The Summer Wives_A Novel

by Beatriz Williams

  “My fault. Of course. Nothing at all to do with your damned insecurities, your ferocious jealousy, your ugly, violent rages.”

  He spun back to the boxwoods.

  “I owe you an apology for that,” he said, and such was the well-trained timbre of his voice, the natural authority of a film director, I heard him clearly and almost believed him. “For what I did at Victor’s flat. That was grossly out of line. You didn’t deserve it.”

  “Nobody deserves that.”

  His head was bowed over his hands, which continued to rotate the hat between them. “I accept that, Miranda. I ask your forgiveness.”

  My arms fell away to my sides. He had never said such a thing before, had never approached the notion of forgiveness. Always it was for him to forgive me for my shortcomings, which were numerous. I was not adventurous enough in bed. I couldn’t cook. I judged his friends too harshly. When I kissed another actor too passionately, even under Carroll’s direction; when I accepted a role in a film he was not himself directing; when I accepted a role in a Hollywood film, Miranda, a prostitution for American fame and filthy American money—when I did any of these things, I committed a conscious betrayal.

  He pressed the hat against his chest and said, “I went to the doctor, after you left. I underwent a few tests. It seems—that operation I had—the—er—the tube, was done in such a way that—careless—the vessel, had somehow repaired itself. So it seems—I may have been unjust—although you must admit I had reason to doubt—”

  “You, who were faithless almost from the beginning. You, Carroll. Can you have any reason to rail at me for faithlessness?”

  He turned. “Were you? Faithless?”

  Until that instant, I had remained calm, as you see. I don’t know how. Maybe it was the coolness of the water nearby, or the shock of seeing him. I had felt panic, I had felt the familiar visceral fear of him, which I quelled by force; but I had not yet felt anger.

  I stared at him in his suit of cream linen, and I thought of the carpet in his bedroom the morning after we had slept together for the first time. The same color, carpet and suit. The same man, only older now, as I was. The cluttered years, oh. Carroll’s eyes had gone a little round, and his mouth made this quivering movement at the injustice of it all, at the idea of my possibly having slept with another man, loved another man except him.

  I said, “I wish to God the baby hadn’t been yours. I wish to God I’d slept with Victor, with Laurence, with any of your friends, with all of them. With the porter at our flat. I wish that baby belonged to any man but you.”

  Carroll made a strangled noise and flew toward me, and such was my anger that I didn’t fall back, I took the force of his blow because I wanted to. It gave me a reason to strike back, but before I could swing, Carroll shoved me again. I lost my balance and fell back hard on the stone. By the time I scrambled up, another man leapt before me and grabbed Carroll by the lapels.

  “You leave my sister alone, do you hear me?” Hugh roared. “You get off this property and don’t even think of coming back.”

  2.

  In the kitchen, I poured my brother a glass of lemonade and reflected on the curious symmetry of events.

  “I can’t believe I did that,” he said. His eyes were bright, his skin flushed. He made me think of a football player who’d just scored a touchdown or something, not that I had ever attended a football game, or even knew what a touchdown really was. He drank half a glass of lemonade in one gulp and set the tumbler down on the table. “I can’t believe I told Carroll Goring to get the hell off my property. And my sister.”

  “He wasn’t actually on me.”

  “He was going to. I could see it in his face.” Hugh spread his first two fingers and pointed to his eyes. “Why’d you marry that creep, anyway? He’s a million years older than you.”

  “Because I was lonely. Because I thought I loved him, at the time. I thought he loved me.”

  “What about Vargas? I thought you were in love with him.”

  I turned away and looked out the window. “Oh, Hugh, I was a teenager then. By the time I married Carroll, I was twenty-six.”

  “So what would you do,” Hugh said slowly, “what would you do if Vargas were standing in this room, right now?”

  I whipped around. “Where?”

  “Gotcha.”

  “I’m going to kill you.”

  He lifted the glass and tilted the mouth of it toward me. “You know what I think? I think you’re still in love with him. You never forget your first love, isn’t that right?”

  “Of course you don’t forget. But you cross a bridge and you can’t cross back to where you stood before. You keep marching, that’s all you can do.” I sat down in the chair opposite him. “Anyway, isn’t this the same man who murdered your father?”

  He shrugged. “My father was a bastard.”

  “What? Where did you hear that?”

  “I hear things, Miranda. I go out in the world. I go down in the harbor. Old Hugh Fisher doesn’t have a lot of friends there, believe me. You get it out of them when they’re drunk.” He finished the lemonade and rose to carry the empty glass to the sink. “You get most things out of people when they’re drunk. Maybe I should get you drunk, and you might tell me about the fellow who carried you home from the dock, the night of the moon landing.”

  I stood up so fast, I overset the chair. “What?”

  “I was still outside that night, sis. I saw you.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything before?”

  “Maybe I was waiting for you to tell me. Maybe I was waiting for something exciting to happen.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know.” He turned to face me, leaning back against the sink, and crossed his arms. The sunlight came through the window to set his hair on fire. “You tell me.”

  “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “Was it Vargas?”

  I glanced down at the tablecloth. “I don’t know.”

  “Sure you do. Where is he now?”

  I looked back up and said fiercely, “I don’t know.”

  “I’m not going to fink, I swear. I’m just curious. And I guess I want to know if my big sister needs protecting from someone other than her husband. Or whether that sweet little yacht you bought from the Huxleys isn’t really for me.”

  I regarded his crossed arms, his fiery hair, his belligerent jaw, and I suppose I smiled a little. “When do you head back to school again?”

  “The middle of September.”

  “Not soon enough.”

  “And what are you going to do when I’m gone, huh? What are you planning to do when the summer’s over? Stay here? Head back to London? Back to being Miranda Thomas?”

  The smile—what there was of it—dropped from my lips. “I’m going to divorce Carroll. That’s the main thing. After that, I haven’t—”

  A knock landed on the door. We turned our heads at the same time; not toward the door, but toward the window next to it. From this angle, I couldn’t see the visitor, but Hugh could. He started forward and opened the door. “What’s cooking, Mrs. Medeiro?” he asked cheerfully.

  “Just some lobsters.” She stepped into the kitchen and held out a wire basket.

  “I didn’t order any lobsters,” I said.

  “They’re a gift.” She walked stiffly inside and set the basket on the counter next to the sink, while Hugh and I watched in a kind of daze. She wore wide-legged trousers and a broad hat of coarse straw, and when the lobsters were settled she continued to stare out the window overlooking the lighthouse. On the water, about twenty yards from the Greyfriars dock, Hugh’s new sailboat bobbed at its mooring, white and bright in the early sun.

  “A gift from whom?” I asked.

  Mrs. Medeiro turned back to us, and because the sun was behind her I couldn’t see her expression. But I had the impression of great anxiety. Her hands, large and reddened, twitched as they fell away from the basket.

  “From a friend,
” she said. “I’d better go now.”

  She started for the door, and Hugh started for the lobsters. I followed her outside and took her arm to stop her.

  “What’s the matter? What’s going on?”

  “Those marshals. They give me a case of the willies.”

  “You mean the ones watching our driveway?”

  She drew her arm away and glanced toward the delivery van, just visible around the corner of the house, parked near the rhododendrons. “Just be sure you watch out for their claws,” she said.

  “The marshals’?”

  She snorted. “No, dearie. The lobsters’. Say, I hear your husband came in on the early ferry this morning.”

  “Came and went,” I said.

  “Ah.” She nodded slowly. “You remember what I said to you in my store, when you came to buy ice cream, many years ago?”

  “You remember that?”

  Mrs. Medeiro tapped her forehead. “I remember everything. I remember you did not take my advice.”

  “I should have taken your advice. If I had—”

  “At this age, girls do not take such advice. My girls, they did these foolish things, they were heedless for love. But you are a woman, Miss Schuyler. You will not do some stupid thing for love. You will let the dogs lie sleeping.”

  “What dogs?” I seized her arm again. “What dogs are sleeping?”

  Mrs. Medeiro stepped away and rubbed her arm where I’d held it. She glanced up the driveway and said, “I am old and tired. Too old for this. I am done. You have your lobsters now. I am done.”

  “He’s your grandson!” I called after her, as she hurried across the gravel to the delivery truck.

  She jumped in the cab and turned on the engine.

  3.

  I had told Hugh no more than the truth when I said I didn’t know where Joseph Vargas was. Until my brother spoke those words in the kitchen—you might tell me about the fellow who carried you home from the dock, the night of the moon landing—I wasn’t even wholly certain I hadn’t dreamed it all, that the hour on Horseshoe Beach wasn’t a drunken hallucination, that I’d simply contrived to drive myself safely back to Greyfriars that night and put myself to bed, and that was when my mind started twitching and scripted out some alternative, fantastic version of events. Yes, my unconscious mind, longing to return to some point in the past in which everything was simple, when you loved a boy and he loved you back, and you were going to audition for the college play and he was going to bring you five dozen roses at your premiere.

  Because when I rowed myself over to the lighthouse the next morning after the moon landing—having consumed six cups of coffee to drown my hangover—there was nobody there but old Mrs. Vargas, looking pale and strained in a black housedress. She was astonished to see me, to say the least. She offered tea, then changed the offer hastily to coffee, which I refused. Instead, I came straight to the point, and she answered me without hesitation. No, she hadn’t seen Joseph. She didn’t know what I was talking about. Last night? She hadn’t heard anything, she hadn’t noticed anything at all. My goodness, she would surely know if somebody was living in her own house, wouldn’t she? You could hear a pin drop at night, when the sea was calm. I asked her about those hiding places the rumrunners used to store their booze, and she said she’d never heard of them, she didn’t know what I was talking about. Pascoal had never spoken of such things to her, God rest his soul. She spread her hands before me and was awfully sorry she couldn’t help me. Maybe—she suggested this delicately—maybe I’d had a little too much to drink last night?

  So I returned to Greyfriars just in time, as the tide began to turn, but not before I peeked inside the small covered portion of the dock that served as a boathouse, and saw that it was empty. Only Pascoal Vargas’s old lobstering equipment, his lines and cages and pots, hanging on their hooks, everything in perfect order.

  But now my brother Hugh had presented me with a new fact, a fact that corroborated the blurred memory of sailing for some time in a small, choppy boat, of being carried, three-quarters asleep, across a drizzly lawn, and told to make not a single sound. The smell of fish. My hair brushed by a pair of gentle hands. As I walked back into the kitchen, my head buzzed with these details I hadn’t remembered until now, the way your recollection of an event sometimes returns to you in small pieces, like a puzzle that must be fit together.

  “There’s something funny about this lobster,” said Hugh, when I walked inside and shut the kitchen door behind me. “Look at his claw.”

  I came up beside him and examined the lobster through the wires of its basket, and I saw that Hugh was right. There was something tied to the claw of the largest lobster, a strip of white cloth, and when I poked my fingers carefully into the basket and detached it, I thought I saw a few black marks on the inside.

  “What is it?” asked Hugh.

  I dropped it swiftly into my pocket. “Nothing,” I said.

  4.

  About Tom Donnelly’s party. Looking back, I have no doubt he’d started planning it way back at the beginning of summer—to bring together, as he said, the Families and the locals on common ground, to celebrate the end of the season. And I suppose it made sense. We were living, after all, in a more egalitarian age. There might not have been any Jews on the Winthrop Island Club rolls yet, for example, but several members, so I understood, had expressed a cautious open-mindedness to the possibility, should any Jew have felt himself tempted to purchase a house right smack in the middle of a nest of WASPs, and should he have found anyone willing to sell. But that was all hypothetical. The year-rounders already existed on the Island, and men like Tom Donnelly—owners of prosperous, well-respected businesses—made a kind of middle ground between the pedigreed summer folk and what you might call the Island’s working class. And he had, after all, been entrusted with the demolition of the old clubhouse and the building of the new one.

  But all that goodwill and modern egalitarianism would have been for nothing if the clubhouse hadn’t closed early that summer of 1969, in order to prepare the building for its careful demise. Without the Club, the Families had no choice but to troop down to Horseshoe Beach on the evening of August twenty-fourth and join their fellow Islanders, and lucky for Tom Donnelly the weather was perfect, sunny and warm. As promised, he’d invited everybody, the lobstermen and the shopkeepers, the clergymen and the harbormen, the small police force and the volunteer fire department. He set up a tiki bar on one corner of the beach and stocked it with enough free booze to fill Lake Winnipesaukee. And then he had the nerve to ask me personally—Miranda Thomas, star of stage and screen—to get up a little theatrical production among the residents of the Greyfriars artist colony, in order to lend the evening some tone.

  Now, as you might recall, there were only two ways to get to Horseshoe Beach. The first was to sail in, which most of the Families did, mooring their boats at the southeastern limit of the sand where the rocks took over. The other was to do as I’d done in July, as Hugh and I had done in June, to park your car on the edge of the field and walk across the grass and down the rocky ledge to the beach below. The Greyfriars Players (that was our company name—has a certain ring, don’t you think?) chose the second route, cramming into Mrs. Medeiro’s delivery van, which Hugh had cheerfully borrowed for the evening to bump along the road with our torches and our few props. I rode in front, in between Hugh and Isobel. The ride wasn’t long, and we hardly spoke. Nerves, I guess. When we reached the field, a couple of cars had parked there already. I recognized a white Chevy Corvair among them.

  “Oh, look.” Hugh switched off the engine. “Our friends beat us to it.”

  “Ignore them,” said Isobel.

  He swung out of the cab, and for a moment, neither of us moved. We watched Hugh cross in front of the van, this brother we shared, half mine and half hers, and Isobel said, “I guess we’re going to make fools of ourselves.”

  “At least we’ll be fools together.”

  She reached for the door
handle. “Well, that’s something.”

  Outside, the Players were jumping from the back of the van onto the turf. I poked my head inside to make sure nothing had been left behind, nobody still sat there curled into a ball of nerves, and shut the doors. When I turned, two men stood before me. One was tall and broad, sweating at the temples, and the other was tall and thin, smoking a cigarette: the fellow I saw on the ferry in July. By now both faces were familiar to me.

  I said pleasantly, “I’m sorry. I’m afraid this party is for invited guests only.”

  The thin man tossed the stub of his cigarette to the grass and ground it out with his heel. “You know, this is the funniest case. The funniest case I’ve seen in twenty-two years. The first time I’ve tracked down a fugitive that nobody wants me to catch.”

  “Really? But I understood you haven’t tracked him down.”

  “Maybe I have and maybe I haven’t. What about you, Mrs. Goring? You tracked him down yet?”

  “Me? I haven’t tracked down anybody,” I said, with a little emphasis on the I.

  “God damn it,” said the broad one. “God damn it. We ought to just arrest her, Frank. She knows where he is. All of you, all you goddamned Islanders, you all know where he is. He’s in the fucking lighthouse.”

  “Jesus, Johnny. Watch your language in front of the lady, will you? That’s no way to get a lady to talk.”

  “It certainly isn’t. Do you mind standing aside? I’ve got a play to direct, down there on the beach. Where you’re not invited.”

  The man named Frank snorted. “Where are we invited? That’s what I’d like to know. Did you know we have to board that damned ferry every morning? The early ferry, Mrs. Goring, every ever-loving morning. Why? Because nobody will rent us a place on this island, nobody will rent us a cottage or a room or a rathole or nothing. That Mohegan Inn’s always full up, for some reason, the only hotel on the Island. And then there’s our orders. Tell the lady about our orders, Johnny.”