The next summer it was mostly the hope of seeing the Thurlows that made Dick not mind going to work at the Bayview where Mrs. Higgins gave him the job of the roomclerk with an increase of pay on account of his gentlemanly manners. Dick was sixteen and his voice was changing; he had dreams about things with girls and thought a lot about sin and had a secret crush on Spike Culbertson, the yellowhaired captain of his school ballteam. He hated everything about his life, his aunt and the smell of her boarding house, the thought of his father, his mother’s flowergarden hats, not having enough money to buy good clothes or go to fashionable summer-resorts like the other fellows did. All kinds of things got him terribly agitated so that it was hard not to show it. The wabble of the waitresses’ hips and breasts while they were serving meals, girls’ underwear in store windows, the smell of the bathhouses and the salty tingle of a wet bathingsuit and the tanned skin of fellows and girls in bathingsuits lying out in the sun on the beach.
He’d been writing Edwin and Hilda long letters all winter about anything that came into his head, but when he actually saw them he felt funny and constrained. Hilda was using a new kind of perfume that tickled his nose; even when he was sitting at the table at lunch with them, eating cold ham and potato salad from the delicatessen and talking about the primitive litanies and gregorian music he couldn’t help undressing them in his mind, thinking of them in bed naked; he hated the way he felt.
Sunday afternoons Edwin went to Elberon to conduct services in another little summer chapel. Hilda never went and often invited Dick to go out for a walk with her or come to tea. He and Hilda began to have a little world between them that Edwin had nothing to do with, where they only talked about him to poke fun at him. Dick began to see Hilda in his queer horrid dreams. Hilda began to talk about how she and Dick were really brother and sister, how passionless people who never really wanted anything couldn’t understand people like them. Those times Dick didn’t get much chance to say anything. He and Hilda would sit on the back stoop in the shade smoking Egyptian Deities until they felt a little sick. Hilda’d say she didn’t care whether the damn parishioners saw her or not and talk and talk about how she wanted something to happen in her life, and smart clothes and to travel to foreign countries and to have money to spend and not to have to fuss with the housekeeping and how she felt sometimes she could kill Edwin for his mild calfish manner.
Edwin usually got back on a train that got in at 10:53 and, as Dick had Sunday evenings off from the hotel, he and Hilda would eat supper alone together and then take a walk along the beach. Hilda would take his arm and walk close to him; he’d wonder if she felt him tremble whenever their legs touched.
All week he’d think about those Sunday evenings. Sometimes he’d tell himself that he wouldn’t go another time. He’d stay up in his room and read Dumas or go out with fellows he knew; being alone with Hilda like that made him feel too rotten afterwards. Then one moonless night, when they’d walked way down the beach beyond the rosy fires of the picnickers, and were sitting side by side on the sand talking about India’s Love Lyrics that Hilda had been reading aloud that afternoon, she suddenly jumped on him and mussed up his hair and stuck her knees into his stomach and began to run her hands over his body under his shirt. She was strong for a girl, but he’d just managed to push her off when he had to grab her by the shoulders and pull her down on top of him. They neither of them said anything but lay there in the sand breathing hard. At last she whispered, “Dick, I mustn’t have a baby… We can’t afford it…. That’s why Edwin won’t sleep with me. Damn it, I want you, Dick. Don’t you see how awful it all is?” While she was talking her hands were burning him, moving down across his chest, over his ribs, around the curve of his belly. “Don’t, Hilda, don’t.” There were mosquitoes around their heads. The long hissing invisible wash of the surf came almost to their feet.
That night Dick couldn’t go down to the train to meet Edwin the way he usually did. He went back to the Bayview with his knees trembling, and threw himself on his bed in his stuffy little room under the roof. He thought of killing himself but he was afraid of going to hell; he tried to pray, at least to remember the Lord’s Prayer. He was terribly scared when he found he couldn’t even remember the Lord’s Prayer. Maybe that was the sin against the Holy Ghost they had committed.
The sky was grey and the birds were chirping outside before he got to sleep. All next day, as he sat holloweyed behind the desk, passing on the guests’ demands for icewater and towels, answering inquiries about rooms and traintimes, he was turning a poem over in his mind about the scarlet of my sin and the scarlet of thy sin and dark birds above the surging seawaves crying and damned souls passionately sighing. When it was finished he showed the poem to the Thurlows, Edwin wanted to know where he got such morbid ideas, but was glad that faith and the church triumphed in the end. Hilda laughed hysterically and said he was a funny boy but that maybe he’d be a writer someday.
When Skinny came down for a two weeks’ vacation to take the place of one of the new bellhops that was sick, Dick talked very big to him about women and sin and about how he was in love with a married woman. Skinny said that wasn’t right because there were plenty of easy women around who’d give a feller all the loving he wanted. But when Dick found out that he’d never been with a girl although he was two years older, he put on so many airs about experience and sin, that one night when they’d gone down to the drugstore for a soda, Skinny picked up a couple of girls and they walked down the beach with them. The girls were thirtyfive if they were a day and Dick didn’t do anything but tell his girl about his unhappy love affair and how he had to be faithful to his love even though she was being unfaithful to him at the very moment. She said he was too young to take things serious like that and that a girl ought to be ashamed of herself who made a nice boy like him unhappy. “Jez, I’d make a feller happy if I had the chance,” she said and burst out crying.
Walking back to the Bayview, Skinny was worried for fear he might have caught something, but Dick said physical things didn’t matter and that repentance was the key of redemption. It turned out that Skinny did get sick because later in the summer he wrote Dick that he was paying a doctor five dollars a week to cure him up and that he felt terrible about it. Dick and Hilda went on sinning Sunday evenings when Edwin was conducting services in Elberon and when Dick went back to school that fall he felt very much the man of the world.
In the Christmas vacation he went to stay with the Thurlows in East Orange where Edwin was the assistant to the rector of the church of St. John, Apostle. There, at tea at the rector’s he met Hiram Halsey Cooper, a Jersey City lawyer and politician who was interested in High Church and first editions of Huysmans and who asked Dick to come to see him. When Dick called Mr. Cooper gave him a glass of sherry, showed him first editions of Beardsley and Huysmans and Austin Dobson, sighed about his lost youth and offered him a job in his office as soon as school was over. It turned out that Mr. Cooper’s wife, who was dead, had been an Ellsworth and a cousin of Dick’s mother’s. Dick promised to send him copies of all his poems, and the articles he published in the school paper.