A Hundred Summers (9 page)

“I beg your pardon,” he says, wiping his mouth. “That wasn’t very civilized, was it?”

“I was about to charge admission.”

He laughs. I like his laugh, easy and quiet. “Sorry. I was just about gone with hunger, with all that business yesterday and then being up most of the night.”

I look at his broad shoulders, his solid torso, his rangy body disappearing under the table. He’s like an engine, idling in neutral, consuming vast amounts of energy even at rest. “Don’t apologize.”

“The food’s good, too,” he says. “You come here often, I take it?”

“I like to study here. They don’t mind if I stay for hours and spread out all my papers. Dorothy refills my coffee, brings me pie. You should try the pie.”

“I’d like to, sometime.” He reaches for his coffee cup. “Now it’s your turn.”

“My turn?”

“Tell me why you’re here. Why you came downstairs, instead of having me kicked out by the housemother.” His eyes are bright and well fed. I love their color, all warm and caramelized, almost molten, hints of green streaking around the brown.
I’m just happy,
he said earlier, and he looks it.

Should I tell him the truth?

Budgie would say no. Budgie would tell me to hold my cards close to my chest, to make him work for it. I should be cagey, mercurial. I should leave him in doubt of himself.

“It was just before you broke your leg,” I say. “You were standing there with Graham, staring into the crowd. You looked like . . . I don’t know . . . fierce and piratical. Different from everyone else, filled with fire. You leaped out at me.”

He is pleased. His smile grows across his face, and I think again how it softens the rather blunt arrangement of his bones, the uncompromising set of his jaw and chin and cheekbones. A few curls dip sweetly into his forehead, and I want to twirl them in my fingers. “Piratical, eh?” he says. “Is that what the girls like these days? Pirates?”

“That was the wrong word. Intent, I should say.”

“You said piratical. That was your first word, the honest one.” He is twinkling at me, not fiery or piratical at all.

I shift direction. “What were you thinking about, looking up like that?”

“Oh, I don’t know. The next play, probably. You get in a fog during a game. The fog of battle, the joy of it. The rest of the world sort of fades into the mist.” He shrugs dismissively.

“But you’re so good at it.”

He shrugs again. “Practice.”

“That forward pass, the touchdown, right before you were hurt. I don’t know a thing about football, but . . .”

“A lucky toss. The receiver did all the work.” He looks down at his plate and swipes up a trace of yolk with his toast.

“Are you upset about your leg?” I ask, softly.

“Well, yes. My last season. Stupid luck. Or rather stupidity, because I should have known . . . But that’s the game, you know.” He looks up. “Touchdown one moment, almost crippled the next. Anyway, I mind a lot less right now than I did yesterday.”

We finish our breakfast. Nick insists on paying the check. He leaves, I notice, a large tip for Dorothy. We walk back out into the chill damp air, and I pull my collar tight against my neck. The street is busier now, filling with Sunday traffic. I look up at Nick, tall and impervious in a dark wool overcoat. He turns to me, and his face is serious again, almost hesitant. “What now?” he asks.

“When do you have to be back?”

He looks at his watch. “Half an hour ago. Team meeting. But I don’t think they were expecting me. Anyway, Pendleton will cover for me. Say I was too doped-up or something.” He taps the tip of his crutch against his cast.

“Still, you should get back. You must be exhausted.”

“Do you want me to go back?” His breath hangs in the cold air.

“No. But you should, all the same.”

He holds out his arm for me, remembers his crutches, tucks them ruefully under his shoulders. “Then I’ll drive you back to your dormitory.”

We drive in silence, the way we drove into town, unable to put the sensations between us into words. But it’s an easier silence this time, and when we stop briefly at a signal, Nick picks up my hand and gives it a squeeze.

He pulls to the curb with my dormitory just in view ahead. Like me, he doesn’t want the eyes of a hundred girls pressed against the windows, watching us.

“Does it hurt?” I ask, nodding at his leg.

“It’s all right. I took some aspirin.”

“How do you move the clutch?”

He shakes his injured leg. “Very carefully. Don’t tell the doctor on me.”

“You were crazy to come. I hope it heals all right.”

“It’s fine.”

Again the silence between us, the car rumbling under our legs. Nick fingers the keys in the ignition, as if weighing whether to cut the motor. “I hate this,” he says, staring through the windshield. “There’s too much to say. I want to hear everything. I want to know all about you.”

“And I you.” My voice is fragile.

“Do you, Lily?” He turns and looks at me. “Do you really? You’re not just playing along, humoring me?”

“No, I’m not. I . . .” My heart is beating too fast; I can’t keep up with myself. I shake my head. “I can’t believe you’re here. I was hoping I’d get the chance to see you Saturday. Budgie said I could return your jacket then, that it would be my excuse for coming up.”

“Budgie.” He shakes his head and takes both my hands. “Why are you friends, anyway? You couldn’t be further apart.”

“Our families summer together. I’ve known her all my life.”

“That’s it, I guess. Don’t listen to her, do you hear me, Lily? Be yourself, be your own sweet self.”

“All right.”

He lets go of one hand to brush at the hair on my temple. “Lily, I want to see you again. May I see you again?”

“Yes, please.”

“When?”

I laugh. “Tomorrow?”

“Done,” he says swiftly.

I laugh again. The coffee is racing in my veins, making me giddy, or maybe it’s just this, the sight of Nick, handsomer by the second, gazing at me so earnestly. How could I ever have thought that Graham Pendleton’s face was more beautiful than his? “Don’t be ridiculous. How are you going to be an architect if you don’t go to your classes?”

“I’m not going to be an architect.”

“Yes, you are. You must. Promise me that, Nick.”

He brushes my hair again and cups my cheek. “My God, Lily. Yes, I promise. I promise you anything.”

We sit there, looking at each other, breathing each other in. I lean my cheek against the back of the seat; against Nick’s jacket, slung across it.

“I don’t know what to say,” says Nick. “I don’t want to go.”

“I don’t want you to go.”

“I feel like Columbus, catching sight of land at last, and having to turn right back home to Spain.”

“Columbus was Italian.”

He pinches me. “Oh, that’s how it is with you?”

“And New Hampshire’s much closer than Spain. And you have a lovely fast car instead of a leaky old caravel.”

“Well, that’s the last time I say something sentimental to you, college girl.”

“No, don’t say that.” I reach up and graze my fingers against his cheekbone, smooth the hair above his ear, dizzy with the freedom of touching him. “I’m sorry. If I don’t laugh right now, I might cry instead.”

“I don’t mind. I’d like to know what you look like when you’re crying. Not that I want to see you crying,” he adds hastily, “or sad in any way. Just . . . you know what I mean. Don’t you?”

I smile. “I look horrible. All puffed up and blotchy. Just so you know.”

“Then I’ll do whatever it takes to keep your tears away.”

The look in his eyes, when he says this, is so massive with meaning that I feel myself crack open, right down the center of me, in a long and uneven line. “It’s grotesque. Budgie, now, Budgie’s an elegant crier. A few tears trickling down her cheeks, like Garbo . . .”

“Enough about her. I’ll be whimpering like a baby myself, in a moment. From sheer exhaustion, if nothing else.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It was worth it.” He turns his head and touches his lips against my fingertips. The slight contact passes through me like a charge of electricity.

“I’ll drive up on Saturday with Budgie,” I say.

“Yes. Do. I’ll be down on the bench with my rotten crutches, but I’ll look for you. We’ll have dinner afterward, like yesterday.”

“We’ll still have Budgie and Graham with us.”

“So I’ll drive down by myself Sunday morning, after the team meeting. I can spend the day here, if you like. And I’ll write.” He smiles. “Lay out my prospects for you.”

“Your prospects look pretty good so far.”

“You must write back. Tell me all about yourself. I want to know what you’re reading, whether you play tennis.” He laughs. “What am I saying? Of course you play tennis. I want the history of your life. I want to know why this hair of yours curls around your ear, just like that, and not the other way.” His head tilts closer. “I want to . . .”

“To what?” I breathe.

“Nothing.” He straightens again. “All in good time. We have plenty of time now, don’t we? I was in such a panic, driving down. I have to remind myself that the emergency is over.”

The idling engine coughs, catches itself, resumes again. Like a chaperone, warning us discreetly.

“I’ll walk you in,” Nick says, with a last caress to the side of my face.

We move slowly down the pavement, using Nick’s crutches as an excuse to stretch out the last remaining minutes. “This is awful, leaving you,” he says, “and yet I’ve never felt better. Don’t you feel it?”

“Yes. Like being a child, when Christm— When the summer holidays were coming up.”

“You were going to say
Christmas
.”

“Yes, I . . .” I pause in confusion.

He chuckles and nudges my arm with his elbow. We are nearing the walkway up to the dormitory door. “My mother keeps a tree every year. We go to services together.”

“Oh. Well, Christmas, then. Or summer. Both rolled into one.”

We turn up the walkway and stop under the spreading branches of a hundred-year-old oak, still thick with the glossy burnt orange of turning leaves. Nick glances up at the obscured rows of windows looming above.

My blood turns to air. I’ve been kissed before, but never a real kiss, never one that meant something.

Nick bends downward, and the brim of his woolen cap bumps against my forehead. He laughs, removes the cap, and bends down again.

His lips are soft. He presses them against mine for a second or two, just long enough so I can taste his maple-syrup breath, and pulls back, mindful of the windows above us.

“Drive carefully,” I say, or rather whisper, because my throat refuses to move.

He replaces the cap. “I will. I’ll write tonight.”

“And get some sleep.”

“Like a baby.” He picks up my hand, kisses it swiftly, and props himself back on his crutches. “Until Saturday, then.”

“Until Saturday.”

We stand, staring at each other.

“You go first,” says Nick.

I turn and walk up the steps into the warmth of the common room. Outside, Nick is hobbling back down the sidewalk, back to his dashing Packard, back to New Hampshire. His large hands will wrap around the steering wheel, his plaster-cast leg will work the clutch awkwardly, his warm caramel-hazel eyes will follow the road ahead. I hope three cups of coffee are enough to keep them open.

Nick Greenwald. Nicholson Greenwald.

Nick.

I cross the lounge and climb the worn wooden steps to my small single room on the second floor. The door is ajar. I push it open, and behold Budgie Byrne, still in her nightgown, with her cashmere robe belted about her tiny waist. She’s draped across my narrow bed, next to the window.

“Well, well,” she says, smiling, swinging her slippered foot. “Who’s been a naughty girl?”

6.

SEAVIEW, RHODE ISLAND

May 1938

N
obody knew for certain when the first house was built on Seaview Neck, but I had witnessed cordial arguments on the club veranda gallop on long past midnight trying to settle the dispute. New Englanders are like that: everyone wants to descend in direct line from a founding father.

Whoever
did
settle Seaview first had an excellent eye for location. The land curved around the rim of Rhode Island in a long and tapering finger, guarded at the end by a rocky outcropping and an abandoned stone battery that had fired its last shot during the Civil War. On one side of the Neck lay the Atlantic Ocean, flat and immense, and on the other lay Seaview Bay, on which most of the households had built docks that poked like a line of toothpicks into the sheltered water. Generation after generation, we children had learned to swim and row and sail in Seaview Bay, and to ride waves and build sand castles along the broad yellow beach girding the ocean.

With all due modesty (and New Englanders are like that, too), the Danes had as much claim as any to the founders’ crown. Our house lay at the end of the Neck, the last of the forty-three shingled cottages, right up against the old battery and with its own little cove hollowed out from the rocks. According to the deed in Daddy’s library, Jonathan Dane laid claim to the land in 1697, which predated the formation of the Seaview Association and the building of the Seaview Beach Club by about a good hundred and seventy years.

I had always thought our location the best on Seaview Neck. If I wanted company, I walked out the front door and turned left, down the long line of houses, and I was sure to see a familiar face before I had gone a hundred yards. If I wanted privacy, I turned right and made for the cove. This I did almost every morning. My window faced east, and the old wooden shutters did little to keep out the early summer sunrise, so I would wrap myself in my robe, snatch my towel from the rack, and plunge my naked body into the water before anyone could see me.

The pleasure varied by the season. By September, the Atlantic had been sunning itself all summer long, drawing up lazily from the tropical south, and my morning swim amounted to a tingling soak in a warm salt bath. In May, a month after the chilling rains of April, the morning after Nick and Budgie drove us back from the Seaview clubhouse, the experience resembled one of the more barbaric forms of medieval torture.