I made a face. “I’m freaking out. What am I doing? Why am I here?”
“Breathe. You’ve been there literally two seconds.”
“What if I don’t make any friends? How did you make friends at coding camp? We haven’t met new people since we were six!”
Niko frowned. “Who did we meet at six?”
“It was an arbitrary number.”
“Anisha moved to South Hadley when we were twelve, so maybe she’s our newest friend.”
“Nikoooo.”
“Okay.” Niko put on her serious face. “Think of this like college practice. You’re going to meet people, and you can be whoever you want—you can reinvent yourself, too. Focus on more than your grandma, because you’re seventeen, not seventy. Go crazy. Be bold. What’s your dad say? Have some chutzpah!”
“My dad is literally the dorkiest person alive.”
“I love your dad. Remember how excited he was when you let him chaperone the aquarium trip?”
“Don’t remind me.”
“He loved the tiny penguins so much. I’ve never seen anything so pure.”
I felt better by the time we hung up. So I’d sent myself to an island thirty miles off the coast where I didn’t know anyone. But no panicking. I had video calls and deep breathing and towels.
At a little past nine, the door flew open and a girl blew in, a tangle of tiny black braids and flour dusting her shirt. She had double-pierced ears and dark skin and three inches on me. She stopped abruptly. “Hi.”
“Hi!” I bolted upright. “You must be Jane.”
“Yeah. You’re Abigail?”
“Abby.”
“Cool. You’re working at the Prose Garden, right?” She tore off her T-shirt and pulled on a red top. “Sorry I’m a mess, I just finished my shift.”
“Oh? Where?”
“My aunt’s bakery.” She turned to the mirror and swept two perfect winged lines on her lids. “I’ve come up the last two summers to help, and also to avoid my brothers and sisters. Thank god Mrs. Henderson has this room for rent. I’m from Rhode Island. You?”
“South Hadley—it’s in western Mass—”
“Yeah, nice, I’m thinking about applying to Smith.” She straightened. “Okay, sorry to rush in and out, but I have to run.”
“Oh.” I tried not to wilt. Last thing I wanted was for my roommate to think I was clingy. “Nice to meet you.”
She hesitated. A space hung between us, charged with risk and potential. I was an unknown quantity, overeager and possibly too much effort. She had a life and friends and plans and no responsibility toward a stranger.
Yet she offered me a kindness anyway. “You want to come? I’m meeting my friends on the beach. There’ll be a bonfire.”
Relief and gratitude pooled through me. The anxiety wrapping around me all evening began to unspool. “I’d love to.”
* * *
The setting sun dyed the sky royal blue as we walked out of town, down North Beach Street and Bathing Beach Road. Sand edged the pavement, cropping up beneath the patchy grass. “So, how’d your aunt end up on Nantucket?” I asked my new roommate. “Did she just decide to open a bakery here?”
Jane laughed. “God, no. We’re from here.”
“Seriously? That’s so cool.”
“Yeah, there’s a decent Azores and Portuguese population on Nantucket. It’s the same latitude, you know, so traders crossed back and forth a lot.” She pointed to the globes of blue blossoms I’d already noticed all over the island. “They say the hydrangeas here were actually originally brought from the Azores, which is between Nantucket and Portugal. It’s the first land you hit if you sail east.”
Eventually the road opened up to the beach parking lot, and we crossed to the sands, the water beyond dark and endless. The moon hung low in the sky, half-full and butter yellow. We kicked off our sandals, and tiny grains of sand scraped at my feet. Jane led us past clusters of people until we reached a bonfire with kids our age gathered around it, drinking from red Solo cups. They wore cable-knit sweaters and striped shirts and Nantucket-red shorts, and their laughter mingled with the scratch of the low-tide against hard sand.
Jane wove her way through the crowd and I followed in her wake. I’d thought teen beach parties only existed in movies, but the scene fit into my heart like a puzzle piece snapping into place. Summer nights were meant for this: toes burrowed in the sand, waves crashing, the scent of salt and seaweed and burning wood. Be bold.
“Want a beer?” Jane handed me a plastic cup.
Right. Alcohol. Cool cool. I was a teen and we drank alcohol. Fine, I didn’t because my friends and I tended toward sleepovers featuring She’s the Man and homemade brownie sundaes. Also, what if I turned into a weepy drunk who sat in a corner and cried?
But. Screw being the boring girl next door. Screw following rules. Screw Matt—or not, because he’d dumped me.
The problem with your generation, Mom always said, is you’re too rule-abiding. In her own youth, Mom had made a career of not following rules. I had the insane urge to send her a picture of me, beer in hand, but came to my senses. She’d probably meant for my generation to get better at civil disobedience, not getting drunk at the beach.
Whatever.
I took a gulp of the pale amber liquid and almost spit it out. Wow. Okay. Screw beer, too.
“This is Abby.” Jane pulled me toward a trio. She nodded at a short white girl with fashionable glasses and a leather jacket. “Lexi, my old roommate, who abandoned me.”
“Don’t hate me,” Lexi said, an uncomfortable amount of earnestness underlying her wry tone.
“I suppose you had a good reason. Is Stella here yet?”
“She gets in tomorrow.”
Jane waved her cup at the others in the circle: a Black boy in pale green plaid and khakis, and a South Asian guy. “Evan’s from Boston and our token rich kid. Pranav’s from London and is an intern at an architecture firm.”
Both boys nodded at me.
“Hi.” I clutched my Solo cup like a safety blanket. My friends and I shared the same jagged edges, fitting together like broken pottery. What should I do here? Wrap myself in gauze so I didn’t cut anyone, or would I then be so blunted I had no shape at all?
I took another sip of beer. It still tasted terrible. Oh well.
Maybe the alcohol chilled me out, though, or maybe Jane’s friends were the best, because within five minutes they’d absorbed me into the group, and we were ears deep in an intense debate: If you were leaving Earth and could only take three cheeses on your spaceship, what would they be?
“Mozzarella,” Jane said decisively. “You can’t make pizza without mozzarella.”
“Sharp cheddar,” her old roommate, Lexi, said. “And maybe Brie or Camembert. But I also could see a good parmesan being helpful.”
“What about American?” Evan said.
Jane stared at him. “Are you kidding me? You can only take three cheeses to eat forever, and you’d include American?”
“I like American!”
“It depends what else you’re bringing,” Pranav said diplomatically. “Also, paneer.”
“It’s true, Brie might be dumb if you don’t have baguettes,” Lexi said.
“You definitely can’t have baguettes,” Evan said. “It’s space! Crumbs!”
“Does cream cheese count as a cheese?” I ventured. “Because I don’t want to say goodbye to bagels forever.”
The group looked at me with consternation, and for a second I was sorry I’d spoken, sure I’d said something horribly embarrassing.
“Oh man,” Lexi said after a moment. “I didn’t even consider cream cheese.”
“Good point,” Evan said gravely. “And sticky buns have cream cheese frosting.”
“If we’re going to space, we’re not going to have time
for sticky buns,” Jane protested.
“Sticky buns give me joy, Jane,” Evan said. “Do you want to deny me joy?”
Slowly, I relaxed, until I was laughing with the rest, laughing and teasing and feeling like a member of the group, and happy, for the first time all day, to be here.
“So you study architecture,” I said to Pranav later, once I’d reached the bottom of my Solo cup. “Do you know about the houses on the island?”
Pranav shrugged. Inane to think he was fancy because he had an accent to die for, but I wasn’t evolved enough to think otherwise yet. “The important ones.”
Lexi rolled her eyes. “You’re so pretentious.”
I plunged onward. “Have you heard of Golden Doors?”
“Yeah. It’s a great example of Federal architecture. Gorgeous. Built in the mid-1800s, before all the rules.”
“Rules?”
“Height limits and materials and stuff,” Pranav said. “The entire island’s a National Historic Landmark District, but Golden Doors was built way before then.”
“The Barbanels are one of the super-wealthy island families,” Jane told me. “Actual islanders, not like the recent blow-ins. They’re also Portuguese! Sort of.”
I cocked my head.
“I mean, they’re Jewish. But a Portuguese sort of Jewish.”
My attention sharpened. I hadn’t realized the Barbanels were Jewish; I wouldn’t have expected a Jewish family to summer on Nantucket. Though what did I know of the extraordinarily wealthy? They could summer wherever they wanted. As for Portuguese—“Sephardic?”
“What?”
“Oh. It’s what you call Jews from Spain or Portugal.” Though they’d been kicked out during the Inquisition. My own family was Ashkenazi—descended from Jews who’d settled in France and Germany around the eleventh century.
“Cool.” Jane turned a high-wattage smile back on Pranav. “Pranav’s right, their house is stunning. They open it up for tours once or twice a year.”
Lexi nodded. “I actually have a gig there tomorrow.”
I swiveled in her direction. “What kind of gig?”
“Catering. They’re having a ‘start of summer’ party.” She shook her head at Evan. “Rich people are weird.”
“I plead the fifth.”
“Do any of you know them?” I asked the group. “Edward Barbanel and his family?”
Jane gave me an odd look, and I realized the others were, too. I’d come off too intense. “Why so interested?” my new roommate asked.
Evan smirked. “Noah?”
I hesitated. I didn’t know these people. They might think it was super weird, me coming to Nantucket to dig into my grandmother’s connection with the Barbanels. Also, a large part of me wanted to hold the reason close, like a dragon guarding its hoard. To change the subject by saying, Who’s Noah?
But how would I find out anything if I didn’t talk to people? What kind of historian didn’t do interviews? “I think my grandmother visited Golden Doors decades ago. She died recently and we don’t know much about her past, so I’m trying to find out more.”
“Did she know the Barbanels?” Evan asked.
“I’m not sure. I think—” I hesitated. “I think she knew Edward. They wrote letters.”
“What kind of letters?” Jane asked.
Pranav smirked. “Love letters?”
I looked at my feet.
“No,” Jane exclaimed happily, and everyone else looked properly interested. “Are you serious?”
“I think so.”
“What are you planning to do?”
“I figure I’ll check out the house, just to see it—I saw those garden tours online. Maybe talk to Edward Barbanel.”
“You should go with Lexi tomorrow,” Jane said. “Get the lay of the land.”
“I don’t want to impose—” I said, hating myself for sounding stiff and timid even as the words left my mouth. “I mean, I do, but—”
“You should,” Lexi said, her brows slightly raised. “Ms. Wilson is always willing to hire more hands. And honestly, I’m all for shaking up some bougie rich people.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I won’t be trouble or anything.”
“You’re only invited because I hope you will be,” Lexi said, cracking a smile. “We feed on drama.”
“Cheers to that,” Pranav said, and we all laughed and lifted our plastic cups.
So the next day, I headed to Golden Doors.
Three
Lexi picked me up at five, in a Jeep crammed with other kids from the catering company. I squeezed in the back, wearing black shorts and a white top like the others, and let their music and conversation wash over me as they gossiped casually about people I didn’t know.
As the elevation climbed, the houses grew farther apart. Hydrangea bushes, with their globes of tiny flowers, blossomed everywhere, beneath shady trees, over white fences, climbing up trellises. Sea views dipped in and out of sight, the water sparkling like diamonds. I draped my arm out the window and turned my face up to soak in the late-June heat.
We passed rolling green fields, our view of the ocean now almost unbroken, a line of ever-present blue beneath the constant sky. Only giant mansions, with colonnaded porches and drives made of crushed white shells, interfered. Eventually, we turned down an unpaved lane.
And Golden Doors came into sight.
The pictures I’d seen hadn’t captured the grandiosity. The house was sprawling and elegant, all gray cedar shingle and peaked roofs and gables and chimneys. Two dozen windows were set on the side facing us alone. A veranda circled the first story, while balconies dotted the second. A widow’s walk crowned one branch of the house.
“It’s a lot,” I said.
“Twenty-five million dollars,” the girl next to me said. “Not that they’d ever sell.”
Wow. It was nice, but not that nice.
“It’s not just for the house,” a boy added, when he saw my face. “It’s also the land.”
At first I didn’t get it, but then, as we drove around the side of the house to the parking area, I did.
The land.
While everyone else bustled about, I stood still. Exquisite lawns and gardens spread behind the house, until the earth dropped away, falling toward the shore and sea itself.
Just as I’d known it would. I knew the gardens E had written of, and the ocean he’d painted. Past the manicured hedges and neatly planted flowers lay a rose garden and a gazebo, and riotous hydrangeas tumbling down dunes to the beach. A shiver cut through me—of recognition, or foreboding. Maybe I’d trespassed too far.
“Come on, Abby,” Lexi said. “Let’s find Ms. Wilson.”
Too late now.
She led me across the lawn, where people raised white tents and strung up fairy lights. Tablecloths billowed in the air before landing on folding tables, where bouquets were then placed at intervals. A clump of workers set up a sound system, and behind them, a woman consulted a clipboard: Lindsey Wilson, who ran the catering company.
We’d spoken on the phone this morning, and she greeted me briskly. “The Barbanel parties are always easy,” she said as I scrawled my signature across several forms. “But they’re a private family, so don’t poke around.”
Lexi smirked.
We moved trays of food from the catering trucks to tables and fridges. Trays of sharp Manchego and soft Port Salut; tiers of strawberries and pineapple and cantaloupe; watermelon and feta with sprigs of mint; asparagus and snap pea salad; bowls of olives and of hummus and of baba ghanoush; Brie baked in dough with fig jam.
I caught glimpses of the house, since the party would extend from lawn to living room. Glass light fixtures hung from the high ceilings, and sand-colored curtains framed French doors. The armchairs and sofas were upholstered in cool blues and off-whites to match the low ta
bles. A painting of the beach hung above one fireplace; a gilded mirror above another. Potted plants and fresh cut flowers filled corners. A row of books spanned both mantelpieces.
“There’s the current CEO.” Lexi nodded at a middle-aged couple standing in the center of the yard, talking to Ms. Wilson. “Harry Barbanel and his wife.”
Harry, son of Edward, and Helen Danziger, the wealthy woman he’d married the same year he told my grandmother he loved her. Harry had lots of hair (Dad would be jealous) and dressed in Nantucket reds (known as salmon to the rest of the world). His wife wore a shiny jacket and constant smile. They looked like they belonged in a magazine.
They couldn’t have been more different from the adults in my parents’ circle, who had an argumentative, unpredictable, hippie vibe. Often, I’d wind up in a debate, and whenever I felt about to win, they’d pivot and say, “Have you considered being a rabbi? You’d make a good rabbi, you’re good at arguing. You should come to shul more,” and suddenly I’d be politely rejecting letting them plan my career trajectory (“But why don’t you want to be a rabbi?”). Then we wouldn’t be talking about me at all, but the new young rabbi at temple who had given such a good sermon on elder orphans, but Joan’s neighbor didn’t like her because she was too progressive, and also did anyone know if the rabbi had a partner? Susan’s daughter might be a lesbian and probably they should get married.
I knew how to deal with my parents’ friends. I doubted the same methods would work on the Barbanels.
At seven, guests started arriving in droves. People in white linen pants and monochrome outfits stood in loose circles, stemless wine glasses dangling from their fingers. I circled the crowd with a tray of champagne flutes, unease curling in my stomach. Had O’ma really spent any time here? Had she laughed and tilted her head like these women? Had she stood on this lawn in an hourglass dress, her hair in curls like a character out of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel? The letters had made it sound like she’d spent plenty of time here, but I couldn’t imagine it. Maybe she hadn’t visited during these parties, or maybe she’d been staff, like me.
The Summer of Lost Letters Page 3