THE WAVES POUNDED ON the beach, rainbows in the spume, lit by the setting sun. The four boys were still out there in the rough sea. Federov didn’t know whether it was because they wanted to stay out or because they couldn’t get in. Either way, and whether they knew it or not, they were in danger. They still paid no attention to Federov’s shouts, which were lost in the pound of the surf.
Death by water.
Federov looked up at the verandah. A waiter in a white coat was serving the old ladies tea and muffins. Federov went up toward the verandah and stopped in front of the old ladies.
“Good evening,” he said.
The old ladies looked up from their tea. They nodded tightly. Guillotine mouths, munching on marmalade. The acid lines of disappointment and privilege pulled the thin lips down like barbed wire. The mottled hands tinkled the china cups.
“Those boys out there”—Federov gestured toward the ocean—“they shouldn’t be out in this kind of sea. I wonder if you could ask the waiter to see if he can find one of the lifeguards and have him go out in the catamaran and round them up. I’ll go out with him, tell him, if he thinks I can help.”
The two old ladies looked out at the boys fighting the waves.
“It doesn’t look so bad to me,” one of the old ladies said. She had a voice like thin glass. “I’ve seen people swim in much worse off this beach. Haven’t you, Catherine?”
The second old lady surveyed the Atlantic Ocean professionally. “Much worse,” she said.
“Still—” Federov began.
“I don’t like to interfere in the pleasures of strangers,” the first old lady said. She spoke with full appreciation of her own good manners.
“They’re not strangers,” Federov argued, feeling foolish. “I’m sure they’re from around here. In fact, I think I recognize—”
“Edward,” the first old lady said to the waiter, “are those boys members?”
“No, ma’am,” Edward said. “They’re from the town.”
He was a Negro and Federov had a fleeting notion that Edward didn’t care who drowned and who didn’t drown as long as he was white.
Another acid dropping of two mouths, twin guillotines. “I’m sorry, sir,” said the old lady who had spoken before. “You heard the waiter. They are not members.”
Federov laughed. He was surprised at the noise as it came from his throat. The two mouths went down, blades.
He turned and saw he hadn’t needed to bother. The boys had caught a big wave and the four mattresses came swirling in, sweeping their riders high up onto dry sand. The boys jumped up, laughing.
Federov strode down to them. “Ok,” he said. He knew one of the boys, Jimmy Redford, the son of the owner of the stationery store the Federovs patronized. “Ok, Jimmy, if I ever see you do anything as foolish as that again, I’ll grab you and take you to your father, and if he doesn’t beat the stuffing out of you, I will. That’s a promise, Jimmy. Did you hear me?”
“Yes, sir.” The boys stood in a short, guilty row, looking as if they had been caught by a policeman as they were breaking windows or lined up in juvenile court for buying beer illegally.
Federov started back toward home as the boys dried themselves and put pants on over their wet trunks. The sun was low in the west as he walked into it.
The afternoon whirled in his head.
They are not members. Sacco and Vanzetti, guilty or innocent, were not members. He and his father, the old catcher, and his brother (flak heavy in the area) and his wife and son (Old Pope Sinister the First) and his eleven-year-old daughter were not members. Pat Forrester, her new party dress hanging uselessly in the closet, her ears stuffed with cotton against the celebrating bells, was not a member. Sternberger’s aunt, coughing her lungs up in Montreal (THEY DO NOT KNOW THEIR GLORY), was not a member. His Uncle George (I should have cried my tears, too, for the two Italians), clubbed by a Boston cop, was not a member. John Stafford with characteristic tact, had quietly resigned and was no longer a member. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, although accepted by the committee on the day of his birth, had declined the invitation and was not a member. You heard what the waiter said.
Now list the members. Bryant, laughing, trying to remember the song Sacco, Vanzetti, What did you do?, was a member. Cohn, that all-’round boy, gifted, heartless, dead, was a member. Article 7: It is understood that there is nothing in the club rules that guarantees that members are immune to suffering or death. The club was no fly-by-night organization, it had its history; according to Henry IV the Duc de Crillon was a charter member.
More recently, the Dyers, father and son, bowing, were members, although under the tacit condition that they were always to arrive by the servants’ entrance. Fräulein Whatever, of the steamer Priscilla, out of New York bound for Fall River, bombed, perhaps, some years later in Essen (Now they can be proud again, the young men), was a member, as a thousand nonmembers died or escaped dying once more in the shot-up planes above her head. Olson, caressing himself, running for help when he should have been in twenty feet of cold mountain water, was a member, accepted the same day as Morris Kahn, who paid his dues for a lifetime by driving the long way around a lake in an ambulance with a dead fool on the stretcher behind him. Mrs. Carol-Ann Humes, in her lamentable green dress, a little tipsy to drown her timidity in this high company, sensitive of nose and not ashamed to say that Pope John XXIII was a Communist, was a member. Craven, the quarterback with the cocky street-fighter’s face and the naked greed for applause, stopped three times within the two-yard line, was a member. Fuck you, brother. The girl in the white dress on the eve of the new year of 1933, having paid an unusually high initiation fee, was a member. The beauty with the loose shoulder strap was on the governing committee and passed on all newcomers. The old Irishwoman (Scum, she said), while given to drink, was a member, although she knew her place as she knew everybody’s place. Louis’s wife (The house in town, the place in Falmouth, and the pictures and the books—my blood, my balls, the marrow of my bones) was a member. The lawyer Rosenthal, ready to work on Sunday, or Yom Kippur, or on the matinée of the Second Coming of the Lord, was a member. The croquet players on the Belgian lawn were members. Leah Levinson Ross Stafford had applied for membership, but perhaps, despite her beauty, her application would be tabled for further consideration. The high school boys and girls in Dallas (Kennedy gawn, Johnson next; Kennedy gawn, Johnson next) were all members.
The wind was dying down. An evening hush was settling over land and ocean. Gulls rose before him and sailed briefly out toward Hispaniola as he approached them. He walked with his head down, accompanied by the dead. It is only with the greatest care that memory can be kept from becoming a prison or a gallows.
Voices speak, faces appear, moments and images come and go—a promise broken, a false smile, a grave, a wedding night, a helmet in the rain, a father dancing, a son using the word “conspicuous,” a vermouth stain on a pink dress, a lipstick stain on a sheet, the mouths of malice, the whispers of betrayal; all movements dangerous, equivocal; weapons everywhere, but targets concealed, the terms of victory or surrender never quite stated.
It sometimes takes more honor to walk the last hundred yards to your front door than to advance against the walls of a fortress.
How gratifying, how simple it is to go to the water’s edge, continue…accomplish that one certain act to write finish to so many uncertain accomplishments.
He shivered. The Atlantic touched him with the first chill of evening, reminding him that glaciers fed these waters. He raised his head. Walking toward him was the blond girl with the two cats. The girl had wound her hair around her head in a crown. Was that all she had done that afternoon? While the guns had sounded, during the hot hours when the sirens had wailed, the murders had been committed, the famous men had broadcast their lies; while the crowds had formed and fled, leaving their wounded on the cobblestones, had she just braided her hair under a dune, sheltered from the wind, with the two cats at her ankles?
She was close enough now for him to see her face. She was young and lovely, a Northern gift to the new continent, a wide clear brow under the weight of pale hair, wide clear eyes, summer-colored skin, the perfect, full, long body sculptured into a hieroglyph by the severe black suit, Miss America, Miss Universe, Miss Rose Bowl, Miss Aphrodite, Miss Pithecanthropus Erectus, with her golden crown.
Their eyes met for a moment. The girl did not smile, nor did he. It was not necessary. All that was necessary was that she was alive, that she was there, glittering and tall, a young animal of his own species, moving in grace, at home between sea and land, with her attendant beasts, sanctifying with their linked flesh the end of a summer’s day.
He did not look behind him as she passed him, the cats now leading her along the small hiss of the ebbing tide.
The sun was nearly down. He approached his house. There were lights on in the kitchen, that pure small flame in the last of the daylight, more like a jewel than a source of illumination against the bright early-evening sky.
His wife and daughter were working in the kitchen. They didn’t see him as he looked in through the window. Their heads were bent as they went about their tasks, the lovely grave face of his wife, the brown dear promise of the face of his daughter. Their hair shone in the kitchen light. They had gone through the ceremony of beauty, the two women of the family, for the homecoming of the husband and father.
He looked through the window. His wife saw him. She smiled.
There are harbors left.
He went in through the kitchen door. He kissed his wife, smelled the clean hair, kissed his daughter, smelled the clean hair.
“What did you do all afternoon?” his wife asked.
“I watched a ball game,” he said.