“How do I know who’s looking?” replied Lydia.
“I don’t care if people look at me,” said Martin, “but you think boys look at you all the time. That’s why you walk around like a statue.” He imitated her straight oblivious stare, which made her look as if she had a neck injury, and, not understanding her lovely self-consciousness, he was soon lost in consideration of green water, gliding sharks, giant sea turtles jetting along with glinting paddle fins, the humidity on the face of the jewel-like tanks, and the feeling of the water’s mass and weight behind the thick glass. He had worn a blue sailor suit, and he had dashed from place to place.
On the Brooklyn side, once the Bayers had viewed Manhattan from the air and seen a landscape of chimneys and brown stone, they passed a faraway group of wan naked swimmers scattered at the foot of piers and embankments (as if they had been thrown there) and soaring from towers and walls into the swirling water. Martin stared at the swimmers with a near-pickled eye. The pleasure was beckoning and indefatigable, but he leaned back to watch the trees passing overhead on a river of blue. He remembered how in winter they went up on Riverside Drive to watch little steam ferries charge across the ice-packed North River, setting out in a puff of white crystal breath, rolling across the cold blue water.
The hotel at Amagansett was a large, airy white frame house standing in the deep green of potato fields that ran to a bluff overlooking an Arabian stretch of dunes and the blinding sea. Martin and Lydia walked to the water each day to swim and jump down the cool sides of the dunes. The sea was achingly cold, so their parents often ignored the beach in favor of sitting on the porch. In the green and the silence, they seemed to be happy just rocking back and forth in beads of cascading sun, their faces relaxed and content.
For the first time, Martin discovered that he carried a store of strong memories which emerged bright and clear in his eyes and gave him access to a world of random and sudden images as beautiful as the upwelling of music. He was chasing a horse in the pasture behind the hotel. The hotelkeeper, a portly Dane named Friebourg, had told Martin that if he could saddle the colt in the back field he could ride him. “Before you saddle him,” the Dane had said with amusement, “you’ll have to catch him, and that, little boy, could take a long time. I will sit here and watch, for this will be better than the vaudeville.” Martin had not liked the Dane’s patronizing attitude, and was determined to catch the colt.
The colt looked at him with the confidence and superiority of a dentist, knowing that after a little bit of fun the creature on tiny legs who had come to capture him would soon be incoherent and exhausted. It was just that way. Martin coaxed him with sweet language, fake smiles, hoarse rhetoric, careful commands, invigorated threats, and pleas for mercy. Nibbling the grass until Martin stealthily approached, breathing hot and heavy, lasso in hand, the colt then flew to another extreme of the field. Martin ran himself silly. Had the colt thrust his neck into the noose, Martin would not have had the strength to hold on, after two hours of the chase. Meanwhile, beyond the clover, the porch had filled with his family and the Friebourgs—the Dane himself, whose laughter could be heard from the pasture; Mrs. Friebourg, a silent hardworking woman; their daughter, Christiana, a girl just a year or two older than Lydia; and an ever-present, cut-glass gallon pitcher of beer.
In exhaustion and embarrassment Martin discovered that his defeat gave rise to splendid pictures—that the mahogany color of the horse billowed into a world of dark-wood city interiors and the dappled shapes of figures within. An exhalation of breath and a dizzy glance at a lone white cloud, riding far off, locked into a tableau of winter in Manhattan—the breath of horses in snow, dark-blue water off the Battery, a shadow across a cold field in which stood a charcoal-limned tree. These frames appeared and he felt the city behind him in a cloud of heat, as if it were a living body like his own. Even though Mr. Friebourg laughed, Martin continued to chase the horse, comforting himself by enjoying the color in a world he saw rapidly blooming and dying as if it were running the gates of a rigid metal machine, remembering all the while the sadness he felt in the frozen images of a motion picture when it ran improperly and crippled. That night he went to bed early and sore. Mrs. Bayer put mayapple vinegar on his legs for the sunburn, and he fell asleep listening to the breeze in contest with a lissome Norway pine.
The next morning, Martin was outside the hotel at five-thirty, furiously building what he called a “wind indicator,” which was a tangle of sticks, flags, strings, and tin cans, designed to sound a different tone for each of the four prime directions of wind. After several hours, it actually worked, though there was no telling what would have happened had the steady south wind changed its course.
Finally, Christiana Friebourg passed by (he had built it mainly for her benefit, imagining that she was watching every step) and asked, “What is that silly thing, Martin? Don’t you think you should clean it up before Father gets back from the village?”
Martin was stung nearly to breathlessness, but he managed to reply, “It’s a wind indicator, so I can always know which way the wind is blowing, even if I’m inside with my eyes closed.”
“What does it matter?”
“It matters,” answered Martin, though he did not know why it did. “It matters.” Then they both turned at the sound of an automobile coming down the road that led across the potato fields. It was not Mr. Friebourg, for he had gone to town in the wagon.
They watched in silence until a drab-colored car with a Marine colonel and his orderly, a lieutenant, pulled up to the hotel. There was an emergency camp at Montauk, across a savage spit of sand and scrub which gave the impression of a fortress and had the air of war, battles, and extremities. Vulnerable on both sides, it was at one point only about five hundred feet wide between the sea and the sound. This was called Napeague Neck. Hundreds of Marines lived on a clifftop above the ocean and practiced gunnery and drills, standing on the sand or knee-deep in low grasses, staring out upon a sea over which they imagined a cold and dark field of battle. When fall closed in, the colonel drove about in his car, looking for families to receive his men for Sunday dinners. It was lonely out there. The approaching autumn was full of fright, as if regenerative nature put to rest were linked to the future of their battalion—which they were sure was destined for France. That morning, it was arranged that the officers would eat at the hotel. The lieutenant evidently knew Christiana, for they spoke by the side of the car as the colonel wrote checks to Friebourg. Martin was awed by the lieutenant’s Sam Browne belt and field hat, not to mention the pistol, khaki puttees, lanyard, gold bars, and, most of all, the man’s speech. He was from South Carolina. To Martin’s delight, he was comfortable and fluent in his dialect. The lieutenant could not open his mouth without conjuring, for Martin, Martin’s idea of the South—burned mansions amid coconut palms, at the foot of which speedy alligators with dangling tongues ran as fast as greyhounds in pursuit of bonneted children and screaming slaves.
When the two men left in the puffing automobile, Martin felt uncomfortable. He thought they were very high and brave, and he might even have wanted to be like them, but the equilibrium of the place had disappeared. They were attractive precisely because they were subject to the caprice of war. They had about them the uncertainty of a frontier, and were unsettling. He did not want them to come on Sunday, especially since Lydia had been magnetized like a needle on a lodestone, and suddenly looked as if she knew something that no one else knew. For Martin, the Marines were like night and cold.
But that Sunday was like summer, and, in ranging the far stretches of beach in search of landed sharks or the magnificent sight of a Coast Guardsman galloping his mount along the water’s edge, Martin forgot about threats from outside. Even looking to the ocean’s horizon, he did not sense beyond the rim the haunting battles which, at other times, were felt by all as if they were the approaching storms of the hurricane season. That day was hot and blue, with a magnificent cold wind.
Almost part of the lan
dscape, Martin wandered down the beach. He wanted to go as far east as he could and then turn to make his way home. A breeze came from the sea, tossing spray off the tips of clear waves. Beach and surrounding duneland were abandoned to autumn. Martin crested the top of a high dune and looked over a pine forest and the multiple intrusions of sounds, bays, inlets, and broken spits with the risen water surging through to make pools in the midst of scrub trees. On the partly sand-covered macadam road, he saw the Marine colonel’s empty automobile.
They must be swimming, thought Martin, or scouting the coast. Then his heart jumped as he saw two figures disappear beyond a wavelike hill of roseate voluted sand. He ran to join them, breathless and afraid, and, although he did not hesitate long enough to discover why, he felt drawn inevitably into something that he suspected would make him appear foolish. When he came near to where they had been, he stayed low among the sharp grasses. Then he felt as if he had come upon a momentous and terrible truth. The young lieutenant and Christiana Friebourg were swimming together in the sea, having left their clothing on the beach. The air was dry and it snapped at wave crests. The lieutenant and Christiana appeared and disappeared over the plane of white beach as they were lifted entwined and turning in the waves. They kissed, and seemed to dance buoyantly, like swans, in a field of azure. They never wet their hair, and always were grasped together and revolving. Christiana threw back her head. Her body, shining from seawater, was nearly as glossy as the brine.
Not wanting to be seen, Martin crept in prodigious low-coursed leaps to a channel between the hills, and ran toward the hotel convinced that the only way he could save himself from a fate unknown at the hands of the lieutenant was to pretend that he had spent the entire day in the opposite direction. He ran for miles, appearing at the hotel as heated as if he had been firing boilers. For about fifteen minutes Mrs. Bayer had watched him running in from the east. “Where have you been, Martin?”
“I was down there,” he said, pointing straight to the west. In a frenzy he went inside and opened a box of stereoscopic views, shuffling them for an hour without memory of a single scene, until Christiana entered casually and went to the kitchen to help her mother. Martin was shaking, sure that she had found him out. How he pitied poor Friebourg and feared for Lydia, since there was no way for him to protect her from the possession which had come over Christiana. When he imagined Lydia naked in the waves, spinning in ecstatic circles with the tall Marine, he blacked out (or perhaps fell asleep) and remembered nothing until the long shadows of Sunday afternoon and a mad rush in the kitchen told him that the Marine was really going to appear, that he would have the daring and contempt to sit at table with the fallen Christiana and her parents. How could anyone be that cruel? And Christiana seemed so happy. Even Martin’s sparkling images gave him no comfort. He prayed that dinner would be short, war break out, and the Marines suffer immediate recall. When they were late, he felt moments of relief in imagining that they were already out on the dark hurricane-covered sea, pushing without any lights toward France and oblivion.
The Marines arrived at early evening—the lieutenant, the colonel, a major, and two other lieutenants. Almost in panic, Martin tried to pull Lydia away from the gathering. He went about, shifty-eyed and breathing hard, attempting to separate her from the Marines. “Lydia! Lydia!” he cried, holding up a dime book. “Read me about Captain Strumpet!” Everyone looked at him in the most peculiar fashion—especially his mother and father, since in normal times Martin would not allow anyone even to touch the Captain Strumpet book.
“Martin,” his mother said, “let’s not have another Turkish Carpet.” No one except the Bayers themselves understood this, and they were glad that it seemed to quiet Martin down. Mrs. Bayer had been referring to Martin’s punishment after they had all gone to buy a Turkish carpet at a fancy rug showroom in one of the new skyscrapers. As they entered the elevator, Martin had come face to face with the elevator boy—who was really a midget.
“Fourteen, please,” Mr. Bayer said.
Martin took an immediate dislike to this fake boy. He did not approve of the uniform that made the little man look like an organ-grinder’s monkey or a jockey in military dress, so he said, “I’ll take seven.”
“No,” said Mr. Bayer. “Don’t pay any attention to him.” He glowered at Martin, and the elevator boy sneered triumphantly. On the third floor, they stopped to pick up a diva wrapped in tubular white furs.
“Eleven, please,” Martin said in falsetto.
The elevator boy tipped his little cakebox hat at the diva, but she said, “Take me to five.”
“Nine,” said Martin, moving to the back of the car to avoid his father.
“Fourteen,” repeated Mr. Bayer.
“Eight!” shouted Martin.
The fake boy was so confused that he had to halt the elevator and ask each person in turn what floor was desired. Later, after they had bought the rug, Martin sweetened his victory by running down fourteen flights of stairs and pushing the elevator call on each floor.
An ocher-colored cloth covered the table, and to the side was a marble-topped cart laden with champagne and bowls of fruit, and shining from the clear electric lights. Christiana stood behind this cart, in a beautiful dress. Her hair was drawn up and this full exposure made her look a bit awkward and sad, but when the lieutenant came in he stared at her gentle imperfect face as if there were nothing finer in the world. He helped her open the champagne, which overflowed onto the marble. They then drank toasts to Britain, France, the Marines, and the U.S. Even Martin had two glasses, but held off at that for fear of another concert-hall disaster. He looked out into the smoky darkness and the rows of trees, thinking of nearby farmyards and their populations of raucous, jovial hogs, sarcastic chickens, and bleating lambs. He ate large amounts of black bread and smoked fish.
One of the Marines went out to the automobile and returned with his guitar, on which he played exciting Spanish songs. He had left the door open, and before they knew it a swarm of flashing insects circled the lights. In the middle of September there was always a renaissance of summer insects. They came in waves from the brown grasses and the silent, still forests, their movements urgent and overheated, as if they knew that soon nights as clear as spirit would fell them and they would quickly become only crackling shells among the frail leaves.
It seemed to Martin that the lieutenant paid excessive attention to Christiana. Before dinner they stayed together in a corner, on a velvet divan, talking as if being close and in love were a patent on the world. He pulled out her chair when they sat down. Martin felt less and less apprehensive, for the lieutenant seemed not to be an exploiter or a philanderer but, rather, a good man acting from his heart. This made Martin almost carefree as he began, like the others, to enjoy the lieutenant’s and Christiana’s mutual infatuation. The young soldier noticed that he was drawing Martin’s attention and, almost pained to look away from Christiana, turned to him and asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Martin reddened and stared at the bronze buttons on which were engraved a globe and an anchor. He had never known how to answer that question. “I want to be a painter,” he said.
“And live in a garret!” boomed out Mr. Friebourg.
“And live in a palace,” said Martin, strongly, besieged from all sides. A vision of a life of colors came to him, and he saw himself laying-on the smooth lateral white of snowfields, beyond which a blue river cut straight as a rail and steamers were strokes of black, gold, and brown followed by billows of icy mist.
“Mr. Bellows doesn’t live in a garret,” said Lydia. “If Martin says he wants to be a painter, then he will be a painter.” Martin nodded his head in approval, of course, and there was silence but for the cicadas outside.
Mrs. Friebourg burst out of the kitchen with a tureen of soup. They drank beer as they pulled apart boiled lobsters and burned their fingers on ears of hot corn. Though the Marines got their own clams and did a lot of surf casting, they seldom had l
obster. Perhaps because of the beer and the struggle against the lobsters, talk turned to war. The major had studied closely reports of the fighting, and he opposed the colonel and the lieutenants. “This war,” he said, “is by no means like others. Never before have machine guns, aeroplanes, and mines been such a threat to survival in battle. I fear that the casualty rates will eventually make those of the War of the Rebellion seem charitable.”
“Nonsense,” said the colonel. “What about Gatling guns in the War of the Rebellion and after?”
“Never used in large-scale battles, sir,” answered the major.
“I think you’re exaggerating,” said a lieutenant. “For in open country we should be able to outflank the trenches and barbed wire. When the U.S. enters the War, its character will change.”
“Indeed,” said the major.
Mrs. Bayer interjected. “Do you think we will enter the War, Colonel?”
“As certainly as history, Madam. The Germans cannot sink American ships with impunity, and there are political and moral reasons which demand our participation. I believe that with the spring we will declare war, and I hope that this battalion will be among the first to go to France.”
Talk of war vanished as quickly as it had come, when Mrs. Friebourg brought dishes of ice cream garnished with waffle cookies and sprigs of mint. Martin looked at his portion and turned to his father with an air of offended innocence. “Take this leaf out of my ice cream,” he commanded.
“Why can’t you take it out yourself, Martin?” asked Mr. Bayer.
“I didn’t put it there.”
“I didn’t, either.”
“I put the leaf, Martin,” said Mrs. Friebourg. “We always had mint with the ice cream in Denmark. Do you know what is Denmark?”