The 42nd Parallel (24 page)

Next morning Johnny got up early and went round to the office of the Ocean City Improvement and Realty Company that was in a new greenstained shingled bungalow on the freshly laidout street back of the beach. There was no one there yet so he walked round the town. It was a muggy gray day and the cottages and the frame stores and the unpainted shacks along the railroad track looked pretty desolate. Now and then he slapped a mosquito on his neck. He had on his last clean collar and he was worried for fear it would get wilted. Whenever he stepped off the board sidewalks he got sand in his shoes, and sharp beachburrs stuck to his ankles. At last he found a stout man in a white linen suit sitting on the steps of the realestate office. “Good morning, sir,” he said. “Are you Colonel Wedgewood?” The stout man was too out of breath to answer and only nodded. He had one big silk handkerchief stuck into his collar behind and with another was mopping his face. Johnny gave him the letter he had from his firm and stood waiting for him to say something. The fat man read the letter with puckered brows and led the way into the office. “It’s this asthma,” he gasped between great wheezing breaths. “Cuts ma wind when Ah trah to hurry. Glad to meet you, son.”

Johnny hung round old Colonel Wedgewood the rest of the morning, looking blue-eyed and boyish, listening politely to stories of the Civil War and General Lee and his white horse Traveller and junketings befoa de woa on the Easten Shoa, ran down to the store to get a cake of ice for the cooler, made a little speech about the future of Ocean City as a summer resort—“Why, what have they got at Atlantic City or Cape May that we haven’t got here?” roared the Colonel—went home with him to his bungalow for lunch, thereby missing the train he ought to have taken back to Wilmington, refused a mint julep—he neither drank nor smoked—but stood admiringly by while the Colonel concocted and drank two good stiff ones, for his asthma, used his smile and his blue eyes and his boyish shamble on the Colonel’s colored cook Mamie and by four o’clock he was laughing about the Governor of North Carolina and the Governor of South Carolina and had accepted a job with the Ocean City Improvement and Realty Company at fifteen dollars a week, with a small furnished cottage thrown in. He went back to the hotel and wrote Mr. Hillyard, inclosing the deeds for the lots and his expense account, apologized for leaving the firm at such short notice but explained that he owed it to his family who were in great need to better himself as much as he could; then he wrote to his mother that he was staying on in Ocean City and please to send him his clothes by express; he wondered whether to write Miss O’Higgins, but decided not to. After all, bygones were bygones.

When he had eaten supper he went to the desk to ask for his bill, feeling pretty nervous for fear he wouldn’t have enough money to pay it, and was just coming out with two quarters in his pocket and his bag in his hand when he met Miss Strang. She was with a short dark man in white flannels whom she introduced as Monsieur de la Rochevillaine. He was a Frenchman but spoke good English. “I hope you’re not leaving us,” she said. “No, ma’am, I’m just moving down the beach to one of Colonel Wedgewood’s cottages.” The Frenchman made Johnny uneasy; he stood smiling suave as a barber beside Miss Strang. “Oh, you know our fat friend, do you? He’s a great crony of Dad’s. I think he’s just too boring with his white horse Traveller.” Miss Strang and the Frenchman smiled both at once as if they had some secret in common. The Frenchman stood beside her swinging easily on the balls of his feet as if he were standing beside some piece of furniture he owned and was showing off to a friend. Johnny had a notion to paste him one right where the white flannel bulged into a pot belly. “Well, I must go,” he said. “Won’t you come back later? There’s going to be dancing. We’d love to have you.” “Yes, come back by all means,” said the Frenchman. “I will if I can,” said Johnny and walked off with his suitcase in his hand, feeling sticky under the collar and sore. “Drat that Frenchman,” he said aloud. Still, there was something about the way Miss Strang looked at him. He guessed he must be falling in love.

It was a hot August, the mornings still, the afternoons piling up sultry into thundershowers. Except when there were clients to show about the scorched sandlots and pinebarrens laid out into streets, Johnny sat in the office alone under the twoflanged electric fan. He was dressed in white flannels and a pink tennis shirt rolled up to the elbows, drafting the lyrical description of Ocean City (Maryland) that was to preface the advertising booklet that was the Colonel’s pet idea: “The lifegiving surges of the broad Atlantic beat on the crystalline beaches of Ocean City (Maryland). . . the tonic breath of the pines brings relief to the asthmatic and the consumptive . . . nearby the sportsman’s paradise of Indian River spreads out its broad estuary teeming with . . .” In the afternoon the Colonel would come in sweating and wheezing and Johnny would read him what he had written and he’d say, “Bully, ma boy, bully,” and suggest that it be all done over. And Johnny would look up a new batch of words in a dogeared “Century Dictionary” and start off again.

It would have been a fine life except that he was in love. Evenings he couldn’t keep away from the Ocean House. Each time he walked up the creaking porch steps past the old ladies rocking and fanning with palmleaf fans, and went through the screen doors into the lobby he felt sure that this time he’d find Annabelle Marie alone, but each time the Frenchman was with her as smiling and cool and potbellied as ever. They both made a fuss over Johnny and petted him like a little dog or a precocious child; she taught him to dance the “Boston,” and the Frenchman, who it turned out was a duke or a baron or something, kept offering him drinks and cigars and scented cigarettes. Johnny was shocked to death when he found out that she smoked, but somehow it went with dukes and Newport and foreign travel and that sort of thing. She used some kind of musky perfume and the smell of it and the slight rankness of cigarettesmoke in her hair made him dizzy and feverish when he danced with her. Some nights he tried to tire out the Frenchman playing pool, but then she’d disappear to bed and he’d have to go off home cursing under his breath. While he undressed he could still feel a little tingle of musk in his nostrils. He was trying to make up a song:

By the moonlight sea

I pine for thee

Annabelle Marie . . .

Then it ’ud suddenly sound too damn silly and he’d stride up and down his little porch in his pajamas, with the mosquitoes shrilling about his head and the pound of the sea and the jeer of the dryflies and katydids in his ears, cursing being young and poor and uneducated and planning how he’d make a big enough pile to buy out every damn Frenchman; then he’d be the one she’d love and look up to and he wouldn’t care if she did have a few damn Frenchmen for mascots if she wanted them. He’d clench his fists and stride around the porch muttering, “By gum, I can do it.”

Then one evening he found Annabelle Marie alone. The Frenchman had gone on the noon train. She seemed glad to see Johnny, but there was obviously something on her mind. She had too much powder on her face and her eyes looked red; perhaps she’d been crying. It was moonlight. She put her hand on his arm, “Moorehouse, walk down the beach with me,” she said. “I hate the sight of all these old hens in rockingchairs.” On the walk that led across a scraggly lawn down to the beach they met Dr. Strang.

“What’s the matter with Rochevillaine, Annie?” he said. He was a tall man with a high forehead. His lips were compressed and he looked worried.

“He got a letter from his mother . . . She won’t let him.”

“He’s of age, isn’t he?”

“Dad, you don’t understand the French nobility . . . The family council won’t let him . . . They could tie up his income.”

“You’ll have enough for two . . . I told him that.”

“Oh, shut up about it, can’t you? . . .” She suddenly started to blubber like a child. She ran past Johnny and back to the hotel, leaving Johnny and Dr. Strang facing each other on the narrow boardwalk. Dr. Strang saw Johnny for the first time. “H’m . . . excuse us,” he said as he brushed past and walked with long strides up the walk, leaving Johnny to go down to the beach and look at the moon all by himself.

But the nights that followed Annabelle Marie did walk out along the beach with him and he began to feel that perhaps she hadn’t loved the Frenchman so much after all. They would go far beyond the straggling cottages and build a fire and sit side by side looking into the flame. Their hands sometimes brushed against each other as they walked; when she’d want to get to her feet he’d take hold of her two hands and pull her up towards him and he always planned to pull her to him and kiss her but he hadn’t the nerve. One night was very warm and she suddenly suggested they go in bathing. “But we haven’t our suits.” “Haven’t you ever been in without? It’s much better . . . Why, you funny boy, I can see you blushing even in the moonlight.” “Do you dare me?” “I doubledare you.”

He ran up the beach a way and pulled off his clothes and went very fast into the water. He didn’t dare look and only got a glimpse out of the corner of an eye of white legs and breasts and a wave spuming white at her feet. While he was putting his clothes on again he was wondering if he wanted to get married to a girl who’d go in swimming with a fellow all naked like that, anyway. He wondered if she’d done it with that damn Frenchman. “You were like a marble faun,” she said when he got back beside the fire where she was coiling her black hair round her head. She had hairpins in her mouth and spoke through them. “Like a very nervous marble faun . . . I got my hair wet.” He hadn’t intended to but he suddenly pulled her to him and kissed her. She didn’t seem at all put out but made herself little in his arms and put her face up to be kissed again. “Would you marry a feller like me without any money?” “I hadn’t thought of it, darling, but I might.”

“You’re pretty wealthy, I guess, and I haven’t a cent, and I have to send home money to my folks . . . but I have prospects.”

“What kind of prospects?” She pulled his face down and ruffled his hair and kissed him. “I’ll make good in this realestate game. I swear I will.” “Will it make good, poor baby?” “You’re not so much older’n me . . . How old are you, Annabelle?” “Well, I admit to twentyfour, but you mustn’t tell anybody, or about tonight or anything.” “Who would I be telling about it, Annabelle Marie?” Walking home, something seemed to be on her mind because she paid no attention to anything he said. She kept humming under her breath.

Another evening they were sitting on the porch of his cottage smoking cigarettes—he would occasionally smoke a cigarette now to keep her company—he asked her what it was worrying her. She put her hands on his shoulders and shook him: “Oh, Moorehouse, you’re such a fool . . . but I like it.” “But there must be something worrying you, Annabelle . . . You didn’t look worried the day we came down on the train together.” “If I told you . . . Gracious, I can imagine your face.” She laughed her hard gruff laugh that always made him feel uncomfortable. “Well, I wish I had the right to make you tell me . . . You ought to forget that damn Frenchman.” “Oh, you’re such a little innocent,” she said. Then she got up and walked up and down the porch.

“Won’t you sit down, Annabelle? Don’t you like me even a little bit?”

She rubbed her hand through his hair and down across his face. “Of course I do, you little blue-eyed ninny . . . But can’t you see it’s everything driving me wild, all those old cats round the hotel talk about me as if I was a scarlet woman because I occasionally smoke a cigarette in my own room . . . Why, in England some of the most aristocratic women smoke right in public without anybody saying ‘boo’ to them . . . And then I’m worried about Dad; he’s sinking too much money in realestate. I think he’s losing his mind.”

“But there’s every indication of a big boom coming down here. It’ll be another Atlantic City in time.”

“Now look here, ’fess up, how many lots have been sold this month?”

“Well, not so many . . . But there are some important sales pending . . . There’s that corporation that’s going to build the new hotel.”

“Dad’ll be lucky if he gets fifty cents out on the dollar . . . and he keeps telling me how rattlebrained I am. He’s a physician and not a financial wizard and he ought to realize it. It’s all right for somebody like you who has nothing to lose and a way to make in the world to be messing around in realestate . . . As for that fat Colonel I don’t know whether he’s a fool or a crook.”

“What kind of a doctor is your father?”

“Do you mean to say you never heard of Dr. Strang? He’s the best known nose and throat specialist in Philadelphia . . . Oh, it’s so cute . . .” She kissed him on the cheek “. . . and ignorant . . .” she kissed him again . . . “and pure.” “I’m not so pure,” he said quickly and looked at her hard in the eyes. Their faces began to blush looking at each other. She let her head sink slowly on his shoulder.

His heart was pounding. He was dizzy with the smell of her hair and the perfume she wore. He pulled her to her feet with his arm round her shoulders. Tottering a little, her leg against his leg, the stiffness of her corset against his ribs, her hair against his face, he pulled her through the little livingroom into the bedroom and locked the door behind them. Then he kissed her as hard as he could on the lips. She sat down on the bed and began to take off her dress, a little coolly he thought, but he’d gone too far to pull back. When she took off her corset she flung it in the corner of the room. “There,” she said. “I hate the beastly things.” She got up and walked towards him in her chemise and felt for his face in the dark. “What’s the matter, darling?” she whispered fiercely, “Are you afraid of me?”

Everything was much simpler than Johnny expected. They giggled together while they were dressing. Walking back along the beach to the Ocean House, he kept thinking: “Now she’ll have to marry me.”

In September a couple of cold northeasters right after Labor Day emptied the Ocean House and the cottages. The Colonel talked bigger about the coming boom and his advertising campaign, and drank more. Johnny took his meals with him now instead of at Mrs. Ames’ boardinghouse. The booklet was finished and approved and Johnny had made a couple of trips to Philadelphia with the text and the photographs to get estimates from printers. Running through Wilmington on the train without getting off there gave him a pleasant feeling of independence. Dr. Strang looked more and more worried and talked about protecting his investments. They had not talked of Johnny’s engagement to his daughter, but it seemed to be understood. Annabelle’s moods were unaccountable. She kept saying she was dying of boredom. She teased and nagged at Johnny continually. One night he woke suddenly to find her standing beside the bed. “Did I scare you?” she said. “I couldn’t sleep . . . Listen to the surf.” The wind was shrilling round the cottage and a tremendous surf roared on the beach. It was almost daylight before he could get her to get out of bed and go back to the hotel. “Let ’em see me . . . I don’t care,” she said. Another time when they were walking along the beach she was taken with nausea and he had to stand waiting while she was sick behind a sanddune, then he supported her, white and trembling, back to the Ocean House. He was worried and restless. On one of his trips to Philadelphia he went round to
The Public Ledger
to see if he could get a job as a reporter.