by Sloan Wilson
The rumors soon reached Sylvia’s parents, who were alarmed both for their daughter and for themselves. The way to get accepted on Pine Island was not to have one’s daughter start sleeping with the hired help.
Sylvia’s father, Danton Raymond, asked her to his room, and it would not be fair to say that he warned her against Ken Jorgenson on the simple grounds that she could do better. Danton Raymond would have been shocked at the thought of advising his daughter to marry for money or for social position, and Sylvia would have rebelled indignantly if he had. Danton started that conversation by saying, “Sylvia, you are no longer a child now, and I know I can’t organize your life. You can do what you want, and in the end I won’t be able to stop you, but I’m your father, and I would like to be able to discuss matters such as Ken Jorgenson with you. Do you mind if I do?”
“No,” she said, feeling immensely guilty, as she had when he had lectured her long ago about being rude to her mother.
“I think Ken Jorgenson is a very fine young man,” Danton continued. “It would be a mistake, however, for you to take any young man too seriously at your age. Your sense of values will change as you get older. Good looks may not always be so important to you. Even football may not always seem so exciting.”
“It’s not football…” Sylvia started to say, but her father interrupted her. “As you grow older, matters of taste, even convention, may seem more important to you. Allowing a young man to monopolize your attentions and to make a public display of affection may seem fine and brave to you now, but later you may realize that the old-fashioned virtues are not without charm.”
“I haven’t made a public display of affection!”
“You are a very beautiful young woman,” Danton said. “It’s time you learned that there is always some foundation to gossip. I’m sure this will sound hopelessly old-fashioned to you, but a lady should be above suspicion.”
Sylvia blushed.
“I know you haven’t done anything wrong,” Danton continued hastily. “The thing is, it’s not enough for just me to know that. Don’t underestimate the importance of a reputation.”
“I haven’t done anything!” she protested. “I don’t even like Ken so terribly much. Can I help it if he keeps following me around?”
“I think that all young ladies eventually learn how to handle that sort of situation.” Sylvia said nothing.
“Your mother and I have high hopes for you, dear,” her father went on. “One reason we’ve worked so hard is that we want to achieve a better life for you. You’re getting old enough to think seriously now about your future.”
“I guess I’ll go to college,” Sylvia said.
“If you wish. I’m also hoping we can arrange a coming-out party for you. But beyond that, I want you to realize that when a woman chooses a husband, she gets more than a man: she marries a whole way of life. Some ways of life would be a great deal more fun for you and more meaningful than others. My point is that when you find yourself thinking seriously of a young man, you should look beyond the man himself, and see what he stands for. Love should be more than just an animal attraction.”
“Yes,” Sylvia said.
“You’re a good girl,” her father concluded. “You’ve just got to learn to use your head.”
It wasn’t that talk alone which influenced Sylvia. There was the gradually deepening realization that almost everyone on the island treated Ken with clear if amiable condescension. He was unfashionable, and at sixteen, Sylvia felt that a peculiarly embarrassing sin. The Hunters, on the other hand, were the height of fashion on Pine Island. Sylvia’s mother tried to learn how to arrange flowers the way Martha Hunter did, and almost imperceptibly began to acquire a few of her mannerisms of speech. “Why don’t you get Bart Hunter to teach you tennis, dear?” she often said to Sylvia. “He plays so beautifully.”
After the talk with her father, Sylvia did not argue with Ken or fight with him, but she began to feel that in some obscure way he had cheated her, that he had misrepresented himself to her, that she had been betrayed into making a fool of herself. Her father advised her to let the swimming lessons “taper off” rather than terminate abruptly, but her body was so rigid that Ken kept asking her in bewilderment what the trouble was. “Nothing!” she said. “I guess I’m just scared of the water.”
The other young people on the island, Sylvia saw, made fun of Ken a good deal, and she soon found in ridicule a way to disprove the gossipers, and at the same time to achieve a reputation as a wit. The insults she fired at Ken were relatively mild at first. She was a good mimic and imitated his Midwestern accent, but when he only smiled good-naturedly at that, she repeated a few funny jokes about Swedes and dumb football players, and other little things which weren’t so bad by themselves, but which in sum made his good-natured smile turn into a hurt look. In spite of herself she had strong impulses to hold tightly to those shoulders, but these feelings, she told herself, were the sort of “animal attraction” which had to be disciplined. He was a beast, she thought, and first turned that into a joke one day when he was doing push-ups on the diving board. “Observe the Beast at play,” she said to Bart, and was rewarded by an appreciative laugh.
The nickname, “the Beast,” seemed to so many of the Islanders to be apt for Ken that it stuck. It really was an inspired instrument of ridicule, because he could never admit he had heard it without creating a scene. Of course they never used that nickname to his face. It was a game to use it just within his hearing, when one could pretend one didn’t know he was there. Once when Hasper’s dog was heard barking, Sylvia said, “Did you say something, Ken?” and it got so she could produce a laugh simply by mentioning a leash or a chain in Ken’s presence.
But even that didn’t turn out to be enough; sadism, like dope, is never satisfactory for long in mild doses, and neither is exhibitionism, Sylvia thought with self-disgust now so many years later. Getting up from her son’s bed restlessly, she paced the narrow room, finally sitting down in a chair in front of the window. This was not the room in which Ken Jorgenson had slept; no, he had occupied the one farther down the hall, but the view from all the windows was the same: they looked across a narrow courtyard to the back of the old mansion. Staring over there now, Sylvia could see the window of the room where she had stayed when she visited the Hunters that summer long ago.
Late one August afternoon Sylvia, at sixteen, went to the window of that room and, glancing across the courtyard, saw Ken at his window, looking up at her. The way he was sitting, with his elbows on the window sill, it seemed apparent that he had been gazing up at her for some time. It gave her a funny feeling to know that he was watching her, that he perhaps watched her often. Impatiently she pulled the window shade, and she wondered if there had been times when she had forgotten to do that.
An idea came to her then, more daring than any she had had before, that she could accuse Ken of being a Peeping Tom, and cause him to lose his job in disgrace. Naturally she wouldn’t do such a thing, but the discovery that the power was in her hands was startling. Of course, she couldn’t accuse him of peeping from his window as he had, because that was her fault for not pulling the shade, but she could accuse him of peeping in other circumstances. She could, as a matter of fact, accuse him of almost anything, and she would be believed. A simple accusation would set all the rumors at rest for good and all. It was quite an interesting thing to think about.
That summer Sylvia got a new black bathing suit which set off her figure well. She strolled down to the beach in the morning and, finding it was chilly, let Bart run up and get her fur coat. When the sun had warmed the air, she threw the coat back, and slipped the straps of her bathing suit off her shoulders to get an even tan. Ken, who was sitting on his lifeguard stand under a big umbrella, glanced down at her, looked away quickly, and buried his face in a book.
“What are you reading, Ken?” Sylvia called, making her voice friendly. That was one of the things that worked best with Ken, like a
lternating fast and slow balls in tennis; a combination of friendliness and insult was more deadly than insult alone.
Ken climbed down from his lifeguard stand and walked toward her. “The Decline and Fall,” he said. For some reason, Bart, who was only a little older than Sylvia, thought this was uproariously funny, and he laughed. Several young people who had been sunning themselves on the beach gathered around, sensing that some bearbaiting was about to begin.
“Tell me about it,” Sylvia said. “I always wanted to read it.”
Standing before her as though he were giving a lecture, the Beast began to talk, describing “marvelous prose rhythms,” “a genius for government,” “a study in decay.” “How interesting,” Sylvia said gravely at two-minute intervals, encouraging him to go on, and “Really?” Ken conducted a monologue for ten minutes, getting excited about his subject, gesticulating with enthusiasm. He looked almost like a preacher standing there waving his arms. Bart, lithe and dapper with a towel over his slender shoulders, and all the rest of them had to struggle to keep straight faces. “I’m awfully glad you’re telling me this,” Sylvia said finally, and Bart couldn’t stand it any longer; he let out a suppressed snort, and that set all the others off. Ken looked up, his big face full of confusion, unable to understand for a moment why everyone was laughing. “Were you pulling my leg?” he asked Sylvia. For some reason this seemed awfully funny to everyone, and the laughing increased.
“You can be sure I’d never pull your leg,” Sylvia said, a really screaming remark, the way she said it, making it sound mildly bawdy.
“I ought to throw you off the end of the dock,” Ken said, his face flushing with anger. “Go ahead,” she said.
He stood over her, a mountain of a man, and he put his right hand on her shoulder, preparatory to picking her up, but it became immediately obvious that if he did so, her bathing suit would come down around her waist. He froze.
“Go ahead,” she said again, folding her hands behind her head, a gesture which made everyone roar with laughter; it seemed unbearably sophisticated and modern, the whole thing. Ken leaned toward her and she had a quick stab of fear that he actually was going to pick her up and carry her squirming, half naked in his arms, to the edge of the dock, an action which would make her appear ridiculous, but which also would be quite likely to get him fired, she knew, thinking quickly; a tutor twenty years old could not do that to a young girl, no he couldn’t. He put his left hand on her waist, and he seemed about to pick her up. Everyone’s laughter stopped. A sudden silence shivered in the air. But then, abruptly, Ken turned and walked determinedly away, with his fists clenched at his sides, and the laughter started again.
The teasing of the Beast continued in many secret ways. Once the whole group of young people went for a moonlight sail in Harry Hulbert’s big sloop, the Gull’s Wing, and Ken was invited for once, because the boat’s big, gaff-rigged mainsail was hard to hoist and get in. It was fun to sit drinking beer and singing while the sloop skimmed over the moonlit bay with Ken at the wheel. He said he liked to steer and he had learned to sail pretty well for a Midwesterner. Sylvia asked Bart to go forward and they sat silhouetted against the white curve of the jib. Feeling Ken’s eyes upon her, Sylvia allowed Bart to kiss her, and she put her head on Bart’s shoulder, making their silhouetted figures merge. Everybody said later that Ken had looked furious; it had been really funny to see.
Adolescent sexuality on Pine Island, Sylvia thought now with the horrified candor of added years. Some anthropologist should study it, the way they study Samoa and New Guinea and places like that. On Pine Island the young teen-agers talked openly about sex; it was very modern and sophisticated to be frank about everything, but it wasn’t fashionable for girls “to go all the way,” oh no; only waitresses and shopgirls did that. It was all right to have lighthearted necking parties on the beach at night. Sometimes, incredible to remember, the laughing young people changed partners at a given signal. “Switch” was a good game; in the early Thirties all anyone had to do was say it to get a laugh.
The laughter was important, the banter and the jokes were necessary, because it was not fashionable “to get serious.” “Getting serious” was a creepy thing to do. That was one trouble with Ken Jorgenson—he “got serious” about Sylvia, oh God, how serious he got.
Now, almost twenty years later, Sylvia could still clearly remember the hungry expression in Ken’s eyes, the earnestness with which he gave her love poems he had written, some of them in Latin, which she couldn’t read at all, and which he wouldn’t translate for her. He said she’d have to learn the language herself; it might be an added incentive for her studies, because it was a wonderful language in which to write love poems. He told her once in a soft voice that he wished they lived in some other land, where sixteen-year-old girls could get married and not waste their youth away. He was on the point of proposing, it seemed, but then he stopped and his eyes looked haunted when she laughed.
We were children, Sylvia thought now as she pressed her hands to her face. We were the foolish children of foolish parents, and we cannot be blamed too much. Oh, the Islanders were very sophisticated about their children—they allowed them to sip cocktails sometimes when they were as young as fourteen, and a few of them laughed when the youngsters’ speech got thick. The drinking was part of what happened; it helped determine the end.
Restlessly, half unwillingly, Sylvia now got up and sat in the chair before the window in her son’s room. Directly across from her, high up on the old mansion, was the yellow square of the draperies at the window which had been hers so many years ago, new draperies now, but they had always been yellow in that room. It had been a curious sensation for a young girl to live there, knowing that a man like Ken Jorgenson often sat staring up at her from his room over the garage. Now, as she watched, the wind swayed the draperies at that window, and a figure was half visible behind them. It would be old Mrs. Hamble, no doubt, who occupied that room now, but Sylvia had the eerie feeling that the curtains would open, and that she was about to see herself, aged sixteen, staring at her older self across the courtyard.
But the draperies did not open, and a few minutes later Mrs. Hamble pulled the shade; perhaps she felt that eyes were upon her. Sylvia got up restlessly and stretched out again on her son’s bed. She covered her face with both hands.
Her second summer on the island, when she was seventeen, she came home from a dance late one night, a dance to which Ken had not been invited. It was a hot July night with little wind. She was slightly drunk; that had to be taken into account. Bart had had a silver flask full of warm Martinis saved from a cocktail party. He had kept passing it to her. It had been difficult to refuse and even more difficult to gauge how much she had drunk. Her position on the island was difficult that year, because her parents had just been turned down by the organization of householders. She was visiting the Hunters as Bart’s guest, in spite of the fact that her family had been weighed and found wanting. Anyway, she had got a little drunk that night. Her head had started to swim, and the kisses and embraces from Bart in the back seat of a Chris-Craft on the way home with the other couples laughing all around them had seemed suddenly nauseous to her. She had been glad to get out of the crowded boat and to be alone in her room. Locking her door, she put on the lights and opened her window. Across the courtyard the light in Ken’s window flashed out. Sylvia pulled back the draperies and, standing before the open window, breathed in the cool air and the fragrance of the garden. While unfastening the hooks at the side of her blue evening gown, it occurred to her that perhaps Ken might be watching, but on the other hand, he probably was in bed. Slowly she undressed and, feeling a new kind of exaltation, let the night air blow over her body, evaporating the small beads of sweat on her skin, making her so cold that she suddenly shivered. She began to tremble, and pulling the shade down, she went to bed. Lying there in the dark, she felt conscious of having done a monstrous thing, and she took comfort from the thought that she really h
ad been drinking a great deal; she had taken several swallows from the flask, four or five at least, and a girl who has been drinking can easily be forgiven for forgetting such small niceties as pulling a window shade before getting undressed.
Still, the memory made Sylvia blush, because it had to be admitted that she was forgetful more than once. It became a teasing game, an intensification of a game that had been going on for a long while. Some nights she pulled the shade down and some nights she did not, and in the mornings when she saw Ken at the beach, he looked at her with those dumb, hungry eyes, and he would sometimes blush and turn away, and he would sometimes go running off the end of the dock, diving into the water with a tremendous splash and flailing his way out to the float, hauling his big body through the water, kicking up a storm of spray, surging through the sea as though pursued by sharks. She was always demure and circumspect with him. When he asked her to go sailing with him, she said no, sounding mildly shocked, as though he had made an indecent proposal. She held herself away from him when they danced, and was coldly aloof on the beach.