The Last September: A Novel

by Nina de Gramont

  He had directed the question at Eli but clearly meant for me to answer. So I said, “We went to college together.”

  “We were best friends in college,” Eli said.

  For me, college had lasted four years. But Eli’s time had been cut short. If things had happened differently, we would have stayed best friends. I wanted to tell him that I still had his cat—that at this very moment she was probably sitting on my pillow at home in a patch of sunlight. If he’d seemed more like the old Eli, I would have. But it was a little like running into the identical twin of someone you know very well. He was enough Eli that I thought he might want Tab back, and at the same time he wasn’t enough Eli that I would trust him with her.

  “Damn,” he said. “Another girlfriend in common with Charlie. He is going to laugh.”

  Ladd turned his head toward me sharply. “You went out with Charlie Moss?”

  “Not exactly,” I said, trying to remember if the incident with Charlie ever came up in Ladd’s and my debriefing of past romances. Generally he did not respond well to discussions of other men, so I tended to give him Cliffs Notes only. I put my hand over his.

  Eli said to Ladd, “I saw your uncle Daniel last week. He said you went back to school.”

  “Yeah,” Ladd said. “Finally.” Ladd had scandalized his family by dropping out of Cornell after some girl broke his heart. He spent six years on a fishing boat in Alaska before he went back to finish at UMass. “That’s where I met Brett. She was the TA for one of my classes.”

  I could feel Ladd’s jumpy insecurity pulsing through his fingers and into my palm and knew he wouldn’t go back to normal until we could be alone, and I could fill him in about Charlie. But Eli wasn’t going to let that happen anytime soon. He sat down next to me. I pulled on my T-shirt and asked what he was up to these days.

  “Spending the summer with Mom and Dad,” he said. “You’re back in school, huh? Advanced degree? PhD or something?”

  “Yes,” I said, with a pang of survivor’s guilt that my brain hadn’t robbed me of that opportunity.

  “That’s great,” Eli said. “Really great.” He turned his gaze out toward the bow of the boat, the blue waves, the mainland in the distance. Ladd finally put on a baseball cap, and the three of us rode together all the way to Hyannis.

  •••

  AS THE FERRY PULLED into port, I excused myself and went into the bathroom. I splashed my face with tinny water and stared hard into the warped, filmy mirror. When I came out, the boat had nearly emptied. All the passengers spilled into the parking lot, collecting luggage. Back on land, the day seemed overly infused with color—the blues of the water and sky, the white of the boats, the green lawn, and the reds and yellows and pinks of cheerful summer clothing. By the time I walked down the metal plank, Ladd stood waiting for me with our luggage—his good leather valise and my faded canvas duffel bag.

  “Where’d Eli go?” I asked, when I got down to the parking lot.

  Ladd gestured sideways with his chin. “Disappeared into the crowd.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I wanted to say good-bye.”

  “Small world, huh?” A slight edge to Ladd’s voice, as if it might be my fault, the size of the world.

  I shrugged, and not just because I didn’t want to take responsibility. In my experience, the world was infinite. Only this very particular world, of summer homes and private schools, could accurately be considered small.

  “I never knew Eli very well,” Ladd said. His voice had gone back to normal. Ladd rarely stayed angry long. Typically a flash would rise, visible, and he would squelch it himself before it could fully erupt. I always found the process—the effort to protect me from his negative emotions—touching. Several months before, Ladd and I had gone to an exhibit of Marsden Hartley’s paintings, mostly landscapes of Maine. But for a long time Ladd had stood in front of a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. The title of the painting was The Great Good Man, and I knew Ladd well enough to understand: that was what he aspired to be. A Great Good Man.

  Now as I slipped my arm through his, he said, adding to his previous thought, “But Charlie and I were friends when we were kids.”

  “Are you still friends?”

  “We still run into each other here and there. But no, I wouldn’t say we were friends.”

  “Why not?”

  Ladd didn’t answer, just moved his arm out of mine and placed his hand at the small of my back, drawing me into his body. I felt his chin against my forehead as I stared out into the crowd and saw Eli getting into the passenger’s seat of a wood-paneled station wagon. The driver was a lean, middle-aged woman with pale curls like Charlie’s.

  Ladd and I walked over to the Raw Bar for chowder, and when we sat down he said, “Why don’t you tell me about you and Charlie?” He kept his eyes on the menu, his body falsely still.

  “There’s not much to tell,” I said.

  “Eli said you went out with him.”

  “I didn’t. Stayed in with him. Just once. One time.”

  “Really?” Finally he returned his eyes to me. “I have a hard time imagining that, you having a one-night stand.” He didn’t say this in a judgmental way. He wasn’t thrown by my loose morals, it just didn’t jibe with his perceptions of my emotional capacity, and of course he was right.

  “Well,” I said, “I was only eighteen. And I didn’t exactly mean for it to be just that one night.”

  Ladd nodded, jutting his chin toward me and then abruptly away. “Typical Moss,” he said. His voice was angry, but I felt my shoulders relax, knowing the anger was toward Charlie, not me. I wanted to ask him about the other girlfriends he and Charlie had in common but decided to save it for later.

  “What about you?” I said. “You spent summers with them here? In the same town.”

  “Yeah. My family has been friends with the Mosses for a long time. You know about my uncle Daniel’s wife, Sylvia?”

  “The one who died?”

  “She was Charlie and Eli’s au pair, in the summers. That’s how Daniel met her. Did you know Eli went to McLean?”

  I nodded.

  “Daniel paid for that,” Ladd said. “Because of Sylvia. She really loved Eli.”

  I nodded again, as if this were something any ordinary person could do, though I couldn’t even imagine what that must have cost. The wealth of Ladd’s family alternately perplexed and embarrassed me.

  “So,” I said. “Do you know what was wrong with him? When he went away?”

  “Schizophrenic, I think.”

  “But he’s better now.” As if my words could make it so. “The Mosses, they couldn’t afford it? The hospital?”

  “Who knows,” Ladd said. “Eli’s father has always had strange ideas about what to spend his money on.”

  I felt a little flare of defensiveness. Ladd had no idea what it was, not to afford something. But I stayed quiet.

  Ladd’s face settled back into its regular ease, and he raised his hand to signal for the check. I could almost see the mental gesture, a broom in his mind, pushing the Mosses aside.

  WE DROVE WITH THE top down in Ladd’s convertible Saab, through the dingy streets of Hyannis, on our way to tell his family about our engagement. The seafood restaurants with lobster traps on the roofs gave way to the grassy, shore-scented highway of Route 6, and then off the highway, passing the increasingly wide lawns, houses farther and farther back from the road until each driveway became its own dusty dirt road. Ladd drove past the one that led to his uncle’s compound, and I found myself turning around in my seat, staring, feeling newly connected to the place.

  “Maybe one of these days we can stay with him,” I said. “Your uncle Daniel.”

  Ladd looked over at me. The skin across the bridge of his nose looked singed from the boat ride. He placed his hand, palm up, on my lap. I gathered it up in both of mine, regretting my T-shirt and cutoffs.

  “Hey listen,” I said. “Can we actually turn around and sneak into one of those guest cottages? I wouldn
’t mind changing before we get to your parents.”

  Ladd checked his watch—the clock on his dashboard didn’t work—then turned the car around, and we drove back to Daniel’s. There were no cars at the main house other than the blue Chevy pickup that lived there permanently. Preparations for the annual Fourth of July party Daniel would be throwing that Saturday had begun—the round tables and folding chairs had been delivered and were stacked against the detached garage. We parked behind the Chevy and carried our bags down the path to the smallest guest cottage.

  We passed an hour or more inside before finally attending to our original mission—showering and changing—so that by the time we walked back down the path the sun had sunk low but was still stubbornly bright in the sky. Refreshed, the two of us were combed and dressed and festive; my engagement ring sat snug in the pocket of Ladd’s Nantucket Reds so as not to give anything away before we could tell his parents. As we headed across the lawn to the car, Ladd’s uncle Daniel called to us from the deck.

  The Williams family owned several houses in Saturday Cove, and although Daniel was years younger than his brother he had inherited the best one. It sat on a hill overlooking a beachside bluff. The summer before, when Ladd and I spent a week at his parents’ house, nearly every day found us at his uncle’s, which had its own long stretch of private beach. Now Ladd and Daniel shook hands, and Daniel bent to kiss me on the cheek.

  “I left my phone in the car,” Ladd said after greetings had been made and drinks offered. “I just need to go inside and let my parents know where we are.”

  Daniel walked inside with Ladd, then returned with a glass of white wine for me. He hadn’t poured a drink of his own. Like Ladd, Daniel was tall, over six feet, which always made me want to stand on my toes, even when I wore my highest heels. I liked Daniel. He had a careful way of being and looking, a mix of intensity and kindness, and the news of how he’d helped Eli had only increased my admiration.

  “You happy to be back on the Cape?” Daniel said, in a formal, making-conversation kind of voice.

  “Yes,” I told him in the same tone. And for no good reason other than a kind of panic, at being left alone with nothing to talk about, I said, “Ladd and I just got engaged. We’re telling his parents tonight.”

  Daniel smiled. The polite, obligatory stance disappeared. He had dark blue eyes like Ladd, and his hair had grayed in a distinguished, silvery way. “I’m happy to hear it,” he said. “I hope you’ll get married here.”

  At first I thought he meant Cape Cod, but as he gestured at the deck I realized he meant this spot, his house. It made me worry that I shouldn’t have said anything, upset the natural order of the announcement, without even consulting Ladd. My face felt a little hot, and I wished I hadn’t left my sunglasses on the dashboard of Ladd’s car. It was such a magnanimous offer, but saying “thank you” would feel like accepting. Which wasn’t exactly my place.

  “Sylvia and I were married here,” Daniel said, graciously ignoring my silence. “I suppose Ladd’s told you about Sylvia?” I hesitated before nodding. “You remind me of her,” Daniel said.

  Again, I wished for sunglasses. I searched my brain for a reply. Before I found one Daniel said, “Would you like to see a picture?”

  He walked through the sliding glass door, which Ladd had left open. I thought he was going to bring the picture back to me, but he paused in the doorway long enough for me to realize I was meant to follow him. So I did, trying to remember a framed portrait hanging over a fireplace from my previous visits. Instead Daniel stopped by the main stairway and opened the single drawer of a small occasional table. We could hear Ladd’s voice as he talked on the phone, coming from the kitchen.

  “Look,” Daniel said.

  He handed me a small leather envelope. I opened it to see a head-and-shoulders picture of a young woman with hair dampened by the ocean. The blue sky stood behind her, and though I couldn’t tell whether she wore a bikini or a maillot, I could tell from the straps she was in her bathing suit. She was very fair and freckled, with narrow eyes the pale blue of a Siberian Husky’s. She had a strong jaw, and short blonde hair. She looked athletic and patrician. Apart from age and the geography of the moment, I couldn’t pinpoint anything the two of us had in common. Still, since he’d just compared us, it seemed wrong—self-congratulatory—to say that she was pretty. So instead I said, “She looks so young.”

  “She was young. This was taken a few years before she got leukemia, before we were married. She was only twenty-eight when she died.”

  “That’s terrible,” I said, as if hearing the story for the first time. “I’m so sorry.” Not able to bear the brief silence that followed, I added, “My father died of leukemia when I was five.” Actually my father had died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. As the words left my mouth, I realized Ladd might have told Daniel this, and my face reddened over the small lie. It would be splitting hairs to correct myself now. Daniel reached out and took the picture from my hands. He studied it for a moment, then snapped the envelope shut and returned it to the drawer.

  “I took all of the framed pictures away,” he said. “The first few years after she died they used to take me by surprise. I’d come around a corner finally feeling normal and then there she’d be, staring out at me from the top of the bookshelf. Now I keep pictures of her in drawers around my houses, so I can look at them when I want to. I thought of this one when I saw you standing out there on the deck. She was very sweet, Sylvia. And very smart. Layered. Always thinking.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again.

  Daniel nodded, staring over my head toward some unknowable point. There was a sadness there that made me like him even more; it made me want to reach out and pat him on the shoulder, though of course I didn’t. I wouldn’t have used the word sweet to describe him, but everything else he’d just said about Sylvia also applied to him. And I supposed there was a sweetness, too. A kindness. The sort of man who stepped in and helped when help was needed. When he brought his eyes back to mine, I blinked and looked away.

  “It was a long time ago,” he said, polite, excusing me from the need to comfort him.

  AT THEIR SUMMER HOUSE, Ladd’s mother—Rebecca—stood in the doorway, holding the screen door open.

  “Darlings,” she scolded, as if Ladd hadn’t called. “We expected you hours ago.”

  His mother frowned at Ladd as she kissed him but then smiled at me and kissed me on both cheeks, not air kisses, but sincere and motherly ones. I smoothed my hair off my forehead as I walked past her to Ladd’s father, Paul, who gave me a hug. He didn’t hug or kiss Ladd but shook his hand warmly, then thumped him on the back. Even though Ladd’s parents seemed genuinely fond of me, the bulk of my contribution to the evening had already taken place—showering, putting on a dress, combing my hair, and saying hello. Before long I would be basking in their good wishes and excitement. My own one-parent household was much lighter on enthusiasm than Ladd’s. I always enjoyed the congeniality of his family but never quite knew how to respond in kind.

  The next morning when I came downstairs wearing my engagement ring, Ladd sat with his mother at the wide oak table in the kitchen. They both looked toward me with the sort of startled, blank faces that told me I’d interrupted a private conversation. I knelt down to pet their little dog. His mother—better at rearranging her face than Ladd—pushed back her chair and smiled. I thought that she looked a lot more like Sylvia than I ever would. She was tall and fair and raw-boned, like she’d stepped out of an Andrew Wyeth painting. I imagined Ladd’s mother, going out to play tennis, or to a party, while Sylvia watched Eli and Charlie. And then later, the brief period they’d had as sisters-in-law. Part of me wanted to ask her what Sylvia was like.

  “Good morning, Brett,” his mother said with genuine warmth. If she ever wondered why her only son wasn’t marrying a woman who freckled after a long day of wind surfing, she never did a thing to show it. “Can I pour you some coffee?”

  “I can do it,” I said, g
iving the dog one last pat and standing up. I moved apologetically toward the coffeepot and poured the steaming liquid into the mug that sat there waiting for me. I stood against the counter for a few minutes, waiting to see what conversation they would invent, to continue.

  Ladd tapped the spot next to him at the table, and I sat down. He said, “We can’t go to Uncle Daniel’s beach today. They’re getting ready for the party tonight.”

  “It looks like rain anyway,” his mother said, and as if on her command gentle drops began pattering against the window. We all looked in that direction as they increased their speed.

  “You two should go into Chatham,” Rebecca said. “Shop. Walk around. Have lunch.” The rain picked up. We could hear it on the roof, three stories above our heads. Ladd’s mother clucked her tongue. “I hope it clears up in time for Daniel’s party.”

  OBEDIENTLY, WE WALKED DOWN Main Street in Chatham, huddled in our raincoats. Ladd and I stared through the rain-streaked windows, not buying anything, not even entering shops except for Cabbages and Kings, the bookstore. Finally we found ourselves walking past the slew of stores and restaurants, past the quaint, restored homes off Main Street, and on the beach—not the tamer bay side of Saturday Cove but the wide Atlantic ocean, roiling with waves nearly as large as we’d seen on Nantucket. Despite the fact that it was the Fourth of July weekend, and the streets of Chatham had been crowded, we had the beach nearly to ourselves if we didn’t count the many seals resting out on the sandbars or the one man who stood in the water with a young child of indeterminate gender on his shoulders. He had valiantly rolled up his jeans and waded into the waves, presumably to get a better look at the seals. Ladd and I watched as the child extended a chubby, raincoated arm, damp fingers pointing.

  “That’ll be me and our kid one of these days,” Ladd said. He pushed off his hood and let the rainy mist gather in his hair. Ever unoriginal, I did the same. Ladd put his arm around my shoulders. I stared up at his face—strong-boned like his mother’s—and thought how I admired his willingness to commit, to look ahead, to be with me, minus any of the personal guardedness I had seen in other men.