When Yale dealt again he won from all three. He had a pile of stockings
and shoes in front of him. He held up Cynthia's silk stockings, laughing.
"It's not fair, you haven't lost a thing," Cynthia said.
"You must be cheating.
Cynthia dealt and lost to Yale. She hesitated, and then remembered her
earrings and pulled them off, laughing. "Thought you had me! Didn't you?"
Beatrice lost to Cynthia and handed her her earrings. Sonny also lost.
He took off his pants and sat in his underwear. When Cynthia dealt again
they all made different combinations of twenty-one. No winners or losers.
Sonny passed the whiskey bottle. He winked at Yale as he gave the deal
back to Cynthia. The dealer stood the chance of losing three pieces and
therefore had the biggest risk.
"I just dealt," Cynthia said.
"No, you didn't," Sonny grinned.
"I did, too. Didn't I, Bee?"
Bee passed her hand over her face. "Darned if I know. I'm tight!"
Cynthia took the cards and dealt. She lost her dress to Yale. Hesitating,
she slowly took it off while they watched her. Sonny obviously was enjoying
her embarrassment. She sat on the bed in her slip. On the same deal
Beatrice lost her dress to Cynthia, and reluctantly took it off and gave
it to her.
Sonny, losing to Cynthia, took off his underwear top and handed it to
her. Cynthia passed the deal to Beatrice again. Beatrice took the cards
dubiously. "I think you're right, Cynthia, you just dealt."
"It's too late now," Cynthia said. "You're stuck."
Beatrice took the cards. She sat on the bed with her legs curled up
under her slip. "If I lose, I am through, I'm not going any further."
She dealt and lost to Sonny, and won from Yale and Cynthia. "We're going
down at the same pace," Cynthia laughed.
"Are you going to take off your slip?" Beatrice demanded. Cynthia looked
at Sonny, grinning at her, as if to say, "I'll bet you don't dare." She
shrugged her shoulders. "Why not?"
She pulled her slip over her head and handed it to Beatrice. Nervously,
Beatrice took hers off and handed it to Yale. She crossed her arms across
her brassiere and blushed.
Sonny picked up the cards. "Here goes someone!" He dealt four cards down.
Yale drew a three underneath. "Hit it."
Sonny flipped an eight of hearts at him.
"Again." A two came next. Yale hesitated. "Again." A jack came next.
"You're over, pay up."
Yale handed him his last stocking.
Sonny dealt a queen underneath to Cynthia and then a six facing up.
She looked at her underneath card for a long time trying to decide
what to do. She could beat Sonny or try for a card between one and
five. She had to play. Sonny would certainly beat sixteen. "Hit it,"
she said breathlessly. Sonny flipped her a ten of hearts. "Damn," she
said nervously.
"Pay up," he laughed. Cynthia looked at Yale. Her eyes said, "Should I?"
"Go ahead. Show him what pretty breasts you have. He's driven me crazy
asking."
Cynthia fumbled with the clasp on her brassiere, unhooked it and held it
against her for a minute. Finally, blushing, she took it off and handed
it to Yale.
"Not bad," Sonny said, examining her breasts with exaggerated interest.
"Keep your comments to yourself!" Cynthia snapped.
Shocked, Beatrice took the deal. "If I weren't drunk I wouldn't do this."
She dealt and lost to Cynthia and Yale. "I have only two things left,"
she wailed.
"Take 'em off," Sonny laughed, examining his cards. "I lost to you so
I'm out, too!"
"I'm not going to undress any further," Beatrice said. Cynthia can do what
she wants to." Beatrice started to pick up her slip as if she were going
to put it on. They were all silent. Her tone of prudishness suddenly
made them realize what they were doing. Their revelry fell through a
sluice. "Oh, all right!" She got off the bed and took off her brassiere
and panties. "There!" she stood naked beside the bed. "I hope you see
enough." There was a peculiar anger in her eyes; her voice sounded near
the edge of hysteria. Something was needed to save the impending tragedy.
Cynthia hopped off the bed and slid out of her panties. "Come on, Yale.
Let's all look at each other like curious kids and get it over with."
Yale and Sonny finished undressing awkwardly. They all sat on the bed,
trying not to look at each other too obviously; trying to hide their
embarrassment.
A "now-what-are-we-going-to-do" silence filled the cabin. Finally,
Beatrice said archly, "If you've all seen enough, I think Cynthia and
I will go to bed." She stated it so flatly that there was no room for
Sonny's hesitant, "But -- "
Cynthia eyed Yale. "You sleep with Sonny." She said it curtly, and started
to draw the chintz curtain across the wire. Yale looked at her body seeing
her uplifted breasts, and, as she turned, her white buttocks between her
tanned shoulders and legs. He was suddenly amazed at the overwhelming
feeling of chasteness and beauty that Cynthia, nude, held for him.
"There's no point in doing that," Yale said. Cynthia gave him a
use-your-head look.
Yale walked back to his side of the curtain. He suddenly realized that his
love for Cindar was a solitary thing. Even if Beatrice had been willing
to sleep with Sonny, the atmosphere of the cabin would have produced a
terrible feeling of sordidness. The whole affair that might have been
beautiful and tender with Cynthia alone, held the possibility of a cheap
orgy. "You won and lost, Sonny. Come on and let's get some sleep."
In bed, after Sonny had ceased telling him that he was a lousy pal,
and given up trying to persuade him that they could shift beds later
on, Yale listened to the quiet breathing of Cynthia and Beatrice on the
other side of the curtain.
It was raining, and the drops fell quietly on the absorbent pine roof.
You start out seeking something, he thought, and you wind up miles from
where you ever wanted to be. He supposed that he had encouraged Sonny in
the game. He couldn't deny his curiosity. He had wondered how Beatrice
looked naked. After he had seen her he realized that she was just another
normal girl. And while he found it good to look at her without clothing,
he sensed that it was in admiration for a generalized aesthetic beauty
and not a sexual attraction. Vaguely, he felt that the mores of the
American culture were wrong in making nudity such a secret, closeted
affair. Perhaps a great deal of the filth and innuendoes associated with
sex would be eliminated if the western, cultures accepted the everlasting
and amazing mystery of man's and woman's bodies. If all children were
brought up with a clear understanding, and taught a real love of man for
man. It would have to start, he thought, with the established religions
first eliminating the sinfulness of man.
What he wanted was to be lying beside Cindar, alone; by themselves
somewhere. He wanted to tell her the ideas careening through his mind
and listen to her sympathetic, "Yes, Yale, I understand."
There was so much to learn, and to know. He realized that he was suddenly
afraid of dying before he could accomplish the vague plans half formulated
in his mind. He didn't know how the fear of death had come upon him but it
had been lurking in his brain for weeks.
Walking along College Avenue, or picking up a book, or starting to work
on the play which continued to elude him, the idea would suddenly seize
him of the uselessness of the whole thing. If he died, he couldn't finish
what he started. All the bright beauty of living would be gone. Plans of
being with Cindar, and marrying her and living in an atmosphere of quest
and study -- all of them were contingent, futile. He would be dead. Maybe
tomorrow, maybe tonight. When you want to live so badly, he thought,
you lose your balance. He fought the feeling. He knew he was perfectly
healthy. He cursed himself for getting such ideas. Why couldn't he live
matter-of-factly like Sonny Thompson or any of the host of people that
he had met at Midhaven College? They acted as if they were immortal.
Nothing would shake his feeling of impending death. It came on him
driving his Ford. He might crash with an oncoming car and be dead.
He might step off a bus, and a car would crash into him, and he would be
dead. He could visualize himself lying in a crushed heap. He shuddered
at the thought. He was mortal. He could die.
Somehow, the pattering of rain on the roof lulled him to sleep and he
started to dream.
In his dream he watched himself before the elevator door. "Don't go!" he
screamed. "Don't go!" He saw himself stand motionless, unable to pull back
from something that was drawing him forward. The room cascaded about him
in fountains of whirling colors. It was a dance floor and the dancers
were huddled together in the center. The murky blues, vanishing into
warm pinks with green tinges, enveloped him. The room was closing in on
him in a warm glutinous mass. The walls bent forward and curled in huge
ripples like massive sheets of steel snapping under whip-like pressure.
"I'm suffocating!" He could feel himself being pushed irresistibly to
the blank, black cavern of the elevator. "Don't go! Don't go! It's a long
way down." He watched himself going forward, tons of pressure squeezing
against his back.
"The elevator, the elevator. It's empty. I can't go down alone."
He cringed against the wall which was no wall, but an endless tunnel
of blackness. Slowly, noiselessly, the door inched closed, the elevator
started down. I'm not alone, he thought. I'm not going down alone. The
bodies moved closer. They were warm and naked, and their perspiration slid
over them wet and sticky. His hand touched a nipple and the deceptive
softness of a breast. Against his stomach and buttocks he could feel
the crackling wire hair of pubes. The elevator was gaining speed.
A warm cloying smell of urine flooded through his nostrils. The elevator
began to spin. "The cable, the cable! -- it's broken!" he yelled.
The elevator was descending rapidly but now in a completely detached
way. The bodies vanished. His head was being drawn up between his legs
while his stomach seemed to be pulled up in an opposite direction. The
elevator whirled faster turning in a rotary motion. "It'll crash!" he
gasped. "Stop it. Stop it! I'm falling!" His body began to spin. "No,"
he yelled with terror. He watched himself becoming dizzy. He watched his
strength ebbing away as he waited for the crash. He heard the deafening
grate of scraping steel and screamed.
"Yale! Yale!" He woke up, and looked at Cynthia, not recognizing her for
a minute. "Where am I?" He shuddered. The room came into focus and he saw
the bright sunlight streaming through the window of the cabin. Cynthia was
dressed, sitting on the bed beside him. She caressed his forehead gently
and spoke soothingly to him. Sonny and Beatrice looked at him curiously.
"Wow, what a dream!" Yale shook his head, trying to free himself of
the memory.
Sonny said, "Come on, get dressed and let's get out of this dump. I need
an aspirin and I'm hungry as hell."
As they got into the car, Yale whispered to Cynthia, "You know, I can't
remember what that dream was about but it felt as if I were being born."
Cynthia squeezed his hand.
6
When Yale looked back on it in later years he would mark the summer
between his Junior year and the beginning of his Senior year as a period
when his life took off on a new direction. Cynthia had taken a summer
job as a counsellor in a girl's camp in Maine. He wrote her almost daily
long letters filled with love and confused philosophy. He entreated with
her that sometime before their senior year started they must be alone
together. They worked out a plan. Yale would come to New Jersey for a
weekend just before school started and would stay overnight with her
family. Then they would drive back to school together and stop somewhere
overnight. Yale went through the summer months buoyed by the thoughts
of being with Cynthia again, and alone with her, to really love for the
first time.
The summer had been very dry. By mid-July the Mamaputock River was three
inches below its normal water level. Unable to navigate his Chris-Craft in
the upper reaches of the river, Pat was forced to give up going to work
in his speed boat. At seven thirty in the morning he would be waiting
restlessly for Yale at the breakfast table, watching impatiently while
Yale would cram in a hurried and inadequate breakfast. In Pat's Packard
convertible, the top down, Yale would sleepily try to adjust himself to
a new day while Pat drove at a furious speed the fifteen miles between
home and factory.
Despite his fast, concentrated driving, Pat managed to maintain an
endless flow of conversation concerning business, politics, and general
developments at the plant. Often his questions to Yale went unanswered,
but it didn't deter him, and he kept right on discussing problems at
length, and providing his own satisfactory answers.
This morning Pat was in a particularly good mood. Yale was working
in the advertising department with Bert Walsh, their new advertising
manager. While Pat's plans were to have Yale work in the factory each
summer through his junior year in college, the uneasy situation with
the Union made this inadvisable. Pat had been pleased with the reports
from Bert Walsh that Yale seemed to have a quick mind, together with an
unusual grasp of public psychology in preparing advertising campaigns
for Marratt products. Pat had hoped that the aggressiveness and drive of
Bert Walsh would rub off on Yale. Though Pat would admit it to no one,
he was quite impressed with his new advertising manager and Bert's degree
of a Master in Business Administration. He intimated to Yale frequently
that rounding off his education at Harvard Business School would be an
excellent idea. Yale continued to be non-committal. Every time Pat thought
he noticed a change in Yale's approach to business, he would discover,
to his disgust, that Yale would take the opposite side of the fence and
extol the merits of Roosevelt and the value of a planned economy.
Pat discussed it with Doctor Tangle. The President of Midhaven College
shrugged it off as growing pains. "Yale has a good mind. He's become an
inspiration to the faculty. While some of his ideas are utter nonsense,
they are keenly thought out. Don't you worry about him, Pat," Doctor Tangle
had continued with his heh-heh chuckle. "He'll come a full circle and
someday he'll take over the Marratt Corporation and run it better than
you have."