The Summer House (5 page)

1972

Chapter 4

“Where the Sam Hill is your sister?” Lizzie’s father hissed beside her.

Lizzie Adams kept her eyes on the parade and bit her lip. “She’ll be here, Father.” Her spine stiffened as ramrod straight as the backs of the West Point graduates who were marching past them. “She promised.”

“I shouldn’t have let her come,” he sputtered. “I should have known better.”

Liz blinked against the bright sun, and tried to shield herself from the glare that hovered over the reviewing stand, its white-hot veil shimmering, marking time with the cadence of the rat-tatting, rum-tumming drums. Why did BeBe have to be late when she knew how important this was to Father? And why, in their second-row seats (VIP honored guests of the governor of New York), were they not exempt from the steamy weather?

Lizzie glanced in front of them at the governor and his wife, surprised that they remained cool-looking, unaffected by the heat. Then she looked down at her linen suit and wondered if the governor’s wife would be as wrinkled
as she surely would be by the time this long-winded ceremony ended.

“Why can’t your sister be more like you?”

Her father’s words made her back straighten again. She adjusted the small heels of her bone-colored shoes on the bleacher plank and clasped the matching handbag in her lap. “Father …” she began to protest, then quickly scanned the marching unit. “Look! There he is. There’s Daniel!”

Although Daniel was in the same gray uniform as the other cadets, his chin was somehow higher, his body more square. His personal magnetism was almost visible as an aura around him. “Destined for greatness,” Will Adams frequently said in case anyone had forgotten. “Presidential material.”

Lizzie could see that the sight of Daniel had distracted her father from the subject of his absent wild-child. She tried not to sigh.

It was no surprise that her sister wasn’t there. BeBe was nineteen now and she’d gone to a graduation party last night. She hadn’t gone to the cotillion last week, of course, because only those lucky girls who had dates with cadets were able to dress like debutantes and float into the ball on a privileged cloud. No, BeBe had not gone to the historic cotillion, and when Father had remarked in private that Lizzie might attend with Daniel’s roommate, Michael Barton, Lizzie had refused. She didn’t refuse Father very often, but she had not wanted BeBe to feel left out. Inside, however, Liz had died a trillion deaths, because she would have loved the cotillion, she just knew she would.

She would also have loved to go to the party last night, but Father had said, “No. Absolutely not, you’re too young.” Chaperoned balls apparently were one thing; beer-drinking parties, another.

Father had not wanted BeBe to go either. But BeBe
went anyway. She could do what she wanted. She was a college student—at Mount Holyoke, no less—and “of age,” at least in New York, where West Point happened to be. Lizzie, however, was doomed to dinner with Mother and Father and some “people” in the ancient dining room at the Hotel Thayer. It was elegant and quite grand, perched high above the Hudson, but Lizzie’s evening could not compare with BeBe’s good time.

Daniel, of course, also went to the party, as did their brother Roger and Michael, Daniel’s roommate, who had ended up going to the cotillion with a girl from New Jersey. “She’s ugly as dog breath,” Daniel had made it a point to tell Lizzie, which did not say much because Daniel’s taste was questionable: he’d taken Evelyn Carter, the granddaughter of the congressman who’d “gotten” Daniel into West Point. Her buck teeth had straightened out, but her personality had not: Evelyn Carter would always be one of those people obsessed with everybody else’s business. But Daniel had taken her. So much for great destinies.

Besides, Lizzie didn’t care who Michael had taken to the cotillion. He was simply Daniel’s roommate, the other Massachusetts boy who had been appointed to the academy. “Michael Hamilton Barton,” he’d introduced himself when he’d been a plebe and Lizzie was only twelve. She later learned that he was a “Barton of Lynnfield,” which mattered to Father.

Just as Lizzie stretched her neck now to try and pick out Michael in the perfectly aligned ranks, a voice behind her whispered, “He’s on the left. Third row. And he asked about you last night.”

Lizzie blushed. “Sit down, BeBe,” she whispered back. “Before you give Father a heart attack.” She ignored the cold-as-ice glare that Will Adams gave BeBe and tried to find Michael among the other gray-suited graduates, secretly dying to know what else he had said.

Later that afternoon, Lizzie sat on the wide back veranda of their Martha’s Vineyard summer home. It was a sprawling, gray-shingled, white-trimmed house set atop a sloping, velvet lawn that met a path that snaked through a thicket then sneaked to their cove and down to the sea.

It was a summer view she knew well, a view meant for just sitting on the white wicker swing on which she was sitting now and watching the sunsets, the seagulls, the tide, and, well, nothing special.

Nothing special, like the way Michael Barton and Daniel tossed a football now, back and forth, high into the pink and peach and navy blue end-of-the-day sky. By the sounds of their laughter no one would guess they had both come here to await their military orders, the word from the Army as to where they would go.

She pushed her feet against the porch floorboards and tried not to stare. But Liz couldn’t help herself.

Like Daniel, Michael had changed since those early plebeian days. His chest was broader, his shoulders straighter, his voice had become grown-up deep. And he was … handsome. Handsome and smart and surely interested in older girls, surely not in the sixteen-year-old kid sister of a roommate, despite what Father seemed to want.

“All that money and textiles, too,” Will Adams had said at least a dozen times, referring to Michael’s lineage, which ran strongly through several renowned Lowell mills.

Lowering her eyes to the moist spot that seeped from Michael’s chest through his T-shirt, Liz tried to decide what it would be like to fall in love with him and his textile mills. Love was unknown territory for Liz. For a girl from a proper Boston family who attended a proper girls’
school, romance was restricted to infrequent dates and backseat kisses and groping between movies and curfew.

“No daughter of mine will shame the Adams name,” she’d once heard Father shout at BeBe, when her sister had come home late—again. Mother had once told Liz that BeBe reminded Father of his dead sister, Ruth, of whom none of them was allowed to speak for some unknown, perhaps sinister, reason.

As Liz slowly rocked on the swing, she wondered why she had always felt compelled to follow Father’s rules and BeBe had not, and what it had to do with his dead sister, Ruth.

“Go back for a long one,” Michael shouted to Daniel. Daniel complied with four, five, six long strides backwards that landed him straight into the thicket of tall grass and scrub oaks.

He disappeared. For a moment, then another, Liz heard nothing. She smiled, suspecting what Daniel was doing.

Then he emerged. He was not carrying a football, however. Instead he was clutching the tail of a fat black-and-white skunk.

Liz squealed.

“Go back for this, Barton,” Daniel yelled, twirling the skunk by the tail in a game he had invented that had sent his mother and most other sane people shrieking into the house.

“You’re nuts!” Michael shouted but did not run away.

Daniel let out another yelp, twirled the skunk again, let it fly into the thicket, and raced up the slope toward the house, with Michael Barton in sudden fast pursuit.

“And that, my dear Lizzie,” boomed the voice of her father, who had appeared beside her, “is the kind of tough stuff it takes to be president of the United States.”

Liz nodded, because she and everyone—including Daniel—knew that he meant it. She leaned back on the swing and wondered if,
when
Daniel became president, she would have fallen in love by then, and if her children would be allowed to play on the White House lawn, and if Daniel would be too important to twirl skunks anymore.

She also wondered if Michael Barton would still be in their lives, if Daniel might appoint him an ambassador or something important, and if an embassy in an exotic land would be as elegant as the White House itself.

“And every president,” came a voice from the doorway, the voice of Evelyn Carter, Daniel’s know-everything-about-everyone cotillion date, “deserves one of these.”

Liz’s eyes dropped to Evelyn’s hands, where she held a shiny, blue-silvery, hefty handgun. For a brief second, Liz thought it was pointed at Father. Then Father laughed and Daniel and Michael lumbered onto the porch, and Father said, “Let’s have Mother bring us some fresh-squeezed lemonade.”

It was a graduation gift for Daniel, a working antique that had been in Evelyn’s family since World War I, maybe earlier, and it was called a pistol, not a gun.

“It’s from Grandfather’s collection,” she explained, “He had planned to put it in the celebrity auction this Saturday, but he decided Daniel should have it instead.”

That, of course, was an honor in itself. The annual Chilmark auction was famous for its social-register festivities, an occasion when those Vineyarders whose names or likenesses had ever appeared anywhere in the media had the “privilege” of donating goods or services. The money raised went to island youth programs; the prestige that it generated lined the egos of the rich.

“Grandfather would have brought it himself,” Evelyn continued, “but he’s still not quite right since the stroke.”

Will Adams nodded understandingly. Daniel moved his eyes from the pistol to Father to Evelyn, then back to the gun. Liz wondered if he was worried that one lousy cotillion date had now locked him into a family-made match, the result of God only knew how many years of “favors” passed between Will Adams and Evelyn’s congressman grandfather.

“He felt you should have it,” she added with an overeager bat to her lashes, “now that you’re a soldier and all.”

“Thank you,” Daniel said. “And thank your grandfather for me, please. It’s …” He turned the pistol over in his hand and studied the wood-carved handle. “It’s great.”

Great
, Liz knew, was a neutral kind of word that Daniel used whenever he did not know what else to say, and in this case it must mean he was not impressed with Evelyn or her gift. It was an observation that made Lizzie smile.

Then Evelyn dug through the red straw tote bag that matched her red canvas shoes and withdrew a small box.

“Ammunition,” she said, proudly holding the box toward Daniel. “Grandfather always says you never know what might happen next.”

For a moment no one spoke, as if each was contemplating what, indeed, might happen next.

Then Father took the ammunition. “We’ll need to keep this in a safe place,” he said and reached for the gun. Daniel seemed glad to hand it over. “I’ll lock it up in my desk in the study. But first we’ll have young Hugh Talbot check it out for safety.” Hugh Talbot was the new town sheriff.

Evelyn smiled and Daniel nodded and Michael took another drink.

It occurred to Liz that Daniel might be glad to get his “orders,” so that he’d be able to escape Evelyn Carter now that he was a “soldier and all.” Swirling the ice cubes in her glass, Liz considered where Daniel would go and how long it would be before he came back again and if the straw tote bag-toting girl would hang around and wait.