“DECENT PEOPLE just don’t act like that,” her mother-in-law said.
Jane’s mother-in-law Mrs. Grim. How aptly named! Jane was amused by the thought until she reminded herself that it was her name too.
Jane’s husband mumbled assent and held up his highball glass and looked through it to change the sky from blue to amber. Lately everything was being so changed.
Jane wasn’t paying much attention to Mrs. Grim’s desultory monologue. She sat with the other two on the front porch and looked on beyond the path that crawled like a lazy snake from the cottage through the dunes to the beach, beyond the glare and dance of light on the white sand of the beach and beyond the flourish of the breaking waves, perfectly ironed creases that became immaculate explosions into the dizzying blue of the sky, cloudless and pure today. There was a line of pelicans, a slightly lopsided V with one arm stretched out longer than the other, and they flew by with a brown sturdy grace like a crew of oarsmen in a racing shell. They followed the leader at the point. He (she guessed it would have to be a male) would spread his wings to soar, and all soared likewise, rising and hovering with delicate balance on invisible currents of air, maintaining always the shape and direction of the formation though, like a single, trained, instantaneous muscular action, like part of a dance. When he pumped his wide wings with a smooth strong motion, the others followed in quick succession. She liked to see them fishing and alone: the twisty, angled high dive followed by a small flash of white, and then up bobbed the pelican to float contented awhile before flying again. She had seen them up close, too, perched like silly newel posts on the pilings near the Fish Market, long-beaked, drab-feathered clowns. They seemed grotesquely comic. But now as formations of them passed by the front porch, at home in their native element of air, they seemed to be made of it, to partake of all the wild, wide-flung, dazzling substance and mystery and marvel of the sky. They were creatures of skill and grace and beauty, and she wished she could paint them.
But, of course, her paints were still packed tight in the wooden box underneath the double bed. She wouldn’t dream of bringing them out.
“But they’re so beautiful!” she exclaimed.
“Who?” the gray-haired woman, firmly in the rocking chair beside her, asked. “Who? Those Quiglys?”
“No, no,” Jane said, laughing. “I was thinking about the pelicans.”
Her mother-in-law snorted.
“I was speaking of the Quiglys.”
Harper, Jane’s husband, merely chuckled and sipped his drink.
Mrs. Grim had been talking about the Quigly family steadily ever since they had arrived and opened the beach cottage a few days (how many has it been already?) before. She noticed right away that they had been using her outside shower. (“Lord knows what kind of a staggering water bill I’ll have!”) She observed that they let their children run wild and free and naked as four little jaybirds all over the dunes and on the beach. And she complained that all of them, the gaunt, grinning scarecrow of a father included, used her path to the beach as if they had a perfect right to, instead of going the longer way around to the public approach. It was clear, too, at the outset, that they had no pride.
The Grims hadn’t been in the cottage five minutes before the man was standing at the back door, beating on it with his bony knuckles, grinning and asking if he could borrow a quarter pound of butter and an electric iron; not explaining why, or, indeed, even making some kind of mannerable small talk about the casual incongruity of the two requests. He didn’t introduce himself. He didn’t bother to ask who they might be. He just asked for butter and the iron and then stood there waiting until he was given what he wanted.
Mrs. Grim had been fuming about the Quiglys ever since.
“Oh, Mother,” Jane had said, mildly amused at first. “What’s wrong with them? I mean really. They seem pleasant enough.”
Her mother-in-law had stiffened.
“You’re not from these parts,” she had answered flatly. “So you wouldn’t be expected to know or make distinctions. They’re trash, honey, that’s all. Trash, pure and simple.”
The element that added insult to injury for Mrs. Grim was the occupation of Joe Quigly, whom she insisted on calling The Man, never by name. It turned out that he was a bulldozer operator. Farther south, more than a mile down the beach, he was daily engaged in leveling the pristine dunes for something or other. A new subdivision of cracker-box houses maybe. Perhaps even a motel. She wouldn’t condescend to inquire.
“It really shouldn’t bother you,” Jane had said. “There’s so much space down there, and there’s a whole mile between here and there.”
“When we first built this place, my late husband and I,” Mrs. Grim told her, “there wasn’t another cottage for miles. It was so peaceful. Now houses are popping up everywhere like the heat rash. Like pimples. They’re tearing the dunes down, and new people—not the kind of people you’d care to have around if you had any say so about the matter—are coming here by the hordes to live. They’re ruining the place. They’re like a lot of weeds choking us out.
“You’d have to know how everything was in the beginning to appreciate what I mean,” she added.
Of course, she never failed to remind Jane that she was an outsider, from the North, and wouldn’t be expected to offer her opinions on subjects she couldn’t possibly know anything about, among them the Quiglys. Jane never failed to resent this either.
At first, their very first night in the cottage, Harper, too, had been amused.
“Oh, you’ll come to love her when you know her and understand her better,” he said. “Everyone does. It’s just that she was born out of her time or, anyway, that she had to live on beyond it. She’s a lady living in a time when that word doesn’t mean anything. And all she sees around her is change, change, change. Change and decay. The good, happy, comfortable world she grew up in turned inside out, turned into something else after the Depression and the War. She’s just a minor, eccentric victim of the great social revolution. A bewildered mastodon wandering around in the postglacial age.”
But by the next night he was past that kind of fancy speechmaking.
“Quit getting in a stew about nothing,” he said. “Don’t pay it no nevermind.”
Which was both strange grammar and an unfamiliar accent coming from him. Jane’s husband was a lawyer now in Philadelphia. It had taken him a day and a night to pick up the accent and the idiom of a speech he couldn’t have used at all since he was a child, if he had used it then. It had taken another full day for him to lose the half irony that made his new guise acceptable. It had taken another day and a very bad night (But she was so nervous visiting here for the first time. Didn’t he even understand that?) for him to start in drinking. And now he wasn’t shaving anymore or brushing his teeth or changing his clothes or bothering to go down to the beach. And now he was always taking his mother’s side.
They did look something alike. Strangely. For wasn’t it always the daughter who was supposed to end up looking more and more like the mother? Sitting together side by side on the front porch, she with her empty hands folded, he with his clasping the almost empty glass, short, square-bodied, long-torsoed, they were clearly cut from the same pattern. Sometimes Harper’s lips turned tight and down in precisely the same expression of unspoken disapproval. Sometimes, now, his small, quick, pale blue eyes reminded her of Mrs. Grim’s. And Jane, slender (“Honey, you’ll have to eat plenty while you’re down here and put some meat on those bones. Harp, boy, you ought to be ashamed to let your wife get so frail and wispy.”), milk-skinned, and long-limbed, was beginning to feel made out of another substance, a member of another race.
At this moment, inspired by the sight of the flying pelicans, images to her at once of rigor and beauty and harmony and freedom, she felt like arguing.
“Now that you mention it, the Quigly children are beautiful.”
Mrs. Grim grunted at that.
“Well, if you think naked savages are beautiful, you might say so. Each one to her own taste, as the old lady said.”
“As a matter of fact, I have seen photographs of naked savages which I thought were beautiful, the savages that is,” Jane persisted.
Harper stood up, sighed, and stretched.
“Tell you what,” he said. “You want to see some savages around here? You just drop over to Black Bottom about ten o’clock on a Saturday night.”
“That would cure her of notions,” Mrs. Grim said, chuckling. She said the word notions as if it signified some kind of physical disease, barely mentionable in polite company. “That surely would cure her.”
“You’d get yourself a bellyful of beautiful savages,” Harper said.
“Where are you going?” Jane said.
“To pour myself another little drink. If you don’t mind.”
“Suit yourself,” she said. “It’s your vacation.”
“Did you say vocation?”
“I did not.”
“Much obliged.”
Harper’s mother rocked busily and steadily, looking straight ahead. Jane turned again to watch the fine line of the waves rising, hovering, exploding on the sand in snowy profusion. She heard Harper stumble over something in the kitchen and curse. Well, there was nothing to be done about it.
A whoop and a holler! A shrill pandemonium of treble cries and then a burst of sun-bronzed flesh as four blond naked Quigly children shot around the corner of the porch, scattered like a flushed covey of quail down the path, and vanished into the dunes. Mrs. Grim was half out of her rocking chair, rigid, her face etched in lines of anger. Harper leaned on the doorframe shaking his head.
“They won’t never learn,” he said.
“I tried to speak to the mother—if she is the mother—yesterday. And do you know she was drunk? Stone drunk in the middle of the day. I mean staggering around inside of that trailer blind drunk. No wonder those poor little children have to run around wild without a soul to look after them.”
“They seem to be getting along all right, considering,” Jane said.
“It’s a wonder to me they don’t all drown in the ocean,” Mrs. Grim said. “I’d feel kind of sorry for The Man, if he wasn’t so common and worthless himself. They tell me when he gets home from work the two of them start drinking together and just keep on until they pass out cold. The children just have to fend for themselves.”
“Who told you that?”
“A perfectly legitimate source. Someone who ought to know,” Mrs. Grim said indignantly.
“She didn’t mean it to sound that way, Mother,” Harper said. “She was just wondering.”
Not even Jane now. Just she.
“I did mean it to sound that way,” Jane said. “Gossip makes me sick.”
“Well!” Mrs. Grim said.
“What in hell got into you?” Harper said.
“I don’t know. I’m sorry. I just don’t know.”
Jane brushed past him running back toward the bedroom, fighting the impulse to tears. She flung herself on the bed and pulled a pillow over her head. It was a silly, childish gesture. He wasn’t going to come running behind her and try to comfort her. He and his mother would talk about it in low voices, and after a while he’d come back to the bedroom and talk to her. He wouldn’t offer any sympathy. And she was perfectly furious with herself that what she wanted was his sympathy.
It wasn’t just the usual battle, the immemorial tug of war between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. It was that all right, intensified by the inescapable fact that Harper was an only child. But it was other things as well. She was seeing her husband for the first time in his native environment, without the well-mannered, gentle, acquired protective coloration he wore in her world, a world of strangers to him. (What camouflage was there for her here?) He was different. He seemed to sense it, too, to succumb in helpless fury to old pressures and forces. She felt that as long as they stayed here they were lost to each other. The man she had married and lived with was a ghost. The one in her bed at night now was not a very attractive stranger. In that sense Mrs. Grim had become in her eyes the evil enchantress of a child’s fairy tale. But then, after all, the whole business was so childish!
Then there were the Quiglys, the Battleground. They lived, the whole tribe of them, in a small trailer behind the cottage and across a dirt road, just at the edge of a palmetto jungle. It was a sagging, worn-out trailer, set up on cinder blocks. And the yard, if you could call the littered and trampled space between the trailer and the road a yard, was a perfect mess. In the center of that space there was the cross-eyed wreck of an old Buick convertible. It never moved. Sun baked it and the sudden summer showers soaked it. Every day Joe Quigly came home from work and washed and sponged it down, apparently to protect the paint and chrome from the salt air that corroded everything under the sun before long. After he’d finished, he’d climb in the driver’s seat and just sit there. It looked (from the distance of the bedroom window where she always watched him) as if he pretended to be driving it. Maybe he had wrecked it and it wouldn’t run anymore. Maybe he had bought it as is from a junkyard and it didn’t even have an engine. Maybe he simply didn’t have the money for gas. (Which would be an odd thing for a bulldozer operator. She had heard they made lots of money. Unless … unless, maybe, alas, Mrs. Grim was quite right, and both Joe Quigly and his poor, frazzle-haired slattern of a wife—who usually appeared once a day anyway wrapped in an oversize dressing gown and wearing sneakers, blinking in the hard sunlight and stumbling over to the topless garbage can by the road to dispose of a bundle of … empty bottles?—were alcoholics.) In any case, Joe Quigly seemed to love that automobile and to be very possessive about it. If he found his children playing in it when he came trudging up the dirt road home, he ran and chased them out and away with kicks and blows and curses. They didn’t seem to mind. They laughed and ran away and left him his car.
The strange thing to Jane was that neither did she mind. She should have cared. A man who mistreats his children! Of course he didn’t really mistreat them. He had a tantrum and they had to flee, but it didn’t seem to mean anything to them or, seriously, to him. It seemed to be a kind of game. It made her uneasy to think that she might have tolerated such a blow or kick or curse coming from him in just that spirit, though she was sure that if Harper ever struck her she would be badly hurt. Quigly was a curious one. Long, lean, shaggy-haired, his face high-boned, deeply tanned and lined, he moved around with a clumsy grace like an animal trying to walk on its hind legs. He grinned a snaggle- and yellow-tooth grin at her if they happened to pass, and he ran a hand through his thick, unruly blond hair. He was a kind of caricature of the country bumpkin. But—and this was what touched and troubled her—there was something else, indefinable, about him that was utterly alien, yet intriguing. It was as if the clothes, the flesh and bones, the face he wore were all composite parts of a disguise, donned by choice and for some reason. Somehow he communicated a sense of elemental shiftlessness, of sly, supple, and insinuative and irresponsible endurance. Thus the early gods, she thought, must have taken on their guise of mortal flesh and moved among us.
She had tried unsuccessfully to express this complex thing to Harper after she’d seen Joe Quigly standing at the back door waiting for his quarter pound of butter and the electric iron. Harper had laughed at her.
“You artists! Him? He’s a typical cracker boy. That’s the way they all are. God-like, my ass! Not worth a damn. Crooked as a bunch of snakes.”
Since the bad night and the others following it when Harper tumbled into his side of the bed, dead drunk, and snored as soon as his face touched the pillow, she had discovered that she was increasingly fascinated by the myth she had made up for Joe Quigly. Oh, not in the ordinary way, to be sure. Not that way. But as one might be attracted by some wonderful new beast on display at the zoo. There was nothing to it, she assured herself, beyond that feeling of curiosity and delight.
Then yesterday something had happened. With Harper drinking and Mrs. Grim deep in a historical novel and Jane restless and bored, she had gone for a long, lonely walk down the beach. She passed the last of the houses and the few bathers splashing in the surf, and she walked on, following the straight and narrow ribbon of soft sand that seemed to stretch, like some ultimate desert, to infinity. The sun felt warm and good. After a while, alone and happy, she sat down at the foot of a high dune to enjoy it, soon lay back and closed her eyes, dozing in the light. It seemed to penetrate her and fill her veins, and she imagined all her blood, streams, rivers, networks, and canals as becoming a choir of pure molten gold. As she lay there in a complete blank pleasure, she heard at first dimly, then near and loud, a roaring sound, and she sat up just in time to avoid being buried alive by a falling mountain of sand. Choking and spluttering, she struggled to her feet with vague gestures like a drowning person and tried to brush away the sand which covered her. She looked around and then up above her. On top of the dune, poised perilously at the very edge of it, was the flat blade of the bulldozer, and standing above and behind the blade, tall against the whirling sky, straddle-legged, with the afternoon sun glaring behind him, was Joe Quigly, his wild hair tousled by sea breeze, his head tossed back laughing. Jane was furious. Though she was fully and modestly dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, she felt as if he’d been spying on her naked. And then to be covered up, nearly killed in fact, was no joke. Joe Quigly obviously felt differently about it, and, even if he guessed how she must feel, he didn’t care. He was content to laugh at her, and she had to laugh too. She stood there looking up at him and laughing, and she shyly raised her hand to wave at him. He waved back, vanished, backed the bulldozer away from the edge and went to work again.
Neither of them had said a word. Yet she was as pleased as if he had tossed her a bouquet of flowers.
She kept that story to herself, not daring to mention it to Harper now.
Jane heard the bedroom door close behind her. She turned her head and saw Harper standing over her.
“I don’t know what gets into you sometimes.”
“I don’t either,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“You ought to be. That was pretty rude.”
“I know it and I really am sorry.”
He dropped down on his hands and knees on the floor and crawled under the bed. She heard him fumbling among the luggage they had stored there.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking for your box of paints,” he said.
“What on earth for?”
“I got to paint me a sign.”
“With those? That’s too expensive.”
“I’d be glad to use some other paint,” he said. “But it happens we ain’t got none. We’ve told these folks for the last time. Now I’m putting up a ‘Keep Off’ sign.”
“That’s silly, Harper. You’ve been drinking and that’s a silly idea.”
He backed out and raised his head to the level of the bed.
“You don’t understand. Not at all,” he said. “There happens to be a serious legal problem involved. If they keep on using the path and we don’t put up a sign, then it becomes a common pathway. We don’t want that, do we?”
“I guess not.”
“Want to help me?” he said. “You can letter a whole lot better than I can.”
“No,” she said. “Just help yourself. The paints are right there somewhere.”
“Where are you going?”
“Just for a walk,” she said, shutting the door behind her.
She took the public approach to the beach and avoided the path to save herself from having to pass under the gray scrutiny of Mrs. Grim. She set off south at a good pace, feeling the warm sand between her toes. The tide was coming in now. Jane liked high tide best, though it was hard to explain why, even to herself. Somehow when the tide was high you felt you knew, were familiar with the things the water covered and concealed. At low tide shallow sloughs were mysteries. If you waded you were apt to step on something hidden there, some submarine creature, a quick, brittle, scuttling crab, a jellyfish. (She remembered with a shiver the story of someone stepping on a corpse in the surf.) High tide, though, seemed to be a blessing, the blue waves breaking over and finally covering the beach. The natural impulse of water. It seemed like a fine idea for water to want to cover the land. Perhaps that’s how old Noah looked at it, she thought.
She almost tripped over a dead pelican and started back a step in surprise. It lay on the sand, a crumpled mass of wet feathers, a beak slack as a drunk’s jaw, as an idiot’s, bloody peepholes for eyes (the little birds had already plucked them like grapes), and crawling with black flies and small bugs. She had to hold her nose as she stepped by.
After the last houses and the last bather—a great fat baldheaded man bobbing and splashing like a happy hippo—she felt liberated at last. The sun glared on the empty sand ahead of her. She imagined herself as a pilgrim lost in a far land. It was almost blinding it was so bright, and the breeze had died down so that she could feel the heat of the sun. She started to run. She ran along the beach at the foot of the dunes, ran breathless until she heard the bulldozer working nearby above her.
She was panting and dripping with sweat, for it had been a long run. With nervous, clumsy fingers she took off her clothes. She looked back once to where the last houses were like small toys and saw not a soul now on the beach. She threw her clothes aside and didn’t care, was suddenly drunk with sea and sun and sky and her lonely freedom. She lay back and closed her eyes and let the sun bathe her. Her brain was blank and heat-struck, and her flesh crawled with rivulets of sweat. Would he come to the edge of the dune and stand tall and see her now? Would he laugh then, or be struck blind? Would he bury her alive under mountains of sand? It was a strange sweet dream.…
She must have been dozing literally, for when she came to herself, the sun had gone behind the dunes and she was in shadow. A breeze had sprung up cool. She was goose-pimpled. The sand was uncomfortable and she felt cold and ashamed. She covered herself quickly with her hands and arms and looked around. Still no one on the beach. No one, thank God, had seen her there. No one, she was sure. What in the world had possessed her to do something like that? Crouching over, she slipped into her clothing and noticed, dismayed, that in her distraction, in her fierce haste, she had ripped off half the buttons of her shorts. She must have been insane.
When she was dressed again and had brushed the sand off her arms and legs, she was ready to start the long walk back. It was then that she heard the laughter, soft and mocking, heard as if at a great distance of time and space, like the light laughter of a ghost, like the memory of laughter. She looked up just in time to see four small blond faces, haloed by light, the Quigly children peering over the edge of the dune, disappear into the camouflage of even blonder, blown sea wheat. Stiff and ashamed, she walked briskly away, following now in reverse the path her bare feet had made in the sand.
When she had to pass the dead pelican again, lapped at, tumbled, and turned by the incoming tide, she was afraid she was going to be sick.
It was nearly dark when she came up the back way to the cottage. He was in the red shell of a car, hands gripping the steering wheel, mouth wide open, driving in some furious daydream, and he didn’t see her pass by. Her feet were hurting and she limped a little, but he had nothing, not even pity, to offer her. Just at the edge of the path, facing the trailer, was a sign, crudely lettered with great smears of her good paint (half-empty tubes lay by the path), multicolored, the squandered paint dripping away from the letters as if they had been written in blood:
KEEP OFF THIS HERE PATH
This means you
And beneath this was drawn a skull and crossbones.
Jane opened the back door and went into the kitchen. She poured herself a drink of Harper’s whiskey and tossed it off.
“Is that you?” he called.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s me. I mean it is I.”
She walked through the house to the front porch. Harper was sitting in his mother’s rocker with a double-barrel shotgun in his lap. He was vigorously cleaning it with an oily rag. Jane leaned against the doorframe behind him in weariness and slack despair and watched him work. He jerked his head around and grinned at her.
“Did you see my sign? Did you see the sign I put up?”
“Yes,” she said. “I saw it.”
“I found Daddy’s old shotgun in the closet,” he went on. “Next time I’m going to shoot. They’ve been warned aplenty. The next time one of them sets a foot on this land, I’m going to get me some tail feathers.”
Just then Mrs. Grim came bustling through the living room. She brushed past Jane as if she didn’t see her, and her eyes, her small, pale blue eyes, were bright with triumph. She put a box at the feet of her son.
“Honey boy,” she cried. “I found the shells for the gun. I knew they were around here somewhere and I found them.”