The Stories of John Cheever

I spent most of my time on the beach and in the cafés. The fortunes of the resort seemed to be middling. The waiters complained about business, but then they always do. The smell of the sea was riggish but unfresh, and I used to think with homesickness of the wild and magnificent beaches of my own country. Gay Head is, I know, sinking into the sea, but the sinkage at Montraldo seemed to be spiritual—as if the waves were eroding the vitality of that place. The sea was incandescent; the light was clear but not brilliant. The flavor of Montraldo, as I member it, was immutable, intimate, depleted—everything I detest; for shouldn’t the soul of man be as limpid and cutting as a diamond? The waves spoke in French or Italian—now and then a word of dialect—but they seemed to speak without force.

One afternoon a remarkably beautiful woman came down the beach, followed by a boy of about eight, I should say, and an Italian woman dressed in black—a maid. They carried sandwich bags from the Grand Hotel, and my guess was that the boy lived mostly in hotels. He was pitiful. The maid took some toys from an assortment she carried in a string bag. They seemed to be all wrong for his age. There was a sand bucket, a shovel, some molds, a whiffle ball, and an old-fashioned pair of water wings. I suspected that the mother, stretched out on a blanket with an American novel, was a divorcée, and that she would presently have a drink with me in the café. With this in mind, I got to my feet and offered to play whiffle ball with the boy. He was delighted to have some company, but he could neither throw nor catch a ball, and, making a guess at his tastes, I asked, with one eye on the mother, if he would like me to build him a sand castle. He would. I built a water moat, then an escarpment with curved stairs, a dry moat, a crenelated wall with cannon positions, and a cluster of round towers with parapets. I worked as if the impregnability of the place was a reality, and when it was completed I set flags, made of candy wrappers, flying from every tower. I thought naďvely that it was beautiful, and so did the boy, but when I called his mother’s attention to my feat she said, “Andiamo.” The maid gathered up the toys, and off they went, leaving me, a grown man in a strange country, with a sand castle.