“It’s funny,” she said. “I’ve always just thought of you as Mary’s brother. I’ve never thought of your eyes.”
“When you come right down to it,” I said, “I’ve never thought of yours.”
It was strange to be on the piazza in the June sun talking to a girl, when all the while I kept thinking of Marvin Myles and what she would have said if she had been there. If Cecilia had not gone abroad that summer, we might have really grown to know each other—have kept on playing tennis and being thrown together, as they put it. I don’t remember that I even touched her hand, but I might have.
“Harry,” she said the last time I saw her, “I’m going to miss you,” and I told her that I’d miss her too.
“Harry,” she said, “I’ll see you in September, just after Labor Day.”
She sent me a post card from London, saying just when she was getting home, but I never called her up. On Labor Day I’d gone sailing with Kay Motford at Northeast Harbor.
All the boys and girls I knew who weren’t married already seemed to be getting married that June. Neither Madeline Bush nor her family believed in long engagements, so she and Joe were married early in the month. I was best man at the wedding, which was held on the lawn of Madeline’s grandmother’s house in Peabody. Joe, who was recovering from his ushers’ dinner, was rather pathetic that day—a gray, chilly day which was not meant for a country wedding.
“We’ll keep right on being friends, won’t we?” Joe said. “It will just be the same as ever, only better. That’s what Madeline says.”
“Yes, of course,” I said. But we both were wrong about that. Friends do not always last through a marriage, and when I saw Madeline’s hard little eyes watching me I knew that she was thinking that I had a bad influence on Joe. Now that she had Joe, she would want him for herself.
I was an usher at several other weddings, so I kept seeing the same faces and going through the same routine—dinners where we drank too much and threw glasses on the floor, guest rooms where we unpacked bags and got into cutaways. Kay’s brother, Guy, got married, and Kay wore blue. Then Kay’s best friend, Lorene Wills, married a man from Baltimore and Kay and all the other bridesmaids wore orchid-colored organdy which made Kay look very badly. Then Bob Carroll married a dark-looking girl from Keene, New Hampshire.
Bo-jo Brown’s wedding was the biggest of them all. He married Gay Paisley in the little church in the town where the Paisley Spinning Company was situated. The Paisleys were always married and buried from the old Paisley house which looked as though it had not been used for anything else for quite a while. Jack Purcell told me that the champagne came right over the border in two trucks. Wherever it came from, there was plenty of it. Jack Purcell was Bo-jo’s best man and Bo-jo spoke to me particularly about my not being an usher; it wasn’t that he didn’t want me, he said, it was just that Gay had so many cousins and there had to be somebody from the football team. Gay Paisley was a pale little girl who looked frightened when Bo-jo lifted her up and sat her on his shoulder.
“Come on now,” Bo-jo shouted. “Three times three for Gay!”
Then he wanted to get all the Class together, and all his old form at School, and the crowd at the Club. As old Mr. Paisley sat in his wheel chair watching at the party I heard him make a remark which was quoted quite often afterwards.
“I’m damned if that boy doesn’t think my daughter’s wedding is a football game.”
It was true that Bo-jo seemed to think his marriage was closely connected with college activities. The only thing that disturbed him was that it was already too late for them to have the class baby, although naturally he only mentioned this to a small group.
“It isn’t right,” Bo-jo said. “Do you know who has the class baby? A guy named Weinberg who lives in Galena, Illinois. Whoever heard of Weinberg? I ask you, is it right?”
We told him that it was not right.
“If it had been any of the old crowd,” Bo-jo said, “I wouldn t say a word, but how’s it going to look at the reunion? When we have to give a loving cup to a little kid named Noel Weinberg!”
We moved up to North Harbor as usual in July and finally around the first of August Bill King came up for two days.
It seemed to me that Bill was looking white and rather tired. He told me that he had a new job with another agency at twice his other salary, and it looked as though they were going to get the Coza account away from J. T. Bullard.
“How’s Marvin Myles?” I asked.
“She’s fine,” he said. “She struck Bullard for a raise. You can’t keep that girl down.”
He looked as though he were going to say more and I was glad he didn’t.
“I’m awfully glad,” I said.
“Marvin’s all right,” Bill said. “You needn’t worry about her.”
That was all he said, but something in his attitude hurt me. He did not want to talk about himself any longer and he no longer seemed interested in what I was doing. He seemed to say, without saying it, that he had spent a good deal of time and thought upon me and now he had given up; but I was determined to have him still like me. I don’t know what I did or said, but I think at the end he saw how hard I was trying, because he began to laugh at me the way he used to, and to make jokes about me with Mary.
“Bill,” I said, “you’re not mad at me, are you?” I felt about him, I suppose, much the way Joe Bingham felt about me.
“I was,” Bill said; “not any more. Forget it, Harry.”
Then he began telling about the people he had met in New York, lots of writers and artists. Bill always liked to use big names.
“It’s just you’re one kind of a person,” he said, “and I’m another. Forget it, Harry. The thing is, you want to settle down—and you’re certainly settling.”
“I suppose that’s true,” I said.
“Now, when it comes to me,” Bill said, “all I want is variety. I don’t want to be tied to anything. I want to see people boiling around. It’s the way I get ideas.”
When we went down to the beach Sunday morning Kay was there. She looked very surprised when she saw Bill, and I left them talking while I swam out to the float. Bill always wanted to put off until the last possible moment jumping into the water. When I got ashore again they weren’t saying much.
“Don’t be so silly,” I heard Kay saying. “That’s perfectly all right.”
Then when she saw me she got up.
“Come on,” she said. “Who’s going out to the float?”
“I didn’t come here to freeze to death,” Bill said.
“Come on,” Kay said. “Come out again, Harry.” We swam out to the float and back. Kay had learned the crawl that summer and she did it very well.
“Why didn’t you tell me he was coming?” she asked, and I told her he had just wired the day before.
“It’s too bad,” Kay said. “I like to do something for your friends. I’m going out to lunch, I’m going out to dinner, and I’m going away all tomorrow.”
Bill was sitting on the beach, just where we had left him.
“Good-by, Bill,” Kay said.
Bill sat watching her as she ran up to the bathhouses.
“Does it strike you,” he said, “that she’s mad at me about something?”
“Why should she be mad at you?” I asked.
Bill picked up a handful of sand and watched it run through his fingers.
“There’s absolutely no reason at all,” he said. “I suppose girls around here haven’t got much to do except build incidents out of their imaginations.”
“Incidents?” I asked. “What sort of incidents?”
“Nothing,” Bill said. “Absolutely nothing. They just don’t seem to realize that you’re here today and gone tomorrow.”
XXIII
Frankly, Only a Symbol
We were beginning to get away from the war that summer and back to normalcy, as President Harding put it; there were signs of a business upturn and the League of Nations w
as becoming a dead issue. My whole generation, except me, seemed to be happy and sure of itself. I had a feeling that my whole life meant nothing, while all the other people I knew were building their lives about something worth-while and permanent. I imagine it is some such line of thinking as this that makes most people marry. Romantic novelists have created the illusion that it is hard to find someone to marry. From my own observation I think they are mistaken. There is nothing easier than doing something that nature wants you to do, and there is always someone ready to help you. Before you know what it is all about, you are selecting cuff links for the ushers. I was amazed when Kay Motford told me that she felt much the same as I did. That autumn marked the first time that we really talked about ourselves—or at any rate about certain aspects of ourselves. It might have been better for us both if we had been frank instead of each nursing a sort of reticence, and a fear that one would be defenseless if the other knew too much.
If Erick Munne had not asked me to Northeast Harbor on Labor Day I might never have been interested in how Kay Motford felt, and there we would have been—Kay and I—just as we had been before, impersonal. It was only by accident that he happened into the customers’ room at Smith and Wilding and that I was looking at the board, watching the trade in Motors. Erick Munne did not ask me because he knew and liked me as an individual, but simply because he wanted an extra man, someone whom he could ask home without bothering about, someone whom he would not have to explain to everyone.
“Why don’t you come to Northeast for Labor Day?” Erick said. “The family wants me to find an extra man,” and then he told me who would be there, and I knew everyone. The more he spoke of it the more I could see that he liked the idea, that I was just the sort of person he was looking for, certain to fit in.
“Kay Motford’s coming up,” he said. “Come ahead. Don’t think about it. Say you’re coming.”
“All right,” I said. “I’d like to very much.”
“Take the boat on Friday,” Erick said. “You’d better make a reservation right away.”
About half an hour after the boat sailed Friday afternoon I saw Kay standing in the bow, looking at the green and peaceful islands in the harbor. The wind was blowing at her dress, and she turned around quickly as though she had been thinking about something so hard that she had forgotten where she was.
“Why, Harry,” she said, “I didn’t know you were here.”
“I’m going where you’re going,” I said, “to the Munnes’.”
“I didn’t know you knew the Munnes.”
“I don’t very well,” I told her, “and I never knew you went away from North Harbor on Labor Day.”
“I’m sort of tired of North Harbor,” she said. “It will be fun to see someone new.”
“And here I am,” I told her.
“Yes, that’s true,” she said, “but then there will be different people; perhaps that will make us different.”
We had dinner together and then we changed at Rockland, at four in the morning, to the little steamer with a walking beam that went up among the islands, and we stood watching everything grow clear and bright as the sun drove the mist off the water. We did not talk much, but I was glad she was there, because I had never visited the Munnes and I have always felt ill at ease going to some unfamiliar place.
“Going on a visit,” Kay said, “is like going to a dance, isn’t it? You never know whether you’ll have a good time, and if you don’t you can’t get away.”
“I didn’t know anyone else felt that way,” I said.
“I always do,” Kay said. “Harry, if everybody knows everybody else too well, let’s try to do things together.”
“Yes, of course,” I said.
“That’s just like you,” Kay said. “You always say, ‘Of course.’”
That was why I took her sailing in one of those little knockabouts, because everyone knew everyone else a great deal better than they knew Kay or me. There were all sorts of local jokes that only people who had been there together could understand, and there was that sort of mutual sentiment among them that comes over people who have spent the summer at the same place and who see that it is almost over.
“Harry,” Kay said when we were in the knockabout, “you’d better trim in the jib. You never keep it flat enough.”
“You’ll do better if you keep her off a little,” I answered.
It was a light breeze and there was not much to do, except sit and watch the islands and the streaks on the blue water, and what made everything pleasant was that neither of us had to make any effort. There was the first chill of autumn in the air, the end of summer. Kay was in a tennis dress with a soft brownish orange sweater pulled over it. She braced her legs against the seat opposite and held the tiller under her left arm. Now and then she brushed the hair away from her eyes, when the breeze blew it over her forehead. Her face had been pudgy when she was a little girl, I was thinking, but now that she was older all the pudginess was gone. Her face was light and active like all the rest of her.
“When the air is like this,” Kay said, “and everything is bright and still, it’s like a period and a paragraph.”
“That’s true,” I said. “You feel that something’s over.”
“Harry, we’re not either of us happy, are we?”
I had been looking at the jib as she spoke. I still thought it was trimmed too flat, but I turned around when she asked that question and was surprised to see that she had been watching me and not the sail.
“What makes you ask that?” I said. “Kay, have I been acting badly?”
She smiled. I had often thought that her smile was mechanical and hard, but now her lips, her whole face, looked delicate and sad.
“It isn’t anything in the way we act, but if you’re unhappy you can tell when someone else is. It’s rather nice to find someone else. That’s all I mean.”
In all the time I had known her she had never said so much. Of course I knew she could not have been happy, or she would not have broken off with Joe Bingham, but I had not thought of it particularly from her point of view.
“Everybody else is so damned contented,” she said, “it makes me sick.”
“I know what you mean,” I said.
“No, you don’t,” she said, “not really. They don’t seem to want anything except what they have or what they can get.”
“Maybe they’re right about that,” I said and stopped. “I never thought of you as wanting something you couldn’t get.”
“Haven’t you?” she asked.
“It’s no good to try to be different from what you are,” I said. “Did you ever try?”
“Yes,” she said, “I’ve tried.”
“Well, it doesn’t work,” I said.
“Oh, well,” she said. There was something in her voice that made me turn sideways to look at her.
“Why, Kay,” I said. She was biting her lower lip and rubbing the sleeve of her sweater across her eyes.
“Don’t look at me,” she said. “I’ll be all right in a minute. It’s just—it’s just—I feel so—damn futile.”
“You’d better let me take the boat,” I said.
Instead of taking the tiller as I intended I found that I put my arm around her.
“Kay,” I said.
She did not draw away from me; she did not seem to mind.
“I’m so tired of it,” she said, “so sick of it.”
“It’s all right, Kay,” I said. “I know.”
“I didn’t mean to come out here and make a scene,” she said. “I hate people who do that. Do I look all right?”
“Yes,” I said, “you look beautiful.”
“You never told me that before,” she said. “I didn’t mean to be such a fool.”
“You haven’t been,” I began. “It’s made me feel a whole lot better seeing someone else—”
I stopped and we did not speak for a moment.
“We ought to be going back now. I’m going to pay her off a
nd jibe.”
We did not talk about ourselves any more, but about the boat and the channel, and I found a chart and we looked over it together. I was thinking about Marvin Myles, but she was in the background when I looked at Kay. We kept looking at each other and looking away again.
“Harry,” she said, “maybe people you’ve always known are better. You know what they’re going to do.”
“Yes, that’s true,” I said.
“Well,” Kay said, “you’d better get up in the bow and take in the jib, and get the boathook ready. I don’t know how far she’s going to shoot when I put her in the wind.”
“All right,” I called to her, “put her over.”
“You mind your own business,” Kay said, “and catch that mooring.”
Now that I try to look at it honestly, I frankly think that Kay was only a symbol in a problem and that I was the same to her. It may not pay to look at life that way, and it probably does not matter much, since it is what happens after marriage, the method two people finally find of getting on with each other, that is really important.
Even during that autumn Kay was honest about it, and it all must have puzzled her a little. Once when we had got to seeing a great deal of each other and had begun to take it for granted that we would, Kay asked a question which used to bother me.
“Harry,” she asked me, “do you think we’re falling in love with each other—or trying to fall in love?”
I don’t know how Kay got into the habit, in October, of calling me up at the office, except that a good many casual impulses seemed to turn into habits with us before we knew it. I don’t know when I began to wait for her to telephone or when I began to feel that something was wrong when she didn’t.
H. M. Pulham, Esquire Page 27