A Hundred Summers

by Beatriz Williams

  “Drink your water,” he said. “Take your aspirin. Go to sleep.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.” He was firm. He set me away and brought me a glass of water. I drank it, swaying. He refilled it from a pitcher in the icebox. I drank that, too, with a pair of aspirin.

  “See? I’ve been a good girl.”

  “You’ve been a very good girl.” He picked me up and carried me down the hall. My head lolled against his shoulder. Nick’s shoulder, Nick’s arms.

  “Is this the same bedroom as before?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you sleep here?”

  “Yes. But not tonight.” The world swayed as Nick drew back the sheets and deposited me in the bed. It smelled of him, overwhelmingly of Nick.

  “Just like Budgie,” I murmured. “You take care of everyone, don’t you? Even Kiki.”

  He unwrapped the towel from my hair and kissed my forehead. “I’m going to fix this, darling, I promise. I’m going to untangle this mess and make everything right.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to imagine Budgie letting Nick go, releasing him from whatever collar she had placed on him, letting him divorce her and marry me. The image eluded me. What match was Nick, strong and upright and honorable, next to Budgie?

  “I’m sorry, too, Nick. It’s my fault, too. I never fought for you, did I?”

  “You shouldn’t have had to. I should never have doubted you. Now, go to sleep.” He kissed my forehead again, smoothed my hair away, and rose to leave.

  “Nick?”

  “Yes, Lily?”

  “I have to tell you something. I don’t want to hide it. The last night, the Labor Day party. I let Graham . . . in the car . . .”

  “Shh. I know.”

  “You knew?”

  He stood there by the bed, looking down at me with infinite kindness. “I went to find you. Everyone was buzzing about Budgie’s news, and I wanted you to know the truth. They said you’d left the party. I saw Pendleton’s car outside your house, and the lights were off inside. I turned around and went home to pack.”

  I turned on my side, facing him. My eyelids were drifting. “Were you angry?”

  “Angry at you, Lilybird? No.” He went to the door and turned off the light. “I figured I deserved it. Now, go to sleep.”

  I AWOKE, perfectly sober, a few hours later. I lay among the sheets, damp and breathless with heat, and stared at the shadowed white ceiling above. I thought, This isn’t Seaview. Where am I?

  I rolled my head to the window and saw a man’s shape outlined against the faint city glow. A large shape, smoking a cigarette, the light falling on his bare shoulders.

  “Nick?” I whispered.

  “Go back to sleep, Lily,” he said, without turning.

  I swung my legs from the bed and rose. Nick’s robe slipped from my shoulders. I pulled it back up and tightened the sash. The room was dark; I was guided only by the hushed glow in the window, by Nick’s body like a beacon before it. The rain drummed down in waves against the glass.

  I placed one hand on his back. The skin was as smooth as polished granite beneath my touch. “You’re supposed to be sleeping.”

  “Couldn’t sleep.”

  “Then you should have woken me.”

  “Couldn’t do that, either.” He stared out the window, and I realized he was looking at our reflection in the glass.

  “Why not, Nick?”

  He didn’t answer, didn’t even move.

  I let my hand drop to my side. “Nick, what is it? Can’t you simply divorce her? You have plenty of grounds, don’t you?”

  “It isn’t quite so simple, Lily.”

  I moved to his side and propped myself against the ledge, my back to the streaming window. I took the cigarette from his unresisting fingers, smoked it, handed it back. “Nick, why did you marry her, if you didn’t love her? What hold does she have on you?”

  He went on looking out the window until the cigarette was finished. He stubbed it out and reached for the pack on the bureau. “She came to me about a month after I’d moved back to New York. She told me she was going to have a baby, and it was mine.”

  The blood left my fingers. I curled them into cold little claws around the edge of Nick’s windowsill. “Was she telling the truth?”

  “I told her it was impossible. I pointed out that I had worn preventive measures, if she recalled.”

  I shut my mind to the image. “I see.”

  He reached for the ashtray. “She said I was mistaken, that I had been too drunk to remember. I told her that if I was too drunk to remember to put on a rubber, I was too drunk to complete the deed in the first place.”

  I stepped away to find Nick’s cigarettes and lit one for myself with my cold and fluttering fingers. “But presumably she convinced you otherwise?” I asked, leaning back against the bureau.

  “She did not. I knew exactly what had happened that night.” Nick turned around, leaning on the window ledge, and met my gaze. “I also knew she’d been scraping by since her father’s suicide, that last winter of college. I knew, like everyone did, she’d been trying for years to marry her fortune, that she’d put out her lure for just about every likely prospect in New York and parts abroad, without landing her expected fish. I presumed she was now so desperate as to try for the Jew.” He flicked his ash into the tray.

  “Nick . . .”

  “So I told her I wasn’t going to fall for it, that if she needed something to tide her over I’d give it to her, but she could look elsewhere for her meal ticket.” He stared thoughtfully at the opposite wall. “That was when things got interesting.”

  “Oh, I’m interested.”

  “She broke down. She admitted she wasn’t pregnant. She said she was desperate, that my father had been paying her money all these years, and now that he was gone she had nothing to live on.”

  “Your father was paying her money?”

  “So she said. I asked her why. She said it was because he’d gotten her in trouble, that last winter, right before we eloped. He’d seduced her, made her promises; they’d had a brief liaison over the holidays. She said that was why Graham wouldn’t marry her, that she’d been ruined, that she’d had to threaten my father with exposure until he agreed to pay for an abortion and give her an allowance.”

  “My God,” I said. I pressed my fingers against my temples, trying to remember the events of that winter, trying to remember what Budgie had been doing. She’d been there at the New Year’s Eve party, of course, looking irresistible in her shimmering silver lamé. Hadn’t she disagreed with Graham that night? Had I seen them together since? And then her father’s firm had gone down, and he’d shot himself in the head in his study, and I hadn’t even seen Budgie for years, until last May.

  But having an affair with Nick’s father?

  “It’s not possible,” I said. “She wouldn’t have done it. She didn’t even know him, did she?”

  “That’s what I thought. But there she was, crying and carrying on in my office, saying I was her last hope, everyone had abandoned her, she had nothing left.” He crossed his arms against his chest. “I was feeling pretty low myself, with my father gone, with the realization that I’d wasted five years rutting around Paris in self-indulgent misery, getting drunk and making women unhappy, while people were starving and being driven out of their homes. So I told her I’d look into it.”

  “And was she telling the truth?”

  Nick stood there, beautiful as a statue, his chest bare and his face fixed in its familiar ferocity. “I suspected it was just possible. I’d learned a few things about my father since then. It’s funny, you know, how the childhood illusions fall, one by one. I’d learned, for example, that he kept this apartment not for business but for his mistresses.”

  I jumped away from the bureau. “What?”

  “Oh, yes. I felt pretty stupid, once it dawned on me. The champagne in the icebox. The polish of it all. The discreet location, well away from our home and ac
quaintances, so Mother wouldn’t be embarrassed.”

  “And you brought me here. We were going to . . .”

  “Well, we didn’t, did we?”

  “No, we didn’t.” I groped for my cigarette. My fingers shook so violently I could hardly hold it to my lips.

  “So I went through my father’s books, which were a mess, because of course his own firm was having trouble at the time. But then I found his personal accounts, and by God, there it was. A thousand dollars, lump sum, followed by two hundred dollars a month, starting in January of 1932 and lasting until his death a year ago. I was frankly amazed she let him off so cheaply.”

  I closed my eyes. Smoke drifted past my nose, heavy and fragrant in the close air of the bedroom. “Could you open the window a crack?” I asked.

  Nick turned and lifted the latch. “It won’t help,” he said, but he raised the sash anyway, and the sound of the rain filled the room, slapping against the pavement below. He was right, it didn’t help. The air outside was as thick with warmth as Nick’s bedroom, laden with tropical moisture.

  “So,” I said. “Let me finish the story for you. You felt sorry for her. You saw a chance for redemption, for yourself and your father.”

  “I suppose I did. I suppose I was afraid of what she might do if I refused. Tell my mother, expose it to the papers. I thought . . .” He was still facing the window, his fingers spread along the edge. I watched the back of his head, his body made of shadows. The muscles of his arms seemed to tremble, though it might have been a trick of the light. “You’ll think me stupid. I thought I could perhaps save her. That in doing so, I could save myself.”

  I joined him at the window, just behind his elbow, so close I could feel his warmth, the lithe tension radiating from his skin. “Aunt Julie came over that morning, the morning the engagement announcement appeared in the Times. I remember how she slapped it down in front of my breakfast.”

  “What did she say?”

  “I don’t remember. Something sarcastic. I was too upset to listen.”

  “If I had known you cared, even a little . . .”

  “It was all anyone talked about all winter. The papers, everybody. Where would it take place? Who would be invited? What would she wear?” I finished the cigarette and ground it into the ashtray. “Where in the world would you take her on your honeymoon?”

  “Ah, yes,” said Nick. “The honeymoon.”

  “Bermuda, wasn’t it?”

  “Three weeks.” He went to the bureau, lit himself another cigarette, and came back to the window with the rest of the pack, letting the smoke curl from his fingers, under the sash and into the night. “Until then, I’d kept my distance, observed the so-called proprieties. It wasn’t just that I wasn’t in love with her; I couldn’t even accept the idea of her, could hardly bring myself to kiss her, and she took even less interest in me, except when she needed more money. Then it was all tears and affection. I hardly cared. I should have simply broken it off, to hell with noble intentions, but I couldn’t seem to deliver the blow.”

  A car rumbled by, and the deep throat of its engine reminded me of that other long-ago night in this apartment, that other car pulling up on the quiet street beneath this window, and my heart gave a wretched thump.

  “Why not?” I asked, when it seemed as if he might stand there until morning, examining the rain.

  “I don’t know. I suspect, deep down, despite everything, I was hoping I’d got your attention at last, that if I kept up the charade one Lily Dane would burst through my door at some point and throw herself in my arms and tell me not to go through with it. I do know this: a dozen times last winter, I must have started across the park to your apartment, and a dozen times I turned back.”

  “Oh, God, Nick.” I put one hand to my eyes, to shield myself from the sight of him, of Nick’s long back, naked and exposed.

  “So the months all passed, and for whatever damned reason, I found myself standing up next to Budgie in the church that day and saying my vows. I told myself it was the right thing to do, after all my father had put her through, after all the world had put her through. I told myself I could learn to love her, that I had to try at least, to try to redeem us both into decent human beings, for her sake and mine. That after all, she was a legendarily beautiful woman and I was a lucky man to have her in my bed, all to myself.” He paused, and the flick of his lighter scratched the silence, starting another smoke. He continued quietly: “The first night, our wedding night, she was too tired and too drunk. I put her to bed and slept on the hotel room sofa. The second night, on the ship, she was simply too drunk. The third afternoon, before she could start on her fourth martini, I sat her down and said that whatever had happened in the past, we were married now. I wanted to try for a real marriage. I wanted children, a family. I wanted to see if I could make her happy.”

  “Trust me, she told me all about it.”

  “Did she tell you what she said to me?”

  I let my hand drop away from my eyes. “No.”

  He lifted his cigarette. “She told me”—he turned his head away to blow out the smoke, then spoke with precision—“she told me she didn’t want to have my Jew babies.”

  The words fell into the air, stark and ghastly.

  “Oh, Nick! She didn’t!”

  “She told me I was crazy to think she had married me for that. She told me she didn’t love me, could never love me, wasn’t capable of love. She told me a few other things, which would make your toes curl, which I’ll take to my grave.”

  I put my hand on his arm and waited for him to continue. My eyes were blurry with tears.

  “I thought at first she was drunk, or that she was just striking out at me, that she didn’t mean it. I turned around and walked out. For two days we didn’t speak. I was waiting for her to sober up. When we reached Bermuda, I took another room. At last she knocked on my door and sat down on the bed and said it was time to discuss terms.”

  “What sort of terms?” My voice had turned to sand. I badly needed another smoke, but I didn’t want to take my hand from his arm, didn’t want to disturb the thread of contact between us.

  “As she said before, she didn’t want children from me. That was the main thing. She said it wasn’t anything personal, she found me attractive enough, but she’d been brought up to believe in pure bloodlines, and I was a mongrel. She used that word. She said if I wanted to raise children, she would be happy to select a mutually acceptable candidate to impregnate her, or vice versa, if I insisted upon a child of my own blood.”

  “My God.”

  “She said she was surprised at my middle-class notions of marriage, that she saw no reason to make a fuss about love and fidelity. She said she was more than willing to go to bed with me, so long as I took steps to prevent conception and didn’t expect her to be faithful. If I wanted to go elsewhere in turn, that was fine with her, so long as I was discreet. She said she would do her part as a wife, organize the household and so on, so long as I provided for her generously, clothes and jewelry and all that. She said she would give parties with me, and display an appropriate wifely affection, and flirt with clients as necessary. Then she poured a drink and crossed her legs and asked me what I thought.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I told her I wanted a divorce.”

  My legs began to sag under the weight of it all. I had imagined many things, but not this. That Budgie would say such things to Nick, to my Nick, to my beautiful Nick, his shoulders so straight and unbending, his eyes so keen and warm. I thought of the patient hours he spent with Kiki, explaining his blueprints, teaching her to sail, and I wept. I lowered myself along the wall and leaned against it, kneeling, one hand at my eyes and the other wrapped loosely around Nick’s cotton pajama leg.

  He put his hand gently on my head, stroking my hair. “It’s all right, Lily. Don’t cry.”

  “But she didn’t let you go, did she? She wouldn’t.”

  “No, she didn’t.”

 
“What did she say?”

  “Lilybird,” he said, “it doesn’t matter. She convinced me, that’s all. In the end, I told her I’d go along with it for the time being. I’d play the willing husband, I’d go to Seaview with her. I thought, at least I’ll get to see you. At least I’d get to meet Kiki.”

  “You wanted to meet her?”

  “Very much. More than I can say.”

  “She loves you so much, Nick. I knew everybody disapproved, but when I saw how you were together, how could I stand in the way? She needed that so desperately, a man to look up to. Every girl does.” My hand ran along his leg, up and down, testing the curving muscle, the flat, solid bones of him. I couldn’t embrace Nick—Nick, who was married to Budgie—but I could embrace one single leg. “I thought, if I can’t have him, at least Kiki can.”

  “You don’t know what it’s meant to me. She was the one good thing, all summer.” Nick’s voice disappeared into the window glass. His hand still moved in my hair, gentle as a hummingbird.

  My eyes were accustomed to the darkness. I stared at the shapes of the furniture around us, the bureau and the bed and the armchair in the corner. They seemed different from the ones I remembered, less sharp, but I couldn’t be sure. A clock ticked away on the bedside table, nearly lost in the drum of rain. I strained to see the face, but it was too far away. We were suspended somewhere in the middle of the night, detached from the march of hours and minutes.

  “Can you fix it?” I asked. “Will she let you go?”

  “That’s not the question. The question is whether I’m willing to pay the price of freedom. No, that’s not it, either. I can bear whatever I have to bear. It’s the price that others will pay.”

  “I don’t understand. What did she tell you? What does she have over you? Your father?”

  “Lily, sweetheart, it’s not my story to tell.”

  “You can tell me. You can tell me anything.” I struggled upward to stand next to him. “I don’t care what the price is. Some scandal? I’ll bear anything. Do you hear me? If she won’t give you a divorce, we’ll live without it. If she wants your money, she can have it all. I don’t care. I’m past caring. I only want you.”