John Passos - The 42nd Parallel

In the dark hotel lobby lit by a couple of smoked oillamps he saw her, out of the corner of his eye, throw her arms round a tall whitehaired man, but by the time he had scrawled John W. Moorehouse in his most forceful handwriting in the register and gotten his roomkey from the clerk, they had gone. Up in the little pine bedroom it was very hot. When he pulled up the window, the roar of the surf came in through the rusty screen mingling with the rattle of rain on the roof. He changed his collar and washed in tepid water he poured from the cracked pitcher on the washstand and went down to the diningroom to try to get something to eat. A goat-toothed waitress was just bringing him soup when Miss Strang came in followed by the tall man. As the only lamp was on the table he was sitting at, they came towards it and he got up and smiled. “Here he is, Dad,” she said. “And you owe him for the driver that brought us from the station… Mr. Morris, you must meet my father, Dr. Strang… The name was Morris, wasn’t it?” Johnny blushed. “Moorehouse, but it’s quite all right…. I’m glad to meet you, sir.”

Next morning Johnny got up early and went round to the office of the Ocean City Improvement and Realty Company that was in a new greenstained shingled bungalow on the freshly laidout street back of the beach. There was no one there yet so he walked round the town. It was a muggy gray day and the cottages and the frame stores and the unpainted shacks along the railroad track looked pretty desolate. Now and then he slapped a mosquito on his neck. He had on his last clean collar and he was worried for fear it would get wilted. Whenever he stepped off the board sidewalks he got sand in his shoes, and sharp beachburrs stuck to his ankles. At last he found a stout man in a white linen suit sitting on the steps of the realestate office. “Good morning, sir,” he said. “Are you Colonel Wedgewood?” The stout man was too out of breath to answer and only nodded. He had one big silk handkerchief stuck into his collar behind and with another was mopping his face. Johnny gave him the letter he had from his firm and stood waiting for him to say something. The fat man read the letter with puckered brows and led the way into the office. “It’s this asthma,” he gasped between great wheezing breaths. “Cuts ma wind when Ah trah to hurry. Glad to meet you, son.”

Johnny hung round old Colonel Wedgewood the rest of the morning, looking blue-eyed and boyish, listening politely to stories of the Civil War and General Lee and his white horse Traveller and junketings befoa de woa on the Easten Shoa, ran down to the store to get a cake of ice for the cooler, made a little speech about the future of Ocean City as a summer resort—“Why, what have they got at Atlantic City or Cape May that we haven’t got here?” roared the Colonel — went home with him to his bungalow for lunch, thereby missing the train he ought to have taken back to Wilmington, refused a mint julep — he neither drank nor smoked — but stood admiringly by while the Colonel concocted and drank two good stiff ones, for his asthma, used his smile and his blue eyes and his boyish shamble on the Colonel’s colored cook Mamie and by four o’clock he was laughing about the Governor of North Carolina and the Governor of South Carolina and had accepted a job with the Ocean City Improvement and Realty Company at fifteen dollars a week, with a small furnished cottage thrown in. He went back to the hotel and wrote Mr. Hillyard, inclosing the deeds for the lots and his expense account, apologized for leaving the firm at such short notice but explained that he owed it to his family who were in great need to better himself as much as he could; then he wrote to his mother that he was staying on in Ocean City and please to send him his clothes by express; he wondered whether to write Miss O’Higgins, but decided not to. After all, bygones were bygones.

When he had eaten supper he went to the desk to ask for his bill, feeling pretty nervous for fear he wouldn’t have enough money to pay it, and was just coming out with two quarters in his pocket and his bag in his hand when he met Miss Strang. She was with a short dark man in white flannels whom she introduced as Monsieur de la Rochevillaine. He was a Frenchman but spoke good English. “I hope you’re not leaving us,” she said. “No, ma’am, I’m just moving down the beach to one of Colonel Wedgewood’s cottages.” The Frenchman made Johnny uneasy; he stood smiling suave as a barber beside Miss Strang. “Oh, you know our fat friend, do you? He’s a great crony of Dad’s. I think he’s just too boring with his white horse Traveller.” Miss Strang and the Frenchman smiled both at once as if they had some secret in common. The Frenchman stood beside her swinging easily on the balls of his feet as if he were standing beside some piece of furniture he owned and was showing off to a friend. Johnny had a notion to paste him one right where the white flannel bulged into a pot belly. “Well, I must go,” he said. “Won’t you come back later? There’s going to be dancing. We’d love to have you.” “Yes, come back by all means,” said the Frenchman. “I will if I can,” said Johnny and walked off with his suitcase in his hand, feeling sticky under the collar and sore. “Drat that Frenchman,” he said aloud. Still, there was something about the way Miss Strang looked at him. He guessed he must be falling in love.

It was a hot August, the mornings still, the afternoons piling up sultry into thundershowers. Except when there were clients to show about the scorched sandlots and pinebarrens laid out into streets, Johnny sat in the office alone under the twoflanged electric fan. He was dressed in white flannels and a pink tennis shirt rolled up to the elbows, drafting the lyrical description of Ocean City (Maryland) that was to preface the advertising booklet that was the Colonel’s pet idea: “The lifegiving surges of the broad Atlantic beat on the crystalline beaches of Ocean City (Maryland)… the tonic breath of the pines brings relief to the asthmatic and the consumptive… nearby the sportsman’s paradise of Indian River spreads out its broad estuary teeming with…” In the afternoon the Colonel would come in sweating and wheezing and Johnny would read him what he had written and he’d say, “Bully, ma boy, bully,” and suggest that it be all done over. And Johnny would look up a new batch of words in a dogeared “Century Dictionary” and start off again.

It would have been a fine life except that he was in love. Evenings he couldn’t keep away from the Ocean House. Each time he walked up the creaking porch steps past the old ladies rocking and fanning with palmleaf fans, and went through the screen doors into the lobby he felt sure that this time he’d find Annabelle Marie alone, but each time the Frenchman was with her as smiling and cool and potbellied as ever. They both made a fuss over Johnny and petted him like a little dog or a precocious child; she taught him to dance the “Boston,” and the Frenchman, who it turned out was a duke or a baron or something, kept offering him drinks and cigars and scented cigarettes. Johnny was shocked to death when he found out that she smoked, but somehow it went with dukes and Newport and foreign travel and that sort of thing. She used some kind of musky perfume and the smell of it and the slight rankness of cigarettesmoke in her hair made him dizzy and feverish when he danced with her. Some nights he tried to tire out the Frenchman playing pool, but then she’d disappear to bed and he’d have to go off home cursing under his breath. While he undressed he could still feel a little tingle of musk in his nostrils. He was trying to make up a song:

By the moonlight sea

I pine for thee

Annabelle Marie…