I always will associate the color blue with Margaret. She’s wearing a gossamer voile shirt with a blue evil-eye medallion around her neck. She has the dead-level gaze that I associate with the words steely intellect. When she was young those lowered eyelids must have been considered smoldering. Now they looked slightly tortugan. I venture, “I just wondered, are you influenced by James Agee?”
“I certainly hope not,” she snaps—do I see a hint of a smile? “He’s a bit sincere for me.” The way she said “sincere,” it almost dripped. She quickly turns back to the famous translator beside her. Damn. I look down into my salad and cross my eyes.
By the time the pistachio gelato comes around, a dozen empty wine bottles stand on the table. I join in where I can but this is a lively group of old friends, almost like a family gathering. (I was often chosen in Red Rover, Red Rover for my ability to break into the linked arms.) Together they started migrating from Rome during the terrorist years of the Red Brigades and high Mafia years, and on into the 1980s. They settled in abandoned houses and palazzo flats they picked up for nothing and restored. The Greeks haven’t restored much; bits of fresco sift down onto the table.
Margaret talks about her research trips to Bulgaria and Russia; she’s followed, her room is bugged, a shadowy man on the midnight train to Sofia. A woman whose name I didn’t catch talks about a family dispute over publication of her grandfather’s correspondence with Winston Churchill. Oh, those papers left behind. What grenades they become. (Note to self: burn all diaries before rigor mortis sets in.)
As the party breaks up Margaret asks about my name. “Well, it’s Catherine, of course. Catherine always was my grandmother, so I became Kit.” Impulsively, I ask her to dinner on Sunday. Impulsively, because I have no furniture and few dishes, only a rudimentary kitchen with a couple of pots and pans. I do have my mother’s silver.
* * *
—
I pick up a blue-checked cloth at the market to cover a stained marble table the previous owners left behind in the garden. Let’s hope the ground stays dry so the table won’t sink. Best keep it simple: spinach crêpes (bought in town), chicken breasts rolled with prosciutto, roasted asparagus, and fruit.
Covered and set with the flowers, the table looks quite inviting. Anything would, really, under a pergola dripping with blooming jasmine. Margaret, I learn, completely restored a ruined tower attached to a small stone house. Her writing room at the top of the medieval lookout affords her three-hundred-sixty-degree views of primo Tuscan landscapes. From her early Italian years working with the postwar American Renewal Foundation in Sicily, where she oversaw a team of teachers and ended up directing the rebuilding of bombed schools (postwar lasted a long time in the South), she has solid technical knowledge of structures as well as the foibles and habits of workers. She was her own contractor. My innocence (ignorance) must be alarming to her. Margaret slightly hesitates before she speaks, as though she might reconsider what she’s about to say. But then she lunges in. Right away she starts correcting my Italian. “Please, you must not say G-O-vannie. Say Jo-vannie. Accent on vannie.” She makes you feel that you’re being watched. Judged? Probably. But I can tell she likes me. You always read of a twinkle in the eye, but she’s the first person I’ve met who has one. She borrows copies of my poems.
* * *
—
Long dinner under the jasmine; Margaret blowing smoke rings at the moon, me wedging my knee against the table to keep it from sinking. She starts to sing “Blue Moon” in a moody voice. I sit very still. She goes somewhere. Where? I’m intrigued. She’s a writer like me, single. Foreign country. My future? Well, my future does not include the CIA or whatever the Italian secret service is, as is whispered about her. At the get-go, washing up after she leaves, I know that my sorrow about my mother’s fate lifted in Margaret’s presence. Mother Muse.
* * *
—
Where’s Colin at this point? He’s floating out in the ether where we don’t know each other. It will be almost two years before he’ll pack for Florence, where his London architectural firm has landed an extensive restoration project. As he arrives there, I’ll fly in from home, where I’ve finally settled my mother’s estate. Colin and I board the same bus into town, and our futures reposition.
* * *
—
Margaret refuses to fall into the straightforward narrative I intend. Oh, it’s me. (Who can say “It’s I”?) Just beyond my grasp is a link. And is there a connection to find with the three women who’ve lighted in the branches nearby? I expect her to remain stolidly Margaret. Unto herself.
“Unbelievable! Susan, this is spectacular!” Julia slid the huge pot of beef bourguignon onto the kitchen counter. Camille struggled with her roll-on and a sack of vegetables. At the door, Susan dropped grocery bags and began opening shutters, letting in the white spring sunlight and the tang of salt air. The kitchen, open to the dining and great rooms, had sweeping views of dunes, beach, and ocean.
“It’s always such a big, big relief to be here,” she said. “I love this place. My whole family does. Did.” She opened double doors onto a porch with rockers and a swing. The sound of breaking waves filled the room. Archie, who’d slept the whole way over to the coast, began to bark. “It always seems impossible that you can be unhappy where tides lull you to sleep, and you open your eyes in the morning to those smeary purple sunrises over the ocean. Amazing—it happens every day!”
* * *
—
They made another trip to Susan’s car, retrieving Julia’s pot of vegetable soup that only sloshed a little in the trunk, various beach bags, the lemon cake Camille baked, and Susan’s box of special teas and coffee beans. Camille wasn’t surprised at the sloshing. Susan passed two or three cars at once, swerving back as an oncoming car loomed. Camille had noticed Julia, too, casting a glance at the speedometer as it wavered around eighty-five miles per hour. “Aren’t there speed traps around here?” Camille finally asked. She wondered if perhaps Susan had a reckless streak.
“I know this road like the palm of my hand. The cops are only out on Sundays along here.”
“I don’t know the lifeline on your palm; I’m hoping it’s not short,” Julia joked.
“Okay! My girls always fuss at me.” Susan got the message and slowed to seventy-five.
“We are not going to starve, are we?” Julia wiped up the mat in the trunk with paper towels. They’d stopped at Harris Teeter for crabs, wine, and cheeses.
After she settled Julia and Camille in their bedrooms—Eva and Caroline’s rooms—just steps from the sand, Susan proposed a long beach walk, lunch, and a rest. Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Three days. Susan had a wild idea she wanted to bring up. She also planned to tackle Aaron’s office and the storeroom if she felt motivated. She thought she could be quick with the two file cabinets stuffed with yellowed receipts for washing machine repair, trash pickup, and driveway paving. More onerous: storeroom shelves full of deflated beach rafts and mildewed duvets. Could she ever sell Sand Castle? Eva and Caroline hardly ever visit and when they do they might stay a long weekend. Her younger brother Mike sometimes brings his family up for a week in the summer. Sometimes her cousin Mary and her partner drive up from Atlanta. Has the life seeped out of the place? Occasionally, Susan drives over alone for a few days. Archie chases gulls and runs like mad on the beach. He has to be washed down after every outing, otherwise his hair turns stiff with salt.
A year ago, she brought lanky Willis Sherman, whose house she sold when he divorced, to Sand Castle for Easter weekend. His wife at age sixty-five up and left him for the lawn maintenance contractor. The wife, Willis told Susan, said she’d been happy enough with him, until the contractor made her laugh. They’d had coffee, then more, and soon she was filing for what she jubilantly called “a silver divorce.” Willis wasn’t vitally wounded. After the sale of his house closed, he began to ask Susan out for dinner. She enj
oyed his mild company, his flashy bow ties, and his thin-lipped self-sufficiency, which apparently had driven the wife crazy. Fine with Susan. She wanted no permanent appendage. Going out with him was a distraction, and then she brought him here, wondering if she wanted to get to know him better.
If she’d toyed with the idea of sleeping with him, she saw the minute he walked in her door that nothing of the sort was going to happen. He seemed like a looming, strange interloper in her sanctuary. His sharp, pointed nose made him look like a giant pelican. He picked up the family’s shells in the big glass bowl and she squelched herself from saying, Don’t touch those.
She showed him to the back guest room, not wanting him in the girls’ quarters. He was fine. They had a quiet weekend playing Scrabble and watching movies. She overlooked his baggy shorts and ugly sandals that revealed yellow talon toenails. He liked the dog and the beach walks. Turned out, he made a delicious margarita. She never again answered when his name came up on her phone.
* * *
—
Now Sand Castle feels inhabited. Camille compliments her on the blue and white great room with its ikat-patterned chairs, sisal rug, and octagonal coffee table stacked with travel books and fashion magazines. Julia loves the long trestle table and the sleek kitchen with nothing on the counters. Susan sees through their eyes how fresh and inviting the house still is, not just a repository of memories.
* * *
—
Julia unpacks her few things and for the first time in three days checks her messages. Automatically she deletes ones from Wade, only two this time, without opening them. Her friends tried to reach her for the first month after she sped out of town, but she never responded and finally they stopped writing, except for the occasional hoping to see you soon. She was a scandal but she doesn’t care. She’ll reach out to them later, she tells herself. One text from her dad. Only he knows the whole story. He’s snug in his glass-walled condo on the Savannah River. His text, only a brief Miss you.
But here’s a message from Alison, her next-door neighbor. Maybe there’s something about Lizzie, who’d always loved Alison’s menagerie of a house. Alison’s kitchen smelled like orange marmalade and spice cake. She reads quickly: Dear Julia, I am missing you today. We just got a new dog—shaggy unholy mix—who loves to slobber and jump all over you. I’m saying this, my friend, because I don’t know what to say. Heaven knows you had reason to leave. I’m sure you know—people knew about him. Wade looks abashed and miserable. Bet you hope he is! I can understand that you want to cut everything off. Just hope it’s not forever, Wade or no Wade. I wish I had something good to tell you but I’ve seen no sign of life at your house, except for W’s coming and going. Miss you, Alison.
Delete.
She misses her dad. At eighty-six, he loves to cook, play tennis, and collect two things, hot pepper sauces and paintings of boats. Daddy, she texts, I’m at a NC beach with two new friends. It’s great! Talk next week. Hugs.
If I can muster the strength, she thinks, I’m going to tell Susan and Camille.
* * *
—
Archie takes off as soon as Susan steps out the door. Fast as his legs can go, he runs toward the waves, plows in and tumbles, rolls in the sand, shakes, then scampers and yelps at sandpipers. Mindlessly elated, he darts and speeds back, barking at their heels. What’s wrong with you, why aren’t you splashing and twirling?
The three women walk to the end of the island, where four houses are sandbagged against erosion. “That must hurt,” Camille says, “their investment down the drain. Who would buy these dangerous mansions?”
“It’s really sad. Parts of the beach are washing away. Lots of people are planting grasses, hauling in big rocks, putting up those flimsy fences to hold in the sand, but the island still slips away more every year. We’re lucky our house sits on a slight rise. I’ve toyed with the idea of selling Sand Castle—not because of the water level. We’re safe for fifty years! It’s just—it’s not the invigorating place it used to be for me. I love being here with you, but normally I come alone. I eat a lot of ice cream out of the carton and watch stupid TV. Gardening in sand isn’t fun. I do still adore the long walks. The peace.” On those home-alone weekends, she felt sometimes that the house was breathing and she was not; the house held in all the past while she was fading into a nebulous future.
“You have plenty of time to decide,” Camille says.
“Yes, we’ll revive it with you—ask anytime.” Julia laughs. The wide, empty beach—a boon and a gift. She feels like bounding into the surf herself and would if it were not sixty degrees with a sharp-edged breeze coming up.
Susan continues, “Good! Really, I can’t imagine not having it. The house sits on my interior map of me. If I erased it, there’d be a big gap.”
“If you need to, that’s one thing; if you don’t…” Camille trails off.
“You know I sold the business, and Aaron was smart enough to have a fat life insurance policy. Not that we ever saved that much. We spent everything, but I’ve been lucky that he was so responsible. If I let this house go, I could give the girls enough that they could afford two dinky places in California, where everything costs the earth. You can’t imagine the rent they pay for dreary one-bedrooms.”
She doesn’t say that she awakened early this morning thinking of hammering a Ware Properties For Sale sign next to Sand Castle’s mailbox. In that half-awake state, she’d happily banged the stake into the sand because she thought for a moment that she had someplace else she really wanted to go, though she wasn’t sure where.
As they turn back, facing the wind, roiling clouds move across the sky. They step up their pace. By the time they reach Sand Castle, cold drops begin to splat on their heads. Julia can’t find where she’d left her sandals, and then she spots Archie at the walkway, gnawing the delicate straps.
* * *
—
Susan turns on the gas log to take the chill off the great room. Not one for hauling wood, she had it installed after Aaron died. Julia towel-dries her fine, springy hair, pushing it into curls. Susan brings over to the hearth a pot of bergamot tea and a plate of Camille’s lemon cake slices. Camille’s longer hair hangs in bedraggled strands, but Susan’s good short cut just looks sharper, slicked and pointy. “Forty-five minutes,” Julia says, stirring potatoes and carrots into the beef so they’ll be done when she pulls her rich stew out of the oven.
They all put on sweaters. Slanted rain batters the windows. Out at sea branches of silver lightning fork and pierce the water. “Thanks for arranging this dramatic event.” Julia smiles. Thunder rumbles the house all the way down to the foundation.
Susan tosses Julia a cloud-soft throw. “Are you freezing?”
“Rain at the beach always seems bone-chilling.” She passes the cake and no one demurs or says anything about it being too close to dinner. In the lamplight on the bookcases, the big window reflecting the women around the fire, Camille luxuriates. For the first time in a year, she doesn’t feel as though she would float off if she were not tethered. She catches the sudden mysterious sparkle on the ceiling as her engagement ring flashes light. For so long she’s looked for signs of Charles’s presence. Stupid, she knows.
Julia wraps herself into a blue mohair blanket. She sips slowly Susan’s tea, with its hint of bitter orange. “I think this is the only moment I’ve felt no tension in my shoulders since I hightailed it out of Savannah.” She smiles broadly. This easy happiness lifts her, illuminating her dark blue eyes that always look slightly surprised.
“You look beautiful right now,” Susan says. “Your eyes are the color of the lapis lazuli ring my mother wore, that same depth of blue.”
“Oh, thanks! I think we all look a bit redeemed by today. I’m happy to be here with you two.” Julia puts down her cup. Suddenly emboldened, she says, “I’m not sure we’re ready for this. You’ve both been forthright and I k
now I haven’t. I’d like to try to tell you about what has been going on with me.”
“Hey, don’t worry. You are under no obligation to dig up the past for us!” Camille loves it that Archie has leapt onto her feet and begun to snooze.
Thunder pounds through the house. “Christ, it’s going to shake the fillings out of our teeth,” Susan cries out.
Camille is not sure she’s up for Julia’s story. She senses that it isn’t going to be pretty and she is relishing this respite from gnawing grief.
But Julia continues, “It’s hard. Hard. But I do want to say a few things. Not to burden you—my saga could sink the weekend.” Julia smiles. “I know this will sound twisted, but I’ve almost envied the two of you. Your husbands died. Awful to say! But in these months I’ve been in Chapel Hill, I often have wished mine had. Oh, god, it would be so clean. I’d be left in a clear space, at least with him.”
Susan’s mouth drops slightly open; Camille rolls her lips in, as she does when speechless, but neither says anything.
Julia exhales a long whistling sigh. “Can I do this?”
“Julia, no, don’t worry. Only if you want! We’re having a fine time and no one thinks we need to rush things, right, Susan?” Camille pours more tea.
Susan brings over three glasses and a bottle of her usual sauvignon. “To hell with tea! I for one would love to get down to it, Julia. You often seem distraught, I’m sorry—so distracted, and oh, lovely. I would like to know your story ASAP. Maybe it actually would help.”
So, Camille thinks, Susan is one to cut to the chase. She wasn’t sure she liked that.
* * *
—
They are three in firelight, the storm waning, the beef bourguignon simmering in the oven. Later, Susan will toss the salad. Camille will prepare a cheese plate. Susan has set the table with her shell place mats and Aaron’s generous breathe-in-the-aroma wineglasses.
Women in Sunlight Page 6