He walked her back to her hotel, the Southernmost House, it was called, an intriguing Victorian mansion of towers and great porches that dominated the point where the Atlantic met the Gulf. He stopped in for a nightcap at the old oak bar that looked out on the sea, and when they paused for a moment on the great balcony and listened to the waves, the night and what they had made of it suddenly gave him the courage, and he kissed her, feeling the recklessness, the restlessness passing from her lips to his. Then, with her kind of suddenness, she broke away.
“Let’s go conching in the morning. Call for me early—say between eight and nine. I’ll show you how the real conchs do it.”
Her door closed him off from her so suddenly that he was left with the effect of her having vanished from his side in some metaphysical way. He could almost have believed this hadn’t happened at all and that their evening had been simply an extension of his daydream. He walked back slowly to his hotel with his mind still flooded with the vision of that afternoon’s golden sweep across the sunlit sea.
Every morning since he had come to Key West, Paul had slept late, counting that one of his chief vacation pleasures. But this next morning he was up in time to see the clouds opening up for the early sun to pour through. Even the pelicans were still asleep, drifting idly in small groups, rocking gently with the tide. Paul pulled on some ducks and a sport shirt and went down to the beach. Suddenly, as if by signal, all the pelicans rose together and went flapping out to sea on some urgent pelican business. Paul realized this was the first day since he had come to Key West that he was really alive. He thought about Gerry, and, for the first time, about her always being with him. The only trouble was, he couldn’t quite see her in his tailored New York apartment. It was a little like bringing home to captivity some wild bird whose home is the open sea. He was in love with her, though, in a way he had not imagined a man of his temperament could be.
He walked down the beach to the Southernmost and when he didn’t find her on the downstairs porch, he went up and knocked on her door.
“Come on in, Paul,” she called and he entered to find her in white ducks with the legs rolled up to her knees, and an old sweatshirt. But somehow these had the effect of heightening rather than smothering her beauty. She was squatting on the floor finishing a hurried water color. Strangely, it was the scene Paul had been watching from the beach, the pelicans rising in formation from the rose water of the morning sea. It was done in swift, fluid strokes, and the rose color was redder, stronger than it had been. The peace and tranquillity of the scene that had impressed Paul on the beach was translated into disturbing colors and broken lines. Thumb-tacked on the walls were half a dozen other seascapes, all blurs and sudden strokes of color, suggesting rather than representing, all catching some of the recklessness and vitality that Gerry brought to everything she did.
“These are all yours?” It wasn’t really a question, merely an opener.
“Just splashing around.”
“But they’re damn good.”
“My God, Paul, I was only playing. Don’t look so serious.”
“But they’re—they’re big league. You should do something with them.”
“I will, darling. I’ll give them to you.”
She jumped up, and with a little mock curtsey handed Paul the one she had just finished. “To remember me by.” She laughed.
He took the picture, beginning to say something serious, trying to make it sound not too pompous, but she cut him off. “Hell with it. Let’s go conching.”
They walked down the street to the Negro “beach,” a narrow, rocky promontory where the rowboats were pulled up. They carried the one they were going to use out over the rocks and pushed off. She showed him how to pole it, and then, when they were out a little way, she said, “Let’s see if we can catch ourselves some crawfish first.” He held the boat for her while she poised the long three-pronged spear over the surface and peered down through the single fathom of light-green water to the edge of the shoal at the bottom. Suddenly the spear shot into the water and when she pulled it up the prongs were fastened to a small speckled brown lobster. Paul tried it after that but even after he spied one on the bottom, the deceptive angle of the spear beneath the surface made him overshoot the target. It was much harder than it looked.
She tried it again, and when she brought up a larger one, lost interest in the spear.
“Conching’s more fun,” Gerry said. “I’ll show you how we dive for them.” Fixing a large circular glass to her eyes, she dived nimbly over the side. Paul was fascinated to watch her glide down through the twinkling green water to the rocks below. Watching her move along the bottom with slow-motion grace, he was reminded again of his earlier vision of her as a mermaid called up from the depths by his imagination.
But just then she popped up through the surface, crying, “Eureka!” triumphantly holding up a good-sized Queen conch.
She slithered over into the boat and handed Paul the goggles. “I know what let’s do. Let’s see who can stay down the longest.” She said it as a child might, as a spur-of-the-moment dare. But Paul, remembering last night’s swim, feared it might develop into more of an ordeal.
“But we haven’t got a watch, Gerry.”
“Oh, we can count, one-and-two-and …” She gave him the beat. “Oh, come on. It’s beautiful down there. It’s fun to stay down.”
Paul adjusted the goggles, inhaled until his temples began to pound, and dived. As Gerry had promised, he found himself enveloped in a shimmering green world more beautiful than he had imagined. He gripped a rock at the bottom to hold himself from rising and groped along, pleased with his unfolding ability to measure up to Gerry’s adventures. He wondered how much time had passed. He had begun keeping track but a large octopus that turned out to be a massive undersea growth had frightened him off his count. Water was slowly seeping in under the rubber rims of the goggles and his eyes were beginning to smart. Then his ears were aching and he had a sense of being squeezed within green walls that were pressing down and in and up at him. He thought he saw a conch a few feet ahead of him, but that was too far now. His lungs were ready to explode. Why, a man could die, die down here to prove something. But what? What did it mean to Gerry? He was shooting up toward the surface now, flailing his arms with mounting frenzy as he wondered if he could make it in time.
Then his head was above water at last and he was breathing, breathing, that first and last of luxuries.
“Ninety-three,” Gerry called. “Paul, I’m proud of you.” The praise, the smile, the warm camaraderie completely erased his choking panic of a moment before.
“Now count for me …” She could hardly wait to get the goggles on and be over the side again. She was gone in a swift little dive that hardly disturbed the calm surface.
Fifty … He could see her gliding leisurely along the bottom. Seventy-five … ninety … Soon she had passed his record and he waited for her to pop to the surface, chortling over her triumph. But she was staying down. One hundred … one hundred-and-twenty-five … He peered down anxiously. She wasn’t moving any longer. Just seemed to be sitting there—the mermaid again—at home on the bottom of the sea. One hundred-and-fifty … sixty … seventy-five … And this count slower than seconds—that was three minutes! The pulse of panic began to thump in his throat … No one could stay down that long … Suddenly he remembered those nightmare stories of giant shellfish that clamp down on a swimmer’s hands … Somewhere he had read how a Marine had been lost that way in the South Pacific …
In this same moment he dived, reached her, groped for her and they shot up to the surface together.
“Gerry—Gerry—are you all right?”
“Of course.” She laughed. “I was just getting ready to come up. How high did you count?”
“One hundred-and-seventy-five.”
“Dare me to stay down for two hundred?”
“Frankly,” Paul said, “I’ve had enough diving for one morning. You won’t be satisfied til
l the Coast Guard drags the bottom for you.”
“Okay,” she said, completely unconcerned. “Do you like conch? The couple who run the Southernmost are friends of mine. We can take these right in their kitchen and start working on them. I lived on these things one season down here when you could’ve turned me upside down and shaken me and never found a nickel.”
That day Paul felt as if he were gliding through life on skis the way Gerry had skimmed the surface of the sea. The lunch on the sun porch of the Southernmost, the walk through town to the fishing docks; the long talk on the beach; the cocktails at sunset, the fun of drinking together and the marvelous sense of growing intimacy; and finally the moonlight dance in the patio and Gerry Lawford, this crazy, unpredictable, magical girl, in his arms at last. His lips were against her golden cheeks and even the smell of her was of some fresh wild berry that one finds on the hills. Later tonight, or perhaps tomorrow, he would ask her. He was already trying it, phrasing it, like a stage bit player with one line to perfect: Gerry, you said you never turn down a dare. So, I dare you to marry me.
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.
THE ONE HE CALLED WINNIE
BETWEEN 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 rememb
ered 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.