“Well, thank God that’s over with,” Richard Strickland said to Jess Cameron the morning after the town meeting. “Now we can all go back to being what we were before. A nice, quiet community where nothing ever happens.”
“Richard,” said the doctor impatiently, “sometimes you are a complete fool.”
Richard Strickland was shocked. “What’s the matter with you, Jess?” he asked.
“Nothing,” said Jess and walked off toward his house.
But later, that afternoon, after the last patient had left his office, Jess sat quietly, his chair tilted back into a patch of sunlight. He was nervous and restless and he not only knew why but also knew what he was going to do about it. He was going to go down to New York where he would get quickly and thoroughly drunk and sleep with a different whore every night. Then he would sober up and come home and perhaps then he could put up with himself and Cooper Station for another six months.
Jess Cameron was one of the few people he knew who could say that he had had a completely happy, normal childhood.
“If Jess Cameron ever turns into a Freudian mess,” said Florence Strickland who prided herself on the fact that she kept abreast of things, “he’ll never be able to blame it on his parents. Amy Cameron was a saint and although Gordon had his moments, he wasn’t far behind her.”
When Jess was small, his mother used to sing in the kitchen and she had always had time to answer questions and play games and draw pictures. She played Chopin waltzes on the piano and she laughed a lot. Jess could never remember having seen her angry and he had never heard her raise her voice.
“Gordon, dear,” she would say to the husband who idolized her, “don’t shout so. Tell me quietly. Tell me what happened.”
Gordon Cameron was a big, heavy man with a mustache and a large head covered with gray hair. Jess could not remember the time when his father’s hair had not been gray. Gordon Cameron could be any kind of man, depending on the patient he happened to be treating at the time. He could be gruff, gay, pleasant, mean, smiling, sneering or sympathetic as the situation demanded.
“You could have been an actor, Dad,” said Jess. “How come you chose doctoring?”
Gordon looked sharply at his son.
He can really make his eyebrows beetle, thought the boy, delighted with this trick of his father’s.
Gordon Cameron lit his pipe and sat down heavily, emitting his usual groan.
“God, it’s enough to put a man in his grave, all this running around after babies and kids who swallow pins and men who get their arms caught in haying machines,” said Gordon. He looked silently at his son for a long moment, then he said, “I guess I’m a doctor because there didn’t seem to be anything else I wanted to be. A man’s got to do something, and by that I don’t mean just anything. He has to do something with his life that brings him a feeling of peace and happiness not only while he is doing it, but also when it is done. There was a philosopher once, French fellow if I remember right, who said something about every man having to cultivate his own garden. Get what I’m driving at?”
“I think so,” said Jess, who did not really understand at all but who enjoyed the words his father used.
“The way I figure it,” said Gordon, “I was put here on Earth for a bigger purpose than just taking up space. One day, when I was just a bit older than you are now, it came to me that the best reason for anyone being here at all is to help out the fellow who’s here along with him, and the way that seemed best to me was doctoring. So here I am, cultivating my garden in my own way, the way that suits me best. Dragging babies into the world and chasing after damned fools who get careless.”
Jess spoke with the impulse of the very young which is to please a beloved elder.
“I think I’ll be a doctor, too,” he said, and was surprised when his own words filled him with decision and a kind of peace.
“You just wait awhile, boy, before you go deciding anything like that,” said his father. “You’ve plenty of time.”
But, excellent actor though he was, Gordon Cameron could not keep the look of happiness from flooding his eyes when his son spoke.
Jess finished his premedical courses at the state university. In August, of the same year, his mother died.
Amy Cameron had been spending the summer at the family cottage on one of the northern lakes and one day she had taken her husband’s sailboat and had gone out on the water, alone. She was caught in one of the heavy storms that come so quickly and furiously to northern New England in August, but she managed to pull up to one of the small islands in the lake to wait out the storm. She reached home finally, safely and soaked to the skin. A few days later she confessed to Gordon over the telephone that she had managed to catch a rather heavy cold, but when he arrived at the lake the following weekend she had pneumonia and within three days she was dead.
In September, Jess left his suddenly old father in the very old Cameron house and went to Cambridge to enter the medical school at Harvard, and he wondered if it were really true, as he had heard Gordon tell so many patients, that time and work would eventually heal all pain.
Gordon Cameron was the first person Jess had ever seen who was the victim of a thorough, overwhelming loneliness, and he wondered what people who were younger, less strong and more frightened than his father did in defense against the dictatorship of loneliness.
Jess’s first year at Harvard brought him in contact for the first time with people who came from places in the world other than Cooper Station and northern New England, and at first he yearned for home with a yearning that was almost a sickness. Then he took up pipe smoking and learned that the drink for a man to order was Scotch with plain water on the side and he went into Boston with a gang of his classmates and was introduced to the Old Howard. He began to think that at twenty-one years of age it was about time some of what he termed his hickish rough edges began to smooth themselves out and he would not admit even to himself that pipe tobacco burned his tongue nor that he preferred mixing drinks nor that the strippers at the Old Howard were a bore with their flabby bellies and their dirty net bras. Finally, he met a girl.
“Lorraine,” he repeated to himself when he was introduced to her. He rolled the name around on his tongue and liked the feel of it.
“Lorraine,” he said to her. “It’s a lovely name.”
She was small, with masses of red hair and an upturned nose which Jess found fascinating. She had small pointed breasts and a tiny waist and her hips flared smoothly. She giggled. She adored things: Clark Gable, fried shrimp, musky perfumes, high-heeled shoes. She was a sales girl at Jordan-Marsh and she lived in a three-room apartment which she shared with two other girls on Beacon Street.
“Beacon Street,” said Lorraine. “Sounds elegant, doesn’t it, Jess? You should see the place. A real dump.”
“I’d like very much to see it,” said Jess.
Lorraine giggled. “Not tonight,” she said. “Kit and Eloise are double dating with a couple of guys from B.U. and they’re using the living room.”
In the weeks that followed Jess spent every moment he could spare away from classes with Lorraine. They went to the movies and ate at the Union Oyster House and walked in the Common. Jess took her to all the Harvard football games and his friends began to plague him with questions.
“Have you got to her yet, Jess?”
“Listen, Harkinson,” replied Jess angrily, “I think you have a mind like a sewer. She’s not that kind of girl.”
“The hell she isn’t,” said Harkinson. “A tart if I ever saw one.”
“You go to hell.”
“A pleasure, dear boy. A pleasure.” Harkinson lifted his drink. “Here’s to hell. May the stay there be as pleasant as the way there. Seriously, Jess, have you tried getting to her?”
“Seriously and for the last time, Harkinson, shut your goddamned mouth. I’m in love with her.”
Harkinson nodded. “That’s good,” he said. “A good, hot love affair will round out your first year at Harvard very nicely.”
“I’m going to ask her to marry me,” cried Jess who, until that moment, had never had any such intention.
Harkinson had been sitting in a tilted-back chair with his feet up on the table in front of him. The chair and Harkinson’s feet hit the floor at the same moment.
“Oh, God,” he said. “Oh, Jess! Listen here, old man, a little poontang is one thing, but marriage—”
Jess stamped out of the room and the last thing he would have admitted to anyone was that there were times when Lorraine bored him to death. She chattered on and on about things that did not interest him, but he found that when he was away from her he missed her constant talk. Boston seemed an enormous place to him and he was lonely when he walked the streets by himself. All his friends had girls and being with Lorraine was far better than being alone.
It was winter. Jess and Lorraine sat in movie theaters and held hands, then they sat in restaurants where they drank hot chocolate and held hands. They walked in the snowy, deserted Common, shivering, and held hands.
“Of all the goddamned foolishness!” said Harkinson. “Look, I’ll fix you up with a hotel room. Then at least you’ll be off the goddamned streets.”
As for Lorraine, Jess was a novelty to her. As she told her roommates, he was the first man she had ever gone out with who hadn’t tried to get his hand down the front of her blouse on the very first date, but as the weeks passed and still Jess kept his distance from her, Lorraine began to wonder if she left him cold, and in the end her curiosity became almost an obsession.
“Listen,” she told Jess. “It’s too cold to keep walking. I’ve got something at home that would keep us both warm. Brandy. Let’s go to my place for a while. We could have a drink and sit where it’s warm. Would you like to?”
“I’d like to very much,” said Jess. “But won’t your roommates mind?”
“Kit and Eloise have gone skiing up to New Hampshire with their boyfriends from B. U.”
At the apartment, she took his coat and hung it up in the closet with her own and for some reason this gave Jess a warm feeling of belonging there, alone with Lorraine. They sat on her studio couch and drank brandy out of jelly glasses. The apartment was warm and quiet and suddenly there was nothing to talk about.
Jess could imagine Harkinson saying, “First of all, children, you must have the proper setting. Any deserted nook or cranny will do: parked car, graveyard, et cetera, but the most desirable is a quiet room, preferably one furnished with a comfortable bed or couch. Floors are hell on a bare behind.” He was suddenly afraid for Lorraine. Suppose she were in a situation like this with a man like Harkinson.
“Lorraine, don’t you have any parents to look after you?” he asked.
“They’re dead,” she said. “I’ve been on my own since I was sixteen.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Why?” she demanded. “They both drank and fought like cats and dogs. I’m better off this way.”
Jess had never felt so sorry for anyone in his life. He put his empty glass down on the cluttered end table and Lorraine set hers down on the floor. Then she sat still, gazing into his eyes until finally he took her in his arms. A throat-closing desire to protect her overcame him so that he tightened his arms around her and felt hot tears behind his eyelids.
“I don’t like the idea of you living alone like this,” he said. “It could be dangerous, a young girl like you—”
“Crazy,” she whispered against his lips. “My crazy, crazy Jess.”
Her mouth was warm and very soft and her body was small and pliant against him. She let him press her down on the couch and her mouth opened under his insistent lips. Suddenly he wanted to crush her, cover her, smother her, and he made himself draw away, afraid of this strange desire to hurt and destroy.
“Don’t pull away from me,” she whispered. “Please, Jess, don’t pull away from me.”
And then it was everything, he thought. Everything.
The feel of her rigid nipple against his palm, the whisper of her clothes as she let them slide to the floor, the slim whiteness of her thighs and the way she moaned.
“Darling, darling, darling.” Everything.
“Are you sure?” he whispered.
Instead of words she answered him by pressing her mouth against his shoulder and moving her legs against his and when she twisted her head from side to side and cried, “No. No, no, no,” Jess clenched his teeth and hated himself for not sparing her this pain and then he thought of nothing and felt only the majestic thrill of taking this woman for his own.
Afterwards, she lay in his arms, shivering and weeping.
“Darling, I’m so sorry,” he said. “Darling, don’t cry. Please, darling. I love you. We’ll be married.”
Lorraine stopped crying at once and lit a cigarette.
“All right, Jess,” she said calmly.
She got up to pour more brandy and as she walked across the room, still naked, to Jess she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. She came back to him and they leaned back side by side on the couch and shared one lumpy pillow.
“Of course,” said Jess, “it’ll be a long time before I can support a wife. After I finish at Harvard I’ll have to intern for two years.”
“Then that makes five years in all, doesn’t it?” asked Lorraine. “After this year, I mean.”
“Yes,” said Jess, frightened at the thought of so much time. He turned and put his lips against her throat. “But we can wait, can’t we, darling?” he asked.
“But Jess,” she said. “Suppose after tonight I found that I was going to have a baby?”
A baby. He could almost hear the sound of his hopes for the future shattering against a cold wall of fact. A baby!
He studied the pattern of white roses against the green background of the studio couch slipcover. He reached out a finger and traced the outline of one fat, full-blown flower.
“Then I should have to give up the idea of finishing school,” he said at last. “I’d have to get a job.”
“But what about your father?” asked Lorraine. “Wouldn’t he take care of us?”
He turned and looked at her, astonished.
“I’d never ask him to do that,” he said.
“Darling!” Her laughter rang out in the small room. “I adore you when you look so tragic.” She stretched slowly, until her body formed an arc of whiteness. “You big silly. I won’t have a baby. I was only teasing you.”
“How do you know you won’t?” asked Jess.
She stopped stretching and let herself relax with a sigh.
“Jess, darling, for a medical student you’re awfully dumb,” she said. “It’s the wrong time of the month for me to get that way.”
“Oh,” said Jess stupidly.
He left her just as daylight began to show over the housetops and for some reason he felt rather like a character in a novel as he watched the roofs of Boston turn pink.
“Goodbye, darling,” he said. “I love you. Sleep now, and I’ll call you this afternoon.”
He felt strong and powerful enough to walk all the way to Cambridge. He strode down Beacon Street, smiling, thinking of how wonderful it was to have a girl like Lorraine who adored him, who had given herself to him and who would marry him in five years.
Spring came too quickly. Jess was with Lorraine every day now, but he hated the thought of the approaching summer that would take him away from her. His grades began to suffer and he grew thin from lack of sleep.
“I never thought I’d actually live through a cliché,” Harkinson said. “But here I am, watching you, Jess, dig yourself into a sweet little mess. And with a girl like Lorraine Jennings. Why, she’s laid half of Harvard and all of B.D. and M.I.T.”
Jess struck him on the mouth but Harkinson only shook his head sorrowfully.
“You poor bastard,” he said.
Jess and Lorraine still sat in movie theaters and restaurants and held hands and once Jess took her to hear the Boston Symphony but she was bored before the program was half over so they left and she took him to a place on Scollay Square where a stripper did tricks with tassels. Occasionally they went to her apartment.
“I adore you,” said Lorraine.
“And I love you, darling,” said Jess. “I love you enough to wait until after we’re married. That first time was a mistake.”
“Are you crazy?” she demanded, and then her voice softened when she saw his shocked expression. “Darling,” she said, “I love you and I want you. I have to have you touch me, I love you so much. Listen, we’ll be careful. It’ll be all right.”
Jess held her and kissed her until they were both breathless and he was sure that no one had ever felt as he did when he carried her to the couch and undressed her, when he made her pant and moan and cry out. He never realized how like clockwork were these exciting little tricks of Lorraine’s, and he never tired of the things she said, time after time after time.
“I adore you,” she said.
And, “Take me, darling. I belong to you.”
And, “Darling, darling, darling.”
“Won’t it be wonderful when you’re a doctor?” asked Lorraine. “Then you can set up an office in New York and we’ll find a gorgeous apartment and go to nightclubs every night.”
Jess laughed and rubbed her neck. “Doctors don’t go to nightclubs every night,” he said. “They go to bed early and sleep with one eye and both ears on the telephone. And I’d be out of place in New York. No, no big cities for me. I’m going in with my father.”
“But, darling,” she protested. “What would we do in that tiny little town of yours?”
She pouted in a fashion that Jesse found adorable and he reached out a finger and touched her bottom lip.
“Do I have to tell you?” he grinned.
Suddenly it was June, and without warning Jess first, Lorraine quit her job at Jordan’s and decided to go to Cape Cod to work at a summer hotel.
“I’ll never get through the summer without you,” said Jess.
“Well, you told me yourself that there was always plenty to do in that little old town of yours.”
“Nothing is going to be any good without you,” he said. “Will you write to me? Every single day?”
“Well, as often as I can,” said Lorraine. “Waiting on tables is no picnic, you know.”
“I know, darling,” said Jess. “But it won’t be much longer. After we’re married you’ll never have to work again.”
“Five years,” said Lorraine crossly. “By that time I’ll be old and have wrinkles.”
Sick with the prospect of loneliness and with a sense of foreboding, Jess boarded the train at North Station and went home. He looked around Cooper Station and thought, Damn, damn, damn.
The town seemed to have shrunk and everyone he saw seemed narrow and provincial and uninteresting, and worst of all, his father seemed very old and very tired.
Gordon Cameron grunted in earnest now when he sat down and Jess remembered sadly how he had used to be just a short while ago, when Amy Cameron had been alive.
Amy had laughed at Gordon’s groaning. “I swear,” she used to say, “you sound like an elephant every time you sit down.”
“It’ll be good to have you back when you finish your schooling,” said Gordon to his son. “Not only to take the load off me, but this is one big house for a man alone.”
“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that, Dad,” said Jess. “What would you think of my setting up an office of my own when I get through? I mean, an office away from here.”
Gordon Cameron kept his voice carefully casual.
“Got any special place in mind, Jess?” he asked.
“Oh, I don’t really know. I thought Boston, maybe. Or New York.”
“Well, son, that’s up to you,” said Gordon. “You have a few more years to go before you have to decide. Personally, I can’t see practicing in the city. Patients are just sick bodies to a big-city doctor. Up here, they’re people. People I know by name and background. People whose fathers I’ve known and whose kids I know.”
“Besides,” said Jess, arguing with himself. “There’s no money in being a general practitioner up around here.”
“Jess,” said Gordon, “this is going to sound hickish as hell to you, but believe me, boy, there’s a lot more to doctoring than the money you get.”
“The money you more often don’t get,” said Jess. “Why, if everybody who owed you money paid up tomorrow you’d be richer than the Coopers.”
Gordon smiled. “Well, we never starved, you and your mother and I,” he said.
“Oh, it’s not just the money,” said Jess. “A man is so limited here. I’ll bet there isn’t a bigger group of narrow-minded people anywhere in the world than the one we have right here in Cooper Station.”
“What do you mean, ‘narrow minded’?” asked Gordon.
It was a question that always induced a long-winded tirade and now Gordon Cameron only half listened to his son. The boy would not say anything that the doctor had not heard many times before from every townsman who had lived away from Cooper Station for a little while. Gordon worked hard to keep the worry from showing in his face, for he had been watching his son. He had seen him mooning around the house, kicking at the furniture for no reason at all and haunting the area around the mailbox twice a day. Gordon Cameron was afraid.
“. . . and another thing,” Jess was saying. “Of course this is just an example, but just supposing I got friendly with a girl here in Cooper Station—”
Gordon Cameron sat up a little straighter.
“Here in Cooper Station,” said Jess, “if a man dates a girl more than three times it follows that he’s sleeping with her and people talk about him over every supper table in town. And when you come right down to it, it’s only natural, isn’t it? I mean, the natural step after falling in love is for a man to want the girl physically.”
Jess had been speaking very rapidly and now he paused for breath. Gordon made a superhuman effort to keep his face empty of amazement, amusement and pity.
“I think you’ve got things a little twisted there, Jess,” said Gordon. “Most often what a man feels for a woman is physical first and then later, sometimes, it turns to love.”
“If that’s true,” said Jess angrily, “then men are no better than animals.”
“What’s the matter, son?” Gordon Cameron asked gently. “You suffering from an attack of conscience?”
“Oh, Dad,” said Jess miserably and began to tell his father.
Gordon listened intently to his son’s low voice.
So we failed after all, Amy and I, thought Gordon. We kept him sheltered and happy and close to us and this is the result. We told ourselves that he was the only child we had so it wasn’t wrong to keep him so close and to enjoy his growing up. Now Jess is paying for all our years of enjoyment, because I forgot what it was like to be young and away from home and lonely. Oh, Christ.
“She said she’d wait until I was through school and that we’d be married,” Jess was saying.
Gordon Cameron wanted to weep for his son.
I used to be amused, he thought, when Jess listened so intently to our man-to-man talks. With me doing all the talking, I guess. I taught him all about love and consideration and honor, and Jess got the idea that every woman in the world was going to be just like Amy.
“She hates small towns,” said Jess. “She wants to live in the city. She said she’d write as often as she could, but it’s been more than two weeks now.”
My son, my son, thought Gordon.
“Perhaps she’s ill,” he offered. “Why don’t you drive down there and find out?”
But the next day there was a letter for Jess at last and his fingers were numb as he fumbled with the envelope.
“Dear Jess,” he read, “I guess this will come as kind of a surprise to you seeing as how we were so friendly and all while I lived in Boston. Well, Jess, I’m married. I guess it’s best to tell you right out straight like that. I met him the very first day I came up here to the Cape. He’s a salesman and sells restaurant equipment and he makes very good money at it. Honest, Jess, he just swept me off my feet and I guess I did the same to him. Anyhow, we got married last week and I have quit my job. We are going to live in Boston and have already found an adorable apartment. Well, Jess, I guess that’s all I’ve got to say except that I’m sorry about the way things turned out between us. I guess we were both lonely before and mistook friendship for love. Anyhow, I hope we’ll always stay good friends. My married name is Mrs. Walter Paquette and I’m enclosing my new address in case you should want to write to me or stop by the apartment the next time you’re in Boston. As always, Lorraine.”
Hopelessly, Jess read the letter over three times, but the words remained the same. Friendly. Friendship for love. Friends. He and Lorraine just friends.
Jess sat in a wing chair in the living room and waited for the pain to start. It came. It came in great black waves when he thought of his Lorraine in another man’s arms, when he thought of her mouth against another man’s mouth, saying, “Darling, darling, darling.” He was sure that he would die, and he jumped from his chair and began to pace the floor. Then he went to his father’s liquor cabinet and poured himself a large drink of bourbon and he pounded his fist against the doorframe.
How could she? Had she forgotten the nights that the two of them had spent in her apartment? Had she forgotten the plans they had made? Had she forgotten how much he loved her?
The answers came to him. Clear, precise and final. She had forgotten, or worse, she had never really cared in the first place. She had never loved him in the first place.
Jess stamped out of the house and began to walk. He walked for miles and came at last to a small hill that looked down on Cooper Station and was isolated and protected all around by a circle of tall pines.
Never again, he vowed silently. I’ll never let myself in for anything like this again.
“I’ll never touch another woman as long as I live,” Jess shouted to the cloudless sky. And his voice echoed back to him and he sat down and wept.
In the years that followed, Jess laughed at himself many times and to parents who complained to him about the behavior of teenage children he often said, “Don’t worry. It passes. I was still an adolescent in my twenties, but I got over it.”
It was almost true. As the years passed he became friendly and slept with and almost loved a great number of women, but something always stopped him at the brink of serious courtship. In the end he always found it easier to leave a woman than to face the possibility of spending a lifetime with her.
“You oughta get married,” said Marie Fennell. “Ain’t fittin’ a man in your position and all. I remember your sainted mother. This house needs a woman.”
Jess had known Marie all his life. Ever since he could remember she had come to help his mother with the house, and after Amy’s death she came every day.
“Why don’t you get married yourself, Marie?” he joked. “Fine-looking woman like you shouldn’t have any trouble and maybe that’d put an end to your matchmaking tendencies.”
Marie’s eyes filled with tears.
“Marie, for God’s sake, I was only kidding. What did I say to make you feel like this?”
Marie brushed her hand angrily across her eyes.
“Nothin’, Doc,” she said. “You didn’t say nothin’. I’m just an old fool.”
Marie was almost fifty now, with a tendency toward stoutness, but once she had been almost beautiful. She had been born Marie Johnson, the daughter of a dairy farmer who owned a farm three miles out of Cooper Station. Sometimes, Marie drank. Not enough to make her drunk. Just enough to blunt the edges of things and make life a little softer and pinker than it really was.
“I dunno when I begun wonderin’ about other places, Doc,” she once said to Jess. “Places outside of Cooper Station and the Mills, I mean. But I did. Didn’t do me no good, though. I was the only one and I had to help Pa with the cows and Ma with the house. They was never much for gallivantin’. Pa, he was happy to stay home after supper. He’d set there after he was done eatin’ and read the paper and Ma, she set and read her Bible all the time after her first sick spell. But I used to go out on the porch at night. The stars was so big out there you felt like you could just reach up and grab yourself a whole bagful if you felt like it. I used to think I’d write poems about them stars someday. I went to school right up through the fourth grade but then Ma, she got took bad and after that I had to stay home with her. Your Pa looked after Ma. He was always good with her, makin’ her laugh a little and easin’ her pain and all. I guess I was sixteen before I started goin’ out some. Yep. Sixteen. The year after Ma passed away. A whole bunch of us farm kids used to go around in Hap Elkin’s old Model-A Ford, and I’m tellin’ you, Doc, we had more fun in that old car than kids have today for all their shiny new convertibles. Pa, though, he’d have fits when I went off with Hap and the gang, but I didn’t care none and as long as I stayed on helpin’ him with the farm, he couldn’t say much. Anyway, that was the year I met Conrad Fennell. I wasn’t all fat the way I am now, Doc. I was slender like, with all my weight where it counted. My hair was long and black then, and Hap Elkins always used to say I had skin like cream. Anyway, we all went to a barn dance one night and that’s where I met Conrad. He was playin’ the cornet and right away he noticed me.
“‘What’s your name, beautiful?’ he says to me.
“And I says, ‘Marie Johnson. What’s your name?’
“‘Conrad Fennell,’ he says. Then he kind a bowed a little like and says, ‘Miss Marie, your servant!’
“Well, I’m tellin’ you, Doc, I went for him right off. He was from Manchester and I only knew him two weeks when he asked me to get married. I thought Pa was gonna blow a fuse.”
“‘Where’s he come from and what’s he do?’”
“‘He’s a cornet playin’ man from the city,’ I said, thinkin’ I might as well get that over with.
“Well, Pa, he was never much of a one for cussin’ but he cussed that night until I thought the air’d turn blue. Didn’t do him no good, though. I married Conrad anyway, and we stayed right there on the farm so’s I could keep on helpin’ Pa. Conrad, he was supposed to help Pa too, but he never did get the hang of any thin’ like milkin’ or the plantin’ or nothin’ like that. He used to set around the house, writin’. Writin’ all the time. Stories, poems, music. Conrad, he could write all kindsa things. Well, Pa, he was about crazy. He said as how no self-respectin’ man with a wife would set around the house all day and not work.
“‘Well, Pa,’ I told him, ‘Conrad is workin’. He’s writin’.’
“But Pa, he couldn’t see how anybody could call settin’ around writin’ work and he and Conrad was always at it, arguin’ and cussin’ each other out. At night, though, it was different. After supper, me and Conrad’d go for walks. We’d walk up the hill behind the farm and set up there and Conrad, he’d tell me these poems he made up. And afterward we’d go into our room and lay there in the dark and he’d tell me stories. Oh, Doc, you can’t begin to think of the stories he’d tell me. He’d tell me about places I’d never been and he’d tell me so plain I could see them right there in front of my eyes. Well, anyway, I guess we was three or four months married when I found out I was in the family way. Pa, he said that was the last straw and that Conrad was gonna have to start helpin’ around the farm. And Conrad, he tried, Doc. Don’t you think he didn’t. His beautiful hands got all callused and he was always sunburned. He tried and he tried hard but it was too much for him. Between Pa naggin’ him all the time and the way I’d started gettin’ heavy with the baby and all, it was just too much for him. He ran off one night. One night he told me a story and rubbed my back for me and after I was asleep he just ran off and I never saw him again. Well, Pa, he was good to me, I gotta give him that. He wouldn’t let me do any work and he saw to it that I took care of myself and all. It was your Pa delivered little Ira. Named him Ira after Pa. I wanted to name him Conrad but if I had, Pa’d just have been more tore up than he was already and I didn’t see no sense to that. I thought I was gonna die sure, for a while back there. It seemed like I was just hell bent on killin’ myself with all the runnin’ around I had done. Pa, he hired a woman to look after little Ira and I went off to Cooper’s Mills and got me a job. I had a room and a job and didn’t lack none for attention, I can tell you. It’s true I ran around and drank like a fish for a while. But it ain’t true what some folks say about my whorin’ around when I lived in Cooper’s Mills. I ain’t never whored around, Doc. I never took no money from nobody. Sometimes fellers’d give me presents and buy me a few drinks but that don’t make a woman a whore. But you wanna know somethin’, Doc? All that drinkin’ and runnin’ around didn’t do no good. I still used to wonder about Conrad and sometimes, even now, I still do. I wonder where he went and if he’s happy and if maybe sometimes he’s sorry he went. I look at little Ira, and he ain’t so little no more. He’s graduatin’ from high school next June and he looks just like his Pa. And I catch myself wonderin’ if maybe things shouldn’t’ve been different. Anyway, Doc, that’s how come I don’t look to get married again now and why I never did, even when I was still young. Once somebody’s had the best there is, it’s mighty hard to be satisfied with second best. Somehow I never got the hankerin’ to try.”
All the rest of his life, whenever Jess thought of loneliness, he thought first of his father whom loneliness had made old before his time, and of Marie, the butt of every unkind joke in Cooper Station.
Once, Jess had asked Marie, “What if you had it to do over again, Marie? Would you still marry Conrad Fennell?”
Marie had smiled sadly, the way she always did when she had had a few drinks.
“Sometimes I ain’t quite sure, Doc,” she said. “But most of the time I know I would.”
“You mean you’d let yourself in for all that pain again? And for the loneliness and wondering?”
Marie shrugged and picked up a dustcloth. “It wa’nt all loneliness,” she said. “I got plenty to remember and that’s more than lots of folks’ve got.”
The third person that Jess Cameron thought of when he thought of loneliness was a man named Philip Hastings whom he had known during the Second World War. But even when the war was long over, he still did not like to remember Philip Hastings.
Hastings is going to be the voice of my conscience for the rest of my life, thought Jess ruefully. Goddamn him.
Jess finished his internship at the Mary Hitchcock Hospital in Hanover just in time to be drafted into the army. He served four years with the medical corps, and spent almost three of those years on the islands of the Pacific. From the moment he received his commission and put on his uniform, Jess hated every single thing about the war. Even years later, he could not bear to talk of the waste, the terror, the helplessness of war and he could not understand the way old service men clung together when it was over, the way they sat around in bars and remembered the war, the way their eyes misted over as they remembered what the tones of their voices seemed to recall as the good old days. Jess never spoke of the broken and mutilated bodies and minds of men at war. He had patched, sewn, cut and bandaged and he knew he had done his job well. Except with Philip Hastings.
Philip Hastings had been a captain in the infantry. He came from Detroit, Michigan, where he had a wife and two sons. He carried pictures of his family with him at all times and he showed them constantly to anyone who would take the time to look.
“The wife,” he would say. “Her name’s Gwenyth, but everyone calls her Gwen. That’s my son Tommy there on the left. He’s six, and believe me there are no flies on Tommy. Smart as a whip. Everybody says so. And that’s my son Mike on the right. Three years old and a hellion. Believe me, if Mike doesn’t grow up to be a fighter, I miss my guess.”
Everyone got a charge out of Captain Hastings. He was the perfect picture of the typical American husband and father who had been doing well at his job, had minded his own business and had voted for Roosevelt. And here he was now. In the infantry.
He was brought into the hospital with a broken arm.
“I don’t know how the hell it could have happened,” he said. “I guess I landed wrong or something when I dived for my hole.”
“Christ, what a mess,” said Major Jess Cameron.
Jess fixed Philip Hastings’ arm and then he arranged for the captain to spend several days at a rest area.
“You’ll be out of it for a while,” said Jess. “But you’ll be back. See you around.”
Exactly one week later, the captain was waiting for Jess in the hospital’s small waiting room.
“Well, Hastings,” said Jess. “Welcome back. “You’re my first customer this morning. Come on in. How’s the arm?”
“Listen, Major, I’m not here because of my arm,” said Hastings.
“Oh?”
“No. Listen, Major.” Hastings leaned forward and almost whispered. “I’ve got it.”
“Got what, Hastings?” asked Jess a little impatiently. He was very tired.
“V.D.,” replied the captain.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” said Jess. “A week out of the hospital, a cast on your arm and you managed to get into that kind of trouble. Are you sure?”
Captain Hastings burst into tears.
“Yes,” he sobbed. “I’m sure. There was a girl back there, a Red Cross girl. Honest to God, Major, I never meant it to happen, I just wanted to talk to someone. I just wanted to talk to a woman.”
“Hastings, pull yourself together,” said Jess. “Red Cross girls don’t usually have V.D. Come on in. We’ll have a look.”
“What am I going to do?” Hastings wept. “How will I ever face Gwen and the children, tainted the way I am now?”
“For God’s sake, Hastings, shut up and hold out your arm.”
The Wassermann was negative.
“Hastings, sometimes it takes a while before we can be sure of these things,” said Jess. “I’m going to keep you here in the hospital for a few days and we’ll see what develops.”
“I’ll never be able to go home,” again cried Hastings. “Gwen will leave me and take the boys—”
“Will you stop blubbering,” Jess snapped impatiently. “You don’t even know whether you have it or not. Come on, now. Go with the orderly and get into bed. You’re just tired.”
“Oh, God,” moaned Hastings. “Oh, God, forgive me.”
“What’s with him, Major?” the orderly asked later. “A nut?”
“How the hell do I know?” said Jess. “Guilty conscience more likely.”
Every morning, Captain Hastings was waiting for Major Cameron.
“Major,” he begged. “Help me. Listen, I’ve got it. You’ve got to do something.”
A week later, Philip Hastings’ Wassermann again proved negative and Jess’s careful examination showed him to be free of anything below the belt save for a rather puckered appendectomy scar.
“Well, Hastings,” said Jess. “Good news today. You’re okay. Clean as a whistle.”
Captain Hastings stood with his shoulders bent and kept his eyes fixed on the floor.
“You don’t have to worry about telling me the truth, Major,” he said. “I can take it. I know I’ve got it.”
Jess was tired. When he stopped to think of it, he could not remember a time when he had been as tired as he was now.
“Listen to me, Hastings,” he said and stood directly in front of the captain. “You haven’t got V.D. There’s not a damned thing wrong with you. Except for that arm you could get the hell out of here this morning and go back to your outfit. Now stop bucking for a section eight and get the hell out of here. I’ve got work to do.”
Philip Hastings just stood there with tears running down his cheeks and Jess supposed that there was something amusing about the conscience-stricken captain but he was too tired to laugh.
He’ll get over it, thought Jess. He hates himself for sneaking a little bit of tail on the side, but he’ll get over it. He’ll go back to Detroit one day and start selling cars again and every time he has a fight with his wife he’ll remember his little Red Cross girl with nothing but sweet memories.
But Captain Hastings did not get over it.
“Sir,” an orderly complained. “Captain Hastings keeps on my ass all the time. Keeps begging me for penicillin. Pulls his rank on me and everything else. Tells me he’s going to the colonel, the general and to President Roosevelt if he has to because we won’t help him.”
Jess sighed with annoyance. “Put Hastings on the list of men going back to the general hospital,” he said. “Maybe they’ll have a psychiatrist there. In the meantime, give him shots of sterile water whenever he asks for penicillin and just keep him the hell out of my way.”
The tiny hospital buzzed with talk about Captain Hastings. He was not sick or really hurt and was, therefore, a welcome change from men with dirt-encrusted wounds and men who screamed for their mothers.
“Hear about Hastings?” the orderlies asked one another. “Shacked up with some broad back at the rest area and now he thinks he’s got syph.”
“He’s a riot to watch. Keeps swiveling his head around to look over his shoulder. Like his wife and kids were following him.”
“A real nut, that one.”
“Jungle jolly.”
“Poor bastard.”
“Just keep him the hell off my neck,” said Jess Cameron. “I haven’t time to wet-nurse him.”
The night before Captain Hastings was scheduled to go back to the general hospital, he went into the latrine and put his revolver against his temple and blew his head off.
Jess Cameron met with his colonel and together they decided what had to be done. Eventually, they sent Captain Hastings’ things to his wife with a letter saying that while in the performance of his duty, the captain had been killed by a fall from a truck and all the reports ever filled out tallied exactly with the words read by Gwenyth Hastings.
“It’s your ass and mine if we ever get caught,” said the colonel.
“I know,” replied Jess.
“Can’t have men knocking themselves off right under our noses, though,” said the colonel. “Looks bad. Besides, his family’ll feel a lot better if they think he was killed in action.”
“Yes,” said Jess.
But afterwards, he couldn’t get Philip Hastings out of his mind.
Your fault, Cameron, he thought. You could have saved him. A little time, a little kindness, that’s all it would have taken. But I had no time, he argued silently with himself. And kindness? During a war kindness is time consuming and I had no time. You killed him, Cameron. You might just as well have held the gun up to his head yourself. But I didn’t know. I didn’t realize that he was as sick as he was. Okay. Okay. Forget it. Forget it.
In July 1945, Gordon Cameron dropped dead of a heart attack only minutes after he had finished delivering a baby in the Cooper Station hospital. By the time Jess heard of it on an island in the Pacific, his father had been buried for nearly a month. Richard Strickland’s father, Joshua, had taken care of everything and when Jess finally returned home it was to a clean, well-ordered, empty house. There were fresh flowers in all the vases and milk in the refrigerator, but the first thing Jess noticed about the house was the single brass plate on the front door. He discovered later that after Gordon Cameron had died, the townspeople had formed a committee to remove the brass plate that had had two names lettered on it and to replace it with the one that now read, Jesse M. Cameron, M.D. In the fashion of northern New England in general and Cooper Station in particular, neither Jess nor anyone else ever mentioned what had been done. But Jess knew that even without his father, the town still wanted him for its doctor, and the town knew that Jess would stay.
He started right in on his father’s old schedule the day after he was discharged from the army. He spent his mornings at the Cooper Station hospital and he had office hours between two and four every afternoon and from seven to nine o’clock every evening. By the time Jess had been home less than six months, it was as if he had never been away at all and the thought that he might ever leave Cooper Station was as ridiculous as the idea that someone might try to transplant the giant oaks that had been on his front lawn for over a hundred years. Jess worked hard and well and as the years passed he reread many times the letter that his father had written and left for him only a few weeks before he died.
“This is my town and they are my people,” Gordon Cameron had written. “Please be good to them, Jess. Everything that has been said of them is true, in part. They are sometimes narrow, vicious, cruel and very small-town indeed, but they are also loyal and once in a great while they will surprise you with their greatness and their nobility. No matter how you find them, remember that most of them have belonged to me and I to them and that from birth your life has been interwoven with their lives. I know that you won’t come back to us the same as you were when you left. War changes ideals and values but if I’m sure of anything, I’m sure that you will be able to find peace here and I know that you’ll do a good job. The house is yours, of course. Jess, fill it for me with the laughter of my grandchildren.”
Dr. Jess Cameron looked through the patch of sunlight that came through his window. He looked out across the wide, elm-shaded lawn that was his to the street beyond. The street, too, was his.
My town, my people, my ass, he said angrily, silent. Then aloud he called, “Marie!”
She opened his office door quietly. “Yes, Doc?”
“Pack a couple of bags, will you please? I’m going down to the city for a few days.”
He got into his car and headed for the highway that would take him, eventually, to the city of New York. As he passed the town line he glanced at the sign there that read, You ARE NOW LEAVING COOPER STATION. PLEASE COME AGAIN, and he almost snorted aloud.
The sign was another Cooper Station enigma. There might be no words of welcome at the entrances of the town but there were cordial words of farewell.
It’s as if they were implying that it’s all right to say goodbye nicely as long as you’ve managed to wangle your way into town in the first place, thought Jess sourly.
He wondered what his father would have said about Chris and Lisa Pappas and whether or not Gordon would still have claimed to find the qualities of greatness and nobility which he had seen in his town. Would Gordon, like the great majority of Cooper Station, have been glad to be rid of the Pappases so that neither anyone nor anything any longer marred the calm surface of the town? Jess was not sure, for while Gordon had been a champion of right over wrong, he had also been a pacifist and he had loved Cooper Station second only to his wife and his son. And what would Gordon Cameron have thought of Lisa Pappas and Anthony Cooper?
“Infidelity,” Jess remembered his father saying, “makes for nothing but guilt and unhappiness and anyone who goes in for it is a fool.”
But what of loneliness? wondered Jess as he drove toward New York. Lisa thought she was in love with Chris because she was lonely. She got pregnant by him because she was lonely. And she was unfaithful to him because she was lonely. Jess remembered his father and his house the way they had been after Amy Cameron died, and he was sure that Gordon would have understood. Just as he had always understood about Marie Fennell and the way he would have understood about Philip Hastings. He would, perhaps, even have understood his son who rushed through the night toward the anonymous city, running from the fact that all his years of caution had failed to protect him from loneliness, because Jess had been in love with Margery Cooper from the first day that Nathaniel had brought her home. And, Cooper Station being what it was, there was nothing for a man like Jess Cameron to do but to run away and try to forget for a little while that he had not built his defenses strong enough and that he was as vulnerable as anyone else after all.