Some Faces in the Crowd (22 page)

The song was still “Because You’re Mine,” only this time Paul was much more tolerant of its sentimentality. Her lips were brushing his ear—his skin tingled with the pleasure of it—she was going to kiss him. Only instead, she was whispering, “Darling, feel like going swimming? Let’s go swimming again.”

“Gerry,” he said. “I’m still water-logged. Why don’t we skip it tonight?”

“I want to go swimming,” she said. “At night I love to go swimming.”

“Baby, I—I just can’t tonight. I love you. I’m lost in you. I want to marry you. But if we start swimming out tonight, you know what’ll happen, you’ll dare me to see which one of us can swim out the farthest. I’ll bust a gut trying to keep up with you and …”

“All right, don’t swim with me. I’ll swim alone. I like to swim alone.” She was glaring at him and the wildness was a new kind, and he thought he knew for the first time what the General meant.

“Gerry, why get so angry? Tonight let’s just dance and have some drinks. Maybe tomorrow night we can swim.”

“I don’t want you to swim with me,” she said. “I’m going swimming alone. I’m going now.”

For a moment Paul considered following her. But then he thought, she’s high-strung, she can’t stay up at that pitch all the time without having these moods. I’ll let her work her way out of it and send her flowers in the morning. By lunch time she’ll be thinking up some new crazy stunt and daring me to follow.

The next morning Paul reverted and slept late. When he went downstairs to breakfast, everyone was talking about it. The Coast Guard was still searching for the body, he heard people say. But she was such a wonderful swimmer, he heard people say. She was always such a happy-go-lucky, such a high-spirited girl, it doesn’t seem possible she’d do a thing like that, he heard people say.

He walked slowly out to the edge of the point and looked across the sea. The sun was high and the waters were smooth. He had no idea how long he had stood there, or when the truth first flashed for him, but when it did he was sure he had known it from that first moment of fear and wonder when she had seemed bent on crashing into the pier. It was so simple now. Gerry’s courage had been fool’s gold, not really courage at all. Only the wish to die. When he cupped his hands to light a cigarette he saw how they were trembling. He stood a long time that morning at the sea wall.

By the time the sun was lowering toward the horizon, the first shock was easing off into a kind of numb submission, a sense of inevitability, of having entered for a few stolen moments into a shadow-world. For he was no longer sure whether Gerry Lawford and their first day, their second, and their last, had really happened. Or whether a mermaid, a water-gypsy, turned mortal for a day, had merely swum home to the green depths out of which she had come.

B
ETWEEN YOU AND YOUR
childhood is a wall. You struggle with some half-remembered incident and it is like a loose stone in the wall. The loose stone may be a chance word or two or some almost forgotten person out of the past who jostles the memory—in this story the memory of a young man who thought he had forgotten the confining complexity of his four-year-old world. Tommy is eighteen now and his mind is busy with the present and the future. It isn’t easy for him to point his mind back into the past when he was four years old and lived with three big people in a big city. He knew one as Mama and one as Daddy, but last and most important was the one he called Winnie.

Tommy remembered Winnie. Tommy remembered how he loved Winnie. When he was four years old he was pleased by the color of her. There was a sense of something that came down to him over the side of his bed, something soothing to him. It was the voice, a warm, quiet, affectionate voice, and a way of touching him that was both playful and respectful. Of course when Tommy was four years old he did not know that he wished to be respected. This only came to him when he was able to look back, as he was doing now. All he knew then was that a certain kind of contact made him laugh or smile or just feel good without having to smile. It was Winnie who knew best how to do this sort of thing. It was not what Mama and Daddy liked to do, which was to get a response out of him whether he felt like it or not. They liked to hear Tommy break out into a certain kind of laugh and often they would tickle him or fuss with him until they got him to make the kind of sound they were waiting for. Sometimes they would have him do this for their guests. It would make everybody laugh and then they would all go downstairs to their cocktails feeling satisfied.

Then Winnie would come. He would not see his parents again until the lights were out and he was almost too sleepy to know whether or not they had remembered their promise to come up and kiss him good night. Meanwhile he would have Winnie. Winnie with her assured way of talking to him, her way of knowing when to play or use playful talk and when to leave him alone to his thoughts. Winnie understood things like that. She made him feel like somebody, not just something to play with and show off to friends. For instance, if Tommy was examining a door knob, as he often liked to do, she would not gush all over him and say, “Ooh, Tommy likes the door knob? Tommy
likes
the door knob!” and then laugh absurdly. Winnie simply would say, “You see, Tommy, now you know how it works, and when you want to lock or unlock it you turn this latch up above—
here.”

And she would show him once and expect him to know how to do it.

So it was all these things, the voice and the manner, her way of treating him as one human being to another, her soothing color—or maybe it was the many things he loved about Winnie that made the color seem nice, too.

He couldn’t remember how far back he remembered the color, for Winnie had tended him in his crib and attended his graduation from the crib to his first real bed. In those first years with Winnie he didn’t know—or he didn’t know he knew—that there was anything special about the color of Winnie as compared with the color of Mama and Daddy. Daddy was whitish except for his chin and the sides of his face that were a sort of bluish. Mama was a sort of pale pink with red lips and often she had some flaky white stuff on her nose and reddish-orange circles on her cheeks. But Winnie was the color of the coffee that Daddy liked to drink with the cream in it. Sometimes Daddy would let Tommy pour the cream. Tommy didn’t know why, but it made him feel very important when he poured the cream into his daddy’s coffee. One morning when he felt he was pouring especially well, he said, “Look, Daddy, I’m making a Winnie color.”

Daddy made a face and looked around as if Tommy had said something bad. Tommy could not understand the look on Daddy’s face. He always felt nervous when his father got that look on his face. Tommy knew he had done something wrong but he could not imagine what it could be.

Daddy looked at his son very solemnly. “Tommy, I want you to remember this,” he said. “You must never
never
mention Winnie’s color again. It is not nice to talk about people’s color.”

But that summer they had gone to the shore and Tommy remembered friends of Mama’s telling her what a wonderful tan she had. Yes, and what about Daddy, picking Tommy up in his arms and saying, “Our little puppy—he’s getting as brown as an Indian.” What about Daddy? If it was all right to talk about people’s color sometimes, why wasn’t it …

He had been ready to point this out to Daddy, but his father would not let him talk.

“I want no argument about this, Tommy. Just remember, it is not nice, it is never good manners, to talk about people’s color. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Daddy,” Tommy said. He frowned very hard, the way he had seen his father do when he was listening to somebody he did not agree with. But frowning did not make it any clearer.

“Now run along and let Daddy read his paper.”

Daddy mussed Tommy’s “rat’s nest,” as Mama called his curly straw-colored hair, and smiled to show that he was no longer angry and that he considered the incident closed.

Tommy went up to his room to be alone with his thoughts. Why, oh why was it bad manners to mention the color of a person? It was only a year or so before that he had learned his colors and Mama had been very proud of how quick he was in telling blue from green and red from yellow. And then he would say, “That sheep is
white,”
and, “That cow is
brown,”
and Mama would hug him and say, “Wonderful, Tommy!” and have him do it all over again when Daddy came home from work. Now if it wasn’t bad manners to know the color of a sheep or a cow, why was it so wrong to say the color of a person?

He thought he knew what his mother would say. Something like, “Now Tommy, you’re too young to worry about such things, just do as Daddy says.” So he decided to ask Winnie. Winnie was his friend and would tell him the truth if she knew.

That evening after Daddy and Mama had gone out for dinner, he and Winnie were alone in the nursery and she was reading to him about Winnie the Pooh. He always thought that was very funny. Instead of Christopher, she would use his name in the story, so it would be Tommy Robin and Winnie the Pooh. That always made him laugh. Sometimes he would call her Winnie the Pooh. Usually, as soon as she had finished the story-poem, Tommy would say, “Oh, again! again!” Often Winnie would have to read it five or six times before he had had enough of it for one evening. But this time, when she had read through it once, he didn’t say, “Again! Again!” He made a frown face like his daddy’s and looked at Winnie, looked and looked at her without saying a word.

Finally Winnie gave a little laugh and said, “Tommy, what’s wrong? Do you see something on my face?”

“You have a nice coffee-’n-cream-color face,” Tommy said.

“Thank you, Tommy,” Winnie said. “I’m glad you think it’s a
nice
coffee-’n-cream-color face.”

“But Winnie Pooh, why is it bad manners to say it’s a nice coffee-color face?”

“What on earth are you talking about, Tommy boy?” she said. And she nibbled his ear a little bit. From the time when he was a little baby he had loved to have her nibble his ear.

He told her about pouring the cream on his daddy’s coffee and what Daddy had said about never mentioning Winnie’s color again. But he liked Winnie’s color, he said. It was a lot prettier color than a pale white or a silly old pink. And it was true. He would always remember Winnie’s color. It wasn’t exactly cream-in-coffee. It was a light golden brown, something like honey color. It was—thought Tommy for many years—just the right color for skin to be.

Winnie took him on her lap. She raised her hand to squeeze his ear lobe gently—he always liked her to do
that
too—and he noticed, perhaps for the first time, that the palm of her hand was quite white, as white as Mama’s. He felt confused by all this white-and-coffee-color difference. There was something about it, he was beginning to sense, that was very big, like the night and the sky and death, something that was outside of him and yet that he was a part of and would have to try and understand.

“Tommy, I wouldn’t say this to every four-and-a-half-year-old boy,” Winnie began, “but you have good sense. Some people can understand things at four that other people won’t understand when they’re forty-four. There’s nothing really wrong with saying what color a person is. I don’t mind being my color. I think it’s a nice color, too. The reason why your daddy says it isn’t nice to mention it is because most people are glad to be white. They’re afraid their being white and my being coffee color will hurt my feelings. But there’s nothing wrong with being coffee color. The only thing wrong is the way some people feel about other people being coffee color or chocolate brown or coal black.”

“Chocolate brown is a nice color, too,” Tommy said.

Winnie nuzzled his cheek and said, “Maybe the time will come when people will all be just people and won’t pay no mind to whether they’re coffee color or peppermint stripe.”

“Peppermint stripe would be fun,” Tommy giggled.

“Children are the nicest people,” Winnie said. “Children just seem to start out knowing all the things that big people forget and sometimes never get to know again.”

Tommy was pleased. While he understood this only a little better than what his daddy had said (and mostly not said) at breakfast, he knew that Winnie was trying to talk to him as a person, the same way she explained door knobs and other interesting things to him. He still felt pretty puzzled, but somehow he was reassured. He hugged Winnie and squirmed his face into her neck. “I wish I could grow up to be your color, Winnie Pooh,” he said.

Winnie laughed, and then looked at him sadly, but with her eyes still smiling.

“You’re a something,” she said, as she often did, and the sound always pleased him, though he didn’t know why. “You’re really a something.”

One evening when Tommy was almost five, Mama and Daddy came to his bedside to tell him they had to take a trip to California. They would be back as soon as possible and they hoped he would not mind.

“Is Winnie going?” Tommy wanted to know.

“Of course not, Tommy. Winnie will be here with you.”

“As long as Winnie stays I don’t care how long you’ll be away,” Tommy said.

Tommy’s mother started to cry. She was so hurt that for a few minutes, until Daddy talked her out of it, she was saying that she would never be able to go and enjoy herself if she thought her baby no longer knew who his mother was. Tommy didn’t want to make his mother cry, but it all seemed silly. He liked his mother tucking him in at night. But she wasn’t Winnie. His mother was always going and coming and talking on the phone. She was terribly busy doing things that had nothing to do with Tommy. Winnie was with him all the time. All except one day a week when she went off somewhere and left him alone. She always brought him something when she came back. Tommy would run out and throw his arms around her and nuzzle into her neck and say, “Winnie, Winnie Pooh, what did you bring me?” And Winnie would say, “Oh, nothing, why? Do you think I have to bring you something every time I come back?” And Tommy would laugh and start hunting for his present, in the pocket of her coat, or in one of her clenched hands, or in her purse or even inside her gloves. It was one of their favorite games. It was great fun. It was always easy to find. Sometimes when Daddy played jokes like that he made it too hard to find and Tommy would get tired and his daddy would tell him he must learn not to give up so easily and then it wasn’t fun any more.