Читать книгу A Hundred Summers: The ultimate romantic escapist beach read - Beatriz Williams, Beatriz Williams - Страница 12

Nobody knew for certain when the first house was built on Seaview Neck, but I had witnessed cordial arguments on the club veranda gallop on long past midnight trying to settle the dispute. New Englanders are like that: everyone wants to descend in direct line from a founding father.

Whoever did settle Seaview first had an excellent eye for location. The land curved around the rim of Rhode Island in a long and tapering finger, guarded at the end by a rocky outcropping and an abandoned stone battery that had fired its last shot during the Civil War. On one side of the Neck lay the Atlantic Ocean, flat and immense, and on the other lay Seaview Bay, on which most of the households had built docks that poked like a line of toothpicks into the sheltered water. Generation after generation, we children had learned to swim and row and sail in Seaview Bay, and to ride waves and build sand castles along the broad yellow beach girding the ocean.

With all due modesty (and New Englanders are like that, too), the Danes had as much claim as any to the founders’ crown. Our house lay at the end of the Neck, the last of the forty-three shingled cottages, right up against the old battery and with its own little cove hollowed out from the rocks. According to the deed in Daddy’s library, Jonathan Dane laid claim to the land in 1697, which predated the formation of the Seaview Association and the building of the Seaview Beach Club by about a good hundred and seventy years.

I had always thought our location the best on Seaview Neck. If I wanted company, I walked out the front door and turned left, down the long line of houses, and I was sure to see a familiar face before I had gone a hundred yards. If I wanted privacy, I turned right and made for the cove. This I did almost every morning. My window faced east, and the old wooden shutters did little to keep out the early summer sunrise, so I would wrap myself in my robe, snatch my towel from the rack, and plunge my naked body into the water before anyone could see me.

The pleasure varied by the season. By September, the Atlantic had been sunning itself all summer long, drawing up lazily from the tropical south, and my morning swim amounted to a tingling soak in a warm salt bath. In May, a month after the chilling rains of April, the morning after Nick and Budgie drove us back from the Seaview clubhouse, the experience resembled one of the more barbaric forms of medieval torture.

Worse, Budgie herself sat waiting for me on the rocks when I emerged from the water, in full-body shiver. “Hello there,” she said. “Towel?”

I flung myself back into the Atlantic. “What are you doing here?”

“Nick was up at dawn, leaving for the city. Rather than go back to bed, I thought I’d find you here. Industrious of me, wasn’t it? Aren’t you cold?”

Water sloshed against my bare chest. Cold? I was numb all the way through, trying to banish the image of Nick in bed with Budgie, Nick rising at dawn and Budgie rising with him. Straightening his tie, smoothing his hair. Kissing him good-bye.

“It’s bracing,” I said.

She held up my towel and shook it. “Don’t be shy. We were housemates once, weren’t we?”

I waved my arms, treading water, trying to come up with an excuse.

“Oh, never mind. I’ll join you.” Budgie rose and pulled off her hat, pulled off her striped blue-and-white sweater and her shirt. I stared in astonishment as her body unwrapped itself before me, exposing her pale skin to the cool morning. She wore a peach silk envelope chemise underneath, edged with lace, without girdle or stockings. She leaned down, grasping the hem, and I whirled around to face the open ocean and the waves rolling along the horizon in long white lines.

Budgie was laughing behind me. “Look out below!” she called, and I turned my head just in time to see her long, narrow body slice like a knife into the water nearby.

She came up shrieking. “Oh, it’s murder! Oh, my God!”

“You’ll get used to it.”

Budgie tilted her head back, soaking her hair until it emerged dark and shining against her skull. The absence of a hairstyle emphasized the symmetrical arrangement of her features, the high angles and pointed tips; the startling size of her Betty Boop eyes, which lent such an incongruous innocence to her otherwise sharp face. She was always slender, but her slenderness had now reached undreamt-of heights and lengths, an impossible skeletal elegance. Next to her, I felt rounded and overfull, my edges blurry.

“How do you stand it, every morning?” she asked me, smiling, waving her arms next to her sides. Her small breasts bobbed atop the surface of the water like new apricots.

“Don’t you remember?” I said. “You used to do it with me, when we were little.”

“Not every morning. Only when I had to get away or go mad. Let’s race.” Without warning, she spun her body around and began to stroke across the cove, her long arms reaching and plunging through the waves, her pink feet kicking up spouts of water.

I hesitated, hypnotized for an instant by her rhythmic limbs, and followed her.

For all her flurry of activity, splashing water in every direction, Budgie wasn’t moving fast. I caught up with her in less than a minute and passed her; I reached the opposite side of the cove and touched off the rocks for the return journey.

By the time I coasted past our starting point, Budgie was no longer behind me. I looked around and saw her running naked from the rocks on the opposite side, along the narrow spit of beach to where my towel lay folded on a boulder. For a second or two, her body was silhouetted against the stark gray stone of the abandoned battery, while the sunrise cradled her bones in radiance.

Then the towel covered her. She rubbed herself dry from head to each individual sand-covered toe, finishing with a thorough scrubbing of her hair, and held out the towel in my direction. “Your turn,” she said, giving it a jiggle.

I had no choice. I found the rocky bottom with my toes and pushed through the surging water, feeling with painful exactitude the inch-by-inch exposure of my skin to the cool air and to Budgie’s gaze, from breasts to waist to legs to feet, traced in foam.

“Well, well.” She handed me the towel. “You’ve kept your figure well, all things considered. Of course, the cold water helps.”

I averted my eyes, but there was no missing the pucker of her nipples, or the shocking absence of anything but Budgie between her legs.

She must have caught my horrified expression. She looked down and laughed. “Oh, that. I picked it up in South America, the winter before last. Everybody sugars there, all over. You do know about sugaring, haven’t you? All that nasty hair?”

“I’ve heard of it.”

“You can’t imagine the pain. But the men just love it to death, the little dears.” She laughed again, her bright brittle laugh. “You should have seen Nick’s face.”

The towel was wet and sandy, but I covered myself anyway, dried myself as best I could, shaking with cold. When I could no longer disguise the distress on my face, I turned away from Budgie, found my robe, and belted it around my waist.

“You’re such an hourglass, Lily, with your itsy waist and your hips and chest. Just like our mothers in their corsets, before the war. Do you remember?” Behind me, Budgie was putting on her own clothes. I heard the slide of fabric against her skin, the little grunts and sighs she made as she pushed her arms and legs into their slots.

“I remember.”

“I can’t think why it’s gone out of fashion. But there it is. There’s no accounting for men’s tastes. Let’s lie in the sand together, like we used to.” She jumped down from the rocks in a thump of displaced sand.

She looked so curiously alone, lying blue-lipped and shivering on the beach, with the sand sticking to her dark hair and her bones sticking up from her pale skin, that for reasons unknown I lay down next to her, a few feet away, and stared up at the lightening sky without speaking. A few lacy clouds streaked across, tinged with gold, the same way they had when we were children, lying on this precise patch of sand.

Budgie broke the silence first. “You don’t mind me talking about Nick, do you? After all these years?”

“No, of course not. That was ages ago. He’s your husband.”

She giggled softly. “I still can’t believe it. Mrs. Nicholson Greenwald. I never thought.”

“Neither did I.”

“Oh, you’re remembering what I said before, aren’t you? What a child I was, thinking that was important. Of course it’s a nuisance, the way those old cats treated us last night at the club. I’d forgotten people still thought that way.”

I pressed my numb fingers against my neck to warm them. “You do read the newspapers, don’t you, Budgie?”

She flicked away newspapers with her hand. “Oh, that’s just crazy old Hitler. Who takes him seriously, with that mustache? I mean here, at Seaview. People refusing to dine with us.” She turned on her side and faced me. “But you wouldn’t do that, would you, Lily?”

“No, of course not. You know I never cared about it.”

She laughed. “Of course you didn’t. Sweet, noble-minded Lily. I still remember you in the football stadium, with that stubborn look on your face. I can count on you, right, Lily? You’ll visit us at the house and join our table at the club, won’t you? Show them all up?”

“It shouldn’t matter, should it? You shouldn’t care.” If you really loved him.

“Says the noble-minded Lily. You don’t know what it’s like, though, do you? Having doors slammed in your face.” Her voice thinned out, and she turned onto her back again.

I rolled my head to look at her. She was staring straight up at the clouds, without blinking. “Have they really?”

“Nick’s used to it, of course, so he doesn’t say anything. But I used to be invited everywhere, and now …” She turned back to me and grasped my hand in the sand. “Come have lunch with me today. Please. Or tennis, or something. I’m so lonely when Nick’s gone.”

“When is he back?”

“The weekend. He only came up to settle me in. It’s so hard for him to get away, even in summer. Everyone at the firm depends on him for every little decision. He works such tremendous hours, it’s barbaric.” Her huge eyes fixed on me. “Please see me, Lily.”

I stood up and dusted off the sand from the back of my robe. “All right. I’ll come by for lunch, how’s that? I’ll have to bring Kiki, if you don’t mind. Mother and Aunt Julie are hopeless with her.”

Budgie jumped up and threw her arms around me. “Oh, I knew you would, you darling. I told Nick you’d stand by us.” She leaned back and kissed my cheek. “Now I’ve got to go. The workmen will be arriving any minute. The old place is almost uninhabitable. I hope my housekeeper’s managed to light the stove by now.”

She put her arm through mine and we scrambled up the beach and around the edge of the cove, where the rising sun had lit the gray shingles of the Dane cottage into a radiant yellow-pink. She turned to me and kissed me again. “It was so lovely seeing you last night, darling. Nick and I talked about it all the way home, how nice it was to see you again. Just like old times. Do you remember?”

“I remember.” I kissed her back. The skin of her cheek was like satin, and just as thin.

EVEN WHEN WE WERE LITTLE, I never spent much time at Budgie’s house. She never invited me. We were always outside, playing tennis or out on the water. What little time we spent indoors unraveled mainly in the kitchen of my house, or else upstairs in my bedroom, and then only when the summer rain became too drenching to ignore.

When I marched up Neck Lane at noon, holding Kiki’s hand, I recognized Budgie’s house only because I knew it sat next to the Palmers’ place, about halfway along Seaview Neck. For years, I had been averting my eyes as I went by, as I would from a scar. I stood outside now and gazed down the narrow path, overgrown with tough seaworthy grass and weeds, to Budgie’s peeling front door. A pair of trucks had parked outside, L. H. Menzoes, General Contracting lettered on the doors; the air rang with invisible shouts and hammering from the interior. Every window and door had been thrown open to the salt breeze, and Budgie’s familiar voice carried above it all, issuing orders.

The Greenwalds’ house, I reminded myself. It belonged to both of them now.

Kiki tugged on my hand. “What are you waiting for, Lily?”

“Nothing. Come along.” I led Kiki up the path and knocked on the half-open door. The hinge creaked beneath the strain.

Budgie’s head appeared from a second-floor window. Her hair was bound up in an incongruous red polka-dot scarf. “Come on in! It’s open!” she called.

Kiki stepped first into the foyer and wrinkled her nose. “It’s awfully musty in here.”

“They haven’t lived in it for years,” I said.

Budgie was bounding down the stairs, tearing off the scarf from her head. The hair beneath fell into perfect lacquer-smooth waves. “Years and years! We were ruined, you see, Koko—”

“Kiki.”

“Kiki. I’m so dreadfully sorry. We were ruined, all smashed up in the markets, and I don’t recommend it to anyone. Lemonade? Something stronger? Mrs. Ridge just got back from the market, and not a moment too soon.” Budgie turned and waved her hand at a door to the right. “That’s the living room, completely shot with mildew, they tell me. You remember the living room, don’t you, Lily?”

“I don’t. I remember almost nothing. I don’t think I came in here more than once or twice.” I looked about me. The Byrne house was relatively imposing from the outside, three stories high, with large bay windows on the first floor and gables on the third. Inside, it had the feeling of a barn, and roughly the same dusty outdoorsy smell, except laced with salt instead of manure. The rooms were airy and spacious, the walls covered with chipped paint and peeling floral paper. To the left, a door stood ajar to reveal a dining room, its corner cupboards thick with dust and its chandelier hanging a good three feet too low.

“Oh, look,” said Kiki, bending down at the side of the stairwell. “I think there’s a family of mice under here.”

“I’ve ordered furniture,” said Budgie, “but it won’t arrive for another month or so, not until they’ve fixed things up. I’d like to take out a wall or two and all these wretched doors everywhere, all these crumbling old moldings, and paint everything bright and white. I want everything gone.” She gestured grandly with her arms, left and right, leading us toward the back of the house.

“It sounds like a lot of work.” I tore at a cobweb in the corner of the foyer. Frayed and empty, as if even the spiders had abandoned the place.

“They’re hiring an army of people to get it done quickly. I told them to spare no thought for expense. Nick and I are staying in the guest bedroom while they fix up ours. That’s first on the list, of course. I want a modern bathroom, I absolutely insist on it. Out we go, now. I thought we’d have lunch on the terrace. I’ve been watching the sailboats on Seaview Bay and feeling terribly nostalgic.”

Budgie ushered us through a badly hung French door at the back of the house and onto the terrace, which was made of good New England bluestone and fully intact, despite the years of neglect; only a few tufts of weed and grass sprang between the cracks. The sun poured down unchecked, making the waters of Seaview Bay flash and glitter as if alive. A small sailboat stood off nearby, trying to catch a decent wind.

“Lemonade, did you say?” Budgie strode across the granite to an idyllic arrangement of table and four chairs beneath a large green umbrella. A pitcher sat sweating on a tray, surrounded by tall glasses, along with a bottle of gin, a pack of Parliaments, and a slim gold lighter.

“Do you have ginger ale?” asked Kiki.

“She’ll have lemonade, thank you,” I said. “And so will I.”

Budgie poured the lemonade, added a generous dollop of gin to her glass. She motioned the bottle inquisitively above mine. I nodded and held my thumb and forefinger a crack of sunlight apart, to which Budgie laughed and poured in a good inch. Mrs. Ridge brought in sandwiches on an old blue-and-white platter, chipped along one edge.

Budgie took off her shoes, propped her feet on the empty chair, and nibbled at her sandwich. Her toes were fresh and pink, the nails painted a bright scarlet. She looked across the bay with distant eyes, as if she was trying to pick out details on the mainland.

“So tell me about everyone, Lily,” she said. “The old gang. Any gossip? Other than mine, of course.”

“Not really. I don’t keep up. Anyway, it seems most people have settled down by now.”

“Yes, even me!” She laughed and wiggled her scarlet toes.

Kiki stood up, sandwich finished, lemonade empty. “Lily, may I go walk down the dock?”

“Oh, sweetheart, it’s an old dock. There might be boards loose …”

Budgie waved her hand. “It’s fine. I went down there myself last night. You’re a sensible girl, aren’t you, Kiki?”

“Yes, Mrs. Greenwald.”

Kiki stood there innocently, her hands folded behind her back, her hair still tidy in its white bow. “Very well,” I said. “But be careful. Stay where we can see you.”

“She’s a lovely child,” said Budgie, watching her saunter across the patchy remains of what had once been a lawn. “How lucky you are.”

Kiki walked toward the dock with unaccustomed docility, aware of our watchful eyes. I’d dressed her in her best, or nearly so: a white sailor dress with a navy collar tied about her neck and shiny black Mary Jane shoes over white cuffed socks. Her dark hair tumbled down her back from its ribbon. She looked the picture of flawless girlhood.

“I know.” My thumb drew circles in the condensation on my glass of tricked-up lemonade. I thought about telling Budgie more, about how we had dreaded Kiki’s arrival, about how unlucky we had felt that she should burst into our lives so inconveniently, without a father to raise her. About how she instead had saved us, had rescued me from a slough of despair so deep and profound I’d thought I should never rise again. How I could not now imagine a life without Kiki; how she had become the sun to my cold and desolate earth.

But I said none of these things. Instead I waited for Budgie to speak. Budgie hated nothing so much as silence.

Right on cue, she said: “It almost makes me think I should like to have one of my own.”

“Well, you’re married now. I’m sure it won’t be long.”

“Who knows? Maybe not long at all.” She put her hand on her abdomen. “Imagine that, Lily Dane. Imagine me, a mother.” She laughed and wriggled her toes again.

“You’ll be a wonderful one, I’m sure.”

“Just think. Your Kiki can help watch the baby.” She snapped her fingers. “Babysitter, that’s the word, isn’t it? All the girls are doing it for pocket money these days.”

My Kiki had reached the dock by now. She stood at the edge for a moment, staring down at the water, and sat down and took off her shoes and socks. She turned to me and waved, and though she was a hundred yards away, I could see her wide smile.

“I should call her back,” I said. “We should be going. Mrs. Hubert”—I thought quickly—“Mrs. Hubert wants to meet about the Fourth of July this afternoon. We still haven’t agreed on a theme.”

Budgie took a drink of lemonade and reached for the pack of Parliaments. “Isn’t the theme self-evident? Smoke?”

I took the cigarette from her and lit it. “We like to feature different aspects of the patriotic spirit. Last year was ‘America the Beautiful,’ which came off very well, everyone hanging pictures from all over the country, and once we did ‘Stars and Stripes Forever,’ more straightforward, as you can imagine, and …”

“Lily.” Budgie blew out a long stream of smoke. “Listen to yourself.”

I reached over the glass for the lemonade pitcher. It was nearly empty, and the ice had melted. I poured the remains into my glass anyway, just to avoid Budgie’s gaze. This time, when she leaned over with the gin, I covered the opening with my palm.

She shrugged. “You’ve buried yourself. I always knew you would, if left to yourself, without someone to pull you along.”

“That’s not true. I haven’t buried myself at all.”

“You have. What a mess we made of things that winter. I shouldn’t have abandoned you like that; I’ve never forgiven myself.”

“You couldn’t help it. You had your own tragedies, didn’t you.” I knocked the ash from my cigarette. A single ham sandwich remained on the platter. I reached forward and took it. The ham was delicate, thinly sliced, and the bread thickly buttered.

Buried yourself. I thought of my desk at home in New York and the locked drawer at the bottom, in which a thick bundle of letters lay at the back, bound together with a rubber band, all of them addressed in efficient typescript to a post office box on Seventy-third Street. Dear Miss Dane, Thank you for your submission of three months ago. While we read the pages with some interest, we regret that the Phalarope Press cannot accept your manuscript at this time … Dear Miss Dane, While your writing shows considerable promise, The Metropolitan finds this story unsuitable for publication in our magazine …

Budgie leaned forward and covered my hand. “I’m going to make it up to you this summer. I’m going to show you the best time. I’m going to invite down housefuls of bachelors for you. I’m sure Nick can think of a prospect or two.”

“No, please. I’d rather not.” My eyes dropped irresistibly to the glittering rocks on the hand atop mine. Up close, they seemed even larger, like Chiclets, sharp-edged and modern, dominating the delicate long bones of Budgie’s fingers. The middle one was the largest, I could now tell, but not by much.