He was sitting outside. Two chairs, chaise lounges, angled toward each other. Peter was sitting on one, in the dark, staring at the swimming pool, empty and clogged with debris. Leaves and grass and sand had collected in the bottom, rotting and brown.
“Checking up on me?” he asked, his back to me. “How considerate.”
He didn’t sound glad.
I walked closer, and he turned. Whatever expression was on his face was gone in less than a moment. “Well. Hello, you.”
Now that I was here, I didn’t know what to say. “It’s so gloomy. Why don’t you turn on a light?”
“They turn off the electricity in the summers. They told me to turn everything on, but I don’t want to impose. I told you I was camped out.”
“The windows are all boarded up.”
“In case of hurricanes. I didn’t want to ask the caretaker to take them down. The guy looks about ninety. What’s wrong?”
“I just had to see you.”
“Don’t fret, pussycat. The punch didn’t hurt.”
“No, I mean, I’m sorry about the punch, but—the Graysons got kicked out of the hotel. Tonight. They’re Jewish. The manager just kicked them out, just like that.”
Peter let out a ppphhhh, shaking his head. “Palm Beach is restricted. You know that.”
“I didn’t know. Anyway, you can’t just kick someone out like that.”
“Of course you can. That’s the way it works. I told you that before. They just didn’t have a sign outside, but Arlene and Tom knew what could happen if they tried to pass. What are they going to do?”
“They’re leaving in the morning. Peter, you don’t understand,” I said. “The manager. He enjoyed it.”
Peter sighed.
“I don’t get it!”
“That’s a good thing,” he said. “A good thing that you don’t get it.”
“But you do. You get it. So clue me in. Tell me how someone could do that and be happy about it!”
“Baby, I was in a war. Of course I get it. That’s where all the bad in the world comes from. Guys who like being mean.” Peter’s face went tight and closed. “I was that guy once. So was Joe. We were all that guy, for at least a minute. We had to be.”
I felt the close, hot darkness around me. “Tell me what you did. Tell me,” I said, very slowly, because just then I realized it, the whole obvious truth of it right in front of my face, “what you and Joe did. Together. What happened? You say I’m good. I don’t need good. I need to know things. I need to know why Joe drinks so much, and why he hates you. Why he wants to move here. Why he wants to get away.”
“Ask him. He’s your dad.”
“Tell me. Tell me, Peter. Tell someone and let it be me.”
He jerked his face away, looked down at the empty swimming pool.
He looked so wretched that it made me brave. “Tell someone who loves you,” I said.
“You don’t love me, kiddo,” Peter said softly. “You’re a lovely little girl with a lovely little crush. You don’t know me—”
“I do know you. I know you right down to the ground,” I said. “I know that you were nice to Mr. Grayson when he was embarrassed about being 4-F. I know that night I met you that you felt sorry for me, that you knew how stupid I looked in that gown and you danced with me anyway. I know you taught me to drive because you wanted me to have a piece of being an adult. You saw that Mom treated me like a baby, and you showed her that I wasn’t. I know that you didn’t punch Joe tonight because he was drunk and you would have flattened him. I know that whatever you did, however bad it was, that you’re not bad.”
He stood there, and I saw something change for him. I saw me change for him. That dress I thought had changed me in his eyes? It had been nothing. This was it, this was finally it, when I got what I wanted.
He sat down at the edge of the pool, his feet dangling. After a minute I sat next to him.
“In the infantry,” he said, “you walk and walk through miles of broken things. Trees snapped in two. Bridges cut in half. Walls of farmhouses blown away so you see chairs and a kitchen table with a cup sitting on it, dusty and perfect. And then there are the things you see that you stop thinking about even while you’re walking by them. You’ve got you and your squad and that’s it. You can’t even remember home anymore, even though you tell your buddies about it. You get used to lifting stuff from another outfit if you need it. A wrench, a gun, some rations—a Jeep, even. Everybody did it. War turns you into a crook and a liar and a cheat. Except you never cheat your buddies.”
Peter put his hands on both sides of his body, as if he wanted to push himself off and leap into the pool. “You remember the story from when you’re a kid, about Aladdin’s Cave?”
“Sure.”
“Well, we found it, Joe and me. After the war. It was a warehouse in Salzburg. Filled with loot. Treasure. And it belonged to nobody. This train, it left Hungary near the end of the war, packed with stuff. The Germans tried to hide it. Only we got our hands on it. It was things that belonged to the Jews. Everything you could imagine. Dishes and rugs and watches and rings and paintings and silverware. You name it. And it was all loaded into this warehouse until they decided what to do with it.”
“What happened…”
“To the Jews? I don’t know. Most of them were dead, I’m sure. Sent to the camps. Maybe some of them made it out; it was near the end of the war. Maybe some were DPs, but how were we supposed to trace them?”
DPs. Displaced persons. No home to go back to. No city, no town, no country even.
“Anyway, there were crates and crates of this stuff. And the people who owned it were probably dead. Name after name, they had, the Germans. They kept track of who owned what, down to every last spoon. But so what? Where was it going to go? Joe and I became buddies—he was the property officer, see—and one night we said to each other, Who’s going to miss a bit of this, a bit of that?”
“So you stole it.” I thought I wanted to know everything. But I didn’t want to hear this.
“It wasn’t just us. The officers took rugs and silver for their quarters. Joe saw it going out the door, and if some of it got shipped home, nobody seemed to care. Not then, anyway. We figured an easy way to get it out, just a couple of boxes of stuff, but good stuff, you know? And Joe knew about this suitcase full of gold. Gold dust. And what were we going to do, just let the army take it? By this time, you see, we were thinking about going home, and what we were going back to. The plan was, Joe would get the gold stateside, and this guy he knew would help him get us cash for it and take his cut. Then, when I got sprung, we’d split the rest. But what happened was, Joe got home and didn’t want to sit on the cash, waiting for me to get back. So he takes it all and buys a business. And then another one.”
“He said it was a GI loan.”
“After a while I’m writing him, and he’s not answering. So as soon as I get stateside, I look him up. He dodged my calls. He didn’t have the cash to give me. And then he takes off for Florida…”
“That was you who called that night.”
Peter nodded. “And the next day I went over to your house, and your grandma might be a battle-axe, but if you talk to her right she brags about her son and how he’s vacationing in Palm Beach. So off I go.”
“Is Joe trying to cheat you?”
“Let me put it this way: I think he’d be a hell of lot happier if I disappeared.”
“I don’t get it. Your father is rich. Why do you need the money so bad?”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t say I got along so well with dear old dad. And a deal’s a deal. Now he’s telling me that if he swings this deal with Grayson he’ll be able to raise some cash and pay me off. He says he took most of the risk, so I can wait. But I get nervous waiting.”
“If the Graysons knew what Joe did…”
“Yeah, they wouldn’t be quite so friendly, would they? Going into business with a guy who steals from Jews.”
I sat there, thinking abou
t a warehouse full of stuff. Like that missing wall, when you could see into a farmhouse, tables and chairs and an empty cup. And all the stuff belonged to families. I looked down at the thin gold bracelet on my wrist, the one I never took off. I took it off and turned it over in my fingers. I wondered about the girl who’d owned it, who had to put it in a pile and give it to a German officer.
And then suddenly, for some reason, I thought of Margie stepping on the back of Ruthie Kalman’s shoe.
“The thing is,” Peter said, “over there, it was easy. We didn’t think too much about it, we just saw our chance and took it. But lately I’m thinking crazy stuff. I’m thinking, there’s a curse on that money. Maybe somebody has to pay.”
We sat for a while and didn’t say anything. I knew this moment was important. I knew I had to help him somehow. I couldn’t make the pieces fit in my mind, about what I thought he was and what he did. But I knew I still loved him. I loved all the parts of him, even the ones I didn’t understand.
I spun the bracelet around on the concrete. It made a little pinging noise. It rolled away and hovered on the edge of the empty pool for a minute. Peter and I both watched it fall in. It didn’t make a sound.
“You know what the priest says in confession?” I asked him. “At the end, after you unload all your lousy sins? I absolve you, he says. I mean, he says it in Latin, and maybe he’s bored and maybe he mumbles, but we know what he means and we believe it. You get a whole bunch of grace, and you get to start over. It’s a good system if you think about it.”
“Could you do that for me?” Peter asked.
“I absolve you,” I said. I leaned over and kissed him on the mouth. I felt my breath mingle with his.
Our faces were so close. His eyes were soft, and he shook his head. Not to say no, but in a wondering way.
“Could it really happen like this?” he asked. “That a girl like you can make me feel…”
“Make you feel what?”
“Make me feel,” he said.
I felt myself expand, as if the night had filled me up full of stars.
He stood up. “Come on,” he said. “I’d better take you back.”
I took his hand, and he pulled me up. I used the momentum to lean against him.
For once, he didn’t put any distance between us. He took his hand and ran it down my spine. “You know what you have?” he asked. “True north.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
He kept his hand on the base of my spine. “Inside you, right here, along your backbone…,” and he ran his finger down it again, making me shiver, “…you’ve got something. Like the needle of a compass. You know the right way to go.”
He looked down at me, right into my face, and this time I got it. I got how to say yes without opening my mouth. He kissed me.
And the kiss turned into something deep and secret.
His mouth opened, and mine opened, too. His tongue went into my mouth and I was so surprised, I didn’t know what to do. At first. Then he showed me.
My pulse seemed to have escaped its usual place. It was somewhere else now, beating in a deep secret place I didn’t know was there. He placed his hand on the small of my back, as if we were dancing, and held me tight against him.
Then he stumbled against the chaise and landed on it. He went backward, and I was on top of him. He kept his arms around me, and we kissed again, even deeper, with need driving it this time.
I knew this was wrong, and I knew I didn’t care, but I was confused. No one had gone through the steps of this with me. I only had Margie in my head, nodding knowingly even though she didn’t know anything.
He pushed up against me, against my skirt. This was it, this was the knowing.
I didn’t want to stop, but I needed a breath. I pulled away, just a little bit.
“Okay,” he said. His breath was short. “Okay, baby, we’ll stop.”
“No, I never want to stop—”
“Evelyn!” The voice was a shout.
Mom stood just a few feet away. “Evelyn, get up.”
I’d seen her mad at me before, of course. Close the door, can’t you feel that draft? Do you expect me to pick up after you all the time? If I say come home at nine o’clock, that means nine o’clock, not twenty minutes after!
This was different. Her face seemed thinner, white, her eyes dark.
I slid off Peter’s lap.
“Bev—”
“Don’t speak to me.” Mom spit out the words. “Either of you.”
“How did you find me?” I asked her.
“It’s not what you think, Bev,” Peter said. “She—”
“I love him!” I said. “I love him! It’s not terrible, what I did. I love him and he loves me!”
“Evie, get in the car.” Her voice was spooky. So tight, so shaky.
“I love him!”
“Beverly—”
She picked up an ashtray and threw it.
I don’t know whether she was aiming at me or him.
It hit the concrete and sprayed glass at me. A piece cut my forehead, near my eye.
“Christ!” Peter took a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at my cut. I could feel the blood running down the side of my face. He looked at me frantically. “Christ, Beverly!”
I didn’t care because he was looking at me with such concern. He loves me. He loves me, he does, he does!
“Get in the car,” Mom said again. “Right now. Get the hell out, I mean it!”
I could have fought her. I could have taken what I knew about what he felt and thrown it at her, proved I was an adult now, just like her. But feeling grown up? I discovered something right then: It comes and it goes. I was still afraid of my mom.
I walked past her. I left her there with Peter.
I walked to the car. It was parked snugly next to Peter’s, underneath the tree. I started toward the passenger door and stopped as a sudden strong breeze shook the tree and orange petals showered down. They fell softly on the hood like a blanket.
I scooped up some petals and crushed them in my fist. What was I going to do?
Mom had been paying attention all along. She knew how I felt about Peter. She knew exactly where to find me tonight. And now she’d tell Joe. I would never see Peter again if they had anything to say about it. They’d keep me a little girl in my pink dress forever if they could. They’d refuse to see what Peter had seen in me tonight.
But how grown-up could I be if I couldn’t defy her? Why couldn’t I run back and stand up to her?
I leaned against the car. I could just see my face in the reflection of the windshield. I could see it like a smudge on the window. I wanted to smash the scared little girl I saw there. Who was I more angry at, Mom or myself?
She ran up to the car, wrenched the door open, and I got in. I slid over to the passenger side, all the way up against the window, and she followed. She took off, tires spinning in the shells, reversing back down the driveway, and then heading for the hotel.
She drove fast with all the windows open. My cut stung and I felt blood running down the side of my face. I tasted it.
“Oh, Evie,” she said. “Don’t be a fool like me.”
She pulled into the hotel parking lot and set the brake. She rested her head on the steering wheel. Then she straightened and tilted the mirror toward her. She slowly put on lipstick, making her shaking fingers cooperate.
Then she got out and slammed the car door. She smoothed her hair and her skirt, waiting for me before we went into the hotel.
“I’m not going to tell Joe,” she said.
I looked at her, surprised.
“This will have to be our secret. And it can’t happen again. It’s already gone too far.”
I wanted to tell her there was no going back. But what was the use?
“Never again,” she said. “Promise me.”
There was only the sharp sound of our heels on the pavement, filling up the silence between us. She had asked for my promise, and I ha
dn’t given it. But she didn’t ask for it again.
Chapter 21
Someone had left a raft floating in the pool. It kept bumping up against the rail near the steps. I thought maybe I could sleep on it. I took off my sandals and bunched up my skirt in one hand and went in and grabbed it, hoisted myself up. Water sloshed over the side and got my skirt wet. I pushed off from the side.
I wanted to stain this place, leave my mark after this night. I hoped my blood would fill up the pool, but it drifted away, a skinny ribbon of pink.
I floated for a long time. I found out that without sun, you don’t get sleepy on a raft. You just get wet.
Then over my head I saw Mrs. Grayson looking down at me. She was dressed in a skirt and flat shoes, a handbag over her arm.
“What are you doing out here?” she asked.
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“So what are you doing in the pool, counting sheep?”
I raised myself up and started to paddle toward her.
“Tom’s packing the car.”
“I thought you were staying until morning.” I climbed out, dripping.
“The bed’s not as comfortable as I thought.” She stubbed out her cigarette and regarded it for a minute. Then she flicked it into the pool.
We were quiet for a minute, just watching the cigarette stub float. She had a sweater around her shoulders and she hugged herself and shivered, even though it was warm. I’d never seen her without lipstick on before. Ladies’ mouths look so pale and small without lipstick.
“There’s a storm coming. We heard it on the radio.” Mrs. Grayson said this absently, looking off toward the ocean we couldn’t see, a block away. “A hurricane. Supposed to hit south of us, near Miami.”
“We didn’t know the hotel was restricted,” I said.
“Every Jew knows about Palm Beach. It’s on the deeds to the houses, you know. No Negroes, no Jews.”
“I don’t understand. Why did you come?”
“Well, I guess the best way to say it is, Tom wanted to get away from everything he was, and this is as far as you can get.”
I was suddenly so tired. I wanted to sit down, but I didn’t want her to think that I didn’t want to talk to her.