Guests of August

by Gloria Goldreich

  ‘If I bought them we needed them,’ she had replied irritably and watched as he wrote out the check.

  She fingers the new clothing in the neatly packed suitcases, Cary’s T-shirts with fashionable logos and his shorts with cargo pockets like the ones that Matt Edwards and Donny Templeton wore last summer. She unpacks and repacks her own new skirt of pale blue polished cotton and the sleeveless top the color of sunlight that the saleswoman at Nordstroms had insisted was just made for her, given her golden hair and blue eyes. The feel of the fabric comforts her. This year she will be as well dressed as snobby Susan Edwards and mousey Wendy Templeton whom everyone is supposed to pity because her husband had died so tragically. Liane reflects that Wendy, who is widowed, lives a whole lot better than her own family. Of course, she has those posh in-laws and Helene, snotty Susan’s weird bohemian sister, who is an art teacher herself, told her that Wendy sells those wishy-washy watercolors of hers to collectors all over the country. All right. It is sad that Wendy’s husband died so young and Donny, who is really a sweet kid, was left fatherless. And Susan and her sister can be really friendly, Liane can admit that. But she had never imagined when she married Michael that their vacations would consist of two weeks in a New Hampshire hotel that had seen better days.

  So much for all Michael’s promises that their life together would be nothing like her lousy childhood in that crummy Natick apartment, the hallway rank with the odors of other tenants’ cooking, her parents’ stale and angry arguments echoing through the tiny cluttered rooms. And she had believed him because she was a file clerk in the office where he was a department head. She ate lunch in a cubicle with two other girls while he worked at a large desk behind a closed door. He had gone to college, his framed Boston University diploma hung above his desk, and he wore dark suits and silk ties and shirts as white as newly fallen snow. She remembered how he had fingered the flimsy sheer white collar of her pale blue nylon dress the night he asked her to marry him. ‘I’ll dress you like a princess,’ he had said, and of course she had believed him. She had been stupid to believe him, stupid to encourage him to start his own software firm, stupid to agree to the purchase of this house which is nothing more than a cracker box. True, it isn’t a crowded apartment, but it isn’t a palace either. She has been told that Wendy, the poor widow who is not poor at all, lives in a huge house, mortgage-free and fully furnished, a gift from her dead husband’s parents.

  Cary wanders into the room, his new sneakers untied, his blue and white shirt unevenly buttoned and hanging half in and half out of the waistband of his new navy shorts. His large eyes are red rimmed, his dark hair is an unbrushed knotted tangle and his long thin face is pale. The urban day camp he attended hadn’t emphasized outdoor play. Well, he’d get enough of that at Mount Haven Inn. No television, no air conditioning, but fresh air and sunlight are always in plentiful supply, Liane reflects bitterly.

  ‘When’s Dad coming?’ Cary asks petulantly, wandering to the window.

  ‘Who knows?’ she replies. She snaps the valises shut. The new clothes are no longer a source of comfort to her. Rather they are a reminder of all that she does not have, of all that she craves.

  ‘Here he is now. He’s just driving up to the house.’ Cary’s voice is no longer petulant. It throbs with excitement and he dashes down the stairs and throws the front door open.

  ‘Dad!’ he shouts. ‘Are you ready? Can we get started? Did you get the quarters?’

  Michael smiles wanly up at him. His shirt is still as white as newly fallen snow, but the collar is wilted. He has loosened his gray silk tie. Sweat trails down the back of his neck and his back aches from the hours spent staring at the computer screen, writing and rewriting the damn program until it worked.

  ‘I have the quarters,’ he says and hands Cary the roll of coins.

  Quarters are the currency of popularity for the August kids at Mount Haven who feed them to the pinball machines with wild excitement.

  ‘Gee, Dad, thanks,’ Cary says. ‘So we can load everything into the car?’ He is anxious for the summer adventure to begin, anxious to reconnect with his friends.

  ‘Just give me a chance to change.’

  Slowly, very slowly, Michael walks upstairs, reluctant to confront Liane’s annoyance, her barely disguised contempt.

  ‘How did it go?’ she asks as he enters the room. Her question is indifferent and she does not turn from the mirror. He watches as she carefully applies her make-up. She reminds him, as always, of a doll, a pretty painted doll, a doll that had caused his hands to tremble and his heart to turn the very first time he saw her. He had despaired then of enticing her. Blue-eyed, golden-haired girls with narrow waists and plump luminous cheeks were rarely drawn to men like himself, men who were short and narrow chinned, who squinted at the world from behind thick-lensed glasses. But Liane had surprised him. Yes to the first date, yes to the second, yes to his hands moving across her smooth skin, yes to his lips pressed against hers. Her acceptance had bewildered him then but soon, very soon, he came to understand it.

  He moves toward her now but she evades his reach and busies herself at the window, slamming it shut and drawing the blinds so that sunlight will not fade the mauve carpet and the matching upholstery of the chaise lounge on which she has never reclined and for which he has not yet paid.

  ‘It went all right,’ he says, relieved that it is the truth, that he was able to debug the program that was the source of his client’s irritation and thus retain the account. He is safe for another month and that month will give him time to consult with Simon Epstein and perhaps with Mark Templeton during their stay at Mount Haven. His new software is good, really good. He just needs some capital to launch it. Mark Templeton will recognize its potential. He is a clever investor and Michael’s project interests him. He had offered some valuable advice the previous year, even suggested contacts.

  It has occurred to Michael that the retired financier might help secure the venture capital he needs to keep his fledgling software business alive. He is dancing perilously close to the edge, barely meeting his overheads, borrowing from one credit card to pay the balance on another. Too often he wakes in the night, drenched in sweat, and wonders why he left the firm where his job had been secure, his health insurance covered, bonuses, however modest, paid into his account at the end of each year. But of course he knows why. A salaried man, even a department head, at a small firm, could not earn the kind of money he needed to fulfill all the promises he had made to Liane before they married. Those promises – the trip to Europe, the great house – were the insurance he had vested in his marriage and that policy is slowly coming due. He wonders what Liane would say if she knew that he will barely be able to pay the bill at the inn. Of course he knows. If he fails, really fails, she will leave him. That knowledge settles like a hard rock at the pit of his heart. And will she take Cary? he wonders. He shivers at the thought and pulls on his khakis, which fit too loosely because he has lost weight during the year. He shrugs into an old soft blue cotton shirt, laces up his sneakers, grabs the valises and hurries downstairs.

  ‘Into the car,’ he calls to Cary. ‘We’re off.’

  ‘This is going to be a great vacation,’ he tells Liane as she slides into the passenger seat. She is wearing a new perfume. He savors the scent, then wonders how much it cost. The car fills with the clink of coins as Cary drops the quarters one by one into his leather change purse.

  ‘Let’s hope so.’ Her voice is tight and she does not look at him, but keeps her gaze fixed on the road ahead. ‘Liane.’ Her name upon his tongue is a plea, a prayer.

  She turns to him and her eyes soften. He really is such a good guy. She has to remember that. She should remember that. She places her hand lightly on his.

  The unexpected gesture lifts the heaviness from his heart. He will seek Mark Templeton out as soon as possible. All he needs is a new injection of cash, some time. Everything is salvageable. His marriage, his business. He lifts Liane’s hand to his lip
s and she does not turn away.

  ‘OK. A great vacation,’ she says as he maneuvers the car on to the highway that will carry them northward to Mount Haven Inn.

  Daniel Goldner washes his Harley motorbike early in the morning, although he had been determined to leave for New Hampshire at sunrise. The delay does not disturb him. Why shouldn’t he change his mind? His time is his own for the first time in years and he revels in that bittersweet freedom. He concentrates on scraping away the scabs of sand that adhere to the bike’s silver trim. It is not that they will corrode the metal but he does not want any reminder of that last weekend in the Hamptons. He rubs vigorously, his eyes squeezed shut against the memory of Laura kicking viciously at the small hillocks of sand with her bare feet, indifferent to the storm of pale grains that adhered to the cycle and pelted his own outstretched hands.

  He wipes the metal dry and polishes the handlebars and the hubcaps, grimacing at his own reflection, his too narrow face unshaven, his pale green eyes watery. It occurs to him that he might grow a beard again. He had been fond of his silken chestnut-colored goatee, accustomed to curling it about his fingers as he lectured, but Laura had disliked it, claiming that it irritated her skin, that it was an affectation. He had reluctantly shaved it off. The thought of allowing it to grow again is vaguely comforting. He no longer has to worry about pleasing a wife who would not be pleased.

  He packs his panniers, shoving his windbreaker, his toilet kit, a long-sleeved shirt and the heavy sweater Laura had bought him as a surprise during their Nova Scotia honeymoon, into the soft leather bags. August nights are cool in New Hampshire and the rooms at Mount Haven Inn are not well heated. That was another thing Laura had complained of during the few vacations they had spent there, although that had been the last and the least of her litany of complaints.

  The phone rings as he goes back into the house. He glances at the caller ID. It is Laura, of course. He considers not picking up but allows it to ring three times and then answers it, as he had known he would.

  ‘Daniel.’ Her voice is uncharacte‌ristically hesitant, and he imagines her crouched on the futon in the barely furnished studio she had rented on the Upper West Side, clutching the receiver, probably wearing her leotard because she will be just leaving for her early-morning class. Ridiculously, he wonders if she is wearing the pale blue leotard or the black one that hugs her small well-shaped breasts and he chides himself for the absurdity of the thought.

  ‘What is it, Laura?’ he asks, struggling to keep his tone cool. ‘I’m just about to leave.’

  ‘I wanted to know if I could come by the house to pick up my jewelry box. You know the teak one that was my mother’s? It’s on the top shelf of the bedroom closet and I forgot it when I moved my stuff.’

  He thinks, with a sudden surge of hope, that she might have left it there so that she would have an excuse to come by, but almost instantly he realizes that that is not Laura’s way. She is incapable of that kind of calculation. She is motivated by impulse, rarely considering consequences. Which is why they are where they are on this August morning. She had simply forgotten it. Forgetfulness and carelessness are in her DNA.

  ‘You have your key,’ he replies drily, relieved now that he did not follow his brother Leo’s advice and ask her for the key back. Leo views the world through the prism of his legal training. Every divorce is a battlefield, he had told Daniel, and keys are powerful weapons. ‘Come in and get it. Whenever you want. I’ll be away for a couple of weeks.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  She is more composed now, her voice steady. He has acquiesced and she no longer fears his refusal.

  ‘Up to Mount Haven Inn. On the bike.’

  ‘Why?’

  He hears the hint of incredulity in her question and his face grows hot, the familiar unforgotten reaction to her derision.

  ‘Because I always liked it there. You didn’t but I did.’

  ‘But it’s August. Probably that same crowd will be back. All those cozy families off to go blueberry picking with the kids or packing up for picnics in the White Mountains. Deadly. And you’ll be alone.’

  Her voice trails off. The impact of her words has shamed her. He will be alone because he is no longer with her and he is no longer with her because she has made it impossible for them to be together.

  ‘Not deadly,’ he responds flatly. ‘And I don’t mind being alone. I’ll be reading the proofs of my novel. Pick up your jewelry box whenever you want.’

  He hangs up, angry at himself for reacting so defensively, angry at her for passing judgment when she has rescinded all right to pass judgment on him, on his life, on the choices that no longer affect her.

  He thinks of her words as he locks the house, as he mounts the motorbike and speeds northward, the helmet heavy on his head, the sun so bright that he stops to put on his goggles.

  ‘The same crowd,’ she had said so dismissively when he, in fact, is looking forward to seeing that crowd. He has missed them during the years he deferred to Laura who insisted on beach vacations, the Hamptons, the Cape, even one very long August on the Jersey shore where she had been invited to teach a dance workshop. The rush of the ocean distracts him, cascades noisily against his thoughts. Plot lines evade him as waves crash across the jetties and he hates the grit of the sand, the oozing dampness at the water’s edge where Laura insisted that they walk at sundown, she dancing always ahead of him, pirouetting and bowing to the foam-crested surge of salt-scented water.

  It is mountain country that soothes him, shadowed glens and meadows, clear and quiet lakes, trails ascending to windswept summits and thick-leafed trees, their branches arching skyward. He had followed those trails as a boy, he and Simon Epstein, both of them the only sons of school-teacher parents who vacationed together every August, bonded by their love of the landscape, the rugged simplicity of the inn and gratitude to the elderly Abbots who, unlike other New England resorts, accepted reservations from families named Goldner and Epstein.

  Those Abbots, the original innkeepers, had died years ago, as had his own parents and Simon’s, but the inn is managed, with very few changes, by their son Evan and his wife Louise. Simon and Daniel, loyal to memory, mindful of history, continued to vacation there. Simon, early on, with his first wife, Charlotte, whom Daniel had never liked, and later with his second wife, Nessa, whom Daniel admires enormously. But Laura, although she joined him a few times during the early and more conciliatory years of their marriage, had disliked the inn, had disliked what she called the forced camaraderie of the veteran August vacationers, had resented the journey to Portsmouth to attend the nearest dance studio that offered practice space. In the end Daniel submitted to her discontent. It is some years since he has been a guest at Mount Haven Inn, but Louise Abbot had assured him when he phoned that she had a room for him.

  ‘On the same corridor as the Epsteins,’ she had added, an unusual addenda from a New Hampshire woman who was frugal in all things, including conversation. But then she had always been partial to Daniel, oddly deferential and protective, perhaps recalling his own kindness to her during that difficult summer when the future she had planned came crashing down upon her.

  He wonders, as he crosses the Massachusetts border, who else will be there. Surely the Edwards family, because when he met Susan Edwards at a Modern Language Association meeting she had told him they had already made their reservations. And Susan’s sister Helene and her husband Greg would also be guests. Daniel loves Greg’s music, the gentleness of his singing voice. He remembers how Wendy, that waif-like, frail young woman who was surely too young to be a widow, had lifted her sweet voice in a sudden unexpected harmony as they sang ‘Foggy Foggy Dew.’ The lyrics flooded back to him and he gave them full voice, singing them out into the wind.

  ‘Now I am a bachelor, I live with my son, we work at the weaver’s trade.’

  His spirits lift. It is a long time since he has been surrounded by familiar faces, since he has sung the songs of his youth. Lau
ra was wrong. He will be neither alone nor lonely. There is nothing strange about his decision to spend these particular August weeks in New Hampshire. He is simply reclaiming his past, girding himself to face a future newly uncertain.

  He leans closer to the handlebars, floors the accelerator, eager for the journey to be over, eager to arrive at Mount Haven Inn.

  Louise Abbot checks the inn’s register and glances nervously at her watch. Her brown hair is pulled back from her avian face in an austere knot, and an oversized white butcher’s apron covers her well-pressed black linen dress. Bought on sale in Portsmouth during the early spring, the dress, with its white collar and cuffs, now hangs too loosely. She has, unwillingly, lost too much weight over the past several weeks. The summer so far has been a difficult one. The July guests had been overly demanding and the chambermaids and waitresses, indifferent to the menial jobs they had taken simply to fill the weeks between school terms, had been unreliable and inefficient. Only Polly, pretty Polly – too pretty for her own good, thinks Louise, who once was too pretty herself – has been a consistently hard worker, arriving early and staying late. Polly is an honor student, improbably and, perhaps impossibly, pre-med working her way through the state university. Louise wonders how Polly imagines she will ever be able to put herself through medical school, but she has little time to ponder Polly’s problems.

  Throughout the summer, she has had to run up and down the stairs, replenishing towels and soap. She had even changed light bulbs herself, perilously balanced on a rickety ladder when Evan seemed to have vanished, a not unusual occurrence. More than once she has had to strip the beds and get a room ready for new arrivals because one of the girls called with a lame excuse or simply did not bother to show up.