by Sloan Wilson
A ridiculous idea, to be sure. Why go back to a place where one has experienced nothing but pain and humiliation? Why open up the memories of a poor, stumbling scholarship student from Nebraska who got way over his head? Why try to recapture the days of what, after all, could only be described as a ludicrous adolescent love affair, a sordid chapter from some book of psychiatric case histories, one’s personal fling at juvenile delinquency? Why try to go back to the scene of a sick youth?
No, it wasn’t that bad, he thought. Oh sure, I made a fool of myself, I was an ass, an idiot compounded, only that and nothing more. But even so, why should the idea of going back to Pine Island in such new circumstances be so attractive, why should the temptation be there, like the temptation to keep wiggling a sore tooth?
Regardless of the reasons, there was no doubt about the result; Ken wanted to go back to Pine Island, to buy a house there perhaps, but at least to pay the place a visit. I just want to see what it is really like, he told himself. I want to check my memories. I want to see how I exaggerated. The time is beyond recall now, thank God, but the place and perhaps the people…
The people. He remembered Bart Hunter as a slender young man, cocky, elegant and dapper, the sort of man who could turn almost any action into a graceful gesture. As though quoting the wisdom of the ages, Bart Hunter had said a gentleman is a man who never insults anyone unintentionally; Ken had always remembered that. It had applied to everyone on Pine Island in those years. Those gentle folk had never insulted anyone unintentionally.
If the definition held for gentlemen, Ken had thought, it certainly must apply to ladies. Ladies are women who never insult anyone unintentionally, and that certainly was true of Sylvia, the girl with the fake mink coat, a person he never thought about, the image he had expunged from his mind, almost. Sylvia had never insulted him unintentionally, he could be sure of that.
What nonsense, Ken thought; the affairs of one’s youth are meaningless and best forgotten. A middle-aged man, a great success, a man supposedly of some intelligence, should certainly not waste time with that. A married man with a wife who, regardless of her weaknesses, had suffered with him on the way up, who took his ill temper, tolerated his nerves, no, a man with a wife and daughter should not be dreaming of a girl who never insulted him unintentionally, a girl in a shining black satin bathing suit, the wheat-colored hair, the brown shoulders, no, it was absurd to remember that.
Good heavens, he thought, she’s almost forty now, thirty-five at least. She probably is fat with large sagging breasts. She had the kind of figure which is magnificent at sixteen or seventeen, but which ages badly, I’m quite sure. And anyway, we are both married, and the state of Sylvia’s breasts is hardly a matter for my concern.
Still, it would be fun to go back, in all innocence. It would be interesting to see how the friends of one’s youth, even the tormentors, had turned out. The purpose of making money is to earn the freedom to do what one wants to do, isn’t it?
What else? And if one wants to take a leisurely journey through one’s past, to revisit the site of old agonies, even, well why not? It would undoubtedly turn out to be therapeutic; it would be wise to replace his memories of Sylvia with the image of a stolid, workaday woman approaching forty, the mother of a great many children perhaps, with the harsh face of reality, not a stereotyped golden girl fuzzed by the aches of memory.
For his wife’s sake Ken wrote a yacht broker and arranged to charter a schooner for the month of July; and for his own sake he wrote a real-estate broker in Harvesport to inquire into rentals on Pine Island. The reply informed him that the island was still owned by a corporation of families, and that they still ran it like a club, screening applicants for admission carefully. If he really wanted to go there, the broker suggested, the best thing was to begin by staying for a few weeks at the Island Inn, which had been opened by Mr. Barton Hunter two years ago.
This astonished Ken. It was impossible for him to think of Bart as an innkeeper and Sylvia as an innkeeper’s wife. He wrote requesting accommodations, and waited impatiently for the reply.
On the morning he heard from Bart, Ken came down to breakfast late. Helen had left the house to take Molly to her new private school, but his mail was piled neatly by his plate. While the new maid poured him his coffee, Ken leafed through the stack of envelopes, which contained more letters than he used to get in a month. The one from Barton was immediately identifiable, because it was written on the same cream-colored stationery which the Hunters had always used—in fact, the paper tore easily when he opened the envelope, and crackled like dry leaves. Bart wrote:
DEAR KEN:
We have the accommodations you request, and are pleased at the prospect of having you back on Pine Island again for August this year. The rates, American plan, would be eleven hundred dollars for three people for the month. If that is satisfactory, please let me know, and I’ll be glad to make the reservations.
Sincerely,
BART
Ken was musing over this letter when the doorbell rang. The maid admitted Nancy Brankist, a portly woman who for some months now had been Ken’s secretary. Nancy gave her coat, a poor worn tweed, to the maid, and came into the dining room. Ken stood up, a habit which had been so deeply ingrained in him by his schoolteacher mother that he had never been able to give it up, even when people made fun of him; one stood up when a lady entered the room. Nancy smiled.
“Good morning, Mr. Jorgenson,” she said, and sat down at the end of the table.
“Want some coffee?” Ken asked, sitting down again.
“No, thanks,” Nancy said, sitting as erect as though she were in an office. From her handbag she took a pad and a pencil. “Want me to open that mail?”
Ken handed her the pile, keeping the letter from Barton. An idea was beginning to develop in his mind. Excusing himself, he went to the telephone and called Bernie Anderson, the one person with whom he felt any identity in these strange days. A new maid answered: “Mr. Anderson’s residence.”
“Hello,” Bernie’s voice said, suddenly cutting in on an extension.
“Good morning,” Ken said. “Want to go yachting?”
“What?” Bernie said, and yawned sleepily, the sound of the yawn coming clearly over the telephone.
“Helen wants me to charter a boat and cruise the Maine coast, and after that I’m going to rent a place on an island. Want to bring Rachel and the kids and come along?”
Bernie laughed. “Boy, you’re really going!” he said.
“I mean it. Want to come?”
“I’d like to,” Bernie said seriously, “but Rachel always wanted to see Paris. We’re off next week.”
“Oh,” Ken said, feeling disappointed. “Well…”
“I’ll see you before we go,” Bernie said. “We’ve got to get going on plans for the fall.”
“Good,” Ken said. “See you, Bernie…” He hung up and returned to the dining room. Nancy extinguished her cigarette.
“This is a letter to Barton Hunter, Pine Island, Maine,” Ken said. “Dear Bart, My family and I are glad to hear you have the accommodations for us, and the financial arrangement you suggest will be fine…”
Chapter Five
ON THE FIRST of August 1953 the big schooner, the Fairy Queen, bowled along at eight knots, with her lee rail awash, bound for Pine Island. Below decks, Helen Jorgenson pressed her lips tightly together in exasperation as she tried to iron Molly’s best dress on the table in the main cabin. The flatirons grew cold rapidly and had to be reheated in the galley by the Negro cook. The cabin was hot, both from the midsummer sun beating down on the decks, and from the roaring fire the cook had had to build in his stove. Helen found it was difficult to avoid letting the sweat from her brow drip on the delicate fabric of the dress. While the schooner rolled and pitched, she braced herself with one hand and ironed with the other. She felt ill, and suddenly burned her finger painfully on the iron. “Oh!” she cried in anger, for Helen nev
er swore. “Oh! Oh! Oh!” Yachting, she decided, was not all it was cracked up to be.
In fact, it was rotten. Molly had been hopelessly seasick from the beginning. Helen worried about shipwreck, about people falling overboard, and most of all, she worried about flags. While under charter to the Jorgensons, the Fairy Queen flew only the national ensign, for Ken had no personal owner’s pennant, and belonged to no yacht club. The lack of an association with a yacht club meant that the big schooner could not moor at the clubs in any of the ports she visited, and as a result she had been doomed throughout this cruise to tie up alongside oily commercial wharfs, or to lie in lonely anchorages away from the other yachts. Helen hated this; it made her feel like an outcast.
The whole etiquette of yachting confused Helen, and she was a woman who wanted to be “correct” above all else. Ken point-blank refused to wear anything but a sports shirt and slacks, and Helen doubted that that was right. The stout professional captain, Mr. White, who said he had worked for the Vanderbilts, looked contemptuous, even while Helen talked to him about her cousin Faye, who had done quite a lot of yachting long ago.
The worst aspect of the cruise was the sense of homelessness Helen felt. The home port of the Fairy Queen, written in gold leaf on her transom, was Boston, and the people they met in the anchorages assumed they came from there. No, Buffalo, Helen always said at the first opportunity, and sometimes they asked, “Where in Buffalo?”
Helen couldn’t say, because before leaving, Ken had sold the house. There was no point in keeping it, he said, because even if they went back to Buffalo, they’d want a bigger place. The furniture was in storage, and all Helen had for a home was this pitching, rolling, sickening boat. Some nights she lay in her tiny stateroom and cried, and now, when she burned her finger on the iron, tears mixed with the sweat on her face.
On deck Ken sat comfortably in the cockpit enjoying the sun. “There it be!” the captain said, pointing over the bow, and sure enough, the pinnacle of Pine Island was just beginning to show over the horizon. How well Ken remembered it, this Gothic mass of land, with the cliffs like walls. He had seen it last in 1936, sitting on the stern of the Mary Anne, a dejected young man carrying a small zipper bag. He had had a dream that someday he would return as a rich man with the world at his feet. He would arrive with an enormous mink coat for Sylvia, real mink, but even then he had known it was a silly dream, and he had tried to put it out of his mind.
“Ken!” Helen called now, sticking her head up the hatch. “Come change your clothes!”
“Plenty of time,” he replied in his deep voice. “The island just came in sight.”
Helen sighed. “Please,” she said. “I have your things all laid out.”
“All right, dear,” Ken said, and went to his stateroom. Lying on his bunk was a new white linen suit which Helen had bought for him. Ken stared at it a moment and put it back in his closet. From a drawer he took a clean green sports shirt, exactly the sort of thing he often wore in Buffalo, and a pair of freshly pressed slacks. Thus dressed, he walked into the main saloon of the schooner.
Helen was on her knees, pulling and adjusting Molly’s dress. The child stood erect, still pale from seasickness. At thirteen, Molly was thin, with a heart-shaped face of great sweetness and glossy black hair cut in a Dutch bob. When Ken came in, Helen glanced over her shoulder at him and in a strained voice said, “Ken! You aren’t going ashore like that!”
“Why not?”
“You look terrible! Why didn’t you put on the clothes I laid out?”
“This is the way I like to dress.”
“Not for this place!”
“Now, Helen,” Ken replied. “I think we’ve passed the point where we have to pretend to be anything we’re not.”
“You’re so stubborn!” Helen retorted, and with her mouth full of pins, plucked and pulled at Molly’s dress. “Hold stilll” she said to the child. “Don’t wiggle so much!”
“You look nice, baby,” Ken said.
Molly smiled at him gratefully. “You do too,” she replied.
Chapter Six
“LOOK OUT THERE!” Todd Hasper said, and his great dog strained at the chain leash. Young John Hunter looked. Rounding the end of the island only a thousand yards away was the big schooner, the Fairy Queen, her white jibs reaching over the blue sea, her bow raising a storm of spray, her fore and mainsails straining upward. “Whose is she?” he gasped.
“Never saw her before,” Hasper said. Satan began to bark.
John had never before seen at close range any large vessel under sail in a stiff breeze. Oh God, she was beautiful! He ran along the shore, just able to keep up with her, his eyes so riveted upon her that he stumbled on a root and fell headlong, bruising his knee to the bone; but he picked himself up without an outcry, and kept running to avoid losing sight of her. The sky that day was an intense blue, like a stained-glass window.
Off the entrance to the harbor the schooner luffed suddenly into the wind, so close that John could hear the violent slatting of her sails as they were lowered. Under power the vessel crept into the bay and there was a splash as she let go her anchor.
By that time John was on the end of the wharf, watching breathlessly. A gleaming motor launch was dropped from davits on the schooner’s starboard side, and a boarding ladder with polished brass stanchions was lowered. Several people descended.
First there was a sailor in faded blue dungarees and a shirt of the same material, then a young girl in a white dress, followed by a thin woman in navy blue. Last of all came a tall man wearing a green sports shirt. The sailor held the launch alongside the boarding ladder while these people seated themselves. When they started toward shore, John whirled and ran pell-mell to tell his mother of the arrival of such wondrous guests.
Bart had already seen the yacht. “Sylvia,” he said to his wife, “I think they’re here.”
Todd Hasper chained his dog to a tree and was dispatched in an ancient Ford to carry the Jorgensons and their baggage up the hill from the harbor. John rode with him, but Bart and Sylvia waited on the big veranda. Sylvia sat with her eyes closed, seeming to be asleep, while Bart paced. When the Ford stopped at the bottom of the steps, Sylvia stood up suddenly and Bart went to her side. Ken was the first one out of the car. His shirt flashed brilliantly in the sun, and Bart glanced at Sylvia, but Sylvia did not look back. Ken, seeming to be a bigger man than could be believed, stared up at her, the broad face so well remembered, the heavy shoulders, the incongruously diffident smile. He came up the steps toward her, his eyes upon her face, and he said, “Hello, Sylvia. Hello, Bart.”
“Hello!” Bart said in a thin dry voice. “We’re glad to see you again.”
“Yes,” Sylvia said.
Ken turned and helped Helen and Molly up the stairs. “I want you to meet my wife and daughter,” he said, and made the introductions. Helen started to offer her hand, but unsure that it was correct for a lady to do that first, she pulled it back. Molly, who was now standing beside her, looked at her feet. There was a short embarrassed silence during which John, who had been helping to unload the baggage, ran up the steps and stood by by mother.
“John,” Sylvia said, “this is Mr. and Mrs. Jorgenson, and their daughter, Molly.”
Looking up, Molly smiled, her fragile face suffused with great warmth. “I’m glad to meet you,” she said. John gave a short bow of acknowledgment, a mannerism he had picked up from his father, and which even at fourteen he performed with the older man’s touch of elegance and grace, but his smile was boyish. “That’s a keen boat you’ve got,” he said.
“Come, and I’ll show you your rooms,” Barton said, and they walked through the big living room of the old mansion. Behind them came Todd Hasper and John, carrying suitcases.
The living room looked almost exactly as Ken remembered it, although the old oak paneling had been painted white, and a stag’s head which had been over the dining-room door had been taken down. In a corner cup
board a French clock with its innards clearly visible under a glass dome and an ivory chess set remained as they had been almost twenty years ago, when they had seemed to Ken to be the epitome of elegance and wealth. Three old ladies, one of whom Ken recognized vaguely, peered sharply at him over their knitting. The carpet on the wide curved stairway was worn, but the big airy bedrooms to which Bart led the way had been newly papered, and each had a modern bath. John and Todd Hasper put the suitcases in the middle of the floor, and Ken reached into his pocket. For a moment Bart thought he was going to tip John, but he gave a dollar to Hasper only, and, turning to the boy, said, “Thanks for doing my work for me. If you’d like to see that boat, I think the captain would be glad to show you over her before he sails.”
“Thanks!” John said, and dashed for the wharf.
“If there’s anything you need, just give me a call,” Bart said, struggling as he always did to be courteous without being obsequious.
“They’re beautiful rooms!” Helen said. “What a lovely view!” Her voice was sugary and false.
Sylvia smiled mechanically. “Dinner’s served from six to eight. Would you care to join us at our table tonight?” Everything she said that day sounded awkward and stilted.
“That would be nice,” Ken replied in his deep tones.
Sylvia avoided his eyes. “We usually start at seven-thirty,” she said, “but the children often eat at six. Molly, would you care to join John and my daughter, Carla? You’ll meet Carla later—she’s swimming with friends.”
“Thank you very much,” Molly said. Hers was the only voice that sounded entirely natural.
Early that evening the children ate at a table by themselves. Carla, a stout eight-year-old, started by spilling her milk, and John glared at her, feeling the family honor had been ruined. “There, there,” Molly said, and helped the waitress to clean it up. Throughout the meal, however, Molly ate little. She sat with her head bowed over her plate, as though saying a sort of perpetual grace, and she didn’t seem very interested in John’s enthusiastic talk about the Fairy Queen.