This late in the year the Williamses still drive down to Travertine for a swim in that dark and nutritious sea and after supper Mrs. Williams goes to the telephone and says to the operator: “Good evening, Althea. Will you please ring Mr. Wagner’s ice-cream store.” Mr. Wagner recommends his coffee and delivers a quart a few minutes later on a bicycle that rings and rattles so in the autumn dusk that it seems to be strung with bells. They play a little whist, kiss one another good night and go to sleep to dream. Mr. Williams, racked by the earth-shaking, back-breaking, binding, grinding need for love, dreams that he holds in his arms the Chinese waitress who works in the Pergola Restaurant in Travertine. Mrs. Williams, sleepless, sends up to heaven a string of winsome prayers like little clouds of colored smoke. Mrs. Bretaigne dreams that she is in a strange village at three in the morning ringing the doorbell of a frame house. She is looking, it seems, for her laundry, but the stranger who opens the door cries suddenly: “Oh, I thought it was Francis, I thought Francis had come home!” Mr. Bretaigne dreams that he is fishing for trout in a stream whose stones are arranged as coherently as those in any ruin and have as profound a sense of the past as the streets and basilicas of some ancient place. Mrs. Dummer dreams that she sails down one of the explicit waterways of sleep, while Mr. Dummer, at her side, climbs the Matterhorn. Jack Brattle dreams of a lawn without quack grass, a driveway without weeds, a garden without aphids, cutworm or black Spot and an orchard without tent caterpillars. His mother, in the next room, dreams that she is being crowned by the governor of Massachusetts and the state traffic commissioner for the unprecedented scrupulousness with which she has observed the speed limits, traffic lights and stop signs. She wears long white robes and thousands applaud her virtue. The crown is surprisingly heavy.
Some time after midnight there is a thunderstorm and the last I see of the village is in the light of these explosions, knowing how harshly time will bear down on this ingenuous place. Lightning plays around the steeple of Christ Church, that symbol of our engulfing struggle with good and evil, and I repeat those words that were found in Leander’s wallet after he drowned: “Let us consider that the soul of man is immortal, able to endure every sort of good and every sort of evil.” A cavernous structure of sound, a sort of abyss in the stillness of the provincial night, opens along the whole length of heaven and the wooden roof under which I stand amplifies the noise of rain. I will never come back, and if I do there will be nothing left, there will be nothing left but the headstones to record what has happened; there will really be nothing at all.
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