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By Root 12441 0

my wits I replied, in that laconic, detached, Virginia gentlemanly voice with which I was aware (or was vain enough to conceive) I had taken her captive from the outset, “Well, honeybun, since you put it that way, I do suppose I could give you a right warm snuggle between the sheets.” She could not know how my heart was racing, after its dangerous shutdown. Both my dialect and my diction comprised a glib contrivance but they had succeeded in wildly amusing Leslie, and obviously winning her. My studied and exaggerated speech had kept her alternately giggling and fascinated as we lazed on the sand. Just graduated from college, daughter of a manufacturer of molded plastics, restricted by the vicissitudes of life and the recent war to travel no further from Brooklyn than Lake Winnepesaukee, New Hampshire (where, she laughingly told me, she had gone for ten summers to Camp Nehoc—a widespread patronymic spelled backward), she said I was the first person from the South to whom she had ever spoken a word, or vice versa.

The beginning of that Sunday afternoon remains one of the pleasantest blurs amid a lifetime of blurred recollections. Coney Island. Seventy-nine degrees Fahrenheit, in golden effervescent air. A popcorn, candy apple and sauerkraut fragrance—and Sophie, tugging on my sleeve, then Nathan’s, insisting that we take all the wild rides, which we did. Steeplechase Park! We risked our necks not once but twice on the Loop-the-Loop and dizzied ourselves on a fearful contraption called The Snapper, whose iron arm flung the three of us out into space in a gondola, where we spun around in erratic orbits, screaming. The rides sent Sophie into what were clearly transports of something past simple joy. I never saw these diversions draw forth from anyone, even a child, such glee, such rich terror, such uncomplicated visceral bliss. She cried out in ecstasy, with marvelous shrieks, all flowing out of some primitive source of rapture quite beyond normal sensations of sweet peril. She clutched at Nathan, buried her head in the crook of his arm, and laughed and screamed until tears streaked her cheek. As for myself, I was a good sport up to a point but balked at the parachute jump, two hundred feet high, relic of the 1939 World’s Fair, which may have been perfectly safe but filled me with heaving vertigo just to look at it. “Coward, Stingo!” Sophie cried and yanked at my arm, but even her entreaties failed to budge me. Licking an Eskimo Pie, I watched Sophie and Nathan in their old-fashioned clothes grow smaller and smaller as they were hoisted up the guide wires beneath the billowing canopies; they paused at the peak, arrested for a harrowing and breathless moment as in that endless ticktock of time before the condemned fall through the gallows trap, then plummeted earthward with a whooshing of air. Sophie’s cry, borne across the milling hordes on the beach below, could have been heard by ships far out at sea. The jump was for her a final intoxication and she talked about it until she was out of breath, teasing me without mercy for my spinelessness—“Stingo, you don’t know what is fun!”—as we walked along the boardwalk toward the beach amid a pushing and shoving freak show of angular, corpulent, lovely, mottled and undulant human flesh.

Except for Leslie Lapidus and Morty Haber, the half-dozen young people sprawled on the sand around Morty’s lifeguard tower were as new to Nathan and Sophie as they were to me. Morty—aggressively friendly, strapping, hairy, the very figure of a lifeguard—introduced us around to three tanned young men in Lastex swim shorts named Irv and Shelley and Bert and three deliciously rounded, honey-colored girls who became known to me as Sandra, Shirley and—then, ah!—Leslie. Morty was more than amiable, but something indefinably stand-offish, even hostile, about the others (as a Southerner I was given to a great deal of spontaneous handshaking, while they obviously were not and accepted my palm as if it were a haddock) made me distinctly ill-at-ease. As I scanned the group I could not help but feel at the same