The Hot Flash Club Chills Out (31 page)

49

W
hat’s in it?” Polly asked breathlessly.

“I don’t know.” Shirley ran her fingers around the edges.

“It’s not locked, but it’s been forced shut…”

“Bring it with you,” Alice ordered. “I’m getting claustrophobic.” She gave Faye a little poke.

Faye obligingly crept forward, the other four women following. When she reached Nora’s basement, she said, “Now, let’s see!”

But the hidden cubicle was so crammed with cardboard boxes there wasn’t room for all five women to stand comfortably.

“Could we please go upstairs?” Polly begged. “This basement is so gloomy.”

“Right.” Faye hurried through the dank, shadowy rooms and up the stairs.

Nora’s kitchen glowed, familiar and cozy. The table, set with all the accoutrements of tea, rose like an island of civility in a dusty world. Shirley put the metal box on the table. Alice slammed the cellar door shut, muttering that she wished it had a lock. The others gathered around the table. Faye sipped her tea to see if it had grown cold—it had. Polly nibbled on a ginger snap for sustenance. They all kept their eyes fastened on the metal box, as if expecting it to attempt escape. It was only about three inches deep, eight inches long, and eight inches wide. It was made from brass, which had darkened with age.

“Okay,” Alice directed. “Now open it, Shirley.”

“Drumroll, please,” Shirley joked. She reached out, then hesitated. “Shouldn’t we do this with Lucinda present?”

Polly groaned.

Marilyn said, “Shirley, Lucinda looked worn out. It wouldn’t be a kindness to her to get her out of bed again…”

“And
I
won’t be a kindness to you if you don’t open it now,” Alice growled impatiently.

“We’ll tell Lucinda about it first thing in the morning,” Faye said.

So Shirley lifted the small brass latch, which was not fastened by a lock. She pulled the lid up and back. It creaked on its rusty hinges.

Inside was a small, dark glass vial and a small bundle of letters tied with a ribbon.

Faye lifted the vial out and turned it in her hands. “Laudanum,” she said. “I’ll bet anything.”

“What’s laudanum?” Polly asked.

“It’s a derivative of opium,” Shirley told her. “It was used in childbirth, to ease pain.”

“And it was used by the wives of sea captains to ease their boredom,” Faye added.

“And the letters?” Alice prompted.

Shirley lifted the bundle out, untied the ribbon, which fell away in a stiff curl of red silk. She scanned the first page. “Oh, my.” She breathed.

“What!” Alice growled.

Shirley handed the missive to Alice. She flipped through the rest, then said, “They’re letters between Amelia, Nora’s mother, and Ford, Lucinda’s father. Just after their affair.”

She picked up the second letter and read it. “Amelia’s telling Ford that she’s pregnant. She’s sure it’s Ford’s child.”

She handed the page to Alice, who handed the first letter to Polly. In this way, all seven letters were read and passed around the table.

“They agree to remain with their spouses, to protect their children. Amelia’s had carnal relations with Pascal so he’ll believe this child is his. Amelia is hiding these letters in the tunnel until the day when the feud between the two families is mended.”

When they had all read the final letter, Shirley said, with wide eyes, “Do you know what this means?”

Faye nodded. “It means that Ford Payne was the father of Nora Pettigrew.”

“Oh, my gosh.” Polly clasped her hands to her face. “Isn’t this amazing! That means Nora and Lucinda are half-sisters!”

“Good grief, Gertrude,” Alice mumbled.

“How wonderful!” Shirley’s eyes were shining. “This means Lucinda isn’t really alone in the world.”

“Get a grip,” Alice told Shirley. “Lucinda and Nora hate one another. I don’t think they’ll run into one another’s arms with cries of delight when we tell them.”

“
If
we tell them,” Faye amended.

“Right,” Marilyn agreed. “We stumbled across this cache by accident. We could put it back in its hiding place and never say another word about it.”

“No.” Shirley crossed her arms and looked adamant. “We found the box. After seventy years, more or less,
we found the box.
You could say it pretty much jumped out at us. I mean, Lucinda’s been using that tunnel for months now, and
her
sleeve never caught on it. Mine did. I think Fate
meant
for us to find the box, so we can help Lucinda and Nora deal with this information.”

Alice buried her head in her hands. “Oh, Shirley.”

Polly spoke up. “I agree with Shirley. I mean, I’m not so sure about Fate meaning for us to find it, but I do think we should tell Lucinda. After all, the motto of the Hot Flash Club is INTERFERE.”

Faye said, “I agree with Shirley, too.”

Marilyn said,
“Look.”

Alice groaned. “What now?”

Marilyn pointed to the window. “The sky’s getting lighter. It’s almost morning.”

“Let’s go to the beach and watch the sun rise!” Shirley cried.

“Yes, let’s!” Marilyn agreed. She stood up, pushing her chair back. “Come on, hurry!”

“We can’t go in our pajamas!” Alice protested.

“Why not?” Faye asked. “Who’s going to see us?”

“Maybe no one, but it’s crazy,” Alice said.

Polly giggled. “Okay, then, let’s do something crazy!”

“I agree!” Faye grabbed Alice’s hand and pulled her out of her chair. “Come on! Let’s do this!” She grabbed the keys hanging from the hook by the back door.

Shirley bundled the letters back into the metal box and shoved the box into a kitchen drawer. Just slightly dizzy and daffy from lack of sleep, the five women scurried out to the car and crowded in.

Faye drove. “’Sconset?” she asked. “That’s the furthest east.”

“Right,” Marilyn told her. “And hurry.”

“I don’t want to break the speed limit,” Faye said. “We don’t want to get arrested.”

They all glanced at one another, surveying their various nighttime ensembles, and they laughed like schoolgirls playing hooky.

The material of Polly’s green pajamas wasn’t see-through, but it was obvious, even behind the giant frog on the front, that she wore no bra. She’d tied her white-streaked auburn hair into a pigtail on each side of her head so her hair wouldn’t get mussed while she was sleeping, but by now most of the strands had escaped to corkscrew outward in the early morning humidity. Faye wore an expensive white linen nightgown with an embroidered and smocked yoke with white cotton rosettes. Her white hair, usually caught back in a chignon, hung loosely around her head, falling just past her shoulders. Marilyn was in a long T-shirt, her auburn hair limp in the humidity. Alice wore a knee-length, sleeveless slash of crimson silk with a mandarin collar, beautiful enough to wear to a party, if only she were wearing a bra. And Shirley wore her lavender peignoir, one cap sleeve missing a section of lace.

The town around them still slept as they passed through. Here and there a lamp glowed in a window, and the evenly spaced streetlights turned their path into a checkerboard of dark and light. They circled the rotary and headed out the long straight ’Sconset road, bordered by slumbering woodlands. Above them, the black sky slowly faded to gray. From overhead came the drone of the first plane, bearing the morning papers. A truck, its headlights two circles of white glare, came toward them, but they were the only vehicle going east.

“You can go faster,” Alice urged Faye, who obliged by pressing her foot on the gas pedal, bringing them up to fifty-five miles per hour, ten miles above the speed limit, as fast as anyone could go on this island.

“I can’t believe all that happened tonight,” Shirley babbled. “My heart feels like it’s been on a roller coaster. Hearing Marilyn scream! Finding that prim old Lucinda in our kitchen! And going through that scary tunnel. And seeing her bizarre bedroom, crammed with stuff—how crazy was that? And then, finding that box, although I really do believe that box found me, I think it reached out and grabbed me, it
did,
it caught hold of my gown!” She gulped. “Then reading those letters, learning that Lucinda and Nora are half-sisters.”

“I wonder whether all families have secrets like that,” Marilyn mused.

“I doubt it,” Alice said sensibly. “Mine sure doesn’t.”

“I don’t know about that,” Faye argued. “If you go back a generation, who knows what your mother and father hid from you. We all hide things, don’t we? Perhaps not anything as significant as Amelia hiding the paternity of her child. But we hide dreams, or fears, or memories…”

“Turn here,” Polly pointed.

Faye steered the Jeep down the narrow road, beneath the white footbridge, and parked at the small lot where the road ended at the beach. By now the sky was silver, and a line of violet glimmered on the horizon. The beach was a soft blur of sooty gray, like a smudged thumbprint, the ocean black.

They spilled out of the Jeep. No one else was around.

“Leave your slippers in the car,” Alice advised them. “Or they’ll get full of tiny grains of sand and you’ll never get them all out.”

They all hopped on one foot and then the other as they removed their slippers, which they tossed, willy-nilly, into the Jeep. The feel of gritty sand against their soles was intimate, engaging, a physical grounding in the moment. Barefoot, they hurried down to the shoreline.

Now a ribbon of gold glimmered beneath the violet streak, and they could see the white ruffle of foam surging up toward them, pulling the dark cover of ocean behind. The sky brightened into the iridescent gray of a pigeon’s breast, illuminating the shoreline. They settled down on the sand at the water’s edge, shoulder to shoulder, because near the water it was slightly cool, and there was a gentle breeze that teasingly lifted their hair away from their faces. They drew their knees up to their chests and wrapped their arms around them, nudging their chins into the V of their knees. They had front-row seats to the best view on earth, and here it came, the golden sun, majestic, radiant, moving in its own sweet time. The sky around it went pink, and the ocean beneath it blushed in response.

With splendid indolence, the sun ascended, unveiling the sky like Salome, in gauzy swathes of coral, then violet, then robin’s egg blue, and the ocean beneath deepened to sapphire. The light was so strong it seemed a living presence, aware of them sitting there on the edge of the world, and pleased they’d come for the performance. They couldn’t help but think how old the sun and the ocean were, and yet as fresh today as if it were all brand new. They couldn’t help but think how small they were, and really, how relatively young.

I want to be with Ian,
thought Marilyn to herself.

I want to paint a sunrise,
thought Faye.

I want to be with Harry,
thought Shirley.

I want to collect shells and make my own sailor’s valentine,
thought Polly.

“I want to eat!” said Alice, breaking into all their thoughts.

“Me, too!” Polly seconded.

“Plus,” Marilyn added, “if I stay in this sun much longer, my nose will burn.”

Rising, they brushed sand off their bare legs and nightgowns, then stalked through the sand back to the Jeep, arriving just as another car arrived at the parking lot. The young couple looked stunned at the sight of five women in their unusual state of undress, and their startled faces made the Hot Flash five laugh uncontrollably all the way back home.

50

’B
ye!” Shirley called.

“’Bye! Have fun!” Faye yelled back.

Shirley slung her backpack over her shoulder, skipped down the back steps, grabbed her bike, steered it to Orange Street, and hopped on. Huffing and puffing, she rode it to the top of the hill, then nipped into a side street, where Harry sat in his red truck, waiting for her, reading the
New York Times.
Reggie, his golden Lab, barked once in greeting, and hung her head out the window to be petted.

“Good morning!” Harry called, carefully folding his paper. He ambled out of the truck, gave Shirley a sardonic grin, and lifted her bike into the cab. Then they both got in the truck, the golden Lab sitting happily between them. It was Thursday morning, and Shirley hadn’t seen Harry for over a week.

“I’m not sure I understand just why we have to go through this charade,” Harry told Shirley. “It seems like an awful lot of fuss.”

Shirley squirmed. Eventually, Harry would meet her friends, but when? One look at the two of them together, and the Hot Flash Club would know Shirley was gaga over this guy.

She waved her hands, trying to explain. “It’s just that this week is supposed to be
our
week. The five of us all doing stuff together. Being with you is kind of like cheating. But Faye’s going off painting by herself, and Marilyn’s going off to some science project by herself, and Alice likes to sleep late, and Polly’s working on a sailor’s valentine and has the dining room table covered with shells and gets irritated if anyone so much as
breathes
in the room, so I don’t feel guilty about spending some time on my own. Well,” she amended, squirming, “kind of on my own.”

Harry looked quizzical. “So what
do
you feel guilty about? Being with me?”

“No!” Shirley automatically replied. She slumped in her seat. “Well, maybe a little. I mean, they’re doing stuff tied in with artistic pursuits, or intellectual activities.”

“Sleeping late’s an intellectual activity?” Harry joked.

She gently cuffed his shoulder. “Let me finish. Whatever they’re doing, it doesn’t involve a man. A man and sex. And what I’m doing…”

“Definitely involves both.” Harry reached across the seat to put his hand on Shirley’s thigh.

Shirley smiled.

Reggie, picking up on the romantic vibes, licked a slobbery kiss on Shirley’s cheek.

Harry said, “I thought I’d show you Coskata today. You have time?”

“Sure,” Shirley said. “We’re going out to dinner and a play tonight, but I don’t need to be back before about four.”

Harry chuckled. “I feel like an adolescent. Like your mother’s going to catch us and ground you and report me to my parents.”

Shirley gently repositioned Reggie’s enormous noble head so that she could see Harry’s profile as he drove. “My friends are all really terrific,” she assured him. “It’s not really about you.” She paused. “It’s more that I haven’t always made the best choices in the past.”

Harry laughed. “Who has? But you know, you’re going to have to introduce me to them sooner or later, because I’m hoping you’ll spend a lot of time down here with me in the off season. If you think Nantucket’s nice in the summer, you’ve really got to see it in the fall.”

Shirley was so delighted by his words, she had to put her cheek against the cool metal of the door to cool down. “Well…” She put her feet up on the dashboard and snuggled against the seat. “Faye and Polly are thinking of renting a house this fall….”

“That’s not what I meant. I want you to stay with me. Keep your stuff in my cottage. I’ve got room for you. I’d clear out a few closets and drawers. I think the two of us would bumble around pretty happily together.”

“Oh.” Shirley’s heart began to pound. “So I guess what we have isn’t just a casual relationship.”

Harry’s blue eyes blazed. “I don’t have ‘casual’ relationships.” He laughed, easing off. “Hell, most of the time I don’t even have relationships. I find I prefer the company of my dog to most people. But the truth is, I’m just happier when you’re around, and I’m too old not to move as fast as I can.”

Shirley rolled her thoughts around. “Would you come visit me in Boston?”

“Honestly? I don’t think so. I hate leaving the island. I don’t enjoy cities anymore.”

“Oh.”

“Well, I suppose I could come up once or twice,” he conceded. “But I guess I’m hoping that in the future, well, it’s not impossible that you might want to retire down here to Nantucket. It seems to me if you took that deal the Rainbow people are offering, you’d be financially set and you wouldn’t have to work. I think you’d love life here on the island.”

Shirley couldn’t breathe. “Are you asking me to move in with you?”

“I suppose I am,” Harry said. “Don’t freak out. I’m not talking marriage, not yet, anyway. That’s too weighted with laws and civil complications. I don’t like corporations, and marriage seems to me like a kind of corporate principle. But you and I have such a good time together. I don’t like it when you’ve gone back to Boston. I want you here as much as I can have you. And if I seem to be rushing you, well, I suppose it’s because I’m aware that I’m getting old. I’ve been old and reclusive and contented for a long time. I
thought
I was contented. Now I see I’ve got the chance to be old and happy and sexy, and that feels a great deal better to me.”

Shirley said softly, “I’m kind of overwhelmed.”

Harry reached around the dog to take her hand. “Yeah, so am I. But at my age, I don’t want to waste any time.”

“I don’t know what to say, Harry. I need to absorb all this.” She was so happy she wanted to giggle and squeal. But one thought clearly pierced the bubbles of her glee. “I want you to meet my friends.”

“I’d like to,” Harry said. “Just tell me when and where.”

Alice carried a mug of coffee up to drink while she showered and dressed. The Orange Street house was quiet. On the message board near the refrigerator, all the others had scribbled their day’s plans: Faye was painting, Shirley was biking (and probably sneaking off to meet that guy, Harry), Polly looking for shells, and Marilyn was at the Maria Mitchell Museum. Tonight they were all going out together for dinner and then to a play.

Today Alice was going to go for a goddamned walk.

She didn’t want to, but she knew it was the right thing to do. So she jumped in the shower, then pulled on a pair of batik cotton pedal pushers—or at least that was what she’d called them the first time they’d hit the fashion scene. Now she guessed they were Capri pants. She pulled on a poncho-shaped fringed orange top, added some heavy topaz and wooden beads, stepped into her comfy walking shoes, plopped a floppy sun hat on her head, and went out the door.

She checked her watch as she strode down Orange Street away from town. She’d walk for an hour, she decided. That ought to give her heart a suitable amount of aerobic activity. And she would observe the houses and gardens as she passed, and she would
appreciate
them. The other four Hot Flashers
got
Nantucket in a way Alice just couldn’t. The whole thing about Quaker simplicity bored her silly. Lying on the beach wasn’t half as comfortable as lying on a bed, plus she got sand in her suit and her teeth and her hair, and if she tried to read a book, either a breeze ripped at the pages or the sun’s glare made her carve frown lines into her face.

But it was clear her Hot Flash friends would be spending a lot of time here in the future. Faye and Polly were discussing renting a house. Faye definitely planned to spend the winter here, painting landscapes. And Polly loved all that craft stuff—she wanted to take a course in lightship-basket-weaving. And Shirley—Shirley had gone lightheaded over this guy, Harry. Shirley would be coming down here a lot, for as long as this Harry kept her dangling on the line. When it came to men, Shirley had the acuity of a flounder. Alice hoped and prayed Shirley wouldn’t get hurt
again.

Alice ambled onto Fair Street. She sauntered along, studying the houses, picket fences, privet arbors, trellised roses. Away from the main part of town, the houses were modest, family-size but not ostentatious. The yards were nicely kept, but not professionally
landscaped.
Real families lived in these homes. She passed a woman snoozing in a striped hammock, her magazine resting on her chest. She passed a yard with a swing set, and a tree house with a rope ladder. Perhaps it was the chirps of the birds flitting from holly tree to birdbath, or the sight of a blue tricycle, or the little old man down on his knees weeding who paused to wave hello, but to her surprise, she was time-warped back to her Kansas childhood. She remembered hiding with her best friend behind mulberry bushes, making dolls of hollyhocks turned upside down, their petals like skirts, climbing on top of a neighbor’s garage to spy on the world from an exciting new vantage point. Like a fresh breeze, the memory of freedom, childhood, laughter, swept through her. Perhaps this was what people loved about Nantucket, that it brought them back to a more innocent time.

Turning a corner, she found herself on York Street. At Five Corners stood the African-American Meeting House. She’d walked by it before, but hadn’t thought there was much to see. It was such a modest little structure, gray-shingled, only one story high and one room large. She’d read in a guide book that it had been built in 1827 and served since then as a church, a school for African children, and a meeting house.

The door was open. On a whim, Alice wandered in.

A handsome black woman in her fifties sat at a small table, reading a book. She wore white cotton slacks and an oversized white cotton shirt just like one Alice had bought in Boston. She smiled. “Hello.”

“Hello.” Alice picked up a brochure and scanned it. “Huh. I didn’t know this place was owned by the Museum of Afro-American History in Boston.”

“Oh, yes. We purchased it in 1989. It was rededicated in 1992. We’ve worked to get it on the map as part of Nantucket’s history.” The woman held out her hand. “I’m Gloria Price. I live in Boston, but I come down here in August to help out. The Meeting House is open for tourists only in the summer. We’d like to do more to research and raise awareness of African-American history on the island, but of course that takes money, which means fund-raising.”

“Uh-huh.” Alice nodded and strolled around the little room.

Two rows of wooden pews lined either side of a narrow aisle to a small stage. The place was plain, but nicely restored. A framed portrait of a stunningly beautiful young black woman caught her eye. Alice stopped to study it. The woman was seated in an ornate chair, its high, heraldic back suggesting a throne. She was magnificently dressed in a coat with fur on the cuffs and lapels, and her elegant head sported an enormous wide-brimmed hat adorned with ribbons and feathers. “Now that’s what I call a
chapeau,
” Alice murmured appreciatively.

Gloria rose and came to stand next to Alice. “That’s Mrs. Florence Higginbotham. She came here in 1911 to work for a summer family. In 1920, she bought this house and lived in it for the rest of her life. When she died, she willed the house to her son, but asked that the house’s history be recognized. And gradually, although it’s taken decades, that’s what we’re trying to do.”

Alice looked at the portrait. She didn’t know when she’d seen such an optimistic, charismatic face. Florence Higginbotham looked proud, but not angry. She wasn’t jutting her chin out defiantly. Her expression was confident, and inviting. Why, she looked like she was about to laugh. She looked like someone Alice would dearly love to know.

Alice said, “She possesses a remarkable countenance.”

Gloria said, “She was a remarkable woman.”

Alice felt like she was under a spell. Like she was in some kind of mutual
communication
with Florence Higginbotham. Alice had never joined any organizations devoted to promoting Black heritage or African-American progress. She’d never had time. She’d always been too busy ensuring her own and her sons’ safety, education, and future. But she was absolutely enchanted by Florence Higginbotham. And Alice was old enough to know she still had a lot to learn and she could learn from someone younger, even from someone who had lived in the past. In a flash, Alice saw how her own expertise at organizing, communicating, brainstorming, and managing could be helpful to this historical organization. It was as if Florence Higginbotham, with her splendid plumed hat, was holding a door open to a world Alice hadn’t known existed, and Alice couldn’t wait to enter.

She turned to Gloria Price. “I’m Alice Murray. I live in Boston, too. I think I might like to help with your fund-raising.”