Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow [85]
33
Ah, what a summer it was! Each morning Mother opened the white-curtained glass doors of her room and stood looking at the sun as it rose above the sea. Gulls skimmed the breakers and strutted on the beach. The rising sun erased the shadows from the sand as if the particled earth itself shifted and flattened, and by the time she heard Father astir in the adjoining room the sky was beneficently blue and the beach was white and the first sea bathers had appeared down at the surf to test the water with their toes.
They breakfasted in the hotel at tables covered with starched white cloths. The service was heavy hotel silver. They dined on half grapefruit and shirred eggs and hot breads, broiled fish, ham slices, sausage, a variety of preserves dispensed to oneself from tiny spoons, coffee and tea. And all the while the breezes from the ocean lifted the bottoms of the window curtains and shivered their salt thrill along the high fluted ceiling. The boy was always eager to be up and out. After the first few days they allowed him to excuse himself and watched from their table as he appeared moments later running down the wide steps of the porch with his shoes held in his hand. They were on nodding acquaintance with several of the guests. This would yield to speech eventually and then the mild curiosity aroused by this one’s looks or that one’s dress would be satisfied. They were in no rush. They felt they looked grand and prosperous. Mother bought beautiful summer ensembles from the boardwalk shops. She wore white and yellow and in the informality of afternoons abandoned herself to no hat and only carried a sun parasol. Her face was bathed in soft golden light.
They would swim in midafternoon, when the air became still and the heat oppressive. Mother’s bathing costume was modest but she required several days to feel comfortable in it. It was black, of course, with skirt and pantaloons that came below her knees and low-cut swim shoes. But her calves were exposed and her neck, almost to the bodice. She insisted that they separate themselves by several hundred yards from the nearest bathers. They encamped under a hotel umbrella with its name imprinted in orange upon its escalloped fringe. The Negro woman sat upon a straw chair some yards away. The boy and the brown child studied the tiny crabs that buried themselves with a bubbly trail in the wet sand. Father wore a horizontal striped blue and white sleeveless one-piece bathing suit that made cylinders of his thighs. Mother found it distasteful to see the outlines of his maleness in that costume when he emerged from the water. Father liked to swim out. He lay on his back beyond the breakers spouting water like a whale. He came in staggering through the waves, laughing, his hair flattened on his head, his beard dripping and his costume clinging to him immodestly; and she felt momentary twinges of dislike, so fleeting she didn’t even recognize what they were. After sea bathing everyone retired for a rest. She would remove her costume with relief, having wet it only for a few moments in the foamy surf, and sponge the salt from her skin. She was so fair that the shore was dangerous for her. Yet cooled by her ablutions, powdered and loosely gowned, she could feel the sun stored in her, spreading in her blood, lighting it as at noon it did the sea, with millions of diamond flashes of light. After-the-swim was soon established by Father as the time for amour. He would make his lusty heedless love every day if she allowed it. She silently resented the intrusion, not as in the old days but with some awareness of her own, some sort