The Summer Wives_A Novel

by Beatriz Williams

  Isobel sprang from her chair and stalked to the French doors. “I’m going to take a shower and change clothes. Are you coming, Peaches?”

  “She’s not answering to Peaches anymore,” called back the Countess. “I forbid it.”

  Isobel didn’t pause, and I rose and followed her, because I did need to bathe and change before dinner, there was no question of that. As I passed the Countess, she took me gently by the elbow.

  “Before dinner,” she whispered, “we’ve got to talk.”

  17.

  “Don’t do it,” said Isobel. “Don’t let her pounce on you. She will, you know. She’s a terrible pouncer.” Isobel made claws with her hands as she paced across my bedroom floor in her bathrobe, smoking fiercely.

  “Why not? I like her.”

  “Oh, everybody adores Abigail. That’s how she does it. Look.” She stopped and spun to me. “I need you to do me a favor, Peaches. A really big favor.”

  “A favor? What kind of favor? Don’t I have to get dressed for dinner?”

  She glanced at her wristwatch. “You’ve got an hour. I need you to go into the village, quick-quick. It’s only a mile. You’ve got to go to the harbor and deliver a little message for me.”

  “Can’t you do it yourself?”

  “No, stupid child. I can’t do it myself. She’s watching me.” Isobel pointed her finger straight down to the rug and the floorboards beneath, presumably in the direction of her mother.

  I was curled up on the window seat in my own bathrobe, my knees pulled up to my chin, my arms wrapped around my legs, still damp from bathing. As soon as I’d emerged from the bathroom, Isobel yanked me down the hall to my room and closed the door and began her pacing, and I contracted into this little ball in which I now found myself, like one of those insects. If I could’ve grown a shell, I would have, because Isobel’s skin positively radiated waves of reckless, crackling electromagnetic energy, and I knew they meant trouble for yours truly. I turned my head and glanced out the window, where the Fleet Rock lighthouse perched atop the water, washed in some kind of unearthly light as the rain sheeted away to the east.

  “Yes, that’s right,” Isobel whispered.

  “What’s right?”

  She darted forward and knelt before me, clutching my knees. “Joseph. I need you to give him a message.”

  “Oh, Isobel—”

  “Please, Peaches. Darling Peaches. You know why she’s here, don’t you? She’s my chaperone.”

  “Of course she is. She’s your mother, isn’t she?”

  Isobel’s fingers dig into my skin. “Listen to me. She hates Joseph. She hates all of them, the Vargases.”

  “Surely she doesn’t hate them?”

  “Oh, she does. She does. It’s why they divorced, don’t you know that? One of the reasons, anyway. She’s the worst kind of snob, the old-money kind, and she hated seeing me play with Joseph when I was little because he’s not the right sort, is he? A lobsterman’s son. So when Daddy went away one summer, just before the war, she forbade me to play with him, forbade Joseph to come here, and when Daddy came home and found out, he absolutely blew up, and that’s when she left him. And I know that’s why she’s here now. I know it.”

  “But that’s ridiculous.”

  “Oh, it isn’t. Believe me. You have no idea, Peaches, no idea what bigots they are. She tried to get me to leave with her, but I wouldn’t. I put my foot down. I wasn’t going to give him up.”

  I released my arms from around my legs, forcing her hands away. She rose quickly and stepped back, but her wide, excited eyes didn’t leave my face. “The thing is,” I said, “aren’t you engaged to marry someone else?”

  “It’s not that, Peaches. It’s the principle. I’m taking a stand, that’s all.” She stuck her hand in the pocket of her bathrobe and brought out a piece of folded paper. “Just give him that, all right? He’s down in the harbor right now, waiting for his mother to come out of church so he can take her home in the boat.”

  I looked down at the paper in her shaking hand. “Can’t you just telephone him?”

  “Abigail will overhear. She’ll pick up the extension in the library.”

  “Then deliver the note yourself!”

  “She’ll see me leaving. She’ll see me headed for the harbor and stop me.”

  “So what? You’re all grown-up. You can take a stand, like you said.”

  “She’ll find a way to punish me for it, believe me. She’s marvelously subtle, our Abigail. She’ll say something to the Monks.”

  “Well, shouldn’t she? If you’re running around behind Clay’s back?”

  Isobel’s arm dropped. “Why, Miranda Schuyler. What a prig you are. You’re no better than she is, aren’t you? Girls should be locked up and spied on, it’s for their own good, gracious me, God forbid the precious flower should speak to a boy she isn’t married to, especially if he’s some dirty Catholic boy—”

  I snatched the paper from her hand. “All right. Just this once. But I don’t like it, Isobel, not one bit. Not because he’s a lobsterman, but because it’s sneaky, it’s dishonest.”

  “I know, I’m terrible.” She enfolded me in an enormous embrace. “You’re such a darling for putting up with me. I can’t tell you how grateful I am.”

  I stared over her shoulder at the pastel wall, the framed watercolor exactly above the bed on the right and the matching watercolor above the one to the left. Her cigarette still burned from between her fingers, perilously close to the pale pink fluff of my bathrobe. The scent made me sick, or maybe it was something else. Maybe I was already sick.

  “Just this once,” I said.

  Isobel pulled back and held me by the shoulders. “Just this once,” she promised, in a voice so sincere I knew it was a lie.

  18.

  I found Joseph right away, reading a book from a puddle of sunshine on the bow deck of a sailboat. The same sailboat, I imagined, he’d taken about the Island earlier that afternoon. I said his name and he scrambled upright, brushing his hair with his hand.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “Not at all.” He glanced over my shoulder, across the street fronting the harbor. “Are you—what are you doing here? Don’t you have dinner at the Club or something?”

  “Not for another hour.” I had all these words, all these clever things I was going to say to him. I’d worked out my lines as I walked down West Cliff Road toward the harbor, jumping over the pockets of mud and water left behind by the squalls, and now I couldn’t remember a single one. So I just pulled Isobel’s note from the pocket of my cardigan and said, “Here. This is for you.”

  He reached forward and took it. “What’s this?”

  “From Isobel.”

  He glanced up at me. “From Izzy? What’s it about?”

  I shrugged. “How should I know? She asked me to bring it to you. Her mother just arrived and she couldn’t get away herself.”

  “I see.” He still held the book in his left hand, folded over his thumb to mark his place. From this angle, I couldn’t see the title, and I didn’t want to act as if I were curious. He was frowning at me, and I tried not to frown back, but the intent quality of his gaze started the blood to rise up my throat and into my cheeks. I shoved my hands in my pockets and started to turn.

  “Well, goodbye then,” I said.

  “Wait! I mean, does she want some kind of reply?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “So hold on a minute.” He scrambled down from the bow and set down the book. I glanced at the cover and saw it was A Handbook of Practical Ship-Building. I hadn’t lied to him; I really didn’t know what Isobel wrote to him. I told myself I was just being honorable and decent, not reading other people’s private messages, but the truth was I didn’t want to know. Had no desire to see the words inscribed on that page in Isobel’s dashing handwriting. Even now, I waited miserably as Joseph read the note, as he stood there in the middle of the sailboat, perfectly balanced against
the gentle lapping of the water, holding Isobel’s sentences between his fingers. Instead of looking at his face, I stared with fascination at his neck and the intersection of his white collar and tanned skin. He swallowed briefly, and his Adam’s apple slid up and down. “All right,” he muttered. “All right.”

  “Can I go now?” I asked. “I’ve got to walk back to Greyfriars so I can change for dinner.”

  “I can drop you off on my way back to the lighthouse. Mama’s coming out of church any minute.”

  “No, thanks. I’ll walk.”

  “Are you headed to the Club to eat?”

  “Yes.”

  “When will you be back?”

  “I don’t know. Ten o’clock, maybe?”

  Joseph folded up the note and stuck it in the pocket of his trousers. His Sunday trousers, I supposed, tan and neatly creased, topped by a white shirt and starched collar and no tie. The kind of clothes you wore to take your mother to afternoon Mass, even if you weren’t going inside the church yourself, but lying back in the sunshine to read about shipbuilding and to intercept clandestine letters from your lady friend.

  “Tell her it’s all right with me,” he said. “If you don’t mind, that is.”

  “What’s all right?”

  He lifted his chin and looked out across the harbor, toward the dark line of the Connecticut shore on the western horizon. His eyes squinted, and his face caught the full sunshine of late afternoon. “What she said in the note,” he said, and looked at me. “You’ll tell her that?”

  “Sure.” I turned away. “Have a nice evening.”

  “Miranda, wait. Is everything okay?”

  “Sure it is.”

  “You look frosted. Are you sore at me?”

  “I’m not sore.”

  “It’s no trouble, is it?”

  “No trouble at all. Enjoy your book. It’s one of my favorites.”

  “Thanks, I will.” He glanced at the cover and grinned. “One of your favorites, huh?”

  “To each his own.”

  “Kind of an obsession, I guess. You’ve got your Shakespeare and your imagination, I’ve got the sea.” The unexpected warmth in his voice held me there on the dock, not moving, while the sun struck my back. The rains had cleared the atmosphere, had cleared the air of haze and heat. A breeze touched my hair. I heard him say my name, like a question.

  “I’m sorry. I’ve really got to get going, or they’ll wonder where I am.”

  “You’re sure I can’t take you back?”

  I thought, I won’t turn. Anyway, I knew how he looked, standing there in his slim little sailboat, one foot braced on the side, wearing his good Sunday clothes. I wondered why he didn’t go to afternoon Mass with his mother, and waited instead on his sailboat, studying shipbuilding. As I wondered this, I noticed a delicate, black-clad woman making her way down Hemlock Street from the direction of the white church on the corner, and I pinned my gaze in fascination upon her figure. She wore something on her head, a hat that was not quite a hat, and a black veil that trembled in the breeze, as if she’d come from a funeral.

  “That’s Mama,” said Joseph. “You’re sure? I can have you home in a jiffy. The wind’s just right.”

  “No, thank you.”

  I started back down the dock, moving quickly so I wouldn’t be obliged to stop and speak to Mrs. Vargas. She seemed to have the same reluctance. She slowed her pace a tiny degree, so I was stepping off the dock in the opposite direction while she was still a dozen yards away. I waved nonetheless, to be polite. She stared at me and nodded, and I thought her face was a little like Queen Victoria’s, only not as plump: round and dour, hung with some pious, deep-felt grief.

  19.

  We went to dinner and came home a little drunk—naturally the Countess’s arrival at the Club had caused the kind of excitement ordinarily reserved for foxes on the fairway, or lobster thermidor on the menu, and everybody came up to greet her, a blur of faces and names made fuzzier by all those bottles of vintage champagne the Countess kept ordering to toast them. So we were drunk, as I said, deliberately on my part, and Isobel made a great show of going to bed, but I wasn’t fooled. I sat awake reading until I heard the infinitesimal creak of her door, the faint disturbance of the back staircase, and I laid aside my book and went to the window.

  Of course, there was nothing but shadows, except for the regular sweep of the Fleet Rock lighthouse. But during one of those brief flights of light, I thought I saw a boat moored at the end of the Fisher dock, and I thought I saw two people embracing on the bench near the water’s edge.

  But it might have been a trick of my eyesight, seeing the thing it expected to see. The mind’s funny that way. In any case, I couldn’t say for certain, and I rose from the window because I didn’t really want to know. I didn’t want to know the answer.

  1969 (Miranda Thomas)

  1.

  I don’t remember much about that first month back at Greyfriars, not until the morning of what would have been my mother’s eighteenth wedding anniversary with Hugh Fisher, if my stepfather had still been alive.

  I didn’t especially want to sleep in my old bedroom at Greyfriars, but Mama insisted. An elderly watercolorist named Brigitte occupied one bed, and Mama convinced her to allow me the other one, the one I used to sleep in. It’s the best I can do for you, Miranda, she told me, and I tried to explain that I would much rather sleep by myself in one of the smaller, northwest-facing bedrooms—the ones that didn’t overlook the Fleet Rock lighthouse, say—but she closed her ears in that particular way of mothers, and I was stuck with Brigitte and a vista most people would kill for.

  But maybe that was no better than I deserved, no more than I’d asked for when I returned to Greyfriars as I had, clandestine and without explanation, like some kind of fugitive. In any case, Brigitte was deaf and had no interest in cinema at all, no regard for actors and fame and gossip, so she kept an amicable silence and never asked a single awkward question. Nor did the sea view trouble me in those early weeks. For most of May the weather was so terrible, rain after rain, you couldn’t see much of the lighthouse, except for the dull, long beam of the light itself. These were mercies, and I was grateful for them. But the fourth of June dawned clear, and the pink glitter of the sunrise woke me in a strange, unquiet mood. I listened to the gentle rumble of Brigitte’s snore until I couldn’t stand it any longer and slipped free from the worn white bedspread, the sagging mattress, to make my way to the window and a sight that puzzled me.

  There was the lighthouse, of course. Your eyes couldn’t help going straight to the lighthouse, sticking up out of that plucky, rocky little island, its white walls all pink with dawn. The tide hung low, exposing the underside of the rocks, and in that flat, uncertain light, a lobster boat seemed to draw away from the ramshackle dock that lay in the lee of the narrow, vicious channel between Winthrop Island and Fleet Rock.

  I suppose my heart stopped, or something like that. Certainly I felt the shock right in my chest, right where everything vital lives, and I couldn’t seem to move. The boat churned quickly to the west, pulling a delicate white wake behind its stern, and as the distance grew between vessel and lighthouse, the life returned to me. I dove for the shelf where I used to keep a pair of binoculars, but of course the binoculars were no longer there, and I went from drawer to shelf to cabinet, searching desperately for binoculars, telescope, anything. In all the fuss, Brigitte woke and demanded to know what was the matter.

  “Nothing,” I said, though I knew she couldn’t hear me. Like I said, she was mostly deaf. I went back to the window, but of course the boat was gone. Not even the foam of its passing remained, and I wondered if I had simply imagined it. A hallucination, a ghost, because it was the fourth of June, after all, the anniversary of my mother’s wedding to Hugh Fisher.

  2.

  There was no going back to bed after all that, so I put on my bathing suit and went to the pool to swim before breakfast, as I did every morning, even in inclement weather
. When I first met my husband, he informed me—in that kind, embarrassed voice of an Englishman telling you an intimate fact—that I needed to lose ten pounds for the camera, and in order to help me achieve this feat he drew up a regular program of exercise that I’d maintained ever since, even while pregnant. I did this not to please him, but because it gave me a strength I thought I’d lost, a strength I couldn’t find elsewhere. I liked swimming most. I felt fleet in the water, weightless, without substance. I felt as if I had distilled myself back to the essential Miranda. I felt as if I were eighteen again, and a boy I worshipped was leaning in close to kiss me.

  This was especially true inside the swimming pool at Greyfriars, which was filled—now as before—with salt water, not that chlorinated stuff they call fresh. How I relished the pungent, saline tang. I counted off thirty laps, long and steady, and I was just pausing at one end, considering the position of the sun in the sky and wondering if I ought to add on another five, maybe ten, when I noticed the tall, blond fellow who stood by the cabana in his swimming trunks, arms crossed against his bare chest, observing me.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Am I in your way?”

  He unfolded his arms and walked toward me. He had a tremendous young physique, a sturdy, masculine skeleton not quite filled out, limbs straight and golden, and he was smiling. I adjusted the side of my bathing cap and summoned my dignity.

  “It’s Miranda, isn’t it?” he said, coming to kneel by the pool’s edge, about three yards away. A respectful distance, and yet familiar.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know whom you mean.”