Guests of August

by Gloria Goldreich

  All marriages are not fragile. My marriage is not fragile. She had felt her family immune to the epidemic of divorce that had swept across Matt’s grade during the past winter. Matt had returned home to report on the splits, sad-eyed and worried. Russ’s father had moved to another city. Eddie’s mom had taken him and his brothers to live with her parents. Eugene spends three days with his mother and four with his father.

  ‘It’s so scary,’ Matt had said.

  ‘Don’t be scared,’ she had assured him. ‘We’re fine. We’re great. You never have to worry about your family. Daddy and I love each other. Forever.’

  ‘All marriages are not fragile,’ she would tell LeBec defiantly.

  Now it occurs to her that her mental and vocal protests were dangerous. She had tempted fate and Jeff’s heart is sealed against her. Weighted with misery, she falls asleep at last. But Jeff tosses and turns until the first light of dawn streaks its way across the sky.

  Wendy springs into wakefulness as a streak of lightning flashes across the sky. She has always been intrigued and excited by summer storms and, after checking on Donny, shrugs into her dressing gown and heads downstairs.

  Next door, Andrea Templeton is awake. She’s always found it difficult to sleep during a storm. Adam too had always been frightened by wind and rain and often, during his boyhood, he had crept into her bed. Too often, she supposes, she had rebuffed him and sent him back to the loneliness of his own room. Familiar guilt settles heavily upon her. She had tried, she has tried to assure herself, but she knows that she had not been a good mother.

  Suddenly Donny calls out, his voice thick with sleep. She waits for Wendy to go to him but when he cries out again, she tiptoes into the adjoining room. Wendy’s bed is empty and Donny is now peacefully asleep, the smile of what must surely have been a happy dream playing on his lips. His cry must have been an utterance of joy.

  Relieved, she glances at the table on which Wendy’s sketchpad lies. She flips it open and studies the rough drawings of the swans. Grudgingly, she admires them. Wendy must have studied Audubon’s technique. She is progressing beyond the watercolor landscapes which, Andrea admits, are very pleasing. She closes the pad and centers it carefully on the table.

  ‘Where is Wendy?’ she wonders, although she is fairly certain that she knows.

  She returns to her own room, fills a glass with vodka which she drinks as she stares unseeingly into the darkness. Mark, a light sleeper, wakens, watches her but says nothing. What, after all, would be the point?

  Michael and Liane sleep peacefully, indifferent to the storm. Now and again, his arm brushes her shoulder and she smiles at his touch. His spreadsheets, bloodied with the red ink of Mark Templeton’s pen, litter the desk. At each subsequent meeting Mark has made corrections, insisted on adjustments, raised questions about proven calculations.

  Michael thinks his suggestions unnecessary, as does Simon Epstein, who is after all a world-famous economist, a financial guru consulted regularly by venture capitalists. But it is Simon, ever the pragmatist, who suggests that Michael acquiesce to Templeton’s suggestions.

  ‘All you need is his capital. Say yes, pocket the check and do as you please,’ he advised, and Michael supposes that he is right.

  Still, although he gets up once in the night to close the window, he does not glance at his work. Time enough in the morning. He no longer feels the urgency that choked him with fear only a few days earlier. No matter what, he and Liane will manage, they will survive. She has offered him reassurances, even a plan. His wife, mysteriously and wondrously, is once again his own.

  He covers Cary with a light blanket, returns to bed and drops a kiss on Liane’s forehead, before drifting back into a sweet and dreamless sleep.

  TWELVE

  The new morning is sun-swept, the air sweet and fresh in the aftermath of the wild and cleansing nocturnal storm. The rain-washed lawn is a verdant expanse across which Donny, Cary and Matt dance barefoot before breakfast. Louise fills the vases with the last roses of summer; the delicate amber-colored petals pearled with drops of dew. The flowers and the promising brightness of the sunlight that emblazons the windows please the vacationers as they drift in for breakfast. Polly carries in one tray of pancakes, but another waitress serves the table where the Edwards family is seated in stiff and uneasy silence. Matt, tousle-haired, his feet deliciously cold, tries valiantly to coax them into laughter, telling jokes which evoke reluctant smiles.

  ‘Want to go antiquing with us today?’ Helene asks Susan. ‘It would be fun for the four of us to do something together.’

  She is eager to please her sister, to encircle Susan in her own newfound cocoon of contentment.

  ‘Maybe,’ Susan says.

  ‘No.’ Jeff’s reply is flatly final.

  Susan blushes and Helene looks away.

  The dining room is abuzz with conversations about plans for the day ahead. Andrea and Mark decide to go to a nursery and select new plantings for Adam’s grave.

  ‘What do you think about a bonsai arrangement, Wendy?’ Andrea asks.

  She is careful not to ignore Adam’s widow on such a delicate topic.

  ‘Or perhaps a small hedgerow just bordering the grave.’

  ‘I thought we’d put in some more bulbs. Daffodils and narcissi. The ones we put in last year were beautiful when they bloomed in the spring,’ Wendy replies carefully. ‘Crocuses maybe. Adam liked crocuses. He always bought potted crocuses for our apartment.’

  That had never happened, but she takes malicious pleasure in inventing it. She wants to wound her husband’s mother who had never visited their small Cambridge apartment, who had not been witness to the sad last weeks and months of Adam’s life, who has no way of knowing whether or not crocuses had bloomed on their windowsill.

  ‘You visited his grave in the spring?’ Andrea has difficulty concealing the surprise in her voice.

  ‘We go every spring, me and Mom. And sometimes in the winter,’ Donny tells her. ‘Last year we went on Thanksgiving morning.’

  He is proud of these pilgrimages in retrospect, although in actual practice he resists them. He has no memory of the father who lies beneath the pale marble gravestone with its elegant cursive inscription. Adam Templeton. Beloved Son, Husband and Father. The year of his birth and the year of his death are carved beneath the letters. Donny has done the arithmetic and knows that his father was thirty years old on the day of his death. Always he runs his fingers across the carved inscription, unnerved to find granules of dark earth within the letters. Diligently, during each such visit, he helps his mother pull the weeds that stubbornly force their way around the plants set in place each August. Sometimes his mother cries and sometimes she is dry eyed. He himself has never cried. How can he weep for a father he never knew? He forgives himself for his lack of sorrow. It is enough that he accompanies his mother, no matter how reluctantly.

  ‘On Thanksgiving morning,’ Andrea repeats, her tone cold. ‘An interesting choice of days to make such a visit.’

  Wendy smiles bitterly. Does Adam’s mother think she has a monopoly on grief, that her August pilgrimages must remain inviolate, that she and Donny have no right to visit the grave on their own? She turns to Donny.

  ‘Do you want to go to the nursery with us?’ she asks him.

  ‘But he always comes with us,’ Andrea protests. ‘I can’t think why you’re giving him a choice this year.’

  ‘Always does not mean forever,’ Wendy replies as Donny crumbles his toast and builds a small hillock with the crumbs which he brushes angrily to the floor. His grandparents should not talk about him. Why don’t they talk to him?

  ‘I’m not sure what I want to do,’ he says sullenly.

  Only then does Mark look up from his perusal of the Wall Street Journal which Michael Curran dutifully delivers to their table each morning.

  ‘Wendy, I think you know that it means a lot to Adam’s mother that Donny come with us, that he help us make a choice about what we want to plant,�
�� he says.

  Each word is clipped. He is not a man who raises his voice. He has other ways of making his will known.

  Wendy flushes, places her arm about her son’s shoulder.

  ‘It’s OK, Mom. I’ll go with you.’

  Donny’s response is swift. He would agree to anything to ease the tension between his mother and his grandparents. He does not point out that, in fact, in past years, his opinion was never solicited as they wandered about the nursery, studying shrubbery and bushes. He has long felt that a small tree should be planted just beyond the grave so that the marble slab might be shaded in the heat of the summer. And perhaps a small stone bench placed just beneath it so that his mother might rest on it when she visits. He has seen such benches at other grave sites. Perhaps today, he will mention both the tree and the bench. After all, his grandfather has said that he should help in their choice.

  Paul volunteers to take Cary and Matt canoeing and he is surprised when Annette offers to join them. Richie frowns but says nothing. His cell phone rings. He glances at the screen and goes outside where the reception is better.

  ‘Our mother probably,’ Tracy says drily. ‘She calls in the mornings. Before her meetings. Before her conference calls. Before she has to rush to the airport or speed to a runway show. We’re like the stuffing in her sandwich – she fits us in between slices of time.’

  Nessa thinks she should defend Charlotte, tell Tracy that her mother is really a very busy woman, that her job is time bound and weighted with responsibility. But she remains silent. It is not her role to run interference for her husband’s first wife. Stepmothers must be careful, very careful.

  Simon also ignores Tracy’s comment. His own morning stretches pleasantly before him, Mark Templeton having announced that he would be unavailable to work on Michael Curran’s project. Simon has a new idea as to how to proceed with young Curran’s software, but he is granting himself a reprieve. For these next few hours, he will be neither an economist nor a business guru but a man on vacation, strolling at his own leisurely pace through a small New Hampshire village, making pleasant purchases, perhaps lingering in a café where the coffee is excellent and the scones are toasted and served with whipped butter.

  ‘I’m going into the village,’ he announces. ‘Anyone want to join me?’

  He turns to his wife, his daughter.

  Tracy opts out. She has promised to play tennis with Jeremy Edwards. She leaves the dining room without waiting for Richie to report on his conversation with their mother.

  ‘I want to visit my swans,’ Nessa says.

  She has roughed out the text of her book and emailed it to her editor who is intrigued by the idea of transforming the beautiful and graceful swan into an adorable mischievous duckling. The editor, an astute judge of children’s yearnings, has raised the possibility of a series of upside-down fairy tales. Why not have a friendly wolf triumph over three arrogant and complacent pigs? A racing hare might outmaneuver the plodding tortoise. Perhaps Nessa will invent a version of Cinderella redux and focus on a beneficent stepmother who worries only about the happiness of her stepchildren. ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who is the best stepmom of them all?’ the editor has suggested.

  Nessa finds the concept attractive. It amuses her to turn the improbable into a happy reality, a reflection of sorts of her own life. She knows that there is some wonderment that overweight, irreverent Nessa married slender, fastidious and successful Simon Epstein and even more wonderment that, in fact, they are living happily ever after. Yes, such a series could work. But first she must complete the drawings of the swans still in residence at the lake.

  Daniel also declines a visit to the village. He is determined to finish reading his proofs. He is, as always, impatient with his own work. The novel is too calculated, too formulaic, written hastily because he needed the money. Laura’s lessons, her rental of a studio, her trips to dance workshops and auditions in distant cities, her costumes, the long skirts in every color of the rainbow, the leotards sculpted to hug her body, the satin-stringed shoes, her very expensive macrobiotic diet – it all meant a constant outpouring of money so he wrote swiftly, almost recklessly. But now, with his life beginning anew, he will be able to write according to his own lights, no longer concerned with commercial success. It is a thought that both pleases and saddens him.

  Jeff and Susan carry their books out to the lawn. The white, high-backed and wide-armed chairs they favor are still wet and Jeff dries them with paper towels.

  ‘Thank you,’ Susan says.

  Her expression of gratitude is overly formal and he acknowledges it with an equally formal nod. They take their seats and turn to their books, not looking at each other, as alone in their casual proximity as two strangers accidentally seated side by side.

  Polly stands at the kitchen window, looks out at them, then turns away and helps Louise fold the newly laundered tablecloths.

  ‘Can you finish doing this?’ Louise asks. ‘I want to wipe off the rest of the garden chairs.’

  That, of course, is Evan’s job, Polly knows, but Evan is still absent from the inn.

  ‘Evan’s at some sort of language conference at the university,’ Louise says, as though reading Polly’s thoughts.

  Polly shrugs, indicating her disinterest. She has no time to worry about Louise and Evan Abbot. She is consumed with worry about her mother, so weak this morning that she could barely lift her glass of orange juice, so frail that she leaned against Polly to cross the room. Their family doctor is on vacation and the doctor filling in for him had not been available when she called. His receptionist was indifferent. Twice, as she cycled to the inn that morning, she was impelled to turn back and make sure that her mother was all right. But she had continued on, spurred by the thought that she might ask Jeff Edwards’ advice. He is, after all, both a surgeon and a diagnostician.

  But seeing him seated beside his wife on the lawn, the courage to do that deserts her. His wife would surely resent it. She looks out the window and watches Annette sprint across the lawn and pause to drop a kiss on her father’s head, to accept his smile and casual wave. Polly wonders what it might be like to have a father like Jeff who understands his children, who cares so deeply for them, a man who has the luxury to sit quietly on a lawn chair on a summer day and turn the pages of a book.

  When Louise leaves, Polly calls her own father, that sad and work-worn man, who tells her that her mother seems to be feeling better.

  ‘She gets these spells,’ he says. ‘Don’t be so scared.’

  Polly does not tell him that cancer is not a spell because ‘cancer’ is not a word that they say aloud, fearful always that its very utterance will vest it with grim reality. ‘Anemia’ is the word they use because it is so much less frightening than ‘leukemia’.

  She hangs up as Liane Curran dashes into the kitchen to fill a thermos with cold water. It is the Currans who will join Helene and Greg on their antiquing junket. Susan looks up from her book, smiles too brightly and waves to her sister as Greg revs the motor and the two couples drive off.

  The nursery that the Templetons favor is lively on this sunny morning. Diligent, optimistic gardeners wander through the outdoor displays of small saplings wrapped in burlap, tangled roots thrusting their way through the rough fabric. Sacks of bulbs are hefted and considered. Groups of laughing and chatting young mothers, their children trailing after them, select trays of russet colored zinnias to combat the dreary arrival of autumn.

  Wendy looks at the carefree shoppers with a twinge of envy. None of them, she is certain, is intent on landscaping a gravesite. They will not carry their fragrant purchases to a cemetery. They are not planning botanical tributes to the dead. She wonders, not for the first time, why this yearly ritual is so important to Adam’s parents. She thinks the answer may be compensation, for the scant attention they gave their son during his brief life. The thought is unkind, she knows, but she allows herself the luxury of malice. Her therapist has taught her that thoughts in the
mselves are harmless.

  The owner of the nursery, a stout red-cheeked man who invariably has a twist of bright green leaves entangled in his thick white hair, greets them effusively. Andrea had been a faithful customer during her years in New Hampshire, and when Adam died he sent a large floral display to the funeral parlor. It annoys him that Adam Templeton’s young widow only visits the nursery during August when she is accompanied by her in-laws. He assumes, with some bitterness, that she makes her own garden purchases at less expensive stores. Nevertheless, he smiles at her and her son although he directs his attention to the elegant elderly couple who will, of course, be writing the check.

  ‘I thought you might be interested in a new ground cover,’ he says. ‘I would advise a new ivy. Very durable. The grounds keepers at the cemetery tell me it survives our terrible winters.’

  ‘That sounds exactly right,’ Andrea says. ‘What do you think, Wendy?’

  ‘Ivy strangles. And it’s difficult to uproot.’

  Wendy states her objection firmly, the first time during these annual nursery visits that she has opposed Adam’s mother. Her therapist would be proud of her. She is proud of herself.

  ‘I’d rather put in bulbs that will come up in the spring and maybe a hydrangea bush,’ she adds.

  ‘There are other ground covers.’

  The nursery owner is persistent, but Wendy shakes her head. ‘I want color,’ she says. ‘Adam loved flowers. Brightly colored flowers.’

  She plays her trump card, certain that Adam’s parents have no idea of either Adam’s loves or his hates.

  ‘Of course. Flowers. But I do think we should consider some ground cover. Perhaps not ivy. Salvia or ferns. Or a self-contained moss that wouldn’t spread and would leave room for your bulbs,’ Andrea counters.

  ‘I don’t think of them as my bulbs,’ Wendy says.

  ‘But you are being just a bit territorial, aren’t you?’ Mark Templeton says, his voice dripping sarcasm.

  Donny grips his mother’s hand and stares hard at his grandmother. She is so bossy. What right does she have to be so bossy? And his grandfather shouldn’t talk to his mother like that. What does territorial mean anyway? And he has the right to say something. It is his own father’s grave, after all, and they did say that he could choose.