There was more than two hours to wait before the dance would be over at twelve and the Wrinkle would take them back home across the bay to the Bluff. When Freddie Vincent came and took her off to the dance floor, George Burton got up and went back along the weather-beaten planks beside the Clubhouse to the dirt road in back. He walked slowly down the dark lane to the brightly-lighted street where the bowling alley was, and the hot dog stand and the cheap dance hall that the nicer people didn’t go to. He bought himself a hot dog and stood outside the dance hall looking in. It was one of those ten-cents-a-dance places, where you could go, girls as well as men, without escorts or a proper date. He watched the couples toddling around the floor. Some of the girls were pretty enough, but they were working girls for the most part, and there wasn’t one of them in the whole place who had what Lynette McCaffrey had. What that was, he couldn’t have said. It was a mysterious something that he had never before found in anyone else, and he knew it was love, all the more so because of his hurt.
Keenly he felt his unhappiness, and he knew that all these strangers in the street, all these callous people who never felt anything, could not possibly know what he was feeling, or, if they did know, understand. It was something he himself had not felt before, ever, and he believed that there could not be many others in this world who had ever felt it, either. It was special and delicious and painful all at once, he knew that it set him apart, and he felt both lonelier and bigger, more capable of feelings, than anybody else had ever felt.
It was life, in short. Oh, there was no fun in being so vulnerable, so much more sensitive than other fellows, but wasn’t that part of love, didn’t it go with falling in love, could a man have one without the other — didn’t it come from being more aware and susceptible to life than the common herd? He turned away from the dancing gay throng so ignorant of the deeper finer things, and wandered off alone toward the upper end of the Point, hugging his misery to himself...
Finally he heard the three deep notes of the Wrinkle whistle, which meant that the boat was leaving for the Bluff in five minutes. He hurried back.
The lights on the pier had been turned on, and a dozen or more couples who had been at the Yacht Club dance were crowding around for the trip home. The Wrinkle was a small narrow steamer, hardly bigger than a big launch, with a brightly-lighted cabin lined on both sides with a continuous leather-cushioned bench and an open deck above with a single bench athwart the steamer just in front of the small glassed-in place where the pilot stood at the wheel. By the time the final whistle blew, everybody was on board, the engines started up with a deep whine, the propeller churned the water at the stern into a noisy swirling foam, and they were off.
Lynette McCaffrey, her legs crossed and one sandalled foot swinging, sat between Art Wallace and Hank Van Duser. She was smoking a cigarette against all the rules of the Wrinkle; while the engines were in motion, smoking was not even permitted on the upper deck, much less inside in the cabin. Blowing directly onto their backs and necks, a chill wind streamed into the open windows as the boat gathered speed, colder in a way, because nobody was dressed for it, than a winter wind — the kind of chill wind that blows across the water on a summer midnight. Some of the girls huddled against their partners’ shoulders, and the fellows put their arms around them. There was a great deal of laughter and lively talk, tossed back and forth among the passengers, but it all rang hollow and false in George Burton’s ear. Feeling out of it, wanting to be alone, he got up and turned toward the ladder-like steps that went up to the open deck above. Just as he began the climb, Lynette called out:
“Georgie! Don’t go up there, kid. You’re probably all sweaty after the dance and you’ll catch your death.”
“I’ll be all right,” he answered casually over his shoulder, and disappeared above.
He sat down on the bench in front of the pilot’s cabin and folded his arms. It was wonderful the way she had said “sweaty”; every single one of the silly girls he knew would have said “perspiration.” He was not a bit sweaty, of course, because he had not danced a single dance; but all the same, in a minute or two he began to be very cold. He sat there in the night wind shivering as if with a chill, and he thought of what Lynette had said about catching his death. He hoped he would. She had warned him, and he had ignored her warning. He hoped she would remember this, a few days from now, and remember, too, how he had gone up to the upper deck just the same, as if he just didn’t care...
The Wrinkle was out in the middle of the bay now, and he saw the lights on Garfield and Cedar Island far off on one side, and a few lights still showing in the long row of cottages that lined the narrow sand bar between the bay and Lake Ontario. The bar shone palely in the moonlight, outlined against the expanse of the lake beyond, bright and wide in the moonlight like the open sea; it was like a reef or magic atoll of the South Seas, and he murmured: “Yon palm-fringed incandescent coast...” The bar was only a piddling strip of gravelly sand strung with a lot of cheesy shacks that passed for cottages and a few moth-eaten cottonwood trees, but the effect was all right...
They’ll be sorry, he said to himself, a few days from now or next week, maybe, when he didn’t turn up at the dance — though of course the news would get around long before then. They’d remember a lot of things about him and tell each other that he was a pretty darn nice guy after all and wish they had paid more attention to him while they had the chance. At the end of the season Lynette McCaffrey would go home to her set in Cleveland and tell them all that though Parsons Point was just a dump where there was nothing to do at all, where you simply went crazy sitting around all day doing nothing, there was one of the most wonderful fellows there that she had ever known in her life and before she got a chance to know him very well, the most terrible thing happened — it had plunged the whole place into the most awful gloom... He gazed across the dark racing waters of the bay and thought: Next week all this will be the same, all this will be here, and I will not...
When the Wrinkle pulled in at the wharf below the Bluff and they all piled out, he waited till the last passenger had left the cabin before he climbed down the ladder and got off. In the moonlit dark he heard the cries of “So long” and “See you tomorrow” as the group broke up and the fellows took home their dates. Then he started up the steep path of the Bluff alone, careful to hang back so that he would not overtake those who were walking slowly on, arm linked in arm, ahead of him.
He came in through the back door of his parents’ cottage and reached overhead for the string of the kitchen light. By now he really was sweaty, his shirt was sticking to his back under the tweed jacket, and he was chilled through and through. On the white oilcloth of the table he found a note in pencil from his mother, written on one of those oblong cards found in Shredded Wheat packages and held down by a saltcellar so that it wouldn’t blow away in the breeze that came in strong through the screen door:
“Be sure and empty the ice pan and this time don’t forget!!!”