A Summer Place

by Sloan Wilson

  Sylvia turned over in bed with her heart pounding, and there was a moment of panic when she thought, What has happened, what are we doing, how did we get into this situation? Why can’t we all just relax, she thought, and take care of our children, and…

  Because I’m in love, she thought, and though it sounds stupid and sentimental, it’s true and I’m glad. Only the dead at heart find virtue easy, the dead at heart or those few fortunate ones who marry for love and do not change.

  Easy virtue, she thought, what a strange phrase, meaning, of course, no virtue. I suppose a clergyman would tell me that virtue was never meant to be easy, that I should grit my teeth and spend the winters on the island with Bart and hold him up with my strength.

  I could do it, she thought with a curious sense of self-revelation. I actually could; but even if the children could survive such a thing, even without considering them, that kind of virtue, the gritted teeth, no, no, no, that kind of virtue is a sin.

  I am beginning to understand, Sylvia thought. I am beginning to understand a lot of things, oh, I’m becoming a great expert on morality. And I am about to shrivel and die, or to have an affair, or to make a man lose his daughter. Is it possible to have an affair that is not shoddy?

  Perhaps the truth is this, she thought, imagining that on the skin of her wrist she could almost feel the hands of her watch crawling toward the hour of three, perhaps the truth is that there is no way out of this business, because there is no absolution, because I have finally arrived in hell. My sins were committed. I have been worrying about the future, but the sins lie in the past, and I committed them in a thousand ways, and now I pay, and Bart pays. Step right up this way, ladies and gentlemen, this is the place to pay.

  This is a new installment plan, a payment every month, the debt growing not smaller but larger, for the rest of my life, Sylvia thought. The price was set, and now we pay, both the guilty and the innocent; we come to the cashier.

  And that’s the unfair part, Sylvia thought. I can see why I have to pay and why Bart does, and maybe even Ken, but what did poor little Molly do, and Carla and Johnny?

  The sins of the fathers, she thought, oh this is a very just plan, the torture of the innocent. The system is more immoral than anyone in it.

  God help us, she thought. This is the morning to pray, as well as pay, and I wonder if a small prayer composed in complete confusion will be acceptable. Dear God, I do not understand.

  At two-thirty Sylvia got up silently and dressed without putting the lights on. Bart did not stir, and the rhythm of his heavy breathing was unbroken. She stole down the hall and stairway to the courtyard. The lawn was gray with dew. A soft night wind was blowing, and there was a fragrance in the air from the sea and the gardens that was easy to understand, and a golden sickle moon, and the distant sound of the breakers surging against the cliffs. She ran to the lilac trees, and Ken’s kiss was easy to understand, yes, and the feeling of sudden joy. This is a triumph against great odds, she wanted to say, perhaps a small victory prefacing great defeat, but I don’t care. Right now, for a little while at least, I understand and I am grateful.

  Ken broke away from the kiss, tearing his lips from hers brusquely, still holding her with both arms around her waist, but averting his face, and his voice was tormented when he said, “We’ve got to talk.”

  “No,” she said.

  “We’ve got to plan.”

  “All right,” she said, and took her arms from around his neck. “Do you want to get divorced, or do we just have an affair?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and in the dim light from the sickle moon, his face looked pale. “What do you want?”

  “A divorce if I could have my children.”

  “Same here.”

  “Would Helen give you Molly?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t want to influence you,” Sylvia said. “I’m perfectly willing to have the affair.”

  “I just have to think.”

  “Not now.”

  “Look!” he said, “We’re too old to make a mess. Right now, if Bart woke up…”

  “He won’t. He drinks himself to sleep. Will Helen wake?”

  “No,” he said. “She takes sleeping pills.”

  “Then we have till dawn,” she said. “Two or three hours.”

  He kissed her again. “I’m afraid I’m too old for the pleasures of dew-covered grass,” he said. “There must be a better place.”

  “The Hulberts’ boathouse,” she said. Turning, she led the way to a path which cut through the woods and around the edge of the bay to the opposite side of the harbor. The boat-house was a large structure of weathered gray shingles which had stood empty for many summers. In the bottom portion of it were two slips for motorboats surrounded on three sides by a narrow pier. It was pitch dark when they entered. Cobwebs brushed Ken’s face and there was a flutter of bats’ wings. Under the dock the sea murmured restlessly. “Take my hand,” she said, and walked to a narrow stairway. Halfway up he pulled her to him and kissed her. “Wait,” she said, and twisted away. His eyes were becoming used to the darkness, and the head of the stairs appeared as a gray rectangle above him, in which her silhouette was framed. He followed her and found himself on a wide-planked floor with the eaves sloping down so steeply on both sides of him that he could stand only in the middle. Through dusty windowpanes there streamed the pale light from the sickle moon and the stars. An old dory sail and kapok life preservers hung from nails. Sylvia walked quickly to a corner and took from a hook a weathered sailbag which was half as big as herself. Letting it fall to the floor, she opened it and drew out a seemingly endless torrent of white canvas which fell in loose folds to the floor and made the loft seem much lighter. “This used to belong to the old Gull’s Wing,” she began. “Remember…”

  His kiss interrupted her. They sank down on the sail, finding that it was surprisingly soft. The clean smell of hemp and tar was everywhere. After the kiss she knelt beside him and with one hand began to unfasten the buttons of her blouse. In the dim light she did not look young. Her face, down-turned, appeared almost gaunt. Her eyes seemed to have grown larger, and her shoulders thin. Misinterpreting his glance, she said with a catch in her voice, “I’m not pretty any more. I’m sorry for that.”

  He caught her hand and pulled her down to him. “I love you too much to speak,” he said.

  Part Two

  Someday You’ll Understand

  Chapter Ten

  THEY WOKE THEMSELVES UP OFTEN after that for secret meetings in the dampness of dawn, and as Ken said wryly, people really have to be in love to do that. Speaking in whispers, they tried to make plans, and they grew tired of whispering. They wanted to talk and laugh and shout, but even in the boathouse they felt they always had to whisper. They had to steal away from there one at a time, they had to keep glancing around to make sure they were alone on the path, even at five in the morning. They had to conduct themselves like thieves.

  “It’s all so absurd!” Sylvia said bitterly one morning. “Even if Bart let me take the children without a terrible battle in court, things wouldn’t be easy. It sounds crazy, but I’d worry about him. I’ve taken care of him so long! How can I just leave him here on the island, all alone with Hasper? He’ll drink himself to death. He won’t eat, and…”

  “We have to make choices,” Ken said.

  “I wish we were both sons-of-bitches! I wish you didn’t give a damn for Molly, and that I hated Bart!”

  “You don’t wish that.”

  “I know! But what can we do?”

  “I’ll arrange some way for both you and Bart to go South. That will solve your immediate problems. The others we’ll just have to work out as we go along.”

  Sylvia bit her lip. In her heart there was a rising sense of disaster too intense to be told.

  On the third of September, 1953, the Jorgensons left Pine Island. John Hunter looked so lonely when he came up the hill after wavi
ng goodbye to Molly that Sylvia wanted to cry for him as well as for herself. Ken had promised her that he’d find some way of getting them off the island before winter came, but she doubted that he could work out any really happy solution to a dilemma such as theirs.

  As though in reaction to the whispering he had had to do with Sylvia, Ken found himself having to stifle an almost constant temptation to shout at Helen. They argued about whether to go to Buffalo before spending the winter in Florida. When Ken reluctantly agreed to a two-week visit in Buffalo, they argued about whether to stay at her family’s house or in a hotel.

  “They’d be terribly hurt if we stayed at a hotel!” Helen said in a shocked voice. “Ken, what’s the matter with you? Has all this success gone to your head?”

  “No,” he replied miserably. “I just don’t like sofa beds.”

  “Not grand enough for you?”

  “Not long enough, damn it!” Ken shouted. “My feet stick over the edge.”

  For two weeks they stayed with the Carters, and from the time they arrived, Ken found himself getting more and more annoyed at them. I suppose I’m being unreasonable and cruel, he thought; my nerves are simply overwrought. But everything he saw fitted into a pattern which appalled him, and he couldn’t understand why he had been blind to it so long.

  First of all, there was the house itself, and the fetish of the perfect lawn. Old Bruce Carter spent hours fertilizing and watering it. He weeded it on his hands and knees, and chased children and dogs off it with indignant shouts.

  He spent far more time with the lawn than with books or newspapers. While on his knees weeding, he looked as though he were worshiping the lawn, and maybe he is, Ken thought, for all I know.

  Then there was the car, a blue Pontiac a year old, which the old man rubbed with a rag every night, and washed every weekend. He’s in love with it, Ken thought. He’s not polishing it, he’s caressing it; there is something about his preoccupation with that car and the lawn which is obscene.

  Seeing Margaret Carter, his mother-in-law, again, upset Ken, because she was so much like Helen, an intensification of her daughter, really. The characteristics which she made obvious explained too much about Helen, he reflected. It was like parading the poor woman naked through the streets.

  Just as old Bruce spent so much time rubbing the car, Margaret was almost constantly polishing silverware or applying liquid wax to her floors or furniture. The sound of the vacuum cleaner in the house was incessant. The washing machine and dryer in the kitchen were always churning, and when any of her towels or sheets didn’t come out of them blindingly white, Margaret immediately put them back in the machines again, with the result that linen never lasted long for her.

  The shelves in the single bathroom at the Carters’ house were full of deodorizers of many kinds, sprays, salves and powders, mouthwashes and toothpastes guaranteed to prevent bad breath. Margaret often went around spraying every room, or hanging up bottles with wicks to reduce smells, of which both she and her daughter lived in terror. Margaret washed her hands so often they became chapped. Dishes and glasses which had stood on the shelves for only a few days since they had been used had to be washed again before the table was set. Any member of the family who got the slightest scratch had to have it elaborately sterilized and bandaged, for it was a dirty world, Margaret Carter felt, against which her guard could never be dropped for a minute. Cleanliness was next to godliness, as she so often said, and as far as Ken could see, she had drawn the conclusion that if it was almost divine to be clean, it must be actually Olympian to be sterile. She gave the impression of wanting to boil herself thoroughly, like a surgical instrument.

  Cleanliness and sterility—she had connected them in her mind, all right, and had deduced that fertility must therefore be dirt—or at least, that’s the way she acted, Ken thought. Dogs had never been allowed in the house because they might hurt the rugs, but Margaret liked cats. She had three, and all had been desexed, even though one was a blooded Persian of high quality which the veterinarian had told Margaret should be bred. Since childhood Margaret had thought that any animal had to be spayed or castrated before being allowed into the house, and she had told the veterinarian to proceed with the operation, because, as she said, she only wanted the cat for a pet.

  Even the decorations Margaret had bought, the plaster-of-Paris statuettes on the living-room mantelpiece and the people depicted in paintings on the walls, had been desexed, Ken noticed. The movies she saw had to omit all reference to any but sentimental love, or Margaret wrote critical letters to the newspapers. Lovers in television plays had to be cute, sad or funny—if they got passionate, Margaret turned off the set. Even words such as “passion” or “sex” had been chopped from Margaret’s vocabulary, and had been replaced by such words as “nastiness” and “dirt.” Margaret’s favorite reading matter was detective stories, the cruder the better, but she complained that the writers of modern mystery novels put in too much filth, by which she meant sex, and not enough action, by which she meant blood and death.

  Bruce and Margaret slept in separate rooms in the Carter house, which was one reason why there was no room for Ken. Margaret’s room was decorated with pink flounces; even the lamp shades had them. At the south end of it was a table for her collection of figurines: small dogs and kittens and bears, most of them with faces twisted into human expressions, the animal lips distorted into sugary grins, the slanting, oval eyes enlarged and made round to represent innocence, apparently. They were the cutest things, Margaret often said, and when she spied a new one in a ten-cent store she swooped down on it, saying, “How darling! You sweet thing! How would you like to come home and live with me?”

  She was constantly fussing over Molly. That was what worried Ken most: the thought of what would happen to his daughter if Helen moved in with the Carters after a divorce. On her fourteenth birthday Molly received from Margaret armfuls of little-girl clothes which would have been suitable for a child of ten. The old lady wanted Molly to wear bows in her hair; she objected violently when Molly put on a touch of pink lipstick; she derided Molly’s blushingly confessed desire to own a brassiere. When Molly asked Helen in a matter-of-fact way to buy her some sanitary pads, Margaret looked appalled and said, “Don’t tell me, child, that you already have the curse! How terrible that you should have to begin so young!”

  Soon after he arrived in Buffalo, Ken saw his financial advisers and had a conference with Bernie Anderson, who had just returned from Paris full of enthusiasm for starting a “New Development Corporation” to repeat their success with Marfab on a broader scale, beginning with three new processes he had been studying in Europe. Several tax questions had been settled advantageously and both Bernie and Ken found their financial situation was even better than they had thought. Subsidiary rights connected with Marfab had been sold profitably, and what with annual payments from the company which had bought Marfab, stock dividends, and retainers for serving as an occasional consultant, Ken’s income was close to a hundred thousand dollars a year. He made plans to join Bernie in forming a new company, although he said that until some of his personal problems were solved, he’d prefer to play a fairly passive role. Bernie didn’t ask what the personal problems were; he’d known Helen a long time. They made plans to get together, perhaps in Paris, in midwinter for another conference.

  When Helen learned that Ken’s success was continuing, rather than disappearing overnight, as she had more than half expected, she said, “I’ve been wondering. We’ve been so fortunate, do you suppose we could do something for Mother and Dad?”

  “What?”

  “I’d like to buy them a new house,” Helen said. “I mean, I know that’s a lot, but if we really are so rich…”

  “Sure,” Ken said, but he felt sardonic; buying the Carters a house might be a good way to begin to reduce the bitterness of an impending divorce, and it salved his conscience a little.

  The trouble was that the house-hunting expeditions, in
which Ken was expected to join, increased the clarity of the pattern he had observed. Margaret Carter talked freely with the real-estate agents about wanting to avoid any neighborhood with Jews; and when she placed her old house on the market, she said proudly that she wouldn’t think of selling it to Jews, no matter what they offered. She was, she said, going to remain loyal to her old friends and neighbors; it was terrible the way some people just sold to anyone when they moved away, they had no loyalty at all.

  “You wouldn’t be getting a new house if it weren’t for a Jew,” Ken felt impelled to say. “My partner is one, and the idea of starting our own corporation was his.”

  “Oh, I know they’re awfully sharp in business,” Margaret replied.

  “It wasn’t that at all. But anyway, would you refuse to sell Bernie your old house?”

  “I don’t doubt that he’s a fine person, but you know, you get one in, and it’s like a crack in the dike,” Margaret replied. “It wouldn’t be fair to the neighbors.”

  “Now, don’t argue with Mother,” Helen said.

  But it wasn’t only the Jews that Margaret Carter wanted to avoid, Ken discovered as the house-hunting expedition progressed. She didn’t want a Catholic neighborhood, and “of course,” she said, one had to be especially careful to steer clear of the Polish section and the Italian section—those people were making so much money nowadays, their houses didn’t look any different from anyone else’s, and one could get fooled. Some of the old parts of the city were being “infiltrated by Negroes,” the real-estate agent said, and “of course” they had to be avoided at all costs. Neighborhoods near schools were eschewed, for there would be too many children running around, too much noise.