Summer House (2 page)

But last year Charlotte had made a profit of four thousand dollars,
and suddenly everyone—well, her aunt and uncle and her cousins—was having fits of jealousy claiming that Nona was giving more to Charlotte than to the rest of them. Which was crazy of them, because to them four thousand dollars was just
nothing.

It was not the four thousand dollars, really, Charlotte knew, that was the issue. It was the whole property, land and house and beach, worth several million, that everyone wanted—and, rightfully, had a claim to. Nona was almost ninety; she couldn’t live forever, even though everyone wished she might and Nona herself seemed to think it possible. Nona had two living children—Charlotte’s father, Worth, and his sister, Grace—two in-laws—Charlotte’s mother, Helen, and Grace’s husband, Kellogg—six grandchildren, and—from Mandy, Grace’s daughter—two great-grandchildren. Nona had not, would not, disclose the details of her will, even though at each annual Family Meeting her children pressed her. When the time is right, she would respond, and it didn’t matter if they claimed to be insulted, she wouldn’t change her mind.

The three acres of land constituting Charlotte’s garden didn’t belong to Charlotte. There had never been any kind of arrangement like that, and in fact Charlotte had insisted on paying a token rent to her grandmother for the use of the land. But no one in the family had ever expected her to stick with gardening; they had all assumed that sooner or later Charlotte would think up some more appealing project and wander away, letting the acreage revert to its natural state.

Well, she was proving them wrong. Her grueling, dogged physical labor had paid off in unexpected ways. No one had expected her garden to be a success; she could understand that completely. She’d never been dedicated to anything before.

When she was younger, she’d had trouble settling down to any kind of career. In college, she’d never known what she wanted to major in. She spent her early twenties drifting from place to place and job to job. She’d tried writing for a newspaper in the Northampton area where she went to college, and then she tried selling ads for them, and then she went backpacking in Europe and forgot about the newspaper. In Italy she met an old friend from college who was
starting a chic shop on Newbury Street, and in a moment of enthusiasm and too much Chianti, she’d agreed to return home to manage it. She’d done all right, but she’d grown bored with retail, so she waited tables for a while, thinking she might learn about the restaurant business, but that hadn’t captured her soul either.

When her father suggested again that she try to learn the family business, she surrendered. She’d always known she would, sooner or later. She adored her father and wanted to please him, and she had worked in the bank for three long years. She’d started as a lowly teller, and then worked in residential lending and for a while in operations. She did her best—and she’d hated every minute of it.

Oh, in the very beginning, she’d had fun with the dress-up aspect of office work. She’d bought some clever little suits and killer high heels. Her parents gave her an expensive coffee-dark leather briefcase with gleaming brass buckles for her birthday, and she carried it to the bank daily, but in truth she was more impressed with how it looked as an accessory than what it ever had in it. Numbers numbed her mind. Graphs, rows, charts, and bank language made her eyes roll back in her head. “Liquidation” made her thirsty, and “asset class” made her think, childishly, of her bum. But Charlotte knew her father hoped at least one of his children had inherited his passion for banking, and she always wanted to make her father happy, so she tried. She really did try.

But she’d hated it. She’d been not just bored but
miserable.
Perhaps that explained why she had an affair, but it did not make it right.

Nothing could ever make it right. But she could try, somehow, to make amends.

When she decided to attempt a market garden, she did so from the deepest part of her heart. She truly believed that one person could change the world—just a little bit—for the better, every day, and to do this through hard physical labor made a kind of sense to her. Plus, her idea was good. Everyone was trying to buy locally now, and on Nantucket there were plenty of posh restaurants and wealthy people who would pay top prices for organic produce. After her decision to leave the bank, Charlotte had determined not to appear like a feather brain in front of her family. She prepared a business plan and
made copies for everyone, and she kept records, paid taxes, and worked her butt off. Also, she was living with Nona, which meant free room and board for Charlotte but relieved the family of no small amount of financial obligation, not to mention personal duty.

After Charlotte’s grandfather Herb died five years ago, Nona had surprised her family by stating that she wanted to sell the Boston house and move permanently to Nantucket. Worth and Grace had objected strenuously. You are eighty-five, Nona, they reminded her. Nantucket is an island with a small cottage hospital. Your health might be fine now, but what if something happens? And think of the winters, so long and dreary. You’ll be so isolated. None of your relatives lives on the island, and most of your island friends have died of old age. And that house is so huge—think of the expense of heating it! And what if you fall down the stairs? In the middle of the night! We will worry about you every moment of every day!

Nona was never one to admit to any shortcomings, and the truth was that she was in excellent health for a woman her age. She insisted on moving to the island house, and to satisfy her anxious offspring she hired Glorious Wellington from Kingston, Jamaica, to live with her and act as housekeeper and, if necessary, nurse, for Glorious was an LPN. Glorious was in her thirties, a tall, broad-shouldered, voluptuous woman with a gentle voice and an easy laugh.

Nona’s children weren’t thrilled with this expenditure of money for live-in help, but it was Nona’s money, after all. And after the first year, they had to admit that Nona seemed to do very well indeed, living in that drafty old wooden yacht of a house, even in the winter. She had friends over once a week to play bridge, and she attended lectures, plays, and concerts, driven to all events by Napoleon Posada in his ancient Cadillac taxi, where Nona sat in the front seat and caught up on all the local gossip, for Napoleon knew it all.

Still, as each year passed, Nona slowed down just a little. Arthritis crippled her, so she needed a cane to walk and could no longer jump up and rush up stairs the way she had all her life. Her hearing and sight were diminished, and more and more she seemed to be forgetful, absentminded. When Glorious had to fly back to Jamaica when her own mother was ill, Nona assured everyone she was fine alone for
a few days. But Helen had made a little spur-of-the-moment trip down from Boston and discovered that for three days Nona had pretty much forgotten to eat. When Helen pointed this out, Nona had argued that at her age she didn’t need much to survive.

Luckily for Charlotte, this was just a month before Family Meeting, and when she submitted her market garden plan, everyone in the family saw at once how helpful it would be to have a member of the family living full-time in the house with Nona.

The arrangement had worked out nicely for everyone. Or it had, until her relatives learned that she’d actually made a profit on her harebrained scheme.

Would it be better, somehow, if her garden enterprise failed?

Carrying a long woven basket piled with weeds for the compost heap, Charlotte headed back through the rows of growing plants to the greenhouse. Her back and arms ached pleasantly. She liked this feeling, liked having worked hard. How different it was from the bank, where she had spent each day with a cramped back and a crashed brain. Now she felt healthy, clear-eyed, well-used.

And she felt guilty for even this much pleasure.

Two

N
ona spent
much of her day tucked up in a lawn chair in the garden, dozing beneath the sun. If it was stormy, or overcast like today, she settled on a chaise at the window with the tea service on a table by her side and a good book in her lap. She seldom read. More often she napped or looked out at the garden and remembered all that had happened over her ninety years.

Today she could not seem to get comfortable. She wedged another pillow behind her back and smoothed the mohair throw over her legs, but she was still restless. Well, of course she was; everyone would be arriving at any moment, and the peace she had come to crave in her dotage would be shattered.

From where she sat now, she could see out into the garden terrace, with its walls of high privet hedge, and just a bit farther through the arched opening onto the white gravel drive. She would spot any arriving vehicle.

Although the main entrance to Wheelwright House with its pretentious Doric columns faced Polpis Harbor, the descendants of its
builder, old Horace Wheelwright, never understood why. It wasn’t as if the mailman, neighbors, or friends regularly arrived at the house by water. When any of the family took a boat out, they set off from the dock at the boathouse on the far side of the property, and they got to the boathouse by leaving the mudroom at the side entrance of the house and following an ancient slate walk carpeted with low-lying mosses and determined periwinkle. The mudroom door was also the entrance for anyone in the family carrying armfuls of groceries or luggage from the garage or the half-circle white shell drive. Guests parked on the drive, walked beneath the arch in the high wall of privet hedge, and followed the path over the slate terrace to the French doors. These opened into the long living room, with its sofas and chairs and piano and fireplace and, at the far end, its expansive view of the harbor.

Back when she was a new bride and still known by her given name of Anne, she had learned how to keep the hedge healthy and trimmed from her mother-in-law, the ironically christened Charity Wheelwright. Anne would have preferred to allow her three children to play in the garden, but Charity Wheelwright was adamant. Children would spoil the elegance and symmetry, they’d poke holes in the thick green tapestry with their careless games. So Worth and Bobby and Grace were sent out the side door, through the mudroom, with their nanny, to play on the windy moors and in the high lofts of the barn—before it was converted to a garage. Perhaps Nona—Anne—longed to go with them, to jump, shrieking, down into the old piles of hay, to chase them through the slender trunks of the forest behind the barn, to feel the tickle of low wild grasses beneath her own bare feet. But in those days, a woman, a
good
woman, was responsive to the demands of her mother-in-law. In those days, a good woman put her husband first and her mother-in-law second. And children were tended by others until they were old enough to sit quietly at the dinner table and appreciate adult conversation.

Still, Nona believed she had been a good mother. An approachable, reasonable, generous-spirited mother-in-law. And an affectionate, adoring, devoted grandmother. It gave her a sense of satisfaction, even smugness, to know that all her family was arriving today to help
her celebrate her birthday. That would be fine. She even looked forward to it, although at her age she hated being the center of attention. Still, Grace had arranged a party at the yacht club, and Nona always loved parties.

No, it was Family Meeting that was making her nervous. Family Meeting was just two weeks away, and she was uncomfortable—
anxious
, really. Nona shifted her knees beneath the mohair blanket as her thoughts stung at her like tiny insects.

The silly business about Charlotte’s little garden!

Three years ago, when Charlotte asked to use the three acres of Nona’s waterfront property that fronted Polpis Road for an organic market garden, Nona had readily agreed. After all, the land was just lying there, fallow, low scrubland with no endangered plant species and all the beauty of a forlorn prairie. You couldn’t even see the land from the first floor of the house because the formal garden, walled in by its high privet hedge, blocked the view. Nona had thought that Charlotte’s business plan was well considered and supported with research and statistics, and the others—Charlotte’s parents, Worth and Helen, Worth’s sister, Grace, and her husband, Kellogg—had thought so, too. When they discussed it at Family Meeting, no one had objected. Not Charlotte’s siblings, not Grace and Kellogg’s three daughters.

Of course, everyone thought privately that Charlotte wouldn’t really follow through; Charlotte’s enthusiasms were like firecrackers, explosive and brief. Everyone assumed she’d tire of the endless manual labor of gardening, and the land would soon be covered again with wild grasses.

No one had expected that Charlotte would love the work, that her garden would flourish, that she would, so soon, be making a profit from the place. Oh, Charlotte wasn’t close to making a living off it, not yet, but Grace and Kellogg and their daughters were already mumbling about “balancing out inequalities.” What did they want? Nona thought irritably. Should she give them each a check for a pitiful four thousand dollars or whatever little amount Charlotte netted last year? Would that keep them from becoming jealous, from believing
that Charlotte was her favorite and receiving more than the others?

It was all nonsense. Nona would not be bullied, no matter with what enormous charm. For that matter, she’d gladly write a few checks to Grace and Kellogg’s children. As for Charlotte’s brothers, Teddy might not even show up and Oliver was sweet and easy about everything. Oliver was quite happy in his life out there on the West Coast, and both he and his partner had work they loved, so they didn’t worry about money. Also, they were Dinks. Nona congratulated herself for knowing, at her age, the term Dinks, which meant Dual Income, No Kids. And she was pleased to remember that she had always treated Oliver and Owen with love, acceptance, and unconditional welcome.

Some days she succeeded better than others. Some days the present rushed toward her like a storm, wild with gale-force winds, rogue lightning strikes, and thundering rain, and she found herself taking refuge in the past. Not all her memories were easy. No one’s were. Yet over the years time had spun her memories into a kind of nest, a comfortable silken cushion into which her mind fit as tidily as a ring into a jewel box. She felt snug there. She escaped the failures and frustrations of her aging body and was young again. Surely those memories of her youthful passions would help her be a good grandmother to her passionate descendants. She hoped that was the case.