Mermaids on the Golf Course (19 page)

Ralph was bowled over by Frances Johnson. She was nearly as tall as he, with longish blonde hair—more blonde than Jane’s—cool, slender, and long-legged, wearing a trouser suit that might have been made by the highest of haute couture, Ralph wasn’t sure. Even the scent she wore was different and fascinating. Why was a girl like this free? And maybe she wasn’t. Unless she had just broken with somebody too.

“Ralph’s our number-one representative,” Stewart Ferguson said to Frances during dinner, and Ferguson’s wife nodded agreement.

The evening went well. When Frances was taking her leave, Ralph asked if he could see her to a taxi. She acquiesced, and he rode with her, as they had to go in the same direction. Frances’s apartment house came first, and Ralph got out and held the door for her. By then, he had a date with her on Tuesday evening for dinner. She smiled as she said, “Good night, Ralph.”

Ralph watched a gray-liveried doorman touch his cap and open a big glass door for her. Now that girl was nice, and maybe she liked him. Maybe she was important. She was a Smith graduate, plus having a degree in a business school whose name had escaped Ralph, maybe because when Ferguson had mentioned it at the table, Ralph had been looking into Frances’s eyes, and she into his.

Tuesday evening, Frances still remained cool and collected, though Ralph fancied he felt a warm glow from her. She inspired him to be gallant and masterful, and he liked that. He had gone to his country place the preceding Sunday, tidied it more than he usually troubled to, with an idea of asking Frances if she would like to come out the following Saturday and stay overnight, if she cared to.

“I have two bedrooms,” Ralph said, which was true.

Frances accepted. She knew how to drive, she said, but hadn’t a car now. Ralph said it would be a pleasure to pick her up Saturday morning around eleven, and they could drive out together.

However, Ralph spent Friday night at his country house, did the shopping early Saturday morning, then drove the twenty miles to fetch Frances. He was in good spirits, and his work had gone well that week. Maybe he was in love with Frances, in love as he had never been with Jane. Maybe he could win Frances. But he hardly dared think of that. Frances was not the type to say “yes” quickly to anybody, about anything. But for the moment, her nearness was exhilarating.

As soon as he drove with Frances into the lane that curved towards his and the Ralstons’ properties, Ralph was aware of the Ralstons’ prettier, better-tended front lawn, better-clipped roses (it was already autumn), and he at once told himself to put such negative thoughts out of his head. Was Frances going to judge him as a man, as a possible lover, or even husband, by the way he clipped three rose bushes in front of his house?

In fact, Frances paid his shack a few compliments. She said the fireplace was just the right size. She liked his kitchen—yellow-walled, everything visible on shelves or pegs, and just now very clean and neat. Ralph put another log on the fire. They had a gin and Dubonnet. Frances did not want a refill before their lunch of cold lobster. They talked a little about their work, about their childhood and parents, and the minutes swam by. Ralph had forgotten his query to himself, was Frances free? She appeared free to him, she seemed to like him, but Ralph counseled himself not to move too fast, or he might lose all. As it was, that afternoon, he felt in a happy glow of expectation, as if the wine had gone to his head, though he had drunk less than he usually did.

“You did all this yourself?” Frances asked, as she stood with her coffee in the living room. She had been looking at the pictures on his walls, the bookcases.

“This shack? Well, I furnish it. I can’t say much more for myself. I—” He broke off, thinking that all he could say was that he had painted the kitchen. He had bought his bookcases. She had seen his two bedrooms and bath, and put her overnight case in the bedroom with the single bed.

“It’s very nice and cozy,” said Frances, smiling, tossing her long hair carelessly back with one hand. But she shivered.

Ralph’s start of pleasure at her compliment at once gave way to concern about her comfort. “Just a sec, I’ll turn up the heat.” He went and did so, in the broom closet off the kitchen where the heating control was. Then he poked the fire into greater action. His next little chore was a final touch to his weather stripping, which he had nearly completed that morning. This was to drive a small wedge of wood into a gap at the upper corner of a door in his living room, a door which opened on his small back garden in summertime. Ralph had just the piece of pine board that he needed, plus a hatchet in his lean-to shed, so he said, “Back in two minutes, Frances,” and went out the front door.

He took the piece of wood, held it on end, and gave its edge a whack at its lower end. The point of the hatchet hit the cement threshold of the shed, but only a curled shaving came off the wood.

“What’re you doing?” Frances asked.

Ralph had been aware of her approach. “Nothing serious,” Ralph said with a smile, still stooped with his hatchet and wood. “I need a wedge for the door in the living room. The door never did fit at the top corner.” Ralph struck again with the hatchet. This time a larger piece came off, but so large that it was not usable for his purpose. Ralph tried to laugh. Was he going to fail again? On a primitive little job like this?

“How big do you want it?” Frances asked, stooping nimbly beside him.

“Oh—like this.” Ralph held his finger and thumb not half an inch apart. “That thick. Then tapering.”

“I see,” she said, and was ready to take the hatchet from him, but Ralph said:

“I’ll try it again.” He lifted the hatchet and tried to come down with direct aim and the right degree of strength, and once more his result was a useless shaving. He banged again more vigorously, which simply put an indentation in the side of the board.

Frances laughed a little. “Let me try. It’s fun!”

“No.” Quickly, as Frances drew her slender hand back, Ralph hacked again. He had it—but it was an oversized wedge, too long, and not worth the effort to shorten.

Frances was still smiling. “My turn.” She succeeded with the first stroke. The hatchet had not even touched the cement threshold. She held up the wedge. “Something like this?”

“Perfect,” said Ralph, rising. A faint sweat came over him.

In the house, he stood on a chair and banged the wedge into the top crack of the door with the hammer side of the hatchet. It went in perfectly, closed the door corner flush with the jamb, and didn’t even stick out. “Makes a lot of difference with the draft,” Ralph said.

“I’m sure.” Frances was watching him. “Excellent. Good.”

A hotter sweat came over Ralph, as if his banging in the wedge had caused him to expend a great deal of muscular effort. But he knew that was not the cause of his physical warmth. He was experiencing some kind of crisis. And Frances was smiling at him, casually but steadily. She liked him. Yet he felt at that moment like a wretch, worthless and inferior. What was it? He reminded himself, in a quick flash of reality, of his job, his “position”—not bad at his age, and even enviable for a man ten years older. His self-congratulation vanished at once.
It was the Ralstons. It was the wedge.
If, with some tact and finesse tonight, he might persuade Frances into his bed (he had changed the sheets that morning), he knew he would not be able to make it. And was he going to impose that failure, yet another failure, upon himself?

“What’s the matter?” Frances asked. “You’re all pink in the face.”

“Blushing maybe?” Ralph tried to smile, and laid the hatchet on the floor by the front door to remind himself to take it back to the shed. When he turned to Frances again, she was still looking at him. “I’m cracking up, that’s all,” Ralph said.

“What?—Why?”

Suddenly words came bubbling out of him. “Because I can’t do anything efficiently! Really, it’s true! I’m not sure I could change a washer on the kitchen sink!—I—The fellow next door, Ed Ralston, even his wife—” Ralph gestured in the Ralstons’ direction with a wave of his arm. “—they can do
everything!
You’d be amazed! He’s a mason, plumber, electrician, and she’s a gardener and
super
housekeeper. They never stop working—and doing things efficiently. Whereas I can’t. I don’t.” Here Ralph was aware that he was or might be boring Frances, because she was looking at him with a puzzled frown, even though she smiled a little, but he plunged on. “It’s—I don’t expect you to understand. You’ve just met me. I’ve got to get out of this house or—” Or collapse under it, Ralph had been about to say.

Frances’s calm, beautiful gray-blue eyes looked in the direction of the Ralston house, visible through the window.

She seemed lost in her own thoughts for a few seconds, and her gaze, to Ralph, seemed the gaze of a person who wished to escape (and who could blame her?). He had lost her. Ralph took a quick, deep breath. He could have collapsed with defeat, with unhappiness, and yet at the same time an insane energy boiled within him.

‘I think you’d better leave,” Ralph said in a hoarse but gentle tone.

“Leave?—Well—of course I will, if—” Now her eyes grew wider, with fear.

Because I’m going to destroy this house,
Ralph thought. But he didn’t want Frances to be crushed under it, just himself, perhaps.

“If you’re so upset—”

“Yes,” Ralph said. “I’m sorry. I can drive you—home.” He stood rigid, boiling with heat and purpose again, ashamed of his behavior, yet ashamed as if he saw himself from a distance, as if he weren’t himself, standing here, looking at the girl.

“All right. I’ll get my case.”

“Oh, no, I’ll do it!” Ralph dashed past her and up the stairs. Her overnight case was still closed on the floor near the single bed, and a glance into the bathroom showed that she had not put out any toothbrush or cosmetics. Ralph went down with the case.

Now Frances had lit a cigarette, and she seemed calmer, standing where she had been before. “You know, it’s absurd—thinking that you’re inferior somehow—just because you’re not a mason.”

A mason was not what he meant. Ralph meant that he couldn’t do
anything
properly. “I am not as efficient as other people,” he said tensely, gasping. He could have leapt to the ceiling as easily as he had just run up the stairs. He twitched with repressed brute strength. “Can you—perhaps leave me alone for a minute or two? Could you take a little walk for five minutes?”

She had mentioned the woods across the road, said something about taking a walk there when they had arrived today. Now she said, “But of course.”

When he saw that she had crossed the road, he took her suitcase and set it outside the house by his car. Then he fetched his large saw with the bow-shaped handle from his shed, and attacked the vertical rafter in the center of his living room. This was a blissful outlet for his energy. The wood seemed to cut like butter, though after a moment the saw stuck with friction, so he attacked the post from the other side, which would result in a V-shaped incision a little lower than his waist as he stood.

Done! He could see through the V even, yet the damned house didn’t fall. “Curse you!” Ralph said.

He took a few steps backwards, rubbed his palms together, bent and charged.

His right shoulder struck the top part of the severed rafter, and he pushed harder against it, aware of a crackling, deep yet sharp, over his head. He was aware of pain in his shoulder, then a brief roar as of an avalanche. Then he blacked out.

When Ralph was next aware of consciousness, or of thought, he seemed to be floating, weightless, horizontal perhaps, and on his back. Frances was beside him, the beautiful Frances, and she was sitting by his bed. Of course he was on a bed, or in a bed, in a hospital. He remembered. What he saw through drugged, half-open eyes was a gray-white. He tried to lift his hands, and couldn’t. But there sat Frances, he saw when he groggily looked to his left.

“I’ve come to see you—but I think I shouldn’t see you again, Ralph. You frighten me. I hope you’ll understand.”

Ralph opened his dry lips to reply, and nothing came. Of course he understood. He was a failure, and worse, he had lost his head. He remembered, he had tried to blow up his house. No, not bomb it, but wreck it. He had attacked it with a sledgehammer. No, a
saw.
He remembered now. No wonder Frances had fled! He wondered if she were all right? And he hadn’t the power to ask her. His eyes when he turned them to the left, whence came her voice, would not even bring Frances into focus. But there was her voice again:

“Ralph, I’m sorry. But I’m afraid of you. You must understand.”

Ralph tried to nod in a pacific, polite and reconciled way. Could she see his nod? Ralph squeezed his eyes shut, wanting to weep, detesting himself, and feeling in agony at the loss, the predictable, inevitable loss of Frances. He wanted to die. And so he gave a groan.

“
O-oh-h!
A-ah-h!”

And Frances fled out the door. Who could blame her? And a nurse arrived quick as lightning, her figure a vague cloud at the left side of his bed, and she made a motion which Ralph knew was the injection of a needle into his arm, though he didn’t feel anything.

Once more, consciousness stirred, he imagined that he saw things, such as the upper corners of his room, Frances somewhere on his left again, maybe sitting on a chair, leaning forward.

“You’re going to be all right,” said Frances in a soft voice. “Things—it’s not so bad. Just a broken collarbone and a bang on the head.”

“It is hopeless,” Ralph murmured, mumbling like a drunk, and sleepy unto death. Maybe he was already dead? “I’m—hopeless.”

“No!—Ralph, I understand why you did it. It’s just a house. So what?” Frances’s voice said with more conviction.

Now Ralph felt a pressure on his left hand. Frances might have been holding his hand in both hers. “I can’t—” Ralph stopped, wanting to make the statement that he was not efficient,
not
efficient. “I can’t do
anything.
”

“Who cares?” Frances’s blonde personage or aura bent and kissed him on the lips.