526
PARTISAN REVI
There are few places on the eastern seaboard where one could b
a man as easily and leave one's chances so to nature, for the w'
could leave the corpse under twenty feet of
fiII,
or as easily co
discover the cadaver before the cells were cold.
Beyond this desert, at the tip of the Cape, in the palm of t
almost closed hand, is one of the last great fishing villages of t
world, the place called Provincetown, in winter 3,000 population
suppose, its situation one of the most easterly promontories of
Atlantic coast. Three miles long and two streets wide, the to
curls around the bay on the skin of the palm, a gaudy run with Me .
terranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing pie
and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aph
disiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a night
club where call girls congregate.
It was in Provincetown the Puritans landed and held to a
starving bivouac for three months before they broke the encampment
and moved on to Plymouth Rock. They were without food and
be–
sides, there was the spiral to wear them down: the Cape from the
wrist to the fingers curls like a snail shell, the harbor an eye of water
in the center, and one's sense of direction is forever confused. With–
out looking at the sun one could not point across the bay in the
proper direction to Boston, Portugal, or the shores of Barbary. It
is a place which defies one's nose for longitude and latitude, a car–
tographer's despair and a Puritan's as wel1. (The character of narrow
intense faith is rectilinear in conception, which is why the clitorine
cove in the facade of most New England churches is triangular or
ice pick steeple in its form rather than obeying the feminine Catholic
arch of almost equally narrow Gothic faiths.)
The house Marion purchased was on a sand dune behind the
last hi11 overlooking the town, and it was isolated, especially in fall
and winter, reached by a sandy road which dipped down one dune
and up another to give a view of rolling furze, rain water ponds, and
the ocean and beach of the back shore. In bad weather the wind was
a phenomenon, a New England wind of the lost narrow faiths which
slashed through open doors, tempted shutters loose from their catch
and banged them through the night, vibrated every small pane in
every Cape Cod window and came soughing out of the sky with the
cries of storm water in its vaults-on such nights the hundred years
