The Color of Water in July (13 page)

It is about a quarter mile from the Wequetona dock to Hemingway Point, but you only swim a short way through wide-open water, for the point is a spit of land that reaches out in front of the Wequetona cove. It is always difficult to measure distance when you are in water, and I remember that day that almost from the start, I kept looking out toward the point and thinking that we were almost there.

It is an odd thing about swimming—or I should say it
was
odd, for I have never been able to stand swimming since that day—but there is something about the rhythm that turns you inside yourself; the noise of breathing, bubble, bubble, bubble, out, out, out, three times, then turn your head and gasp. I would look up periodically to search for the rowboat, the flash of white paint with red trim helping me to stay my course, or sometimes I would look at the white necklace of sand on the point; the land always looked close, but at the same time, it never seemed to get any closer.

I know that we were well past the midpoint when Thomas rowed ahead a bit. I had not until that moment sensed any fatigue, nor thought much about the depth of the water below me, but when I looked up and saw that the rowboat was about a hundred yards ahead, I had a sudden sensation that the lake had become infinitely larger; I looked below me at the dark blue of the water, and noticed again the icelike current that ran just below the surface. Suddenly, my arms began to ache and I feared that it was too far to the point and that I might not be able to make it. Treading water, I measured the distance to the boat with my eyes, wondering whether if I called out, Thomas would hear me. Though the water had been still as glass when we set out, now there was quite a bit of chop. I could not tell if the wind was picking up or if it was just the normal roughness that far into the lake.

“Thomas!” I called, unsure if he could hear me. “Thomas,” I said, “you’re getting too far ahead.”

I turned away then to look for Lila.

Disoriented, I did not see her. Scanning the open expanse of lake, I saw nothing. I felt panic squeezing my chest. Again, the lake seemed monstrous, enormous, infinitely wide and deep. I began looking about frantically, spinning this way and that, until I had completely lost my bearings and could not figure out even where I should be looking.

Feeling dizzy, I scanned the bluffs on the shoreline, searching for a recognizable landmark. There, I caught sight of the bulk of Journey’s End. Right in my line of sight, about twenty-five yards behind me, came Lila, swimming steadily. Turning back toward the point, I saw that Thomas was closer now—evidently he had heard me and started to circle back. I took off swimming again, pulling myself strongly through the water, wanting to be done with this frigid swim, back on the shore, warming myself in the sun. Thomas turned the boat around again and was rowing steadily in front of me.

For the rest of the swim, I did not speak or look up. I took glimpses every few strokes or so: there was the boat’s red gunwale; the scrubby pine of the point; the flash of Lila’s white arm, keeping pace with me, a few yards behind.

About ten yards out from shore, the water grew warmer again; the silty, rocky bottom grew visible, and the water’s tone turned from deep blue to a pale, murky green. I felt that warm water like a prayer of welcome, and I sprinted the last few yards, tearing my lungs full of air, until it was so shallow I could swim no more, and I stood stumbling on the sharp rocks that cut into my feet—and then running, at once freezing and tired and cold and sun-warmed, propelling myself forward with the sheer joy of the air filling my lungs, the sun shining down, and my beloved there on the beach, holding out my sweater in welcome.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

J
ESS
,
AGE SEVENTEEN

After it was over, Jess lay in her bed alone. It was still hot and stuffy upstairs in the cottage, although finally that afternoon the weather had broken with a thunderstorm, and the air had cooled. She was running over the events of that day in her mind. Daniel had been coming down to take pictures, thinking that the still air would attract birds to the spring, when he had seen her. Mamie, with a quick look, seemed to know what to do. She folded three snowy-white towels between Jess’s legs, towels that rapidly changed color to crimson. Mamie let Daniel sit with Jess for an instant; she disappeared into her room wearing only a dressing gown and her blue-velvet mules, and somehow reemerged a moment later wearing stockings, pumps, and a spotless pink linen suit. With Jess in the backseat, towels clenched between her legs, Mamie drove quickly to the hospital.

Dr. Coggins was an older man, tall and sinewy, with a crew cut and military posture that reflected his years as a navy doc. Jess recognized him from the Ironton church, where he was a vestry member and often read the Collect, his voice rumbling. His blue eyes, which peered at her over bifocals, were harsh and she could see he judged her unkindly.

“Well,” he said, as he probed deep inside her with his long fingers while pressing down hard on her belly. “You’re a lucky girl,” he said, though his voice was not kind.

“You could have easily bled to death.” He jabbed upward inside her so sharply that it made her draw in her breath.

“Or worse,” he intoned. “You could have actually stayed pregnant. That would have been even worse.”

Jess’s head was starting to clear now. The nurse had come in and removed the IV; the effects of the medication seemed to be wearing off. Finally, he finished her exam and turned his back on her to wash his hands, raising his voice to talk to her over the sound of the rushing water.

“From now on, you two need to stay away from each other. It’s genetic incompatibility that caused this. Cousins are not designed to make babies together. It’s against the laws of nature!” And with that, he strode out the door, leaving Jess on the table staring at the yellowing tiles of the acoustic ceiling. She could hear the steps of the discharge nurse squeaking down the hall toward her.

The ride back to Wequetona was silent. Mamie said nothing—didn’t even look her way. Jess, plastered up against the passenger-side door, stared resolutely out the window, watching the farms and fields go by, the funny broken-down castle walls at the old Loeb estate, and, finally, the gateway to Wequetona, the road past the neighboring cottages, and the broad back of Journey’s End. Her mind was spinning. What was the doctor talking about? What did he mean by
cousin
? She cast an occasional sideways glance at her grandmother, but Mamie’s eyes stayed firmly fixed on the road.

Cousins?
It made no sense. Margaret never talked about the family, nor did Mamie, come to think of it. Jess realized she knew almost nothing—just that Mamie had been married only briefly, to someone named Cleves, and that Margaret had never known her father. But she had no cousins that she had ever heard of, and she had never heard the name Daniel Painter until this summer. She closed her eyes and tried to blot out all of it—the pain and bleeding, the doctor’s words, and even the face of Daniel. It was too much to think about. She was exhausted and felt shattered inside.

Finally, once back at the cottage, Jess blurted out the question.

“Am I related to Daniel Painter?”

For a moment, the question hung in the air between them. Jess studied Mamie’s face. She waited for her grandmother to look puzzled by such an off-the-wall question. Related to Daniel Painter—of course not. What an absurd idea!

But, in a split second, Jess knew the truth. She could see from the look on Mamie’s face, all at once ashen and eager, that her grandmother was planning to tell her something. But instead of answering the question, Mamie put a firm hand on Jess’s arm.

“Not now, dear. Not now,” Mamie said. “Right now, you are in a delicate condition.” Before Jess could think to protest, Mamie had guided her up the stairs, covered her with a cool sheet, and said a no-nonsense “Get some rest.”

In spite of everything that had just happened, Jess fell into a deep sleep. When she opened her eyes, the slanted rays of late-afternoon sun were making a pattern of golden diamonds on the pine-board wall beside her bed. For a moment, she remembered nothing, but then it all came flooding back to her.

When Jess went downstairs, late that afternoon, Mamie had laid out the table for tea: two china teacups with saucers, the blue-and-white sugar bowl, and two carefully polished silver teaspoons. Mamie put a kettle on to boil and sat down at the table, and Jess sat down facing her, feeling her own weariness as she sank into the chair.

“I’ll explain everything,” Mamie said. “But I’ll have to begin at the beginning.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

J
ESS
,
AGE SEVENTEEN

“I am sure you know,” Mamie began, “that I lost my dear sister in the flower of her youth. The year was 1922. My darling Lila left us, drowned in Pine Lake. As you can imagine, my entire family was devastated.”

Jess had rarely heard her grandmother speak Lila’s name aloud.

“I was several years older than Lila. But she was very beautiful, exceedingly beautiful, and so was the first to marry. Not that I was terribly plain myself, but I had come of age during the war, when all the young men were overseas. Still, I was not to be passed by in love either. The summer that Lila drowned was in all other ways a glorious summer, long, and at times hot. And that summer, it was my turn. I was in love, my dear, with a wonderful man, the most glorious man alive, and Jess, he was in love with me.”

Jess looked at Mamie’s face, her powdery skin lined with age but still soft, and scented faintly with the old-fashioned Sem-pray Jo-ve-nay lotion that she used. Mamie’s eyes had a distant look in them, as though she were seeing past the cottage, past the kitchen, past Jess herself, into another long-distant time.

“Thomas Cleves was his name,” Mamie said. “Captain Cleves. Oh, he was handsome, almost a foot taller than I was, and dark, with black hair and snapping brown eyes. We had known each other for several years, ever since his family bought a cottage on the other side of the woods. His father was the pastor at the little church in Ironton—they were not rich, but very respectable.

“When the soldiers came back from the war, they seemed so much older, inclined to stand back a little from the rest of us. I felt a funny kinship with them, because I was kind of an old soul too. When my daddy died, my mother almost went out of her mind with grief; she used to ‘go to the country,’ as she put it. She took to her bed, leaving me to manage our household. We lived quite nicely on Sycamore Street. The house was three times bigger than this one, so managing the household was quite a task. I proved quite adept at it, and I thought that my excellent housekeeping skills were as strong an advertisement for my qualities as running around to a lot of movie shows and cotillions, as Lila used to do. For the right sort of man, that is—the serious kind of man that I was looking for.

“And Lila . . . Well, my dear sister was a handful—so lovely, but the oddest ideas sometimes. Certainly, she had no shortage of beaux. She could have married any of a half dozen young men. But Chapin Flagg came along and just grabbed her. She was still a schoolgirl, not even out of her boarding school in Connecticut yet. I begged Mama to think twice before consenting to it.”

“And . . . ?” Jess said, standing up to turn on the kettle, not wanting Mamie to see that she was still feeling woozy and had to steady herself on the edge of the table.

“Well, Mother wouldn’t hear about it. A marriage to the Flagg family, a Wequetona family? She couldn’t see any reason to worry. I supposed she was right, but I had my reservations.”

“Why?” Jess asked. “What was wrong with him?” She could not see where Mamie was going with this story, but she understood that she was going to have to let her grandmother tell it her own way.

“The Flagg family had a great deal of money. But Chapin, he was . . . ” Mamie paused, unsure of how to go on. “He was . . . ” She stopped again. “I wasn’t convinced that he cared about Lila,” she finally said.

“I remember once he took her to a party at the Loeb estate, and then he just left her there. She did not even know where he had gone. She had to get Dickie Loeb to get one of the servants to drive her back. I used to tell my mother that there were stories about Chapin . . . He drank . . . Some say he gambled . . . He was . . . ” Mamie stopped speaking again. Something about him, she was having a hard time putting into words.

“He had the swankiest car at the Club. I just thought he wanted the prettiest girl to go with it . . . Like a Rolex watch or something . . . Like something to wear. But then again, Lila had no sense. She just did not think straight sometimes. People at the Club were starting to say . . . ”

Jess closed her eyes for a few seconds, trying to concentrate on Mamie’s words, to follow them. She opened her eyes, then laid her head down on her arm.

“Jess, now is not the time. You need to rest. I can see that you’re exhausted.”

“No,” Jess said, sitting up again. “You have to tell me now. I can’t wait another minute.”

Mamie hesitated, opened her mouth as if to protest but then thought better of it. She picked up two sugar cubes and dropped them into her teacup, making a thin pinging sound as she stirred with her silver teaspoon.

“People were jealous of her, so pretty and being courted by the heir to the Flagg fortune. Still, I was worried that people might believe . . . ”

Mamie looked straight at Jess, studying her face. She seemed to be wondering whether her granddaughter was able to understand her, as though speaking about the past was like conversing in a foreign language—a language that Jess might not understand.

Jess turned her head and looked out the window; light was playing in the gently moving leaves of the old maple behind the kitchen. She could see that the tips of the leaves were already tinged with yellow and orange. Fall came so early up there in the North.

“Might believe . . . ?” Jess had no idea what Mamie was trying to get at, or why they were talking about this old forgotten story now. She kept thinking about Daniel. Was there something about him she should have noticed but didn’t?

“Well, of course it wasn’t true,” Mamie continued, almost as though she were talking to herself. “I never believed it. Not for one minute. To think that a Tretheway . . . ” It did almost seem as if Mamie were speaking a foreign language. Jess was unused to having to decode messages. Her own mother, Margaret, was always perfectly blunt.

“Anyway, Chapin married her. Right under the rose arbor in front of their cottage, Aldergate. He had a gown flown in from Paris, beaded all over, cut up above the knees in front, with a long train hanging down the back. Scandalized everyone in the Club, getting married outside, with her kneecaps showing and a beaded veil over her bobbed hair. Then, she went off with him, to Europe for a Grand Tour. It was that very summer, the summer that Lila married, that I met Thomas Cleves—and right from the start, we were in love.

Mamie sipped her tea, looking intently at Jess as though trying to see if somehow, across time, her granddaughter was getting it. Jess too was looking at Mamie, trying to see through her stern demeanor, stiff gray hair carefully coiffed into pin curls once a week.

“I thought that Thomas might propose to me almost right away, that very first summer, the summer Lila married. But Thomas was called away suddenly when his father took ill. So, hard as it was, we parted with our plans as yet unsettled, not to see each other again for almost a whole year.”

Unexpectedly, Jess felt her throat tighten and the need to fight back tears. She looked away from Mamie and around the familiar kitchen, taking in the hinged beadboard cupboards, the faded green-and-white linoleum floor. She knew her plane ticket to Texas lay on the glass-topped vanity upstairs, the departure date less than a week away.

“You know, Jess, no sooner had I boarded the steamer to head back to Chicago than the porter brought me a telegram, and then another, and then another. Thomas Cleves sent me telegrams and letters every day, sometimes several times a day, and so I never felt apart from my beloved, nor did I ever feel lonely, though my own dear sister was away in Europe with Chapin, and I was home alone in our house on Sycamore Street, going about my solitary ways.

“We were to meet at Pine Lake, near the end of May. We arrived at the Club a few days before the Cleveses did. I still remember those last few days of waiting, pacing up and down the front walk, as though I could will the hours away, as though the lake wouldn’t turn blue nor the trees green until I could look at them knowing that he was by my side.”

Jess’s own thoughts flew to Daniel.

“And then, finally, there he was. Oh, Jess, it seemed he was taller than ever, and handsomer still than I remembered him. The very first time I saw him, he dropped to his knees before me and offered me a ring.” Jess could see that Mamie was fingering the emerald-cut diamond that she had always worn on her ring finger.

“And so, we agreed to be married, and the wedding was set for Christmastime. We were supposed to be married in the Ironton Congregational Church, with the reception at home.”

“And you were?” Jess asked.

“No,” Mamie said, suddenly sounding businesslike, more like her usual self. “Tragically, my younger sister drowned in the lake, and because of the need for a year of mourning, it meant that we would have to postpone the wedding. Lila drowned in May, and after a terrible year of waiting, suddenly we were facing another year.”

A year, Jess thought, looking out again at the multihued leaves outside the kitchen, framed by the weathered, unpainted casement now pushed open to let in the soft August air. What would a whole year of waiting feel like? What about a whole lifetime?

“I’ll never forget the day of the funeral. Lila lay in an open casket. You know, Jess, she was fair, like you are, but in death, she was almost a ghost, her skin whiter than whiteness can be, eyes closed, yes, but to me, they were staring up at me like they did when we pulled her out of the water, as dead and cold as a stone. Thomas took it very hard. He was there when she drowned, you know, right out there in the rowboat, rowing alongside; after all the killing he had seen in the war, it was as though it was just one death too many. He stood there at the funeral like a block of granite, gray as a tombstone, but he was crying—tears just slipping silently down his face. Miss Ada was out of her mind with grief, just wailing and wailing until someone finally had to lead her away. But you know how I felt, Jess? I felt angry. Angry at my sister for going off and getting herself drowned. It was supposed to be my turn, but that was Lila. She could always steal your thunder.”

Mamie was quiet for a moment, and Jess looked at her, surprised at her candor. Mamie’s eyes were still far away, looking through Jess to another time.

“So that night, after the funeral, we left,” she continued. “Just took off, the two of us, down toward Indiana. I don’t remember which one of us thought of it. But we just realized that we couldn’t wait. Hitched a ride down to Traverse on Billy Webster’s old Model T and then got the steamer from there. Oh, we were so much in love, and, Jess, it felt like the right thing to do. We took off and got ourselves married, no fancy wedding on Sycamore Street, no honeymoon Grand Tour, just two foolish young people in love.”

And what had happened to all that passion, Jess wondered. He seemed to have left no trace behind but his name.

“And that’s it,” Mamie said, folding her hands primly in front of her. “The rest of the story you know.”

Jess looked at Mamie with bewilderment. The rest of the story she knew? What on earth did she mean? She had just stopped the story at the part that Jess already knew. Mamie ran off with Thomas Cleves. And then what?

“Miss Mamie,” Jess said, “I don’t understand.” An icy sensation gripped the back of her throat. Could she have misunderstood what the doctor had said? She did not want to understand.

“I take it that Daniel told you nothing about his mother?”

“His mother? Mrs. Painter?”

“Thomas Cleves left me,” she said curtly. “Married again, had a family . . . had a daughter . . . named Elizabeth Cleves.”

“But what does that have to do with Daniel?”

“Did he never mention his mother’s name to you?”

“Yes, I think he said his mother’s named—Elizabeth.” Jess felt realization bloom as she spoke the name aloud.

“Elizabeth Cleves,” Mamie said. Jess could hear the cruel edge in her voice. “Aunt Elizabeth. Your mother’s half sister.”

“That makes me and Daniel . . . ?”

“First cousins,” Mamie whispered. “And I suggest you stop doing what the Lord never intended. It’s just not right. Not proper. It’s
sinful
. . . ” Mamie’s face crumpled, and as she covered her face in her hands, her shoulders started shaking. After a moment, she looked up, and Jess saw that her face was full of tears. “I’m sorry, Jess. I should have stopped you. I never imagined it would come to this.”

Jess was stunned into silence, looking at her hands, the chipped Formica tabletop, out the window over Mamie’s shoulder, anywhere but at Mamie herself. Jess did not have any cousins, did not have a family, just a line of solitary females, Mamie, Margaret, Jess . . . An aunt? A cousin? And that cousin was Daniel?

“Does my mother know?” Jess asked.

“I told her that her father remarried when she asked me.”

“Does she know his family owns a cottage just on the other side of the woods?”

“Your mother can barely remember that
I
own a cottage. Has
she
ever been here? Why would she care a whit about that?” Now, the bitterness in Mamie’s voice was not hidden, nor was the ugly twist at the corner of her mouth.

The words of the doctor were ringing in Jess’s ears—
genetic incompatibility.
She heard what her grandmother and the doctor were trying to tell her, a kind of final and incontrovertible no, an incestuous no, a scientific and moral no. Just last night, she had not been able to think of anything that would make her give Daniel up.

But, of course, she had never thought of
this
.

When Mamie started to speak again, her voice was soft and trembling a bit. “It was raining really hard the night that Thomas and I left, ran away. We were running so fast, I never even got damp. We ran right through that rain, hand in hand, jumped in the back of an old Model T, no hesitation, never looking back. How I wish I’d had someone close by to tell me to stand still and let myself get wet. If I could have stood still and taken it then, a lot might have been different, a whole lot. Now, Jess, I feel like it’s my responsibility to tell you. You are going to be a doctor, Jess; imagine that, a young lady doctor. You’ve got a bright future ahead of you. Just stand still and let the rain pour down on you. No matter how bad you feel right now, it’s nothing compared to what you would feel if you gave up all of that bright future.”