Nancy Thayer

by Summer House (v5)

  “Wait, Helen!” Grace pointed her pencil at Helen. “What time did you say Oliver and Teddy are arriving?”

  “I don’t know, Grace.” Helen lifted the tray and headed for the back stairs. “But you know Oliver and Owen aren’t staying here at the house. And they know what time the party starts. And Teddy—”

  “Yes. Well,” Grace said peevishly, “it would help if we knew what time they’re arriving. What if we’re in the middle of something and they need to be picked up?”

  “Mom.” Mandy held the baby to her shoulder and burped her. “They’re big boys. They can grab a cab.”

  Another martyred sigh from Grace. “Yes, but I was hoping to get a group photo before the party begins—”

  “I’m sure they’ll be here in plenty of time for that,” Helen assured her sister-in-law.

  “Auntie Helen, just go.” Mee waved a lazy hand toward the stairs. “Or Mom will have you here picking over details until that tea turns cold.”

  “You’re an ungrateful daughter,” Helen teased Mee, but she turned to climb the stairs.

  Interesting, she thought to herself, how quickly a person can slide into schizophrenia. All morning she’d bantered with her nieces, chatted with Glorious, and moved around the house just as if everything were normal.

  The truth was she hadn’t slept last night. Her entire body ached with fatigue. Her mind had gone haywire, like a CD set on continual loop, replaying yesterday morning in her own home, when she’d overheard Worth talking to Sweet Cakes.

  Pain cramped her right in her midriff. She stood still on the stairs a moment, bent almost double, catching her breath. Don’t think about that now, she ordered herself. Not today. This was Nona’s big day. Be a grown-up, for heaven’s sake! She straightened and climbed the stairs.

  Nona’s room was at the far end of the hall, stretching across the east wing of the house, with windows facing the harbor. Helen knocked and entered. Nona was still in her enormous bed, linen-cased pillows tucked behind her against the carved mahogany headboard. She looked very old and Victorian in her white cotton nightgown with her funny little white braid hanging over her shoulder. The lavender mohair bed jacket lay around her shoulders.

  “Good morning, Nona!” Helen smiled brightly. “Grace said you wanted to see me. And I’ve brought you some tea.”

  “Good girl, thank you.” Nona patted the bed beside her. “Put the tray here, will you? No, don’t perch on that chair, I can’t see you properly, sit here beside me on the bed.”

  Helen obeyed, pouring Nona’s tea, adding cream and sugar, handing it to her, then arranging herself at the end of the bed where she could lean against the footboard. It was more comfortable this way. The room was filled with sweet cool air. Nona always liked the windows open at least a bit unless there was a blizzard.

  “You look very pretty in that bed jacket,” Helen said.

  “It feels lovely, warm and light. Thank you, Helen.”

  “Happy birthday, Nona,” Helen said.

  “The dreaded day begins!” Nona took a sip of tea.

  “Grace said you wanted my opinion on which dress to wear tonight?”

  Nona leaned back against her pillows. “Yes, I told Grace that, but what I want to talk with you about is Worth.”

  “Worth?” Helen’s heart kicked.

  “What’s going on with him? He looks terrible, Helen. He looks aged and worried. Ever since he’s been here he’s been distracted and abrupt.”

  Helen looked down at her hands. She venerated her mother-in-law and had great respect for Nona’s intelligence. She was shocked, and yet not entirely, that Nona was so perceptive. But whatever was going on between Worth and another woman was, first of all, a matter between Helen and Worth. It was a temptation to spill out a confession to Nona, because Nona would take charge of the matter in no uncertain terms. Nona would make Worth end the affair. But was that how Helen wanted the matter resolved? Worth chastened like a schoolboy and forced back into his marriage by his powerful mother? No. Helen was not yet sure how she was going to deal with this, but she would not come crying to Nona to make things right.

  “I think it’s Teddy.” Helen met Nona’s eyes. Nona would see the anxiety there, she would believe. “Nona, we are very worried about him.”

  “I understand it’s a matter of alcohol?”

  “Yes, and also drugs, perhaps.”

  “What kind of drugs? Marijuana?”

  “That would be the least of it.”

  “Is Teddy coming today?”

  “He said he is. He left a message on our answering machine. He should arrive at any moment.”

  “And Oliver?”

  “He arrives this afternoon.”

  Nona sipped her tea. “I’ve enjoyed Charlotte’s company.”

  “Oh, good. I’m glad. And her garden is flourishing.”

  “Yes. A mixed blessing, it seems. We are all glad to see her persevering with something, but I know Worth would like to have one child follow him into the bank.”

  “Yes. Charlotte did try.”

  “It’s not such a concern for me, Helen, I want you to know that. It is sufficient for me that Mandy’s husband is at the bank. They have two children and may have more. Perhaps the Wheelwright bloodline will carry on the bank even if not the Wheelwright name.”

  Helen felt her heart lighten slightly. “I’m very glad to hear that, Nona. I wouldn’t like my children to be a disappointment to you.”

  Nona reached over and squeezed Helen’s hand. “Don’t talk nonsense. You know I adore Oliver, always have, always will. In fact, I told him I’d like him to hold his marriage ceremony here at the summer house.”

  Helen’s hands flew to her heart. “Nona! How lovely of you!” Nona was like this, she could be formal and cool and then surprise everyone with a splendid gesture of love.

  Nona continued, “And Teddy is a problem, I understand, but he’s young—”

  “Twenty-two is not so young,” Helen murmured.

  “It is these days, I believe. I read things, you know, Helen. I watch the news. Adolescence seems to be lasting longer. Young people of twenty and even thirty are moving back to live with their parents. Children are taking longer to find their place in the workforce. It’s not like it was when I was a girl, or even when you were young.” Nona sipped her tea again. “If thirty is the new fifteen and, as I read in the ladies’ magazines, sixty is the new forty, that should make me about—oh, fifty-two, don’t you think?”

  Helen laughed. Nona could be charming when she wanted; Worth had inherited that characteristic. And she was being very kind. “Well, Worth and I are worried about Teddy. For different reasons. I want Teddy to do anything at all, as long as he gets off this frightening alcoholic path he’s been on. And Worth—”

  “Worth wants Teddy to go into the bank.”

  “Eventually, yes.”

  “And Teddy is your rebel. Your rogue.”

  Helen shrugged. “I suppose all three children are.”

  “You look a little frazzled, too,” Nona observed.

  Helen raised her hand to her face. “I didn’t sleep well.”

  “Perhaps the bed on the sleeping porch is too bumpy.”

  Of course, Helen thought. In this house, Nona knows everything. “I like fresh air. Cool air. I’m still having hot flashes.” That would head the older woman off at the pass. Nona was not comfortable discussing female physicality.

  “I keep worrying about Worth.” Nona voice sharpened. “Charlotte is certainly being given her way in the matter of career. And she’s thirty now. She’s had plenty of time for summer romances and playing the field.”

  Helen felt skewered by her mother-in-law’s clear blue gaze. “You think Charlotte should marry Whit Lowry.”

  “Well, he is a catch. From all I hear, Whit is proving to be quite capable at the bank. He’s a handsome young man, and a good sailor and athlete. No blots on his copybook as far as I know.”

  Honestly, Helen thought, this family!
She made an attempt to keep her tone reasonable, but she did feel angry. She was not going to sacrifice her daughter to the Wheelwrights’ legacy. If you only knew what your precious Worth has been doing! Helen wanted to cry. She heard the emotional quaver in her voice when she replied, “This is all true, Nona, but you can’t engineer love. We aren’t living in feudal times.”

  But Nona only sipped her tea. “Perhaps you’re right,” she said at last. “Perhaps you can’t engineer love. Yet Whit and Charlotte will be thrown together over the summer. Whit and his family are coming tonight for my birthday party, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, of course they are. But Nona, Charlotte has known Whit since she was a child. She worked with him at the bank and nothing sparked between them.”

  “That was three years ago,” Nona reminded Helen. “Let’s just sit back and see what happens. And you, Helen, try to get Worth out on the dance floor, will you? Be sure he drinks a lot of champagne. I’d like to see him enjoy himself. I’d like to see him smiling.”

  “Of course.” Helen rose. “Shall I take the tray down?”

  “If you would.”

  Helen lifted the tray and crossed over the thick blue and gray Aubusson rug to the door.

  When her hand was on the doorknob, Nona said, “Oh, and Helen?”

  “Yes?”

  “I will be wearing the navy blue dress tonight. It displays my grandmother’s diamonds best. Should anyone ask.”

  “The navy blue dress it is,” Helen agreed, admiring the way Nona closed their little tête-à-tête with a moment of light conspiracy.

  Instead of returning to the kitchen, Helen went down the hall to the sleeping porch. She wanted to take just a few minutes to regain her equilibrium. She had made her bed after showering and dressing and before breakfast—one did, in Nona’s house—but even so, the room appeared, not messy, but occupied. Her dresses hung from the wrought-iron plant hangers, her evening sandals sat tidily against the wall, her paperback novel and her purse and some toiletries were on the card table, and her stained-glass silk wrapper lay where she’d tossed it, at the foot of the daybed.

  Sinking into the wicker rocker, Helen planted her feet on the floor and counseled herself to breathe, just breathe. She forced herself to relax her hands in her lap. Worth. Sweet Cakes—

  “Mom!” Charlotte’s voice was sharp. “What in the world are you doing out here?”

  There in the doorway stood her beautiful daughter. Overalls again today, and an old white shirt, her butterscotch hair pulled back and held with a bit of gardening twine.

  “Hi, Charlotte. I thought you’d be out in your garden.”

  “I was. I came in to grab a bite of breakfast.” She glanced over her shoulder, then skewered Helen with a look. “Why are you sleeping out here?”

  Helen shrugged, amused. “Why shouldn’t I sleep out here? I never have before, not in all the years I’ve stayed in this house. I’d think you’d understand, Charlotte, the appeal of being almost outdoors, and yet—”

  “But what about Dad?” Charlotte plunked herself down on the edge of the daybed.

  “What about him?”

  “Why aren’t you sleeping with him?”

  Helen snorted with exasperation. “Charlotte, Dad and I have had separate bedrooms for ages. He can’t sleep with me prowling around the room, or reading in bed, or flipping from side to side in one my insomniac fits. You know that.”

  “Yes, but that’s at home. Here—” Charlotte scraped a bit of dirt from her wrist.

  “Here, what?” She knew what her daughter meant but she was also feeling very cranky with Charlotte, who always assumed Worth could do no wrong and that Nona was nothing less than an angel from heaven.

  Charlotte squirmed. “Well, there aren’t as many bedrooms here. What about everyone else?”

  “Everyone has a bedroom, Charlotte. Except for Teddy, and he can take an attic room. And you know Oliver and Owen are staying at a B and B in town.”

  Charlotte slumped. “But what will Nona think? If you’re not sharing a room with Dad?”

  “Charlotte, Nona is well acquainted with the aggravations of old age. She knows I have trouble sleeping. As for the others, I’m sure Grace and Kellogg have nights when they sleep separately, too. It doesn’t mean anything.” Rising from her chair, she crossed the small room to sit next to her daughter. She put an arm around her. “Sweetie. What’s bothering you?”

  Charlotte leaned against her. “Oh, I don’t know, Mom. I just want everyone to be happy.”

  “Everyone is happy, Charlotte.” She squeezed her child’s shoulder. “Tell me,” she said briskly. “What are you doing in your garden today? And can I help?”

  Charlotte perked up. “Are you serious? About helping? Gosh, if you could do some weeding—”

  “I’d love to.”

  “But it’s hard work, Mom. It really stresses the back.”

  “Why don’t I do what I can, and I’ll stop when I get tired?”

  “Great!” Charlotte jumped up. “Okay, I’ve got to get back outside, and you need to put on work clothes and sunblock and a sun hat.”

  “Aye-aye.” Helen stood and saluted. How easy it was, just for now, to make her daughter happy. Smiling, she remembered what she and Cecilia, her best friend, had agreed when their children became teenagers: they couldn’t think about what would happen in the future. They had to be grateful for the present moment. They had to take things one day at a time. Even if, sometimes, it was one hard, confusing, maddening day at a time.

  Nona’s Party

  Eight

  Nona spent Saturday in her room, saving her energy for the evening’s festivities. It was a little appalling, how easily she dozed through the hours in her chaise near the window. It wasn’t so much that she slept as that she daydreamed, and not even that, it was more a kind of drifting, as if her chaise of its own accord transformed into a hot-air balloon or Aladdin’s magic carpet, lifting her effortlessly up and away from her present life, out the window, above the clouds, and smoothly through her past.

  She could look down on herself as a girl, galloping her enormous old quarter horse across the fields, riding western, not that prissy eastern way, as wild as an Indian, her hair flying straight out behind her and her springer spaniel loping alongside, pink tongue hanging out, smiling, because Pup loved to run. She could spy herself as a young woman, giddy and silly and crazy with love for the dashing officer she’d met, Herbert Wheelwright. She could watch herself keeping her back straight as she endured her mother-in-law’s barbed “compliments,” and wasn’t amused by those memories; the old wash of anger flooded through her, as heated and potent as it had been all those years ago. She saw her babies again, and her heart sang with joy, and she heard the knock on the door of their Boston house in 1970, when Captain Bruce Moore came to inform them that their son Bobby had been killed on the battlefield in Vietnam. Such grief. Such darkness. She attended Grace and Kellogg’s wedding—what a fuss that was!—and Worth and Helen’s, and she saw the pink baby faces of her grandchildren, and the hot-air balloon carried her just a little farther, and she was at Mandy’s wedding, and Mellie’s, and Mee’s, and she saw the sweet precious faces of her great-grandchildren, Christian first, with his great thatch of brown hair, and then bald little Zoe.

  What a lot of life she had lived! No wonder she was tired!

  All day long she was aware of the unusual commotion in her house. It always took awhile, at the beginning of summer, to get used to the noises of a full house; it was like going to sleep in a library and waking up one day to discover that overnight it had become a train station. Baby Zoe wailed like a siren. As Christian waited in the upstairs hall for his mother to change his baby sister’s diaper, he kicked a ball up and down the hall, yelling “Goal!” when it thumped into the wall. Nona didn’t mind. Long ago she’d packed away all the valuable antique vases and heirloom bibelots, and she didn’t miss them. Downstairs, the doors slammed and squeaked and voices rose and fell, Grace’s chi
pped soprano answered by Glorious’s slow deep hums. Water ran through the pipes as various members took their showers, and the uncarpeted back stairs resounded with footsteps running up and down.

  At four, a knock came on Nona’s door. “Yes?”

  Helen peered in. “Are you awake, Nona?”

  “I am now.” Nona waved Helen into her room.

  Helen was wearing a brilliantly colored silk wrapper and a pair of rubber flip-flops, and her hair was freshly shampooed, hanging in those ridiculous Shirley Temple ringlets that no grown woman should sport, but of course Helen couldn’t help it if she had naturally curly hair. Although Nona secretly wondered if that rebellious hair didn’t have a genetic link—like white cats and deafness—with an insubordinate personality.

  Helen said, “We thought you might like to have a little bite to eat.”

  Nona frowned, perplexed. “I ate lunch today, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, you did, but that was at noon. We thought you ought to have something substantial before the party.”

  The hardest part about becoming truly aged was having to take suggestions, which were really velvet-gloved commands, from younger people. Nona tried not to bristle. They were, after all, only thinking of her own good. “Won’t there be food at the party?”

  “Of course. A buffet dinner. But you know how it is, impossible to eat with people all around you talking to you. We thought perhaps a nice hot pot of tea and a cheese sandwich?”

  Nona snorted. “How about a nice big Scotch and some Cheez-Its.”

  “Nona! Cheez-Its?”

  “I’m old. They settle my stomach. And I have always drunk a Scotch every day of my life, you know that, Helen.” She peered closely at her daughter-in-law. “Your nose is red.”

  “I know. I helped weed in Charlotte’s garden today.” Helen put her hands on her back. “I’m not as young as I used to be.”