The Summer Wives_A Novel

by Beatriz Williams

  “I know.”

  “Aw, of course you do. Sorry.”

  “My father used to tell me things like that, when I was little.”

  “Did he? I like your dad. In my head, I’ve been calling him Prospero. But I guess that’s not his real name, is it?”

  “No. It was Thomas. Thomas Schuyler.”

  “Thomas Schuyler. Warrior, teacher of art, father of Miranda. And maybe a bit of a Shakespeare nut, too. Right?”

  I stretched out my legs and listened carefully to the rhythmic wash of the waves as they uncurled onto the beach. The air was so warm and so silvery, like a primordial dream, like we sat on a beach at the beginning of the world, and we were the only people in it. I said, out to sea: “We used to read plays out loud to each other.”

  “Did you? Now that’s grand. Do you remember any of it?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. A lot of things.”

  “Can you do Once more unto the breach?”

  “That’s a man’s part.”

  “So what? You’ve got it in you, I’ll bet. Thomas Schuyler didn’t raise a sissy.”

  I straightened and crossed my legs, Indian-style. The tulle floated out over my knees, and as I gazed out over the gilded water, I thought, if I strained my eyes, I might actually see all the way to France. Harfleur. Did it still exist? Had anything happened there in the last five hundred years since the siege, or had it fallen into obscurity? Had my father maybe glimpsed it, in his last days? We’d received no letters from France. Any messages, any postcards he’d had time to write had disappeared along with his body, and yet I felt sure that if my father had seen Harfleur with his own eyes, he would have written to tell me.

  “It’s been a while,” I said. “Since he left for the war.”

  “Say, you don’t have to if you don’t want to. I mean, if it hurts too much or something.”

  “No. It doesn’t hurt anymore.”

  “All right. Whatever you want. I’m listening, that’s all.”

  I lowered my voice and said,

  Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,

  Or close the wall up with our English dead!

  In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man

  As modest stillness and humility,

  But when the blast of war blows in our ears,

  Then imitate the actions of the tiger:

  Stiffen the sinews, conjure up the blood,

  Disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage.

  “Go on,” said Joseph softly, from the sand.

  I scrambled to my feet and shook out the grit from my dress. I had told Joseph the truth; I hadn’t spoken those words since childhood, and yet—in the way of certain memories—they rose passionately from my throat. They burst from my mouth in my father’s hard, warlike delivery. The blood hurtled into my fingers to grip an imaginary sword.

  On, on, you noblest English,

  Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof,

  Fathers that, like so many Alexanders,

  Have in these parts from morn till even fought

  And sheathed their swords for lack of argument:

  Dishonor not your mothers. Now attest

  That those whom you called fathers did beget you.

  Be copy now to men of grosser blood,

  And teach them how to war. . . .

  I didn’t recognize myself. I was not Miranda but someone else, a man, a king, a warrior, a voice roaring. I heard its faint echo from the rocks.

  The game’s afoot.

  Follow your spirit, and upon this charge

  Cry “God for Harry, England, and Saint George!”

  And there was silence, and my original soul sank back into my skin. Miranda resumed herself. My arm dropped to my side. I went down on my knees, one by one, shaking a little. Against my hot skin, the sand felt cool. Each grain made its individual impression on my nerves.

  “That was something,” said Joseph.

  I shook my head and laughed.

  “I mean it. You’re something, you know that? You’re something else.”

  I felt as if I’d just stepped off some boardwalk roller coaster. Been spat back ashore by some monstrous wave. Shaken and changed, muscles stiffened from the shock of metamorphosis. Joseph’s gaze lay on my shoulders, on the back of my neck. I thought, If I turn, if I look at him looking at me, I’ll die.

  “Here, lie down,” he said. “You can see the stars real good from here.”

  So I settled myself back in the sand, rigid, arms straight against my sides. Wanting and not wanting to come into contact with Joseph’s shoulder, Joseph’s arm, bare above the elbow in his white T-shirt. From this small distance, I could smell his soap. He must have been getting ready for bed when he saw our signal. That would explain the toothpaste, the soap, the T-shirt. I should have felt overdressed in my blue tulle, but I didn’t. Maybe it was my stocking feet, crusted with sand, or the democratizing effect of moonlight and salt water.

  “How well do you know your constellations?” Joseph asked.

  “Pretty well.” I was surprised to hear that my voice had returned to its ordinary timbre, not quivering at all. “But you must be an expert.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Aren’t sailors supposed to be experts on the stars?”

  “Not anymore. The old explorers were, I guess. Back before we had clocks and instruments, and you only had the sky to tell you where you were. Skies and lighthouses. The old days.” He made some movement with his hand, sliding it out from beneath his head to rub his brow. “Anyway, lobstermen fish by day, mostly.”

  “So what does that mean? Are you an astronomer, or not?”

  “The answer to that, Peaches, is yes. I can map the night sky pretty well.”

  “Peaches,” I said.

  “It’s your Island name. Don’t you like it?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t decided yet. It’s too new.”

  “Well, let me know what you decide.” He lifted his hand and pointed. “There’s Hercules. I’ve always liked him. Had to earn his place there in the sky. He wasn’t just born with it, like the others.”

  “Me too. Makes me feel safer, somehow, knowing he’s hanging there with his sword raised. Why don’t you have an Island nickname?”

  “Me? I don’t know. Nobody ever gave me one.”

  “Maybe nobody ever dared.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  I turned on my side to face his profile. His nose was too big, his brow too ridged. His lips were full, though, which softened him a little. I wondered if the moonlight gilded my skin in the same way; whether his cheeks, if I were so unfathomably brave as to touch them, would feel as cool and smooth as they looked from here, a foot or two away. “That was something, this morning,” I said. “What you did. Diving into the water and saving Popeye. You might have been killed.”

  He didn’t turn toward me or anything. Just shrugged his shoulders a little, against the sand. “Popeye?” he said.

  “That’s what I called him, in my head. Watching you from the window. He had that shirt on, and he was chewing on a pipe—”

  “Wait a second.” He turned his head and squinted at me. “You saw his pipe?”

  “I—well—”

  “You were watching us with binoculars, weren’t you?”

  “Well—”

  “Miranda! For how long?”

  I rolled back to face the sky. “Just a minute or two. I was curious. Never saw anybody fishing for lobsters before.”

  “Aw, you’re blushing.”

  “No I’m not. Anyway, how could you tell if I was?”

  “I just can. I can feel your cheeks getting warm.”

  “No you can’t. Not from over there.”

  “Yes I can.”

  I made to rise, and he caught my hand, and for a second or two we didn’t move. The air grew heavy between us. His hand was calloused and hot, larger than
I thought, so rough it seemed to scratch my skin. The hand of a lobsterman. I looked away, because I didn’t know what was happening, because I’d never held a boy’s hand before, certainly not a tough hand like that. The sea slapped against the rocks, the lighthouse beam swept above our heads. A fierce voice called out.

  “Joseph! What’s going on out there?”

  Joseph turned toward the sound, but he didn’t drop my hand. Instead his grip tightened, not uncomfortable, just snug. I looked, too, and saw a dark silhouette in the middle of a glowing rectangle, painted on the side of a squat, square building attached to the lighthouse.

  Joseph called back to this apparition. “Nothing much, Mama. Izzy rowed over with a friend.”

  She said something back, something I couldn’t understand, and Joseph replied in the same language, which I figured was Portuguese. Sounded a little like Spanish, but it went by too fast for me to pick out any words. The exchange ended with a noise of exasperation from the other side, the maternal kind of noise that means the same thing in any language, I guess, and the silhouette stepped forward from the doorway and became a woman, monochrome in the moonlight. She was small and sharp and graceful, and her dark hair was gathered in an old-fashioned bun at the nape of her neck. She made me think of a ballerina, only shorter. She was examining me, I knew. I felt the impact of her dislike like a blow. I shifted my feet and straightened my back, and when I realized Joseph still held my hand, I pulled it free and tucked my fingers deep into the folds of tulle that hung around my legs.

  She turned her head to Joseph and said something in Portuguese.

  He answered in English. “Don’t worry. I’ll row them back myself.”

  “You don’t need to do that,” I said. “I can row.”

  “Not on your life. That current’s a killer when the tide’s going out, and you’ll be rowing against it.” He bent over Isobel and shook her shoulder. “Izzy! Izzy, wake up!”

  She moved her head, groaned, and went still.

  “She’s drunk,” said Mrs. Vargas.

  Joseph didn’t reply to that. He didn’t even sigh, as he might have done, annoyed as he must have been. Just lifted Isobel in his arms and said to me, “Can you make it across the rocks all right?”

  “Sure I can.”

  He went ahead of me, carrying Isobel, and I followed his white T-shirt, phosphorescent as the ocean in the moonlight. My feet were steadier now. I wrapped my toes around the sharp, wet edges of the rocks and didn’t slip once. When we reached the dock, I held the boat steady while Joseph bore Isobel aboard. “You better hold her while I row,” he said, so I stepped inside and made my way to the bow seat and took Isobel’s slack body against mine.

  I don’t think we said a word, the two of us, the entire distance from Flood Rock to the Fisher dock. I sat on the bench and held Isobel between my legs while she slumped against my left side. Joseph just rowed, steady and efficient, like a fellow who’d been rowing boats since he could walk, which was probably the case. He wasn’t lying about the current. I watched as he fought the strength of the outgoing tide, hurtling through the narrow channel and out into the broad Atlantic; I watched the strain of his muscles, the movement of his shoulders, the pop of his biceps, and my bones filled with terror as I realized I couldn’t have done this by myself, Isobel unconscious at my feet, however hard I pulled. The boat would have borne out past the Island to the open sea.

  At one point, near the dock and the shelter of the small Fisher cove, our eyes met. I’d been looking over his shoulder and so had he, judging the distance to shore, and when he turned back his gaze made right for my face and stayed there, so that I couldn’t help but succumb to its human gravitation. Instead of looking away, he smiled, as if we’d just shared a secret, the nature of which I couldn’t have guessed, so young as I was in the early days of that summer. I only thought that he had a warm, beautiful smile, the most beautiful smile I’d ever seen, and in the instant before I ducked my head, I knew I was in love with him. Just imagine. As innocent, as uncomplicated as that. I still remember that moment, that sweet, shy revelation, remember it fondly, because it only comes once in your life, and then it’s gone. You can’t have it back. And it’s only a second! Isn’t that capricious? One measly instant of clarity, tucked inside the reach of your livelong days. And then the boat touches the shore, and the moment flies, and your life—your real, murky, messy, incalculable life—your life resumes.

  10.

  At eight o’clock the next morning, the morning after our parents’ wedding, Isobel came into my room, dressed and fragrant, and told me we were going to church.

  I hadn’t exactly expected her, as you might imagine. I lay curled on the armchair in my dressing gown, comfortable as could be, staring through the window at the young, watery sunshine that drenched the Flood Rock lighthouse. A book spread open in my lap, unread. Last night, I’d fallen into bed, slept a sound, soundless six hours, and woken more refreshed than I ought, filled with an anticipation I couldn’t yet name, and unable to concentrate on any words written on any page. I blinked at the shadows under Isobel’s eyes and said, “Church?”

  “Darling, it’s Sunday,” she said, as if the two ideas couldn’t possibly exist without each other.

  My father came from an old, intellectual family, and Mama from a young bohemian one. Neither viewed organized religion with uncritical awe; it was one of the few common territories between them. After my birth, nobody thought of baptizing me. When I asked about God—aged eight, mind you—Daddy told me solemnly that I should believe whatever my conscience held to be true. I asked him, what was a conscience? He said it was my inner voice that told me right from wrong, and from then on, when I thought of God at all, I thought of old Grandmama Schuyler, because for some reason her voice shrilled inside my head whenever I faced any kind of moral crisis. Don’t you take that second cookie! or Let the adults speak for a change! and that kind of thing.

  At the moment, and in her present condition, Isobel Fisher did bear an uncommon resemblance to Grandmama Schuyler, who was also long-boned and lean, and whose hair had been blond before it turned a rusty, streaked silver. I hadn’t seen my stepsister since the previous night, when she’d stumbled onto dry land, vomited over the grass, and staggered into the house under Joseph’s protection. His arm had held her shoulder, and his face wore an expression of stern pity, mixed with maybe a little remorse. He must have cleaned her up and put her to bed, but you could still read the history of the night before in that wan, tanned skin, in that dull hair, in those lavender half-moons beneath her eyes, which squinted against the sunshine. She wore an immaculate suit of dandelion yellow and a pair of matching shoes, and one hand rested against the doorframe to hold the whole act upright. The other hand contained her white gloves and pocketbook.

  “What time does it start?” I asked feebly.

  “Eight thirty.” She glanced at her watch. “You’d better hurry. I’ll get the car.”

  11.

  “The thing is, everybody goes,” Isobel called, above the roar of the engine, as we hurtled down the road toward St. Ann’s Episcopal Church at the eastern end of the Island. “If you don’t turn up, they’ll wonder why.”

  “I don’t care about that!” I called back.

  “You will, believe me.”

  She drove wantonly, wastefully, rushing down the straight stretches and then slamming the brakes into the curves, so that the tires of her father’s sleek Plymouth convertible whined and slid against the faded asphalt. All the while, she clutched a cigarette between the first two fingers of her right hand, and along the straightaways she sucked long currents of smoke between her clenched, red lips.

  I kept my hands fixed in my lap. The sun packed its heat into the car’s interior—Isobel had put the top up, in order to save our good hats from the draft—and my flesh still glowed from the haste of getting dressed. Underneath the suit and blouse, a trickle of perspiration ran down my left armpit and along my side. The smell of hot leather and cigaret
tes made me want to vomit. By the time we reached the neat white church, sitting against a field of green and surrounded by cars, I’d begun to feel faint for the first time since that terrible flu in my freshman year at Foxcroft. Isobel slammed to a stop in the grass and I threw open the door to inhale the clean, green-smelling air. The swollen chords of an organ billowed past.

  “Damn it all to hell and back again.” Isobel threw her cigarette into the grass and stomped it with her toe. “We’re late.”

  We ran across the meadow, holding hands, weaving between cars until we reached the wooden steps of the church and slowed to a reverent pace. Isobel turned in the vestibule and ripped off her glove to fix my hat. By some strange trick of the sunlight, her engagement ring threw a shower of glitter on the wall just above the altar, and all the inhabitants of the packed pews started and turned, searching for the source of this otherworldly fireworks. They found us soon enough.

  I don’t know if you’ve ever had that experience, a churchful of well-dressed strangers all staring at you in astonished disapproval. I don’t recommend it. Sometimes, in my nightmares, the image of those faces still returns to me, except I’m naked and grossly pregnant, and Isobel’s left me to face them all alone, instead of clutching my hand in a firm grip—as she did then—and leading me to a pew in the last row, wedged up against the side aisle. The organ tootled on from above, oblivious, and the faces turned away, one by one, because the singing was about to start and none of those great ladies wanted to miss her cue. On Winthrop Island, as I learned, the singing of hymns was a competitive exercise, preferably in a high, godly soprano to reach Heaven itself and—coincidentally—drown out the efforts of both your neighbor and the choir in the small balcony above. (The choir, you understand, had room for just ten members, filled by a ritual of cordial, bitterly contested auditions at the beginning of each summer season.)