The Summer Girls (4 page)

Marietta strode from the porch with purpose. The west wing was original to the old beach house. It was a warren of three rooms: one she and Edward had slept in, one had been Parker’s room, and the wide room with heart-pine paneling, bookshelves, and paintings of hunting dogs had been the den. Years later when Marietta had expanded the house
and Parker’s three daughters came for summers, the girls laid claim to the west wing by virtue of squatter’s rights. In her mind she could still hear the giggling and squeals. The poor men were chased out of their lair, grumbling about hormones and the vanities of youth.

“Did you get the necklaces out as I asked?” Marietta said as they walked through the den.

“They’re in your room, on your bed.”

Marietta walked through the living room to the master bedroom. The master suite made up the house’s east wing, and it was her sanctuary. She’d restored and remodeled Sea Breeze when she’d made the permanent move from Charleston to the island. Poor Edward hadn’t lived long enough to enjoy his retirement. Marietta had found him slumped over his computer only a year after Parker’s death, leaving her utterly alone in her redone house.

She walked across the plush carpeting directly to her ornately carved, mahogany four-poster bed, where she saw three black velvet bags lying on the bedspread. Three necklaces for three granddaughters.

“It’s high time I selected which necklace to give which girl.”

Lucille crossed her arms over her ample breast. “I thought you said you was gonna let
them
pick out the one they like the best.”

“No, no, Lucille,” Marietta replied impatiently. “That wouldn’t do at all.” She paused, turning her head to meet Lucille’s gaze. “It’s said,” she said in the manner of a sage, “that pearls take on the essence of the person who wears them.” She nodded, as though adding emphasis to the declaration.
She began walking again. “I’ve worn those pearl necklaces for decades. Why, each pearl is positively
infused
with my essence. Don’t you see,” she said as though it were obvious, “that by giving my granddaughters my pearls, I’m passing on a bit of myself to each of them?” The very idea of it still had the power of giving her pleasure. “I’ve been looking forward to this moment for years.”

Lucille was accustomed to the air of the dramatic in Marietta and remained unconvinced. “They can still pick their own necklace and get that essence juju. What if they don’t like the one you picked out for them?”

“Don’t like? What’s not to like? Each necklace is priceless!”

“I’m not talking about how much it’s worth. I’m talking about liking it. You don’t want them sneaking looks at each other, checking out what the other one got. Chances are, you’ll get it wrong. I’ve never known three people more different than those girls. If you asked me to choose, why, I couldn’t. Wouldn’t have a clue what they like.” She narrowed her eyes and nodded her head in a jerky motion. “And you don’t neither.”

Marietta lifted her chin. “Of course I do. I’m their mamaw. I
know
.”

“Uh-huh,” Lucille replied with a doubtful shake of her head as they crossed through the living room. “So much for you trying not to manipulate folks so much.”

“What’s that? You think I’m manipulating them?”

“I’m just saying . . . Seems to me I remember you saying how you wanted to sit back and watch the girls choose, so’s you could see for yourself what their tastes were and what
kind of women they’d grown up to be. You
said
you wanted to help them get close again. How’re you gonna do that if you’re already setting things up the way you like? Didn’t you learn nothin’ from Parker?”

Marietta looked away, troubled by the truth in the accusation. “My life was devoted to Parker,” she said, her voice trembling with emotion.

“I know it,” Lucille replied gently. “And we both know it was that boy’s undoing.”

Marietta closed her eyes to calm herself. Now that years had passed since her son’s early death, she could look at his life with a more honest eye, one no longer blurred by her devotion.

Marietta and Edward had wanted children, expected them. Not a horde, but an heir and a spare at the very least. In retrospect, it was a miracle that Marietta had delivered a son. After Parker’s birth she’d suffered countless miscarriages and the despair of a stillborn child. She had doted on Parker . . . spoiled him. She didn’t learn until years later that she was what the doctors called an
enabler.

Edward had complained it’d cost him a fortune in donations just to get the boy through the drunken debauchery of fraternity parties and countless girls to miraculously collect a degree. After college graduation, Edward had wanted to “boot his son off the payroll” and force him to “become a man and find out what it meant to earn a dollar.” To which Marietta had responded with tongue in cheek, “Oh? You mean like you had to do?”

Parker could do no wrong in his mother’s eyes, and Marietta became adept at making excuses for his failings. If he
was moody, she declared him sensitive. His womanizing, even after marriage, was always the fault of his unsatisfactory mates. And his drinking . . . well, all men liked to drink, didn’t they?

Parker had been a beautiful child and had grown to become, no one could argue, an unfairly handsome man. He was tall and lean, with pale blond hair and azure eyes—the Muir color—rimmed with impossibly long lashes. Combined with his upper-class Southern heritage, to her mind he was Ashley Wilkes incarnate. When Parker looked appealingly into his mama’s eyes, it was impossible for her to stay angry with him for his indiscretions. Though his father had grown immune to it over the years.

Never the women, however.

Women flocked to him. Marietta had secretly loved to watch them flutter their feathers around him like plumed birds. In her vanity, she took credit for it. Yet, Marietta had never been naive. It was precisely because she knew Parker could be indifferent to consequences that she’d taken it upon herself to introduce him to his future wife.

That woman was Winifred Smythe, an acceptably attractive young woman from a fine Charleston family. More to the point, she was a woman who was malleable, of moral upbringing, and willing. Everyone who saw them together couldn’t help but agree they were a “golden couple.” Their wedding at St. Philip’s made headlines on the society pages. When Winnie gave birth to a daughter one year later, Marietta felt it was a personal triumph. Parker named his daughter Dora, after his favorite Southern author, Eudora Welty.

It was at this time that Parker declared he was writing a novel. Marietta had been infatuated with the idea of her son as an artist. Edward saw it as an excuse not to get a real job. Parker had tried to work in the bank with his father but that had lasted less than a year. Parker hated being cooped inside a building without windows and hated numbers, suits, and ties. He claimed he needed to write.

So he was given an allowance by his parents and began writing a novel that, according to Parker, would allow him to join the hallowed ranks of celebrated Southern authors. It was the seventies, and Parker became a stereotype of an author: he holed up in his dingy office at the Confederate Home with bottles of Jim Beam and marijuana for his inspiration. He wore turtleneck sweaters, let his hair grow, and generally was self-indulgent regarding his “craft.”

Two years later, Parker’s novel was not completed and it was discovered he was having an affair with the nanny. Marietta had stormed to the house she’d bought the couple on Colonial Lake in Charleston and demanded that Parker leave the nanny and beg his wife’s forgiveness with a significant piece of jewelry. To her shock, Parker had stood up to her for the first time and refused to do her bidding. The other woman, a beguiling French girl of barely eighteen, was pregnant, and he intended to divorce Winnie to marry Sophie Duvall.

And so he did. Immediately after his divorce from Winnie was final, Parker married Sophie. True to form, Parker’s apologies and cajoling eventually brought his parents to the shack of a house he and Sophie rented on Sullivan’s Island. Marietta had wailed to Edward that the only reason
the house was still standing was because the termites were holding hands. Marietta and Edward did not attend the sham wedding with the justice of the peace, but they took heart when their son found his first job, managing an independent bookstore in the city. Edward had been so hopeful about his son’s commitment to
something
that he’d agreed to an allowance to help support the couple after the baby was born—another girl. Parker named his second daughter Carson, after Carson McCullers, thus continuing his predilection for naming his children after Southern writers.

Poor Sophie,
Mamaw thought to herself, recalling the waif of a woman. She suffered postpartum depression and eventually became Parker’s drinking partner. Their lifestyle slipped from bohemian to dysfunctional. Their drinking had kept Marietta awake nights with worry. The tragedy she feared occurred four years later. No one ever mentioned that horrible fire that took Sophie’s life. The circumstances were hushed and became yet another of the Muir family secrets.

After Sophie’s tragic death Parker dug deep enough to finish his novel. Energized with renewed enthusiasm, he moved to New York to work as an assistant in a publishing house. He was determined to find an editor, and, Mamaw thought with a sigh, in fact, he did. Unfortunately this editor didn’t publish his novel. Instead she married him. Georgiana James was an up-and-coming junior editor for Viking. She had drive, ambition, and the generous support of her wealthy British family. They’d married quickly—and divorced months later, before the baby was born. It was another girl, and in a rare concession to Parker because
Georgiana approved of the literary reference, the child was named Harper after the Southern author Harper Lee.

Georgiana had proved a stalwart opponent to all things Muir. She steadfastly refused Marietta’s invitations to visit Charleston, nor was Marietta invited to New York to visit Harper. But Mamaw persevered, determined not to be snuffed out of any of her granddaughters’ lives.

During these tumultuous years, Carson had come to live with Mamaw in her South of Broad home in Charleston. During the summers, little Dora came to stay with them at Sea Breeze on Sullivan’s Island to play with Carson. Mamaw smiled wistfully remembering those years, so long ago. The two girls were like peas and carrots, always together. Even after Carson moved to Los Angeles with her father, she still came back to Sea Breeze to spend each summer with Dora. It wasn’t until years later that Harper was old enough to join them on the island.

Those few precious summers of the early 1990s were the only years all three granddaughters were together at Sea Breeze. Only three years, and what magical summers they’d been. Then the teenage years intervened. When Dora turned seventeen she no longer wanted to spend her valuable vacation time with her baby sisters. Carson and Harper became a duo. So it was that Carson was the link between all the girls. The middle child who had spent summers alone with each sister.

Mamaw brought her hand to her forehead. To her mind, all the summers seemed to blend together, like the ages of the girls when they played together. She had a kaleidoscope of memories. There once had been a very special bond
between her granddaughters. It worried her to see them as near strangers today. Mamaw couldn’t abide the term
half sisters
. They were sisters, bound by blood. These girls were her only living kin.

Bolstered with resolve, Marietta turned to the velvet bags. One by one she spilled the pearl necklaces atop the pale pink linen coverlet. The three necklaces shone in the natural light that poured in through the large windows. As she studied the glistening pearls, her hand unconsciously rose to her neck. Once, each of these necklaces had graced the slender length of it, back when her neck had been her glory. Now, sadly, it was an embarrassment. High-quality natural pearls, all of them. Not these modern, freshwater bits that were more accessories than treasured pieces of fine jewelry. Back in her day, pearls were a rarity, among the most valued pieces of a woman’s jewelry collection.

It was traditional to give a modest, classic pearl necklace that rested just below the base of the neck to a young girl at her sixteenth birthday or at her debut. Reaching out, Marietta lifted the first necklace. It was a triple-strand necklace of pearls with a showy ruby-and-diamond clasp. Her parents had given her this choker for her coming-out at the St. Cecilia Debutante Ball. Her father loved extravagance and this had certainly been an extravagant choice, one that had made her feel like a queen among the other princesses bedecked in their white gowns and single-strand pearl necklaces.

Marietta studied the pearls dangling from her palm, considering to whom she should give this necklace.

“I shall give these to Harper,” Marietta announced.

“The quiet one,” Lucille commented.

“Not so much quiet as reserved,” Marietta said, contradicting her. “It’s the English in her, I suppose.”

“Same thing to me,” Lucille said. “She was like a little mouse, wasn’t she? Always holed up with a book. Startled easy, too. But Lawd, that girl was as sweet as Tupelo honey.” Lucille pursed her lips in thought, then shook her head. “Don’t know but that it’s a showy necklace for a tiny thing like her.”

“Exactly the point. They’ll show her off. And she’ll wear them well,” Marietta replied, thinking of Harper’s proud bearing. “You see, Harper is the closest in age to mine when I received these pearls. And I do think the cream-colored pearls will complement her creamy skin tone.”

“Creamy?” Lucille’s chuckle rumbled low in her chest. “She might be the whitest white girl I’ve ever known.”

Marietta smiled at the truth in it. Harper’s skin never tanned in the sun; it only burned—no matter how much lotion she applied.

“She has that fair English skin like her mother. Georgiana James,” she said with a sniff of distaste, remembering the cool, expensively tailored woman who had snubbed her the last time they’d spoken. “I swear she must apply her makeup with a trowel. She looks positively cadaverous! And she claims she has royal blood,” Marietta scoffed. “Not a drop of blue blood flows in those veins. I daresay not much red, either. But dear Harper really does have the most soulful eyes, don’t you think? She gets that color from the Muirs . . .”