He walked along a brick path, smiling at this stranger, nodding at that one, and wound up standing alongside the swimming pool. Some 12 or 15 people sat at poolside tables, talking and drinking, the volume of their conversations rising as they drank. In the enormous pool, a young boy swam back and forth, back and forth.
Keller felt a curious kinship with the kid. He was standing instead of swimming, but he felt as distant as the kid from everybody else around. There were two parties going on, he decided. There was the hearty social whirl, and there was the solitude he felt in the midst of it all, akin to the solitude of the swimming boy.
Huge pool. The boy was swimming its width, but that dimension was still greater than the length of your typical backyard pool. Keller wasn’t sure if this was an Olympic-size pool, but he figured you could just call it enormous and let it go at that.
Ages ago he’d heard about some college-boy stunt, filling a swimming pool with Jell-O, and he’d wondered how many little boxes of the gelatin dessert it would have required, and how the college boys could have afforded it. It would cost a fortune, he decided, to fill this pool with Jell-O, but if you could afford the pool in the first place, he supposed the Jell-O would be the least of your worries.
There were cut flowers on all the tables, and the blooms looked like ones Keller had seen in the garden. It stood to reason. If you grew all these flowers, you wouldn’t have to order from the florist. You could cut your own.
What good would it do, he wondered, to know the names of all the shrubs and flowers? Wouldn’t it just leave you wanting to dig in the soil and grow your own? And he didn’t want to get into all that, for God’s sake.
So maybe he’d just forget about evening classes at Hunter, and field trips to Brooklyn. If he wanted to get close to nature he could walk in Central Park, and if he didn’t know the names of the flowers he would just hold off on introducing himself to them. And if—
Where was the kid?
The boy, the swimmer. Keller’s companion in solitude. Where the hell did he go? The pool was empty, its surface still. Keller saw a ripple toward the far end, saw bubbles break the surface.
He didn’t react without thinking. That was how he’d always heard that sort of thing described, but that wasn’t what happened, because the thoughts were there, loud and clear. He’s down there. He’s in trouble. He’s drowning. And, echoing in his head in a voice sour with exasperation: Keller, for Christ’s sake, do something!
He set his glass on a table, shucked his coat, kicked off his shoes, dropped his pants and stepped out of them. Ages ago he’d earned a Red Gross lifesaving certificate, and the first thing they taught you was to strip before you hit the water. The six or seven seconds you spent peeling off your clothes would be repaid many times over in quickness and mobility.
But the strip show did not go unnoticed. Everybody at poolside had a comment, one more hilarious than the next. He barely heard them. In no time at all he was down to his underwear. Then he was out of range of their cleverness, hitting the water in a flat racing dive, churning the water till he reached the spot where he’d seen the bubbles, then diving, eyes wide, barely noticing the burn of the chlorine.
Searching for the boy. Groping, searching, then finding him, reaching to grab hold of him. And pushing off against the bottom, lungs bursting, racing to the surface.
People were saying things to Keller, thanking him, congratulating him, but it wasn’t really registering. A man clapped him on the back, a woman handed him a glass of brandy. He heard the word hero and realized people were saying it all over the place, and applying it to him.
Hell of a note.
Keller sipped the brandy. It gave him heartburn, which assured him of its quality; good cognac always gave him heartburn. He turned to look at the boy. He was a little fellow, 12 or 13 years old, his hair lightened and his skin bronzed by the summer sun. He was sitting up now, Keller saw, and looking none the worse for his near-death experience.
“Timothy,” a woman said, “this is the man who saved your life. Do you have something to say to him?”
“Thanks,” Timothy said, predictably.
“Is that all you have to say, young man?” the woman asked.
“It’s enough,” Keller said, and smiled. To the boy he said, “There’s something I’ve always wondered. Did your life actually flash before your eyes?”
Timothy shook his head. “I got this cramp,” he said, “and it was like my whole body turned into one big knot, and there wasn’t anything I could do to untie it. And I didn’t even think about drowning. I was just fighting the cramp, ’cause it hurt, and about the next thing I knew I was up here, coughing and puking up water.” He made a face. “I must have swallowed half the pool. All I have to do is think about it and I can taste vomit and chlorine.”
“Timothy,” the woman said, rolling her eyes.
“Something to be said for plain speech,” an older man said. He had a mane of white hair and prominent white eyebrows, and his eyes were a vivid blue. He was holding a glass of brandy in one hand and a bottle in the other, and he reached with the bottle to fill Keller’s glass to the brim. “‘Claret for boys and port for men,’” he said. “‘But he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.’ That’s Samuel Johnson, though I may have gotten a word wrong.”
The woman patted his hand. “If you did, Daddy, I’m sure you just improved Mr. Johnson’s wording.”
“Dr. Johnson,” he said, “and one could hardly do that. Improve the man’s wording, that is. ‘Being in a ship is like being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.’ He said that as well, and I defy anyone to comment more trenchantly on the experience, or to say it better.” He beamed at Keller. “I owe you more than a glass of brandy and a well-turned Johnsonian phrase. This little rascal whose life you’ve saved is my grandson, and the apple — nay, sir, the very nectarine — of my eye. And we’d have all stood around drinking and laughing while he drowned. You observed, and you acted, and God bless you for it.”
What did you say to that, Keller wondered. It was nothing? Well, shucks f There had to be some sort of apt phrase, and maybe Samuel Johnson could have found it, but Keller couldn’t. So he said nothing, and tried not to look po-faced.
“I don’t even know your name,” the white-haired man went on. “That’s not remarkable in and of itself. I don’t know half the people here, and I’m content to remain in my ignorance. But I ought to know your name, wouldn’t you agree?”
Keller might have picked a name out of the air, but the one that leaped to mind was Boswell, and he couldn’t say that to a man who quoted Samuel Johnson. So he supplied the name he’d traveled under, the one he’d signed when he checked into the hotel, the one on the driver’s license and credit cards in his wallet.
“It’s Michael Soderholm,” he said, “and I can’t even tell you the name of the fellow who brought me here. We met over drinks in the hotel bar, and he said he was going to a party and it would be perfectly all right if I came along. I felt a little funny about it, but—”
“Please,” the man said. “You can’t possibly propose to apologize for your presence here. It has kept my grandson from a watery if chlorinated grave. And I’ve just told you I don’t know half my guests, but that doesn’t make them any the less welcome.” He took a deep drink of his brandy and topped up both glasses. “Michael Soderholm,” he said. “Swedish?”
“A mixture of everything,” Keller said, improvising. “My great-grandfather Soderholm came over from Sweden, but my other ancestors came from all over Europe, plus I’m something like a sixteenth American Indian.”