Guests of August

by Gloria Goldreich

  ‘I’m tired, Susan, really tired,’ he had said and turned away, unwilling to read either the disappointment or the relief on her face.

  ‘All right.’

  She slid back beneath the blanket and did not edge closer to him when he stretched out beside her.

  And now she is gone from their bed and he knows that she has carried her work downstairs, that she spent the pre-dawn hours working on her translation, perhaps at the same table where he and Polly had sat the previous evening. A wave of annoyance sweeps over him. He is surprised by the intensity of his irritation. But her bringing work along on this vacation isn’t what really angers him. True, they had agreed that the August vacation worked best for them, best for their family, if they were free of all obligations. Still, he knew how proud she was to have been offered the LeBec translation and he would have understood if she had told him that she needed time to work on it. It is her deception that outrages him. They have always been honest with each other.

  Why is it, he wonders, that she could not tell him about it? How is it that they have fallen out of the pattern of ease? Their conversations are scripted, stripped of the passion and the laughter that had once animated them. They speak of their children, of the adolescent tensions between Jeremy and Annette, of Matt’s timidity. In the darkness of the night, when once they read each other’s lips with their fingers, they now worry that their neighborhood is growing over-gentrified, that their roof must soon be replaced, that they may have to buy a car for the twins to share. Words, unspoken, lie heavy upon his heart. He does not tell Susan that the shadow of boredom has fallen across his days, that he sometimes feels himself an automaton in the operating room, that he has, more than once, stopped listening when a post-operative patient complained of pain. Sometimes, driving home during the twilight hour, he pulls over to the side of the road, opens the car window and watches the scudding clouds tumble across the cobalt sky. He envies those untethered clouds and wonders, at such moments, how he came to be on that road and if there is any way he can change direction. He wonders too if other men share such feelings with their wives. Midlife crisis, he supposes. It happens. It passes.

  He wonders if a similar toxic silence had poisoned Daniel Goldner’s marriage to Laura, the slender, blonde-haired dancer who had never bothered to conceal the boredom she felt at the inn. Jeff recalls that when Daniel spoke she clasped and unclasped her hands impatiently. Once Jeff had watched her as she danced alone beneath a giant oak, her feet bare, her arms hugging her breasts, only to fall still when Daniel approached. Have he and Susan become like Daniel and Laura, solitary dancers on a shadowed lawn?

  Immediately, he chides himself for the absurdity of the comparison. The two marriages do not remotely resemble each other. Daniel and Laura always seemed adrift, riding the tides of their separate and separating careers. He and Susan are firmly anchored. They will be all right. They will be fine. They will talk. They will have to talk. This new certainty soothes him and he picks up her nightgown, fingers its silken folds and inhales the familiar commingling scents of her body.

  ‘Hurry up,’ he calls to Jeremy and Annette who are bickering in the adjoining room, but he does not wait for them. Instead he hurries downstairs to join his wife at the breakfast table as Donny Templeton, followed by Matt and Cary, marches importantly through the inn, jangling the breakfast bell.

  Daniel Goldner hears the bell and the shouting children, but he does not go down to breakfast. His sleep, such as it was, had been troubled; unremembered dreams had filled him with inexplicable fear and an odd trembling.

  ‘It’s not the end, it’s only a chapter,’ he told himself, struggling to capture the calming cadence of Simon Epstein’s voice and shamed at all that he had revealed to his friend. He shivered as a cold sweat slithered across his body, then pulled the cover closer and slept again.

  Now he was adrift on the large double bed, Laura beside him, floating across sun-streaked waters. He wakened, weeping, because she had vanished and he feared that she had danced across shimmering wavelets and allowed herself to sink below their surface.

  ‘No, no,’ he cried in a sleep-strangled voice. He pounded the pillow where her head should have rested and opened his eyes to the reality of the night’s darkness and his own irrational terror.

  He remains in bed then, as the boys and their bell disappear down the corridor, and closes his eyes in pursuit of rest, in pursuit of forgetfulness.

  He does not stir when Louise Abbot tiptoes into the room and places a tray containing a carafe of coffee and a plate of toast on the bedside table. Such pampering is a rarity at Mount Haven Inn, generally reserved for sick children and indisposed guests. But, of course, that is how Louise must perceive him, as a convalescent in need of beneficent coddling. He opens his eyes as she leaves the room and glimpses the swirl of her denim skirt against her legs as she softly closes the door. Louise always had good legs, he remembers. He and Simon had agreed on that. He takes a sip of coffee and is surprised at how good it tastes. Hungry, for the first time in weeks, he gobbles up the toast.

  He goes to the window and looks down at the emerald-green lawn across which Evan is very slowly guiding a mower. The aroma of newly mown grass hangs sweetly on the summer air. Daniel inhales deeply and decides that it was, after all, a good idea to come to the inn.

  Polly, standing at the kitchen window, waiting for the dishwasher to complete its last cycle so that she can unload it and then fill it with the rest of the breakfast dishes, watches as the guests glide across the lawn. She knows that they usually stay close to the inn on this first vacation day, still testing the waters of their new leisure, still uneasy with the empty hours that stretch before them, so newly bereft of reassuring schedules and crowded calendars. She supposes that the absolute quiet of Mount Haven Inn is unnerving after the turmoil of classrooms and offices where phones ring, and urgent emails summon them to meetings and consultations. But, of course, they are relieved to have abandoned their work lives for these few weeks. Polly notes that they leave their cell phones in the drawers of their bedside tables and the only visible newspapers are those Michael Curran buys each morning.

  No television, no radios intrude on this peaceful respite. Wars are fought in another world, stock prices rise and fall on distant continents, all a matter of indifference to these guests of August. They are on leave from the larger world as well as from their own small frenetic universes. They have shed their urban uniforms in favor of the light fabrics and vivid hues of summer.

  They scatter across the emerald green lawn after breakfast, veering in different directions, like brightly colored wild flowers driven by a gentle wind. The small boys race to the play area, as though flying on the wings of their own laughter. Annette, Jeremy and Paul, with gaily patterned beach towels draped over their shoulders, their long legs lathered with glistening sunscreen, head for the lake. The twins break into a run but Paul moves at his own pace, now and again gazing skyward. He spots a hawk, flying low and then soaring out of sight. He regrets not bringing his birdwatching diary but he was afraid that Annette might think that nerdy and he does not want Annette to think him nerdy. Impulsively, he sprints ahead, seizes her hand and, laughing, they race past her brother who, taken by surprise, stares after them and slows his gait to a walk.

  Mark Templeton leads his wife and daughter-in-law to the three chairs he arranged earlier. Obediently, the two women settle into the wide-armed, low-backed white wooden Adirondack chairs which Evan Abbot painted during the long winter months.

  Andrea Templeton, wearing oversized sunglasses, tilts her large straw sun hat, fingers its band of apple-green linen that exactly matches her shorts, and removes her needlepoint from her carrier bag, also apple green. The long silver needle glitters in the sun and she draws a thread of crimson silk through the taut fabric and works her pattern in rhythmic stitches. She reaches into her bag for her scissors, which she finds without any difficulty. She seems a woman in control of her life, in control of her possess
ions, but Polly is not deceived. She has already cleaned and straightened the Templetons’ room and discovered the three bottles of vodka, buried beneath a gray cashmere stole in the elegant black leather case with the monogram AM. They are exactly where they were the previous year only last year the stole was red and the brand of vodka was different. Grey Goose has replaced the Stoli.

  Polly is familiar with secret drinkers. Her own mother sips very cheap bourbon from a teacup; her father keeps a flask in his tool chest. But neither of them are as careful as elegant Andrea Templeton who always places a bottle of very expensive mouthwash in the medicine cabinet and who never ever slurs a word.

  As though she’s fooling anyone, Polly thinks, and watches as Wendy drops her sketchpad and pencils on to the grass, closes her eyes and turns her face upward toward the sun. Wendy loosens the straps of her lavender sun dress, kicks off her sandals and releases her hair, dark as a raven’s wings, from a tortoiseshell clip and allows it to fall about her face. Polly thinks her very beautiful.

  The dishwasher stops and Polly unloads it, begrudging the minutes lost at the window.

  She is waiting for Jeff Edwards. She is free for an hour after finishing the dishes and she is hopeful that Susan will go walking with Helene as she usually does on their first morning at the inn.

  ‘We hardly see each other during the year and we need to catch up,’ Helene had said apologetically to Polly the previous summer, as though an explanation for that early-morning walk was necessary. ‘You know how it is with sisters.’

  Polly had nodded agreeably. She, in fact, does not know how it is with sisters. She is an only child. Her mother, who suffers from a rare anemia, had been warned that another pregnancy might threaten her life. Despite her caution, despite her regimen of drugs and vitamins, and the bourbon which she insists is medicinal, she sometimes appears half dead to Polly who often shakes her awake when she returns home, to assure herself that her mother has not died in her absence. She did not, of course, tell this to Helene whom she distrusts because she laughs too often and stares too closely at her older sister.

  If the sisters do go off together and Dr Edwards is alone, she will ask him if he wouldn’t mind going over part of yet another chapter with her, perhaps in the brick outbuilding which Evan Abbot has turned into a kind of study, its walls lined with books, an old sofa and a rickety desk placed in a corner. Evan, she knows, is at the university library in Durham and she and Jeff Edwards will be undisturbed in his sanctuary. Such privacy is necessary. Louise Abbot would, of course, disapprove of her intruding on a guest and she does not want to risk angering Louise. She needs her job.

  She is still at the window when Helene and Susan pass by. She smiles, waits for them to disappear down the road, and then swiftly removes her apron, runs her fingers through her hair, grabs her textbook from its hiding place behind the sugar and hurries out just as Jeff Edwards begins to cross the lawn.

  ‘Dr Edwards,’ she says breathlessly, ‘I wonder if you would mind going over another chapter with me?’

  He smiles, the non-committal practiced smile of a man who has spent years reassuring the families of post-operative patients that things went well, that everything will be fine, and nods.

  ‘Of course, Polly. I’ll be glad to.’

  Together they make their way to the red brick building, their passage marked only by Nessa Epstein who stares after them before turning back to her book.

  Liane Curran wonders if she can persuade anyone to go to the outlets with her. New Hampshire does have terrific outlets. Or maybe she could go antiquing. That is something Greg and Helene Ames do a lot and it might be fun. Greg bought that great darts set in an antique shop. Helene is with her sister, that snobby Susan who barely said hello to Liane. Maybe she and Greg could go alone. Greg might want the company and Michael wouldn’t mind. She waits for the sisters to vanish down the road before approaching Greg Ames who has carried his guitar out to the lawn. Michael is safely sequestered with Simon Epstein who has agreed, somewhat reluctantly, Liane thinks, to look at his spreadsheets.

  ‘Hey, Greg,’ she says in the lilting voice she cultivated as a young girl. ‘I just love that dart game. You were lucky to find it. You know, I’ve never gone antiquing. Are there any good antique places around here?’

  ‘A couple,’ Greg says.

  ‘I’d love to find a nice old bookcase for Cary’s room. Michael’s busy. Would you have time to drive me to one of those places?’

  ‘I’d love to, Liane, but I want to practice this morning. Helene and I may go after lunch. You could join us.’

  ‘Oh, thanks. Maybe.’ She flashes him a smile that shows no hint of disappointment and watches him walk across the lawn toward a chair at a remove from the other guests.

  Annoyed, she turns back indoors. She will find a book or perhaps start a puzzle. Instead she heads for the box of darts, set on a shelf out of the reach of the smaller children. She selects one, blows on its feathers, stands at a distance from the board and aims at the target with angry ferocity.

  Helene and Susan, as always, follow the road that leads from the inn to Middleton, the very small hamlet only a half mile away. Although they do not look alike, they walk with similar energy, with matching grace, bearing down hard on the balls of their feet and sprinting forward. Greg and Jeff have noted their shared gait and smiled at each other, admiring husbands of women who are sisters.

  The two women continue on in companionable silence until they reach the last acreage of the property belonging to the inn. They pass a clapboard house sinking into disrepair, its paint peeling, a slab of wood substituting for a pane of glass in a downstairs window.

  ‘Polly Syms’ house,’ Helene says absently. ‘The family’s on hard times. Her father hasn’t much work and her mother is really sick. You have to admire her for plugging on.’

  Susan nods.

  ‘It’s tough,’ she says. ‘But she’ll manage. Girls like her always do.’

  Helene looks at her quizzically but says nothing. She will not tell her sister how much she sounded like their mother.

  They reach the small white house which has always charmed them.

  ‘They painted it last summer,’ Helene observes. ‘We looked at a house very similar to that one but decided against it.’

  Susan nods. She has heard those words before. Greg and Helene are forever searching for a house, finding one that seems possible and then rejecting it. She and Jeff speculated about their hesitancy back in the days when they, the contented couple, secure in their home, happy with their family, their careers, sat lazily over glasses of wine and mused on the vagaries of their friends and family. They were certain in that bygone time that their own lives were secure enough to escape such idle scrutiny.

  Jeff had posited that Greg and Helene were aiming too high, seeking out homes that were beyond their means. Their incomes were modest, given the burden of their student loans and the fact that they were latecomers to their careers, having spent so many years traveling the world. Greg catches gigs in small clubs and Helene exhibits her paintings in even smaller café galleries, now and again making a small sale. Over the years, picture postcards from Spain and Greece, from Turkey and Ireland had arrived at irregular intervals at the Edwards’ home and were briefly displayed on the mantelpiece, talismans to be envied and derided.

  ‘No pension plan, no real savings, no equity.’ Jeff had ticked off their financial missteps in the self-congratulatory tone of a man who has planned his own life carefully, and yet Susan detected a trace of wistful envy in his accusation.

  ‘It might be that they don’t really want a house, like they don’t really want children. Maybe that kind of permanence is just not for them. They’re still gypsies at heart,’ he had said.

  ‘Helene even dresses like a gypsy,’ Susan had countered.

  And indeed, Helene is in gypsy mode today, in a rainbow-colored dress, its ragged hem swirling at her knees, the bodice baring her shoulders, all but exposing the rise of her b
reasts. Her bright hair, so carelessly tinted, is, as always, too long and too unruly. Susan pats her own golden helmet and adjusts the collar of her impeccably ironed pale blue shirt.

  ‘Maybe you ought to scale down your expectations,’ she tells her sister cautiously. ‘Small houses can be very cozy, very easy to maintain.’

  Helene shrugs. ‘Your kids look great,’ she says, too swiftly changing the subject.

  She forgives herself. She does not want Susan’s advice and she does have a deep fondness for her niece and nephews. There are framed photos of them on her bedside table and snapshots in her wallet.

  ‘Yes. They’re OK, I suppose,’ Susan says.

  Helene is surprised at the uncertainty in her sister’s voice.

  ‘But Annette and Jeremy are at a funny stage,’ Susan continues. ‘They were once so close and now they bicker constantly. They’re so mean to each other that they actually scare Matt.’

  ‘Adolescence isn’t easy,’ Helene says carefully.

  She and Susan seldom discuss their own teenage years, a time riddled with sadness and tension, with melancholy memories of their ineffectual father who died of a heart attack the day before Susan’s sixteenth birthday, and ambivalent feelings about their mother who was diagnosed with uterine cancer when Helene entered college and was dead within a week of her graduation. They do not speak of the years of her illness, of their own uneasy balance on the seesaw of remission and recurrence, relaxing in her brief optimism, fleeing her fury at the onset of too familiar pain, breathing easy only when they stood side by side at her funeral, safe at last from her roiling rage. They are sisters, sharers of a painful past, who remain firmly armored in the tacit silence of survivors, defending themselves against secrets they will not articulate.

  ‘No. It’s not,’ Susan agrees. ‘What did Shakespeare call it – the heyday of the blood. A difficult phrase to translate into French. All that sexual juice begins to ferment and the poor kids don’t know how to handle it. The twins are only seventeen, but I have a friend who teaches at their school and she claims that lots of the kids in their grade are already sexually active. It scares me, Helene.’