III

The one busy spot in all Sconset, the only hive of activity in the place, seemed to be the drugstore. Ethel Grandin sat on a bench at the bus stop across from the store and watched the people go in and out. There were, of course, ten women to every man; with very few exceptions, each male was either under eighteen or well over forty. Those who came between—half a dozen at the most, during an entire hour—were in uniform.

It was a full white day, so white with a morning glare that the sky was not blue at all, though there was not a cloud to be seen. The day was not yet warm; a kind of early morning coolness still lingered on the air; but by noon or even by eleven, this coolness was sure to be gone. The beach would be blazing, the day hot and enervating like the tropics.

She had yet to get postcards; but inasmuch as she had forgotten them in Woods Hole and again when they landed at Nantucket, it didn’t seem to matter too much. After Boston the chain had been broken; further cards could wait awhile.—She now remembered, also, that she had forgotten to telephone home last night, letting her mother know they had arrived. That could wait too, till tonight; she would try to call early enough so she could speak to the boys.

Far more important than cards or phone calls was the problem of the holiday: how to save it or, failing that, how to get through it. When the dreadful moment was met, something deep inside her had risen up at last and taken the stand for her, willy-­nilly: it was as if she had had no part in it, almost no say in the matter. To apologize or backtrack, now, was impossible. The step was taken; it had to lead where it would, and she to follow.

And yet she was bitterly aware of how completely she had cut off her husband, certainly without intending to do so. She had gone to such lengths that he had been left with nothing. She had not wanted to spare him; yet she had not wanted to tie him hand and foot, either, or reduce him to such a zero status that whatever move he might make from now on would be inacceptable as husband or lover, almost even as friend. It had all been necessary, last night; but now, more than ever before in their lives, they must find some way of getting together again. He was alone and she was alone; they must face this fact, and seek an opening for a return to one another. With all her heart she wanted to put her arms around him and say, “Look, John . . . John . . .”—but from there she could think no further. She did not know what she had to say to him; in plain fact, she had nothing to say, really; but how else were they to reach one another again? He would not be coming to her bed, nor could she blame him for that; and it was utterly impossible for her to go to his, and thus invalidate the truth of what she had been trying to tell him last night.

Ethel Grandin was no nearer knowing this morning what she would do than when she had sat for so long in the wicker chair, waiting for him to go back to his bed. Even when he did go, she must have sat there for another half hour or even an hour longer, long after the harp recital was finished in the parlor below, the hotel quiet for the night, her cigarettes gone, and her husband asleep. During that period she had thought literally nothing; she was shaken and frightened because of what had happened, yet somehow curiously relieved at last.

The one moment when she had been at all afraid of weakening was when he first got into her bed and she felt at once that he had no pajamas on. Stiff in his pleading embrace she still resisted, though her heart went out in pity for his nakedness. He seemed at that moment more pathetic than ever. It hadn’t been his fault; not more than half a dozen times in ten years had he done such a thing. It had long been part of his tact and consideration that he never took it for granted beforehand that she would let him make love to her, so that whenever he came to her bed it was always with his pajamas on, both jacket and pants; if he took them off at all, it was only after their love-­making had begun. Last night he had had no pajamas to put on or take off because he hadn’t unpacked. When she heard him undress in the dark, in fact, and get into his bed—when she lay there in the dark herself and thought of him lying naked between the cold sheets of the unfamiliar bed—she wished she had thought to lay out his pajamas for him before he came back upstairs.

From the little square where she sat, irregular lanes wound away toward the back alleys of Sconset, toward the moors, or the beach. Along these lanes could be seen incredibly small cottages of the salt-­box variety, high and tiny, packed so intimately close together that one could scarcely have walked between them, unpainted or else weather-­beaten to a harmonious uniform hue that was not color at all, and every one of them all but smothered in rambler roses which were fast fading from their bright original pink (for the season was getting on and the sun was strong now) to a pink-­white. Many of them had quaint but quite useless picket fences hemming in their infinitesimal yards, useless because knee-­high; into the parlor of most of them one could have stepped directly from the street in a single step. It was all picturesque, charming, and self-­conscious, exactly as one expected to find it, so that pictorially Sconset held no surprise whatever to anyone who had ever seen picture postcards of Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, or the Cape.

After her husband had left last evening, she had unpacked and got into bed. When he returned he must have supposed she was already asleep; either that or he pretended to think so. Perhaps he was afraid that if he put the light on, the thing would start up again. But there was nothing more to be said: he could have turned on the light and read all night, or tried to talk it all out with her, and she would not have had another word to say. She would certainly not bring it up again today; no more would he; but what was going to happen when they met again? They couldn’t just go on in stony silence for two whole weeks.

One of the reasons why they had chosen Sconset was because they knew no one here; now, for the first time, she wished they did. If ever they needed the company of friends or someone to pass the time with, it was now. Could there be anything in the Howards? she wondered. From their twenty minutes in the bus together, he seemed amiable enough, but there was something about Mrs. Howard that disconcerted her and discouraged an intimate exchange. She did not especially care for women, to begin with, particularly women her own age, so many of whom were too sophisticated for her, unsimple, or dishonest. Happily married women, those in full possession of their husbands (as Mrs. Howard seemed to be), put Ethel Grandin off her ease, made her self-­conscious, unwilling to compete socially or take part. She was much more comfortable in the company of older women, who thought her an ideal young matron full of sound sense and thus did not really know her at all, or women younger than herself who looked up to her as an experienced wife and mother or talked freely and at length only of themselves and their problems, thus exempting her from social effort. This preference to stay aloof was not snobbishness; it was partly her New England upbringing, partly her lack of confidence in herself as a wife. Had her marriage been completely happy, even blindly so—or even had she been one of those wives who feel superior to or contemptuous of their husbands—she would have been able freely to enter into whatever relationships came up, casual or intimate. As it was, besides the friends of her husband, she had no close friend whatever of her own, and there was small chance of her making any.

It had not been fair to light that cigarette last night and so let him know she was still awake; this was the kind of feminine trick she deplored and so seldom indulged in. She had known what it would lead to when she did it. Woman-­like, she had been unable to resist the temptation to tell him, in this way, that she hadn’t fallen asleep as if nothing had happened, she was still firm, she had not forgotten. She had wanted to make him feel it still, in short. When, her cigarette finished, he had got out of his bed and come over to hers, it was no more than she expected; indeed, what else could he have done? Had he ignored the trick she would have despised him, and despised herself even more—therein lay the risk. In any case, he did feel it: his tone of voice as he whispered “Ethel” was as lonely as any she had ever heard. But what else could she have done, either? She would never have forgiven herself had she stayed in bed after he got in beside her; all that had gone before and all she had said would have been made ridiculous and cheap. No matter how badly she wanted him, last night had been one time when nothing in her life was more important at that moment than to say “No”—how few times lately had it been given her (oh, humiliating!) to say it? The shameful part of these many past weeks was that she had not even been allowed to deny him; for all he knew, she was ready and willing night after night on end. She had been, too—up till now.

A flock of young girls went sailing by on bicycles, wheeling recklessly about the square, narrowly missing pedestrians whom they ignored as if they did not exist (not because they were pedestrians but because they were old and thus didn’t count), and carrying on, with petulant shrill cries, an un-­understandable conversation among themselves which had no apparent logic or sequence whatever. The questions shouted back and forth seemed to have been put for the edification of anyone who overheard, without expectation of answer; but at one point one of them called out querulously, “Oh dear, isn’t it time to go to the beach” and another answered, “Have you lost your mind Jimmy, are you absolutely wacky, why it isn’t even ten-­thirty.”

When she had got up in the sunlighted room she had not dared to stay there looking at him, innocently asleep in the bed next to hers. How many mornings in the past, when he had stayed in her bed till morning, had she delighted to wake early and look at him before he awoke, study him in sleep beside her, so unconscious of them both or of where he was. Then she loved him so that it took all her self-­control, all her consideration and thought of him, not to bend over and kiss him, or wake him and hold him again. This morning, for all his forty-­four years, he had seemed again like a man much younger, giving himself intensely to sleep: he lay on his right side partly turned away from her, one knee bent and one leg thrust straight down, the left wrist and hand dangling loosely over the side, the other under his head so that his cheek was cushioned in his palm; his thick sandy hair was disarranged more attractively than he could ever consciously have arranged it. She had never got used to him physically, never overcome the attraction of his physical person, perhaps because he had been hers only, the only man she had ever had or wanted. Because he was asleep, she could look at him with the eyes of memory, though the night before was not forgotten. But she did not look long, lest he wake and spoil her reverie by at once becoming a stranger.

Why had she picked a time like this for a showdown, a time when he could have been her lover for two weeks? But he himself had known the answer to the question even as he asked it: because he expected to be that lover—expected that it was expected of him. He knew; which was why, reckless, he had dared her with mockery, saying such an outrageous and true thing as “I suppose it’s a moral question.” In preference to a holiday of love or at least of love-­making (long delayed, intended merely as a stopgap for another month or few months), she had pulled ruin down upon them both. Neither of them, now, could ever undo last night. Well, out of that ruin they would build, or part; there could be no half measures from now on, no evasions, pretenses, or falling back on cowardly custom. If he wanted her, she was his to take, but not as he had half-heartedly tried to do last night. Let him pull himself out of his apathy first, emerge from the strange murk in which she had lost sight of the man she loved; let him declare himself and show his love as if they were just beginning. Once she was assured that she still counted as his wife, she would be only too willing to meet him halfway and try again. But she had to know—from inside herself and from him, not from his just saying it—that he wanted her. And in that there could be no make-­believe.

Of course the problem had not been solved at all, or even faced; it had been stated merely. But since the first step toward the solution of any problem is to state it, perhaps there was hope. Or was there something else back of it; did a problem exist beyond the issue, always personal for her, of their marriage? She did not know; she only knew now where she stood in the matter, and had so expressed herself. How it was with her husband—that would be for him to say.

It was time to go to the beach. She preferred to go alone; she wanted to lie in the sun and not think about it any more: not think of anything. She got up from the beach and crossed the square to the drugstore to get some sun-­tan oil and cards for Alan and Ted, dodging bicycles as she went.