The Summer We Read Gatsby (7 page)

“Are you crazy?”

That’s when he burst out laughing. He laughed so hard he started to choke on what was in his mouth. “Dudes,” he managed to squeak out, sitting up and doubling over in spasms of hysterical guffaws. “You shoulda seen your faces.”

At first we didn’t know how to react. We both just stood there, frozen, as he laughed at us. He took a deep breath and was able to contain himself enough to speak. “That was one of Lydia’s favorites.”

“You just made yourself throw up?” I stared down at the very believable vomit on our floor. “And then ate it? Are you crazy?”

“Literally? I almost threw up myself,” Peck exclaimed. I could hear her already turning this into an anecdote, shaping the story in her mind in order to repeat it.

Finn looked unimpressed, as if he’d seen the vomit trick before, while he rinsed out the bowl he’d used for the eggs. Biggsy pulled aside his jacket and shirt to reveal what looked like a hot water bottle with a tube that he’d snaked up through the top of his shirt. “Cream of mushroom soup.” He sat back on his heels and nodded, a proud grin lighting up his face. “Among other things.”

Trimalchio nuzzled up next to him, licking his face.

“Trimalchio likes you, Fool,” Peck said to him. She seemed to have made a decision about the young artist. She always had a weakness for a pretty face. “And he doesn’t like anyone.”

The dog looked up at her in agreement. True, not
anyone
, his expression indicated.

“He does like soup, though,” I said, watching Trimalchio move on to the mess on the floor, lapping at it eagerly.

“Let’s go, kid,” Finn said to me. “Show me the safe.”

“Safe?” Biggsy glanced over at him. “What safe?”

As Finn followed me up the stairs I could hear Peck telling the Fool-in-Residence about Aunt Lydia and the wording of the will, in which she spoke of finding a thing of utmost value. It occurred to me that it was bad form to talk about this with too many people. But it was only a brief flash of a thought, surprise that my half sister with her obsession with manners would speak so loosely about something that should be kept private, and then it was gone.

3

 

 

 

 

T
hat night, as was tradition, we held the Fool’s Welcome. Our first party on the porch started as a summer vacation does, giddily hopeful. The early part of the evening, with its fragrant, darkening air, held such expectation, like the beginning of summer: this is going to be
fun.

First, there were dressing drinks. “It’s important to mark these moments in life,” Peck said as I joined her in the living room, where a brass bar cart had occupied its spot in the corner since Lydia had moved in to Fool’s House. For a few seconds I wondered what Lydia would be wearing for the party that evening, before I remembered in a rush of emotion that stung my eyes with tears that she would not be joining us. God, I would miss her. “Record this moment,” she might have told me. “Paint it with your words.” She loved to give me writing advice, little tidbits that were like expressions of fondness, coming from her. “Writing is rewriting,” she would say.

Marking a moment, in Peck’s parlance, meant drinking a cocktail, so she was mixing up a batch of her “famous” Southsides, a minty concoction meant to be consumed while we dressed for the evening. “I coined that term, the dressing drink,” she said. “It’s the cornerstone of a civilized life.

“Isn’t this so
Something’s Gotta Give
?” Peck asked as she held up a silver cocktail shaker like it was a trophy. This was part of her continued attempt to convince me we could keep the place. She was referring to the movie with Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton in which a particularly spectacular beach home stirred house lust in its audience. The dank little Fool’s House resembled that light and airy—and large—house only in theory. Yes, they were both shingled and in Southampton. But Diane Keaton’s was on the ocean and surely didn’t smell like mildew. Fool’s House was close to town and reeked like an old shower curtain. Diane Keaton’s house didn’t have a pair of mannequin legs in one corner with silver platform shoes on the feet, or stacks of needlepoint pillows with sayings on them—
A laugh a day keeps the doctor away
, that sort of thing. It also didn’t have a floor covered in a blue-green-and-yellow floral rug so loud it could be heard as far away as Montauk. It wasn’t filled with stuffed sofas and chairs and lamps collected at the estate sales where Lydia went in search of treasures in other people’s junk. And I don’t believe it had a tiny closet tucked under the stairs, perfect for hide-and-seek or building forts, that was now jammed so full of old coats and pillows and boxes of things that it could not be opened.

Our house had a doll called the Pink Lady. It was a relic of an earlier era at Fool’s House, before it had a name, when perhaps there was a young girl occupying the bedroom that was now mine, with its view of the tiny garden in the back. The doll had bald patches and hair that was supposed to be red but had faded to a punk shade of pink. She was missing an eye and wore an old-fashioned smock that had once been pink but was now a dirty mauve color. The Pink Lady was creepy, but she’d become the house mascot and sat on the edge of the second-floor landing looking down at the living room. There was a cocktail of the same name, and Lydia had been known to invite friends to parties allegedly given by the doll at which only these horrible concoctions—something involving gin and grenadine and raw egg created during the Prohibition days—would be served.

The
Something’s Gotta Give
house didn’t have a leaking roof, a gas stove that looked and smelled like it was going to combust any minute, or a raging ant
situation.
But there was a certain zany joy to Fool’s House that the perfectly decorated movie set lacked, and I did love it, although I knew it was wise to keep my feelings in check. This was to be a brief summer fling, that was it.

“More like
Grey Gardens
,” I said. “Without the cats.”

There
was
something of Edie Beale’s uncensored dramatics to my half sister. When she was thirteen she’d been in a car accident that nearly killed her. She hovered near death—at least that’s the way she liked to tell it; “I hovered near death, for months, I tell you,
months
!”—and then, slowly, she recuperated. She missed almost her entire eighth-grade year, spending weeks and weeks of bed rest with old movies on television and gothic romances to read, followed by many more weeks of physical therapy. Like a color photograph coming into focus, she grew bolder and brighter and more intensely saturated as she grew stronger. This process had continued until she evolved, as an adult, into a full-fledged
character
who prided herself on being an eccentric.

“Mum saw that play.” Her mother was “Mum.” Not “Mom,” or “my mother,” or even “
my
mum.” Just
Mum
. As though she were a universal British parent. But Peck was not British and, thankfully, Mum was not anyone else’s mother.

Mary-Alice O’Sullivan was a reasonably attractive Irish housekeeper with red hair hired to clean my dad’s apartment twice a week, back in the seventies, when he was a bachelor artist. According to
my
mother, who told the version she’d heard from Lydia, Mary-Alice had parlayed that assignment into a lukewarm love affair, and then into marriage the old-fashioned way, through pregnancy. They were both Catholic and my father had remained unmarried into his late thirties—“There were rumors he was gay, of course,” my mother told it—so it wasn’t too much of a challenge, and Peck was born six months after the wedding. It was the late seventies in New York and even if anyone had been interested enough to do the math, nobody cared.

Once she was Mrs. George Moriarty she poured all her ambitions into her daughter. She called her Pecksland, a name she insisted had somehow been passed down through her family of potato farmers, and filled Peck’s head with fanciful notions about the proper way to live a well-mannered life. She bought her daughter clothes that were too expensive, fostering her love of fashion, and insisted on lessons in diction, piano, and acting. She fueled Peck’s fantasies about the life she would go on to lead, as a star of the stage or perhaps a fashion icon.

While Peck was still a baby my father had gotten more interested in music, letting his hair grow and staying out late at concerts. He met my mother, a Smith College graduate working on a PhD in philosophy she never finished, at a Grateful Dead show in Virginia. She was only twenty-two and, to hear Lydia tell it, extremely beautiful, with long streaked hair down her back. My mother told me they fell instantly and passionately in love, and that it was a love so deep and true they were powerless to ignore it, despite the fact that my father was married with a young daughter. The intensity of their love allowed them to rationalize what happened afterward, when George behaved badly, abandoning his wife and child to follow the Dead with my mother, never looking back.

Lydia was the one who used those words,
behaved badly
. My mother always told it as a straightforward love story, as though it was destiny that they should be together, previous wife and child or not. She’d leave out any judgment, or guilt, at their behavior. When she told the story, she used a lightly ironic tone, as though she herself were distanced from the emotions she described, as though God or some higher power had been at work and to refuse to go along with it would have been foolish. “Once in a while,” my mother would say, quoting “Scarlet Begonias,” “you get shown the light.”

It hadn’t been easy for Mary-Alice once my mother diverted her husband’s attentions. She was a single working mother—she’d gone back to school and become a nurse—but there were arrangements where she traded housekeeping and other services for things like singing lessons for her daughter, and there’d been scholarships, too, although those were harder to come by as Peck grew older and less interested in academic success. Peck had always taken small jobs to help out, babysitting and that sort of thing, but I knew it had been hard for her, growing up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan without money.

But Peck never complained. She’d simply convinced herself that the upbringing her mother had struggled to give her (the 10021 zip code, the girls’ school, the many private lessons) was not a facsimile of a privileged existence (a one-bedroom rental on First Avenue, scholarships, and bartered agreements) but the real thing. She believed she was extraordinary and that her background, as she chose to view it, was exactly the way a young woman who would go on to be a woman of style and creative substance would have been raised.

I wouldn’t call her pretentious, though some people, without understanding the nuances of her performance, might use such a word, thinking she was putting on airs. But she really wasn’t. She was always open about her mother and her background, and appreciative of the sacrifices “Mum” had made for her. She wasn’t a snob, either. But she was a Method actor and she’d immersed herself so thoroughly into the role in which she’d cast herself that she knew no other reality.

If you asked her about this, as I once had, trying to reconcile the interpretations of the story of her life into one cohesive narrative I could understand, she would feign ignorance. But Peck was more astute than that, and I believed her refusal to grasp what I meant resided in a decision she’d made early on, that envy was far more palatable than pity. She viewed herself as a character and her upbringing as backstory. “If you need a
subject
,” she would say, impatient that I’d yet to write anything resembling a novel, “why not
me
?” And then she would add, “I’d write it myself, but who has the time?”

From the bar cart Peck now chose two glasses and, with great flourish, poured the drinks into the glasses, garnishing them with two quarters of lime speared with plastic toothpicks from a collection in a small silver jar. The toothpicks had little figures on the end that were supposed to look like jesters, the kind of gift I suppose one would give to a person who named her home Fool’s House.

The lemons and limes for the bar cart had been sliced by Just Biggsy. That afternoon he’d cut
panini
in the shape of hearts. He rolled chopped beef into meatballs and cut phyllo dough, sliced carrots, and shaved thin sections from the salmon that Peck had brought home from the market. He worked efficiently, his hands moving quickly, and he knew where everything was. I’d expected some jockeying for position within the house between Peck and me, without Lydia to mediate. But there were advantages to taking up temporary residence with a woman who envisioned herself as one television gig and a jail sentence away from being the next Martha Stewart; Peck was constantly preparing food and drinks and trying new recipes. And Biggsy, who was gracious and proper and deferential and treated us exactly as a long-serving butler would his royal charges, helped enormously. In those first days at Fool’s House the handsome young artist proved himself indispensable.

The friction between my sister and me didn’t have its source in the upkeep of our shared house, although Peck could be ill-tempered when I wasn’t as quick with the compliments as she’d have liked. What we didn’t agree on was the future of the house. Peck kept dropping hints about expensive renovations we might undertake and how she wanted to turn Fool’s House into an artistic and literary retreat. She called me a “stick-in-the-mud” and a “nervous Nellie” when I pointed out that neither of us was in possession of money for such a plan. She even said, “Shut your piehole” when I suggested we schedule a meeting with a real estate broker.

Now Peck lifted her glass and clinked mine. She’d gotten some of the recipes for the food for the Fool’s Welcome from a magazine article entitled, with absolutely no irony, “The Perfect Hamptons Party.” The instructions on how to host such an event were accompanied by heavily styled photographs of carefully cast models posing as guests, looking maniacally happy as they lifted their glasses in a fictional toast to the “chef,” a stout woman in a red taffeta dress.