Mosquitoes

  ELEVEN O’CLOCK

  “I say,” said Mr. Talliaferro, popping briskly and cautiously into the room, accepting his glass, “we’d better slow up a bit, hadn’t we?”

  “What for?” asked the Semitic man, and Fairchild said:

  “Ah, it’s all right. She expects it of us. Sornebody’s got to be the hoi polloi, you know. Besides, we want to make this cruise memorable in the annals of deep water. Hey, Major? Talliaferro’d better go easy, though.”

  “Oh, we’ll look out for Talliaferro,” the Semitic man said.

  “No damned fear,” Major Ayers assured him. “Have a go, eh?” They all had a go. Then they rushed back on deck.

  * * *

  “What do you do in New Orleans, Pete?” Miss Jameson asked intensely.

  “One thing and another,” Pete answered cautiously. “I’m in business with my brother,” he added.

  “You have lots of friends, I imagine? Girls would all like to dance with you. You are one of the best dancers I ever saw—almost a professional. I like dancing.”

  “Yeh,” Pete agreed. He was restive. “I guess—”

  “I wonder if you and I couldn’t get together some evening and dance again? I don’t go to night clubs much, because none of the men I know dance very well. But I’d enjoy it, with you.”

  “I guess so,” Pete answered. “Well, I—”

  “I’ll give you my phone number and address, and you call me soon, will you? You might come out to dinner, and we’ll go out afterward, you know.”

  “Sure,” Pete answered uncomfortably. He removed his hat and examined the crown. Then he slanted it once more across his dark reckless head. Miss Jameson said:

  “Do you ever make dates ahead of time, Pete?”

  “Naw,” he answered quickly. “I wouldn’t have a date over a day old. I just call ’em up and take ’em out and bring ’em back in time to go to work next day. I wouldn’t have one I had to wait until tomorrow on.”

  “Neither do I. So I tell you what: let’s break the rule one time, and make a date for the first night we are ashore—what do you say? You come out to dinner at my house, and we’ll go out later to dance. I’ve got a car.”

  “I—Well, you see—”

  “We’ll just do that,” Miss Jameson continued remorselessly. “We won’t forget that; it’s a promise, isn’t it?”

  Pete rose. “I guess we—I guess I better not promise. Something might turn up so I—we couldn’t make it. I guess—” She sat quietly, looking at him. “Maybe it’ll be better to wait and fix it up when we get back. I might have to be out of town or something that day, see? Maybe we better wait and see how things shape up.” Still she said nothing and presently she removed her patient humorless eyes and looked out across the darkling water, and Pete stood uncomfortably with his goading urge to keep on saying something. “I guess we better wait and see later, see?”

  Her head was turned away, so he departed unostentatiously. He paused again and looked back at her. She gazed still out over the water: an uncomplaining abjectness of passivity, quiet in her shadowed chair.

  * * *

  As he embraced her, Jenny removed his hat slanted viciously upon his reckless head, and examined the broken crown with a recurrence of soft astonishment; and still holding the hat in her hand she came to him in a flowing enveloping movement, without seeming to move at all. Their faces merged and Jenny was immediately utterly boneless, seeming to suspend her merging rifeness by her soft mouth, then she opened her mouth against his. . . . After a while Pete raised his head, Jenny’s face was a passive drowsing blur rich, ineffably rich, in the dark; and Pete got out his unfresh handkerchief and wiped her mouth, quite gently.

  “Got over it without leaving a scar, didn’t you?” he said. Without volition they swung in a world unseen and warm as water, unseen and rife and beautiful, strange and hushed and grave beneath that waning moon of decay and death. . . . “Give your old man a kiss, kid. . . .”

  * * *

  The niece entered her aunt’s room, without knocking. Mrs. Maurier raised her astonished, shrieking face and dragged a garment shapelessly across her recently uncorseted breast, as women do. When she had partially recovered from the shock she ran heavily to the door and locked it.

  “It’s just me,” the niece said. “Say, Aunt Pat—”

  Her aunt gasped: her breast and chins billowed unconfined. “Why don’t you knock? You should rever enter a room like that. Doesn’t Henry ever—”

  “Sure he does,” the niece interrupted, “all the time. Say, Aunt Pat, Pete thinks you ought to pay him for his hat. For stepping on it, you know.”

  Her aunt stared at her. “What?”

  “You stepped through Pete’s hat. He and Jenny think you ought to pay for it. Or offer to, anyway. I expect if you’d offer to, he wouldn’t take it.”

  “Thinks I ought to p—” Mrs. Maurier’s voice faded into a shocked, soundless amazement.

  “Yes, they think so. . . . I mentioned it because I promised them I would. You don’t have to unless you want to, you know.”

  “Thinks I ought to p—” Again Mrs. Maurier’s voice failed her, and her amazement became a chaotic thing that filled her round face interestingly. Then it froze into something definite: a coldly determined displeasure, and she recovered her voice.

  “I have lodged and fed these people for a week,” she said without humor. “I do not feel that I am called upon to clothe them also.”

  “Well, I just mentioned it because I promised,” the niece repeated soothingly.

  * * *

  Mrs. Maurier, Jenny, and the niece had disappeared, to Mr. Talliaferro’s mixed relief. They still had two left, however. They took turn about with them.

  Major Ayers, Fairchild, and the Semitic man rushed below again. Mr. Talliaferro following openly this time, and a trifle erratically.

  “How’s it coming along?” Fairchild asked, poising the bottle. Mr. Talliaferro made a wet deprecating sound, glancing at the other two. They regarded him with kindly interest. “Oh, they’re all right,” Fairchild reassured him. “They are as anxious to see you put it over as I am.” He set the bottle down well within reach, and gulped at his glass. “I tell you what, it’s boldness that does the trick with women, ain’t it, Major?”

  “Right you are. Boldness: dash in; take ’em by storm.”

  “Sure. That’s what you want to do. Have another drink.” He filled Mr. Talliaferro’s glass.

  “That’s my plan, exactly. Boldness. Boldness. Boldness.” Mr. Talliaferro stared at the other glassily. He tried to wink. “Didn’t you see me dancing with her?”

  “Yes, but that ain’t bold enough. If I were you, if I were doing it, I’d turn the trick tonight, now. Say, Julius, you know what I’d do? I’d go right to her room: walk right in. He’s been dancing with her and talking to her: ground already broken, you see. I bet she’s in there right now, waiting for him, hoping he is bold enough to come in to her. He’ll feel pretty cheap tomorrow when he finds he missed his chance, won’t he? You never have but one chance with a woman, you know. If you fail her then, she’s done with you—the next man that comes along gets her without a struggle. It ain’t the man a woman cares for that reaps the harvest of passion, you know: it’s the next man that comes along after she’s lost the other one. I’d sure hate to think I’d been doing work for somebody else to get the benefit of. Wouldn’t you?”

  Mr. Talliaferro stared at him. He swallowed twice. “But suppose, just suppose, that she isn’t expecting me.”

  “Oh, sure. Of course, you’ve got to take that risk. It would take a bold man, anyway, to walk right in her room, walk right in without knocking and go straight to the bed. But how many women would resist? I wouldn’t, if I were a woman. If you were her, Talliaferro, would you resist? I’ve found,” he went on, “that boldness gets pretty near anything, in
this world, especially women. But it takes a bold man. . . . Say, I bet Major Ayers would do it.”

  “Right you are. I’d walk right in, by Jove. . . . I say, I think I shall, anyway. Which one is it? Not the old one?”

  “All right. That is, if Talliaferro don’t want to do it. He has first shot, you know: he’s done all the heavy preparatory work. But it takes a bold man.”

  “Oh, Talliaferro’s bold as any man,” the Semitic man said.

  “But, really,” Mr. Talliaferro repeated, “suppose she isn’t expecting me. Suppose she were to call out—No, no.”

  “Yes, Talliaferro ain’t bold enough. We better let Major Ayers go, after all. No necessity for disappointing the girl, at least.”

  “Besides,” Mr. Talliaferro added quickly, “she is in a room with someone else.”

  “No, she ain’t. She’s in a room to herself, now; that one at the end of the hall.”

  “That’s Mrs. Maurier’s room,” Mr. Talliaferro said, staring at him.

  “No, no; she changed. That room has a broken screen, so she changed. Julius and I were helping her move this afternoon. Weren’t we, Julius? That’s how I happen to know Jenny’s in there now.”

  “But, really—” Mr. Talliaferro swallowed again. “Are you sure that’s her room? This is a serious matter, you know.”

  “Have another drink,” Fairchild said.

  TWELVE O’CLOCK

  The deck was deserted. Fairchild and Major Ayers halted and gazed about in pained astonishment. The Victrola was hooded and mute, smugly inscrutable. They held a hurried council, then they set forth to beat up stragglers. There were no stragglers.

  “Put on a record,” Fairchild suggested at last. “Maybe that’ll get ’em up here. They must have thought we’d gone to bed.”

  The Semitic man started the Victrola again, and again Major Ayers and Fairchild combed the deck in vain. The moon had risen, its bony erstwhile disc was thumbed into the sky like a coin after too much handling.

  * * *

  Mrs. Maurier routed out the captain and together they repaired to Fairchild’s room. “Find it all,” she directed, “every single one.” The captain found it all. “Now, open that window.”

  She gave the captain further directions, when they had finished, and she returned to her room and sat again on the edge of her bed. Moonlight came into the room level as a lance through the port, like a marble pencil shattering and filling the room with a thin silver dust, as of marble. “It has come, at last,” she whispered, aware of her body, heavy and soft with years. I should feel happy, I should feel happy, she told herself, but her limbs felt chill and strange to her and within her a terrible thing was swelling, a thing terrible and poisonous and released, like water that has been dammed too long: it was as though there were waking within her comfortable, long familiar body a thing that abode there dormant and which she had harbored unaware.

  She sat on the edge of her bed, feeling her strange chill limbs, while that swelling thing within her unfolded like an intricate poisonous flower, an intricate slow convolvulae of petals that grew and faded, died and were replaced by other petals huger and more implacable. Her limbs were strange and cold: they were trembling. That dark flower of laughter, that secret hideous flower grew and grew until that entire world which was herself was become a slow implacable swirling of hysteria that rose in her throat and shook it as though with a myriad small hands while from overhead there came a thin saccharine strain spaced off by a heavy thumping of feet, where Fairchild was teaching Major Ayers the Charleston.

  And soon, another sound; and the Nausikaa trembled and pulsed, girding herself with motion.

  * * *

  Mr. Talliaferro stood in the bows, letting the wind blow upon his face, amid his hair. The worn moon had risen and she spread her boneless hand upon the ceaseless water, and the cold remote stars swung overhead, cold and remote and incurious: what cared they for the haggard despair in his face, for the hushed despair in his heart? They had seen too much of human moiling and indecision and astonishments to be concerned over the fact that Mr. Talliaferro had got himself engaged to marry again.

  . . . Soon, a sound; and the Nausikaa trembled and pulsed, girding herself with motion.

  * * *

  Suddenly Fairchild stopped, raising his hand for silence.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “What’s what?” responded Major Ayers, pausing also and staring at him.

  “I thought I heard something fall into the water.” He crossed to the rail and leaned over it. Major Ayers followed him and they listened. But the dark restless water was untroubled by any foreign sound, the night was calm, islanding the worn bland disc of the moon.

  “Steward throwing out grapefruit,” Major Ayers suggested at last. They turned away.

  “Hope so,” Fairchild said. “Start her up again, Julius.”

  And, soon, another sound; and the Nausikaa trembled and pulsed, girding herself with motion.

  Epilogue

  1

  Lake water had done strange things to Jenny’s little green dress. It was rough-dried and draggled, and it had kind of sagged here and drawn up there. The skirt in the back, for instance; because now between the gracious miniature ballooning of its hem and the tops of her dingy stockings, you saw pink flesh.

  But she was ineffably unaware of this as she stood on Canal street waiting for her car to come along, watching Pete’s damaged hat slanting away amid the traffic, clutching the dime he had given her for carfare in her little soiled hand. Soon her car came along and she got in it and gave the conductor her dime and received change and put seven cents in the machine while men, unshaven men and coatless men and old men and spruce young men and men that smelled of toilet water and bay rum and sweat and men that smelled of just sweat, watched her with the moist abjectness of hounds. Then she went on up the aisle, rife, placidly unreluctant, and then the car jolted forward and she sat partly upon a fat man in a derby and a newspaper, who looked up at her and then hunched over to the window and dived again into his newspaper with his derby on.

  The car hummed and spurted and jolted and stopped and jolted and hummed and spurted between croaching walls and old iron lovely as dingy lace, and shrieking children from south Europe once removed and wild and soft as animals and cheerful with filth; and old rich food smells, smells rich enough to fatten the flesh through the lungs; and women screaming from adjacent door to door in bright dirty shawls. Her three pennies had got warm and moist in her hand, so she changed them to the other hand and dried her palm on her thigh.

  Soon it was a broader street at right angles—a weary green spaciousness of late August foliage and civilization again in the shape of a filling station; and she descended and passed between houses possessing once and along ago individuality, reserve, but now become somehow vaguely and dingily identical; reaching at last an iron gate through which she went and on up a shallow narrow concrete walk bordered on either side by beds in which flowers for some reason never seemed to grow well, and so on across the veranda and into the house.

  Her father was on the night force and he now sat in his sock feet and with his galluses down, at his supper of mackerel (it is Friday) and fried potatoes and coffee and an early afternoon edition. He wiped his mustache with two sweeps of the back of his hand.

  “Where you been?”

  Jenny entered the room removing her hat. She dropped it to the floor and came up in a flanking movement. “On a boat ride,” she answered. Her father drew his feet under his chair to rise and his face suffused slowly with relief and anger.

  “And you think you can go off like that, without a word to nobody, and then walk back into this house—” But Jenny captured him and she squirmed onto his rising lap and though he tried to defend himself, kissed him through his mackerelish mustache, and held him speechless so while she delved amid that vague pinish region
which was her mind. After a while she remembered it.

  “Haul up your sheet,” she said. “You’re jibbing.”

  2

  Pete was the baby: he was too young to have been aware of it, of course, but that electric sign with the family name on it had marked a climacteric: the phoenix-like rise of the family fortunes from the dun ashes of respectability and a small restaurant catering to. Italian working people, to the final and ultimate Americanization of the family, since this fortune, like most American ones, was built on the flouting of a statutory impediment.