The Color of Water in July

by Nora Carroll

  Jess could not imagine what horror lurked in the mind of a person who had chewed her own umbilical cord, abandoned her newborn, and then set off in the lake to swim. The horror was unfathomable, and this lake, calm, blue, beautiful, mutely held on to her secrets.

  Spirit waters. Maybe they had released her from whatever place she dwelled.

  The envelope flew open, the old seal brittle with age—she slipped out the contents; there were two sets of pages. With a start, she saw that clipped to a sheaf of handwritten papers was a small sheet of her grandmother’s familiar pearl-gray writing paper, inscribed with Mamie’s tidy blue script.

  Dear Chapin,

  It is time for my granddaughter to know whatever part of the story that you know.

  But I fear after all these years it is too late for me. The story that I choose to live with must be my own. I know that Margaret is Lila’s daughter, but there must be a piece of the puzzle that only you can tell.

  Please address the letter to my lovely granddaughter, Jess Carpenter. Write what you like. I will not open it myself.

  May God bless you and keep you in good health.

  Mamie

  Under it, on plain white writing paper, were several pages written out longhand. Jess started when she noticed the date in the upper left-hand corner: Tuesday, July 30th, 1980—San Francisco, California.

  Sixteen summers ago. Jess’s last summer at Wequetona. The summer of farewell.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPIN

  Dear Jess,

  A few days ago, I received by post an odd request from your grandmother Mamie. It brought me back to a place and time that I thought I had forgotten entirely. But then, one doesn’t actually forget, does one?

  She has asked me to tell you what I know about her sister, Lila, to whom I was once briefly married, so long ago that it now seems part of another life, and I have decided that I shall endeavor to do so, and hope I shall acquit myself reasonably of the task.

  I should start by saying that I admire your grandmother greatly, and believe her to be a woman of character. She said that I should write what I like, and I trust your grandmother knows that there’s no way to tell this story unless I leave in the parts that wouldn’t normally be discussed in what used to be called “polite company.” I do hope you’ll not be shocked, but then I doubt you will. You’re Mamie’s granddaughter, after all. Without doubt, a young woman of character, and of course, you have the benefit of being born into a more enlightened time.

  The story starts in summer, of course. When else would a Michigan story start? My family, the Flagg family, was fortunate. My father had made his money in shoe leather—you remember this was just after the Great War—and we had become impossibly rich helping to boot up every young foot soldier who marched off to be slaughtered in the war. If I recall correctly, my father had bought his cottage, Aldergate, from the penurious sister of an officer who was killed at Verdun, no doubt killed with Flagg soles nailed to his shoes. We were new money—bright as a minted penny, and quite unknown by the Wequetona set; had they known me better, I trust they would have pinned fewer of their hopes upon me and recognized me sooner for what I was. Of course, this is not my story, this is Lila’s story, but our tales ended up getting entwined somehow. That was the trouble with how we used to do things in those days—Lila and I did not ever belong together. Trouble was, to those around us, we looked as though we did.

  Lila was a great deal younger than I, which suited me quite well. She was a skinny girl with a face that would have been unremarkable except for her eyes, which tended to violet and were set wide apart. Her hair was flaxen colored and hung perfectly straight. She was the first of the group to bob her hair. You could say she was an ordinary-looking girl, but as people sometimes do, she had a look that suited the spirit of the time. She did not talk much. In all honesty, I did not think her very bright. But that summer, there was something luminous about her. Like a firefly, Lila Tretheway lit up the dark.

  It was the summer of 1921, Lila was, well, I guess she must have been about sixteen, and I was just up from Yale. There were always groups of us going into town. The young girls prized driving with me because they fancied my car, a Stutz Bearcat, yellow, the only one in town. I’m sure you don’t imagine it like that—the way Charlevoix was in those days, but Jess, there was a moment, back between the wars, when those thirty-room “cottages” were being built, when people used to arrive at the Pere Marquette station in private railway cars to be picked up by chauffeured limousines.

  Not a big enough town for me though. I was fidgety there, lived with a weariness that was bone deep. I used to go into town, into Koch’s almost every evening to play roulette. The Wequetona girls were, for the most part, wholesome sorts, but Lila was always willing to sneak out on a pretense and bump with me over the bone-rattling roads between Wequetona and town. Her clothes were fabulous. (Not that I found her attractive, in that way, Jess. I trust you have understood, by this time, that my proclivities did not lie in that direction.) Your Aunt Lila was at boarding school at Farmington then, and she must’ve been up in New York at the dressmakers almost every weekend. You could just see the older Wequetona ladies, the matronly sisters of Bible professors, frowning at that girl when she tripped into the dining room looking every inch the flapper. But stout Mrs. Tretheway had apprised herself of the interested looks of the young men toward Lila Tretheway’s legs, and she just let her gad about like that. When Mrs. Tretheway wasn’t in bed, that is; the grieving widow, who had lost her husband three years previous, suffered from a nervous condition, and on physician’s orders, spent much of her time in bed.

  Lila did not demand much from me. She was just looking for a good time. Koch’s was a Georgian building, right in town, that made little pretense of hiding that it was a first-class gambling joint. I remember walking in the front door with Lila Tretheway. She always reeked of smoke, pulling out her Chesterfields the moment she and I left the Wequetona grounds. There were a lot of chauffeurs around town then, bringing in the families from the Chicago Club and the Belvedere, but I drove us right up to the front door in my Stutz, and you could just see the way people paused a little, and said, “Who are those two?” Inside the front hallway with its polished wooden floors, we would shrug off our coats, mine white cashmere and Lila in a little ermine wrap. At the end of the hallway, there was an arched window and a buffed mahogany table with a silver vase kept full of dozens of red roses. Mr. Koch had them sent up from Chicago every day.

  That moment, when we were standing there in front of the vase of roses, with eyes looking up from the dining room and the card room, was the moment that I cherished. We were just it, Lila and I. I knew how people saw us: young, fair haired, and lanky legged.

  I think that’s what she married me for. Somehow, standing next to each other, we were the thing that everyone wanted to be, the stars that had aligned just so in the sky. I’m sure she truly believed that she would always get precisely what she wanted. I myself was less convinced. Both of us should have known that looking fabulous in a hallway in front of a vase of roses is not the surest route to happiness.

  Lila was a born gambler. She would keep playing in the Ladies’ Room as long as I would leave her there, shooting craps with ten-penny bets. I could see the gleam in her eye when I came back to get her, the relish with which she scooped up her pile of silver and copper and let it fall tinkling into her beaded bag.

  I did not care if I won or I lost; I just loved sitting there in the game room, surrounded by stout middle-aged men who had made fortunes in things—rubber, sugar, guns, shoes—watching the roulette table, spin clatter clatter clatter spin, inhaling that intoxicating odor of Havana cigars mingled with the sweat of powerful men.

  One afternoon, a warm sunny day in mid-July, we were bored, looking for some amusement. We decided to go down to the Pine River Channel and watch the lumbermen bringing in the logs. The Pin
e River Channel was a man-made throughway that connected Pine Lake to Lake Michigan. The lumbermen used to ride the logs down through the channel; big chested and bare backed, they would wrestle the huge logs through the narrow channel to where they would be loaded up onto the waiting freighters.

  Lila and I stood on the banks of the channel. I remember that Lila looked especially lovely that day in a cream-colored linen sheath with a dropped waist. She was one of the few girls actually thin enough to wear a dress cut like that. It hung loose past her hips in graceful straight lines.

  Down the channel, straddling a huge log, came a big, strapping fellow, tanned a deep brown, with a powerful muscled chest that immediately caught my eye.

  I noticed that Lila was looking at him too, and she started pointing to him, shouting out, in that silly, girlish way of hers, “Oh look, Chapin, do look . . . It’s Billy, Billy McKawber . . . the Indian . . . from the Club. It’s Billy.” Just like, that she was hopping up and down like a girl half her age and yelling, “Yoo-hoo, Billy . . . It’s me . . . it’s Lila.”

  I felt a fool with her hollering out like that, but at the same time, I was hoping the fellow would take notice, and then he did. He smiled and waved at us. Even at a distance, I saw the white flash of his teeth, the smooth arc of his muscled arm.

  “Chapin,” Lila prattled on excitedly. She had a nasal tone of voice, curiously flat. “You remember Billy. Billy the caretaker’s son. He used to live right next to Wequetona. His father did work for the club all the time. You remember him. The Indian. We used to play together all the time, when we were kids. We were best friends. Mamie couldn’t stand him. She said all Indians smell.”

  Lila always talked like that. Like a small child. Her chatter was just background noise to me; I couldn’t get past the thought of the fellow with his legs wrapped around the enormous virgin pine log.

  “He still lives out at the club, then?” I asked. “In the caretaker’s cottage?”

  “Oh, Chapin, don’t you know anything? Old Joe McKawber got fired. They said he was a drunk, and people worried he might steal. That’s when they built the caretaker’s house. Don’t you remember? When John and Mabel came. A lot of folks just thought they’d rather have a white couple living there year-round. What with the Indian camp being so nearby.”

  “Well, if you want to say hello, let’s go find him,” I said.

  So we found him. He was standing on the rough dock down where the freighters loaded up, still bare chested, leaning against the iron railing, swigging root beer out of an amber-glass bottle.

  “Well, aren’t you the swell,” he said to Lila, and he gave a slow, easy smile that poured down me like hot molten steel. I bit down on the inside of my lip until I could taste the iron bitterness of blood.

  “Need a lift?” I said, hating the thin quaver in my voice as I tried to hide how badly I wanted him to agree. “If you’re all done working, we could take you somewhere.”

  He might not have bothered with us at all if it hadn’t been for the car. He and everyone else in the world wanted to ride in a Stutz Bearcat. It was a two-seater and he climbed in between us, the stick shift nestled up snug against his crotch. He had the stink of hard work on him, and I felt so faint with desire that I wasn’t sure I could drive. I reached over to grab the stick shift, letting my forearm press hard against his well-muscled thigh.

  Some men are like that, so easy in their body that they’ll let you touch them and they don’t draw away, they just accept it, like it’s their due. I felt a shiver of hope building inside me. I was blind though, because I didn’t notice what was going on over on the other side of the car. He was in the middle, and Lila and I rode along each side of him, both of us, always alone when together, just breathing him in.

  When we got to the county road just about a quarter mile from the Club, he leaned over and breathed in my ear, the tickle shooting jarringly down my spine. “We can walk from here,” he said, and I pulled over, light all the way down to my ankles, my heart beating wildly, thump thumpty thump. It was a perfect summer day—you could just catch a glimpse of the blue water through the trees, and I got this momentary feeling of infinite possibility, like all was right with the world. But before that feeling could even sink in enough for me to name it, Lila grabbed his hand and they were out of the car, in a flash, just like that. Into the woods, hand in hand, under an umbrella of green leaves. And I was left alone in the car, hand on the polished cherrywood of the stick shift.

  Believe me, Jess, I can still call to mind the precise shade of the water that day. I call that summer blue, the color of water in July—all of promise wrapped up in it, and every disappointment too.

  That was what I married her for, Jess. Because I wanted what she seemed to get with so little effort. That day, she had just stretched out her hand and taken what she wanted, so easy on a sunny summer day. That’s why everyone wanted to be near her—because they hoped that some of that quality would rub off on them. But that Lila, the one I saw, the one everyone else thought they saw, was flimsy, and inflammable. Light a match to her, and she just flashed up into smoke and was gone.

  After our wedding, during our trip abroad, it should have been clear to me that Lila was feeling poorly, but by then I was scarcely aware of Lila. We had two large, separate chamber rooms. I shared mine with a redheaded valet named Paul. Though the crossing was smooth, I rarely saw her above deck, and when I did see her, she was sallow and pitiful-looking, sometimes shocking me with her wrinkled frocks and uncombed hair. She was my wife, after all, and I wanted her to be a credit to me. I wanted her to glitter and shine and to deflect the glare away from me.

  Once, early in the trip, she had come to my chamber in the evening, dressed in a silk peignoir. I opened the door and saw her standing there, small and pale, her blue eyes large and moist.

  “I’m lonely, Chapin,” she said, and I saw the note of puzzlement in her eyes as she looked around the small anteroom and took in Paul reading the newspaper in his silk dressing gown.

  At that moment, when I saw her there, I realized that she had not understood; what I had seen as a tacit agreement was only Lila’s girlish inattentiveness. I would like to say of myself that I felt sorry for the pitiful green-faced, lonely girl who came hoping for something that she was never going to find. Looking back, of course, I feel sadness, sadness for both of us, but at the time I was filled with nothing—nothing but indifference and a cold, deep dagger of disdain. I had given her trunks full of gowns and first-class accommodations. I had given her an allowance and a Grand Tour. It had never once occurred to me that the girl who had so easily stolen into the woods with Billy McKawber would someday come looking for affection.

  After that, Lila and I kept our distance. Though we were traveling together, we rarely spoke. I could see that she was rapidly losing her prettiness. She went from being wan and green on the ship to taking on a fishwife pudginess—not surprising, as she rarely went out and dined on rich food. Finally, she started begging to go home again, and I thought to myself, Let the girl go. I supposed that she was going mad on me, like her mother. I thought it was just something that ran in their family.

  I had been in Berlin for several weeks when I got the wire that Lila had drowned. Several weeks that had been the best that I had ever lived in my young life, a taste of what life was supposed to be like for others, for people who weren’t like me. I was sitting at a café on the Nollendorfplatz with Paul, drinking bitters, the warm sun slanting down on my face, when the concierge brought me the wire.

  Lila drowned. Stop. Pine Lake. Stop. Funeral tomorrow.

  I must not have shown much emotion at all, because Paul did not even ask the contents of the wire. I just kept looking at him—coarse red hair, translucent skin, and a gap between his teeth—and smiled just seeing him sitting there. I did not leave then—there hardly seemed to be a point. By the time I got there, the funeral would be two months past. I would neve
r return to Wequetona. Thankfully, I would never return to the ghost-man-shadow that being there had forced me to be.

  And what of Billy McKawber? He didn’t last long. The winter that followed our joyride together, he went out fishing on the frozen lake, fell through the ice, and drowned.

  I never tried marriage again. Deciding not ever to go home, for me, was a much better solution. What I regret, looking back, is that I did not find a way to help Lila. I thought we had the same problem—that each of us had a love problem. I thought both of us loved across boundaries—I loved red-haired valets, and she loved Billy. I used to imagine ways I could have made it work for her, another servant along to carry our trunks, a villa in Italy somewhere, a flat in Paris. Those were the 1920s, and on the Continent, it could have been done. But whenever I mentioned Billy, Lila’s eyes went flat with utter hopelessness, an expression that I don’t think she even realized she was making. I guess her imagination wasn’t big enough to imagine a future that included the two of them.

  Your grandmother did not tell me why you needed to hear this story now, Jess, but I’m willing to guess, this being July, that yours may be a love story too. I spent but a few brief days of my youth up north in Michigan, and I have seen many lovely places since. But to this day, I can close my eyes and see the exact shade of the water that day, and I’ll feel a stab of regret that I’ll never see it again. I’ve seen blues in my life: Italy, Aruba, Carmel, but never once quite that same shade, tinged through with want, and desire, and regret.

  But I’m not sorry that I didn’t sacrifice all to stay there, like Lila, and like Billy. I walked away long ago, and I hazard a guess that someday you will too. (Everyone swears they won’t, but in the end, most people do.) But it’s still there for me, in my mind’s eye, blue water, and youth, and love frustrated, and I daresay, when you leave, it will still be there for you too.