The Winter After This Summer

by Stanley Ellin

  “It’s just as good as new,” the girl said eagerly. “Look,” and she took my hand and rubbed it back and forth along the sleeve, not caring what the feel of her did to me, but only concerned with proving that her pride in the coat was warranted.

  I looked. I looked at her, this travesty of the eternal woman and what she seeks, this warm, ripe symbol of maidenly aspirations, this Artemis in mink coat and canvas sneakers, and I wondered what Ben Gennaro would have given to be in my place now. I didn’t have to wonder what he would do in my place; that much I could do for him.

  Then as the girl released my hand I saw the wedding ring on her finger. Her eyes followed mine, and what she made of my surprise angered her. “We’re married,” she said. “What did you think?” Letting me know that she not only had a mink coat and canvas sneakers but a husband as well, even if he was old and shopworn.

  I could not tell her what I thought, because she would not have understood. It was a simple thought, yet it would be beyond her for the time being. Only I could understand it and consider it while the girl watched me uneasily, and the shadow of her husband towered over us in the lamp light.

  I thought, exultantly and bitterly, everything in my life has been a preparation for this.

  Everything.

  PART TWO

  Barbara-Jean Avery

  ONE

  That’s the kind of man he was. It was Ethel Waterhouse told me how he fixed it up with that Indian friend of his so the shipyard would move me into her place right down the hall from him, and when I told him I knew all about it he thought it was funny. And when I told him he couldn’t keep coming in and out of my room any time he wanted because what would Ethel think, he thought that was funny, too. He said, “You’re not giving Ethel enough credit. She’s a dirty old woman, but she has the fine clean instincts of Juliet’s nurse,” as if that made any sense.

  Then he said, “You don’t know Romeo and Juliet, do you?” and when I said, “I know about them,” he said, “It’s not the same thing. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you a copy of it when I go on the job later, and if you read it tonight I’ll take you to Coney Island tomorrow.” Because he knew I wanted to go to Coney Island.

  So I read it and we did go to Coney Island. We could do it because Avery had to be on the barge every night while it was laid up at the yard, and all day he was out in New York looking for that man he was in such a sweat to find, so I hardly saw him at all. Now and then he’d stop by the room in the morning after he came off duty, but from the way he’d open up all the dressers and closets and everything I knew it was just to see if I had any lipstick or cigarettes put away somewhere. I didn’t because they were in Egan’s room, and Egan thought that was funny, too.

  He was the kind of man thinks something is funny when it’s not, and then he’s all serious about something you can see for yourself is funny, so you never know. There are other people like that, too, and it’s almost always a man, hardly ever a woman. That’s because the men you meet aren’t much of anything, but they want to be. So they like to watch your face while you try to puzzle them out, and that’s all right because it makes you out kind of cute and it makes them feel so brainy which is the point of the whole thing anyhow. But it was different with Egan. I didn’t feel cute when I was trying to puzzle him out. I just felt dumb. After a while, all I wanted to do was say whatever he would have liked me to, whatever I was supposed to say if I was a genius, but I couldn’t. I didn’t know how. All I could do was feel dumb and look at him big-eyed and maybe lean forward so he’d see down the front of my dress and forget what he was talking about. He knew what was in the front of my dress all right, but it never made him forget what he was talking about.

  Take that business of the picture on the wall in back of Ethel’s garden. I thought it was kind of nice, and when he asked me about it I told him so. Then he asked why, just like Mr. Ellsworth in high school with his stinking Elsie Dee, and I told him it was some on account of the hills, they were so pretty, but mostly on account of the water. You could see it was real cold clear river water, not miserable salty Gulf water full of coral and jellyfish, but cold clear water that you could lie in and drink at the same time and never have enough of. But that wasn’t for him. He didn’t care about the water. All he wanted me to do was look at the picture, as if I wasn’t looking at it.

  Another picture we got to talking about was on the wall of his room. It was a big cabinet photo of a girl’s face pasted on cardboard, but underneath the face Egan had drawn an angel’s body with the hands playing a harp. It was a good drawing, but it made the whole thing look queer. There was this beautiful girl’s face with dark eyes and dark hair like a real Latin and underneath it this small angel’s body, but very sexy with the things in front sticking out and the rear end sticking out. It was really kind of indecent because of making fun of angels, but when I told him it was funny he went the other way this time and said it wasn’t supposed to be. It was supposed to be very sad.

  “Why?” I said.

  “Because she was my Beatrice.”

  From what Ethel Waterhouse told me he had plenty of girls coming and going, but she never said anything about a special one called Beatrice. “Was she your girl friend?” I asked him. “What happened to her? Did she die?”

  “She was my girl friend. She didn’t die, but now she’s in paradise.”

  Make something out of that. But one thing I could make out was that Beatrice didn’t matter to him now the way little old Barbara-Jean did. It was nice some ways, scary others. Nice because he was somehow like Jimmy, and when I was with him, listening to him talk or watching him move around, I could feel the tickling inside of me when I saw how much he was like Jimmy. And scary because he just wouldn’t understand that I was married with a preacher and a license and all, and if Avery ever caught us together even though we never did you know what, it would be terrible.

  I wasn’t fooling about that, but he didn’t care. I knew what Avery was like in a temper, and how it felt when he hit you. The first time he ever hit me was right in front of Ma and Pa when I was ready to get married and I put lipstick on. He told me to take it off, and when I wouldn’t he slapped me in the face and almost knocked me down, and neither of them said a word about it. I guess I was the first girl ever got married in Key West without lipstick, but then I guess I was the first girl ever got married to anybody who was so crazy about religion.

  I told Egan a lot about me and Avery and getting married and all, but I never told him about Avery hitting me sometimes or calling me names. From the first time I was with Egan I knew he was looking for trouble with Avery just the way Avery was always looking for it with me. I was watching once when Avery walked out of my room and down the hall, and Egan was coming the other way. The hall was narrow, but Egan kept coming right down the middle of it as if he wanted to run into Avery head-on. He would have done it, too, except that Avery stepped aside and put his back against the wall, and Egan passed by looking at him like one dog smells the other is afraid. Only I knew Avery wasn’t afraid. It was just the religion in him. And I didn’t think the religion would hold up if he ever found out about me and Egan being together so much, even if we never did anything but talk. Religious people can be mean when it matters.

  But it really was only talking then, or listening to the record player in Egan’s room, or going to Coney Island or the movies. If it was up to Avery I couldn’t have even gone out in the street, because all I had to wear was the mink coat and a couple of the dollar dresses he had picked up for me when the barge stopped on the way up the coast, and they were the kind of dresses an old mammy would rather die than wear. But I made a fuss about it until Avery finally gave me ten dollars for clothes, and then Egan took me to a big store in Brooklyn—a million people in it and you’d never believe so many niggers and Latins were up north—and he must have spent another fifty getting me the things I needed and the lipstick and eye make-up and cigarettes he kept in his room for me. Avery believed it
when I told him the whole thing only cost ten dollars, he was that far gone. I guess he was happy it didn’t cost more, because he never said anything about it except that the dresses and high heels were indecent. Which they weren’t.

  Up to then it hadn’t been any joke about money, because Avery just wouldn’t give me any. As far as he was concerned, the mink coat and the money he gave Pa took care of everything, and that was no help when my monthlies came and I needed a box of things from the drugstore or my old comb broke in half and I needed a new one. He just didn’t understand about women, but Egan did. The first time I hung out the red flag while I was in the boarding house I was real sick in bed, and when he walked into the room I could have died for shame. But it didn’t bother him at all. He seemed to know what it was all about without anybody telling him, and he fixed me coffee on his hot plate and got me pills and sat there holding my hand until the worst of it was over. It was very comfortable. And when he came home from work midnight he brought me movie magazines, because I was keeping the old ones in his room and had just about used them up.

  After that and the way he kept buying me clothes and things I let him give me money whenever I needed it for something like movie magazines or cigarettes or ice cream. I started to have ice cream every day, it was so good. It didn’t turn to water in the plate like Key West ice cream. And if I was careful there was enough money left over so that I could save some. It was too hot to wear the mink coat anyhow, and it just hung there with the plastic thing over it that Ethel gave me, and I hid the money away in a pocket of the coat where maybe Avery wouldn’t think to look.

  So it was mostly talking between Egan and me. Mostly my talking, because he liked to hear about Mooney’s Key and the big house I used to live in with the hibiscus so thick on it you could hardly see through them and the poinciana gardens and palms and how rich Pa was and the inboards we had at the dock and the cabin cruiser—not just for fishing with an open bridge and strap seats, but very fancy for going around the Gulf and looking at things—and the big car we had garaged over on Simonton Street in Key West in case we wanted to drive up Miami way or Tarpon Springs or any place. He liked to lie on his bed next to me smoking a cigarette and listening, and I knew he was listening even when his eyes were closed because now and then he would ask about something, and I had to be real sharp keeping ahead of him.

  It was like that when I was telling him how I came to marry Avery. It was because there was this good-looking Cuban, Sebastiano, who had a lot of money and was crazy in love with me. He had a beautiful schooner with an auxiliary engine and would make the run from Havana to Mooney’s Key every week just to see me, and all he wanted to do was get married. Only he was kind of depraved.

  That’s how I knew Egan was listening. Because he said, “I like that. How much is kind of depraved?”

  “A lot. He was with a gang that ran dope into the country through the Keys. And he carried a gun. He said he would kill me if I didn’t marry him.”

  “Why didn’t you turn him in to the police?”

  “Because I was scared to. Then he’d sure enough kill me.”

  “He sure enough sounds like a bad character,” Egan said, and he was so serious about it that I had to look at him to see if he was fooling. But it didn’t look like he was fooling.

  “He was a real killer,” I told him. “So when Avery came along and wanted us to get married I went and did it. It was the only way I could get away from Sebastiano.”

  “Aren’t you sorry now?” Egan said. “Life with a good-looking Cuban dope smuggler would have been almost as good as anything Mooney’s Key had to offer.”

  “It wouldn’t. It would have been awful running away from the cops all the time. You think they won’t catch up with him?”

  “Oh, they will,” Egan said. “They always do. And what a rich, beautiful widow you would have made. This way you’re just so beautiful that it hurts. With Sebastiano’s money lumped in, you’d be out of reach altogether. My good luck he didn’t throw away that gun and go into the sugar-cane business.”

  I didn’t like it when he talked as if I was married to him and not to Avery. Well, maybe I did like it a little, but I knew it was wrong. And it was wrong the way he kept picking at my coat. He hated the coat because Avery bought it for me, and he talked about it sometimes as if it was a miserable nothing instead of real mink. After all, he said himself it must be worth five thousand dollars.

  The worst of that was the night I heard banging and knocking on my door, and I was afraid to open it because it was so late and everybody asleep. But I did, and there he was with that Indian friend of his—not a Seminole, but nice-looking like a movie Indian—and both of them so drunk they could hardly stand. Then the Indian said, “He’s yours, baby. You can do a better job for him now than I can,” and pushed him right into the room at me.

  I didn’t know what to do. The Indian slammed the door shut and you could hear him a mile away going down the stairs, and Egan stood there looking at me with his eyes half closed and a silly smile on his face. He looked at me up and down so I suddenly remembered you could see right through my nightgown with the light behind me, and then he looked at the coat hanging there in that plastic thing. Before I could stop him he went over to it and grabbed it down. I said to him, “You let go of that, you drunk bastard,” but he didn’t, and when I tried to pull it away from him he wouldn’t let go, and I was sure he would rip it apart.

  Then all of a sudden he did let go. He started laughing real drunk style and went over to the bed and fell down on it, out cold. I shook the coat out and hung it back, feeling into the pocket to see if my money was all there, and then I went over to the bed. He just lay there on his back peaceful as a dead one, and when I tried to move him I knew it was no use. All I could do was wait until he sobered up and got out by himself, and I knew it better be before Avery got off duty, just in case.

  I sat down on the side of the bed to wait, and after a while I lay down next to him. It came to me then that every time I got in bed with a man he sure enough had his clothes on, and that was a funny thing. But this one was so much like Jimmy that it wasn’t funny. I lay there watching him, thinking how much he was like Jimmy, and then when he didn’t move and his breathing was steady I took his hand very carefully and put it between my legs. It was wrong but not too much, because he didn’t know about it.

  And he was so much like Jimmy.

  TWO

  Jimmy died the last day of September in 1955, but I didn’t find out until the next day when Suzie Rios told me, and it changed my whole life. I was already sixteen when it happened, and up to then I could stand everything because of thinking about him so much and waiting to see him, but after that it was no use. I would go out to the cove inside Half Mile Reef or up to the mirador on top of the house at night, and I would try to just think about him and me, but it was all mixed up with things I hated. A lot of things.

  Mooney’s Key and the Gulf and the way you scratched your legs on the coral and they festered and got full of pus.

  And the broken-down house where you’d fall through the floor some places if you didn’t watch out, and the generator that didn’t work half the time, and the sign by the dock you could hardly read any more that said SYLVESTER’S—FAMOUS THROUGHOUT THE GULF, which was a lie.

  And the way Cole sat around all the time drinking beer and dealing himself solitaire with his one hand, and the deck of cards he cut in half so that they would last longer. Maybe it wasn’t his fault that he was working for the railroad when the big Labor Day hurricane in ’35 knocked down the Highway with the trains on it and he got hurt and had to have his arm cut off, and then he took the money the railroad gave him and bought the place on Mooney’s Key with it, but I couldn’t stand the way he kept saying the same things about it all the time so you knew what he would say even before he opened his mouth. Like I had plenty of luck in my life and all bad. Or The railroad took away my arm and gave me this bucket of sand for it. Or When I had two arms I was
ten times the man I am now. And then loading himself up on beer and telling about the hurricane again and how he was swindled until I could scream.

  And the way Lettie always picked on him and was always after me, even when there wasn’t anybody eating in the restaurant and there wasn’t any cooking or dishes to do.

  And Mr. Ellsworth in Business Arithmetic in school and his Elsie Dee. And Miss Scott in Typing where the machine they gave you never worked right and she never believed it.

  And everything else in Key West like the Cubanos hanging around on Duval Street and kissing the backs of their hands at you when you walked by, and the whole United States Navy with their stupid hats over their eyes thinking they knew so much.

  And the cistern water on Mooney’s Key that always made your hair feel sticky after you washed it.

  And everything else on Mooney’s Key, too, except maybe Sebastiano because you could talk to him. Sometimes he was a nuisance always saying that when you had a ma and pa like Cole and Lettie you had to pity them and do things for them, or he was so crazy to read books to you down by the cove that you couldn’t think about what you wanted to, but mostly you could talk to him and he’d listen. He never saw Jimmy at the San Carlos but he said that if I loved him he must be a good man because my love was pure. Sebastiano talked like that. It was kind of fancy but that was because of the books. Especially Don Quixote.

  I was at the cove a lot with him. I used to go there whenever I could get away from Lettie, because I had my movie magazines and my scrapbook in a box between the rocks there all covered with an old tarpaulin, and he would come out of his shack and sit and talk to me. Or he would read to me while I was looking at the magazines and cutting out pictures. He was very old and wrinkled and his hair was all white, but he said that when he was a handsome young caballero he used to get paid for reading books. That was when he worked in a tobacco factory in Tampa, and all the girls would sit making cigars while he sat in a tall chair and read books to them so they wouldn’t mind working so hard. And he got paid for it.