IN JULY, the first week, the psychiatrists came. A heavy black car with a black-and-orange license plate appeared on the dirt road to the lake, known as Mirror Lake on the road map but always spoken of by the natives and the “old” summer people as Poor Farm Pond. The car hesitated for a moment at the trampled clearing in the bushes where a number of dusty station wagons and shabby sedans and convertibles and a trailer were already parked. On the small strip of muddied beach at the road’s left, a group of young matrons and their children sat, not moving a muscle; behind the bushes, in the meadow, a young couple, sunbathing, raised their heads and let them drop back in disgusted unison. A curtain twitched in the trailer. In the water, a rowboat manned by a small, curly-haired boy came to a halt as the rower stared darkly at the car, whose engine made the only sound in the bristling silence. It was as if Poor Farm Pond were holding its breath, beseeching the intruders to pass on. But the big car was deaf to entreaty; a mop of gray hair protruded from the window by the driver’s seat and nodded with commanding emphasis to another car, behind. The horn tooted, “Doctor, here is the place.”
On the beach, the young mothers sighed and reached for their cigarettes. The new cars always hesitated and always concluded this was the place. If (unlike these latest arrivals) the occupants were well mannered, they called out to ask whether the beach was private, as evidently it was; you could tell from the old green rowboats drawn up on the shore and the little fishing hut and the kayak that the place must belong to somebody. But you could not refuse them, even when they paid you the courtesy of asking. The young mothers were accustomed to reply, in their soft, anxious, scrupled voices, that the beach was private but that the owner would not mind, probably, if the new people swam there. Whereupon the new people, already dressed in bathing suits, would park their car at an awkward angle and, pantomiming thankfulness, heat, exhaustion, plunge into the water, stirring up the bottom, while the children looked on coldly and angrily, sometimes groaning aloud, until the mothers shushed them. “Why did you tell them they could, Mother, for heaven’s sake?” the adolescent girls would wail when the newcomers had struck out for the middle, and the young mothers, noble Romans, would answer with simple dignity, “You must remember, it doesn’t belong to us either, dear.”
But this statuesque reminder did not express the felt truth, which was that the beach did belong to Us, for the group of young mothers had been coming here ever so long, with the owner’s permission—since Mother’s or Grandmother’s day, in many cases, right back almost to the time when the tall, tumbling house up the road, with its old raspberry patch, had been the town poor farm. And it was they, the young mothers and their husbands and occasional house guests, who had made the place a beach. Before they came, the bottom had just been mud and slippery brown leaves, like the rest of the lake’s margin; they had imported the sand. Every summer, they conscientiously laid down a new load of it, and every summer, on the first warm weekend, one of the husbands and some of the prep-school boy cousins would go and find the old raft, at the other end of the lake, where it had drifted to during the winter, and tow it back to the beach and moor it, so that the children could dive. So they did have the right to say no, as the children begged them to do, but they did not have the temerity or the cruelty to, especially since Lodestone Pond, where the natives and the French Canadians from the nearby granite town had been swimming from time immemorial, had been taken over by the beavers.
There were other places, admittedly, even now, for the public to patronize, but either they were marshy or stony or froggy or had bloodsuckers or you had to pay to park there or pay to be rowed out to the middle. This spot on Poor Farm Pond, thanks to the work that had gone into it, was something pretty enviable in a region where the swimming was nothing to boast about. There was really quite a problem. The young mothers and their husbands had discussed it until they were sickened by the subject. Their mothers, the grandmothers, crisply advised them to take action—buy the place and put up “No Trespassing” signs and a fence. But that, smiled the young mothers sadly, was a different generation talking. Few would criticize the grandmothers for putting up “No Trespassing” signs, or even a fence, because the grandmothers, like the children, did not know any better; they had not gone to Vassar or Bryn Mawr. And in any case the owner, who was elderly and deaf and peculiar, had no inclination to sell. A year ago, one of the husbands had approached him with a tentative offer, but the old man had misunderstood. “Use it, use it!” he had shouted benevolently in his flat, deaf voice. “You folks have always used it.” And whenever he drove by, on a Sunday, in his new Buick, and saw a crowd of people in the water, he smiled and nodded like a Maecenas. If he had ever swum himself, he might have seen the hardships of having twenty or thirty strangers and their dripping dogs crowd onto two hundred and fifty square feet of specially imported sand, but, like so many of the old-timers, Mr. Bascomb was wary of the water. It was in winter he used the pond; the fishing hut on the shore belonged to him, and every winter he pulled it out to the pond’s center, cut a hole through the ice, and, protected from the elements, fished through the hut’s open bottom. This was his asserted reason for refusing to sell, even though the would-be buyer, a Washington lawyer, had assured him that he could retain, in the deed, the right to fish from the shore lot and the right to keep the hut there. The real reason, observed the grandmothers, was that the old man was land-proud; he liked to know that the “old” summer people and the man with the trailer, who kept a grocery store across the mountains, were beholden to him every year for their swimming.
“Money talks,” opined the local real-estate man, counselling a higher offer. But the young mothers firmly shook their heads; if old Mr. Bascomb was really disinclined to sell, it would not be fair to tempt him with an appeal to his baser nature. It would surely hurt the old man to come by on his Sunday drive and see a place barred that had always been open; even the grandmothers conceded this, when pressed by their daughters. There was a tacit covenant in the region governing change, property rights, and the relations between the summer people and the natives, though the old ladies, who were supposed to be its custodians, were growing more and more wayward and forgetful of their duties. “Quis custodiet ipsos custodies?” angrily cried a Swarthmore classics professor when his mother-in-law “surprised” her grandchildren by damming up her brook to make a swimming pool for them. You did not make swimming pools in Minster; the spirit of the place frowned on it. Here in this secluded corner of a northern state, with its spruce forests and mountain panoramas and round red cow barns and abandoned quarries and bears and wildcats and beavers, there was a tradition of pioneer simplicity and frugality of which the summer people were supposed to be proud. There were no estates or country clubs; there was not, as yet, even a cocktail set, properly speaking. The summer ladies baked and put up jellies and preserves, sharing their recipes with the farm women; the children went blueberrying and raspberrying, and sold Kool-Aid on Sundays and holidays at roadside stands under the maple shade. There was a dairy coöperative and an electrical coöperative and a coöperative store; the gaunt little towns, with their cheese factories, had pallid fairs and barbecues and lawn fêtes and Fourth of July displays. The whole valley was different from the other side of the mountain range, where there were winter ski resorts and summer tourist hotels and gentlemen-farmers and Black Angus cattle. The summer people even dressed differently. The old ladies—widows of clergymen and college professors and lawyers—still wore white straw hats and printed lawn dresses; the husbands wore old clothes, and the young mothers, for the most part, blouses and skirts and moccasins. They came to the beach with liberal magazines and serious books borrowed from the library at the state capital and discussed world events and local oddities while keeping an eye on the children in the water. The “difference” of the place rested responsibly on their minds; they were anxious to preserve it, as an heirloom, for their children, like one of Grandma’s quilts. They had a cupboard language of place names, unknown to the mapmakers, for the ponds, brooks, and mountain peaks: harsh names that had been passed on to them by the old-timers, quaint names that had been coined by the children—Bloodsucker Pond, Quag Pond, Hunger Brook, Sodom Marsh, Niggerhead, Dogface, the Dark Tarn, Sliding Pools. They knew the wildflowers and the birds and the snakes. Some of them had taken a geology course at college, and, sitting to dry on slabs of limestone, they talked eagerly of regional formations—Ordovician, pre-Devonian, metamorphic rock, the mica schist in the gorges.
And the place was beautiful—“beyoutifull,” as the two psychiatrists, alighting from their big black cars, now informed their womenfolk. The mop-haired psychiatrist took a stand on the narrow strip of sand, surveyed the birch-fringed lake, and addressed his colleague. “I like the background,” he stated, in an authoritative foreign voice, while the young mothers, a few feet away, but disregarded, as if by a stage convention, faintly grimaced at each other. “It’s like a picture.” Indeed it was. Like many northern lakes, with green waters reflecting the near birch and the long ridge of spruce trees rising sharply from the far shore, it resembled a picture on a calendar; one could imagine an Indian maiden and her lover in a birch canoe drifting across the canvas. But from the vantage point of the young mothers and their huddle of curious children, the psychiatrists themselves and their wives and female secretaries (“Right away, Doctor”) were now in the picture also.
From their cars they brought out rainbow-striped beach towels and two large tan blankets, a portable radio, the New York Times, sun-tan oil, Noxzema, and two inner tubes. The two older women, disrobed, displayed mountains of white flesh and bulging veins spilling out of very tight new bathing suits, one lavender, one black; they wore white cut-out fancy sandals on short, fat white feet. While the two younger women oiled themselves and lay down, shoulder straps dropped, to sun themselves on towels, the rest of the party spread the blankets, turned on the radio, opened the newspaper. Twirling the dial, the reclining fat women sought a news program, found dance music, household hints, a French-language broadcast from Canada, a ball game; they propped their waved heads on their palms to appraise the frowning young mothers in their decorous bathing suits, who had reopened their books and magazines and were pointedly trying to read. The smaller psychiatrist, who had a bald head, thickly wrinkled brown skin, and bowed legs, impatiently switched off the radio (“Please! We are here to enjoy Nature”) and began to tell his colleague about a flattering letter he had once received from Stekel. His colleague answered with an anecdote about Ferenczi. The men’s voices were loud and heavily stressed; each repeated the other’s final line, choruslike, on a rising note: “I had a letter from Stekel.” “So? You had a letter from Stekel?” And then, to the lavender-suited woman, who wore a hearing aid: “Martha, he had a letter from Stekel.” The lake magnified this dialogue, as it did every sound; ordinarily, you could hear a fish jump half a mile away or an old Victrola playing in a house on the ridge.
The young mothers rattled their magazines. In sheer self-defense, they declared afterward, they started a show conversation of their own, talking in high, strained voices of impersonal, mannerly things, till the children took it as a game and began to shout commonplaces at each other. “Nice day!” they bellowed. “Looks to me like rain!” “Sh-h-h!” duteously murmured the mothers, coloring. “These people will think you’re copying them.” “Mother, who are they?” whispered a pig-tailed girl, under cover of the radio, which had been turned on again. In this region, every stranger was supposed to be known, or at any rate identifiable. “They’re psychiatrists, I think, dear,” whispered back her mother, unplaiting the child’s wet braids. “That’s a sort of doctor that fixes your soul when it’s sick.” This explanation was uttered in a sweet, pensive, “understanding” tone that made the other mothers squirm. “How ridiculous,” said a boy, with a scornful glance at the soul doctors. “It’s not ridiculous; it’s a science,” reproved his mother. “It’s not a science, it’s a pseudo science—isn’t it, Mother? That’s what you and Daddy think,” said another boy, eagerly. “Hush,” said his mother, equably. “Manners! We will talk about it when we get home.” “But, Mother, where do they come from?” persisted the first child, irritably pulling her long hair away from her parent’s hands. “New York, silly—you can see it on their license plates,” said the second boy. “I can see that,” said the girl. “I mean up here, in Minster.” And the mothers’ widened eyes appealed to each other. “I know that, too,” said the same sturdy boy calmly as the mothers turned to stare at him. “They’re staying at Meade Farm.” “Ah-h-h,” cried the mothers softly. Meade Farm was a boarding farm fifteen miles away, in the next township, that advertised “Cultured Surroundings” in the Saturday Review. “Are you sure?” “How did you find out?” “I listened,” answered the boy simply. “You only have to listen to find out everything about them.” The mothers smiled fondly among themselves; this eight-year-old was the brightest of all their progeny, and every mother loved him as if he were a communal holding. “But why do they come here?” demanded a hoarse twelve-year-old. “Nobody from Meade Farm has ever come here before.” The mothers smiled wanly. “Somebody must have told them about it.”
There it was: what could you do? It was foolish to imagine you could keep Poor Farm Pond and this special beach a community secret forever and yet, alackaday, these psychiatrists were the first rank outsiders to find their way along the dusty network of back roads and “discover” it, as they were now proclaiming to each other in blaring, self-commendatory tones. (“I am a water witch, eh, Doctor?” the mop-haired man chuckled.) Everybody else who had come here either was local, like the granite workers and the townspeople from the state capital, or had some thread of connection with one of the original summer families. If you did not know them, they knew a friend or a friend of a friend. The young mothers could not but feel, forlornly, that they were witnessing the end of an epoch as they watched the frizzle-headed psychiatrist, who had sloping shoulders and breasts like a woman, don a black bathing cap and stride into the water with one of the inner tubes. Soon he was shouting, through the megaphone of his hands, that the water was wonderful and splashing himself to demonstrate it, like a man in a shower. The small brown psychiatrist fitted on a nose clip and followed him, and finally the whole party was in the water, with the inner tubes and a ball; the two immense older women floated in the inner tubes; the men tossed the ball back and forth to each other; the secretaries lay sunning on the raft.
It did not occur to them, probably, that they were monopolizing the water—this was the kindest explanation and the one that had to be given the children, who were looking on with poison-steeped eyes, like little savages seeing the white man preëmpt the happy hunting ground. One atavistic little girl, in fact, picked up her homemade bow and arrow and, pointing it at the bathing party, glanced around, grinning boldly, for approval; her mother seized her wrist, slapped it, and confiscated the toy. But the children could not be quelled. One and all, they were refusing to swim while these awful people were in the water. They were unmoved by the force of example—“Come, Mummy will swim with you,” announced one resolute matron—and coldly indifferent to the argument, usually decisive for them, that they would hurt the people’s feelings. On the other hand, despite whispered cajolery, they declined to leave and go and take a dip in Granny’s pool or be driven to a pothole, ten miles off, made by a waterfall on Dogface—a mossy, cold, green, balsamy, hidden spot that was saved for special treats. The older children simply sat, wrapped in dirty towels, and stared adamantly at the strangers, while the younger ones, not comprehending, began to whimper. The mothers gazed at each other pregnantly. The children’s attitude seemed a judgment handed down from on high; it absolved them of responsibility. They did not wish to be snobbish or over-fastidious, God knew, but there was a limit. They consulted their wristwatches; they shrugged. Grasping towels, children, sneakers, reading matter, they rose in panoplied purpose and picked their way to their cars, past the psychiatrists’ outspread gear. It was only three-thirty, and the sun still lay warm on the violated pond.
“There is a limit, Pick,” said Margaret Callaway to her husband, striding into her house with a retinue of weeping children behind her. Tall and olive-skinned, with a long, aristocratic nose and a shock of black short hair, she confronted her husband with the air of an avenging queen. “The children mutinied,” she announced. “All of them. Ours and everybody else’s.” And she recited what had happened, crisply, while the children bated their sobs to listen to the account of their grievance.
“The children simply copied your attitude,” said Pickman (“Pickles”) Callaway, an industrial consultant, when he had heard. “I knew you would say that,” answered his wife, between her teeth. “I knew it, I knew it. But, Pick, I promise you I didn’t say a word—not a word.” Her manner had become hysterical; the children looked up at her curiously. “You didn’t have to say a word,” said Pickles, in a more sympathetic tone. “You obviously looked volumes. Kids are animals,” he added, stroking a small, crew-cut head. “They felt you stiffen up the way a dog feels it when a human being is afraid.”
Margaret slumped into a chair. “You are right,” she said desolately. “I was wrong.” She vented an exhausted sigh. To be in the right was Margaret’s consuming ambition, to which all meaner aims had been sacrificed. She was a sincerely moral person, as Pickles Callaway, who had no morals, was always discovering to his surprise. Poor Margaret (as he privately styled her) had been renowned as a big brain at college; she had inherited a tidy wad from a Massachusetts mill-owning family; she had a successful husband, three beautiful children, a knack for household management, troops of friends; two winters before, she had had a tremendous nervous breakdown, which was all that was needed, Pickles once remarked (in a jest oft repeated in Minster), to complete the picture of the all-round woman of the year. Yet her accomplishments and sensibilities galled her, like handicaps imposed in the race for perfection. Margaret was a thoroughbred, the grandmothers averred, and with her distant, alarmed gaze and flaring nostrils and restive gait, she had the strained look of a blood mare carrying extra weight. Like all the Minster matrons, she worried a great deal about her privileges, which obliged her, she knew, to make allowances for those who had not had them. At the same time, the shortcomings of others seemed to her a sort of unfairness, a drain on her resources of understanding that was bleeding her white. Her mind, Pickles complained, was like a civics textbook, and Minster had served her for a model of what she believed possible.
It was Margaret, preëminently, who had been the conscience of Poor Farm Pond, the watchdog of the genius loci. She had been outraged by the plan to buy the shore lot from old Mr. Bascomb; she had grown heated in defense of the granite workers who came to the pond on Sundays in trucks and cars that blocked the parking space. It was not much of a sacrifice, she pointed out, in her high-pitched Bostonian voice, for the summer people to give up Poor Farm Pond one day in the week to men who worked six days at heavy labor. The fact that she had voted Republican in the last two Presidential elections (in the interests of the national welfare and public harmony, relinquishing her own preference for the Democratic candidates) gave this pro-labor statement of hers an air of disinterested equity that silenced all opposition. Wives whose husbands flew up just for the weekend—unlike fortunate Pick, who took the summers off—were free, she cheerily suggested, to drive the extra miles to the waterfall, where they would be rewarded by a wonderful view. And to demonstrate the feasibility of this she had started a series of prodigious Sunday-lunch mountain picnics, to which everybody brought a covered dish.
And last year, when parties of high-school students from the state capital, twenty miles away, began to come to the pond on Saturday afternoons, late, and sometimes Sundays, too, and leave beer cans and paper plates and candy wrappers behind them, Margaret had remained staunch and organized a work detail with her children to clean up the beach on Monday mornings. The other mothers were grateful to Margaret’s superior energy; the fact that Margaret outdistanced them in her zeal for local democracy, as in everything else, allowed them to praise her without emulation. “She enjoys it; let her do it,” decreed the husbands when the other mothers voiced a qualm. But this, alas, was false. Margaret believed in the force of example and was always perplexed when other people did not follow her lead; she did not understand how anybody could see the right thing and not desire, urgently, to imitate or surpass it. She did not really enjoy the cleanup; picking up dirty papers with a pointed stick, she felt lonely and a little absurd, as if her friends’ absence were a subtle criticism. And the children, usually so compliant, hated this early-morning chore. Sometimes, too, they found things in the bushes that led them to ask premature questions. This, in turn, showed Margaret that she was making a grave mistake. The children were learning to hate the public-high students who left this jetsam behind them; she had perhaps found the surest way of turning her children into snobs and disgusting them with sex as well. Therefore, this year, every Monday, Margaret rose quietly, before the children were awake, and drove in her jeep down to the pond to clean the beach herself. Pickles Callaway, who once accompanied her, promptly declared that the whole idea was masochistic. “Delegate power, my dear,” he commanded. “Make the other gals help you. They swim here, too.”
But this was cavalier husband talk. Pick in his heart knew better: the other girls were not Margaret. Even her best friends, Ginny and Adelaide, after two Mondays of it, would be shirking and sending their husbands to try and overcome Mr. Bascomb with an offer of more money. If Margaret wished to preserve the tradition, she would have to clean the beach herself. There was no other solution, Pickles had to admit as he felt Margaret stir every Monday morning in the bed beside him. You could not get the town to clean the beach, because the town did not own it; you could not get old Mr. Bascomb to do it; and you could not leave it littered. You could set up a trash can with a sign, “Please dump here,” but this would invite the inference that the beach was public—an inference nobody, not even Margaret, wanted the community to draw, for despite everything, despite the weekend incursions and the trailer and old Mr. Bascomb’s attitude, the township itself still understood that this peninsula jutting into Poor Farm Pond “belonged” to the summer people who had brought the sand and the raft. The Minster youngsters used the swimming holes in the brooks and another part of Poor Farm Pond, a reedy shallow cove round the bend where a man had rowboats to rent. And when the granite workers came on Sunday—whole enormous families of them, with a long picnic table on their truck—they, too, understood that the place had a prior claim on it and treated it with respect. They were shy, nice, traditional people who sent to ask permission for their children to use the rowboats and always left them in good order, pulled up on the beach. Even the high-school students were well aware that this was the summer people’s preserve and never came when the young mothers were there but waited till the last station wagon had driven off before starting their parties. Sometimes, on a weekday, a pair of young lovers would come walking, hand in hand, up the road, carrying their bathing suits to change in the meadow, but lovers had special rights everywhere—the whole natural world “belonged” to them.
This was democracy, the summer colonists consoled themselves whenever they were tempted to look back with longing to a time when they had had the pond all to themselves. It was not ideal but it worked; given tact and mutual forbearance, you could always find a modus vivendi. And in dreamy moods, some of the mothers looked upon Poor Farm Pond as a sort of parable for today, the kind of thing you saw with pictures in the Sunday-magazine section: everybody pulling together—America. They had a lump in their throats when they thought of their own and everybody else’s goodness. That is, until now.
The republic had fallen. This, in effect, was the news the desolated young mothers carried home to their husbands that evening—carried, however, with a certain triumphant ceremony, as if on a flashing salver. Margaret and Ginny, Adelaide and Charlotte—they all marched into their dwellings and set down the news with a thud. The gentlest, softest, creamiest mother recounted the details of the invasion with a glittering intensity quite unlike her normal self. And each young woman had an air of speaking as a corporate body, attesting incontrovertible truths. When the puzzled husbands remarked, reasonably, that the psychiatrists were not likely to put in an appearance every day, the wives tossed their heads. Psychiatrists, they declared, were clock men; they would be there every afternoon, punctually, at two. Furthermore, they would summon their colleagues to share their discovery, this summer or the next. Psychiatrists vacationed in swarms, often surrounded by their patients; this was a well-known fact, and Ginny Marx could instance, from her own experience, a lonely beach in Massachusetts that had been completely taken over by them. Their profession had made them overbearing (of course, there were exceptions); they methodically pulped every experience like an orange-juice extractor. And they might as well be armadillos for all the feeling they had for the feelings of other people.
The husbands scratched their heads, astounded by the knowledge their wives appeared to have of the characteristics of psychiatrists in general and by the wealth of simile and metaphor these particular psychiatrists had tapped. “They’re against Nature, Pick,” said Margaret Callaway, with a breathless seriousness, when the children had been tucked into bed, and the two sat, with the Silex between them, in the small, sparsely furnished sitting room. “The children felt it, I tell you. Jonathan stared at them as if they were some of the space people he sees in his comic books. That’s exactly how they looked in the water, with the black bathing cap and the inner tubes; they’re contrary to Nature. Everything about them is synthetic and sleazy, like some horrible new fabric. One of them has skin that looks like imitation crocodile leather.”
“They’re probably no more unsightly than some of the locals,” observed Pickles calmly. Margaret leaned forward and spoke almost in a whisper. “Pick, they’re different, I tell you. I’ve been thinking about it; I’m sure I’m right. They’ve chosen to look the way they do. I shouldn’t blame them for an accident or a deformity—you know that—but they’ve chosen to be ugly and dissonant.”
Pick blinked his light-green eyes. As a scientist of sorts, he was irked by positive assertions. He was a homely man himself—small, slight, lantern-jawed, with thick, rather sensual red lips and heavy black-rimmed glasses. Partly for business reasons, he had stylized himself as an impersonal, scientific observer and dressed the part, as he conceived it; in the country, he wore Bermuda shorts cut down from old flannels, ribbed, heavy knee socks, and a soft white shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbow, baring tan, wiry arms, on one of which flashed a very expensive French wristwatch that told the day of the week, and the month and year, and the moon phases, as well as the time of day. Out-of-doors, he carried a German camera and binoculars in leather cases on shoulder straps. To human life and technology, his subject, he had fashioned an attitude of strict, gloomy accuracy; his own bias was conservative, but he did not shirk the facts. To him, as he sometimes told his clients, man was chiefly an animal, obedient to certain biological and technological laws. At the same time, Pickles was a humorist, and the moral consciousness of Minster was a source of wry entertainment to him as he sat in his loge seat, watching, with a critical, erudite eye. Behind the mask of imperturbability, he was peppery and eccentric, like a boyish little old man—exactly the same now, said the grandmothers, as when Ginny’s brother had brought him home from prep school, a wizened State of Maine boy on a scholarship, bright as paint in his studies, full of the devil, and a convinced, logical tory even then.
For two summers now, detachedly, he had watched his wife fighting her anxious shadow-battle with the problem of Poor Farm Pond. It did not surprise him that she had finally reached the breaking point. He was not a heartless man, but he regarded Minster as a pocket of old-fashioned individualism that could not long resist the encroachments of mass society. Margaret’s “solutions,” he perceived, were typically anachronistic: she relinquished the pond on Sundays at a time when the forty-eight-hour week was already a thing of the past. She reckoned, as he could have told her, without the expansion of leisure, and supposed she could contain the problem within the limits of the region, though it was not a regional question, as he would presently seek to show her: mechanized man was leisured man, wherever you found him—the industrial revolution had unleashed the crowd. But it was interesting that she was now reacting, like all old cultures, with a violent xenophobia. The psychiatrists, as he saw them, advancing on Margaret’s pond, were the prophets of universal leisure, teaching the glad gospel of play, bidding nerves relax—their trademark, of course, was the couch. And nothing, he agreed, was more horrible to homo faber, that vanishing American, than the sight of other men sprawling, relaxed and unbuttoned, in a state of nature.
“Pick,” said Margaret, urgently, interrupting his thoughts. Pickles quirked an eyebrow. She laced her long fingers; two jagged lines of worry appeared between her dark, somewhat protruding eyes. “I’m afraid of myself,” she announced. “I didn’t know until this afternoon that I had so much hatred in me. Pick, such a power of hatred!” She raised her eyes and looked straight at him. “Pickman, I have to tell you. I wanted to kill those six people.” Pickles was shocked and irritated; it seemed to him she presumed on their marriage to make him such a grotesque and unseemly confidence. “And not because they gate-crashed our beach. That was just an excuse. I wanted to kill them because they were the way they were. Can you understand that? To make them see themselves, for one second, reflected from my eyes?” The dilation of her mare eyes unnerved Pickles; he did not like the slightly rolling look of complicity with which she was now regarding him, as though she expected him to share her murderous fantasies. As a proclaimed conservative, he had been, before this, the recipient of a number of confessions from liberals to the effect that they too loathed their fellow-man; Pickles, who was a stranger to all strong emotion, found the implication insulting.
“Nonsense,” he said sharply. “You’ve been playing good little girl too long. You and your friends are acting a silly charade you pleasantly call democracy—a dangerous charade, let me tell you. The common man is no fool—face it, my dear. He doesn’t like to be patronized. He can spy out a moral aristocracy in its simple last year’s bathing suit.” He lit a cigarette. “A moral aristocracy,” he repeated. “Bred in the convents of Vassar and Bryn Mawr and Radcliffe. Holding its summer court at Minster, waving its sceptre over Poor Farm Pond. A very pretty pastoral—Arcadian. But this is the twentieth century. What right have you to try to be better than the common herd and to teach your children to be better? No right, in a universal democracy; the people won’t stand for it. Why should they? I agree with them. This moral superiority is an insufferable ostentation—an exercise of privilege that derogates the common man.”
Pickles glared mettlesomely at his wife, who was now sitting, downcast and submissive, her arms clasping her knees, in her flowing chambray skirt. “Why, Pick, you sound like a radical,” she murmured, doubtfully smiling. But Pickles shook his head. He believed, as she ought to know, in private property and individual rights. He considered the idea of equality the most pestilential idea ever to have entered human thought—an idea that could only culminate in murder, as she herself had just demonstrated. There were only two kinds of equality that a rational man could accept: equality before the law and the career open to the talents. Social equality was an absurdity; there could never be equal shares of the things men valued. “Face facts, my dear. You can’t share Poor Farm Pond or anything else you care about. Either you have it or they do. I’ve got nothing against these psychos, personally, but there’s not enough water to go around. You gals have been a long time seeing that.”
“But that’s just it,” cried Margaret. “We have seen it.” She leaned forward with a pleading smile. “Pick, how can we say no to a car full of hot people when there isn’t another place in miles?” “You have your own kids to think about,” retorted Pickles. “What are you going to do—pack them off to camp so as to leave the pond free for the hoi polloi?” “Oh, Pick, you’re exaggerating.” Margaret gave a nervous laugh, as if he had paid her a compliment. “I’m facing facts,” said Pickles. “That’s what’s in the cards. You’ve waited too long as it is. John Q. Public has got his foot in your pond.” Margaret nodded glumly, seeming to give up all at once. “It’s my fault, I see it,” she sighed. “I assumed the leadership.” Pickles said nothing. “If only,” she murmured, “there were some other solution, some place that was just as nice for them to go.” “That,” said Pickles brusquely, “is their worry.” “Oh dear, oh dear,” said Margaret. “We always come back to that. Think, Pickles, think,” she adjured him. “If you think of something, I promise we’ll do anything you say.”
All over Minster, that night, thinking caps were on. Something would have to be done, nearly everybody conceded; today’s episode was the last straw. Aside from anything else, it was bad for the children to have all this buzz about psychiatry. “It’s nothing, Mother,” “Please, Mother!” exclaimed the young matrons with acerbity when the grandmothers telephoned, abrim with curiosity and counsel. One typical old lady wished to know whether the two men were Freudians or whether they belonged to the new interpersonal school—it made all the difference, a friend in Brookline had told her. “How should I know, Mother? Go to bed, Mother,” wearily replied her daughter. “We will talk about it tomorrow.” “I hope to goodness you’re going to do something finally,” and “You’ve brought this all on yourselves,” affirmed the old voices. “Yes, Mother, yes,” sighed the young voices. They had heard this same judgment from the children (“We think you try to be much too good, Mummy”), and though the mothers smiled, it alarmed them to see the youngsters deducing, critically, that goodness did not pay.
Next day, the dire effect on the children sprang to every mother’s thoughts. Thanks to the party line, the whole township was astir. All afternoon, the road to Poor Farm Pond was dusty with unwonted traffic as the community turned out to take a peek at the psychiatrists, who, sure enough, were spread out on the tiny strip of beach with their blankets and their radio, just as the young mothers had described them. It was awful, declared the young mothers, alighting resolutely from their vehicles and proceeding to the waterside as if nothing had happened; the psychiatrists themselves were bad enough, but the way people came to stare at them, as if they were animals in a zoo, made you ashamed for Minster. And the children were lapping it all up, sitting in a long line on their haunches and giggling and declining to go in the water, till one of the mothers, strapping Charlotte Husted, bodily dumped her two in, while the psychiatric party clucked and frowned. What were you going to do? Adelaide Currier, a warm-spoken, lively brunette, announced that she was going to take her children to swim on Dogface every day until the excitement blew over, but everybody knew Adelaide would not hold to it; you could not run a household—even a slapdash one like Adelaide’s—and drive more than twenty miles for a swim every day. And then there was the idea Ginny Marx had, of talking it over with the psychiatrists in a friendly way and asking them to leave the beach to the children after nap-time every afternoon, but everybody knew Ginny would never have the nerve. How could you explain to them delicately a thing they did not feel for themselves?
And they were here for the whole month. Mrs. Currier, Adelaide’s mother-in-law, briefly settled this question by calling up the landlady at Meade Farm, who was on the Valley Fair Committee with her. So it was not just a temporary annoyance, which was what everybody had been half hoping; it was the heart cut out of the summer—and the next summer and the next, in all probability. A long-range solution would have to be found, said Margaret Callaway, briskly, in the post office, quoting Pickles. Minster was now facing a problem that had been gripping most of northern New England; a farming area was being converted into the site of a vacation industry that was overturning all the old values. The problem was really worldwide, she explained to a group of mothers as the tobacco-stained old codgers who hung around the post office edged up to listen: it would be the fate of all obsolete civilizations to become the tourist meccas of the civilizations that replaced them. Minster was feeling the effects of a technological revolution that was just as unsettling as a geological upheaval like the Appalachian Revolution, which had metamorphosed the mountain ranges.
A long sigh rose from around the postboxes. According to Pickles, then, there was no escape, the young mothers queried, absently opening their mail; the postmistress’s rubber stamp stayed poised in the air as she listened. But Margaret shook her head. A strange, new exaltation had appeared in her. Her nostrils quivered; her faraway gaze had taken on a focus of conviction. Pickles was thinking, she said proudly. He was looking at the problem scientifically, in terms of the new situation, and was very near an answer. The mothers exchanged looks. Any “solution” of Pickles’ would have in it something caustic; he would want to rub salt in the community’s wounds as he applied iodine to his boys’ feet when they had cut them. The grandmothers doted on Pickles, but the young mothers had never approved of him since he went into business; they thought him selfish and a snob.
And yet their own ideas were terribly shaken, they had to confess. They were distressed by the froth of ill will that rose in their breasts whenever they so much as thought about Poor Farm Pond. Instead of hating the intruders, they ought to pity them, they supposed, for being noisy, ugly, and self-satisfied, which was probably the result of conditioning. “Imagine looking like that!” murmured Ginny to Adelaide with a shudder. “Imagine being like that!” retorted Adelaide. “I won’t pretend to be sorry for them; they have free will just like the rest of us.” And absurd arguments began to break out, at parties, about free will, and whether people could help their appearance. One or two of the husbands, plain men, were so irritated by these conversations that they were actually threatening to sell their houses and move away from Minster if the swimming problem was not settled, once and for all, this summer.
Nothing was the same. Starting with the psychiatrists, many new species of summer people began to be seen in Minster. A bright-red British car with a New York license plate was sighted flashing by on the back roads; slim, tanned, painted, smart women were glimpsed driving about with the real-estate agent, poking into old farmhouses. And all through July—for the first time in history—cars with streamers saying “Ausable Chasm,” “Howe Caverns,” “Desert of Maine” drew up at the parking place at Poor Farm Pond and parties of tourists settled down for an outing, with dogs, potato chips, Cracker Jack, shampoo soap, insect repellent, beer, and all the rest of it. It was unaccountable. Minster had not been written up, so far as anybody could find, in the newspapers or travel magazines. It was as though the news had got about telepathically, as messages fly between birds. One afternoon—an ominous touch—a tall lean coveralled native with pale shifty eyes came with his lean pale-eyed son and a fishing rod and “borrowed” the Curriers’ rowboat; and the psychiatrists had the gall to complain to their landlady (Mrs. Currier had it direct) that “Mirror Lake” was getting spoiled: “We are writing a few friends to join us for a rest—here is so nice and quiet. And now comes a crowd. What can you do? It is America.”
Even the animals, apparently, had tuned in on the news. The eeriest thing—one afternoon, late, at sunset, when the pond was finally deserted, Adelaide Currier came down with a towel for a swim, and as she sat drying her legs, she heard an unusual sound in the water, not a fish jumping but a beaver swimming. She saw his black tail slapping the surface near the farther shore. And, looking more closely, along the far edge, green and still, under the shadow of the ridge, she noticed for the first time a little paling of dry branches. Her heart nearly stopped beating. Everybody in Minster knew what the beavers meant.
“Lodestone!” she cried five minutes later, panting across the Callaways’ lawn in her white towelling robe and beach slippers. “The beavers have come over from Lodestone!” She fell into a deck chair. “They’re building, along the far shore. I saw it.” The Callaway children came running out of the house. Pickles set down his highball leisurely, and got up to make her one at the trestle table. “That is very interesting, Adelaide,” he observed with a smile, glancing at his wife and children. “You actually saw the beaver?” Adelaide nodded. Then and there, as she said later, she should have guessed something queer was up. “Very interesting,” repeated Pickles, in his most mystifying young-fogy manner. Adelaide was irritated. She stared from Pickles to Margaret. “You’re taking it so calmly,” she protested. “You’d think you’d never seen Lodestone.” The three children looked at their parents and burst into giggles. “We saw it yesterday!” cried the youngest, gleeful, and dove under the table. “Then you know what it means,” said Adelaide, sternly. “It’s nothing to laugh about.” “No,” agreed the children, but their lips were twitching. “What is this?” she demanded. “Pickles, what are you up to? What were you doing at Lodestone?” All the Callaways smiled enigmatically. “A good question,” said Pickles.
And, in fact, Adelaide’s puzzlement was well founded. With the coming of the beavers, Lodestone Pond had reverted to wilderness, and the remote little village of Lodestone, five miles up the valley, had dried up and died of neglect. Nobody from Minster ever went there any more, except to show it to visitors as a curiosity. Today, there was nothing left of the village but a paintless church and a post office that sold a few dust-coated packaged provisions to the half-savage natives who lived in the hills on derelict farms, with fierce mongrel dogs and wild, inbred children. Civilization had crept away from Lodestone and left it—rumor declared—to incest and bestiality. The faded old homemade signs, indicating “Lodestone” with a pointer, in frail, spidery lettering, could still be seen nailed to trees along rutted back roads that had once borne a Sunday traffic of picnickers from the granite town and the cheese town and the state capital. But when they fell down, nobody replaced them; the stony mountain roads were nearly impassable to modern, low-slung automobiles, and dogs rushed out of unkempt farmyards, barking amazedly at the rare car that came through, usually with an out-of-state plate and a shaken, scarified driver, who emerged full of sociological questions—questions that won only the briefest retorts from the Minster natives, for Lodestone Pond and the whole infertile scrubby valley round it had the name of a place accursed.
It had not always been so; the grandmothers could remember a time when Lodestone was the dearest spot in the region, with strawberry festivals and church suppers and a music school and a little local band playing in the picnic grove. And, actually, there was nothing supernatural about what had happened. The beavers had done it. The tree-shaded pond had vanished, like a sunken ship; there was only a noisome still swamp, with dead birch and poplar trunks, stripped of bark, rising like masts or spars from the scummy surface. At one end of the swamp, amid the reeds and yellow water lilies, a remainder of the old diving raft still floated, with its tower. And you could see where the picnic grove had been, by the rope swing still hanging from the big arm of a dying giant maple that stood in a foot of slimy water. Whenever weekend visitors were driven over to see Lodestone, a cry of horror went up as the station wagon drew up on the little peninsula and the deathly sight was disclosed.
Outsiders found it hard to understand how the beavers could have done it. They had read in their school natural-science courses that beavers lived in streams and built dams there. They had never heard, they said, awe-struck, of beavers taking over a whole lake. Somebody (most often Pickles Callaway, for whom the place had a fascination) would then have to show them, with a geodetic map and binoculars, precisely what the beavers had done. Offering the binoculars, Pickles would point out the brook that had originally been dammed by the beavers, and explain how, to make their dams and underwater lodges, they had cut down small birch and poplar and dragged them to the lake’s outlet. This obstruction had had the effect of flooding the pond, which had overflowed its borders and killed the surrounding vegetation. The tall dead trees they saw had once been on dry land—they could find it on Pickles’ map. Dammed up, the pond had become a spreading marsh; reeds and water lilies had sprung up in the stagnant water, and scum had slowly covered it. With knitted brows, the visitors would pass the binoculars back and forth, note the interlacing of twigs, branches, and sapling trunks, sawed by the rodent teeth. And in the end they never saw how Pickles could take it so coolly. Facing the ruined pond, fending off the mosquitoes and gnats, sniffing the unwholesome air, they all claimed to feel something vast and unjustifiable in the magnitude of the destruction, as if Nature, in her ordinary business, could never have encompassed such a thing. “The industrious beaver,” they would murmur, the implication making them solemn for the rest of the afternoon. They could not help sensing that the quality of this devastation was human; the decapitated tree trunks made them think of mutilated cities. There was something at once purposive and purposeless in the display of technology before them. “The means,” Margaret always remarked, in her sharp, high, querulous bird voice, “have literally swamped the end.”
And she told a story that had been told her by the old music teacher in Lodestone—that it was a summer person who was responsible for what had happened to the pond. The beaver had disappeared from the region until a man from New York had come and bought property and imported a pair of beavers to dam up his brook and make him a natural swimming pool. The beavers had escaped and settled in the outlet of Lodestone. Nobody but Margaret put credence in this tale. The beavers, said the grandmothers, had first come to Lodestone years ago, before there were any summer people, except themselves, in the neighborhood. The story was a native fabrication, scoffed Pickles; no summer person could ever have been that thrifty.
Except Pickles, emended Adelaide, now, on the terrace, turning her bright hazel eyes from one grinning Callaway face to another. Pickles, she said to herself, had always had a mean, frugal streak, just like the man in the story. Adelaide was angry; she hated having mysteries made. “Shall we tell her?” wondered Pickles aloud, tilting his narrow head sidewise. Margaret and the children eagerly nodded.
“We drove over to inspect the property,” he said, with a sharp look at Adelaide over his glasses. “Margaret bought Lodestone yesterday.”
Adelaide’s gasp resounded throughout the community. This, at last, was the fruit of Pickles’ thought, and truly it was a stroke of genius, Minster acknowledged—tactful, diplomatic, and remarkably public-spirited. “I believe it will last our time,” Pickles said with modest pride, at a lap supper Margaret gave to explain the idea to their friends. And Pickles had arrived at the idea, emphasized Margaret excitedly, via the social sciences. Using the historical method, he had asked himself (Pickles nodded confirmation) what was the proximate cause of the problem of Poor Farm Pond. The basic cause was, of course, as they all recognized, the social and technological revolution, whose trend, in the long run, was irreversible. But the immediate tendency could be checked or diverted elsewhere, depending on secondary factors. In this case, the secondary factor, or proximate cause, had stared Pickles in the face, the minute he sat down to think: the problem of Poor Farm Pond had come to a head two years ago, when the last, forlorn camp on the shore of Lodestone had been given up and the pond had finally been abandoned to the beavers. The tradition or unwritten law regarding swimming rights had rested on the assumption that there were two ponds to swim in: one for the natives and transients and one for the “old” summer people—separate but equal. The beavers had destroyed this assumption.
Ergo, concluded Pickles, to restore the status quo ante you had only to eliminate the beavers.
The main point, which everybody saw at once, murmuring assent to Margaret, was that there was no human component to reckon with. That was the beauty of Pickles’ scheme. Nobody swam at Lodestone now. There could be nobody, therefore, to complain that the summer people had displaced them, as there would have been, inevitably, at Poor Farm Pond, even if Mr. Bascomb had been brought to terms. In this light, all the manifest objections to Lodestone—the sinister and forsaken character of the lake, the stagnant smell, the evil repute the place bore with the natives—became positive assets. Nobody wanted Lodestone, which meant that the land could be bought up dirt-cheap, for the taxes. Much of it, Pickles had discovered, had already been taken over by the bank in Graniteville, through mortgage foreclosures. The bank was delighted to arrange for Margaret to get the whole thing for a song. The bank president, in fact, had nearly wrung her hand off when the deeds were signed, congratulating her on a public service. He seemed to think, actually, that the reclamation of the pond would put the whole village of Lodestone back on its feet.
Clearing out the beavers, continued Margaret, should not present too much difficulty. Not nearly as much as some people were saying who had not gone into the matter. They were protected for most of the year, of course, but you could trap them during the open season; Pickles and some of the other men might come up for a weekend beaver hunt during the winter. The main thing, however, would be to knock out their dams and lodges with a bulldozer and a dredger—in this state, no conservationist statute could stop you from doing that on your own property. The beavers could shift for themselves, since they were supposed to be very adaptive. The worry would be to not let them get reëstablished in Lodestone after you had driven them out; it might be fun for the children to set up a beaver patrol. Besides the bulldozer and dredger, there would be a few other expenses, for removing the dead trees and landscaping and replanting the shore. It would be nice if the people who were going to be using Lodestone, the “old” summer people and their friends, would get together and share the costs and the labor, just as they had always done with the sand at Poor Farm Pond.
And the people who put up the money (or the labor, either one) could form a little club—nothing pretentious, just a diving raft and a few bathhouses, since Lodestone was pretty far from home for some of the colonists, and maybe later on a tennis court and a hall for barn dances. You would not have to call it a club, said Margaret, quickly, cutting into the murmur that rose from all sides of her long dining room. If the word “club” struck a false note in Minster, you could call it “Lodestone Associates,” or something of that kind. And it would not have to be snobbish; anybody could buy shares and join—more like a subscription library, really, than a club.
“Anybody?” said Ginny, sharply. Everybody knew what she was thinking, but there had never been a trace of anti-Semitism in Minster. “Anybody we knew, I suppose,” said Charlotte, with a hesitant look around. “Does that go for the natives?” demanded Bill Husted, in a rather truculent tone. Margaret’s hand, alarmedly, went to her olive brow; she turned to Pickles for help. “Let’s be realistic,” urged Sam Marx in his soft, sweet, husky voice. “The natives won’t come into such a project. It’s a question of economics.” Pickles nodded. “Right. Let’s put it this way. They can join if they want to but they won’t.” “Oh,” said Janet Wheeler, a Girl Scout leader, in a booming voice, “I think it’s disgusting to put it on a basis of economics. I thought we were going to share.” “Don’t be absurd, Janet,” said Adelaide. “The natives are farmers; they work twelve hours a day.” “And they don’t swim, anyway,” said Ginny. “I predicted this,” said Pickles glumly to Margaret as the whole room began to talk at once.
Margaret shook her head. The whole thing, she declared, rapping for order, was eminently fair. The public, including the natives, would get Poor Farm Pond—why should they want Lodestone? Everybody stood to profit. And the old summer people had the right to protect themselves against today’s migratory population by joining together and pooling their resources. Naturally, if the consensus of opinion should be against a club, she and Pickles stood ready to bear the expense themselves and invite their friends to swim with them. But it seemed to her that it was more democratic if everybody did it together; nobody would feel, then, that they were presuming on the Callaways’ hospitality.
The assembly, uneasily dispersing, had to agree that Pickles’ proposition was logical. To form a club, as they pointed out to each other during the ensuing days, was only to vest in legal form that membership, one of another, that had always been the essence of Minster. The belongingness they all felt, among themselves, the young mothers admitted, had always had its focus on the peninsula at Poor Farm Pond. It was there plans were made, world affairs argued, magazines and newspapers shared; a de-facto club already existed, which Lodestone Associates would merely incorporate formally. There would be no real difference, except in the name. Or would there?
“You’re ungrateful fools in my opinion,” said old Mrs. Hathaway, Ginny Marx’s mother, “if you don’t take Pickles’ offer while the taking’s good.” She sat on her side porch, serving dandelion wine (with just a tincture of raspberries) to a conclave of dubious young mothers. Across the road, the children were dining in the pool she had dammed up. “You’ve lost nearly the whole month of July already,” she said sharply. “If I were Pickles, I’d withdraw the offer and teach you all a lesson.” “We can’t be taught a lesson, apparently,” said Adelaide Currier, from the steps, with a humorous sigh. “Then you’re not going to do it!” cried Mrs. Hathaway. The young mothers sighed together, swaying like willows on the porch: “We don’t know.” “Look, Mrs. Hathaway,” said Charlotte. “You’ve been here longer than anybody else. Don’t you think this club will make a line between the summer people and the natives? That’s what Bill and I keep coming back to.” “There’s a line right now,” said the old lady. “There always has been. And there’ve always been some that cross it.” “Mother!” cautioned Ginny. Adelaide mixed a good deal with the natives, came up early in the spring and stayed late in the fall; she was also rumored to be very friendly with a tall telephone linesman, who came sometimes in his high boots to the pond, late in the afternoons. Still, cross it or not, the line was there. The summer women did not drink with the natives, but the summer men did, getting out a bottle and glasses with punctilio when the plumber or the carpenter came. The summer women did not wear shorts in public, because the farm women disapproved. The summer children did not speak of their winter boarding schools, except in terms of sorrow, to the native children they played with, or of money or city entertainment. Even Adelaide’s flirtation came within the rules, for the rumored meetings were out-of-doors and casual; she did not invite the man to her house. And, of course, she could not take him to a club.
“Our equality’s really based on pretense,” said Ginny. “We pretend we don’t have a winter life or any life that’s different from theirs. Come September, we die down like the vegetation.” “Like Persephone, we go back to Hades,” said Adelaide, who hated the city. “That’s the point, I think, Mother,” cried Ginny. “If we have the club, we’ll be flaunting the other side of our lives, the winter side. I can’t help it; it seems tasteless to plump a clubhouse down in plain sight of people we see every day, in the store and the post office, who won’t be able to come to it.” “Perhaps they won’t want to,” said Mrs. Hathaway. Ginny shook her head. “That isn’t the point,” she insisted. “Even if they wanted to, they couldn’t.” Mrs. Hathaway shrugged; she had seen it before. Girls who married Jewish husbands were always touchy on these questions, even when there was no reason.
“There’s another thing,” said Charlotte. “What if we don’t like somebody and he has the money for the shares?” “Exactly!” cried Adelaide. “You know how it will all end? We’ll be letting in those damned psychiatrists. After having spent thousands of dollars. The last state of the man will be worse than the first.” Rueful laughter shook the porch swing. “You don’t have to let them in,” said Mrs. Hathaway placidly. Ginny’s big round china-blue eyes glared at her mother. “You tell us, Mother, please, how we’re going to keep them out,” she said sarcastically. “On what basis, do you suggest?” “Why, simply because you don’t care for them socially,” replied Mrs. Hathaway. “That’s the basis of every club’s membership policy. A club is like your home; you’re not required to give a reason for not inviting people to it. Not yet, at any rate.” The young women exchanged looks. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Hathaway,” said Charlotte, acting as spokesman. “That may be all right for the Chilton Club, but it just won’t do for the country, where you see people every day. You can’t practically say in so many words, ‘We don’t like you.’ ”
Three young bosoms, gingham, linen, chambray, exhaled a common sigh. Mrs. Hathaway’s voile print underwent a convulsion. “Then what is the point of a club, girls?” “Exactly,” said Adelaide mournfully. “For people like us, maybe there isn’t any point. We couldn’t say no to anybody. You see, we are incorrigible.” She flashed her most winning smile, demure and repentant, on the old lady, and held out her glass. “But you’re willing and able to say no to Pickles?” rapped out Mrs. Hathaway, setting down the pitcher. The three heads, fair, dark, and chestnut, denied the charge. “We feel Pickles is trying to rush us,” said Ginny. “We aren’t sure yet in our own minds. We do see the advantages. A club would keep out transients.” “But there’s another thing, Mrs. Hathaway,” said Adelaide. “What’s going to happen to the beavers when Pickles drives them out of Lodestone?” Mrs. Hathaway’s eyes closed for an instant, as if in silent prayer. “My dear,” she remonstrated, in a kindly, concerned voice that seemed to belong to a gentler old lady, “you can’t worry your head about the fate of the beavers. You must leave that much to Providence.” “It’s not the beavers themselves, Mrs. Hathaway,” proffered Charlotte. “It’s where they’ll go. They’ll be all over the countryside, like a plague. Pickles can’t trap them all, in one open season. He admits that himself.” “Adelaide saw one in Poor Farm Pond, Mother,” put in Ginny. “Stuff!” said Mrs. Hathaway. “Adelaide doesn’t know a beaver from an otter.” “No, truly,” protested Adelaide. “I could tell by the tail. It’s going to be a terrible thing if they pour into Poor Farm. Everybody in Minster will be furious with us.”
“I shouldn’t be at all surprised,” observed Charlotte, “if the town raised our taxes.” The old lady’s brows shot up, but she recovered herself. “Girls!” she said firmly. “You sound like children. Why, it would take the beavers years to come all the way over from Lodestone. They’ll settle down in some stream over there and mind their own business.” “It seems to me,” said Adelaide, “that Pickles will never be shut of them if they don’t come over to Poor Farm. They must be an enormous colony by now. You’d think Pickles, since he’s so clever, would have given that some thought.” The old lady considered. “Have you spoken to him about it?” she demanded. “Yes, of course,” said Adelaide. “And what did he say?” Adelaide looked rueful. “He just laughed. He says everybody has a private obsession that’s working against the club, and mine is the beavers. He and Margaret are getting pretty annoyed with us. Every day, somebody meets him in the post office with a new objection. Some of them, I admit, are pretty farfetched.” “Including yours, my dear,” said Mrs. Hathaway, rising. “If I see Pickles, I shall tell him what I think of the lot of you. You deserve to have a stick of dynamite put under you.” She made her way into the house. “Mother is dying to have the club so she can start blackballing people,” confided Ginny, with a giggle. “The Historical Society has never given her any scope.”
On the last day of July, Pickles looked steadily at Margaret. “They’re not going to do it,” he announced. They were sitting alone on the terrace, at twilight. Their friends had been avoiding them for the last few days; the older children had gone with the Husteds to the state beach over the mountains, where there were lifeguards and twenty-foot diving towers; the youngest was in bed, tearful, because he was too little to stay up so late and drive home after dark. Every child, practically, in Minster had been in the dumps for weeks; the Husteds had packed theirs off to camp, where they could have all the swimming they wanted, right outside their tent. “And yet, damn it,” cried Pickles now, “their fool parents won’t raise a finger.” “Perhaps they’ll still do it,” said Margaret. Pickles shook his head. “I know them,” he said. “Once the psychiatrists go and Minster gets its beach back, they’ll forget there was ever an emergency.” “Well,” said Margaret bravely, “we can still fix up Lodestone. We can afford it, Pick.” “It’s not the money,” said Pickles. “It’s the principle. This whole damned community has lost the will to survive.”
And, of course, on the first of August, the psychiatrists were gone. It was like a miracle, almost. The other invaders were gone, too, as if obedient to a signal. The young mothers, in their skirted bathing suits, were back on their slabs of limestone; the children were in the water; the rowboats plied back and forth; the old raft buckled as divers hurtled off it. The pond was still, save for the plash of oars and the swash of the raft and the shrieks and gurgles of the children. Pages turned in the liberal weeklies; a clear voice quietly read aloud a dispatch from Yugoslavia in the New York Times. Knitting and four back numbers of the New Statesman came out of a wicker basket. Everything seemed precisely as it had been a month before, as it always had been. At four o’clock, a truck drove up, and it was the telephone linesman; handsome as a bronze and very tall, he nodded tersely to Adelaide and did a perfect jackknife from the raft. Dragonflies dipped; a fish jumped; firs rustled. As the sun descended toward the ridge, a murmurous rippling arose, like a sigh, from the shaded far shore. It can never change, really, the young mothers reflected, because we are the same.
But it was on the very next afternoon—the second of August, two days after the psychiatrists had gone—that Ginny Marx, walking up to the raspberry patch with her two small children, saw the creature cross the road. There could be no mistake; it was a beaver. The children saw it, too, and it looked just the way a beaver was supposed to look—reddish brown and low-slung, something like a large rat, but with webbed hind feet. It hurried across the road in the direction of Poor Farm Pond, and Ginny let out a little cry. A moment later, coming from the other direction, Pickles Callaway drove up in his new station wagon—on his way, he said, to the post office. Ginny and the children excitedly climbed in. They had just seen a beaver, they all attested, heading for Poor Farm Pond. Pickles raised a skeptical eyebrow. They had beavers on the brain, he said, scoffing; it was probably just a woodchuck. But Ginny and the children all shook their fair heads. It was a beaver; they had just seen one in the Natural Science Museum at the state capital.
And a minute later, while they were still arguing, the children made a curious discovery. Under one of the back seats was a canvas case with holes for ventilation. “What is it?” they asked, edging it out with their sandalled, dusty feet. Ginny, turning to rebuke them, caught a funny, boyish flicker of Pickles’ light-green eye, magnified by the big lens. The thing under the seat was a cat carrier, empty.
Naturally, Ginny acknowledged, breathless, when Pickles, bold as brass, had let her off at the beach, you could not prove what had been in it. “But of course we know,” said Charlotte, tucking her chestnut hair into her bathing cap. “How long do you suppose he’s been doing it?” “From the very first, I imagine,” said Adelaide. “The one I saw must have been his maiden effort.” Ginny shook her head. “Perhaps it was the other way round. Perhaps that one came there naturally and gave him the idea.” Adelaide dimpled. “So like Pickles,” she murmured. “He saw the historical trend and lent it a helping hand.” “Dreadful,” pronounced Charlotte. “Do you think Margaret knows?” Adelaide slowly shook her head. “Impossible,” she said. “Inconceivable.” “But why, Mummy, why?” whispered Adelaide’s eight-year-old beauty, who had been sitting in the water, eavesdropping. “Why is Mr. Callaway putting beavers in our pond?” The mothers looked helplessly at each other. “Hush,” said Adelaide. “You’re not to speak of it.” “Is it because he’s mad at us?” “In a way, I suppose, dear,” said her mother. “It’s a sort of joke on us. Run away now and swim.” The child obeyed. “Joke?” cried Charlotte. “Why, I think he’s doing it to pressure us into joining his club.” Adelaide and Ginny shook their heads. “No,” said Adelaide. “Pickles doesn’t care any more where we swim; he’s washed his hands of us. I don’t blame him. In fact, you know, I rather admire him. He had to dispose of the beavers, and this was simple, ingenious, and anti-social. He made us a present of them. Pickles is an actionist; none of us would have had the nerve. And for that matter,” she added, “I don’t suppose he’s even doing anything illegal. Is it illegal to transport a beaver in a station wagon across a town line?” There was a ripple of reluctant laughter. “I think it’s criminal,” said Charlotte, rather feebly, immersing herself in the lake.
Ginny and Adelaide sat staring into the clear green water—deep, much deeper than Lodestone, and fated, it almost seemed, like something beautiful in a fairy tale, to create trouble and perplexity. All at once, the Currier rowboat came to a stop. The oarsman, nine-year-old Henry Currier, had heard a peculiar sound. “Hey!” he called. “Hush,” said Ginny. Everybody stiffened, as if playing a game of statues.
Across the pond, near the far shore, two lustrous beavers were swimming. Their flat tails made a distinctive noise as they slapped the water. “Beavers, children!” softly cried Charlotte, her face suddenly aglow. She stood like a classic water nymph, pink and plump, in her ample bathing dress, up to her waist in the water. The rowboat veered about; the little girls on the raft stood up and shaded their eyes. “I see them, I see them,” proud voices called in shrill succession. “Mother, they’re darling.” “Look at their little heads!” The young mothers caught their breaths; the gleaming round heads moving along the green surface were charming, and behind each beaver was a shining silver-white wake. At the same time, in the late-afternoon light, the line of newly cut gray branches was quite plainly visible, etched against the dark bank.
The rowboat drew up, with businesslike strokes. “Can we row over and investigate them? Please?” Henry Currier had a crew of three aboard. The young mothers’ eyes consulted; each face had a look of consternation. “Very well,” said the mothers. The rowboat made off swiftly, with its four tense explorers. Ginny ran her tongue over her lips. “Henry,” she called, “if you see their house, don’t disturb it. Just investigate and report back.” Her fair neck flushed. “We can trap them later on,” she explained to the other young mothers. “After the children are gone.” “We won’t be here in the winter,” whispered Charlotte. “Perhaps the town could do it,” murmured Adelaide. “They could get a permit or something. Or maybe old Mr. Bascomb could trap them.”
The eyes met again, and dispersed to the moving boat. “Much the best,” said Charlotte, settling down to a backstroke and thereby closing the subject.