by Caryl Rivers
“Die, you suckers,” I would snarl at them. In their fury, they would hurl themselves at the nets, which always held, as a shiver of danger curled up my spine. But they could not get to the tender brown flesh that swam in the safety of the enclosed areas. Now and then, one or two would sneak by, and they could give a nasty sting with their tentacles. Then a parent would fish the offending creature out of the water with a stick, leaving it gasping on the beach.
But some nights the jellyfish would take their revenge on the child who taunted them. They would surge past the nets in a great, gooey mass to the shore, to rise up on millions of little gelatinous legs they had miraculously sprouted, and come marching straight towards me. They would hurl their yucky, slimy bodies on top of me and begin to ingest my flesh. They would eat it, inch by inch, smacking their gooey lips with each tender brown morsel as I shrieked and shrieked.
Mr. Williams would look on sadly and say, “You just got to be careful around jellyfish.”
But nightmares aside, there were no happier times of my childhood than those I spent at Sparrows Beach. Sometimes I would paddle my inner tube out as far as I could and peer curiously at the shoreline on a far curve of the bay where Beverly Beach was. I strained my eyes, but all I ever saw was the line of trees near the edge of the shore. So I imagined the details: sand as white as a swan’s throat, azure water like the pools Esther Williams swam through at Saturday matinees. Heaven, I used to imagine, was acres and acres of those pools — whose waters could instantly turn to violet or green or red and sprout mermaids in gold lame — filled with colored people, backstroking. Never mind that, as far as I could tell, no black bodies were ever allowed to frolic with Esther. But they did let Ricardo Montalban in the water, and at last he was swarthy, which was close.
There had to be something wonderful about those white beaches, since white people were so careful to guard them from us. Why would they bother to put up signs and posts with chains across them simply to protect the same brown sand and brackish water and jellyfish that we had? How they kept the jellyfish away I was not certain. Maybe it was a death ray, or mind control, or something mysterious. White people could probably do death rays, if they put their minds to it. Ah, what places they must be! Beverly Beach was more exotic to me than Xanadu could have been.
But then I grew up, and mostly forgot about all that. When I learned to drive, my friends in high school — and later in college — and I would head for the ocean beaches on the Eastern Shore. There were some cottages glad to have us, and there was too much ocean to be fenced off, and the water was blue and bracing, not tepid and greenish brown.
So I was surprised, one day during my junior year in college, when I found myself driving that winding road that led to the Chesapeake shore. It was a bleak November day, I’d had it with studying, and I just got in my car and headed off down the road, aimlessly, I thought. I kept going down that familiar road, passing landmarks long forgotten, and then, suddenly, I saw it. At first I thought there must be some mistake. When I was a kid, the ride had seemed to take forever. How could I be here so soon? But there it was, the sign I had passed so many times: Beverly Beach.
I turned down the road, feeling a strange throbbing in a corner of my neck and a dryness in my throat. There was no one around, but the feel of danger once again curled up my spine. I soon reached the parking lot. There was no one in the wooden ticket booth, and no chain barred the way. I parked the car and walked the few yards to the place where the straggly grass disappeared and the sand began. Then I walked across that sandy strip and looked at the water. It was brown.
I squatted down by the edge of the water and stuck my hand in it. It was greenish brown and cool — but not yet chill — to the touch. A dead beetle floated by, and I looked out at the water. The posts that held the jellyfish nets stood faithfully on guard, awaiting another August.
To my amazement, all I felt was sad. And more than a bit cheated. All that fantasy. All that white energy spent on keeping us out, and this was it? Just another brown spit of sand on the bay, no different than Sparrows Beach? Esther Williams wouldn’t have stuck a pink toe in this water. No white sand. No death rays.
It should have been better. It should have been wonderful. All that time I’d wasted, imagining.
I drove back to school, knowing that a piece of my childhood had vanished as surely as the jellyfish from the bay in October. I had the sense that I should have been constructing great notions in my head, about the banality of prejudice and the illusion of power, but I just felt — sad. I wanted my money back. I wanted the magic, even though it wasn’t time.
At long last, I had come to face to face with my Xanadu: Beverly Beach. And it was not at all what I had imagined.
Harry Springer gripped the wheel, his mood swaying between righteous anger and self-abasement. Was it so much he asked? She was his wife, dammit! What was he asking? To touch her, to hold her, get rid of the emptiness inside that seemed to stretch across a distance greater than the Argentine pampas. Not that he knew a hell of a lot about the pampas, but it was the one thing he remembered from geography; ever since the fifth grade it was the image he had used for vast. Who was she, the goddamn Supreme Court? He thought, abruptly, of how good it would be to drive out to Barneys, see some of the guys, have a beer. One beer, what the hell could it do?
I am an alcoholic. I will always be an alcoholic.
How many times had he said that in the AA meetings? He fought against the words, at first. No, he wasn’t really a drunk, not really. Just a young guy who got mixed up, lost his job. Only one beer.
I am an alcoholic.
One beer would mean two, and he’d be on the floor by midnight. It had been “one beer” the night he’d gotten so tanked up that he ended in the city lockup and lost even the crummy job in the grocery store bagging produce. One more episode like that and it was finis, all she wrote, babe. All that agony, the hard slogging of the past eight months, just to wind up on the floor at Barneys? Fuck that.
She was right, he hadn’t proved himself yet. Anybody could climb on the wagon for a few months. Four more months — it stretched ahead of him, like the pampas. No, think of it one day at a time, that way it wouldn’t seem so long.
He laughed ruefully to himself. He was waiting. Hot damn, that was something new. He had always wanted everything right away, thought he deserved it. Marge, the old broad in the AA group, called his drinking one little boy’s massive temper tantrum. Foulmouthed old broad, but she had something.
Jesus, growing up was hard, especially at twenty-five. Why didn’t anyone ever tell him how hard it was? It was one of those secrets they kept from you, like sex. You had to learn it by doing, so of course you got it wrong.
But he was doing it. He would show her he could do it. Her approval was a beam of light ahead, towards which he was moving. Sometimes he thought it was the only thing that kept him going, a fucking star in the East. Why was it so important? He didn’t know. He only knew it was, and that was it.
I am an alcoholic.
He thought about Klein, the skinny hebe pitcher. He wondered what ever happened to Klein. He never made it to the bigs. Had he ever tried? Did Klein know what it was like to be crawling in his own vomit on the floor of a drunk tank? He thought about Klein a lot, the kid who had one hell of a curveball and threw it right through Harry Springer’s life.
Harry had gone off to the All-State game in his senior year certain that the big league scouts in the stands would be looking for him. That was what all the smart guys in town were saying, nobody like him in the league for twenty years. Harry Springer, bonus baby — it sounded good to the ears. He’d have to fight the broads off.
The first time he came to bat in the game, Klein threw him a curveball he couldn’t even see, much less hit. He missed the ball by two inches. He’d never seen a curveball like that. How could that skinny hebe throw so good? And even he wasn’t good enough for the big leagues. With each pitch, the bigs grew dimme
r and dimmer. In the small regional league the Belvedere Blades played in, Harry Springer was a standout. But he’d never seen kids who could play like this.
“You wanted to be DiMaggio,” Marge, the old broad said. “I wanted to be Jean Harlow. We ain’t none of us stars, kids, we’re drunks. Maybe because we wanted things we couldn’t have. You got to take it one day at a time, and get the fucking stars out of your eyes.”
“They’re gone, Marge.” The last one went out the night he hit bottom, crawling around on the cement floor, crying and heaving while an old drunk kept hitting him on the back. They all thought he was finished when that happened, even his parents. They wrote him off: boy drunk. They were wrong. He wasn’t ready to pack it in yet. Fuck it, he’d show them all.
He turned the wheel in the direction of his parents’ house.
Mary walked into the city room and saw Jay at the desk cropping a set of pictures. She walked over, sat on the edge of his desk and clutched her raincoat close to her body.
“Dick, guess what I have on under my good Republican cloth coat.”
He looked up. “What, Pat!”
“Black panties and a peekaboo bra.”
“For Chrissake, Pat, you want people to think we’re Democrats or something!”
“Look, Dick, I’m so horny I’m going to do it with Checkers. ”
“Checkers is dead.”
“He’s in the freezer. And he’s a hell of a lot livelier than you.”
They both cracked up. Dick and Pat had become their own private little joke. Sam Bernstein looked at them and shook his head.
“Too bad Nixon didn’t win. You could have taken that act on the road.”
“Yeah,” Jay said. “Too bad. Dick Nixon is one guy we’ll never hear from again.”
“That’s a shame,” Sam said. “I liked the way Herblock did his five o’clock shadow. ‘Would you buy a used car from this man?’”
“Anybody thirsty?” Jay asked. “How about we hit the Sahara Room?”
“I got to finish an overnight,” Sam said. “You guys go on. I’ll catch you later.”
Jay and Mary walked across the street and slid into a booth.
“We’re getting a hell of a reaction on the urban renewal story,” Jay told her. “Charlie’s been on the phone all day.”
I wonder if Charlie knows what he’s stirred up.”
“What do you mean?”
“Things are coming out of the woodwork. My mother is getting it from a lot of people because they saw my byline.”
“What kind of things?”
“How come your daughter is helping that Jew bring a lot more Niggers into town?”
“That Jew? Charlie? He’s a Unitarian.”
“I know, but people see bylines like Bernstein, Speigel, Rosenberg, and they get ideas. Some people say the Blade is a Jewspaper.”
“What’s the local viewpoint on Irish Catholics?”
“You didn’t see this place go for Kennedy. Irish Catholics are drunks who want to sell the country to the Vatican.”
“Jeez, this is a bigoted place.”
“Like most, I guess. But I think that we’ve really picked up a rock and a lot of things are going to crawl out. Especially if the Negroes organize to fight the plan like they’re talking about doing.”
“Do you think they have a prayer?”
“With the paper against the plan? Maybe. But there’s going to be a fight.”
“I wouldn’t mind a little action. You know, if I thought I could keep body and soul together, I’d go down South and get some shots of the civil rights marchers.”
“Could you make it, freelancing?”
“It’s hard. Especially when you haven’t got a name. This is my first real job as a photographer, not counting the Army. I think I’ve got to get more experience before I go out on my own. Or maybe I’m just chicken.”
“What’s your dream job?”
“That’s easy. Life. I want to be another Capa. Mydans, Eisenstaedt. I want to be really, really good. But I’ll be thirty in a couple of years, and those guys were already famous by then. In this job, you have to make it young, you have to hustle. I got started late. I may never catch up.”
“I know that feeling.”
“I don’t want to end up like Pete Franklin, hanging around a small paper, shooting crap, doing weddings on the side. I think most people end up never getting to do what they want. Who was the guy who said that most men lead lives of quiet desperation? Boy, was that sucker right.”
“Do you think that’s really true?”
“You bet your ass I do. In my family, we had a fucking monopoly on quiet desperation. My father drove a cab and died at forty-eight from bad kidneys. He was a smart man too; he said if he’d gone to college maybe he could have been a professor, or a lawyer. He just lived and died and nothing ever happened to him.”
“But you’re so good, Jay. Everybody says so.”
“You think life’s like Sunday school? You’re good and you get a gold star on your forehead? There’s a thousand photographers who are good, and they all have a head start on me.”
“So you think life’s a jungle?”
“You bet it is. Don’t let anybody tell you different.”
“To me it’s like fourth grade. I keep thinking I have to put my hand up and ask for things. This job, it’s like a present that I think somebody’s going to come and take back. I don’t feel like I’m … entitled to it. Some days, anyway. Other days, I feel like I’m hot shit.”
He laughed. “Keep thinking that. Have it tattooed on your chest: ’I Am Hot Shit.’”
“You know what, we ought to have a secret club, like we used to do when we were kids. The Hot Shit Society. And we’ll keep on telling each other how great we are.”
“Good idea. Give me your hand.”
She extended her hand, palm up.
“I should spit on it. That’s what we used to do to seal a bargain.”
“Yuck. Isn’t there some other way?”
“Yeah.” He raised her palm to his lips and kissed it. “You are now a Hot Shit, for the rest of your life.”
She picked up his hand, turned it over and kissed his palm. “I dub thee Hot Shit.”
“Hey Pat, if you do it in the freezer with Checkers, can I watch?”
“You’re sick, Dick. Sick, sick, sick.”
“You’re screwing a dead cocker spaniel, and I’m the one who’s sick?”
“OK, you can watch, but only if you don’t wear your suit.”
“You’re a hard woman, Pat.”
“Take it or leave it.”
“OK, OK, but I’m keeping my shoes on.”
The group of students had traipsed in to give him a plaque; he had forgotten what for, he got so many of the damn things. He usually forgot them five minutes after they had left, but in this group there had been a girl — he nearly gasped audibly when she walked in, her honey-colored hair swinging gently with the motion of her body.
Kathleen.
The resemblance was so eerie that he was still thinking about her hours later. It figured, with only a few basic elements to work with, that a number of human beings who were totally unrelated would end up looking exactly like each other. Still, it was unnerving.
She had died a long time ago, but she lived on in his mind, radiant as ever. She had been the only rebel in a family overpowered by a father’s iron dream. Her older brother became the perfect surrogate, groomed, like a fine racehorse, to carry the family colors. But Kathleen rebelled, against her church, her mother and the requirements of a dynasty in the making. She had said it would be a relief not to be a Kennedy anymore when she married, because there were enough of those as it was.
She had seemed to carry sunlight with her-, all of his friends fell in love with her. The man who was her first innocent love spoke for all of them when he wrote her obituary: “Bright, pretty, quick, vivid, filled with ever bubbling enth
usiasm, eager, eager to learn everything … Kathleen. Little Kathleen. Where have you gonel”
If his brother was a shield, deflecting his father’s ambitions, his sister was a guide to finding an independent path. She married a member of the British aristocracy despite her mother’s objections. When he died in battle, she fell in love with a married man who was divorcing his wife, and when her mother said she would declare her dead and no more a member of the family, she decided she would marry him anyway, and not go to talk to a bishop about it. “Really, it’s my life,” she said. She was with him when a small plane crashed against a mountainside in a storm, killing them both instantly.
Her brother could see her face, still, with its heart shape and the Fitzgerald jaw, and the honey-colored hair glinting in the sunlight of a British country lane. When he had visited her that last summer in England, she had confided in him that she had found her Rhett Butler, a man who could carry her away, make her laugh and cry, the sort of passion she had never expected to find. And the hidden romantic in him had envied her. She could lose herself in love, risk everything for it, in a way he never could.
And when she died, something in him, too, was stripped away. He had lost his best friend, the one person to whom he could talk of his doubts about God, and even about his father. When they were teenagers, after parties she would come into his bedroom, wrapped in her bathrobe, and they would talk and gossip and giggle for hours. A friend who saw them together thought them so much alike they should have been twins; they acted like twins, together.
After she died, for a time he had almost longed for death; he seemed to promise Kathleen and Joe that soon he would be dead too. He was unable to concentrate. Sitting at a congressional hearing, he would find himself suddenly back in time, laughing, dancing, walking down a country road, with Kathleen. He found it was better when he took some girl he hardly knew to his bed, because he could imagine that she was a friend of Kathleen’s, and in the morning they would all be together, laughing, joking, Kathleen with a beau and he with a girl, the way it always had been. Finally, he decided he had to live, and if he did, he would burn brightly, fiercely, live as if each day were his last. If death could come at any time, to anyone, then you had to take what you could.