Bittersweet

by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

  I cleared my throat. “Do you mind if I ask—” I began, my voice coming out thin and shaky. “I just mean, if I need to buy a ticket home …”

  “You’re not thinking of leaving us?” Birch looked stricken.

  “Oh no,” I said, “I wouldn’t want to, just, if I need to.”

  “Why would she need to leave?” Tilde asked as though I wasn’t there.

  Birch waved his hand dismissively. “Nonsense.”

  Tilde handed Birch the platter, then turned to take in the view, lifting a pair of binoculars from a side table that sat beside the door. The porch was scattered with twiggy rattan furniture painted white, in stark contrast to the jewel-toned Adirondack chairs that were sprinkled across the lawn below. At the far end of the porch, I admired a twin-size cushioned swing upholstered in navy ticking, comfortably appointed with an abundance of peachy pillows. It looked like the perfect place to curl up with a book and drift into a sun-dappled nap. But no, I couldn’t love it until I knew.

  “So you were pleased, then,” I pressed. “We passed the inspection.”

  Birch’s eyes lingered over me for a long, odd moment. He frowned, dismissing my words, before turning back to the water. “How many do we have?” he asked. I followed his gaze out to Winslow Bay as Tilde counted aloud, noticing, for the first time, a tangle of masts, bobbing like a floating forest.

  “Do you know much about yachts?” he asked.

  I shook my head, thoughts racing. They hadn’t told me I had to leave. Which meant they were going to let me stay. I almost laughed aloud with relief but for the serious tone Birch used as he pointed out toward a moored boat with two masts. “That’s a yawl—the mizzenmast, which is the second mast, is behind the rudderpost. And that”—he moved his hand to the right—“is a ketch—the rudderpost is behind the mizzenmast. The rest are sloops—single masts.”

  “Twenty-six,” Tilde said crisply.

  “Give her a chance to look,” he said, and she handed me the heavy binoculars. I wasn’t even sure what I was supposed to be looking for, but I held the glasses to my eyes. The magnification moved so quickly across the suddenly close landscape that I felt dizzy. Finally I found the fleet of moored boats in the water right before us. In the golden light I could make out a family swimming beside one of the yachts. On the deck of another, a couple sipped martinis.

  “Canadians,” Birch said in a mocking tone.

  “They sail down just for the weekend?” I asked, impressed that so many people were living such luxurious lives.

  “Twenty-six is far too many,” Tilde said. “They’ll keep us up half the night.” Then a look of delight flitted across her face. “Perhaps one will get stuck on the reef.”

  “We don’t want that—then we’d have to help them.” Birch laughed, and, much to my surprise, Tilde joined him. I’d never seen her amused, and the sound was much lighter and looser than I would have imagined. Birch turned to me again, and Tilde’s laugh cut itself off, midair. He hardly seemed to notice, but I could feel her disdain.

  “I curse the crows when they wake me up,” he declared, “but I praise them when they wake the damn Canadians.” He held up the platter of muffins. “Shall we find a place to put these?” I was grateful for his graciousness, and to leave Tilde behind.

  Birch led me into the room just inside the screen porch, the finest I’d seen at Winloch; if this was the summer room, I wanted to know what the rest of the house looked like. Upon the honey-colored floor stood antique wooden sideboards and a large mahogany table. An exquisite burgundy Oriental rug tied the furniture together, ending before a large fireplace sporting a brass fender and matching andirons. Canapés were arranged in colorful formations upon hand-painted porcelain platters: crab cakes and mini-lobster rolls and demitasses of chilled pea soup. Never before had I been at a “spur-of-the-moment” family dinner of this caliber—now I understood why my corn muffins had been in error. Birch found a spot for them, a spot I kept my eye on as the night progressed, praying someone would finish the stupid things so I might be absolved of my blunder.

  As more Winslows arrived, I filled a china plate and nibbled at the far wall, watching them pass before me—an older woman, a little boy, the well-dressed mothers, the chiseled men—all with their alabaster skin, scrubbed clean of dirt and imperfections. They were a perfect, particular breed of animal, like racehorses or hounds, thin-ankled and groomed. It was easy to tell those of us not related by blood—we were almost all shorter and darker, but there was something else: we hung back.

  Elegant Ev checked in on me more than once; apprehensive Annie sought me out for company; blundering Banning spilled his daughter’s apple juice all over my sandal, making my left foot moist and sticky for the rest of the evening. But otherwise I was left alone. As the soiree progressed, a herd of blond children thundered in and out of the room, raiding the crackers and cheese. They were shooed out onto the porch intermittently by a clucking mother, and, more than once, I thought to follow them, longing for their honesty. As the summer room grew too small to contain the sheer number of Winslows inhabiting it, the party spilled out onto the porch, and I made my way to the other side of the room, thinking I’d go in search of the toilet, when my gaze settled on an alcove built into the wall, out of sight of my previous post. Inside the alcove hung the most beautiful painting I’d ever seen.

  True, I hadn’t seen many paintings in my life; the reproductions in the art books at the library had, at best, been murky sketches of the real things. In person, Ev’s Degas had impressed me; I’d known, just by looking at it, that it was Important. Still, that small, predictable work of art called forth a far less rousing sensation than the gasping good fortune I felt as I took in the great painting hanging before me.

  It was a Van Gogh.

  I couldn’t call up the painting in my memory, so perhaps I’d never seen it reproduced. It was unmistakably one of his, if bigger than I’d ever guessed a Van Gogh to be.

  A landscape—his telltale cypress trees in rich greens and blues, reaching up toward a night sky. Above, stars. Below, yellow and green grasses, purpling in the distance. If there was a distance; it was hard to hold on to the perspective in any of it, for just as the eye would settle on a horizon line, a glance to either side would reapportion the whole thing, casting one’s first impression into doubt. But far from causing frustration, as such an effect would have elicited from a lesser artist, the result was exhilarating, pulse-quickening. The painting heightened emotion as only great art can.

  For the first time that evening, I forgot about the Winslows. I stepped slowly toward the feverish brushstrokes as though they were calling to me, until I was mere inches away. Had the same work of art been hanging on the wall of my parents’ house (however laughable that possibility), I’d just have assumed it was a cheesy reproduction bought at a mall shop and set in a spray-painted frame. But as the evening light filtered in from the bay, I felt proud, as though somehow, being here with this piece of history, I had already made something of myself.

  “It’s magnificent, isn’t it?”

  I turned to find Indo right beside me. I could only nod, enthralled. “Is it really …?”

  She nodded, a smile forming on her lips. “My mother loved art.”

  “She was a collector?”

  She took a good while to answer. “It’s mine.”

  “Oh?”

  “My financial inheritance was smaller,” she said, gesturing to the grand house around us, “because I was a girl. So Mother gave me the painting. I was the only one who loved it the way great art must be loved. But then my brother magically came up with some heretofore unknown bylaw which apparently gives him the right to march into anyone’s home and seize her personal property like some kind of dictator. So here it hangs, when I was the one who was prepared to do what was right on its behalf, to—”

  “Can I get you girls something?”

  I turned, surprised, to find Tilde standing on my other side, smiling falsely, glass of sherry
in hand.

  “We were just discussing …” I gestured back to the Van Gogh.

  “She asked,” Indo said.

  “Oh, Indo, I’m certain the poor girl did no such thing.”

  I stepped back and out of the sandwich they’d made around me. Something was happening that I did not understand. Yes, Indo was spilling family gossip, but she was a good person, and Tilde just seemed mean.

  “It’s beautiful,” I offered. Something sharp passed between the older women that I could not name.

  A little girl ran up and tugged on Tilde’s arm. “Auntie T., can we do sparklers down on Flat Rocks?”

  “I’ll bring them right out.” The girl squealed and ran out into the tangle of adults. Tilde turned to us. “If you’ll excuse me, the angels call.”

  “It’s creepy to call children angels,” Indo said, as she glowered.

  “And you know so much about it because of all your experience parenting,” Tilde replied.

  Indo listed, and Tilde watched her, satisfied she’d stung.

  “No, you’re right,” Indo said, “I should keep to my role as bitter eccentric.” But Tilde was already gone.

  Cursing quietly, Indo gulped down her wine before charging in the other direction, opening a door into the rest of Trillium and slamming it shut behind herself.

  I turned back to the painting, unwilling to let it out of my mind. But what had occurred between the two women—even if I didn’t fully understand it—made it impossible to really see again. The beautiful space inside my head that the Van Gogh had created, that the promise of a summer at Winloch had warmed, was filled with the idle babble all around me, about the sad disrepair of the docks over on the far side of camp, and the best breed of hunting dog, and the name of the right contractor to hire for cottage renovation, so that even as I tried to hold on to the painting with my eyes, the cacophony pulled me away from it, rendering the artwork unfriendly.

  Soon I found myself drifting, unnoticed, onto the lantern-lit porch and out into the night, where the children’s sparklers made brilliant, swooping circles upon the lawn. Beyond them, the lights atop each of the twenty-six masts bobbed like fairies, reflected in the velvety black water below. That was when I remembered the sound of my brother’s voice, carried along, like the heady smell of a thunderstorm, on the warm night wind.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Inevitable

  I got the package from my mother that Monday morning. From the way it crinkled, I knew it was lined with Bubble Wrap. John delivered the prize himself, along with a bag of apple-cider donuts.

  “You remembered!” Ev clapped, jumping unabashedly into his arms when he appeared with the treats. He looked alarmed at the public display of affection, so I excused myself to the bathroom, smiling even more broadly to myself in private, giddy at the notion John was the one Ev was sneaking off to in the early morning hours.

  Back in the living room, they stood over me eagerly like children at summer camp as I opened my mother’s package. I noticed him link his hand briefly with hers as she hoped aloud for candy. But I knew what the envelope held without having to look: a stack of self-addressed, stamped envelopes that would lead straight back to Oregon.

  “M.,” the letter began, “Jeanne says you had a lovely visit. I forgot to ask you when we talked. Please call when you get a chance. We miss your voice. Please give Mr. and Mrs. Winslow our thanks again. Your father sends his love too.”

  Six sentences. Easy enough to reply to. I had the envelopes, after all. But responding to my mother in kind always felt like lying. She was so good at playing her part; I was terrible at the role I was meant to uphold. And the alternative, to write what I was really thinking, was impossible, if wickedly fun to imagine:

  Mom,

  I’m glad to be almost as far away from you as this country allows. The Winslows are beautiful and rich, probably more than your imagination can muster. I know you’re picturing gold candlesticks and infinity pools, but this place they made isn’t decadent, no, it’s rustic in the way only a rich person’s place can be, with money flowing under it invisibly, so that they get to pretend they’re just like the rest of us. They are characters, all of them, and I’m sure they must quibble with each other behind closed doors, but no one here walks around with the imprint of a ring scabbed onto their cheekbone. Funny, that. To a person, they are attractive, devoid of body odor, and not the least bit interested in me. Their dozens of children (nearly all biologically impeccable, with one adopted Chinese toddler for good measure) are precocious. Their dogs ignore me in the nonchalant way only overindulged canines can. They all—even the dogs—eat organic.

  Ev has three brothers. The fat one, Banning, has a house made out of straw; the meticulous one, Athol, has a house made out of steel; and I’m fairly certain the third brother, Galway, is the big bad wolf. Ev’s parents, Birch and Tilde (these people all have names only the rich can get away with), are, at once, enigmatic and gracious.

  Birch has five living siblings, and they and their broods make up the bulk of the clan in residence at camp. (You’re supposed to call it camp, even though no one is actually camping.) Most of the Winslows, with the exception of Birch’s eccentric sister Indo (who I’m beginning to suspect may be of sapphic persuasion), have children and grandchildren.

  Birch’s oldest sister, Greta, has a husband and asexual daughters and a vague son, and three Teutonic grandchildren: Arthur Jr., Victoria, and Samson. Skippy is their Jack Russell, Absalom their golden.

  Birch’s younger sister Stockard (Ev calls her Drunkard), has a fat husband called Pinky, a divorced son, PJ, and soccer-loving teenage grandsons. Word is that PJ and his wife were driven apart by the death of their little girl, Fiona, years ago; apparently this loss has rendered them too sad for pets.

  Birch’s youngest, pseudo-bohemian sister, Mhairie, has an unremarkable family but for her Jewish son-in-law, David. Everyone has made a point of remarking on the fact that he’s “Jew-ish,” as they pronounce it, not that there’s anything wrong with that. His children, as a result, are Jew-ish too: sharp Ramona, worried Leo, and silly Eli. They are too allergic for pets.

  Then there’s Birch’s sister CeCe. She’s the one whose son, Jackson, killed himself. She hasn’t shown her face yet.

  Each relative I’ve met wants to discuss Cousin Jackson’s suicide, but discreetly (they adopt the same hushed tone as when they mention David’s Jew-ishness), leaning, with great concern, against their porch rails, asking Ev—even asking me, forgetting I’m no one—“Have you heard how CeCe’s doing?” “Can’t medication help with that kind of thing?” “Do you think there was a way to stop it?” I wonder if Jackson knew they would talk this vividly about him, and if that’s part of why he did it.

  Is it lost on me that a boy who blew his own brains out is the primary reason I find myself Genevra Winslow’s personal guest in the sun-dappled Eden where she’s spent every summer of her life? Not a bit. I have come to believe Jackson’s death was a necessary sacrifice to the gods of friendship (“he died so that I may live”), and I tell myself it isn’t selfish to believe so. After all, he was born into this bounty. It’s his problem it wasn’t good enough.

  Give my love to Dad if you dare.

  Okay, I wrote it. But I didn’t send it.

  Just one weekend spent amid the Winslow clan and I’d already learned a useful trick—if you didn’t speak, they forgot you were listening. That’s how I gathered that only a handful of Winslows had attended Jackson’s memorial service back in February, where CeCe, Jackson’s mother, had been inconsolable. Over the first lantern-lit dinners of the season, there volleyed a tingling, electric replay of the returning soldier’s every act the previous summer, the last time anyone had noticed him.

  He had been too skinny.

  Too quiet.

  Always buried in a book.

  Angry about the Kittering boys borrowing the canoe.

  Or no, when Flip was hit by the dock repair truck, he’d been empty of emoti
on, remember, hadn’t so much as batted an eye, just carried the mangled dog into the grass and laid her down.

  Wasn’t there a broken engagement to some girl from Boston?

  Hadn’t he once yelled at Gammy Pippa in the Dining Hall?

  As all of Winloch replayed the stammering timbre of Jackson’s voice, the slight shake in his hands—which hadn’t been there before Fallujah—our collective chatter crescendoed, filling Winslow Bay with the single, relieving point the Winslows could finally agree upon:

  It was because of the war. A relief, someone uttered, to have a reason.

  Beyond that, one couldn’t blame anyone in particular, but it didn’t escape me, as I listened invisibly, that those few Winslows who lived in Burlington and had four-wheel drive were doing their best to forget the unhinged pitch of CeCe’s keening, not to mention the attention-sucking way she’d fallen, dramatically, to her knees beside her son’s coffin (her histrionics, frankly, a bit much), as the snow fell outside the funeral home, blanketing the city in fresh, pure white.

  It was times like these that one was thankful for tradition. At least that’s how Birch Winslow began his toast that first Monday evening of summer, raising a glass of local ale before the whole of Winloch. It was the twenty-first of June, the Midsummer Night’s Feast, held every year on the solstice upon the Dining Hall lawn, before the tennis courts, such a fundamental Winslow tradition that Ev seemed shocked when I needed it explained. A good hundred of us were spread before Birch on blankets and folding chairs in the soft, falling light, our collective contributions to the groaning board (the elite’s name for a potluck, I’d come to learn) already picked apart on the tables made haphazardly of sawhorses and plywood. Stockard’s russet potato salad, Annie’s fried chicken, and my homemade blueberry pie were all long gone.

  “We are missing one of our own,” Birch went on, and a sad hush descended upon us—even wild little Ricky stopped squirming—“and the loss is a great hole in us that will remain unhealed.” Missing was any mention of Jackson’s name; his family was absent as well. Rumor had it that Mr. Booth had left CeCe for good back in April, and that she and her offspring would not be coming back. But Birch did not elaborate. We raised our glasses of artisanal beer as the Winslow coat of arms rippled above us.