Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 26, No. 4. Whole No. 143, October 1955

The idea terrified him because it meant the end of the only happiness he’d known since he married her and it meant a return to the awful house in Hanover. He’d been so used to doing what she wanted that he didn’t say anything, but that afternoon, while he was lying in the sun, he made up his mind that he wasn’t going to leave and go back to Hanover. As he dressed himself, he made up the speech he was going to say to her, repeating it over and over to himself in the silence of the dunes to give himself courage.

He was walking home through the dunes, kicking the white sand and thinking how he meant to defy Etta, when he heard a curlew crying, and looking up to see it, he saw something else. Just ahead of him, lying in a hollow between two dunes, he saw the figures of a man and woman. They were asleep in the sun.

At first he wanted to run, and then he was overcome suddenly by a return of his old bitterness. He was outraged and indignant. And then he saw that, like himself, they had thought themselves alone among the dunes because it was a spot never visited by the people who came to La Vallette.

He tried to run away and could not. He was only able to stand there, his feet fixed in the white sand, staring.

Suddenly he was no longer shocked. These two people were like himself. They weren’t like Etta. Like him, they worshipped the sun!

He did not know how long he stood there. The sun slipped down towards the blue lake and the girl stirred, and he saw then for the first time that the Venus of the sands with the golden hair was the waitress over whom Etta had made the scene.

He turned and ran, fearful lest they should discover him, and as he ran he knew that he meant to stay on at La Vallette, and that maybe he would never go back to Hanover at all. When he got home he went to Etta and told her he meant to stay, and when she couldn’t find out any reason she tried everything to gain control over him again. She even flung the washbowl on the floor and broke it and dashed her head against the door, but all her hysterics seemed to have no effect upon him.

That night he dared not look for the waitress, because he saw her in a new way and looking at her became intolerable to him.

I imagine she was good-hearted and easy-going and meant well to everybody, and was just born to be good to men and make them happy. She felt sorry for Homer, I guess, being married to a dried-up whiner like Etta.

Anyway whenever he did look at her, she looked back and smiled, and that set Homer to thinking of everything he’d missed and that he was 48 and pretty soon he’d be dead without ever having lived at all.

After that day when he went to walk he tried not to go past the place where he’d seen them lying in the sun among the white dunes, but always, in spite of anything he could do, he’d find himself moving towards the spot. Sometimes he found them there and sometimes he didn’t. And they never knew that all the time there was someone watching their rendezvous.

And then one day on the streets he saw the boy dressed in a shirt and an old pair of trousers and looking for all the world like himself 30 years ago, and when he asked who he was, they told him that the boy’s name was Henry Landis and that he came to La Vallette in summer to take the baggage of the summer people to and from the train.

Then one day the boy disappeared, and Homer asked what had become of him, and they said he’d gone away because his mother had died in Appleton and that he wouldn’t be back until next summer.

So Homer went out and bought a cheap handbag and wrote a note and put it inside and asked one of the waitresses to give it to Frieda, the big blonde girl.

Just before he died he told me that he thought he must have been going crazy all that time. Up to the very end he couldn’t make out whether he’d been crazy all those years he’d been married to Etta and only began to be sane when he took to lying in the sun among the dunes.

At night he always went to the tabernacle with Etta, but that night right after the second hymn he told Etta he would have to get some air. So she stayed and he went outside and walked down to the boat landing, and there in the shadow of some bushes stood Frieda waiting for him and carrying the handbag he’d sent her.

At first he thought he was going to die of excitement and of fear. He began to shake all over. His teeth chattered and he waited for a little while till he got control of himself before he went forward to meet her.

For a long time they stood looking at each other in the darkness talking awkwardly about the cheap handbag and the moon. He said it was kind of as if all that he’d missed all these years had been rolled up and burst out of him at last. There was so much he wanted to say that he couldn’t say anything at all.