The 42nd Parallel

The Camera Eye (19)

the methodist minister’s wife was a tall thin woman who sang little songs at the piano in a spindly lost voice who’d heard you liked books and grew flowers and vegetables and was so interested because she’d once been an episcopalian and loved beautiful things and had had stories she had written published in a magazine and she was younger than her husband who was a silent blackhaired man with a mouth like a mousetrap and tobaccojuice on his chin and she wore thin white dresses and used perfume and talked in a bell-like voice about how things were lovely as a lily and the moon was bright as a bubble full to bursting behind the big pine when we walked back along the shore and you felt you ought to put your arm round her and kiss her only you didn’t want to and anyway you wouldn’t have had the nerve walking slow through the sand and the pine needles under the big moon swelled to bursting like an enormous drop of quicksilver and she talked awful sad about the things she had hoped for and you thought it was too bad

you liked books and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Captain Marryat’s novels and wanted to go away and to sea and to foreign cities Carcassonne Marakesh Isfahan and liked things to be beautiful and wished you had the nerve to hug and kiss Martha the colored girl they said was half Indian old Emma’s daughter and little redheaded Mary I taught how to swim if I only had the nerve breathless nights when the moon was full but Oh God not lilies