Nancy Thayer

by Summer House (v5)

  “Auntie Grace,” Teddy said, with his sweet smile, “Suzette and I are married.”

  “Married!” Everyone in the room cried out the word simultaneously.

  Charlotte couldn’t help it. She looked at Oliver, and Oliver widened his eyes, and they both burst out laughing.

  “Married?” Worth was not amused. “Teddy, are you serious?”

  Helen left her place in the group and went to her son. “Teddy. Why didn’t you tell us? Why didn’t you invite us to the wedding? We didn’t even know you were—seeing someone.” She put a hand, not controlling but gentle and soothing, on Suzette’s arm. “My dear.” She studied the pregnant woman’s face. “You are having Teddy’s child.”

  Staring at the floor, Suzette said, “Well, maybe.”

  Another informational bomb. “Maybe?” everyone said.

  Charlotte struggled to contain herself. She collapsed in helpless hysteria against Oliver, who whispered into her ear, “Steady on.” The babble of voices filled the room.

  Grace said, “I need a drink.”

  Nona said, loudly, “I think we should get this picture taken or we’ll be late for my party. Grace, stop pacing around and come stand next to Kellogg, here on my left. Glorious, are you focused?”

  Glorious took several shots and showed them to Grace, who found something wrong with each one but finally threw up her hands and cried that they had to leave for the yacht club now. She insisted that Nona ride with her and Kellogg in the old Chrysler, and Nona objected, saying she wouldn’t ride with the top down, so Grace put the top up and Kellogg helped Nona fold her body into the front seat, then held the door for Glorious to squeeze into the backseat with him. Helen and Worth crowded with all the Ms into the Yukon and the Volvo. Charlotte told her brothers she was driving the Jeep and she thought she could fit everyone in—Oliver, Owen, Teddy and Suzette—if Suzette sat on Teddy’s lap, but to her immense surprise Teddy said thank you, no, he had rented a car and he’d prefer to drive Suzette in that, it would be safer, and they would have the use of seat belts. Charlotte looked at the vehicle parked on the white gravel and saw that it was a Taurus sedan.

  With much slamming of doors and rumbling of engines, the family set off, white gravel crackling and spewing up from the tires. Charlotte’s Jeep was at the end of the convoy. All around them the summer evening fell in gentle swaths of muted light and warmth, and for just a moment the peace of the island drifted by.

  Then Oliver leaned forward from the backseat and said, “Teddy has really outdone himself now. A wife! And a baby!”

  “And a Taurus!” Charlotte cried. “I thought I was going to faint.”

  “I can’t wait to get Teddy alone,” Oliver said. “I can’t imagine why, of all the females our handsome Teddy could have chosen, he picked Suzette. I would never say this to Teddy, but Suzette is—”

  “Weird,” Owen suggested.

  “Yes, but more than that. I don’t want to be catty—”

  “Oh, please, Oliver, you’re with me.” Charlotte urged him on.

  “Well, folks, she’s so sallow.” Oliver sat back in his seat. “I’m sorry. I’m being a bitch.”

  “She looks as if she hasn’t had the best medical care in her life,” Charlotte pointed out, and the mood in the car plummeted.

  “You’re thinking drugs, aren’t you?” Oliver’s voice was serious now, too.

  “Oh, Oliver,” Charlotte said. “Drugs and a baby? I’ve read such terrible things about what babies have to endure when their mothers are on drugs.”

  No one spoke. Charlotte drove rapidly and carefully through the small town of Nantucket and out along Madaket Road toward the yacht club.

  Into the glum silence, Owen suggested, “Is it possible that Teddy is—well, tricking you all? That he’s hired this young woman to help him play a kind of practical joke?”

  “Oh, Owen, you’re a genius!” Charlotte leaned across to the passenger seat and kissed his cheek. “That is exactly the sort of thing Teddy would do.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Oliver said, from where he’d subsided into a corner of the backseat. “I mean, he’s always ready to torment Mom and Dad, but Nona? He adores Nona. He wouldn’t want to ruin her birthday.”

  “Nona didn’t look particularly tormented,” Charlotte remarked. She turned into the yacht club parking lot. “Look at all the cars! It’s going to be a fabulous mob for Nona’s party!”

  Owen said, “Charlotte, let me get in the driver’s seat and find a parking space. You and Oliver go on in.”

  Charlotte put the Jeep in park. “Good idea, Owen, thanks.”

  They squeezed their way through the foyer with its tables set with gigantic spilling vases of flowers into the huge main room, as large as a basketball court, with wooden floors and a high ceiling hung with burgees and banners. At one end of the room, a band was playing soft jazz; the dancing wouldn’t start until after the buffet. All around the edge of the floor, tables and chairs were set up, each table set with flowers and a candle centerpiece on blazing white linen tablecloths. At the far end Nona was holding court, greeting her friends who flocked up to wish her happy birthday. Beside her chair was a long table, also covered in white linen, decorated with more flowers and holding a guest book for people to sign, and the table was quickly becoming laden with beautifully wrapped presents.

  “Drinks first, I think,” Oliver told Charlotte.

  “Absolutely.”

  Passing through a wide double door, Charlotte and Oliver entered another reception room, with a bar set up at one end and a buffet table just being organized at the other. Stewards in white jackets hurried to and from the kitchen, bearing great wooden bowls of salad and heavy stainless steel trays.

  Against one wall was a giant peg-board covered with photos of Nona at different ages.

  “Auntie Grace really did an amazing job organizing this,” Charlotte told Oliver. It was so noisy in the room she had to shout to make herself heard.

  “You’re right. I’m going to make it a point to be grateful to her, the poor old obsessive-compulsive bat.” Oliver turned to shout their drink orders at the bartender, then handed Charlotte a flute of champagne. “I never did tell you how beautiful you look tonight.”

  “Oliver, thanks! You look pretty smashing yourself, but then you always do.”

  “I want to hear all about your garden,” Oliver began, but at that moment an old friend threw herself upon him.

  “Oliver! Darling! I was hoping you would be here! I don’t see Owen! Have you broken up? Have you gone straight, by any chance? Oh, please say yes.”

  With a grin, Charlotte allowed Oliver to be idolized and made her way through the crowd in Nona’s direction. She didn’t get far. Everyone stopped her, kissed her cheek, told her she looked lovely. These were her friends, after all, or her parents’ friends, or her grandmother’s friends, or her aunt or uncle or cousins’ friends. She’d sailed with these people or played tennis or badminton with them ever since she could walk, she’d gone to parties with them, and to boarding school and college, and had dated some of them. She’d even been in love with one or two.

  “Hello, Charlotte. Great party.”

  Glancing up, she saw Whit Lowry standing there, in his tux and red tartan cummerbund and bow tie, his black hair falling over his forehead, looking like an ad for a very expensive Scotch. She’d always thought Whit looked like a male version of Snow White, with blue eyes and pale skin and natural roses in his cheeks.

  “Whit, hello, how are you?” Charlotte always felt awkward around Whit. He was her father’s best friend’s son, and she knew he was as irked as she was by their fathers’ barely concealed desire that they would fall in love and marry. He had been very kind to her when she’d tried working at the bank. He’d saved her ass several times, actually. He was very good at what he did, he understood stocks and bonds and foreign currencies and asset classes and diversification, and sometimes she had just wanted to kick him because he was such a reliable, unrebellious son.
She hadn’t seen him for almost a year—it was here, last summer, when she saw him last.

  “Did you see Oliver?” Charlotte had to yell to be heard. Guiltily, she was glad she was wearing this wonderful dress, a long streak of gold silk that made her hair, worn loose to her shoulders tonight, appear gold, too. She was glad the dress had a plunging neckline.

  “I’m just on my way over,” Whit yelled back. “Did Owen come?”

  “He did. He’s somewhere in this crush. And Teddy is here. Have you seen him yet? He’s brought a girl with him.”

  “Wow, I haven’t seen Teddy in years. How is he?”

  “As mischievous as always.” Before she could say more, one of Nona’s dowager cronies swooped down on her, embracing her in a cloud of talcum powder and bugle beads. “Hello, Mrs. Burton,” Charlotte said, and was released from the hug in time to see Whit wave a quick goodbye and head off in Oliver’s direction.

  A waiter came along, smartly bearing a tray of drinks at shoulder level. Charlotte snagged a second champagne flute and held them both up high, so people would think she was taking a drink to someone as she squeezed through the crowd. Finally, she arrived at the end of the room where most of the family stood. So many people crowded around Nona, Charlotte could see only the top of her grandmother’s white head, and her parents and other relatives were equally engaged by friends. Charlotte took a moment to study her mother. Helen had always been a little eccentric about her clothing. Aunt Grace and the Ms and the group Helen ran with on the island tended to wear L. L. Bean for day and something like Lilly Pulitzer with a string of pearls for dress. No one ever tried to be fashionable, nor was Helen actually fashionable, she was just colorful. More—Charlotte had heard Grace use this word often—Bohemian. Certainly she was tonight. She wore a crimson floor-length silk skirt with a high tight waist and a long-sleeved white shirt with a scoop neckline. Her ornate necklace of brass studded with huge ruby, emerald, and sapphire stones looked antique, as if it had been made from old Romanoff medals, crosses, and rosettes. Her gray hair had become, with the evening’s mist, something between a cloud and a tangle. She looked good. To Charlotte’s eye, her mother looked suspiciously attractive.

  Charlotte’s father was talking to Whit’s father, Lew Lowry. Both men were tall and, for their age, relatively slim in their tuxes. They stood slightly apart from the crowd, the very set of their shoulders giving off an air of superiority and self-satisfaction. Their handsome heads were bent close to each other. They were scheming about something. Those two always were, always had been since they were boyhood chums.

  Charlotte was searching for Teddy and spied him backed up against the wall by a cluster of admirers. Suzette stood next to him, staring down at her bare extended belly as Teddy bantered with a little herd of young women with silk headbands and yacht-club teeth. Teddy had a possessive arm looped around Suzette’s shoulders, and from time to time he would sort of jostle her affectionately. Suzette would force a smile in response, but she never glanced up from her belly. She looked out of place and miserable.

  “Suzette!” Charlotte put the champagne on a nearby table and swept up, as brisk and commanding as Nona often was. “Sweetie, what on earth is Teddy thinking, making you stand up this way! Come sit down with me. We have so much to talk about!”

  She took Suzette’s limp hand and drew the girl out of the circle of Teddy’s admirers. “Here,” she said, pulling out a chair.

  “Thanks.” Suzette slumped down.

  Charlotte pulled her own chair close. “You must find this bewildering, thrown into the pack all at once like this,” she said encouragingly to the young woman. “Teddy is a little thoughtless sometimes.”

  “It’s okay,” Suzette mumbled. “I know what Teddy’s like.”

  “Well!” Charlotte leaned closer. “Tell me about yourself, Suzette. Where did you and Teddy meet?”

  Suzette continued to stare at her belly. “At AA.”

  “Oh! Well, that’s good. Um, where?”

  The girl shifted, looking peeved. “In a church basement.”

  Charlotte laughed. “No. I mean, what town?”

  “Tucson. Tucson, Arizona.”

  “So! You’re from Tucson.”

  “No.”

  Charlotte stared at the girl. Was she being purposefully rude or was she socially inept? Perhaps she was just painfully shy. Charlotte softened her voice. “I hope Teddy told you all about his crazy family.”

  Suzette shrugged.

  Charlotte grabbed up her champagne and knocked it back. “Do you have anything to drink, Suzette? Would you like me to get you some sparkling water or some juice?”

  “I have juice.” She nodded at the other side of the table.

  “Well, let me get it for you!” Charlotte made her way around the table, got the glass of juice, set it before Suzette, and sat down again. “So you know all about Nona, our grandmother; she is wonderful. We all adore her. I don’t know if you got to meet Oliver and Owen, it was so rushed back at the house with the photographs and everything. Oliver’s over there talking to that really tall woman, and Owen is trying to get to Oliver with some drinks. Aren’t they just about the handsomest men on the planet?”

  Defiantly, Suzette declared, “Teddy’s handsome.”

  “Yes, he is. I have two handsome brothers.” After a long inspirational sip of champagne, Charlotte asked, “Do you have any brothers, Suzette?”

  Suzette didn’t answer for a few moments. “A stepbrother,” she conceded. “But I haven’t seen him for a while.”

  Charlotte looked desperately around the room. Everyone else seemed to be having a fabulous time, exchanging gossip and laughing uproariously. “Well, I’m the oldest of three children. I’m Teddy’s big sister. I guess he told you that. And I’ve been trying to build up a little market garden business here on the island. Perhaps you noticed my little farm when Teddy brought you to the house?” She waited for some kind of response, got none, and plunged ahead. “I grow lettuces and other produce and flowers. I sell the produce at posh restaurants, plus I have my little roadside stand.”

  Suzette continued to stare at her belly.

  All righty, Charlotte thought. “So, when is your baby due?”

  “September.”

  “Oh, lovely. And do you know whether you’re having a boy or a girl?”

  “No.” But for the first time Suzette lifted her head. She smiled shyly. “I hope it’s a girl.” She ducked her head.

  “Oh, I do, too!” Charlotte agreed. “Girls’ clothes are much more fun!” Before she could continue her friendly chatter, the piercing ring of a tapped mike sounded, and she heard her father’s voice.

  “Hello, everyone! We are so glad to have you all here to celebrate Anne Anderson Wheelwright’s ninetieth birthday! After dinner, there will be dancing and a few extremely brief speeches, but for now the buffet line is open, so please begin!”

  The noise level changed as people flocked out of the large room into the smaller reception room to line up at the buffet tables.

  “Would you like me to get you a plate?” Charlotte asked.

  “I can do it.” Suzette pushed herself up off her chair.

  Teddy appeared from the squeeze of bodies. Wrapping an arm around Suzette’s shoulders, he leaned forward to kiss Charlotte’s cheek. “Hey, Char. You’re looking well.”

  Now that she had an opportunity to see him close up, Charlotte studied her brother before answering, “You look good, too, Teddy. Really good.” She studied his jeans, his wrinkled dirty cheap martini-glass-dancing shirt, his worn camel’s-hair blazer. There was a hole in one of the sleeves, and part of the breast pocket had come loose. “But couldn’t you have come just a little bit earlier? We didn’t get a chance to meet Suzette properly, and this must be a pretty overwhelming way for her to meet your family.”

  “Don’t be such a big sister,” Teddy scolded. “Any way of meeting this family would be overwhelming.”

  Charlotte relented. “That’s true. Well, I
’m glad you’re here, Teddy. I can’t wait to have a long long talk with you, you and Suzette, about everything. What are your plans?”

  “My plans?” Teddy’s grin glinted with the old mischief. “Suzette and I plan to stay at Nona’s for the summer. So you and I will have lots of time for long long talks.”

  Ten

  It was not the first time Helen had felt emotionally apart from the other Wheelwrights. But this was separateness of an entirely different magnitude. Everyone else was talking, laughing, gobbling up the delicious food, and tossing back the drinks, and Nona, now seated at a table enjoying her own dinner, seemed glowing and happy and right in the moment. Helen sat next to Owen, with Oliver on Owen’s right, and Suzette next to Oliver, who was trying to make conversation with the young woman. She wasn’t responding much, mostly staring down at her belly, although Helen was glad to see that she ate rapidly and finished everything on her plate. Teddy was on Suzette’s other side, with Nona on his right. The glass in his hand, a tall tumbler filled with ice, seemed to be only water. Helen had been watching and she didn’t think he’d had an alcoholic beverage yet. Teddy leaned toward Nona, chatting and laughing, and Nona glittered under his attentions. On Nona’s other side sat Charlotte, talking with her father, both of them as fascinated with each other as if they hadn’t been together for months.

  What a handsome family. What a fortunate family. All this champagne, this wealth of friends, this summer evening, this celebration. Helen allowed Oliver to engage her in a lighthearted conversation about current movies; she hoped she was managing to keep her anxiety concealed.

  She had believed that once her children were adults, out of college, moving forward in their own lives, she would be less burdened with worries, or that the worries would be less compelling. She had been wrong. When her eye fell on Suzette, Helen’s thoughts went wild. Was Suzette’s baby Teddy’s child? Were they really married? Had Suzette been on drugs or alcohol earlier in her pregnancy? Helen had heard heartbreaking stories of fetal alcohol syndrome. What were Teddy’s plans? How could he support a child? He’d received a small inheritance when his grandfather died, but he’d run through that already, and had nothing substantive to show for it. And Teddy had always been unstable.