An Unfinished Season

by Ward Just

  Finally her arms relaxed.

  Are you all right?

  I’ll be all right in a minute, she said. Is it gone?

  It flew away, I said.

  My God, Aurora said. I didn’t know what it was. One minute I was kissing you and the next, there it was. Those eyes.

  Here, I said, and handed her my champagne. Only about a quarter inch was left in the glass but she took it and drained it, her hands still trembling. She said, I didn’t know what I was looking at. I didn’t know what it was, some creep standing and watching us or what. She shook her head.

  Sorry, she said, with an attempt at a smile. Gosh.

  It’s gone now, I said.

  That’s what happens when I take off my glasses. I can’t see a thing without them. Plus which, I was with you. I wasn’t thinking about wild animals, at least not that one. Where are we, anyhow?

  I said, Come on. I’ll show you the pool, and pointed to the portico and the semicircle of cabanas back of it. We could smell the chlorinated water. She didn’t say anything but the expression on her face was not encouraging. I lit a cigarette for her and one for myself and we sat listening to the night insects and, far away, an owl. After a while, Aurora opened the car door and began to stroll in the direction of the pool. She turned and asked me to bring her eyeglasses; and then she removed her high heels and walked off on tiptoe, swinging the shoes from their straps.

  When I caught up with her she was sitting on the low board, her toes just touching the water, squinting into the darkness. A silent audience of canvas chairs and sunmats was arrayed around the pool. The moon was gone and the stars were fading. I handed Aurora her eyeglasses but she did not put them on right away, preferring to squint into the darkness. I began to describe for her this swimming pool on a Saturday afternoon in midsummer, indolent teenagers and young mothers and their small children, pool boys present with fresh towels and a drink if you wanted one. We were drowsy from the sun and the syrupy odor of suntan oil. At five the children were ordered out and the adults took over, men just in from a round of golf, their wives from the tennis court. The men would show off their diving skills from the high board; and those who had no skill would cannonball. The bar did a brisk business until six o’clock, when everyone dressed for dinner, usually some affair in the clubhouse; there was a dance every Saturday night. I pointed to a cabana at the far end and told her that was where I had my first taste of tobacco and, the next year, scotch. I was eleven the first year, twelve the second. That was a naughty cabana, owned by a family called Cordes. They had two teenage daughters, older than me and eager to corrupt. I was a kind of mascot and fell in love with both of them. Later on, the older daughter started sleeping with the lifeguard. The lifeguard was infatuated but good, and had bought a ring and was planning elopement when the summer ended and Suzan—everyone called her Suzan-with-a-z, and eventually just Z—went back to Northwestern, and that was that with the lifeguard. He returned the next summer but it wasn’t the same. Suzan had found another boyfriend, a senior at Purdue, a football player as big as an oak and just about as dumb. Each summer had its own story, usually centering on a romance that didn’t work out.

  Aurora smiled but didn’t say anything. She still held her shoes from their straps.

  The summer after that, the lifeguard was gone. He moved up to one of the better clubs in Winnetka. Better pay. But the manager was quite specific, no fraternizing with members. The lifeguard had had it with members and the members’ wives and daughters, so he didn’t mind. That was what Suzan told me.

  Aurora said, I don’t understand about perdu.

  It’s that university in Indiana.

  Oh, she said, laughing. I thought it was the French, perdu. Lost.

  Perdu in West Lafayette, Indiana.

  I never heard of it, she said.

  You don’t know what you’re missing, I said.

  What happened to the football player?

  He graduated, I said. Married a Delta Gamma.

  What’s a Delta Gamma?

  Sorority, I said.

  So you were here every summer, she said.

  Watching the comedy, I said. I took a long look down the line of cabanas at the Cordeses’, all the furniture tucked away for the evening. I remembered that the cushions were royal blue and the tables white. The daughters wore identical yellow Jantzen swimsuits, and by the end of the summer their skin was brown as mahogany, their hair bleached white. Every hour or so they would walk together to the bar for a Coke or an iced tea, enjoying the attention from the pool boys and the lifeguard and every other man in the vicinity. Sometimes they’d ask me to fetch the drinks and I would return to find them painting each other’s toenails, concentrating fiercely as if they were looking through microscopes. Suzan and—I had unaccountably forgotten her sister’s name. Those summers when I was eleven, twelve, thirteen, we were inseparable at the swimming pool. The summer after the year I had been sick, they had been very kind, wanting to know all the medical details and shuddering when I invented a few. They said they had always wanted a kid brother and now they had one. I spent hours listening to them gossip in a sisterly language, difficult to decipher; but I thought if I listened hard enough I would learn about girls. What I learned was the inevitability, the curse, of menstrual cramps and that the sisters had them at identical times of the month. Then they would both retire to the cabana’s interior, avoiding the sun. Men had it so easy, Suzan said. Men didn’t know how easy they had it. Men could do what they wanted whenever they wanted to do it, so darned unfair. Don’t you agree, Wils? Yes, of course, I said. It was a tragedy, a never-ending wrong. Then the girls would continue their indecipherable conversation. The next summer their family took a house in Wisconsin and I didn’t see them at all. And the summer after that, the girls spent less time at the pool because they had summer jobs and busy lives on the weekends, and who needed the pool? Our great friendship was ended.

  Donna, I said.

  Aurora said, What?

  I’d forgotten Suzan’s sister’s name. It was Donna.

  I stepped off the low board and lit a cigarette, leaning against the lifeguard’s elevated chair. I had not been to the pool at all this summer and I wondered if the routine was the same, and who were this year’s Cordes girls.

  Come on, I said. Let’s go to Chicago.

  I like it here, Aurora said. I like the silence.

  Shall we take a swim?

  No swim, Aurora said.

  We drove to Chicago in near silence, through the acrid smoke of the peat bogs, through the farmland and villages to the edge of the North Shore. The roads were empty, the night as dark as it had ever been, until we approached the city. We drew close, the spell between us unbroken. I wanted to confide in her, believing in her completely, but I had not the words to reprise the rush of memory when I looked at the empty chairs and sunmats and the Cordes cabana bare of furniture. Those girls had brought me up, whether they knew it or not. I went on to describe our conversations and I could see Aurora nod in the darkness, and I knew she was back in her memory, too. I thought to ask her where she was going to college in September, and when she said Barnard I laughed and said I would write her from the University of Chicago, one urban bohemia to another; I said I knew she’d fit right in and so would I. All this time we held hands and I was so glad she was there in the darkness beside me.

  We passed through Half Day and Winnetka and Evanston. I drove to Lake Shore Drive via Bryn Mawr, the jazz club closed now, the El station empty, the streets deserted. I told her about the bartender and his greeting and about the time Georg Brunis let me sit in for Hey-Hey Humphrey, one number only, “Big Noise from Winnetka,” where all you needed from the drummer was supercilious percussion. It was my eighteenth birthday, legal drinking age at last; and I had been a customer for three years already, Chicago as wide open as it had ever been. Aurora said she had been to the Eleven-Eleven Club just once, with a man her father did not approve of, an intern at Passavant Hospital. He wanted t
o sit in for Hey-Hey Humphrey, too, but Brunis wouldn’t let him. Brunis and Humphrey looked at him as if he were a bug in a tweezers. She said this with a wide grin, and I leaned over to her and kissed her on the mouth, flying through the red light on Sheridan Road.

  He didn’t take it well, she said.

  An embarrassment for him, I said.

  Terrible, she said. He thought being a doctor entitled him to play Hey-Hey Humphrey’s drums. He had beautiful hands, long fingers as supple as rubber. I mean Hey-Hey Humphrey. The intern was a brute.

  So your father was right.

  That one time, Aurora said.

  And Oscar Palshaw, I said.

  Two times, she admitted.

  I’ll bet you liked the green MG.

  A coffin with an engine like a sewing machine, she said.

  We swept down Lake Shore Drive, the city spread out before us glittering with nervous energy, its relentless industrial hum. Chicago never closed down completely and now it seemed swollen with potential, crouched beside the black void of the lake, void all the way to Canada. The wind came off the lake and rushed through the open windows of my car and I was as happy as it was possible to be. I began to speculate on the marital arrangements of the Palshaws and where the green MG and the rude Englishman fit, if they fit at all. Aurora added a thought about Oscar’s habit of drinking three martinis before dinner and proposing marriage before the dessert.

  Did he ask you to marry him? I asked.

  All but, she said.

  What did he say exactly?

  He said he’d have to sleep with me first.

  As the precondition to become Mrs. Palshaw, she added.

  Lucky you, I said. Didn’t you find him—old?

  Not as old as you, she said.

  What do you mean by that? I said.

  It’s a compliment, Wils. She leaned over and bit my ear. And you, she said. What do you think about Oscar? What was I supposed to say to him? Gosh, let me just get my pants off and we’ll see where this leads.

  I think that’s what he thought, she said. Aren’t they amazing?

  Boys, I said.

  Boys, she agreed. Now’s your turn in the confessional.

  I waited a long time before answering. I had an easier time with other people’s stories than I did with my own. I had yet to find a narrative to my life, certainly no narrative that advanced in any coherent order or in which I played anything but a winning cameo role, kid brother or newsroom raconteur. It did not seem to me that you could fashion a life until you could make the decisions that governed it. Until that time you lived quietly in your father’s house.

  No stories that can match that one, I said.

  No girlfriends? she said.

  A few. Not very serious.

  Why not? Aurora said.

  Bad chemistry, I said with a smile.

  Too young, you mean.

  They’re inexperienced. Like me.

  But you tell them stories. You flirt with them all the time, I’ve watched you. It’s quite a performance.

  I like it when their fathers are around. They get so pissed off.

  She grinned and turned up the volume on the radio and we began to sing along with Ella Fitzgerald, Aurora’s head on my shoulder. I was still thinking about the debs and their irritated fathers, and then about Oscar Palshaw. I could not believe he had said what Aurora said he said; no one behaved that way. Then I wondered if there were different rules on the North Shore. Aurora told her story with conviction and a nonchalance that suggested—extravagance. Gosh, let me just get my pants off and we’ll see where this leads.

  I remember now, she said. He winked at me.

  Who? I asked.

  Brunis, she said. Georg Brunis with his bad skin and dinky mustache and bartender’s belly. He put his trombone to his mouth and winked at me. He made sure the intern saw it, too.

  And did he?

  He did. His face got red. Then he said it was past my bedtime and we would have to go home right now. And I said I didn’t want to go home, that I liked it at the Eleven-Eleven Club and wanted to stay through the set. He could go if he wanted but I was staying, because Georg Brunis was so great.

  Aurora and I held hands in the darkness, the wind rushing into the car. We passed the marina and the Lincoln Park Gun Club and I accelerated, anticipating the turn into Lincoln Park. The skyscrapers of the Loop loomed over us to the south, behind the Drake Hotel. Summer was not ended and before too long my parents would leave for New Orleans and the slow boat to Havana. I thought the promised red shirt would look marvelous on Aurora and more than marvelous if she wore it without a bra. I shot up the long curve of Lake Shore Drive and into the turn with her head touching my shoulder, and when we arrived at her apartment building on Lincoln Park we were both as wide awake as if it were noon. When I parked and turned toward her she put her finger to her lips and winked.

  6

  A THREE-WEEK STRETCH that summer was unusually warm and I imagine it was for that reason that people told stories of their winter ordeals, the commuter trains that did not run and the basement pipes that burst. Too cold for the paperboys to deliver the Tribune. Too cold to walk the dog. People stood limply in their evening clothes, sweating under the high-topped tents, too enervated to dance. Men removed their dinner jackets as a matter of course, and Meyer Davis and Lester Lanin often played to empty dance floors. The heat gave rise to confusion, people losing their bearings and drinking more than was good for them, a gin and tonic a kind of oasis in the tropical heat. Everyone had a story but it was the same story, details altered; and all the stories were remembered with an amusing twist, the nuthatch belly-up in the birdbath, the absence of gray squirrels. Where had all the squirrels gone? Palm Beach, old Mr. Bartlow said. They’ve gone to Palm Beach.

  He was dancing with one of the debs. He had not danced all evening and decided to select the prettiest girl he could find so he could tell her about the squirrels in Palm Beach. They were dancing a tango, one of the two dances he executed really well, a dip and a reverse, elbows flying. The girl loved it because boys could not tango, they didn’t understand the Latin spirit of it, a kind of concentrated abandon. Only experienced older men knew how it worked. People made way for them, watching enviously because the girl was completely in synch and that was so rare. They made a handsome couple, the girl laughing, her head next to his as they broke into a little foxtrot. He was telling her about the squirrels scrambling aboard the—and he forgot the name of the train, either the Florida Limited or the City of Miami. Bar car, he said, and ordering drinks all around before bedding down for the night and then, two days later, disembarking in Palm Beach and being taken at once to the Breakers, where a floor had been reserved. Squirrel floor, each room with its vase of roses and dish of acorns. Once they were settled they made a run for the beach, where they would sit under umbrellas. He spun the story out, what the squirrels had for cocktails and dinner and the sports they enjoyed, shuffleboard and miniature golf. The deb laughed and laughed but people noticed that an odd expression had come over her face. When the dance ended she kissed old Mr. Bartlow on the cheek, a warm kiss, thanks for the dance. He was winded but pleased about the kiss. She stood waiting, and when he thanked her—You’re a fine dancer, young lady, let’s do this again sometime soon—she looked at him with an expression somewhere in the vicinity of dismay leaning toward amusement and said in a strangled voice,

  Bill? It’s me, Marcie.

  Marcie?

  And he saw at once that she was Marcie Lamb, his stepdaughter, and all this time he had thought she was just another pretty deb in an alice-blue gown with pearls and a white orchid, so they collapsed together in laughter and he led her to the bar for a congratulatory drink because they had danced so well together, everyone commenting on how cute they were in the strut. The story went around the floor, everyone amused, old Bill so caught up in the tango that he didn’t recognize his own stepdaughter, and that was what the hot weather did to you. Even Marcie’s mother
rolled her eyes. Bill could be so damn dim sometimes.

  Brutal heat following so closely on the brutal cold caused people to wonder if the weather was not undergoing some fundamental change, perhaps a return to the Ice Age or worse, the seasons themselves no longer reliable. Florida had been cold and damp, ice in the sand traps. Migratory birds were not following their usual patterns, canvasback ducks disappearing from the Mississippi flyway, other anomalies. It made you wonder about the monkey business above the Arctic Circle, Russian nuclear testing, one explosion after another and no one called them to account.

  Don’t tell me the Russians don’t have something to do with it.

  Rads in the atmosphere interfering with nature’s rhythms.

  There’s a lot we don’t know.

  And here someone would turn to the older man who hadn’t said much but had been listening with mounting alarm.

  Don’t you think so, Charlie?

  Anything’s possible—

  That’s exactly what I mean.

  But not actually, no, Charlie said in a voice that commanded respect.

  Aren’t you hearing the same thing?

  No, I’m not. It’s just—weather. Weather’s changeable. Don’t you remember the winters we had years back? And everyone’s testing nuclear weapons, even us.

  Charlie Smithers was a lawyer who had clients in Washington. There was a rumor that Ike had wanted him for a very sensitive position in the Justice Department but he had turned the White House down. He didn’t want to leave the North Shore for Washington but he was reported to have said that he could be helpful to them in other ways. So he was often in the capital on unspecified business with the Justice Department and other government agencies; and in the spring Charlie and his wife had been invited to a state dinner at the White House, and the next morning he and Ike had played golf together at Burning Tree. Charlie knew whereof he spoke; not that he spoke often or at length, he was much too discreet for that. But if you asked him a straight question you got a straight answer. Now half a dozen people had collected around Charlie Smithers, including Aurora and me, Aurora listening intently.