by Sloan Wilson
“Does she sail fast?” John asked her.
Only then did Molly smile. “Yes,” she replied. “It was terrible. Have you ever tried to live at sea?”
Helen and Ken rested in their room all afternoon. When Sylvia sat down to dinner with them and Bart that night, she glanced at Ken’s tanned face, and she thought, The trouble is we are strangers and we are not, we know too much about each other, and too little. In her flat Buffalo accent, Helen carried on a rather nervous conversation with Bart, answering the questions he gallantly fed her. What ports had they visited on their cruise? Which one had they liked best? Helen talked fast, punctuating her sentences with apologetic little laughs.
When there was nothing more to say about the cruise, she began telling Bart about the Buffalo PTA.
She’s doing better than I am, Sylvia thought in sudden panic. This is ridiculous, but I can’t think of anything whatever to say, and I can’t just sit here throughout the meal without uttering a word.
“You have beautiful children,” Ken said to her, and she looked at him, thinking how wonderful that a voice can be both so deep and so soft. She had almost forgotten that.
“Your Molly is a real charmer,” she replied, thinking, Yes, that’s true; she has your face in miniature, turned feminine, but the same symmetry, the same straight nose, and lucky for her she got her father’s chin.
“What school do you send them to?” Ken asked, the deep voice sounding a little stilted now as he fought the silence.
“There’s no school on the island,” Sylvia replied. “I have to teach them myself.”
“You live here the year around?” Ken sounded shocked.
“Yes,” Sylvia answered, and felt obligated to add, “It’s really quite lovely with the snow.” The phrase kept repeating itself in her ear. Her mind raced, and she was breathing too fast.
Lovely with the snow, she thought, oh it’s lovely with the snow, all right. I wish you could know what it’s really like. Someday I would like to tell you. When he said, “Tell me about it,” she was startled. “Oh, there’s really not much to tell,” she replied.
“I remember the winters out in Nebraska,” Ken said, the word “remember” sounding suddenly startling. “They were fun sometimes.”
“Tell me about Nebraska.”
His face was thoughtful, and it was absurd to think there was the same old hunger in his eyes; he was just a man who always had a brooding look about him, as though his thoughts dwelt always in some sad and distant place.
“I left Nebraska when I was so young I hardly remember,” he said, and there it was again, the word “remember”—a beautiful word really, the way he said it in his soft, deep voice; “remember”—a word that should not hang like that, resonant in the air between them, “remember.”
“I’ve read Willa Cather,” Sylvia said, and was suddenly chattering about books, her voice racing along, seeming entirely detached from herself; she could even sit back and listen to it and make silent comments on it, as though her words were coming out of a machine. Oh, let’s talk about books, she thought, and yes there is a power in the West as Willa Cather describes it, even a warmth in winter, quite lovely with the snow, and it’s better to chatter like this than to sit silently. She blundered along, feeling that she was headed for disaster. “In the winter,” she said, “we have plenty of time to read. I was never much of a reader before. As a girl I was so stupid…”
Her mind went blank. “As a girl I wasn’t much of a student…” she continued, and then she heard herself say, “I’m sorry! Excuse me!” and saw she had turned over a glass of water.
Somehow the meal came to an end, and they walked to the living room. Old Mrs. Hamble excused herself from her bridge table and approached them, with a smile on her sunken-cheeked face. “Aren’t you Mr. Jorgenson?” she asked.
“Yes,” Ken said, “I…”
“Oh, you wouldn’t remember me, but I remember you!” Mrs. Hamble said. “Dear, dear, yes. How nice to see you back!”
There were introductions all around the room then, and Sylvia had a problem; she didn’t want to keep following Ken around. She didn’t want to keep up that tortuous conversation, yet when she walked away, she was drawn back, so that she kept getting up and sitting down. The absurdity of this frightened her, and at nine she told Bart she had a headache and went to bed.
Lying in the dark, in her room above the garage, the word “remember” seemed to repeat itself, merging with the phrase, “warmth in winter, lovely with the snow,” and to her horror, she couldn’t stop remembering, not just Ken and all that had happened with him, but the winters, the terrible two winters over the garage alone with the children, and with Bart. “Tell me about it,” Ken had said.
In the beginning it had seemed like a fine, brave idea to winter on the island. All their friends remarked upon the decision being so courageous and all that. They were going to read Thoreau together, Bart said. They were going to sit before a roaring fire while it was snowing outside and read all the books of their youth over again. They were going to get “reacquainted with the outdoors.” They were going to go fishing through the ice, and have just a marvelous time alone on the island together.
But it didn’t work out that way at all. Sylvia never told anyone about those two winters alone on the island; the memory lay within her too horrible to admit. Even the word “winter” was one which Bart and she never mentioned to each other. They talked about “next year” or “next summer,” but even the word “fall” was best not used any more.
The trouble started that first fall, when the families from the other cottages on the island prepared to leave and, reasonably enough, brought cartons of food from their iceboxes which, they said, would have to be thrown away if the Hunters didn’t take them. There were quarter pounds of butter, and milk, partially eaten roasts, and canned goods which would freeze if left on the shelves, quite a store, altogether, when the leavings of eleven families and many guests were counted. Bart accepted this provender not happily, but as he said, it was a shame to let good food go to waste, and they were not yet low enough to have to refuse gifts from old friends out of pride. The trouble started when Todd Hasper, coming into the kitchen to deliver wood, saw the pile of groceries on the table. “I used to get that stuff,” he said.
“Take it!” Bart immediately replied. “We just didn’t want it to go to waste.”
“I guess you people need it more than I do,” Todd said, breaking a record of twenty years of sullen courtesy to the Hunter family, and he stamped morosely out of the house. That night Bart delivered the groceries to Todd’s cabin, leaving them in a box in front of the locked door when no one answered, and on that small issue, apparently, the two men stopped talking to each other for the rest of the winter.
From late September through May, Todd Hasper was the only person on the island other than the four Hunters. Throughout the fall Sylvia saw him walking his dog or working around the cottages with a ladder, putting shutters on windows and taking down awnings. He never glanced at her or Bart, never raised his hand in greeting, and they felt like intruders on their own land.
Fall, Sylvia thought now as she lay in bed. My God, in another month it will be fall again!
Shortly after Labor Day, the rowboats and canoes and sailboats always were hauled out and stored in boathouses with the paint peeling from their bottoms. The leaves fell from the big maples, oaks and elms, leaving the old mansion on the hill naked and forlorn, its crumbling paint dreadfully exposed.
Huddled in an overcoat, Bart sat for hours on the veranda watching the yachts owned by people he knew heading back for Boston or New York or Florida. “There go the Johnsons,” he’d say. “There go the Depews.”
During the evenings Bart lay in their tiny bedroom with the windows stuffed with newspapers and the air smelling of kerosene and whisky. He did not read Thoreau. No, he read the Wall Street Journal. Every evening he read it, making notes of the investments he would m
ake if he had any money to invest. One night he got even more drunk than usual because he said that he had just made a theoretical profit of a million dollars.
The atmosphere in the cramped garage apartment became so tense that the children erupted from it and played outdoors regardless of the weather. “At least they have each other,” Bart used to say, but what little real love had existed between the children withered that winter. Carla and John fought each other with a cold, deadly bitterness which Bart called “a perfectly normal sibling rivalry,” but which Sylvia thought was a tragedy. “All we’ve got is each other!” she used to say. “We’ve got to learn to get along together!” The children listened solemnly, but at the first opportunity Carla, at six and seven, would openly strike her brother, kick or even bite him, and John, who was six years older, would go pale, and stalk out of the house with his fists doubled up in his pockets.
Occasionally the children played together in the snow. Just before their first Christmas on the island John built his little sister a snowman. He became interested in the job himself after he got started, and ended by making it an enormous, surprisingly well-sculptured rendition of Santa Claus. Standing at the window of her room, Sylvia watched the children working together in the snow, putting the final touches on their creation, and for a little while she thought they might be solving their differences; but then, before Sylvia’s horrified eyes, poor little Carla lost her temper and attacked the snow Santa Claus in a fury, butting it with her chunky little body and flailing at it with both arms, and John, turning abruptly, ran off like a wild thing into the icy woods which surrounded the house like a glass forest.
In the fall, before it grew too cold to use the piano in the big, unheated living room of the inn, Sylvia gave John music lessons, and she was both touched and horrified to find that in dead of winter he often let himself into that frigid place, left his wool mittens on top of the piano, and played until his hands were blue. He taught himself to play remarkably well, but the image of him huddled over the keyboard in an overcoat and filling that great deserted house with music seemed to Sylvia to be small cause for parental pride.
During the mornings Sylvia laid the school materials sent by the State on the kitchen table. “No!” she said countless times. “No, Johnny! No, Carla! That’s not right! Oh dear! Remember, you’ve got to keep up with the children on the mainland!” She became so nervous and so irritable that she shrieked at the children, and occasionally they all put their heads down on the kitchen table and cried together.
Todd Hasper’s dog appeared to bark more when winter came, or perhaps the sound just carried more clearly through the leafless trees. His growling and whining seemed never to cease, and sometimes at night he rattled his long chain and bayed at the moon in a way that made the children tremble. That first winter on the island instilled a lasting fear of dogs in both children, and the following summer Carla screamed in panic when a small fox terrier owned by a guest at the inn came toward her unleashed.
Remembering this now, Sylvia twisted and turned in bed. Yes, summer was almost gone. Within a month it would be fall again, and fall brought terrors of its own, because the only thing worse than winter on the island was waiting for it, knowing it all lay ahead, like a horror movie which one must sit through time and time again, knowing each terror that is coming, but having to see it again, sitting frozen in a dark theater with no exit.
Not that everything was precisely the same. Bart drank much more the second winter, although he was rarely sober between November and April of either year. He apologized for it a lot. “I know I’m impossible to live with,” Bart often said.
Poor Bart. One of his troubles was that he knew everything, or almost everything, that was happening. He played the parts of both participant and spectator simultaneously, and when he lost a game, when he kept losing, he seemed amused.
Only occasionally did Sylvia allow herself to fight with Bart. Once when she became convinced that John should be sent to the mainland at any cost, she asked Bart to see if a small trust fund his mother had left for her grandson’s college expenses could be used for boarding school instead. Bart refused to consider it. John was bright enough to get into college under almost any conditions, he said, and the money should be waiting for him, as had been planned.
“You’re deluding yourself!” Sylvia shouted. “No child can get into college by himself, and I’m a terrible teacher!”
“Then I’ll teach him,” Bart said, but that course of instruction petered out within a month. Sylvia finally became so enraged that she slapped Bart’s face, and she was appalled when he cried.
Ken would not be like that, Sylvia thought. The two men were almost as different as they could be, not only in character but in aspiration. Both men were sensitive, for instance, but Bart not only suffered from a thin skin, he valued it. He thought that being sensitive was synonymous with being intelligent or beautiful. He was always talking about people with such sensitive faces, and such sensitive hands and such sensitive heads.
But Ken Jorgenson did not look sensitive. His hands were like hams; and although his face was well-shaped, it was the face of an aging semi-professional football player, or of a fighter who has been good at keeping his gloves up, but no one can ward off the blows every time.
Ken Jorgenson was sensitive but he was also tough, and that was one of Bart’s favorite words of condemnation, “tough.” “She has a rather tough face,” he often said of professional beauties, and Sylvia had often agreed with his scorn; but now she thought it was wonderful to be tough, to endure, to win once in a while.
It’s not just that, Sylvia thought. Bart has perverted a legitimate respect for sensitivity into a love of weakness, almost. He takes everything and twists it around. When, for instance, he said Mrs. Pitten was “a very cheerful woman” he meant she was a fool. At first he had said, “She’s one of those terribly cheerful women,” but Bart kept refining all his phrases, as did the other families on the island. They worked out their own language, almost, and if anyone on Pine Island said a person was cheerful, that person was being insulted, whether he knew it or not.
Yes, Sylvia thought bitterly, this is a great place. The weak are eulogized for being sensitive and the strong are criticized for being tough. Gloom is highly fashionable and cheer is regarded only as a symptom of a vacant mind. The clever Islanders, the wonderful sophisticated people who find it so funny to understate or to put everything in reverse! “A nice little animal,” is what Bart called Hasper’s dog. Industry was frowned upon and indolence revered. Only fools sweated, Bart often said; this constant preoccupation with work is an American neurosis. Truly mature men like Bart were glad to escape the hubbub of the city and just sit on an island winter and summer, enjoying the beautiful view from the veranda, which in winter especially was a real killer, the frozen bay stretching away to meet the icy hills, the whole landscape indistinguishable from the North Pole.
Bart and the other Islanders also made a virtue out of incompetence. He couldn’t fix automobiles or dripping faucets or broken chairs and he was proud of it. “I’m afraid I am just one of God’s helpless people,” he often remarked.
Ah, Sylvia thought, what fun lies in self-condemnation and in the denial of all they stood for! Money was said not to be important, while hardly a husband on the island wasn’t bleeding and dying either for it or for the lack of it. The men of Pine Island said that at heart they wanted to be painters or writers or musicians; they were all a bunch of frustrated artists to hear them talk. But they became advertising men and salesmen and brokers who explained seriously to their sons that money isn’t important, not worthy of a second thought.
Sylvia’s reflections were interrupted by the door opening. Bart came in, sighed and took off his coat. “Are you awake, dear?” he asked in a stage whisper.
“Yes, Bart.”
“How do you like our new guests?”
“All right. What do you think of them?”
Barton sli
pped out of his trousers, managing to do even that gracefully. “Of course, the woman’s impossible,” he said. “But I suppose she’s about what you’d have to expect.”
Sylvia said nothing.
“That little girl of theirs is pretty,” Bart continued.
“What do you think of Ken?”
“Well,” Bart said, “he seems cheerful, even more cheerful than he used to be, don’t you think?”
Chapter Seven
IN THE MORNING Sylvia awoke to find it raining hard outside, a driving August rain, almost like a tropical storm. She hated rain, because she feared the roof of the inn would develop more leaks. Last month one had developed in a bathroom on the third floor, fortunately enough, just over the tub. Bart had been content simply to pull the stopper and let the leak drip. God takes care of His own poor helpless people in mysterious ways, he had said, making quite a joke of his solution. But the dread had been there, the fear that the whole roof would soon have to be repaired at enormous cost; that the inn, the one asset they had left, was rotten at the core, and might even come tumbling down around their heads. Sylvia had wanted to have a contractor examine the roof, but Bart was so sure that something terrible would be found that he refused to do it. Let it go, he had said, let it go; if there is something drastic the matter with it, what good will it do us to know? If a contractor examines it and finds the frames are rotten, he might talk about it, and it wouldn’t be good for business. He might report it to the building inspector in Harvesport, and the inn might even be condemned.
For a while Sylvia had argued with him, but his worry became so acute that “roof” became one of the many words that never could be mentioned between them, like the names of the partners of the investment firm which had not appreciated Bart. Oh, there was a whole list of words which agitated him, and could not be used without causing distress. So they had both tried to forget the roof, but of course that was impossible, because if one leak had developed, might not there soon be others in places which could not be joked away?