They had bruised girls’ lips with kisses then, had learned the pleasure of encircling a waist or running a hand along a stockinged leg, of feeling a heartbeat behind a breast, but the Paulist Fathers had gotten them at an early age and they had studied heaven and hell long before they knew that at the top of a stocking there was only bare flesh, and boys they had
known from the basketball court or the K. of C. had already gone over and lost their lives. And even in Manhattan, at midnight, in uniform and as drunk as the girls on their knees, they saw through the bold music and the laughter and the smoky air their foreshortened lives, the nearness of eternity, and so always rode the subway home alone, reeling and laughing and helped by the hands of innumerable smiling strangers, to sleep it off under their mothers’ own roof.
The next afternoon the two girls and their six charges were there again, the thinner one in the same dark blue bathing suit that cut squarely across the top of her thighs in the front but in the back relented a little and followed the sweet lines of her bottom; the other in yet another swim cap, a pale yellow one this time, a halo now as Billy squinted at her from across the sand. They had a beach umbrella with them today, green with yellow stripes, and in its shade they had both a lunch hamper and a wicker laundry basket.
The children were in the water already when the two of them arrived, the younger ones equipped today with red and blue inner tubes, and so it was easy enough, after they had shed their boots and their socks and their khaki pants, to nod at the ladies once more and then to say to the children as they walked past them into the gently lapping surf, “The water’s very wet today, don’t you think?”
There was a pause of children’s stares.
Billy winked. “It wasn’t quite as wet yesterday, was it?”
The four children gazed at them, four towheads with bluegreen eyes and a red bandage of sun across each nose. “No,” one of them, the tallest girl, said. “It couldn’t be.”
“Sure,” Billy told them. He rubbed some water between thumb and forefinger as if he were feeling cloth. “And one day last week it was hardly wet at all.”
“Didn’t need a towel,” Dennis said.
“Didn’t need a towel,” Billy agreed. “Went in for half an hour and came out dry as a bone.”
The older girl was still looking at them skeptically, but the younger ones had begun to giggle, the laughter bobbing up to their throats much as they were bobbing inside their swim tubes. “No,” they said. “You’re making that up.”
“It’s the truth,” Dennis said indignantly, and then Billy pointed to the smallest girl, who, because she could not touch the bottom, moved with more abandon as she laughed.
“Look at this little one here,” Billy said. “She looks like a buoy.”
Dennis shook his head gravely. “No, she’s a girl.”
The little one looked to her bigger sister and the sister said, “She’s a girl.”
“But she looks like a buoy,” Billy said again. “A buoy, a buoy.” He pointed out to the bay, to the black buoys that dotted the horizon until the children saw what he meant and began shouting, “A buoy, a boo-eee, one of those.”
But Dennis continued to shake his head. “How could she be a boy with all that hair piled up on top of her head? You’re a girl, aren’t you?”
And the little one, uncertain of the joke but delighted by the attention, merely giggled and bobbed and let the other three cry for her, “Yes, she’s a girl, but he means a buoy, a buoy.”
The commotion had the desired effect (blessed, blessed children) and slowly, the young woman in the navy-blue suit sauntered toward the water with a toddler on her hip, a smile beginning, Dennis was certain, if she would only raise that coyly bent head.
This she did as she entered the water and with her free hand splashed some of it on the baby’s plump leg. “Hello,” she
said, meeting their eyes just long enough to show that hers were gray and darkly lashed.
“Hello,” they said, one after the other, with as much gallantry and graciousness as they could, being bare-chested and thigh-high in water. Had they been wearing hats, they would have tipped them.
“Isn’t the water wet today, Mary?” the older girl asked.
Mary continued to sweep up water languidly with her fingertips and to brush it onto the child’s legs. “Yes, isn’t it?” she said. The poor child looking down into the bay with something nearing terror, clinging to her shoulder and the neck of her suit, pulling it down just that much to show an inch of pure white flesh just below a delicate suntan. “Wetter than yesterday, I think,” she said.
And there it was.
“You’re Irish,” Dennis said, and Billy asked, “Where from?” at the ready with the information that his own father was from Cork and his mother Donegal.
She was from a place in County Wicklow, although she’d been over here since before the war. Since before Jonathan, the oldest boy, who was now stretched out under the umbrella with a magazine and an apple, was born. And of course, looking up at Jonathan on the blanket, they could not help but see the other girl, too (although Billy saw her as a mirage of smeared color, pink legs and a dark suit, pink shoulders and arms and face, and a yellow cap like a low flame, a mirage that perhaps only wild hope and great imagination could form into a solid woman).
“That’s Eva, my sister,” Mary said. “She’s only visiting. She’s on her way home.”
The family they worked for had a place on Park Avenue and a house in East Hampton and money, Dennis gathered, that poured down like sunlight. The man of the house had
spent the war in Washington, D.C., but not so much of it that the babies ever stopped coming, all six of them born in the past decade, and the seventh, the newest, now asleep in the wicker basket.
“It was really too much for me,” Mary said. “So I asked if my sister could come for the summer. She’d been with a family in Chicago. She’ll be going home in the fall.”
Billy squinted and nodded and stirred the water around him with his hands. It might have been quicksand, he seemed, at the moment, so mired in it. It was not that Mary herself wasn’t pretty enough, with her gray eyes and her dark hair and her boyish and direct way, but Dennis already had the greater part in the conversation and she herself seemed to like it that way. And he wanted to swear no allegiance until he had considered both options carefully, and he sensed, perhaps because she was still a blur of colored light, that the girl on the blanket was the one for him.
But how to get to her? How to end this conversation here (he and Dennis, after all, hadn’t even swum yet) and get up on the shore and near enough to the blanket where she sat in the partial shade of the umbrella to say, “Well, hello, Eva.”
And then the infant in the basket began to cry. At first he thought it was the cry of a gull and he looked toward the sky, but then he saw her kneeling beside the basket and lifting the child—another blur—to her shoulder, then standing, rocking, beginning to pace. The other children were oblivious to the crying, as no doubt they had to be in a family where year after year another baby arrives to bump them that much further into adulthood, but Mary and Dennis were oblivious, too, talking now, just the two of them, about certain lucky investors who had done nothing but profit from the war.
Billy walked past them, through the water and over the rocky edge of the shore. He had not swum and so only his
trunks and legs were wet and even his hands seemed to dry as he made his way toward her. The baby was crying full blast now, hot and sleepy and desperate against her shoulder. She had a hand behind its head and was hushing and clucking, but as soon as he was close enough to see her better, he knew she’d had her eyes on him all along. The boy with the magazine turned his slim back to them, as befit a magnate’s son.
She smiled ruefully. The blossom of curly hair above her forehead was dark, dark red, and the yellow cap that hid the rest of it had been partially knocked back, a dishevelment that made what at a distance was the illusion of an aura, a halo, seem, close up, only childish and adorable. Her eyes were brown, her cheeks smooth and broad, and because her teeth were crooked her mouth was crooked, too. She was shorter than her sister and indeed plumper. And the shoulder the poor babe was wetting with saliva and tears was whiter than the sand, scattered with dark beauty marks as delicate as distant stars.
“Can I take him?” Billy said, holding out his hands. He stood at the edge of the blanket, darkening the sand with the water from his suit.
“If I can just get him his bottle,” she said—her accent, too, was plumper than her sister’s, and there was a tremble in it, a kind of panic, set off, no doubt, by the child’s insistent misery.
“I’ll take him,” he said.
If he had been more self-conscious, it wouldn’t have worked. Or if he had been more calculating. If, when she handed him the screaming child he had noticed the movement of her breasts, the size of her waist, the shape of her legs and her thighs as she quickly turned to the lunch hamper to find the bottle of milk, the child would have stiffened in his arms and screamed all the more and he would have been forced to hand him back to her and perhaps even, awkwardly, make his defeated way back to the water, matters far worse for his interference.
But the child was as light as a feather in his hands and the lightness took his breath away. The baby wore a seersucker sunsuit that left his tiny arms and shoulders bare, and Billy covered these with a cupped palm as he rested the child against his chest. The flesh was as sweetly warm as if the hand of God had just formed it. He blew softly across the child’s downy hair and closed his eyes to say, “Now now, little fellow. Now now.”
The child was lighter than the sun-warmed air. The miracle of it, for him, was the perfection of the tiny head and spine, ear and hand. The miracle was that the child quieted immediately in Billy’s arms, placed his cheek to Billy’s heart, and heaved one deep and restful sigh even before she had turned from the cooler with the bottle of milk in her hand.
“Will you look at that now?” she said, showing her crooked smile, her flashing eyes. “You must have a way with children.”
And he could see from the start (her eyes were not so much brown but a kind of mahogany, the exact color of her hair) that there was nothing she more admired in a man.
“Have you got lots of brothers and sisters?”
What better way to begin? He held the child and they talked together until the wet sand at his feet had dried again, and when the child next woke she handed him the bottle and he lowered himself and the baby onto the blanket, under the umbrella’s shade, and fed him there while the other children ran up and back and Dennis and Mary, now standing at the edge of the water, talked and talked.
When did he fall in love with her? Probably it was the day before, before she had even come clearly into his view. But that afternoon he fell in love with the rest of his life, and that was better still. The days ahead when he would come to the beach here and the child he held, the children who ran to them, wet and trembling, would be theirs and when the flesh
of her arms and her throat and her sweet breasts would be as familiar to him as his own.
It was there, that life, that future. It had been there all along. He simply hadn’t known it until now, or had the capacity to imagine just a month ago that something like this might be his. That this golden future, this Eden, had been part of the same life he’d been living all along. Wasn’t that something? He hadn’t known until now that it was there.
They met again the next afternoon and the next. Dennis and Billy began to quit work a bit earlier each day, and at times it was nearly dusk before they left their boots on the steps by the front door.
The Mr. and Mrs.—or so the girls called their employers—were in Washington for the week, and so it was easy enough for them to tell the driver not to come until six or so, then seven. The children were glad to be out late and to have their supper at the shore, with the candy Billy brought them for dessert.
At night the boys still made their slow circuit of the stately homes, but now with a keener interest and intent, to discover the house the girls lived in. Although they tried gentle questioning for the first few afternoons (“You’re not in one of those places on the beach, are you?”), it was only by direct inquiry that they learned which house it was exactly and then were rewarded that same night with the sight of Eva, glimpsed through the only opening in the high hedge that until now had made the house uninteresting, crossing the front path, barefoot, and going up the steps to the porch.
Late in August, a Tuesday night, they met the girls at the house itself. It was nine o’clock. The Mr. and Mrs. had said the girls could go out, but only after the children were asleep, and the girls told them to come around to the back and knock at the kitchen door.
At deep blue twilight they passed through the village and
down the now-familiar streets. They were newly showered and shaved and they wore the white shirts they had washed out in the morning and left to dry in the sun all day long and then ironed themselves, with an ancient, secondhand Proctor-Silex, on a towel under a pillowcase spread out on the kitchen table. They turned in, as they had been instructed, past the tall hedge, and the crackle of their slow wheels on the gravel drive was enough to set their nerves drumming, the way the fanfare did in the moment before a curtain was raised on a stage.