A Hundred Summers (37 page)

“Mr. Greenwald?”

“I belong to Lily, Mrs. van der Wahl. If she wants me, I stay.” Nick puts his arm around my back.

Aunt Julie sighs. We are standing beneath a grand chandelier, festooned with crystal, and the reflected light moves across her face in patches of white. In the instant before she speaks, I see her with new eyes, different eyes, and I think to myself that she’s not beautiful, not really, only very good at looking beautiful.

“Well, well,” she says, sounding almost bored. “Nothing so stubborn as young love. In that case, I won’t hold back. Your father has suffered a stroke, Lily, and you are required at home immediately.”

20.

MANHATTAN

Wednesday, September 21, 1938

T
he rains of September had passed by at last, and the morning air lay still and sunny outside Nick’s bedroom window. When I turned on the radio in the living room at eight o’clock, neatly clothed, coffee and cigarette in hand, toast browning in Nick’s shiny pop-up electric Toastmaster, the announcer informed me that the weather today would continue sunny and pleasant, breezy in the afternoon, a peaceful end to a scorching summer, and that the expected hurricane in Florida had instead spun harmlessly out to sea. A good omen, I thought.

I ate my toast and finished my coffee and cigarette. I checked my pocketbook. I had a few dollars, a crumpled handkerchief, a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, some lipstick, a compact. I fixed up my face and went to Nick’s bureau to find a fresh handkerchief.

I wasn’t snooping, not really. What a man kept in his bureau was his own business. I simply noted both the presence of fresh white underwear in the right-hand drawer and the absence of any feminine articles, and moved to the left-hand drawer, where I found Nick’s handkerchiefs, and beneath them, a small dark blue box.

I wouldn’t have taken any notice, except that I had seen that box before.

I picked it up and opened it, and inside I found the diamond ring Nick had placed on my finger in the first few minutes of 1932.

I lifted it out. The familiar facets caught the sunlight through the window, glinting at me like an old friend.

There was no note nearby, no sentimental label of any kind. Certainly not the note with which I had sent the ring back to him, some time later. Was it sitting underneath his handkerchiefs because he treasured it, or because it was a valuable piece of jewelry he didn’t want to lose?

The telephone jangled aggressively into the silence, making me jump. The ring fell from my fingers onto the floor. For a moment I stood there as the telephone rang again and again, looking desperately over the rug, torn between the two imperatives.

Then I remembered the caller might be Nick.

I rushed from the bedroom and into the living room, where the telephone sat on Nick’s desk. I snatched the receiver, and in the split second before I spoke, I remembered that it might
not
be Nick. That it might, in fact, be his wife.

What would I say if it was Budgie?

The voice came through on the other end, hissing and popping: “Hello? Lily? Are you there?”

“Nick.” I sank down on the chair. “I was afraid you were Budgie.”

“No, darling, it’s me. I’m at a filling station in Westport. I just wanted to see how you were.”

“I’m fine. I . . . I miss you.” I said it tentatively. So strange, so disorienting, to be once more exchanging endearments with Nick.

“I miss you, too. You’re feeling all right? Did you get some more sleep?”

“Yes. I slept until seven. You must be exhausted.”

“I couldn’t sleep anyway. I’ve had coffee. Talk to me, Lily. Tell me a story. I need to hear your voice.” He sounded weary, apprehensive.

“I don’t know what to say. I miss you terribly. I’m worried about you, about Kiki. I wish you’d tell me what we’re up against.”

“Sweetheart, don’t worry. Don’t worry about a thing. I’ll find a way. I’ve been thinking about it all the way up.”

“Can’t you offer her money?”

“It isn’t money she wants, Lily. Not really.”

“Then what does she want?”

His sigh crackled down the line. “Haven’t you guessed yet? She wants
you
, Lily. She worships you, she envies you. She always has. I tried offering her money, back in Bermuda. I offered her an obscene amount. She wouldn’t take it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No, you wouldn’t. I don’t think she understands it herself. Listen, I’m almost out of change. I’ll telephone again when I get in.”

“Wait, Nick. I . . .” I twisted the cord around my finger. “I was looking for a handkerchief, in your drawer.”

He was silent, breathing softly into the telephone. I unwound the cord, wound it again, waited for him to reply.

“And what did you find, Lilybird?” he said at last.

“I found the ring. You
kept
it, Nick.”

“I kept it. I couldn’t bear to get rid of it. Listen, Lily. Put the ring back in the drawer. Keep it safe for me. When I return, when Budgie’s safely out of the picture, we’ll take it out again. I’ll put it back on your finger myself.” His words frizzed with static. I wasn’t sure I’d even heard them all.

“Nick,” I whispered.

“If you want me to, Lily. If you’ll allow me another chance to make you happy.”

“I will.”

“Good. Now, I want you to relax. I want you not to worry at all. I’ll fix this, one way or another.” His voice was dark with resolve. I could see his face, his piratical eyes, staring at the walls of the telephone booth as if he could burn through them. I thought of Budgie lying on the beach at Seaview, her ripening body open to the sun, cigarette dangling from her fingertips, her Thermos of gin deadening her nerves, unaware of his approach. “Lily, are you there?” Nick said. “Say something. Let me hear your voice.”

“Here I am. I’m sorry. Yes. Be careful with her, Nick. I don’t want her to be unhappy. She’s already so miserable.”

“Lily, I don’t give a damn anymore whether Budgie Byrne is happy or unhappy. The only happiness I’m concerned with is yours. Now go outside, enjoy the nice weather, and let me take care of this.”

“Nick, I mean it. Don’t hurt her.”

“I’ll do my best. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye, Nick. Drive safely.”

“I will. I love you, Lilybird.”

Before I could say it back, he hung up the receiver.

I sat in the chair, staring at the telephone, while the radio chirped on behind me: an advertisement for Ivory soap flakes, 99 and 44/100 percent pure. I rose and switched it off.

In the bedroom, I found the ring, which had rolled under the bureau. I put it back in the box, and put the box back in the drawer underneath the handkerchiefs. I took one from the top of the stack, pressed to stiffness by some invisible laundress.

The window was still cracked open. I closed and latched it, picked up my hat and pocketbook from the hall, and left Nick’s apartment.

EVERY WEEKDAY MORNING,
Peter van der Wahl arrived punctually at eight-thirty to his Broad Street offices. His secretary recognized me at once and smiled widely. “Why, Miss Dane!” she said. “You’re up early. Are you back from Seaview now?”

“Not quite, Maggie, I’m afraid,” I said. “Just some business to attend to before we pack up. Is he in?”

“Yes, he is. Going over some briefs. Shall I tell him you’re here?”

“Yes, please.”

I sat down in an armchair while Maggie went into Peter’s office. The law firm of Scarborough and van der Wahl occupied a single floor of the Broad Street building, and no one had thought of renovating it in twenty years. It stood as a monument to venerable shabbiness. The armchairs had worn down in comfortable patterns, the rug was clean and threadbare, the pictures on the wall were of comfortable Hudson River landscapes, framed in gilt. Maggie’s reception desk was a claw-footed wonder, polished in beeswax once a year and chipped in all the right places. In the left front drawer, she kept a bag of sweets that she used to hand out to me, on the sly, when I was little.

“Lily!”

I looked up, and my onetime uncle-in-law stood in the doorway with both hands extended, his hair newly clipped and his reading glasses stuck on top of his head.

“Uncle Peter!” I jumped up and grasped both his hands. “You’re looking well. How was your summer?”

“Pretty well, pretty well. A hot one, wasn’t it? I was out on Long Island most of the time. And you? Seaview, of course? How are your mother and Julie?”

“Covered in suntans and brimming with gin and tonic. Do you have a moment for me?”

“Always. Maggie. Would you mind holding my calls for a bit? Coffee?” He ushered me through the doorway.

“No, thank you. I’ve had some already.”

Uncle Peter’s office had a pleasing view of New York Harbor. When I was younger, and my parents were meeting with him to go over estate papers and things, I would cram myself into the far-right corner, next to the window, where I could just glimpse the raised green arm of the Statue of Liberty around the edge of a neighboring building.

Now, of course, I was twenty-eight years old, and I settled myself decorously in the armchair before his desk, crossed my legs, and accepted his offer of a cigarette.

It was typical of Peter van der Wahl that he kept cigarettes and an ashtray in his office, though he didn’t smoke himself. He leaned back in his chair, smiling pleasantly, while I fiddled with the lighter. “You’re out and about early, in this part of town,” he said.

“As I said, I’m here on errands. I have to go back and pack everybody up in a day or two.”

He dribbled his fingers on the edge of the desk. It was stacked on either side with legal briefs and law books, and one pen was missing from the set at the front. But the stacks were neat, and the pen lay next to the papers on the desk blotter, all squared with care. “And how high do I rank on your list of errands?” he asked, still smiling.

“You’re at the very top, Uncle Peter, as always,” I said, returning his smile, marveling as ever that my Aunt Julie had once been married to this man. He wasn’t unattractive, not at all. But his face was pleasant rather than handsome, laid in quiet plateaus, eyes a mild gray and hair sifting gently from pepper to salt. He reached perhaps five-foot-eight when he wore his thick-soled winter shoes, and his shoulders suggested tennis rather than football. Every line of him spoke kindness and humor, mild-mannered Episcopalian good breeding, and yet Aunt Julie, in one of her more gin-soaked moments a few summers ago, had confided that he was a tiger between the sheets, that the first year of their marriage had been the most exhausting of her life, that she’d spent half of it in bed and the other half in the hair salon, repairing her coiffure. Another month of it would have killed her, she said.

It had been two years before I could look Uncle Peter in the eye again.

“And what can I do for you today, Lily?” he asked now.

I raised my cigarette to cover my hesitation. I had woken up this morning with Nick’s words burning in my brain, with conjectures and questions I hadn’t thought to ask him last night fitting together in haphazard pieces. I knew Nick had left out nearly as much as he’d told me, and I knew there was only one person who knew the affairs of my family—and Manhattan generally—so well as Peter van der Wahl, who handled them for a living.

On the other hand, he wasn’t supposed to reveal them.

“Uncle Peter,” I said, “what do you remember about the winter of 1932?”

He removed the glasses from his head, folded them on the desk, and picked up his pen. “Why do you ask?”

“It was a busy winter, wasn’t it? There was Daddy’s stroke, and my spectacularly unsuccessful elopement with Nick Greenwald. Everybody was going out of business. Budgie Byrne’s father killed himself, do you remember?”

“I do. Shocking. One of the more dramatic bank failures that year, and I believe he had a number of lawsuits directed at him. There was some question of personal ethics.” Uncle Peter watched me keenly. He was not a lawyer for nothing.

“And Nick’s father’s firm was in trouble, too, wasn’t it?”

“I recall something like that. You may be right. Lily, my dear, what are you asking me?”

I leaned forward, putting my hand on my crossed knee, letting the cigarette dangle above Uncle Peter’s old and priceless rug. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m asking you. I don’t even know
what
to ask you. Look, may I speak to you in confidence?”

“Of course.”

“You know Nick Greenwald married Budgie Byrne last spring.”

His eyes softened with sympathy. “I’d heard that, yes. Julie went to the wedding, didn’t she?”

“Of course she did. They’ve been summering in Seaview with us, the old Byrne house, fixing it up. And I know now—don’t ask me how, Uncle Peter—I
know
he didn’t marry her because he loves her. So I’m trying to find out why. What hold she might have over him.” In my agitation, I reached across to prop the cigarette in the ashtray on the desk, and stayed there with my hands knit together on the wooden edge.