Читать книгу The Summer Wives: Epic page-turning romance perfect for the beach - Beatriz Williams, Beatriz Williams - Страница 17

I REMEMBER HOW Daddy used to describe the Foxcroft commencement ceremony. He liked to play this little game. As each girl’s name was called, and she went forward in her white dress to claim her diploma, he would name the product from which her family had achieved its wealth. Miss Ames walked forward, and he thought, Shovels. Then Miss Kellogg—Corn flakes. Miss Vanderbilt, of course, recalled Railroads.

Now, no Fisher girls graduated from Foxcroft while my father taught there, so far as I know, but if they had, he would have said to himself, Toilets. It’s true. Look closely at the throne in your bathroom, and you’ll maybe see the Fisher logo, a stylized F bracketed by the word FINE on the left side and FIXTURES on the other. The company had been founded a hundred years earlier by Hugh Fisher’s great-grandfather, expanded into kitchen and bathroom fixtures generally, and soon straddled the entire Western world by taking keen-eyed advantage of the Victorian hygiene craze. Of course, the Fishers themselves gave up management of the company some time ago—on the death of Hugh Fisher’s father, I believe—and to save the blushes of later generations, the Fisher logo had diminished into that single, magnificent F I just mentioned. But still. Never forget where you came from, I always say.

Anyway, I don’t know if Mama knew much about the source of the Fisher riches. To do her credit, I don’t think she even thought about them, at first. She never did lust for wealth. After all, she’d married my father, hadn’t she, when she could have married for money instead, and you just show me any other woman with her beauty who wasn’t married to a rich man.

As I told Joseph, I don’t remember exactly which tasteful affair on the commencement week calendar threw her together with Hugh Fisher, but I do remember the look on her face when she arrived home afterward. Dazed, smitten. Nothing came of it right away—summer intruded between them, summer and Winthrop Island—but come September, when school resumed again without Isobel Fisher, and Hugh Fisher should have no possible reason to visit Foxcroft Academy, visit he did. Drove right up to our small, shabby house in his graceful silver roadster, top down to reveal the sunshine of his hair, and off they went on a drive somewhere, laughing and gleaming. He stayed discreetly in a hotel nearby, but he took her out to dinner, and he took us both to lunch, and four months later, New Year’s Eve, he asked her to marry him at some gala party in New York, while I stayed home in Virginia and heated up a can of split pea soup for dinner.

And now? Now June had arrived, that month of weddings and roses, and I was buttoning the back of Mama’s tea-length lavender tulle dress, fixing the jaunty birdcage veil that just reached the bottom of her jaw. Downstairs, the guests were assembling in the drawing room, where the French doors had been thrown open to the salt breeze so you might almost be outside. There were only thirty of these guests, because Mr. Fisher’s ex-wife apparently belonged to one of the other Families—as Joseph Vargas called them—and while the Island air wasn’t exactly poisoned by ill will, there still persisted a sense of civilized discretion, without which these clubs and islands couldn’t exist from generation to generation. The Dumonts and their allies, who mostly clustered on the northeastern end of the Island, pretended nothing was going on down along the southeastern end, and on the table in the foyer a few dozen wedding announcements lay stamped and addressed in a beautiful copperplate hand, which would, sometime during the course of tomorrow morning, delicately inform the absentees of today’s doings. You see how it works?

“Dearest Mama,” I said, stepping back. “You’re the most beautiful bride. Mr. Fisher’s just the luckiest fellow in the world.”

“Oh, don’t.” She glanced in the mirror and hastily away. “I still can’t believe it. I woke up pinching myself. I keep thinking it’s all going to disappear. He’s going to disappear.”

“He’s not going to disappear. He’s waiting downstairs for you this minute to make you his wife. It’s all real. This is your life, Mama. A whole new wonderful life for you.”

“For us both, darling.” She laid her hand on my arm, so fiercely I could feel the ridge of her engagement ring as it pressed against my skin. I could smell the powdery, flowery, new-bride smell of her. She whispered, “Do you mind?”

“Mind? Mind what?”

“You know what I mean. We were just two, snug as could be, and now suddenly there’s Hugh and—and Isobel, and everything else. Tell me the truth. If you mind at all, even the smallest bit …”

She left the sentence dangling, of course. No possible way she could articulate that terrible alternative.

I opened my mouth to tell her what I ought to tell her. What I meant to tell her, what I thought I felt, true and deep, bottom of my heart and all that. What a good daughter should say at a moment like this, as her mother stands before a shimmering dreamworld, waiting to enter. What Mama’s violet eyes implored me to say.

I thought of something, just then, as my mouth hung open and the words formed in my throat. I thought of the moment I crawled into her bed after we learned about Daddy, into her hot, tiny bedroom that stank of July, and how bleak those violet eyes had seemed to me then. How wet and curling the lashes around them. She was hardly more than a child herself then; not just physically young at twenty-nine, but childlike. That’s the word. In those days, Mama was one of God’s childlike people, and I offer that as a compliment. Oh, she was clever, there was nothing diminished about her intellect. I guess I mean she was childlike in spirit, the way we’re supposed to be and never really are, lamblike in her innocence, and my father’s death was probably the first time this faith had betrayed her. I remember thinking I’d heard the cracking of her heart in the way her voice cracked and broke as she whispered to me in that terrible moment, and when I embraced her soft, small body, I embraced her more as a sister than a daughter. When we slept at last, we curled around each other for comfort. So it had gone on for seven more years. We had read each other’s thoughts and dreamed often in each other’s beds. We’d laughed and wept, we’d shared books and clothes. When we went to the seaside for a week each summer, everybody just assumed we were sisters, the especially close kind of sisters, by the way we giggled and ate ice cream and gamboled hand in hand in the surf.

So as the old lie formed in my throat, I recognized its untruth by the sting of bile, by the stiffness of my vocal cords as they labored and labored to give birth to the words. And then this gust of fury blew through my chest, stealing even the breath I needed to say them. I thought wildly, like a premonition, This is the end, not the beginning. We’ll never stand like this again, we two.

But my God, I couldn’t actually say such a thing! Not while her enormous violet eyes begged me to say something else. But I couldn’t say those words either, so I just placed my two hands on her cheeks, atop the veil, and kissed her, and in that instant the right words came to me.

I said, “Daddy wouldn’t have wanted you to pine away the rest of your life.”

She nodded frantically. “He was so good.”

“Don’t cry, Mama. Here, have some champagne.” I turned for the silver tray on the dresser, loaded down with bucket and champagne coupes of crystal etched in trailing leaves, and I refilled my glass and Mama’s. Before I handed hers over, while I stood there holding them both in my fingers, fizzing sweetly between us, I said, “You really love him, don’t you?”

“I do, Miranda. I truly love him.”

I gave her the glass and clinked it with mine. “To true love.”

Before I could sip, a soft knock sounded on the door, and Isobel slipped inside the room without waiting for an answer. She wore an identical dress to mine, pale blue and full-skirted to just below the knees, off-shoulder sleeves overlaid by sheer organza. Sweet floral cap nestled in her hair. “Everybody ready in here? Your groom awaits impatiently. Oh my! Don’t you both look lovely. And champagne! Wait! Don’t start without me!”

She rushed to the dresser and poured herself a glass, which finished off the bottle and nearly overflowed the wide, shallow bowl of the coupe. She smelled of cigarettes and flowers and champagne, and when she raised her glass, her eyes glinted with either mischief or wine, I wasn’t sure. “What are we toasting, girls?” she said.

“To true love,” I said.

“Oh yes. To love!”

We clinked and drank, giggling a little, and through the crack in the door came the sound of violins and a dignified cello. Isobel put her arm around Mama’s shoulder and whispered something in her ear, and there was something so intimate about this gesture that I turned my head and stared through the window at the sea, at the Flood Rock lighthouse erupting in the exact center of the frame. A sailboat beat lazily across the channel behind, and in the violent sunshine, the whiteness of its canvas hurt my eyes.