Guests of August

by Gloria Goldreich

  They deeded the New Hampshire house, fully furnished, to their son’s wife and their grandson in a revocable trust. An arrangement was made for an allowance. It was a generous offer and one Wendy did not refuse. Nor did she refuse their request that they would all come together in August in the neutral setting of Mount Haven Inn. She would have agreed to anything during those first sorrow-seared days, and she was grateful, truly grateful for their generosity.

  But now, at last, she herself is slowly, very slowly, struggling out of the web of grief. There have been new friends, pleasant men seated beside her by well-meaning hostesses at dinner parties. Some of them extended casual invitations which she did not accept. She did, however, go out to dinner twice with Kevin, a gentle widower, the father of one of Donny’s classmates. After the second dinner she invited him in and, wordlessly, she led him upstairs to the master bedroom, to the huge double bed once shared by Mark and Andrea that she has made her own. They made love, slowly, sadly, as though adhering to the rhythm of their separate sorrows, each thrust beating back a memory.

  It occurred to her after Kevin left, tiptoeing down the staircase with his shoes in his hands, that she had made love to another man on the very bed on which her dead husband had, in all probability, been conceived.

  ‘A ludicrous thought,’ she had confided to her therapist, pleased that she had something, at last, to tell him.

  ‘Perhaps a healthy one,’ he had responded quietly. ‘Perhaps you are telling yourself that it’s time to move out of the shadow of Adam’s past, to tell his parents that you want your own furnishings, your own home, your own life.’

  She wonders now if she will be able to say as much to Mark and Andrea and, with quiet honesty, acknowledges that it may not yet be possible. She remains too dependent on their approval, their support, too complicit in their grief.

  ‘Donny,’ she calls. ‘It’s time to go.’

  It will take them an hour to drive to Mount Haven, an hour and a half if she drives very slowly, two hours if they stop for lunch. Which is what they will do, she decides suddenly.

  Donny tosses his backpack into the car and she backs out of the driveway, on to the sun-spangled road. He looks back at the house but she does not turn her head. She is already focused on the weeks to come.

  Nessa Epstein moves slowly through the appetizer section of the Fairway supermarket, crowded as all the supermarkets in New York’s Upper West Side are mid-morning. She should be hurrying, she knows. Simon reminded her before she left the apartment that the trip to New Hampshire might take longer than usual because, as always, he has consulted a mysterious site on the internet which reports road conditions. Simon is a hoarder of time, scavenging minutes by avoiding traffic jams and lights, veering off the road if the voice on his GPS offers an alternative route. Minutes add up to hours, he reminds her, and hours add up to days. He is an economist who translates his professional skills into his daily life, determinedly multi-tasking, his phone at his ear, his eyes on his computer. Nessa wonders what he will do with the surplus hours he has accumulated. Perhaps they are entered into the credit column on some giant celestial ledger. Perhaps he will live forever. She smiles at the thought and always ignores his advice.

  She herself neglects to make entries in the register of her checkbook, is often late for appointments (but never for work) and wanders the city at her own pace, even pausing now and again at a street corner to stare up at the sky, to revel in a sunset of muted colors, a cloud formation tinged with gold. She certainly will not rush through Fairway, not on a day like this when there is so much she must buy. Besides, it is her vacation and vacations mean that the demands of working life are vacated. She will take her time since Simon will, of course, leave before she returns with her purchases. It has long been their habit to drive to New Hampshire in separate cars, Simon in the small yellow sports car, newly washed and polished for the journey, its soft leather seats impeccable, its radio set to the FM station he favors, his hands-free phone checked and rechecked because he will make and receive at least five calls during his drive. She and Paul will drive north in her ancient van, the luggage that would not fit into the trunk piled on to the rear seat, Paul’s CD player and his collection of discs precariously balanced on the oversized shopping bag in which she packed her sweaters because she could not find her large valise. It is Paul who arranged the luggage earlier that morning, sweeping the empty cardboard coffee containers and crumbled bags of chips off the front seat. He has already assumed a proprietary attitude toward the van which will become his own when he receives his driver’s license. Nessa is relieved that he still has only a learner’s permit. She is not eager to surrender her only son into adulthood.

  Her cell phone rings as she stands before the display of olives. Simon reminds her to buy Stilton, to inform her that he is now leaving the apartment, to hope that she is almost done with her shopping, to caution her to drive safely.

  ‘Yes. Fine. I will,’ she says, putting a wrinkled Greek olive into her mouth and trying to remember if these are the olives that Paul favors. ‘I love you,’ she adds as she moves on to the huge green ones stuffed with pimento that Simon prefers, but he has already hung up. She shrugs and fills the largest of the plastic containers to the brim.

  ‘Shopping for a party, Nessa?’

  It is the mother of one of her nursery-school students who asks the question. Nessa struggles to remember her name and, when she fails, she compensates by smiling brightly and remarking on the beauty of the infant, strapped to the young mother’s chest, a weeping appendage whose wails are muffled by the Baby Bjorn.

  ‘No. Not a party. Just food for our vacation.’

  ‘You’re going camping?’ There is envy and admiration in her voice. She too would love to go camping but her children are too young, her husband too reluctant. Lucky Nessa Epstein to be so free and so daring, to have such an accommodating husband.

  Like many of the mothers whose children attend the Magic Mountain Nursery School she is in awe of Nessa Epstein, its founder and director. All the mothers know that Nessa is so marvelous with their children, magically coaxing forth hidden talents, gentling a raging boy into smiling calm. The children’s books she writes are whimsical and unpredictable, sweet messages hidden in unlikely stories of skunks and spiders. The mothers buy them for their children, shyly ask Nessa for her autograph and send them as gifts to nieces and nephews, proudly confiding that they know the author and she is just marvelous. Even Nessa’s appearance intrigues them. Her auburn hair is almost always in disarray, her color high although she wears no make-up and her nails are painted in wild hues – sometimes in varying shades, her thumbnails mauve, her middle fingers scarlet, which they take to be a mark of her daring, her wild courage. She is a large woman, comfortable with her height and her girth. Rainbow-colored skirts flare about her ample hips, her oversized shirts of rough and colorful weave hang loosely, offset by glittering beads which delight the children who grasp them with sticky, paint-smeared fingers. The toddlers, whom she calls her magic mountaineers, do not cry when she playfully brushes their small hands away.

  The mothers envy her because she is no longer burdened with maternal servitude. She has graduated from the years of temper tantrums and insistent whining, of endless laundry and pureed food that still hold them prisoner. Nessa’s son, Paul, is an adolescent, a tall and talented boy who sometimes comes to the school to play his guitar at a holiday celebration, and her stepchildren, Tracy and Richie, are away at college.

  Simon, her husband, who sometimes waits outside the school building for her in his bright yellow sports car, is a grave-eyed man, his well-trimmed beard threaded with the silver strands that also weave their way through his thick dark hair, expertly layered by an expensive barber. Unlike Nessa, he is always impeccably dressed, his clothing the uniform of the upscale academic, tweed suits with leather patches at the elbows, dark shirts, woven ties, cable-stitched sweaters. The mothers have traded scraps of information about him. Nessa is his sec
ond wife. An unlikely match considering that his first wife, Charlotte something (not Epstein, of course) is the editor of a high-end fashion magazine.

  They know that he is the chairman of the economics department at the university to the north of the city and that he is quoted now and again in the Business section of The Times. He has even appeared on the PBS Evening News, offering learned advice on the ups and downs of the stock market. He, like Nessa, is much admired.

  The young mother in the cheese aisle of Fairway, her baby happily and stickily asleep against her chest, has often thought that Simon Epstein is the sort of man she should have married, a successful intellectual who is also rugged enough to enjoy hiking and camping.

  ‘No, we’re not going camping.’

  Nessa laughs at the thought as they move on through the cheese section. Simon could not put up a tent if his life depended on it. She tosses a brick of cheddar, a loaf of Feta and a package of Muenster cheese into her wagon and searches for the Stilton, remembering Simon’s monitory call.

  ‘We go to this small hotel in New Hampshire every August, a wonderful place but kind of spartan. No air conditioning, no television, three meals a day – nourishing, of course, and boring. Still, they give us a shelf in the refrigerator and I bring nosh stuff for our family.’

  ‘Oh. I see.’

  The young mother is disappointed. She would have expected Nessa Epstein to plan a more daring or exotic vacation than a small hotel in New Hampshire that offers only plain cooking.

  ‘Have fun,’ she adds as she moves on, her envy dissipated.

  Nessa heads for the appetizer counter and places her order of white fish, lox and pickled herring. She remembers to include the olive tapenade and bruschetta that her stepchildren Richie and Tracy favor. Simon will be pleased with her selection. He will, as he has done every year during his older children’s visits, arrange the delicacies on the large plate that he cajoles from Louise Abbot, the inn’s proprietress, who disapproves of their cocktail hour picnics on the lawn. Her in-laws, the first Mount Haven innkeepers, had also disapproved of the pre-dinner drinks Simon’s parents had set out each afternoon.

  Simon’s family is the second generation of Epsteins to vacation at Mount Haven and Louise Abbot is grateful for his loyalty. Fewer and fewer vacationers are drawn to the very basic accommodations of the inn.

  Simon will set the food on the small wooden table in the center of a circle of Adirondack chairs, adding it to the bottles of Aquavit and vodka and the wicker basket that contains their cocktail glasses and small plates, the tiny silver spoons and the long stirrers.

  Nessa will not participate in these arrangements. The wicker basket, a wedding gift to Simon and Charlotte, which he carried into his second marriage, seems pretentious to her but she does not criticize it. It makes Simon happy and it has become part of their Mount Haven ritual. It has long been their tacit agreement to accept each other’s small conceits. Those who find Nessa and Simon an unlikely match, which of course they are, do not understand that their very differences, and their acceptance of those differences, are the glue that cements their marriage.

  Her shopping completed, Nessa returns home. Paul is waiting for her, his guitar slung over his shoulder. His denim shorts are ragged at the seams, his T-shirt, once orange, faded to an odd shade of rust, oversized and frayed at the neck. Unlaced sneakers cover his bare feet. She thinks to tell him to put socks on but does not.

  ‘You didn’t bring your guitar last year,’ she says instead.

  ‘I wasn’t as into it last year,’ he replies. ‘I want to teach some chords to Donny Templeton and I got an email from Annette. She’s bringing her mandolin and I thought that maybe we could work up some duets.’

  ‘Good idea.’

  Nessa likes Annette Edwards, who has, through their many shared Augusts, blossomed from small girl awkwardness into a strangely confident adolescence. Sweet-faced, lithe and narrow waisted, with silvery blonde hair falling loosely to her shoulders, she speaks so softly that her listeners must bend closely toward her in order to discern her words. Nessa had seen Paul’s head lowered as she spoke, his auburn hair brushing Annette’s pale cheek. She had watched them walk together down a mountain path, kicking stray acorns, and then suddenly break into a run, two teenaged children, racing their way out of childhood. Their friendship, vested with innocence, survives through the winter months with email and phone calls. But Nessa knows that it will soon be more than a friendship. Perhaps during this very August. Hormonal juices are flowing. She prays silently that they will not hurt each other, her gentle son and slender, wispy-voiced Annette. Annette’s twin brother Jeremy, as dark and muscular as she is fair and fragile, does not like Paul. She senses something ominous in Jeremy’s hostility but, immediately, she dismisses the thought. It has been a long winter. Perhaps Jeremy has changed. Perhaps they have all changed.

  ‘We’d better get started,’ Paul says. ‘Dad left like an hour ago.’

  ‘I think he’s going to stop at Camp Kenakee, to see Tracy and Richie,’ she replies as she places her purchases in the battered cooler.

  The children of his first marriage are another subject on which she and Simon have tacit agreement. They do not discuss them although Tracy and Richie drift through their lives at will. They are very much Charlotte’s children, blonde and fine-boned like their mother, always at the head of the class, effortlessly leading the pack in any race they choose to run. Richie is a junior at Harvard, Tracy a sophomore at Swarthmore. Dean’s List, of course, high achievers, children of divorce equipped for battle. They each have a bedroom in the West End Avenue apartment, keys to the front door, foraging rights to the refrigerator and, although they are cool to Nessa, they are always polite. Their warmth against all odds is reserved for Paul, whom they treat as younger brother, younger friend.

  Nessa is grateful to them for that. It ensures that Paul, an only child, will never be alone in the world. As she is without Simon. As Simon is without her.

  ‘Yeah, I forgot,’ Paul says. ‘Tracy and Richie are going to come up to the inn, aren’t they?’

  ‘They always do.’

  She does not add that the camp was chosen because of its proximity to the inn. Chosen originally by Charlotte, when Tracy and Richie were campers and she and Simon, a married couple then, vacationed at the inn. Simon is pleased that they have chosen to return to the camp as counselors. It gives them time together, time with Paul. They are, however briefly, a family. Nessa does not resent his pleasure although she tends to go off on her own when they visit. Long walks with Susan and Helene, the sisters who are so unlike each other. Perhaps she will plan a trip into Portsmouth with Wendy Templeton or even a solitary drive into the White Mountains.

  ‘OK. Let’s go.’

  Paul is impatient to get started, impatient to see Annette Edwards again. He wonders if she will kiss him on the cheek in welcome as she did last summer. He remembers still the butterfly brush of her lips against his skin.

  ‘We’re off,’ Nessa agrees.

  She arms the alarm system and then they are out the door, which she double locks behind them. She remembers that there are no locks on the doors at Mount Haven Inn and the thought cheers her. How wonderful it will be to fall asleep beside Simon in their unlocked, white-walled bedroom and waken at dawn as the first rays of sunlight brush the mountain’s foothills. She and Paul smile at each other and dash to the car. They are eager for the journey to begin, and eager for the journey to end.

  Liane Curran has packed the night before their departure for Mount Haven Inn, hoping to get an early start so that they can claim one of the better suites that overlook the lawn. Louise Abbot, that sour-faced bitch who barely looks at Liane when she speaks to her, always maintains that she assigns the rooms on a first-arrival basis, but Liane does not believe her. The Abbots, Louise and Evan, clearly have favorites. They are certainly partial to the Templetons, the money dripping oldsters, their wraith of a daughter-in-law, Wendy and her weirdo son, Donny. The Tem
pletons are never denied the suite of rooms on the second floor, with the remodeled bathrooms. And those Epsteins always arrive early, grabbing the room with French doors that open to the wraparound porch that Liane would have preferred. But of course people like Simon and Nessa Epstein know how to manipulate their way through life. Their kind always does. Pushy New Yorkers, both of them.

  But now of course they will not get an early start. Michael has screwed up again, regardless of his promise that they would be on the road right after breakfast. He left for his office early and promised to return within the hour but then he had called, his voice quivering with apology. A client, his major client actually, was in Boston for the day and had insisted on meeting with him that morning. There was no way he could say no. He needed the account.

  ‘And I need to get the hell out of here,’ Liane had retorted. ‘What am I supposed to do with Cary all morning?’

  She did not expect Michael to offer any suggestions. Does he even know that their ten-year-old son is not a kid who has to be amused, thank God. Cary has his books, his computer, his email correspondence with other Harry Potter geeks like Donny Templeton, Matt Edwards and Paul Epstein, their summer friendships resuscitated throughout the winter months by their internet lifeline. It bothers Liane that Paul, who is almost ready for college, spends so much time with the younger kids. He seems different to other kids his age, but that doesn’t come as a shock to her given who his parents are and New York and all that.

  She is not surprised that Michael never mentioned it. Her husband moves like a zombie through their home, through their marriage, through Cary’s life. The confident young man she had married, the man who promised her the house of her dreams, European vacations, charge accounts in Neiman Marcus and Nordstroms, has morphed into a stoop-shouldered worrywart who checks their credit card bill, questioning her about every item. Only last night as he paid bills, he had asked, in that tired, whining voice that really, really annoys her, if Cary needed all the new shorts and shirts she had bought for their Mount Haven stay, and why she needed two new bathing suits and the outfits she had purchased for herself.