by North, Will
Colin wrapped Pete in a hug, kept her there for longer than was perhaps appropriate under the circumstances, then held her away from him. He was surprised to see her tears shining in the sunlight. But she was smiling.
“How are you, little cub?” he asked.
They had evolved nicknames. Colin, from black Irish stock, a descendant, his mother had claimed, of a Spanish nobleman washed ashore in Kerry after the defeat of the Armada, had matured to become a big-boned six-footer with a dark, neatly-trimmed beard and a helmet of close-cropped, curly brown hair. His chest was a mass of inky curls as well, a source of embarrassment to him, as if he hadn’t quite fully evolved, but also an odd source of attraction to certain women. Pete had taken to calling him “big bear.” He called her “little cub.”
She took his arm and led him across the lawn.
“Bored is how I am! I’m waiting to play doubles, but Tyler and Rob have been at match point forever!”
He stopped and looked at her and she finally understood.
“Oh! And happy! Really, Colin. It’s what I’ve always wanted.”
“Good. Yes, that’s good. I’m glad.”
He turned toward the tennis court.
“That’s Rob March?”
“Yeah, I know, he’s gained a lot of weight since last summer. Tyler was killing him, but Rob’s caught up. He works harder than Tyler, despite the weight, but Tyler’s better-trained. They’ve been cycling between advantage and deuce for twenty minutes and neither will yield.”
“I’ll go over and be a distraction.”
“Colin?”
He turned to the tiny tanned woman with the chiseled chin beside him.
“I am so glad you’re here. You have no idea.”
He disengaged his arm, patted her shoulder, and walked toward the fenced tennis court behind the Old House.
Pete watched him cross the lawn. Instead of entering the fenced tennis court, he chose to stand quietly in the shade of a hawthorn tree and watch. She knew Colin didn’t play tennis. Tennis was a country club brat’s sport and country clubs, she guessed, would have been thin on the ground among the tenements on Manhattan’s West Side where he’d grown up. But she knew that wasn’t why he stayed outside. It was his natural reticence, a kind of modesty—not weak, but strong. Unlike Tyler, Colin did not need to prove himself, did not need to be the center of attention.
For the hundredth time since their meeting in London she thought, he loves me. I love him, too. Such a good man. But it’s too late now.
She turned away and headed for the old Petersen house. It was always too late, dammit. Preordained. And nothing I can do about it now, anyway.
***
WATCHING THE TWO tennis opponents, Colin was struck by the stark differences in their playing style. Though Tyler’s shirt was drenched with sweat, his strokes were fluid, almost effortless. He appeared, as if by magic, in just the right spot to return Rob’s shots. Rob, on the other hand, was all effort. Grunting on his serves, and groaning with each return, he stalked the court like a beast after prey.
Colin liked Rob. The summer before, Rob had become the newest young lawyer in Old Adam’s firm. He was the son of Adam’s late partner, Eli March. There was something in the gentle giant’s nature that calmed the turbulence that occasionally rippled across the surface of the beach families’ relationships. The surviving members of the three families—the Petersens, Strongs, and Rutherfords—were so tightly knit that it was as if they had a blood connection. But old childhood rivalries occasionally flared among both parents and offspring. When they did, it was Rob, the newest member, who was the oil cast upon the waters that made it possible for sparring friends or warring partners to let go of their ancient hurts and get on with just being.
The Marches had no summer home on the island, but Old Adam invited Rob to the beach because he saw depth in the big man. He wasn’t a member of the beach families, but he was a member of the firm’s family, and that was good enough for Old Adam.
When Colin had met him the summer before, Rob had reminded him of the slightly pudgy kid in high school who never quite fit in but always could be counted on to help you with your homework. Earnest. Seriously smart. There was a pretty blonde girl, a relative of the Rutherfords called Peggy, on whom Rob had his eye that summer and Colin wondered if she had been invited to the wedding too.
He returned his attention to the game.
As he watched from the shade of the hawthorn, Colin began to see Tyler’s strategy: he was running Rob around the court to wear him down enough to make mistakes. Once again at deuce, Rob rocketed a predictable passing shot down the line. Tyler let it go, conserving his energy.
“Advantage!” Rob crowed.
A condescending nod from Tyler. I’m toying with you, you idiot, and you don’t even know it.
After his next serve, Rob charged the net and Tyler popped a short lob over Rob’s head and out of reach.
“Shit!”
“No, I believe that’s deuce again, old man.” Smirk.
Colin left the shade of the hawthorn, entered the court, and sat on the slatted green wooden bench at the sideline. A nod of recognition from Rob; nothing from Tyler. Tyler was aware of only the court. Rob’s next serve was an ace that left Tyler flatfooted when the ball nailed the far corner. Rob danced briefly, like a circus bear.
“Advantage, Rob,” Colin now called from the bench.
“No shit,” Tyler snapped.
Rob served again, softly this time to catch Tyler off-guard. But Tyler swept his racquet just above the rubberized green surface of the court, lobbed the ball over Rob’s head, laughed dismissively, and waved his racquet, as if saying, “Bye, bye!”
But Rob lumbered back, reached, reached, connected, and executed a blind forehand return over his left shoulder. Tyler, so confident Rob would fail, didn’t even turn to follow the arc of the ball, and thus did not see it drop, with a puff of dust, just inside the baseline.
“That’s game,” Colin called.
“What!?”
“It fell inside. Just.”
Rob whooped and pumped his racquet in the air.
Tyler slammed the edge of his racquet on the top of the net over and over until the wire cable supporting it sang. Colin was stunned by the ferocity. Tyler whipped around toward Colin.
“That was your fault, bastard!”
“Uh-huh, and thank you for that gracious welcome, loser.”
Tyler stalked to the sidelines, dropped onto the bench, and stared at the dirt as the sweat from his forehead left spots as black as blood on the court surface. “Why did I invite you to this wedding? Remind me.”
“You didn’t; the bride’s family issues the invitations.”
“True. Never saw your attraction, to be honest.”
Rob arrived, Colin shook his hand and turned back to Tyler.
“There wasn’t any, Tyler, and you know that. She was always yours, my friend. To be honest.”
***
THAT AFTERNOON, OVER drinks on the porch, Colin watched Tyler. Knowing him as he did, he had expected an anxious jauntiness, a mix of groom’s day-before jitters and Tyler’s characteristic bravado. Instead, his friend seemed oddly subdued. Colin put it down to tennis exhaustion initially, but as the afternoon wore on, it seemed to him that his friend was like a man in slow motion, slogging as if through hip-deep mud, not toward the matrimonial altar but toward execution. A dead man walking. Colin put himself in Tyler’s place: if he’d been about to marry Pete, he’d feel only elation. He’d be over the moon. But would he ever have put himself in Tyler’s place? Would he ever have asked Pete if she loved him, asked her to marry him? No, it wasn’t his place to do so. It would never be his place. He was not one of them.
After dinner, in a spasm of traditionalism, Pete banished Tyler from her sight until the morning’s ceremony. It was bad luck, she said, for him to see her again until she was in her wedding gown, approaching the minister—her own father—on the arm of old Adam Strong, Tyle
r’s uncle.
As the dishes were being cleared, Pete appeared at Colin’s side.
“I need a walk on the beach. Will you come?”
“Of course.”
She smiled and took his arm.
The two of them sloshed along the tide line for a while in companionable silence. To the west, the sun had dipped behind the fir-clad hills and the cobalt blue sky began fading to the color of robin’s eggs. Across the outer harbor and beyond the low hills of Maury Island the almost iridescent white cap of “the mountain,” as everyone here called towering Mount Rainier, had turned the color of pale Spanish sherry. All around them the visible world seemed to slip from three dimensions to two, the low hills flattening to a navy blue screen.
Colin finally spoke. “You okay, luv?”
Pete squeezed his arm against her side and smiled but said nothing.
A little farther on, looking out across the darkening water, she said, “It’s what was meant to be. All along. This is where it’s all been going.”
“This wedding?”
“Well, marrying Tyler, anyway.”
“You act as if it was inevitable.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“What would you say?”
She paused. “Preordained. I think that’s what I’d say… preordained.”
“As in, not a choice?”
“As in part of the plan, part of the natural order of things.”
“I never took you for a fatalist.”
“I’m not.
“Then…?”
“Life is what you’re given; this is what I’ve been given.”
“That’s bullshit. Life is what you make of it.”
To his surprise, she giggled.
“What?”
She hugged his arm again. “If I’d been given as little as you were, I’d believe life was what I made of it, too. But I have had a certain degree of privilege, haven’t I?”
“With no mother and an absentee father?”
“No, with the interwoven safety net of the Petersens, the Strongs, and, to a lesser extent, perhaps, the Rutherfords, not just here on the beach but in town, too. We’re like a tiny galaxy, held together by our own form of gravity. That’s part of what draws Tyler and me together, what keeps us together.”
“The weight of history?”
“No. Or at least not just that. Something else, but I think it’s related. We are known to each other. Do you know what I mean? I think everyone, deep down, longs to be known—truly known—to someone. There is such a comfort in that. I think that’s the foundation of love. Tyler and I, we’ve always had that.”
Colin wanted to argue with her, but there wasn’t any point. He’d never pressed his case and this wasn’t time to start. He nudged the conversation off on a tangent.
“If that’s the case, what’s up with Tyler this afternoon? Where’s the dazzled groom?”
Pete said nothing for a moment. She used the soles of her feet like paddles to spray seawater out ahead of her as she walked through the shallows. Finally, she spoke.
“I think it’s his mother. She’s not coming.”
“Mother? He’s never said a thing to me about his mother.”
“No, I don’t suppose he would have.”
“Meaning?”
Again, silence.
“Tyler’s dad, Richie Strong?” she said finally. “He was a famous pilot.”
“So he said, but he’s never told me much about him, either.”
“He seldom does. But I will. You deserve an answer. Tyler’s dad was something of an aviation hero. Went to Billie Boeing’s flight school down in Oakland before the war. He was maybe twenty. Came home with a commercial pilot’s license and a wife, Amanda James. She was a secretary at the school; I don’t think she was even eighteen yet. American Airlines, which was only a couple of years old, had already heard about Richie from Boeing and they snapped him up.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. And then, in World War II, the president of American Airlines, a guy named C. R. Smith, was made head of something called the Air Transport Command. Their job was to ferry planes filled with equipment and soldiers back and forth across the Atlantic. Tyler’s dad was one of the first pilots Smith commandeered under the war powers. Apparently, Smith already had Richie on his radar screen. Tyler’s uncle…”
“Old Adam?”
“Yeah, well Old Adam told me Smith used his brother for all kinds of top secret missions. One story is he took General Mark Clark, who was tight with Eisenhower, deep into North Africa to oversee the campaign against Rommel there. The plane he piloted was flanked by a dozen fighters.”
“Impressive.”
“Yeah. Old Adam’s crazy about his kid brother. It’s very sweet. Anyway, after the war, Richie went back to American Airlines. He was already one of their most senior pilots and he was only thirty. Flew for them from then on, from prop planes to jets. Then he was killed.
“What, he crashed or something?”
“Yeah, he did.”
“Oh, man…”
“In a car.”
They’d reached the far west end of the beach, where the sand gave way to sharp, barnacle-encrusted rocks. When they turned, they could just see the tip of Rainier, above the hills across the harbor, glowing as if aflame.
“For years,” Pete continued, “everyone said it was an accident; Richie was driving his car, a convertible, too fast. Hit a telephone pole. Nineteen sixty-two.”
“Shit. All those years in the air and he dies on the ground. That’s so ironic.”
“And wrong.”
“Yeah, that too.”
“No, I mean it didn’t happen that way.”
“What?”
“Tyler’s father killed himself.”
Colin stopped and stared at her. “Jesus, Pete!”
“It’s all about Amanda.”
“Tyler’s mom?”
“I got this from Old Adam, after several bourbons, okay? Tyler doesn’t know I know. Please don’t say anything.”
“Okay. Promise.”
“Old Adam and his wife Emily made room for Richie and Amanda at the beach house, right here, after they’d married. Emily was the only daughter of Silas Wolfenden, the founder of Wolfenden Industries, the timber giant, and Silas gave Adam and Emily the land here on the beach. Silas had cut all the timber decades before and it was all new growth then. Old Adam’s got a big heart; he built the smaller Strong beach house next door to his own for his brother and Amanda. But Emily never trusted Amanda. Figured Amanda had seen that Richie was going places and just latched on to him for the ride.”
Pete paused and looked out over the darkening water.
“And?” he said after a few moments.
“And she was right. American Airlines based Richie in Chicago. Richie was gone a lot, building a career, and Amanda landed a job as a stewardess. For the next ten years they both flew, though not together, and put off having kids. Adam said word was Amanda was a quite a party girl. In 1950, when Amanda was twenty-nine, Jamie was born. But she didn’t settle down.”
“Okay, I’m not following here. I thought they were married a long time. They had two kids.”
“Yeah, Jamie…”
“And Tyler.”
“Right, but Tyler came along much later, when Amanda was nearly forty.”
“And Tyler’s father killed himself? I don’t get that.”
“Old Adam told me his brother Richie came home early from a trip, found the house empty, Jamie with a sitter, and went looking for his wife. Found her at her favorite bar, right there in their neighborhood outside Chicago. She was wrapped around the bartender. Not the first time, either. Richie turned around, climbed in his car, headed out fast into the countryside. Police figure he drove straight into that pole. Died instantly. Or maybe he really died back at the bar, you know? I mean, how can someone who has a kid commit suicide? I think some part of them has to be dead already to do that.”
Pete
had stopped, and, reflexively, Colin put his arms around her. She did not withdraw.
“Man; that must have been hard on Tyler.”
Pete pushed away and continued walking.
“Tyler wasn’t even born yet. He came along eight months later.”
“Wait. Was Richie even Tyler’s dad?”
“Good question.”
“He doesn’t know?”
“He believes he’s Richie’s son, the son of a hero and flight pioneer; it’s Amanda who doesn’t know.”
“Shit.”
“She swears he is. Problem is, as Old Adam tells it, the math doesn’t work. Richie couldn’t have been the father; he was away, flying.”
“This is tough.”
“But Amanda wasn’t done.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It wasn’t enough for her.”
“What wasn’t?”
“Having a dead hero for a husband. She wanted a son who was a hero, too. She wanted a fucking parade of heroes, if only to put the spotlight on her mothering instead of her adultery.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“It’s simple; when Richie died, she pushed Jamie to live up to Richie’s legend. The kid joined the Marines first chance he could, got sent to Viet Nam, and was so gung-ho he’d already been made a company commander by the time they sent his unit to Khe Sahn. The battle of Khe Sahn, which was at the end of his tour, was a bloodbath. A week before he was to be discharged—he already had a Purple Heart by then—Jamie dug a hole, climbed into it, and issued orders to his company from it. He didn’t want to get shot just days before going home.”
“That makes sense.”
“Yeah, except he took a direct shell hit instead. Nothing left of him but the dog tags.”
“Jesus.”
They were now nearly parallel to the Petersen compound. Pete stopped and looked at her friend.
“So Amanda drilled it into Tyler that he had two heroes to live up to, his father and his brother. And she never let him forget it. He hates her.”
“Hates her but invited her to the wedding?”
“Oh, yes. His mother, after all. A chance to prove he’s made good. Except she couldn’t care less. Plus, she knows what Old Adam thinks of her. She sent Tyler to boarding school for years and left him in Adam’s care for the summers. Showed up here once with a boyfriend. Adam gave them both the bum’s rush. She hasn’t been back since.”