Wrote For Luck (4 page)

There was a pain in her right hand where she had been clutching the arm-rest of her seat, and she massaged it with the fingers of her left. The streetcar had slowed practically to a halt and the people around her were stirring, rather as if they had been woken from sleep. A girl a yard or so away from her with a pair of zealously plucked eyebrows that made her look like Betty Boop said: ‘Gee, Stan, will you look at the way the sun shines off the water?’ and the boy she was with grinned and said: ‘Fritzy, you’re a poet and you just don’t know it.’ The girl’s dress was made of cheap, plain cotton, and she wondered how she had come by Stan, who had a shock of dark, unruly hair and was wearing a college football sweater. They stepped cautiously from the streetcar at a point where the sand had come nearly up to the sidewalk and there was a man with a peaked visor and arm-bands on his shirt selling ice-cream out of a portable refrigerator. In the distance there were white birds criss-crossing the blue sky and beyond that long ships
apparently motionless on the horizon, so slow-moving that they were almost inert, like pieces of balsa wood laid out on an azure blanket. ‘This is the life,’ Huey said vaguely. He was a tall boy, taller than the man in the college sweater, but his weight was not adequate for his height and made him look spindly. ‘You must be careful,’ she said, ‘not to sit in the sun with that pale skin of yours.’ There had been an occasion when Huey had come back lobster-coloured.

‘Oh, I’ll be careful,’ he said. He had the remote, far-away look that he sometimes wore on these excursions to public places. ‘It’s awfully hot,’ she said, aware of the sun on her bare arms, the warm sand spilling over the tops of her shoes, the draw-string of her bag digging into her shoulder. ‘That’s right,’ he said. Something was concerning him beyond the sheen of the water, the long, low ships and the crowds at the beach, and he said, not curiously but as if courtesy impelled him to ask: ‘How long is it till you stop off working for Mr Lonigan?’ She had an answer to this which had already been doled out to several other enquirers. ‘On next Friday fortnight,’ she said. ‘I can’t stay a moment longer. I don’t know why but I just can’t. I guess the other girls will buy me a cake. They usually do. When Susie Montgomery left to get married they bought her ever such a nice one. But she was there five years and I’ve only been there two.’ She thought about Lonigan’s, with its crackling fan sending the stale air around the green baize table, and the odds and ends of cloth lying around in heaps, and the trimming scissors as big as shears, and realised that the only thing that made it tolerable was the fact that she was leaving it. ‘Two years,’ Huey said, who had
never been in a job longer than six months. The sunlight was shining off the buttons of his jacket and he stepped gingerly over the sand, fearful of bumping into people or putting his feet into the picnic baskets.

They found a spot near the shoreline, where some young kids were ducking each other in the shallows while a lifeguard looked benevolently on and a mustachioed old man in a one-piece bathing costume swam backwards and forwards against the tide, labouring like a grampus, and established themselves on the sand, and she clasped her hands over her knees and looked out into the far corners of the lake, beyond the line of ships, where the water was greyer and less tractable. Huey took off his shoes and socks and sat with his feet stretched out in front of him. They were enormous feet – size twelve, at least – and her mother had once said that if Mrs Niedermeyer ran short of a clothes line then all she had to do was to hang a string from one of his big toes to the other. Sometimes he picked up pebbles and threw them into the water, and at other times he squeezed the parcel that contained his bathing clothes into a pillow and lay flat on his back staring up at the sky. To right and left the crowds of people extended as far as the eye could see: couples running in and out of the water; families grouped around their rugs and baskets; men in straw hats with their pants furled to knee level walking up and down. ‘Don’t you want to bathe?’ she asked. Huey threw a little stone, so weakly that it barely made the water-line. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I guess I don’t feel like it. Maybe I will later.’ The young kids had stopped ducking each other and were staring hopefully out over the water, as if they expected
a frogman to emerge from the depths, but the old man in the one-piece bathing costume was still labouring strenuously up and down, ever more pious and determined, as if only a sense of responsibility, some weighty obligation to wife, children and dependants, was stopping him from heading north to Canada, thrashing his way along the rivers that flowed out of the Great Lakes and swimming up the Yukon like a salmon. She had seen all this before, a hundred times at least, but now she realised that the prospect of going to Wheaton was making her see it anew, but to Huey it was just the beach crowd and the splashing children and the doughty old men. There were some words in her head that had not been there when she sat on the streetcar or asked Huey whether he intended to bathe, and suddenly, without her being conscious of the effort, they assembled themselves into something coherent and she said:

‘What’s that?’ Huey asked. He knew the words were not hers and suspected them.

‘It’s a poem we learned at literature class,’ she said. She was proud of the literature class, which took place in a young women’s institute and was addressed by a middle-aged lady who had studied at Bryn Mawr. A few more lines came into her head and she went on:

The old man in the one-piece bathing costume was not swimming quite so fast. She thought that if she looked at the lines of ships – they were container ships, bringing goods in to the port – then, all but imperceptibly, she would see them move. The sun was burning hotter now and she wished she had brought a parasol.

‘What does it mean?’ she asked.

Huey distrusted the literature class. It was not how girls were supposed to spend their time. But he was fair-minded in his attitudes, had gone with her to see movies he had known he would not enjoy and been proved right, and once to a classical concert. That had been very terrible, but he had gone. Now he said:

‘I don’t know. I suppose it means what it means.’

Shedding white rings of tumult, building high/Over the chained bay waters Liberty
, she repeated. It was intriguing to say it, as if all the people on the beach had vanished and there were only the two of them attending to the grave matter of a poem and what it meant.
Shedding white rings of tumult
, she said again.

‘I guess it’s a seagull flying over the water,’ Huey said, not quite comfortable with all this and fearing its implications. It was hard not to associate it with the new life stretching out before her, of studious girls and unthought-of destinies. He was not insensible to beauty and sometimes cut out
poems that had appeared in newspapers and presented them to her.

‘I guess I can come and see you at Wheaton,’ he said. ‘At weekends, I mean.’

‘I shall want you to,’ she said. She had no idea of what it would be like there, or what she expected from it, or from anyone. The sun had risen full into the sky now, and the people beneath it were wilting in its heat. She rose to her feet, carefully brushing the grit out of the folds of her skirt, and walked a little way over the sand to the water’s edge. It was at times like these that she wanted to fling a bottle into the deeps with a message in it saying who she was and where she lived, so that some other girl, in Canada maybe, or perhaps even in England, would come across it on some lonely shore and know that she had written it, and there would be an article in a newspaper remarking on the miracle of this transition, this flight of a sealed-up bottle from one world to another, but she knew that she would never be able to do this, that it was too quixotic, and offended against her sense of responsibility, which of all things was the one she prized herself on the most. When she came back from the water’s edge Huey was sprawled back onto his outstretched arms with one of his feet balanced on top of another to create an extraordinary ziggurat of flesh on which a flag could quite easily have been flown. She had meant to stop talking about the poem, but somehow it was in her head again and she declaimed:

Huey did not respond. He was lost in the majesty of his feet. Still out in the deeper water, fifteen yards away, the old man in the one-piece bathing costume laboured back and forth. The crowd around them was thickening fast. There were shop-girls on their lunch-hours come to sunbathe, old ladies setting out the contents of their picnic baskets, strange, shock-haired children whom no one seemed to be in charge of roaming at the water’s edge.

Foretold to other eyes
, she said. The middle-aged lady from Bryn Mawr had suggested that poetry bred up in you emotions that you would not otherwise have felt. There was a poem by Emily Dickinson that had once aroused her to a state of exaltation, and she had recited it to her mother. Mrs Christie, who preferred the verses printed in the
Sun-Tribune
about the banks of the Wabash, had said it was very nice and gone on measuring out cupfuls of flour. Poetry was all very well, but it went only so far. Huey seemed to have lost faith in the spectacle of his feet. He set them down, side by side, too self-consciously to let the gesture pass, and said with great determination:

‘I shan’t be staying with Mr Dreiser forever, you know.’

At the college in Wheaton there was a special black gown which the girls wore for Sunday church services. She knew that her first act when she arrived there would be to purchase one of these gowns.

‘No, Huey,’ she said patiently. ‘I don’t suppose you will.’ She could never quite decide what amount of faith she ought
to place in Huey’s ambitions, whether simple loyalty on her path would enable him to win through and secure his dreams – whatever they were – or whether more complex factors were at work. Mrs Christie had said that Huey was a nice boy, but plain unlucky, that his employers would always die on him, or go bankrupt, or flee to Indiana with their creditors on their tails.

‘What a fellow needs,’ Huey said, with what was meant to be steely determination but in some way fell a yard or two short of this, ‘is a chance.’

There was a sound of heavy footsteps coursing rapidly over the sand. Ten yards away two people – a lifeguard in a yellow shirt and a smaller man in a neatly tailored suit – were running towards the water’s edge. The smaller man looked as if this sharp exercise was inimical to him, a betrayal of his dignity but nevertheless a part of the compact he had forged with the world. There were other people, she saw, clustered around the old man in the one-piece bathing suit, who had fallen to his knees and was supporting himself on his outstretched hands, like a child readying itself for a wheelbarrow race.

‘Overdid it, I guess,’ Huey said knowledgeably. He was still thinking about his chance. The group of people broke apart – they did this with great courtesy and a little awe – to admit the lifeguard and his companion. A cop appeared from nowhere, planting his booted feet delicately on the sand, and began to shoo the onlookers away. The lifeguard dragged the old man in the one-piece bathing suit out of the shallows and the second man clasped one hand over his chest and felt with the other for a pulse in his wrist.

‘He doesn’t look too good,’ Huey said dispassionately as they laid the old man down on the sand. He was quite motionless now, his face a kind of grey-green colour, like ancient rock from the botanical garden, and did not respond as they worked on him.

‘All a fellow needs…’ Huey began again, and then stopped, aware even in his own distress about Mr Dreiser and the teacher-training college at Wheaton that this was not a time to be talking about chances, his own or anyone else’s. The lifeguard and the doctor – if that was what the second man was – continued with their work, their backs bent in unison. On one side of them the old man’s legs stuck out stiffly in the sand. Once a child’s ball came rolling towards them, but the child’s mother came anxiously running to scoop it up in her hands and bear it away. She realised, to her shame, that she was annoyed by the old man’s falling down like this, for it had given the day a context from which nothing she or Huey could say or do would ever rescue it, that she was, however indirectly, caught up in something from which there was no escape. A hundred yards or so away she could see a pair of men bringing up a stretcher, stumbling in the sand and sometimes almost falling over their feet in their determination to bring it home to port. She had once attended a first-aid course that involved practising mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a splay-limbed dummy, but somehow she did not care to bring this expertise forward in the service of the old man.

Huey stood irresolutely at her side, sometimes taking a sideways glance at the old man but mostly staring at the sand that lay in the shadows created by his two thin legs. The cop
was saying ‘Nothing to see here people. Just move along, will ya? Nothing to see’ to anyone who came within earshot. Slowly the life of the beach began to resume its original pattern – the children playing with their toys, the old ladies freshening themselves with fans made of rolled-up newspapers – only that the old man still lay at the water’s edge with the doctor pushing every so often at his rib-cage. Once a pause in the movement of the doctor’s hands exposed the old man’s face, and she saw that it was as grey as lead. She found herself thinking about the black gown she would wear on Sundays at Wheaton and the bright sunshine streaming through the vaulted windows of the Episcopalian chapel. In this way great stretches of time seemed to pass, but when she looked at her watch she found that only a few moments had gone by since the old man had been dragged out of Lake Michigan. But the bloom had gone off the day: there was no doubt about it. Huey looked at his monstrous feet again, as if they might have the answer to the problems with which he was clearly beset.