The Color of Water in July (2 page)

CHAPTER TWO

M
AMIE

In those long summer seasons before the war, when the chill of spring and fall wrapped around the languid warmth of endless midsummer days, the only way to get to Wequetona was by water. We arrived in mid-May, coming across Pine Lake on the little steamship
Jefferson
; it stopped right at the Wequetona dock on the way to Horton Bay. In the sheltered circle of the harbor, the water was always calm. But as we steamed out farther into the lake, the water deepened to a menacing indigo, and the brisk wind that blew across Five Mile Point carried the knifelike reminder of a Great Lakes desolation. No matter that the weather was fair, Pine Lake always hinted at her wildness, even on the mildest, most even-tempered summer day.

Every summer, Lila got seasick on the crossing and was peevish. I can still see her clear as day, leaning up against the bulwark, its paint gray and blistered from the lashings of a thousand northern storms. Her blond hair whipped around her face, golden strands catching in the corners of her mouth. With one hand she shielded her eyes, and with the other she pressed against her sash, a queasy greenish look on her pale, angular face.

Nowadays, the area around Pine Lake is heavily wooded, but when Lila and I were girls, the lakeshores were mostly bare. There were still loggers around in those days, unsavory characters, Indians mostly, and some sharp-tongued bearded Scotsmen who appeared never to bathe. They lived in wretched camps in the woods: you used to see the squaws with babies tied to their backs, walking barefoot along the railroad tracks. I remember Daddy saying it was mostly logged out by then. Still, sometimes you’d see patches of smoke from the burning stumps pluming up around the lakeshore in the spots where they were still logging.

The steep canted roof of our cottage was the highest point on the north shore. Its roofline, like a church spire, cut a sharp outline against the sky, mirroring the dark-green points of the few remaining giant pines. Lila and I strained our eyes from the moment we came into Loeb Bay, wanting to be the first to catch sight of our beloved summer destination. Lila usually saw it first; I always suspected that the sheer strength of her impatience made her eyes so keen.

The SS
Jefferson
docked at Wequetona on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Old Joe McKawber would ring the clubhouse bell, and all the Wequetonans would gather down at the dock to collect their mail and to see the new arrivals to the Club. A couple of Indians milled about, ready to heft our many steamer trunks onto their backs and carry them up the steep stairs to the cottage walk. Lila and I stood with arms linked, waiting to feel the boat bump up against the dock—our signal that another summer had begun.

During the war, the
Jefferson
stopped its resort runs. It was converted to a Coast Guard patrol boat, and after the war, I guess nobody thought to bring it back. The roads were slowly starting to improve. Eventually, we began to take the train, and then later to drive.

But I still remember the approach by water: the slant of gables against the blue sky, the sound of the clubhouse bells clanging out over the water, the sight of our dear friend May Lewis, the hem of her white organdy drenched in water, waving a gay summer welcome with her upstretched, white-gloved hand.

Up in Michigan, the summer is brief, crowded between two ends of a desolate northern winter. And yet somehow when you are young, it seems to last forever. A whole lifetime can be hastened to fit between the giddy green leaves of May and the chastened red and yellow of September.

During my long life, I’ve seen the world constantly changing, spinning around, until the next thing you know, it becomes a place you don’t even recognize anymore. But Wequetona doesn’t change that much. Summer after summer, it has a way, perhaps an illusion, of seeming much the same. As it was in the beginning
. The pine trees.

Is now and ever shall be
. The lake.
World without end
.

But then there’s no such place as that now, is there? Not on this earth anyway.

I’ve just come home from the lawyer’s office, where I signed the papers about the cottage. Tomorrow, I move into Coventry Manor. I was born in the year of our Lord 1902, and in two months, I will turn ninety-four, if it is the Lord’s will.

CHAPTER THREE

J
ESS
,
AGE THIRTY-THREE

Jess got out of the car and walked down the grassy slope. The back of the wooden-framed cottage loomed in front of her, painted white, with green-shingled gables and dormer windows. To her right were dense woods where white trunks of birch trees shone through like slender ghosts. The gravel road ran along the back of the cottages. The cottage, with its wide porches and tall windows, faced the lake.

Remembering that it had once squeaked, she grasped the green-painted screen door tentatively. Sure enough, the door protested with a raspy squawk. The air inside was a stale combination of mildew and mothballs. The back hallway to the kitchen had always smelled like that, as long as she could remember. She paused before stepping all the way through the doorway, sensing the oddness of the quiet inside. There was no brisk clicking of pumps across the wood floor; no waft of Chanel No. 5. The cavernous cottage was dark and still. Russ let the screen door slam shut with a thud.

As her eyes skimmed the room, she was surprised that after all this time everything looked exactly the same. A balcony with a Craftsman-style geometric railing encircled the living room like a wide catwalk. The second floor had no ceilings; you could look all the way up into the exposed pine rafters in the house’s vaulted gables. All across the front of the cottage were windows looking out on the lake. The rooms were furnished with Navajo rugs and Indian baskets, wicker furniture and hand-bent hickory rockers. There was a stillness common to rooms that have stood empty, the old house silent but for the creaking of the worn floorboards under their feet.

Russ broke the silence with a loud, appreciative groan.

“This is unbelievable!” Russ exclaimed. “American cottage style, eclectic Arts and Crafts, and look at this Indian stuff. This house could be a cover story.”

“Journey’s End.” Jess whispered the cottage’s name so softly she wasn’t sure if she had spoken aloud.

“I’ve got to get on the phone,” Russ said.

Jess looked at the view through the warped glass, out toward Hemingway Point. With the lights on in the living room, she could see her own reflection faintly in the windows, her same narrow face, with fair hair in a ponytail. She was wearing button-fly Levi’s and a white cotton T-shirt. Exactly what she might have worn the last time she was here, when she was seventeen.

Russ started fingering the Navajo rugs and inspecting the Ojibwa sweetgrass baskets. Jess stood there with their suitcases—there were so many rooms here, most of which had always stood empty. At first, she wasn’t sure which room they should use.

“Come on, Jess. Let’s put our bags in here.” Russ pointed to one of the ground-floor bedrooms with wide windows looking out on the lake.

Mamie’s room. Jess hesitated, then decided her hesitation was silly. She grabbed the handle of her suitcase and wheeled it into the room.

“I can’t find an outlet, Jess!” Russ hollered from his position under Mamie’s Victorian writing table. Jess was standing upstairs on the balcony. From where she stood, she could see into the room that used to be Mamie’s. It was a feminine room with frilly white curtains and pictures of Gibson girls hanging framed on the walls. Jess’s grandfather had run off when her mother was a baby. Her grandmother’s room bore no trace of him. All she could see of Russ was his jeans-clad legs and the pointy toes of his expensive leather cowboy boots. His computer paraphernalia crowded the top of Mamie’s writing desk; his bomber jacket and camera case were strewn across the bed, lenses, camera paper, and other junk littering the spotless pink-and-white chenille spread. “We’re going to need to get set up for Internet access.”

Russ had already been on and off the phone with the magazine half a dozen times.

“Classic Gaines,” she kept hearing him say. “His signature work.”

When Russ wasn’t on the phone, he walked around with Jess like a tour guide, showing her things about the cottage that she had never consciously noted.

“See the foundation.” Russ pointed to the uneven heaping of gray stones that ran along the base of the shingled structure. “That’s local flint. Arts and Crafts style. Characteristic.” Inside, he pointed at the walls and ceilings. “Look at the pine board—unvarnished, so Gaines—that golden-honey color.” Jess had never really noticed the walls, had taken for granted their warm amber hue.

But she knew that they were pine boards—
number one white pine planks
. Jess almost felt like she could hear a voice, long forgotten, whispering in her ear. She shook her head.
No
, she was not going to think about him. All that was so long ago. Jess ran her hand along the smooth, knotty surface of the wall, feeling the carefully grooved edges, the slightly shirred ends.

“The amazing thing about this place,” Russ said, “is that it hasn’t had a thing done to it. You just don’t find cottages like that. They’ve all been screwed around with, mucked up.”

In the bedroom, Russ was drawn to a collection of small Indian artifacts on the shelf in the corner. They were little tourist trinkets, painstakingly made by hand: a miniature birch-bark canoe, a finely beaded sandal, and two small woven baskets, one with a tiny doll in deerskin cradled inside. Russ handed one of the baskets to her. “Do you see how fine the weaving is?”

She examined the intricate beadwork, the careful stitches. Each basket had a name stenciled on it:
Mamie
, written on the basket that still held the doll;
Lila
, on the basket that was empty, the doll no doubt lost long ago during play.

“How am I ever going to figure out what to do with this stuff?” Jess said.

“Are you kidding? These old handmade tourist trinkets from the twenties are worth a small fortune.” Russ picked up a hand-painted toy tomahawk and brandished it toward his reflection in the mirror.

Russ didn’t understand, but maybe that was just as well. These were just things to him—to catalog, describe, photograph, and eventually sell. For herself, they were dusty relics of a past that seemed frozen in time—it was hard to know what value to assign to things like that.

Russ lost no time getting acquainted with the layout of the rambling cottage. He was upstairs in the alcove now, muttering into his voice recorder. Behind him, the high alcove windows were thrown open, and a fresh breeze from the lake was making the faded curtains flutter.

“Wow, Jess, this picture of your grandmother,” Russ called over the balcony. “I never knew you looked so much like her. It’s the spitting image of you.”

“Is that the picture that was up there in the alcove?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s not Miss Mamie. That’s my great-aunt Lila—Mamie’s sister.”

“What was she like?”

“I don’t know. I never knew her. She drowned in the lake years ago. Before I was born.”

“That’s sad.”

“Actually, it was kind of creepy. Miss Mamie almost never talked about her. Just left her picture there, staring out over the lake. Kids used to say that late at night you could hear footsteps on the balcony and the sound of water dripping—the ghost of old Aunt Lila.”

Russ came down the stairs holding the picture.

“It is an amazing likeness though, isn’t it?”

Jess looked at the faded image, the face of a pretty young girl, in the old sepia-toned photograph. She looked to be about seventeen, with fair hair and wide-set eyes in a narrow face. There was a faint likeness, she supposed.

Jess had never liked the way she looked that much, blond and ordinary, not at all like her mother, Margaret, who was a black-eyed beauty, with dark hair, prominent cheekbones, and almond-shaped eyes. Margaret used to stand in front of the mirror, combing her thick, dark hair, making Jess feel like a pale wraith beside her. Jess imagined that she looked more like her father—even though she had no idea what her father actually looked like. She didn’t even know his name. All her mother had told her was that she was the result of a one-night stand with an Irishman when Margaret was in Belfast reporting on the Troubles. At cocktail parties, Margaret loved to retell the story of Jess’s conception, always with the utmost hilarity, including lines about seeing bombs exploding in the sky. Try as she might, Jess could learn nothing about him. Margaret steadfastly stuck to the story that she never even knew his name. Jess’s own name,
Carpenter
, was Margaret’s invention—she had picked it, she said, because it was easy to pronounce.

For the rest of the afternoon, Russ was on and off the phone. Jess went out onto the wide front porch. She tested each of the porch swings and finally came to rest in the hammock. From there, she could see through the birches and out over the lake toward the beach and sailboat moorings.

The Wequetona Club was set on a sheltered cove where for thousands of years the Woodland Indians had made their summer camps, fashioning arrowheads from the tough, flinty stone and fishing for trout in the clear water surrounded by an unbroken expanse of dense woods. In those woods, there was a grove of the giant white pine that had surrounded the lake. These trees once drove the economy of the region, drawing first lumbermen, then white settlers, and, eventually, summer people to the shores of Pine Lake.

By now, all the giant trees were gone—shipped out to build the great cities of the Midwest. Only one small stand remained, on the plot of land adjoining Journey’s End. From the cottage, there was nothing distinctive about them; it was from across the cove, at Hemingway Point, that their majesty could be seen: dark-green towering spires pointing sharply up into the sky.

Lying in the hammock, staring out at the sun-dappled expanse of lake, Jess felt as if she had momentarily stopped time. The hammock was rocking slightly in the gentle breeze. Then, she heard a frail voice calling her name.

“Why, Jess Carpenter, welcome to Wequetona.” Jess looked out and saw May Lewis, tiny and hunched over, dwarfed by a woolen suit in a bright shade of robin’s-egg blue, coming along the walk.

Jess was startled to see Mamie’s friend. It made her grandmother seem closer, the fact of her passing more real.

Jess climbed out of the hammock and walked out to say hello. “Mrs. Lewis. How nice to see you. I’m surprised you recognized me after all this time.”

“Why, you look exactly the same, Jess. I’m so sorry about your grandmother. Miss Mamie is missed.” Her face was wrinkled, but she had a sharp look in her eye. Jess squirmed under her gaze, wondering if Mrs. Lewis knew that Jess hadn’t seen her grandmother for many years before she died.

But Mrs. Lewis was poised, and her friendly smile gave no hints.

“You must stop by The Rafters sometime. You can tell me all about your medical practice.”

Jess flushed in spite of herself.

“Oh, I . . . I never did go to medical school . . . ” It was half a lie and she stammered through it.

“Well, I’d love to hear what you are doing now,” Mrs. Lewis said, smiling. “You were always such a bright girl—you must have accomplished great things.”

“Oh, nothing special,” Jess said. Nothing that really helped people, as she had once dreamed of doing.