She paid Mrs. Marshall that night, and when she came downstairs in the morning, in slacks and raincoat for the boat, the sleeping house had the curious anticipatory hush that came with this time of day. Outside, the city was still given over to birds and the scents of damp lawns and early blossoms. Gulls planed over the elms where it was already full day, and their urgent cries suddenly set off some excitement in Van, like a summons. She hurried.
In the restaurant there was the smell of coffee and the early morning look of waitresses, some cheerful, some yawning, being kidded by men on stools at the counter. Van went to a booth where she could look up at the hotel’s mansard roof in sunshine and the pigeons preening and courting.
“Good morning!” There was a warm aroused burst of laughter from the girls. Vanessa sat quietly, looking at her cup, but she felt a fierce pride.
“Well, here’s a face from home!” Owen came toward her. “You going out today? You must be. That’s the only reason for getting up early in this goddam place.”
“Yes, I’m going out. It looks like a good trip, too.”
“Oh, it’ll be finest kind. Mind if I join ye, or do you like to sulk over your breakfast and try to get up enough courage to face the day?”
She nodded at the bench opposite, and he slid in behind the table. A waitress came to them, a girl with a towering hairdo that made Vanessa think of Gina. “Sweetheart, what do you keep up there?” Owen asked her. “Your virtue?” Her make-up cracked into a youthful grin and she could do nothing better than jab her pencil at him and exclaim, “Oh, you!”
When she left he said, “What did you do last night?”
“Went to bed and read The Secret Sharer.”
“Appropriate title for right now. Good story?”
“I don’t know if it’s good or not. I kept on reading, anyway. I think I got what he was getting at. The feel of it.”
His breakfast came and he said to the girl, “You’re a dear girl. When you grow up I’ll come and claim you as my own.”
“I’ll put that down in my date book.” Unexpectedly a tide of color rushed up her throat and into her face. Smiling broadly, she turned and hurried away.
“Dazzling females before breakfast, even.” said Vanessa. “Is that your form of wake-up exercises?”
“After last night I have to do something to prove that I’m alive.” He shuddered. “Drank too much, smoked too much, playing poker with a bunch of pirates. They were out to take the old man.”
“And did they?”
“Let’s say I held my own.”
“Spoken with true modesty.” They smiled at each other. He lifted his coffee cup toward her as if in a toast. But they said nothing else about themselves. The talk was desultory.
When they finished and went out, he said, “How about walking down to the boat?” She nodded, and he took the bags and went back along the block to where two taxis were parked, and put the bags in one of them.
They turned down toward the harbor. In the street there was thin but constant traffic to and from the waterfront businesses, but they were the only walkers, along with occasional pigeons, sparrow, and cats.
“I wanted to talk to you,” he said, his public manner abruptly gone. “When we get back, it’ll be pure hell for us, but nobody’s going to know it. Agreed?”
“Of course.” She gave him a sidewise glance of mild surprise. “Did you think I was going to yell the truth at Barry the minute I got off the boat?”
“Christ, no,” he said irritably. “But I don’t think we ought to try to see each other right off. It’ll be hard to act halfway normal before or after. I know. I’ll do pretty well if I stay away from you.”
She looked straight ahead. The street shimmered oddly in the blaze of the climbing sun. “For how long?”
“Till I tell her. And I’ll know when the time is right for that.”
“Right for which of you?” They stopped at a place where the street passed by an inlet of quiet water occupied by paddling gulls, and stood by a rough rail looking down. You can see their feet move, she thought. “It’s never going to be right for her,” she said coldly. “You’ll keep putting it off.”
“I’m not thinking of when it’s right for her. Good God, Van, I’m not even thinking of you when you come right down to it. I’m concentrating on me. It’s my survival. It’s come to that. I’ve got to live out a little of my own life, not somebody else’s as somebody else, or the trying.”
The rawness got through to her, she saw it in his face. Out here on this public place she was shaken enough to want to take hold of him, to comfort him, as if that were the only way to comfort herself. No, not comfort. If ever a man were less in need of comfort—no, he would do it. He had come to that point.
“Barry’s another reason why I don’t want us to say anything until we’re ready to walk out, clip and clean. The minute you tell Barry anything he’ll be off to tell the whole thing to Father Philip.”
“And then the family’ll be on your neck. I know. You’ll never survive that,” she said.
“No, not the family then, just Phil.” They began walking again. “He’ll think it’s his duty, and looking at it from his viewpoint, it will be. But I don’t figure on justifying myself to anyone, chewing it over, getting put on the defensive, argued with, reasoned with, appealed to—”
“You’re furious already,” she told him. “Why? Do you really feel, underneath, that they could break you down?”
“No! But once anybody gets hold of it, it’s public property—we’re public property—the whole goddam shooting match is handled, fingerprinted, breathed on—do you want that?” He didn’t give her a chance to answer. “Or wouldn’t you give a hoot? You’d be showing ’em all, wouldn’t you? Good enough for the arrogant bastards.”
“I don’t want to fight with you, Owen,” she said gently. “You’ve got the hardest thing to do, and I want you to do it the way you want to. When it’s all over, there’ll be the island. Maybe we’ll be there when the strawberries are ripe.”
He stopped on the sidewalk. “You,” he half-growled. “I could take hold of you now, and to hell with the world. How do you know how to do it? Swear back at me, be sarcastic, and I can almost convince myself I don’t even like you, there’s no love involved, just me out dragging my wing for one good illegal diddle when I’ve got the chance dropped in my lap. Then you pull the other on me, that voice, that look, straight past the noise and the bluff, and you say, I know what he is, and what scares him, and what makes him want to howl like a lunatic, and what eats at him till he’s ready to run. You see all that and the rest and you say, So be it, I love the bastard anyway. It’s in your eyes. So then I could go to hell for you.”
“You may yet,” she said. “But I’ll be with you. It will be easy. Because you know me the way you say I know you. I never wanted anybody to, until you. Now I’m committed. It’s as simple as that.” His eyes glistened, and his hand moved toward her, then back and into his pocket as a panel truck rattled down toward them. “You’re damn right we’ll be there when the strawberries are ripe,” he said. The truck went by and somebody touched the horn. “Link and the mail,” he growled without looking around. The taxi that had their bags followed, carrying passengers. They began to walk again, silently agreeing not even to brush even a sleeve.
“The world is too much with us;” Vanessa said drily.
“Late and soon,
“Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,” said Owen. “I told you we had one teacher for five years out there who was crazy about poetry. That one had a real racy line in it.”
“The sea that bares her bosom to the moon,” said Van. They both laughed, and this carried them for quite some distance.
“She was a great old girl, Minnie Lufkin,” said Owen. “She pounded the stuff into our stubborn heads, and what we couldn’t understand then we still remember. It’s like money in the bank, I told my kids the other day. Rich was grousing about having eight lines to memorize, and I gave ’em a few rousing stanzas of Marco Bozzaris. The old man surprised them. Surprised himself too.”
My kids. A new silence surrounded them for the rest of the way.
At the wharf Owen joined the engineer and a truck driver in loading bundles of trap stock into the hold. The captain and the man from the bottled-gas company were rolling a dozen hundred-pound cylinders across the deck. A couple of boys were trundling cases of canned goods and crates of vegetables down the slip. Gulls squawked and wheeled over the glistening roofs of the seafood factory opposite. A faint cloud-layer was beginning to dull the early morning gold of the sun.
Vanessa didn’t sit with the other passengers on the bench, but leaned against the cabin on the side facing out across the harbor, and smoked. Once she heard Owen laugh and felt her face tighten as if it were hardening clay. Tears were squeezed into her eyes. Withdrawal symptoms—she tried to ridicule herself. But she knew that if he came around the pilot house in this instant she would not be able to hide this awful defenselessness, no matter who else saw. She tried to summon up a vision of Jessup’s Island, herself and Owen walking over the rocks, but she could not evoke it and in a moment of terror she thought a section of her memory had given way, like a piece of land weakened by surf. She stood rigid against the pilot house with her eyes shut.
Someone drawled at her elbow, “Well, I’d say that was some real old jumbo economy size hangover. You want something for it?”
She stared blurrily and at first without recognition into the small grotesque mask with the Egyptian eyes under a dense black fringe. The fringe was new.
“Hello, Gina,” Van said. The spinning slowed. “No, it’s not a hangover. Are you going out to the island?”
“Yah.” Gina slumped against the side of the pilot house. “Back to Alcatraz. I’ve got no choice because I’ve got no money, and neither has Wandering Willy. He’s down forrard, trying to sleep. . . .” She gave Van a sly sidewise grin. “I suppose you heard I took all his money when I skipped. I should’ve got on the first bus for New York or Miami, even.” She stared out at the harbor and after a moment said, “I wouldn’t be here now. I’d never be here again.” There was a tremble in her voice. “But no, damn fool, I had to go on one big kick. Willy’s been chasing me around trying to get me to come home. Home.” She lifted one shoulder in contempt. “I was onto something good. A guy off one of their trawlers.” She nodded her head toward Universal Seafoods. “Money to burn when he come ashore, and no woman. When he was like that I could a talked him into anything.” Her eyes became liquidly bright, she gave Van an eager excited smile that was incongruously childish through the make-up. “He always wanted to get on one of them tuna boats out on the West Coast, so I was working on him about that. California, you know, Hollywood and all that. Disneyland.” She said it in a hushed tone. “Jeest, I could just see me, out in all that sunshine. And I look real good in a bikini,” she added complacently. “You have to be skinny. Some men like skinny girls. I dunno if it makes them think of boys or not.” She giggled. “Got a spare cigarette on you?”
Van handed her a package. At least this ghastly visitation was giving her a chance to come to her senses. Gina lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply, then blew smoke through her nostrils. The boat was backing away from the wharf and a damp breeze was beginning to blow. The harbor wrinkled under a silvery diffusion of sunlight. “Yep, I had something going for me,” Gina said regretfully. “He was just crazy for it. Then Willy ran us down in Chuck’s room at the Avalon. My God, I never knew him to be so savage! A wild man! He was pounding on the door and yelling, and we was—well, you know—” She leered coyly at Van. “So we didn’t answer, but he knew we were there, all right. He’d been listening. So he kicked in the door, and by then the man who runs the Avalon was up there, and I dunno who else, and there I was, bollicky bare-arse.” She giggled. “My, their eyes popped! And Chuck was trying to get into his pants and Willy was yelling he’d murder him. You’d think he had three pair of arms the way they were swinging around there.” Her voice had never sounded so alive. “Some nut called the police, so we all ended up in the police station. I had my clothes on by then, but that fresh cop, Wallace Winslow, wouldn’t give me a chance to put my makeup on.”
“You must have felt naked,” said Vanessa.
Gina said suspiciously, “Huh? Well, anyway, we spent the night in jail, and poor Willy he like to heaved up his whole insides he was so upset. The sheriff had to call in a doctor for him. And Chuck, he’s moaning for fear he’ll lose his next trip out. I was the only one who looked half alive the next morning when the three of us were rampsed into court. Honest to Gawd, I thought I’d die laughing at the sight of them two.”
The bow had begun to dip into deepening swells and spray splashed over the rail. Under a dimming sun the water took on the dull gleam of pewter. Van leaned her shoulder against the wall and gazed ahead past Gina, who said resentfully, “And they never even spoke to me. Jeest, I warn’t the one who made the mess, it was that Willy. . . . Anyway, we got our choice of fine or jail. Well, Chuck paid his and walked out without a blink at me, and Willy didn’t have a cent on him. So the goddam numbnuts told the judge he could still have his job out there”—she twisted her mouth—“if he got right back to it, but he’d lose it if he went to jail. Stammered and swallowed and blinked away, and the judge said all right, but we had to be out of Limerock today and can’t show up again with-out reporting to the goddam probation officer. And you should of heard him read me the Riot Act!” she said indignantly. “You’d think I was some old two-bit whore or something. And then ship me off out here at the end of it.”
“Would you rather have gone to jail?” Van asked.
“Damn right, and get it over with. Then I’d get my bus fare somehow and I’d be gone.” She looked into Van’s face and said belligerently, “I’m going anyway, soon’s I can get some cash together. Wouldn’t you, if you was me?”
“If I were you,” said Van, “that’s exactly what I’d do.” You little imbecile, she thought dispassionately. In six months you’ll be strangled by one of your pick-ups who won’t be an honest draggerman everybody in town knows, or you’ll be half-dead from liquor or drugs or syphilis. You’ve got neither brain nor imagination, just a colossal conceit that would let you walk right into a sewer and think you smelled roses.
“You know what?” Gina said innocently. “You look as if you didn’t want much to go back either. And I always thought you liked it.”
“That’s not what I was thinking.” She was bored and tired, she felt as if the monotonous drawl had been going on forever. She straightened up to walk away. Owen and the engineer were spreading a tarpaulin over some bags of cement piled on the forward hatch. If she went near, she and Owen might catch each other’s eye, even have a few innocent words. But some impulse or compulsion niggled at her. She tried to ignore it, but said at last, reluctantly, “I said if I were you that’s what I do. That’s if I really were you, Gina, with your way of thinking. But being me, I’d always want to be sure there was an escape hatch.”
“Meaning?” The girl screwed her face up into a grimace of suspicion. I don’t know why I bother to say it, Van thought, she’d be no loss to the world, only to Willy, and he’s nothing either.
“Meaning your bus fare home, kept in a safe place. Meaning some kind of a job. Meaning a little common sense about the people you drink with.” She shrugged and walked between Gina and the railing. “Oh, forget it,” she said. “You’ve probably got more sense than I credit you with.”
“Well, that’s a hell of a thing to say!” Gina bawled after her. Van didn’t look back. Up forward the men had secured the tarpaulin and had disappeared, probably into the fo’c’sle where they would attempt to cheer up Willy. The Ella Vye was heading out now between the breakwater and Owl’s Head. Ahead lay some twenty wet miles with a freshening easterly wind and deepening seas. Dry lobster crates had been stacked along one rail. She moved one so she could sit with her back against the pilot house and her feet braced against the rail. She turned up her raincoat collar, tied her scarf around her head, pushed her hands deep into her sleeves, and sank back into herself for the hours ahead.