“What do you mean, the powers-that-be?”
“Larry Vaughn, for one.”
“Oh. I didn’t realize you had talked to Larry.”
“He came to see me as soon as he heard I planned to close the beaches. He wasn’t what you’d call subtle about telling me he didn’t want the beaches closed. He said he’d have my job if I did close them.”
“I can’t believe that, Martin. Larry isn’t like that.”
“I didn’t think so, either. Hey, by the way, what do you know about his partners?”
“In the business? I didn’t think there were any. I thought Penrose was his middle name, or something like that. Anyway, I thought he owned the whole thing.”
“So did I. But apparently not.”
“Well, it makes me feel better to know you talked to Larry before you made any decision. He tends to take a wider, more overall view of things than most people. He probably does know what’s best.”
Brody felt the blood rise in his neck. He said simply, “Crap.” Then he tore the metal tab off his beer can, flipped it into the garbage can, and walked into the living room to turn on the evening news.
From the kitchen Ellen called, “I forgot to tell you: you had a call a little while ago.”
“Who from?”
“He didn’t say. He just said to tell you you’re doing a terrific job. It was nice of him to call, don’t you think?”
FOUR
For the next few days the weather remained clear and unusually calm. The wind came softly, steadily from the southwest, a gentle breeze that rippled the surface of the sea but made no whitecaps. There was a crispness to the air only at night, and after days of constant sun, the earth and sand had warmed.
Sunday was the twentieth of June. Public schools still had a week or more to run before breaking for the summer, but the private schools in New York had already released their charges. Families who owned summer homes in Amity had been coming out for weekends since the beginning of May. Summer tenants whose leases ran from June 15 to September 15 had unpacked and, familiar now with where linen closets were, which cabinets contained good china and which the everyday stuff, and which beds were softer than others, were already beginning to feel at home.
By noon, the beach in front of Scotch and Old Mill roads was speckled with people. Husbands lay semi-comatose on beach towels, trying to gain strength from the sun before an afternoon of tennis and the trip back to New York on the Long Island Rail Road’s Cannonball. Wives leaned against aluminum backrests, reading Helen MacInnes and John Cheever and Taylor Caldwell, interrupting themselves now and then to pour a cup of dry vermouth from the Scotch cooler.
Teenagers lay serried in tight, symmetrical rows, the boys enjoying the sensation of grinding their pelvises into the sand, thinking of pudenda and occasionally stretching their necks to catch a brief glimpse of some, exposed, wittingly or not, by girls who lay on their backs with their legs spread.
These were not Aquarians. They uttered none of the platitudes of peace or pollution, or justice or revolt. Privilege had been bred into them with genetic certainty. As their eyes were blue or brown, so their tastes and consciences were determined by other generations. They had no vitamin deficiencies, no sickle-cell anemia. Their teeth — thanks either to breeding or to orthodontia — were straight and white and even. Their bodies were lean, their muscles toned by boxing lessons at age nine, riding lessons at twelve, and tennis lessons ever since. They had no body odor. When they sweated, the girls smelled faintly of perfume; the boys smelled simply clean.
None of which is to say that they were either stupid or evil. If their IQs could have been tested en masse, they would have shown native ability well within the top 10 per cent of all mankind. And they had been, were being, educated at schools that provided every discipline, including exposure to minority-group sensibilities, revolutionary philosophies, ecological hypotheses, political power tactics, drugs, and sex. Intellectually, they knew a great deal. Practically, they chose to know almost nothing. They had been conditioned to believe (or, if not to believe, to sense) that the world was really quite irrelevant to them. And they were right. Nothing touched them — not race riots in places like Trenton, New Jersey, or Gary, Indiana; not the fact that parts of the Missouri River were so foul that the water sometimes caught fire spontaneously; not police corruption in New York or the rising number of murders in San Francisco or revelations that hot dogs contained insect filth and hexachlorophine caused brain damage. They were inured even to the economic spasms that wracked the rest of America. Undulations in the stock markets were nuisances noticed, if at all, as occasions for fathers to bemoan real or fancied extravagances.
Those were the ones who returned to Amity every summer. The others — and there were some, mavericks — marched and bleated and joined and signed and spent their summers working for acronymic social-action groups. But because they had rejected Amity and, at most, showed up for an occasional Labor Day weekend, they, too, were irrelevant.
The little children played in the sand at the water’s edge, digging holes and flinging muck at each other, unconscious and uncaring of what they were and what they would become.
A boy of six stopped skimming flat stones out into the water. He walked up the beach to where his mother lay dozing, and he flopped down next to her towel. “Hey, Mom,” he said, limning aimless doodles with his finger in the sand.
His mother turned to look at him, shielding her eyes from the sun. “What?”
“I’m bored.”
“How can you be bored? It isn’t even July.”
“I don’t care. I’m bored. I don’t have anything to do.”
“You’ve got a whole beach to play on.”
“I know. But there’s nothing to do on it. Boy, am I bored.”
“Why don’t you go throw a ball?”
“With who? There’s nobody here.”
“I see a lot of people. Have you looked for the Harrises? What about Tommy Converse?”
“They’re not here. Nobody’s here. I sure am bored.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Alex.”
“Can I go swimming?”
“No. It’s too cold.”
“How do you know?”
“I know, that’s all. Besides, you know you can’t go alone.”
“Will you come with me?”
“Into the water? Certainly not.”
“No, I mean just to watch me.”
“Alex, Mom is pooped, absolutely exhausted. Can’t you find anything else to do?”
“Can I go out on my raft?”
“Out where?”
“Just out there a little ways. I won’t go swimming. I’ll just lie on my raft.”
His mother sat up and put on her sunglasses. She looked up and down the beach. A few dozen yards away, a man stood in waist-deep water with a child on his shoulders. The woman looked at him, indulging herself in a quick moment of regret and self-pity that she could no longer shift to her husband the responsibility of amusing their child.
Before she could turn her head, the boy guessed what she was feeling. “I bet Dad would let me,” he said.
“Alex, you should know by now that that’s the wrong way to get me to do anything.” She looked down the beach in the other direction. Except for a few couples in the dim distance, it was empty. “Oh, all right,” she said. “Go ahead. But don’t go too far out. And don’t go swimming.” She looked at the boy and, to show she was serious, lowered her glasses so he could see her eyes.
“Okay,” he said. He stood up, grabbed his rubber raft, and dragged it down to the water. He picked up the raft, held it in front of him, and walked seaward. When the water reached his waist, he leaned forward. A swell caught the raft and lifted it, with the boy aboard. He centered himself so the raft lay flat. He paddled with both arms, stroking smoothly. His feet and ankles hung over the rear of the raft. He moved out a few yards, then turned and began to paddle up and down the beach. Though he didn’t notice it, a gentle current carried him slowly offshore.