A Hundred Summers (13 page)

“He’s a paragon, I’m sure. You know about his father, don’t you?”

“I know a little. I know Mother isn’t going to be happy about his last name, but I’m sure your mind is much more open than that.” I insert a challenging note in my voice.

“His last name.” She lets out an elegant snort. “No, you’re right. Your mother isn’t going to be happy at all. You don’t know the half of it, not the quarter of it.”

My temper begins to flare. “Well, it doesn’t matter to me. I’m in love with him. He’s in love with me.”

“Oh, you’re in
love
with him, are you? How charming. I was in love once. It’s a very pleasant thing. I’d recommend it to anyone.”

“Don’t joke. We are
serious
, Aunt Julie.”

“Do you know, I was very serious about Peter, before we married. As much as I can be serious about anything, that is. Do you have a cigarette, by chance? Or are they forbidden at top-drawer women’s colleges?”

Her hands are trembling in her lap. She moves her arm to the side of the sofa and begins to tap the red-lacquered tip of her index finger against the worn upholstery.

I rise to my feet. “Why are you here, Aunt Julie? Did somebody warn you that I was having an affair with someone ineligible? You’ve come here like a Victorian grandmother to forbid me to see him again?”

“Oh, shush. Sit down. For goodness’ sake, I never knew you to have such a dramatic streak.
Love.
Really, it’s responsible for the most vulgar excesses.”

I stand for a moment longer, fingers clenching, before I drop back down to my seat.

“Now, listen. You can do as you like, of course. Believe me, I know better than anyone that there’s no better way to get some headstrong young lady to do something than to forbid her to do it. I just ask you to listen to me.”

I fold my arms. “All right.”

“Now, you know, of course, that Nick’s father’s firm is on the brink of collapse?”

“Collapse?” My arms fall apart. “What do you mean
collapse
?”

“I mean he’s going to lose everything. He’s been clinging on, ever since the crash, but he can’t hold the house of cards together any longer. He’s done for. Finished.”

“Says who?”

“Says Peter, who as you know is not given to hyperbole or false rumor.” She delivers this triumphantly, and so she should. Peter van der Wahl is the soul of discretion, the model of ancien régime Knickerbocker manhood. I would expect nothing less than that he remain on friendly and confidential terms with his ex-wife, passing on cautionary hints about her niece’s admirers.

The shock of this information passes through my body in sharp pulses. “I don’t care about Mr. Greenwald’s money. I’ve never even thought about it. Anyway, Nick isn’t planning on joining his father’s business. He’s going to be independent, an architect.”

“An architect?” Aunt Julie hoots. “Oh, the young. That’s charming. An architect. And you’re going to live on this, the two of you?”

“I don’t know. We haven’t discussed it. But I don’t care about money. I’d rather live in a hovel than marry a man for his money.”

“Well, that’s a fine sentiment, my dear. A noble ambition. I applaud you.” She claps her hands. “Love is enough for you, then? Enough to make up for material comfort, for the good opinion of your family and friends, for your poor father’s good health . . .”

“Do not,” I say tightly, “do
not
throw Daddy’s condition at me. He’ll love Nick, I’m sure. He doesn’t share your close-mindedness.”

“You know he can’t stand a shock like that.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

The front door opens and closes with a slam. A group of girls swarms the room, laughing and chattering like birds, throwing off their hoods. They take turns signing in, while Aunt Julie and I sit rigidly on the sofa, staring each other down. Nick’s tender words jumble together in my brain. I can still feel the outline of his hand on my breast, each individual finger mapped out against my heart.

The girls are too wound up for bed. They settle on the sofa and chairs around us. One of them recognizes me. “Oh, hello, Lily! I thought you were still out with Nick.”

“No, he’s headed back to Hanover.”

“Poor thing, on these frozen roads. He must be crazy about you.”

I introduce her to my aunt, trade a few more pleasantries.

“Look,” says Aunt Julie, rising, “I must be on my way. I only stopped off for a bit.”

“Must you go?” My voice is exactly as false and bright as I intended.

“Look, don’t weep, will you? You know how I despise sentiment.” She kisses my cheeks. “Think about what I said. You’re in a cloud, darling, the la-di-da of love, but believe me, the cloud lifts after a while, and then what? You’ve still got a life to live.”

“But it’s different with us.”

She waves her hand. “It’s always different, isn’t it, until it turns out to be just the same. Oh, well. I tried, didn’t I? I’ll be fascinated to see how all this turns out. I’ll have a front-row seat, too. Lucky me. No, don’t walk me out. I know where I’m going.”

She’s gone in a waft of perfume and powder, and I make my way upstairs to my single room with its narrow, neatly made bed. I’m half expecting Budgie to be lying there, eager for debriefing, as she is most Sundays, but the space is empty.

Budgie already knows all she needs to know.

8.

SEAVIEW, RHODE ISLAND

July 4, 1938

F
or more than a hundred years, the Independence Day celebration had propped up the sagging middle of the Seaview summer like a giant red-white-and-blue tent pole.

Not that it had been much of a summer so far. After those fine few days at the end of May, June slid into a waterlogged stupor, sticky and rainy, forcing us indoors for endless rounds of bridge and mah-jongg. Mrs. Hubert began organizing gin-fueled charades in the Seaview clubhouse as a desperate measure, to mixed success. By the time July rolled around, that summer of 1938, we were ready for excitement.

Every year, the ladies of the Seaview Association spent weeks in careful preparation for the Fourth. In the morning, we held a small but enthusiastic parade down Neck Lane to the old battery, where the Dane family—according to ancient Seaview tradition—lit off a miniature ceremonial cannon wheeled over from our garden shed. When Daddy was away at the war, I had taken over this duty, learning to clean and prepare the gun, to prime and load it, to fire it off. After his return, I had quietly kept on, and everybody had quietly understood.

The firing of the gun signaled the start of the Fourth of July picnic on the beach. In earlier years, the picnic had been a chaotic affair of rampaging children and firecracker ambushes, interspersed with fried chicken and potato salad. Now, with the children grown up and failing to replace themselves on the Seaview sands, the picnic had taken on an incurable somnolence, all gray hair and long skirts, not a firecracker in sight.

“Isn’t it peaceful?” Mrs. Hubert leaned back on her elbows, exposing a perilous length of bone-thin calf to the hazy sun.

“Peaceful? It’s a goddamned crypt,” said Aunt Julie. “And worse every year. I seem to remember a great many more firecrackers, when everyone was younger. Pass me another deviled egg, will you, Lily? At least those have a little paprika.”

I checked the picnic hamper. “They’re finished, Aunt Julie.”

“Hell. Cigarettes, then.”

I passed her the cigarettes and lighter and leaned back against the blanket. The air followed me, heavy and hot. “Thunderstorms again this afternoon, I’ll bet,” I said.

“Oh, the thrill of it.” Aunt Julie lit her cigarette with a few quick flicks of the lighter. A magazine lay across her lap, opened to a page of glossy fashion models. “I’m almost tempted to take up old Dalrymple’s offer of Monte Carlo. Just as hot, probably, but at least one’s entertained in Monte. I . . .” A delicate pause, fragrant with smoke. “Well, well. On the other hand.”

I closed my eyes. “What is it?”

“Don’t look now, darling, but I think the afternoon’s entertainment has arrived at last.”

Before I could open my mouth, Kiki landed atop me in an explosion of sand. “Lily! Lily! Mr. Greenwald’s here! May I go over and say hello? Please?”

My face was flecked with sand. I brushed it off my cheeks, my lips, my hair.

“Well, Lily? What do you think?” said Aunt Julie. “May the child say hello to Mr. Greenwald?”

I looked over at Mrs. Hubert for reinforcement, but she had fallen asleep beneath her straw hat and was beginning to snore.

“I don’t think we should bother them, sweetheart, if they’ve just arrived.”

“But he’s waving, Lily.”

“Yes, Lily.” Aunt Julie drew on her cigarette. “He’s waving.”

Kiki propped herself up on my chest and looked into my eyes. “
Please,
Lily. He’s so nice. And he makes the best sand castles.”

What could I say? Nick Greenwald
was
nice to Kiki, when he was around at all. Most of the husbands who still worked in New York would take the train up on Wednesday or Thursday and return to the city late on Sunday; Nick rarely appeared in public before Saturday morning, and stayed only long enough to escort Budgie to dinner on Saturday night. You could catch sight of him at the house during the weekend, dressed in old clothes and striding about with blueprints and hammers, or else on the beach, between thunderstorms, carrying Budgie’s umbrella and blanket and accepting her caresses with easy intimacy.

Though I saw Budgie often during the week, I’d managed to avoid them both on weekends. The rest of Seaview assisted me in this project, by unspoken collusion, until I began to suspect the existence of a secret board-level Committee to Isolate the Jews, chaired by Mrs. Hubert herself. If the Greenwalds made an appearance anywhere, I’d be instantly invited to sit with one family or another, or asked for walks along the beach, or brought into the armed fortress of the club for drinks and bridge, where the Greenwalds never followed. At dinner on Saturday, if I ran into Nick and Budgie, I had time to exchange no more than a few words before someone would swoop down with an urgent consultation on the recent addition of crêpes suzette to the club menu (Mrs. Hubert considered all flaming desserts vulgar), or else the name of that fellow who wrote
The Mill on the Floss
.

But Kiki slipped beneath all these barriers. She had liked Nick Greenwald from the beginning, and when I would return from an examination of horseshoe crabs with Miss Florence Langley, or bridge with the Palmers, I’d inevitably find Kiki building a sand castle with Nick’s assistance, or out on the bay while he taught her to sail, or playing cat’s cradle with her tiny hands matched against his enormous ones, or trading sketches on cocktail napkins, while the other club members watched in horror and Budgie looked on in amused tolerance from behind a novel or a magazine or a glass of something stronger.

She would glance up at my arrival. “Here she is, Lily! Look at the two of them. It’s uncanny, don’t you think?”

Nick would stand and give Kiki a nudge, and tell her to go along with her sister, now; and Kiki, who obeyed only me, and that only on occasion, would obey him the way an acolyte obeys his bishop.

So when I looked into Kiki’s pleading eyes that Independence Day afternoon, I knew there was no way I could stop her, really.

“Go ahead, darling,” I said. “But mind your manners, and don’t interrupt if they’d rather be alone.”

Kiki kissed both my cheeks with her damp lips. “Thank you, Lily!”

She scampered off, and I stood up and dusted off my dress and face and put my hat back on, without sparing a glance at the cozy domesticity of the Greenwald picnic. I hardly needed to, anyway. A vacuum passed over the beach, as the Seaview Association caught sight of the newcomers and gasped in unanimous disapproval. If I could count on nothing else, I could count on a close watch being kept on the Greenwalds.

The shadow of the umbrella was beginning to shift with the sun; I adjusted it to cover Mrs. Hubert and sat back down, fully exposed. To the southwest, above the mainland, a bank of cumulonimbus built toward the heavens. “Should we clean up, do you think?” I asked.

“Clean up?” Aunt Julie turned the page of her magazine, cigarette dangling elegantly from her fingers. “Don’t you see the party’s just begun?”

I cast my eyes about the lugubrious beach. “How do you mean?”

“I
mean
, you oblivious child, that Budgie of yours has another trick up her darling little sleeve today, and he’s heading straight over.” She stubbed out her cigarette in the sand and fluffed her hair. “How do I look?”

A shadow fell across my legs.

“Why, Lily Dane! As I live and breathe!”

I shaded my eyes with my arm and looked up into the smiling sun-bathed face of Graham Pendleton.

“Graham!” I leaped to my feet.

He grasped my outstretched hand with both of his. “Budgie told me you’d be here today, but I hardly dared to hope. It’s been, my God, how many years? Five? Six?”

“Nearly seven.” I couldn’t stop smiling at him. He was almost laughing, his blue eyes grinning, his mouth wide. He looked the same as ever, except a little more weathered, a little more sculpted; his handsomeness hadn’t dimmed a fraction. His hair, streaked with sunshine despite the poor weather, flopped lazily into his forehead beneath his worn straw boater. I felt an absurd rush of gladness to see him, an inexplicable lunge of my soul toward the old and familiar.

“How have you been?” he asked.

“Awfully busy. And you? Something about baseball, isn’t it?”

“That’s it.” Graham cast a look of friendly inquiry at Aunt Julie. “You don’t mind if I join you a moment?”

“Please do,” said Aunt Julie, holding out a scarlet-tipped hand without bothering to rise. “I’m Julie van der Wahl, Lily’s old and dilapidated aunt.”

Graham bent over her hand and kissed it. “I don’t believe a word you say.”

“It’s true,” I said. “She’s very old, and divorced, and she rackets around from scandal to scandal, collecting and discarding unsuitable lovers. Avoid her at all costs, is my advice.”