A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

When he let me out I made straight for the concession pavilion down near the pier, where most of the ten who had come out with me were hanging around buying postcards and ice-cream cones, waiting for the ferry to pull in. It wasn’t more than fifty yards away by this time, coasting in a big half-circle from the right to get into position, with its engine already cut off.

The fat man wasn’t in the refreshment house — one look inside from the doorway told me that. I asked one or two of the others if they’d seen him since they’d come out of the statue. Nobody had, although plenty had noticed him going in — especially on the way up — just as I had.

“He must be around some place,” one of them suggested indifferently. “Couldn’t very well get off the island until the ferry came back for him.”

“No kidding?” I remarked brittlely. “And here I am thinking he went up in a puff of smoke!”

I went around to the other side of the base, following a series of cement walks bordered with ornamental cannonballs. No rotund gentleman in sight. I inquired at the dispensary at the back of the island, and even at one or two of the brick cottages the caretakers lived in, thinking he might have stopped in there because of illness or out of curiosity. Nothing doing.

I completed my circuit of the terraced lawn that surrounds the statue and returned to the front of it again. It had dawned on me by now that I was going to a hell of a whole lot of trouble just to return a man’s hat to him, but his complete disappearance was an irritant that had me going in spite of myself. It was the size of the man that burned me more than anything. I wouldn’t have minded if it had been somebody less conspicuous, probably wouldn’t have noticed him in the first place, but to be as big as all that and then to evaporate completely—

The ferry was in when I got back and the passengers were straggling up the long, almost horizontal gangplank. It hadn’t brought anybody out with it this trip, as the statue was closed to visitors after 4:30 each day and this was its last round trip. “Turn this in at the lost-and-found for me, will you?” I said, shoving the hat at one of the soldiers on pier-duty as I went by. “I just found it up there.”

“Hand it in at the other end, at the Battery,” he said. “That’s where they come and claim things.”

I was so dead-sure of lamping the lid’s owner on the ferry, this being its last trip back, that I hung onto it without arguing and went looking for him in the saloon, or whatever they call the between-decks part of a ferry. Meanwhile the landing platform had been rolled back and we’d started to nose up the bay.

“He’s got to be on here,” I said to myself. “He’s not spending the night back there on the island. And nothing that floats came to take him off between the time we all got off the first time and just now when this thing called back for us.” I knew that for a fact, because the ferry only made the run once every hour, on the half-hour, and it was the only one in service. So I went all over the schooner from bow to stern, upstairs, downstairs, inside and out. In the saloon a couple of kids were sitting one on each side of their father, swinging their legs over the edge of the long bench that ran all around it. And a guy who didn’t give a hoot about the skyline outside was reading Hellinger in the Mirror. Nobody else.

On the port deck the other half-dozen were sitting in chairs, just like they would on a transatlantic greyhound only without rugs, and one or two were leaning over the rail trying to kid themselves they were on an ocean trip. He wasn’t there either. Then when I went around to the starboard deck (only maybe it was the port and the other was starboard, don’t expect too much from a guy that was never further away than Coney Island), there was his wife sitting there as big as life, all by herself and the only person on that side of the scow which faced good old Joisey. I walked by her once and took a squint at her without stopping. She never even saw me. She was staring peacefully, even dreamily, out at the bay.

Now, I had no absolute proof that she was his wife, or had made the excursion with him at all. He had mentioned his wife to me, so his wife was along with him, no doubt about that. But each time I had overtaken him on one of the benches inside the statue she had gone up just ahead of him and I had missed seeing her. Then when I got up to the top this particular woman had been up there ahead of me scrawling her initials. That much I was sure of. She had been at the next observation window to me with that same “come-and-take-me” far-away look that she had now. But it was only by putting two and two together that I had her labeled as his wife; I had no definite evidence of it. So I stopped up at the other end of the narrow little deck and turned and started back toward her.