Short Stories: Five Decades (106 page)

The sorrow was deep and complex, and was composed of many elements—a sense of deprivation, a shadow of impending departure, a nostalgia for memories that were moving irrevocably away from innocence, a confusion of emotion more profound than anything he had ever experienced before in his life. Engulfed and shaken as he was, Munnie also knew that if, telepathically affected, Martha would stop laughing with Bert and get up and walk the thirty yards along the wall to where he lay, and if she were to sit down beside him and touch his hand, all would instantaneously be well.

But she didn’t move, and he heard her laugh more loudly at something that Bert had said and which Munnie couldn’t hear.

Suddenly, Munnie knew what he was going to do. As soon as he was on the boat, and all bargains were over, all rules no longer in effect, he was going to write Martha and ask her to marry him. Clumsily, he began to compose the letter in his mind.
This will come as a surprise to you, I suppose, because all summer long I never said a word, but I didn’t realize for a long time what had been happening to me, and besides there was the arrangement you and Bert and I made in Florence to keep everything on a purely friendly basis, which I am happy we did. But now I’m on the boat and I feel free to tell you how I feel about you. I love you and I want to marry you. I don’t know how you feel about me, but maybe the arrangement kept you from saying anything, just the way it did me. Anyway, I hope so. I am going to get a job and get settled just as soon as I get home, and then you could come back and meet my family and all that
…

The letter stopped writing itself inside his head. He thought of his mother sitting down having tea with Martha, saying, “You say your mother lives in Philadelphia? And your father … oh … Do try one of these cakes. And you say you met Munnie in Florence and then just you and he and Bert went all around Europe for the rest of the summer all together … Lemon, cream?”

Munnie shook his head. He’d handle his mother when the time came. He went back to writing the imaginary letter.

You said once that you didn’t know what you wanted to do with yourself, that you were waiting for some kind of revelation to send you in a permanent direction. Maybe you’ll laugh at me for offering myself as a revelation, but maybe you’ll feel that marrying me will
…

Munnie shook his head disgustedly. God, even if she was crazy in love with him, he thought, a sentence like that would queer it forever.

I
don’t know about you and other men
, he went on jumpily in his head.
You never seemed interested in anybody else while you were with us and you never mentioned anybody else in any particular way and as far as I could tell you never showed any preference between Bert and me
…

Munnie opened his eyes and turned his head to look at Bert and Martha. They were sitting close together, almost head to head, facing each other, talking in low, serious voices.

He remembered Bert’s description of what he called his gift. I have charm and I don’t give a damn. Well, Munnie thought, with satisfaction, even if she overlooked the egotism, that can’t have attracted her so much. And besides, there was that open and avowed blonde in St. Tropez. If Bert had planned to do anything with Martha, or if Martha, as Bert had predicted, was interested in making a choice, that certainly would have put an end to it, wouldn’t it? Bert, Munnie decided, could be the amusing, bachelor friend of the family. The best kind.

Munnie dozed a little, a succession of warm and delicious images pouring through his mind. Martha coming off the airplane at Idlewild, because after getting his letter the boat was too slow, and walking away from the runway into his arms. Martha and he waking late on a Sunday morning in their own apartment and deciding to doze for another hour and then go out to breakfast. Martha coming into a party on his arm and a slight, approving, envious, subtle hush sweeping the room for a moment, because she was so beautiful. Martha …

Someone was shouting. Far off, someone was shouting.

Munnie opened his eyes and blinked, thinking, puzzled. Now, why did anyone shout in my dream?

The cry came again and Munnie stood up and looked out at the bay. In the water, at least three hundred yards away, was a small boat. It was the dory they had seen before. It had capsized and it was low in the water and there were two figures clinging to it. As he watched, he heard the cry again, wordless, desperate. A hand and arm flashed in the sunlight, waving.

Munnie turned and looked over at Bert and Martha. They were stretched out, their heads together on the towel, their bodies making a wide V, sleeping.

“Bert!” Munnie called. “Martha! Get up!”

Bert stirred, then sat up, rubbing his eyes. The shout came again, wailing, from the bay.

“Out there,” Munnie said, pointing. Bert swung around, still sitting, and looked at the capsized boat and the two almost-submerged figures clinging to it, a man and a woman. “Good God,” Bert said. “What do they think they’re doing there?” He nudged Martha. “Wake up,” he said, “and watch the shipwreck.”

The boat lay almost motionless in the water, only shifting a little as the two figures moved, changing their positions. As Munnie watched, he saw the man push off from the boat and start to swim toward the beach. The man swam slowly and every thirty seconds he stopped and shouted and waved. After each stop he slid under, then reappeared, splashing and frantic.

“Oh, my,” Bert said. “He’s leaving her out there!”

Bert was standing by now, with Martha at his side, peering across the bay. The man had a good three hundred yards to go before he could touch down on the beach and with his screaming and waving and going under twice a minute, it didn’t look as though he was going to make it. The woman who had been left hanging onto the boat shouted from time to time, too, and her voice sounded shrill and angry as it floated across the glittering quiet water.

Finally, Munnie could make out what the swimmer was shouting. “
Au secours! Je noye, je noye!
” Munnie felt a little flicker of annoyance with him. It seemed melodramatic and overdone to be shouting “I’m drowning,” especially in such a powerful voice, on a peaceful afternoon in the calm, sunny bay. He went over to the edge of the wall, joining Bert and Martha.

“He seems to be doing all right,” Bert said. “He’s got a nice, strong stroke there.”

“He’s going to have to do a little explaining later,” Martha said, “leaving his girl friend out there like that.”

As they watched, the man went under again. He seemed to stay under a long time and Munnie began to feel his mouth get very dry, watching the spot where the man had disappeared. Then the man surfaced again, this time with his shoulders and arms bare, white and glistening against the deep blue water. He had taken off his shirt underwater and a moment later the shirt came up and floated away, billowing soddenly. The man shouted again. By now it was plain that he was calling directly to the three of them, standing on the wall. The man started swimming again, thrashing heavily.

Munnie scanned the beach and the wharf on which the Snipes were put up on blocks for the winter. There wasn’t a boat of any kind he could use, or even a length of rope. He listened for the sound of the hammer they had heard when they had first come onto the wall. Then he realized it had stopped a long time ago, while they were still eating. Far across, on the other side of the bay, there was no movement in front of the houses that faced the water and there were no swimmers or fishermen or children playing anywhere in sight. The entire world of stone, sand and sea that afternoon seemed to be given over to the three of them standing on the wall, and the woman clinging to the bottom of the capsized boat calling shrilly and angrily to the half-naked man struggling in the water and moving slowly and painfully away from her.

Why couldn’t this have happened in August? Munnie thought irritably. He looked down at the water rippling in gentle regular swells against the base of the wall. It wasn’t very deep now, with the tide out, four or five feet at the most, and huge chunks of rock and concrete broke the surface irregularly. If you jumped it was a drop of at least fifteen feet and there would be no avoiding the rocks.

Munnie looked, almost embarrassedly, across at Martha and Bert. Martha was squinting and there were lines on her forehead. She was biting her thumbnail absently like a little girl puzzling over a problem in school. Bert seemed critical and mildly interested, as though he were watching the performance of an acrobat in a third-rate circus.

“The damn fool,” Bert said mildly. “If he couldn’t handle a boat any better than that you’d think he’d have had the sense to stick close to the shore.”

“Frenchmen,” Martha said. “They think they can do anything.” She went back to chewing on her nail.

The man called again, aiming it at them.

“What’re we going to do?” Munnie asked.

“Bawl the stupid bastard out,” Bert said, “when he comes ashore, for being such a lousy sailor.”

Munnie peered at the swimmer. He was going more slowly now and he seemed to be settling deeper in the water after each stroke. “I don’t think he’s going to make it,” Munnie said.

“Well,” said Bert, “that’ll be too bad.”

Martha said nothing.

Munnie swallowed dryly. Later on, he thought, I won’t be able to bear remembering today, standing here, watching a man drown.

Then another picture flicked before his eyes. It was sharp and clear and there was nothing missing. It was of Bert and Martha and himself standing in front of a French policeman, seated at a desk, with his cap on, scratching away with a leaking fountain pen in a little black book.

“So,” the policeman was saying, “you wish to report a drowning?”

“Yes.”

“So—you saw this gentleman, some distance from the shore, waving at you, and then he disappeared?”

“Yes.”

“And the lady?”

“The last we saw of her she was still holding onto the boat, floating out to sea.”

“Ah. And—uh—what steps did you take, personally?”

“We … we came here and reported it.”

“Oh, yes. Of course.” More scratching in the book. A hand reaching out. “Your passports, please.” A quick riffling through the pages and one short, coldly smiling glance as the policeman tossed them on the desk. “Ah, Americans, all of you …”

The man out in the water went under again for a second.

Munnie tried to swallow, again. This time he couldn’t manage it.

“I’m going to go get him,” he said. But for a moment he didn’t move, as though, somehow, just saying it would fix everything, put the man on dry land, right the boat, stop the screams.

“It’s two hundred and fifty yards at least from the beach,” Bert said, very calmly. “And then two hundred and fifty yards back, or a little less, with a crazy Frenchman holding onto your neck.”

Munnie listened gratefully. “Yes,” he said. “At least.”

“You never swam five hundred yards in your life,” Bert said, sounding friendly and reasonable.

The man screamed again and now his voice was hoarse and terrified.

Munnie started walking swiftly along the wall, back to where there was a narrow flight of steps leading down to the little beach in front of the fort. He didn’t run because he didn’t want to be out of breath when he went into the water.

“Munnie!” he heard Bert call behind him. “Don’t be a damn fool!”

Even as he started down the steep flight of steps, slippery with moss, Munnie noticed that Martha hadn’t said anything. When he got down to the beach he trotted across it, at the water line, to get to the point nearest the man. He stopped, breathing heavily, and waved at the swimmer, encouraging him. Now, down at water level, it looked a good deal more than two hundred and fifty yards. He kicked off his shoes and tore off his shirt. The wind felt cold on his skin. He took off his pants, tossing them to one side on the sand, and stood there in his shorts. He hesitated. They were old shorts and they had torn at the crotch and he had mended them, clumsily, himself. He had a sudden picture of his body washed ashore and people noticing the shabby mending job and smiling a little. He unbuttoned the shorts, his fingers fumbling thickly at the buttons and let the shorts drop to the sand. As he walked deliberately into the water, he thought, She’s never seen me naked, I wonder what she thinks.

He scraped his toes on a rock and the pain made the tears come into his eyes. He kept walking until the water was up to his chest, then pushed off and began to swim. The water was cold and his skin felt tight and frozen almost at once. He tried not to swim too fast, so that he would have some strength left when he reached the drowning man. Whenever he looked up to see how far he’d gone it seemed to him that he had hardly moved at all, and it was hard to keep going in a straight line. Somehow he always seemed to be veering to his left, in the direction of the wall, and he had to keep correcting himself all the time. Once, he looked up at the wall, searching for Bert and Martha. He couldn’t see them and he had a moment of panic. What the hell have they done? he thought. They’ve left. He turned over on his back, losing precious seconds, and saw them on the beach, standing at the water’s edge, watching him. Of course, he thought.

He turned over and kept on swimming methodically toward the Frenchman. Whenever he picked his head out of the water, the Frenchman seemed to be screaming, and just as far away as ever. He decided not to look again for awhile. It was too discouraging.

Then his arms began to feel tired. It can’t be, he thought. I haven’t even gone fifty yards yet. Still, the muscles between his shoulders and his elbows seemed to be contracted, twisting his bones, and there was a deep ache of weariness in the back of his arms. His right hand began to cramp a little, too, and he let it flutter loosely through the water, which slowed him down, but he didn’t know what else to do about it. The cramp reminded him that he had eaten not very long before and had a lot of wine and grapes and cheese. As he swam, with the water a green blur in his eyes and the slow, steady push of it going past his ears, he remembered his mother, in all the summers of his boyhood, on the shores of the lake in New Hampshire, saying, “No swimming for at least two hours after meals.” Sitting on a little wooden chair, under a striped umbrella, watching the children play on the narrow, pebbly beach.