I looked up an old friend of the Major’s who was in a cotton firm and he went down to his bank with me and helped me cash a draft. I bought a traveling bag for Angelina and had her initials put on it and told the shop to deliver it to the hotel and then went to a florist’s shop and ordered some flowers. When I had finished this I walked down Market to 24th and the car was still there across from the bar. One of the taxi drivers in front of the cab stand next door grinned at me as I went by and said, “Say, ain’t you the guy that tangled with Jack the other day?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“He’s been telling it big about what he’ll do if you ever show up down here again. Says the reason you haven’t picked up your car is because you’re afraid to come back.”
I went on to the car. His eagerness to see a free fight was a little disgusting. In front of the place I hesitated and wondered if I should go in, but then I remembered I was supposed to meet Angelina in about a half hour and went across the street and got in the car and drove off, feeling proud of myself as a married man with responsibilities. I wondered at it a little. Before, the prospect of another fight with Big-mouthed Jack would have had an irresistible allure.
I parked across the street from the beauty shop and waited. After a while she came out of the shop and stood looking up and down the street. I felt warm and happy watching her and waited a minute before I hit the horn and waved at her. The close-cropped hair was a shock, as I had known it would be, but now with the sun on it and striking fire in the curls I could see that it was going to be easy to live with and that by the time she got ready to change it again I would be just as outraged as I had been this time. I got out and went across the street and she waited for me eagerly.
“Well?” she asked.
“You’re right,” I said. “I was talking through my hat all the time. It’s lovely.”
“Feel,” she said. I put my hand on the side of her head, very gently so as not to muss anything, and felt the brush of the ringlets against my palm.
“Let’s go back to the hotel,” I said.
She grinned at me. “No. You have too much trouble working out your schedules back there. Let’s stay downtown until we get finished.”
We went around to one of the department stores and picked out a blue bathing suit and a woolly beach robe of canary yellow and some sandals and a bathing cap. I bought some bathing trunks for myself while she ran ecstatically through their stock shopping for more clothes. We filled the car with bundles and went back to the hotel. The flowers were there in the room when we came in. She put her arms up around my neck and pulled down hard, with that way she had, like a drowning swimmer, and with her lips against my ear she whispered fiercely, “Hold me tight like this, Bob. Don’t ever let me go.”
Nineteen
Those six days were wonderful.
We would go swimming in the surf in the early morning, sometimes before sunrise, and lie on the sand afterward and talk and come in at nine or later, ravenous for breakfast. She never seemed to tire of battling the surf or of marveling at the existence of it. It was a source of continual surprise to her that the Gulf was never calm, and she would never call it the Gulf, but always the ocean.
Most of the girls who came down to the beach were content to wade out a little way and then come back and drape themselves attractively around on the sand, but Angelina wanted more of it than that. The water fascinated her and she seemed to derive some strange exhilaration from fighting with the rollers, and the higher they came, the better she liked it. And the strange part of it was that she couldn’t even swim at first. I took her to the pool up the sea wall every afternoon and gave her lessons and she learned fast.
She turned heads whenever she appeared on the beach and shed the yellow robe, and she knew it, all right, but just lounging around on the sand was always secondary with her to the thrill of the waves. When she did finally tire of it we would go up on the sand and sprawl and I would always lie down near her and smoke a cigarette and watch her while she took off the white bathing cap and shook out the curls.
She would grin at me. “Why do you always lie where you can see me, and look at me like that?”
“Now, that’s a brilliant question,” I said. “You wouldn’t have any idea at all how you look in that suit, would you?”
“Do you like it?”
“Just when you’re in it. Or should I say, when you’re partly in it. I can’t look at you without running a temperature of a hundred and four. That’s sex at its very worst, isn’t it? And still it all seems good and right. Maybe the symptoms are all wrong and we are pure and our love is platonic.”
“What’s platonic?” she asked, and I told her.
She laughed. “Well, I guess it hasn’t been very platonic so far, but we could begin now, couldn’t we?”
“Right now,” I said. “We’ll begin this morning.”
“It sounds like fun. I always wanted to sit on a pedestal. I’ve read about it in books. How long do you think we ought to try it?”
“At least as long as we’re out here on the beach. We want to give it a fair trial.”
We were silent for a long time and finally she threw a handful of sand on my shoulder and said, “What are you thinking about? You’re so solemn.”
“Angelina. Your name. It’s so musical and has a sort of rippling sound to it. Why did they name you that? Is it after the river?”
“Yes,” she said. “I was born in the Angelina River bottoms, when Papa was renting a farm there. Do you think it’s silly?”
“I think it’s beautiful. I’m glad you were born there. Suppose you had been born up north. On the Penobscot or the Schuylkill.”
“Would you have loved me?”
“I would have loved you if you’d been born on the north fork of the Yangtze Kiang.”
One night when we were lying in darkness in the room, late, after the noises out on the sea wall had died away and there was only the eternal sound of the Gulf and I thought she was asleep, she suddenly threw her arms about my neck and pressed her face against my neck. “Bob,” she whispered, “let’s don’t ever go back. Can’t we always stay here?”
“It has been wonderful, hasn’t it?” I agreed.
“Oh, it isn’t just that, Bob. I was so miserable back there, and all this has been so—so—I don’t know how to say it, but I always kind of choke up when I think about it, and about you, and I’m afraid to go back. Is there any way we could stay?”
“No,” I said. “I have to go back to work.”
“But you don’t have to work there, do you? You could work here or somewhere else, couldn’t you?”
“No. Remember, the farm’s there and we have to live on it.”
“But you don’t have to live on a farm. You could do a lot of things. Think of what you learned in college.”
I grinned in the darkness, thinking about what I’d learned in college. Opening up holes in the line or knowing how to counter a left hook wasn’t exactly valuable in later life, particularly when you weren’t good enough for the pros in either one.
“I’m sorry, Angelina,” I said. “But I like living on the farm, and I’m going to show you how to like it too. It’ll be different from what you’ve known of it.”
She sighed. “I know that, Bob. Anywhere I lived with you would be fun and I want you to be happy, and I won’t say any more about it. Only sometimes I get scared when I think about going back.”
We went dancing nearly every night. She had never danced in her life and I’m no gazelle on the floor, but I taught her to follow in a short time, and with the natural grace of all her movements and a good sense of rhythm she was soon ready for more accomplished dancers than I, not that she ever got a chance at them.