“What on earth possessed you to make such a provision?”
“I’ve told you, Kate. I keep telling you. You’re my sister.”
“I see. And I keep forgetting.” The sharp edge of derision was again in Kate’s voice, a glint of bitter amusement in her eyes. “Well, no matter. We must at least enjoy our week together. Is Little Jim on the beach?”
“Yes. I promised that we’d join him there. Would you like to go down?”
“God, yes! This air-conditioning depresses me. Let’s go and lie in the sun.”
“Little Jim,” said Ruth, “this is your Aunt Kate.”
Little Jim squinted in the bright sunlight. His thin face, despite the squint, was grave and somehow composed. His body, which had been heavily coated with lotion, was straight and strong, but it was conspicuously pale among all the brown bodies on the beach, and it seemed, therefore, excessively naked where near-nakedness was almost a cult. He dug his toes into the hot sand and extended a hand.
“Hello, Aunt Kate,” he said.
“How are you, Little Jim? Do you like to be called that?”
“I guess so. Everyone does it. Father was Big Jim and I’m Little Jim.”
“I see.”
“Are you coming back home with Mother and me?”
“Why do you ask? Do you expect me to?”
“Mother said you might.”
“We’ll see. For the present, we must simply enjoy ourselves. Have you been swimming?”
“Not yet. I promised Mother that I’d wait for you and her.”
“Well, here we are, and you can swim all you like. Do you know how?”
“Oh, yes. I haven’t been this year, but one never forgets.”
“That’s true.”
“Would you like to come in with me?”
“Not just now. I’ll lie here in the sand with your mother. This is your first visit to Florida, isn’t it? How do you like it here?”
“It’s nice to visit. I wouldn’t want to live here, though. I like living in Chicago.”
“Run along, Little Jim,” Ruth said. “But don’t go too far out.”
“It’s quite shallow for a long way,” Kate said. “He’ll be all right.”
Turning, Little Jim ran down the beach past a little girl who sat digging intently in the sand just above the reach of the quiet tide. About twenty yards away, posed like a bronze model beside his observation tower, the lifeguard was allowing himself to be admired by a blond in a bikini. The admiration was apparently mutual and absorbing. On the terrace of the hotel, sun-soaked guests were dispersed at tables or stretched indolently in lounge chairs. Voices and laughter and the clinking of glasses drifted over the beach.
“He’s a nice boy,” Kate said.
“Yes,” said Ruth.
“But he needs more sun. He’s far too pale.”
“He had a bad experience earlier this summer. He was very ill for a little while.”
“Oh? I didn’t know, of course.”
“He nearly died, and it was all so cruelly absurd. The doctor said he has something called acute anaphylactic reaction.”
“It sounds deadly, but I have no idea what it is.”
“It’s being hyper-sensitive to something that is ordinarily not dangerous at all. Sometimes it’s a drug of some sort. In Little Jim’s case, it’s the venom of certain stings.”
“Stings?”
“Yes. We were in the country one day, outside Chicago, and Little Jim was stung twice by wasps. At least, we think they were wasps. Anyhow, Little Jim nearly died before we could get him to a doctor. It was frightening and horrible.”
Remembering the fright and the horror, Ruth shuddered in the bright warmth, the skin visibly crawling on her frail and wasting body. Turning away, she spread a vivid towel on the white sand and lay down upon it. She closed her eyes against the glare.
“But surely something can be done about it,” Kate said.
“Oh, yes.” Ruth’s eyes remained closed, her thin face haggard and old in the merciless light. “Something called hyposensitization. Injections of the allergen over a period of time. But one can never be certain that it will be effective in all instances. Only wait and see.”
Her fragmented speech was an effect of weariness. Waiting herself for death, alone and lonely wherever she was, she was resigned to waiting as an integral quality of truncated living.
How much time had passed?
Lying on the glittering beach beneath the high, hot sun, Kate raised her head and turned to see the frail body of her sister. Ruth’s thin arms were spread wide on the sand, as if open to receive the last precious degree of solar heat, and her meager bosom rose and fell in a rhythm of rationed breath. Kate had a sudden notion that she was in that instant slowly bleeding to death, her thin and colorless blood seeping away through an invisible wound into the hot absorbent sand. With a feeling of faint and fastidious revulsion, she turned her eyes again into the glare of the sun. Between the sun and her, a gull slanted to a landing. Higher and farther out, above the sea and between the beach and the remote, discernible curve of Earth, a small airplane dragged across the sky a series of connected letters that spelled out the name of a nightclub in downtown Miami.
Beside his observation tower, the lifeguard still posed for the blond in the bikini. She tilted her face and laughed with her lips stretched wide, and the sun struck sparks from her polished teeth. The little girl still dug in the sand just out of the reach of the climbing tide, and beyond the girl in the blue water of the Atlantic, moving slowly into Kate’s range of vision with an awkward flailing of arms, was the head of a swimming boy.
It was Little Jim, she saw, and he was really quite far out. Perhaps too far. It was apparent from his flailing strokes that he was not a strong or practiced swimmer, and the angle of his course was taking him steadily farther from shore. He seemed, moreover, to be swimming with intent, a steadfast purpose, as if he had set himself a goal this side of Cuba. And so he had. Ahead of him some ten yards, afloat on the water, was a shimmering blue balloon, a pale and delicate transparency of seductive beauty. A small boy, an innocent inlander, he was straining to reach and to hold a casual wonder of the miraculous alien sea.
Kate sat erect in the sand, her lean body tense and a cry of warning rising in her throat. The shimmering bauble, blown in by the winds, was a Portuguese Man-of-War, that strange drifter of tropical waters that trails below its seductive pneumatophore a colony of long filaments armed with powerful nettle-cells. The multiple stings of the Man-of-War, she knew, were capable of causing paralysis, and perhaps even, in rare instances, death. What would be their effect on a small boy who was critically allergic to the sting of a wasp?
If Little Jim should die, it will all come to you.
Was that Ruth’s voice? Hadn’t she said that? Had she now repeated the words, lying sick and wasted on her bright towel in the white sand, or were they an echo in Kate’s brain?
Down the beach, the lifeguard lifted his eyes with longing to the sun-soaked guests on the hotel terrace.
Close enough to touch, arms spread to embrace the warmth, Ruth whimpered like an uneasy child in her half-sleep.
Out in the blue water, the ten yards were now five.
Deliberately, her unuttered cry a stone in her throat, Kate lay back in the sand beside her sister.
The shadow of a gull passed over her closed eyes.
Obituary
Originally published in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Magazine, March 1966.
Mr. Cameron Fleming belonged to another age. In a time of sprawling urban growth, two-car garages and super-markets, he remained what he had always been, and what his father had been before him. He was, in brief, the sole and independent proprietor of a neighborhood grocery.