part of July, without his showing any improvement.
THEN IT is a summer night, a wonderful summer night. The passengers on the eight-fifteen see Shady Hill?if they notice it at all?in a bath of placid golden light. The noise of the train is muffled in the heavy foliage, and the long car windows look like a string of lighted aquarium tanks before they flicker out of sight. Up on the hill, the ladies say to one another, “Smell the grass! Smell the trees!” The Farquarsons are giving another party, and Harry has hung a sign, WHISKEY GULCH, from the rose arbor, and is wearing a chef’s white hat and an apron. His guests are still drinking, and the smoke from his meat fire rises, on this windless evening, straight up into the trees.
In the clubhouse on the hill, the first of the formal dances for the young people begins around nine. On Alewives Lane sprinklers continue to play after dark. You can smell the water. The air seems as fragrant as it is dark?it is a delicious element to walk through?and most of the windows on Alewives Lane are open to it. You can see Mr. and Mrs. Bearden, as you pass, looking at their television. Joe Lockwood, the young lawyer who lives on the corner, is practicing a speech to the jury before his wife. “I intend to show you,” he says, “that a man of probity, a man whose reputation for honesty and reliability…” He waves his bare arms as he speaks. His wife goes on knitting. Mrs. Carver?Harry Farquarson’s mother-in-law?glances up at the sky and asks, “Where did all the stars come from?” She is old and foolish, and yet she is right: Last night’s stars seem to have drawn to themselves a new range of galaxies, and the night sky is not dark at all, except where there is a tear in the membrane of light. In the unsold house lots near the track a hermit thrush is singing.
The Bentleys are at home. Poor Cash has been so rude and gloomy that the Farquarsons have not asked him to their party. He sits on the sofa beside Louise, who is sewing elastic into the children’s underpants. Through the open window he can hear the pleasant sounds of the summer night. There is another party, in the Rogerses’ garden, behind the Bentleys’. The music from the dance drifts down the hill. The band is sketchy?saxophone, drums, and piano?and all the selections are twenty years old. The band plays “Valencia,” and Cash looks tenderly toward Louise, but Louise, tonight, is a discouraging figure. The lamp picks out the gray in her hair. Her apron is stained. Her face seems colorless and drawn. Suddenly, Cash begins frenziedly to beat his feet in time to the music. He sings some gibberish?Jabajabajabajaba?to the distant saxophone. He sighs and goes into the kitchen.
Here a faint, stale smell of cooking clings to the dark. From the kitchen window Cash can see the lights and figures of the Rogerses’ party. It is a young people’s party. The Rogers girl has asked some friends in for dinner before the dance, and now they seem to be leaving. Cars are driving away. “I’m covered with grass stains,” a girl says. “I hope the old man remembered to buy gasoline,” a boy says, and a girl laughs. There is nothing on their minds but the passing summer nights. Taxes and the elastic in underpants?all the unbeautiful facts of life that threaten to crush the breath out of Cash?have not touched a single figure in this garden. Then jealousy seizes him?such savage and bitter jealousy that he feels ill.
He does not understand what separates him from these children in the garden next door. He has been a young man. He has been a hero. He has been adored and happy and full of animal spirits, and now he stands in a dark kitchen, deprived of his athletic prowess, his impetuousness, his good looks?of everything that means anything to him. He feels as if the figures in the next yard are the specters from some party in that past where all his tastes and desires lie, and from which he has been cruelly removed. He feels like a ghost of the summer evening. He is sick with longing. Then he hears voices in the front of the house. Louise turns on the kitchen light. “Oh, here you are,” she says. “The Beardens stopped in. I think they’d like a drink.”
Cash went to the front of the house to greet the Beardens. They wanted to go up to the club, for one dance. They saw, at a glance, that Cash was at loose ends, and they urged the Bentleys to come. Louise got someone to stay with the children and then went upstairs to change.
When they got to the club, they found a few friends of their age hanging around the bar, but Cash did not stay in the bar. He seemed restless and perhaps drunk. He banged into a table on his way through the lounge to the ballroom. He cut in on a young girl. He seized her too vehemently and jigged her off in an ancient two-step. She signaled openly for help to a boy in the stag line, and Cash was cut out. He walked angrily off the dance floor onto the terrace. Some young couples there withdrew from one another’s arms as he pushed open the screen door. He walked to the end of the terrace, where he hoped to be alone, but here he surprised another young couple, who got up from the lawn, where they seemed to have been lying, and walked off in the dark toward the pool.
Louise remained in the bar with the Beardens. “Poor Cash is tight,” she said. And then, “He told me this afternoon that he was going to paint the storm windows,” she said. “Well, he mixed the paint and washed the brushes and put on some old fatigues and went into the cellar. There was a telephone call for him at around five, and when I went down to tell him, do you know what he was doing? He was just sitting there in the dark with a cocktail shaker. He hadn’t touched the storm windows. He was just sitting there in the dark, drinking Martinis.”
“Poor Cash,” Trace said.
“You ought to get a job,” Lucy said. “That would give you emotional and financial independence.” As she spoke, they all heard the noise of furniture being moved around in the lounge.
“Oh, my God!” Louise said. “He’s going to run the race. Stop him, Trace, stop him! He’ll hurt himself. He’ll kill himself!”
They all went to the door of the lounge. Louise again asked Trace to interfere, but she could see by Cash’s face that he was way beyond remonstrating with. A few couples left the dance floor and stood watching the preparations. Trace didn’t try to stop Cash?he helped him. There was no pistol, so he slammed a couple of books together for the start.
Over the sofa went Cash, over the coffee table, the lamp table, the fire screen, and the hassock. All his grace and strength seemed to have returned to him. He cleared the big sofa at the end of the room and instead of stopping there, he turned and started back over the course. His face was strained. His mouth hung open. The tendons of his neck protruded hideously. He made the hassock, the fire screen, the lamp table, and the coffee table. People held their breath when he approached the final sofa, but he cleared it and landed on his feet. There
