by Hugh Hood
They didn’t see him there, thirty-four-year-old ghost from 1961, in the little boy squirming on the back seat. He shrank into the little boy and swelled into himself in his coffee-mill Volkswagen, and there were two of him, four years old and thirty-four.
“Put the cap on good and tight.” Alex turned to Margaret. “Did I ever tell you about the man who drank all the liquor?” They nodded their heads and gazed lovingly at each other and (thirty-) four year old Arthur looked on, feeling safe and happy.
Five years later they changed the name and called them Essex Terraplanes and then just Terraplanes and at last they stopped making them. They don’t even make Hudsons anymore but we were able to keep that car until the war was halfway over. The two of him expanded into three — as multiple as he ever became, even with his sense of period. I was learning to drive our old Essex the day I first saw Mrs. Vere in Westport. It must have been 1942 because I got my driver’s licence the next year, in the other car. I might have had the Essex for my own; but it died with sixty thousand miles on the clock the second time around, a bare grey spot that always hurt my eyes on the upholstery in the driver’s seat.
We were by the slips when she came along in the Saturday morning sun. The codgers stared behind her and gossiped as she passed, mourning Lieutenant Vere, hero of Pearl Harbor, and commending his widow’s fair beauty. Her four-year-old trailed behind her and, Heavens, thought Arthur seeing it, relishing it, the ghost of twenty-three-year-old Gloria was in that toddler, and I couldn’t see her. I saw Mrs. Vere, how I saw her in white tennis shorts, mourning behind her, fine gold fuzz on her legs catching the sun. I saw the glint, cowering in my rickety Essex. How she strode, how she put forward her perfect ankles, coming to look at the sunlight on the water. She looked, oh, she looked like a girl, like an attainable girl to me at fifteen, and how I loved her as she sauntered along I feel still, all three of us feel, four, fifteen, and thirty-four, comfortably here in my little period piece.
On the other bucket seat the paper cone of flowers moves lazily with the car’s motion, wetness from the leaves shining on the leather, tiny rustle of green leaves, flip of the yellow blossoms catching Arthur’s eye as he rolls along in June, coming for Gloria, thinking of her marvellous mother at twenty-six. She looked like a co-ed, with that funny authority one’s older sister has, that sway compounded of a trifling difference in age and a cloud of otherness, mystery of being a woman. How I adored Mrs. Adam Vere, that golden widow as she said, looking into my Essex: “Where do we swim around here, that’s safe for children?” She listened attentively to my knowledgeable counsel.
Love me or leave me
And let me be lonely.
You won’t believe me
But I love you only.
I gaped, I croaked, I blushed:
“At the Boating Club,” I told her, “afternoons I’m on duty as a lifeguard and I’ll look after your little girl.” I scarcely looked at the toddler out of the corner of my eye, using her as a comic prop, an introduction-arranger, something out of a comic-strip or the opening paragraphs of a Ladies Home Journal story. There are ghosts out of the future, the unborn, as well as the dead from the past. How could I fathom marriageable Gloria, twenty-three, inside a pouting four year old? I looked instead at her unmarriageable mother and yearned and Gloria has her revenge.
She turned away and the back of her knees dimpled at me, her thighs like butterscotch, to the edge of her shorts. Fifteen is hell! I shook all the way home and the knob of the gearshift loosened in my hand. And all that summer I bounced baby Gloria through the wavelets at the water’s edge, on her stomach, on her back, rolled her yellow red blue white beachball along the sand and chased it when the wind caught it and she cried, and Mrs. Vere laughed.
“Get it, Arthur, get it!” they commanded together, their voices blending. That ball took off, sailed, spinning along the tops of the ripples, nothing inside to hold it down. I often chased it a quarter of a mile, coming back digging my toes into the beige sand to lie panting beside Mrs. Vere, while Gloria jumped up and down on my sacroiliac.
“Don’t jump on Arthur, sweetie, he’s winded!” I peeked, pulse racing, through a screen of sand at an expanse of butterscotch flank, and pressed my aching adolescent length flat on the sand’s heat.
Pulse, he thought, that’s funny. He was Assistant Circulation Director of Pulse Magazine, man of a thousand details, and had spent this long June day checking the results of a sample mailing piece which he’d tested in Philadelphia and Boise. They drew a three-percent response in Boise, so he took the figures to the files, digging out the results from a campaign of thirty-second TV spots which he had tried on Cheyenne, the year before. No one in the world knew as much about the circulation of Pulse as Arthur Merlin, historian, builder of archives, ranker of green filing cabinets. He loved Gloria best; but next to her he loved documents on circulation figures broken down by region, and third he loved the files of Pulse.
Twenty-five years of Pulse — it came out first in 1936 with a famous picture of Boulder Dam on the cover, a picture which he had a hundred times affixed to his mailing pieces. His adolescence and young manhood slumbered in the files. Often on a working day, on the excuse that he was seeking promotional material, he spent an afternoon at Pulse Index where Gloria worked, or with a swash of twenty-six issues from 1938 on his desk, admiring the page layout, studying the changing typefaces, loving the unlined face of Brenda Diana Duff Frazier, the Jimmy Lunceford piece, the Studebaker Champion $537 F.O.B. Detroit, all the stories in those old issues landmarks of his trip to adulthood, documents as familiar to him as MS. C. (Cotton, Otho A. 6) to some brother scholar.
He stopped for a red light and hoped that they would arrive at the beach before the sunshine died. He wanted to see Gloria illuminated by the sunset on this, nearly the longest, day of the year. Lately she had been petulant and pouty, which made him think of her behaviour at the age of four. The child is mother to the woman, he reflected as he crossed the intersection, I suppose she’ll always be a pouty one. When she had come to him looking for work she’d pouted.
“School’s out forever,” she said dolefully, “nothing will be the same.”
“You can’t go to school indefinitely, Gloria,” he told her. “I’ll help you find a nice job, and you can have some fun in New York. Most girls like to live in New York for a while before they get married.”
“I’m not ‘most girls.’”
“You’re certainly not average,” he said, laughing beyond hilarity, “no, definitely not average.” He had never really seen her before; he had this troublesome treble vision; but he saw her now and she was very good. “How old are you now, Gloria?” he asked her, avuncular, disinterested, beginning to tremble.
“I’m twenty-two, I guess.”
“I guess?”
“I never think of it. Are you going to give me a job?”
“I don’t give jobs but the company certainly will.” On his recommendation they put her to work on the Index and he saw her all the time. All day she read stories from the files, and examined yellowing pictures, and prepared case histories; the pictures puzzled her.
“You mean that’s Frank Sinatra? But he looks young?”
Arthur started at her in amusement. “Frank Sinatra is young.”
“He’s a foolish bald old man.”
“Whom do you consider young, for goodness’ sake?”
“Any girl whose bust hasn’t developed.”
“How do you tell about boys?”
“There isn’t any decent way,” she said, laughing.
So he was afraid to ask her how old she thought him. He hadn’t had his real life yet, none of it, he told himself. All his college classmates were settled into the beginnings of middle age, with wives and a plethora of children. Of all his generation, he thought, only a few like himself could sometimes feel like children. I’m young, he swore earnestly, I’m a bab
y. He picked up the picture of Sinatra and studied it, the floppy necktie, the luxuriant curls, the hollow cheeks, the swaying back and forth with the microphone clutched in both hands. It must be from the story on Frank’s first date at the Paramount, 1942 perhaps, certainly no earlier than 1941. Gloria would have been three years old, and should remember the excitement.
“He was a swoon-crooner, Gloria,” he said kindly, “surely you remember the phrase.”
“A swoon-crooner?” He might as well have said a doughboy, a wise-guy, a tough egg, she didn’t understand the language. “Your crowd must have the equivalent, Paul Anka perhaps or Fabian,” he hazarded.
“I don’t have a crowd,” she said positively.
He wanted to shake her but said instead: “Come to the beach with me tonight?” He imagined beachballs yellow red blue white rolling along far stretches of beige sand.
“I love the beach,” she said simply, and he took it for assent.
As he handed her the daffodils and watched her bury her face in the petals, he checked his watch and guessed that there were almost two hours of sunlight left. It was a dying sunlight though, a seven-thirty slant of the beams which traced the flowers on the beachrobe she wore, and the ties on her sandals. At least she’s ready to leave, he realized, we may not get into the water but we can stretch out together on the sand for maybe an hour. The daffodil girl, the primavera.
“Where did you get these, so late in the season?”
“I had them refrigerated months ago, just for you,” he claimed extravagantly but truthfully. He had said to the florist: “I want an assured supply of daffodils, I don’t care what it costs. Keep them in cold storage for me and I’ll pay extra.” He thought he stood to win or lose on daffodils, her favourite flower. If he kept her like spring, she might never think of the eleven years’ difference in their ages. I’m a child, I’m young, young, he reflected, watching her put them carefully in water, afraid to hurry her. Don’t make her think of time, he advised himself, and other voices in his mind supported the strategy, never nudge her out of the glorious present. Don’t give her time to think about time. So he waited patiently until she pulled her beachrobe modestly around her and started for the door. He opened it quickly, rang for the elevator with sharp precision, started the car with unobtrusive speed, and hastened across the graceful old town towards the Boating Club, zipped into the parking area, plucked a beach-basket from the back seat, and felt an urgent joy. It would not be dark until nine-thirty, lots of time, hours, hours.
“Start down the beach and find a place to sit,” he commanded, feeling his excitement stir, “I’ll get out of my clothes and catch up to you.” He trotted towards the clubhouse and paused at the door to watch her make her lovely way along the beach, no longer beige, the sand, but a darker shadowy hue spreading as the light changed and the shadows lengthened. At every second stride she dug her toes in the sand and kicked out like a colt. The onshore breeze took her robe and filled it like a pregnant sail as she shook out her hair, and then it cradled every yellow lock and made them dance. He broke all records for changing into swimming trunks and chased her down the strip of sand.
A dozen yards from where she halted at their favourite spot, he stood still and watched. Her back was to him as she bent and loosened her sandals, kicking them off. Then she straightened and slipped off her flowery robe, stood erect on her bare toes, scrunching them into the sand for balance, stretching her arms above her head, looking for a bizarre instant like a piece of radiator sculpture. Then her form seemed to zoom in on him, taking his sight, and she was so perfectly there, so present, that his heart paused and his throat constricted with his press of feelings. Gazing, he recognized her power and her everlasting triumph, and how it was that the aureole, the haze of recollection in which he wrapped her appearance when he imagined her, was not around her now — the glory was in her. She pressed outwards against the air, filling out her lines.
“She’s only a pretty girl in a bathing suit,” he told himself, to make his head stop spinning. As he came up to her he made a commonplace remark about the sea. “The moving waters at their priest-like task of pure ablution,” he said.
“It’s a lot of water,” she said, inhaling.
“Do you know,” he said, a little desperately, “that water connects everything? It’s the only element that goes everywhere. This same water washes the shores of the Ganges, the floes in Franklin’s Land.”
“It’s Long Island Sound,” she said, looking away, “it comes out of the tap in my bathtub.”
“Why do you come to the beach at all?”
“To get out into the air. The beach makes me feel good, I like to get my clothes off. I wish they allowed Bikinis at the club.”
“They don’t forbid them.”
“They don’t allow them. I know what they think.”
He pounced on it. “How do you know?” The trivial question suddenly assumed importance in his eyes. How could she know? How could she ever grasp a tradition or a moral convention? How do these people manage to live, he wondered, how do they make their calculations?
“I don’t see anybody else wearing one,” she said defensively.
“Why let that stop you?”
“Don’t quiz me,” she said impatiently, “I’ll wear one when I see somebody else wear one.”
“Give me the ocular proof,” he said, “unless I put my hand in the wound, unless I see the nails, I will not believe.” He looked at her but she wouldn’t look back. “Blessed are they,” he said gently, “who have not seen and yet believe.”
“Why can’t you be content with me as I am?” she complained. “Instead of puzzling yourself with all that stuff. I came with you, didn’t I?”
“I’m glad you did,” he said, “and thank you.” He returned to the charge. “Don’t you feel anything about the ocean, about the water? Think of all the fish in the sea, of all the ships, the treasure. There’s supposed to be a galleon lying somewhere off Montauk, blown a thousand miles off its course by freakish gales. And over there,” he gestured widely, “lies the Andrea Doria with millions of dollars worth of stuff inside, just out of reach, just too far down.”
“Hundreds of people in her,” she said, “floating at the portholes, knocking at the glass trying to get out, their hair washing behind them. Do you know where my father is?”
He ought to have remembered, he had remembered, and perhaps that was why they were where they were.
“He’s still in the Arizona,” she said in a shaking voice, “he’s down there with hundreds of other men who didn’t get out. I’ve been to Pearl Harbor, you know, and I’ve seen it. The masts are sticking out of the water and the men are still inside; they’ve been there twenty years. My father was younger than you are when he drowned. To hell with the moving waters at their priest-like task. They’ve melted my father’s flesh — what do you suppose he looks like now?”
“Forget what I said!”
“How did you hear the news about my mother, Arthur, did you hear it the way I heard it? They called me at the dormitory, I was asleep, and told me that I wasn’t going to see her again. She was all smashed to pieces, you know. There were bits of the car along the Parkway for half a mile. They didn’t open the coffin, and I hadn’t seen her for a month before the accident. She just disappeared; there was nothing left for me. I wasn’t born without a memory, Arthur, I just don’t want to remember.”
“Let me tell you something,” he said, “we all become orphans in time. My father died late last year but before that my world was just what you make yours now, static. Things went along and never changed from year to year. Everybody was always there when I went home, the same books and pictures, and the litter of papers maybe a little thicker every spring. Then my father died, and I thought it would all change, that the house would be empty and my mother all at once shrivelled and old.”
“And it was!” she positively gu
essed.
“Not in the least,” he denied, “not at all. My mother looks younger every day and my father advises me constantly. He’s closer to me than ever. I’m not a superstitious man, Gloria.” She laughed. “I’m not superstitious but I can hear him talking to me, telling me how to handle things. It isn’t like a voice, it’s a … I don’t know what it is … it’s a tendency, a feeling. I know what to do, because that’s what he would have done. It’s as though his intelligence were in my own, like a habit.”
“That’s a hangover from childhood.”
“No. It’s as if there were another mind in mine.”
“You’re simply highly suggestible.”
“Cut it out,” he said, “you have these flashes too, admit it.”
“I’ll never have them,” she said, “I only see what’s there.”
He saw her mother over again. He had seen her closer to death than Gloria had, the weekend she died, and she had looked as though neither time nor death could ever touch her. At thirty-five she looked exactly as she had looked twenty years ago on this same beach, fresh, unlined, immortal. And over a Saturday to Monday she had disintegrated, to be redistributed along the universe like the moving waters. He shivered. Twilight is coming, he thought. They were sitting with their backs to a ledge of rock four or five feet high, which ran the length of the beach and some days acted as a windbreak. If you lay down near the ledge, the air was completely still, all its currents diverted and passing over you. You could bake under the ledge in unadulterated sunlight on days when it was downright cool in less sheltered spots. Tonight, in the declination of the sun, the ledge threw a shadow towards them which lengthened as they lay there. Already their bodies lay in it to the waist, and in a few minutes it would cover them up. It was cold in the shadow and soon they both shivered.
“It’s too cold to go in,” said Gloria, musing.
The sun sat on the edge of the world and to the east the moon was an unimportant shred of cotton batting. Way way out on the Sound a single sail hovered, almost seemed to disappear, was there again. Underneath them the sand grew black and lost its daylight warmth.