A Hundred Summers (3 page)

2.

SEAVIEW, RHODE ISLAND

May 1938

K
iki was determined to learn to sail that summer, even though she was not quite six. “You learned when you were my age,” she pointed out, with the blunt logic of childhood.

“I had Daddy to teach me,” I said. “You only have me. And I haven’t sailed in years.”

“I’ll bet it’s like riding a bicycle. That’s what you told me, remember? You never forget how to ride a bicycle.”

“It’s nothing like riding a bicycle, and ladies don’t bet.”

She opened her mouth to tell me she was
not
a lady, but Aunt Julie, with her usual impeccable timing, plopped herself down on the blanket next to us and sighed at the crashing surf. “Summer at last! And after such a miserable spring. Lily, darling, you don’t have a cigarette, do you? I’m dying for a cigarette. Your mother’s as strict as goddamned Hitler.”

“You’ve never let it stop you before.” I rummaged in my basket and tossed a packet of Chesterfields and a silver lighter in her lap.

“I’m growing soft in my old age. Thanks, darling. You’re the best.”

“I thought summer started in June,” said Kiki.

“Summer starts when I say it starts, darling. Oh, that’s lovely.” She inhaled to the limit of her lungs, closed her eyes, and let the smoke slide from her lips in a thin and endless ribbon. The sun shone warm overhead, the first real stretch of heat since September, and Aunt Julie was wearing her red swimsuit with its daringly high-cut leg. She looked fabulous, all tanned from her recent trip to Bermuda (“with that new fellow of hers,” Mother said, in the disapproving growl of a sister nearly ten years older) and long-limbed as ever. She leaned back on her elbows and pointed her breasts at the cloudless sky.

“Mrs. Hubert says cigarettes are coffin nails,” said Kiki, drawing in the sand with her toe.

“Mrs. Hubert is an old biddy.” Aunt Julie took another drag. “My doctor recommends them. You can’t get healthier than that.”

Kiki stood up. “I want to play in the surf. I haven’t played in the surf in months.
Years,
possibly.”

“It’s too cold, sweetie,” I said. “The water hasn’t had a chance to warm up yet. You’ll freeze.”

“I want to go anyway.” She put her hands on her hips. She wore her new beach outfit, all ruffles and red polka dots, and with her dark hair and golden-olive skin and fierce expression she looked like a miniature polka-dotted Polynesian.

“Oh, let her play,” said Aunt Julie. “The young are sturdy.”

“Why don’t you build a sand castle instead, sweetie? You can go down to the ocean to collect water.” I picked up her bucket and held it out to her.

She looked at me, and then the bucket, considering.

“You build the
best
castles,” I said, shaking the bucket invitingly. “Show me what you’ve got.”

She took the bucket with a worldly sigh and started down the beach.

“You’re good with her,” said Aunt Julie, smoking luxuriously. “Better than me.”

“God did not intend you to raise children,” I said. “You have other uses.”

She laughed. “Ha! You’re right. I can gossip like nobody’s business. Say, speaking of which, did you hear Budgie’s opening up her parents’ old place this summer?”

A wave rose up from the ocean, stronger than the others. I watched it build and build, balancing atop itself, until it fell at last in a foaming white arc, from right to left. The crash hit my ears an instant later. I reached for Aunt Julie’s cigarette and stole a long and furtive drag, then figured
What the hell
and reached for the pack myself.

“They’re arriving next week, your mother says. He’ll come down on weekends, of course, but she’ll be here all summer.” Aunt Julie tilted her face upward and gave her hair a shake. It shone golden in the sun, without a single gray hair that I could detect. Mother insisted she dyed it, but no hair dye known to man could replicate that sun-kissed texture. It was as if God himself were abetting Aunt Julie in her chosen style of life.

Down at the shoreline, Kiki waited for the wave to wash up on the sand and dipped her bucket. The water swirled around her legs, making her jump and dance. She looked back at me, accusingly, and I shrugged my told-you-so shoulders.

“Nothing to say?”

“I’m looking forward to seeing her again. It’s been years.”

“Well, she’s got the money now. She might as well spruce up the old place. You should have seen the wedding, Lily.” She whistled. Aunt Julie had gone to the wedding, of course. No party of any kind among a certain segment of society would be considered a success without an appearance by Julie van der Wahl, née Schuyler—known to the New York dailies simply as “Julie”—and her current plus-one.

“I read all about it in the papers, thanks.” I blew out a wide cloud of smoke.

Aunt Julie nudged me with her toe. “Bygones, darling. Everything works out for the best. Haven’t I been trying to teach you that for the past six years? There’s nothing in the world you can count on except yourself and your family, and sometimes not even them. God, isn’t it a glorious day? I could live forever like this. Just give me sunshine and a sandy beach, and I’m as happy as a clam.” She stubbed out her cigarette in the sand and lay back on the blanket. “You don’t have a whiskey or something in that basket of yours, do you?”

“No.”

“Thought not.”

Kiki staggered back toward us with her pail full of water, sloshing over the sides. Thank God for Kiki. Budgie might have had everything in the world, but at least she didn’t have Kiki, all dark hair and spindly limbs and squinting eyes as she judged the distance back to the blanket.

Aunt Julie rose back up on her elbows. “Now, what are you thinking about? I can hear the racket in your brain all the way over here.”

“Just watching Kiki.”

“Watching Kiki. That’s your trouble.” She lay back down and crossed her arm over her face. “You’re letting that child do all the living for you. Look at you. It’s disgraceful, the way you’ve let yourself go. Look at that hair of yours. I’d shave mine off before I let it look like that.”

“Tactful as ever, I see.” I stubbed out my half-finished cigarette and opened up my arms to receive Kiki, who set her pail down in the sand and flung herself at me. Her body was sun-warmed, smelling of the sea, smooth and wriggling. I buried my face in her dark hair and inhaled her childish scent. Why didn’t adults smell so sweet?

“You have to help me.” Kiki detached herself from me, grabbed her bucket, and spilled the water thoroughly over the sand. Last summer, we built an archipelago of castles all over this beach, an ambitious program of construction that ended in triumph at the annual Seaview Labor Day Sand Castle Extravaganza.

I’ll tell you, the things we got up to in Seaview.

I let Kiki pull me up from the blanket and knelt with her on the sand. She handed me a shovel and told me to start digging, Lily,
digging,
because this was going to be a
real
moat.

“We can’t have a real moat this far from the water,” I said.

Kiki said, “Let the child have her fun.”

“And what is that
thing
you’re wearing, that
abomination
? Don’t you have a bathing suit?” asked Aunt Julie.

“This
is
my bathing suit.”

“Lord preserve us. You’re going to let Budgie Byrne see you in that?”

I dug my shovel ferociously into the moat. “She’s not a Byrne anymore, is she?”

“Ah. So you
are
holding it against her.”

I stopped digging and rested my hands on my knees, which were covered by the thick cotton of my black bathing suit. “Why shouldn’t Budgie get married? Why shouldn’t anybody get married, if she wants to?”

“Oh, I see. We’re back to bygones again. Where are those cigarettes? I could use another cigarette.”

“The child can hear you,” Kiki reminded us. She turned her pail over and withdrew it to reveal a perfect castle turret.

“That’s lovely, darling.” I shoveled sand upward from the moat excavation to form a wall next to the tower. For an instant I paused, wondering if I was angry enough to shape it into battlements.

Aunt Julie rummaged through the basket, looking for the Chesterfields. “Did I tell you to bury yourself with your corpse of a mother for the past six years? No, I did not. Live a little, I told you. Make something of yourself.”

“Kiki needed me.”

“Your mother could have looked after her just fine.”

Kiki and I both stared at Aunt Julie. She had found the cigarettes and held one now between her crimson lips as she fumbled for the lighter. “What?” she asked, looking first at me and then at Kiki. “All right, all right,” she conceded, holding the flame up to the cigarette. “But you could have hired a nanny.”

“The child does not wish to be raised by a nanny,” said Kiki.

“Mother has enough to do, with all her charity projects,” I said.

“Charity projects,” Aunt Julie said, as if it were an obscenity. “If you ask me, which you never do, it’s a bad sign when a woman spends more time looking after orphans than her own family.”

“She looks after Daddy,” I said.

“You don’t see her looking after him
now
, do you?”

“It’s summer. We always come to Seaview in the summer. It’s how Daddy would want it.”

Aunt Julie snorted. “Has anybody asked him?”

I thought of my father in his pristine room, staring at the wall of books that used to give him such pleasure. “That’s not
nice
, Aunt Julie.”

“Life’s too short for nice, Lily. The thing is, you’re wasting yourself. Everyone has a little bump in the road when they’re young. God knows I had a few. You pick yourself up. Move on.” She offered me the cigarette, and I shook my head. “Let me cut your hair tonight. Trim it a bit. Put some lipstick on you.”

“Oh, do it, Lily!” Kiki turned to me. “You’d look beautiful! Can I help, Aunt Julie?”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “Everyone knows me here. If you put lipstick on me, they won’t let me into the club. Anyway, dress myself up for whom? Mrs. Hubert? The Langley sisters?”

“Someone’s bound to have an unmarried fellow down for the weekend.”

“Then
you’ll
have him running for your gin and tonic before I can stick you with my hatpin.”

Aunt Julie waved her hand in dismissal, trailing a coil of smoke. “Scout’s honor.”

“Oh, you’re a Girl Scout now, are you? That’s rich.”

“Lily, darling. Let me do it. I need a project. I’m so desperately bored out here, you can’t imagine.”

“Then why do you come?”

She wrapped her arms around her knees, staring out at the ocean, cigarette dangling ash into the sand. The wind ruffled her hair, but only at the tips. “Oh, it keeps the beaus on their toes, you know. Disappearing for a few weeks every year. Even I wouldn’t
dare
bring a boyfriend to Seaview. Mrs. Hubert still hasn’t forgiven me for my divorce, the old dear.”

“
None
of us have forgiven you for your divorce. Peter was such a nice fellow.”

“Too nice. He deserved better.” She jumped to her feet and tossed the cigarette in the sand. “It’s settled, then. I’m taking you in hand tonight.”

“I don’t remember agreeing to that.”

Aunt Julie’s crimson lips split into a thousand-watt smile, the one the New York papers loved. She was nearing forty now, and it crinkled up the skin around her eyes, but nobody really noticed the crinkling with a smile as electric as Aunt Julie’s. “Darling,” she said, “I don’t remember asking your permission.”

LIFE IN SEAVIEW
revolved around the club, and the club revolved around Mrs. Hubert. If you asked any Seaview resident why this should be so, you’d be met with a blank stare. Mrs. Hubert had been around so long, no one could remember when her reign began, and considering her robust state of health (“vulgar, really, the way she never sits down at parties,” my mother said), no one would hazard a guess to its end. She was the Queen Victoria of summertime, except she never wore black and stood as tall and thin as a gray-haired maypole.

“Why, Lily, my dear,” she said, kissing my cheek. “What
have
you done with your hair tonight?”

I touched the chignon at the nape of my neck. “Aunt Julie put it back for me. She wanted to cut it, but I wouldn’t let her.”

“Good girl,” said Mrs. Hubert. “Never take fashion advice from a divorcée. Now, Kiki, my sweet.” She knelt down. “Do you promise to be a good girl tonight? I shall have you blackballed if you aren’t. We are young
ladies
at the club, aren’t we?”

Kiki put her arms around Mrs. Hubert’s neck and whispered something in her ear.

“Very well,” said Mrs. Hubert, “but only when your mother’s not looking.”

I glanced back at Mother and Aunt Julie, who had been stopped by an old acquaintance in the foyer. “Are you sitting out on the veranda this evening? It’s so lovely and warm.”