Summer House (6 page)

“You know I do. And you know I will. I promise. But I’ve got to get through this family business first. I’ve explained it to you. Come on, talk nice to me.”

Talk nice to me?
Worth’s voice held a low, playful, sexual urgency Helen hadn’t heard for years. The very sound of it made her blush. She stood there, paralyzed in the hall, eavesdropping on her husband and flushing with a painful heat.

“I don’t think she’s awake yet. I don’t smell coffee. But she’ll be up any minute so I really should get off the phone. Oh, Sweet Cakes, you know I’ll phone you.” His voice grew louder, as if he were moving closer to the door, to the hall, where Helen stood paralyzed.

Then the primitive fight-or-flight survival instinct shut down her thoughts and shocked her into action. Heart pounding, she raced down the stairs and into the den, where she paced around the room, wringing her hands together.

My God. Worth was having an affair.

She had known something was wrong. She’d sensed it, the presence of a parasitic vine twining around her life, draining her marriage of its nutrients.

Growing green and supple, while she grew gray and brittle.

But perhaps she was wrong! Perhaps—but no. She had heard her husband say it. All he wanted was to take Sweet Cakes to bed.

All right, then, perhaps it wasn’t
serious.
But what if it was? Worth was a handsome man with enormous charm and charisma. He was a powerful man with many friends. She was sure he hadn’t had affairs before now. For one thing, he was always so busy, either at the bank or with his family. Of course she was not naïve; she knew a man could always find time to have an affair, but Worth was a Wheelwright, and Wheelwrights were all about family.

Worth’s father would not have tolerated any kind of insult to the family. But Herb had died five years ago. He was not here to judge. Nona judged, and harshly, but she didn’t have the kinds of access Herb had had to the world of men. She did not have the enormous range of contacts.

Was this why Worth was having an affair? Because his father had died and his mother was aging? Nona’s hearing and strength were failing. Worth was always her favorite, and Nona’s slowly flagging energy had to be very hard for him to see.

And his children were refusing to go through the golden doors Worth had opened for them, into the business of the family bank. Perhaps he considered himself a failure because of this, and Worth did not like to fail.

Oh, come on, Helen
, she told herself. It doesn’t take a convoluted
Freudian reason for a man to have an affair. It only takes Sweet Cakes and chemistry. What should she do?

What
could
she do?

Should she confront him? No. Not now. Not today. It was Nona’s birthday. Her children were already bringing enough disorder into the clockwork perfection of the Wheelwright family. She would not allow herself to distract anyone from this weekend celebration of their revered and beloved Nona.

But she was almost shivering with a frantic energy that outdid any caffeine hit she’d ever had. Was she hysterical? Probably. She had reason to be!

She had to think about something else, or she’d simply explode. Hurrying to her desk, she forced herself to focus.
Book sale
, her calendar said. Book sale. She needed to sort books for the island library sale.

One wall of the den had shelves built in from floor to ceiling, and the shelves were full. In some places, books had been placed in front of or on top of the original rows. Pacing back and forth, she scanned the titles, and then she began to empty the shelves.
The Scarlet Letter!
They hadn’t read that in years. And all those Hemingways were her college texts. And Edgar Allan Poe was so weird and depressing. These editions, handsomely bound, would bring a pretty penny.

Her stack grew. She would box these up and take them down to the island when they moved down for the summer.

And the children’s books! She could pack those too, all of them! Who knew when she would ever have grandchildren? She
longed
for grandchildren, but would she ever have any? Oliver and Owen wouldn’t have children. Teddy was practically a child himself. And she couldn’t press the responsibility on Charlotte. Charlotte already had enough on her plate, with her father’s constant reminders that he’d love her to return to work at the bank.

“What are you doing?”

Helen jumped, startled, heart pounding, as if she’d been caught in some dire guilty act. “Books,” she managed to say. “I’m sorting books.”

“Why now? And why are you crying?” Worth came toward her, an expression of genuine concern on his face. “Helen? What’s wrong?”

Helen turned away and hid her face in her hands.

“Grandchildren,” she sputtered desperately. “I’ll never have grandchildren to read all these wonderful books to.”

Worth put his arms around her and pulled her close to his body. “Of course we’ll have grandchildren. Everyone has their families late these days. Charlotte’s only thirty.”

Helen sniffed and wiped her cheeks with her hands. “I know. I’m just being silly.”

“Not silly. Not at all. I’d like grandchildren, too.”

She pulled away from him. His warmth and understanding made her feel like an emotional nutcase; he was having sex with Sweet Cakes and yet he could be so loving to his wife. She couldn’t process it.

“I need to shower and pack,” she said, without looking at him. “We don’t want to be late.”

Without waiting for a reply, she left the den and hurried up the stairs to her bedroom. She crossed her room, entered the bathroom, shut the door and locked it, stripped off her gown, and stepped into her shower. Pain slammed at her head. She wrenched the water taps open to the fullest, grateful for the onslaught of noise and water. She bent over, put her hands on her knees, and gasped for breath.

The hot water beat against her bare back. She unfolded to her full height and sagged against the tiled wall, letting the steady flow of water comfort her.

But the thought would not recede: Worth was having an affair.

Had Nona ever run down the hall and thrown herself into a shower to collect her thoughts? Helen doubted it. Nona was always composed. Nona was perfect.

Helen turned off the water, stepped out, dried off, and ran a comb through her heavy, curly salt-and-pepper hair. She’d always been secretly proud of her hair, thick and wavy and luxurious. She never wore makeup, except for lipstick on formal occasions. Her skin was pretty good, considering all the time she’d spent in the sun. Her
mother had been an early devotee of sunblock and straw hats. Her blue eyes were her best feature, she thought; she needed glasses only for reading. And although she’d gained weight over the years, the various sports she pursued in her own mild way and the hours spent on the exercise bike or treadmill when she thought about it had paid off. Perhaps she was not slim, but she was not fat, either. Until now, she’d considered herself just pretty much
healthy.
And at sixty, healthy was fabulous.

But obviously not fabulous enough for Worth. Helen returned to her bedroom and pulled a loose floral sundress over her head. She slipped into a cashmere cardigan in the same dreamy pinks and sat down on the side of the bed to buckle her sandals. As she stood before her mirror, fastening her necklace, a tinkling dangle of silver with beads and nuggets of reds and yellows and blues, her hands trembled.
Sweet Cakes.
The name conjured up a soft blond beauty, someone with delicious flesh and adorable dimples. Someone irresistible.

Someone who could change all their lives.

How different would this summer be? Would Worth still fly down every weekend, to swim, sail, and play tennis, to enjoy lobster dinners and clambakes? Or would he remain in Boston, claiming the exigencies of work, when in truth he wanted to be with his—his what? His
mistress?
That sounded rather Victorian and frivolous. His
girlfriend?
She couldn’t imagine Worth with a girl.

Well, then, a
lover.
She hugged herself and rocked slowly as she sat on the side of her unmade bed.

“Helen?” Worth called from the bottom of the stairs. “What’s taking you so long? We’ve got to leave for the airport.”

Helen steadied herself. “I’ll be right down,” she called.

Arrival

Four

F
rom her chaise
, Nona heard the white shells on the driveway crackle and then doors slammed, voices called out, and a baby cried.

She looked out to see them file beneath the curved arbor, through the hedge, her daughter Grace and Grace’s family—Kellogg, the nicest and most boring man on the planet, and their three daughters: Mandy, thirty-five; Mellie, thirty-three; and Mee, twenty-eight. When they were infants, their names had been cutely abbreviated from Amanda, Amelia, and Amy, and of course they were referred to as the Ms. The fact that not one of the girls, when she became an adult, insisted on reverting to her full name suggested to Nona that all three granddaughters chose to exist in the infantile state their parents preferred.

But Nona had to admit that nicknames were rampant in the Wheelwright family. Long ago, Oliver had referred to Kellogg, his daughters’ husbands, and Worth as the Bank Boys, and the name stuck. That was, at least, a useful moniker. Secretly, Nona thought of
Kellogg and his daughters’ husbands as the Nonfiction Husbands: no romance, no mystery, no suspense. She wished she could share this witticism with someone without hurting anyone. Perhaps someday she would tell Oliver. He could keep a secret, and he’d appreciate the humor.

But she would never want to hurt her granddaughters. They were nice girls, the Ms, never the least trouble, and pretty, but they lacked the spirit, what Nona thought of as
spunk
, that inspired Worth’s children. Ms had made good marriages, all three—although Mee had just gotten a divorce.

Something rather strange had been happening to Nona over the past few years, and it worried her. She’d even considered discussing this with a psychiatric doctor, and Nona had always scorned therapists and psychology. The older she grew, the more she seemed to love
people in general.
When she voyaged across the water on the ferry, she watched the other passengers and felt an unexplainable rush of affection for them all—the gawky teenage boys wearing their jeans so low they trod on the cuffs; the young women with their glossy hair, multicolored nails, and cell phones; even the (probably illegal) Hispanic immigrants clutching their shopping bags full of the inexpensive merchandise one could always buy on the Cape and never on Nantucket. Or if she watched television—for example, one winter evening she’d watched the Super Bowl with Charlotte and some of Charlotte’s friends. A good-looking blond-haired man named Tom Petty sang during halftime, and the cameras panned around to show some faces of the individuals swaying to the music, smiling, singing, waving light sticks, all of them young and in jeans, and Nona was swept with something she could only call bliss at the sight of so many beautiful and happy young people. It was odd, but she felt related to them all, as if they were all her grandchildren. This is how God feels, she thought, looking down at an infinity of faces.

And yet now that her real grandchildren were arriving, what she felt was a kind of dread. She seemed to have lost her enthusiasm for
people in particular.
Or, rather, for particular people. She loved having Charlotte around, and when Oliver visited she was in heaven. But plodding Kellogg and his three bland daughters often bored and
sometimes just plain irritated her. That in turn made her feel guilty. She and Herb had tried their best not to show favoritism to any of their children or grandchildren, and she thought they’d succeeded.

What had caused this change? It had to be this business with Charlotte’s garden. It was peculiar and almost amusing, how Beach Grass Garden’s paltry net income of four thousand dollars had sent the family into a maelstrom of jealousy and greed. Of course no one, and Nona included herself, had expected Charlotte to make a go of her garden. It had seemed just one more of the idealistic, save-the-world, bubble-headed schemes that all the grandchildren had proposed at one time or another. Even Mee had taken time off from college to travel the country telling fortunes at state fairs. She’d set off in an ancient rattling VW camper with her boyfriend Sky, a handsome, emaciated fellow who seemed to survive on whatever nutrients he inhaled from marijuana plants. They had gotten as far as Indiana before the VW broke down. She’d called her parents, who sent her a plane ticket. Mee flew home and went back to college that January. Sky had stayed in Indiana and, as far as Nona knew, Mee never heard from him again.

But remembering this about Mee made Nona feel a surge of affection for her, and the timing was propitious, for here they were, three of the four Wheelwright granddaughters. Mandy carried her baby, Zoe, and her husband, Claus, had four-year-old Christian riding on his shoulders. Sweet little children, really. Mellie lumbered along behind, hugely pregnant, with her husband, Douglas, following, his forehead wrinkled in concentration as he barked into his cell phone. Mee came last, by herself.