The Summer We Read Gatsby (16 page)

I kneeled before the safe on the floor of her closet, the overpowering scent of mothballs tickling my nose. I turned the dial, first one direction to 9, then counterclockwise to 24, and back around to 96. Nothing happened. I sat back on my heels, wondering if I’d been mistaken. I tried again, this time turning the dial several times before stopping at the 9. I tried 9, 24, 18, 96. But that didn’t work. I started to think I’d been wrong, that only someone who’d eaten a pot brownie would come up with such an idea. And with such conviction. But then I gave it another try, leaving off the 18, but spinning the dial twice past 0 first, and the safe door clicked open.

I pulled it toward me. I was about to look inside when it hit me: I should wait and do this with my sister. Even though I was almost certain she wouldn’t have waited for me—Peck has the patience of a sugar-addled toddler—if she’d been the one to figure out the combination, I knew I had to wait for her. It took all the willpower I had to close the safe back up again without looking inside it. Peck deserved to be part of the discovery process. Plus, she would throw a major hissy fit if she was left out of anything.

I let my imagination run wild, conceiving all sorts of scenarios: in the safe was a huge diamond, or a million dollars, or how about a signed first-edition
Great Gatsby
—wasn’t such a thing the most rare of collectible books? Or would it be a certificate of authenticity, or some other official piece of paper that might indicate that the painting now missing from our wall was actually some rare and valuable thing, desired by museums and art collectors who would pay up for such a piece? Or it could be nothing. I had to keep my expectations in check.

I shut the door. I left the safe locked and wandered through the house, gazing in fascination at the paintings on the walls, most of which didn’t look nearly as bad now. I was stoned. In fact, some of them looked pretty good. Even the two painted by my father no longer seemed so amateurish. I decided I would ask Peck if I could keep the one that had more pinks and purple, if she would agree to take the orange one.

I flipped through some of the books on the shelves, and stared at the photographs in silver frames that populated every free surface. There were images of Peck as a child in her school uniform and a few of me and my mother, her long hair always blowing, in India and South Africa, and, later, with Lydia on top of a mountain in Switzerland on one of her visits. I particularly loved the ones of Lydia and my father when they were younger, wearing bell-bottomed pants and shirts with big flowers on them in sixties fashion. I stared at my father’s face, the dark eyes, short, straight nose, and full mouth that I’d inherited.

Peck didn’t come home while I was still awake and eventually I dozed off with the light on in the bedroom. I don’t know what time Peck came in, but I woke in the morning to the loud rumble of thunder and rain pouring off the porch eaves. Fool’s House felt like flimsy protection against such a force of nature, the sky a mood-altering gray that wrapped the tiny house in a thick blanket of fog. The moisture seeped in everywhere and while Peck slept in, I strategically placed buckets under the places where the roof leaked.

It was hardly cold but the dark morning called for a fire and I piled up the wood in the fireplace to build a big blaze that radiated heat and filled the room with the smell of wood smoke and the glow of dancing flames. Even the cheap-looking art, not quite as fascinating as the night before, looked charming in the mellow lamplight. I waited for Peck in the living room with a pot of coffee and cupcakes for breakfast.

My curiosity about the contents of the safe was an itch I was dying to scratch. I suppose I could have woken my sister; she would be annoyed that I hadn’t. But there was something about the calm of the dark morning I wasn’t in a hurry to disrupt.

The quiet disappeared soon enough, though, when Pecksland Moriarty came down the stairs in a gold lamé dressing gown. This was the sort of attire she assumed most of the world would find totally normal but also unique and cool. She expected to be lauded for such style and when she came down the stairs with enormous dark glasses covering her eyes, moaning dramatically, she posed with an unlit cigarette held elegantly in a tilted wrist, waiting for me to remark on her “look.” I was reading
The New York Times
and did not offer a comment. This made her sigh and exclaim, “Good God, those boys can party.”

“I thought you didn’t get hangovers,” I said, pouring her a cup of coffee from the pot at my side.

She lifted her sunglasses to squint in irritated fashion at me. “Isn’t that exactly the point I’m making? I don’t.
Normally.
”

She made her way gingerly to the sofa, easing herself down onto the cushions. “Literally? Half the time you don’t listen to a word I say. You have ADD, Stella. And when you were hungover, I gave you a Bloody Mary, not some mangy little cup of coffee that’s going to do nothing for me.”

“Would you like a Bloody Mary?” I handed her the box of cupcakes.

She sighed. “No.” She took the box and helped herself to one of the cupcakes. “The clean living starts today.”

I waited until the sugar kicked in before telling her. As I suspected, she was annoyed I hadn’t woken her sooner. And annoyed too that she hadn’t been the one to figure it out. “I’m the one with the Fitzgerald thing,” she complained. “You’ve totally copied me. As usual.” She made a face indicating her impatience with me, looking me over as if seeking something else she could claim I’d copied from her. Finding nothing, she continued. “I suppose you think a literary obsession is extremely chic? Even, as in my case, when it’s predicated on falsehood?”

She paused, frowning at me, then stood. “Well, what are we waiting for?” She headed for the stairs, lamé rustling, holding the unlit cigarette in the air in one hand and the coffee in the other. “Are you telling me the truth? You didn’t even peek?”

“Wouldn’t you have waited for me?” I asked as I followed her.

She moved more quickly than one would expect from someone with a hangover. “No way,” she cried out as she scampered up the stairs ahead of me, spilling coffee.

We kneeled in front of the safe together and she clutched my hand in hers. “Oh God, I’m nervous,” she cried, at her most theatrical. “What if it’s empty?”

“I had that thought,” I started to say.

Peck interrupted me, shaking her head. “Of course you did. You’re so
negative
. Let’s think big, let’s think positive. Now open the damn thing already.”

The combination, 9, 24, 96, worked again, and the safe clicked open. We looked at each other with great anticipation before pulling open the door. Not all that surprisingly, the safe contained no big stash of money, no pile of jewels, and no first edition of
Gatsby
or any other collectible book. In fact, it almost appeared empty, although a closer look revealed a few of the usual papers: Lydia’s birth certificate, her Social Security card, and then what appeared to be a packet of letters, tied up with a neat ribbon.

Peck sat back on her heels. “I’m so
greedy
,” she exclaimed, laughing a little. “Expecting the thing to be full of dough. Or no, that’s not it. Actually, I expected a
surprise
. A surprise of utmost
value
.”

I sat back too. “I don’t know why, but I had this idea we might find a first-edition
Great Gatsby
hardcover with a dust jacket. Signed, maybe.”

“What would that be worth?” Peck asked, scoffing. “Nothing. Maybe a few grand?”

“Signed?” I reached for the packet of letters and untied the ribbon. “Those things are worth a lot to some people.”

“I can’t imagine anyone would spend much for an old book,” Peck was saying as I gazed down at the letters in my hand. In the upper-right-hand corner of each of the envelopes, all the same pale blue tissue paper, was an address on East 51 Street, with no name, written in a neat print.

I held them up to Peck. “What do you think these are?”

She frowned, disappointment on her face. “Whatever they are, they’re not the thing of value. I just don’t know why Lydia had to be so
confusing
. I’m sure she’s up there chuckling away at us.”

I handed one of the envelopes to her, took one for myself, and we began to read. All the letters were, in neat little block print, addressed to
Dearest Lydia
from someone named Julian, who signed off each of them as
Forever Yours, Julian
, or,
Impatiently and Infatuatedly Awaiting Your Response, Julian
. And, more than once,
Desperately Yours, Julian
. They were in no chronological order and seemed to span a period of years in which Julian, married to someone by the name of Rita, claimed to be madly and irrevocably in love with Lydia.

“Julian?” I asked as Peck and I each read through the dense and perfectly formed words crammed onto the tissue-thin pages. Some of the letters were three or four pages long, filled on both sides with intense and overwrought proclamations of love. “I don’t remember Lydia ever mentioning that name.”

Peck didn’t look up from her reading. “It’s him. The ghost of Fool’s House.”

This Julian fellow was the original owner of Fool’s House. And yes, they’d played backgammon together. But Lydia didn’t win the house from him that way. She bought it from him, paying off her debt over a period of about a decade, from the sound of it, with money she’d carefully saved and invested wisely. He made it sound as if he had given her a very good price on it because he wanted her to have it, for it to be a place where they could be together and be free. They’d been friends up to that point, but then they fell in love. Or he did.

“Listen to him, he was absolutely
insane
for her.” Peck read some of the words aloud. “ ‘I can’t eat. Or if I do, I taste nothing. I can’t sleep. Or if I do, I’m tormented by dreams of you until I awake in a sweat, imagining you with someone else.’ ” As we read on, it became evident that Lydia was not waiting around for her married lover to be available while his wife wasn’t paying attention. Lydia had other company. A lot of company, from the sound of it. Not to mention some of those young artists and writers who took up residence above her garage each summer.

“What a naughty thing she was,” Peck said, in an admiring tone. “Can you imagine having her as a teacher?”

“If he was so in love with her, why didn’t he leave his wife?” I asked, as I read on. “And why did Lydia never mention him?”

“The wife might have had the money,” Peck said, flipping ahead. “Were there any kids?”

“Listen to this,” I said, reading aloud. “ ‘Did you ever find the silver cocktail shaker that belonged to Grandma Nonah?’ Who was Grandma Nonah? Her grandmother? Or his?”

Peck looked up. “I think we might have had a Nonah somewhere in the family. Is that the cocktail shaker on the bar cart? Or another one?”

I read on. “ ‘I suspect the ghost of Fool’s House,’ he writes. ‘You know I have always told you the house is haunted but in the most amiable way. Our specter would enjoy a cocktail or two, of that I’m certain.’ ”

“I thought
he
was the ghost,” Peck complained. She slumped back on her heels again. “Now we find out there was another ghost? A previous one? Was he one of her lovers too? God, this is all so confusing. How come we know so little about our ancestors? And I’m afraid Aunt Lydia was rather a slut.”

“Shut your piehole,” I said, borrowing one of her expressions. “Lydia was not a slut. She embraced life.” I was never a believer in ghosts and always assumed Lydia’s tales of her haunted house were, as they say, strictly for entertainment purposes. “Maybe in her mind her ghost was Julian. And his was a different, earlier version.”

We went back to our reading, handing over each letter as we finished it, reading aloud the bits that we couldn’t resist sharing. “ ‘I will never forget the image of you in that white dress with your feet on the porch railing as you squinted at the words on the page, bringing them to life for me the way you must have done for your students,’ ” Peck intoned, giving dramatic voice to Julian’s words. “ ‘I’m now convinced all of them, and their fathers too, must have been in love with you and I am madly envious of the hours they would have spent watching you move before them, your hair all done up in a bun. I certainly hope you never wore a sleeveless dress such as that one when you taught a class of teenaged boys, for they would have been helpless to concentrate in the face of the vision of your slender, shapely arms. Lydia, you have the most beautiful arms.’ ”

“He sounds a bit crazed,” I said.

“She did have beautiful arms, though,” Peck added. “You have the same ones, Stella. I’ve always been madly envious that you got the Moriarty arms.” Arms were the kind of feature about which Peck would profess envy while making it clear that she didn’t actually feel at all strongly about them, not when she knew full well that boobs such as hers were far more likely to make other women jealous.

Then I came to a letter in which Julian mentioned—in the same flowery language Lydia had always favored—the “darling niece” who was living with her. “ ‘Darling niece,’ ” I read aloud with a jolt. “Is he talking about you or me?”

This darling niece, according to the letter, had lived with Aunt Lydia from the sound of it, and as I read on, it became evident that it was I who had spent a full year with her when I was two, while Eleanor followed the Grateful Dead to Europe and didn’t return.

This came as a shock. It was a version of the story I’d never heard or even suspected. I’d always been told by my mother, and by Lydia too, that the reason my mother never wanted to come back to the United States was because it was too painful for her after my father died. I always understood that she’d left with me
after
he was killed. They were deeply in love, I was told, and this great passion was the rationale for his behaving callously toward his first wife. But from Julian’s allusions, it seemed my mother had already moved on almost a year before my father’s accident, a year that I apparently spent living with Lydia, first in Southampton, right there at Fool’s House, and then in New York when the summer ended and it was time for Lydia to go back to teaching. Presumably my father lived with us too, or stayed at Fool’s House that summer, although Julian didn’t mention him.