A Hundred Summers (44 page)

By December 1941, more than three years after the storm, I was several months along with our second child, writing regular newspaper features and collecting material with Nick’s help for a book on the hurricane and its aftermath. At least ten stone cottages had reappeared on Seaview Neck, and we were idly discussing the possibility of a new clubhouse.

ON THIS PARTICULAR DAY,
however, the sixth of June, 1944, the thought of a Seaview clubhouse is the furthest thing from my mind.

At dawn, Aunt Julie knocked on my door with news of the invasion of Normandy, and we are now sitting on the rocks beneath the battery, looking out to sea and praying for Daddy and all the soldiers.

Nick, of course, is Daddy now. Even Kiki started calling him that, once Little Nick could pronounce the word, though my father lives with us in Gramercy Park and sits at the moment in his own room at Seaview, overlooking the bay. The endearment seems natural to all of us. We haven’t yet told her the complicated story of her parentage, though she is nearly twelve now and possibly wondering why she looks so much like the man her sister married. Regardless, she loves Nick like a father; she wept for days when he left for England in his neat well-pressed lieutenant’s uniform; she follows the progress of Nick’s unit with religious zeal.

As have I. As the sun rises above the eastern horizon, I imagine I can hear the great guns pounding into the sand of the landing beaches, that I can hear Nick’s commanding shout pierce the chaos from across the ocean. I remember him during the football game on the beach, his piratical eyes and his fierce will, leading and teaching as we went along. Is that what he’s doing now, in the thick of the battle? Or is he still in England, waiting his turn on the invasion ships?

Is he still alive?

Surely I would know if he weren’t. Surely, if Nicholson Greenwald’s heart stopped beating, mine would have felt a concurrent jolt, a cessation of momentum, like a stream cut off from its source.

I sit on the rocks and inhale the familiar Atlantic brine. I watch our two young sons play in the cove under Kiki’s supervision, laughing and splashing and entirely oblivious to their sister’s red eyes and anxious face. I place my hand on the enormous curve of my nine-months’ belly, Nick’s parting gift to me, and try very hard not to wish that Nick weren’t Nick, that he hadn’t felt compelled to go about obtaining an Army commission from the moment the news of Pearl Harbor first crackled over the radio in President Roosevelt’s measured Hyde Park drawl.

But Nick
is
Nick, and not only did he complete his officers’ training with extraordinary commendation, he used every influence he possessed to gain an assignment to a combat unit. He told me, as I lay in bed weeping before he left, that he had been expecting this fight, preparing for this fight since he traveled through Europe with his parents as a college boy. That it was his duty to take arms against Hitler. That he would be thinking of me and the children every moment, and that he would keep himself alive and whole for us.

When I told him he couldn’t possibly promise that, he gathered me close and whispered that he’d lived through a hurricane for my sake and Kiki’s, and a single hurricane had a thousand times more destructive power than a mere human war.

A hand falls on my shoulder. “Hungry yet?” asks Aunt Julie, with a picnic basket hanging from her hand.

I should be too worried to eat, but the baby inside me isn’t troubled by concerns for its father, and I tuck into the boiled eggs and Marelda’s iced lemon cake with my usual appetite. The boys, spying food, run over to join us, and Kiki slumps on the rock by my side with a bottle of ginger ale, fresh from the icebox.

“He’s all right, isn’t he?” she asks, as if I really do have some magical ability to divine Nick’s well-being over three thousand miles of open ocean.

“I’m sure he is, sweetheart.” I put my arm around her, and for an instant I think of Graham Pendleton, whose golden body now lies in fragments on the floor of the English Channel, broken in a Luftwaffe dogfight five months ago. “You know Daddy. Remember how he kept you safe in the battery, during the hurricane?”

“I remember.” She leans into me and puts her hand on my stomach. She’s done that with all my pregnancies; she loves to feel them kick her hand. It’s like they’re saying hello, she says, and I tell her they are. The baby obliges her with a wallop solid enough to make me gasp. Kiki laughs. “Zowie. That’s Daddy’s baby, all right.”

“I’ll bet it’s another boy,” says Little Nick with glee.

“Absolutely not,” says Aunt Julie. “No more boys. If this one isn’t a girl, I’ll disown you all.”

The boys groan loudly at this idea, even two-year-old Freddy, who still doesn’t quite understand there’s a genuine baby in Mommy’s tummy, because he always follows wherever his big brother leads. Little Nick punctuates his disgust with a resonant belch.

“Nicky!” I exclaim.

“Oh, that’s all right,” says Aunt Julie, peeling herself another egg. “Better over the table than under the table.”

The sun climbs across the sky, and night is falling on the beaches of Normandy. We finish our picnic and go inside, and later we get up a croquet match on the tough little lawn behind the house and let Freddy win. After dinner, after the boys are bathed and in bed, I sit outside with Kiki and Aunt Julie and watch the red-orange sunset ring around the horizon. I’m drinking lemonade; I have no appetite for gin and tonic anymore, which always reminds me of Budgie. In any case, no amount of gin could dull the omnipresent ache of missing Nick.

“Red sky at night, sailor’s delight,” says Aunt Julie. The evening breeze whisks her fading hair, and she tucks it behind her ears.

“Red sky in the morning . . .” I begin.

Kiki finishes: “Sailor’s warning.” She curls her long legs beneath her and drinks her lemonade. Her brown hair curls across her cheek, as unruly as Nick’s, and she props her chin on her palm with the deeply thoughtful expression of a girl hovering on the brink of adolescence. She asks, “Was the sky red the morning before the hurricane?”

“Damned if I know,” says Aunt Julie. She’s drinking gin and tonic without compunction, and her cigarette dangles from her scarlet-tipped hand. She hasn’t changed a bit.

I think of the long-ago dawn outside Gramercy Park, when Nick sat on the bed to say good-bye before driving up to Seaview. “It was. The old salts say the sky glowed red three mornings in a row. A sure sign of a hundred-year storm.”

“I hope the weather is nice for Daddy,” says Kiki, and her eyes fill with tears.

“So do I.”

“So do we all,” says Aunt Julie, “because God knows I can’t get Lily pregnant again on my own.”

“And God knows I’d put a bullet through my head before going through another pregnancy,” I say.

AS CHANCE WOULD HAVE IT,
I go into labor that night, and by ten o’clock the next morning Nick and I have a baby daughter, eight pounds, two ounces, with fuzzy pale hair and eyes that crinkle at the corners when she cries, which she does with frequency and conviction. I name her Julie Helen Greenwald. (“If that’s a naked attempt to influence my last will and testament,” says Aunt Julie, “it’s working.”) We send off a cable to Nick’s unit, though we know it will be given a low priority because of the invasion, and the next day we mail him a snapshot and a letter, signed with Julie’s tiny footprints. We carry on as if we know baby Julie’s father is alive and well and celebrating the news of her arrival with cigars and apple brandy.

Seven days later, while the baby and I are still in the hospital, a Western Union telegram boy pedals all the way down the sand and gravel of Neck Lane and stops at our door. His face is somber and respectful and exhausted. He’s been a busy fellow the last few days.

Kiki is at the garden hose, cleaning the sand from the boys’ swimsuits. She lets out an agonized shriek and drops the hose on the grass, where it rotates in wild spirals to the boys’ infinite and noisy delight.

Aunt Julie runs up from the beach, hat flopping, white and shaking, and snatches the telegram. It’s addressed to me.

For a moment she hesitates, thinking perhaps she should bring it to me at the hospital, that I should be the first to learn any news, but Aunt Julie is Aunt Julie.

She rips open the envelope and reads:

OVER THE MOON STOP GIVE SWEET JULIE KISS FROM DADDY STOP LONG TO HOLD ALL MY DARLING GIRLS IN MY ARMS STOP BOYS TOO STOP FAITHFUL LOVE ALWAYS NICK

Historical Note

I had just handed in the copyedited manuscript of
A Hundred Summers
(including the original text of this historical note) when Hurricane Sandy made landfall in New Jersey on October 30, 2012, causing widespread devastation and the mandatory evacuation of my own family from our Connecticut home. Though the wreckage in Sandy’s wake recalled the 1938 blow, they were in fact two very different storms.

The great New England hurricane of 1938 thundered ashore without warning in the afternoon of September 21, killing over seven hundred people and felling over two billion trees. Fireplaces were fueled for decades from the wood reclaimed from the storm, and Moosilauke Ravine Lodge in the mountains of northern New Hampshire is built in part from the massive old-growth timber toppled by the hurricane’s ferocious winds.

In our modern age of Doppler radar and vigilant weather satellites, it’s hard to imagine how a Category 3 hurricane, barreling northward at 70 miles per hour, could make landfall without anyone suspecting its arrival, but the so-called Long Island Express had no electronic eyes to monitor its progress and the science of meteorology was then in its infancy. Residents noticed the wind picking up, the rain accelerating into a torrent, and then a two-story-high storm surge towered toward the shore. That was the weather bulletin.

New Englanders and students of the storm may recognize in Seaview Neck a loose fictional representation of Napatree Point, a sandy peninsula extending from the tip of Watch Hill, Rhode Island, that bore a catastrophic pummeling from the hurricane. Of the forty-odd idyllic beach houses that adorned Napatree on the morning of September 21, 1938, not one survived the day, and none were ever rebuilt. My description of Lily and her family coasting across the bay on roof sections and pieces of furniture is based on the actual experience of Napatree residents, and beachcombers did indeed take shelter in the fort at the end of the cape.

Seaview is not Napatree, however. I created my own geography and pedigree for the purposes of this story, and the architecture and history of the battery and the Seaview Association bear only a passing resemblance to their real-life inspirations. The characters themselves are all entirely fictional, though the zinnias did, in fact, exist.

For those who want to read more on the subject, I highly recommend
Sudden Sea: The Great Hurricane of 1938
(Little, Brown, 2003), by R. A. Scotti, whose lyrical descriptions and vivid account of the disaster on Napatree and elsewhere first propelled the storm into my imagination. Katharine Hepburn—who famously played nine holes of golf in Old Saybrook that morning and had lost her home, her possessions, and nearly her life by dinnertime—also penned a gripping recollection of the hurricane in her 1991 autobiography,
Me: Stories of My Life
.

I have lived for many years in Connecticut, and my husband hails from solid old New England stock. The legend of the 1938 hurricane remains vigorous among those old enough to have experienced the events of that day, and if you want to start a lively cocktail party conversation around here, just bring up the topic among the old salts. I met one man who had just started work as a property insurer when the storm hit, and spent the rest of his life praying that he wouldn’t see another. At the time, I thought the odds were in his favor. Forecasters call New England hurricanes of that magnitude hundred-year storms, because the probability of such a disaster occurring in any one year is roughly 1 percent.

We had not yet seen a hundred summers since the hurricane of 1938, when my family found ourselves evacuees, eating dinner by candlelight with my in-laws near the mouth of the Connecticut River, while the trees toppled outside and the waters of Long Island Sound crept up the lawn. Storms, after all, don’t follow our man-made timetables, no matter how pious the property insurers of New England. But we will rebuild, as we always do: a little stronger each time.