Barnegat Bay - 3. Chapter 3

One of the reasons Claire wasn’t interested in Al was she was more interested in me. I kind of knew that. She’d look at me, and I could tell she was seeing something that really wasn’t there. When women got like that, I could never do much about it. So I rarely tried.

A lot of what got their attention was my being a doctor – though it actually started when I was still in med school. And now, there was no denying: I had my own practice. But even calling it that made it sound too big.

It was a tiny practice. A tiny, fledgling practice. And it was starting at a time when other people were going bankrupt – plenty of them far wiser than I’d ever be. Still, I never worried about it failing.

So it was an attraction, and so – admittedly – was I. I could speak well. I dressed presentably. I was clean-cut and the kind of man an intelligent woman could take home to meet her parents. I was the marrying kind. A family man. Except I wasn’t.

Actually, I didn’t know what I wanted in terms of a family. It wasn’t that I didn’t think about women and the kind I might eventually settle in with. But like the guys, I didn’t think about it in the present.

For one thing, I didn’t have time. For another, money was never outside the edge of my thoughts. My going to Barnegat was my big extravagance, and that cost me nearly nothing. I had family there. I could always sleep on a cot in their attics in the winter or on one of their screened-in porches when it was warm. Though after I won my boat – which still needed a lot of repair – I slept onboard in the summers. And I always thought the med school friend who lost the boat to me in a poker game did it so he didn’t have to pay for its upkeep.

Fortunately, I didn’t have that expense. My friend had to pay to keep it docked and dry docked in Newark. But I moved it to Barnegat where – for most of the year – it was tied to the family pier. In the winter, we tugged it onto the grass. Overall, it cost me less to keep than it would have for a nice evening with someone I was seeing at a good New York club.

The other thing about women is – like Spence – I had no trouble finding them. Spence was more playful, but if women wanted dependable, they chose me. For that reason, I always had dates. Holidays. Weddings. Family occasions. You name it, and I trotted out my best suit.

I was also careless in my flirting because it didn’t mean anything to me. So I did it all the time and justified my ultimate cowardice by thinking, “If I didn’t make any promises, I’ve made no commitments.” It wasn’t a question of sleeping with anyone. None of the women I knew would have done that with anyone before they were married. So it was a hollow criteria. And the men I knew who were that indiscreet – and some of them were surprisingly respectable – wouldn’t get involved sexually with any girl they planned to marry. Still, I pretended that if a woman was more interested in me than I was in her, it wasn’t my fault. That lie got harder as I neared thirty.

Claire seemed to have more sense than that, and – in the beginning – she’d no sooner go walking alone with me than she would have with Al. Mary was always with us. The one thing that might have made a difference is my family had known Claire’s for years.

Like my grandfather, her father was in business and was a community leader. Though my grandparents’ home was in Pleasant Point Beach, not Toms River, so they didn’t need a summer house. They couldn’t have afforded one anyway because instead of two big lumber yards, my grandparents had a half-dozen small bakeries in neighboring towns. Each store was established by my grandfather but given to a son or nephew or cousin to run, with part of the profits always coming back to Grampa. And since \Claire and I were parts of this extended community, we’d seen each other for years at dances and parties.

Though she and Mary were eight years younger than I was, so I wouldn’t have thought about dating either of them till they reached their twenties – eighteen or nineteen, at least. But I was busy with studying then – and so seriously. It’s a wonder I even knew poker existed or was good enough to win.

Claire also might have seemed a bit ahead of me. From when we occasionally talked, she seemed to want so much more than marriage – definitely more than the comfortable life her mother had. She was an excellent wife to her businessman husband and devoted to their four kids, and Claire admitted she had nothing against that. “I plan on doing those things myself. But...”

And that’s where she got stuck. Heading off to college, she couldn’t yet define that “But.” Until then, her biggest rebellion had been insisting on going on after graduation. Before that, she’d dutifully gone to Catholic schools – not that her family was Catholic, but because those classrooms offered the best education. She’d also dismissed going anywhere but a real college. “Not somewhere nearby. Not a finishing school. And not some place that only trains teachers or nurses.”

Her mother politely disagreed. Her mother seemed to do everything politely. “A man’s education will just make you more independent.”

It wasn’t meant as a compliment, and it did exactly that – despite Claire’s not being at the best college. She would have preferred Smith over Holyoke, which she found only acceptable. And no matter how respected it was, she wasn’t about to stay as close as Swarthmore. She’d also only studied Liberal Arts because nothing harder was available.

“There’s nothing wrong with Liberal Arts,” I pointed out.

“Would you have studied it?”

“I knew I wanted to be a doctor.”

“What if I did, too?”

“Then you could’ve studied science.”

The problem was that even by her junior year, she hadn’t figured that out – or found a better major. So she took what was there.

“But it simply continued my ladies’ education – my harmless education. It increased my general knowledge rather than challenging me with something like business.”

“The problem with business,” Mary added, “at least for women, is it’s all shorthand and typewriters.”

“Fortunately, they’ve been invented,” I joked – not that they laughed. “You could’ve been practicing penmanship.”

They ignored that, too.

“I don’t want to be a secretary,” Claire insisted. “That’s not what interests me, and you know it.” But rather than fight her parents on that, she’d sidestepped. “I won on college. That had to be enough.”

“It’s too bad,” Mary put in. “Because Claire’s really good at math. She helped me through it in every grade. She’d probably be very good at business.”

Claire laughed at that. “Actually, I’m so good at logic and math that men seem to think it’s a fluke. They also think that – given a chance – I’ll quickly fail and embarrass everyone.”

Claire has just graduated and was only temporarily back in Toms River – Barnegat for the summer. She wanted to move to New York in the fall, but her mother was absolutely against that, this time with her husband’s support. Claire’s father admired his younger daughter’s ambition, though he seemed sure she’d turn conventional as soon as she “met the right man.” And even if Claire had agreed to live with her family’s most conservative cousins, her father wasn’t about to let her loose in Manhattan. The wilds of Massachusetts were enough.

“I could just go,” Claire admitted, “but I love my parents and can’t imagine doing anything to hurt them. Besides, as Mary said, in the city, I’d go right to being a secretary or teacher. That’s better than working in a dress shop,” – she smiled at Mary, who simply smiled back – “but it’s not what I want.”

“Which is?” I asked.

“Definitely the challenge I missed in college. After the first year, I should have insisted on going somewhere better. But Holyoke was costing enough – and in these times. I’ve asked Mary to move to New York with me, but she’s not interested.”

“It’s too big,” Mary said. “And I’d miss the ocean.”

“You and the water,” Claire kidded, more than slightly amused.

After they’d met in grade school, Claire and Mary had always been best friends. Mary was more typically pretty, so marginally more popular. But Claire was close behind. And Mary was less ambitious.

“I admire Claire,” she said, “but she is a little crazy. We’re no longer living in the 1920s.”

I had to laugh at that.

“No – times are more serious,” Mary went on. “People can’t only think of themselves.”

“I don’t see Claire doing that,” I countered. But Mary didn’t answer.

At college, Claire had stayed in touch with Mary by almost daily letters and occasional visits. It wasn’t a long trip by train, and Claire’s father’s caution had sheltered his family’s savings from the stock market crash. But businesses were continuing to fail. “We’re not poor,” he reminded her. “But you can’t come home every weekend.”

“She wouldn’t have wanted to anyhow,” Mary poked. “Not with all those boys around.”

“You picked exactly the right word,” Claire emphasized. “Boys. And these days, they seem pretty lightweight.”

“But cute,” Mary reminded her. “Especially in their swimming suits.”

Claire didn’t disagree.