Summer House (11 page)

“Worth wants Teddy to go into the bank.”

“Eventually, yes.”

“And Teddy is your rebel. Your rogue.”

Helen shrugged. “I suppose all three children are.”

“You look a little frazzled, too,” Nona observed.

Helen raised her hand to her face. “I didn’t sleep well.”

“Perhaps the bed on the sleeping porch is too bumpy.”

Of course, Helen thought. In this house, Nona knows everything. “I like fresh air. Cool air. I’m still having hot flashes.” That would head the older woman off at the pass. Nona was not comfortable discussing female physicality.

“I keep worrying about Worth.” Nona voice sharpened. “Charlotte is certainly being given her way in the matter of career. And she’s thirty now. She’s had plenty of time for summer romances and playing the field.”

Helen felt skewered by her mother-in-law’s clear blue gaze. “You think Charlotte should marry Whit Lowry.”

“Well, he
is
a catch. From all I hear, Whit is proving to be quite capable at the bank. He’s a handsome young man, and a good sailor and athlete. No blots on his copybook as far as I know.”

Honestly, Helen thought, this family! She made an attempt to keep her tone reasonable, but she did feel angry. She was not going to
sacrifice her daughter to the Wheelwrights’ legacy.
If you only knew what your precious Worth has been doing!
Helen wanted to cry. She heard the emotional quaver in her voice when she replied, “This is all true, Nona, but you can’t engineer love. We aren’t living in feudal times.”

But Nona only sipped her tea. “Perhaps you’re right,” she said at last. “Perhaps you can’t
engineer
love. Yet Whit and Charlotte will be thrown together over the summer. Whit and his family are coming tonight for my birthday party, aren’t they?”

“Yes, of course they are. But Nona, Charlotte has known Whit since she was a child. She worked with him at the bank and nothing sparked between them.”

“That was three years ago,” Nona reminded Helen. “Let’s just sit back and see what happens. And you, Helen, try to get Worth out on the dance floor, will you? Be sure he drinks a lot of champagne. I’d like to see him enjoy himself. I’d like to see him smiling.”

“Of course.” Helen rose. “Shall I take the tray down?”

“If you would.”

Helen lifted the tray and crossed over the thick blue and gray Aubusson rug to the door.

When her hand was on the doorknob, Nona said, “Oh, and Helen?”

“Yes?”

“I will be wearing the navy blue dress tonight. It displays my grandmother’s diamonds best. Should anyone ask.”

“The navy blue dress it is,” Helen agreed, admiring the way Nona closed their little tête-à-tête with a moment of light conspiracy.

Instead of returning
to the kitchen, Helen went down the hall to the sleeping porch. She wanted to take just a few minutes to regain her equilibrium. She had made her bed after showering and dressing and before breakfast—one did, in Nona’s house—but even so, the room appeared, not messy, but occupied. Her dresses hung from the wrought-iron plant hangers, her evening sandals sat tidily against the
wall, her paperback novel and her purse and some toiletries were on the card table, and her stained-glass silk wrapper lay where she’d tossed it, at the foot of the daybed.

Sinking into the wicker rocker, Helen planted her feet on the floor and counseled herself to breathe, just breathe. She forced herself to relax her hands in her lap.
Worth. Sweet Cakes
—

“Mom!” Charlotte’s voice was sharp. “What in the world are you doing out here?”

There in the doorway stood her beautiful daughter. Overalls again today, and an old white shirt, her butterscotch hair pulled back and held with a bit of gardening twine.

“Hi, Charlotte. I thought you’d be out in your garden.”

“I was. I came in to grab a bite of breakfast.” She glanced over her shoulder, then skewered Helen with a look.
“Why
are you sleeping out here?”

Helen shrugged, amused. “Why shouldn’t I sleep out here? I never have before, not in all the years I’ve stayed in this house. I’d think you’d understand, Charlotte, the appeal of being almost outdoors, and yet—”

“But what about Dad?” Charlotte plunked herself down on the edge of the daybed.

“What about him?”

“Why aren’t you sleeping with him?”

Helen snorted with exasperation. “Charlotte, Dad and I have had separate bedrooms for ages. He can’t sleep with me prowling around the room, or reading in bed, or flipping from side to side in one my insomniac fits. You know that.”

“Yes, but that’s at home. Here—” Charlotte scraped a bit of dirt from her wrist.

“Here, what?” She knew what her daughter meant but she was also feeling very cranky with Charlotte, who always assumed Worth could do no wrong and that Nona was nothing less than an angel from heaven.

Charlotte squirmed. “Well, there aren’t as many bedrooms here. What about everyone else?”

“Everyone has a bedroom, Charlotte. Except for Teddy, and he can
take an attic room. And you know Oliver and Owen are staying at a B and B in town.”

Charlotte slumped. “But what will Nona think? If you’re not sharing a room with Dad?”

“Charlotte, Nona is well acquainted with the aggravations of old age. She knows I have trouble sleeping. As for the others, I’m sure Grace and Kellogg have nights when they sleep separately, too. It doesn’t mean anything.” Rising from her chair, she crossed the small room to sit next to her daughter. She put an arm around her. “Sweetie. What’s bothering you?”

Charlotte leaned against her. “Oh, I don’t know, Mom. I just want everyone to be happy.”

“Everyone is happy, Charlotte.” She squeezed her child’s shoulder. “Tell me,” she said briskly. “What are you doing in your garden today? And can I help?”

Charlotte perked up. “Are you serious? About helping? Gosh, if you could do some weeding—”

“I’d love to.”

“But it’s hard work, Mom. It really stresses the back.”

“Why don’t I do what I can, and I’ll stop when I get tired?”

“Great!” Charlotte jumped up. “Okay, I’ve got to get back outside, and you need to put on work clothes and sunblock and a sun hat.”

“Aye-aye.” Helen stood and saluted. How easy it was, just for now, to make her daughter happy. Smiling, she remembered what she and Cecilia, her best friend, had agreed when their children became teenagers: they couldn’t think about what would happen in the future. They had to be grateful for the present moment. They had to take things one day at a time. Even if, sometimes, it was one hard, confusing, maddening day at a time.

Nona’s Party

Eight

N
ona spent Saturday
in her room, saving her energy for the evening’s festivities. It was a little appalling, how easily she dozed through the hours in her chaise near the window. It wasn’t so much that she slept as that she daydreamed, and not even that, it was more a kind of drifting, as if her chaise of its own accord transformed into a hot-air balloon or Aladdin’s magic carpet, lifting her effortlessly up and away from her present life, out the window, above the clouds, and smoothly through her past.

She could look down on herself as a girl, galloping her enormous old quarter horse across the fields, riding western, not that prissy eastern way, as wild as an Indian, her hair flying straight out behind her and her springer spaniel loping alongside, pink tongue hanging out, smiling, because Pup loved to run. She could spy herself as a young woman, giddy and silly and crazy with love for the dashing officer she’d met, Herbert Wheelwright. She could watch herself keeping her back straight as she endured her mother-in-law’s barbed “compliments,” and wasn’t amused by those memories; the old wash
of anger flooded through her, as heated and potent as it had been all those years ago. She saw her babies again, and her heart sang with joy, and she heard the knock on the door of their Boston house in 1970, when Captain Bruce Moore came to inform them that their son Bobby had been killed on the battlefield in Vietnam. Such grief. Such darkness. She attended Grace and Kellogg’s wedding—what a fuss that was!—and Worth and Helen’s, and she saw the pink baby faces of her grandchildren, and the hot-air balloon carried her just a little farther, and she was at Mandy’s wedding, and Mellie’s, and Mee’s, and she saw the sweet precious faces of her great-grandchildren, Christian first, with his great thatch of brown hair, and then bald little Zoe.

What a lot of life she had lived! No wonder she was tired!

All day long she was aware of the unusual commotion in her house. It always took awhile, at the beginning of summer, to get used to the noises of a full house; it was like going to sleep in a library and waking up one day to discover that overnight it had become a train station. Baby Zoe wailed like a siren. As Christian waited in the upstairs hall for his mother to change his baby sister’s diaper, he kicked a ball up and down the hall, yelling “Goal!” when it thumped into the wall. Nona didn’t mind. Long ago she’d packed away all the valuable antique vases and heirloom bibelots, and she didn’t miss them. Downstairs, the doors slammed and squeaked and voices rose and fell, Grace’s chipped soprano answered by Glorious’s slow deep hums. Water ran through the pipes as various members took their showers, and the uncarpeted back stairs resounded with footsteps running up and down.

At four, a knock came on Nona’s door. “Yes?”

Helen peered in. “Are you awake, Nona?”

“I am now.” Nona waved Helen into her room.

Helen was wearing a brilliantly colored silk wrapper and a pair of rubber flip-flops, and her hair was freshly shampooed, hanging in those ridiculous Shirley Temple ringlets that no grown woman should sport, but of course Helen couldn’t help it if she had naturally curly hair. Although Nona secretly wondered if that rebellious hair didn’t have a genetic link—like white cats and deafness—with an insubordinate personality.

Helen said, “We thought you might like to have a little bite to eat.”

Nona frowned, perplexed. “I ate lunch today, didn’t I?”

“Yes, you did, but that was at noon. We thought you ought to have something substantial before the party.”

The hardest part about becoming truly aged was having to take suggestions, which were really velvet-gloved commands, from younger people. Nona tried not to bristle. They were, after all, only thinking of her own good. “Won’t there be food at the party?”

“Of course. A buffet dinner. But you know how it is, impossible to eat with people all around you talking to you. We thought perhaps a nice hot pot of tea and a cheese sandwich?”

Nona snorted. “How about a nice big Scotch and some Cheez-Its.”

“Nona! Cheez-Its?”

“I’m old. They settle my stomach. And I have always drunk a Scotch every day of my life, you know that, Helen.” She peered closely at her daughter-in-law. “Your nose is red.”

“I know. I helped weed in Charlotte’s garden today.” Helen put her hands on her back. “I’m not as young as I used to be.”

“Who is? But you’ve got just a bit of a burn, a glow, actually; it becomes you.”

Helen blushed. “I’ll go get your drink and your Cheez-Its.”

Nona wedged herself up off her chaise, leaned on her cane, and wobbled off into her private bathroom. She urinated, washed her hands, and studied her reflection in the mirror. She looked as old as Moses, and about as attractive. From this room, she could hear Grace in the next bedroom.

“I
knew
they’d do this! Helen’s children have always been unreliable! They’re going to ruin everything!”

Kellogg’s voice was soothing. “Grace. They’ll be here, or they won’t; it doesn’t matter. You have arranged a magnificent party, and Nona will be thrilled.”

Nona sighed. Why did Grace not have Worth’s ease? Was it her fault? Of course it was her fault. She would have to be fulsome in her compliments to Grace. Grace was such a worker.

She hobbled back to her bedroom and lowered herself into the old wing chair by the fireplace. She knew from experience it was easy to pull up the old lacquered octagonal Chinese table, for eating. She was glad Helen had suggested a little treat. She
was
peckish.

Through her open window, she heard the crackle of gravel. Doors slammed. Voices called out. More commotion. Laughter and more laughter. Then the pounding of feet up the back stairs, and her door opened.

Into her room burst two gorgeous young men, their confident air of health, strength, and sheer love of life billowing around them like an invisible perfume. Oliver and Owen.

“Nona! Forgive us for being late! Our plane had an emergency landing in Kansas City! It was such a drama!” Oliver strode over to Nona, talking, gesturing, smiling, while Owen stood shyly in the background. Tall, slender, elegant, Oliver had honey-brown hair, shining azure eyes, milk-white teeth, and the overall aura of a knight straight from King Arthur’s round table. He was wearing a three-piece tight black suit, and his hair had been cut and gelled into one of those bizarre thatches pointing straight up, and he hadn’t shaved for a day or two, so his square jaw was dotted with whiskers.