Cape Fear by John D. MacDonald Page B

had talked about the war and about childhood and music and pine trees and the best breed of dog. Then she said she had an eight-o’clock and they stood up, facing each other, and her face was faintly illumined by a distant street lamp. There was a most curious silence and he put his hands on her shoulders. She moved vividly and completely into his arms and the long hungry kiss stirred them so they swayed and lost balance. They sat on the bench and he held her hand during a long and wonderful silence, while she tilted her head far back and looked directly overhead at the stars. They kissed again and their need and urgency increased until she pushed him gently away.
    “It’s going to be pure horror telling Bill,” she said.
    “And Claire.”
    “Pooh to Claire.”
    “And to Bill. It’s an easy math problem. We make two happy and two unhappy instead of four unhappy.”
    “The world’s oldest rationalization, darling.”
    “Please say that again.”
    “The world’s old—”
    “Just that last word.”
    “Darling? Gosh, I’ve been calling you that for weeks, but not out loud. And there are lots of other words. Let’s cover the whole list. You first.”
    They stayed up all that night. They got their degrees. The rings were mailed back. They were married. They were utterly and sublimely convinced that no two people in the history of mankind had ever been more in love or more perfectly suited to each other in every way. It was a quiet civil wedding. An unexpected check from her father financed them while he sought and obtained a commission and reported to Washington for duty. The rented room in the brick house in Arlington was a special and personal heaven.
    She went to the West Coast with him and they shared the three weeks he waited there at Camp Anza for shipment. George had been in the Army six months by then. Carol charmed Sam’s mother and sister-in-law, and it was agreed she should move in with them rather than go to Texas to be with her father. She was seven months’ pregnant when he left, and he was very glad she was with his mother and Beth.
    He was shipped out in early May of 1943, and came back to the States in September of 1945, Captain Bowden, deep brown from forty days on the blue canvas hatch cover of an A.P.—came back to a world much changed. George had been slain in Italy in 1944. And his mother had died two months later. Carol’s father had died in an oil-field accident in Texas, and after burial expenses and sale of his possessions, there had been fifteen hundred dollars left. Sam requested and received his separation in California. He moved into the small rented house in Pasadena and became acquainted with his wife and the daughter he had never seen. Two weeks after he arrived they attended Beth’s wedding. She married an older man, a widower who had been kind to the women living alone.
    And two weeks later, after long phone conversationswith Bill Stetch, they were in New Essex, in a rented house, and Sam was boning up for his bar examinations. And on Christmas Eve Carol announced, with mock outrage and pointed comments aimed at all military people in general and one Captain Bowden in particular, that she found herself a tiny bit pregnant.
    Sam painted the hull of the boat in long strokes, half hearing the chatter of the children. Good years. The best of years. Much love, and a success that was gratifyingly steady though not in any special sense spectacular.
    He was glad when Carol left the dock and began to work. Bucky, without anyone noticing, had decided to paint the underside of the hull. He had a big brush and he liked to get it full of paint. He had been painting directly over his head. Carol yelped when she saw him. Bucky was a uniform ghastly white, a clown in total makeup. They all stopped painting and got rags and turpentine and worked on Bucky. He was full of shrill resentment and wiggled incessantly. When he was reasonably clean, all the kids went over to change at the Boat Club