Editor's Selection for Winter - John Updike

John Updike (1932-  ) has published over 60 books, including novels, collections of short stories, poetry, drama, essays, memoirs and literary criticism. He has won most of the important awards given for writing including The Pulitzer Prize (twice), The National Book Award, the National Medal of Art and the National Medal for the Humanities. The National Literary Review is pleased to present one of Updike's short stories from 2000 entitled, How Was It, Really?
		ncreasingly, Don Fairbairn had trouble remembering how it had actually been in the broad middle stretch of his life, when he was living with his first wife and helping her, however distractedly, raise their children. His second marriage, which had once seemed so shiny and amazing and new, now was as old as his first had been--twenty-two years, exactly--when he had, one ghastly weekend, left it. His second wife and he lived in a house much too big for them yet so full of souvenirs and fragile inherited treasures that they could not imagine living elsewhere. In their present circle of friends, the main gossip was of health and death, whereas once the telephone wires had buzzed with word of affairs and divorces. His present wife, Vanessa, would set down the telephone to announce that Herbie Edgerton's cancer had come back and appeared to be into his lymph nodes and bones now; thirty years ago, his first wife, Alissa, would hang up and ask him if they were free for drinks and take-out pizza at the Langleys' this Saturday. Yes, she would go on, it was such short notice that it would have been rude from anybody but the Langleys. They were socially voracious, now that psychotherapy had helped them to see that they couldn't stand each other. Everybody's mental and marital health, as Don remembered it, was frail, so frail that women, meeting, would follow their "How are you?" with "No, how are you really?" And then--this with an averted glance and the hint of a blush from Alissa--she had seen Wendy Chace in the superette and impulsively asked her and Jim to drinks tomorrow evening. She had said yes, they'd love to, but they couldn't stay more than a minute, Jim had the Planning Commission meeting, they were fending off this evil out-of-state developer who was trying to turn the entire old Burgoyne estate into Swiss-chalet-style condos. Just paraphrasing Jim's flighty, cause-minded wife made Alissa glow. This at least was vivid in Don's memory, the way his former wife's eyes would become livelier and her cheeks, a bit sallow normally, would turn pink and her lips, usually pursed and pensive, would dance into quips and laughter when Jim was near or in prospect. He couldn't blame her; he had been as bad as she, looking outside the home for strength to keep the home going. The formula had worked only up to a point--perhaps the point, somewhere in their forties, when they realized that life wasn't endless. The Fairbairns had been, actually, among the last in their old set to get divorced. They had stayed on the sinking ship while its deck tilted and its mast splintered and its sails flapped, whipping loose line everywhere. A teetotaller now (weight, liver, conflicting pills), Don could remember the drinks--drinks on porches and docks, on boats and lawns, in living rooms and kitchens and dens. The high metallic sheen of gin, the slightly more viscid transparency of vodka, the grain-golden huskiness of bourbon, the paler, caustic timbre of Scotch, the sprig of mint, the slice of orange, the chunk of lime, the column of beer with its rising flutes of bubbles, the hemispheres of white and red wine floating above the table on their invisible stems, the little sticky-rimmed glasses of anisette and Cointreau and B & B and green Chartreuse that followed dinner, whirling the minutes toward midnight, while the more prudent, outsiderish guests peeked at their watches, thinking of the babysitter and tomorrow's sickly-sweet headache. Don remembered, from the viewpoint of a host, the magnanimous crunch of ice cubes broken out of their aluminum trays with an authoritative yank of the divider lever, and the pantry's round-shouldered array of half-gallon bottles from the liquor mart beside the superette, the cost of liquor a kind of dues you cheerfully paid for membership in the unchartered club of young couples. How curiously filling and adequate it was, the constant society of the same dozen or so people. Western frontiersmen, Don remembered reading somewhere, said of buffalo meat that, strange to say, you never tired of eating it. The Fairbairns' friends would arrive for weekday drinks at six, harried and mussed, children in tow--the women bedraggled by a day of housework, the men fresh off the train with their city pallor--and be slowly transformed into ebullient charmers. Become dizzyingly confiding and glamorous and intimes, they would not leave much before eight, when the time had long passed to get the children, who had been devouring potato chips and Fig Newtons around the kitchen television, decently fed and into bed. "How did you and Mom do it?" Don's sons and daughters asked him, with genuine admiration, of his old servantless four-child household. His children as they homed in on forty lived in city apartments or virtually gated New Jersey enclaves, with one or two children of their own whose nurture and protection required daily shifts of women of color--tag-team caregivers, one to achieve the dressing and the administration of breakfast and safe passage to nursery school, and another to supervise the evening meal and bath and bedtime video. Nevertheless, his daughters were exhausted by motherhood, which had come to them late, as a bit of progenitive moonlighting incidental to their thriving professional careers; conception had been rife with psychic tension and childbirth fraught with peril. His sons spoke solemnly, apprehensively to him about the education of their children and, even more remote, the job prospects available to these toddlers in the year 2020. They both, his two sons, performed some inscrutable monkey-business among computers and equities, and they thought in long-range demographic curves. Don had to laugh, being interviewed by them as a kind of pioneer, a survivor of a mythical age of domesticity, when giant parents strode the earth. "You were there," he reminded them. "You remember how it was. Our key concept was benign neglect." But they would not be put off and, indeed, half persuaded him that he had been an epic family man, chopping forests into cabins amid the wilderness of the baby boom. Tracking their own children's progress, they asked him how old they had been when they first crawled, walked, talked, and read, and he was embarrassed to say that he could not remember. "Ask your mother," he told them. "She says she doesn't remember, either. She says we were all wonderfully normal." An only child, born in the Depression, Don had been honored at his birth with the purchase of a big white book, its padded cover proudly embossed Baby's Book, in which pages printed in dove-colored ink waited for the entry of his early achievements and the dates thereof. July 20, 1935. Donald took his first step. A shaky one. September 6, 1938. Off to kindergarten! Donny clung and clung. Heartbreaking. He was surprised to discover that his mother, in that little curly backward-slanting hand that seemed to his eyes the very distillation of methodical maternity, had entered everything up through his various graduations and his first wedding; she had noted her first two grandchildren but had not bothered with the second two or with his second nuptials. How odd it is, he thought, that America's present prosperity, based upon our outworking the Germans and the Japanese, has produced the same pinched, anxiously cherishing families as the Depression. His children's individual developments had become in his failing mind an amiable tangle while he daily dined on the social equivalent of buffalo meat. The lack of recall almost frightened him. Did he help the kids with their homework? He must have. Did he and Alissa ever go grocery shopping together? He had no image of it. The beds, how had they got made, and the meals, how had they got onto the table for twenty-two years? Alissa must have done it all, somehow, while he was reading the sports page. Having the babies, now such a momentous rite of New Age togetherness and unembarrassed body-worship, was something else she had done alone, in the hospital, without complication or much complaint afterwards. The baby just appeared in a basket beside her bed, or at her breast, and in a few days he drove the two of them home, two where there had been one, a doubling of persons like a magic trick whose secret was too quick for the eye. The last childbirth, Don did remember, came on a winter midnight, and the obstetrician, awakened, had swung by in his car for her, and she had looked up smiling from the snowy street, like a Christmas caroller, and disappeared into the doctor's two-tone Buick. Left alone with the residue of their children, he had been jittery, he remembered, and convinced that a burglar or crazed invader, sensing his family's moment of being vulnerably torn asunder, was in the big creaky house with him; Don had fallen asleep only after taking a golf club--a three-iron, in preference to a slower-swinging wood--into bed with him, for protection. He tried to picture Alissa with a vacuum cleaner and couldn't, though he remembered himself, in the dining room of the first house they had lived in, wielding a wallpaper steamer, pressing the big square pan against the wall for a minute or two and stripping the paper with a broad putty knife and, in drenched shorts and T-shirt, wading through curling wet sheets of faded silver flowers. Once a week, in that same room, she would serve flank steak, it came to him, the brown meat nicely tucked around a core of peppery stuffing, and the whole platter, garnished with parsley and little red-skinned potatoes, redolent of bygone home economics, of those touching Fifties-born culinary ambitions that sought to perpetuate a sense of the family meal as a pious ceremony heavy with female labor. All those meals slavishly served, and in the end he had dismissed her like a redundant servant. Vanessa and he, with no children to feed, had become grazers, snackers, eaters-out, sometimes taking their evening meal separately, gobbling from microwave-safe containers while Peter Jennings injected his personal warmth into the news. She still had a fondness for pizza, hot or cold. "But what did you do about sleep? About children waking up all night?" the elder of his hard-working daughters, with tender blue shadows beneath her eyes, persisted. "You all slept through, virtually from birth," he told her, suspecting he was Iying but unable to locate the truth of it. There had been a child whimpering about an earache and falling asleep with the hurting ear pressed against the heat of a fresh-ironed dish towel. But was this himself as a child? He could not remember Alissa with an iron in her hand. He did remember getting up from bed in the pit of night and bringing a squalling armful of protoplasm back to bed and handing it to its mother, who was already sitting up with her nightie straps lowered, her bare chest shining. He would go back to sleep to the sound of tiny lips sucking, little feet softly kicking. He had been the baby, it seemed. Yet no social workers came to the door to rescue his children from abuse, no neighbors complained to the authorities, the children waited for the school bus dressed like the others--like little clowns in the space-age outfits of synthetic fabrics decades removed from the dark woollens, always damp, that he himself had worn--and ascended more or less smoothly through the passages of school and, like smart bombs, found colleges and mates and jobs, so he must have been an adequate parent and householder. "It frightens me," Don confessed to his daughter, "how little I remember." The Saturday afternoons of it all, the masculine feats of maintenance, the changing of the storm windows to screens, the cellar workbench where spiders built webs across the clutter of rusting tools. The heating, electricity, telephone, and water bills--he could not see himself writing a single check, but he must have written many, all cashed, cancelled, and stored in Alissa's attic, along with the slides, the scrapbooks, the school reports and tinted school photographs that had accumulated over twenty-two years of days, each with its ups and downs, its mishaps, its sniffles, its excited tales told by children venturing toward adulthood, through a world that on every side was new to them. Don had lost the anatomy. He was like an astronomer before the Voyagers, before the Hubble telescope, working with blurs. He remembered being in love with one or another man's wife, getting drunk after dinner, telling Alissa to go to bed, and playing over and over again "Born to Lose," by Ray Charles, or maybe it was the Supremes' "Stop! in the Name of Love!," lifting the player arm from the LP repeatedly to regroove the band, and being told with a shy smile the next morning by his older son, "You sure listened to that song a lot last night." The curtains for a moment parted; there was a second of shamed focus. His son's bedroom was above the den where Don had sat mired in himself and the revolving grooves. He had kept the boy, who had to get up for school, awake. And what of his girls' dating, that traditional tragicomedy, with its overtones of Attic patricide, in the age of the sitcom? His older daughter had gone off to boarding school when she was fifteen, and his younger daughter had been but twelve when he left the house. He could scarcely remember a single hot-rod swerving into the crackling driveway to carry off one of his trembling virgins. Now this younger daughter invited him to have drinks on a boat. He didn't have to drink liquor, of course, she explained. More and more people didn't; it interfered with their training routines. She herself was slim and hard as a greyhound, and entered local marathons; her hair, which like Alissa's had begun to turn white early, was cut short as a boy's, to lower wind resistance, he supposed. The deal was this, Dad: the husband of a friend of theirs was turning forty, and she, the wife, was giving him as one of his presents a sunset cruise in the marshes, and since his parents were coming the friend, the wife--are you following this, Dad?--wanted some other members of the older generation to be there, so the question is could you and Vanessa come, since you know I guess the husband's father from apparently playing a few golf tournaments with him? Actually, when he shook his peer's hand, under the canopy of the flat-bottomed cruise boat, he remembered him as an Opponent who had illegally switched balls on the eighteenth green and then sunk the putt to win the match. At the time, he hadn't wished to undergo the social embarrassment of complaining to the officials, but he had avoided club tournaments ever since. Now the man--one of those odious exultant retirees with a face creased and thickened by an all-year tan--crowed over that remembered triumph. His wife, who was somewhat younger than he, and preeningly dressed in clothes that would have appeared less garish in Florida, fastened onto Vanessa as her only soulmate. Don drifted away, trying to hide among the drinking young couples, to whom he had nothing to say. Not drinking did that--it robbed you of things to say. How strange it was to be once more at a party where the women were still menstruating. Lean, smart, they moved and twittered and struck poses with an electricity like that in silent movies, which look speeded-up. The men in their checked jackets and pastel slacks were boyish and broad--relatively clumsy foils for their wives' animation, which in the shuffle of the party kept sprouting new edges, abrupt new angles of slightly startled loveliness. Don inhaled, as if to extract from the salt air the scent of their secretions, their secrets. It had been at parties like this that he had gotten to know Vanessa Langley, her and her socially voracious husband. The similarity of her name to Alissa's had been one of the attractions; she would be a wife with a "v" added, for vim and vigor, for vivacity and vagina and victory. He had fallen in love with her, she had fallen with him, and here they were, on board together, more than twenty years later. The boat trundled, with its burden of canned music and clinking drinks and celebrating couples, out through the winding channel between the black-mud banks of the golden-green marsh toward the wider water, where islands crammed with shingled summer houses slowly changed position, starboard to port, as the captain put his craft through a scenic half-circle. There was a white lighthouse, and a stunning sunstruck slope where some American grandee of old had decreed a symmetrical pattern of trimmed shrubs like a great ideogram, and a marina whose pale masts stood as thick as wheat, and a nappy blue-green far stretch of wooded land miraculously yet undeveloped, and the eastward horizon of the open sea already darkening to receive its first starlight while the undulating land to the west basked under luminous salmon stripes, the remnants of daylight. Don silently gazed outward at all this, and his fellow-passengers gave it moments of notice, but the main thrust of their attention was inward, toward each other, in bright and gnashing conversations growing shrill as the drinks sank in, a feast of love drowning out the canned music. That was how it was, how it had been, the living moment awash with beauty ignored in the quest for a better moment, slightly elsewhere, with some slightly differing other, while the weeds grew in the peony beds, and dust balls gathered beneath the sofa, and the children, unobserved, plotted their own escapes, their own elsewheres. A few children had come along with their parents and, after being admonished not to fall overboard, fended for themselves. To one boy, rapt beside him at the rail, Don on the homeward swing pointed out a headland and a rosy mansion whose name he knew, beyond the marsh grasses now drinking in darkness as the tide slipped away from their roots. Vanessa, on the drive home, volunteered, "The birthday boy's father's wife and I have a number of mutual acquaintances, it turned out. She said an old college roommate of mine, Angela Hart, just had a double mastectomy." Don thought of confiding in turn how magically strange he had found it to be again among fertile women, with all the excitement that bred. He might in his youthful cruelty have once said something like this to Alissa--anything to get her to respond, to get the blood flowing--but between Vanessa and him there had come to prevail the tact of two cripples, linked victims of time. Copyright © 2000 by John Updike.

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Previous Editions:

Autumn - 2006

None of them knew the color of the sky. - Stephen Crane

  My 9th grade English teacher, Mr. O'Leary, told us this nine word beginning of "The Open Boat" formed the best opening line in American literature. 

   He told us that in 1959. Perhaps someone has surpassed Crane since then. But I loved Crane's short story and love it still.

  Remarkable, as well, is the heartbreaking truth of Stephen Crane's own tragically short life (1871-1900). Mr. O'Leary told us Crane believed that you had to live an experience in order to write about it truthfully and powerfully. Reportedly, Crane died of the effects of exposure in his own open boat experience. Yet he was able to write his one and only novel, the immortal Red Badge of Courage, never having fought in a single battle.

   For the autumn issue of NLR, we take a look back at one of the great writers of 19th century American literature. A giant whose reputation was built on a single novel and a small number of published short stories.

THE OPEN BOAT:
A TALE INTENDED TO BE AFTER THE FACT. BEING THE
EXPERIENCE OF FOUR MEN SUNK FROM THE STEAMER
COMMODORE.
By Stephen Crane

I

      NONE of them knew the color of the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them. These waves were of the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were of foaming white, and all of the men knew the colors of the sea. The horizon narrowed and widened, and dipped and rose, and at all times its edge was jagged with waves that seemed thrust up in points like rocks.

     Many a man ought to have a bath-tub larger than the boat which here rode upon the sea. These waves were most wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and tall, and each froth-top was a problem in small boat navigation.

     The cook squatted in the bottom and looked with both eyes at the six inches of gunwale which separated him from the ocean. His sleeves were rolled over his fat forearms, and the two flaps of his unbuttoned vest dangled as he bent to bail out the boat. Often he said: "Gawd! That was a narrow clip." As he remarked it he invariably gazed eastward over the broken sea.

     The oiler, steering with one of the two oars in the boat, sometimes raised himself suddenly to keep clear of water that swirled in over the stern. It was a thin little oar and it seemed often ready to snap.

     The correspondent, pulling at the other oar, watched the waves and wondered why he was there.

     The injured captain, lying in the bow, was at this time buried in that profound dejection and indifference which comes, temporarily at least, to even the bravest and most enduring when, willy nilly, the firm fails, the army loses, the ship goes down. The mind of the master of a vessel is rooted deep in the timbers of her, though he command for a day or a decade, and this captain had on him the stern impression of a scene in the grays of dawn of seven turned faces, and later a stump of a top-mast with a white ball on it that slashed to and fro at the waves, went low and lower, and down. Thereafter there was something strange in his voice. Although steady, it was deep with mourning, and of a quality beyond oration or tears.

     "Keep'er a little more south, Billie," said he.

     "'A little more south,' sir," said the oiler in the stern.

     A seat in this boat was not unlike a seat upon a bucking broncho, and, by the same token, a broncho is not much smaller. The craft pranced and reared, and plunged like an animal. As each wave came, and she rose for it, she seemed like a horse making at a fence outrageously high. The manner of her scramble over these walls of water is a mystic thing, and, moreover, at the top of them were ordinarily these problems in white water, the foam racing down from the summit of each wave, requiring a new leap, and a leap from the air. Then, after scornfully bumping a crest, she would slide, and race, and splash down a long incline and arrive bobbing and nodding in front of the next menace.

     A singular disadvantage of the sea lies in the fact that after successfully surmounting one wave you discover that there is another behind it just as important and just as nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats. In a ten-foot dingey one can get an idea of the resources of the sea in the line of waves that is not probable to the average experience, which is never at sea in a dingey. As each slaty wall of water approached, it shut all else from the view of the men in the boat, and it was not difficult to imagine that this particular wave

     In the wan light, the faces of the men must have been gray. Their eyes must have glinted in strange ways as they gazed steadily astern. Viewed from a balcony, the whole thing would doubtlessly have been weirdly picturesque. But the men in the boat had no time to see it, and if they had had leisure there were other things to occupy their minds. The sun swung steadily up the sky, and they knew it was broad day because the color of the sea changed from slate to emerald-green, streaked with amber lights, and the foam was like tumbling snow. The process of the breaking day was unknown to them. They were aware only of this effect upon the color of the waves that rolled toward them.

     In disjointed sentences the cook and the correspondent argued as to the difference between a life-saving station and a house of refuge. The cook had said: "There's a house of refuge just north of the Mosquito Inlet Light, and as soon as they see us, they'll come off in their boat and pick us up."

     "As soon as who see us?" said the correspondent.

     "The crew," said the cook.

     "Houses of refuge don't have crews," said the correspondent. "As I understand them, they are only places where clothes and grub are stored for the benefit of shipwrecked people. They don't carry crews."

     "Oh, yes, they do," said the cook.

     "No, they don't," said the correspondent.

     "Well, we're not there yet, anyhow," said the oiler, in the stern.

     "Well," said the cook, "perhaps it's not a house of refuge that I'm thinking of as being near Mosquito Inlet Light. Perhaps it's a life-saving station."

     "We're not there yet," said the oiler, in the stern.

II

     As the boat bounced from the top of each wave, the wind tore through the hair of the hatless men, and as the craft plopped her stern down again the spray slashed past them. The crest of each of these waves was a hill, from the top of which the men surveyed, for a moment, a broad tumultuous expanse; shining and wind-riven. It was probably splendid. It was probably glorious, this play of the free sea, wild with lights of emerald and white and amber.

     "Bully good thing it's an on-shore wind," said the cook. "If not, where would we be? Wouldn't have a show."

     "That's right," said the correspondent.

     The busy oiler nodded his assent.

     Then the captain, in the bow, chuckled in a way that expressed humor, contempt, tragedy, all in one. "Do you think we've got much of a show, now, boys?" said he.

     Whereupon the three were silent, save for a trifle of hemming and hawing. To express any particular optimism at this time they felt to be childish and stupid, but they all doubtless possessed this sense of the situation in their mind. A young man thinks doggedly at such times. On the other hand, the ethics of their condition was decidedly against any open suggestion of hopelessness. So they were silent.

     "Oh, well," said the captain, soothing his children, "we'll get ashore all right."

     But there was that in his tone which made them think, so the oiler quoth: "Yes! If this wind holds!"

     The cook was bailing: "Yes! If we don't catch hell in the surf."

     Canton flannel gulls flew near and far. Sometimes they sat down on the sea, near patches of brown sea-weed that rolled over the waves with a movement like carpets on line in a gale. The birds sat comfortably in groups, and they were envied by some in the dingey, for the wrath of the sea was no more to them than it was to a covey of prairie chickens a thousand miles inland. Often they came very close and stared at the men with black bead-like eyes. At these times they were uncanny and sinister in their unblinking scrutiny, and the men hooted angrily at them, telling them to be gone. One came, and evidently decided to alight on the top of the captain's head. The bird flew parallel to the boat and did not circle, but made short sidelong jumps in the air in chicken-fashion. His black eyes were wistfully

     In the meantime the oiler and the correspondent rowed. And also they rowed.

     They sat together in the same seat, and each rowed an oar. Then the oiler took both oars; then the correspondent took both oars; then the oiler; then the correspondent. They rowed and they rowed. The very ticklish part of the business was when the time came for the reclining one in the stern to take his turn at the oars. By the very last star of truth, it is easier to steal eggs from under a hen than it was to change seats in the dingey. First the man in the stern slid his hand along the thwart and moved with care, as if he were of Sevres. Then the man in the rowing seat slid his hand along the other thwart. It was all done with the most extraordinary care. As the two sidled past each other, the whole party kept watchful eyes on the coming wave, and the captain cried: "Look out now! Steady there!"

     The brown mats of sea-weed that appeared from time to time were like islands, bits of earth. They were travelling, apparently, neither one way nor the other. They were, to all intents stationary. They informed the men in the boat that it was making progress slowly toward the land.

     The captain, rearing cautiously in the bow, after the dingey soared on a great swell, said that he had seen the lighthouse at Mosquito Inlet. Presently the cook remarked that he had seen it. The correspondent was at the oars, then, and for some reason he too wished to look at the lighthouse, but his back was toward the far shore and the waves were important, and for some time he could not seize an opportunity to turn his head. But at last there came a wave more gentle than the others, and when at the crest of it he swiftly scoured the western horizon.

     "See it?" said the captain.

     "No," said the correspondent, slowly, "I didn't see anything."

     "Look again," said the captain. He pointed. "It's exactly in that direction."

     At the top of another wave, the correspondent did as he was bid, and this time his eyes chanced on a small still thing on the edge of the swaying horizon. It was precisely like the point of a pin. It took an anxious eye to find a lighthouse so tiny.

     "Think we'll make it, captain?"

     "If this wind holds and the boat don't swamp, we can't do much else," said the captain.

     The little boat, lifted by each towering sea, and splashed viciously by the crests, made progress that in the absence of sea-weed was not apparent to those in her. She seemed just a wee thing wallowing, miraculously, top-up, at the mercy of five oceans. Occasionally, a great spread of water, like white flames, swarmed into her.

     "Bail her, cook," said the captain, serenely.

     "All right, captain," said the cheerful cook.

III

      IT would be difficult to describe the subtle brotherhood of men that was here established on the seas. No one said that it was so. No one mentioned it. But it dwelt in the boat, and each man felt it warm him. They were a captain, an oiler, a cook, and a correspondent, and they were friends, friends in a more curiously iron-bound degree than may be common. The hurt captain, lying against the water-jar in the bow, spoke always in a low voice and calmly, but he could never command a more ready and swiftly obedient crew than the motley three of the dingey. It was more than a mere recognition of what was best for the common safety. There was surely in it a quality that was personal and heartfelt. And after this devotion to the commander of the boat there was this comradeship that the correspondent, for instance, who had been taught to be cynical of men, knew even at the time was the best

     "I wish we had a sail," remarked the captain. "We might try my overcoat on the end of an oar and give you two boys a chance to rest." So the cook and the correspondent held the mast and spread wide the overcoat. The oiler steered, and the little boat made good way with her new rig. Sometimes the oiler had to scull sharply to keep a sea from breaking into the boat, but otherwise sailing was a success.

     Meanwhile the light-house had been growing slowly larger. It had now almost assumed color, and appeared like a little gray shadow on the sky. The man at the oars could not be prevented from turning his head rather often to try for a glimpse of this little gray shadow.

     At last, from the top of each wave the men in the tossing boat could see land. Even as the light-house was an upright shadow on the sky, this land seemed but a long black shadow on the sea. It certainly was thinner than paper. "We must be about opposite New Smyrna," said the cook, who had coasted this shore often in schooners. "Captain, by the way, I believe they abandoned that life-saving station there about a year ago."

     "Did they?" said the captain.

     The wind slowly died away. The cook and the correspondent were not now obliged to slave in order to hold high the oar. But the waves continued their old impetuous swooping at the dingey, and the little craft, no longer under way, struggled woundily over them. The oiler or the correspondent took the oars again.

     Shipwrecks are apropos of nothing. If men could only train for them and have them occur when the men had reached pink condition, there would be less drowning at sea. Of the four in the dingey none had slept any time worth mentioning for two days and two nights previous to embarking in the dingey, and in the excitement of clambering about the deck of a foundering ship they had also forgotten to eat heartily.

     For these reasons, and for others, neither the oiler nor the correspondent was fond of rowing at this time. The correspondent wondered ingenuously how in the name of all that was sane could there be people who thought it amusing to row a boat. It was not an amusement; it was a diabolical punishment, and even a genius of mental aberrations could never conclude that it was anything but a horror to the muscles and a crime against the back. He mentioned to the boat in general how the amusement of rowing struck him, and the weary-faced oiler smiled in full sympathy. Previously to the foundering, by the way, the oiler had worked double-watch in the engine-room of the ship.

     "Take her easy, now, boys," said the captain. "Don't spend yourselves. If we have to run a surf you'll need all your strength, because we'll sure have to swim for it. Take your time."

     Slowly the land arose from the sea. From a black line it became a line of black and a line of white, trees, and sand. Finally, the captain said that he could make out a house on the shore. "That's the house of refuge, sure," said the cook. "They'll see us before long, and come out after us."

     The distant light-house reared high. "The keeper ought to be able to make us out now, if he's looking through a glass," said the captain. "He'll notify the life-saving people."

     "None of those other boats could have got ashore to give word of the wreck," said the oiler, in a low voice. "Else the life-boat would be out hunting us."

     Slowly and beautifully the land loomed out of the sea. The wind came again. It had veered from the northeast to the southeast. Finally, a new sound struck the ears of the men in the boat. It was the low thunder of the surf on the shore. "We'll never be able to make the light-house now," said the captain. "Swing her head a little more north, Billie," said the captain.

     "'A little more north,' sir," said the oiler.

     Whereupon the little boat turned her nose once more down the wind, and all but the oarsman watched the shore grow. Under the influence of this expansion doubt and direful apprehension was leaving the minds of the men. The management of the boat was still most absorbing, but it could not prevent a quiet cheerfulness. In an hour, perhaps, they would be ashore.

     Their back-bones had become thoroughly

IV

     "COOK," remarked the captain, "there don't seem to be any signs of life about your house of refuge."

     "No," replied the cook. "Funny they don't see us!"

     A broad stretch of lowly coast lay before the eyes of the men. It was of low dunes topped with dark vegetation. The roar of the surf was plain, and sometimes they could see the white lip of a wave as it spun up the beach. A tiny house was blocked out black upon the sky. Southward, the slim light-house lifted its little gray length.

     Tide, wind, and waves were swinging the dingey northward. "Funny they don't see us," said the men.

     The surf's roar was here dulled, but its tone was, nevertheless, thunderous and mighty. As the boat swam over the great rollers, the men sat listening to this roar. "We'll swamp sure," said everybody.

     It is fair to say here that there was not a life-saving station within twenty miles in either direction, but the men did not know this fact and in consequence they made dark and opprobrious remarks concerning the eyesight of the nation's life-savers. Four scowling men sat in the dingey and surpassed records in the invention of epithets.

     "Funny they don't see us."

     The light-heartedness of a former time had completely faded. To their sharpened minds it was easy to conjure pictures of all kinds of incompetency and blindness and indeed, cowardice. There was the shore of the populous land, and it was bitter and bitter to them that from it came no sign.

     "Well," said the captain, ultimately, "I suppose we'll have to make a try for ourselves. If we stay out here too long, we'll none of us have strength left to swim after the boat swamps."

     And so the oiler, who was at the oars, turned the boat straight for the shore. There was a sudden tightening of muscles. There was some thinking.

     "If we don't all get ashore -- " said the captain. "If we don't all get ashore, I suppose you fellows know where to send news of my finish?"

     They then briefly exchanged some addresses and admonitions. As for the reflections of the men, there was a great deal of rage in them. Perchance they might be formulated thus: "If I am going to be drowned -- if I am going to be drowned -- if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees? Was I brought here merely to have my nose dragged away as I was about to nibble the sacred cheese of life? It is preposterous. If this old ninny-woman, Fate, cannot do better than this, she should be deprived of the management of men's fortunes. She is an old hen who knows not her intention. If she has decided to drown me, why did she not do it in the beginning and save me all this trouble. The whole affair is absurd. . . . But, no, she cannot mean to drown me. She dare not drown me. She cannot drown me. Not after all this work." Afterward the man might have had an impulse to shake his fist at the clouds: "Just you drown me, now, and then hear what I call you!"

     The billows that came at this time were more formidable. They seemed always just about to break and roll over the little boat in a turmoil of foam. There was a preparatory and long growl in the speech of them. No mind unused to the sea would have concluded that the dingey could ascend these sheer heights in time. The shore was still afar. The oiler was a wily surfman. "Boys," he said, swiftly, "she won't live three minutes more and we're too far out to swim. Shall I take her to sea again, captain?"

     "Yes! Go ahead!" said the captain.

     This oiler, by a series of quick miracles, and fast and steady oarsmanship, turned

     There was a considerable silence as the boat bumped over the furrowed sea to deeper water. Then somebody in gloom spoke. "Well, anyhow, they must have seen us from the shore by now."

     The gulls went in slanting flight up the wind toward the gray desolate east. A squall, marked by dingy clouds, and clouds brick-red, like smoke from a burning building, appeared from the southeast.

     "What do you think of those life-saving people? Ain't they peaches?"

     "Funny they haven't seen us."

     "Maybe they think we're out here for sport! Maybe they think we're fishin'. Maybe they think we're damned fools."

     It was a long afternoon. A changed tide tried to force them southward, but wind and wave said northward. Far ahead, where coast-line, sea, and sky formed their mighty angle, there were little dots which seemed to indicate a city on the shore.

     "St. Augustine?"

     The captain shook his head. "Too near Mosquito Inlet."

     And the oiler rowed, and then the correspondent rowed. Then the oiler rowed. It was a weary business. The human back can become the seat of more aches and pains than are registered in books for the composite anatomy of a regiment. It is a limited area, but it can become the theatre of innumerable muscular conflicts, tangles, wrenches, knots, and other comforts.

     "Did you ever like to row, Billie?" asked the correspondent.

     "No," said the oiler. "Hang it."

     When one exchanged the rowing-seat for a place in the bottom of the boat, he suffered a bodily depression that caused him to be careless of everything save an obligation to wiggle one finger. There was cold sea-water swashing to and fro in the boat, and he lay in it. His head, pillowed on a thwart, was within an inch of the swirl of a wave crest, and sometimes a particularly obstreperous sea came in-board and drenched him once more. But these matters did not annoy him. It is almost certain that if the boat had capsized he would have tumbled comfortably out upon the ocean as if he felt sure it was a great soft mattress.

     "Look! There's a man on the shore!"

     "Where?"

     "There! See 'im? See 'im?"

     "Yes, sure! He's walking along."

     "Now he's stopped. Look! He's facing us!"

     "He's waving at us!"

     "So he is! By thunder!"

     "Ah, now, we're all right! Now we're all right! There'll be a boat out here for us in half an hour."

     "He's going on. He's running. He's going up to that house there."

     The remote beach seemed lower than the sea, and it required a searching glance to discern the little black figure. The captain saw a floating stick and they rowed to it. A bath-towel was by some weird chance in the boat, and, tying this on the stick, the captain waved it. The oarsman did not dare turn his head, so he was obliged to ask questions.

     "What's he doing now?"

     "He's standing still again. He's looking, I think. . . . There he goes again. Toward the house. . . . Now he's stopped again."

     "Is he waving at us?"

     "No, not now! he was, though."

     "Look! There comes another man!"

     "He's running."

     "Look at him go, would you."

     "Why, he's on a bicycle. Now he's met the other man. They're both waving at us. Look!"

     "There comes something up the beach."

     "What the devil is that thing?"

     "Why, it looks like a boat."

     "Why, certainly it's a boat."

     "No, it's on wheels."

     "Yes, so it is. Well, that must be the life-boat. They drag them along shore on a wagon."

     "That's the life-boat, sure."

     "No, by -- -- , it's -- it's an omnibus."

     "I tell you it's a life-boat."

     "It is not! It's an omnibus. I can see it plain. See? One of these big hotel omnibuses."

     "By thunder, you're right. It's an omnibus, sure as fate. What do you suppose they are doing with an omnibus? Maybe they are going around collecting the life-crew, hey?"

     "That's it, likely. Look! There's a fellow waving a little black flag. He's standing on the steps of the omnibus.

     "That ain't a flag, is it? That's his coat. Why, certainly, that's his coat."

     "So it is. It's his coat. He's taken it off and is waving it around his head. But would you look at him swing it."

     "Oh, say, there isn't any life-saving station there. That's just a winter resort hotel omnibus that has brought over some of the boarders to see us drown."

     "What's that idiot with the coat mean? What's he signaling, anyhow?"

     "It looks as if he were trying to tell us to go north. There must be a life-saving station up there."

     "No! He thinks we're fishing. Just giving us a merry hand. See? Ah, there, Willie."

     "Well, I wish I could make something out of those signals. What do you suppose he means?"

     "He don't mean anything. He's just playing."

     "Well, if he'd just signal us to try the surf again, or to go to sea and wait, or go north, or go south, or go to hell -- there would be some reason in it. But look at him. He just stands there and keeps his coat revolving like a wheel. The ass!"

     "There come more people."

     "Now there's quite a mob. Look! Isn't that a boat?"

     "Where? Oh, I see where you mean. No, that's no boat."

     "That fellow is still waving his coat."

     "He must think we like to see him do that. Why don't he quit it. It don't mean anything."

     "I don't know. I think he is trying to make us go north. It must be that there's a life-saving station there somewhere."

     "Say, he ain't tired yet. Look at 'im wave."

     "Wonder how long he can keep that up. He's been revolving his coat ever since he caught sight of us. He's an idiot. Why aren't they getting men to bring a boat out. A fishing boat -- one of those big yawls -- could come out here all right. Why don't he do something?"

     "Oh, it's all right, now."

     "They'll have a boat out here for us in less than no time, now that they've seen us."

     A faint yellow tone came into the sky over the low land. The shadows on the sea slowly deepened. The wind bore coldness with it, and the men began to shiver.

     "Holy smoke!" said one, allowing his voice to express his impious mood, "if we keep on monkeying out here! If we've got to flounder out here all night!"

     "Oh, we'll never have to stay here all night! Don't you worry. They've seen us now, and it won't be long before they'll come chasing out after us."

     The shore grew dusky. The man waving a coat blended gradually into this gloom, and it swallowed in the same manner the omnibus and the group of people. The spray, when it dashed uproariously over the side, made the voyagers shrink and swear like men who were being branded.

     "I'd like to catch the chump who waved the coat. I feel like soaking him one, just for luck."

     "Why? What did he do?"

     "Oh, nothing, but then he seemed so damned cheerful."

     In the meantime the oiler rowed, and then the correspondent rowed, and then the oiler rowed. Gray-faced and bowed forward, they mechanically, turn by turn, plied the leaden oars. The form of the light-house had vanished from the southern horizon, but finally a pale star appeared, just lifting from the sea. The streaked saffron in the west passed before the all-merging darkness, and the sea to the east was black. The land had vanished, and was expressed only by the low and drear thunder of the surf.

     "If I am going to be drowned -- if I am going to be drowned -- if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods, who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees? Was I brought here merely to have my nose dragged away as I was about to nibble the sacred cheese of life?"

     The patient captain, drooped over the water-jar, was sometimes obliged to speak to the oarsman.

     "Keep her head up! Keep her head up!"

     "'Keep her head up,' sir." The voices were weary and low.

     This was surely a quiet evening. All save the oarsman lay heavily and listlessly in the boat's bottom. As for him, his eyes

     The cook's head was on a thwart, and he looked without interest at the water under his nose. He was deep in other scenes. Finally he spoke. "Billie," he murmured, dreamfully, "what kind of pie do you like best?"

V

     "PIE," said the oiler and the correspondent, agitatedly. "Don't talk about those things, blast you!"

     "Well," said the cook, "I was just thinking about ham sandwiches, and -- "

     A night on the sea in an open boat is a long night. As darkness settled finally, the shine of the light, lifting from the sea in the south, changed to full gold. On the northern horizon a new light appeared, a small bluish gleam on the edge of the waters. These two lights were the furniture of the world. Otherwise there was nothing but waves.

     Two men huddled in the stern, and distances were so magnificent in the dingey that the rower was enabled to keep his feet partly warmed by thrusting them under his companions. Their legs indeed extended far under the rowing-seat until they touched the feet of the captain forward. Sometimes, despite the efforts of the tired oarsman, a wave came piling into the boat, an icy wave of the night, and the chilling water soaked them anew. They would twist their bodies for a moment and groan, and sleep the dead sleep once more, while the water in the boat gurgled about them as the craft rocked.

     The plan of the oiler and the correspondent was for one to row until he lost the ability, and then arouse the other from his sea-water couch in the bottom of the boat.

     The oiler plied the oars until his head drooped forward, and the overpowering sleep blinded him. And he rowed yet afterward. Then he touched a man in the bottom of the boat, and called his name. "Will you spell me for a little while?" he said, meekly.

     "Sure, Billie," said the correspondent, awakening and dragging himself to a sitting position. They exchanged places carefully, and the oiler, cuddling down to the sea-water at the cook's side, seemed to go to sleep instantly.

     The particular violence of the sea had ceased. The waves came without snarling. The obligation of the man at the oars was to keep the boat headed so that the tilt of the rollers would not capsize her, and to preserve her from filling when the crests rushed past. The black waves were silent and hard to be seen in the darkness. Often one was almost upon the boat before the oarsman was aware.

     In a low voice the correspondent addressed the captain. He was not sure that the captain was awake, although this iron man seemed to be always awake. "Captain, shall I keep her making for that light north, sir?"

     The same steady voice answered him. "Yes. Keep it about two points off the port bow."

     The cook had tied a life-belt around himself in order to get even the warmth which this clumsy cork contrivance could donate, and he seemed almost stove-like when a rower, whose teeth invariably chattered wildly as soon as he ceased his labor, dropped down to sleep.

     The correspondent, as he rowed, looked down at the two men sleeping under foot. The cook's arm was around the oiler's shoulders, and, with their fragmentary clothing and haggard faces, they were the babes of the sea, a grotesque rendering of the old babes in the wood.

     Later he must have grown stupid at his work, for suddenly there was a growling of water, and a crest came with a roar and a swash into the boat, and it was a wonder that it did not set the cook afloat in his life-belt. The cook continued to sleep, but the oiler sat up, blinking his eyes and shaking with the new cold.

     "Oh, I'm awful sorry, Billie," said the correspondent, contritely.

     "That's all right, old boy," said the oiler, and lay down again and was asleep.

     Presently it seemed that even the captain dozed, and the correspondent thought that he was the one man afloat on all the oceans. The wind had a voice as it came over the waves, and it was sadder than the end.

     There was a long, loud swishing astern of the boat, and a gleaming trail of phosphorescence, like blue flame, was furrowed

     Then there came a stillness, while the correspondent breathed with the open mouth and looked at the sea.

     Suddenly there was another swish and another long flash of bluish light, and this time it was alongside the boat, and might almost have been reached with an oar. The correspondent saw an enormous fin speed like a shadow through the water, hurling the crystalline spray and leaving the long glowing trail.

     The correspondent looked over his shoulder at the captain. His face was hidden, and he seemed to be asleep. He looked at the babes of the sea. They certainly were asleep. So, being bereft of sympathy, he leaned a little way to one side and swore softly into the sea.

     But the thing did not then leave the vicinity of the boat. Ahead or astern, on one side or the other, at intervals long or short, fled the long sparkling streak, and there was to be heard the whiroo of the dark fin. The speed and power of the thing was greatly to be admired. It cut the water like a gigantic and keen projectile.

     The presence of this biding thing did not affect the man with the same horror that it would if he had been a picnicker. He simply looked at the sea dully and swore in an undertone.

     Nevertheless, it is true that he did not wish to be alone with the thing. He wished one of his companions to awaken by chance and keep him company with it. But the captain hung motionless over the water-jar and the oiler and the cook in the bottom of the boat were plunged in slumber.

VI

     "IF I am going to be drowned -- if I am going to be drowned -- if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods, who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees?"

     During this dismal night, it may be remarked that a man would conclude that it was really the intention of the seven mad gods to drown him, despite the abominable injustice of it. For it was certainly an abominable injustice to drown a man who had worked so hard, so hard. The man felt it would be a crime most unnatural. Other people had drowned at sea since galleys swarmed with painted sails, but still --

     When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples. Any visible expression of nature would surely be pelleted with his jeers.

     Then, if there be no tangible thing to hoot he feels, perhaps, the desire to confront a personification and indulge in pleas, bowed to one knee, and with hands supplicant, saying: "Yes, but I love myself."

     A high cold star on a winter's night is the word he feels that she says to him. Thereafter he knows the pathos of his situation.

     The men in the dingey had not discussed these matters, but each had, no doubt, reflected upon them in silence and according to his mind. There was seldom any expression upon their faces save the general one of complete weariness. Speech was devoted to the business of the boat.

     To chime the notes of his emotion, a verse mysteriously entered the correspondent's head. He had even forgotten that he had forgotten this verse, but it suddenly was in his mind.

     In his childhood, the correspondent had been made acquainted with the fact that a soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers, but he had never regarded the fact as important. Myriads of his school-fellows had informed him of the soldier's plight, but the dinning had naturally ended by making him perfectly indifferent. He had never considered it his affair that a soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers, nor had it appeared to him as a matter for sorrow. It was less to him than breaking of a pencil's point.

     Now, however, it quaintly came to him as a human, living thing. It was no longer merely a picture of a few throes in the breast of a poet, meanwhile drinking tea and warming his feet at the grate; it was an actuality -- stern, mournful, and fine.

     The correspondent plainly saw the soldier. He lay on the sand with his feet out straight and still. While his pale left hand was upon his chest in an attempt to thwart the going of his life, the blood came between his fingers. In the far Algerian distance, a city of low square forms was set against a sky that was faint with the last sunset hues. The correspondent, plying the oars and dreaming of the slow and slower movements of the lips of the soldier, was moved by a profound and perfectly impersonal comprehension. He was sorry for the soldier of the Legion who lay dying in Algiers.

     The thing which had followed the boat and waited had evidently grown bored at the delay. There was no longer to be heard the slash of the cut-water, and there was no longer the flame of the long trail. The light in the north still glimmered, but it was apparently no nearer to the boat. Sometimes the boom of the surf rang in the correspondent's ears, and he turned the craft seaward then and rowed harder. Southward, someone had evidently built a watch-fire on the beach. It was too low and too far to be seen, but it made a shimmering, roseate reflection upon the bluff back of it, and this could be discerned from the boat. The wind came stronger, and sometimes a wave suddenly raged out like a mountain-cat and there was to be seen the sheen and sparkle of a broken crest.

     The captain, in the bow, moved on his water-jar and sat erect. "Pretty long night," he observed to the correspondent. He looked at the shore. "Those life-saving people take their time."

     "Did you see that shark playing around?"

     "Yes, I saw him. He was a big fellow, all right."

     "Wish I had known you were awake."

     Later the correspondent spoke into the bottom of the boat.

     "Billie!" There was a slow and gradual disentanglement. "Billie, will you spell me?"

     "Sure," said the oiler.

     As soon as the correspondent touched the cold comfortable sea-water in the bottom of the boat, and had huddled close to the cook's life-belt he was deep in sleep, despite the fact that his teeth played all the popular airs. This sleep was so good to him that it was but a moment before he heard a voice call his name in a tone that demonstrated the last stages of exhaustion. "Will you spell me?"

     "Sure, Billie."

     The light in the north had mysteriously vanished, but the correspondent took his course from the wide-awake captain.

     Later in the night they took the boat farther out to sea, and the captain directed the cook to take one oar at the stern and keep the boat facing the seas. He was to call out if he should hear the thunder of the surf. This plan enabled the oiler and the correspondent to get respite together. "We'll give those boys a chance to get into shape again," said the captain. They curled down and, after a few preliminary chatterings and trembles, slept once more the dead sleep. Neither knew they had bequeathed to the cook the company of another shark, or perhaps the same shark.

     As the boat caroused on the waves, spray occasionally bumped over the side and gave them a fresh soaking, but this had no power to break their repose. The ominous slash of the wind and the water affected them as it would have affected mummies.

     "Boys," said the cook, with the notes of every reluctance in his voice, "she's drifted in pretty close. I guess one of you had better take her to sea again." The correspondent, aroused, heard the crash of the toppled crests.

     As he was rowing, the captain gave him some whiskey and water, and this steadied the chills out of him. "If I ever get ashore and anybody shows me even a photograph of an oar -- "

     At last there was a short conversation.

     "Billie. . . . Billie, will you spell me?"

     "Sure," said the oiler.

VII

     WHEN the correspondent again opened his eyes, the sea and the sky were each of the gray hue of the dawning. Later, carmine

     On the distant dunes were set many little black cottages, and a tall white wind-mill reared above them. No man, nor dog, nor bicycle appeared on the beach. The cottages might have formed a deserted village.

     The voyagers scanned the shore. A conference was held in the boat. "Well," said the captain, "if no help is coming, we might better try a run through the surf right away. If we stay out here much longer we will be too weak to do anything for ourselves at all." The others silently acquiesced in this reasoning. The boat was headed for the beach. The correspondent wondered if none ever ascended the tall wind-tower, and if then they never looked seaward. This tower was a giant, standing with its back to the plight of the ants. It represented in a degree, to the correspondent, the serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual -- nature in the wind, and nature in the vision of men. She did not seem cruel to him, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent. It is, perhaps, plausible that a man in this situation, impressed with the unconcern of the universe, should see the innumerable flaws of his life and have them taste wickedly in his mind and wish for another chance. A distinction between right and wrong seems absurdly clear to him, then, in this new ignorance of the grave-edge, and he understands that if he were given another opportunity he would mend his conduct and his words, and be better and brighter during an introduction, or at a tea.

     "Now, boys," said the captain, "she is going to swamp sure. All we can do is to work her in as far as possible, and then when she swamps, pile out and scramble for the beach. Keep cool now and don't jump until she swamps sure."

     The oiler took the oars. Over his shoulders he scanned the surf. "Captain," he said, "I think I'd better bring her about, and keep her head-on to the seas and back her in."

     "All right, Billie," said the captain. "Back her in." The oiler swung the boat then and, seated in the stern, the cook and the correspondent were obliged to look over their shoulders to contemplate the lonely and indifferent shore.

     The monstrous inshore rollers heaved the boat high until the men were again enabled to see the white sheets of water scudding up the slanted beach. "We won't get in very close," said the captain. Each time a man could wrest his attention from the rollers, he turned his glance toward the shore, and in the expression of the eyes during this contemplation there was a singular quality. The correspondent, observing the others, knew that they were not afraid, but the full meaning of their glances was shrouded.

     As for himself, he was too tired to grapple fundamentally with the fact. He tried to coerce his mind into thinking of it, but the mind was dominated at this time by the muscles, and the muscles said they did not care. It merely occurred to him that if he should drown it would be a shame.

     There were no hurried words, no pallor, no plain agitation. The men simply looked at the shore. "Now, remember to get well clear of the boat when you jump," said the captain.

     Seaward the crest of a roller suddenly fell with a thunderous crash, and the long white comber came roaring down upon the boat.

     "Steady now," said the captain. The men were silent. They turned their eyes from the shore to the comber and waited. The boat slid up the incline, leaped at the furious top, bounced over it, and swung down the long back of the waves. Some water had been shipped and the cook bailed it out.

     But the next crest crashed also. The tumbling boiling flood of white water caught the boat and whirled it almost perpendicular. Water swarmed in from all sides. The correspondent had his hands on the gunwale at this time, and when the water entered at that place he swiftly withdrew his fingers, as if he objected to wetting them.

     The little boat, drunken with this weight of water, reeled and snuggled deeper into the sea.

     "Bail her out, cook! Bail her out," said the captain.

     "All right, captain," said the cook.

     "Now, boys, the next one will do for

     The third wave moved forward, huge, furious, implacable. It fairly swallowed the dingey, and almost simultaneously the men tumbled into the sea. A piece of life-belt had lain in the bottom of the boat, and as the correspondent went overboard he held this to his chest with his left hand.

     The January water was icy, and he reflected immediately that it was colder than he had expected to find it off the coast of Florida. This appeared to his dazed mind as a fact important enough to be noted at the time. The coldness of the water was sad; it was tragic. This fact was somehow mixed and confused with his opinion of his own situation that it seemed almost a proper reason for tears. The water was cold.

     When he came to the surface he was conscious of little but the noisy water. Afterward he saw his companions in the sea. The oiler was ahead in the race. He was swimming strongly and rapidly. Off to the correspondent's left, the cook's great white and corked back bulged out of the water, and in the rear the captain was hanging with his one good hand to the keel of the overturned dingey.

     There is a certain immovable quality to a shore, and the correspondent wondered at it amid the confusion of the sea.

     It seemed also very attractive, but the correspondent knew that it was a long journey, and he paddled leisurely. The piece of life-preserver lay under him, and sometimes he whirled down the incline of a wave as if he were on a hand-sled.

     But finally he arrived at a place in the sea where travel was beset with difficulty. He did not pause swimming to inquire what manner of current had caught him, but there his progress ceased. The shore was set before him like a bit of scenery on a stage, and he looked at it and understood with his eyes each detail of it.

     As the cook passed, much farther to the left, the captain was calling to him, "Turn over on your back, cook! Turn over on your back and use the oar."

     "All right, sir!" The cook turned on his back, and, paddling with an oar, went ahead as if he were a canoe.

     Presently the boat also passed to the left of the correspondent with the captain clinging with one hand to the keel. He would have appeared like a man raising himself to look over a board fence, if it were not for the extraordinary gymnastics of the boat. The correspondent marvelled that the captain could still hold to it.

     They passed on, nearer to shore -- the oiler, the cook, the captain -- and following them went the water-jar, bouncing gayly over the seas.

     The correspondent remained in the grip of this strange new enemy -- a current. The shore, with its white slope of sand and its green bluff, topped with little silent cottages, was spread like a picture before him. It was very near to him then, but he was impressed as one who in a gallery looks at a scene from Brittany or Algiers.

     He thought: "I am going to drown? Can it be possible? Can it be possible? Can it be possible?" Perhaps an individual must consider his own death to be the final phenomenon of nature.

     But later a wave perhaps whirled him out of this small deadly current, for he found suddenly that he could again make progress toward the shore. Later still, he was aware that the captain, clinging with one hand to the keel of the dingey, had his face turned away from the shore and toward him, and was calling his name. "Come to the boat! Come to the boat!"

     In his struggle to reach the captain and the boat, he reflected that when one gets properly wearied, drowning must really be a comfortable arrangement, a cessation of hostilities accompanied by a large degree of relief, and he was glad of it, for the main thing in his mind for some moments had been horror of the temporary agony. He did not wish to be hurt.

     Presently he saw a man running along the shore. He was undressing with most remarkable speed. Coat, trousers, shirt, everything flew magically off him.

     "Come to the boat," called the captain.

     "All right, captain." As the correspondent paddled, he saw the captain let himself down to bottom and leave the boat. Then the correspondent performed his one little marvel of the voyage. A large wave caught him and flung him with ease and supreme speed completely over the boat and far beyond it. It struck him even then as an event in gymnastics, and a true miracle of the sea. An overturned boat in the surf is not a plaything to a swimming man.

     The correspondent arrived in water that reached only to his waist, but his condition did not enable him to stand for more than a moment. Each wave knocked him into a heap, and the under-tow pulled at him.

     Then he saw the man who had been running and undressing, and undressing and running, come bounding into the water. He dragged ashore the cook, and then waded toward the captain, but the captain waved him away, and sent him to the correspondent. He was naked, naked as a tree in winter, but a halo was about his head, and he shone like a saint. He gave a strong pull, and a long drag, and a bully heave at the correspondent's hand. The correspondent, schooled in the minor formulae, said: "Thanks, old man." But suddenly the man cried: "What's that?" He pointed a swift finger. The correspondent said: "Go."

     In the shallows, face downward, lay the oiler. His forehead touched sand that was periodically, between each wave, clear of the sea.

     The correspondent did not know all that transpired afterward. When he achieved safe ground he fell, striking the sand with each particular part of his body. It was as if he had dropped from a roof, but the thud was grateful to him.

     It seems that instantly the beach was populated with men with blankets, clothes, and flasks, and women with coffee-pots and all the remedies sacred to their minds. The welcome of the land to the men from the sea was warm and generous, but a still and dripping shape was carried slowly up the beach, and the land's welcome for it could only be the different and sinister hospitality of the grave.

     When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea's voice to the men on shore, and they felt that they could then be interpreters.

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Summer Selection

Michelle Richmond is the author of the story collection The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress, which won the Associated Writing Programs Award, and the novel Dream of the Blue Room. Her new novel is forthcoming from Bantam. Her stories and essays have appeared in Glimmer Train, Playboy, the Mid-American Review, Salon.com, 7x7, and many other publications.

Michelle holds an MFA from the University of Miami, where she was a James Michener Fellow, and teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at California College of the Arts. She recently served as Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bowling Green State University, and she is currently Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at St. Mary’s College of Moraga, California. She is the recipient of the 2006 Mississippi Review Fiction Prize.

A native of Mobile, Alabama, Michelle lives with her husband and son in San Francisco. She is the founding editor of the literary journal Fiction Attic, and she serves on the advisory board of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. She is represented by Valerie Borchardt of Georges Borchardt, Inc.

Read an interview here, here or here. Read short stories online at the Mississippi Review, Exquisite Corpse, and Other Voices, or in the February issue of Playboy. Read an excerpt from Dream of the Blue Room in USA Today, or a chapter from Michelle’s forthcoming novel in the San Francisco Chronicle. For more information go to www.michellerichmond.com

National Literary Review is pleased to present this re-publication of

The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress reprinted here by permission of the author & ©UMass Press.

                                                              Detail: Woman by a Tree 1980 -Erie Chapman

The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress

by Michelle Richmond

Ingrid

I heard her voice before I saw her, her sing song dancing the air of Casa de Paella in Barcelona. Something Scandinavian?

"Perhaps we could take a boat to Majorca tonight, Bertie. I've heard it's wonderful...the biggest of the Balearic Islands."

"Fine idea, Ingrid," a male voice answered.

I braced myself. Ingrid might be as old as forty talking to her even older husband, Bertie.

A second male, "If we go down to the harbor right now, we could get our tickets, have dinner, get drunk."

"I thought you were dee-runk already, Sammy," Bertie's voice said.

A night cruise to Majorca, I thought, the next chapter in my Homeric odyssey after four days on the French Riviera my unburdened by an itinerary.

"It's my last little summer of independence," I told my fiancee grandly. "After this, I'll be buckled into my seatbelt for the duration."

Diane and Mom wanted to track me, buckle me in from a distance. But I saw sympathy in Dad's eyes. Chained to his insurance agency for twenty-three years, he bore the hopeless look of a zoo lion.

The threesome behind me was about to leave. I summoned my courage and turned around. Ingrid smiled into my soul. Back then, I believed in the perfect woman theory. That there was, out there, some goddess who was ideal in every way, designed by God for me alone. Diane was okay. Lovely enough to win a part of my heart. But the woman before me was Aprodite.  

I had fallen for five women in five days, women I saw on the train or in restaurants or along the beach in Cannes. Now, I fell in love with Ingrid believing, in my arrow-pierced heart, that I would love her forever. She was one of the Sirens in my eighth grade copy of The Odyssey. I loosed my bonds and sailed toward the song of her voice.

"Excuse me. I happened to overhear you might go to Majorca tonight. I was planning to go there too," I lied. "May I join up with you?"

We were all about the same age. Europe in the '60s was jammed with young people wandering train stations, museums, beaches; crowding into the Caves in Paris to sway to the voices of Edith Piaf imitators. You picked up with someone who was headed the same way and broke off with them when they were going some place else.

"Sure, I'm Bertie from England. This is Ingrid Deceto. She's named after Ingrid Bergman," he laughed. "And the one with the pirate patch over his eye here is Sammy from Australia. The patch is genuine, the man is a fake."

I shook hands with my Cyclops.

"Hi, I'm Lance Bloom from New York - Manhattan." My name was Larry and I was from Rochester. "So you're from England," I said to Bertie, "and you're from Australia. Where are you. from, Ingrid?" I stammered into her beauty.

She wore her dark blond hair long. It was pulled together behind her neck by a sapphire ribbon that matched her eyes. She was prettier than the black and white Ingrid of Casablanca. Her face was all fine lines, full lips, high cheek bones. The Spanish sun had awakened freckles across the crests of her cheeks and along her bronzed arms.

"I'm from everywhere. Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm, London. When I was nine, I was from Istanbul; when I was thirteen, Athens; when I was seventeen, London. That's where I'm from now, London. We live along the Thames. We always live near the water. My father is with the Danish Foreign Service. I'm from everywhere and nowhere."

We paid our check, headed for the harbor along rain-wetted streets, past little shops exhaling leather-coffee-roses and restaurants where paella bathed in large tubs, midnight blue wine rose from the center of each table in label-free bottles. The afternoon sun rode our shoulders as we reached the harbor. Along the pier, diesel fumes and fish smells mixed with the light stench of oil tankers. We booked deck passage on a ship called La Zanzibar bound for Palma, Majorca. It was part passenger-part cargo ship and carried boxes of bananas.

I was glad I wasn't engaged to Diane; glad I hadn't strapped on the seat belt yet. My freedom tasted like the 1959 Bordeaux I drank down to the dregs two nights before at a Cannes restaurant and sounded like the guitar I purhcased in Barcelona.

During our walk to the ship, I collected delicious facts about Ingrid. Since I now loved her, everything was delicious. She wore a sleeveless white blouse with a pocket over the left breast, cotton shorts the color of the sea, leather sandals with a single thong that separated her first two toes. Her nails were polish-free. Her face was its own cosmetic.

The scent of bananas straddled the mid-section of the ship as we boarded. We made our way to the bow, carved out a spot against a tarp covered load of lumber. I was careful to secure the spot on Ingrid's right so I would be free to drape my left arm around her shoulders leaving my right hand free.

Instinct informed me that my competitors would not challenge my Ulyssian power. Sammy was anti-power anyway. "I'm an anarchist. All rules are evil," he announced on the walk to the harbor as we passed a couple of Franco's policemen decked out in shiny black tri-corner hats and toting submachine guns. "Men who enforce rules are bloody devils."

Pale, sunken-chested Bertie was T.S.Eliot. In between tubercular-sounding coughs, he smoked oval Galois Disc Blue cigarettes stored in a brown leather cigarette case with gold trim.

"You seem chronically depressed, Bertie old man," Sammy teased.

"You don't understand me," Bertie grumbled, his arms crossed, a Galois stuck to his lower lip. "I own a dry sense of humor - too sophisticated for a goddamned Aussie."

Sammy laughed and gave Bertie a hug. Ingrid laughed too, the sound smiling up from deep in her throat.

Sammy withdrew a bottle of Chianti from the blue canvas bag looped over his shoulder. Bertie produced a wedge of Stilton from his bag. I shaved four slices with my pocket knife and handed them out. Someone broke into a case of the bananas and passed bunches to everyone. The four of us sat down on the wooden deck, leaned our backs against the canvas tarp, devoured the wine, cheese, bananas as the ship steamed away from the collapsing sun.

An hour later, I took out my guitar and sang, "Unchained Melody." Ingrid joined in. I took her singing of "I hunger for your touch," as a personal invitation.

By midnight, Sammy and Bertie were asleep and Ingrid and I were a couple. Beneath the stars, she slipped on a blue sweater adorned with snowflakes and mountains and trees. I was glad the sweater buttoned down the front as I wrapped her with my left arm.

I confessed as much of my life story to Ingrid as I could: my degree from Dartmouth with a major in English literature, my acceptance to Columbia Law School; how I was embarrassed by my rich family, how I admired JFK and thought it was time for me to start marching with Martin Luther King; my two nights in jail for drunk driving. I didn't tell her about Diane and how this was my last summer before I buckled up.

She listened with her eyes, her lips and the space between the buttons on her sweater. The breeze kept slapping a yellow forelock back and forth. Each time it flopped in front of her eyes, she would flick it back with her right hand. All the while, I studied her lips and tried to figure out how to kiss them.

"Just think," I said. "We'll both be parents some day."

"I don't know about me," she replied. "Children are a lot of responsibility."

"Well, I hear the process of conceiving them is lots of fun."

"You hear?" she laughed. "So are you telling me you have no first hand experience with the 'process'?"

"Certainly not!" I said, as if shocked. "How about you?"

She cast her head down. "My, what a question."

"Give me your answer."

"I've heard that it's quite dangerous for a young woman." She paused, pushed back from me. Her eyes turned dark. "Look, Lance. The most important things about me you can never know. I am completely different from you. I live a very strange life. A life you could never, possibly understand."

Bertie coughed. Sammy stirred and called out, "Nuclear nightmares ... bloody Reds'll kill us all unless we learn to fly through the air with the greatest of ease."

We laughed. "Leave me alone," Sammy grumbled from the mystery of his sleep talking, his shoulders twitching, his eyes sealed shut.

"Okay," I said. Sammy relaxed and resumed snoring.

It was only then that I noticed, as Ingrid's left hand slipped over the top of her thigh, that she was missing the little finger on that hand. In its place a tiny nub twitched.

She looked down at the hand. "It happened when we were living in Istanbul, a dog attacked me on the street. I was fourteen. Two men pulled the dog off of me but he took my little finger with him. I thought no boy would ever like me. My dad wanted to find the dog and kill him. I told him that wouldn't bring my little finger back." She tilted her head and smiled up at me. "Do you feel strange to have your arm around a cripple?"

"You aren't a cripple. You're the prettiest woman I ever saw."

"Thank you, Lance. I think you are very nice looking yourself."

"Ingrid. I know we just met, but I feel I know you so well, that we were meant to take this trip together - to be together."

She didn't answer. But amid the perfume of bananas and the double sheen of the moon smiling from sky and sea, she snuggled closer, didn't stop my hand as it slipped under her sweater.

I planned to stay awake all night sketching Ingrid with my fingers. Some girls know how to kiss and others don't. The bad kissers keep their lips thin and hard or relax them so completely they go all wobbly like the gunnels of an unlashed boat you're trying to board. Ingrid's lips were twin pillows, soft as spring rain and firm as her breasts. She murmured something in another tongue.

"What did you say?"

"The Danish is hard to translate, exactly."

"Then what did you say, approximately," I murmured.

"I said you have the gift of kissing."

I returned my hand to her left breast. "You have the gifts of a goddess, a Siren."

Soon after midnight, we both drifted into sleep.

I dreamt I was back in Rochester. Ingrid and I were sitting on the couch in my living room necking when Diane and my mom walked into the room. Diane was carrying a giant scimitar. She lifted the long curved blade above me. I tried to raise my arm to block the blow but I couldn't move. The sword came down between Ingrid and me, cutting off Ingrid's right arm and slicing into my left. Ingrid cried out at Diane, "You have crippled me." Then her detached arm floated across the room and slapped Diane so hard that Diane's head fell off.

For me, this is a typical nightmare. I awoke with numbness along my left side, shook my arm to life, gazed at a dawn soft as bath water. A few panels of sun trimmed the top of the single mast soaring above us.

"How did you sleep, old man?" Sammy asked a grouchy looking Bertie.

Bertie switched off his horn rimmed glasses and drew on a pair of sunglasses. The emerald disks made him a bored T.S. staring out at the wasteland of the world.

"Weird dreams," Bertie answered. "How 'bout you?"

"Sammy spent the night preaching about the evils of nuclear war," I interjected.

"Oh God, was I talking in my sleep again?"

"You were very entertaining," Ingrid said.

Sammy looked toward us, "Well, you two seem to be getting on well. A regular couple I'd say."

We gathered our few possessions, headed for the gangplank. The city of Palma snaked a vast sidewalk along its shoreline. Low, sand-colored buildings with rosy tile roofs and a few taller buildings slept amid the fronds of hundred of palms. Above it all, a 14th century cathedral reigned .

We found a café, ordered coffee, bread and cheese. I was more than Ulysses. I was Zeus, my goddess under my sway. The Mediterranean, all of Europe, was mine. I picked up the check and we wandered out to survey the town.

Sammy got a map. "Santanyi, that's the place!"

"Where is that?" Ingrid asked.

"Southwest of here. There's a nice new German resort down there. Very reasonable."

We took a bus along a road who's paving got more and more sparse until it gave way to plain dirt just beyond a town called Campos del Puerto. We jolted and jarred along, dust clouding through the open windows, until the driver dropped us off in the middle of nowhere.

We walked about a mile across desert like land. Bert and Sammy walked ahead while Ingrid and I straggled several yards back.

"I hope I haven't made Bert and Sammy jealous," I said.

"That's unlikely," Ingrid said.

"Now why is that? I would think any man would want to be with you and would be upset if any other man tried to get in his way."

"I guess you don't get it about Bert and Sammy.

I didn't.

"Lance, don't you understand? Bert and Sammy are boyfriends."

"You mean. they are homosexuals?"

"I mean they love each other. It's not such an unusual thing in Europe as it may be in the U.S. Europeans are more tolerant of what's different."

All of us were sweating by the time we found the hotel, rising white and new, miraging shifting shoulders of the sea. Sammy's arm wrapped Bertie's waist. He withdrew it as we arrived at the entrance to the hotel.

"Now why is it we want to stay in a German hotel on a Spanish island?" I asked.

"Because the damn Germans are always so clean and neat and orderly and I'm already sick of cheap Spanish hotels," Bertie grumbled.

Bertie was right. The place was clean and neat and orderly and stunning and rose like an ice castle above the little cove. Herr Gottfried said, "We have just opened and I am pleased to give you our best rate - six dollars per room."

We booked two rooms one would be for Ingrid and the other for the three men. For all I cared, Bertie and Sammy could sleep in the same bed while I slipped off to visit Ingrid.

The manager put some cheese, sliced apples and bread on a plate. We ate at an umbrella table set up on the edge of the sand. We drank two bottles of Chianti and by the end of the second one I was feeling very happy and very powerful.

"How about a swim?" I proposed.

"Yes. I'm still very hot," Ingrid said.

Bertie and Sammy exchanged glances. "Not us," Sammy said.

The hotel was mostly deserted and only one other couple, an older pair, perched on the sand in the bright sun. As Ingrid and I passed by I heard them conversing in German, wondered if the man was someone my dad had tried to kill just a couple decades earlier.

Ingrid wore a pink and white beach towel around her and let it fall to the sand when she got to me. Her bathing suit was a two piece. White. The sight of her in so little clothing took my breath away, her narrow waist, the handfuls of her breasts.

"You look.so.lovely," I stammered.

"Well, thank you."

She turned, dashed toward the water, her thighs jostling lightly, her shoulders swingingback and forth. She reached the water, paused a moment, then slid into the low surf. I followed. The water was warm, the air tender, the six o'clock sun angled orange.

Ingrid stroked toward a rock several hundred feet from shore. She was an astonishing swimmer and though I had been on the swim team in high school, it was all I could do to stay close. She reached the rock way ahead of me and shouted, I won, when she touched it.

"You had a head start," I complained.

"Okay. We'll have a second match." She pulled herself halfway up on the rock, took a breath, didn't seem tired. The blue hair ribbon was long gone and her locks hung to the tips of her shoulders in clumps, water dripping from each, tracing its way down her neck, across her shoulders, between her breasts.

"Let's swim for that rock," she shouted. "Ready. Set. Go."

The second rock was further out, sat at a sharp left diagonal from the shore. I swam next to her, smiling as I turned my face toward her, grabbing at her to hold her back a little. I reached the second rock just barely ahead. But I sensed she let me win.

"Well. I guess we're even now," I said.

"You cheated, of course, grabbing onto me. And here I am swimming with a disability," she said, holding up the hand with the nub. "

"You're very competitive for a girl."

"What makes you think I'm a girl?"

"Everything about you, especially now that I've gotten such a good look."

"Looks can be deceiving."

"There's nothing deceiving about that figure of yours. It's perfection."

Her top was tied in the back rather than hooked. She reached around and untied it. I thought she was going to take it off. Instead, she just tied it tighter. The two of us laid down on the rock like a pair of seals. It was barely large enough for two people and the Mediterranean licked our feet. I thought about sharks, couldn't for the life of me remember if any inhabited the Mediterranean. The second rock was isolated around a bend from the hotel cove. Ingrid and me, the wide cloudless sky, the delicate lips of the sea kissing our feet, surging around our thighs.

I was Zeus at rest, gentle, tender, at ease. I looked over at my companion. Nothing with Diane ever felt like this. Not even on New Year's Eve the year before when we almost went all the way in the back of her Dad's Cadillac. With Ingrid, I was at the top of a peak. Diane down in some valley out of sight, small, insignificant. 

"Ingrid. I think we were meant for each other."

"Is that so?"

"Yes. It is."

"Maybe or maybe not."

"There's no maybe about it, Ingrid. I know I love you."

She lifted her face from the smooth surface of the rock and studied me. "Yes. I do think you are in love with me."

"You say that like you are a doctor who has just diagnosed a condition."

"Perhaps that's true. Perhaps you have just a condition and it will pass. But remember what I told you. I have a condition of my own that will not pass. If your love is true, it will change me. If it's not, well."

"Look, Ingrid. My love is permanent. I am sure of it as I am that this." I looked around for the right analogy to prove my love. "As sure as this rock is solid."

At that moment, a larger wave washed over the rock and over both of us. We stood up, shaking like drenched dogs.

"Don't you think that's a bad sign?" Ingrid laughed.

"It's a good sign. The rock is still here in spite of the wave. We are standing on it. I think this must be our own island. I can't think of a better place for what I want to say. Ingrid, will you marry me?"

"Oh Lance, my strong sailor. You do love me. You're so sweet."

"Sweet, maybe. Serious, absolutely. Ingrid, I have lots of money or at least I will have. My father is very successful and my mother comes from big wealth and I'm the only child. You need to marry me and we need to have lots of children."

She smiled at me from Mt. Olympusl. I didn't feel like Zeus any more. I was a human in the hands of her celestial power. She leaned up, kissed me. I ran my hand up and down her naked back. I thought she would say yes as soon as our lips came apart. I thought how the two of us, embracing there on that pedestal of the sea, must look like some grand romantic statue, twin ornaments atop the crown of the vast silver Mediterranean.

Ingrid didn't answer. Instead, she wrapped a long sad gaze around me. A single tear escaped each eye. Then she turned and dove into the sea.

When she surfaced, she was laughing. She had removed her white top and flung it at me. She rose up in the water just far enough for me to gain my one and only look at her breasts. She flashed me her smile warm as noon, then plunged back down into the Mediterranean, a mermaid returning to the deep. I called to her. Then I saw the flick of her fishy tail, iridescent in the bright sun as she vanished beneath the waves.

I return every summer to Majorca with Diane and our three kids. Bertie and Sammy are still together and we all remain close. I give the pair free lodging at my hotel whenever they wish.

Bertie never believed my story about Ingrid. But Sammy did. Bertie thinks I killed her. Sammy knows I loved her.

"Why can't there be mermaids?" Sammy would say to Bertie. "Sailors have been seeing them for centuries. Maybe she's the Lorelei and she swam off her perch in Copenhagen down past the rock of Gibraltar to Spain and to us. Why not?"

Bertie would scoff and shake his head. One of them thinks I'm a murderer but he's never tried to turn me in. The other believes my love and my story.

I bought the hotel in Santanyi, renamed it The Lorelei. The statue of Ingrid I commissioned rises up from our little rock beyond the view of the cove. The likeness is good, right down to her high cheek bones and full lips. When I die, a statue of me will be mounted on the other half of the rock embracing my Ingrid. People can come to the hotel and hear the story of me and my mermaid and shake their heads like Bertie or believe like Sammy.

Some summer days, I swim out to our rock. When I arrive, I perform a little ritual. First, I pull myself up next to the statue and wrap my left arm around her bronze shoulder. Next, I cast my eyes out to sea watching for signs of my mermaid's return. After she fails to appear, I turn and kiss my statue full on the lips.

Then I swim back to my hotel. I still have the Germans manage it. Like Bertie says, they're so neat and clean and orderly.

Story and Photographs ©Erie Chapman, 2006

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