The Last Summer of the Camperdowns (2 page)
I
CAN STILL SMELL THE AIR THAT MORNING. SMELLS LIKE JUNE.
Smells the way the hermit thrush sings. If I listen hard enough, I can hear the metallic ripple of the old gray fan swiveling back and forth, wobbling on the uneven dresser top, my basset hound, Dorothy, softly snoring at the foot of the bed. It was an old-fashioned room in an old-fashioned house, florid wallpaper pattern of cabbage roses covering the plaster walls, a room out of step with its cranky, opinionated occupant. I was twelve—almost thirteen, as I reminded everyone incessantly—and desperate for modernity with my melodramatic shrine to the late Brian Jones, with its pop colors and angular graphics, its collage of newsprint pictures torn from the pages of
Fab
magazine, an embarrassingly earnest art installation at aesthetic odds with the chenille bedspread, the handmade quilt and the botanical prints.
My bedroom was my private refuge and lucky for me—and for my parents—it took up the entire third story, affording me the luxury of a separate wing all to myself.
The ancient dollhouse next to the window seat made it plain that it was a girl’s room, though in decor it was matronly rather than feminine and featured good traditional pieces. Darkly veneered four-poster bed, tallboy, a mirrored vanity with velvet chair—my sanctuary was filled with the kind of furniture that gets passed down through generations, which meant that I spent most of my childhood feeling as if I was channeling the musty spirit of my maiden aunt Kate, the one whose breath I still vividly recall as having the power to curdle my will to live.
We lived in the town of Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, in a weathered cedar-shake house with robin’s-egg blue shutters and a salmon door. My father, then forty-six years old, had grown up in that house, one of two heritage properties located at the end of a long private road. Our place sat on top of a soaring sand dune overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, part of a large parcel of land that ran along the Outer Cape shoreline.
The walls were painted in the rich saturated hues that my mother loved, blue and coral, orange and yellow, red. From top to bottom, you could feel her refined sensibilities at work in every inch of our old house, with its miles of buffed herringbone floors. My father had no interest in decor—he would have been more inclined to get a perm than comment on a fabric choice. Because my mother relished discord, nothing matched. She detested conspicuous decorative effects, preferring the conspiracy of random elements to create a seemingly accidental chic.
Outside, white-capped waves rolled in with sublime efficiency.
That dear old house. If there is a heaven, I will spend eternity on the back porch, sipping iced tea and eating radish and mayonnaise sandwiches, listening to the birds chirp, watching the mulberries ripen, hearing the waves roll in, reading Sun Tzu when my father is looking, Trixie Belden when he isn’t.
It felt so alive where we were, everything seeming to happen all at once: sun, sea, sand, wind, blowing grasses, tangled woods and secretive wildlife. Even the roof was covered in thick layers of actively growing green moss. We were bound by a conservation area on one side, with its circuitous trails and cluttered enclaves of trees, their trunks congested with matted vines, and on the other side was a small stable with a paddock where my mother and I kept my horse, Eugene Debs, and her horse, Joe Hill. Across the road, deeply forested tracts of land, along with open fields of pasture and wildflowers and kettle ponds both small and large, offered a spectacularly different vision of the natural world. My father used to say that the only thing we were missing was a view of the Matterhorn—in which case, according to him, we weren’t missing much.
It was the start of summer holidays, and I felt so light and liberated I practically had to anchor myself to the ground to keep from floating away. I hated school. St. Patrick’s Academy was my own private Leavenworth, criminally earnest, a school that promised to develop physical, spiritual and intellectual greatness in students whose parents were inclined to interpret life’s disappointments in terms of a mediocre wine list. Despite my worst efforts, I was a good student and had just graduated from grade eight.
A loner by choice, I viewed the summer months as my time—to ride my horse, play with my dogs, read my books, run on the beach, gaze out over the ocean and daydream. My father was running for Congress, unfortunately for me, since it meant there was always the implicit threat that with school out I was available to attend endless fundraisers and help out with the campaign.
Politics was an inherited affliction in our family, passed on like a weak chin from one generation to the next. My grandfather, a fervent Democrat, had been an early labor activist and union leader who scandalized his blue-collar disciples by marrying the boss’s daughter, a concert pianist.
“I believe the term ‘limousine liberal’ was coined with your paternal grandfather in mind,” my mother used to scoff at every opportunity.
Any time there was a major strike or a serious bout of labor unrest my father talked about running for office, a constituency of powerful union supporters and left-leaning pedigree pals urging him on, but it was Vietnam and the release of the Pentagon Papers, his growing disillusionment with the ethical failures of leadership, that pushed him to finally make good on his word.
I
T WAS JUNE 4, 1972
. The day started out peacefully enough, a creamy soft Sunday afternoon, a sweet do-nothing day. My mother called them tea-finger-sandwich days. A day with the crust removed. My parents and I were in the dining room eating lunch. The garden doors were open. The late spring sun poured in, conferring a brilliant sheen to the ocean air, the exuberant complementary colors of the fabric on the chairs, orange and blue, fading against the natural light.
The election was five months away, and we were enjoying a rare quiet moment as a family. Camp had promised to take the day off and unplug the phone, but not before receiving the news that one of his biggest supporters had died unexpectedly the night before.
“Terrible about Franklin.” My mother unfolded her napkin and positioned it in her lap.
“There’s a goddamn bullet for everyone,” my father said, not for the first time, from his position at the head of the long table as we sat together in the cherry-paneled room. Four courses. Soup. Salad. Entree. Dessert.
“I’d settle for a goddamn hot dog,” I said, grousing, unconvinced that a stranger’s death was worth my attention, pulling a paperback novel from my back pocket.
Diary of a Nobody
. Lifted from my mother’s nightstand. At that stage of my life, I was persuaded that curmudgeonly complaint lent me a certain gravitas that belied my age, which is not to say that whining didn’t come naturally to me.
“Riddle, you sound like a hockey player,” my mother said as Louise, called Lou, our durable staff of one, emerged from the kitchen with a pot of coffee, steam pouring from the spout. “How many times must you be told not to read at the table?”
“Better a hockey player than a debutante,” my father said, patting my hand, indicating his ongoing support for my minor acts of rebellion. Grateful and a little bit smug, I smiled back at him.
“Shall I pour?” Lou asked no one in particular, the coffeepot poised in midair over my mother’s empty cup.
“Yes, thank you,” my mother said.
“No,” my father interrupted. “We are quite capable of pouring our own coffee. Just leave the pot. Thanks anyway, Lou.”
Lou smiled nervously as my mother sighed in annoyance.
Everything about Lou was short: her stubby legs, her thick waist, her spiky hair, a kind of electrified crew cut. The only thing long about Lou was the extent of her suffering—she had taken care of my mother as a child and continued to perform the same penance now that she was an adult. She cooked and cleaned and ran the household, subject to occasional cursory inspection by my mother, who made it clear to everyone that when it came to what she found interesting, housework and children ranked just above medieval fairs and slightly below collecting bottle caps. I generally felt the welcome mat yanked from beneath my feet after ten minutes of undiluted exposure. Her impatience with my father hovered at the five-minute mark, at which point her fingers would begin their deadly tabletop drumming.
She was tapping up a storm that day in the dining room. “It’s when the drumming stops you start to worry,” my father said, inexplicably in thrall to her sleek furies.
When it came to my father and what he had to say, the bar was always open. He served up endless rounds of proclamation and intimidation, each garnished with a spritz of soda and a wedge of lime. He liked fizz. Try to imagine
North Korea: The Musical
and you might begin to understand the ruthless carbonated foundation on which Godfrey Camperdown was built.
“Your father makes Fidel Castro sound like Gilligan,” my mother said with practiced indifference. “I’m going to buy him a lectern for his birthday.”
She reached for four strips of bacon and, bending down, fed them to the dogs, her beloved basset hounds, Dorothy, Madge, Hilary and Hilary’s three-month-old puppy, Vera.
Dunhill cigarette in hand, her sixth finger, she straightened up and exhaled in my direction, a plume of silky smoke winding through her yellow hair like a gray ribbon. I breathed in deeply of her sophistication, imprinting forever that angular and archly feminine aesthetic native to her but elusive to me. I still find the malignant trinity of cashmere sweater set, French manicure and cigarette smoke irresistible.
I’m a good listener. Maybe it comes from being an only child living in a large house with high ceilings and wide baseboards, wandering through rooms as elegant in their quietude as the first hours of morning. Growing up in the exclusive company of my parents, I was attuned to all the things that tend to go unsaid between adults in a relationship of long standing. My mother and father were great talkers, their conversation part of the electrical circuitry of the house, lighting up rooms, propelling forward the machinery of our daily lives.
Nodding enthusiastically, in thrall to the idea that my father could diminish Castro to the status of little buddy, I scooped up a grape and popped it into my mouth with relish, juice trickling down the back of my tongue. Like my mother, I deplored all that bored me—unlike her, though, I absolved myself of any obligation to be entertaining. I might as well have been born with a pistol in my hand, firing furiously at the floor, ordering life to dance.
There were four members of the private club that made up my immediate family: my father, my mother, me and World War Two, which I had come to think of as an unfunny uncle with a penchant for fighting and moodiness. My dad had volunteered in 1943 when he was only seventeen years old, lying about his age, and served in Europe in the infantry. For him, the war was a present-tense event against which all other experiences languished in pallid comparison.
He was hell-bent on making a man out of me. I was his special project, one of several missions he’d undertaken both on and off the field of battle, where his role as a frontline combatant had permanently blurred the lines of distinction between war and peace. Preoccupied with my personal safety, troubled by my inability to defend against the world’s evils, he taught me to conceal a rock in my fist whenever I left the house. You never know when you might need to shatter an unshaven cheekbone or crack open a resistant skull.
“Castro? Since when do you take your mother’s side against me?” Camp said, glancing in my direction as I grinned over at him. He picked up one of Lou’s freshly baked biscuits and lobbed it at me, hitting me in the cheek.
“Oh, Lord,” my mother said as he followed up by reaching over and pinching my forearm.
“Ouch!” I yelped.
“Don’t tell me you’re going to just sit back and take it,” he said, playful and challenging as I reached for an olive, pinging him in the forehead.
“Finally! Now, we’re talking.” He stood up, gesturing with both hands, daring me to launch a full-scale reprisal. “Punch me in the stomach. Come on. Hit me as hard as you can. Don’t hold back.”
“For God’s sake, Camp, she’s twelve years old . . .” my mother said.
“Almost thirteen,” I interrupted.
“This is Cape Cod, not the Russian front,” my mother protested.
“What should I teach her? How to iron?” My father reluctantly sat back down in his chair, unable to conceal his contempt for the so-called feminine arts. He was a true anomaly, an alpha male with suffragette sympathies. I sometimes suspected that his militant feminism had its roots in his desire to rid both sexes of all traces of effeminacy.
My mother’s attempt to speak devolved into a low grumble deep in her throat. Greer was a master sigher. Then she brightened. She had decided on a different tactic.
“So, it’s interesting timing for Michael Devlin’s return from Italy, what with the election, I mean.” She glanced downward at the antique Aubusson rug on the floor, as if something remarkable might spring up from beneath its faded tapestry.
“Hmm.” Camp seemed as remote as my mother seemed engaged. His hands opened in front of him, he extended his fingers and then tightened them together into a fist, gathering up the loose ends of a waning Sunday morning and tying them into a knot. My mother intuitively responded to the sudden tension by loosening the ribbon that held back her hair, which fell onto her shoulders in a single sleek, swooping motion.
