Summer People (3 page)

Nathan raised his hand and called hello as he ascended the porch stairs. Carl sipped from his wine and settled onto the swing. In the summer breeze, strands of hair rose and fell around his forehead, his unruly gray eyebrows looking like the bristles of an old toothbrush. “So what did you and Ellen do today?” Carl asked, his voice a low rumble.

Nathan told him about attending St. Michael's and explained how the rain had kept them housebound for the rest of the afternoon. Carl said that when the weather was better, he should take Ellen to the Point, a short, jutting plateau, not far from the golf course, which she apparently loved for its incredible view of the Atlantic. Then he asked, “Have you met many people up here yet?”

“Just a couple people at church.”

“I was here for three years before anyone would talk to me,” Carl said, smiling with wan satisfaction. He had been staring down at his glass, which he held gingerly with both hands, but he glanced up to see Nathan's reaction.

“Why wouldn't they talk to you?”

Carl pushed out his lower lip and shrugged. “Well, I was from Oregon, an accountant at Boston College when I met Franny. I don't think
I'd even been to Maine. I think it's a little more open now, but maybe it just seems that way because I've been here so long. What's funny is that most of these people don't even have that much money. Their parents or grandparents bought the house and put a couple million in the bank, and now they just live off the interest.”

Nathan wondered how much money Carl must have married into for a couple million not to seem like genuine wealth, but he was more interested in taking a walk with Leah. He tried glancing down at Carl's watch, but there was not enough light from the house to see the time. Carl adjusted himself in the swing, clumsily moving his fat hand over the age-spotted crown of his balding head, and something about the gesture made Nathan wonder if Carl had been drinking before he arrived. The heavy man tilted his head back to finish off the last of his wine while Franny's nasal voice bleated from the other side of the French doors.

Carl glanced up at Nathan as if noticing him for the first time, and said, “Ellen seems like she's doing all right, though?”

“I think so.”

“How confused is she?”

Nathan searched Carl's face before answering. “She seems a little absentminded, I guess. Why do you think she's confused?”

“Well, that's just what I'd heard—from people who see more of her in Cleveland. But we haven't seen so much of her lately. A few summers ago, she was back home taking care of Harry before he died, so…”

“Harry,” Nathan said.

“Her husband.”

Nathan knew that Ellen's husband was dead, but he did not know that he had died so recently. A moment passed wherein Nathan considered how little he knew about the woman with whom he'd be spending the rest of the summer.

Carl said, “Then last summer she had to leave early because of her accident.”

“Yeah, everybody seems kind of surprised that she's back this summer.”

“Well, there's the rock,” Carl said, gesturing down at Parson's Beach as
if pushing something away from him. “Imagine hitting that, going thirty or forty miles an hour without a seat belt, at her age.”

Nathan stepped away from the porch column where he'd been leaning to approach the railing for a better view. Eyes narrowed, he glanced back at Carl. “What rock?”

“The big one there on the right, by itself.”

Parson's Beach was littered with seaweed-covered rocks of various sizes, but on the eastern rim, moonlight struck the pale barnacles of a single boulder roughly the size of a tank.

“She just drove into it?” Nathan asked.

In Carl's dark, recessed eyes it was possible to see him process the information: Nathan did not know the story of what had happened. The recognition seemed to tire him, and he sighed. “It was at night, and she got into the car and drove down through the yard until she hit it head-on.”

Nathan scanned the grounds for what Ellen might have been trying to do when she slammed her car into the boulder, but he could think of no explanation. On the other side of the house, Harbor Avenue dead-ended into her driveway, and on this side there was only the steeply sloping lawn and a rocky beach, where no sane person would attempt to drive.

“What was she trying to do?”

Carl shrugged.

When it was evident Carl was not going to say more, Nathan asked, “How bad was she hurt?”

“She messed up her hip, I remember. She's using a cane now to walk?”

“Yeah, she has when I've been with her.”

“That's what I heard,” Carl said, nodding. He glanced down at the empty space beside him as if gauging whether the swing would accommodate him lying down. “She hit her head pretty badly, too,” he said. “Totaled the car. She might have died if Bill McAlister hadn't found her when he was out walking that morning. They took her to the hospital here for a few days, but then her son Glen came and flew her back to Cleveland.”

Nathan stared out at the rock with arms folded across his chest, biting his thumbnail.

Carl said, “I'm sure she's doing okay now. I don't think Glen would have let her come back up otherwise.”

The older man's sad, faintly smiling face made him such a sympathetic figure that Nathan told him what had happened that morning—about waking up to find Ellen sitting in the hothouse atmosphere of the car—but he watched Carl absorb the information as if each word were a blow, pushing him further and further into himself. Carl inhaled deeply, leaning back on the swing. “Well, I had heard she was having some problems. It might be a good idea to keep a special eye on her, then.”

“I will,” Nathan murmured. He shook his head, almost laughing with sudden nervousness. “I'm just having a hard time believing that they sent me up here with her alone.”

“She wasn't always like this, you know,” Carl said, his eyes suddenly flinty, as if Nathan had suggested otherwise. “Did you know this bay, Albans Bay, would be filled with shit right now if it weren't for her? They were going to pump waste from South Albans,” he said, gesturing vaguely down the coastline. “They were going to pump it right
here,
but Ellen started a petition and was able to stop it. This was before environmentalism was so popular, so she had to be tenacious to convince those people. She was charming and smart and very beautiful…but…ah hell, how do you explain how somebody was?”

Nathan nodded in sympathy and stared down at the cracks in the wooden floorboards.

“Have you seen pictures of her when she was younger?” Carl asked.

“I've seen a couple.”

“I never met a more beautiful woman in my life.”

Nathan glanced through the French doors at the two dimly lit women still in the living room.

“I tried to tell her that once, and she said…she said I had a high fructose content,” Carl said, his smile fading as he rubbed his thumb along the rim of his glass. “I don't know if it's a stroke, or Alzheimer's, or whatever it is going on, but you won't know what it's like until you get old like me, to see something like this happen to someone who was so beautiful and
lovely to be around that you—” Carl's voice grew hoarse with emotion and he clamped his mouth shut.

Wind rustled the branches of honeysuckle bushes beneath them, and a bell rang out on a yacht, followed by distant laughter, across the harbor. Nathan was afraid to look at Carl, but after enough time had passed, he nodded as if to affirm something already agreed upon, and said, “I guess I should probably go in and check on her.”

As he started toward the French doors, Carl pulled himself up from the swing. His bulky frame swayed back and forth like an old sea captain not yet used to solid ground. Then he reached back with surprising quickness and flung his glass in a high arc across the lawn. The glass somersaulted across the moonlit sky and landed almost soundlessly in the tall grass and shrubbery along the shore. Nathan's body tensed, and he pretended not to have noticed as he grabbed the handle of the French door. He half-expected to be slapped in back of the head or hear one of the chairs overturned. But Carl just mumbled, “Sorry, I shouldn't have done that,” and followed Nathan into the house.

 

T
hey waited as Franny finished chatting about a friend's equestrian daughter, then pushed her hands from her lap to her knees. Her feline eyes flickering at Carl with irritation, she said, “Well, maybe we should let Eleanor get her sleep.”

“It was a pleasure seeing you again, Ellen,” Carl whispered. He held her hand a moment longer than necessary, eyeing her blearily. Then Franny reached for his arm.

By the time Nathan closed the door behind them, Ellen was already shuffling toward the front stairs.

“Are you heading to bed?”

Ellen frowned. “Oh, I think so.”

Near the base of the stairs, she turned and outstretched her arm in an apparent invitation to hug good night. Hesitating, Nathan leaned closer—leaving a foot of space between them—and patted her back. Struggling to
escape the awkwardness of the moment, he said, “Was it good seeing your friends again?”

Ellen looked away, sighing, as if taking a moment to consider whether it really had been good to see them. She shrugged. “It was okay,” she said, beginning a slow ascent of the stairs.

In the kitchen, the clock read 9:55
P.M.
—too late to head over to see Leah—so Nathan cursed and sat down at the kitchen table. Outside the window, the colors of the sailboat lights streamed like melted crayon across the water. Living in Cleveland, Nathan had not often dreamed of the sea. But now he found himself yearning for a sailboat and everything a long sea voyage would mean: freedom from this job, from his father. Maybe part of it was the age difference. Nathan's parents hadn't had him until they were in their late thirties, but his father had never been a great communicator, and Nathan's mother had been crucial to the maintenance of their adult father-son relationship: sorting out misunderstandings, soothing egos, helping each to see how much the two men had in common. Now they were trying to get along without her, and Nathan wondered if it was possible. He cradled his head in both hands for several minutes, then picked up the phone.

“Hello?” his father answered, a note of concern in his voice, undoubtedly wondering why someone would be calling him so late. Nathan could picture him downstairs, in front of the television, tilted back on the old couch that reclined and propped up his legs like a La-Z-Boy chair.

“Hey, Dad.”

“Hey, Nathan,” his father said, but then there was a rustling on the other end of the line. Nathan listened to what he suspected was his father losing control of the phone as he searched the couch for the remote to turn down the volume of the television. When Nathan could no longer hear the exchange of TV voices, he heard his father fumbling again with the receiver.

“Hello?”

“I'm here.”

“How're you doing?”

Nathan said he was fine, but then told him about his conversation with Carl. He asked, “Ellen's son, Glen, didn't tell you about any of this?”

“No…not that I can think of…not anything about her trying to kill herself.”

“Jesus, I don't know if she was actually
trying
to kill herself. But Glen never breathed a word to you about her wrecking her car up here last summer?”

“I don't think so,” his father said, but in the silence that followed, Nathan could hear his father trying to remember if perhaps he had known and forgotten. His thick, graying eyebrows would knot together as he stared across the darkened room and worked his tongue across the cigarette stains of his teeth. When Nathan was still in junior high, his father had stopped smoking, and with Nathan's mother's encouragement, started a regular workout routine. Every other evening the two of them had gone to the local YMCA to stretch, walk the track, and mildly exert themselves lifting weights. But since her death three years ago, his father had let his membership expire and resumed his old habit, his teeth turning the color of old newspaper.

“I think maybe he did say something about his mother having an accident last summer,” his father admitted. “But I don't remember him saying she drove the car into a rock.”

“You didn't ask him what happened?”

“I manage their estate, Nathan. I'm not their friend.”

Nathan leaned forward and clutched the back of his neck. “I'm just trying to figure out if I should be up here.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You mean in addition to her driving her car into a boulder?”

“I wouldn't worry too much about…She's an older woman, Nathan. You knew that before you went up there. It sounds like she just probably lost control of her car. Don't let yourself get worked up over it.”

“How about this morning when I woke up and couldn't find her anywhere in the house? I looked around for half an hour and finally
found her asleep in the car with the windows up, in the broiling sun.”

His father did not respond immediately. “What did she say she was doing there?”

“She didn't say. She just said she wanted me to take her to church.”

“Well,” his father said. “Why don't you just see how it goes for a little while?”

“I think I'm going to call Glen. I just want to know if there's anything else I should have been told about her condition.”

“You can't reach him now. He's on vacation with his wife until next week. Why don't you try someone at the house? Like her nephew?”

“You mean her grandnephew Ralph?”

“I'm sure he can tell you if there are things you need to be aware of about her.”

Nathan snorted. “Okay.”

“What?”

“Nothing. It's just that that guy isn't right.”