A Hundred Summers (38 page)

Uncle Peter put his hand on his forehead and rubbed it. “Lily, Lily. What are you up to?”

“We made a terrible mistake seven years ago. You know that. You know what happened.”

“I know that.” His hand still rubbed his temple. “Is he proposing to divorce her?”

“Yes. The marriage—I speak in confidence, remember—it was never even consummated. And all this time, Uncle Peter, all of it . . .” My voice broke down. I sat back in the chair and stared at my knees. “I was so stupid. I pushed him away after Daddy’s stroke, I couldn’t even bear to see him. I was so full of guilt, because I had done that to my father, poor Daddy. You remember how he was, those first few months. We didn’t even think he’d live. Every day was pure torture.”

Uncle Peter handed me his handkerchief, but I pushed it away. I was gaining strength now.

“I remember,” Uncle Peter said.

“I sent Nick back the ring. I told him I could never see him again. I think I was hoping he wouldn’t accept it, that he would come back and storm through the front door and tell me everything would be all right, that it wasn’t my fault, that he couldn’t live without me. But instead he left for Paris.”

“I understand his father’s firm . . .” said Uncle Peter.

“I know, I know. But I was twenty-one and in despair, and I suppose, like a child, I thought he should sit around New York and pine. When he left for Paris, I thought I’d die. I would have died, except for Kiki. And by springtime I was hearing stories about what he was doing over there, and I thought I hated him.”

Uncle Peter turned in his chair and looked at the window, at the twitching water of New York Harbor. “But you don’t hate him now.”

“No. I think he was hurt, as I was. He thought I didn’t care, as I thought he didn’t. We were young and stupid and proud. And Budgie found him.”

Uncle Peter said nothing, only stared at the window, the pen still flipping among his fingers. The sunlight glinted on the gray hair around his temples.

“We aren’t having an affair, if that’s what you’re thinking,” I said. “Nick’s an honorable man. He wants to settle things with her first.”

“What a god-awful mess.”

“Yes. It’s why I’ve come to you. He’s gone up there today. He’s going to ask her for a divorce, and I don’t think she’ll give it to him. She’s very . . .” My cigarette was nearly burned out in the ashtray. I picked it up and finished it. “She’s not happy. Drinking all day, and . . . other things. Whatever it is she used to get him to marry her, she’ll use it now, and I’m worried. I don’t know what she’ll do. I think Nick’s at the end of his rope. He said some things on the phone this morning. I don’t want this to end badly. So I came to you.”

“What can I do?”

“You know everything, Uncle Peter. Everything that happens in our little world makes its way to that discreet brain of yours. You know all our secrets. I thought you might know this one.”

He sighed and turned back to me. His face looked a little pale, or perhaps it was the abundant light from the window. “Lily, I’m not in Mrs. Greenwald’s confidence. I hardly know the woman. I certainly don’t know her reasons for marrying her husband, still less why he married her.”

“Did you know she was having an affair with Nick’s father, that last winter?”

If I hoped to shock him into an admission, I was disappointed. His eyebrows lifted; he placed his pen back on the desk. “I did not,” he said. He steepled his fingers and stared at the tips. “But I would be surprised if that were the case.”

A pulse of sensation went through my veins, awakening my nerves. Uncle Peter’s words repeated in my head, calm and heavy with significance. I leaned forward and put my elbows on the desk. “Why is that, Uncle Peter? Why is that?”

He shrugged. “Because I would, that’s all. Mrs. Greenwald isn’t known for her strict adherence to the truth.”

“But Nick looked at his father’s accounts. He was paying her off all those years, two hundred dollars a month.”

“He might have been paying her for any number of reasons.”

“Such as?”

Uncle Peter shook his head and rose. For a moment I thought he meant to usher me out, but instead he picked up a chair from the corner of the room, brought it before me, and sat down. He lifted my hands and held them between us. “Lily, my dear. Of all the unhappy consequences of that winter, yours has always given me the most distress. You kept everything together, didn’t you, when everyone else went to pieces. And yet you were the one who lost the most.”

“It doesn’t matter now, Uncle Peter. What I want is the truth. I want to know how a woman like Budgie could convince a man like Nick to marry her. I want to know how to release him.”

Uncle Peter shook his head. “Lily, you’re not asking the right questions. You’re not thinking of the bigger picture.”

“What bigger picture?”

“All these years, my dear, you’ve burdened yourself with the guilt of your father’s illness.”

“How could I not? He had a stroke, Uncle Peter. When he learned about the elopement, he had a stroke, he nearly died. He’s sitting right now in front of a window, staring out at Central Park, the way he’s done for years. He’s never even held Kiki in his arms. His own daughter.”

Uncle Peter’s hands pressed mine. “You’re certain that was how it happened?”

“That’s what they said. He got my note, he raced down to Gramercy Park to stop us. My mother and Mr. Greenwald told him he was too late.”

“And you’ve never wondered how your mother came to know this? About the two of you?”

“Well, it was Budgie, wasn’t it? She saw my mother at the party and told her. How else would Mother have found out? My mother found Mr. Greenwald and went down to the apartment to find us. We saw it happen, from the window.” I shook my head. “I couldn’t even hear Budgie’s name for years after that. I still don’t know why she would have betrayed us like that.”

Uncle Peter laid my hands on top of each other, between his, and patted the upper one. He gazed into my eyes with concentrated strength, soft gray turned to iron. “Lily, you’re still not looking at it the right way. Think, Lily. Think very carefully. Think about what you saw that night. Think about what came after.”

I sat there, staring into Uncle Peter’s eyes, my hands sandwiched within his. I examined the picture in my head, turned it around, shook it, held it upside down, added a few speculative brushstrokes.

“No,” I whispered. “It doesn’t make sense. They would have told me.”

“Would they? When you have always willingly taken the burden from their shoulders?”

Uncle Peter took one hand from mine and stroked the side of my head, smoothing the springy curls, his forehead pulled into a triangle of sympathy.

“And you think Budgie knows?”

“I have no idea. But she was paid for
something
, wasn’t she?”

I pulled my hands away and picked up my pocketbook.

“Uncle Peter,” I said, “would you mind terribly if I borrowed your car?”

21.

1932–1938

I
remember very little of the next twenty-four hours. I remember how Nick demanded to travel with us down to New York, but Aunt Julie pointed out that he couldn’t simply leave the Packard in Lake George, and I was too distressed to argue. Looking back, I think perhaps he interpreted this as ambivalence.

I remember saying good-bye to Nick at the station, through my stinging throat, while Aunt Julie waited impatiently behind me. I remember the way he held me in his big arms, and how comforting I found the solid wall of his chest and the steady heartbeat beneath. I remember wondering how I could survive the next day or two until I would feel them all again.

I remember his voice in my ear, though not the exact words. How he loved me, how everything would be fine, how he prayed for my father’s recovery, how he would do whatever he could to help. I wasn’t to think of him or worry about him, he would find me when he reached the city. I meant everything to him, did I know that? He would never forget last night. I had bound him to me forever. I was his whole life, his wife before God, his Lilybird. We were as good as married, he would wait patiently, as long as it took.

Things like that.

I remember I didn’t have the voice, or the composure, to answer much in return.

I remember the scent of steam and coal smoke, hanging dank and sultry in the air, and to this day I feel a little ill when I stand on a train platform and breathe it in too deeply.

I remember looking out the window of the train as we pulled away, and seeing Nick’s figure standing alone on the platform, and yet not seeing it, because my mind was already too consumed with disaster.

I wish I could remember more. I wish I had taken down every detail of Nick’s appearance, his expression, his outline against the gray buildings of the station, because I was not to see him again until the summer of 1938, the summer the hurricane came and washed the world away.

22.

SEAVIEW, RHODE ISLAND

Wednesday, September 21, 1938

T
here is a point, as you approach Seaview from the mainland, where the road turns around the edge of a sharp hillside and the whole of Seaview Neck spreads out before you. The view is so dramatic, it’s easy to miss the turnoff onto Neck Road. People do it all the time, blowing right through the stop sign, heads craned to catch the roll of the Atlantic onto the pristine cream-colored stretch of the Seaview beach, or else the virgin white sails dipping through the waters of the bay. My God, they think. Who lives there? I’d kill to have a place along that beach, one of those pretty houses with the shingles and the bay windows and the gables and the summerhouses out back. I’d love to have one of those docks with a sailboat or two moored to the pilings.

But I was used to Seaview’s beauty. I had driven along that road a thousand times.

I reached the turnoff at about two o’clock in the afternoon, having raced up the gleaming new Merritt Parkway as far as Milford, and then wended my way up the Boston Post Road as fast as Peter van der Wahl’s ten-year-old Studebaker could stretch its engine. I would have arrived earlier, except I stopped to see Daddy before leaving the city.

He had been sitting before the window, as before, the ghostly remains of a smile on his face. I had knelt before him and kissed his dry cheek and put my hands on his knees.

“I’m going up to Seaview today, Daddy. I wish I could stay and see you longer, but I have a few things to do. Some wrongs to put right.”

He looked at me without speaking, his old blue eyes flat in the diffuse light.

“I don’t know if you can understand me, Daddy. I hope you can. I hope you’re still there. I’m going to get Nick back, Daddy. You threw him out, once, but I think it wasn’t because of the reason I thought back then. I think it was something else. I hope it was something else.”

His right knee moved beneath my hand. I found his fingers, folded together in his lap, and pressed them between mine.

“I think you would like him, Daddy, I really do. I think you would have gotten along so well. He isn’t easy to know well, but once you do, once he trusts you, he’s so warm and kind, so brilliant and funny. He unfolds like a flower.” I bent my face into our clasped hands. “I wish things had been different. I think he would have been good for you. I think you would have been good for each other.”

The clock had chimed nine-forty-five, and I knew I had to go. I rose, kissed Daddy’s hands, and put them back in his lap, and then I kissed his cheek again. “Good-bye, Daddy. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Wish me luck.”

I thought perhaps he’d leaned his cheek into mine, but I might have been wrong. I hurried downstairs and jumped into Uncle Peter’s car and zoomed up Park Avenue, beating every stoplight.

I drove to the absolute limit, stopping only for gas and coffee. By the time I reached Rhode Island, the weather, so fine and breezy along the shore towns, had grown strangely heavy, almost oily, as tiny packets of rain slammed against the windshield and debris whipped across the road and the power lines shrieked in agony. I put out my cigarette and wrapped both hands around the steering wheel. As I turned down Neck Road, I lifted my eyes and caught a glimpse of the ocean, thick and gray, streaked with long rollers beneath a sickly dun sky. A gust of wind caught the car, making it stagger.

Oh, damn, I thought. Another storm. Just what I needed.

I drove down the approach and past the clubhouse, which was shut and deserted, the tables and chairs already locked inside for the winter. Most of the houses were shut, too, the awnings put away until next year, wooden shutters closed tight. The Palmers had left last weekend, and so had the Crofters and the Langley sisters. I drove past the Huberts’ house, where Mrs. Hubert was bringing in her zinnias, one pot in each hand, skirts whipping furiously about her legs.

I drove past the Greenwalds’ house without even looking.

I drove unconscionably fast, rattling and bouncing along the potholes, spurting gravel from beneath Uncle Peter’s heavy tires. My hands clenched around the wheel; my eyes ached from peering through the dashing wipers. A swirl of rain hit the side of the car just as I pulled up in front of the old Dane cottage, and I clutched my hat as I ran down the path and opened the door with a crash.

“Mother!” I screamed.

I heard a movement in the floorboards above me. I turned and ran up the stairs.

“Mother!” I screamed again.

“Lily! What is it?”

Her feet emerged down the attic stairs, one by one, shod in practical brown leather and dark stockings. I stood quivering as she revealed herself, scintillating, every nerve in my body ready to burst. Her hands appeared, holding a pair of white towels. A pink cardigan lay about her shoulders. Her dark hair, pinned in a little knot at her neck, was coming undone. Her eyes were round and bright with surprise.