The Children (16 page)

*   *   *

Everett always thought Whit never knew about what went on between the two of us. He imagined that Whit would have been enraged, that he would have fired him and thrown him out of his house if he knew. But Whit did know. One morning, the summer after we first started hooking up, Whit had woken up early and saw a young woman leaving Everett's house. He had chuckled to himself, he later told me. He couldn't see who it was through the lake mist, in that silvery predawn light, but it wasn't the first time he'd seen one of Everett's girlfriends coming or going. He was, therefore, very surprised a moment later when I tumbled in through the dog door and landed at his feet.

“Charlotte!” he said after a moment. “Where the hell are you coming from?”

“Um—”

“Did I just see you leave Everett's?”

“No,” I said. “Well, it's not what you think. I was just out walking. I just stopped at his house to say hi.”

Whit looked puzzled. I replayed the moment obsessively in my mind all morning, wondering if he was angry or disappointed in me. Ultimately, I realized that he had just seemed to be surprised. He had looked at me, then he'd ducked to look through the window at Everett's. Finally, he'd shrugged.

“I need a coffee,” he had said. That was it.

That afternoon, I was walking down to the beach for a swim when he called me over to the shed. He was holding a banjo.

“Here, I want to see how it sounds. I'm sending it to a guy up in Northern California.”

I took the banjo from him and sat on the bench outside the shed. I plucked at a few strings, listening carefully.

“It's in tune. Just play something,” Whit said. So I played one of his favorite songs. It was an old folk song he had taught me when I was little, and I embellished it with some crazy licks during the chorus. He sang along. It was impossible for Whit not to sing to a tune.

Wake up, wake up darling Corey

What makes you sleep so sound

The revenue officers are coming

They're gonna tear your still house down

Whit was belting it out by the final verse, and I ended with a few good fast strums.

“Sounds pretty sweet,” I said. I turned the banjo over and saw the inlaid mahogany that surrounded the drum and the graceful curve of the neck. “It's beautiful, Whit.”

Whit smiled when I handed it to him. He looked it over with pride.

“I think it's the best I've ever made,” he said. “It's the closest I'll ever come to making art, this banjo.”

“That's what you say about every banjo you make.”

“This is it, though, this one's the best.”

From Everett's house came the sound of his truck starting. We watched as he backed out of his driveway and then drove off. Everett gave us a little honk as he passed, and I waved.

“The thing you haven't considered,” Whit said, gently tightening one of the strings, “is what'll happen when it's over between you two. Nothing can ever come of this thing. You're never going to stay here in Harwich, and he's not likely to leave.”

“Yeah, well, so what? We're just having fun,” I said.

“You're setting yourself up for some awkward times ahead, once one of you starts dating somebody else. That's all. It's just too close to home. It puts Everett in a compromising situation. I'd hate to think that he'd have to move from here because of any fallout from this.”

I remember thinking the words I wished he had said. I remember thinking, And you're just a kid. And I care about what happens to you. I want what's best for you. Those were the things a father would say. But Whit wasn't my father. Whit was worried about Everett.

“You're like your mom. You're a free spirit, you'll never stay here,” Whit said dreamily. “This town was always too small for her.”

“Funny how she still lives here,” I said.

*   *   *

Joan was absent from Harwich for almost a decade after she graduated from Holden, and in Whit's mind, this departure was just another shining example of her joyous devil-may-care attitude, which he so admired.

The summer after her second year at Princeton, Joan took a job as a nanny with a family in New York City. She didn't return to Princeton in the fall, nor did she return to Harwich. She told her parents that she had asked for a leave of absence from school, then sort of disappeared into the East Village, where she was spotted, very infrequently, by some of her old Holden friends, who would report back to her anxious parents. She was fine, they told my grandparents; she was planning to call. The year passed and Joanie didn't go back to school. She never went back. She did come out to Harwich from time to time, and her mother worried about how thin she had become. She was jittery. She was a chain smoker. Often, the reason she came home was to ask for money. She was modeling those first couple of years. She told her parents that she might start acting. She was seeing this guy. He was studying at the Actors Studio. A few years later, she returned to Harwich with a haircut like Debbie Harry's. She was so thin and pale. She didn't tell her parents much about her life in the city or the husband that she never brought home (our father, the actor), but she would entertain some of her old friends with stories of her previous exploits. She had been a regular at Studio 54; she had partied with Mick and Bianca. She had slept with Warren Beatty. Now she had Sally on her hip and was pregnant with me. Within a year, her hair had grown out, her deviated septum had almost fully healed, and she was sprinting across the tennis court in her old Holden whites. It's hard now for anyone to imagine she ever left Harwich at all.

 

TWELVE

Ever since we were children, whether we dined outside or in, each of us has always sat at the same place at the table. Joan had her end; Whit had his spot at the other end of the table, which now is occupied only when we have guests. I used to sit next to Whit. Spin sat next to Joan. Everett, who ate many meals with us while growing up, also had “his” chair, which was across from mine. I'm only telling this now because on Laurel and Spin's first night here, there was an awkward moment when we all sat down to eat at the porch table.

Spin held Joan's chair out for her and then Laurel moved to the seat on the other side of Spin. This was Sally's seat. I know—Sally and I are no longer children. We should have been able to cope with this, and, of course, we did after a few moments of watching Sally walk around the table, muttering about having no place to sit. There were several empty chairs, of course, but Sally had that jaded, faraway look she gets when she's been working on music too intensely for too long. It's hard for her to snap out of her work sometimes.

“Sal,” Everett said during her second lap around us. “Sit here, next to me.” Sally plopped into the chair he had pushed out with his foot and she stared sullenly at Laurel.

Joan launched into her plans for the Fourth of July barbecue. We have it every year. The town puts on a great fireworks display here on the lake, and we invite the same crowd that would come when Whit was alive: friends from the club, some of our old friends from school, various Holden classmates of Spin's and Perry's. The fireworks are set off right here on the end of Whitman's Point, so the town's volunteer firefighters and their families join us as well.

“This year, it'll also be an engagement party,” Joan said. “Everybody's dying to meet you, Laurel.”

“And I'm dying to meet everybody,” Laurel said. “You'll have to let me help with the preparations.”

“It's totally casual. A kind of a potluck thing. People really come for the fireworks. And the music. All the picking and fiddling crowd will be here—you'll love it,” Spin said.

“So you guys are getting married at the end of August?” I asked. I wanted Sally to know that they'd set a date.

“Joan, Perry thinks that the house and the ‘grounds,' as he calls them, could look a lot better,” said Sally, ignoring me. “Maybe you should think about getting the place fixed up a little before the Fourth. Look, there are leaves all over the place from last year and the weeds are getting so high down near the beach. The place looks like a dump.”

“A dump,” Joan laughed. “Don't be silly. Do you have any idea what those landscaping guys charge? Anyway, it's fine. It looks the way it always has. We'll rake the leaves; I hadn't even noticed them.”

“Didn't you tell me there is a trust or something that covers those types of expenses, Philip?” Laurel asked. “Would that come out of your own trust fund or what, babe?”

She took a bite from her burger and looked first at Spin and then around the table as we all silently grappled with our alarm and confusion.

“Could you pass the butter, please, Spin dear,” my mother said finally.

While we were growing up, we never heard Whit or Joan talk about money, unless it was about how not to spend it. The topic was as mysterious as sex to us when we were children. We knew that people liked it, that they craved it. But we also knew you weren't supposed to talk about it, that doing so was indecent somehow. The grown-ups in our house really didn't seem to want to touch it with their hands. Of course, now we were able to joke about it with one another—me, Sally, and Spin; we could laugh at our parents' bizarre relationship to money. But Laurel's question had to do with whose money belonged to whom, and I can't speak for the others, but I was dreadfully ashamed. I knew nothing about the various trusts that Whit had left behind. I just knew that Joan was living off the interest of some of it.

“Here you are, Joan,” said Spin finally, with a forced laugh. He shoved the butter plate at my mother.

“Mmm, these hamburgers are great,” Everett said, and we all dove into our food, mumbling about how delicious the salad was, how tender the corn, how perfectly cooked the burgers! Laurel glanced from one of us to the next, chewing her food slowly, and I thought I caught a little smile, a little show of delight. Joan appeared to be choking on something; her face was very red and she grabbed her water and sipped at it between little coughs.

“We don't need to have anybody come here,” Spin said. “The place looks fine. It's got character, as Dad always said. Perry and Catherine are more used to the Hamptons. They like things a little more formal, that's all.”

“But this place is looking a little shabby,” Sally said. Clearly, she wanted to help Spin. Also, though she had been highly offended by Catherine's
Grey Gardens
remark, she had long wished that Lakeside looked nicer. Why couldn't it better resemble the grand house in the old Whitman photos, with the formal gardens and lovely, uncluttered rooms?

“You don't notice it, Joan,” Sally continued, “because you're here all the time. Why not let somebody come and fix the landscaping, for example? You could get a few guys to come in twice a week and mow. Tend to the gardens. Maybe pull out some of those weeds growing up near the beach. If we let them get too long, the wetlands commission won't let us remove them.”

Joan looked at Spin and then at Sally. “I don't think we need that. Everett and I can pull those weeds down by the beach. I just hadn't thought about it, but you're right about wetlands. I'm going to pull them out tonight, when it's dark, just to prevent any commotion from the wetlands nuts. I'll pull the weeds.”

“No, I'll do it,” said Everett. “Hey, Lottie, will you pass the corn? Which weeds are we talking about, now?”

“But the rest of it,” Sally said. “How about getting one of the crews that work on some of the neighboring properties? And, well, I think it would be a good idea to have a cleaning person come in once a week. Maybe that woman who works for Ethel. Just to help you with the heavy stuff, you know, washing the floors and the bathrooms.”

“No, I don't want any strange person in the house,” I said. “I'm happy to do the floors, it's good exercise. The bathrooms, too. And we don't need a landscaping crew. Everett does a lot around here. It might not be that obvious, but he's always mowing and fixing things. There's just a lot to do. I think you're being ungrateful to Everett, Sally.”

I passed Everett the corn and he mouthed, “Thanks, babe,” and gave me the little dopey smile that he knows I love.

I kicked at Sally under the table, and when she looked up, I shook my head and scowled. What was the matter with her? Strangers coming in to clean. It was bad enough having Laurel here.

“I don't want people wandering all around the place,” Joan said definitively.

When I saw Sally catch Spin's eye and shrug sympathetically, I realized that she had told him she would speak to Joan about the condition of the place.

“You two haven't left yourselves much time for all the wedding preparations,” Joan said cheerfully, changing the subject. “Will it be in Ketchum? I've never been to Idaho.”

“We're not planning on having a very big wedding,” Laurel said.

“Mostly family and close friends,” Spin added.

“Right,” Laurel said. She was twisting her engagement ring around her finger and biting her lip.

“That sounds lovely,” Joan said. There was another awkward silence as Laurel gave Spin a pained look.

They don't know how to tell us we're not invited, I thought. Marissa doesn't want us at the wedding.

“Joan … Spin and I were wondering—of course we'll understand completely if this is something you don't want, but—we were wondering if we could have the wedding here. At Lakefront,” Laurel said.

“Lakeside,” Sally said. “It's called Lakeside.”

“Oh, sorry,” Laurel said. “Lakeside.”

Joan smiled, but her eyes revealed a mounting panic. “A wedding? Here?” she said. “What a lovely idea! But you're right, the place isn't in shape at all. I mean, I don't know how we could possibly get the house in order in such a short time.”