After that day when he went to walk he tried not to go past the place where he’d seen them lying in the sun among the white dunes, but always, in spite of anything he could do, he’d find himself moving towards the spot. Sometimes he found them there and sometimes he didn’t. And they never knew that all the time there was someone watching their rendezvous.
And then one day on the streets he saw the boy dressed in a shirt and an old pair of trousers and looking for all the world like himself 30 years ago, and when he asked who he was, they told him that the boy’s name was Henry Landis and that he came to La Vallette in summer to take the baggage of the summer people to and from the train.
Then one day the boy disappeared, and Homer asked what had become of him, and they said he’d gone away because his mother had died in Appleton and that he wouldn’t be back until next summer.
So Homer went out and bought a cheap handbag and wrote a note and put it inside and asked one of the waitresses to give it to Frieda, the big blonde girl.
Just before he died he told me that he thought he must have been going crazy all that time. Up to the very end he couldn’t make out whether he’d been crazy all those years he’d been married to Etta and only began to be sane when he took to lying in the sun among the dunes.
At night he always went to the tabernacle with Etta, but that night right after the second hymn he told Etta he would have to get some air. So she stayed and he went outside and walked down to the boat landing, and there in the shadow of some bushes stood Frieda waiting for him and carrying the handbag he’d sent her.
At first he thought he was going to die of excitement and of fear. He began to shake all over. His teeth chattered and he waited for a little while till he got control of himself before he went forward to meet her.
For a long time they stood looking at each other in the darkness talking awkwardly about the cheap handbag and the moon. He said it was kind of as if all that he’d missed all these years had been rolled up and burst out of him at last. There was so much he wanted to say that he couldn’t say anything at all.
They sat down on the grass and all he could do was sit and look at her. The moonlight came through the trees on her hair. I guess she was a pretty swell looker. The people I talked to at the trial told me so. She wasn’t very bright and she didn’t have any ambition or she could have had almost anything she wanted.
While he was looking at her, he suddenly remembered Etta sitting at the tabernacle waiting for him to return, and he said to Frieda, “Will you meet me tomorrow afternoon?” And he told her where to meet him, among the dunes not very far from where he’d seen her and the boy.
He didn’t sleep any that night and went off early to spend the day among the dunes. It was a brilliant day, late in September, with wonderful sunlight, but it seemed to him the time would never pass until he’d see Frieda coming along the shore.
She came at last, dressed all in white in her waitress’ clothes, with her gold hair shining against the blue lake.
And for the first time in his life Homer knew what it was to be free and happy. When he told me about it, it all sounded simple and beautiful. I wanted to cry.
Two days before the hotel closed, Etta came up from the front porch and found a note pinned to the pillow. It said that Homer had gone away and that she needn’t try to look for him and that she’d never see him again. He wrote that he’d taken the money that was in the bank at Hanover and left her and the children the hardware store, which would keep them all well enough.
At first they thought he’d committed suicide and Etta fainted and screamed a good deal. They tried dragging the water by the boat landing, but about 6 o’clock one of the waitresses said it wasn’t any use because he’d run off with Frieda.
Then Etta screamed and fainted a lot more and took the next train for Hanover, and about two days later the newspapers ran them to ground in a little town up in northern Michigan and printed a lot of stuff about the elopement, so they had to run away again. They kept running from town to town till the newspapermen got tired hounding them, and at last they disappeared.
Etta tried to have them arrested, but nobody could or would do anything about it. She wouldn’t divorce him — she just got more and more righteous and martyred. It made an awful scandal in Hanover, but it died down pretty soon.
I was glad because I’d always wanted to see Homer have a little fun in life, but I couldn’t say anything. He’d been a stranger to me for twenty years, all dried-up and sour from living with Etta. I couldn’t understand how he did manage to do it until two years afterwards when I opened the paper one morning and read that a girl called Frieda Hemyers had been killed with some man and that Homer Dilworth, who had been living with her, was arrested for both murders; and a week later I got a letter from a town called Mitchellville, in Missouri, where they had him in jail.
It was from Homer himself, asking me to come and see him and help him. I went right off, and that was when he told me everything.
I expected to find a dried-up man on the verge of old age, but when they opened the door of the cell I saw a vigorous man of about 35 or 40. I couldn’t have believed it was Homer except that he looked like himself when he was young.
He must have grown 15 years younger since I last saw him on the street in Hanover. He was always a good-looking fellow and he’d got handsome again, just as I said, like an apple tree that suddenly blossoms in October.
And when he spoke, it was harder still to believe that he was Homer Dilworth.
He looked at me and sort of grinned and said, “Well, Jim, I guess you thought I was the last person in the world you’d ever find in a fix like this.” I saw that he had a kind of manliness about him he’d never had even in the days before he married Etta, because then he was always kind of soft and good.
He told me to sit down on his cot. He didn’t seem to be discouraged. He just said, “I did it, Jim. I didn’t mean to do it, but I did it. They can do with me whatever they like.”
The funny thing was that he didn’t seem to care.
He told me he’d sent for me because I was the only one he knew who’d understand. It wasn’t any good sending for church people because they’d just lecture him and pray over him, and he didn’t want to see Etta, even if she would have come.
She never did come and she wouldn’t let any of the children come to see him. And in the two years since he’d run away with Frieda they’d had to go from place to place, so they’d never stopped anywhere long enough to make friends. In the end he went back 30 years, to that last afternoon we’d gone swimming together, and sent for me.
He told me all the story of what happened to him at La Vallette up to the time he ran off with Frieda, and then he told me what happened afterwards — how they were followed from town to town by newspapermen, and then how they’d always get found out and be forced to move on. He said they’d been to 27 little towns in two years.
He had the money he’d drawn out of the bank, and when that gave out he worked, sometimes as dishwasher, sometimes as farmhand, doing anything he could find to do. And he was happy all the time because Frieda was easy-going and good-natured.
He spoke about her as if she wasn’t dead at all. Sometimes he was jealous of her, and once or twice they’d quarreled when she spoke to a man younger than himself.
It seemed he was frightened of younger men. He knew that he was getting old and that some day he’d lose her to a younger man because she was still young. It got to be a kind of obsession with him.