• • •
I can’t believe you didn’t tell me,” Tiny said. “You took my picture like that, you slept with me, and you didn’t happen to mention that you’d met my mother an hour before.”
“I didn’t see how that was relevant to sleeping with you.”
“Men.”
He added, “Anyway, that wasn’t sleeping.”
They were driving Caspian’s old Ford down Route 3 to the Cape. His idea. Does she know your name? Tiny had demanded, and Yes, of course, he’d answered; and So she knows where to find you, said Tiny, and Well, I gave her my card, he’d said, in the most natural way in the world; and Why the hell did you do that, screamed Tiny, and Don’t worry, she doesn’t know you’re with me, he’d told her soothingly; and Trust me, she’ll know it in a few hours, when he gets the note I put through his mail slot and dials up Mother, and Mother comes marching over to batter down the door, she’d said.
He’d leaned back on the pillow, put his hands behind his head, and considered the matter: weighed the satisfaction of letting Mrs. Schuyler batter down his door to discover the precious Tiny lying luxuriously deflowered in his arms, versus the wisdom of postponing such a confrontation until Tiny was ready to face it, and the downstairs neighbors weren’t around to call the police.
“I have this place on the Cape,” he’d said at last. “My mother’s place, an old family house. She left it to me and my sister, when she died. About an hour away, at this time of night.”
This time of night: the car crashing through the moonlight, the grass shimmering silver by the road. He’d put the top down, because that’s what you did when you drove to the Cape in the middle of a silvery May night with the woman you loved.
“Don’t get funny,” she said. Her arms were crossed over her chest, and a ladylike silk scarf tethered her hair. She sat primly in the passenger seat, her legs tangled at the ankles under her powder-blue skirt.
“Come here.” He held out his right arm.
She considered the arm, considered the chest to which it was connected. She brushed her fingertips down her skirt and edged grudgingly in his direction.
He dragged her into the middle seat and kissed the top of her head. “That’s better.”
She fell asleep at once, nestled sweet-smelling in his shoulder, and as the car rolled along, and the salt wind and the moonlight stirred the hair at the top of his head, he thought that he would probably never be happier than this moment, that you couldn’t achieve any greater contentment than this, any more sublime confluence of sensation. Before life fell apart again.
• • •
In the end, they swung into the sandy driveway of his mother’s beach house an hour and a quarter later, because Cap drove a little more slowly than usual, prolonging the ride. He cut the engine and stared at the old shingles, at the white trim catching the moon. How long had it been? Maybe a decade. So hard to schedule his few family visits to coincide with the height of summer.
He nudged Tiny. “Wake up, sweetheart.” He’d never used that word before, but it fit, at this moment.
“Hmm?”
“We’re here.”
Tiny lifted her head. “The Cape?”
“Mmm.” He climbed out of the car and held out his hand. She stumbled out after him, untying her silk scarf, straightening her skirt. “Let’s get you to bed.”
“What time is it?”
“One o’clock or so.”
“It feels later.”
He found the key in the birdhouse and opened the door. The familiar smell surrounded him: wood and weather, mildew and salt and lemon polish, towels drying in the sun. Childhood. The place was tidy, exactly as he remembered: the family sent someone over every so often for dusting and repairs, kept the gardener on his rounds. There was his mother’s chair, next to the knobbled fieldstone fireplace, covered in a ghostly white sheet. The electricity was probably still off. He used a flashlight from the car to find the hurricane lamp in the pantry and light it with a long match.
Tiny still stood in the hallway, blinking sleepily. She took off her shoes and dropped them by the door.
“Bathroom?” he said.
She nodded.
“Go upstairs and turn right. The door at the end of the hall. Water should be on by now, because of the gardener, but the boiler’s not lit, obviously, so it’s going to be cold. I’ll just get the suitcases from the car.”
He heard the water trickling through the pipes when he came back in. He carried the suitcases upstairs to his room and set the hurricane lamp on the bedside table. The curtains were closed. He pulled them wide to the moonlight and yanked up the bottom sash of the window. The cool air rushed in, the rhythmic wash of the ocean. He watched the faint undulating phosphorescence of the surf until the water stopped and the bathroom door creaked in the hall behind him. He turned and lifted away a few sheets from the furniture. A pale fog of dust rose and settled.
“Is this your room?” Tiny asked from the doorway.
“Yes. Slept here as a kid. I can push the beds together, if you like.”
“That’s not necessary. Which one is yours?”
That’s not necessary. A little ungentlemanly fall of disappointment in his chest.
He pointed to the single bed closest to the window. “Right there. I’ll just use the bathroom while you get changed.”
The water in the tap ran ice-cold. He splashed his face and brushed his teeth. His reflection was paler than he expected, or maybe it was the moonlight. He scrubbed his skin with a towel and headed back to the bedroom, where Tiny had blown out the hurricane lamp and burrowed into his bed.
He arrived on the old hooked rug in the center of the room, hesitating. The bed wasn’t built for two.
“Well, come on,” said Tiny. “I’m not getting any warmer in here.”
Under the sheets, she was naked and fresh, delicate in his arms, miraculous. He kissed her collarbone, her beautiful neck. “You’re not too sore or anything, are you?”
“We can find out.”
He’d never really liked the term she used, making love, but he liked it now. Like sweetheart, it fit somehow, it carried the scent of truth. The sweetening of his heart when he touched her skin. The enlarging of this store of love inside his chest, when she touched his skin, when he balanced himself on his palms and locked them carefully together. No, she wasn’t too sore. She’d never felt better, she said, and he thought of the photographs he’d taken—the ballet ones, interestingly, not the naked ones—and he raised her elastic right leg to his shoulder.
“Oh!” she said, surprised and pleased.
Like the drive along the highway, he made it last as long as he could; but like the drive, it had to end sometime, didn’t it, drenched in moonlight and the salt scent of the pulsing ocean outside the window. “How dangerous is it, really? Tell me the truth,” panted Tiny, damp and hot below him in the mattress, her chin hooked over his shoulder, her arms still clenched around his back. (It meant Vietnam, he surmised.)
“Am I going to make it back, you mean?”
“Don’t say it like that.”
He concentrated on lifting himself off her—conscious of her dainty frame, which must surely be crushed under his bulk, though she didn’t complain—without falling over the side of the bed. She turned on her side, making room. Her back to the window.
“The odds are good, if you keep your head down,” he said.
“Will you promise to keep your head down?”
“If you ask me nicely.”
“What does that mean?”
He pulled her in a little more snugly. “It means I can’t make any promises, can I?”
He’d said that line before, more than once, but he meant something different this time. Something more to do with her freedom than his. He knew for a fact there wouldn’t be any other women, no matter how brutal and
barren things got out there in the jungle, the way he knew he could do without hot water and cold beer when he put them out of his mind. But Tiny? He couldn’t ask her to wait. He couldn’t ask her to take on the chaste and peripatetic life of an army wife, just like that, on the basis of a few weeks’ unstudied passion.
Look what it did to his mother.
“Okay,” she said. “But you’ll know where to find me when you get back.”
He rested his cheek against Tiny’s soft hair and thought about getting back, next year. He thought about the possibility of reunion. He thought the unthinkable, about maybe changing his line of work. Selling his photographs or something. Money wasn’t the problem. He had money, at least. Enough to support a wife and kids in a little house in San Diego, near the ocean. Spend summers at the Cape, right here in his mother’s old place, just like when he was a kid. Happiest time of his life, until it ended.
“Don’t worry, I’ll find you,” he said at last, but she was already asleep.
• • •
It wasn’t the few bars of charcoal dawn that woke him, changing color outside the window, but the absence of Tiny from his side.
He called her name. No answer.
He listened for the sound of water trickling in the pipes, for the vibration of her footsteps on the old floorboards. The hollow next to him was cool, but at least the hollow was there. She couldn’t have been gone long.
Cap was a man of action, but at that moment, he didn’t want to act. His body lay slack and heavy in his old single bed, unwilling to stir. An unsettling premonition struck him: if he rose from this bed, if he threw off the sheet and blankets that had sheltered the two of them during the night, he’d break the spell. He’d return them both to the ordinary world, to their ordinary lives, and the past three days would have been nothing but a dream. A parallel universe. An unstable element, created by a team of curious scientists, existing for a second or two in a laboratory before breaking apart.
Tiny, he said again, more loudly, but the house remained silent.
He had no choice.
He flung away the covers and launched his feet to the floor. The boards were cold and hard against his skin. At the window, the curtains were still open, the bottom sash still raised. The ocean breeze had turned positively chilly, more suited to the beginning of April than the third week of May. In another week, the houses along the shore would be filling up, the businesses would open their shuttered fronts. The beach outside his house and his cousins’ houses would, by the end of June, have witnessed football games and swimming races, sailing competitions and fishing matches. Always competition. They were always winners and losers in his family.
At this moment, though, while a pink sun struggled to rise above the heavy gray horizon, the beach contained only a single tiny figure, wrapped in a blanket, smoking a cigarette, facing the ocean. The breeze moved her tousled dark hair. She stood at the edge of the ragged wet lines marking the reach of the surf, so that when the white foam washed toward her, it sometimes found her toes and sometimes not quite.
I am in love with you, he thought, and then, an instant later, the more permanent, the more certain I love you.
For an instant, he contemplated crouching down and shouting the words from the open wedge of the window. But of course you didn’t spoil the moment like that. You didn’t wreck her serenity with a brash display. Anyway, she probably couldn’t even understand him, while the surf crashed in her ears.
So he stood a moment or two longer, leaning against the window frame, marveling at her. Marveling that he’d found her, that she wanted him, too. In the growing pink light, he saw the dissolution of his own doubts, the emergence of a truth, whole and clean. He saw, in cinematic detail, the infinity laid out before them: two weeks of honeymoon bliss, crossing the country in his car with the top down, staying in motels and campsites and eating at roadside diners and coffee shops, making love to rattle the heavens, to make the angels weep. A year of hell, writing back and forth, exchanging photographs, while a ball of virtuous longing took up residence in the pit of his stomach. Then homecoming, reunion, a house in San Diego near the ocean. Small but pretty. Her ballet studio, his photography. Kids, friends, family. Christmas Eves. A couple weeks back east every summer, maybe, or as long as they both could stand.
Mornings like this, poised in the dawn, in which he would make her coffee and bring it down to the beach, where she’d be waiting for him, and they would stand there wrapped in a shared blanket, drinking coffee, not saying anything. Waiting for the wondrous day.
He turned from the window, found his undershirt and trousers, and headed downstairs to tell her.
Tiny, 1966
I drive with the top up, because that’s what you do when you’re sneaking out of the family compound under the suspicious eyes of your in-laws.
I can’t find my keys, I told Caspian. That was true, if a little misleading. Actually, the keys to my Cadillac have gone missing from the drawer in the pantry where I always place them after a drive, always, and I suspect I’d be wasting my time if I tried to look for them.
Half an hour along the highway, I’m glad the top is up, because the usual afternoon thunderclouds arrive early, all black and towering, and five miles out of Plymouth the first fat drops fall kersplat on the windshield, scattering the dust. Après them, the deluge.
There’s nothing like the clamor of a downpour on the raised canvas top of a convertible. You feel as if your head is stuck inside a dwarves’ mountain mine, an incessant rolling clatter, like metal on stone. You think it’s the end of the world, possibly. How could the sky release that much water and survive? But eventually the decibels climb back down, the horizon swallows the clouds. The sun comes out, mollified, just as you pull the car up to the curb outside your husband’s campaign office on Boylston Street.
“Mrs. Hardcastle!” Josephine is surprised to see me. So surprised, in fact, that her confident young face actually fills with color. “We thought you were at the Cape.”
“I’m sure you did.” In ten precise tugs, one for each finger, I take off one white cotton summer driving glove and then the other. My pocketbook is hooked over my elbow. “I was looking for my husband.”
“Frank— Mr. Hardcastle’s giving a speech in Cambridge this afternoon.”
“Will he be back here before returning to his hotel?”
She looks down at her desk and shuffles through a paper or two. “I’m not sure. Scott’s with him; he has the schedule.”
“Really? He didn’t ask you to accompany him?”
A pair of young women at the back of the office raise their heads to stare at us. Josephine’s cheeks take on a little more raspberry. “He asked me to stay in the office this time. It’s not a big speech.”
“I see. May I take a look at Scott’s desk? Perhaps he’s left a copy of the schedule there.”
“Right over there by the window, Mrs. Hardcastle.”
Frank’s campaign headquarters are carefully plain, a bureau of the people. The walls are decorated with campaign memorabilia and cheap American flag bunting. There are no private offices, except for a large meeting room at the back, and the battered brown furniture is all secondhand. A massive Xerox machine fills a space in the corner, next to the storeroom. Scott’s desk sits in the opposite corner, overlooking the Boston Public Library, immaculately organized. There is a leather blotter, a silver cup for pens and pencils, a plastic telephone in avocado green, a ceramic ashtray, empty metal in and out trays. A cubby at the end contains a few stacks of paper, a notepad, a manila folder labeled PRESS RELEASES, another labeled DAILY BRIEFINGS, and another labeled SCHEDULES. I open that one. WEDNESDAY, JULY 25TH, 1966, announces the paper on the top of the stack.
MORNING.
9:00 coffee at American Legion (see notes)
10:45 coffee at Carpenters Local 111 (see notes)
AFTERNOON
; 2:15 Lunch at the Union Oyster House with Barry Gorelock
3:00 Speech at Austin Hall, Harvard Law School (arrival 2:30, see notes)
EVENING
6:00 Reception and dinner, the Harvard Club (see notes, guest list attached)
I check the clock on the wall next to the storeroom door. A quarter past three. Should I make the drive out to Cambridge? Do I have time? Frank usually sticks around after a speech, if he hasn’t got anything pressing afterward, talking in his shirtsleeves, listening. Frank’s a good listener, actually, when he wants to be. When he’s campaigning for your affection. He looks you right in the eye, like there’s nothing more fascinating or moving in the world than your little problems. It’s almost irresistible.
My gaze falls back to Scott’s desk, as if to find an answer to my dilemma. A couple of cigarette butts lie in the ashtray, interrupting the general cleanliness. Next to them is a stamp roll on a pewter dispenser, half-finished. A few stamps drag on the wooden surface of the desk, as if the coil was tugged too hard the last time it was used.
I reach out and touch the foremost stamp with one finger.
George Washington.
• • •
As a child, I hated trouble like a cat hates fleas. My sisters were always happy to take advantage of this particular weakness. When I got up in the middle of the night for a glass of milk and caught Vivian just sneaking in, reeking of cigarettes, she’d say: I’ll tell Mums you were the one who broke her perfume bottle, or I’ll tell old Roby you forged Mums’s John Hancock to see that ballet with the senior class (Mrs. Robillard was our headmistress at Nightingale-Bamford), and that was that.
But here’s the curious thing: the trouble in question didn’t have to be my trouble. Do you remember that time I walked in on Mums in the library with her Russian prince? Mums raised her beautiful tousled head from the sofa cushion and said, For God’s sake, Tiny, the door was closed, you silly child, you should have knocked, and the shame rained down on my thin shoulders. My fault, that I had disturbed her; my fault, that I had discovered her fault. If I hadn’t opened that door, everything would be fine. The tree falling in the woods, with no one to hear it. And I am always careful, now, to knock on a closed door. I am always afraid of what I might find on the other side. Whose shame might be transferred to my shoulders.
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