Bay Head is a summer workplace and formative social landscape in Dick Savage’s adolescence. At the Bayview hotel he moves from bellboy to room clerk, makes money selling homemade sweets, and encounters the Thurlows through the local Episcopal chapel. The town’s beach becomes the secluded setting for his affair with Hilda, turning a seemingly modest seasonal job into a passage between religious discipline, social ambition, and sexual experience.

Seasonal Work and Independence

One summer, Dick is sent to Bay Head to work as a bellboy at the Bayview, a small hotel run by a woman who belonged to Dr. Atwood’s parish. Before his departure, Major and Mrs. Glen give him five dollars for pocket money and a book for the train journey. Dr. Atwood tells him that Kent has accepted him as a scholarship pupil, and urges him to work hard and preserve both body and mind. The counsel gives the journey an orderly moral frame, but the life Dick finds at the hotel is cramped, tiring, and far from the future his education seems to promise.

The Bayview’s guests and staff are mostly elderly; Dick’s nearest companion in age is Skinny Murray, a tall, quiet bellhop a couple of years older. They sleep on cots in a small room beneath the roof, where daytime heat makes the beds almost untouchable at night. The waitresses’ adjoining room, separated by a thin partition, brings sounds and smells that Dick finds unsettling. On the hottest nights, he and Skinny remove the window screen and crawl along the gutter to a flat section of roof over an upper porch. When girls see them and accuse them of peeping, the boys spend the night fearing they will be fired and planning to seek work on fishing boats at Barnegat. The next day brings no complaint, but Dick remains dissatisfied with running up and down stairs at the sound of bells.

Trade, Taste, and Social Aspiration

A small piece of fudge gives Dick and Skinny a way to make money beyond their hotel wages. After Dick sells a package sent by his mother to one of the waitresses, his mother begins mailing fudge and panocha each week; the boys package and sell the sweets to hotel guests. Skinny buys the boxes and does most of the labor, while Dick persuades him that he should receive no more than ten percent of the profits because Dick and his mother supplied the initial capital. The arrangement reveals Dick’s aptitude for bargaining as well as his willingness to turn family resources into a modest business.

The next summer the enterprise grows, though Skinny does still more of the work. Dick has spent the winter at private school among wealthy boys and carries the marks of that experience back to Bay Head. He tells Skinny about school, recites ballads he has written and published in the school paper, and recounts his service at the altar and place on the junior baseball team. His accounts make Bay Head a place where he can display a more cultivated version of himself, even as his room-clerk job and limited means sharpen his awareness of the distance between his circumstances and the fashionable lives he envies. Mrs. Higgins promotes him on account of his gentlemanly manners, but improved pay does not dissolve his frustration with his clothes, family circumstances, or lack of money.

The Chapel and the Thurlows

Dick brings Skinny to St. Mary’s-by-the-Sea, the small Episcopal chapel in Bay Head, and insists that he attend each Sunday. After services, Dick stays to discuss doctrine and ceremony with the young minister Edwin Thurlow. The conversations lead to an invitation to dinner at the Thurlows’ bungalow, an unpainted, peaked-roof house on a sandlot near the station. The bungalow and chapel establish a second social world alongside the hotel: intimate, intellectually charged, and organized around the Thurlows’ marriage and religious life.

Hilda Thurlow is a dark-haired reader who smokes, dislikes Bay Head, and enjoys shocking the older parishioners. She reads advanced books and mocks Edwin’s attempts to restore primitive Christianity to the boardwalk. Edwin responds mildly, both correcting her and reassuring Dick that her sharpness is less serious than it sounds. Dick is captivated by Hilda’s wit and unconventional manner, and begins visiting the bungalow whenever he can get away from work. Skinny occasionally comes along but soon leaves, saying he has to sell fudge. The contrast places Dick between two kinds of companionship: Skinny’s practical business and Hilda and Edwin’s talk of books, faith, and dissatisfaction.

The Beach and a Change in Dick’s Life

When Dick is sixteen, Sunday evenings off from the hotel become a recurring occasion for supper and walks with Hilda while Edwin is away. Dick anticipates these meetings throughout the week, sometimes resolving not to go because their closeness leaves him feeling guilty afterward. One moonless night, they walk beyond the picnickers’ fires and sit on the sand discussing the love poetry Hilda has been reading aloud. Hilda makes the encounter physical; Dick initially tries to stop her, then pulls her down over him. She tells him that she wants him but fears becoming pregnant, and says that this fear is why Edwin will not sleep with her. The beach, previously a place for walks and summer leisure, becomes the scene where Dick’s attraction and religious anxieties collide.

Dick returns to the Bayview trembling and unable to meet Edwin’s train as he usually does. In his stuffy room under the roof, he thinks of suicide, fears damnation, and tries to recall the Lord’s Prayer, only to find that he cannot. He interprets this failure as a possible sign of sin. Yet the relationship continues on Sunday evenings when Edwin is conducting services in Elberon. During the Christmas vacation, Dick stays with the Thurlows in East Orange and, after trying through the week to be alone with Hilda, succeeds when Edwin goes out on parochial calls. This time Dick takes the initiative; afterward, the pair laugh together, and Dick tells stories at supper without revealing what has happened. Bay Head’s summer circuit has thus led from instruction and adolescent self-consciousness to an affair conducted within the shadow of Edwin’s absence, leaving the town associated with both Dick’s moral fear and his growing experience of the adult world.