Guests of August

by Gloria Goldreich

  ‘It’s great that you’re able to spend some time with us,’ Nessa says easily.

  She gets along well with her stepchildren although, with her usual unflinching honesty, she acknowledges that she does not love them. She anticipates that sometime in the future she and Tracy will be friends but that is something they will have to grow into. She is less certain about Richie who reminds her, for no discernible reason, of the handsome boy who was president of her own high-school senior class, a boy with a talent for adolescent cruelty. Anonymous notes left in the locker rooms of less popular girls. Insinuations about boys who listened to music and read classics. In secondary school Richie had been accused of bullying but he has, apparently, moved on. And he has always been kind to Paul who, in turn, admires his older half-brother. Her Freudian friends might claim that their bonding is simplified because they do not have to share the same mother, but she thinks that they are simply boys who like each other enough to be friends, despite the disparity of their ages. After all, Daniel is years younger than Simon and they have always been like brothers to each other. She really should not worry about the friendship between her son and her stepson.

  ‘We love having you here,’ she adds.

  ‘It’ll be great, really great.’ Paul amends her words.

  Lunch is over, chairs are being pushed back, napkins folded, watches consulted. The long afternoon awaits them. The guests move slowly, sated by their meal, anticipating hours of drowsing in the sunlight or retreating into the cool silence of their rooms, the delightful luxury of a midday nap. Their alternatives are numerous. Perhaps a drive. Perhaps a short walk. Books dangle from their hands, smiles linger on their lips.

  The small boys race to their fort. Richie and Tracy, dragging knapsacks and duffle bags, trail after Polly who carries a load of linens and towels.

  Wendy and Daniel head for her car and drive off. Nessa stares after them and smiles. A perfect fit, she thinks. A soap-opera dream. The lovely young widow and the soon-to-be-divorced novelist. Definitely the ingredients of romance. Simon, who worries about Daniel, will be pleased when she shares her news with him, but that will have to wait. Simon has arranged a meeting with Mark Templeton and Michael Curran.

  She watches from the steps of the inn as Simon sets three chairs in a circle. He is soon joined by Michael Curran, who has discarded his Bermuda shorts in favor of khaki slacks and a well-pressed shirt, although he still clutches his attaché case. He wears the uniform of a man concerned with business. Minutes later Mark Templeton strides toward them and claims the chair in the middle.

  ‘Do you want to take a walk, Nessa?’ Helene Ames asks.

  Nessa turns. She had not heard Helene come up behind her. ‘Sure. I’d love to,’ she says, and the two women follow the tree-lined path that leads to the lake.

  Wendy and Daniel discover that the craft shop in town is closed but will reopen within the hour. They do not mind. They wander the quiet streets of the small town, pausing at shop windows, stopping outside the bookstore to examine the used books that are ranged on sidewalk racks.

  ‘I’m always afraid I’m going to find a copy of one of my books in a place like this,’ Daniel says.

  He shoves books aside and actually finds a short-story anthology that he has been meaning to read. He glances at the price – less than a dollar – and winces, pitying the editor whom he knows.

  ‘And I’m always afraid that I’ll find Adam’s novel in a remainder pile,’ Wendy says.

  ‘It was a good book. You know, Adam and I were once on a panel together. I had forgotten.’

  ‘I sometimes forget myself,’ she replies and falls silent. How could she explain that Adam, his work, his angular melancholy face, his long lithe body, was slowly fading from her memory? It was as though his death, in all its tragic finality, obscured his life.

  Daniel pays for the anthology and they walk on, pausing at a small café.

  ‘A cappuccino?’ he asks.

  ‘Why not?’

  They find a corner booth in that intimate room, its newly painted walls hung with watercolors by local artists, and African violets in brightly colored ceramic pots centered on each blond-wood table. Daniel looks around appreciatively, captivated by the café’s modesty and charm, so unlike the trendy cafés of the Hamptons with their faux seashore ambience that Laura favored. He stares at a delicate drawing of a weeping willow tree, casting its shade across an intricately drawn flower bed.

  ‘I really like that one,’ he murmurs.

  Wendy blushes. ‘It’s mine,’ she confesses.

  He looks at her in surprise.

  ‘I live only an hour away,’ she explains. ‘I like this café. Ellen, the owner, is a friend. She’s a portrait painter herself and her café doubles as a gallery for her own work and the work of local artists. I gave her that one because I thought she might be able to sell it and earn a commission. I know things are a little tight for her. But she says she likes it too much to sell it so there it hangs.’

  ‘You’re good. Really good.’

  ‘I have to be. It’s what I do for a living.’ Her words are matter of fact, seeking neither approval nor surprise.

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘We don’t know each other very well, do we? Hardly at all. Strange, considering that we’ve seen each other at the inn now and again over the years.’

  He nods. She is right, of course. During his infrequent visits with Laura, they had scarcely spoken to other guests, spending all of their time with Simon and Nessa. He had noticed Wendy, of course, had gleaned a few facts about her, crumbs of information offered by Nessa who somehow always seems to know everything about everyone.

  ‘Here’s what I do know,’ he says reflectively. ‘I know that you’re a widow; that your husband, who had just published his first book, was killed in an automobile accident and that you and your son live in his childhood home. I didn’t realize it was so close to Mount Haven. Now I discover that you’re a very talented professional artist. I also know that your in-laws live in California and that you meet each August at Mount Haven Inn, a ritual reunion that I don’t quite understand. And I have the feeling that your husband’s parents are not your favorite people,’ he adds daringly.

  ‘You’re right about that,’ she admits and wonders why she is being so honest. She is relieved when Ellen approaches their table, kisses Wendy on the cheek and waits for their order.

  ‘You’ll want your usual decaf cappuccino, won’t you, Wendy?’ she asks.

  ‘I’ll have the same,’ he says.

  Ellen nods, smiles agreeably and he turns back to Wendy.

  ‘And what do you know about me?’ he asks.

  She hesitates and then decides to match his candor with her own.

  ‘I know that you’re a novelist and critic. Historical novels. I read the first one because it was set in New Hampshire and I read the second one because it wasn’t. And, of course, I know that you’ve been coming to Mount Haven Inn since you were a kid, that you and Simon Epstein have been friends forever and that Louise Abbot is your biggest fan. And I was here during the occasional August when you came with your wife who is very beautiful and who always seemed bored to death. Now you’re here alone so I assume you’re separated or divorced or maybe she’s just dancing somewhere. She is a dancer, isn’t she?’ she asks, although of course she knows the answer.

  ‘Laura. Her name is Laura. And it’s possible that she is dancing somewhere even as we speak. I wouldn’t know. We were married for twelve years and now we’re separated and in the process of getting divorced, whatever that process may be.’

  He relates this in a monotone and is astonished by the brevity of his revelation. How is it that his marriage, his life with Laura and its lonely aftermath, can be reduced to so few sentences? He wonders if he will ever be able to weave the strands of those cursory melancholy words into a fictional tapestry.

  ‘Laura.’ She says slowly, measuring out the syllables. ‘My husband’s name was Adam but y
ou probably know that. We were only married for two years. I fell in love at twenty, out of love at twenty-one and I was widowed a month before my twenty-third birthday. Rather precocious of me, don’t you think?’

  She looks up as Ellen serves their coffee and places a bowl of biscotti on the table.

  ‘Almond. Fresh baked. I know you like them, Wendy.’

  ‘I do. Thanks, Ellen.’

  Daniel watches her bite into the pastry and wonders what it would be like to live in this small community, to be coddled by a café owner who doubles as a portrait painter and greeted with affection by passers-by. He imagines himself resident here – he is, after all, in search of a new life. He might write all morning, glance now and again at the mountains beyond his window and then stroll down the quiet street to this café where Ellen will greet him by name, as she greeted Wendy. The anonymity and solitude of his work hours might be briefly banished, his writerly loneliness briefly sated. He smiles at this improbable fantasy, dismisses it and focuses on Wendy.

  ‘I don’t know if “precocious” is the word I’d use.’

  ‘Oh. What word would you use?’

  He thinks for a moment. ‘Sad,’ he replies simply. ‘What happened to you was sad. Falling out of love is sad. Confronting death is sad. Being left with a small child is sad.’

  ‘Yes.’

  All flippancy is drained from her voice which becomes so faint he must lean across the table to hear her.

  ‘It was sad and hard, very hard. Sometimes I think it might have been easier if I had loved him during those last months, that last year. I would have earned the grief of a mourner. I would have been entitled to the sorrow of loss. Instead I felt abandoned and frightened and, of course, sad, so very sad.’

  ‘When did you stop loving him?’

  The intrusiveness of his question startles him. It was a question he had thought to ask Laura. When did you stop loving me? But he had feared her answer and settled instead for the congealing bitterness of silence. Yet now he has thrust these words at Wendy. He chastises himself. This intimacy between them is too sudden. It is riddled with danger and yet he waits expectantly for her reply.

  She sighs. Their conversation has ambushed her. She has never before spoken so openly about her relationship with Adam and it startles her that she has offered Daniel Goldner, whom she hardly knows, such intimate revelations. And yet the words come easily. She answers his question without hesitation.

  ‘It’s easier to think about when I started loving him. I came to Cambridge from the Midwest, a small Ohio town, because I’d won a scholarship to the Art Institute. I was so far out of my league I might have been in another country. Some friends in my watercolor class dragged me to a party, which turned out to be one of those mob scenes in a small, smoke-filled grad student apartment that stank of liquor and pot. I was sorry I’d come the minute I walked in and sorrier still that I’d worn my new blue sweater. People were talking about writers whose names I’d never heard, places I’d never been to, poetry readings in cafés, experimental theatre in church basements. Reefers were being passed around, beer cans were popping and, crazily enough, in all that din, a baby was crying. Some couple had brought their infant and just tossed it on top of the pile of coats in the bedroom. I had one beer and then another, then two or three puffs on a reefer. My first weed and yes, I inhaled. My head was spinning and I was trying to work my way across the room, thinking that maybe I’d just leave, or maybe I’d find the baby and cuddle it, when I bumped into this tall thin guy.’ She pauses and takes a sip of coffee which Daniel assumes must be tepid by now.

  ‘Adam?’ he asks. ‘Adam was the tall thin guy.’

  ‘Of course. Adam. He was carrying a glass of beer and it spilled all over me, all over my new blue sweater. I looked up and I began to cry. The crowd around him looked at me and laughed but Adam didn’t laugh. He took me by the arm and led me into the bathroom. He locked the door, patted my sweater dry, sat me down at the edge of the tub, washed my face with a corner of a dirty towel, took a comb out of his pocket and combed my hair. He asked me what had made me cry and I told him about the baby and how it was crying. ‘OK. Let’s get the baby,’ he said but instead he sat down beside me, put his arm around me and we kissed and kissed, the two of us clinging to each other on the edge of that scummy white tub until people began banging on the door. So Adam unlocked it and we went back to the party, which was winding down. The baby was gone and so were most of the coats.

  ‘“Adam, let’s find a bar on the Square and really celebrate your book,” one of his friends called to him. So I knew that his name was Adam and that he had written a book and it had been published. It occurred to me that maybe the party was in celebration of its publication, and that turned out to be true. But Adam didn’t go down to the Square. Instead he took me back to his apartment and we made love once and then again. We laughed and took a shower together and then we lay down on his bed and marveled at how swiftly and easily we had fallen in love.’

  She laughs bitterly.

  ‘You were twenty,’ Daniel reminds her.

  ‘Yes. I was twenty. A very young twenty. A Midwestern small-town twenty. I wore pastel sweater sets and matching head bands and I never cut a studio class and I worked the reception desk at the Fogg so I’d have expense money. In my small town a girl like me didn’t get into bed with a guy she had known for two hours. Adam was twenty-seven, a sophisticated twenty-seven. He’d graduated from Harvard, lived in Europe, trekked through India, written a novel and gotten it published. He bought his clothes at J. Press, mostly chinos and soft collared shirts. I knew, I suppose, that there was money lurking in the wings. He told me that his father kept an apartment in New York because that’s where his business interests were and his mother lived in a house in New Hampshire, the house he’d grown up in, because she hated the city. But I didn’t ask any questions. I decided that I was in love. I moved into his apartment but I kept my job at the Fogg and, good girl that I was, I never missed a class or a workshop. We played house, those first couple of months. Adam bought the food and I cooked it. His friends came over and drank beer and talked about who was writing and who just said they were writing and who was selling out which meant that someone had taken a job, and of course, how rotten the government was and how great some new restaurant in Somerville was. We always had bottles of gin and vodka and Scotch and bourbon that always seemed to need replenishing way too soon, but I didn’t think much about that. It didn’t occur to me that Adam was drinking. I was out all day and I assumed he wrote all day. Wasn’t that what writers were supposed to do?’

  ‘Ideally,’ Daniel agrees. ‘But it often happens that they don’t.’

  He thinks of his own days too often spent in moody silence, in desperate fear of the blank computer screen.

  ‘Anyway, I got pregnant. We decided to get married just as easily and swiftly as we had decided to move in together. No discussions. No weighing of options. I called my parents who were suitably horrified. They knew I had a boyfriend named Adam but they didn’t know I was living with him. And they asked questions that I thought were stupid and invasive. How did this Adam plan to support a family? Had I met his parents? What sort of people were they? I didn’t answer because I couldn’t. I hung up. I called back and we argued some more and my mother cried and they hung up. A week later my father sent me a check of one thousand dollars which was a lot of money for them and I didn’t cash it. They didn’t even talk about coming to the wedding, which was a grim little civil ceremony. A couple of Adam’s friends came and when we left the courthouse they threw breadcrumbs instead of rice because, they said, birds sometimes choked on the rice. I thought it was great that I was marrying into a community of people that worried about birds. We all laughed and pretended that we were having fun and it was great to be so off-beat, so creative. Adam’s parents came. It was the first time that I met Andrea and Mark, but they were very correct, smiled their thin disapproving smiles, kissed me on the cheek with very dry lips a
nd took us out for a wedding lunch at Locke-Obers. Mark gave Adam an envelope and I knew that it answered my father’s question about how Adam would support a family. I went back to my classes and continued working until Donny was born.’

  ‘And then?’ Daniel asks.

  ‘And then Adam and I were home together all day and I was out of love. Because it was really hard to stay in love with a man who spent most of the day drinking very small glasses of vodka and blaming everyone for what was not happening in his life. He blamed his publisher for not promoting his book, his agent for not getting him a better contract, his parents for his lonely childhood, his disloyal friends who stopped coming around because Donny’s crying and the stink of his diapers annoyed them. And he blamed me for getting pregnant. He discovered that he really didn’t want to be married after all and he certainly didn’t want to be a father. We quarreled and made up and then we quarreled and didn’t make up. And the blame game went on and on and he drank more and more. Finally, we had a kind of terminal argument. It was a day when Donny was really sick and I had to take him to the pediatrician. He yelled that I cared more about Donny than I did about him and that crazy outburst made me realize that we couldn’t go on. I told him he had to do something about himself, about our lives or I would leave. He began to cry then and said there was no way he could plan a future if he couldn’t confront his past. He talked about having it out with his parents, of driving to his mother’s house in New Hampshire. His father was there. It was the day scheduled for their usual monthly visit and he had to go. “Not today,” I said, because he was already drunk. But he didn’t answer me. Instead he called his father and he was talking to him when I left to take Donny to the pediatrician. He was gone when I got home. I knew he was on his way to New Hampshire. And, of course, I knew that he was too drunk to drive. I wasn’t even surprised when the phone rang. His father told me that Adam was dead. ‘Gone’ was the word Mark used, the only word he could manage because he was crying. I picked Donny up and said, ‘He’s gone. Your daddy is gone.’ I hung up the phone and wondered who Adam was blaming when he died. Maybe me. I actually blame myself. Sometimes. Maybe, if I hadn’t forced an ultimatum on him, if I hadn’t said the things that I said, if I hadn’t made him cry, if I had wiped away his tears … I was an awful person to think that. Awful not to be crying myself. Awful that I didn’t cry for him then and I don’t cry for him now.’