Belonging
Authors: Nancy Thayer
Belonging
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
2014 Ballantine Books eBook Edition
Copyright © 1995 by Nancy Thayer
Introduction copyright © 2014 by Nancy Thayer
Excerpt from
Nantucket Sisters
by Nancy Thayer copyright © 2014 by Nancy Thayer
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Originally published in hardcover by St. Martin’s Press in 1995.
This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book
Nantucket Sisters
by Nancy Thayer. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.
eBook ISBN 978-0-553-39102-2
Cover design: Eileen Carey
Cover image: © Shawna Lemay/Flickr Open/Getty Images
Author photograph: copyright © Jessica Hills Photography
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
An Introduction from the Author
Epigraph
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Part Two
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Part Three
Chapter Twenty-nine
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
Excerpt from
Nantucket Sisters
An Introduction from the Author
Joanna Jones, the main character in
Belonging
, longs for a family and a true home. When she sees a sea captain’s house on the water’s edge, she knows she’s found her place in the world. But even the most fabulous house feels empty if there’s no one there to love.
I wrote
Belonging
because I was enchanted with Nantucket Island, its fabulous romantic history, complicated society, and many mysteries and secrets. This novel holds buried treasure in love and discoveries.
I’m delighted that my early novels are being made available to my readers as ebooks. My style has changed slightly, as the world has grown faster, but my subject, family life, remains as mysterious and fascinating to me now as it was in these early books: falling in love, raising children, friendships and betrayals and forgiveness.
Looking back at all my books, I note one other consistency: most books are set somewhere near water.
Stepping
begins on an island in Finland where I lived for a few months. My other books take place in Vancouver, British Columbia on the Pacific Ocean, in Milwaukee on Lake Michigan, and finally on my beloved Nantucket. I’ve always found the blue immensity of water inspirational, and of course the storms and sunny beachside days provide wonderful settings and metaphors for novels.
I hope you enjoy these early novels and discover some new friends there.
Nancy Thayer
There is an old Indian tradition that some time previous to the settlement of the island by the whites, a French ship, having on board a quantity of specie, came ashore at the east end of the island in a severe storm, and was driven up into what is called the “Gulch,” a trifle to the westward of Siasconset, and wrecked. The island at the time was so thickly wooded in that vicinity that they were compelled to cut their way through the forest to reach the Indian settlements. Such is substantially the tradition, as remembered by many of our older inhabitants, and it is submitted for what it is worth. That the story was not wholly regarded as a myth by our ancestors is shown from the fact that the beach in that vicinity has been thoroughly dug over within a hundred years, in the vain hope of unearthing the ship’s treasure, which was said to have been buried there.
Wrecks Around Nantucket
, compiled by Arthur H. Gardner (New Bedford, Mass.: Reynolds Printing, Inc., 1913, 1943)
John Coffin built a house at Quaise, on one of the harbor’s eastern coves, and it became known as Kezia’s country estate. Watching Kezia Coffin profit at what they considered their expense, many Nantucketers spread rumors about her dealings with the enemy. The Patriots on the island were the most vociferous because they felt the most aggrieved. Kezia Coffin was trading regularly with the British, they claimed. Coffin ships were running the British blockade with impunity. And Kezia’s country house at Quaise was the collection point for smuggled goods and a rendezvous for secret deals with the enemy. So went the rumors, including a claim that Kezia had had a tunnel dug from her house to the beach, and that the tunnel was jammed with illicit merchandise.
A. B. C. Whipple
Vintage Nantucket
, revised edition
Part One
One
The television screen showed a family and their guest at ease in a luxuriant garden. The man wore white flannels and held on his lap, recumbent in the curve of his arm, his curly-haired daughter, fresh as peppermint in a pink sundress. Leaning toward them in indolent possession, a pregnant woman clad in a floral smock reclined on a white wicker chaise, her hand with its glinting diamonds draped complacently against her abdomen.
The other woman wore a crisp silk suit of a green so pale it was nearly white. She was not pregnant, and she wore no rings.
She spoke: “Until next time, this is Joanna Jones with
Fabulous Homes
.”
Joanna Jones smiled, tilting her head slowly so that her blond hair slid rippling against her shoulder, catching the sun. The camera moved steadily back, opening up the scene to focus on the house. Massive and stony as a castle, it was softened by trellises of roses and window boxes spilling with flowers. In the open door a black Lab and a white cat sat side by side in a shower of sun.
Theme music sparkled in. The credits began to roll.
Joanna flicked the remote control and the scene vanished. She was glad. She’d taped this Tennessee segment just last month, and now, watching the final version from her office in the CVN building on Third Avenue, she was surprised to find that this particular home stirred her emotions just as it had during her interview and tour. Joanna did not usually lust for possessions or envy others their lives, but the pretty little curly-haired girl and her smug pregnant mother made her feel oddly lonely and filled her with an unsettling, powerful longing.
Secretly she chided herself: she should feel exhilarated.
She
should feel smug. She’d completed another show for next year’s series. This one was slotted for next March. It would be a welcome spot of fresh air and flowery bloom right when her audience would be most desperate, most receptive, most eager for spring to come. It would cheer everyone.
“That’s it!” she announced to the two men watching with her.
“It’s good,” Jake told her.
Jake Corcoran was vice-president in charge of network programming for CVN; a benevolent dictator, his opinions were famous in the cable television business for being precocious, brilliant, and trend-setting. Jake had been the first to endorse Joanna’s show, and she had not let him down.
Jake was right; this show was really good. Her shows kept getting better and better. The fan mail proved it, as did the caliber of guests who opened their homes to her. And before all that, before the airing of the produced shows and the response of the audience, before the praise of her employers and the compliments from her colleagues, before she even saw the first videotapes on the monitor, she knew as she was planning and writing and hosting the shows that they were so good, so substantial, so
meaty
, that they were no longer merely entertaining. They were significant. They were worthwhile.
The essential focus of
Joanna Jones’ Fabulous Homes
was not on the celebrity of the owners or the costliness of the statues in the garden or the prestige of the architect or interior decorator. The homes Joanna profiled were not museums of fabulously expensive, fragile, and unusable antiques. In FH houses there were cookie crumbs on the counters, silk shirts flung on the chaise longues, dog hair under the sofas, and opened novels lying on the sunroom floors. The air was electric, ringing with calls down the stairwell and doors slamming shut and bathwater bubbling and little boys wrestling and maids muttering over their caviar ceviche. Joanna Jones’ Fabulous Homes were lived in by families, and although they were families of notable people—writers, painters, movie directors, actors, corporate leaders, statesmen, professors—the emphasis was not on the fame or wealth, but on the family life.
Joanna had a talent for discovering homes full of movement, contentment, beauty, and warmth, and a gift for graciously displaying those homes and their families in the richest, most generous light.
If, during the past two years as she produced and presented her show, she came to realize that this knack was like that of a starving person sniffing out a bakery, or a cold person locating heat, she ignored that old news, shrugging it off as irrelevant. She was a practical woman. She could not change the past, only the future.
Carter Amberson, who coproduced the show, remarked, “We thought it was quite a coup to get the senator’s permission.”
“It was,” Jake agreed, adding, “Joanna’s reputation is pure gold.”
A whisper of tension rang in the room then like the reverberation of a struck gong.
From the beginning, Carter had been scrupulously careful to see that Joanna got full credit for her achievements; now that
Fabulous Homes
was two years old and successful, he no longer had to be vigilant on her behalf, but rather on his.
Carter was one of the network’s producers, working behind the scenes, handling a complicated spectrum of tasks. He was responsible for the dry work of contracts and logistics, but provided necessary conceptual advice on both the taping and the postproduction editing. The crucial procurement of in-house production financing and advertising hookups was also in his charge. He had to be creative and analytical; he had to deal with small print and with giant egos. He could do it all; and he did do it all beautifully.
But Jake was not willing to give Carter any praise these days, and Joanna was always putting herself into the position of peacemaker between these two men, both of whom she loved in complicated ways.
