A Hundred Summers (30 page)

“Thank you,” I say to the waiter, offering it.

His eyes go round. “Thank you very much, Mrs. Greenwald. Very much indeed.”

The water begins to drain from the bathtub. The waiter leaves.

A few minutes later, Nick emerges from the bathroom, wearing his pants and his undershirt, his formal white shirt hanging from one hand. He rubs his unshaven face with the other. “Should have called down for a razor. Do you mind?”

“Not at all. It makes you look especially piratical.”

He smiles and holds out the shirt. “I thought you could wear this, until we can get something for you tomorrow. More comfortable than your dress, right?”

“Thank you.” I take it from him. “I gave him five dollars. I’m sorry, I know it was far too much, but he came so quickly and brought the wine after all, and . . . and after all, it is a holiday . . .”

“Lily, for God’s sake, of all the things to worry about. What’s mine is yours, all right?”

“That’s not necessary, really . . .”

“Necessary or not. You shouldn’t need to ask. Now, let’s eat.”

We eat in silence, surrounded by the enormity of the evening, by the close-packed winter darkness, by the snow blowing outside the window, by the fatigue settling around Nick’s hazel-brown eyes, by the honeymoon bed stretching from the wall with its bedspread turned back. Nick pours me a glass of the hotel’s best claret, but I can hardly touch it, can hardly touch the food on my plate.

“Lily, eat,
please
.” He stabs my fork into a piece of roast beef and offers it to me. “You’ve got to eat. You’re worrying me.”

I take the meat and chew it carefully, until it fits past the lump of tension in my throat and into my belly. Nick looks at me anxiously. “What’s wrong, Lilybird? Are you afraid?”

“No, only tired.”

“Second thoughts? Cold feet?”

“Of course not! No.” I rise from the chair. My knees wobble, and then hold. “Why don’t I take my bath now? That’s all I need.”

Nick rises, too, and sets his napkin by his plate. “Lily, if you’re worried about . . .” He brushes my hair from my cheek and speaks softly. “We don’t have to, you know. I’d never . . . you
know
I’d never . . .”

“I know.” I force myself up on my toes and kiss his lips. “But I want to, Nick. I want to share this with you. You know I do.
Jitters.
” I find the word. “It’s just jitters.”

“Jitters? What kind of jitters?”

“Going-off-to-school jitters. First-time-driving-a-car jitters.”

Nick puts his arms around me. “There’s nothing to be afraid of, Lily. It’s only me. Just your old Nick, who’s crazy about you, who wants to make you happy. If you’re not ready, say so. We’ve got the rest of our lives, remember?”

“I’m ready, Nick. I am. I’ve wanted this forever.”

“Are you sure?”

I draw back, so I can see his face, and nod. “I’ll go take a bath, and make myself all fresh and sweet for you, and it will be perfect. Everything will be easier, don’t you think, once we’re together.”

“Get it over with, do you mean?” He gives me a grin and thumbs my chin.

“You know what I mean.”

“I’ll be waiting,” he promises.

When I emerge from the bathroom a quarter-hour later, pulse clanging in my throat, wearing Nick’s shirt and nothing else, the table has been tidied and set aside, and Nick lies upon the bed, fast asleep, his arm crossed over his white-cotton chest.

My heart gives way at the sight of him. He is so long and stark and marvelous, his face so still in repose. His bare feet hang over the frame. On the bedside table sit our two glasses of wine, half finished, glowing scarlet under the lamp.

“Oh, Nick,” I breathe. I kneel by the bed and brush the hair at his temple. He doesn’t stir.

As gently as I can, I work the covers out from under his heavy body and tuck him in. The room is still and watchful around us, the hotel and its guests at rest. I turn off the lamps, one by one, and make sure the curtains are tightly shut. I take the telephone off its cradle. Nothing shall disturb Nick’s rest tonight.

A distant thump, a murmur of voices, and the silence resumes. I raise the covers on the other side of the bed—the right side, the one on which I usually sleep, as if I’ve always known—and ease myself between the cool sheets, next to Nick.

Now that I’m here, in bed with Nick, the fatigue has lifted from my shoulders like the weight of Mother’s fur coat. I lie awake with my eyes fixed on the shadowed ceiling and listen to Nick’s steady breath, trying to pick out his heartbeat through the sheets and blankets, feeling the heat of his enormous body creep toward me and surround me, keeping me warm while the snow whirls outside the window.

16.

MANHATTAN

Tuesday, September 20, 1938

G
rand Central Terminal swarmed with dripping people and dripping umbrellas. It had been raining since Saturday, raining with epic conviction, thunderbursts and downpours and drizzles. Mother, driving me to the train station at dawn, had made a rare joke that she ought to have taken me in an ark instead.

I had been planning to take a taxi up to our apartment, but with the rain streaming down the streets like that, I might as well have panned for gold as found an empty cab. Subway it was, then. I set down my satchel and hunted through my pocketbook for a nickel, beneath all the detritus of summer. My fingers were damp with perspiration; my body was soaked with it. The rain hadn’t driven away the heat at all. It was the third week of September, and we were living in the tropics, here in the Northeast.

I found a nickel, stuck with lint, and trudged down the stairs and through the turnstiles to the IRT platform. The heat grew successively more oppressive with each stairway. My hair felt like a sticky coil of steel wool beneath my hat.

When I reached the apartment, the first thing I’d do was take a shower.

Assuming Graham wasn’t there already, of course, but it was the middle of the day and I was quite certain he’d be out. He had called me every morning since his departure from Seaview—early, because he had to leave for training and doctor appointments and meetings of various kinds. Every morning he had called me and asked when I would come down to visit, and every morning I had put him off. So hard to leave Kiki. Mother had a cough. We had started packing up, doing the end-of-summer cleanout. I’d be down soon, I promised. I couldn’t wait.

He would often call in the evenings, too, his voice a little unsteady, his mood a little more sentimental. Couldn’t I just come for the day? Everything was flat and empty without me. He needed me. He wanted to set a date, he wanted to take me away on our honeymoon. He’d been down to the Cunard offices, picked up a few brochures: what did I think of the Caribbean? Of South America? What about sailing around the world and coming back just in time for spring training? He couldn’t wait to see me. We had so much to talk about, so many plans to make. A whole new life together, a clean slate. He’d be so good to me.

He promised to pay the telephone bill when my mother returned from Seaview.

“Why haven’t you gone to see him yet?” Budgie had asked, one morning last week. “He phoned me the other day in absolute despair.
Despair,
Lily.”

“Because I feel so guilty leaving everyone here,” I said.

“Don’t be such a martyr. We can all get on without you. He’s
pining
. You can’t leave a man like Graham waiting too long, darling.”

“But Nick’s been in the city since Labor Day, without you.” The words slipped out before I could stop them.

We were lying on a blanket in the cove, sunning ourselves during one of the rare patches of cloudlessness that September. Budgie lay on her stomach, her swimsuit rolled down to her waist, her eyes closed in a contented torpor of Parliaments and gin, which she’d brought with her in a large Thermos jug with tonic and plenty of ice. She opened one eye at me and smiled. “Well, that’s different, darling,” she said, reaching for her cigarette. “We’re married. And he wants me to stay out here as long as I can, because of the baby.”

The baby. She talked all the time about the baby: how happy she was, how happy Nick was. (Would it be a boy or a girl? She hoped a boy, for Nick’s sake.) How she hoped Graham and I would have a baby of our own right away, so we could raise them together. (Wouldn’t that be darling? Our children would spend summers together at Seaview, just like we had. Did I remember how we ate our first ice cream cones together, when we were five or so?)

“Yes, of course,” I said. “It’s much better for you and the baby out here. All this fresh salt air.”

Budgie turned over on her side, reclining like a harem girl. “Just look at me, Lily. I’m getting fuller already. Can you tell?” She cupped one breast with her left hand, the one holding her cigarette. The diamonds caught the sun and dazzled against her skin.

There was no denying it. Her breasts had rounded out with new weight, her soft brown nipples had taken on a rosy density. She looked almost maternal.

I lifted Budgie’s Thermos cup from the sand next to her elbow, took a swallow, and settled it back in its hollow. “Maybe I’ll go Tuesday.”

“Do that.” She closed her eyes again. “And start on that baby right away for me, will you? I want our little Nick Junior to have lots of company. Besides, I don’t want to be all fat and pregnant by myself, do I?”

“Naturally. Graham’s eager about that part.”

Budgie said sleepily: “I want you to be
happy,
Lily. I’m so glad you’re happy.”

Happy. Of course I was happy. Happiness thrilled through my veins as the subway train rattled up Lexington Avenue, or perhaps I was just dizzy from the heat. I was going to see Graham; I was going to marry Graham. My glamorous, invincible, universally admired husband-to-be.
Mr. and Mrs. Graham Pendleton
, engraved in black ink on thick ecru stationery. In a few moments, I would arrive home to my familiar apartment. I would take a shower and turn on all the ceiling fans and make myself lovely; I’d put on some low-cut silky number edged with lace and dab my wrists and throat with Shalimar. Graham would rattle his key in the knob and open the door, and there I would be, waiting for him, fragrant and soft-skinned and free of perspiration. We would make love on my bed with the daylight spilling across the room, and go out to dinner and dancing, and then come home and make love again and fall asleep together, and I would be Graham’s, entirely belonging to Graham and no one else, filled with love and hope for the future. Maybe we wouldn’t bother with precautions after all. Maybe I would take Budgie’s advice and start a baby as soon as possible. If we married in November as Graham wanted, no one would really notice.

Tomorrow I would take Graham to visit Daddy, and Daddy would be so happy.

Kiki would be my bridesmaid, of course. We would pick out her dress together at Bergdorf’s, something not too frilly because she hated frills.

The train thudded to a stop at Sixty-eighth Street. I got out and climbed the dirty, wet steps to the dirty, wet sidewalk and juggled my pocketbook and satchel as I opened my umbrella. The rain fell steadily, crackling above my head. After the summer at Seaview, New York was a shock of storefronts and people, of jostling competition, smelling of steam and dirt and human bodies. A pair of taxis honked angrily at each other, disputing possession of a lane. I crossed Lexington and walked down the relative quiet of Sixty-ninth Street before turning up Park Avenue.

The familiar vista spread before me: the wide avenue split by an abundantly floral central island, the tall gray apartment buildings with their forest-green awnings shading all the windows, the terraces scaling along the upper floors. I huddled beneath my umbrella and walked up the sidewalk, nodding at the doormen, until I reached the modest entrance and self-effacing lobby of my home.

“Hello, Joe,” I said cheerfully to the doorman. Joe was our building’s only friendly attendant, and the only one under the age of sixty.

His mouth split open. “Why, Miss Lily! There you are! Where’s our little girl?”

“Still back in Rhode Island. I’m just up for a couple of days to run errands. Have you been taking care of my guest?”

Joe’s face went holy beneath his strict cap. “Miss Lily, you could have knocked me with a feather. Been a fan of Pendleton’s since the Yanks first called him up. Don’t you worry, we’ve been taking good care of him. Some newspapers came by the other day, we chased them off.”

“Newspapers?”

He nodded. “Yes, ma’am. We told ’em we never heard of him.” He bent forward. “Is it true? You’re getting hitched?”

I smiled. “Yes, Joe. He’s an old friend, and we just . . . well, it was a whirlwind.”

“Well, congratulations, Miss Lily. I’m sure you’ll be very happy.” Joe nodded to the elevator. “He’s up there now, in fact. Just got back from practice.”

“Really? Already?”

“It ain’t like working in an office, is it?” He winked.

“No, it isn’t.”

I followed Joe to the elevator. He pressed the call button for me. The cabin was already down in the lobby, and the doors opened with a spasmodic lurch. Joe opened the grille. “I’ll see you later, Miss Lily.”

“Thank you, Joe.”

I pressed number twelve and leaned back against the wall, watching the numbers ascend. The building felt quiet, empty, as if the heat and the rain had lulled everybody to sleep. I closed my eyes and counted off the clicks as the cabin rose.

So Graham was already there. He would have to take me as he found me, then. I took out my handkerchief and dabbed at my forehead, my chin. I took off my hat and fluffed my damp hair.

The elevator stopped. I picked up my satchel, opened the grille, and stepped through the opening. To my right stood the front door of my apartment, my home since childhood, with the claimant to my adult life now sitting somewhere inside, in the dining room or the living room or even Daddy’s study, reading the newspaper or listening to the radio, smoking a cigarette, a cup of coffee or probably something stronger sitting by his side.