because they gate-crashed our beach. That was just an excuse. I wanted to kill them because they were the way they were. Can you understand that? To make them see themselves, for one second, reflected from my eyes?” The dilation of her mare eyes unnerved Pickles; he did not like the slightly rolling look of complicity with which she was now regarding him, as though she expected him to share her murderous fantasies. As a proclaimed conservative, he had been, before this, the recipient of a number of confessions from liberals to the effect that they too loathed their fellow-man; Pickles, who was a stranger to all strong emotion, found the implication insulting.
“Nonsense,” he said sharply. “You’ve been playing good little girl too long. You and your friends are acting a silly charade you pleasantly call democracy—a dangerous charade, let me tell you. The common man is no fool—face it, my dear. He doesn’t like to be patronized. He can spy out a moral aristocracy in its simple last year’s bathing suit.” He lit a cigarette. “A moral aristocracy,” he repeated. “Bred in the convents of Vassar and Bryn Mawr and Radcliffe. Holding its summer court at Minster, waving its sceptre over Poor Farm Pond. A very pretty pastoral—Arcadian. But this is the twentieth century. What right have you to try to be better than the common herd and to teach your children to be better? No right, in a universal democracy; the people won’t stand for it. Why should they? I agree with them. This moral superiority is an insufferable ostentation—an exercise of privilege that derogates the common man.”
Pickles glared mettlesomely at his wife, who was now sitting, downcast and submissive, her arms clasping her knees, in her flowing chambray skirt. “Why, Pick, you sound like a radical,” she murmured, doubtfully smiling. But Pickles shook his head. He believed, as she ought to know, in private property and individual rights. He considered the idea of equality the most pestilential idea ever to have entered human thought—an idea that could only culminate in murder, as she herself had just demonstrated. There were only two kinds of equality that a rational man could accept: equality before the law and the career open to the talents. Social equality was an absurdity; there could never be equal shares of the things men valued. “Face facts, my dear. You can’t share Poor Farm Pond or anything else you care about. Either you have it or they do. I’ve got nothing against these psychos, personally, but there’s not enough water to go around. You gals have been a long time seeing that.”
“But that’s just it,” cried Margaret. “We have seen it.” She leaned forward with a pleading smile. “Pick, how can we say no to a car full of hot people when there isn’t another place in miles?” “You have your own kids to think about,” retorted Pickles. “What are you going to do—pack them off to camp so as to leave the pond free for the hoi polloi?” “Oh, Pick, you’re exaggerating.” Margaret gave a nervous laugh, as if he had paid her a compliment. “I’m facing facts,” said Pickles. “That’s what’s in the cards. You’ve waited too long as it is. John Q. Public has got his foot in your pond.” Margaret nodded glumly, seeming to give up all at once. “It’s my fault, I see it,” she sighed. “I assumed the leadership.” Pickles said nothing. “If only,” she murmured, “there were some other solution, some place that was just as nice for them to go.” “That,” said Pickles brusquely, “is their worry.” “Oh dear, oh dear,” said Margaret. “We always come back to that. Think, Pickles, think,” she adjured him. “If you think of something, I promise we’ll do anything you say.”
All over Minster, that night, thinking caps were on. Something would have to be done, nearly everybody conceded; today’s episode was the last straw. Aside from anything else, it was bad for the children to have all this buzz about psychiatry. “It’s nothing, Mother,” “Please, Moth
er!” exclaimed the young matrons with acerbity when the grandmothers telephoned, abrim with curiosity and counsel. One typical old lady wished to know whether the two men were Freudians or whether they belonged to the new interpersonal school—it made all the difference, a friend in Brookline had told her. “How should I know, Mother? Go to bed, Mother,” wearily replied her daughter. “We will talk about it tomorrow.” “I hope to goodness you’re going to do something finally,” and “You’ve brought this all on yourselves,” affirmed the old voices. “Yes, Mother, yes,” sighed the young voices. They had heard this same judgment from the children (“We think you try to be much too good, Mummy”), and though the mothers smiled, it alarmed them to see the youngsters deducing, critically, that goodness did not pay.
Next day, the dire effect on the children sprang to every mother’s thoughts. Thanks to the party line, the whole township was astir. All afternoon, the road to Poor Farm Pond was dusty with unwonted traffic as the community turned out to take a peek at the psychiatrists, who, sure enough, were spread out on the tiny strip of beach with their blankets and their radio, just as the young mothers had described them. It was awful, declared the young mothers, alighting resolutely from their vehicles and proceeding to the waterside as if nothing had happened; the psychiatrists themselves were bad enough, but the way people came to stare at them, as if they were animals in a zoo, made you ashamed for Minster. And the children were lapping it all up, sitting in a long line on their haunches and giggling and declining to go in the water, till one of the mothers, strapping Charlotte Husted, bodily dumped her two in, while the psychiatric party clucked and frowned. What were you going to do? Adelaide Currier, a warm-spoken, lively brunette, announced that she was going to take her children to swim on Dogface every day until the excitement blew over, but everybody knew Adelaide would not hold to it; you could not run a household—even a slapdash one like Adelaide’s—and drive more than twenty miles for a swim every day. And then there was the idea Ginny Marx had, of talking it over with the psychiatrists in a friendly way and asking them to leave the beach to the children after nap-time every afternoon, but everybody knew Ginny would never have the nerve. How could you explain to them delicately a thing they did not feel for themselves?
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