The Book of Summer

by Michelle Gable

  “Of course I have. Here and there. It’s mostly just people talking about parties and hairdos. A nice keepsake but not particularly compelling.”

  “What?! Come on, there’s so much more to it than that. Look! Here’s an entry about little Cis, dated June 6, 1964. Written by your mom … ‘We opened Cliff House today. About ten days late. Cissy had a Bobby Sox tournament. Her team lost two to one in the finals. The girls put forth a valiant effort, or so I’m told. I don’t know the first thing about it. Cis is quite aggrieved by the loss.’

  “Bobby Sox!” Bess says, and glances up. “How precious!”

  Cissy rolls her eyes.

  “Pretty slow-paced if you ask me.”

  “I’m delighted to learn you’ve had a long history of being aggrieved.”

  “Please. Mother couldn’t tolerate any sort of ‘mood.’”

  “And why would she?” Bess says, returning her eyes to the page. “You had Cliff House for that. ‘Our moods lifted the minute we arrived on-island. Right on time or days overdue, Cliff House gives me the same feeling every time. This is my forty-fifth summer at Cliff House, something north of four thousand days, but my stomach still somersaults with the thrill of it, the promise that our lives will change, if only for a season.

  “‘The decades, the memories, only the best of these cling to the home, the bad spirited away on a swift ocean gale. Life’s not been perfect here, or anywhere, but no matter what’s happened, in spite of the business with Sam and all the variations of bad business before and after, my heart fills with unrepentant joy the moment the tires crunch on the shelled drive.

  “‘Cliff House is a comfort. In the winter months you only need think: Well, summer’s not so far away. I can last until then. Whatever happens in the real world, Cliff House remains a permanent, never-changing promise. In this big house cemented on its bluff, we can return to the people we are supposed to be.’”

  “I thought you wanted me to leave the house,” Cissy says, sniffling. “That doesn’t help.”

  “Just hairdos and recipes, huh?”

  Bess smacks the book shut.

  “It’s funny,” she says. “That entry was made exactly twenty years, to the day, after D-day. I wonder why Grandma didn’t mention the date?”

  “Why would she?”

  “Well, it’s been twelve years since 9/11 and it’s still a pall over the day no matter what else is going on. One of my friends got induced on September tenth just to avoid her child having that birthday.”

  “That’s different.”

  “Is it?”

  The thunder crashes again. Lightning rips across the sky. When Bess looks up, she sees a tall man standing in the window bay.

  “Motherfucking Christ!” Bess screams.

  “Bess! What in God’s name?”

  When Cissy spies the man, her face at once relaxes. She patters over to the French doors.

  “It’s just my engineer,” Cissy says as she kicks open the door. “Hello, Mike. Sorry about the weather. I didn’t think it’d come down like this.”

  A man in boots and a rain slicker stomps inside. He shakes himself off like a wet dog.

  “Mike oversaw the relocation of Sankaty Head,” Cissy explains to Bess proudly, as if describing how her son hit a three-run homer. “He’s the best in the biz. Mike, this is my daughter Bess.”

  “Hi, Bess,” he says in a half mumble. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Mike is going to move Cliff House for us!” Cissy grins. “So, what’s the damage? How far back do we have to go and how much will it cost? Do you think a pool is feasible? I mean, eventually.”

  “Cissy, no.”

  “Fine.” Cissy flicks her hand at him. “No pool. But the other stuff we talked about…”

  “I’m not moving this house.”

  “Not you personally, but—”

  “Cissy,” Mike says, sternly. He must have experience in Cissy-related matters. “You’re not listening.”

  “I am listening! I’m a great listener! It’s one of my premier qualities.”

  Bess scoffs from her corner of the room. Cissy doesn’t catch it, naturally.

  “There’s no easy way to tell you this,” Mike says. “So I’ll just come out with it. I can’t move your house.”

  “Then I’ll find someone else.”

  “No one can.”

  Cissy looks disoriented, like she’s in a Coyote and Roadrunner cartoon and someone’s tried to blast her with TNT. There are practically symbols circling above her head.

  “What do you mean?” she says.

  “The bluff is too far gone,” Mike explains. “The soil might as well be quicksand.”

  “But you’re testing it in the rain! It’s not always like this!”

  “Well, if it never rained again…”

  “And the geotubes. Don’t forget about the geotubes! Did you read that they’re going to approve my measure?”

  “Yes, you e-mailed it to me three times.” Mike sighs. “Cissy, I really hate this.”

  “Listen, move the house all the way to the street. No yard? That’s fine. I can hold my parties indoors. Do whatever you have to do.”

  “I can’t move it any closer to the street.”

  “Take out the privet hedge! I realize that I said to keep it at all costs but if that’s the cost of saving Cliff House, so be it.”

  “Cissy,” Mike says again and takes a few steps closer.

  Bess stands in place, ogling. He is a brave man to tell Cissy no.

  “You can put in sandbags,” he says, and gently pats her arm. “You can take out privacy hedges. You can do both of these things but the fact is that this land is unstable. A pool, you ask? I wouldn’t put a bowl of good chowder anywhere on this property.”

  “But isn’t there any way—”

  “See that?” he says, and points toward the door. “My soil-testing kit outside? It’s pouring rain but I’m going to walk out there and grab it. I’m afraid it won’t survive the holiday weekend and I’ll be out fifty bucks. Never mind the kit, though. If I were you…” He looks at Cissy. He looks at Bess. “I’d get out. Now. You don’t have a lot of time left.”

  41

  Friday Night

  The rain has stopped, mostly, but even the lingering drizzle doesn’t impede Felicia Bradlee’s multiboat soirée. And why would it? Bankers and lawyers can rough it in hats and raincoats. They wear their slumming-it shoes. It makes them feel outdoorsy despite so many hours logged in conference rooms.

  Bess sits on the bench of Kip’s Folly, a glass of white wine in hand, not a friend to be found. Flick is off humoring guests with work anecdotes and her brusque, infectious laugh. Palmer and Brooks are chasing Amory around, making sure she doesn’t drown in the marina. Bess checks her watch. It’s already past Amory’s bedtime and soon Bess will have no compatriots left at the party. The guest she invited never responded.

  If that’s not humiliating enough, even her mother is missing. Cissy promised to attend, RSVP’d even (unlike certain local contractors), but in the end stayed home, leaving Bess to explain her absence.

  To Aunt Polly and Uncle Vince: “She’s not feeling well.”

  To Flick: “She’s being Cissy.”

  And to Palmer: “The engineer told her a big fat ‘NOPE’ on moving Cliff House so she’s hunting down someone willing to give her the answer she wants.”

  “Cis, you have to come,” Bess said earlier, as she rooted around her suitcase for something to wear.

  She and Palmer picked up new tops and some “darling” wedge heels in town, but diaphanous silk blouses and slick-bottomed shoes weren’t going to cut it in that weather. A gross error in judgment when the party called for the delicate sartorial balance between looking decent and keeping warm, a formula that very much defined life on-island eighty percent of the summer. It’s something Bess should’ve remembered as the woman in the shop swiped her card. Summer People. They have no clue.

  “Finding a new engineer is more important,
” Cissy said as Bess settled on a cashmere white-and-navy sweater. “As for the party? It was a courtesy invite. No one really wants a sixty-year-old woman there. How come Yelp won’t let you expand the search to ‘entire eastern seaboard’?”

  “Of course people want you there, Cis. And it’s rude to bail. You can’t say you’re coming and then not show up.”

  “Felicia only invited me to be nice,” Cissy said. “Listen, my back is against a wall. You heard Mike. This predicament is time-sensitive. I’ll attend the wedding. That’s the main event. No one will miss me tonight.”

  “Mom, people always miss you. You add a unique dimension to any gathering of two or more.”

  Cissy peered out over her glasses.

  “Don’t be fresh.”

  And so Bess sits alone, on a boat, in a fog so thick she can’t even pretend to gaze wistfully out toward sea. At thirty-plus she should be okay with the solitude, and she is, for the most part. But it’d be nice to not feel so out of place.

  Bess takes a sip of Chardonnay: the teensiest, tiniest, most minuscule bubble of a taste. It burns on the way down—more than it should, as Flick surely bought the good stuff. A punishment, Bess decides, though she isn’t sure for what. God, she is pregnant. Pregnant! Thirteen weeks almost. It’s inexcusable to be that far along.

  She sets down her glass (glass, on a boat, for the love of all that’s logical) and glances around. Little groups of people wander up and down Old South Wharf, and Bess finds herself scanning the crowd for any meanderers of the male persuasion, approximately six foot two in height. After all, she didn’t request a response, she simply asked him to show up. But people around here only walk in packs.

  As Bess returns her focus to the party, she accidentally provokes eye contact with a girl standing a few feet away. The stranger offers a small wave and makes a move in her direction. Bess flinches, but it’s too late to disappear.

  The girl, a woman really, is in her mid-thirties, too, give or take. She wears skinny jeans and a gray cashmere sweater. Her hair is pulled back, thick and straight and blond like a horse’s tail. As she approaches, Bess recognizes her from somewhere. Choate? Boston College? Definitely not Nantucket High. She’s too shiny for that. Bess smiles, trying to dredge up a name, but can’t get it anywhere close to the tip of her tongue.

  “Hi!” Bess says brightly, too brightly.

  “Bess Codman in the flesh!” she says, right out of the gate, showing off her superior facial recognition skills. “So great to see you! You look fabulous.”

  The woman leans down for a hug and then plants herself beside Bess.

  “Gosh, thanks,” Bess says. “You, too.”

  The woman is beautiful, though Bess doesn’t know whether it’s more or less so than before.

  “I almost didn’t recognize you,” the woman says. “Did you get glasses?”

  “It’s not so much that I ‘got glasses.’ I’m just not wearing my contacts.”

  “Oh, weird.” She makes a face. “Anyway, what have you been up to?”

  The woman sips some reddish-pink concoction through a straw so as not to muddle her lip gloss.

  “Uh, er, um…” Bess stutters. “What have I been up to?”

  Choate. The woman has to be from Choate, since Flick went to Penn. Although maybe they took sailing lessons together at the club umpteen summers ago.

  “Do you work?” the woman asks. “Stay at home? What?”

  “Oh. Right. I work in an ED?”

  The woman crinkles her nose.

  “The Education Department?” she asks. “Is that in Washington?”

  “No … no … the emergency … I work in the ER, in San Francisco.”

  “Oh! A doctor!” The woman claps. “That makes sense. You were a total brainiac.”

  “I was?”

  “I work in publishing, which everyone thinks is so cool and so glamorous. People just mob me at parties, peppering me with questions, trying to tell me about some half-baked book idea.” She rolls her eyes. “Everyone thinks they can write a book. It’s so annoying.”

  “That sucks,” Bess says, and looks down at her Chardonnay. She really wishes she could drink more of it.

  “And, yeah, it sounds awesome and all,” the woman goes on. “But what you do! You save lives! That must be such a rush.”

  “Um, thanks. Most of it isn’t particularly exciting. It’s a job, like anything else.”

  Who is this person? The more Bess tries to remember, the more faces from her past jumble together.

  “Just a job!” the woman trills. She takes several gulps of her red-pink swill. “Just a job, she says. Please! Anyway, it’s so great to see you! To talk to you like this! Hey. Whoa.”

  She stops jabbering for a nanosecond and grips the edge of the bench.

  “Is it me or is the boat rocking like crazy?” she asks.

  “I feel okay…”

  “Anyhow, I have a confession to make.”

  She goes to pat Bess’s leg, presumably, but misses and whacks her hand on the bench.

  “I was so intimidated by you,” she says, shaking out the injured hand.

  “Me?” Bess snorts. “When? Why?”

  Here is a gorgeous palomino with glacier-blue eyes and a foal’s gait. Bess has no real objections to her own looks, she is general-population attractive and med-school smoking hot, but this girl is full-stop stunning. Bess is more along the lines of Wednesday Addams with bangs. In other words, appealing only to specific tastes.

  “At school, silly!” the woman says. “First of all, you’re Felicia’s cousin. Her older cousin, which was cool in itself.”

  “Yes, older,” Bess says. “By all of one year.”

  “Yeah, but I mean, it’s still older.”

  “One year isn’t all that…” Bess shakes her head. “Sorry. Go on.”

  How on earth could this person be intimidated by Bess when Bess was always with Palmer Bradlee, the girl who glided through life forever poised and beautiful and en pointe?

  “You seemed so mature,” the woman says. “So dark and exotic.”

  She reaches out and snags a chunk of Bess’s hair, which feels like a violation though Bess isn’t exactly sure why. You don’t go around petting strangers at parties, right? Or perhaps such social transaction came into fashion while Bess was working weekend shifts and trying to get divorced.

  “Huh,” Bess says as the woman continues to grip her hair like a leash.

  Though hair is nothing but dead cells, Bess swears hers is getting dank beneath this person’s hold.

  “Then there’s the pièce de résistance, so to speak. The De Leudeville Affair.”

  “Oh.” Bess clears her throat. “Right.”

  Monsieur de Leudeville. The scandal that got one French instructor fired and one student kicked out of school. It was a shocking fiasco for anyone, especially someone like Bess.

  “The De Leudeville Affair,” Bess repeats. “That sounds almost cinematic.”

  “Everyone called it that. You know you’re involved in a juicy scandal when it gets its own name.”

  Sometimes Bess actually forgets that she didn’t leave Choate so much as go down in flames. Bess can’t even remember if she told her ex-husband the story. But the De Leudeville Affair wasn’t an affair, not really. Yes, there was sex involved but it was more an excuse, a circumstance Monsieur de Leudeville himself walked right into. That this blond, drunk publishing person remembered Bess for him and not what happened before was the very point of the letch. And so: mission accomplished.

  “He was pretty hot,” the woman notes, and glugs the rest of her drink. “For an old guy anyway.”

  “He was twenty-seven. And into sixteen-year-old girls. So not that hot, when you think about it.”

  Does he have to register as a sex offender? There never was a trial, so the answer is likely no.

  “Wow,” the woman says. “That’s scary.”

  “What? That he was a perv?”

  “No. That if he was tw
enty-seven, what must we look like to teenagers?” She shakes her head. “Ugh.”

  The woman stands. She sways as she works to keep straight.

  “You always seemed so badass,” the woman says, going cross-eyed as she speaks. “A steamy affair and you had, like, no remorse. Zero. Felicia said they gave you the opportunity to exonerate yourself but it was like, no thanks!”

  “It didn’t happen quite like that.…”

  “Can I get you another drink?”

  The woman waggles her own emptied glass as Bess glances down at hers, on the bench, still full.

  “No, I’m fine. Thanks though.”

  “Okay. Cool. I’ll be back. I want to know the details. Hell, you could write a memoir. Like, unapologetic, you know?” She contemplates this. “You were taken advantage of but you liked it. Or would that send a bad message?”

  “Uh. Yeah. Very much so.”

  “Hmmm,” the woman says, wandering off. “Hmmm.”

  As the woman careens away, Bess reaches into her pocket, thoughts of de Leudeville evaporating at once. She checks her phone. Still no word from Evan. And why would there be? What obligation does he have to respond at all?

  Bess stands, moves her glass to a nearby table, and turns to go. As she charges down Old South Wharf, the party’s voices and laughter tinkle in the distance. If anyone notices Bess’s abrupt departure, they don’t say a thing.

  42

  RUBY

  Summer 1942

  The drill had gone as planned, which was to be expected with Mary manning the show.

  Everyone in the neighborhood took cover. All blinds were drawn, no sliver of light able to sneak out. Mary checked the sum total of Baxter Road’s cricks and cracks but didn’t uncover a single violation, though not for lack of trying. The bird loved filing incident reports, no greater thrill than committing other people’s mistakes to paper.

  “Golly, Ruby,” Mary said as they went through the house, turning on lights and opening curtains. “You performed aces this time around. For once you didn’t treat it like a joke, or as though you have special privileges since you’re related to the warden.”

  “Thanks,” Ruby said. “I’m trying.”

  She did take it seriously and certainly never viewed Mary’s position as anything worthy of abusing. But naturally Mary liked to think of herself in such terms. Ruby forgot to turn the radio off once and Mary harangued her about it for seven days straight.