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By Root 5108 0

She was affectionate to her son, her husband, her invalid father; she was affectionate to her Negro woman and most of all to the still-unchristened and beautiful son of Sarah, who was thriving here and seemed to be growing visibly. She began to consider the attentions that were being paid her by various of the hotel guests. They hovered on the edges of her consciousness, waiting for some recognition from her. For simple occupation she was now prepared to bestow this. There were several impressive Europeans at the hotel. One was a German military attaché to his embassy who wore a monocle and always saluted her with discreet gallantry. He was tall and wore that cropped hair they affected and came to dinner in his formal uniform of white, with a black bow tie. He made a great show of ordering wines and then rejecting them. There were no women in his party but three or four men, somewhat coarser-looking, whose rank was apparently inferior to his. Father said he was a Captain von Papen and that he was an engineer. They saw him every day walking the beach and unrolling charts and pointing to sea and speaking to his aides. Usually there was at the time a small craft slowly traversing the horizon. It is some kind of engineering survey, Father said lying on the beach sand with his face to the sun. I can’t imagine why the South Jersey coast should interest Germans. Father was oblivious to the man’s speculative notice of his wife. Mother was amused by this. She knew from the first careless glance she returned to the officer that he presented to her only the most lascivious intentions focused, as it were, in the imperiousness of his monocled gaze. She decided to ignore him.

There was an elderly French couple with whom she learned to exchange pleasantries; she laughed to recall her schoolgirl French and they very generously complimented her accent. They never appeared in the sun except cocooned in endless swaths of linen and gauze topped with Panama hats. For good measure they carried parasols. The man, who was shorter than his wife and quite heavy, had liver spots on his face. He wore thick glasses. He had enormous pendent ear lobes. He carried a butterfly net and jar with a cork stopper and she a picnic hamper so heavy that she could not walk upright with it. Each morning she struggled after him over the dunes and they disappeared in the distant haze where there were no hotels, no boardwalk, only the gulls and sandpipers and the dune grasses, where sat the trembling wings for which he lusted. He was a retired history professor from Lyons.

Mother tried to interest Grandfather in the French couple on the basis of their academic background. The old man would have none of it. He was totally engrossed by his condition and too irritable to engage in civilized discourse. He defeated all the diversions she thought up for him—except one, a daily ride in a boardwalk chair in which he could sit and be wheeled without being thought infirm. But he carried a cane across his lap and whenever the pedestrian traffic did not move fast enough for him he lifted the cane and prodded women and men alike, who would turn and stare, outraged, as he sailed past them.

There were other guests, of course, who were not Europeans: a gigantic stockbroker from New York with a huge wife and three immense children, who spoke not a word when they dined; several family groups from Philadelphia, who could be placed quickly by the nasalities of their speech. But Mother found that the persons who interested her were invariably foreigners. They were not a substantial number but seemed to beam more life than her countrymen. The most fascinating of all was a small, limber man who wore jodhpurs and a white silk shirt open at the neck and a flat white linen cap with a button. He was a flamboyant, excited person whose eyes darted here and there, like a child’s, afraid of what they might miss. He carried on a chain around his neck a rectangular glass framed in metal which he often held up to his face as if to compose for a mental photograph what it was that had captured his