was meant to enrage her father.
“I want to stay, I want to stay, I want to stay, I want to stay!” she cried.
“Joan, you’re acting like a child!” he shouted. “Get up.”
“I want to act like a child!” she screamed. “I want to act like a child for a little while! Is there anything so terrible about wanting to act like a child for a little while? I don’t have any joy in my life any more. When I’m unhappy, I try to remember a time when I was happy, but I can’t remember a time any more.”
“Joan, get up. Get up on your feet. Get up on your two feet.”
“I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” she sobbed. “It hurts me to stand up?it hurts my legs.”
“Get up, Joan.” He stooped down, and it was an effort for the old man to raise his daughter, to her feet. “Oh, my baby, oh, my poor baby!” he said, and he put his arm around her. “Come into the bathroom and I’ll wash your face, you poor baby.” She let him wash her face, and then they had a drink and sat down to a game of checkers.
RUSSELL got to Whitebeach Camp at half past six, and they drank some gin on the porch. The liquor made him garrulous, and he began to talk about his war experiences, but the atmosphere was elastic and forgiving, and he knew that nothing he did there that night would be considered wrong. They went outside again after supper, although it was cool. The clouds had not colored. In the glancing light, the hillside shone like a bolt of velvet. Mrs. Nudd covered her legs with a blanket and looked at the scene. It was the most enduring pleasure of these years. There had been the boom, the crash, the depression, the recession, the malaise of imminent war, the war itself, the boom, the inflation, the recession, the slump, and now there was the malaise again, but none of this had changed a stone or a leaf in the view she saw from her porch.
“You know, I’m thirty-seven years old,” Randy said. He spoke importantly, as if the passage of time over his head was singular, interesting, and a dirty trick. He cleaned his teeth with his tongue. “If I’d gone back to Cambridge for my reunion this year, it would have been my fifteenth.”
“That’s nothing,” Esther said.
“Did you know that the Teeters have bought the old Henderson place?” Mr. Nudd asked. “There’s a man who made a fortune in the war.” He stood, turned the chair he was sitting in upside down, and pounded at the legs with his fist. His cigarette was wet. When he sat down again, the long ash spilled onto his vest.
“Do I look thirty-seven?” Randy asked.
“Do you know that you’ve mentioned the fact that you’re thirty-seven eight times today?” Esther said. “I’ve counted them.”
“How much does it cost to go to Europe in an airplane?” Mr. Nudd asked.
The conversation went from ocean fares to whether it was pleasanter to come into a strange city in the morning or the evening. Then they recalled odd names among the guests who had been at Whitebeach Camp; there had been Mr. and Mrs. Peppercorn, Mr. and Mrs. Starkweather, Mr. and Mrs. Freestone, the Bloods, the Mudds, and the Parsleys.
That late in the season, the light went quickly. It was sunny one minute and dark the next. Macabit and its mountain range were canted against the afterglow, and for a while it seemed unimaginable that anything could lie beyond the mountains, that this was not the end of the world. The wall of pure and brassy light seemed to beat up from infinity. Then the stars came out, the earth rumbled downward, the illusion of an abyss was lost. Mrs. Nudd looked around her, and the time and the place seemed strangely important. This is not an imitation, she thought, this is not the product of custom, this is the unique place, the unique air, where my children have spent the best of themselves. The realization that none of them had done well made her sink back in her chair. She squinted the tears out of her eyes. What had made the summer always an island, she thought; what had made it such a small island? What mistakes had they made? What had they done wrong? They had loved their neighbors, respected the force of modesty, held honor above gain. Then where had they lost their competence, their freedom, their greatness? Why should these good and gentle people who surrounded her seem like the figures in a tragedy?
“Remember the day the pig fell into the well?” she asked. The sky was discolored. Below the black mountains, the lake ran a rough and deadly gray. “Weren’t you playing tennis with Esther, Russell? That was Esther’s tennis summer. Didn’t you win the pig at the fair in Lawchester, Randy? You won it at one of those things where you throw baseballs at a target. You were always such a good athlete.”
They all waited graciously for their turn. They recalled the drowned pig, the launch on Gull Rock, Aunt Martha’s corsets hanging in the window, the fire in the clouds, and the blustering northwest wind. They laughed helplessly at the place where Nora fell down the stairs. Pamela cut in to recall the announcement of her engagement. After this, they recalled how Miss Coolidge had gone upstairs and returned with a briefcase full of music, and, standing by the open door, so that she could get the light, had performed the standard repertoire of the rural Protestant Church. She had sung for more than an hour. They couldn’t stop her. During her recital, Esther and Russell left the porch and went up to the field to bury the drowned pig. It was cool. Esther held a lantern while Russell dug the grave. They had decided then that even if they were in love they could never marry, because he wouldn’t leave Macabit and she would never live there. When they got back to the porch, Miss Coolidge was singing her last selection, and then Russell left and they all went to bed.
