Guests of August

by Gloria Goldreich

  Andrea places the napkin on her grandson’s lap and Donny scowls. Wendy, a tangerine-colored shawl covering her shoulders because the evening is cool and her white sun dress is of the lightest of linens, shoots her son a reproving look and his scowl becomes a dutiful smile. Mark Templeton, not for the first time, observes that the inn would do well to stock a wine cellar and Louise makes no response. She is content on this first evening, pleased to be seated between Evan and Daniel.

  Daniel. She rolls his name over in her mind. Dear Daniel. The alliterated words fall together easily as well they might. She has known him since his boyhood, when she was a teenaged waitress busy at her chores but pausing to watch as he and Simon Epstein raced across the lawn to the lake. Simon the elder, swift and long-legged, was always the first to plunge into the calm, sunlit waters. But she had noted Daniel’s grace and appreciated the softness of his tone, the gentleness of his understanding. He was such a good friend, such a good boy.

  And then he was no longer a boy. She remembers still his return to the inn after an absence of several summers. On that bright August day he emerged from his car, the youth now a tall, bearded man, his shoulders broad, his thighs muscular, his voice deep and confident. His graduation into manhood had startled her and she had stood naked before her own mirror that night and saw that she herself had, with equal mystery, morphed into womanhood, her waistline thickened, the breasts that would never nurture an infant high and firm. They had, both of them, passively and inevitability, drifted into maturity.

  Daniel had achieved his ambition. He was a published writer. His small novel had made a small splash and he presented her with an autographed copy. The inscription, For Louise, my August Friend, Sharer of Dreams, pleased her, although she herself had long since abandoned the modest dream she had shared with him. There would be no secretarial course in Portsmouth, no job in Boston, no cute apartment shared with laughing roommates. She was, instead, a childless woman, the summer serving girl become an innkeeper. But then things happen, things change. Boys become men, girls become women, parents die. Life moves inexorably and often unexpectedly forward.

  She had never expected to sleep in Prudence Abbot’s bed, to supervise village girls at the tasks she herself had undertaken, the employee now an employer, her future defined.

  Only Evan, her husband, remains unchanged, his face unlined, his hair thick and tousled as it had been all those summers ago. He still mounts his bicycle with boyish grace, the perennial student earning degree after degree, now mastering Spanish, now Italian, writing papers, taking exams with no purposeful end in sight. His mother Prudence had been prescient. Evan never would have been able to manage the inn, never have been able to sustain his own whimsical life. His courses never would have steered him into a profession, a career. He had needed Louise who doles out the money he needs for his courses, his books, his expenses, accepting it as an adolescent carelessly accepts an allowance.

  Louise glances at Evan now who is excitedly telling Daniel about a summer course he is taking entitled ‘Novels of Death and Darkness’.

  ‘We’ll be reading fictional studies of loss and illness. Have you ever thought of examining that aspect of literature?’ he asks.

  Daniel nods wearily.

  ‘Hard not to. It’s the stuff of life and that’s what absorbs novelists.’

  He looks nervously at Andrea and Mark Templeton, recalling that their son Adam’s novel had concentrated on the theme of a boy obsessed with the loss of his parents. Fortunately, they are not listening to the conversation, absorbed as they are in a murmured conversation with Wendy about Donny’s grades, which, he gathers, were fortunately excellent.

  It is Louise who winces at his reply. She wonders if Daniel recalls that she sat behind him at his father’s funeral. She and Evan had traveled south to New York for the service, proving yet again that the Abbots were more than innkeepers, that their guests were also their friends.

  It was at the funeral that she had seen Laura, then Daniel’s fiancée, for the first time and had taken an instant dislike to her. Laura had sat beside Daniel at the funeral, wearing her flaring black skirt and long-sleeved black leotard, her hair fashioned into a tight dancer’s knot. Louise had thought her outfit inappropriate for the synagogue service. Later, she had thought their marriage inappropriate. Laura was not good enough for Daniel, not smart enough for him. She had overheard Simon Epstein say as much to Nessa. It neither surprises nor dismays her that Laura and Daniel have most probably separated, that they may, in fact, have divorced. She sighs imperceptibly and lifts the silver bell that will signal the waitresses to carry the trays in as Wendy Templeton struggles to keep the conversation afloat, launching Evan on a discussion of ‘The Magic Mountain.’

  The waitresses, four sullen village girls whom Polly has coaxed into service, work in tandem, one setting the huge bowl of mashed potatoes on one end of each table, the other positioning the platters of meat and vegetables on the other end, while the wooden bowls of salad are handed to a diner who dutifully passes them around the table.

  ‘Family style, as usual,’ Louise says brightly. ‘So much nicer to be informal, don’t you think?’

  They nod obediently although Mark Templeton frowns. He prefers formal service and his table mates are definitely not his family.

  Andrea recognizes his irritation but ignores it. She knows that these days of August, spent in proximity to their vanished life, to their son’s grave, in false intimacy with Adam’s widow and his son, ignite Mark’s anger and fuel his fury. She knows that he, who is always in control, is frustrated because he cannot comprehend how their son’s life rocketed so inexplicably into disaster. His inability to solve that impossible riddle enrages him. Andrea prefers her husband’s anger and fury to the wildness of his unspent grief. She has learned, since their son’s death, to weather Mark’s moods. She numbs her own pain with vodka, the colorless liquid that has been her life’s companion, her anodyne.

  Adam’s birthday will come and go as will the anniversary of his death. They will place new plantings at his grave. Wendy his widow will weep and Donny, the son who barely remembers his father, will stare unhappily at the austere marble gravestone. She herself will murmur a prayer or perhaps recite a fragment of poetry. Perhaps Dylan Thomas. ‘Do not go gentle into that good night.’ Such rituals are important.

  Polly wanders about the room with her tray of gravy boats and salad dressings. She too has changed for dinner. Her cheeks are aglow and her too-blonde hair is brushed to a high gloss. She wears a bright pink sweater, so loose and low cut that when she leans over the table to pass the gravy boat to Jeremy Edwards, her breast brushes his father’s bare arm.

  ‘I’ll take that,’ Susan Edwards says, her gesture so swift that drops of gravy spatter across the white cloth.

  Polly blushes. Jeff turns and smiles at her apologetically and Helene Ames stares reprovingly at her sister. How could Susan have been so insensitive, so stupid? The poor girl didn’t mean anything. Or perhaps she did. The possibility tantalizes.

  The meal is swiftly over, dessert plates left half empty because no one likes the tapioca pudding Louise makes herself following the recipe handed down by Prudence Abbot. Only Evan scrapes his dish clean, the obedient son become the obedient husband, the boy-man licking morsels of his mother’s pale yellow pudding from his lips.

  FOUR

  The children and the teenagers scatter before coffee is served. The adults linger over their second cups of the bitter beverage and watch as the mauve shadows of evening curtain the mountains and splash puddles of darkness across the lawn. Slowly they drift out of the dining room. Polly watches them, noting with satisfaction that Jeff Edwards does not take his wife’s hand.

  The youngsters have already carved out their territory in the sprawling room which Louise calls the lounge and they call the rec room because it is dominated by a ping pong table and a pool table, placed too close to each other. It is furnished with an assortment of cracked brown leather couch
es and easy chairs. Matt, Cary and Donny, each clutching a hoard of quarters, are hunched over the pinball machine which stands in a corner, strategically placed near the rest rooms, its lights flashing, as the metallic cars race down the winding electronic paths.

  Polly, her chores done, sits at a small table in the corner, the molecular biology text open in front of her. She bought the book cheaply from a pre-med drop out, determined to study it over the summer and get a head start on the demanding course. She needs an A if she is going to get any financial aid in med school, if by some miracle she gets that far. She moves her lips as she reads, slides her tongue across the cherry-colored lipstick she applied so carefully.

  Paul Epstein and Jeremy Edwards play ping pong, the white ball bouncing with tympanic speed over the sagging net. Annette has settled herself at a table, her long bare legs tucked beneath her as she desultorily works on a jigsaw puzzle, her soft brown hair falling about her face in graceful waves as she turns her head now this way, now that way, in search of an elusive puzzle piece.

  The guests of Mount Haven are partial to jigsaw puzzles which they purchase at a shop in town and work on in the evening. Their lives may be fragmented, their present uneasy, their future uncertain, but at least the small, oddly shaped puzzle pieces so disjointedly spread across the splintered table can be fitted into place. There is, after all, something that they can control.

  Annette is working on a puzzle of United States Presidents, purchased by Simon Epstein the previous year, completed by Paul on the day they left and then disassembled by Louise, the pieces scooped into a box for the following summer. Annette has, so far, managed to isolate all the straight-edged bits and to join several together to form a fraction of the frame. The ping pong game over, Paul slides into a chair beside her.

  ‘Can I help you with that?’ he asks, and she nods.

  Together they slip one piece and then another into place, their hands touching as they sort through the pile in their search for matching colors. Annette frowns as her twin leans over her shoulder and reaches for a piece that does not fit. Why can’t Jeremy ever leave her alone? He’s not a brother, he’s a leech. A goddamn annoying leech.

  ‘Hey, these two fit,’ he insists.

  ‘No. They don’t. You’re forcing them,’ Paul corrects him and Annette snorts derisively.

  Matt, Cary and Donny, having tired of the pinball machines, are at the pool table, struggling to manipulate the poles that are too long for them.

  ‘Hey, let me show you what to do with them,’ Jeremy says and Annette’s sigh mingles relief and annoyance as he joins the younger boys and shows them how to set up the balls, how to chalk the stick.

  ‘Show-off,’ she thinks and turns back to the puzzle, back to her study of Paul’s long and graceful fingers.

  Nessa Epstein sprawls across the couch, a copy of Bruno Bettelheim’s Uses of Enchantment unopened on her lap, her gaze fixed on the window which overlooks the path that Simon and Daniel are following down to the lake. She supposes that Daniel is telling Simon about his marriage, if indeed he is still married. Simon is the father confessor of unhappily married men, an example that divorce does not mean the end of the world, that life does offer a second chance. Haven’t he and Nessa, against all odds, found each other? He will, she supposes, tell Daniel as much, as they stand lakeside, puffing on their pipes.

  Simon has always been Daniel’s wise, older friend, a big brother to the boy who had so disliked Leo, his own biological sibling. The Goldner boys and Simon had grown up together. Their parents had been colleagues, all of them teachers at the same high school, their friendship close enough to be familial. They played bridge together, argued politics passionately, traded books which they discussed with enthusiasm, and vacationed together each August at Mount Haven Inn. Nessa has scrapbooks filled with snapshots of those distant Augusts, given to her by Charlotte, Simon’s first wife, who had no fondness for Mount Haven and is always generous with discarded memories.

  Simon and Daniel vanish from her view and she opens her book and closes it again.

  ‘I hate fairy tales,’ she says to Wendy Templeton and tosses the book aside. ‘I don’t even have them on the shelves at my nursery school. All they do is set the kids up for disappointment. Nobody lives happily ever after.’

  ‘But fantasy does offset sadness,’ Wendy replies softly. Her tangerine-colored shawl is wrapped tightly around her thin shoulders and she is curled up in a deep leather chair, her sketchpad open, her drawing pencils spread on the low table beside her although her hands are clasped. She is grateful to sit quietly and watch her son at play, grateful that her in-laws, wearied by the long day of travel, have elected to go to their room after dinner, grateful that Nessa, whom she likes very much, will again share these August weeks with her. There is an instinctive understanding between Nessa and herself, the rare rapport of women who sense each other’s feelings and speak in rapid emotional shorthand.

  Wendy wanders over to the bookshelves that line the wall and wonders if she will find Adam’s novel. It had a very brief life in paperback but she does not have the heart to search for it. Besides, she imagines Louise would have removed it. Louise is sensitive to such things as an innkeeper must be. She turns away, sorry that she trespassed in this literary boneyard.

  Liane Curran, her pretty painted face frozen into a mask of boredom, listlessly turns the pages of an ancient Vogue, wondering what Nessa and Wendy are talking about. They are strange, she thinks, not for the first time. Their conversations are so weird. Liane glances at her husband who sits in a corner of the room studying the spreadsheets that shroud the top of the wobbly bridge table. Damn it, doesn’t Michael realize that they are on vacation? Can’t he abandon his stupid project even for a few weeks? She shakes her head impatiently and looks across the room to the corner where Greg Ames is hammering a dartboard into place. His wife, his sister-in-law and his brother-in-law watch him warily.

  ‘You’re sure it’s safe?’ Susan Edwards asks. ‘I don’t want the kids throwing darts. You hear all these stories.’

  ‘Perfectly safe,’ Greg assures her. ‘I’ll put the darts on that high shelf when we’re done.’

  He opens the wooden box of darts, selects one, takes aim and throws. It lands right on the bull’s eye and they all clap.

  ‘Want to try?’ he asks Jeff.

  ‘I’ll pass,’ Jeff replies.

  ‘I’ll try.’ Liane springs forward. Darts had been a big thing in Natick, a Saturday night activity in the local bar, and she had been a pretty good dart thrower, always chosen first for a team, even when the team was all guys. Greg hands her a dart and she fingers its sharp steel point, admires the colored feathers and presses them to her cheek, the seductive gesture of her high-school years. She steps back, pauses, narrows her eyes and throws. Her dart lands right beside Greg’s and there is another round of applause. She blushes.

  ‘Hey, Ma, I didn’t know you could throw like that,’ Cary calls.

  ‘There’s lots you don’t know about me,’ she replies.

  She waits for Greg, whose dart lands outside the bull’s eye and then throws again and again hits her target.

  ‘Well, I’m going upstairs,’ Susan says. ‘I’m really tired. Jeff, make sure the kids don’t go near those darts.’

  ‘All right. Fine. I may be up late. Simon talked about a chess game,’ he says without looking at her.

  ‘Good luck with that.’ Simon and Jeff are equally matched and equally competitive.

  She waves to her sister who is waiting her turn at the dart board and sprints up the stairs. She has at least an hour, perhaps two, to work on the translation. Five pages. Perhaps even seven or eight because this section of the book is largely conversational. LeBec’s dialogue is mostly monosyllabic and easily rendered into English.

  Simon and Daniel light their pipes in the shelter of a copse of conifers which protects the fragile match flame until the bowls are safely aglow. Companionably puffing on their briars, they sit on the bat
tered bench on which, during their boyhood years, they had whittled long branches into makeshift swords.

  ‘Nice night,’ Simon says.

  ‘Beautiful,’ Daniel agrees, but his voice is flat.

  ‘Good year?’ he asks Simon, realizing that although he spoke to his friend several times during the course of the year, they have not seen each other. The well-intentioned plans they made to meet for a drink or for dinner were always canceled by one or the other.

  ‘Not bad. What about yours?’

  ‘Lousy. Bordering on horrific. Or does horrific border on lousy?’

  ‘The book?’ Simon asks, although he knows the answer.

  ‘No. The book’s fine. The editor’s happy with it. The marketing people are happy with it. I’m sort of happy with it. Even Laura read it and liked it, great literary critic that she is.’ Daniel’s laugh is an angry bark.

  ‘So it’s Laura.’

  ‘Of course it’s Laura. As though you hadn’t guessed.’

  ‘I guessed.’

  ‘I think we’re done. In fact, I know we’re done.’

  Simon is silent. He waits and remembers arriving home one evening to find Nessa and her friend Meredith, who was edging toward divorce, sitting in their darkened living room, their heads bent close, their voices soft but their exchanges rapid and audible.

  Women, he conjectures now, have the gift of intimacy while men are emotionally handicapped. He wishes that he had a handkerchief to offer Daniel. He even wishes that Daniel would weep.

  ‘What happened?’ he asks at last.

  ‘I guess what’s been happening for a long time only I was too dumb to see it. Or maybe I just didn’t want to see it. I could blame it on my writing, on my so-called gift. Fiction writers create imaginary worlds for their characters, which is only one step away from creating imaginary worlds for themselves. So there I was, married to Laura and writing our love story, the great romantic coming together of the beautiful dancer and the talented novelist walking through life hand in hand. So the beautiful part was true. She was – is – beautiful and I guess the talented part was sort of true. I do have talent; not genius but talent. But we were hardly on the same life path and our hands really didn’t touch a lot. I was just too stupid and self-absorbed to see it.’