Ellis Island & Other Stories (7 page)

He is not a symbol. He stands neither for innocence nor for evil. There is no parable and no lesson in his coming and going. I was neither right nor wrong in bringing him aboard (though it was indeed incorrect) or in what I later did. We must get on with the ship’s business. He does not stand for a man or men. He stands for nothing. He was an ape, simian and lean, half sensible. He came on board, and now he is gone.

Yours & etc.,
S
AMSON
Low

By September, 1916, the hotels on Long Island’s eastern extremity were in dire straits. Southampton marked the limit of fashionability, because military camps, whalers, a few remaining Indians, and the thinness of the land projecting unescorted into open ocean kept most people from the one or two resorts near the Amagansett beaches. People had avoided the shore since the sinking of the
Lusitania,
for it was rumored that the Germans were going to use gas and germ warfare against the Atlantic Coast. Autumn was approaching, and all but the very rich and unemployed were pulled back to Manhattan and Brooklyn as if by electromagnetic force. The sea was cold and bright.

Mr. Bayer had seen a newspaper advertisement describing a hotel as splendid as a palace of Byzantium, overlooking a regal, breathtaking prospect of savage sea—with extraordinary conveniences, with a garden close of tall oaks and fireflies—offering ten days’ room and board to a family of four at a hundred and fifty dollars. He had forfeited a vacation that summer because business was booming and demanded full attention. It was especially delightful to know that by traveling in the off-season he could bank a hundred and fifty of the three hundred dollars budgeted for a holiday, during a time when he was making so much money anyway. Of course the hotel was a gamble, but one fine morning in Manhattan, when summer’s last colors were sharpened by a blast of fall air galloping down the Hudson from Canada, they set out in their automobile for ten days at Amagansett. The air was so clear and enlivening that they wondered why they were headed into the country just as the heat was finally dying.

When Mr. Bayer and Martin had lashed canvas over the suitcases and automotive-repair apparatus, Martin’s sixteen-year-old sister, Lydia, got in the front seat with an expression of determination and dread.

“Lydia!” said Mr. Bayer. “Ride in the back with your mother.”

“That’s right,” said Martin, pompously.

“Martin, you shut up. Lydia, in the back.”

“No,” she said. “I want to ride in the front.”

“Lydia, please come in the back,” said Mrs. Bayer. “The front is for Daddy and Martin, in case of a puncture.”

“No.” Every time she said “No,” the word got shorter.

“Lydia, Daddy says you’d better get in back or—”

“Shut up, Martin. Lydia, darling, get in back or we don’t go to Amagansett.”

“I don’t
want
to go to Amagansett,” she said. “We’ll be the only people there. Why can’t I ride in the front?”

“Martin rides in the front. He’s a boy.”

“But he’s only ten.”

“Ten and three-fifths,” said Martin.

“Lydia, Lydia,” said Mrs. Bayer. Then she leaned forward and touched her daughter’s cheek. Lydia was extremely beautiful, with a warm, gentle face. She stood up, got out, slammed the door, got in the back, slammed the door, and stared at the second floor of their house. Her reddened face and neck and incipient tears made her even more beautiful, and her mother embraced her while Martin and Mr. Bayer, nearly chuckling over their victory, climbed in the front and began the driving.

Martin was in charge of the emergency brake, the gasoline gauge, the water temperature, and cleaning the windshield—which he thought was a “winsheel.” In a breakdown, he was the warning dummy, rag carrier, and nut holder. Even though Lydia wanted these jobs, she would not have taken them had they been offered. But Martin was extremely proud of the responsibility, just as he was proud to stand with the mannequins in his father’s store window, looking grave, as he thought a young mercantile employee should when in public view. But he hated to wash dishes or take out the garbage, and would disappear after dinner as if composed of the rarest gas—better to be beaten up by the Irish ruffians who terrorized the Jews than to take out garbage. This was mainly because the Irish ruffians never did beat up the Jews. Instead, they described it in such convincing detail that the Jews ran home overbrimming with the living English—“He smashed my face, bashed my belly, and splintered my Jew bones”—and the memory of a fight that had really never been.

They drove at 23 m.p.h. down the avenues to the Brooklyn Bridge. Martin glanced in the windows of sepia-colored tenements full of stretching people new to morning. There was still some sense of wilderness left in the city, in the brown and the dust, in the freshness of the earth overturned in excavation, in the farmlike emerald beauty of the Park. Once, his father had awakened him at four in the morning just to walk in the streets. They wound through fresh squares and down empty boulevards into the commercial district, where, at five, the markets were feverishly active. Martin was in an airless daze, though on that unusually warm March morning the air was wet and mild. The last drunk was expelled from the most riotous bar with a thunderclap and he wheeled through the doors and hit the sidewalk, rolling about like a ball bearing. Martin thought the ladies of the night were early-rising shopgirls and devoted nurses. Father and son passed countless gleaming fish on ice-covered tables, barrels of herring, vegetables still fresh and spotted with earth from Hudson Valley farms. They went into a workmen’s cafe. It was the only time Martin had ever drunk coffee. The proprietor put so much extra milk in it that he had to charge Mr. Bayer another nickel, but Martin didn’t know, and, despite his size, tried to blend with the crowd by pretending that he was a grown man.

They drove at 23 m.p.h. because their mechanic had told them that if they didn’t the engine would burn out. Martin liked the way the engine sounded, rolling over and around itself like a player piano. The sound of machines was like the rising of the sun on a winter morning, full of promise, relief, and lightheartedness. Martin liked so many things that he could not open his eyes without a pleasant inrush. And he was prone to fits of laughter. Once, they had dressed him up and taken him to a concert hall near the Park. Martin thought it was wonderful—the airy echoing ballroom, a view of dark-green citified trees, a mixture of expensive perfumes, and miles of silver trays with a thousand pounds of what Martin termed “complexly baked sculpture cookies.” After eating thirty or forty of these and quenching his thirst with four or five cups of champagne punch, Martin thought the world was a paradise. He took his seat while the musicians tuned their instruments. He was just beginning to fall asleep when an enormous fat woman suddenly appeared from behind a curtain and began to scream and squeak. Her teeth stuck way out of her mouth, and after the especially long and voluminous squeaks, she looked proud and delighted. At first, Martin was dumbfounded. Then he began to giggle, keeping it down until the muscles in his throat and abdomen felt as if they were sweating fire. The pain and tension were such that he started to get serious, when Lydia, afraid of being deathly embarrassed, decided to inflict a minor torture on him to stop the oncoming explosion. This she did by reaching from behind and driving her fingers into his ribs. Overflowing, caught by surprise, and got from behind, Martin shrieked with such force that people all around him jumped in their seats. A storm of laughter then issued from him. Unable to catch his breath, he rolled on the floor in such enviable enjoyment that the rest of the hall found it wonderfully amusing, even when Mr. Bayer swatted him and carried him, still doubled over, out the French doors into the greenery.

Recognizing her role in the disaster, and that it had cost Martin his allowance and several outings, Lydia took him to the aquarium. Of course he was delighted, but, as they tiptoed through the slimy galleries, he thought she was crazy. “How do you know they’re looking at you?” he asked.

“How do I know
who’s
looking?” replied Lydia.

“I don’t care if people look at
me,”
said Martin, “but you think boys look at you all the time. That’s why you walk around like a statue.” He imitated her straight oblivious stare, which made her look as if she had a neck injury, and, not understanding her lovely self-consciousness, he was soon lost in consideration of green water, gliding sharks, giant sea turtles jetting along with glinting paddle fins, the humidity on the face of the jewel-like tanks, and the feeling of the water’s mass and weight behind the thick glass. He had worn a blue sailor suit, and he had dashed from place to place.

On the Brooklyn side, once the Bayers had viewed Manhattan from the air and seen a landscape of chimneys and brown stone, they passed a faraway group of wan naked swimmers scattered at the foot of piers and embankments (as if they had been thrown there) and soaring from towers and walls into the swirling water. Martin stared at the swimmers with a near-pickled eye. The pleasure was beckoning and indefatigable, but he leaned back to watch the trees passing overhead on a river of blue. He remembered how in winter they went up on Riverside Drive to watch little steam ferries charge across the ice-packed North River, setting out in a puff of white crystal breath, rolling across the cold blue water.

The hotel at Amagansett was a large, airy white frame house standing in the deep green of potato fields that ran to a bluff overlooking an Arabian stretch of dunes and the blinding sea. Martin and Lydia walked to the water each day to swim and jump down the cool sides of the dunes. The sea was achingly cold, so their parents often ignored the beach in favor of sitting on the porch. In the green and the silence, they seemed to be happy just rocking back and forth in beads of cascading sun, their faces relaxed and content.

For the first time, Martin discovered that he carried a store of strong memories which emerged bright and clear in his eyes and gave him access to a world of random and sudden images as beautiful as the upwelling of music. He was chasing a horse in the pasture behind the hotel. The hotelkeeper, a portly Dane named Friebourg, had told Martin that if he could saddle the colt in the back field he could ride him. “Before you saddle him,” the Dane had said with amusement, “you’ll have to catch him, and that, little boy, could take a long time. I will sit here and watch, for this will be better than the vaudeville.” Martin had not liked the Dane’s patronizing attitude, and was determined to catch the colt.

The colt looked at him with the confidence and superiority of a dentist, knowing that after a little bit of fun the creature on tiny legs who had come to capture him would soon be incoherent and exhausted. It was just that way. Martin coaxed him with sweet language, fake smiles, hoarse rhetoric, careful commands, invigorated threats, and pleas for mercy. Nibbling the grass until Martin stealthily approached, breathing hot and heavy, lasso in hand, the colt then flew to another extreme of the field. Martin ran himself silly. Had the colt thrust his neck into the noose, Martin would not have had the strength to hold on, after two hours of the chase. Meanwhile, beyond the clover, the porch had filled with his family and the Friebourgs—the Dane himself, whose laughter could be heard from the pasture; Mrs. Friebourg, a silent hardworking woman; their daughter, Christiana, a girl just a year or two older than Lydia; and an ever-present, cut-glass gallon pitcher of beer.

In exhaustion and embarrassment Martin discovered that his defeat gave rise to splendid pictures—that the mahogany color of the horse billowed into a world of dark-wood city interiors and the dappled shapes of figures within. An exhalation of breath and a dizzy glance at a lone white cloud, riding far off, locked into a tableau of winter in Manhattan—the breath of horses in snow, dark-blue water off the Battery, a shadow across a cold field in which stood a charcoal-limned tree. These frames appeared and he felt the city behind him in a cloud of heat, as if it were a living body like his own. Even though Mr. Friebourg laughed, Martin continued to chase the horse, comforting himself by enjoying the color in a world he saw rapidly blooming and dying as if it were running the gates of a rigid metal machine, remembering all the while the sadness he felt in the frozen images of a motion picture when it ran improperly and crippled. That night he went to bed early and sore. Mrs. Bayer put mayapple vinegar on his legs for the sunburn, and he fell asleep listening to the breeze in contest with a lissome Norway pine.

The next morning, Martin was outside the hotel at five-thirty, furiously building what he called a “wind indicator,” which was a tangle of sticks, flags, strings, and tin cans, designed to sound a different tone for each of the four prime directions of wind. After several hours, it actually worked, though there was no telling what would have happened had the steady south wind changed its course.

Finally, Christiana Friebourg passed by (he had built it mainly for her benefit, imagining that she was watching every step) and asked, “What is that silly thing, Martin? Don’t you think you should clean it up before Father gets back from the village?”

Martin was stung nearly to breathlessness, but he managed to reply, “It’s a wind indicator, so I can always know which way the wind is blowing, even if I’m inside with my eyes closed.”

“What does it matter?”

“It matters,” answered Martin, though he did not know why it did. “It matters.” Then they both turned at the sound of an automobile coming down the road that led across the potato fields. It was not Mr. Friebourg, for he had gone to town in the wagon.

They watched in silence until a drab-colored car with a Marine colonel and his orderly, a lieutenant, pulled up to the hotel. There was an emergency camp at Montauk, across a savage spit of sand and scrub which gave the impression of a fortress and had the air of war, battles, and extremities. Vulnerable on both sides, it was at one point only about five hundred feet wide between the sea and the sound. This was called Napeague Neck. Hundreds of Marines lived on a clifftop above the ocean and practiced gunnery and drills, standing on the sand or knee-deep in low grasses, staring out upon a sea over which they imagined a cold and dark field of battle. When fall closed in, the colonel drove about in his car, looking for families to receive his men for Sunday dinners. It was lonely out there. The approaching autumn was full of fright, as if regenerative nature put to rest were linked to the future of their battalion—which they were sure was destined for France. That morning, it was arranged that the officers would eat at the hotel. The lieutenant evidently knew Christiana, for they spoke by the side of the car as the colonel wrote checks to Friebourg. Martin was awed by the lieutenant’s Sam Browne belt and field hat, not to mention the pistol, khaki puttees, lanyard, gold bars, and, most of all, the man’s speech. He was from South Carolina. To Martin’s delight, he was comfortable and fluent in his dialect. The lieutenant could not open his mouth without conjuring, for Martin, Martin’s idea of the South—burned mansions amid coconut palms, at the foot of which speedy alligators with dangling tongues ran as fast as greyhounds in pursuit of bonneted children and screaming slaves.