John Passos - 1919

It wasn’t so bad at the Bayview, but the guests and help were all old people; about his own age there was only Skinny Murray the other bellhop, a tall sandyhaired boy who never had anything to say. He was a couple of years older than Dick. They slept on two cots in a small airless room right up under the roof that would still be so hot from the sun by bedtime they could hardly touch it. Through the thin partition they could hear the waitress in the next room rustling about and giggling as they went to bed. Dick hated that sound and the smell of girls and cheap facepowder that drifted in through the crack in the wall. The hottest nights he and Skinny would take the screen out of the window and crawl out along the gutter to a piece of flat roof there was over one of the upper porches. There the mosquitoes would torment them, but it was better than trying to sleep on their cots. Once the girls were looking out of the window and saw them crawling along the gutter and made a great racket that they were peeping and that they’d report them to the manageress, and they were scared to death and made plans all night about what they’d do if they were fired, they’d go to Barnegat and get work on fishing boats; but the next day the girls didn’t say anything about it. Dick was kinda disappointed because he hated waiting on people and running up and down stairs answering bells.

It was Skinny who got the idea they might make some extra money selling fudge, because when Dick got a package of fudge from his mother he sold it to one of the waitresses for a quarter. So Mrs. Savage sent a package of fresh fudge and panocha every week by parcel post that Dick and Skinny sold to the guests in little boxes. Skinny bought the boxes and did most of the work but Dick convinced him it wouldn’t be fair for him to take more than ten percent of the profits because he and his mother put up the original capital.

The next summer they made quite a thing of the fudgeselling. Skinny did the work more than ever because Dick had been to a private school and had been hobnobbing with rich boys all winter whose parents had plenty of money. Luckily none of them came to Bay Head for the summer. He told Skinny all about the school and recited ballads about St. John Hospitaller and Saint Christopher he’d made up and that had been published in the school paper; he told him about serving at the altar and the beauty of the Christian Faith and about how he’d made the outfield in the junior baseball team. Dick made Skinny go to church with him every Sunday to the little Episcopal chapel called St. Mary’s-by-the-Sea. Dick used to stay after the service and discuss points of doctrine and ceremony with Mr. Thurlow the young minister and was finally invited to come home with him to dinner and meet his wife.

The Thurlows lived in an unpainted peakedroofed bungalow in the middle of a sandlot near the station. Mrs. Thurlow was a dark girl with a thin aquiline nose and bangs, who smoked cigarettes and hated Bay Head. She talked about how bored she was and how she shocked the old lady parishioners and Dick thought she was wonderful. She was a great reader of the Smart Set and The Black Cat and books that were advanced, and poked fun at Edwin’s attempts to restore primitive Christianity to the boardwalk, as she put it. Edwin Thurlow would look at her from under the colorless lashes of his pale eyes and whisper meekly, “Hilda, you oughtn’t to talk like that”; then he’d turn mildly to Dick and say, “Her bark is worse than her bite, you know.” They got to be great friends and Dick took to running around to their house whenever he could get away from the hotel. He took Skinny around a couple of times but Skinny seemed to feel that their talk was too deep for him and would never stay long but would shuffle off after explaining that he had to sell some fudge.

The next summer it was mostly the hope of seeing the Thurlows that made Dick not mind going to work at the Bayview where Mrs. Higgins gave him the job of the roomclerk with an increase of pay on account of his gentlemanly manners. Dick was sixteen and his voice was changing; he had dreams about things with girls and thought a lot about sin and had a secret crush on Spike Culbertson, the yellowhaired captain of his school ballteam. He hated everything about his life, his aunt and the smell of her boarding house, the thought of his father, his mother’s flowergarden hats, not having enough money to buy good clothes or go to fashionable summer-resorts like the other fellows did. All kinds of things got him terribly agitated so that it was hard not to show it. The wabble of the waitresses’ hips and breasts while they were serving meals, girls’ underwear in store windows, the smell of the bathhouses and the salty tingle of a wet bathingsuit and the tanned skin of fellows and girls in bathingsuits lying out in the sun on the beach.

He’d been writing Edwin and Hilda long letters all winter about anything that came into his head, but when he actually saw them he felt funny and constrained. Hilda was using a new kind of perfume that tickled his nose; even when he was sitting at the table at lunch with them, eating cold ham and potato salad from the delicatessen and talking about the primitive litanies and gregorian music he couldn’t help undressing them in his mind, thinking of them in bed naked; he hated the way he felt.

Sunday afternoons Edwin went to Elberon to conduct services in another little summer chapel. Hilda never went and often invited Dick to go out for a walk with her or come to tea. He and Hilda began to have a little world between them that Edwin had nothing to do with, where they only talked about him to poke fun at him. Dick began to see Hilda in his queer horrid dreams. Hilda began to talk about how she and Dick were really brother and sister, how passionless people who never really wanted anything couldn’t understand people like them. Those times Dick didn’t get much chance to say anything. He and Hilda would sit on the back stoop in the shade smoking Egyptian Deities until they felt a little sick. Hilda’d say she didn’t care whether the damn parishioners saw her or not and talk and talk about how she wanted something to happen in her life, and smart clothes and to travel to foreign countries and to have money to spend and not to have to fuss with the housekeeping and how she felt sometimes she could kill Edwin for his mild calfish manner.

Edwin usually got back on a train that got in at 10:53 and, as Dick had Sunday evenings off from the hotel, he and Hilda would eat supper alone together and then take a walk along the beach. Hilda would take his arm and walk close to him; he’d wonder if she felt him tremble whenever their legs touched.

All week he’d think about those Sunday evenings. Sometimes he’d tell himself that he wouldn’t go another time. He’d stay up in his room and read Dumas or go out with fellows he knew; being alone with Hilda like that made him feel too rotten afterwards. Then one moonless night, when they’d walked way down the beach beyond the rosy fires of the picnickers, and were sitting side by side on the sand talking about India’s Love Lyrics that Hilda had been reading aloud that afternoon, she suddenly jumped on him and mussed up his hair and stuck her knees into his stomach and began to run her hands over his body under his shirt. She was strong for a girl, but he’d just managed to push her off when he had to grab her by the shoulders and pull her down on top of him. They neither of them said anything but lay there in the sand breathing hard. At last she whispered, “Dick, I mustn’t have a baby… We can’t afford it…. That’s why Edwin won’t sleep with me. Damn it, I want you, Dick. Don’t you see how awful it all is?” While she was talking her hands were burning him, moving down across his chest, over his ribs, around the curve of his belly. “Don’t, Hilda, don’t.” There were mosquitoes around their heads. The long hissing invisible wash of the surf came almost to their feet.