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| - From The Best Stories of Wilbur Daniel Steele 1946 May Coberly was a coward. Things that scared her, scared her so much they made her feel sick at her stomach. She was always so proud, though, that nobody knew it. Even as a very little girl she would never let on. The Rock Island tracks ran almost under their back yard in Des Moines, and her older brother, Fred, who would have been ten or eleven then, used to make her sit astraddle of the back fence sometimes when the Chicago flier was coming. It made her scream, and she knew it was going to, but she always managed to hold it till the shaking and roaring were at their worst and drowned out the noise she made, and then she would run away and pretend to play somewhere, and if she was sick Fred never knew it. The words about fearing God in the Bible never puzzled May as they do most children. God always did frighten her. When she was taken into the Wilder Avenue M. E. Church, when she went up forward to her first communion, the instant she got the grape juice into her mouth she tasted blood and had to go out— somebody showed her to the door under the choir the minister used, and there was his lavatory. But the time she had the fright which really put her to bed was when she was seventeen, the day they told her that the Grace Church girl who was delegate to the Epworth League Convention at Ocean Grove, New Jersey, couldn't go, because of her father's being suddenly worse in Colorado, and May, who was the alternate, had to go. Two of May's best friends brought the news to the house, Milla Heiffer, who was president of May's class at high school, and Kathleen Batt, who sang soprano in the choir at Wilder Avenue and went with Sylvester Templin, who sang the baritone solos. They asked May why she looked that way, after they had told her, and she said it was because she had an awful pain in her stomach, which she really had, but it would be all right soon if she lay down. They laughed and said it had better be, seeing she was to leave for the East day after tomorrow. "You'll see Chicago and Pittsburgh and New York City, think of it!" Kathleen said. May's mother said she would go and write a card to May's cousins in Davenport to be at the station there when May came through, and Milla said: "And you'll see the Atlantic Ocean, think of it, May!" May did think of it. It seemed to make the pain inside of her ten times worse; she had always been so thrilled when she thought about the seashore and the sea. May's mother was explaining to the girls how interesting that would be for her daughter, since she herself had been born and raised on the coast of Maine, and her father, May's grandfather, had been mate on a sailing ship, although he spent his last days here in Des Moines, passing away in their old house on Slater Street. "Often he used to spin yarns about voyages and storms while he trotted my daughter on his knee, though of course she was too little at the time to remember." May, from her bedroom where she'd gone, wanted to call out, "I wasn't— I do!" But it didn't matter enough to pay to make the effort, she was so panic-stricken at the idea of starting out for the East all by herself, and so terrified something might happen and she wouldn't. Her upset got better soon after she lay down. Dozens were at the station to see her off. The girls had put up a box for her first luncheon, and Dr. Warren, of Grace, handed over the expense money and the two tickets, the regular one and one for the Pullman. She thought to herself, when the train had started, in a few minutes she could look out and up and see the back fence of the Slater Street house, and think: "How little I could have dreamed, then!" But a man came in and sat down in the seat opposite, where his hat was, and said, "Pardon me," with a kind of humorous smile, and May quickly got out a book she'd brought and read it, so that she completely forgot to watch for the old fence when it passed. And she saw that the man had sandy hair and gray-blue eyes and broad shoulders, with a kind of tweed suit with a double breast— a man, by his looks, of twenty-three or -four or -five. So she read until the two conductors came. She had an awful minute then. Her regular ticket was there, but the little berth ticket wasn't. May wanted to die. She tried to tell them that she had had it; they could ask the porter. The two conductors smiled and said they guessed it wasn't going to be fatal. There was something about wiring back from the next stop, and what was May's name. She told them, May Price Coberly, and she was going to Ocean Grove— though they knew that already, of course. And just then the man opposite leaned forward and picked up something from under May's seat. It was the berth ticket. Then they all laughed, and the regular conductor patted her shoulder and said, "Change to the Pennsylvania in Chicago, that's all you have to remember," and the two went on. May didn't know what to do, whether to thank the man or not. If she said anything he might think she would talk. She looked in her book. Then he said, more to himself: "May, that's a pretty name —though I'd have said April." May read. He said: "It's not my fault, young woman. It's Fate's. Here you are, bound for Ocean Grove, and here I am, for Atlantic City, and both over the Pennsy too, and we simply can't sit here face to face for God knows how many hours pretending each other is not alive. So why don't you start by telling me why you're going to Ocean Grove, of all places! . . . I'm going to Atlantic City because I live right near, and I have a sort of a kind of boat there." May didn't know what she ought to do. It would have been different had he been strikingly handsome, like Sylvester Templin when he threw his dark hair back and sang baritone, or like the clerk at Stanger's who would try it on with any good-looking girl. But he wasn't awfully handsome, with his rough-combed hair, his wide jaw and wrinkly-cornered eyes, and freckles on his hands— at first sight anyway. And of course, older. So May said: "The Epworth League national convention is at Ocean Grove and I am a delegate." He threw up his hands. "Help!" he groaned, though he grinned. May had to ask why. So he told her, a friend of his, a fellow he'd gone through prep and college with, he'd been on a train with a Y.W.C.A. delegate once, and that was only from Camden to Air toona, but now they'd been married two years. May felt her face go as hot as fire. He made haste to cover it up by laughing to himself and saying, God help the girl who had to marry him, because he was a sailor. He looked at May, with that, and seemed hurt. "If you don't believe I am, I'll take you up to the baggage car and you can see my duffel bag." It wasn't that she didn't believe him; it was just the opposite. It was knowing he was a sailor, all of a sudden like that, that fussed her. She opened her book and started to read whatever page happened, but he warned her that reading on trains was a terrible way to treat anybody's eyes, which she hadn't known before. And anyway, he said, getting up, it was away past lunchtime, and they ought to be getting to the dining car. Fortunately, May had an answer to that, the box Kathleen and the others had put up. The man looked crestfallen. "Well, make sure you clean it up now, for this evening you are dining with me." And after all, May couldn't eat a bite of the lunch, tasty as the girls had made it. She had hardly opened it when she began to have the same stomach ache she'd had two days before, and it got worse. Finally she pushed the box back out of sight under the seat, and was clenching her hands and almost biting her lip to keep looking right, when the man returned. "What's wrong with you?" he asked. "Hot in here?" She let it go at that, and he said they'd better go out back to the observation platform and get some air— "and have a look at several of the United States," he said— although in fact they were still in Iowa. May began to feel better out there. The train was just leaving a station. May saw the sign at the yard limit, "Marengo." She waited till they were beyond the last of the town, and then she said to the man: "Now I'm the farthest east I've ever been." He just looked at her with those wrinkles of humor out of the corners of his eyes, and kind of shook his head, and got his pipe out. They sat and watched the rails and he smoked. By and by the pain was gone. May began to feel hungry. "What did you have for your lunch?" she said. She had almost to shout, on account of the train. He hitched his chair nearer and took his knee between his hands. "Lunch," he said, "is a thing of the past. Dinner is what I am thinking about intensively now." May was too. She felt so hollow. "I think for my dinner I'm going to have some — " He stopped her. "You are an Iowa girl. How do you know what people have for dinner in foreign places like Illinois, any more than you know what they have for breakfast in Ohio or for lunch in Pennsylvania? No, no!" He shook his head. "I am a world-traveled man; I shall just have to take hold of this whole thing. In fact, I have a rough working plan sketched out for dinner already. To begin with, some salami, celery, and olives— green, because the ripe olives they have are canned. We will have some soft-shelled crabs, which will come on at Davenport, the chef tells me, very fresh, and a small but succulent fillet of beef to follow, and an artichoke— and let me think." He must have been watching May from the corners of his eyes and seen the worried way hers went to the purse she had tight in her hands in her lap, for he gave her a look with his eyebrows pulled together. "I hope you understand, when I say dining with me, I mean dining with me, young woman!" May kept looking in her lap. "No, I couldn't let you do that." "You can too. See here, I am an easterner, and therefore a man of great wealth. So, please!" "No, please, I don't think I ought." He began to jeer. "You, you're a fine Epworth League delegate, not to know any more about God than that!" May was so startled that she asked why. "Because God practically all but put it in the Bible that sailors must buy dinner for girls with pretty eyes. It's called the Law of the Medes and Persians." May couldn't help it, he looked so provoking and merry. She laughed. "All right, I guess so then. Just dinner, though." They were past West Liberty by that time. They sat for a while and watched the rails, while he smoked his pipe. May began to feel funny. She thought it might come from her eyes, the way the rails went. So she looked at the passing fields and then at the sky. But it didn't help much. Her lips felt dry. She wet them with her tongue. "I'm sorry I'm not more talkative," she said. He simply grunted. "Thank God! I've spent most of my life running away from the kind of people who can't just sit, sometimes." Presently he knocked out his pipe. He caught her licking her lips. "Let's have some lemonade." He called the steward and ordered two glasses of lemonade. When hers was in her hand, May said to herself, "I'm going to drink this!" But next instant the glass got away and she grabbed for the man who was a sailor. All she managed to catch was one of the buttons on his coat, and that was all she knew then. The next she knew, it was in the station at Davenport, on the platform, and people were saying, "Yes, we are her cousins," and people were saying, "Gangway." He was carrying her. He was looking down at her. Probably he wouldn't have said it out loud, even to himself, if he had realized she had come to. "Poor girl with the pretty eyes, you never did get out of Iowa." The next she knew, the second time, she was in bed in a hospital, all tied up around the middle, and they had taken her appendix out. Her mother had come from Des Moines and was staying with the cousins. They all came in every day. They asked May how she was, and she said she was all right. They asked if there was anything she wanted, and she said no. But at night, when there was no nurse, she cried a good deal. They brought her belongings one day, the purse and compact and things which the nurse had done up in a package. And one cousin asked, "What's this button, May?" "What button?" "Well, you had it tight in one fist, the nurse said. It looks like off a coat or something." May raised herself quickly and looked. Her breath came hard. "Oh, that button— yes— I know— it's nothing." She got hold of it. "It was just something I had— something I had to make me remember something." That night when she cried she beat the pillow with her fists, took a wad of it between her teeth to keep her sobs from being heard everywhere. For something told her now. "I know, as certain as certain, if we had gone on all the way . . ." She dreamed about it often in the following two years. She could never dream it straight, though. She would be somewhere, say in Kathleen Batt's living room, and somebody was shouting outside, and when she looked it was a railway station, and an announcer was walking up and down, calling, "Camden to Altoona!" Or she would be at table somewhere and ask someone to pass the bread. Instead of bread, it was like a cross between a pineapple and a green Easter lily that came toward her, and then she saw it was he who passed it, saying, "And now your artichoke, young woman," and May would wake up crying. That was about as near as her dreams ever came to getting hold of it. They stopped pretty well altogether when she married Sylvester Templin. She was nineteen then. It seemed at first as much like lucky lightning as the other had seemed at first, the time the real delegate to Ocean Grove had to go to Colorado instead. May was almost the only girl in the Wilder Avenue who had never run after Sylvester. That's why it went the way it did, perhaps. So often superattractive men, or women, will end by doing exactly that, picking the last person in the world anybody has ever thought of. For once May wasn't frightened; she was too bewildered even for that. Everybody was too excited, everything went too fast, for her to ask herself if this was what it meant to be in love. It took the five days and nights of their wedding trip to the Kentucky caves for her to begin to realize, and then it didn't come fully until they were home again. It happened in church, the Sunday after they returned, at the morning sendee. All that any of the girls could see that day was May, May in her pew and Sylvester in the choir loft. May knew it. She felt their eyes on her, full of envious speculations they couldn't help, and wonder, and awe. Her own eyes she dared not turn or lift, till everybody did, when the choir got up to sing. Sylvester had on the dark suit he'd been married in, made to measure by a tailoring house. It set off his tall, slender, almost willowy figure to perfection against the many-colored light that came in by the Young St. John window. And when it came his time, and he flung his head back to throw the dark lock off his forehead, and lifted his face and began to sing alone with the organ, May caught her breath. Of a sudden she knew what love and marriage really meant. Not just going around to caves and hotels with Sylvester, and being called Mrs. Templin. It was something so much bigger, so much deeper, marriage, and children, and everything. May couldn't help it, she didn't care who saw, down went her hands on the pew back ahead and down went her face between them. "O God our Father, grant and let me have a child— grant and let me bear to Sylvester my husband a son in his own image, O God, Amen." She couldn't help it, she didn't care if the other girls did see that her face was wet when she lifted it. But as the years began to go by it seemed that her prayer was not to be answered. Whether it was she or Sylvester she didn't know; it didn't matter. And perhaps it was just as well in a way. Sylvester's aim had always been the opera; everybody had always said that there was where he would land. An English opera company from Chicago came to Des Moines the year after he and May were married, and Mr. Agassiz of the Third National Bank, a trustee at Wilder Avenue, got Sylvester a chance to sing for the director and some of the stars at their hotel. He sang well. They thought he had the makings of something. But the director wanted him, if he went with them, to be in the chorus simply— "carry a spear awhile," was the way he put it, "and begin to get a glimmer of the rudiments." The pay, moreover, was practically nothing. May could have met that part of it. She went so far as to see Mr. Agassiz, and he promised to give her a job in the bank at eighteen a week, and she could have lived with her mother when Sylvester was away. In the end, though, she had to agree with Sylvester that there was nothing in being a chorus man, for him. Something better was bound to come along. He had a position for a few months with another church member, a concern that handled hides. But he wasn't adept, and he wasn't contented. Music, after all, was the career he was marked for. "Why waste time and energy on a sidetrack?" he told May. Some people said it was a pity the church couldn't pay something, even a little, for choir work. May went to Mr. Agassiz the second summer. He kept his word and gave her a job mailing statements and things like that, which she could do. May always had been a coward. Little by little as she grew tired she worked out a philosophy, without knowing it was a philosophy, certainly without ever putting it in words. But it was this: if you don't look at a thing, then it isn't there: if you don't say it, it isn't so. Pride was mixed up with this too. If she met one of her old girl friends (and that meant one of Sylvester's old girl friends) and if she was asked how Sylvester was making out, May would look happily mysterious. "Oh, Sylvester is working on something now that looks so good that we're not saying a word." And if there was any wooden thing handy May would reach and rap on it three times. May began by liking the Wilder Avenue less and less; she ended by hating it more and more. She explained it to herself by thinking it was because she had to see so many people in whom she was no longer interested, when she went there. Often, of a Sunday, she let Sylvester go alone. If he asked what he should say— whether he should say she was tired or ill— she made haste to tell him no. That was the last thing on earth she would have had Kathleen and Milla and the others thinking, that she was ill or tired. He could say she had gone over to Grace with a friend that belonged there, one of the bank girls. The last time May set foot inside the Wilder Avenue was the day her mother was buried from there. They moved out to the Viaduct section shortly after. Once on a time some independents built a packing house in the Viaduct, and two streets of small houses for the labor to live in. The packing business had failed in short order, and now all sorts of people had the houses, which were cheap, renting for sixteen dollars a month. Of course there were the trolley fares, but they didn't make anywhere near the difference. Some months, if nothing special came up, May could add two or three dollars to the account she kept at the bank against the chance which terrified her more than anything else: "Supposing something should happen to me!" For if anything should happen to her, and if she didn't leave him any money, Sylvester would have to go to somebody, and the only ones he could go to would be their old friends and acquaintances at the Wilder Avenue. But the best part of living in the Viaduct was that it was so far across town that Sylvester gave up his choir work. May's first realization of the truth of why she had fallen away from the church came to her by chance, if not by sheer accident, and it came like a bombshell. It was in the spring when she was thirty-one. A girl at the bank had a husband who was a steel worker, and one Saturday afternoon she wanted May to go to Halvert Union Hall with her. Perhaps because she was too tired to want to argue out of it, May went. She wished she hadn't, when she saw that the speaker was dressed like a clergyman. But when he began to speak he took her breath away. The fear of God and the hope of the Hereafter have always been the drugs, he said, with which the Have's have kept the Have-Nots doped in submission. The Truth has got to put these bugaboos to flight before the workers can hope to come into their own— the Truth that there's actually no such thing as God, no such thing as life going on after the grave. People long for immortality. So the capitalistic church says to a woman: "There's your man that you love —you be good and make him be good, and when you're dead you'll be raised again to live together in a happy land, forever and ever and ever." Then the speaker pounded on his desk and pointed at them all and told them. That husband and wife do go on living after the grave, not because they're good, nor because they're bad, but because they have loved. Married, mingled, in the veins and brain of the child they have made, and of that child's children, together they shall live till the end of time. That is their immortality. It took May's breath away. She grasped at what he said, grabbed at it, and fiercely believed. When they were out on the sidewalk the other girl asked her what had happened, that she looked that way. May said: "Thank God, I'm barren. When I die I can call it a day." It seemed as if tons had fallen from her shoulders. She could carry them straight now. She felt better, stronger, harder, more independent. She spruced up. She bought a new compact the following Monday and put more color on her mouth and cheeks, simply because she felt that way. Before leaving the bank, after hours, when they were in the washroom, the other girl asked May why she didn't put a touch of mascara on her lashes, she had such pretty eyes, that color brown. The girl had some. May was sorry, though, when she reached home looking that way. She hadn't thought. It got Sylvester started. She couldn't say she was too tired that night; she'd already said she felt fine, though she hadn't told him why. That night a second bombshell of realization hit May. Sylvester went to sleep quickly, when he went. It was warm weather. He hadn't any pajama top on, and the bedclothes were half off his shoulders and chest, which were as smooth and white as a child's. He never seemed to change. Time, which dragged May down little by little, passed over Sylvester and left no mark. He might still have been twenty. He might have been seventeen. It may have been some premonition and May didn't know it. All she knew was that horror came to her as she lay there in the dark beside him and couldn't sleep. Finally she couldn't help herself, she lifted on an elbow and stared at the grayness his whiteness made in the gloom. There was something unnatural, unhealthy, unright. Between a boy of seventeen and a man of thirty-four there ought to be a difference, in mind and in flesh. Either a thing is alive or it is dead. If a mind is alive it doesn't quit. If flesh is alive it changes, grows, grows older. If it's dead it's only so much meat, and decays— unless you want to keep it on ice. Suddenly, all May could see was the glassed-in meat counter at the A. & P. store, rimed with frost around the lower edge. She saw red steaks, pinky-gray chops, greeny-gray sausages, and laid among them on the bed of shaved ice, about of a size with the sausages, perfect and willowy and white, she saw Sylvester. And she knew in that instant what she had fooled herself about for years. It wasn't that she was too tired. It was because her flesh loathed that flesh. She got out of bed, went into the bathroom, shut the door and turned on the light. She didn't know what, she didn't know why. She sat on the side of the tub and stared at the wall. She said to herself, "I can't be awake." She got up. "One thing I want, I want to wash my mouth with something." She opened the medicine case above the bowl, pushed bottles around, hardly looking to see what they were. There was one away at the back she hadn't seen or thought of for months, some mercuric cyanide tablets she had got through the bank's insurance doctor two years ago, for some antisepsis. This was just what the drug clerk had warned her against, forgetting and leaving them around where somebody might mistake them for some kind of soda-mints or medicine. They ought to be down the drain, before somebody did. She sat on the bathtub again and looked at the bottle. "You'd be dead in a wink," that's what the clerk had said. "You'd never know," he'd said, "what struck you." May shook herself. What was wrong with her? She didn't know. "Don't be such a fool!" she said. She returned the phial to the case. She went back and got into bed, lying as far as she could over on her side of it. "Don't be such a fool! Forget it!" She did forget it, for some weeks. When she remembered it again was when she was beginning to go around her work at the bank with white cheeks, and big eyes that might have been blind, the way she dropped this thing or bumped into that. One blistering morning in July the other girl said to her: "Look, May, you don't look good. Why don't you see some doctor?" The head bookkeeper spoke to her the same morning. "Go see Doc Gable, May. Won't cost you anything. I'll ask Mr. Agassiz." May flew at him. "No you don't! I keep telling you!" She came back to his cage a little later. "Please! It's just this heat." At noon she got out alone. She took a streetcar and went across to a part of town she didn't know, and found a doctor's sign. She gave the doctor a wrong name and wrong address, she couldn't have said why. It was simply panic. He catechized her and examined her. He told her, yes, she was going to have a baby. He had to remind her, when she got up to go: "That will be two dollars and a half, Mrs. Brown." Even then he had to call her back. He was looking at the small silver that made up the half dollar, spread on his palm. He grinned in a kind of sheepish way. "I guess you would as soon have this, Mrs. Brown, and I'm sure I'd rather have the nickel." He handed back the luck piece she'd always had a habit of carrying in her purse, a coat button made of horn. She gave him the nickel and went away. First she thought she wouldn't go back to the bank. Then she decided she must, otherwise they would think there was something wrong with her. Besides, she'd rather be working than thinking. She needn't have worried. She couldn't think. She felt the heat that afternoon, not as heat, but as a weight without particular temperature pressing down on top of her brain. After closing, while she was waiting for a Viaduct car, a newsboy stuck a paper into her empty hand. It was the Evening Courier. She had given him pennies mechanically before she realized what she was doing. She wanted to call after the boy, tell him they took the Courier. It would be at home when she got there, on the floor by the stuffed chair, sprawled open at the radio page. But what was the use?— and the car had come. Then she was glad she had the paper. There was a man sitting next to her, hip to hip with her, who wanted to make a pickup. She knew she would break out screaming if she had to argue, so she just kept looking hard at the paper. It was a Wednesday, and the outside section was the MidWeek Pictorial. There was a picture of a record baseball crowd in Chicago. There was a picture of a two-masted boat at anchor somewhere, with a man, a woman, and a small boy at work about it, coiling ropes and things. In an oval at an upper corner was a half-length snapshot of a bearded man in a fur parka with the hood laid back. Behind him, in the background, was a stripe of black water and one of white ice. A strong wind beat at his beard and his hair. A soiled ringer came and pointed at the picture. "That wouldn't feel good a day like this— oh no!" May slammed the paper between the fellow's knees. "Take it, if you're so interested; and let me be!" She got up and went out to stand by the motorman till the car reached Alpine. May's house was the fifth on the right, up Alpine. It was distinguished by stained glass in the front door, a garish imitation of Delia Robbia which some Italian tenant had put in years before. Otherwise one would have had to count. Sometimes Sylvester had things started toward supper, the potatoes peeled, for instance. Tonight of all nights May hoped to God he would. She hoped to God Fred wouldn't be there. But when she was on the porch she knew that Fred was there. She could hear the music through the closed window. They always kept the window closed for secrecy, because of whatever new "novelty" they were trying to work up. This one, May knew, was one they called the Mixed Quartette. Sylvester had learned how to throw his voice into a falsetto contralto when he wanted to. Fred could jump back and forth between tenor and soprano so cleverly that you would have sworn it was a man and a woman alternating. Sylvester played on a portable melodion, while Fred doubled in saxophone, steel guitar, and some hand traps. There was going to be money in this one, Sylvester said. It was a tossup with May. For two cents she would have turned back down the steps and walked around for a while. She was too dead on her feet, though. They stopped singing when she came in, but neither one got up. Sylvester said: "How are you, May? Feel any better?" "It's this weather, I guess," said May. Fred kept his eyes turned out through the window. He was a short, heavy-bodied man with a pock-marked face, an ex-barber, some said Armenian and some Greek. They said he took cocaine too. Like Sylvester, he was in his undershirt, on account of the heat, and had his shoes off. His feet looked smaller than ever so, in nothing but socks, and rounded and soft and moist, like his hands. He said nothing to May. He never did, any more than he ever looked her way when she was in the room. May started for the passage leading to the kitchen. "Well?" The funny way Sylvester spoke made May stop and look at him. "What's the matter?" He threw the hair off his forehead. "Nothing. Why?" May picked up the Courier from beside the stuffed chair. "Why. nothing." She started on again. "Well, don't you want to hear the news?" "News about what?" "About Fred and me tonight— at WFKA?" "Not— another audition!" "I don't know why not. E. F. Mackay wants to hear us, for the Mackay Furniture hour. It looks pretty good, doesn't it, Fred?" Fred never stirred. May said: "That's fine." She went out into the kitchen. She wanted nothing but just to be by herself. Of a sudden she got to the chair by the table and sat down, her body felt so heavy. She had realized she wasn't herself. She couldn't be. For months to come she'd never be able to be alone with herself anywhere— month by month, less and less alone. Her hands moved on the oilcloth of the table and touched the paper she had brought out. She took it up. She reversed the fold to get away from the radio page. That brought the rotogravure section outermost again, but never mind. Anything to look at, anything. That man in the oval, think of it, furs! Try and think of it, on a hot, hot evening in July, in Des Moines, Iowa! The wind that threshed at his square beard and tumbled his hair was blowing straight off of white arctic ice! There wasn't any name. It would probably be down below, under the bigger picture of the two-masted boat with its crew of three. . . . Ketch "Kestrel" Home After an Adventurous Winter Locked in the Ice off Baffin Land: Mr. Eric Abernathy y of the Smithsonian Institute, His Wife and Son Bobby Bring Back Valuable Drift Data and Rare Arctic Algae for the Instit — May's eyes quit in the middle of the word. They went back to the first words, which they hadn't consciously seen, the date line. "Atlantic City, N. J." They moved down obliquely to the caption's end: "... hi the Oval: Eric Abernathy in Arctic Geary They went up then and reached the oval. There they stayed, and there they stared. Presently she made a whimpering sound. "It's the beard, that's why." "What's that, May?" She hadn't heard Sylvester come out from the other room. When he put a hand on her shoulder, to lean and look, she fainted dead away. She was on the bed in the bedroom when she came to. Her face and blouse were wet with water. Sylvester had a saucepan with more in it, and looked helpless. "I'm all right now," she said. "You are? What do you suppose you — " "Nothing. Just the heat." Fred was out in the passage, protesting in a lowered voice, "Syl, do you know it's seven thirty-five?" May took her lip between her teeth and sat up. The room went around and around. "Go, Sylvester. I'm all right, honest! You mustn't be late." "I know— but how can I — " "You must, it's so important. You can get something to eat on your way, at the Green Car. Get me my purse." There were two one-dollar bills and a quarter in it; May knew without having to look. She put the quarter in his hand. She cried sharply, when he just stood and looked at it: "There's all the bills this Saturday, and two months' rent, you know that. You can get a hamburger and pie and coffee for that at the Green Car." He stood. "How about Fred?" She gave him one of the dollars quickly. Anything! Anything to get them gone! She called after Sylvester in the passage: "I may lie down awhile. Take your things along with you to the Car. I might sleep a little while." She went into the kitchen when she was sure they were gone, sat down and put her elbows on the table, one on either margin of the picture page. "So that's your name. Eric Abernathy. I never did know your name." May had always thought that beards on men were funny. His didn't look funny. It made him look older. "But you are, though. Fourteen years." The boat in the bigger picture had been taken from a little above, from a dock, perhaps. No furs there. That was Atlantic City, and summer. The boy, balanced monkey-wise on the furled sail on the main boom, looked to be about ten. Like his father, he was in dungarees and singlet. "He needs a haircut." Abruptly, May put a hand down and hid them, boat and all. She swallowed at something in her throat. Swallowed and swallowed. Dusk had come, out of doors. As yet it brought no coolness. May took her hand up. She looked at the woman. The woman too was in dungarees, with some kind of a jersey on. It was hard to see, that small, how her hair was done, though you knew it was long hair. Thick braids, perhaps, roped around. She was turned the other way: you couldn't see her face. May had the same impulse she used to have as a little girl, to turn the picture over, so as to see her from the other side. No, she didn't want to, though. She didn't want to see or know. She hid the picture again, this time with both hands. She put her face down on them, biting the knuckles. "He'd be my boy. I would be her." Night came down, a hot, black cloud. May started, and couldn't believe it, when she heard Sylvester at the front door; it didn't seem possible she'd been there in the dark that long. She wondered in a panic whether she could get through the passage to the bedroom and pretend to be asleep. She had seen him come home with his hopes dashed more than once. She could have borne it better if he had borne it worse, been blue or bitter, or gotten swearing mad. Anything but the easy acceptance, the quick forgetting. It was too late for the bedroom. She jumped up, turned on the light, and pretended to be just looking around, thinking, when Sylvester came into the kitchen. Fred was with him. "What's that?" May asked. Sylvester had a bottle under his arm. "Some claret I bought. It's good— seventy-five cents." "With what?" "Why?" He gave her a look, up and down. May had never seen him like this before. He threw his head, to toss the hair back from his brow. "What's worrying you— your money?" He took bills from his pocket and put one into her hand. "How about some glasses from the pantry, Fred?" Fred went. May sat down. She stared from Sylvester to the money she held. "Where did you get this?" "Why, off old man Mackay. A little advance. And was he tickled to do it, Fred!" Fred had brought two tumblers. Sylvester filled them from the bottle. He looked at May. "Why, aren't you having any, May?" When she made no answer: "Don't look so dumb!" he protested. "I told you we would put it over, didn't I?" "How much?" "Oh, ninety a week, to split." He sipped at his claret. "Only three months, though, at that money. Mackay wanted to make it six." He touched his mouth with the handkerchief from his breast pocket. "Fred and I are no suckers. Once we get this thing on the air ... !" Fred spoke into his tumbler. "We ought to get some white flannel suits." "Double-breasted." May commenced to laugh. She caught hold of the back of her chair. Higher and higher she laughed, harder and harder. After the way of hysteria, the thoughts racing through her brain seemed killingly funny. "So I don't have to go on now. . . . Don't have to go on— don't have to have the baby now." Sylvester looked mystified, then uneasy. "Stop it, May! You're tired." Fred actually addressed her. "Look, May!" That was better than cold water. May got hold of herself and got to the door, biting on her teeth. "Yuh-yes— I— I'm tired, I g-g-guess." She went, and the two men sat down. It was the heat, Sylvester explained to Fred. A few minutes later, however, May was back in the kitchen. "Sylvester, I wonder if you'd do something. I feel so kind of all in tonight. I've made up the sofa in the living room and put your things out there, and I wondered — " Sylvester lifted a hand. "Not another word, little girl— of course. Get a good sleep now. Run on." May went into the bathroom first, to the medicine chest. In the bedroom, when she had closed the door, she stood till she heard them talking loudly enough to cover the sound, and turned the key in the lock. Snapping the light off, she sat down on the edge of the bed. She held the phial, half full of tablets, between her hands, on her knees. It wasn't horrible, it was fascinating. May wasn't afraid of death, as death, now that she wasn't afraid of God or of waking up afterwards. She was afraid of pain, but that clerk had said it would be only a wink, said that she wouldn't know what struck her. When an auto or trolley went past the foot of Alpine, eastbound, a faint light fanned around the bedroom walls, in reverse. Again in reverse, in miniature, it ran around the inside of the phial. May could have laughed, no longer in hysteria, but because she felt so light-as-feathers, so irresponsible and free. Sylvester and Fred went along the passage. There was the sound of the front door. Sylvester moved about the living room for a while, getting ready for bed. Presently, whether worried or curious, he came out into the passage and stood. What if he were to try the door? What would he think to find it locked? What would he say? Do? All of a sudden it came to May: "What difference?" She uncorked the bottle and dropped one tablet in her palm. "Why should I care? One wink, and I wouldn't know it even if he broke the door down. Wouldn't know it if the whole house— if the whole worldfell down on my head. Wouldn't know there'd ever been a world, even. Or Sylvester. Or me." May never heard him when he tiptoed away. She was so engrossed. She, who had always been so cowardly, was so thrilled. For with this in her hand, there was nothing on earth she couldn't do. She could walk around the cornice of the Baise Building tower, if she wanted to. She could take off every stitch right now and go out and run around the streets, if she felt like it. She should worry! If she wanted, she could murder people. She could go to the living room, where Sylvester would be asleep, and take a chair and beat his skull in. She remembered when the Chicago train used to scare her as a child. Well, with this in her hand all ready to swallow, she could go and stand between the rails and watch the engine coming at her and never flinch. It could never hit her. Never while she knew. "But I don't want to, any of those things. I'd rather sit right here and go." All at once she thought of something. She crammed the tablet back into the bottle and corked it, wiped her palm on the bedclothes, in a panic. She could have cried, it had all looked so simple. What she had remembered in time was this: if they found her here, it wouldn't be just Sylvester and Fred and the neighbors, and like that. The police would want to know about it too. They always did, when people who weren't sick were found dead. They cut them open then; that was the law. Autopsy. There was the woman they found in the Wyant Hotel last year; they knew well enough she had done it herself, but they cut her open just the same, and it was in the papers. They didn't let anything get by them in an autopsy. "She was in an expectant condition" it said at the end. And that May couldn't have, and wouldn't have. Whatever happened, she wouldn't have Sylvester knowing that. She got up and walked around the floor. The room of release had turned into a cage. "Somewhere, where they wouldn't know who I was . . . There's money enough. Over a hundred and forty dollars in the bank. All I need to do . . ." May turned on the light. She opened the closet door. There was a suitcase on the upper shelf. But what if Sylvester should be curious, seeing her go out with a suitcase in the morning? Well, she would just have to tell him it was some cleaning, or some other lie. Luckily, she didn't have to lie. Sylvester was still asleep when she got out at eight, by the kitchen way. She left the suitcase in check at the station before she went to the bank. She was afraid of the bank, afraid some of the backoffice people might see her and ask questions. She slipped in by the front way and across to the teller she knew the least. It worked. "I didn't realize your vacation came so early, Mrs. Templin. Going on a regular one this time, eh? . . . How will you have it?" "I don't care— five twenties, I guess. Thanks!" That was all she dared draw. She was afraid even that much would seem suspicious. Besides, there was something she wanted to do. At the station she wrote a check to Sylvester for the balance, forty-four dollars and odd cents. It would cover the two-months' rent that had to be paid right away, the light, gas and milk. May wanted to do that. She had reached the ticket window before it occurred to her that she had no idea where she was going. The man looked at her. She fiddled with her purse. He tapped with a pencil and looked at her. "Ocean Grove," she said. "New Jersey?" "Yes, New Jersey. And I want to go by the Pennsylvania." The man started along his rack. "No, wait!" May said. "Make it Atlantic City." May walked up and down the Boardwalk at Atlantic City, carrying her suitcase. There was no use in going to a hotel, she thought at first. Finally, it was so hot, she checked the case at a checking place in a drugstore. Then she walked and walked, looking at the ocean. It was a pity it couldn't have been another time, when she could have been thrilled by the strangeness and wonder of it, coming in blue from the horizon to whiten on the sands. All she wondered now was, she wondered where the anchored boats could be. She didn't see a one, though she saw a few under sail, out further. Perhaps it was only at night they came in toward the beach, among the diving floats— though she had to say it looked uncomfortably rough there for anchoring. May hated to ask questions, for fear of questions. When it got late, however, she approached a policeman. "Do you know of a man named Eric Abernathy, a sailor?" The way he looked at her when he said no, she almost decided to give it up and have it over with. It was so small a thing after all, just a whim she had taken, just to see his boat once, first, from a dock or beach or wherever it was, even though she didn't see him, which she wouldn't, ten chances to one. But it was too late; too late, that is, for going on with the other business. The beach was deserted of bathers. The tide was low, a bathhouse man told her, just at the turn; before there was much water again it would be dark, he said. May grasped at the chance his words gave her, for making doubly sure. (She had already, in a roundabout way, asked the Parmalee man crossing Chicago, and a dining steward on the Pennsylvania, and they had both said they thought so.) So now she put on a vague expression and said: "I suppose people that get drowned, if it's when the tide's rising, it'll bring their bodies right back in and you find them. I suppose it's only when it's going out that it carries them out to sea?" He too looked at her in a funny way. "Why?" "Oh, nothing, I'm just trying to write a story for a magazine, that's all. If they ever find the body, then there's no point. That's why." May went away. She got her suitcase. She had to go to a hotel after all. She signed the register as a Mrs. Kathleen Brown from Toledo. Then she had a streak of luck. "Abernathy?" echoed the clerk. "You mean the Polar man. He'll probably be lying over the other side of the island, in the Inlet, at one of the boat yards. Probably Forston's." It was after ten next morning when May found the Forston Boatbuilding Company. There was a man sitting on a half barrel in the gateway. "I'm afraid you're a little late," he said, before May got any further than, "Is this where — " He mopped his head and looked down through the tangle of railways, derricks, hulls, and spars that almost hid the water. "There comes the reporters' boat ashore now. He'll be under way any minute now." May just stood. The gateman mopped the inside of his collar. It was ninety-six in the shade. "The crowd's down there at Number Two Ways, if you want to go — " A faint sound of cheering interrupted him. "There!" He pointed into the tangle of wood and iron. "There she goes." May was bewildered. She felt dumb. She saw whiteness in one of the gaps. It passed slowly to another, and another, a sail beyond them, hardly more than drifting. The man was grumbling. "Damn foolishness. If he'd ask me, I'd say 'twas no day to be starting out for Great Egg even, say nothing of the Ar'tic Circle. This weather's going to bust wide open, you watch, and not too many hours." May began to laugh of a sudden. The man, thinking she laughed at him for claiming to know more than Abernathy, glowered and said, "Oh, all right." But May wasn't laughing at him. She was laughing at everything. "That's done," she thought. "That's that!" She walked back across town. There was no hurry in getting to the beach. It would be after twelve before the tide began to ebb, she'd seen in a paper. On the way she went into a shop and bought a bathing suit. She didn't feel like renting one, somehow. She chose a deep-blue suit and bought a blue waterproof bag that tied to the wrist, to go with it. She found another bathing place than the one where she'd talked with the man the day before. When she had undressed in the sultry cubicle they gave her, she looked at herself. It seemed strange to think . . . Then she put on the suit. She made sure, one last time, there were no marks in the clothes she was leaving. She had already done that for the things abandoned at the hotel. She had gone so far last night as to soak the Harknett Drugstore label off the phial. The phial she had left in the wastebasket; the label she had put down the toilet, together with all but one of the tablets; one was all she would need. She had it loose in her purse now, along with everything by which she might have been identified, her initialed handkerchief, wedding ring, highschool pin, such things. These, before she went out, she transferred to the little rubber wrist bag. There was a dollar bill and seventy cents change left from her hundred. She put the bill back in the purse; there was no reason somebody shouldn't have it; it told no tales. But the silver would help weight the rubber bag, which she meant to take off. There mustn't be any mistake about its sinking. When she went out on the sand she was faced by an unappreciated problem, and by its solution, almost in the same moment. A boy, a lifeguard with deeply tanned body, was there in a skiff beyond the first of the surf, laughing and nodding to a girl who climbed in over the stern. May ran through the shallow foam. "Wait! Take me out too!" She had hold of the gunwale, and there was nothing he could say. "I'm going to the offshore float," the girl said with some tartness, looking sidewise at May. "I am too," said May. "How about it? Good enough swimmer?" The guard had to know. Good enough! Apparently, that gave May a good laugh. Any day she couldn't swim a mile! And that meant in fresh water, she said. It ought to mean two, in salt. (May couldn't swim a stroke. She wet a hand over the gunwale and touched it to her tongue when they weren't looking. She'd always known it, but she'd never believed it could be. But it was true. It was salty.) "The only reason," she explained, "I want to get my sun bath before I get my shoulders wet." May lay on her stomach on the canvas deck of the offshore float and stared seaward and wished the girl would go away. Before she did go, others had come. They talked, giggled, teetered on the springboard. Noon was furnace hot. There wasn't a stir in the air. Half a dozen boats, out a way, lay with slack canvas, pointing in all directions. The sun beat down. One of the swimmers, a woman, warned May. "You're going to have an awful burn if you don't look out." May just lay and stared seaward. "All right," the woman said to her companion, "she don't feel it now, but wait a couple of hours!" May wondered what their faces would have looked like if they had known. It ought not to be more than an eighth part of those two hours before the tide would change. It grew long. Those swimmers went and left May alone. It seemed as if at least an hour was gone. Yet the low, lazy, glassy swells still came from seaward and went on shoreward, exactly as they had. (In her midland mind May confused the waves with the tide. The tide was already ebbing, but she didn't know.) A man and a woman came, rocking the float as they climbed on. The man said suddenly: "God A'mighty, Nell, look what's coming!" The woman said: "As quick as that! Just while we've been swimming out! We better beat it." The man trod nearer to May. "Look what's coming, lady." He laid a hand on her shoulder, on the sunburn. That brought her up, pivoting on a hip. Over the shore, above and beyond the town, a black cloud climbed for the sun. Lightning split it. Thunder thudded. "Beat it!" the man said to the woman. She plunged and swam. He looked at May. May could have killed him. She could have cried. She looked at the waves, and they still ran as they had run. Among the boats becalmed offshore, sails were dropping down. People on the floats nearer the beach were excited, shouting to one another to get ashore. The man grew impatient. "That's going to hit quick. You better come." May felt helpless. She felt angry too. "Yes, yes, I'm coming in a second. I'm a fast swimmer— I'll be there before you two. Go on." To her relief he turned and dived. She dropped on the canvas behind the butt of the springboard. When he came up and looked back and didn't see her, he thought she was in the water too, turned and swam after the woman, who was well ahead. May lay where she was till the cloud touched the sun. She sat up and watched the black shadow come, broken by lightning. All at once it made her think of the train when she was little. She laughed. She untied the rubber bag, fumbled out the tablet and held it in one fist. With the other hand she threw the weighted bag as far as she could, away into the water. She stood up. She laughed out loud. Nothing could hurt her. Nothing could hit her while she knew. Rain hit her in a blinding flood. But that was only rain. Wind hit her and knocked her down to her knees. It was only wind. She scrambled up and stood against it. She could see no more than a hundred feet in any direction, so she didn't know the float had swung right around at its mooring; all she knew was that when she looked at the water the thing had happened; the waves had turned and were running past her the other way. At last there was no worry. She could have danced while the wind and rain hammered at her and the lightning crackled and couldn't scare her. There was no worry and no hurry, and May could have sung. It was only by chance she turned and saw a boat coming close through the welter, a boy with a scared face over a brown shoulder, pulling at the oars. Just in time she lifted her fist, popped the pellet into her mouth, tumbled toward the float's edge and the water. A rending flare, and blackness. Heavy, cold blackness. And May thought: "I did know what struck me." Then she thought: "How do I know?" She felt herself turning over in slow somersault, touching nothing. How could she feel that if she w T as dead? There was something on her tongue. It was the tablet. She hadn't swallowed it. She tried to swallow it, tried and tried and couldn't. She tried to bite it, and couldn't seem to. She was under the sea, and she wasn't dead. Terror came and got her. "O my God!" She fought out with arms and legs. "O God!" She tried to climb. "Oh, please!" But there was nothing to climb by. "O God, please!" Her lids paled. Her lips parted, and for an instant air came between her teeth. But water followed. It grew dark again as she went down. By and by she stopped praying. She stopped thinking, stopped caring. The muscles about her mouth tired and loosened. Water leaked in. If there was another paling of the dark, May didn't know it. She knew nothing till she opened her eyes and saw a city of gold. It was far off and quite small, painted on a ribbon of sun-shot mist beyond water the color of lead. Around May the dark still racketed, wind and rain. Voices shouted and were small. "Ease her off, Bobby— keep some way!" . . . "Off it is, sir!" . . . "No more!" By turning her head a little May could see the second of the speakers, a boy of ten or so, braced at a wheel at the other end of a cockpit sharply aslant, a taut rag of sail above him. He had his jaw clamped, for courage, and his eyes narrowed, for mastery, and he needed a haircut, May saw. She couldn't see much of the other speaker, only, out of the bottoms of her eyes, a bit of the forearm with which he held her, half lying, half jammed, against the cockpit combing. But that was all she needed. She knew. Strangely, she hadn't time yet to think how strange. There was something in her mouth. She had to think about that. "Let me!" she gasped. He didn't hear. She got one hand free and stuck her fingers in, down between tongue and gum. She got the tablet out and looked at it. It wasn't a tablet. It was a button made of horn. "Let me!" she gasped. She strained. The arm gave. She leaned out over the combing, over the side. She looked down into rushing foam. She opened her mouth, and water and sickness emptied out. "There you are, young woman!" She was lifted to her feet, thrust toward an opening in a low house with a ladder of three steps inside. When she was in and down she turned to look back. Eric Abernathy was leaning, one hand on either side of the companionway, looking down and in. It was enough like the rotogravure picture to be funny, the wind battering his beard and hair and his eye corners puckered— though of course it was against the wetness now, not the cold. May said to herself: "He doesn't know me from Adam." Then she thought: "How would he, in a bathing suit?" He said to her: "It's about blown out now. You lie down awhile, while Bobby and I get some sail on." May looked around her. Of a sudden she caught a big breath. She thought: "Where is she?" Eric was gone. There was only the boy at the wheel to be seen, and he wasn't looking, and she didn't feel like asking, anyway. In the narrow cabin where she stood there seemed to be everything: bunks, books, boots, oilskins, dishes, charts, quadrants, binoculars—everything but a Mrs. Abernathy. A door at the other end opened into a passage. May dreaded to go, but she did. There was nobody in the passage. There was nobody in the galley at its other end. There was nowhere to go beyond the galley. May wondered till she was giddy. She tried to lean in the doorway, but the doorway knocked her about and threw her down. She had to get up. There were still two doors, both closed, behind her in the passage. She opened the first. She closed it quickly, feeling abashed, even though there was no one. It was the lavatory. She opened the second. There was a stateroom with two berths, made up with nautical neatness, one on either side. When she saw there was nobody even here May felt like a rag. She lay down on one of the berths. She hadn't slept for what seemed weeks. She slept. It seemed to May she had been asleep for weeks, when she waked. Some of the bits of dreams she remembered were like things years and years away, and even they, once she was wide awake, went like mist in the morning when she tried to see them again. At first she had no idea where she was. Her eyes were on the window, and the window was funny. It wasn't rectangular, it was round. Then a sight of sea tipped up and filled it, the blue-green flank of a comber, spangled with foam and sunshine, and she remembered. She remembered she'd been in her wet bathing suit when she threw herself down. She was in the bed now. She looked at her arms, felt at her throat. Soft Shantung. When she moved her legs, under the sheet, she knew it was pajamas. She turned quick eyes to the other berth. It had been slept in. A hotness swept her cheeks. "Where could she have been when I was looking for her?" The door from the passage opened a crack. It opened wider. May hated to look, but she had to. And it wasn't the woman, after all; it was the boy. "Well," he said, "have you had enough at last?" When he smiled he grinned. When he grinned, he wanted a tooth here and there— he was at that age— and he had quantities of freckles. May's mind played a queer trick on her for one instant. It thought: "If I don't get the shears at that mop of his today!" She was confused, and that was why she failed to answer. Bobby seemed not to mind. "Captain!" he shouted aft along the passage. "Lash the wheel and come and see!" Eric came. "Well, Commodore, feel better?" That was funny. Commodore? He came and knelt down beside the berth, all woolly in a big windbreaker. May thought her heart was going to stop when he laid a hand on her forehead. But then: "Maybe I've had a fever," she thought, "maybe it's that." It seemed, though, as if he only did it to smooth the hair back out of her eyes. He looked into them hard for a while. "Lazy May," he said, "get up and stand your trick now." It came to May: "It's the eyes— he remembers my eyes." She got them away from his, and past Bobby, in a panic to the open. door. "What would she think if she came and saw!" Aloud, May said: "Yes— now— go— I'll get up quickly." She got up when they were gone and slipped out of her pajamas. She looked at herself. She looked at her hair, that hung down over her shoulders. With a strange regret she looked out of the port at the water, crisp with crests. "I suppose I'm too late for my bath— they hove to hours ago and had theirs. That's for being lazy." She pulled open the middle one of the three drawers let in beneath the berth. She took out something of primrose georgette. She wondered. Again she looked out at the water, at the color of it. "No," she said, "I think I'd better . . ." Replacing the georgette, from another layer she took a garment of Scotch wool, almost as sheer as the crepe itself. This she put on. There were dungarees, worn but clean, in the big drawer at the bottom, and a bright yellow jersey with a turtle neck, and sneakers. When she had washed in the bowl that let down from the cabinet by the porthole, she combed her hair before the mirror. She looked at the small framed photograph that stood on the shelf below it, and smiled half a smile, with a fleeting wistfulness. "How far away and how long ago. That was taken in my senior year at high school." The wistfulness was gone, and the smile was purer merriment. "He thought I thought I'd lost it, when we both changed at Philadelphia. As if I didn't know he had it in his bag!" May had got to the door before she thought. She stopped. She brushed a hand over her eyes, turned and looked back at the picture. "What am I thinking of? How did that come here?" Again she ran fingers over her eyes. "What difference!" A coat button of horn lay near her feet on the stateroom deck; she picked it up and put it in the top drawer under the berth before she went on out. She had a fright in the cabin. Somebody was in one of the bunks there, rolled in a blanket. But then May saw it was Bobby. Without thinking, she thought: "Poor lamb, he must be tired." For she thought: "They've been standing watch and watch while I've been ill." She stood on the ladder, halfway out of the companion. A fine morning, a fine, tingling, blue-and-white wind out of the west; gulls high above the wake rode like sleep on the wind. A mile off on the port beam a basalt reef stood on the ocean, surf-laced and lonely. May said: "Why, there's the Pope and Cardinals! Already?" Eric, riding the wheelbox, laughed. "We've come along. Seven days from Nantucket Shoals to Cape Race of Newfoundland— tell me that's not coming!" "Whew!" May whistled. But then she was all confused again, as if her whistling had waked her up. Quickly she twisted in the opening, peered along the house, along the narrow decks, all the way to the bow. She got back down into the cabin. Once and for all, she made certain there was nobody else but Bobby in that cabin. She went forward into the passage, looked in at the stateroom, made certain there. She knocked on the door of "the Head," opened it. Empty. And the galley was the same. There was a half door in the forward bulkhead of the little sea kitchen. May went and pulled it open. She peered in. She reached in. She brought out part of a side of bacon, some coffee, tinned milk, flour for making griddle cakes, lime juice in a bottle. She fired the vapor stove and put the coffee on. She sliced the bacon with a heavy, sharp knife and beat up the batter for the cakes. When all was ready she set the table for two in the cabin. She touched the boy on the shoulder. "Wake up!" He rolled over, opened his eyes, shut them, rubbed them, opened them again. Presently he would outgrow those comical tooth gaps, outgrow his freckles perhaps. Thank God, May thought, he could never outgrow those eyes. "Wake up, breakfast, Bob!" Suddenly the eyes were like Christmas morning. "You called me 'Bob'! That means I'm grown up, doesn't it?— growner-up than 'Bobby.' Won't you ask Father to call me it too?" May leaned and kissed him between those eyes. There was something in her throat that made her laugh. "Yes— and drink your lime juice." "Bobby wants you to call him Bob," she told Eric as she relieved him at the wheel. "Do, and go before your breakfast's cold. ... Is this right, nor'-by-west-a-half-north?" "Due north," said Eric. Mechanically, May's hand swung the wheel. Half a point the needle in the binnacle swung. "By the way, Eric." He looked back from the ladder. "Where's your old tweed jacket, the gray-brown one with the double breast? I've found that button." Eric started to answer, and then didn't. He looked at her. "Why, May, what's the matter? Why are you crying?" She took her lip out from between her teeth. "I don't know." She felt like simply blubbering. "I love Bobby so. I love you so. . . . No, go on before your coffee's cold." The Pope and Cardinals had gone down astern. The sea ran unbroken. Trough and crest, trough and crest, with an ordered, almost monotonous motion, the Kestrel drove. The steady wind blew cool against May's cheek, blew cool through her body and mind, and the white wings of the gulls astern rode the wind like sleep. There began a twittering. Then a racket of sailcloth as the boat came up under a limp rudder and the canvas lost the wind. May winked back half awake as man and boy came tumbling out. They took it well when they saw how it was, both laughing. But May was flustered, and she was ashamed. "It's all this air, I guess," she mumbled as Eric carried her below in his arms. While he was undressing her, pulling jersey off one way and dungarees the other, she kept at it like a drunk with one ideadrunk with sleep. "All this air— I must get used to it." May waked in the middle of some night and sat up in bed. She didn't know what night it was. She only knew it was the middle of it because they grew so short now and it was black dark out of the port. The only light came in at the door from the lantern in the passage. Half in the ray, Eric was getting ready for his four-hour turn of sleep, stripping the heavy woolen shirt over his head, off his square-built, hard-muscled body, still brown from southern suns. "It'll be all right tonight," he said, when he saw May sitting up. "It's clear, the glass high, and hardly any sea running, and I've told him to call me right away if he sees any ice. He's a great sailor, and he's a great kid, isn't he, May?" When there was no answer he stepped nearer and saw that May wasn't looking or listening. She was looking down at the two loosely braided ropes of her brown hair, which fell forward, one over either shoulder, to lie together in the valley of her breast. Now, and again, she raised a hand and almost touched them, and let the hand drop. There was a mist of trouble mixed with sleep over the surface of her eyes. Eric said, "May dear!" almost sharply. That brought her out of it. She reached with her arms and her hands. "Eric, please, here!" He was beside her quickly, hunkered down by the berth. "Put your arms around me, Eric. Tighter! I've had such dreams. Eric, I dreamed I hadn't you and Bobby. It was as if I was back in Iowa, Eric, and I couldn't wake up, and I couldn't get away, and there was no air. And the awful thing, Eric —it seemed as if I was married to somebody that wasn't you— and Eric— I was going to have a baby— and it was— oh, it was — Look at me, Eric, I'm all of a shiver still." Eric got in bed and held her against him to stop her shivering. With his strong hand he caressed her brow and smoothed her hair, till that made her remember something, with a caught breath. "And my hair, Eric— that was what I was dreaming when I waked— my hair was short— they'd bobbed my hair." He held her head a little away and looked at it and smiled. "That would be a pity!" The way he said it, the way he smiled, all at once the shiver was gone, and she laughed in her breath as she pulled one braid through under Eric's neck and the other over it and was busy with their ends beyond. "Wouldn't it! For how could I tie you up with it then, so you couldn't get away?" Eric looked in her eyes. "Pretty eyes," he said. "Take care, Mr. Abernathy!" May's heart was filled with an enchanted merriment. "You got yourself into an awful pickle once, if you'll remember, with this talk of pretty eyes." "Do you mean, Mrs. Abernathy, that time on that train?" May simply gazed at him, shaking her head as if with pity. As if with pity, he shook his. "And you, poor dolt of an Iowa girl, you imagined I meant it." "I didn't imagine. I knew. Right then." "Right when?" "Remember that first evening in the dining car, after Davenport? I do— because it was the first artichoke I ever had. Well, I think it was then that something really told me." "Be explicit! Told you what?" "That if I could get you across Chicago without losing you, then Bobby would have brown eyes." "Indeed? ... I think I shall kiss you, May." But May was busy untying the knot in the braids she had tied. "Go shut the door first," she said. The storm at noon hadn't broken the weather after all, as people in Atlantic City had hoped it would. It was hot again that evening, hot even in the morgue. A police sergeant and a police surgeon stood by the body of the unidentified woman that lay under a sheet on one of the slabs. The doctor mopped his head with a handkerchief. "Drowned?" "No, and that's funny, Doc. The guard did pretty work, even to get out there in that squall, and when he was almost to the float he saw this dame kind of stumble and slide overboard. He got her the second time she come up, still breathing some, he says, and he figured he'd pulled the trick. But when he got her ashore she was dead— and I mean dead too" "Try the pulmotor?" "We did, till we found there wasn't hardly any water in her. . . . Funny. . . . Heart failure or something, could it be? Or maybe poison?'''' "Tell you better about that after the post-mortem— that and everything.'" The doctor touched the hand that lay outside the sheet, on the slab. "Almost be nice to be as cool as that for a while, dogged if it wouldn't.'''' The sergeant wiped his neck. "Be heaven," he said. "Do you believe in heaven, Sergeant?" "Life eternal? Don't you, Doc?" "Eternal? No, I thank you. A heaven with sometime an end to it, I might buy. Somewhere where you wake up to find yourself what you always dreamed of being. For a while. No, but crazier than that, Sarge. Find you always HAVE been— turns out— somehow. . . . That's just mine. Tastes differ, 1 suppose. . . . Well, whatever her heaven, this one's, she's there by now. Look." The doctor tried the wrist between his strong fingers. "Quick work for weather like this. Rigor is setting in" There was a numbness and stiffness in the hand that lay outside the sheet, where May could see it for a flickering instant now and then, when phosphorescence, curling on the black water washing past the port, lighted the stateroom ever so little. But it was only because it had gone to sleep, May knew, and she wouldn't for the world have moved it to wake it, for fear of waking Eric too. He slept so peacefully, now that he slept, his cheek rough against her breast, his dear head heavy in the hollow of that arm. May didn't want to sleep, herself; she had slept so much. Now that memory had been excited, she wanted passionately and vividly to re-create in her memory the length of their days together, the years so rich in adventure and peace, so full of love and living, yet so short they seemed, it seemed beyond belief that the boy with Eric's jaw and May's eyes could be big enough already to be out there alone, carrying their life in his hand steadily, steering them iceward through the cold dark. "Maybe we'll see ice in the morning— it feels like it," May thought with a curious ecstasy, and lay closer to the warmth of her husband, in the beautiful dark and the beautiful cold.
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