The Summer Wives_A Novel

by Beatriz Williams

  “Unless you’re hoping Joseph turns up. Unless you’re hoping to catch a little adulterous adventure from an escaped con. Sail off with him in that yacht you say you bought for Hugh. Are you?”

  “What a question. As if I even knew where to find him.”

  “You’d better hope you don’t,” Isobel called after me. “Because if I find out where he’s hiding, I’ll kill him.”

  5.

  Now, don’t let Isobel fool you. I wasn’t in charge of the Greyfriars refurbishment; my mother was, right from the start. She had laid out a number of stipulations when we first sat down with Mr. Donnelly, but they all boiled down to this: we couldn’t do anything that would alter the appearance of Greyfriars from that of eighteen years ago. Instead of replacing any fixtures in the bathroom or kitchen, Mr. Donnelly’s men had to take out the old ones, clean and repair them, and reinstall; only the rotting wood could be taken away and rebuilt with new; each new bucket of paint had to be carefully matched to the existing color. I gazed at her in tremendous admiration as we sat at the dining room table with our blueprints. She was made of steel. Someone had taken my exquisite mother and tempered her in a forge of some kind, and this was the result: stainless, unbendable. The blueprints went in the dustbin. Work began the next morning.

  As anyone knows, however, the idea of a renovation is far more appealing than the reality. The hammering, the mysterious white powder settling on every surface, the bathrooms in squalor: my God, it was awful. I made my way around the furniture piled in the foyer—that once-grand hall of perfect proportion, of checkerboard marble, of staircase curving elegantly to the second floor—in the direction of the library, which happened to be the only room downstairs still untouched by Mr. Donnelly’s men.

  Inside, the furniture had been cleared to the sides, and right in the center of the great Oriental rug stood a modest box on a tripod, on which Hugh and Brigitte were operating like a pair of surgeons.

  “My God,” I said. “She wasn’t kidding.”

  Hugh looked up. “Who wasn’t kidding?”

  “Isobel. How did this get here?”

  “Borrowed it from a friend.” Hugh stepped over the snaking electrical cable and turned for a loving gaze. He cupped his hands around his mouth and said loudly, “Switch it on, Brigitte!”

  Brigitte turned the switch at the bottom, and instantly the square screen filled with loud, livid static. Hugh dashed forward and turned down the volume. A pair of long antennae stretched from the back; he grasped hold of each one and started moving them around. “Any better?” he called, over his shoulder.

  “No. What’s it for? I thought we were going over to the Monks’ to watch the landing.”

  Brigitte, observing from a few feet away, uncrossed her bare arms and pushed Hugh gently aside. She was so tiny, he was like a blond giant next to her. He stepped back politely while she reached for the channel knob and turned it, and the messy gray lines on the screen resolved into a clear monochrome picture of a grinning Hoss Cartwright. Hugh smacked his forehead.

  “Is that Bonanza?” asked a querulous voice from the doorway. It belonged to Miss Patty, carrying her paints under one arm and the easel under another, hair seized by the kind of disorder that only a damp sea breeze could bring.

  “I believe so,” I answered, “but don’t worry, we’re just testing it out. We’ll turn it off in a moment—”

  She turned around and bellowed, “Felicity! Bonanza’s on!”

  “Wonderful,” I said. “Exactly why did you bring this thing into the house again?”

  Hugh turned to me with one of his thousand-watt grins. “Because there’s been a change of plans, sis. Clay and Livy’re coming here tonight. I invited them over at church this morning.”

  6.

  Like any good ship, we all pulled together in times of crisis. Miss Felicity made a crumb cake, I made cocktail sauce for the shrimp Hugh brought in from the harbor and steamed in a large, battered pot on the Garland range. Miss Patty threw open the doors to the old liquor cabinet and Brigitte coaxed the icebox to produce ice. Otto the sculptor produced a delicious pimento cheese recipe from his old nanny. Then Leonard, who’d been writing poetry on the beach all day, blew in through the kitchen door and started whipping up a ham loaf. There was pineapple salad and a noodle ring with a crabmeat center, and somebody carved a watermelon basket and filled it with melon balls. We spread it all out on the sideboard in the dining room with the good china, like the company buffet in a Betty Crocker cookbook, and I stood there before it all and thought, Maybe it just might work.

  Although I wasn’t thinking about the food. I was thinking about Tom Donnelly’s party.

  The Monks arrived promptly at one minute past five o’clock. The younger girls stayed home; Lucy had gone to the moon party at the Club. With an air of indecorous curiosity, Livy glanced around the room and asked, “Where’s Mrs. Fisher?”

  I kissed each of her cheeks. “She’s upstairs with Isobel. They’re a little under the weather.” Well, I didn’t exactly lie, did I? There was weather, after all, and they certainly existed beneath it.

  “Both of them together,” said Livy. “How strange.”

  Clay was concerned. “They didn’t eat something, did they?”

  “I think it was just the excitement. Won’t you come in? Miss Patty’s made a champagne punch from Old Mr. Fisher’s vintage Pol Roger, unless you’d prefer something mixed.”

  The verdict came in unanimous in favor of Miss Patty’s champagne punch—a dozen or so bottles poured over a trove of frozen strawberries, age unknown, rescued from the depths of the icebox—and we migrated out to the terrace. The sky was overcast, the air unseasonably cool. As we filed through the French doors, each person looked up reflexively, searching for the moon.

  “A shame about the clouds,” said Clay.

  “It’s only a crescent, anyway,” I said. “Nothing much to look at.”

  “You’d think they might have waited for a full moon,” said Livy. “Wouldn’t it be easier to land?”

  I stared at her over the rim of my champagne glass—darling little crystal coupe, excavated from the dust in the butler’s pantry—but her square, sharp face was perfectly serious. She held a cigarette between her fingers as she sipped her punch, and as I watched, she glanced at Hugh, who had struck up a nearby conversation with Brigitte about televisions. He spoke loudly in her ear, and her expression was so animated, so unlike its usual flat apathy, I thought for an instant she was somebody new.

  Livy leaned toward me. “Is that one of your artists?” she asked, forming the word artists as if it were a vocabulary lesson.

  “That’s Brigitte. She works in watercolor, mostly. She’s my roommate.”

  “Roommate?”

  “She was sleeping in my old room, and my mother didn’t have the heart to kick her out.”

  “I see.” Livy paused to sip her punch, to suck her cigarette. “She speaks with a touch of an accent, doesn’t she?”

  “I think she’s Austrian.”

  “Austrian. I see. And now she’s come here to America, how nice. I’ve always thought your mother such a heroine to take them all in and give them a home. Like strays.” She laughed faintly.

  “Actually, Brigitte has talent,” I said. “Some of them are really quite skilled.”

  “Are they? Well, I suppose a view like this would inspire anybody. The Island is such a haven, I’ve always said.”

  “Such magical properties, the Island.”

  “They ought to put on an exhibition at the Club. Wouldn’t that be fun? So many of the members are patrons, after all.”

  “I can’t imagine anything I’d enjoy more.”

  She turned her head—all this time, you see, she’d been speaking sideways to me, fixing her attention on the other guests, on the view across the disgraceful lawn—and lifted her eyebrow. The same skepticism I suppose I expressed earlier, when she asked about the full moon.

  “I’ll be happy to put in a word with the eve
nts committee,” she said. “Although I’m afraid we’d have to leave your name out of it. I’m sure you understand.”

  “I understand perfectly.”

  “Mind you, we’re up to our eyeballs right now with the flower show. My God, it gets worse every year.”

  “Not enough flowers?”

  She snorted, if such a sound could be said to originate from the nose of Livy Monk. “The opposite. Everybody trying to outdo each other. It’s really too much. And this year, of course, there’s the rose problem.”

  “The rose problem?”

  “All the prize roses are just disappearing during the night. First one garden, then another. Clipped and gone in the morning. A rose thief! Can you believe it? The lengths some women will go to.”

  I choked back a little champagne.

  “Are you all right?” asked Livy.

  “Yes. Just caught a bit of strawberry. If you’ll excuse me. I think your husband’s run out of punch already.”

  Now, Carroll and I had done a great deal of entertaining during the course of our marriage, and I learned the essential trick of it early on. Being a hostess was like acting, it was like taking on the role of somebody else, somebody who was gregarious and solicitous, somebody who could listen to a narcissist and a raconteur with equal delight, somebody who drank just the right amount as she ensured her guests drank just a little too much. There was also the art of matching unlikely pairs, and the art of discovering useful secrets, at which Carroll excelled. We made an excellent team in that respect. Oh, you should have seen our parties, before it all fell apart. You should have seen who came, and who left, and when. You should have seen Sinatra standing on Carroll’s Steinway and belting out “It Had to Be You,” or Laurence and Vivien igniting an unholy row when he caught her screwing one of the hired waiters in the kitchen. (Actually, it might have been two at once—that woman had the libido of a Thoroughbred stud.) But the main thing about our parties, the essential thing, is that we never invited anybody boring. They sinned freely, Carroll’s friends, and they were often mean and mercurial and faithless, and they were always, always high, but by God they entertained. That was their job, after all, the only thing of genuine value they brought to this world, and they knew it too well. When I think about those years, I think about what a show it was, an endless, shallow, brilliant, pitiable vaudeville.

  On the night of the moon landing, though, as I carried Clay’s glass to the Waterford punch bowl and refilled it, as I passed the Burbridge sisters along the way and directed them mischievously to Livy, I hadn’t yet begun to reflect on my life with Carroll. It was too raw and recent, and I had only this party to compare it to. This strange intermingling of the Greyfriars art colony with Mrs. and Mrs. Clayton Monk of Boston and Winthrop Island, and the way we were brought together by the moon, a waxing crescent that lay hidden behind a bank of sturdy clouds. I refilled my own glass for good measure, and when I turned to make my way back to Clay, I saw a flash of light from one of the windows of the Fleet Rock lighthouse, and I sort of froze, I guess, while Hugh called my name from across the terrace, near the doors.

  “Miranda!” he said again. “Miranda! Hello!”

  The light was gone. Did not reappear. I rotated my body in the direction of Hugh’s voice. “Right here,” I said.

  He came up to me swiftly, and I was surprised by the expression on his face, which had nothing to do with his pleasure in discussing circuitry and diode tubes with Brigitte.

  “Is something the matter?” I asked.

  He spoke in a low, confidential voice. “Not too bad. I just thought you’d want to know that a pair of U.S. Marshals turned up a moment ago, wanting to speak to Mom. They’re in the library talking, right now.”

  7.

  I remember exactly nothing of the next hour or so, just that I kept away from that corner where the library window overlooked the terrace—not because I didn’t want to see what was going on in there, but because I didn’t want them to recognize my face. My damned face, which had appeared on billboards and movie screens, magazines and newspapers, and was safe from the vulgar consequences of that exposure only on Winthrop Island. Or so I’d thought, anyway. At some point, somebody—I think it was Clay—stuck a cigarette in my hand, and I believe I actually smoked it. Like I said, I don’t exactly remember.

  I do recall that after an hour or so, I couldn’t bear the strain any longer, so I set my empty glass next to the punch bowl and stole into the morning room, where I peered between the curtains into the driveway. The intruding vehicle—a white Chevrolet Corvair parked at a rakish angle next to the sad, dry fountain—seemed to hook my memory. I’d seen a car like that recently, hadn’t I? I’d seen something like it just that morning on Hemlock Street, in fact, as the felt-hatted man from the ferry approached the passenger door.

  I drew away from the window and sat on the seat, panting a little, holding my hand to my chest. The room was papered in oppressive florals, which Mama refused to take down; they matched the chintz upholstery, they provided a bucolic setting for all the china shepherdesses. I thought I was going to suffocate in those flowers. I thought my chest was going to crumple under the weight of all those knickknacks. I heard the floorboards creak, and I turned automatically to the door, which I had stupidly left open, and where a man now stood, leaning to get a view inside the room. He wore a pale suit and held a straw hat between his hands. I thought I saw another man behind him, bending his shoulders to light a cigarette.

  The first man stepped inside the doorway, quite tall and narrow-chested. “Mrs. Goring?” he said respectfully.

  I stood and smoothed my dress, which didn’t take much smoothing, being short and white and made of a thin, stiff fabric. “I’m afraid I am not receiving visitors, just now,” I said, and I walked to the door on the opposite wall the way they had taught me at Foxcroft, a book balanced on your head, and found myself in the library, where Brigitte was coaxing the television back to life.

  “Is my mother upstairs?” I asked, leaning back against the closed door, as if that could stop a pair of United States Marshals who wished to have a word with me.

  Brigitte showed no sign of having heard me. She made some adjustments to the rabbit ears and looked back down at the screen, which remained fuzzy. I walked to the television and touched her shoulder, and she startled so boldly, she nearly knocked me to the floor.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  Sorry, I said at the same time.

  We stared at each other for a second or two. I leaned toward her ear. “My mother! Is she upstairs!”

  “I think so.”

  I turned to go, and she took my arm. “What did the police want?”

  There was a peculiar tenor to her voice. I reached for her hand that clutched my elbow and covered it gently. “I’m sure it’s nothing,” I said.

  From her expression, she didn’t believe me, but she let me go anyway. I hurried across the hallway to the back stairs and went up two at a time, staggering a little as I reached the warm air of the landing and turned left, toward the master bedroom, which Mama and Isobel now shared. When I burst in, they jumped from the window, through which they had both been staring in the direction of the lighthouse.

  “What did they want?” I asked.

  “You should knock first.”

  “What did they want, damn it?”

  Isobel said, “They want to set up a listening post in the attic.”

  “A what?”

  “They want to keep watch on the lighthouse. Station an officer upstairs with binoculars and a—I don’t know—some kind of special microphone for spying on people.”

  My legs gave way. I found a pink slipper chair just in time.

  “What did you say? You didn’t agree, did you?”

  “Of course not,” Mama said. “The idea.”

  “But why here? Why a listening post? Have they learned something?”

  Isobel went to the bureau and lifted the pack of cigarettes that rested there. “I don’t kno
w, Peaches. What do you think? Is there something you need to tell us?”

  “Nothing.”

  “It seems they think he’s visiting the lighthouse from time to time,” Mama said. “Visiting his mother. Possibly even staying there.”

  “If that’s true, then why won’t you agree to the listening post?”

  “Because it’s my home. It’s not a—a police stakeout.”

  Isobel lit her cigarette and turned to me. “We play fair around here, Peaches. Never forget that. You have to give the man a sporting chance.” She blew out a little smoke. “Besides, they can watch Fleet Rock from somewhere else just as easily. From a boat in the water, maybe, or the cliffs.”

  “It’s not a direct line from the cliffs,” I said, “and if they station a boat out there, Joseph will notice it.”

  “So he’s Joseph, is he?”

  “If he’s really there, I mean. Which is almost impossible.”

  “Why? Why is it impossible?”

  “Because somebody would know, wouldn’t they? Somebody in the village. His family and friends.”

  Isobel laughed. “Oh, for God’s sake. You know an Islander would never rat him out to a mainlander. It’s simply not done. He might be a despicable murderer, but he’s our murderer.” She took a long drag on her cigarette and wandered back to the window. The dull twilight shadowed her face. She rested her elbow on one hand and said, “Your murderer.”

  “He’s not mine. I haven’t seen him in eighteen years, not since I left.”

  “Oh, he’s yours, all right. You’re the reason he went to prison, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re the reason he left. I used to wonder why. I used to think, why on earth did he confess like that? Plead guilty, go straight to prison without a trial. I used to wonder if maybe he was covering for someone, and then I wondered—well, whom?”