Summer People

by Marge Piercy

  The green silk tunic and the straight black pants she had been wearing were tossed on her vanity bench. She must have put on her suit in a hurry, for she was extremely neat and fussy about her clothes. Even when they were about to make love, she would pause and hang the blouse she took off. Never again. It could not be. Why had she rushed out in such a hurry and gone off to drown? Had she been in despair? He knew that the distance between them had hurt her as much as it had hurt him. She needed him, she always needed him. She had pretended to think lately about leaving, but he knew she was rooted in him.

  ‘Dad … Dad!’ Jimmy stood over him, frowning with worry.

  ‘Sorry. I didn’t hear you.’

  ‘I told the undertakers we’d have a viewing tomorrow night for friends of the family and the cremation the next morning … I need to tell them what kind of minister. Do you want a minister and a funeral?’

  ‘A minister? Do we have to have one?’

  ‘People usually do, but whatever you want, Dad. Please sit up and look at me. It’s hard to talk to the back of your head.’

  ‘Can’t we discuss this later?’ He wanted to tell Jimmy to do whatever he felt like with the thing that had come out of the pond, an object like one of those rubber inflatable women, a caricature of his wife. It wasn’t Susan. He wouldn’t leave this room. He would stay here where she seemed to linger, her scent, her clothing. It was almost like touching her. If he had not been talking with Toby, maybe he would have heard her. Maybe she had called to him. He still did not know if that had been her screaming. Had she hit her head? The medical examiner had not thought so. Had she had a cramp? He had been sitting and gabbing and drinking beer when he should have been swimming after her.

  ‘Dad, we have to arrange the funeral. We have to let people know. Mother was raised Catholic, so should we get a priest?’

  ‘She hadn’t been in a church in thirty years. You can’t do that to her. She told me she wanted to be cremated.’ He remembered also that she had told him, they were in bed and fooling around, that if she died before him, she wanted him to eat her ashes. Remembering that made him feel ill. He sat up. She had also suggested scattering the ashes from an airplane. ‘She wanted the ashes scattered on the Cape from a small plane.’

  ‘How are we going to do that?’

  ‘The Captain can fly a plane. He’ll help us.’

  Jimmy looked dubious. ‘Johnny will like that touch. But if you don’t want a priest, what about a minister?’

  ‘She didn’t like churches. She wasn’t a Christian. She said she was a pagan. She said she was a Druid.’

  ‘I don’t think they have ministers, Dad. Maybe we should just have a memorial service and friends can get up and say something.’

  ‘That sounds better,’ Willie said.

  ‘Great,’ Jimmy said with a loud sigh of relief and went directly to the bedside phone.

  Willie realized he did not want to overhear that conversation. He pulled himself off the bed and stumbled downstairs. He remembered his uncle Jasper’s funeral, with the widow weeping throughout; his aunt Maryellen’s, when his grandfather had fallen asleep during the eulogy. He would have to call his parents. There had been little contact since a bitter fight some six years before when his damned brother Ted had been stupid enough, after a visit during a tour of New England, to act the tattletale to his parents about his living arrangements. Since then they had sent each other Christmas and birthday cards, but there had not been phone conversation. He hoped they would not come north for the funeral, but he must give them that option.

  Someone was banging on the screen door. Without curiosity he shuffled across the kitchen to open it. Behind him the phone was ringing, but it stopped, as he assumed Jimmy picked it up. Candida was banging on the screen door, which somebody had latched. He never latched it. He stood aside for her to come in. A moment later he looked hard at her because even in his absorption, he noticed her eye was puffy and darkening. Her left cheek and her throat were bruised.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked her, with a great effort at speaking.

  She began to cry at once, putting her hands over her face. ‘Alec found out I’ve been seeing Tyrone. He beat me up. Tyrone has run away to New York. I don’t have anywhere to go! I don’t understand what happened with Susan, but I’m terribly terribly sorry!’

  He had trouble following, but she was a mess and needed help. She was crying full throttle on his shoulder, and that was something real to be dealt with. He could pat her back and make comforting noises and put a pot of coffee on. Alec was a fool to beat her. He had never wanted to hit Susan, ever. Sometimes he withdrew from her and sometimes he argued with her; usually he waited her out. All chances gone now, wrongs never to be straightened and made right.

  Partly he had been raised a gentleman, who would never raise his hand to his wife or any other woman, although the civil rights movement had made him quite aware of the lie of that tradition. Partly he could never imagine wanting to cause Susan physical pain, for she had seemed fragile to him, flowerlike, after all these years still with a flush and bloom on her. A doctor was supposed to heal pain, not willingly and brutally to cause it. He felt a fierce despisal of Alec MacIvor, who used his wife badly and sent her out bruised and weeping, who did not understand that losing a wife was losing your centre, your core, the motive power of your life.

  Candida was settled in the livingroom with ice on her face when Dinah arrived with the curly-headed musician. The phone rang every time Jimmy hung it up. Dinah put her arms around Willie and cried. He was wracked with sobs, he shook, but his eyes would not moisten. After a moment she pulled free of him. She seemed shy about touching him. He guessed she felt guilty too. They had all failed Susan. They had all let Susan lose herself in the pond.

  Dinah was weeping on and off, but she was dashing around, electrified like Jimmy to make things happen. He would have liked better to sit down and mourn together. He did not give a damn about the undertakers or the friends who had them to dinner or people Susan used to work with in the library or the PTA. They would all survive her death just fine. He was bleeding silently and invisibly all of the time.

  Dinah took charge of the memorial service. She went off to her house to work on it. Johnny called, crying on the phone, and promised to come the next day. He had not slept at all. The air felt thick. His body was oversized and heavy. It moved poorly. Dinah made a big fish chowder for everyone from cod Toby brought by. Zee baked a blackberry pie. Leroy dropped off fresh baked bread. Willie realized he had not eaten since supper the night before, except for a piece of stale coffee cake.

  After supper he went upstairs to Susan’s room again and lay on the bed. When he woke up it was lighter, which puzzled him until he realized from the clock and the sun that he had slept from eight in the evening until nine the next morning. Susan was gone. That was why he was in her bed. She was not with him and she would never again be with him. It was permanent, this sense of being gutted like a fish. At first when he stood, he swayed. He felt drugged. He could hardly focus his eyes.

  Downstairs, breakfast was set up, everything clean and put away. Candida was waiting at the table. Her right eye had been blackened and the bruises on her throat were lurid, but she seemed calm. He figured out from her chatter that it was she who had cleaned up the kitchen. Dinah was going with her to her house, to protect her.

  He stayed in the kitchen. He did not know what to do with himself. He did not feel like going to his studio. He felt broken. His work seemed absurd. Why would he want to build a cage with hands sticking out? Susan had called the piece that. She was right. It was meaningless. What was he to do with the half-built garage in the yard? What was he to do with the rest of his life? Susan dying had taken half of himself along. She could not be utterly gone, suddenly, like that. How could he get through a day without her? He had always thought she was the one dependent on him. I can’t go to Minneapolis, he had told Johnny, because Susan doesn’t want to go (nor did Johnny want her to come) and s
he can’t sleep when I’m away. He had thought of Susan as unable to manage without him. He had thought she could not survive in the house, in the woods, without his protection and help. Now he saw he was the one who could not manage alone.

  Dinah appeared and took Candida off with her. Johnny called from Logan to give him her time of arrival in Provincetown. He could not imagine driving, but Jimmy had gone off with Toby to town, so he must fetch his daughter. He was halfway to the airport before he realized that he was looking at a gas gauge on empty and must fill the truck’s tank.

  When Johnny got off the plane and saw him, she started to run. She hurled herself into his arms and burst into tears. When she could speak, she blew her nose and asked, ‘Are you okay, Dad? Are you okay?’

  ‘No,’ he said honestly, but he was feeling a little better being with her. ‘I’m kind of busted.’

  ‘What happened, Dad? How could she drown right in front of the house?’

  ‘She swam all the way to the raft and the way I piece it together – it was after dark – Tyrone was humping Candida MacIvor. Susan must have heard them and tried to swim back. She died from being too damned polite, I guess.’

  ‘Who is Candida MacIvor?’

  ‘You met her at my opening. She’s married to a doctor who beat her up.’

  Johnny shook her head. ‘My friends are dull compared to life here.’

  ‘I liked it when it was dull.’ They were standing in the parking lot. Johnny took the keys from his hand and got into the driver’s side. He took the passenger’s seat gladly. He felt good about being with Johnny because he thought she must feel as guilty as he did. They had both been cut off from Susan, they had both quarrelled with her. An image came to him. He remembered Tosca had got tangled up in a fishing line hung with sharp barbed hooks, and she had simply crouched there and waited to be discovered, not panicking, in a kind of numb abiding despair. He was caught in just such a barbed net that seemed to hurt no matter which way he pulled, but if he waited patiently in his despair Johnny might help him. They were both murderers and victims, they were complicitous and lost. Maybe she would stay for a while.

  She did not take him home but to the Bay, where they parked at the end of a wriggly sand road and walked over the dune and along the pebbled shore. Out on the waves lavender-blue under a huge thickening swirl of rain clouds, terns were diving and streaking away. ‘I can’t believe the last time I’m ever going to see her, she poured tomato juice on me. I know I should have kept my mouth shut. I always used to swear I would, but then she’d get at me, and I’d have to hurt her. And now it’s stuck there.’

  He put his arm around her shoulders. ‘For me it’s stuck with her furious with me, threatening to sell the house in spite. And me hiding in my studio and sulking around, scared to confront her. I was just waiting for her anger to wear itself out, the way it always did. It would have. I know she would have forgiven us all and we would have carried on.’

  ‘She wrote me a letter about how my telling her was for the best and she was sorry she lost her temper. So she was already coming around. What’s happening with a service? Are we getting some minister in a tie and grey suit?’

  ‘Dinah is taking care of a memorial service.’

  ‘Good. Because she’s really family. We have to make it beautiful, for Susan. For us. There shouldn’t be anything we say or do that isn’t real and doesn’t mean something. Nothing at all!’

  He stirred. ‘You’re right. I should talk to Dinah about it.’

  ‘What are you going to do, Dad?’

  ‘I’m kind of empty. I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘Come back to Minneapolis with me. You’ve never been. It’ll be good for you. Why not?’

  ‘Maybe I will.’ It sounded like something to do. He could remember that he had wanted for a long time to visit his daughter. It was a thing he had wanted, back then; it would be nice to look forward to. Maybe what he needed more than anything else was someone in his family to tell him what to do, to give him some mandated activity beyond the funeral.

  ‘I want you to get to know Aldo and see my new work, I really do.’

  ‘Right,’ he said nodding, and from that moment on, he took it as settled.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  LAURIE

  Laurie was proud of herself, the way she packed in under an hour and slipped behind the wheel, ready to go. Loyalty to her father was like a bright fierce rush in her veins, a blast of early invigorating fall air galvanizing her into decisive action. Tyrone was right in his confidence in her and she was proving it. She drove, alert but fast, the radar indicator perched on the dash. Tyrone was deferring the appointments he had in the country, setting up others in the city.

  The night before, when she had come in with Jimmy, her phone had been ringing with Willie almost hysterical. On the door had been a note from Sally asking that she drop by the big house no matter what the time. Jimmy had hurried off to see what had happened at home, and she had slipped off to find Sally and Tyrone waiting for her. The situation with Candida had blown up, and something was clearly wrong with Susan, with Toby Lloyd and Willie screaming all over the pond and now the lights of police cars on that shore. This morning the phone call had arrived as Tyrone was already packed for a strategic retreat to New York. He had turned white. She had not seen him as disturbed since Somoza fell, queering some coffee speculation. His reaction scared her. It was time for them to pull together as a family, for her to show every bit of the strength he had been praising in her. Carefully he watched her to see if she was with him, and she jumped to prove herself. A trap of scandal and potential danger was seeking to close on them, but they would break free.

  Around New Bedford, he caught up with himself and poured them each a cup of coffee from the thermos in the basket Celeste had packed. Sally had stayed behind to field inquiries and problems. Donald was already in the city, dealing with the decorator refurbishing the gallery.

  ‘It’s not as inconvenient as it might have been a week ago,’ Tyrone said. ‘It wouldn’t hurt to put in an appearance at the gallery and have a look-see.’

  The sense of sudden death and scandal mixed was overly familiar. She could not bear it again. But she must. Brave, he had called her. ‘Daddy, do you think she killed herself?’

  ‘Don’t be absurd. She may have gone beyond her depth and her distance. I know she was spying on me. I don’t know what was in her mind. Indeed, whether she imagined she could parlay that knowledge into something she wanted, such as assistance in finding housing in the city, or whether it was simply prurient interest, we’ll never be sure.’

  She didn’t want to believe anything like that of Susan. ‘Couldn’t she just have come upon you by accident?’

  ‘On the raft? I don’t believe it. This is only for your ears. My opinion is that the woman was suffering some sort of menopausal depression, a wild veering to and fro and loss of control.’

  Laurie saw the kitchen dripping with tomato sauce like thick blood. ‘That’s it – a complete loss of control!’

  ‘Exactly.’ Tyrone sighed. ‘It’s a great pity, and I, for one, will miss her. She was like an aunt to you when you were younger. Women sometimes become a little strange, Laurie, in their middle years if they’re unhappy.’

  She suspected he was referring to her mother. She pretended not to understand. Her eyes burned for a moment. She blinked rapidly and thought of Sean Corrigan, of the gallery that was to come on Prince Street, of all Tyrone was risking for her. Others were unreliable: Tom, Susan. ‘What will we do about the funeral?’

  ‘One of us will return for it, of course.’

  She understood she was likely to be sent. ‘But what about Sean Corrigan? He was going to visit us Labor Day weekend.’

  ‘Tranquillity should be restored by then. We can slip back and enjoy a quiet weekend with our guests.’

  ‘You’re more worried about Alec MacIvor than you are about the situation with Willie and Jimmy.’

  ‘I’ve nothing
to be ashamed of with the latter. Alec MacIvor has good reason to be hostile. I’m truly annoyed with myself.’ He screwed his face up, ran a linen handkerchief over his dome. She saw that he was speaking the truth: he was angry with himself. ‘It was a foolish entrapment. Quite, quite over, I promise. You must think your father has faltered this summer, but if I was slipshod in my personal involvements, I was brilliantly aggressive, if I may boast a little, on more important fronts. On the Japanese front, I made a killing, Laurie, giving us the stuff of which the best galleries are made.’

  It was great of him to level with her. They rarely spoke of finances, so this was in the nature of a confidence she truly appreciated. It was just like him to judge himself harshly for a little affair. ‘Daddy, you don’t have to apologize to me about Candida. I liked her. I think she genuinely admired you and cared about you. She was very unhappy and she made herself more than available.’

  ‘Ah, what’s put on your plate, courtesy may force you to taste, but nothing requires you to finish.’

  ‘Besides, Daddy, if Alec has thrown her out, the scandal is over and she’s free.’

  ‘A divorce can be nasty and expensive. I don’t wish to be locked into negotiations between them. But I sincerely doubt one more argument is about to end that marriage. The kindest gift I can give them is to absent myself permanently from their lives … My major concern is the awkwardness of having them for neighbours. No, Laurie, you’re too kind. Getting involved with the wife of a neighbour was inexcusable.’

  ‘Do you think my getting involved with Jimmy was inexcusable?’

  ‘Not in the least. He was an amiable and convenient summer romance. And it’s ended with a minimum of ruckus, hasn’t it?’ He turned sharply to face her, bringing his knee up on the seat.