“I want another one,” he said.
“All right,” she said. “As soon as we get to the beach.”
“No. Now.”
“Let’s go on to the beach first. It’s almost three o’clock. Won’t that be better?”
“Just so you are not trying to tell me I can’t have another drink now.”
“Of course not,” she said, slipping the flask into the cape’s pocket and looking at him again with that warm, faint, inscrutable smiling. “I just want to have a dip before the water gets too cold.” They went down to the car; the Filipino knew this too: he held the door for her to slip under the wheel, then he got himself into the back. The car moved on; she drove well. “Why not lean back and shut your eyes,” she told Ira, “and rest until we get to the beach? Then we will have a dip and a drink.”
“I don’t want to rest,” he said. “I’m all right.” But he did close his eyes again and again the car ran powerful, smooth, and fast beneath him, performing its afternoon’s jaunt over the incredible distances of which the city was composed; from time to time, had he looked, he could have seen the city in the bright soft vague hazy sunlight, random, scattered about the arid earth like so many gay scraps of paper blown without order, with its curious air of being rootless — of houses bright beautiful and gay, without basements or foundations, lightly attached to a few inches of light penetrable earth, lighter even than dust and laid lightly in turn upon the profound and primeval lava, which one good hard rain would wash forever from the sight and memory of man as a firehose flushes down a gutter — that city of almost incalculable wealth whose queerly appropriate fate it is to be erected upon a few spools of a substance whose value is computed in billions and which may be completely destroyed in that second’s instant of a careless match between the moment of striking and the moment when the striker might have sprung and stamped it out.
“You saw your mother today,” she said. “Has she—”
“Yes.” He didn’t open his eyes. “That damned Jap gave it to her. She asked me for money again. I found out what she wants with it. She wants to run, to go back to Nebraska. I told her, so did I. . . . If she went back there, she would not live until Christmas. The first month of winter would kill her. Maybe it wouldn’t even take winter to do it.”
She still drove, she still watched the road, yet somehow she had contrived to become completely immobile. “So that’s what it is,” she said.
He did not open his eyes. “What what is?”
“The reason she has been after you all this time to give her money, cash. Why, even when you won’t do it, every now and then she asks you again.”
“What what . . .” He opened his eyes, looking at her profile; he sat up suddenly. “You mean, she’s been wanting to go back there all the time? That all these years she has been asking me for money, that that was what she wanted with it?”
She glanced at him swiftly, then back to the road. “What else can it be? What else could she use money for?”
“Back there?” he said. “To those winters, that town, that way of living, where she’s bound to know that the first winter would . . . You’d almost think she wanted to die, wouldn’t you?”
“Hush,” she said quickly. “Shhhhh. Don’t say that. Don’t say that about anybody.” Already they could smell the sea; now they swung down toward it; the bright salt wind blew upon them, with the long-spaced sound of the rollers; now they could see it — the dark blue of water creaming into the blanched curve of beach dotted with bathers.
“We won’t go through the club,” she said. “I’ll park in here and we can go straight to the water.” They left the Filipino in the car and descended to the beach. It was already crowded, bright and gay with movement. She chose a vacant space and spread her cape.
“Now that drink,” he said.
“Have your dip first,” she said. He looked at her. Then he slipped his robe off slowly; she took it and spread it beside her own; he looked down at her.
“Which is it? Will you always be too clever for me, or is it that every time I will always believe you again?”
She looked at him, bright, warm, fond and inscrutable. “Maybe both. Maybe neither. Have your dip; I will have the flask and a cigarette ready when you come out.” When he came back from the water, wet, panting, his heart a little too hard and fast, she had the towel ready, and she lit the cigarette and uncapped the flask as he lay on the spread robes. She lay too, lifted to one elbow, smiling down at him, smoothing the water from his hair with the towel while he panted, waiting for his heart to slow and quiet.
Steadily between them and the water, and as far up and down the beach as they could see, the bathers passed — young people, young men in trunks, and young girls in little more, with bronzed, unselfconscious bodies.
Lying so, they seemed to him to walk along the rim of the world as though they and their kind along inhabited it, and he with his forty-eight years were the forgotten last survivor of another race and kind, and they in turn precursors of a new race not yet seen on the earth: of men and women without age, beautiful as gods and goddesses, and with the minds of infants.
He turned quickly and looked at the woman beside him — at the quiet face, the wise, smiling eyes, the grained skin and temples, the hairroots showing where the dye had grown out, the legs veined faint and blue and myriad beneath the skin. “You look better than any of them!” he cried. “You look better to me than any of them!”
III
The Japanese gardener, with his hat on, stood tapping on the glass and beckoning and grimacing until old Mrs. Ewing went out to him. He had the afternoon’s paper with its black headline: LALEAR WOMAN CREATES SCENE IN COURTROOM. “You take,” the Japanese said. “Read while I catch water.” But she declined; she just stood in the soft halcyon sunlight, surrounded by the myriad and almost fierce blooming of flowers, and looked quietly at the headline without even taking the paper, and that was all.
“I guess I won’t look at the paper today,” she said. “Thank you just the same.” She returned to the living room. Save for the chair, it was exactly as it had been when she first saw it that day when her son brought her into it and told her that it was now her home and that her daughter-in-law and her grandchildren were now her family.
It had changed very little, and that which had altered was the part which her son knew nothing about, and that too had changed not at all in so long that she could not even remember now when she had added the last coin to the hoard. This was in a china vase on the mantel.
She knew what was in it to the penny; nevertheless, she took it down and sat in the chair which she had brought all the way from Nebraska and emptied the coins and the worn timetable into her lap.
The timetable was folded back at the page on which she had folded it the day she walked downtown to the ticket office and got it fifteen years ago, though that was so long ago now that the pencil circle about the name of the nearest junction point to Ewing, Nebraska, had faded away.
But she did not need that either; she knew the distance to the exact halfmile, just as she knew the fare to the penny, and back in the early twenties when the railroads began to become worried and passenger fares began to drop, no broker ever watched the grain and utilities market any closer than she watched the railroad advertisements and quotations.
Then at last the fares became stabilized with the fare back to Ewing thirteen dollars more than she had been able to save, and at a time when her source of income had ceased. This was the two grandchildren. When she entered the house that day twenty years ago and looked at the two babies for the first time, it was with diffidence and eagerness both. She would be dependent for the rest of her life, but she would give something in return for it.
It was not that she would attempt to make another Ira and Samantha Ewing of them; she had made that mistake with her own son and had driven him from home. She was wiser now; she saw now that it was not the repetition of hardship: she would merely take what had been of value in hers and her husband’s hard lives — that which they had learned through hardship and endurance of honor and courage and pride — and transmit it
