Due North

== DUE NORTH ==
=== by Wilbur Daniel Steele ===
From The Best Stories of Wilbur Daniel Steele 1946 
May Coberly was a coward. Things that scared her,
scared her so much they made her feel sick at her stomach. She was always so
proud, though, that nobody knew it. Even as a very little girl she would never
let on. The Rock Island tracks ran almost under their back yard in Des Moines,
and her older brother, Fred, who would have been ten or eleven then, used to
make her sit astraddle of the back fence sometimes when the Chicago flier was
coming. It made her scream, and she knew it was going to, but she always
managed to hold it till the shaking and roaring were at their worst and drowned
out the noise she made, and then she would run away and pretend to play
somewhere, and if she was sick Fred never knew it. 
The words about fearing God in the Bible never puzzled
May as they do most children. God always did frighten her. When she was taken
into the Wilder Avenue M. E. Church, when she went up forward to her first
communion, the instant she got the grape juice into her mouth she tasted blood
and had to go out— somebody showed her to the door under the choir the minister
used, and there was his lavatory. 
But the time she had the fright which really put her
to bed was when she was seventeen, the day they told her that the Grace Church
girl who was delegate to the Epworth League Convention at Ocean Grove, New
Jersey, couldn't go, because of her father's being suddenly worse in Colorado,
and May, who was the alternate, had to go. 
Two of May's best friends brought the news to the
house, Milla Heiffer, who was president of May's class at high school, and
Kathleen Batt, who sang soprano in the choir at Wilder Avenue and went with
Sylvester Templin, who sang the baritone solos. They asked May why she looked
that way, after they had told her, and she said it was because she had an awful
pain in her stomach, which she really had, but it would be all right soon if
she lay down. They laughed and said it had better be, seeing she was to leave
for the East day after tomorrow. 
"You'll see Chicago and Pittsburgh and New York
City, think of it!" Kathleen said. May's mother said she would go and
write a card to May's cousins in Davenport to be at the station there when May
came through, and Milla said: "And you'll see the Atlantic Ocean, think of
it, May!" 
May did think of it. It seemed to make the pain inside
of her ten times worse; she had always been so thrilled when she thought about
the seashore and the sea. May's mother was explaining to the girls how
interesting that would be for her daughter, since she herself had been born and
raised on the coast of Maine, and her father, May's grandfather, had been mate
on a sailing ship, although he spent his last days here in Des Moines, passing
away in their old house on Slater Street. 
"Often he used to spin yarns about voyages and
storms while he trotted my daughter on his knee, though of course she was too
little at the time to remember." 
May, from her bedroom where she'd gone, wanted to call
out, "I wasn't— I do!" But it didn't matter enough to pay to make the
effort, she was so panic-stricken at the idea of starting out for the East all
by herself, and so terrified something might happen and she wouldn't. 
Her upset got better soon after she lay down. 
Dozens were at the station to see her off. The girls
had put up a box for her first luncheon, and Dr. Warren, of Grace, handed over
the expense money and the two tickets, the regular one and one for the Pullman.
She thought to herself, when the train had started, in a few minutes she could
look out and up and see the back fence of the Slater Street house, and think:
"How little I could have dreamed, then!" But a man came in and sat
down in the seat opposite, where his hat was, and said, "Pardon me,"
with a kind of humorous smile, and May quickly got out a book she'd brought and
read it, so that she completely forgot to watch for the old fence when it
passed. 
And she saw that the man had sandy hair and gray-blue
eyes and broad shoulders, with a kind of tweed suit with a double breast— a
man, by his looks, of twenty-three or -four or -five. 
So she read until the two conductors came. She had an
awful minute then. Her regular ticket was there, but the little berth ticket
wasn't. May wanted to die. She tried to tell them that she had had it; they
could ask the porter. The two conductors smiled and said they guessed it wasn't
going to be fatal. There was something about wiring back from the next stop,
and what was May's name. She told them, May Price Coberly, and she was going to
Ocean Grove— though they knew that already, of course. And just then the man
opposite leaned forward and picked up something from under May's seat. It was
the berth ticket. Then they all laughed, and the regular conductor patted her
shoulder and said, "Change to the Pennsylvania in Chicago, that's all you
have to remember," and the two went on. 
May didn't know what to do, whether to thank the man
or not. If she said anything he might think she would talk. She looked in her
book. Then he said, more to himself: "May, that's a pretty name —though
I'd have said April." 
May read. He said: "It's not my fault, young
woman. It's Fate's. Here you are, bound for Ocean Grove, and here I am, for
Atlantic City, and both over the Pennsy too, and we simply can't sit here face
to face for God knows how many hours pretending each other is not alive. So why
don't you start by telling me why you're going to Ocean Grove, of all places! .
. . I'm going to Atlantic City because I live right near, and I have a sort of
a kind of boat there." 
May didn't know what she ought to do. It would have
been different had he been strikingly handsome, like Sylvester Templin when he
threw his dark hair back and sang baritone, or like the clerk at Stanger's who
would try it on with any good-looking girl. But he wasn't awfully handsome,
with his rough-combed hair, his wide jaw and wrinkly-cornered eyes, and
freckles on his hands— at first sight anyway. And of course, older. 
So May said: "The Epworth League national
convention is at Ocean Grove and I am a delegate." 
He threw up his hands. "Help!" he groaned,
though he grinned. May had to ask why. So he told her, a friend of his, a
fellow he'd gone through prep and college with, he'd been on a train with a
Y.W.C.A. delegate once, and that was only from Camden to Air toona, but now
they'd been married two years. 
May felt her face go as hot as fire. He made haste to
cover it up by laughing to himself and saying, God help the girl who had to
marry him, because he was a sailor. He looked at May, with that, and seemed
hurt. "If you don't believe I am, I'll take you up to the baggage car and
you can see my duffel bag." 
It wasn't that she didn't believe him; it was just the
opposite. It was knowing he was a sailor, all of a sudden like that, that
fussed her. She opened her book and started to read whatever page happened, but
he warned her that reading on trains was a terrible way to treat anybody's
eyes, which she hadn't known before. And anyway, he said, getting up, it was
away past lunchtime, and they ought to be getting to the dining car. 
Fortunately, May had an answer to that, the box
Kathleen and the others had put up. The man looked crestfallen. "Well,
make sure you clean it up now, for this evening you are dining with me." 
And after all, May couldn't eat a bite of the lunch,
tasty as the girls had made it. She had hardly opened it when she began to have
the same stomach ache she'd had two days before, and it got worse. Finally she
pushed the box back out of sight under the seat, and was clenching her hands
and almost biting her lip to keep looking right, when the man returned. 
"What's wrong with you?" he asked. "Hot
in here?" 
She let it go at that, and he said they'd better go
out back to the observation platform and get some air— "and have a look at
several of the United States," he said— although in fact they were still
in Iowa. 
May began to feel better out there. The train was just
leaving a station. May saw the sign at the yard limit, "Marengo." She
waited till they were beyond the last of the town, and then she said to the
man: "Now I'm the farthest east I've ever been." He just looked at
her with those wrinkles of humor out of the corners of his eyes, and kind of
shook his head, and got his pipe out. 
They sat and watched the rails and he smoked. By and
by the pain was gone. May began to feel hungry. 
"What did you have for your lunch?" she
said. She had almost to shout, on account of the train. He hitched his chair
nearer and took his knee between his hands. 
"Lunch," he said, "is a thing of the
past. Dinner is what I am thinking about intensively now." 
May was too. She felt so hollow. "I think for my
dinner I'm going to have some — " 
He stopped her. "You are an Iowa girl. How do you
know what people have for dinner in foreign places like Illinois, any more than
you know what they have for breakfast in Ohio or for lunch in Pennsylvania? No,
no!" He shook his head. "I am a world-traveled man; I shall just have
to take hold of this whole thing. In fact, I have a rough working plan sketched
out for dinner already. To begin with, some salami, celery, and olives— green,
because the ripe olives they have are canned. We will have some soft-shelled
crabs, which will come on at Davenport, the chef tells me, very fresh, and a
small but succulent fillet of beef to follow, and an artichoke— and let me
think." 
He must have been watching May from the corners of his
eyes and seen the worried way hers went to the purse she had tight in her hands
in her lap, for he gave her a look with his eyebrows pulled together. "I
hope you understand, when I say dining with me, I mean dining with me, young
woman!" 
May kept looking in her lap. "No, I couldn't let
you do that." 
"You can too. See here, I am an easterner, and
therefore a man of great wealth. So, please!" 
"No, please, I don't think I ought." 
He began to jeer. "You, you're a fine Epworth
League delegate, not to know any more about God than that!" 
May was so startled that she asked why. 
"Because God practically all but put it in the
Bible that sailors must buy dinner for girls with pretty eyes. It's called the
Law of the Medes and Persians." 
May couldn't help it, he looked so provoking and
merry. She laughed. 
"All right, I guess so then. Just dinner,
though." 
They were past West Liberty by that time. They sat for
a while and watched the rails, while he smoked his pipe. May began to feel
funny. She thought it might come from her eyes, the way the rails went. So she
looked at the passing fields and then at the sky. But it didn't help much. Her
lips felt dry. She wet them with her tongue. 
"I'm sorry I'm not more talkative," she
said.  
He simply grunted. "Thank God! I've spent most of
my life running away from the kind of people who can't just sit,
sometimes." 
Presently he knocked out his pipe. He caught her
licking her lips. 
"Let's have some lemonade." He called the
steward and ordered two glasses of lemonade. When hers was in her hand, May
said to herself, "I'm going to drink this!" But next instant the
glass got away and she grabbed for the man who was a sailor. All she managed to
catch was one of the buttons on his coat, and that was all she knew then. 
The next she knew, it was in the station at Davenport,
on the platform, and people were saying, "Yes, we are her cousins,"
and people were saying, "Gangway." He was carrying her. He was looking
down at her. Probably he wouldn't have said it out loud, even to himself, if he
had realized she had come to. 
"Poor girl with the pretty eyes, you never did
get out of Iowa." 
The next she knew, the second time, she was in bed in
a hospital, all tied up around the middle, and they had taken her appendix out.
Her mother had come from Des Moines and was staying
with the cousins. They all came in every day. They asked May how she was, and
she said she was all right. They asked if there was anything she wanted, and
she said no. But at night, when there was no nurse, she cried a good deal. 
They brought her belongings one day, the purse and
compact and things which the nurse had done up in a package. And one cousin
asked, "What's this button, May?" 
"What button?" 
"Well, you had it tight in one fist, the nurse
said. It looks like off a coat or something." 
May raised herself quickly and looked. Her breath came
hard. "Oh, that button— yes— I know— it's nothing." She got hold of
it. "It was just something I had— something I had to make me remember
something." 
That night when she cried she beat the pillow with her
fists, took a wad of it between her teeth to keep her sobs from being heard
everywhere. For something told her now. "I know, as certain as certain, if
we had gone on all the way . . ." 
She dreamed about it often in the following two years.
She could never dream it straight, though. She would be somewhere, say in
Kathleen Batt's living room, and somebody was shouting outside, and when she
looked it was a railway station, and an announcer was walking up and down,
calling, "Camden to Altoona!" Or she would be at table somewhere and
ask someone to pass the bread. Instead of bread, it was like a cross between a
pineapple and a green Easter lily that came toward her, and then she saw it was
he who passed it, saying, "And now your artichoke, young woman," and
May would wake up crying. 
That was about as near as her dreams ever came to
getting hold of it. They stopped pretty well altogether when she married
Sylvester Templin. She was nineteen then. 
It seemed at first as much like lucky lightning as the
other had seemed at first, the time the real delegate to Ocean Grove had to go
to Colorado instead. May was almost the only girl in the Wilder Avenue who had
never run after Sylvester. That's why it went the way it did, perhaps. So often
superattractive men, or women, will end by doing exactly that, picking the last
person in the world anybody has ever thought of. 
For once May wasn't frightened; she was too bewildered
even for that. Everybody was too excited, everything went too fast, for her to
ask herself if this was what it meant to be in love. It took the five days and
nights of their wedding trip to the Kentucky caves for her to begin to realize,
and then it didn't come fully until they were home again. 
It happened in church, the Sunday after they returned,
at the morning sendee. All that any of the girls could see that day was May,
May in her pew and Sylvester in the choir loft. May knew it. She felt their
eyes on her, full of envious speculations they couldn't help, and wonder, and
awe. Her own eyes she dared not turn or lift, till everybody did, when the
choir got up to sing. 
Sylvester had on the dark suit he'd been married in,
made to measure by a tailoring house. It set off his tall, slender, almost
willowy figure to perfection against the many-colored light that came in by the
Young St. John window. And when it came his time, and he flung his head back to
throw the dark lock off his forehead, and lifted his face and began to sing
alone with the organ, May caught her breath. Of a sudden she knew what love and
marriage really meant. Not just going around to caves and hotels with
Sylvester, and being called Mrs. Templin. It was something so much bigger, so
much deeper, marriage, and children, and everything. 
May couldn't help it, she didn't care who saw, down
went her hands on the pew back ahead and down went her face between them.
"O God our Father, grant and let me have a child— grant and let me bear to
Sylvester my husband a son in his own image, O God, Amen." 
She couldn't help it, she didn't care if the other
girls did see that her face was wet when she lifted it. 
But as the years began to go by it seemed that her
prayer was not to be answered. Whether it was she or Sylvester she didn't know;
it didn't matter. And perhaps it was just as well in a way. Sylvester's aim had
always been the opera; everybody had always said that there was where he would
land. An English opera company from Chicago came to Des Moines the year after
he and May were married, and Mr. Agassiz of the Third National Bank, a trustee
at Wilder Avenue, got Sylvester a chance to sing for the director and some of
the stars at their hotel. He sang well. They thought he had the makings of
something. But the director wanted him, if he went with them, to be in the
chorus simply— "carry a spear awhile," was the way he put it,
"and begin to get a glimmer of the rudiments." The pay, moreover, was
practically nothing. 
May could have met that part of it. She went so far as
to see Mr. Agassiz, and he promised to give her a job in the bank at eighteen a
week, and she could have lived with her mother when Sylvester was away. In the
end, though, she had to agree with Sylvester that there was nothing in being a
chorus man, for him. Something better was bound to come along. 
He had a position for a few months with another church
member, a concern that handled hides. But he wasn't adept, and he wasn't
contented. Music, after all, was the career he was marked for. "Why waste
time and energy on a sidetrack?" he told May. Some people said it was a
pity the church couldn't pay something, even a little, for choir work. May went
to Mr. Agassiz the second summer. He kept his word and gave her a job mailing
statements and things like that, which she could do. 
May always had been a coward. Little by little as she
grew tired she worked out a philosophy, without knowing it was a philosophy,
certainly without ever putting it in words. But it was this: if you don't look
at a thing, then it isn't there: if you don't say it, it isn't so. 
Pride was mixed up with this too. If she met one of
her old girl friends (and that meant one of Sylvester's old girl friends) and
if she was asked how Sylvester was making out, May would look happily
mysterious. "Oh, Sylvester is working on something now that looks so good
that we're not saying a word." And if there was any wooden thing handy May
would reach and rap on it three times. 
May began by liking the Wilder Avenue less and less;
she ended by hating it more and more. She explained it to herself by thinking
it was because she had to see so many people in whom she was no longer
interested, when she went there. Often, of a Sunday, she let Sylvester go
alone. If he asked what he should say— whether he should say she was tired or
ill— she made haste to tell him no. That was the last thing on earth she would
have had Kathleen and Milla and the others thinking, that she was ill or tired.
He could say she had gone over to Grace with a friend that belonged there, one
of the bank girls. 
The last time May set foot inside the Wilder Avenue
was the day her mother was buried from there. They moved out to the Viaduct
section shortly after. 
Once on a time some independents built a packing house
in the Viaduct, and two streets of small houses for the labor to live in. The
packing business had failed in short order, and now all sorts of people had the
houses, which were cheap, renting for sixteen dollars a month. Of course there
were the trolley fares, but they didn't make anywhere near the difference. Some
months, if nothing special came up, May could add two or three dollars to the
account she kept at the bank against the chance which terrified her more than
anything else: "Supposing something should happen to me!" 
For if anything should happen to her, and if she
didn't leave him any money, Sylvester would have to go to somebody, and the
only ones he could go to would be their old friends and acquaintances at the
Wilder Avenue. 
But the best part of living in the Viaduct was that it
was so far across town that Sylvester gave up his choir work. 
May's first realization of the truth of why she had
fallen away from the church came to her by chance, if not by sheer accident,
and it came like a bombshell. It was in the spring when she was thirty-one. A
girl at the bank had a husband who was a steel worker, and one Saturday
afternoon she wanted May to go to Halvert Union Hall with her. Perhaps because
she was too tired to want to argue out of it, May went. She wished she hadn't,
when she saw that the speaker was dressed like a clergyman. But when he began
to speak he took her breath away. 
The fear of God and the hope of the Hereafter have
always been the drugs, he said, with which the Have's have kept the Have-Nots
doped in submission. The Truth has got to put these bugaboos to flight before
the workers can hope to come into their own— the Truth that there's actually no
such thing as God, no such thing as life going on after the grave. People long
for immortality. So the capitalistic church says to a woman: "There's your
man that you love —you be good and make him be good, and when you're dead
you'll be raised again to live together in a happy land, forever and ever and
ever." Then the speaker pounded on his desk and pointed at them all and
told them. That husband and wife do go on living after the grave, not because
they're good, nor because they're bad, but because they have loved. Married,
mingled, in the veins and brain of the child they have made, and of that
child's children, together they shall live till the end of time. That is their
immortality. 
It took May's breath away. She grasped at what he
said, grabbed at it, and fiercely believed. When they were out on the sidewalk
the other girl asked her what had happened, that she looked that way. 
May said: "Thank God, I'm barren. When I die I
can call it a day." 
It seemed as if tons had fallen from her shoulders.
She could carry them straight now. She felt better, stronger, harder, more
independent. She spruced up. She bought a new compact the following Monday and
put more color on her mouth and cheeks, simply because she felt that way.
Before leaving the bank, after hours, when they were in the washroom, the other
girl asked May why she didn't put a touch of mascara on her lashes, she had
such pretty eyes, that color brown. The girl had some. 
May was sorry, though, when she reached home looking
that way. She hadn't thought. It got Sylvester started. She couldn't say she
was too tired that night; she'd already said she felt fine, though she hadn't
told him why. 
That night a second bombshell of realization hit May.
Sylvester went to sleep quickly, when he went. It was warm weather. He hadn't
any pajama top on, and the bedclothes were half off his shoulders and chest,
which were as smooth and white as a child's. He never seemed to change. Time,
which dragged May down little by little, passed over Sylvester and left no
mark. He might still have been twenty. He might have been seventeen. 
It may have been some premonition and May didn't know
it. All she knew was that horror came to her as she lay there in the dark
beside him and couldn't sleep. Finally she couldn't help herself, she lifted on
an elbow and stared at the grayness his whiteness made in the gloom. There was
something unnatural, unhealthy, unright. Between a boy of seventeen and a man
of thirty-four there ought to be a difference, in mind and in flesh. Either a
thing is alive or it is dead. If a mind is alive it doesn't quit. If flesh is
alive it changes, grows, grows older. If it's dead it's only so much meat, and
decays— unless you want to keep it on ice. 
Suddenly, all May could see was the glassed-in meat
counter at the A. & P. store, rimed with frost around the lower edge. She
saw red steaks, pinky-gray chops, greeny-gray sausages, and laid among them on
the bed of shaved ice, about of a size with the sausages, perfect and willowy
and white, she saw Sylvester. And she knew in that instant what she had fooled
herself about for years. It wasn't that she was too tired. It was because her
flesh loathed that flesh. 
She got out of bed, went into the bathroom, shut the
door and turned on the light. She didn't know what, she didn't know why. She
sat on the side of the tub and stared at the wall. She said to herself, "I
can't be awake." 
She got up. "One thing I want, I want to wash my
mouth with something." She opened the medicine case above the bowl, pushed
bottles around, hardly looking to see what they were. There was one away at the
back she hadn't seen or thought of for months, some mercuric cyanide tablets
she had got through the bank's insurance doctor two years ago, for some antisepsis.
This was just what the drug clerk had warned her against, forgetting and
leaving them around where somebody might mistake them for some kind of
soda-mints or medicine. They ought to be down the drain, before somebody did.  
She sat on the bathtub again and looked at the bottle.
"You'd be dead in a wink," that's what the
clerk had said. "You'd never know," he'd said, "what struck
you." 
May shook herself. What was wrong with her? She didn't
know. "Don't be such a fool!" she said. 
She returned the phial to the case. She went back and
got into bed, lying as far as she could over on her side of it. "Don't be
such a fool! Forget it!" 
She did forget it, for some weeks. When she remembered
it again was when she was beginning to go around her work at the bank with
white cheeks, and big eyes that might have been blind, the way she dropped this
thing or bumped into that. 
One blistering morning in July the other girl said to
her: "Look, May, you don't look good. Why don't you see some doctor?"
The head bookkeeper spoke to her the same morning.
"Go see Doc Gable, May. Won't cost you anything. I'll ask Mr.
Agassiz." 
May flew at him. "No you don't! I keep telling
you!" She came back to his cage a little later. "Please! It's just
this heat." 
At noon she got out alone. She took a streetcar and
went across to a part of town she didn't know, and found a doctor's sign. She
gave the doctor a wrong name and wrong address, she couldn't have said why. It
was simply panic. He catechized her and examined her. He told her, yes, she was
going to have a baby. He had to remind her, when she got up to go: "That
will be two dollars and a half, Mrs. Brown." 
Even then he had to call her back. He was looking at
the small silver that made up the half dollar, spread on his palm. He grinned
in a kind of sheepish way. "I guess you would as soon have this, Mrs.
Brown, and I'm sure I'd rather have the nickel." He handed back the luck
piece she'd always had a habit of carrying in her purse, a coat button made of
horn. She gave him the nickel and went away. 
First she thought she wouldn't go back to the bank.
Then she decided she must, otherwise they would think there was something wrong
with her. Besides, she'd rather be working than thinking. 
She needn't have worried. She couldn't think. She felt
the heat that afternoon, not as heat, but as a weight without particular
temperature pressing down on top of her brain. After closing, while she was
waiting for a Viaduct car, a newsboy stuck a paper into her empty hand. It was
the Evening Courier. She had given him pennies mechanically before she realized
what she was doing. She wanted to call after the boy, tell him they took the
Courier. It would be at home when she got there, on the floor by the stuffed
chair, sprawled open at the radio page. But what was the use?— and the car had
come. 
Then she was glad she had the paper. There was a man
sitting next to her, hip to hip with her, who wanted to make a pickup. She knew
she would break out screaming if she had to argue, so she just kept looking
hard at the paper. It was a Wednesday, and the outside section was the MidWeek
Pictorial. There was a picture of a record baseball crowd in Chicago. There was
a picture of a two-masted boat at anchor somewhere, with a man, a woman, and a
small boy at work about it, coiling ropes and things. In an oval at an upper
corner was a half-length snapshot of a bearded man in a fur parka with the hood
laid back. Behind him, in the background, was a stripe of black water and one
of white ice. A strong wind beat at his beard and his hair. 
A soiled ringer came and pointed at the picture.
"That wouldn't feel good a day like this— oh no!" 
May slammed the paper between the fellow's knees.
"Take it, if you're so interested; and let me be!" She got up and
went out to stand by the motorman till the car reached Alpine. 
May's house was the fifth on the right, up Alpine. It
was distinguished by stained glass in the front door, a garish imitation of
Delia Robbia which some Italian tenant had put in years before. Otherwise one
would have had to count. 
Sometimes Sylvester had things started toward supper,
the potatoes peeled, for instance. Tonight of all nights May hoped to God he
would. She hoped to God Fred wouldn't be there. But when she was on the porch
she knew that Fred was there. She could hear the music through the closed
window. They always kept the window closed for secrecy, because of whatever new
"novelty" they were trying to work up. 
This one, May knew, was one they called the Mixed
Quartette. Sylvester had learned how to throw his voice into a falsetto
contralto when he wanted to. Fred could jump back and forth between tenor and
soprano so cleverly that you would have sworn it was a man and a woman
alternating. Sylvester played on a portable melodion, while Fred doubled in
saxophone, steel guitar, and some hand traps. There was going to be money in
this one, Sylvester said. 
It was a tossup with May. For two cents she would have
turned back down the steps and walked around for a while. She was too dead on
her feet, though. They stopped singing when she came in, but neither one got
up. 
Sylvester said: "How are you, May? Feel any
better?" 
"It's this weather, I guess," said May. 
Fred kept his eyes turned out through the window. He
was a short, heavy-bodied man with a pock-marked face, an ex-barber, some said
Armenian and some Greek. They said he took cocaine too. Like Sylvester, he was
in his undershirt, on account of the heat, and had his shoes off. His feet
looked smaller than ever so, in nothing but socks, and rounded and soft and
moist, like his hands. He said nothing to May. He never did, any more than he
ever looked her way when she was in the room. 
May started for the passage leading to the kitchen. 
"Well?" 
The funny way Sylvester spoke made May stop and look
at him. "What's the matter?" 
He threw the hair off his forehead. "Nothing.
Why?" 
May picked up the Courier from beside the stuffed
chair. "Why. nothing." She started on again. 
"Well, don't you want to hear the news?" 
"News about what?" 
"About Fred and me tonight— at WFKA?" 
"Not— another audition!" 
"I don't know why not. E. F. Mackay wants to hear
us, for the Mackay Furniture hour. It looks pretty good, doesn't it,
Fred?" 
Fred never stirred. May said: "That's fine."
She went out into the kitchen. 
She wanted nothing but just to be by herself. Of a sudden
she got to the chair by the table and sat down, her body felt so heavy. She had
realized she wasn't herself. She couldn't be. For months to come she'd never be
able to be alone with herself anywhere— month by month, less and less alone. 
Her hands moved on the oilcloth of the table and
touched the paper she had brought out. She took it up. She reversed the fold to
get away from the radio page. That brought the rotogravure section outermost
again, but never mind. Anything to look at, anything. 
That man in the oval, think of it, furs! Try and think
of it, on a hot, hot evening in July, in Des Moines, Iowa! The wind that
threshed at his square beard and tumbled his hair was blowing straight off of
white arctic ice! 
There wasn't any name. It would probably be down
below, under the bigger picture of the two-masted boat with its crew of three. 
. . . Ketch "Kestrel" Home After an
Adventurous Winter Locked in the Ice off Baffin Land: Mr. Eric Abernathy y of
the Smithsonian Institute, His Wife and Son Bobby Bring Back Valuable Drift
Data and Rare Arctic Algae for the Instit — 
May's eyes quit in the middle of the word. They went
back to the first words, which they hadn't consciously seen, the date line.
"Atlantic City, N. J." They moved down obliquely to the caption's
end: "... hi the Oval: Eric Abernathy in Arctic Geary They went up then
and reached the oval. There they stayed, and there they stared. 
Presently she made a whimpering sound. 
"It's the beard, that's why." 
"What's that, May?" 
She hadn't heard Sylvester come out from the other
room. When he put a hand on her shoulder, to lean and look, she fainted dead
away. 
She was on the bed in the bedroom when she came to.
Her face and blouse were wet with water. Sylvester had a saucepan with more in
it, and looked helpless. 
"I'm all right now," she said. 
"You are? What do you suppose you — " 
"Nothing. Just the heat." 
Fred was out in the passage, protesting in a lowered
voice, "Syl, do you know it's seven thirty-five?" 
May took her lip between her teeth and sat up. The
room went around and around. 
"Go, Sylvester. I'm all right, honest! You
mustn't be late." 
"I know— but how can I — " 
"You must, it's so important. You can get
something to eat on your way, at the Green Car. Get me my purse."
There were two one-dollar bills and a quarter in it;
May knew without having to look. She put the quarter in his hand. 
She cried sharply, when he just stood and looked at
it: "There's all the bills this Saturday, and two months' rent, you know
that. You can get a hamburger and pie and coffee for that at the Green
Car." 
He stood. "How about Fred?" 
She gave him one of the dollars quickly. Anything!
Anything to get them gone! She called after Sylvester in the passage: "I
may lie down awhile. Take your things along with you to the Car. I might sleep
a little while." 
She went into the kitchen when she was sure they were
gone, sat down and put her elbows on the table, one on either margin of the
picture page. 
"So that's your name. Eric Abernathy. I never did
know your name." 
May had always thought that beards on men were funny.
His didn't look funny. It made him look older. "But you are, though.
Fourteen years." 
The boat in the bigger picture had been taken from a
little above, from a dock, perhaps. No furs there. That was Atlantic City, and
summer. The boy, balanced monkey-wise on the furled sail on the main boom,
looked to be about ten. Like his father, he was in dungarees and singlet. 
"He needs a haircut." 
Abruptly, May put a hand down and hid them, boat and
all. She swallowed at something in her throat. Swallowed and swallowed. 
Dusk had come, out of doors. As yet it brought no
coolness. 
May took her hand up. She looked at the woman. The
woman too was in dungarees, with some kind of a jersey on. It was hard to see,
that small, how her hair was done, though you knew it was long hair. Thick
braids, perhaps, roped around. She was turned the other way: you couldn't see
her face. 
May had the same impulse she used to have as a little
girl, to turn the picture over, so as to see her from the other side. No, she
didn't want to, though. She didn't want to see or know. She hid the picture
again, this time with both hands. She put her face down on them, biting the knuckles.
"He'd be my boy. I would be her."  
Night came down, a hot, black cloud. 
May started, and couldn't believe it, when she heard
Sylvester at the front door; it didn't seem possible she'd been there in the
dark that long. She wondered in a panic whether she could get through the
passage to the bedroom and pretend to be asleep. She had seen him come home
with his hopes dashed more than once. She could have borne it better if he had
borne it worse, been blue or bitter, or gotten swearing mad. Anything but the
easy acceptance, the quick forgetting. 
It was too late for the bedroom. She jumped up, turned
on the light, and pretended to be just looking around, thinking, when Sylvester
came into the kitchen. Fred was with him. 
"What's that?" May asked. Sylvester had a
bottle under his arm. 
"Some claret I bought. It's good— seventy-five
cents." 
"With what?" 
"Why?" He gave her a look, up and down. May
had never seen him like this before. He threw his head, to toss the hair back
from his brow. "What's worrying you— your money?" He took bills from
his pocket and put one into her hand. "How about some glasses from the
pantry, Fred?" 
Fred went. May sat down. She stared from Sylvester to
the money she held. 
"Where did you get this?" 
"Why, off old man Mackay. A little advance. And
was he tickled to do it, Fred!" 
Fred had brought two tumblers. Sylvester filled them
from the bottle. He looked at May. "Why, aren't you having any, May?"
When she made no answer: "Don't look so dumb!" he protested. "I
told you we would put it over, didn't I?" 
"How much?" 
"Oh, ninety a week, to split." He sipped at
his claret. "Only three months, though, at that money. Mackay wanted to
make it six." He touched his mouth with the handkerchief from his breast
pocket. "Fred and I are no suckers. Once we get this thing on the air ...
!" 
Fred spoke into his tumbler. "We ought to get
some white flannel suits." 
"Double-breasted." 
May commenced to laugh. She caught hold of the back of
her chair. Higher and higher she laughed, harder and harder. After the way of
hysteria, the thoughts racing through her brain seemed killingly funny.
"So I don't have to go on now. . . . Don't have to go on— don't have to
have the baby now." 
Sylvester looked mystified, then uneasy. "Stop
it, May! You're tired." 
Fred actually addressed her. "Look, May!" 
That was better than cold water. May got hold of
herself and got to the door, biting on her teeth. 
"Yuh-yes— I— I'm tired, I g-g-guess." 
She went, and the two men sat down. It was the heat,
Sylvester explained to Fred. A few minutes later, however, May was back in the
kitchen. 
"Sylvester, I wonder if you'd do something. I
feel so kind of all in tonight. I've made up the sofa in the living room and
put your things out there, and I wondered — " 
Sylvester lifted a hand. "Not another word,
little girl— of course. Get a good sleep now. Run on." 
May went into the bathroom first, to the medicine
chest. In the bedroom, when she had closed the door, she stood till she heard
them talking loudly enough to cover the sound, and turned the key in the lock.
Snapping the light off, she sat down on the edge of the bed. 
She held the phial, half full of tablets, between her
hands, on her knees. It wasn't horrible, it was fascinating. May wasn't afraid
of death, as death, now that she wasn't afraid of God or of waking up
afterwards. She was afraid of pain, but that clerk had said it would be only a
wink, said that she wouldn't know what struck her. 
When an auto or trolley went past the foot of Alpine,
eastbound, a faint light fanned around the bedroom walls, in reverse. Again in
reverse, in miniature, it ran around the inside of the phial. May could have
laughed, no longer in hysteria, but because she felt so light-as-feathers, so
irresponsible and free. 
Sylvester and Fred went along the passage. There was
the sound of the front door. Sylvester moved about the living room for a while,
getting ready for bed. Presently, whether worried or curious, he came out into
the passage and stood. What if he were to try the door? What would he think to
find it locked? What would he say? Do? 
All of a sudden it came to May: "What
difference?" She uncorked the bottle and dropped one tablet in her palm.
"Why should I care? One wink, and I wouldn't know it even if he broke the
door down. Wouldn't know it if the whole house— if the whole worldfell down on
my head. Wouldn't know there'd ever been a world, even. Or Sylvester. Or
me." 
May never heard him when he tiptoed away. She was so
engrossed. She, who had always been so cowardly, was so thrilled. For with this
in her hand, there was nothing on earth she couldn't do. 
She could walk around the cornice of the Baise
Building tower, if she wanted to. She could take off every stitch right now and
go out and run around the streets, if she felt like it. She should worry! If
she wanted, she could murder people. She could go to the living room, where
Sylvester would be asleep, and take a chair and beat his skull in. 
She remembered when the Chicago train used to scare
her as a child. Well, with this in her hand all ready to swallow, she could go
and stand between the rails and watch the engine coming at her and never
flinch. It could never hit her. Never while she knew. 
"But I don't want to, any of those things. I'd
rather sit right here and go." 
All at once she thought of something. She crammed the
tablet back into the bottle and corked it, wiped her palm on the bedclothes, in
a panic. She could have cried, it had all looked so simple. What she had
remembered in time was this: if they found her here, it wouldn't be just
Sylvester and Fred and the neighbors, and like that. The police would want to
know about it too. They always did, when people who weren't sick were found
dead. They cut them open then; that was the law. Autopsy. There was the woman
they found in the Wyant Hotel last year; they knew well enough she had done it
herself, but they cut her open just the same, and it was in the papers. They
didn't let anything get by them in an autopsy. "She was in an expectant
condition" it said at the end. 
And that May couldn't have, and wouldn't have.
Whatever happened, she wouldn't have Sylvester knowing that. 
She got up and walked around the floor. The room of
release had turned into a cage. 
"Somewhere, where they wouldn't know who I was .
. . There's money enough. Over a hundred and forty dollars in the bank. All I
need to do . . ." 
May turned on the light. She opened the closet door.
There was a suitcase on the upper shelf. 
But what if Sylvester should be curious, seeing her go
out with a suitcase in the morning? 
Well, she would just have to tell him it was some
cleaning, or some other lie. 
Luckily, she didn't have to lie. Sylvester was still
asleep when she got out at eight, by the kitchen way. 
She left the suitcase in check at the station before
she went to the bank. She was afraid of the bank, afraid some of the backoffice
people might see her and ask questions. She slipped in by the front way and
across to the teller she knew the least. 
It worked. "I didn't realize your vacation came
so early, Mrs. Templin. Going on a regular one this time, eh? . . . How will
you have it?" 
"I don't care— five twenties, I guess.
Thanks!" 
That was all she dared draw. She was afraid even that
much would seem suspicious. Besides, there was something she wanted to do. At
the station she wrote a check to Sylvester for the balance, forty-four dollars
and odd cents. It would cover the two-months' rent that had to be paid right
away, the light, gas and milk. May wanted to do that. 
She had reached the ticket window before it occurred
to her that she had no idea where she was going. The man looked at her. She
fiddled with her purse. He tapped with a pencil and looked at her. 
"Ocean Grove," she said. 
"New Jersey?" 
"Yes, New Jersey. And I want to go by the
Pennsylvania." 
The man started along his rack. 
"No, wait!" May said. "Make it Atlantic
City." 
May walked up and down the Boardwalk at Atlantic City,
carrying her suitcase. There was no use in going to a hotel, she thought at
first. Finally, it was so hot, she checked the case at a checking place in a
drugstore. Then she walked and walked, looking at the ocean.  
It was a pity it couldn't have been another time, when
she could have been thrilled by the strangeness and wonder of it, coming in
blue from the horizon to whiten on the sands. All she wondered now was, she
wondered where the anchored boats could be. She didn't see a one, though she
saw a few under sail, out further. Perhaps it was only at night they came in
toward the beach, among the diving floats— though she had to say it looked
uncomfortably rough there for anchoring. 
May hated to ask questions, for fear of questions.
When it got late, however, she approached a policeman. "Do you know of a
man named Eric Abernathy, a sailor?" 
The way he looked at her when he said no, she almost
decided to give it up and have it over with. It was so small a thing after all,
just a whim she had taken, just to see his boat once, first, from a dock or
beach or wherever it was, even though she didn't see him, which she wouldn't,
ten chances to one. 
But it was too late; too late, that is, for going on
with the other business. The beach was deserted of bathers. The tide was low, a
bathhouse man told her, just at the turn; before there was much water again it
would be dark, he said. May grasped at the chance his words gave her, for
making doubly sure. (She had already, in a roundabout way, asked the Parmalee
man crossing Chicago, and a dining steward on the Pennsylvania, and they had
both said they thought so.) So now she put on a vague expression and said:
"I suppose people that get drowned, if it's when the tide's rising, it'll
bring their bodies right back in and you find them. I suppose it's only when
it's going out that it carries them out to sea?" 
He too looked at her in a funny way. "Why?" 
"Oh, nothing, I'm just trying to write a story
for a magazine, that's all. If they ever find the body, then there's no point.
That's why." 
May went away. She got her suitcase. She had to go to
a hotel after all. She signed the register as a Mrs. Kathleen Brown from
Toledo. Then she had a streak of luck. 
"Abernathy?" echoed the clerk. "You
mean the Polar man. He'll probably be lying over the other side of the island,
in the Inlet, at one of the boat yards. Probably Forston's." 
It was after ten next morning when May found the
Forston Boatbuilding Company. There was a man sitting on a half barrel in the
gateway. 
"I'm afraid you're a little late," he said,
before May got any further than, "Is this where — " He mopped his
head and looked down through the tangle of railways, derricks, hulls, and spars
that almost hid the water. "There comes the reporters' boat ashore now.
He'll be under way any minute now." 
May just stood. 
The gateman mopped the inside of his collar. It was
ninety-six in the shade. "The crowd's down there at Number Two Ways, if
you want to go — " A faint sound of cheering interrupted him.
"There!" He pointed into the tangle of wood and iron. "There she
goes." 
May was bewildered. She felt dumb. She saw whiteness
in one of the gaps. It passed slowly to another, and another, a sail beyond
them, hardly more than drifting. 
The man was grumbling. "Damn foolishness. If he'd
ask me, I'd say 'twas no day to be starting out for Great Egg even, say nothing
of the Ar'tic Circle. This weather's going to bust wide open, you watch, and
not too many hours." 
May began to laugh of a sudden. The man, thinking she
laughed at him for claiming to know more than Abernathy, glowered and said,
"Oh, all right." 
But May wasn't laughing at him. She was laughing at
everything. "That's done," she thought. "That's that!" 
She walked back across town. There was no hurry in
getting to the beach. It would be after twelve before the tide began to ebb,
she'd seen in a paper. On the way she went into a shop and bought a bathing
suit. She didn't feel like renting one, somehow. She chose a deep-blue suit and
bought a blue waterproof bag that tied to the wrist, to go with it. She found
another bathing place than the one where she'd talked with the man the day
before. 
When she had undressed in the sultry cubicle they gave
her, she looked at herself. It seemed strange to think . . . Then she put on
the suit. 
She made sure, one last time, there were no marks in
the clothes she was leaving. She had already done that for the things abandoned
at the hotel. She had gone so far last night as to soak the Harknett Drugstore
label off the phial. The phial she had left in the wastebasket; the label she
had put down the toilet, together with all but one of the tablets; one was all
she would need. She had it loose in her purse now, along with everything by
which she might have been identified, her initialed handkerchief, wedding ring,
highschool pin, such things. These, before she went out, she transferred to the
little rubber wrist bag. There was a dollar bill and seventy cents change left
from her hundred. She put the bill back in the purse; there was no reason
somebody shouldn't have it; it told no tales. But the silver would help weight
the rubber bag, which she meant to take off. There mustn't be any mistake about
its sinking. 
When she went out on the sand she was faced by an
unappreciated problem, and by its solution, almost in the same moment. A boy, a
lifeguard with deeply tanned body, was there in a skiff beyond the first of the
surf, laughing and nodding to a girl who climbed in over the stern. May ran
through the shallow foam. "Wait! Take me out too!" She had hold of
the gunwale, and there was nothing he could say. 
"I'm going to the offshore float," the girl
said with some tartness, looking sidewise at May. 
"I am too," said May. 
"How about it? Good enough swimmer?" The
guard had to know. 
Good enough! Apparently, that gave May a good laugh.
Any day she couldn't swim a mile! And that meant in fresh water, she said. It
ought to mean two, in salt. (May couldn't swim a stroke. She wet a hand over
the gunwale and touched it to her tongue when they weren't looking. She'd
always known it, but she'd never believed it could be. But it was true. It was
salty.) 
"The only reason," she explained, "I
want to get my sun bath before I get my shoulders wet." 
May lay on her stomach on the canvas deck of the
offshore float and stared seaward and wished the girl would go away. Before she
did go, others had come. They talked, giggled, teetered on the springboard. 
Noon was furnace hot. There wasn't a stir in the air.
Half a dozen boats, out a way, lay with slack canvas, pointing in all
directions. The sun beat down. One of the swimmers, a woman, warned May.
"You're going to have an awful burn if you don't look out." May just
lay and stared seaward. "All right," the woman said to her companion,
"she don't feel it now, but wait a couple of hours!" 
May wondered what their faces would have looked like
if they had known. It ought not to be more than an eighth part of those two
hours before the tide would change. 
It grew long. Those swimmers went and left May alone. It
seemed as if at least an hour was gone. Yet the low, lazy, glassy swells still
came from seaward and went on shoreward, exactly as they had. (In her midland
mind May confused the waves with the tide. The tide was already ebbing, but she
didn't know.) 
A man and a woman came, rocking the float as they
climbed on. The man said suddenly: "God A'mighty, Nell, look what's
coming!" The woman said: "As quick as that! Just while we've been
swimming out! We better beat it." 
The man trod nearer to May. "Look what's coming,
lady." He laid a hand on her shoulder, on the sunburn. That brought her
up, pivoting on a hip. Over the shore, above and beyond the town, a black cloud
climbed for the sun. Lightning split it. Thunder thudded. 
"Beat it!" the man said to the woman. She
plunged and swam. He looked at May. May could have killed him. She could have
cried. She looked at the waves, and they still ran as they had run. Among the
boats becalmed offshore, sails were dropping down. People on the floats nearer
the beach were excited, shouting to one another to get ashore. 
The man grew impatient. "That's going to hit
quick. You better come." 
May felt helpless. She felt angry too. "Yes, yes,
I'm coming in a second. I'm a fast swimmer— I'll be there before you two. Go
on." 
To her relief he turned and dived. She dropped on the
canvas behind the butt of the springboard. When he came up and looked back and
didn't see her, he thought she was in the water too, turned and swam after the
woman, who was well ahead. 
May lay where she was till the cloud touched the sun.
She sat up and watched the black shadow come, broken by lightning. All at once
it made her think of the train when she was little. She laughed. She untied the
rubber bag, fumbled out the tablet and held it in one fist. With the other hand
she threw the weighted bag as far as she could, away into the water. She stood
up. She laughed out loud. Nothing could hurt her. Nothing could hit her while
she knew. 
Rain hit her in a blinding flood. But that was only
rain. Wind hit her and knocked her down to her knees. It was only wind. She
scrambled up and stood against it. She could see no more than a hundred feet in
any direction, so she didn't know the float had swung right around at its
mooring; all she knew was that when she looked at the water the thing had
happened; the waves had turned and were running past her the other way. 
At last there was no worry. She could have danced
while the wind and rain hammered at her and the lightning crackled and couldn't
scare her. There was no worry and no hurry, and May could have sung. 
It was only by chance she turned and saw a boat coming
close through the welter, a boy with a scared face over a brown shoulder,
pulling at the oars. Just in time she lifted her fist, popped the pellet into her
mouth, tumbled toward the float's edge and the water. 
A rending flare, and blackness. Heavy, cold blackness.
And May thought: "I did know what struck me." 
Then she thought: "How do I know?" She felt
herself turning over in slow somersault, touching nothing. How could she feel
that if she w T as dead? There was something on her tongue. It was the tablet.
She hadn't swallowed it. She tried to swallow it, tried and tried and couldn't.
She tried to bite it, and couldn't seem to. She was under the sea, and she
wasn't dead. 
Terror came and got her. "O my God!" She
fought out with arms and legs. "O God!" 
She tried to climb. "Oh, please!" But there
was nothing to climb by. "O God, please!" 
Her lids paled. Her lips parted, and for an instant
air came between her teeth. But water followed. It grew dark again as she went
down. 
By and by she stopped praying. She stopped thinking,
stopped caring. The muscles about her mouth tired and loosened. Water leaked
in. 
If there was another paling of the dark, May didn't
know it. She knew nothing till she opened her eyes and saw a city of gold. 
It was far off and quite small, painted on a ribbon of
sun-shot mist beyond water the color of lead. 
Around May the dark still racketed, wind and rain.
Voices shouted and were small. "Ease her off, Bobby— keep some way!"
. . . "Off it is, sir!" . . . "No more!" 
By turning her head a little May could see the second
of the speakers, a boy of ten or so, braced at a wheel at the other end of a
cockpit sharply aslant, a taut rag of sail above him. He had his jaw clamped,
for courage, and his eyes narrowed, for mastery, and he needed a haircut, May
saw. She couldn't see much of the other speaker, only, out of the bottoms of
her eyes, a bit of the forearm with which he held her, half lying, half jammed,
against the cockpit combing. But that was all she needed. She knew. 
Strangely, she hadn't time yet to think how strange. 
There was something in her mouth. She had to think
about that. 
"Let me!" she gasped. He didn't hear. She
got one hand free and stuck her fingers in, down between tongue and gum. She
got the tablet out and looked at it. It wasn't a tablet. It was a button made
of horn. 
"Let me!" she gasped. She strained. The arm
gave. She leaned out over the combing, over the side. She looked down into
rushing foam. She opened her mouth, and water and sickness emptied out. 
"There you are, young woman!" 
She was lifted to her feet, thrust toward an opening
in a low house with a ladder of three steps inside. When she was in and down
she turned to look back. Eric Abernathy was leaning, one hand on either side of
the companionway, looking down and in. It was enough like the rotogravure
picture to be funny, the wind battering his beard and hair and his eye corners
puckered— though of course it was against the wetness now, not the cold. 
May said to herself: "He doesn't know me from
Adam." Then she thought: "How would he, in a bathing suit?" 
He said to her: "It's about blown out now. You
lie down awhile, while Bobby and I get some sail on." 
May looked around her. Of a sudden she caught a big
breath. She thought: "Where is she?" 
Eric was gone. There was only the boy at the wheel to
be seen, and he wasn't looking, and she didn't feel like asking, anyway. 
In the narrow cabin where she stood there seemed to be
everything: bunks, books, boots, oilskins, dishes, charts, quadrants,
binoculars—everything but a Mrs. Abernathy. A door at the other end opened into
a passage. May dreaded to go, but she did. There was nobody in the passage.
There was nobody in the galley at its other end. There was nowhere to go beyond
the galley. 
May wondered till she was giddy. She tried to lean in
the doorway, but the doorway knocked her about and threw her down. She had to
get up. There were still two doors, both closed, behind her in the passage. She
opened the first. She closed it quickly, feeling abashed, even though there was
no one. It was the lavatory. She opened the second. There was a stateroom with
two berths, made up with nautical neatness, one on either side. When she saw
there was nobody even here May felt like a rag. She lay down on one of the
berths. She hadn't slept for what seemed weeks. She slept. 
It seemed to May she had been asleep for weeks, when she
waked. Some of the bits of dreams she remembered were like things years and
years away, and even they, once she was wide awake, went like mist in the
morning when she tried to see them again. 
At first she had no idea where she was. Her eyes were
on the window, and the window was funny. It wasn't rectangular, it was round.
Then a sight of sea tipped up and filled it, the blue-green flank of a comber,
spangled with foam and sunshine, and she remembered. 
She remembered she'd been in her wet bathing suit when
she threw herself down. She was in the bed now. She looked at her arms, felt at
her throat. Soft Shantung. When she moved her legs, under the sheet, she knew
it was pajamas. She turned quick eyes to the other berth. It had been slept in.
A hotness swept her cheeks. 
"Where could she have been when I was looking for
her?" 
The door from the passage opened a crack. It opened
wider. May hated to look, but she had to. And it wasn't the woman, after all;
it was the boy. 
"Well," he said, "have you had enough
at last?" 
When he smiled he grinned. When he grinned, he wanted
a tooth here and there— he was at that age— and he had quantities of freckles. 
May's mind played a queer trick on her for one
instant. It thought: "If I don't get the shears at that mop of his
today!" She was confused, and that was why she failed to answer. 
Bobby seemed not to mind. "Captain!" he
shouted aft along the passage. "Lash the wheel and come and
see!"  
Eric came. "Well, Commodore, feel better?"
That was funny. Commodore? 
He came and knelt down beside the berth, all woolly in
a big windbreaker. May thought her heart was going to stop when he laid a hand
on her forehead. But then: "Maybe I've had a fever," she thought,
"maybe it's that." 
It seemed, though, as if he only did it to smooth the
hair back out of her eyes. He looked into them hard for a while. "Lazy
May," he said, "get up and stand your trick now." 
It came to May: "It's the eyes— he remembers my
eyes." She got them away from his, and past Bobby, in a panic to the open.
door. "What would she think if she came and saw!" 
Aloud, May said: "Yes— now— go— I'll get up
quickly." 
She got up when they were gone and slipped out of her
pajamas. She looked at herself. She looked at her hair, that hung down over her
shoulders. With a strange regret she looked out of the port at the water, crisp
with crests. "I suppose I'm too late for my bath— they hove to hours ago
and had theirs. That's for being lazy." 
She pulled open the middle one of the three drawers
let in beneath the berth. She took out something of primrose georgette. She
wondered. Again she looked out at the water, at the color of it.
"No," she said, "I think I'd better . . ." Replacing the
georgette, from another layer she took a garment of Scotch wool, almost as
sheer as the crepe itself. This she put on. There were dungarees, worn but
clean, in the big drawer at the bottom, and a bright yellow jersey with a
turtle neck, and sneakers. When she had washed in the bowl that let down from the
cabinet by the porthole, she combed her hair before the mirror. She looked at
the small framed photograph that stood on the shelf below it, and smiled half a
smile, with a fleeting wistfulness. 
"How far away and how long ago. That was taken in
my senior year at high school." The wistfulness was gone, and the smile
was purer merriment. "He thought I thought I'd lost it, when we both
changed at Philadelphia. As if I didn't know he had it in his bag!" 
May had got to the door before she thought. She stopped.
She brushed a hand over her eyes, turned and looked back at the picture.
"What am I thinking of? How did that come here?" Again she ran
fingers over her eyes. "What difference!" A coat button of horn lay
near her feet on the stateroom deck; she picked it up and put it in the top
drawer under the berth before she went on out. 
She had a fright in the cabin. Somebody was in one of
the bunks there, rolled in a blanket. But then May saw it was Bobby. Without
thinking, she thought: "Poor lamb, he must be tired." For she
thought: "They've been standing watch and watch while I've been ill."
She stood on the ladder, halfway out of the companion.
A fine morning, a fine, tingling, blue-and-white wind out of the west; gulls
high above the wake rode like sleep on the wind. A mile off on the port beam a
basalt reef stood on the ocean, surf-laced and lonely. 
May said: "Why, there's the Pope and Cardinals!
Already?" 
Eric, riding the wheelbox, laughed. "We've come
along. Seven days from Nantucket Shoals to Cape Race of Newfoundland— tell me
that's not coming!" 
"Whew!" May whistled. 
But then she was all confused again, as if her
whistling had waked her up. Quickly she twisted in the opening, peered along
the house, along the narrow decks, all the way to the bow. She got back down
into the cabin. Once and for all, she made certain there was nobody else but
Bobby in that cabin. She went forward into the passage, looked in at the
stateroom, made certain there. She knocked on the door of "the Head,"
opened it. Empty. And the galley was the same. 
There was a half door in the forward bulkhead of the
little sea kitchen. May went and pulled it open. She peered in. She reached in.
She brought out part of a side of bacon, some coffee, tinned milk, flour for
making griddle cakes, lime juice in a bottle. She fired the vapor stove and put
the coffee on. She sliced the bacon with a heavy, sharp knife and beat up the
batter for the cakes. 
When all was ready she set the table for two in the
cabin. She touched the boy on the shoulder. "Wake up!" 
He rolled over, opened his eyes, shut them, rubbed
them, opened them again. Presently he would outgrow those comical tooth gaps,
outgrow his freckles perhaps. Thank God, May thought, he could never outgrow
those eyes. 
"Wake up, breakfast, Bob!" 
Suddenly the eyes were like Christmas morning.
"You called me 'Bob'! That means I'm grown up, doesn't it?— growner-up
than 'Bobby.' Won't you ask Father to call me it too?"  
May leaned and kissed him between those eyes. There
was something in her throat that made her laugh. "Yes— and drink your lime
juice." 
"Bobby wants you to call him Bob," she told
Eric as she relieved him at the wheel. "Do, and go before your breakfast's
cold. ... Is this right, nor'-by-west-a-half-north?" 
"Due north," said Eric. 
Mechanically, May's hand swung the wheel. Half a point
the needle in the binnacle swung. 
"By the way, Eric." He looked back from the
ladder. "Where's your old tweed jacket, the gray-brown one with the double
breast? I've found that button." 
Eric started to answer, and then didn't. He looked at
her. 
"Why, May, what's the matter? Why are you
crying?" 
She took her lip out from between her teeth. "I
don't know." She felt like simply blubbering. "I love Bobby so. I
love you so. . . . No, go on before your coffee's cold." 
The Pope and Cardinals had gone down astern. The sea
ran unbroken. Trough and crest, trough and crest, with an ordered, almost
monotonous motion, the Kestrel drove. The steady wind blew cool against May's
cheek, blew cool through her body and mind, and the white wings of the gulls
astern rode the wind like sleep. 
There began a twittering. Then a racket of sailcloth
as the boat came up under a limp rudder and the canvas lost the wind. 
May winked back half awake as man and boy came
tumbling out. They took it well when they saw how it was, both laughing. But
May was flustered, and she was ashamed. 
"It's all this air, I guess," she mumbled as
Eric carried her below in his arms. While he was undressing her, pulling jersey
off one way and dungarees the other, she kept at it like a drunk with one
ideadrunk with sleep. "All this air— I must get used to it." 
May waked in the middle of some night and sat up in
bed. She didn't know what night it was. She only knew it was the middle of it
because they grew so short now and it was black dark out of the port. The only
light came in at the door from the lantern in the passage. 
Half in the ray, Eric was getting ready for his
four-hour turn of sleep, stripping the heavy woolen shirt over his head, off
his square-built, hard-muscled body, still brown from southern suns. 
"It'll be all right tonight," he said, when
he saw May sitting up. "It's clear, the glass high, and hardly any sea
running, and I've told him to call me right away if he sees any ice. He's a
great sailor, and he's a great kid, isn't he, May?" 
When there was no answer he stepped nearer and saw
that May wasn't looking or listening. She was looking down at the two loosely
braided ropes of her brown hair, which fell forward, one over either shoulder,
to lie together in the valley of her breast. Now, and again, she raised a hand
and almost touched them, and let the hand drop. There was a mist of trouble
mixed with sleep over the surface of her eyes. 
Eric said, "May dear!" almost sharply. That
brought her out of it. She reached with her arms and her hands. 
"Eric, please, here!" He was beside her
quickly, hunkered down by the berth. "Put your arms around me, Eric.
Tighter! I've had such dreams. Eric, I dreamed I hadn't you and Bobby. It was
as if I was back in Iowa, Eric, and I couldn't wake up, and I couldn't get
away, and there was no air. And the awful thing, Eric —it seemed as if I was
married to somebody that wasn't you— and Eric— I was going to have a baby— and
it was— oh, it was — Look at me, Eric, I'm all of a shiver still." 
Eric got in bed and held her against him to stop her
shivering. With his strong hand he caressed her brow and smoothed her hair,
till that made her remember something, with a caught breath. 
"And my hair, Eric— that was what I was dreaming
when I waked— my hair was short— they'd bobbed my hair." 
He held her head a little away and looked at it and
smiled. 
"That would be a pity!" 
The way he said it, the way he smiled, all at once the
shiver was gone, and she laughed in her breath as she pulled one braid through
under Eric's neck and the other over it and was busy with their ends beyond.
"Wouldn't it! For how could I tie you up with it then, so you couldn't get
away?" 
Eric looked in her eyes. "Pretty eyes," he
said. 
"Take care, Mr. Abernathy!" May's heart was
filled with an enchanted merriment. "You got yourself into an awful pickle
once, if you'll remember, with this talk of pretty eyes." 
"Do you mean, Mrs. Abernathy, that time on that
train?" 
May simply gazed at him, shaking her head as if with
pity. As if with pity, he shook his. 
"And you, poor dolt of an Iowa girl, you imagined
I meant it." 
"I didn't imagine. I knew. Right then." 
"Right when?" 
"Remember that first evening in the dining car,
after Davenport? I do— because it was the first artichoke I ever had. Well, I
think it was then that something really told me." 
"Be explicit! Told you what?" 
"That if I could get you across Chicago without
losing you, then Bobby would have brown eyes." 
"Indeed? ... I think I shall kiss you, May."
But May was busy untying the knot in the braids she
had tied. 
"Go shut the door first," she said. 
The storm at noon hadn't broken the weather after all,
as people in Atlantic City had hoped it would. It was hot again that evening,
hot even in the morgue. A police sergeant and a police surgeon stood by the
body of the unidentified woman that lay under a sheet on one of the slabs. 
The doctor mopped his head with a handkerchief.
"Drowned?" 
"No, and that's funny, Doc. The guard did pretty
work, even to get out there in that squall, and when he was almost to the float
he saw this dame kind of stumble and slide overboard. He got her the second
time she come up, still breathing some, he says, and he figured he'd pulled the
trick. But when he got her ashore she was dead— and I mean dead too" 
"Try the pulmotor?" 
"We did, till we found there wasn't hardly any
water in her. . . . Funny. . . . Heart failure or something, could it be? Or
maybe poison?'''' 
"Tell you better about that after the
post-mortem— that and everything.'" The doctor touched the hand that lay
outside the sheet, on the slab. "Almost be nice to be as cool as that for
a while, dogged if it wouldn't.'''' 
The sergeant wiped his neck. "Be heaven," he
said. 
"Do you believe in heaven, Sergeant?" 
"Life eternal? Don't you, Doc?" 
"Eternal? No, I thank you. A heaven with sometime
an end to it, I might buy. Somewhere where you wake up to find yourself what
you always dreamed of being. For a while. No, but crazier than that, Sarge.
Find you always HAVE been— turns out— somehow. . . . That's just mine. Tastes
differ, 1 suppose. . . . Well, whatever her heaven, this one's, she's there by
now. Look." The doctor tried the wrist between his strong fingers.
"Quick work for weather like this. Rigor is setting in" 
There was a numbness and stiffness in the hand that
lay outside the sheet, where May could see it for a flickering instant now and
then, when phosphorescence, curling on the black water washing past the port,
lighted the stateroom ever so little. But it was only because it had gone to
sleep, May knew, and she wouldn't for the world have moved it to wake it, for
fear of waking Eric too. He slept so peacefully, now that he slept, his cheek
rough against her breast, his dear head heavy in the hollow of that arm. 
May didn't want to sleep, herself; she had slept so
much. Now that memory had been excited, she wanted passionately and vividly to
re-create in her memory the length of their days together, the years so rich in
adventure and peace, so full of love and living, yet so short they seemed, it
seemed beyond belief that the boy with Eric's jaw and May's eyes could be big
enough already to be out there alone, carrying their life in his hand steadily,
steering them iceward through the cold dark. 
"Maybe we'll see ice in the morning— it feels
like it," May thought with a curious ecstasy, and lay closer to the warmth
of her husband, in the beautiful dark and the beautiful cold.
Category:Steele
Category:Published