But that still wasn’t the point. What troubled him went deeper than that. This Nazi was a Nazi first and a doctor second. And if that was the way it was going to be it affected everything. It affected himself, forced him into being first anti-Nazi and then doctor, an American first and a scientist second; forced all science into partisanship. And what, then, became of the bright cool world of science that we had begun to project out into the dark? There was something toxic about the whole thing; the big entities had gone haywire. In reaching down and contaminating Schurz’s value as a doctor they had reached down and contaminated Meigs too.
Hold the letter? He scribbled on the envelope, “Opened by mistake. Meigs” and sent it back to Miss Julia in the mailroom.
And fresh from Brunswick “in a week or more”: “But I said to hold it for me, Doctor.”
“Oh, did you? A little static on the line—”
“He’s halfway to Tokyo by now.”
“Stupid of me.…”
Miss Gilbert putting her head in the door with a privileged frown over the bridge of her glasses, bi-focals and ten years larger. “Dr. Meigs—” “Show him in.” and he got up, walked around the desk and shook hands with a young man he half expected to be the other one. He had never seen this one before. But he had seen the gesture before of reaching for the brown wallet with the unimpeachable identification, felt as if he had seen the same brown wallet.
“I’m sorry to trouble you, Doctor—”
“Have a chair.”
“Thank you, sir. Sorry to trouble you but we’re doing a routine check and I wonder if you can give us a little information about one of your doctors, a man named Williams, Richard S. Williams. He seems to be identified with a Communist element on the West Coast …,” Dr. Meigs turning to his window as if hoping to see the pyramid of star-shaped sweetgum leaves that had given way four years ago to the black-top parking area. He took a deep breath, let it out and faced about. “What do you want to know?”
BEACH PARTY
There were closer beaches to the village, but when you gave a party you didn’t want strangers straggling by staring at everything. The beach to go to was four or five miles away. “Nobody ever comes there, Cherry.” Or “Chetty,” rather, in their nice clipped voices, making her feel like one of them though twice their age—not that much!
She thought she knew the place. You stopped the car on the cliff in a flat clearing in the midst of grass; you couldn’t see any water from there, only the edge of the tall grass where it broke off against the sky. There was a hard path pointing off at the sky, almost flat, easy walking even with her stick, and after a minute you came round a knoll and saw the great level bay, farther beneath you than you would have guessed, and the beach at the foot of the sand cliff. There used to be a strong back-and-forth stair down the cliff, sticky from the salt winds and half coated with sand; she could get down that and, with a tight solicitous hand under each arm, could skim the sliding sand at the bottom and in two or three plunging strides reach the flat, the nearly-flat.
It wouldn’t be much trouble. Everybody helped. It was wonderful how everybody would turn on to help carry the boxes and baskets and bottles, Bruce and Jimmy and Donny and all of them, even the girls, running past her on their beautiful brown legs that she almost hated. Sometimes, on dark days, she felt—oh, people! Treacherous, lecherous people! Sometimes she thought they only liked the ones they could get something out of, only liked her because she had money and they hadn’t. But then the sun would come out and she knew she was being too hard on them. They liked her, liked her for herself. “Chetty, darling!” She was one of them. And that was a precious feeling now, since that awful summer nine years ago that seemed like ninety. She could laugh now, after thinking she would never laugh again, and with the stick and the horrid metal on her leg she could get about as well as any of them—almost; sometimes it made men draw away from her (strangers, not in their “group”), unless they had had too much to drink.
But there would be enough, she would see to that. “Chetty will bring the booze.” And the sandwiches, and the lobster salad. “Can’t I bring something, Chetty?” “Don’t be silly! Chetty will bring everything.” And why not? She liked to do it. When they turned to her helplessly to take care of the details it warmed her heart. “A party wouldn’t be a party without Chetty.” Occasionally somebody else had a party and asked her, but everybody said her parties were the best, “the most”; and she would rather do it herself anyhow. What was the use of money if your friends weren’t there to enjoy it?
And how they pitched in! It was lovely to see them hurrying over the grass with the sun still high and down the stairs, stumbling and laughing and calling back to each other and to “Chetty,” carrying the case of Scotch down the path, and the charged water and the sandwiches and the lobster salad and the caviar. It was lovely to be caustic with them (“Do this, you naughty boy!”—that sort of thing), to direct them, herd them all petulantly before her like fifteen or twenty chicks. Lovely to have them push at each other for the privilege of giving her their arms going down the tricky stairs and swinging her off the bottom over the soft sand. She had never given them all a beach party before; always at home, at “The Villa,” really afraid of the sand. But it wasn’t so hard to walk in, with a little help, and how they helped! She would give another before the summer was over. You didn’t need to know people a long time to love them, to be loved by them, stage people, many of them, “mummers” they liked to call themselves with a sort of medieval unpretentiousness, artists, writers, photographers, models. One sweet boy was going back to pose under the white lights on Monday. Sweet people, warm, simple, open. Personality; they all had such personality.
And now, like children, unpacking the boxes and baskets, screaming, “Chetty!” at the Scotch, at the sandwiches and the salad, and hopping about to be the first to bring her a highball. And sweet of them to have asked their friends to her party, their “house pests” as they called them; they were so amusing. Sweet of people to drop in casually like this, no introductions, to leave casually, with a simple wave of their hand at her, or even without any leave-taking at all, people going up and down the stair all the time, climbing into the shadow now with the sun setting behind the cliff. They would come and go until nearly dark, then four strong laughing hands would pull her to her feet and they would all move on to something else; you never knew how or where or when these things would end. She probably wouldn’t get home before daybreak.
She hoped there would be enough Scotch; now that she saw how many there were she wished she had brought more. There had to be plenty of liquor—to dissolve a rubber-tipped walking stick and a steel brace. But they couldn’t possibly use a whole case, not before dark anyway. And when the liquor was gone, that would be the signal to move on somewhere else, to somebody else’s party. There was no telling what would happen, no telling when she would get home. It was lovely to see them so happy at her party, singing, laughing, squealing, lying on the sand with their arms round each other. Maybe they would all go swimming. Not she, of course, but the rest. She would like to see that sweet Mickey What’s-his-name dropping off his delightfully baggy pants and his sweater and his rope sandals. Shouting and singing up and down the sand, with the shadow from the dark cliff moving out into the bay, and everything getting soft and dusky.
“Mickey darling, how is the Scotch holding out?”
“It’s setting, Chetty dear!” And everybody screaming at that and rushing to bring her another drink.
Which she took, just to sip along with them, keep them company; she never drank much. Hard enough to walk cold sober. Of course if she had wanted to drink they would have got her home; they loved to take people home to “pour” somebody into bed. It was a wonderful thing to have friends to pour you into bed if you needed it, cronies. Not quite cronies, but dropping in any old time, just walking in the door, going to the pantry for ice without asking. She liked to have people make themselves at home; it made you feel more at home yourself. Poor things! They hadn’t any homes, at best a “pad”—wandering up and down the beach, girl and boy, boy and boy, arms round each other, waving, capering, disappearing into the soft dusk. She wasn’t old, just older than they; her skin was as soft as the soft dusk. When it got a little darker, if one of the dear boys begged her to go up the beach with him, close to the water where the sand was hard—
“Chetty darling!” on his knees, bending over her.
“You’re drunk, Bruce Watkins.”
“Chetty, I want to whisper something in your beautiful facetious ear.”
Looking up into his floating-in-whisky eyes, a little sorry it wasn’t Mickey but unable to keep her chest from expanding with a deeper breath.
“The Scotch has set, Chetty my love.”
Turning her head away quickly to fumble in her beach-bag in the half-dark, telling herself that was what she had expected him to say and she was glad he had come and told her so frankly, as a real friend would, not to let the party be spoiled, and pulling out two or three new bills that must have been twenties and pushing them, crumpled up, into his warm palm. “Run, you bad boy, and get some more. Take my car.”
“You’re an angel, Chetty! Isn’t Chetty an angel?” Starting off toward the sloping sand and the nearly invisible stair, and laughing so merrily, his arm round a girl with round springing legs, and stuffing the bills in his pants. And then going on past the steps, on up the beach.
“You can’t get up that way, Brucie darling!” He didn’t know there was no other way up the cliff for a mile. But he didn’t hear her. And maybe they would be back in a minute, those sweet absent-minded artist fellows—
Where was everybody? She could hear voices blowing on the wind, not very close, and she could see a few shadows moving about down near the water, two, maybe four. Evidently the party was breaking up. “Oh, Mickey darling!” It was time to get the silver and the plates back in the basket before it got too dark to see. But Mickey couldn’t hear her; and even the other voices seemed to have stopped.
Then she saw a shadow crawling toward the large hamper a few yards away, reaching into it. “Is that you, Mickey? Brucie?” No answer, feeling about in the basket. “Give Chetty a hand, darling. Get her on her feet. Where do we go from here? Donny?” But the only reply was a feminine scream of laughter as the figure snatched a bottle out of the basket, sprang up and ran. She smiled in sympathy; whoever it was should have answered, said something, but it was lovely to have them so happy at her party—turning over on her “tummy” and pushing herself up on her good knee. Lovely to have them at all. It wasn’t so easy to make real friends as it used to be, feeling for her stick and pushing to her feet with the point thrusting deep into the dry sand.
Of course they would be back. Not all of them, maybe, but most; some of them anyhow. They would be back, but it was pretty dark now. The beacon at the Coast Guard Station beyond the village had begun to flash. One or two of them, certainly. She didn’t want them all to disappear; somebody had to help with the baskets. And somebody had to help her over the soft sand to the bottom of the steps, some two of them—with their strong arms under hers, rushing her up the sand as they had rushed her down.
That looked like two shadows moving over there. “Come, children! Give Chetty a hand. It’s time to move on. It’s getting dark now.” They didn’t hear her, starting to run, vanishing. “Bruce! Jimmy!” imperiously, as was her privilege. Where was everybody! There seemed to be nobody left at all. Turning about in the other direction, the stick sinking in the sand. “Bruce! Jim! Donald!”
They had gone. She could hear the quiet bay water running in whispers over the sand, shrill. They had gone away and forgotten all about her. And it was dark, pitch dark now, and she didn’t like the dark, not even at home in her own house. You couldn’t see the top of the cliff now, maybe because the sky was getting cloudy and there were no stars beyond where the top of the cliff ought to be. It might rain before morning.
But she wouldn’t be there all night. They would remember. As soon as they got to the next place everybody would say, “Where is Chetty?” “I thought she was with you!” “We thought she was with you!” And they would come, masses of them, calling for her, worried about her, weeping, repentant. And it would be quite beautiful, like a reunion, though she would scold them mercilessly. Because they really shouldn’t have gone off and left her like this—like a tossed-away picnic plate. Yet not too angrily, unless they were contrite; not angrily enough to make them resent it. You wouldn’t want to sacrifice their love that meant so much. She couldn’t afford that; all the luxuries but that.
They were probably on the way back now, with flashlights and lanterns, running, calling. Just sit down for a while and be patient, count the stars over the bay, there were some close down, listen to the low bay surf running in over the flat sands, watch the gay light flashing on the Coast Guard tower. There would be a moon later, if the clouds broke. And the Coast Guard boy would come along after a time. She was all right. Nothing was going to bother her. The moon would come up and one of the nice Coast Guard boys would get her to the bottom of the stairs. Just sit down and be patient and listen to the water and remember what a nice party it had been and what a good time they had all had—
HAPPY NEW YEAR, MR. GANAWAY
New Year’s Day fell in the middle of the week that year, a warm, gray, blustery Thursday. There had been rain the night before, and the overcast in the morning suggested rain to come, but Jim Ganaway, who considered himself something of a weatherman from long experience with the winds and clouds of Georgia, doubted if it would rain again before night unless the wind changed and passed the information on to his regular Saturday-Sunday-Holiday foursome in his usual flatfooted manner that implied the matter had been referred to his desk for disposal and he had turned thumbs down on it—flashed it a red light.
But whether because most people thought different or because they were taking it easy after a late night, there were no players out and the foursome reached the sixteenth tee before noon, in something less than two hours and a quarter. The “gallery,” which they had picked up after the turn (Ganaway wasn’t sure where the young man joined them though he remembered seeing him wandering toward them across the windy tenth, the skirts of his raincoat blowing), stood politely out of the way in the shadow of a grove of pines and remained correctly still and silent while they all drove off. He thought he had seen the boy before somewhere but he couldn’t place him.
“Who’s our gallery?” he mumbled at lean old Tom Griggs as they walked away, the young man strolling after them at a distance, hands in his raincoat pockets, apparently more interested in just being out in the open air than in the display of golf—which was certainly nothing to display.
