Fling and Other Stories Read online

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  John Hersey was born in Tientsin, China, in 1914 and lived there until 1925, when his family returned to the United States. He studied at Yale and Cambridge, served for a time as Sinclair Lewis’s secretary, and then worked several years as a journalist. Beginning in 1947 he devoted his time mainly to writing fiction. He won the Pulitzer Prize, taught for two decades at Yale, and was president of the Authors League of America and Chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Hersey died in 1993.

  BOOKS BY JOHN HERSEY

  BLUES

  THE CALL

  THE WALNUT DOOR

  THE PRESIDENT

  MY PETITION FOR MORE SPACE

  THE WRITER’S CRAFT

  THE CONSPIRACY

  LETTER TO THE ALUMNI

  THE ALGIERS MOTEL INCIDENT

  UNDER THE EYE OF THE STORM

  TOO FAR TO WALK

  WHITE LOTUS

  HERE TO STAY

  THE CHILD BUYER

  THE WAR LOVER

  A SINGLE PEBBLE

  THE MARMOT DRIVE

  THE WALL

  A BELL FOR ADANO

  INTO THE VALLEY

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION

  Copyright © 1947, 1950 © 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990 by John Hersey

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 1953, and simultaneously In Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Ebook ISBN 9780593080795

  www.vintagebooks.com

  The short stories in this collection were originally published in the following publications: “God’s Typhoon,” The Atlantic, January, 1988; “Peggety’s Parcel of Shortcomings,” The Atlantic, June, 1950; “Fling,” Grand Street, Summer, 1987; “The Blouse,” Special Report: Fiction, May–July, 1989; “The Announcement,” The Atlantic, October, 1989; “Why Were You Sent Out Here?” The Atlantic, February, 1947; “Requiescat,” Paris Review, No. 107, Summer, 1988; “The Captain,” The Yacht, November/December, 1988; “Mr. Quintillian,” The Yale Review, Fall, 1987; “The Terrorist,” Esquire, August, 1987; “Affinities,” Shenandoah, Vol. XXXVII-2, 1987.

  v5.4

  a

  To Judith Jones

  “Tongue, whither wilt thou?” says the old proverb.

  “I go to build,” says the Tongue, “and I go to pull down.”

  FROM The Life of Aesop,

  BY SIR ROGER L’ESTRANGE,

  LONDON, 1694.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Books by John Hersey

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  God’s Typhoon

  Peggety’s Parcel of Shortcomings

  Fling

  The Blouse

  The Announcement

  Why Were You Sent Out Here?

  Requiescat

  The Captain

  Mr. Quintillian

  The Terrorist

  Affinities

  God’s Typhoon

  In the lot next to ours at the summer resort of Peitaiho, at the foot of the hill that swooped down toward Rocky Point and the “American beach” and the sparkling North China Sea, Dr. Wyman had planted his famous arboretum. It boasted every conifer that could survive in that slice of the temperate zone. I was a small boy; I didn’t know the names of any of the trees, but I was in awe of the grove. I did not dare go into it. Even Dr. Wyman’s three sons had been strictly ordered to stay out. Huge NO TRESPASSING signs, in English and Chinese, capped its shoulder-high stone walls. Only Dr. Wyman and his invited guests, who were few and far between, were allowed entry—besides, of course, Chinese coolies to tend the grounds.

  On days when I was bored, I used to sit on a boulder in our lot and contemplate that exquisite little forest. Salty sea breezes off the Gulf of Peichili had gnarled many of the pines and firs and spruces and cedars and yews and had caused all their feather-bearing boles to tend to the west, toward the plains and mountains beyond the hill, as if they yearned for the bone-dry air that sometimes came all the way down from the Gobi Desert. On foggy days even I could sense something of the mystery in evergreen shapes that had entranced so many Chinese painter-philosophers. Through the years the trees had woven a brownish-green carpet on the ground, and after a rain a delicious fragrance of resin and sweet gum spilled over onto our land.

  Quite often I saw Dr. Wyman strolling alone along the paths among the trees, with his head thrown back as if to drink. Sometimes I saw his mouth moving. Possibly he was rehearsing his dreadful sermons.

  His son Billy Wyman and I both had brothers who were old enough to be Boy Scouts, while we two were still only Wolf Cubs. North China reverberated that summer with the cannon fire of warlords’ battles, and the Scouts were constantly being mobilized, in their insufferable (to us) uniforms with red kerchiefs and merit badges all up and down their arms and chests, to run errands for the 15th U.S. Infantry and the Royal Marines. Those troops were bivouacked to protect foreign persons and their property at this heavenly enclave on Chinese soil, where Chinese persons—except, naturally, for house servants and coolies and donkey tenders—were unwelcome.

  Furious at being kept at home under our mothers’ wings while the big boys were out defending us, Billy and I spent every minute we could in and around a pup tent, defending an imaginary world of our own. I played soldier and he, being a Brit, played marine. Our good guy was the warlord Wu Pei-fu, our sworn enemy the Japanese-supported Chang Tso-lin. We were very brave but not brave enough to pitch our tent near Billy’s house. We were both scared of his father.

  The Reverend Doctor Josephus P. Wyman had remarkable gifts of body and mind. He seemed as tall and broad and dangerous, coming along one of the resort’s sandy roads, as a lorry, and when he ground his jaws in a grimace of effort, as he often did, his chin and throat muscles bulged so much that you expected a bullfrog’s song to come out from between his huge, pipesmoke-tinted teeth. Billy said he had once scored six hundred and seventeen runs at one stretch as a cricketer for Oxford. His interminable sermons at the Union Church came at us in an insistent singsong, half whine, half roar, and my restlessness in the pews on those Sabbath mornings was edged with dread.

  Dr. Wyman preached a God I couldn’t quite see in my mind, and certainly couldn’t love. I dimly pictured some kind of Grandfather, who dealt out to bad people their awful “just deserts,” which I thought must be poisoned food at the end of delicious meals. Grandfathers seemed mysterious and rather awesome to me anyhow, because I had never seen my two, both of whom lived back in the States. The Grandfather Dr. Wyman talked about was suspicious and angry, for no reason I could perceive. Shouldn’t He be wildly happy over having created, among other wondrous things, our ravishing summer resort? Yet this Grandfather apparently spent most of His time on the lookout for ways of punishing everybody’s “trespasses” and “sins of pride.” Dr. Wyman harped on sins of pride. After his sermons I gloomily wondered about mine. Something to do with merit badges? S
kill in swimming the Australian crawl?

  Dr. Wyman was a polymath; we could imagine no subject on which he could not bury an adversary under the ever-spreading lava of his knowledge. His house—a queer, ugly block of stone with a flat roof, which he had designed himself—was like an untidy museum, crammed with all sorts of tools and instruments invented by man in order to assist in the study of God’s manifest ingenuities. Strewn about on workbenches, parlor chairs, the dining-room table, and even his poor wife’s sewing machine and ironing board, were Bunsen burners, microscopes, several of the latest cameras, a delicate balance with tiny scalepans, a stereoscope, numerous magnifying glasses, racks of test tubes holding various ominous-looking fluids; scattered here and there were sets of pipettes and syringes and beakers, of scalpels and chisels and dissecting knives, slide rules and compasses and tape measures, electromagnets and inductor coils and Leyden jars. Only Dr. Wyman’s Deity knew what else—but oh! also a crystal radio capable of picking up Peking, a telegraph key on which he had conversed in Morse code with Vladivostok, and, most majestic of all, right in the center of the parlor, causing some awkwardness in group conversation there, a seven-foot-long telescope that he sometimes lugged up onto the roof at night to make sure the spheres were still revolving in God’s good order.

  Though known for his brilliance, he was also a jovial man. My mother had said that his laughter was as loud as the roar of Niagara Falls. Adults agreed that he was conscientious and tender in his pastoral duties; he was wonderfully sweet to Mrs. Fenton, they said, a cranky old lady, whom Billy and I used to mimic, sitting on her veranda all day in a rocking chair, moaning. I had heard Billy’s mother say that breathing the piny air in the arboretum was what made the Reverend, as she called him, so serene.

  Yet I was afraid of him. The reason for this—beyond whatever it was in his marathon sermons that set my nerves twanging—was the kind of boy his son, my friend Billy, was turning out to be. Pale, thin, washed-out, obedient, with eyes as sad as those of a bloodhound, Billy wore shorts that hung down below his knees, and scuffed black shoes with no socks. He made a hopeless Royal Marine. He was a wonderful pal to have, though, because he would do anything I asked him to. But I pitied him, too, and blamed his flaccid condition entirely on his father. If Dr. Wyman could spend so much on a swarm of coolies to tend his conifers, why couldn’t he buy Billy some decent clothes, instead of making him wear his older brothers’ worn-out hand-me-downs? Couldn’t he expend some of his renowned gentleness on his forlorn son? What I saw flicker in Billy’s eyes whenever we came roistering into that cluttered house and found Dr. Wyman looming there over some foul-smelling chemicals in an experiment he was touchily conducting—the pain I glimpsed in Billy’s eyes at such a moment—told me that he was mortally afraid of that big, kind man.

  One day I had a thrilling idea: Billy and I would camp out overnight in the pup tent. I asked my mother if we could. “You’ll have to ask your father,” she said.

  I waited until after he had won a tennis match, six-one, six–love, and then I did.

  “Do you have your mother’s permission?” he asked me.

  “I haven’t had a chance to check with her,” I said.

  “Come back when you have her permission,” he said.

  This was a game of shuttle diplomacy at which I had become adept, and before long I had my go-ahead. I announced the plan to Billy. He shook his head back and forth only about a quarter of an inch each way—an economical gesture that expressed an enormous negative. He would never get permission from his father. I suggested that, to begin with, we go to work on his mother.

  Mrs. Wyman seemed at first glance to be one of those deeply wounded but resigned ladies—of whom there were so very many among missionary wives—who wore shapeless dresses and were always having to push back, with a sigh, stubborn stray tresses of their prematurely gray hair and refasten them any which way with one of a shoal of tortoiseshell hairpins. She had no territory of her own in her home. Dr. Wyman had considerately set aside a small oaken desk on which she might keep his accounts, but he had ruined its surface by spilling some acid during one of his explorations of God’s marvelous secrets. Yet with my shrewd small-boy’s eyes I had often observed the way she could balance the huge minister on the little finger of her left hand while her right hand was doing something that would have astonished if not outraged him, had he but noticed. She had Scottish blood and a residue of lake-country canniness in her makeup.

  The long and the short of it was that we got permission from Wyman mère and later, with mère’s help but not without growls, from père. Protocols drawn up by Dr. Wyman required that the tent be pitched no more than twenty feet from the sleeping porch of our house, so that, if necessary, a yell would waken my parents. We were not to stir from inside the tent after sunset and before dawn. We could not sleep in our clothes but would have to wear pajamas. No foodstuffs, no matches, no loud talk.

  It was dark in the tent, and we obeyed all the rules that first night.

  * * *

  —

  For a while, the warlords having packed themselves off, Billy and I had to try to keep up with the energies of our older brothers. We galloped to East Cliff on donkeyback, left far behind by the big boys, in a paper chase—a simulated fox hunt, introduced at Peitaiho by British missionaries, in which the hunters followed a trail of torn-up bits of back issues of The Peking and Tientsin Times, which had been scattered earlier for miles across the country by an adult “master of hounds.” We fished for puffers from Tiger Rocks, off the American beach, and under the pressure of dares from the bigger boys we dived in terror into mysterious boulder-rimmed depths off the high “forehead rock.” They made us serve as ball boys for their tennis tournament, and allowed us to shag foul balls when they played baseball against the 15th Infantry team, which always beat the missionary kids by scores like 33–2, in five innings.

  On some days our brothers refused to let “the brats” tag along, and we went howling to our mothers. A few of those days turned out to be the sweetest of the summer. Once, taking pity on us, Mrs. Wyman sent her Number One Boy down to the village to find an itinerant rice-paste sculptor, who came up the hill carrying the two cylindrical cases of his “studio” on a shoulder pole; in twenty minutes, for two coppers, mixing and tinting and molding the plasticene-like paste, he made for Billy and me a pair, each eight inches tall, of magnificently ferocious warriors of the era of the Three Kingdoms. The next time was my mother’s turn, and she sent our Wang down to find a magician, who, also with his gear in two containers on a shoulder pole, dazzled us on our front veranda, pulling silk cloths out of his ear, and asking Billy and me to try to guess which shifting riceware cup the jade grasshopper was under, and even finding a live dove in my mother’s hat, the one with red wax cherries on it, which she had left lying on the glider that day. Once we were entertained by child acrobats. Once we were allowed to make ice cream in midafternoon in the hand-turned freezer, with rock-salted ice, both of us licking the mixing blade at the same time.

  The greatest treat of all for me—we had learned to redouble our howls when the big boys left us behind—was the day Dr. Wyman took us for a walk in the arboretum. My fear of him vanished, and I was glad to have him keep hold of my hand along the cavernous, deep-shaded paths. Birds were in ecstasy among the slivers of light overhead. The needle scent acted on me like opium, and I felt that I was floating, to the music of the Latin names of species that Dr. Wyman softly recited, in a kind of dream I had never even hoped to have.

  A few days later news came that troops of Chang Tso-lin had shown up again near Shanhaikwan, only a few miles from us, where the Great Wall came down to the sea. The big boys were called up for guard duty, and Billy and I wheedled and whined until we were given permission to sleep out in the tent another time.

  It was a full-moon night. The cloth of the tent glowed. I could not sleep. I don’t know what time it was when something perverse surged
up in me and I whispered, “Billy?”

  He, too, was wide awake. “What?”

  “Let’s go down to the arboretum.”

  “Now?”

  “Sure. It’s a wizard night.”

  “It’s against the rules,” Billy said.

  “Pshaw, Billy”—the closest I could come to swearing at that time—“don’t be a spoilsport.”

  “I don’t think Daddy would like it.”

  But Billy would do anything I asked him to, and soon we were two bright ghosts in our white PJs, slinking downhill along the three-foot-high border wall of my family’s lot, both of us in a crouch, as if that would hide us from the searching light of the moon. The gate to the arboretum was locked. I had to help Billy up onto the wall and then, my heart beating wildly, I jumped up after him. We sat there on the curved plaster top quite a while, not daring to hurry down the other side. Finally I scrambled down. Billy still hesitated. I tugged at him, until finally his need for compliance overcame his fear, and he slithered down.

  When our eyes had adjusted to the shadows, we started along the central path. I held Billy’s hand. I had goose pimples all up and down my back and arms and legs. We did not speak.

  Somewhere far away—not in the grove, I am now convinced—an owl suddenly hooted, and Billy and I turned and ran. He got over the wall this time without any help.

  * * *

  —

  A British submarine cruised like a shark on the surface of the silver gulf and anchored in our bay, close enough to shore that boys even as small as Billy and I could swim out—nervous all the way—to look it over. Its presence lent a new naval arm to our daytime military operations in and around the pup tent. Since nothing naughty or dangerous appeared to have happened, our sleeping out in the tent on fair-weather nights had now come to be accepted by both mothers—and therefore had been sanctioned with doubtful glowers by the supposed final authorities, the fathers. The next three times after our adventure in the arboretum, we pitched the tent at sundown, crawled in, and more or less scrupulously followed the rules. But as I lay awake on the hard ground on those nights, something kept gnawing at me, filling me with delight and fear.