THE GREEN FLASH
There are about a dozen people standing and sitting in a large, high, airy room with windows on three sides. The windows are open, shaded by faded green and white striped canvas awnings. The main one overlooks a long grassy hill which ends in a natural bowl. The flat bottom of the bowl is punctuated by the weathered stakes and battered wickets of a croquet layout set up by children, but no one is playing at the moment. The bowl’s farther rim lifts just high enough to hide a road, and beyond the road the land slopes down to a harbor. From the windows of the house on the hill, the harbor entrance and a slice of the bay beyond are visible; judicious cutting of the scrub oak, pine and sumac tangles over the years has framed the water view like an old postcard’s serrated edges. In late summer the sun sets between the twin headlands of the harbor’s narrow mouth right after dinner, but at this moment it is hanging well off the water, pausing before its plunge as if awaiting instructions from the house.
The people in the sunroom wear bright, soft clothes. The men have on madras-print jackets or blazers in deep pink, navy blue or yellow. Their trousers are khaki, ice-cream white, light gray, or the dried blood color known as Nantucket Red. On their narrow, high-arched feet are blue canvas sneakers, deck shoes, or oxblood loafers with little leather tassels. The women wear straight linen shifts or man-tailored shirts tucked into tapered pants of velvet or satin. Their haircuts are sensibly short – they are all amateur athletes, or used to be – and variously blond. Even the brunettes’ hair has been bleached, either by design or by the work of wind and sun over years spent playing outdoors.
The women’s slim gold bracelets and understated necklaces chime tinily as they shift their pared-down bodies, throwing their heads back to laugh largely, chopping their hands in emphatic gestures borrowed from the mechanics of tennis, golf and sailing. Their small, expensive earrings flash as they interrupt one another. The sun room is full of their perfume, dry as the gin they are drinking, underlaid by a light tang of sweat.
The men’s teeth, big and brilliant, are generally better than the women’s, for even if the women, in the enlightened middle of the American Century, have never breast-fed their children (and all of the women in the room have children, though not necessarily by the men here), the calcium loss childbirth entails has grayed and abraded their smiles. In the year of the blue-eyed lord 1952, calcium supplements have yet to be promoted: the women smile very tightly, when they smile at all.
Both men and women are deeply tanned. The sun is still a benign god: the ozone layer, whose existence is barely suspected at this time, hasn’t yet begun to fray, and even the women with cancer beginning to web in their flesh believe that a sunbath cures hangovers, the blahs and the blues. Their faces are comfortably lined, and the skin drawn across their high foreheads and prominent cheekbones looks polished. Mahogany dominates, and though the skin of the older women is as creased as old saddle-leather, the effect is not unattractive. Their faces suggest the spare elegance of the wooden masks from primeval Africa which some of them hang on the walls of their winter homes in Boston and New York.
There is laughter edged with light tension, because the man in the madras jacket is recently divorced from the woman in the black velvet slacks, and the hosts’ invitation was a courtesy only; they never expected the estranged couple to actually show up at the party. But there is no fuss. Everyone has perfect manners.
They all have drinks in their hands. The men hold fist-filling squat crystal cylinders as solid as stones; the women balance longer, slimmer tubes, beaded with condensation, between the tips of their bright-clawed fingers. There is conversation and mingling, a tacit refusal to bring up any serious issue. It’s a subtle, beatless dance in which the partners change so easily it would be impossible for anyone outside this circle to say who came to this party with whom. Foolish question, anyway: all of these people are related, one way or another. A web of genetic laws has drawn them all together, though there isn’t a person in the room who has ever heard of genetics. They believe they control their own destinies. Of course they are all gamblers.
Children, as mentioned, exist, the results of two or three hundred years of selective breeding; but there are no children in the sun room. At the moment the children are of no more concern than the buzzing of the cicadas in this last gasp of clear heat. They are ambient sound from the browning lawn, blending their little stinks with the odor that rises from the low-tide mud flats at the water’s edge, outside, out of sight, out of mind.
Seersuckers and khakis crinkle in the angles of elbows and knees. Velvet nap picks up the crimson of the setting sun across tight buttocks. The women stoop unnecessarily, showing the clefts between their freckled breasts. The men hide their hands in their pockets and their faces flush red. Someone clinks coins together nervously in his pocket; someone else releases a cloud of maddening scent from her small clutch bag.
The sun, given the go-ahead, does its dip into the bay, and the host is complimented. Dinner will be announced soon, by a short, stolid woman named Delia (only the host and hostess know her last name) who wears a light blue uniform a bit too tight for her. Her black face will be completely expressionless, and after she stalks silently back through the swing-door into the kitchen, at least one of the guests will say something about the sculptures of Benin. But when Delia makes her announcement everyone in the sun room will act delighted, as if the notion of eating after getting decorously drunk has been invented tonight. They will gulp the ends of their last refills, crunching slivers of ice between their teeth (the women wincing a little), patting one another on the shoulders almost hard enough to hurt, touching and challenging and reassuring as they jostle toward the dining room.
The blend of voices, analphabetic as the chuckle of the small waves on the beach, will recede from the sun room, leaving only the whisper of the offshore breeze through the leaves of the last two mature beeches alive in the grove of trees that frames the bowl. They are sick, but beeches rot from the inside: it will be many years yet before a big wind finally knocks them down.
Dinner is served on time. No bare feet at the table. No public expressions of love, no politics, no religion, and no talk about the separated couple so awkwardly brought together here, though the gaffe will not be repeated for neither of them will be invited again. No intimate touching. That will take place later, in secret, if at all. A few of the children who have almost entered adolescence will be permitted places at the table, but they will say little and eat fast.
There is golf and tennis. There is trolling for blues and bass off the taffrails of cabin cruisers or motorized ocean-going sloops and yawls. There is racing small, fat, slow boats, where the best weather forecaster always beats the best sailor. There’s fresh fish for supper tonight. There’s fresh corn from Delia’s garden. There are niggers in the woodpile, there’s a killing in the market, there are accidents of the heart. Everyone knows somebody who died untimely, over a gambler-green desk blotter eighteen stories above Wall Street, in the company of a mistress or a call girl in a suite at the Carlyle or the Pierre, on the thirteenth tee of the Pinehurst Golf Club in North Carolina, in a mangled Lincoln Continental found wrapped around a tree in the median strip of the Merritt Parkway.
Brothers, uncles, and cousins have been slapped out of the Pacific sky by Japanese fighter planes, or blown up into the French and German sky by Nazi artillery in the Big One just seven years past. And even as the guests sit to the table other relatives and friends are dying in the police action, as the press calls it, halfway around the world, where the enemy’s heaving, terrified breath as he cuts an American’s windpipe with his bayonet stinks of fermented cabbage.
There are other people’s husbands, other people’s wives, other people’s problems. Far above the big house the sky is streaked by the contrails of military planes on maneuvers, rehearsing for the Next Big One. For upsets and scandals, minor soilings, and ugly revelations, there’s a crying room, a bathroom off the pantry generally used by servants. A boy, girl, or even a grown woman who disrupts the decorum of the dinner table will be banished to it by the family patriarch before the meal is over. In the crying room there is wallpaper figured with fairy boats sailing serenely across dreaming lagoons.
There is the taste of outrage, tears like blood in the throat.
Supper’s done. The older children vanish again. The adults return to the sun room. Backgammon is initiated, ice cubes tinkle again in the hefty glasses. The leather dice-cups are the same size as the glasses, and someone will accidentally throw double icecubes. Loud hard laughter: they are all family, one way or another, but backgammon is played for real money. Double you. Sewered! Rather drunk out tonight. Bum. Never trust your sister.
The light softens. Shadows gather in the corners of the room, sliding from blue to purple, and nestle like cats in the laps of the seated wives and ex-wives, sisters and mistresses. The dice-cups chuckle, and Delia refills the glasses. The sun is done. Someone is winning, but no one is losing.
Across the bay where the sun is setting, a Navy blimp ghosts through crimson streamers like the dream of a whale out of water. In the long gloaming the drinking accelerates, and the younger wives and sisters will open up the old phonograph and put on dance music, weaving their bodies into a web spun when they were still children. One older woman will claim she met Duke Ellington in Paris, sometime before the war. Her husband will dispute her statement, but without heat; the argument’s gone stale even to them. The evening will eventually swing into night to the comfortingly syncopated march of horns and drums, led by a man so dignified that the people in the room, even the woman who claimed to have met him, never mention that he is a Negro.
There is a moment when everyone goes still. The twilight’s last gleaming reddens the faces of the elegant people as their bodies are dissolved by the shadows. Soon it will be time to turn on the lights, but not yet, oh, please, not quite yet. The green flash may be coming. It’s said to happen at the moment after the sun’s top arc disappears completely beneath the water. Nobody’s ever seen it, and one man, who has stuck to club soda because he is a recovering alcoholic, says that it’s silly to expect it, because they’re looking at a narrow bay, not an open ocean, and the horizon line is land, not sea.
Nobody pays any attention to him. Everybody freezes in place, gazing intently out the window, waiting. The green flash does not occur.
But a young boy running barefoot, nearly naked, across the narrow verge of lawn rimming the bowl, tickles their peripheral vision. He’s gone before they can identify what they have seen. One woman, perhaps the child’s mother, says, “But I thought we didn’t have deer any more.”
The boy, still flying along on his bare feet, end-of-summer omens burning in his heart, as the back-to-school cicadas chirr their desperate mating calls and the stars begin to wink on, might stop and peek into the sunroom, wondering why why all the people are standing so still, and what they are waiting for.