1919

  That summer they got him a job as bellboy in a small hotel at Bay Head that was run by a lady who was a parishioner of Dr. Atwood’s. Before he left Major and Mrs. Glen, who were Aunt Beatrice’s star boarders, gave him a fivedollar bill for pocket money and a copy of the “Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come” to read on the train. Dr. Atwood asked him to stay after the bibleclass his last Sunday and told him the parable of the talent, that Dick knew very well already because Dr. Atwood preached on it as a text four times every year, and showed him a letter from the headmaster of Kent accepting him for the next year as a scholarship pupil and told him that he must work hard because God expected from each of us according to our abilities. Then he told him a few things a growing boy ought to know and said he must avoid temptations and always serve God with a clean body and a clean mind, and keep himself pure for the lovely sweet girl he would some day marry, and that anything else led only to madness and disease. Dick went away with his cheeks burning.

  It wasn’t so bad at the Bayview, but the guests and help were all old people; about his own age there was only Skinny Murray the other bellhop, a tall sandyhaired boy who never had anything to say. He was a couple of years older than Dick. They slept on two cots in a small airless room right up under the roof that would still be so hot from the sun by bedtime they could hardly touch it. Through the thin partition they could hear the waitress in the next room rustling about and giggling as they went to bed. Dick hated that sound and the smell of girls and cheap facepowder that drifted in through the crack in the wall. The hottest nights he and Skinny would take the screen out of the window and crawl out along the gutter to a piece of flat roof there was over one of the upper porches. There the mosquitoes would torment them, but it was better than trying to sleep on their cots. Once the girls were looking out of the window and saw them crawling along the gutter and made a great racket that they were peeping and that they’d report them to the manageress, and they were scared to death and made plans all night about what they’d do if they were fired, they’d go to Barnegat and get work on fishing boats; but the next day the girls didn’t say anything about it. Dick was kinda disappointed because he hated waiting on people and running up and down stairs answering bells.

  It was Skinny who got the idea they might make some extra money selling fudge, because when Dick got a package of fudge from his mother he sold it to one of the waitresses for a quarter. So Mrs. Savage sent a package of fresh fudge and panocha every week by parcel post that Dick and Skinny sold to the guests in little boxes. Skinny bought the boxes and did most of the work but Dick convinced him it wouldn’t be fair for him to take more than ten percent of the profits because he and his mother put up the original capital.

  The next summer they made quite a thing of the fudgeselling. Skinny did the work more than ever because Dick had been to a private school and had been hobnobbing with rich boys all winter whose parents had plenty of money. Luckily none of them came to Bay Head for the summer. He told Skinny all about the school and recited ballads about St. John Hospitaller and Saint Christopher he’d made up and that had been published in the school paper; he told him about serving at the altar and the beauty of the Christian Faith and about how he’d made the outfield in the junior baseball team. Dick made Skinny go to church with him every Sunday to the little Episcopal chapel called St. Mary’s-by-the-Sea. Dick used to stay after the service and discuss points of doctrine and ceremony with Mr. Thurlow the young minister and was finally invited to come home with him to dinner and meet his wife.

  The Thurlows lived in an unpainted peakedroofed bungalow in the middle of a sandlot near the station. Mrs. Thurlow was a dark girl with a thin aquiline nose and bangs, who smoked cigarettes and hated Bay Head. She talked about how bored she was and how she shocked the old lady parishioners and Dick thought she was wonderful. She was a great reader of the Smart Set and The Black Cat and books that were advanced, and poked fun at Edwin’s attempts to restore primitive Christianity to the boardwalk, as she put it. Edwin Thurlow would look at her from under the colorless lashes of his pale eyes and whisper meekly, “Hilda, you oughtn’t to talk like that”; then he’d turn mildly to Dick and say, “Her bark is worse than her bite, you know.” They got to be great friends and Dick took to running around to their house whenever he could get away from the hotel. He took Skinny around a couple of times but Skinny seemed to feel that their talk was too deep for him and would never stay long but would shuffle off after explaining that he had to sell some fudge.

  The next summer it was mostly the hope of seeing the Thurlows that made Dick not mind going to work at the Bayview where Mrs. Higgins gave him the job of the roomclerk with an increase of pay on account of his gentlemanly manners. Dick was sixteen and his voice was changing; he had dreams about things with girls and thought a lot about sin and had a secret crush on Spike Culbertson, the yellowhaired captain of his school ballteam. He hated everything about his life, his aunt and the smell of her boarding house, the thought of his father, his mother’s flowergarden hats, not having enough money to buy good clothes or go to fashionable summer-resorts like the other fellows did. All kinds of things got him terribly agitated so that it was hard not to show it. The wabble of the waitresses’ hips and breasts while they were serving meals, girls’ underwear in store windows, the smell of the bathhouses and the salty tingle of a wet bathingsuit and the tanned skin of fellows and girls in bathingsuits lying out in the sun on the beach.

  He’d been writing Edwin and Hilda long letters all winter about anything that came into his head, but when he actually saw them he felt funny and constrained. Hilda was using a new kind of perfume that tickled his nose; even when he was sitting at the table at lunch with them, eating cold ham and potato salad from the delicatessen and talking about the primitive litanies and gregorian music he couldn’t help undressing them in his mind, thinking of them in bed naked; he hated the way he felt.

  Sunday afternoons Edwin went to Elberon to conduct services in another little summer chapel. Hilda never went and often invited Dick to go out for a walk with her or come to tea. He and Hilda began to have a little world between them that Edwin had nothing to do with, where they only talked about him to poke fun at him. Dick began to see Hilda in his queer horrid dreams. Hilda began to talk about how she and Dick were really brother and sister, how passionless people who never really wanted anything couldn’t understand people like them. Those times Dick didn’t get much chance to say anything. He and Hilda would sit on the back stoop in the shade smoking Egyptian Deities until they felt a little sick. Hilda’d say she didn’t care whether the damn parishioners saw her or not and talk and talk about how she wanted something to happen in her life, and smart clothes and to travel to foreign countries and to have money to spend and not to have to fuss with the housekeeping and how she felt sometimes she could kill Edwin for his mild calfish manner.

  Edwin usually got back on a train that got in at 10:53 and, as Dick had Sunday evenings off from the hotel, he and Hilda would eat supper alone together and then take a walk along the beach. Hilda would take his arm and walk close to him; he’d wonder if she felt him tremble whenever their legs touched.

  All week he’d think about those Sunday evenings. Sometimes he’d tell himself that he wouldn’t go another time. He’d stay up in his room and read Dumas or go out with fellows he knew; being alone with Hilda like that made him feel too rotten afterwards. Then one moonless night, when they’d walked way down the beach beyond the rosy fires of the picnickers, and were sitting side by side on the sand talking about India’s Love Lyrics that Hilda had been reading aloud that afternoon, she suddenly jumped on him and mussed up his hair and stuck her knees into his stomach and began to run her hands over his body under his shirt. She was strong for a girl, but he’d just managed to push her off when he had to grab her by the shoulders and pull her down on top of him. They neither of them said anything but lay there in the sand breathing hard. At last she whispered, “Dick, I mustn’t have a baby . . . We ca
n’t afford it. . . . That’s why Edwin won’t sleep with me. Damn it, I want you, Dick. Don’t you see how awful it all is?” While she was talking her hands were burning him, moving down across his chest, over his ribs, around the curve of his belly. “Don’t, Hilda, don’t.” There were mosquitoes around their heads. The long hissing invisible wash of the surf came almost to their feet.

  That night Dick couldn’t go down to the train to meet Edwin the way he usually did. He went back to the Bayview with his knees trembling, and threw himself on his bed in his stuffy little room under the roof. He thought of killing himself but he was afraid of going to hell; he tried to pray, at least to remember the Lord’s Prayer. He was terribly scared when he found he couldn’t even remember the Lord’s Prayer. Maybe that was the sin against the Holy Ghost they had committed.

  The sky was grey and the birds were chirping outside before he got to sleep. All next day, as he sat holloweyed behind the desk, passing on the guests’ demands for icewater and towels, answering inquiries about rooms and traintimes, he was turning a poem over in his mind about the scarlet of my sin and the scarlet of thy sin and dark birds above the surging seawaves crying and damned souls passionately sighing. When it was finished he showed the poem to the Thurlows, Edwin wanted to know where he got such morbid ideas, but was glad that faith and the church triumphed in the end. Hilda laughed hysterically and said he was a funny boy but that maybe he’d be a writer someday.

  When Skinny came down for a two weeks’ vacation to take the place of one of the new bellhops that was sick, Dick talked very big to him about women and sin and about how he was in love with a married woman. Skinny said that wasn’t right because there were plenty of easy women around who’d give a feller all the loving he wanted. But when Dick found out that he’d never been with a girl although he was two years older, he put on so many airs about experience and sin, that one night when they’d gone down to the drugstore for a soda, Skinny picked up a couple of girls and they walked down the beach with them. The girls were thirtyfive if they were a day and Dick didn’t do anything but tell his girl about his unhappy love affair and how he had to be faithful to his love even though she was being unfaithful to him at the very moment. She said he was too young to take things serious like that and that a girl ought to be ashamed of herself who made a nice boy like him unhappy. “Jez, I’d make a feller happy if I had the chance,” she said and burst out crying.

  Walking back to the Bayview, Skinny was worried for fear he might have caught something, but Dick said physical things didn’t matter and that repentance was the key of redemption. It turned out that Skinny did get sick because later in the summer he wrote Dick that he was paying a doctor five dollars a week to cure him up and that he felt terrible about it. Dick and Hilda went on sinning Sunday evenings when Edwin was conducting services in Elberon and when Dick went back to school that fall he felt very much the man of the world.

  In the Christmas vacation he went to stay with the Thurlows in East Orange where Edwin was the assistant to the rector of the church of St. John, Apostle. There, at tea at the rector’s he met Hiram Halsey Cooper, a Jersey City lawyer and politician who was interested in High Church and first editions of Huysmans and who asked Dick to come to see him. When Dick called Mr. Cooper gave him a glass of sherry, showed him first editions of Beardsley and Huysmans and Austin Dobson, sighed about his lost youth and offered him a job in his office as soon as school was over. It turned out that Mr. Cooper’s wife, who was dead, had been an Ellsworth and a cousin of Dick’s mother’s. Dick promised to send him copies of all his poems, and the articles he published in the school paper.

  All the week he was with the Thurlows he was trying to get to see Hilda alone, but she managed to avoid him. He’d heard about French letters and wanted to tell her about them, but it wasn’t until the last day that Edwin had to go out and make parochial calls. This time it was Dick who was the lover and Hilda who tried to hold him off, but he made her take off her clothes and they laughed and giggled together while they were making love. This time they didn’t worry so much about sin and when Edwin came home to supper he asked them what the joke was, they seemed in such a good humor. Dick started telling a lot of cock and bull stories about his Aunt Beatrice and her boarders and they parted at the train in a gale of laughter.

  That summer was the Baltimore convention. Mr. Cooper had rented a house there and entertained a great deal. Dick’s job was to stay in the outer office and be polite to everybody and take down people’s names. He wore a blue serge suit and made a fine impression on everybody with his wavy black hair that Hilda used to tell him was like a raven’s wing, his candid blue eyes and his pink and white complexion. What was going on was rather over his head, but he soon discovered what people Mr. Cooper really wanted to see and what people were merely to be kidded along. Then when he and Mr. Cooper found themselves alone, Mr. Copper would get out a bottle of Amontillado and pour them each a glass and sit in a big leather chair rubbing his forehead as if to rub the politics out of his mind and start talking about literature and the nineties and how he wished he was young again. It was understood that he was going to advance Dick the money to go through Harvard with.

  Dick had hardly gotten back to school as a senior the next fall when he got a telegram from his mother: Come home at once darling your poor father is dead. He didn’t feel sorry but kind of ashamed, afraid of meeting any of the masters or fellows who might ask him questions. At the railway station it seemed as if the train would never come. It was Saturday and there were a couple of fellows in his class at the station. Until the train came he thought of nothing else but dodging them. He sat stiff on his seat in the empty daycoach looking out at the russet October hills, all keyed up for fear somebody would speak to him. It was a relief to hurry out of the Grand Central Station into the crowded New York streets where nobody knew him, where he knew nobody. Crossing on the ferry he felt happy and adventurous. He began to dread getting home and deliberately missed the first train to Trenton. He went into the old dining room of the Pennsylvania Station and ate fried oysters and sweet corn for lunch and ordered a glass of sherry, half afraid the colored waiter wouldn’t serve him. He sat there a long time reading The Smart Set and drinking the sherry feeling like a man of the world, a traveller on his own, but underneath it all was the memory of that man’s trembling white hurt face, the way he’d walked up the area steps that day. The restaurant gradually emptied. The waiter must be thinking it was funny his sitting there that long. He paid his check, and before he wanted to found himself on the train for Trenton.

  At Aunt Beatrice’s house everything looked and smelt the same. His mother was lying on the bed with the shades down and a handkerchief soaked in eau de cologne on her forehead. She showed him a photograph that he’d sent from Havana, a withered man who looked too small for his palm beach suit and panama hat. He’d been working in the consulate as a clerk and had left a ten thousand dollar life insurance in her favor. While they were talking Henry came in looking worried and sore. The two of them went out in the back yard and smoked cigarettes together. Henry said he was going to take Mother to live with him in Philadelphia, get her away from Aunt Beatrice’s nagging and this damn boardinghouse. He wanted Dick to come too and go to the U. of P. Dick said no, he was going to Harvard. Henry asked him how he was going to get the money. Dick said he’d make out all right, he didn’t want any of the damned insurance. Henry said he wasn’t going to touch it, that was Mother’s, and they went back upstairs feeling about ready to sock each other in the jaw. Dick felt better though, he could tell the fellows at school that his father had been consul at Havana and had died of a tropical fever.

  That summer Dick worked for Mr. Cooper at $25 a week getting up a prospectus for an art museum he wanted to found in Jersey City and delighted him so by dedicating to him a verse translation of Horace’s poem about Maecenas that he worked up with the help of the trot, that Mr. Cooper made him a present of a thousand dollars to take him through college;
for the sake of form and so that Dick should feel his responsibilities he put it in the form of a note maturing in five years at four percent interest.

  He spent his two weeks’ vacation with the Thurlows at Bay Head. He’d hardly been able to wait going down on the train to see how Hilda would be, but everything was different. Edwin didn’t have the paperwhite look he used to have; he’d had a call as assistant in a rich church on Long Island where the only thing that worried him was that part of the congregation was low and wouldn’t allow chanting or incense. He was comforting himself with the thought that they did allow candles on the altar. Hilda was changed too. Dick was worried to see that she and Edwin held hands during supper. When they got alone she told him that she and Edwin were very happy now and that she was going to have a baby and that bygones must be bygones. Dick stalked up and down and ran his hands through his hair and talked darkly about death and hellonearth and going to the devil as fast as he could but Hilda just laughed and told him not to be silly, that he was a goodlooking attractive boy and would find many nice girls crazy to fall in love with him. Before he left they had a long talk about religion and Dick told them with a bitter stare at Hilda, that he’d lost his faith and only believed in Pan and Bacchus, the old gods of lust and drink. Edwin was quite startled, but Hilda said it was all nonsense and only growing pains. After he’d left he wrote a very obscure poem full of classical references that he labelled, To a Common Prostitute and sent to Hilda, adding a postscript that he was dedicating his life to Beauty and Sin.

  Dick had an exam to repeat in Geometry which he’d flunked in the spring and one in Advanced Latin that he was taking for extra credits, so he went up to Cambridge a week before college opened. He sent his trunk and suitcase out by the transfer company from the South Station and went out on the subway. He had on a new grey suit and a new grey felt hat and was afraid of losing the certified cheque he had in his pocket for deposit in the Cambridge bank. The glimpse of redbrick Boston and the state house with its gold dome beyond the slatecolored Charles as the train came out into the air to cross the bridge looked like the places in foreign countries he and Hilda had talked about going to. Kendall Square . . . Central Square . . . Harvard Square. The train didn’t go any further; he had to get out. Something about the sign on the turnstile Out To The College Yard sent a chill down his spine. He hadn’t been in Cambridge two hours before he discovered that his felt hat ought to have been brown and old instead of new and that getting a room in the Yard had been a grave mistake for a freshman.