The Summer Wives_A Novel

by Beatriz Williams

  He was shaking his head, and I couldn’t tell if he was proud of her or ashamed. “So how did it end?” I asked.

  “I walked away, is how it ended. I told her she ought to go home with her mother. With her mother, mind you, not Monk. But by then we’d caused a real stir. I’ll bet the whole Island knows about it.” He stepped back into the boat and settled between the oars. “You’ll be all right? You’ll speak to her?”

  “I don’t know what I can say. You know how determined she is.”

  “Determined is right. Determined to throw herself off a goddamned cliff. Could you toss that rope for me?”

  I lifted the rope from the bollard and dropped it into the boat, and Joseph dipped the oars. The water swam around the wooden hull. I felt an instant of panic, thinking of all the things I meant to say to him, the vastness of what was unsaid, but it was too late. The wedge of sea grew between us. Joseph looked up and smiled, and the panic dissolved.

  “Going to the Club tonight? I hear there’s a swell party going on.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, have fun.” He maneuvered the boat a little, getting a line on the lighthouse, and looked back at me, still grinning. I remember thinking how white his teeth were in his tanned face. “Just not too much fun, all right? And keep our girl out of trouble for me, will you?”

  “I’ll do my best,” I said, but he was already pulling out of earshot. I waved once and turned toward Greyfriars, where a committee of two—Isobel and her mother—ran down the grass to meet me.

  6.

  Actually, I’d forgotten all about the party at the Club tonight, until Joseph mentioned it. It was a Hawaiian luau theme, and Isobel had made us both muumuus out of some garish floral fabric—much like that worn by the Countess today—she’d ordered from the mainland, having been talked out of her original idea for grass skirts and coconut shells.

  Mind you, these weren’t ordinary muumuus—you might say they weren’t exactly muumuus at all—and Isobel hadn’t exactly made them herself. She’d found a pattern somewhere, Butterick or something, and had a seamstress in the village stitch them up. They had arrived yesterday, wrapped in brown parcel paper, and Isobel hadn’t let me see them before she whisked the package upstairs. They were a surprise, she said. Just you wait.

  Now I sat in the back of the silver convertible in my muumuu that wasn’t a muumuu, thinking I should maybe pitch myself out of the car before I arrived, because surely that would prove less painful than walking into the clubhouse wearing . . . well, I don’t know how to describe it. You might say that while the grass and the coconuts were out of the picture, the general idea remained. I looked down at my bosom and tried to tug up the neckline—such as it was—but that only exposed more of my midriff to general view. At least the evening air was still warm. If I had to walk into the Winthrop Island Club wearing a few scraps of floral costume fabric, I wasn’t going to leave with pneumonia.

  And there was Isobel, dressed as briefly as I was, but with far more panache. A giant hibiscus nestled in her hair, and she drove with one hand while the other held a forgotten cigarette. I think she was too animated to smoke. Her mother sat beside her so they could continue to argue about what had happened that afternoon. I wasn’t listening, mostly because the draft thundered against my ears, leaving me in blissful ignorance of the exact sequence, the words that were said, Isobel’s opinions of both men, the Countess’s opinion of her. By the time we pulled up to the clubhouse, where a swarm of scholarship boys in bow ties were parking the cars, the Countess had belatedly turned to the subject of Isobel’s costume. To my surprise, she approved.

  “At least it’ll remind that poor boy why he fell in love with you in the first place,” she said, pitching her cigarette into the impatiens. “And Miranda looks divine. Why doesn’t she have a hibiscus?”

  Isobel spun to look at me for the first time. “Why, where’s your hibiscus, Peaches?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t have one.”

  She smacked her forehead. “My God! I forgot! Here, have mine.”

  “No, really—”

  “No, you must. It’s my fault.”

  She reached for her hair, but I stopped her hand. “Really. I don’t want it.”

  “You must, Peaches. It’s pink, and pink looks better on you than it does on me, trust me.” She unpinned the flower and turned my head. “Hold still. See? Sitting pretty in those lovely dark curls of yours. Much better.”

  “I feel silly. You can pull it off, but I can’t.”

  Isobel pulled back, took my shoulders, and angled me back and forth for examination. A smile grew on her mouth. “You’re wrong, my precious. You can pull off anything if you just stop trying.”

  “Come along,” said the Countess, “before Mrs. Monk drinks up all the mai tais.”

  At the door, the members of the Luau Committee dropped fragrant leis over our heads, handed us cocktails in coconut shells, and wished us aloha or something. A cloud of thick, sweet-smelling smoke drifted in from the open doors to the terrace, lending authenticity to the rumor about the suckling pig. I plucked a coconut hair from the surface of my drink and said to Isobel, “Do you have a minute?”

  “Now, Peaches?”

  “Yes.”

  She sighed a little and turned to her mother. “Abigail, I’m going to take Peaches into the powder room to fix her lipstick. Run along and chitchat, will you?”

  The Countess lifted one of her sculptural eyebrows, not at Isobel but at me. I tried to return her some kind of knowing gaze, and I guess she noticed, because she made a small nod and shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t chitchat,” she said to Isobel, and she walked off in the direction of the terrace, holding her coconut in the middle of her palm.

  Now, the ladies’ powder room at the Winthrop Island Club—the old clubhouse, I mean, not the one they rebuilt after the fire—that powder room was something. First you walked into a kind of anteroom, with a long white marble counter and a row of lighted mirrors and red velvet stools, and intimate little sofas upholstered in the same soft red velvet, and then—if you actually needed to answer the call of nature, that is, not just the call of vanity—you stepped through a doorway into the business side of things. Lucky for us, the place was empty. Isobel stalked to one of the velvet stools, motioned me into the one next door, and opened her pocketbook.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Why, fixing your lipstick. Come on, sit down.”

  “I don’t need you to fix my lipstick. I need to talk to you.”

  “Well, talk, then. Just do like this.” She made a purse of her mouth.

  “Isobel, about what happened this afternoon—”

  “You don’t know anything about it, Peaches, so shut your trap and let me put this on you. I’ve been meaning to tell you for ages that coral doesn’t suit you. Pink, Peaches. You may not want to hear this, but pink’s just right for you, with your dark hair and fair skin.”

  “Pink’s too frivolous.”

  “Not the right kind of pink. Now, hold your lips still and listen to me. I know what you’re going to say. Shh! Lips still. I know what you’re going to say, and it won’t make any difference. I’ve made up my mind.” She leaned back to scrutinize her work, and turned me to the mirror. “What do you think?”

  I stared back at my reflection, lit to brilliance by twelve low-wattage incandescent bulbs, and said, “Made up your mind about what?”

  “I can’t tell you, can I? That wouldn’t be fair. I can tell you what I think, though. Clayton Monk doesn’t love me, not the way I want to be loved. He doesn’t understand me the way I want to be understood. And I guess I knew that already, but I thought it didn’t matter, because there was always—I could always—”

  “Joseph,” I said.

  We were speaking to each other in the mirror, our faces laid out side by side in perfect contrast. Mine, round and fair and large-eyed, pointed at the chin, framed by dark hair; hers, lean and blond and oval, anchored by a pair of small
, hooded eyes. But there were symmetries, too. Our hair, light and dark, curled in the same short style around our ears, and our lips were the same wide shape, except she had colored hers in their usual scintillating red, and mine were magenta. They matched the hibiscus in my hair, just above my left ear, which was the other obvious difference between the two of us.

  Now Isobel laid her finger over her scarlet lips and winked at me in the mirror. “Not a word about that, precious. That’s private, all right? Now let’s go get nice and drunk together, shall we? I’m going to need a few more of these to work up my courage.”

  She lifted her coconut from the counter and I lifted mine, and together we walked to the entrance just as the door flung open to reveal Livy Huxley in a grass skirt.

  “Livy! You nearly spilled my drink, darling,” Isobel said.

  But Livy was staring at me. “Why, is that you, Miranda?”

  “Isn’t she beautiful? I had a feeling that muumuu would suit her.”

  “It’s not really a muumuu,” I said modestly.

  Livy made a tiny, vicious smile. “Whatever it is, it certainly does something for her. Did you put that lipstick on her, too?”

  “She’s like a different girl with it, isn’t she? Like a movie star.” Isobel wrapped her arm around my shoulders. “When you’re famous, Peaches, I’m going to give an interview to Life magazine and say it was all my doing.”

  7.

  In later days—or so I understand—that luau party of 1951 took on a legendary reputation among the Families. Everybody agreed that the committee carried off the theme so well and so thoroughly, nobody could ever host a luau party on the Island again, because this one couldn’t be topped. I don’t know if that’s true. I do know we got nicely drunk, as Isobel wanted, and we sat down at round tables on the terrace and ate our pineapple and our suckling pig and various other dishes I can’t remember. The orchestra played all the usual numbers, except with a Polynesian twist, and I later learned that the committee—isn’t this just the most?—the committee actually brought in musicians all the way from Hawaii itself to play that evening. Yes, by ship and by train, seven thousand miles just to entertain the Families for dinner and dancing on a single hot July night in the summer of 1951.

  Or maybe the luau’s legendary status came about not because of the food and the coconuts and the Polynesian music, but because of what happened on the lawn below the terrace a half hour before midnight, when Isobel Fisher finally swallowed enough fruity cocktails to break off her engagement with Clayton Monk in the middle of “Some Enchanted Evening.” It was what they call a scene, I believe. The Countess lifted her skirts above her knees—she was wearing an actual muumuu, not Isobel’s version—and ran down the steps to take her daughter into custody, and when we had maneuvered her safely into the shelter of the tennis dressing room, the Countess turned to me and said, “Go find Clay.”

  “Clay? Me? Why?”

  “Make sure he doesn’t throw himself off a cliff or anything. Make sure he doesn’t get himself engaged to somebody else. I don’t know. I saw him heading off toward the sixth hole.”

  I thought it was pointless to argue at such a moment. I looked at her and at Isobel, who was waltzing herself dreamily around the lockers, and I turned around and walked back across the lawn toward the golf course, while every single pair of silent, well-bred eyes in the joint that evening traced my progress.

  The Countess happened to be an avid golfer, as familiar with the Club course as she was with her own living room, and she was exactly right about Clay. I found him on the green at the sixth hole, practicing his long putt with an imaginary club. Maybe she was right to be worried, because the sixth hole was one of the most dramatic on the entire course, bordering the steepest part of the cliffs that formed the northern edge of the Island, such that the green itself was only a few yards from catastrophe and the flag looked as if it marked the end of the world. A lot of golf balls lay half-buried on the narrow beach below, let me tell you.

  The dense, short grass swallowed my footsteps, and I knew I should make some kind of noise so I wouldn’t startle him. I stopped a few yards from the green, cleared my throat, and said his name softly.

  He didn’t so much as flinch. “Miranda? That you?”

  “Yes.”

  “How is she?”

  “Pretty tight, I’d say.”

  “Well, we’re all a little tight, aren’t we? That’s the trouble.” He lined up his putt just so and swung his club made of air, and the figurative ball must have gone straight in the hole because he straightened and turned toward me. The moon was about three-quarters full and the sky was clear, and I could see him pretty well because he was wearing a pale, tropical suit. I stepped forward onto the green.

  “She didn’t mean it,” I said, and the words probably sounded every bit as insincere to him as they did to me.

  “Of course she meant it. She’s been meaning it all summer. I could see her simmering with it since Memorial Day; I’m surprised she held back so long.”

  “It’s just nerves. She’s still so young to get married.”

  “Not that young. She’s twenty, plenty of girls get married sooner.”

  “Yes, but Isobel’s different.”

  Clay turned back to the hole and lined up another putt. “Yes, she is. She certainly is. That’s why I love her, because she’s different from the other girls, she’s strong and wild, and I thought I could love her enough to—to make her—to calm her a little, just enough to—” He bent suddenly to the grass and came up with a bottle of something he must’ve purloined from the bar.

  “You should tell her that. You should tell her what you’ve just told me. She wants to be worshipped, Clay, she wants to be a goddess to you. She doesn’t want to be a wife, she wants to be a—a—I don’t know, a fellow adventurer. She wants adventure.”

  “But I want to settle down, Miranda. I want to settle down and have kids. My mother’s been dying for grandkids. You know my brother, couple of years older, paratrooper, he was killed in Holland. So I’m her last chance, she’s been waiting and waiting . . .” He lowered the bottle from his lips and held it between his hands as he settled into his stance again. “She told me a month ago to break it off with Isobel and find some other girl, but I wouldn’t do it. I can’t imagine being with anyone but Izzy. She’s the only adventure I want.”

  “Oh, Clay.”

  He swung the bottle like a club. “Aw, it’s all right, Miranda. Here I am, dumping all my heartache on you. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You’re like a sister to me. Izzy’s little sister.”

  There was a sad lilt to his voice that drew me closer. His shoulders were still bent, but he wasn’t looking at the hole. He was staring down the neck of the bottle. Like I said, he was dressed in a tropical suit of white linen, according to the theme of the evening, although he had discarded the jacket and stood there in his shirtsleeves, rolled up to the elbow, like they’d been when we first talked like this above the cliffs at his own house, not far away. I took the bottle from his fingers and poured out the rest of the contents on the green.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I’m glad someone had the nerve to do that.”

  “Any time.”

  “You look sensational tonight, by the by. In case nobody’s told you. You’ve got a kind of bloom, these past weeks. Maybe the Island agrees with you, or something.”

  “Oh, you know. It’s just this lipstick Isobel gave me.”

  “You’re going off to college in September, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes. Mount Holyoke.”

  “Good for you, good for you. You’re going to blossom. You’ll make some—some Amherst kid a very lucky—lucky man—”

  His voice broke a little, and it seemed natural, because his arms had spread open, to step inside the circumference of those arms and hug him, the way a kid sister would comfort her big brother when some girl broke his heart. He wrapped his arms around me and be
nt his head to cry into my hair, and we stood there while the wind blew softly over us and the smell of whisky made a snug, pleasant, pungent knot binding us together. He stroked my hair a time or two, smoothing away his own tears, and I happened to look up at that instant. “You’re so beautiful, Miranda,” he whispered, and he kissed me on the cheek.

  I didn’t know what to say. The embrace turned awkward. I started to pull away just as he went to kiss my other cheek, and somehow the kiss ended up on my lips, and we were kissing each other, my first kiss.

  At first I was too shocked to move. I just stood there while his mouth moved mine and his hands slipped against my back, which was bare in most places, remember, because of the provocative design of Isobel’s muumuu. Then, because I’d drunk a cocktail or two myself, and because he kissed so gently—because the kiss surprised me, because I didn’t want to wound him, because I didn’t know what else to do when a boy kissed you—I started to kiss him back. He groaned a little, the way boys do when they’re overcome by the taste of a girl’s mouth, though of course I didn’t know that yet. I’d never heard a boy groan before. I felt his tongue slip through the seam of my lips, at the same time as his right hand crawled up and grasped the bandeau top of my muumuu-that-wasn’t-a-muumuu and pulled it down, so my breast spilled out into the bare, warm air, to be captured at once by Clay’s spread fingers.

  There was a gasp that I thought was my own, but which actually came from Livy Huxley, who stood at the edge of the green, about ten yards away, wearing her grass skirt and an expression of outrage.

  “Livy!” Clay exclaimed, but she was already gone, running back toward the clubhouse, grass skirt whisking into darkness. He looked back at me, down at my naked breast, and said, “Oh, hell.”

  I turned away and stuffed my bosom back into place, shocked and throbbing with shame.