The Goodbye Summer

by Patricia Gaffney

  So she approached his ground-floor room with caution now, but before she even got close she heard the stagy, unnatural rhythm of soap opera dialogue blaring through the closed door. Along with everything else, Magill’s hearing was supposed to have been affected by his skydiving accident. She knocked, waited. Knocked again louder.

  He opened the door.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  She could swear he looked guilty again. She started to back up, but then she saw Nana half sitting, half lying on his bed with her foot on a pillow, watching the small TV across the room. Holding a plastic glass in her hand.

  “I only gave her a swallow, a thimbleful, I made it almost all 7 UP.”

  Caddie came all the way in. The room smelled like cigarettes and booze. “You gave my grandmother a drink?”

  “A little Seagram’s, a spot. She saw me pouring it and asked if she could have some. What could I say?”

  “No?” She wasn’t really upset, but he looked so defensive, she felt she ought to be. “I wish you hadn’t,” she said crisply, “it’ll only put her to sleep. And what if Brenda finds out?” Drinking was forbidden except on special occasions.

  Magill reached around her and slammed the door. He had on regular clothes today, not sweats or pajamas, and his knee pads but no football helmet. He used the furniture for help getting across the room to the bed, first the desk, then the top of a chair. That probably didn’t have anything to do with alcohol, though; any fast movement could send him sprawling.

  “Hey, Caddie,” Nana said, just noticing her. “Come over and sit. We’re watching our story.” She patted a place between her and Magill on the bed. “Zander just found out about the baby, what’s-her-name’s baby, this girl right here. What’s her name?”

  “Laura,” Magill mumbled, sounding sheepish. He moved his legs reluctantly, and Caddie sat at the bottom of his rumpled bed. He and Nana lay side by side with their backs propped on pillows, cozy-looking, a couple of old pals.

  “I didn’t know you two had a story.”

  “This girl’s pregnant but she couldn’t tell Jason because she thought he loved the other one, Rachel,” Nana informed her. “Shh, listen.”

  A slick, shiny, blue-black-haired, distraught young man in shirtsleeves and a vest was telling a blonde girl, “Laura, for the love of God, why didn’t you tell me? Darling, darling, did you think I’d be angry? Oh, sweetheart—”

  Laura began to sob. Whenever anybody cried, in life or on screen, Caddie cried, too. She had to blink fast and swallow down a sympathetic lump when Zander and Laura embraced, both of them crying now in extreme close-ups, mashing their faces against each other, holding on so hard it looked painful. Stirring music swelled and a commercial came on.

  “That’s not how it was when I told my boyfriend I was pregnant.”

  Caddie reached for the remote control and pressed the mute button. “What, Nana?”

  In the sudden quiet, her grandmother’s long, crinkly face registered surprise, as if she’d startled herself, too. “Sometimes I think I’ve already told you.”

  “Told me what?”

  “You’re illegitimate.”

  Magill brought his fist to his mouth to clear his throat.

  “Oh,” Caddie said with an artificial laugh, “I already knew that.” She sent Magill an apologetic glance. Sorry. Family laundry.

  Nana pushed up from the pillow and looked at her more closely. “Jane, I meant Jane. I should’ve told her.”

  “My mother?” Caddie gave another chagrined hiccup of a laugh. “No, Nan, I am. I’m Caddie,” she reminded her.

  Nana shook her head sadly. “Oh, honey, Chick and I never did get married, and then he went and died.”

  Chick? “You mean Grampa Charles? No, he was killed on the last day of the war, World War Two, remember? He got all those medals for bravery. He was your husband.”

  Nana made a face by squeezing her eyes shut tight and rolling her lips back over her dentures. “Too handsome,” she said in a stage whisper. “That’s what got me.”

  “He was,” Caddie agreed. She’d seen his picture. One of those man-and-car photos, her grandfather leaning against an old Dodge with his legs crossed, cigarette in his mouth, a sexy shock of black hair in his eyes. She’d never seen a picture of him in his army uniform. Never seen any of his medals for courage, either.

  “He mowed the lawn at the college,” Nana said. “Junior gardener, he called it. We started up that spring I got my teacher’s certificate. Pretty spring. I always blamed it on the azaleas.”

  “What?”

  “I never told your mother, and I should’ve.”

  “That what?”

  “I fell in love, that’s what.”

  “You and Chick—Charles—”

  “Chick Buckman. You should’ve seen him walk. That was one man nobody could resist, especially from the back.”

  “Chick Buckman? Then who’s Charles Buchanan?”

  Nana made a grinding sound in the back of her throat. Her eyes watered. “Haaaa,” she said fondly, nudging Caddie’s hip with her good foot.

  “But—so then—what, Nan, he died?”

  “I heard he did, yes, some years later. He left town the day after he found out about the baby. Not like Zander.” She reached for the remote and turned the sound back on the TV.

  Caddie took it from her and turned it off. “Wait. You didn’t marry him? He left you pregnant? My grandfather?”

  “Yes, yes, yes, and now I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I should’ve told you before. I wasn’t ashamed, I just never got around to it. Give me that thing, honey, it’s starting.”

  “But you—you made up the name Buchanan? You just pretended to be a war widow…”

  “Till I took back my own name and said to hell with it. It was after Jane died and there was no reason to keep pretending.” She turned to Magill, who was staring at the silent TV screen in perfect stillness. “So that’s two whatchamacallits of fatherless girls.”

  “Generations?” His face was a study.

  “Two generations of bastard daughters in a row. Poor Jane and then poor Caddie. The sins of the mothers. Caddie’s father, we don’t even know who he was. A fine man, though, I’m sure.” She grabbed again for the remote. Caddie held on; after a tug-of-war Nana yanked it out of her hand and punched the sound back on.

  Wow. The things you learned.

  Magill got up. He went over to the bureau and pulled a pint of whiskey from the top drawer. “Want to sit outside for a while?” He wagged the bottle invitingly.

  Nana had her arms crossed over her bosom, staring at the TV with fierce attention. She was through talking.

  “Sure,” said Caddie. And a drink, too. It wasn’t every day you found out you were the second generation of bastard daughters.

  Magill’s room was on the first floor, so his French doors, unlike Nana’s, weren’t locked or painted shut. They led onto a small porch with a stone floor and a sagging overhead trellis, vine-covered. He had the best room in the house, even better than Thea’s tower room, Caddie thought, because he could walk right out into the grassy side yard whenever he liked. The only furniture on the porch, though, was one chipped white wrought-iron chair and a matching table. After some polite wrangling, Caddie took the chair and he sat on the table.

  Sounds of hammering overhead broke the sleepy afternoon quiet. A roofer, nailing shingles that had blown off last week in a storm. Something was always falling off Wake House. Caddie watched Magill pour whiskey and 7 UP into clear plastic cups, swish them around, add a little more booze to his cup, and push hers over to her. “To interesting news,” he said in a neutral voice. They drank.

  Fat bees drifted over their heads, looking for a nesting place in the flaky wood lattice. The same windy rain that had blown off roof shingles had blown away the petals on a white dogwood tree in the yard, and now they lay rotting on the grass, turning brown. Magill spoiled the sweet smell of honeysuckle by lighting up a cigarette.
“Are you okay?” he asked casually, tapping ash against the side of the table. “Not upset?”

  “Because of Nana and…” Whoever.

  “Chuck Bickman.”

  “Chick Buckman. No, not upset. I’m surprised. I’m amazed. It’s something I would never have known about if she hadn’t just told me, if she hadn’t been watching Zander and Laura. It makes you wonder.” What other secrets Nana was keeping. Maybe not even on purpose, just out of forgetfulness.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever known a bastard before,” Magill observed.

  “It wasn’t so bad. When I was little, I just told people my dad was dead.” She would think about this later: When they were children, she and her mother had told their playmates the exact same lie about their fathers, and the only difference was, her mother had thought it was the truth.

  “You have no idea who he was?”

  “My father? Not really. My mother was a singer, back in the seventies. All I know, because it’s all she ever told Nana, is that he was somebody in the band. But the members changed every few months, so that wasn’t much help.”

  “What was the band called?”

  “Oh, different things. They never got famous. Red Sky, that was one of their names. My grandmother went to see them once. She said they were pretty good.” Nana had met a guitar player named Bobby, a drummer named Patrick, a handsome, sweet boy—she said she wished it was him, but Caddie didn’t look a thing like him—and another boy, the bass player, but she said it couldn’t be him because he was black.

  “Why do you think she didn’t tell you about Chick Buckman before?” Magill wondered.

  “I don’t know. She said she never got around to it, but that’s…”

  “It couldn’t have been much fun being pregnant with no husband in Michaelstown in the 1940s.”

  “No,” Caddie agreed.

  “So she invents a dead one, and there he is. Years go by, he’s not doing any harm. She was a teacher, right? It’s the conservative fifties, she’s Mrs. Buchanan, respectable widow—”

  “Until my mother died. Right after that, Nana told me our name was going to be Winger,” she remembered.

  “No reason to keep pretending.”

  “Except she did keep pretending, even to me.”

  “How old were you when your mother died?”

  “Nine.”

  “Well.”

  “I know, but—why not tell me later? When I was older?”

  Magill shook his head. “Must’ve been complicated.”

  Very complicated. A lot of things had changed, not just Caddie’s last name, when her mother died. Nana only had six years to go before she could retire from teaching art, but suddenly she’d given it up and started making her own strange art. She’d turned into a sort of bohemian, a look that blue-collar Early Street didn’t exactly embrace. Neither did Caddie, who, as always, only wanted to blend in.

  “My mother and my grandmother didn’t get along,” she told Magill. “I think Nana was too strict. Believe it or not. They fought all the time and my mother rebelled, and finally she left home for good.”

  “Joined a rock-and-roll band.”

  “I guess after she died, Nana decided she could stop being this super-respectable person she thought she needed to be to set a good example for her daughter.”

  “Where were you all this time? When you were little. Where’d you grow up?”

  “Here. I grew up here. With Nana.”

  Magill waited for the explanation.

  There wasn’t much of one. “My mother—I guess she couldn’t take care of me and be a singer, too. She had to move around a lot. So, that’s how that worked. Why don’t you ever use your first name? I still don’t even know what it is.”

  He tilted his head and narrowed his eyes on her, processing the change of subject. She hadn’t managed that very smoothly, but she didn’t like talking about her mother, it was like approaching a hole in the ground loosely covered with camouflaging brush and sticks. Some things you just knew better than to go near.

  “Henry,” Magill said. “That answer your question?” With two loud zips, he unfastened the knee pads from around his legs.

  “Henry. That’s all right, it’s a good name. What’s wrong with it?”

  He picked up a stick that had been leaning against the table and began to peel the bark off, squinting his eyes against smoke from his cigarette.

  “But you always just use one name. ‘One’s enough for me,’ you said that day in the parlor. Remember? You were lifting weights.”

  “Was I drinking?”

  “What?”

  “Sounds like something I’d say if I was drunk. Get some cheap sympathy.”

  “No, you were drinking Ensure. I think.” Maybe he’d spiked it, though. Bourbon and Ensure, like an eggnog. “Do you always…nothing. Never mind.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “It’s none of my business.”

  “Ask.”

  “Do you always drink during the day?”

  He kept his eyes down, intent on the stick. “Only if I’ve been to see my therapist in the morning. That always drives me to drink by afternoon.”

  “Oh. I guess you went this morning, then.”

  “No, last Wednesday.”

  “But…”

  He was kidding. He kept a straight face but let his blue eyes go sly, and finally he smiled, confirming the joke. She hadn’t quite known how to take Magill at first, but now it was simple: You just kept in mind that everything was a joke to him. And if he happened to say something bitter or serious, he pretended it was a joke, and you had to play along.

  “Lieberman,” he said. “Isn’t that a great name for a shrink? Dr. Lieberman. He hates it when I call him Fred.”

  “So of course you do.”

  “Yeah, but only when he gets on his favorite subject.”

  “Which is?” A personal question, but she could tell he wanted her to ask.

  “How much of what ails me is in my head.”

  Well, that was certainly getting to the heart of it. She wanted to know the answer to that question, too. She imagined everybody did, especially Magill.

  “What I don’t get is what difference it makes,” he said, banging the stick against the top of his running shoe. “What if I’m a world-class hypochondriac? So what? Just because you’re psychosomatic doesn’t mean you’re not crippled.” He grinned, then lapsed into morose silence.

  She’d heard something, an awful rumor about his accident. Secrets didn’t keep for long at Wake House. “The woman in the picture,” she said softly, “in your room, that photograph on your dresser, is she…”

  He lifted his head and looked at her.

  “She’s very pretty,” she finished, losing her courage.

  He put his elbows on his knees and his hands over his ears.

  She looked like she was funny, the girl in the picture. Like she would enjoy making you laugh. She was wearing pajama tops and leaning against a magnet-spattered refrigerator with a quart of milk in her hand. She had tousled brown hair and a wide, toothy mouth, squinty, dancing eyes. How could he bear to look at that picture? Caddie would’ve kept another one on her dresser if she were Magill. A soberer one, not smiling. Not so alive.

  “She was a schoolteacher,” he said, still with his head in his hands. He had a funny way of speaking sometimes, as if he had to take care with every word or it might come out garbled. Everything was clear, but it sounded like an effort. “Second-grade teacher. The kids used to hang on her like…balls on a Christmas tree. You couldn’t pry them off.”

  He straightened up to take a long pull from his drink. “She used to do accents, German, French, Yiddish. She’d crack the kids up telling these long, silly stories. Sometimes I’d drive over, try to see her when she was outside, supervising recess. But I couldn’t get near her, the kids wouldn’t leave her alone. They just, you know. They loved her.”

  Caddie smiled, but Magill wasn’t looking at her; he didn’t see. “Wha
t was her name?” she asked.

  “Holly.”

  “Pretty.”

  “She didn’t want to go up with me. I wouldn’t let it go. I kept telling her about the rush, how she’d never know anything so intense, if she did it once she’d be hooked for life. Do you want to know how it happened? It was her birthday.”

  “No. I’m sorry. I don’t.”

  “Sure? Lieberman does. His mouth is watering.” He kept his eyes on her in a fixed stare, smiling a small, not nice smile. His gaze seemed to shift back and forth between her and a scene playing inside his head.

  “Don’t tell me.” With all her heart, she didn’t want to hear how Holly had died, not the way he would tell it to her now, in this mean mood she’d never seen him in before. “Why do people skydive?” she asked. “I would never, I mean, I don’t understand it. Why in the—”

  “I’m so fucking sick of that question.” He ripped a strip of bark from the stick in one violent pull and stood up. She was afraid he’d stumble, but he was steady on his legs, glaring off to the side while he clenched and unclenched his jaws. He punched his thumb against the end of the stick, gouging the pad of it with the sharp point.

  “What was your life like before?”

  He cupped his ear. “What?”

  “What was your life like before the accident?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “I bet you can.” But then she had a thought. “Oh—you mean you have amnesia?”

  He peered at her, his eyes incredulous. Then he burst out laughing. She was so relieved, and his laughter sounded so real, just pure, tickled mirth, she had to laugh with him. Soap opera organ music soared through the open door from his room just then, and they looked at each other and doubled over. Amnesia! Magill had to drop back down on the table to keep his balance. He had a rolling, carbonated kind of laugh she’d never heard before and couldn’t resist. When they finally groaned to a stop, he wiping moisture from his eyelashes, they were their old friendly selves again. No, much better.