A Hundred Summers

by Beatriz Williams

  “I mean he’s going to lose everything. He’s been clinging on, ever since the crash, but he can’t hold the house of cards together any longer. He’s done for. Finished.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says Peter, who as you know is not given to hyperbole or false rumor.” She delivers this triumphantly, and so she should. Peter van der Wahl is the soul of discretion, the model of ancien régime Knickerbocker manhood. I would expect nothing less than that he remain on friendly and confidential terms with his ex-wife, passing on cautionary hints about her niece’s admirers.

  The shock of this information passes through my body in sharp pulses. “I don’t care about Mr. Greenwald’s money. I’ve never even thought about it. Anyway, Nick isn’t planning on joining his father’s business. He’s going to be independent, an architect.”

  “An architect?” Aunt Julie hoots. “Oh, the young. That’s charming. An architect. And you’re going to live on this, the two of you?”

  “I don’t know. We haven’t discussed it. But I don’t care about money. I’d rather live in a hovel than marry a man for his money.”

  “Well, that’s a fine sentiment, my dear. A noble ambition. I applaud you.” She claps her hands. “Love is enough for you, then? Enough to make up for material comfort, for the good opinion of your family and friends, for your poor father’s good health . . .”

  “Do not,” I say tightly, “do not throw Daddy’s condition at me. He’ll love Nick, I’m sure. He doesn’t share your close-mindedness.”

  “You know he can’t stand a shock like that.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  The front door opens and closes with a slam. A group of girls swarms the room, laughing and chattering like birds, throwing off their hoods. They take turns signing in, while Aunt Julie and I sit rigidly on the sofa, staring each other down. Nick’s tender words jumble together in my brain. I can still feel the outline of his hand on my breast, each individual finger mapped out against my heart.

  The girls are too wound up for bed. They settle on the sofa and chairs around us. One of them recognizes me. “Oh, hello, Lily! I thought you were still out with Nick.”

  “No, he’s headed back to Hanover.”

  “Poor thing, on these frozen roads. He must be crazy about you.”

  I introduce her to my aunt, trade a few more pleasantries.

  “Look,” says Aunt Julie, rising, “I must be on my way. I only stopped off for a bit.”

  “Must you go?” My voice is exactly as false and bright as I intended.

  “Look, don’t weep, will you? You know how I despise sentiment.” She kisses my cheeks. “Think about what I said. You’re in a cloud, darling, the la-di-da of love, but believe me, the cloud lifts after a while, and then what? You’ve still got a life to live.”

  “But it’s different with us.”

  She waves her hand. “It’s always different, isn’t it, until it turns out to be just the same. Oh, well. I tried, didn’t I? I’ll be fascinated to see how all this turns out. I’ll have a front-row seat, too. Lucky me. No, don’t walk me out. I know where I’m going.”

  She’s gone in a waft of perfume and powder, and I make my way upstairs to my single room with its narrow, neatly made bed. I’m half expecting Budgie to be lying there, eager for debriefing, as she is most Sundays, but the space is empty.

  Budgie already knows all she needs to know.

  8.

  SEAVIEW, RHODE ISLAND

  July 4, 1938

  For more than a hundred years, the Independence Day celebration had propped up the sagging middle of the Seaview summer like a giant red-white-and-blue tent pole.

  Not that it had been much of a summer so far. After those fine few days at the end of May, June slid into a waterlogged stupor, sticky and rainy, forcing us indoors for endless rounds of bridge and mah-jongg. Mrs. Hubert began organizing gin-fueled charades in the Seaview clubhouse as a desperate measure, to mixed success. By the time July rolled around, that summer of 1938, we were ready for excitement.

  Every year, the ladies of the Seaview Association spent weeks in careful preparation for the Fourth. In the morning, we held a small but enthusiastic parade down Neck Lane to the old battery, where the Dane family—according to ancient Seaview tradition—lit off a miniature ceremonial cannon wheeled over from our garden shed. When Daddy was away at the war, I had taken over this duty, learning to clean and prepare the gun, to prime and load it, to fire it off. After his return, I had quietly kept on, and everybody had quietly understood.

  The firing of the gun signaled the start of the Fourth of July picnic on the beach. In earlier years, the picnic had been a chaotic affair of rampaging children and firecracker ambushes, interspersed with fried chicken and potato salad. Now, with the children grown up and failing to replace themselves on the Seaview sands, the picnic had taken on an incurable somnolence, all gray hair and long skirts, not a firecracker in sight.

  “Isn’t it peaceful?” Mrs. Hubert leaned back on her elbows, exposing a perilous length of bone-thin calf to the hazy sun.

  “Peaceful? It’s a goddamned crypt,” said Aunt Julie. “And worse every year. I seem to remember a great many more firecrackers, when everyone was younger. Pass me another deviled egg, will you, Lily? At least those have a little paprika.”

  I checked the picnic hamper. “They’re finished, Aunt Julie.”

  “Hell. Cigarettes, then.”

  I passed her the cigarettes and lighter and leaned back against the blanket. The air followed me, heavy and hot. “Thunderstorms again this afternoon, I’ll bet,” I said.

  “Oh, the thrill of it.” Aunt Julie lit her cigarette with a few quick flicks of the lighter. A magazine lay across her lap, opened to a page of glossy fashion models. “I’m almost tempted to take up old Dalrymple’s offer of Monte Carlo. Just as hot, probably, but at least one’s entertained in Monte. I . . .” A delicate pause, fragrant with smoke. “Well, well. On the other hand.”

  I closed my eyes. “What is it?”

  “Don’t look now, darling, but I think the afternoon’s entertainment has arrived at last.”

  Before I could open my mouth, Kiki landed atop me in an explosion of sand. “Lily! Lily! Mr. Greenwald’s here! May I go over and say hello? Please?”

  My face was flecked with sand. I brushed it off my cheeks, my lips, my hair.

  “Well, Lily? What do you think?” said Aunt Julie. “May the child say hello to Mr. Greenwald?”

  I looked over at Mrs. Hubert for reinforcement, but she had fallen asleep beneath her straw hat and was beginning to snore.

  “I don’t think we should bother them, sweetheart, if they’ve just arrived.”

  “But he’s waving, Lily.”

  “Yes, Lily.” Aunt Julie drew on her cigarette. “He’s waving.”

  Kiki propped herself up on my chest and looked into my eyes. “Please, Lily. He’s so nice. And he makes the best sand castles.”

  What could I say? Nick Greenwald was nice to Kiki, when he was around at all. Most of the husbands who still worked in New York would take the train up on Wednesday or Thursday and return to the city late on Sunday; Nick rarely appeared in public before Saturday morning, and stayed only long enough to escort Budgie to dinner on Saturday night. You could catch sight of him at the house during the weekend, dressed in old clothes and striding about with blueprints and hammers, or else on the beach, between thunderstorms, carrying Budgie’s umbrella and blanket and accepting her caresses with easy intimacy.

  Though I saw Budgie often during the week, I’d managed to avoid them both on weekends. The rest of Seaview assisted me in this project, by unspoken collusion, until I began to suspect the existence of a secret board-level Committee to Isolate the Jews, chaired by Mrs. Hubert herself. If the Greenwalds made an appearance anywhere, I’d be instantly invited to sit with one family or another, or asked for walks along the beach, or brought into the armed fortress of the club for drinks and bridge, where the Greenwalds never f
ollowed. At dinner on Saturday, if I ran into Nick and Budgie, I had time to exchange no more than a few words before someone would swoop down with an urgent consultation on the recent addition of crêpes suzette to the club menu (Mrs. Hubert considered all flaming desserts vulgar), or else the name of that fellow who wrote The Mill on the Floss.

  But Kiki slipped beneath all these barriers. She had liked Nick Greenwald from the beginning, and when I would return from an examination of horseshoe crabs with Miss Florence Langley, or bridge with the Palmers, I’d inevitably find Kiki building a sand castle with Nick’s assistance, or out on the bay while he taught her to sail, or playing cat’s cradle with her tiny hands matched against his enormous ones, or trading sketches on cocktail napkins, while the other club members watched in horror and Budgie looked on in amused tolerance from behind a novel or a magazine or a glass of something stronger.

  She would glance up at my arrival. “Here she is, Lily! Look at the two of them. It’s uncanny, don’t you think?”

  Nick would stand and give Kiki a nudge, and tell her to go along with her sister, now; and Kiki, who obeyed only me, and that only on occasion, would obey him the way an acolyte obeys his bishop.

  So when I looked into Kiki’s pleading eyes that Independence Day afternoon, I knew there was no way I could stop her, really.

  “Go ahead, darling,” I said. “But mind your manners, and don’t interrupt if they’d rather be alone.”

  Kiki kissed both my cheeks with her damp lips. “Thank you, Lily!”

  She scampered off, and I stood up and dusted off my dress and face and put my hat back on, without sparing a glance at the cozy domesticity of the Greenwald picnic. I hardly needed to, anyway. A vacuum passed over the beach, as the Seaview Association caught sight of the newcomers and gasped in unanimous disapproval. If I could count on nothing else, I could count on a close watch being kept on the Greenwalds.

  The shadow of the umbrella was beginning to shift with the sun; I adjusted it to cover Mrs. Hubert and sat back down, fully exposed. To the southwest, above the mainland, a bank of cumulonimbus built toward the heavens. “Should we clean up, do you think?” I asked.

  “Clean up?” Aunt Julie turned the page of her magazine, cigarette dangling elegantly from her fingers. “Don’t you see the party’s just begun?”

  I cast my eyes about the lugubrious beach. “How do you mean?”

  “I mean, you oblivious child, that Budgie of yours has another trick up her darling little sleeve today, and he’s heading straight over.” She stubbed out her cigarette in the sand and fluffed her hair. “How do I look?”

  A shadow fell across my legs.

  “Why, Lily Dane! As I live and breathe!”

  I shaded my eyes with my arm and looked up into the smiling sun-bathed face of Graham Pendleton.

  “Graham!” I leaped to my feet.

  He grasped my outstretched hand with both of his. “Budgie told me you’d be here today, but I hardly dared to hope. It’s been, my God, how many years? Five? Six?”

  “Nearly seven.” I couldn’t stop smiling at him. He was almost laughing, his blue eyes grinning, his mouth wide. He looked the same as ever, except a little more weathered, a little more sculpted; his handsomeness hadn’t dimmed a fraction. His hair, streaked with sunshine despite the poor weather, flopped lazily into his forehead beneath his worn straw boater. I felt an absurd rush of gladness to see him, an inexplicable lunge of my soul toward the old and familiar.

  “How have you been?” he asked.

  “Awfully busy. And you? Something about baseball, isn’t it?”

  “That’s it.” Graham cast a look of friendly inquiry at Aunt Julie. “You don’t mind if I join you a moment?”

  “Please do,” said Aunt Julie, holding out a scarlet-tipped hand without bothering to rise. “I’m Julie van der Wahl, Lily’s old and dilapidated aunt.”

  Graham bent over her hand and kissed it. “I don’t believe a word you say.”

  “It’s true,” I said. “She’s very old, and divorced, and she rackets around from scandal to scandal, collecting and discarding unsuitable lovers. Avoid her at all costs, is my advice.”

  Graham plopped down between us on the blanket, keeping clear of Mrs. Hubert’s sleeping length. “I don’t know. She sounds like my kind of girl.”

  “I like this fellow, Lily,” said Aunt Julie. “Ask him if he wants a cigarette.”

  “Would you like a cigarette, Graham?”

  He laughed. “Thanks, I’ve got my own. You don’t mind?”

  “Go ahead.” I glanced over my shoulder, where Kiki directed Nick in the construction of a yawning moat around her castle. Budgie was reading a novel from behind a pair of large, round tinted glasses, apparently unaware of the gimlet eyes of the Seaview Association trained upon her. I turned back to the ocean and Graham Pendleton. “In fact, I think I’ll join you.”

  He pulled out his cigarettes from his shirt pocket and handed me one and lit it for me, right between my lips, which I’d colored before we left with a brand-new tube of Dorothy Gray Daredevil. “Thanks,” I said, blowing out the smoke in a long and irregular curl.

  “You’re welcome. I saw your mother in the clubhouse, playing bridge. I don’t think she recognized me.”

  “Lily’s mother doesn’t recognize anybody when she’s playing bridge,” said Aunt Julie.

  “Well, she told me where to find you, anyway. I can’t believe the old place still looks the same. Look, there. The exact same rocks on which I brought that old sailboat to a bad end.” He pointed out past the jetty to the rock outcropping that protected the Seaview sunbathers from the gazes of the vacationers on the public beach, farther up. “I was trying to impress my passenger and ended up weathering too close.”

  “I remember. Budgie wasn’t so impressed.”

  Graham laughed. “No, she wasn’t.”

  “But I see there are no hard feelings.” I nod over my shoulder. “She’s even asked you back.”

  “Oh, Budgie? No, I’m not staying with her. I’m with my cousins again. You know the Palmers, don’t you? Yes, of course you do. They heard I was laid up for a few months with this lousy old shoulder of mine and offered to put me up for a bit.” He reached back and rubbed his right shoulder.

  “Oh, the Palmers! Of course. I simply assumed, because . . .”

  Graham laughed again. “Well, it would be a little awkward, wouldn’t it? But I phoned up Nick and Budgie and warned them I’d be down. Be good to see what they’re up to these days, really. Both of them.” He stared out at the oily heave of the ocean. “That one set me back on my heels a bit, I’ll tell you. Nick and Budgie. Never would have put them together.”

  “The heart has its reasons,” said Aunt Julie.

  “They certainly seem very happy together,” I said. “But what’s all this about baseball? I’m sure I heard something, not that long ago. . . .”

  “I’m relief pitching for the Yankees these days,” said Graham, brushing away a speck of sand from his flannels.

  “The Yankees! That’s very good, isn’t it?”

  “Very good,” said Aunt Julie. “How do you like it?”

  “It’s all right,” said Graham. “My father’s come around, anyway. He belongs to the age of the gentleman sportsman, can’t quite wrap his mind around the idea of playing baseball for filthy lucre.” He knocked the ash from his cigarette. “But I told him I was a damned sight happier throwing baseballs all day than sitting around in an office, counting up columns in a ledger.”

  “I suppose it helps that you’re so good at it,” said Aunt Julie.

  “Is he really?” I looked at Graham. He’d always been a natural athlete, of course, but I’d never really followed sports at all, certainly not after college. I had no idea who was who, other than Babe Ruth, and that bad-mannered fellow Aunt Julie used to sneak around with, what was his name, somebody Cobb, or Cobb somebody.

  “Well,” said Graham modestly.

  “He’s the best relief pitch
er in baseball,” said Aunt Julie. “A living legend. I understand you even have your own brand of cigarettes, don’t you, Mr. Pendleton?”

  “Please, it’s Graham. Anyway, they’re lousy cigarettes. I don’t recommend you try them.”

  “How exciting!” I said. “Tell me more. What’s a relief pitcher?”

  “It means I come in to pitch after the starter’s done for the day.” He smiled at me indulgently.

  “The starter?”

  “The one who starts off the game, Lily. Pitches until he gets tired, or else lets us get too far behind.”

  “Oh, really! So are you hoping to be made the starter one day?”

  “No, no.” Again, the indulgent smile. “I’m happy where I am, actually. I like the pressure. Do or die, hero of the day, white knight riding up on his charger and all that.”

  I poked at the sand with my toe, trying to think of another question. “Do you still play any football?”

  “I think Joe would kill me.”

  “Joe?”

  “McCarthy. Team manager. My boss.” Graham stubbed out his cigarette in the sand. “But enough about all that. Tell me about you, Lily. I always expected big things from that brain of yours.”

  “I keep myself busy. There’s my sister to look after, for one thing.” I turned around to look for Kiki, but she and Nick were gone, leaving only Budgie and her novel, and her red toes digging into the sand just outside the shelter of her umbrella. “I think she’s gone off with Nick somewhere. Looking for shells, probably.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Graham. “The famous Kiki.”

  “Infamous,” said Aunt Julie.

  “I’m sorry to say that she seems to be taking after her aunt,” I said. “Just a moment while I look for her.” I lurched to my feet and shaded my eyes to look up and down the beach. A trickle of sweat crept down my back, in the gap between the hollow of my spine and the pale cotton of my dress. No sign of them. I put the remains of my cigarette to my nervous lips.

  Graham appeared at my elbow. “Do they run off like this often?”