My Summer With George (3 page)

“Ah, what a wonderful breeze,” I murmured. “Would you like to sit here for a moment? Or is it too chilly for you?”

He looked at me blankly, as if he didn’t know what
chilly
meant, or didn’t feel anything at all and so didn’t understand my statement. But he plopped into one of the gleaming white canvas deck chairs Janice kept on the dock. I sat in another.

“My god!” he said. He was quite pale.

“Sorry you had to hear that,” I said. But then I burst out laughing. “And to think I thought they were making love! I should have known!”

“Love?”
George repeated, horrified. “Love?”

I shrugged. “Pitching woo. You know.” I giggled. “They seemed so passionate.”

“And here
I
thought he was such a great guy, a great journalist!”

“Well, he is. A great journalist.”

“All he cares about is money. How can he be a great journalist? He’s destroyed my respect for him, I tell you that!”

“He was just talking about money at that moment. He cares about lots of other things. Writers get crazy on the subject of money. It’s an occupational hazard. They work alone, the loneliness gets to them. They develop fantasies about other writers—who’s earning more, who gets more publicity, sells more books, is better known. Money is the only scorecard. Don’t be dismayed. Ellis is a decent man. I’ll introduce you to him another time.”

George shook his head. “No, thanks. Umm-umm. No.” He kept shaking his head. Suddenly, he stopped and stared at me.

“You do that? Get crazy about money? Yell at publishers?”

“I’ve done my share of yelling in my life,” I confessed, smiling, “mainly at incompetent cabdrivers, parking lot attendants, and other petty obstructionists. I’ve never yelled at a publisher, and I’ve never yelled about money—that I can recall. But I can imagine doing it, if I were…anxious enough.”

He was listening to me as if what I was saying really mattered to him. “I never heard anything like that in my life. Never. That was terrible.”

I examined him with some interest. Tender soul, I thought. Better he should stay in Louisville.

It was then I realized I had already been imagining him moving to New York.

During the next hour, as George and I sat on the dock, he regularly exploded with enthusiastic invitations. Three or four times, he urged me to come to Louisville to enjoy its cultural glories, especially its theater. He invited me to the local summer theater that evening, to see Edgar in (what else?)
Our Town.

“He’s the narrator. He’s really fabulous, he’s great! You should see him!”

When it became clear that I did not intend to take him up on this, he fell silent. But only a few moments passed before he announced enthusiastically that at least I should see Edgar’s garden. “You’re interested in flowers, and he has a great garden—I don’t know the names of anything, but he’s a real gardener. His garden’s not as big as this one, of course. But it’s nice; you’d like it. I could show you the garden, then we could pick up a hamburger or something. I really want to get out of here; I don’t like these people.”

As the Altshulers’ weekend guest, I would have been committing a social gaffe to leave the party, especially with a complete stranger. Moreover, I knew that for Janice Altshuler, the best part of a party was afterward, when a small group of trusted friends would sit around the living room having high tea—lovely little finger sandwiches and scones and oozy cream cakes, tea or coffee—and rehashing it. We all reveled in the new gossip, evaluating the clothes, the food, and any behavior that was in the least bit unusual. Tonight we would probably have to skirt the main bit of gossip—Ellis Porter’s terrible breach of decorum—since he would be there. But if he had already decamped in shame, there would surely be an orgy of gossip. For me to defect from that crucial after-party session would be as close to unforgivable as any sin in the Altshuler catechism. Only a death in the family could excuse it.

But George had no idea of any of this, since I smiled in pleasure with each invitation, even the repetitions of invitations, as if I was taking them seriously. Indeed, I was: I took them as expressions of George’s desire to see me again. This delighted me. Words kept running through my head: that there would be time, there
will
be time…“time for you and time for me, / And time yet for a hundred indecisions…”

Smilingly complacent, I sat gleaming at him.

He finally gave up, fell silent, and stared at the water with a furrowed brow. It was after six, and the sun was slowly lowering itself into the water, which was brilliant with reflected color. Suddenly, he turned and announced that if I couldn’t come tonight, I absolutely had to visit the garden the next morning. Edgar would be home until he left for rehearsal for next week’s play
(Harvey,
of course) at about eleven. George would be there until around noon. It was urgent that I see this garden.

But guesthood has unbreakable rules. Whenever I stayed overnight at the Altshulers’, I returned to New York the next morning with Leo in his limousine. Leo looked forward to these sessions, the only times we were alone together. Although we always chatted easily enough, he never spoke personally during these drives. But I knew he felt they were our private times for communication. When I got out of the car at my apartment (he dropped me uptown first, then drove downtown), he would clasp my hand with particular fervor and kiss my cheek with special warmth. I could not abandon him.

“He always leaves at eight o’clock in the morning,” I apologized. “He goes in every day. He’s retired, but he has his hand in everywhere. He’s on boards.” That was all Leo did, as far as I knew. “I serve on a lot of boards, Hermione,” he’d told me. I gathered that he—that some people—made money from being on boards. How, I didn’t understand. The few boards I’d been on took up huge amounts of my time and money. They never
paid
anything.

“New York! You’re going to New York?”

“Yes. I live there.”

“Huh! I thought you said…what did you say? Didn’t you say you lived in Bag Bar or something?”

“Sag Harbor.” I laughed. “I have a summer house in Sag Harbor. That’s on Long Island. But I have an apartment in New York too, and that’s where I’m going tomorrow.”

“Well, say! The reason I’m here, in the North—I just came to Connecticut to spend the weekend with Edgar—is to attend a conference of newspaper editors at Columbia, an international seminar. It lasts all week. So I’ll be in New York too!”

His furrowed brow had smoothed; he seemed quite cheered. Eyes glittering, he gazed at me with a broad smile.

“How nice!” I glowed back at him. “So where are you staying?” I asked casually.

Columbia was putting up the participants in university housing, he wasn’t exactly sure where. “Say”—he pulled out a notepad and a ballpoint pen—“give me your phone number and address, and maybe we can have lunch or something.”

Edgar appeared behind George’s chair. “Have to be off, old man,” he said, “grab a bite before show time.” He turned to me. “Say, Hermione, bunch of us’re going to Donnelly’s for a hamburger before the show. Want to come?”

“Yes, come!” George urged, standing.

I stood too. “Thanks, but I can’t. I really can’t.”

“Bring the Altshulers,” Edgar urged. Perhaps he knew their rituals.

“They’ll be tired. They won’t want to go. But thanks.”

George stood there like a demand. “Ask them. Hell,
I’ll
ask them! It’ll be fun,” he insisted.

“Please don’t!” I held up my hand. I could imagine his importunacy swaying Janice to agree, thinking it was important to me, then resenting it afterward, resenting
me,
mourning the loss of the after-party gossip session, giving me the third degree about him, not all that pleasantly…

I just shook my head. “Sorry. It would be fun, but…”

“Well, all right.” George turned away reluctantly. “I’ll call you in New York,” he said.

The two men walked up the steps toward the house. I watched their silhouettes, one tall, one short, in the dusky light. They were talking in low voices, and their heels clattered on the stone terrace. They walked around the back of the house to the side lawn, headed for the parking area, and disappeared.

I sat down again and watched the water. Little caps of foam appeared as the breeze grew stronger, roiling the water, turning the calm Sound into a miniature ocean. It was exciting to watch, like seeing passion arise from tranquillity.

I
LAY IN BED
that night unable to sleep after the hashing-over session. Gossip is stimulating, and raking poor Ellis Porter over the coals (he
had
left early) had been especially so. We’d laughed ourselves silly. And I’d eaten too many sandwiches (they were delicious, and so tiny I gobbled them up without counting) and drunk too much coffee. Janice said it was decaf, but can I trust her? The food, the coffee, and the conversation all contributed to my insomnia, but the content of my awakeness was George. I couldn’t get him out of my head. His urgency, his importunacy—it had been many years since a man had acted that eager, that
demanding
toward me. I tried to recall the last man who had pursued me, pressured me that way. Were any of my husbands that insistent? That doctor in Colorado, the one with the Jeep—he’d been really pushy. And the famous Greek movie director I met at the Opera in Paris, whose name I could never remember. There had been others, but not in years, not since I’d hit my middle fifties. My experience with sexual pursuit had been unsettling: by the time I got used to men pursuing me, I was in my late thirties, when they were just about to stop. It didn’t seem fair, somehow.

But it wasn’t just George’s importunacy. By itself, that never won me over—I never went out with the movie director, for instance. What turned me to mush was his dejection. Sad people touch my heart; they always had, women and men. Some of my best friends are deeply depressed. This has its downside, I have to admit. I get entangled in the idea that I can help them become more cheerful, and of course, I can’t. A number of the men I’d married—my best marriages actually—had been on the depressed side. Charles and Mark. Even Bert, if truth be told, although no one could call that a good marriage. In his case, even depression wasn’t enough…

But on the whole, I understand sadness. I sympathize with it; it is familiar to me. After all, my whole early life was spent in a depressed household, fighting off depression myself. I may be billed as the Queen of Hearts, but I am an ordinary hardworking woman. I may put on a flounced gown and a tiara and have myself photographed on the Altshulers’ grand staircases, but afterward my very bones are tired. I didn’t start out knowing how to behave in rooms of five hundred people—or even five, if they weren’t family. In fact, I am often startled that I did learn these things: I don’t know how I did. Like many of my friends, I’d created myself.

Although today I live in comfort, even luxury, I grew up poor. My family lived in Millington, a pleasant undistinguished town north of Boston. My father, Herman, was exposed to poison gas in the war—World War I, that is. He survived and returned home to marry my mother, Helen, and father five children, but he never really recovered his health, and after many years of illness, he died. Mother was left with five of us, ranging from twelve to two. I was the youngest. Father’s illness and the Depression had depleted their small savings, and they had had to borrow against his life insurance and mortgage the house. Mother was in a pickle. We were too young to be left alone, so she felt she couldn’t go out to work, and besides, she had no particular skills. She believed the only thing she was really good at was baking, so she started baking layer cakes and pies and other confections, and selling them for fifty cents apiece.

That was a fair amount of money during the Depression, when a pound of hamburger cost fifteen cents, but she was an excellent baker and used only the best ingredients—unbleached flour, four score butter, heavy cream, eggs, Swiss chocolate—all the things no one eats anymore. She was a mild woman who unexpectedly exploded on one or two subjects. Baking was one of them: her mouth would curl with contempt at the mere mention of bakers who used lard or Crisco. Mother’s pies were as buttery as shortbread but lighter; her apple, pumpkin, lemon meringue (my favorite), and pecan pies were famous in the neighborhood. She was less imaginative with layer cakes, making only two varieties—a chocolate one with white icing and a vanilla one with chocolate icing—but she made a wonderful cheesecake and a luscious strawberry shortcake and the best cookies I have ever tasted. All our neighbors had enjoyed her baking, sampled at kaffeeklatsches or as gifts offered during illnesses or funerals; the neighbors spread her fame, and her business grew. She began to bake bread and rolls, turning the glassed-in front porch of our house into a full-fledged bakeshop. She made a counter by shirring a long piece of cloth and tacking it onto the front of an old table. At the beginning, we didn’t have glass cabinets like real bakeries: the cakes and pies sat on the table on glass-covered pedestal dishes.

Our big old Victorian house had come down to Mother from her Scots grandmother. It stood on the main street of Millington, a little Massachusetts town whose sole reason for existence, a textile mill, had long since vanished. Mother worked all day and into the night in the big old kitchen at the back of our house, baking, kneading, making dough. Jerry was twelve, and she taught him to chop up fruits and nuts, to knead dough and make frosting—a job she hated. She put my older sisters to work selling. At first, Susan, who was nine, and Merry, who was seven, were very self-important, and Tina and I complained to Mother that they acted as if they were the bosses of us. But soon enough the job became a burden to them, partly because the porch was freezing cold. Mother had storm windows made for the wide glass window panels; she put an electric heater behind the counter and moved our dining room rug to the porch floor. But the porch remained chilly. Susan’s and Merry’s hands and feet were always blue in the winter.

We all missed Father. Well, maybe not Father himself: “Father” was how we referred to our old life, what we called it. I have no memory at all of my father. But once in a while, when Mom went to bed early, we kids would sit around the dinner table putting off doing the dishes, and Susan and Jerry would reminisce about how it was when Daddy was there. They remembered Mom sitting at the kitchen table talking to them while they ate cookies and milk after school; and they remembered going outside to play every single day except when it rained. They had even gone to the beach. When I was five, that awed me: I’d never seen a beach. Jerry and Susan and Merry remembered Daddy walking down the long street from the bus stop after work. He repaired watches in a jewelry shop, but he wasn’t working by the time I was born. In those earlier days, they said, Mom would have dinner on the table as he walked in the door, real dinners, with meat and potatoes and vegetables. And sometimes Daddy would play ball with Jerry after dinner or let Merry hold the hose when he watered the front lawn.