First Citizen Read Free

shore looked close and we were both good swimmers.
    I towed Clary back to the overturned pram, boosted her up and clamped her hands around the stubby keel. Clary is normally a pretty tough lady, but that day she was gritting her teeth and rolling her eyes like a bad trip on O-dyne. She was also beginning to freeze in that cold water, being a lot smaller than I was.
    The waves were like long-fingered ghosts pulling at our legs, pushing at our arms and chests. While the wind sang in our ears, the waves chanted: “Come with me ... go with us ...”
    Clary must have heard that song, too. Out of her throat came a tiny whimper, “No-oo.”
    Then I started talking to her, talking around my chattering teeth and shuddering lungs, about holding on and how soon somebody—Mother, Father, the man who rented us the boat and wanted it back—would certainly be looking for us, even with the rain and wind and all.
    For six hours it went on like that. We held on while the storm passed and the water smoothed and the golden light of a summer evening broke over the shoreline, some miles away. Clary sobbed quietly with fright and the cold, and I gabbled about holding on and rescue coming soon.
    Toward the end, when the cold was really beginning to get to me, so that my fingers and feet were like amputated stumps, my body stopped shivering and went hard inside. A white flame burned deep inside my chest. I thought it was my soul. Its light was without a flicker, like the cold white flash, edged with all colors, that I had once seen deep inside Mother’s wedding diamond. I knew then that it would take a lot more than fifty-degree water and a summer rainstorm to put out that flame.
    I talked to Clary about the white flame and told her she had one inside her, too. The way she screwed up her face with concentration showed she was trying to believe it and not doing very well. I fanned that little fire with words until she admitted that, yes, she had one too.
    It was almost eight o’clock and getting dark when the police patrol boat from the Town Dock found us. An old man in oilskins—not my father—pulled us off the turtled hull of the pram and wrapped us in blankets. He looked like the fisherman’s statue come alive.
    Mother was waiting on the dock and publicly cried over her draggled, shriveled babies for ten minutes. However, in our station wagon on the drive home she straightened and set her mouth.
    “You’ve made a spectacle of yourself,” she said to me. The tears in her eyes turned into a gleam of contempt.
    “I just—”
    “Please don’t tell me what you were doing in that silly little boat. I don’t want to know. Clearly, you were careless and got in over your head—although I can’t imagine where you thought you could sail a boat like that. You not only risked your own life but your sister’s as well.”
    “Momma,” Clary started, “he was just—”
    “I meant it when I said don’t tell me.”
    Mother took a breath, as if to begin again. “You are a Scoffield. And a Corbin. It’s your responsibility, James, to set an example for those about you. Live so that they can see how it should be done. Not so they have to come along and pull you and your sister out of the water. That’s a weakness.
    “Now, you’ll never do a thing like that again, will you?”
    “No, Momma,” we chorused.
    There was more, but I forget most of it. What stood out was Mother’s absolute belief in politesse oblige. Her family, her social set were destined to civilize the crawling masses who were not fortunate enough to be Scoffields. Or Corbins. As Clary and I grew up, the simple lessons of right and wrong were too obvious for Mother. Instead she taught us to distinguish grandeur from gaucherie, seemly behavior from eccentric bombast, beaux gestes from rude gaffes, and personal freedom from plodding conformity.
    Of course, it was remarkably stupid of me to try sailing an open pram out to the Georges Bank. If she had known that was my plan,