Danielle Ganek

by The Summer We Read Gatsby (v5)

  Over lunch—the most delicious lobster rolls, as promised, at a photogenic roadside shack—Hamilton told us what he knew about the author of the love letters in Lydia’s safe. “I don’t know much at all. It was before my time. But she always said he was the most beautiful man. Lydia and I always did have a weakness for handsome men.”

  He paused to heavily salt, for the third time, his side of French fries. “I never met him. But I was under the impression from what little she told me that he was neurotic. An artist, of course. She wouldn’t have been interested in him if he weren’t. A hypochondriac. And his wife was worse, always nearing death and then recovering, so he couldn’t leave her. He checked himself into Silver Hill every other week.”

  “She did eventually buy the house from him,” I said.

  He nodded his head. “She worked hard. In some ways, your aunt was very practical.”

  “Then why all this mystery around the will?” I asked in frustration.

  Hamilton shrugged. “I haven’t the foggiest.”

  “But you knew her better than anyone,” Peck protested, picking the celery out of her lobster salad.

  He pursed his lips together before answering. “How well can we really know another person? People can be in your lives for years—they can fill your lives. But all you really know of them are the stories they tell you. And then they die. They always leave a mystery behind.”

  We were quiet for a bit after that. I was thinking of Lydia, with her white hair that hung in thick waves around her shoulders, and the gypsy rings she always wore. She was always dressed for a party, even when she was tending the hydrangeas around her property, or reading on the porch. Even, I supposed, when she’d been at the front of a classroom, lecturing a roomful of boys on Gatsby’s green light. She’d always carried herself very erect, a commanding presence. I remember going to meet her plane at the airport when she’d come to visit my mother and me and being surprised to see, when she emerged from baggage claim in a rush of much larger passengers, that she was actually quite small, because I always thought of her as such a big presence. She’d been a model at a time when a pretty face could earn some money, even if she wasn’t that tall.

  “She would tell us to make an effort to get to know each other,” I said. “ ‘You’re sisters,’ she would say, ‘you should know each other.’ Didn’t she say that all the time?”

  “She did,” Peck acknowledged. “She said it all the time.”

  “Drove my mother crazy,” I said. “She’d never admit it, but I think it bothered her. She always seemed like she wanted to forget there was a first wife and a daughter whose father had moved out.”

  “Mine too,” Peck said with a laugh. “And she would definitely never admit it. She’d say, ‘Of course, you’re absolutely right, you should get to know your half sister.’ ” She mimicked her mother’s high singsong words. “And then I’d say, ‘When can we go visit my sister in Italy?’ Or Belgium, or wherever you were living at the time. And she’d say, ‘Not this summer.’ ”

  “My mother knew yours would never let you visit us,” I said, remembering now. “So she could play the laid-back one, always saying, ‘Sure, no problem, we’d love to have Peck.’ ”

  Peck nodded her head. “It’s true. Mum acted like you were raised with wolves, like, in a commune or something. She always said your mother was so alternative. That’s what she called it, like your mother was a radio station.”

  “And my mother always said yours was limited,” I told her.

  “Lydia loved both of you,” Hamilton said definitively, as he paid the bill. “And she would have been so happy to see you enjoying each other the way you are this summer. This would have given her such joy.”

  “But we still hate each other,” Peck said, startling him for a second or two before he realized she was kidding.

  “Are we near Jackson Pollock’s house?” I asked as we got back into the car. “Isn’t Springs out this way?”

  “Oh, let’s go, let’s go,” Peck cried out. “Inspiration.”

  “It’s on Springs Fireplace Road,” Hamilton said. “The Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center. I’m surprised Lydia never took you there. She certainly forced me to go more than a few times. It’s quite moving, for some odd reason.”

  “Let’s go, let’s go,” Peck repeated, like a child being enticed by the promise of a candy store visit, as she pulled out onto Route 27 behind a red pickup.

  “I seem to remember that it is open on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays in the summer months,” Hamilton said. “And today’s Thursday and it’s July, so I think we can go without an appointment.”

  Hamilton directed Peck and we got lost, but eventually we pulled alongside a small, picturesque 1879 farmhouse, the home of a fisherman, we were to learn, before Jackson Pollock and his wife, Lee Krasner, bought it for five thousand dollars in 1945 with the help of a two-thousand-dollar loan from Peggy Guggenheim. The house was very close to Fireplace Road, set off by a small, scraggly hedge, and at the end of the short driveway was a sign and a wooden box containing pamphlets describing the place and its affiliation with the Stony Brook Foundation. We parked and wandered to the back of the property, where there were several outbuildings, including one that had been the original outhouse that the two artists had used for several years before they added plumbing and electricity. This was now a gift shop and information center, where we were greeted by a cheerful woman and given instructions.

  I did feel a shiver of excitement as the three of us stood together briefly, gazing at the shingled studio at one end of the property. It had been moved there from its original location near the creek—the former foundation remained—where it had blocked the view of the water from the house. The property, with its almost iridescent light, was extremely serene, and we were immediately transported back to a simpler time when the isolation Pollock would have experienced here would have made it, temporarily at least, easier for him to go out to the converted barn with its northern light to work than to a bar to drink.

  The house and studio were apparently left exactly as they had been when Lee Krasner died, with some of the original furniture and bits of driftwood they had collected while beachcombing. We were able to wander through the rooms she’d occupied with her brilliant but difficult husband until he died in 1956. Krasner continued to live there until she died in 1964.

  “It reminds me a little of Fool’s House,” Peck said of the ramshackle little home, and Hamilton and I agreed that there was something of a similar feel to it, although the interior of the Pollock-Krasner House was sparse, without any of the clutter Lydia had accumulated over the years.

  We entered the house through the back door directly into the kitchen, like at Fool’s House, and walked slowly through the rooms on the ground floor. There was a large round table in the open dining room, where they’d apparently hosted many guests. In the living room, shelves still contained their collection of books and hundreds of old jazz records, even a hi-fi system that Pollock had installed only a year or two before he died.

  On the second floor were two bedrooms. One of them had been Pollock’s studio when they first moved in and then Krasner’s. Later, when he died and she painted in the converted barn out back, this became something of an office. The other room was their bedroom. “They slept in twin beds,” Hamilton whispered. “No wonder they had a difficult marriage. And look, there’s the toilet. You can look at it, but you mustn’t sit on it.”

  Peck, in her passion for all things vintage, crowed enthusiastically at the sight of a collection of old-fashioned suitcases lined up neatly on one side of the room and then called us over. “Check this out,” she said, pointing at one that was engraved with the letters J.P. below the handle. “Remind you of anything?”

  The house was interesting and evocative, but the real highlight of our visit was the studio, with its clear northern light, where we were instructed to take off our shoes and put on a pair of slippers from the bins near the door.

&n
bsp; “I’d forgotten this part,” Hamilton grumbled as he removed his heavy brown lace-ups.

  “I wouldn’t take mine off for Bethany Samuels,” Peck said. “But Jackson Pollock is a different story.”

  The purpose of the slippers became evident when we were invited to walk across the paint-laden floor, on which Pollock had created his most important works and where his footprints remained visible. We fell silent as we padded across this vivid piece of history, as thickly layered with drips of paint and colors and as redolent with energy as one of the artist’s masterpieces. “Wow,” Peck intoned breathlessly as Hamilton and I followed her into the space.

  A series of photos documenting the artist’s work habits and methods dotted the walls, and the three of us spent some time studying them, then gazing reverently down at the floor. The experience was surprisingly moving and even the normally chatty Peck was awed into quiet while we soaked up the atmosphere in the studio. “I envisioned myself skating around like a crab, like he did when he was painting,” she whispered. “But I feel like I’m in church.”

  We eventually retrieved our shoes and made our way out to the back lawn of the house, where there was a cluster of granite boulders on which Pollock had been photographed with his girlfriend, Ruth Kligman, on the day of the accident that killed him. Peck and I paused there while Hamilton was still chatting with the woman who ran the information desk and gift shop.

  Peck pulled out a pack of American Spirits and lit one with a world-weary sigh as she rested one leg on a rock. “Sometimes I just don’t know what the hell the guy in the sky is thinking.” She lifted her eyes as though she might find the answer up there.

  I followed her gaze upward. “You getting existential on me?”

  She gave me a look of pleased surprise, as though I’d just alerted her to something nice about herself of which she hadn’t been aware. “I am, aren’t I? It’s the salt-scrubbed air, Stella. It’s giving me deep thoughts.” She paused, taking a deep inhale, and then she broke into a silly voice. “Jack Handey’s Deep Thoughts.” She looked to see if I got the reference. I did. The summer we read Gatsby we also watched a lot of Saturday Night Live reruns.

  She smoked for a while in silence as we stood looking out at the view that had inspired Pollock. “You know,” she said, “I started reading The Great Gatsby myself the other day.”

  “You did?” I was surprised. Peck, for all her talk of literary fetishes, was not an avid reader.

  “I read the whole thing at once. It’s shorter than I remembered it. And I probably shouldn’t admit this,” she said, “but I always thought it was this great love story. I think I read it as a romance novel the first time. But now, when I read it again, I realized what he was saying about that kind of love. It’s just a dream, right? It’s not real, the way he loves that memory of Daisy, right?” She lifted her sunglasses and squinted at me. “Isn’t that exactly what I did with Miles?”

  I nodded. “I guess so. But you really were in love with him.”

  “I was,” she said. “But am I now? Or is it just a dream? And think about it, Stella. Could I actually love someone with no style or taste?” She gestured at her outfit to make her point. “How is that even possible?”

  “He can acquire taste,” I suggested. “With your help. He already said he would sell that house of his.”

  She nodded. “But where’s he going to find a buyer who wants a monogrammed pool?”

  “I’m sure they can change that to something else. Or get rid of it,” I said. “The point is, I think you do love the person underneath all that stuff that doesn’t matter. And it’s obvious that he loves you.”

  She put one hand on my shoulder so she could lift her foot and tap the cigarette out on the bottom of her shoe and then she gazed at me. “Hamilton was right about you. You’re not immature at all. You’re wise beyond your years, Stella.”

  “I thought I was a pill bug.”

  She pulled me closer to her. “You’re kind of funny too. Maybe we could have an act. The Moriarty sisters.”

  15

  Laurie Poplin was the type of person who would call every number she had listed for us six times in quick succession until she got either of us on the other end, so she was particularly excited to reach me on what must have been her first try. “You’re there,” she marveled.

  It was a Friday morning. Peck and I had finished organizing the second floor, taping up the boxes labeled GIVE AWAY, and I’d moved on to the living room, with its overflowing desk and mountains of papers that could probably all be thrown out, while Peck packed one of her old-fashioned Vuitton steamer trunks to take to the Ritz for the weekend with enough outfits to move permanently to Paris. “One should always be prepared,” she explained in a huff when I commented on the size of her luggage. “I’ve never been to the Ritz, so I don’t know what I’m going to want to wear, do I?”

  “Hello, Laurie Poplin,” I said into the phone while Peck smiled at me, noting my improved telephone response time. Her smile quickly turned to a frown, however, when she heard me say the name of the real estate broker she preferred to call Laura. She hadn’t liked Laurie to begin with, mostly because she wasn’t going to like anyone who had anything to do with the selling of Fool’s House, but now she had even more reason to dislike her. Laurie had called Miles, saying she’d heard he might be putting his house on the market and wanted to offer her services. “She heard he might be selling his house,” Peck had complained. “And I know what kind of services she thinks she can offer. They’re like hookers, these women. They can just call up any old guy they want, pretending it’s business, and then: watch the fuck out. It’s some racket, real estate sales. It’s unbelievable what women in this town will do to get a rich guy.”

  “I’ve got major news to discuss with you,” Laurie was singing now through the telephone, all faux friendliness.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “The Bosleys want to come back to see the house.”

  “How did you know?” She sounded almost hurt that I’d stolen her thunder. Peck was now shaking her head vehemently and gesticulating at me.

  “Just a hunch.” I hadn’t told Peck or Finn that I’d buried a statue of Saint Joseph under the hydrangea bush by the front door, and I was surprised at how quickly it appeared to have worked. “Is it the only thing in this neighborhood they can afford?”

  “Not at all,” Laurie was quick to say. “But they do love it. And here’s the thing I know you and your sister will like. They don’t want to change a thing.”

  While Laurie was talking, Peck was growing increasingly agitated at my side, mouthing, “No! No! Tell her no!”

  “They’re even talking about buying it furnished,” Laurie continued, as proud as if she were making the offer herself.

  “They’re cheaper than I thought,” I said. “But sure, bring them around.”

  “Don’t sound so unimpressed,” Laurie huffed. “I told you I’d get it sold. And they’re talking about moving in for August. So this could go quickly.”

  As I had the phone to my ear, I’d been gazing out the screen door to the front lawn. Just as we were about to hang up, a rather astonishing sight appeared in my line of vision. “Bye now,” Laurie Poplin was saying after arranging to bring the Bosleys back, but my jaw had dropped to my chest and I couldn’t answer her. I couldn’t speak because what I was seeing was Hamilton, naked except for his socks, clutching his clothes and shoes in front of his private parts, dashing through the open garage door and across the driveway toward the house, pale flesh jiggling like a bowl of Jell-O.

  “Oh my God,” I said, when I could say anything, the words catching in my throat, as he dropped a shoe and bent down to pick it up, then lost the bundled-up shirt. This necessitated another labored bending and retrieval, and at that I had to look away.

  “I know, isn’t it fantastic?” Laurie squawked into the phone as though I’d been talking to her. “I’m telling you, it only takes one—”

  I interrupted her to say, “Good-
bye, Laurie,” and clicked the phone shut as Hamilton rushed up the porch steps. His hair was wildly disheveled and his face tomato red, in contrast to all that nakedness. “Oh dear,” he said, smiling a little when he suddenly noticed me for the first time and realized I must have been standing right there, witnessing his little parade of flesh and dropped clothing.

  “Okay. This—” Peck said as she noticed the commotion and came over to join me at the door. “This, I would call a situation.”

  Hamilton had reached the other side of the screen door by now and he peered in, clutching his clothing in strategic places. He looked not unlike Trimalchio caught sneaking a brownie. “May I come in?” he muttered. “Please?”

  Peck and I grinned at each other as we stood aside so he could swing open the screen door. “Are you coming from the garage?” I asked him. “Did you sleep with Biggsy?”

  A soulful expression came over his face as he shook his head. “No. No, I couldn’t do it. I thought I could, he’s so beautiful. And he was game, I tell you.” He dropped a shoe, but fortunately he didn’t bother to pick it up. “Especially when I told him I would help him sell the painting. He has it, by the way. Much as we suspected.”

  “So you were successful,” I said in an encouraging voice. “But you didn’t sleep with him after all? I thought that was part of the plan.”

  He shook his head back and forth, as though he couldn’t quite believe himself. “No. I thought about that silly little Scotsman and I realized I love him. I don’t know if he feels the same for me, but I owe it to myself to find out.”

  “Are you kidding?” Peck looked over at me in amusement. “Is he kidding? He doesn’t know that Scotty is crazy about him?”

  Hamilton didn’t seem to hear her as he continued. “I thought beauty was so important. My whole career is about beauty. But that boy is bad. He’s rotten to the core underneath those looks.” He paused and then added with a hiss, “And his beauty will fade.”