“You implied it!” Barrett shouted.
“Just because you can’t read,” Mackham said, “it doesn’t follow?”
“Damn it, man, I didn’t say that I couldn’t read!” Barrett was on his feet again.
“Please, gentlemen. Please! Please!” Mayor Simmons said. “Let’s keep our remarks temperate.”
“I’m not going to sit here and have someone who lives in Maple Dell tell me the reason he’s such a hot rock is because he read a lot of books!” Barrett shouted. “Books have their place. I won’t deny it. But no book ever helped me to get where I am, and from where I am I can spit on Maple Dell. As for my kids, I want them out in the fresh air playing ball, not reading cookbooks.”
“Please, Mark. Please,” the Mayor said. And then he turned to Mrs. Selfredge and asked her to move that the meeting be adjourned.
“MY DAY, my hour, my moment of revelation,” Charlie wrote, in his sun-deck cabin on the Augustus, “came on a Sunday, when I had been home eight days. Oh God, was I happy! I spent most of the day putting up storm windows, and I like working on my house. Things like putting up storm windows. When the work was done, I put the ladder away and grabbed a towel and my swimming trunks and walked over to the Townsends’ swimming pool. They were away, but the pool hadn’t been drained. I put on my trunks and dove in and I remember seeing?way, way up in the top of one of the pine trees?a brassiere that I guess the Townsend kids had snitched and heaved up there in midsummer, the screams of dismay from their victim having long since been carried away on the west wind. The water was very cold, and blood pressure or some other medical reason may have accounted for the fact that when I got out of the pool and dressed I was nearly busting with happiness. I walked back to the house, and when I stepped inside it was so quiet that I wondered if anything had gone wrong. It was not an ominous silence?it was just that I wondered why the clock should sound so loud. Then I went upstairs and found Marcie asleep in her bedroom. She was covered with a light wrap that had slipped from her shoulders and breasts. Then I heard Henry and Katie’s voices, and I went to the back bedroom window. This looked out onto the garden, where a gravel path that needed weeding went up a little hill. Henry and Katie were there. Katie was scratching in the gravel with a stick?some message of love, I guess. Henry had one of those broad-winged planes?talismanic planes, really?made of balsa wood and propelled by a rubber band. He twisted the band by turning the propeller, and I could see his lips moving as he counted. Then, when the rubber was taut, he set his feet apart in the gravel, like a marksman?Katie watched none of this?and sent the plane up. The wings of the plane were pale in the early dark, and then I saw it climb out of the shade up to where the sun washed it with yellow light. With not much more force than a moth, it soared and circled and meandered and came slowly down again into the shade and crashed on the peony hedge. ‘I got it up again!’ I heard Henry shout. ‘I got it up into the light.’ Katie went on writing her message in the dirt. And then, like some trick in the movies, I saw myself as my son, standing in a like garden and sending up out of the dark a plane, an arrow, a tennis ball, a stone?anything?while my sister drew hearts in the gravel. The memory of how deep this impulse to reach into the light had been completely charmed me, and I watched the boy send the plane up again and again.
“Then, still feeling very springy and full of fun, I walked back toward the door, stopping to admire the curve of Marcie’s breasts and deciding, in a blaze of charity, to let her sleep. I felt so good that I needed a drink?not to pick me up but to dampen my spirits?a libation, anyhow?and I poured some whiskey in a glass. Then I went into the kitchen to get some ice, and I noticed that ants had got in somehow. This was surprising, because we never had much trouble with ants. Spiders, yes. Before the equinoctial hurricanes?even before the barometer had begun to fall?the house seemed to fill up with spiders, as if they sensed the trouble in the air. There would be spiders in the bathtubs and spiders in the living room and spiders in the kitchen, and, walking down the long upstairs hallway before a storm, you could sometimes feel the thread of a web break against your face. But we had had almost no trouble with ants. Now, on this autumn afternoon, thousands of ants broke out of the kitchen woodwork and threw a double line across the drain-board and into the sink, where there seemed to be something they wanted.
“I found some ant poison at the back of the broom-closet shelf, a little jar of brown stuff that I’d bought from Timmons in the village years ago. I put a generous helping of this into a saucer and put it on the drain-board. Then I took my drink and a piece of the Sunday paper out onto the terrace in front of the house. The house faced west, so I had more light than the children, and I felt so happy that even the news in the papers seemed cheerful. No kings had been assassinated in the rainy black streets of Marseille; no storms were brewing in the Balkans; no clerkly Englishman?the admiration of his landlady and his aunts?had dissolved the remains of a young lady in an acid bath; no jewels, even, had been stolen. And that sometime power of the Sunday paper to evoke an anxious, rain-wet world of fallen crowns and inevitable war seemed gone. Then the sun withdrew from my paper and from the chair where I sat, and I wished I had put on a sweater.
“It was late in the season?the salt of change was in the air?and this tickled me, too. Last Sunday, or the Sunday before, the terrace would have been flooded with light. Then I thought about other places where I would like to be?Nantucket, with only a handful of people left and the sailing fleet depleted and the dunes casting, as they never do in the summer, a dark shadow over the bathing beach. And I thought about the Vineyard and the farina-colored bluffs and the purple autumn sea and that stillness in which you might hear, from way out in the Sound, the rasp of a block on a traveler as a sailboard there came about. I tasted my whiskey and gave my paper a shake, but the view of the golden light on the grass and the trees was more compelling than the news, and now mixed up with my memories of the sea islands was the whiteness of Marcie’s thighs.
“Then I was seized by some intoxicating pride in the hour, by the joy and the naturalness of my relationship to the scene, and by the ease with which I could put my hands on what I needed. I thought again of Marcie sleeping and that I would have my way there soon?it would be a way of expressing this pride. And then, listening for the voices of my children and not hearing them, I decided to celebrate the hour as it passed. I put the paper down and ran up the stairs. Marcie was still sleeping and I stripped off my clothes and lay down beside her, waking her from what seemed to be a pleasant dream, for she smiled and drew me to her.
TO GET BACK TO Marcie and her trouble: She put on her coat after the meeting was adjourned
