Chapter Twenty-Four

There were many people in the dark street outside the iron gates that closed the entrance to the old submarine base now transformed into a yacht basin. The Cuban watchman had orders to let no one in, and the crowd were pressing against the fence to look through between the iron rods into the dark enclosure lit, along the water, by the lights of the yachts that lay moored at the finger piers. The crowd was as quiet as only a Key West crowd can be. The yachtsmen pushed and elbowed their way through to the gate and by the watchman.

“Hey. You canna comein,” the watchman said.

“What the hell. We’re off a yacht.”

“Nobody supposacomein,” the watchman said. “Get back.”

“Don’t be stupid,” said one of the yachtsmen, and pushed him aside to go up the road toward the dock.

Behind them was the crowd outside the gates, where the little watchman stood uncomfortable and anxious in his cap, his long mustache and his deshevelled authority, wishing he had a key to lock the big gate and, as they strode heartily up the sloping road they saw ahead, then passed, a group of men waiting at the Coast Guard pier. They paid no attention to them but walked along the dock, past the piers where the other yachts lay to pier number five, and out on the pier to where the gang plank reached, in the glare of a flood light, from rough wooden pier to the teak deck of the New Exuma II. In the main cabin they sat in big leather chairs beside a long table on which magazines were spread, and one of them rang for the steward.

“Scotch and soda,” he said.

“You, Henry?”

“Yes,” said Henry Carpenter.

“What was the matter with that silly ass at the gate?”

“I’ve no idea,” said Henry Carpenter.

The steward, in his white jacket, brought the two glasses.

“Play those disks I put out after dinner,” the yachtsman, whose name was Wallace Johnston, said.

“I’m afraid I put them away, sir,” the steward said.

“Damn you,” said Wallace Johnston. “Play that new Bach album then.”

“Very good, sir,” said the steward. He went over to the record cabinet and took out an album and moved with it to the phonograph. He began playing the “Sarabande.”

“Did you see Tommy Bradley today?” asked Henry Carpenter. “I saw him as the plane came in.”

“I can’t bear him,” said Wallace. “Neither him nor that whore of a wife of his.”

“I like Helène,” said Henry Carpenter. “She has such a good time.”

“Did you ever try it?”

“Of course. It’s marvellous.”

“I can’t stick her at any price,” said Wallace Johnston. “Why in God’s name does she live down here?”

“They have a lovely place.”

“It is a nice clean little yacht basin,” said Wallace Johnston. “Is it true Tommy Bradley’s impotent?”

“I shouldn’t think so. You hear that about everyone. He’s simply broad minded.”

“Broad minded is excellent. She’s certainly a broad if there ever was one.”

“She’s a remarkably nice woman,” said Henry Carpenter. “You’d like her, Wally.”

“I would not,” said Wallace. “She represents everything I hate in a woman, and Tommy Bradley epitomizes everything I hate in a man.”

“You feel awfully strongly tonight.”

“You never feel strongly because you have no consistency,” Wallace Johnston said. “You can’t make up your mind. You don’t know what you are even.”

“Let’s drop me,” said Henry Carpenter. He lit a cigarette.

“Why should I?”

“Well, one reason you might is because I go with you on your bloody yacht, and at least half the time I do what you want to do, and that keeps you from paying blackmail to the busboys and sailors, and one thing and another, that do know what they are, and what you are.”

“You’re in a pretty mood,” said Wallace Johnston. “You know I never pay blackmail.”

“No. You’re too tight to. You have friends like me instead.”

“I haven’t any other friends like you.”

“Don’t be charming,” said Henry. “I don’t feel up to it tonight. Just go ahead and play Bach and abuse your steward and drink a little too much and go to bed.”

“What’s gotten into you?” said the other, standing up. “Why are you getting so damned unpleasant? You’re not such a great bargain, you know.”

“I know,” said Henry. “I’ll be oh so jolly tomorrow. But tonight’s a bad night. Didn’t you ever notice any difference in nights? I suppose when you’re rich enough there isn’t any difference.”

“You talk like a school girl.”

“Good night,” said Henry Carpenter. “I’m not a school girl nor a school boy. I’m going to bed. Everything will be awfully jolly in the morning.”

“What did you lose? Is that what makes you so gloomy?”

“I lost three hundred.”

“See? I told you that was it.”

“You always know, don’t you?”

“But look. You lost three hundred.”

“I’ve lost more than that.”

“How much more?”

“The jackpot,” said Henry Carpenter. “The eternal jackpot. I’m playing a machine now that doesn’t give jackpots anymore. Only tonight I just happened to think about it. Usually I don’t think about it. Now I’m going to bed so I won’t bore you.”

“You don’t bore me. But just try not to be rude.” “I’m afraid I’m rude and you bore me. Good night.

Everything will be fine tomorrow.”

“You’re damned rude.”

“Take it or leave it,” said Henry. “I’ve been doing both all my life.”

“Good night,” said Wallace Johnston hopefully.

Henry Carpenter did not answer. He was listening to the Bach.

“Don’t go off to bed like that,” Wallace Johnston said. “Why be so temperamental?”

“Drop it.”

“Why should I? I’ve seen you come out of it before.”

“Drop it.”

“Have a drink and cheer up.”

“I don’t want a drink and it wouldn’t cheer me up.”

“Well, go off to bed, then.”

“I am,” said Henry Carpenter.

That was how it was that night on the New Exuma II, with a crew of twelve, Captain Nils Larson, master, and on board Wallace Johnston, owner, 38 years old, M.A. Harvard, composer, money from silk mills, unmarried, interdit de sejour in Paris, well known from Algiers to Biskra, and one guest, Henry Carpenter, 36, M.A. Harvard, money now two hundred a month in trust fund from his mother, formerly four hundred and fifty a month until the bank administering the Trust Fund had exchanged one good security for another good security, for other not so good securities, and, finally, for an equity in an office building the bank had been saddled with and which paid nothing at all. Long before this reduction in income it had been said of Henry Carpenter that if he were dropped from a height of 5,500 feet without a parachute, he would land safely with his knees under some rich man’s table. But he gave value in good company for his entertainment and while it was only lately, and rarely, that he felt, or expressed himself, as he had tonight, his friends had felt for some time that he was cracking up. If he had not been felt to be cracking up, with that instinct for feeling something wrong with a member of the pack and healthy desire to turn him out, if it is impossible to destroy him, which characterizes the rich; he would not have been reduced to accepting the hospitality of Wallace Johnston. As it was, Wallace Johnston, with his rather special pleasures, was Henry Carpenter’s last stand, and he was defending his position better than he knew for his honest courting of an end to their relationship; his subsequent brutality of expression, and sincere insecurity of tenure intrigued and seduced the other who might, given Henry Carpenter’s age, have easily been bored by a steady compliance. Thus Henry Carpenter postponed his inevitable suicide by a matter of weeks if not of months.

The money on which it was not worthwhile for him to live was one hundred and seventy dollars more a month than the fisherman Albert Tracy had been supporting his family on at the time of his death three days before.

Aboard the other yachts lying at the finger piers there were other people with other problems. On one of the largest yachts, a handsome, black, barkentine rigged three-master, a sixty-year-old grain broker lay awake worrying about the report he had received from his office of the activities of the investigators from the Internal Revenue Bureau. Ordinarily, at this time of night, he would have quieted his worry with Scotch high balls and have reached the state where he felt as tough and regardless of consequences as any of the old brothers of the coast with whom, in character and standards of conduct, he had, truly, much in common. But his doctor had forbidden him all liquor for a month, for three months really, that is they had said it would kill him in a year if he did not give up alcohol for at least three months, so he was going to layoff it for a month; and now he worried about the call he had received from the Bureau before he left town asking him exactly where he was going and whether he planned to leave the United States coastal waters.

He lay, now, in his pajamas, on his wide bed, two pillows under his head, the reading light on, but he could not keep his mind on the book, which was an account of a trip to Galapagos. In the old days he had never brought them to this bed. He’d had them in their cabins and he came to this bed afterwards. This was his own stateroom, as private to him as his office. He never wanted a woman in his room. When he wanted one he went to hers, and when he was through he was through, and now that he was through for good his brain had the same clear coldness always that had, in the old days, been an after effect. And he lay now, with no kindly blurring, denied all that chemical courage that had soothed his mind and warmed his heart for so many years, and wondered what the department had, what they had found and what they would twist, what they would accept as normal and what they would insist was evasion; and he was not afraid of them, but only hated them and the power they would use so insolently that all his own hard, small, tough and lasting insolence, the one permanent thing he had gained and that was truly valid, would be drilled through, and, if he were ever made afraid, shattered.

He did not think in any abstractions, but in deals, in sales, in transfers and in gifts. He thought in shares, in bales, in thousands of bushels, in options, holding companies, trusts, and subsidiary corporations, and as he went over it he knew they had plenty, enough so he would have no peace for years. If they would not compromise it would be very bad. In the old days he would not have worried, but the fighting part of him was tired now, along with the other part, and he was alone in all of this now and he lay on the big, wide, old bed and could neither read nor sleep.

His wife had divorced him ten years before after twenty years of keeping up appearances, and he had never missed her nor had he ever loved her. He had started with her money and she had borne him two male children, both of whom, like their mother, were fools. He had treated her well until the money he had made was double her original capital and then he could afford to take no notice of her. After his money had reached that point he had never been annoyed by her sick headaches, by her complaints, or by her plans. He had ignored them.

He had been admirably endowed for a speculative career because he had possessed extraordinary sexual vitality which gave him the confidence to gamble well; common sense, an excellent mathematical brain, a permanent but controlled skepticism; a skepticism which was as sensitive to impending disaster as an accurate aneroid barometer to atmospheric pressure; and a valid time sense that kept him from trying to hit tops or bottoms. These, coupled with a lack of morals, an ability to make people like him without ever liking or trusting them in return, while at the same time convincing them warmly and heartily of his friendship; not a disinterested friendship, but a friendship so interested in their success that it automatically made them accomplices; and an incapacity for either remorse or pity, had carried him to where he was now. And where he was now was lying in a pair of striped silk pajamas that covered his shrunken old man’s chest, his bloated little belly, his now useless and disproportionately large equipment that had once been his pride, and his small flabby legs, lying on a bed unable to sleep because he finally had remorse.

His remorse was to think if only he had not been quite so smart five years ago. He could have paid the taxes then without any juggling, and if he had only done so he would be all right now. So he lay thinking of that and finally he slept; but because remorse had once found the crack and begun to seep in, he did not know he slept because his brain kept on as it had while he was awake. So there would be no rest and, at his age, it would not take so long for that to get him.

He used to say that only suckers worried and he would keep from worrying now until he could not sleep. He might keep from it until he slept, but then it would come in, and since he was this old its task was easy.

He would not need to worry about what he had done to other people, nor what had happened to them due to him, nor how they’d ended; who’d moved from houses on the Lake Shore drive to taking boarders out in Austin, whose debutante daughters now were dentists’ assistants when they had a job; who ended up a night watchman at sixty-three after that last corner; who shot himself early one morning before breakfast and which one of his children found him, and what the mess looked like; who now rode on the L to work, when there was work, from Berwyn, trying to sell, first, bonds; then motor cars; then house-to-housing novelties and specialties (we don’t want no peddlers, get out of here, the door slammed in his face) until he varied the leaning drop his father made from forty-two floors up, with no rush of plumes as when an eagle falls, to a step forward onto the third rail in front of the Aurora-Elgin train, his overcoat pocket full of un- saleable combination eggbeaters and fruit juice extractors. Just let me demonstrate it, madame. You attach it here, screw down on this little gadget here. Now watch. No, I don’t want it. Just try one. I don’t want it. Get out.

So he got out onto the sidewalk with the frame houses, the naked yards and the bare catalpa trees where no one wanted it or anything else, that led down to the Aurora-Elgin tracks.

Some made the long drop from the apartment or the office window; some took it quietly in two-car garages with the motor running; some used the native tradition of the Colt or Smith and Wesson , those well-constructed implements that end insomnia, terminate remorse, cure cancer, avoid bankruptcy, and blast an exit from intolerable positions by the pressure of a finger; those admirable American instruments so easily carried, so sure of effect, so well designed to end the American dream when it becomes a night- mare, their only drawback the mess they leave for relatives to clean up.

The men he broke made all these various exits but that never worried him. Somebody had to lose and only suckers worried.

No he would not have to think of them nor of the by-products of successful speculation. You win; somebody’s got to lose, and only suckers worry.

It would be enough for him to think about how much it would be better if he had not been quite so smart five years ago, and in a little while, at his age, the wish to change what can no longer be undone, will open up the gap that will let worry in. Only suckers worry. But he can knock the worry if he takes a Scotch and soda. The hell with what the doctor said. So he rings for one and the steward comes sleepily, and as he drinks it, the speculator is not a sucker now; except for death.

While on the next yacht beyond, a pleasant, dull and upright family are asleep. The father’s conscience is good and he sleeps soundly on his side, a clipper ship running before a blow framed above his head, the reading light on, a book dropped beside the bed. The mother sleeps well and dreams about her garden. She is fifty but is a handsome, wholesome, well- kept woman who looks attractive as she sleeps. The daughter dreams about her fiancé who comes tomorrow on the plane and she stirs in her sleep and laughs at something in the dream and, without waking, raises her knees almost against her chin, curled up like a cat, with curly blonde hair and her smooth- skinned pretty face, asleep she looks as her mother did when she was a girl.

They are a happy family and all love each other. The father is a man of civic pride and many good works, who opposed prohibition, is not bigoted and is generous, sympathetic, understanding and almost never irritable. The crew of the yacht are well-paid, well-fed and have good quarters. They all think highly of the owner and like his wife and daughter. The fiancé is a Skull and Bones man, voted most likely to succeed, voted most popular, who still thinks more of others than of himself and would be too good for anyone except a lovely girl like Frances. He is probably a little too good for Frances too, but it will be years before Frances realizes this, perhaps; and she may never realize it, with luck. The type of man who is tapped for Bones is rarely also tapped for bed; but with a lovely girl like Frances intention counts as much as performance.

So, anyhow, they all sleep well and where did the money come from that they’re all so happy with and use so well and gracefully? The money came from selling something everybody uses by the millions of bottles, which costs three cents a quart to make, for a dollar a bottle in the large (pint) size, fifty cents in the medium, and a quarter in the small. But it’s more economical to buy the large, and if you make ten dollars a week the cost is just the same to you as though you were a millionaire, and the product’s really good. It does just what it says it will and more besides. Grateful users from all over the world keep writing in discovering new uses and old users are as loyal to it as Harold Tompkins, the fiancé, is to Skull and Bones or Stanley Baldwin is to Harrow. There are no suicides when money’s made that way and everyone sleeps soundly on the yacht Alzira III, master Jon Jacobson, crew of fourteen, owner and family aboard.

At pier four there is a 34-foot yawl-rigged yacht with two of the three hundred and twenty-four Esthonians who are sailing around in different parts of the world, in boats between 28 and 36 feet long and sending back articles to the Esthonian newspapers. These articles are very popular in Esthonia and bring their authors between a dollar and a dollar and thirty cents a column. They take the place occupied by the baseball or football news in American newspapers and are run under the heading of Sagas of Our Intrepid Voyagers. No well-run yacht basin in Southern waters is complete without at least two sunburned, salt bleached-headed Esthonians who are waiting for a check from their last article. When it comes they will sail to another yacht basin and write another saga. They are very happy too. Almost as happy as the people on the Alzira III. It’s great to be an Intrepid Voyager.

On the Irydia IV, a professional son-in-law of the very rich and his mistress, named Dorothy, the wife of that highly paid Hollywood director, John Hollis, whose brain is in the process of outlasting his liver so that he will end up calling himself a communist, to save his soul, his other organs being too corroded to attempt to save them, are asleep. The son-in-law, big-framed, good looking in a poster way, lies on his back snoring, but Dorothy Hollis, the director’s wife, is awake and she puts on a dressing gown and, going out onto the deck, looks across the dark water of the yacht basin to the line the breakwater makes. It is cool on the deck and the wind blows her hair and she smooths it back from her tanned forehead, and pulling the robe tighter around her, her nipples rising in the cold, notices the lights of a boat coming along the outside of the breakwater. She watches them moving steadily and rapidly along and then at the entrance to the basin the boat’s searchlight is switched on and comes across the water in a sweep that blinds her as it passes, picking up the coast guard pier where it lit up the group of men waiting there and the shining black of the new ambulance from the funeral home which also doubles at funerals as a hearse.

I suppose it would be better to take some luminol, Dorothy thought. I must get some sleep. Poor Eddie’s tight as a tick. It means so much to him and he’s so nice, but he gets so tight he goes right off to sleep. He’s so sweet. Of course if I married him he’d be off with someone else, I suppose. He is sweet, though. Poor darling, he’s so tight. I hope he won’t feel miserable in the morning. I must go and set this wave and get some sleep. It looks like the devil. I do want to look lovely for him. He is sweet. I wish I’d brought a maid. I couldn’t though. Not even Bates. I wonder how poor John is. Oh, he’s sweet too. I hope he’s better. His poor liver. I wish I were there to look after him. I might go and get some sleep so I won’t look a fright tomorrow. Eddie is sweet. So’s John and his poor liver. Oh, his poor liver. Eddie is sweet. I wish he hadn’t gotten so tight. He’s so big and jolly and marvellous and all. Perhaps he won’t get so tight tomorrow.

She went below and found her way to her cabin, and sitting before the mirror commenced brushing her hair a hundred strokes. She smiled at herself in the mirror as the long bristled brush swept through her lovely hair. Eddie is sweet. Yes, he is. I wish he hadn’t gotten so tight. Men all have something that way. Look at John’s liver. Of course you can’t look at it. It must look dreadful really. I’m glad you can’t see it. Nothing about a man’s really ugly though. It’s funny how they think it is though. I suppose a liver though. Or kidneys. Kidneys en brochette. How many kidneys are there? There’s two of nearly everything except stomach and heart. And brain of course. There. That’s a hundred strokes. I love to brush my hair. It’s almost the only thing you do that’s good for you that’s fun. I mean by your- self. Oh, Eddie is sweet. Suppose I just went in there. No, he is too tight. Poor boy. I’ll take the luminal.

She looked at herself in the mirror. She was extraordinarily pretty, with a small, very fine figure. Oh, I’ll do, she thought. Some of it isn’t as good as some of the rest of it, but I’ll do for a while yet. You do have to have sleep though. I love to sleep. I wish I could get just one good natural real sleep the way we slept when we were kids. I suppose that’s the thing about growing up and marrying and having children and then drinking too much and then doing all the things you shouldn’t. If you could sleep well I don’t think any of it would be bad for you. Except drinking too much I suppose. Poor John and his liver and Eddie. Eddie is darling, anyway. He is cute. I’d better take the luminol.

She made a face at herself in the glass.

“You’d better take the luminal,” she said in a whisper. She took the luminol with a glass of water from the chronium-plated thermos carafe that was on the locker by the bed.

It makes you nervous, she thought. But you have to sleep. I wonder how Eddie would be if we were married. He would be running around with someone younger I suppose. I suppose they can’t help the way they’re built any more than we can. I just want a lot of it and I feel so fine, and being someone else or someone new doesn’t really mean a thing. It’s just it itself, and you would love them always if they gave it to you. The same one I mean. But they aren’t built that way. They want someone new, or someone younger, or someone that they shouldn’t have, or someone that looks like someone else. Or if you’re dark they want a blonde. Or if you’re blonde they go for a redhead. Or if you’re a redhead then it’s something else. A Jewish girl I guess, and if they’ve had really enough they want Chinese or Lesbians or goodness knows what. I don’t know. Or they just get tired, I suppose. You can’t blame them if that’s the way they are and I can’t help John’s liver either or that he’s drunk so much he isn’t any good. He was good. He was marvellous. He was. He really was. And Eddie is. But now he’s tight. I suppose I’ll end up a bitch. Maybe I’m one now. I suppose you never know when you get to be one. Only her best friends would tell her. You don’t read it in Mr. Winchell. That would be a good new thing for him to announce. Bitch-hood. Mrs. John Hollis canined into town from the coast. Better than babies. More common I guess. But women have a bad time really. The better you treat a man and the more you show him you love him the quicker he gets tired of you. I suppose the good ones are made to have a lot of wives but it’s awfully wearing trying to be a lot of wives yourself, and then someone simple takes him when he’s tired of that. I suppose we all end up as bitches but whose fault is it? The bitches have the most fun but you have to be awfully stupid really to be a good one. Like Helène Bradley. Stupid and well-intentioned and really selfish to be a good one. Probably I’m one already. They say you can’t tell and that you always think you’re not. There must be men who don’t get tired of you or of it. There must be. But who has them? The ones we know are all brought up wrong. Let’s not go into that now. No, not into that. Nor back to all those cars and all those dances. I wish that luminol would work. Damn Eddie, really. He shouldn’t have really gotten so tight. It isn’t fair, really. No one can help the way they’re built but getting tight has nothing to do with that. I suppose I am a bitch all right, Jut if I lie here now all night and can’t sleep I’ll go crazy and if I take too much of that damned stuff I’ll feel awfully all day tomorrow and then sometimes it won’t put you to sleep and anyway I’ll be cross and nervous and feel frightful. Oh, well, I might as well. I hate to but what can you do? What can you do but go ahead and do it even though, even though, even anyway, oh, he is sweet, no he isn’t, I’m sweet, yes you are, you’re lovely, oh, you’re so lovely, yes, lovely, and I didn’t want to, but I am, now I am really, he is sweet, no he’s not, he’s not even here, I’m here, I’m always here and I’m the one that cannot go away, no, never. You sweet one. You lovely. Yes you are. You lovely, lovely, lovely. Oh, yes, lovely. And you’re me. So that’s it. So that’s the way it is. So what about it always now and over now. All over now. All right. I don’t care. What difference does it make? It isn’t wrong if I don’t feel badly. And I don’t. I just feel sleepy now and if I wake I’ll do it again before I’m really awake.

She went to sleep then, remembering, just before she was finally asleep, to turn on her side so that her face did not rest on the pillow. She remembered, no matter how sleepy, how terribly bad it is for the face to sleep that way, resting on the pillow.

There were two other yachts in the harbor but everyone was asleep on them, too, when the Coast Guard boat towed Freddy Wallace’s boat, the Queen Conch, into the dark yacht basin and tied up alongside the Coast Guard pier.