Conrad Aiken - Great Circle

— the night when Uncle Tom and Aunt Norah had gone to the Yacht Club to see the fireworks, riding on their bicycles, with the little lamps lighted, the red jewel at one side and the green at the other, and the smell of hot kerosene, we watched the little wobbling arcs of light moving away along the sand-ruts, and I pointed out to Susan the stars in Cassiopeia’s Chair, standing on the tennis court. Mother and Uncle David were talking on the porch, each in a different hammock, slapping at mosquitoes and laughing, for they had decided to stay at home and watch the fireworks from the Point. We sat down on the edge of the porch and looked at the Plymouth lights and waited for the fireworks, but they didn’t come. Perhaps they would be later. Mother was lying back in her hammock, with her hands under her head and her white elbows lifted and Uncle David was smoking a cigarette. When he drew in his breath, the end of the cigarette glowed and lit up his face, and he was always looking downward at the floor and frowning.

— Susan, darling, how did all that water get there on the floor.

— It was Porper, Mother, he was blowing soap bubbles before supper.

— Will one of you please clean it up. Andy, will you get a mop or a cloth from the kitchen and wipe it up. You’re the porch cleaner, aren’t you.

— Oh, Mother, I’ll have to sweep it in the morning anyway—

— But it doesn’t look nice. Run along. Perhaps afterward you and Susan would like to have a game of croquinole together.

— Could we go out for a row in the dory.

— If it’s a very short one. You must have Susan back in time for her bedtime.

In the kitchen, I stood by the sink and looked out of the window at the back, and saw someone carrying a lighted lamp across one of the windows in the Wardman house. Molly and Margaret were talking to a man in the darkness on the back porch, probably the chauffeur from the Tuppers, who was always hanging around them. I didn’t either. You did too. I didn’t either. You did too. You’re crazy to say such a thing you ought to know better than that I never said any such thing to him in my life, not me. I only said I saw them on the beach. I wouldn’t say more than that. What were they talking about? I listened, but they must have known I was there, for they lowered their voices, and I couldn’t make out anything else, especially as the windmill was pumping, and I could hear the groan of the rod and the regular gush of water into the cistern. I went out into the pantry to get the mop, went down the three wooden steps to the earthen floor, and stood there in the nice smell of potatoes and squashes and green corn and damp smell of earth, watching the indicator on the cistern, the little lead weight jiggling lower and lower against the pine boards as the water raised the float. Last year we had to pump all the water by hand. A hundred strokes without stopping. I rolled up my sleeves, and always felt my muscles when I had finished, to see how hard they were. Why was Mother always trying to get rid of us like this. With Father it was different, he always wanted to do things with us in the holidays. Like last year, when he gave me the camera and took me on walks and showed me how to take pictures, and I got the picture of the beach-plum dyke all crooked, so that it looked like a wave of cobblestones. And I took the Horse Monument, but it was out of focus, or light-struck, or something. But I had fifteen blueprints that were quite good.

When I got back to the porch Susan was alone.

— Where have they gone.

— Oh, down to the front beach or something.

— They make me sick always going off like that.

— Andy, you shouldn’t talk like that.

— Well, they do. I bet they’ve gone out in the motorboat, that’s what they’ve done, and without inviting us.

— They don’t have to invite us every time they go, do they?

— No, but they might invite us sometimes. Come on, we’ll go out in the dory, and I don’t care if we never get back.

— But we won’t see the fireworks, Andy.

— Who wants to see the fireworks, besides we could row around to this side of the Point, couldn’t we? Don’t be a twit.

We walked down across the humped grass to the Point, in the dark, the blades of the oars clacking together as I carried them over my shoulder, the rowlocks jingling in Susan’s hand. It was warm and the crickets were chirping. Susan was ahead of me when we got to the bluff, I watched her white dress vanish down the sandy path to the beach, and then I looked out at the water and saw a light in the cabin of Uncle David’s motorboat. It looked far out, because the tide was high, almost up to the foot of the bluff. Susan was already sitting in the stern of the dory, hanging her hands in the water, the ripples were slapping against the sides, and I pulled the anchor out of the bayberry bush and got in. Ought I to tell Susan what I was going to do, or not. If I didn’t, she might talk, and spoil everything. If I did, she might not want to, and besides we might see something—

— I tell you what we’ll do, we’ll pretend we’re spies, and row right around them. I’ll row around them so close we could touch them, and they won’t hear a sound.

— But, Andy—

— Shut up, will you?

I pushed the blade of the oar into the sand and shoved off with two shoves and then began rowing very softly, rowing backwards, so that I could face toward the motorboat. Why was I frightened. What was there to be frightened of. It was only like playing the Indian scouting game. It was only like the guerrilla war in the Pembroke Woods. How could they possibly hear us anyway, with the ripples washing against the Osprey, making that hollow coppery sound that you heard when you were down in the cabin. And they couldn’t see us, because the little yellow curtains were drawn across the two cabin portholes. I backed out till we were past the white bow, which looked very high, and then shipped my oars and let the tide take us slowly alongside. We could hear them talking. The tender, which was tied with too short a painter, was bumping against the port side of the stern, and in the cabin there was a thump as if something had been dropped on the floor.

— Come on, Doris, let’s have another.

— Oh, no, let’s—

— Oh, come on, the night is young.

— I don’t like it, David.

— What’s wrong with it? Are you getting a conscience or something?

— Oh, no, but if they thought—

— Thought what.

— Oh, you know as well as I do.

— Let them think. Here, try this—

— Please, David—

I gave a push with my hand against the brass corner of the stern plate and we just barely cleared the gunwale of the tender, which was swinging across. They were drinking, Uncle David must be trying to make Mother drunk, that was it, perhaps the thump was a bottle falling on the floor of the cabin. I let the tide carry us a little way toward the bridge, where I could see the high wooden piers of the draw, and then I shipped my oars and began to row.

— We’ll go through the draw, and then across to the outer beach. Then we’ll walk along the beach to the dunes and watch the fireworks.

— Andy, what were they saying, what was Mother saying.

— I couldn’t hear. Was the cabin door open or shut?

— It was shut.

I shot the dory through the draw, where the tide was swift, the deep eddies sucking and chuckling at the foot of the tall piles, and felt my face hot, and I wanted to do something, to go back there, to bank at the side of the Osprey, to shout. But what was the use.

— particularly always, too, the hour after lunch, the hot and peaceful hour, the sleepy hour, when Susan and Porper always had to have naps upstairs, and Mother and Aunt Norah stretched themselves out in hammocks on the porch, and Uncle David went into his room to read, and Uncle Tom wrote letters on the dining-room table, or painted screens on the grass in front of the house, the screens supported on wooden horses. What would we do later. Would we be sent to the playhouse for the whole afternoon, or would we go clam-digging, or take a walk to the cove, or would Sanford come to tell me that there was a baseball game at the Peters’. I went down to the playhouse by myself, it was very hot and smelt of new wood, greenhead flies were on the insides of the screens, and I thought it would be a good chance to see if I could take off the handle bars of Aunt Norah’s new Columbia bicycle, so I stood on the table, the one we played Gonko on, and hauled myself up to the top of the wooden partition, and dropped over into the bicycle shed. This business of taking naps after lunch. This hammock business. Mother’s hand lying over the edge of the yellow striped hammock, the fringe of long yellow strings rippling in the southwest wind, her book fallen to the veranda floor, the opened pages fluttering. Susan, pretending to take a nap in her room, but really reading. Uncle David pretending to take a nap, but really drinking out of one of those bottles, using the tumbler on the washstand, which always smelt like bay rum. I took the monkey wrench out of the little cylindrical tool kit under the saddle and got the handlebars off easily enough, but I was worried for fear I wouldn’t get them back on again at the same height and angle, and sweated at the thought that Aunt Norah might notice it. It was a Columbia Chainless, and what I really wanted to do was to open the gearbox and look at the gears, but the nuts were too tight, and I was afraid. Besides, somebody might come — Uncle Tom might take it into his head to come down looking for me, maybe to ask me to go on a wildflower hunt, and I wouldn’t have time to get it together again. I climbed back into the playhouse, and then I went outside and crawled under the floor and got some more shingles, with crickets walking on them, and took them into the playhouse to make some new Gonko rackets. We would need some more Ping-pong balls. Porper was always losing them or stepping on them. He kept throwing them into the bed of poison ivy at the foot of the hill, by the stone wall. That was where all the golf balls used to go when Uncle Tom and Father played golf. I looked at my shin to see if the little blue map of the golf ball was still there, and it was almost gone.