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By Root 1715 0

on his arms with his palms flat in the hot sand, and the sun was warm on his exposed neck and shoulders. Around him was the ebbing and rising of talk, and constant eruptions of laughter. All this was not serious, and he wanted not to be serious, and he had something facing him that he had to be serious about. And right beside him was Catherine, who had to be serious about the same thing. She sat quiet, brooding unhappily, and his feeling for her was one of being very sorry. But he had to admire the guts she was showing. There was something! How many of these cuties on the beach here had as much guts as Catherine?

“Come on, let’s take another plunge.”

He looked wistfully over the lake at the horizon, where the merging of sky and water was like some mystery. He was struck with the desire to swim out to it and reach the center of where the sky fell into the water, and he knew there was no such place, and if he swam out, he would finally just sink, and this wish was like so many others that he had had all along. He was like a swimmer going out and out, and the farther he swam the more tired he got and the harder he had to swim.

“A penny for your thoughts, Bill.”

“Oh, I was just looking at the lake. It’s kind of nice to look out over the lake on a day like this.”

They stared again at the horizon, but Catherine’s eyes were more attracted by a child hobbling on unsure bow legs to the water to fill a small tin pail.

“Cute, isn’t it?”

“What?” Studs asked.

“Darling, and our child is going to be more cute, isn’t it, and it won’t be bow-legged, either,” she said, pointing as the child bent down with its pail.

He nodded mechanically. Her words brought back to him, with too much clarity, what was ahead of him, the problems and responsibilities he would have to face. He felt weak and powerless before them, and with his face clouding he began to pity himself, to feel almost as sorry for himself as he did for Catherine. Christ, what was he going to do? Himself, a father! How would he act, and what did he know about bringing up a kid? And the dough. Yes, goddamn it, he knew now what money meant. And while he began to understand such things, there were all those people here having a good time, all these fellows and girls flirting, some lads breaking the ice with girls they would lay and leave, and maybe others starting off with them on a road that would lead to the same place as Catherine’s road and his own had led to. Why couldn’t he have just made her, and then left? But how could he? Jesus, he couldn’t take a run-out powder on her. And he didn’t know if he wanted to, either. But he was out here at the beach to forget and have a good time.

“Yes, well, I’m nineteen,” an almost flat-chested, pertly attractive girl was saying nearby to a group of three fellows.

“And wouldn’t I hate to hang until you reach seventeen.”

“Well, hang then.”

“Yes, Nellie, he’s just a cynical old dope, isn’t he?”

“If he tries hard and studies late at night, he might be a dope. He’s not even that yet,” the girl said, throwing sand at one of the fellows, jumping up to run screaming toward the water, pursued by them.

Hot little teaser, Studs thought, imagining how those fellows would grab and handle her in the water. His eyes met Catherine’s, who also had been watching and listening. They smiled knowingly.

He laid his face downward in her lap, his right arm slung under his closed eyes. She toyed with his hair, and he liked the caressing touch of her fingers. So often he’d seen other fellows at the beach with their heads in girls’ laps this way, and he had envied them. Well, some guys would be plenty dumb to envy him now.

“My darling little boy,” Catherine whispered into his ear.

The world closed out of his mind, and the beach with its noises seemed far away. He was only half-awake, and he felt her fingers twining through his hair. Christ, if only life could be forever like this, no worries, no thinking of money, duties, responsibilities. If he had never to lift his head from her lap, and could just go on forever and forever feeling just like he did