“His hands are full with Russia, which is why we should strike now!”
“A German occupation of Iceland would be highly strategic,” Sam interjected. “The Brits have been stationed there but are moving their troops to the Continent. People think FDR is going to offer up some replacements. It’d be a way to aid Britain without jumping all in.”
“Why can’t he send troops to Iceland and to Europe?” Topper said. “We’ve got plenty of men in this country anxious to help.”
“For example…” Sam said, gesturing toward Topper and rolling his eyes.
“You boys are aces,” Hattie said with a cackle. “Big fun.”
“Speaking of big fun!”
Dang it all to hell, Ruby wasn’t going to give up yet. Hattie must’ve met some real charmers in Europe to withstand Topper and Sam for so long a stint.
“It’s buckets of fun,” Ruby said, “to watch Hattie play tennis. She whips that ball around almost as deftly as she can knit a pair of booties. We’ve entered the Independence Day tournament together. Won’t that be a hoot? I think we’ve got a decent shot at top prize.”
“Swell, swell,” Topper said, lighting yet another cigarette, though one was still fuming and pinched between his teeth. “If we do go to Iceland, it just proves that we don’t actually care about helping the Allies. We care about protecting ourselves.”
“Nothing wrong with protecting ourselves,” Sam said. “The initial deployment has to go somewhere. This is good as any.”
“I’m sure Londoners and Parisians will sleep better at night knowing we’re in damned Iceland, cutting up with Eskimos and so on.”
“You’re thinking of Alaska. And it’s save ourselves first, sport.”
Topper grunted and flicked his cigarette. It skittered into Hattie’s shrimp salad.
“Robert!”
Ruby leapt to her feet. This time she didn’t care who was watching.
“Your manners are abysmal! Mother would be horrified. I’m horrified. Hattie, Miss Rutter, I’m so extremely sorry. I’d offer an excuse but I can’t think of a decent one.”
“Ah, shucks, it’s no problem whatsoever.” Hattie plucked the butt from her plate with her perfectly manicured fingertips. “This is the most excitement I’ve seen at the Yacht Club to date. And if you can’t get your hackles raised by a war”—she tucked the cigarette inside a napkin—“then you don’t have a pulse to start.”
“She gets it.” Topper crooked a thumb in her direction. “The woman gets it.”
“You’re a good sport, Miss Rutter,” Sam said. “And Robert over here is most sorry. Their mother wasted all her energy in raising the older three. Gave up when she got to the fourth. He was too much of a project.”
“Sam is full of tommyrot, but I am truly sorry,” Topper said. He extended an arm across the table. “Friends?”
“Friends.” Hattie shook his hand and extinguished her own cigarette. “And no apology necessary. I quite enjoy a political tussle. But just so we’re clear, Mr. Young. Robert. Topper. Whatever they call you. You keep mentioning London and Paris, but there is more to Europe than these two cities.”
“Of course, but I…”
“And I’m alarmed that you don’t seem to know this.”
As Topper tried to mask his pale-faced, dropped-mouth look of shock, Ruby smiled. Hattie did not act like a Hulbert Avenue type at all. Maybe this night wouldn’t prove such a bust. Maybe Topper had finally met his match. There was hope in their little crew yet.
* * *
The Nantucket High School band kicked off the parade.
Ruby felt a swirly thrill with the boom of the bass drum and the first tentative clangs of the instruments, most of them poorly played but darn spirited nonetheless.
All along Main Street and its cobblestone byways, from the red-bricked, white-pillared Pacific Bank at its head to the Rotch warehouse at its foot, people waved paper flags as American Legion floats rolled past.
Ruby and her family were smushed together on the sidewalk with hundreds of Nantucketers and off-islanders alike. To Ruby’s left was Mother, to her right was Mary. Behind them stood Daddy, his presence tall and firm. He’d been ill, unsure if he would make the trip out. Poor man had been working like a beast lately, retooling his facilities to handle gas masks instead of golf balls.
As for the other boys, Topper and Sam and P.J., they were having a few preparade pops at the Moby Dick. They promised to show up before it was over, but any pledge by Topper might as well have been made in sand, mainly where whiskey was involved.
“What a sight, eh petal?” Dad said, and squeezed Ruby’s shoulder. “Best Independence Day parade yet.”
She turned to smile, squinting with the too-bright sun, the brilliance of the trees and moors and heather. They’d opened Cliff House weeks ago but finally it was summer.
“It’s the tops,” Ruby said, blinking into the sunlight. “An absolute A plus.”
Daddy smiled and gave her another squeeze. Ruby turned back toward the street to watch as Lord and Lady Marley of England motored by. Their appearance in the parade had been Big News on the island, but who or what they were Ruby didn’t exactly know. It sounded fancy enough, which was probably the very purpose of them.
Ruby glanced toward the opposite sidewalk in time to see Hattie stroll up. She was with a pack of girls, a couple of familiar faces, though no one Ruby knew personally. Hulbert Avenue dames, no doubt. Ruby and Hattie caught eyes and exchanged smiles and waves.
Hattie was still in that morning’s tennis togs, but Ruby had changed into a shirtwaist dress, partly because of Hattie herself. When Ruby tossed on her tennis costume that morning—crisp white shorts and a tab-necked blouse—she thought herself pretty danged sporty-slick. She even gave a little strut for the benefit of her husband, who had been reading the paper on the veranda.
“Why, look at you!” Sam had said. “You’re cute as a bug’s ear.”
Ruby left the house tra-la-la-ing and feeling nifty, at least until Hattie meandered up in a midi skirt, nipped and pinched in all the right places. The getup was somehow old-fashioned and modern at the same time, and most assuredly direct from Paris to boot. Très chic, Hattie Rutter’s customary status.
“Ready for the semis?” Hattie had asked, and stubbed out her cigarette on a bench. “Let’s blast them to Hades.”
Their opponents stood on the other side of the net, gawping at the pair.
With chic playing the ad side, and schoolgirl playing the deuce, Hattie and Ruby won their match (7–6, 6–4) against the prior year’s champs. One was athletic and violent, prone to slamming balls at opponents’ bellies. The other was pretty but dim. On the beam but off the bean, as they said.
Hattie and Ruby were to face a new team in the finals at four o’clock. They’d miss the annual fisherman-postman tug-of-war as well as the various eating contests (doughnuts, pies, apples). But if Ruby had the chance at a trophy, by golly she’d go after it. Lord knew she’d never get one trying to take down a plate of pie.
“There’s your doubles partner,” Mother said, and leaned close. “She’s quite the looker.”
“That she is,” Ruby said with a nod. “Actually, I’ve been trying to set her up with Topper. I think they’d make a smashing pair.”
“Topper?” Mother screwed up her face. “Why, it’s hard to think of him settling down. He just plumb doesn’t seem interested.”
“That’s one way to put it,” Daddy grumbled.
“Oh! Look!” Mary called. “Here come the Red Cross ladies!”
“The way I see it,” Ruby said to her mom, “Hattie Rutter might very well be the one to lock Topper into place.”
Lock him into a country, she did not add.
“Perhaps,” Mother said. “But I would hate for my fiendish son to waste the poor girl’s time. She must have a line of suitors a mile long.”
“She does. But is anyone more dashing than Tops?”
“Philip Junior,” Mary offered as she kept
her eyes glued to the Red Cross float and its six-foot-tall papier-mâché hypodermic needle.
“P.J. is darling,” Mother said unconvincingly. “Well, I’m anxious to watch the two of you cream the Coffin sisters at four, sharp.” She wiggled her brows. “Those girls don’t stand a chance.”
“What about you, love?” Daddy said, and gave Mother a soft pinch to her side. “Surely you can bring home a trophy or two, just like the old days.”
“Oh please. My tennis is rustier than the weather vane on our roof.”
“No, I was thinking along the lines of … let me see … By Jove, I have it!” Daddy snapped his fingers. “The rolling-pin-throwing contest. I’ve seen you exhibit great skill in that department. The other night, when I came home late from work, for example.”
“Malarkey,” Mother said, giggling as she squirmed away from him. “I brandished the rolling pin. I didn’t throw it. You interrupted my baking.”
“Likely story.”
“Who could blame me? You tinker in that factory fourteen hours at a go. I barely know what you look like in the daylight. How is it that we’ve had so many kids? Better check with the milkman!”
Mary turned around, her mouth fallen in horror.
“Mother Young!” she yipped. “I’ve never heard such a crude remark!”
“Because you married the boring one,” Ruby said.
As both of Ruby’s parents laughed, Mary took several very deliberate steps away from them.
When Ruby turned to look at Daddy, she noticed Mother clinging to his arm as tears puddled.
“Ma?” Ruby said, tentatively. “Are you all right?”
“I’ve never been better. This island. My family. Cliff House. It makes me full, finally and at last.”
Ruby flinched. Her mother’s mind had drifted to Walter, as it so often did. The second son had been Sarah’s favorite. He was kind and handsome and whip-smart. Walter committed but one error in life, a first mistake that would also be his last. Late one night, with too much hooch diluting his blood, Walter Young drove a carful of girls into a tree a quarter mile from the Dartmouth campus. The girls survived but Walter did not.
It’d been five years and the family hardly talked about the middle brother anymore. But Ruby still saw Walter, every once in a while, lingering between her parents. Usually, though, his ghost stayed in Boston. No one brought thoughts of him into summer.
“Nantucket is the best,” Ruby said, aspiring to keep her mother’s spirits high. “I can’t imagine life without Cliff House.”
Mother smiled, though her eyes continued to tear.
“It’s everything I dreamed of when I asked your father to build it.” Mother’s tears were streams now, the puddles moved on. “And you know what? It keeps getting better. Because next year we’ll stand in this very spot, together. And the year after we’ll stand again. Soon there will be babies in our home and at this parade, clutching American flags in their chubby precious hands.”
Mother sighed and Daddy wrapped one arm around her.
“Sometimes I think the world is so scary and hopeless,” Mother said. “And getting worse by the day. But when our family is together in Sconset, it makes me believe that in the end, everything will turn out precisely as it should.”
* * *
“Well, here they are. Everyone please put your hands together for the Ladies’ Doubles Champions of the Nantucket Yacht Club.”
Topper clapped wildly and took a deep bow. He kissed Ruby’s hand, followed by Hattie’s, then whipped out his Rolleiflex. As Topper set his camera down, Ruby saw his eyes dawdle on Hattie, as well they should. She was a one-hundred-percent-certified knockout in a silk ivory dress with ruffles cascading toward the floor.
“Champs,” Hattie said with a grin. Her nose was slightly sunburned. “That’s us. But, shhhh, don’t tell the rag mags. We don’t want to get mobbed by the press or our hordes of adoring fans.”
“Your secret’s safe with me.”
Topper flung the camera over his shoulder and placed a hand over his heart.
“And as for you, little brother,” Ruby said. “You cut a dashing figure. I’m glad to see it’s not all snips and snails and puppy-dog tails with you.”
“Thank you, Madame.”
He took another bow, and then flipped the tails of his tuxedo as if they were feathers.
“I can gin up okay.”
Ruby exhaled, only just then realizing she’d been holding her breath. Gee whiz, Topper sure looked and sounded loads better than the last time they’d all been in that ballroom together. Ruby thanked her lucky stars.
“Alas my countenance could never match that of a one Miss Rutter or a Missus Packard,” he said. “You two dames have already stolen the show and it hasn’t even begun.”
“You snake charmer, you,” Ruby said. “Speaking of Packards, where’d my husband run off to?”
“He’s chatting with the valet. I lost interest and wandered off to find you.”
He reached into his coat.
“Care for a cig, Miss Rutter?” He extended an engraved silver case in her direction. “I picked up some Gauloises on your recommendation.”
“Glad I could spread the good word.” Hattie snagged one. “I admire a man who takes my advice.”
Philip Junior and Mary strolled up then, looking agreeable if not both slightly put out. He was acceptably dapper and she was elegant, for an old stodge anyhow. It was amazing how half a decade could turn a pretty, white-gloved deb into an ordinary Boston low-heeler. Then again, Mary’s heels had never been that high, even when she wore the gloves. But Ruby had to give it to her. Mary did look mighty swell that night, years shaved off her in a jiff.
“Holy Moses!” Ruby said, and gave her sister-in-law a squeeze. It was easier to have compassion toward Mary after a few swigs of gin. “That’s some dress. Gorge as can be. Would you call that a wisteria blue?”
Maybe the gal had a bit of the va-va-voom in her yet.
“Er, um, I’m not sure,” Mary said, straightening her skirt. “I suppose you’d know better than I.”
“Hello, Ruby,” P.J. said, and gave his sister a tin-man embrace.
He nodded toward Hattie, a bob of acknowledgment.
“Hello there,” he said.
“You really are a hot numbah,” Hattie said to Mary, and took a suck on her cigarette. “Simply de-vine. Thank God they haven’t rationed our good fabrics like over in Europe.”
“Not yet,” Topper said. “It’s only a matter of time.”
“And how.”
Hattie took another drag and Topper slipped her a wink of appreciation, a gesture caught by Ruby alone. She beamed at the two of them.
“Hey now,” Topper said. “Whaddya say we shake a leg and head outside? The water carnival and sky parade are due to start.”
“Three parades in one day.” Hattie shook her head and laughed. “And a tennis competition. This is some kind of town. Buzz off, ya stupid war!”
“Well, actually,” Ruby said. “The sky parade is in lieu of the traditional fireworks in respect for…”
“T’hell with all of it!” Hattie prattled on. “We don’t need any of that wretched business marring our sweet island.”
“No siree!” Topper said, joining in. “I personally would rather think about lights on a boat than Stalin’s scorched-earth policy. Come; let’s find a place in line. A bad spot would be the true tragedy.”
He took Hattie’s hand and led her outside. Ruby’s heart lifted as if the hand was hers. Though they were bantering about the stupid war, they were clearly enjoying the party, and each other.
“Shall we go, darling?” P.J. asked, petting Mary’s slender arm. “We don’t want to get a sucker’s seat and miss the show.”
“Very well,” Mary said with a sigh. “Are you coming, Ruby?”
“Ummm…”
Ruby glanced toward the door, surprised to be suddenly frowning.
“Actually,” she said, “I’ll wait for Sam. We’ll
be out in a minute.”
“Fine.” Mary sighed again. “But don’t ask us to save you a spot.”
* * *
The water carnival was no joke.
Every boat at the club was decked out in red, white, and blue mini-lights. A band played from a flotilla in the harbor while searchlights bounced between the land and sky. Colored flares lined the shores.
“Golly, what a scene!” Ruby cried, leaning more tightly against Sam.
He stood behind her, arms secured around her waist. Every once in a while, he nuzzled her neck and hair.
“Get a load of all the people!” Ruby said. “They’re dancing everywhere!”
“It’s a scene and a half,” Sam agreed.
With a smile on her face, Ruby picked through the crowd with her eyes. Surely somewhere in the middle of the festivities were Hattie and Topper. She grinned wider just to think of it.
“Oh, Sammy.”
Ruby spun around to face him, tucking both arms beneath his.
“Isn’t this night the tops? The laughter, the lights, the air itself. I’ll never be able to breathe enough of it in.”
She looked up at her husband, expectantly, but Sam didn’t answer right away. And in that flicker Ruby noticed his eyes. They were glassy, on another plane. Just like Mother’s when she was thinking of Walter. Ruby’s stomach dropped.
“Sammy?”
“The night’s grand, baby. Simply grand.”
He pulled her snug and rested his chin atop her head.
“You’re a light in this life, Rubes,” he said, his voice vibrating against her cheek. “There’s not a soul like you in all of Massachusetts. All of the world, I’d venture.”
With a happy little shudder, Ruby tried to catch his eyes.
“Tonight,” she said. “I’m thinking … tonight seems so filled with magic. So perfect and ripe. Perhaps now it all comes together.”
“What comes together?” Sam asked, crinkling his forehead.
“Tonight’s the ideal night to make a baby.”
Ruby blinked and at once Sam’s eyes went from glassy to full-out wet. Though Ruby’s peepers were plenty damp themselves, she understood at once that his tears were a different type.
“What is it?” she said, trying not to snivel. “You seem … sad.… Something’s wrong. Please don’t rain on my parade.” Ruby pointed to the harbor and then to the sky. “Either one of them!”
The Book of Summer Page 12