The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss by Louis Auchincloss

final, memorial volume of her poetry. But during that summer I had begun to look up from the blue notepaper on which she had written the small stanzas of her garden verse to find myself gazing out the window towards the campus with a blank steadiness that could only have been symptomatic, I feared, of the heresy of boredom. And thus it was with something of a sense of guilt and a little, perhaps, in that mood of nostalgic self-pity that makes one try to recapture the melancholy of remembered sorrow, that I traveled up to Anchor Harbor in the fall.
    My wife and I had spent our summers there in the past, not, as one of her obituary notices had floridly put it, “away from the summer resort in a forest camp, nestled in that corner of the peninsula frequented by the literary,” but in the large rambling pile of shingle, full of pointless rooms and wicker furniture, that belonged to my mother-in-law and that stood up on the top of a forest-covered hill in the very heart of the summer community. In Anchor Harbor, however, the poets’ corner and the watering place were akin. Each was clouded in the haze of unreality that hung so charmingly over the entire peninsula. It was indeed a world unto itself. Blue, gray and green, the pattern repeated itself up and down, from the sky to the rocky mountaintops, from the sloping pine woods to the long cliffs and gleaming cold of the sea. It was an Eden in which it was hard to visualize a serpent. People were never born there, nor did they die there. The elemental was left to the winter and other climes. The sun that sparkled in the cocktails under the yellow and red umbrella tables by the club pool was the same sun that dropped behind the hills in the evening, lighting up the peninsula with pink amid the pine trees. It was a land of big ugly houses, pleasant to live in, of very old and very active ladies, of hills that were called mountains, of small, quaint shops and of large, shining town cars. When in the morning I picked up the newspaper with its angry black headlines it was not so much with a sense of their tidings being false, as of their being childishly irrelevant.
    By mid-September, however, the big summer houses were closed and the last trunks of their owners were rattling in vans down the main street past the swimming club to the station. The sky was more frequently overcast; there was rain and fog, and from the sea came the sharp cold breezes that told the advent of an early winter. I was staying alone in my mother-in-law’s house, taking long walks on the mountains and going at night to the movies. I suppose that I was lonelier than I cared to admit, for I found myself dropping into the empty swimming club before lunch and drinking a cocktail on the terrace that looked over the unfilled pool and the bay. There were not apt to be more than one or two people there, usually the sort who had to maintain a residence in Maine for tax purposes, and I was not averse to condoling with them for a few minutes each day. It was on a day when I had not found even one of these that a youngish-looking man, perhaps in his early thirties, approached the table where I was sitting. He was an oddly shaped and odd-looking person, wide in the hips and narrow in the shoulders, and his face, very white and round and smooth, had, somewhat inconsistently, the uncertain dignity of a thin aquiline nose and large owl-like eyes. His long hair was parted in the middle and plastered to his head with a heavy tonic, and he was wearing, alas, a bow tie, a red blazer, and white flannels, a combination which was even then out of date except for sixth-form graduations at schools such as mine. All this was certainly unprepossessing, and I shrank a bit as he approached me, but there was in his large gray eyes as they gazed timidly down at me a look of guilelessness, of cautious friendliness, of anticipated rebuff that made me suddenly smile.
    â€œMy name is Gregory Bakewell. People call me Greg,” he