Читать книгу Providence Island - Gregor Robinson - Страница 10

| Chapter 4 |

Marjorie came up the stairs. She snatched the scribbler from my hands and locked it away in the drawer. She had lost interest in me, in the party, in her poems. She was annoyed, not because the Millers had come, but because they hadn’t come — and because her mother hadn’t told her that she had invited them.

A few days later, Phil showed me the dark green clapboard garage behind the Merrick Bay Hotel. “This place belongs to Providence Island,” he said.

We peeked through the windows. The 1942 Packard limousine and an old Morgan sports car were kept at Merrick Bay year-round. There was also a late model Cadillac and a station wagon. These cars were put away at the beginning of the summer, after the Millers arrived; the ones they used every day, including the maroon Buick that we had seen at the party, were kept at the Bellisle Club.

Back home, I was ashamed of our house: it wasn’t on the lake nor was it a summer house. It was a farm that had stood ramshackle and abandoned until my father bought it. I felt he had been duped.

I rode my bike out to the highway, past the village of Merrick Bay, and down the dirt road to the landing at Bellisle. I watched the mahogany launches cruise in from the islands. Boxes of groceries from Ault’s or Merrick’s Butchers were loaded into the boats. And liquor, cases of it. I loved the throaty roar the launches made as they sped away from the pier. In the parking lot were big sedans and station wagons from Pennsylvania, Michigan, and New York State. From the landing you could see some of the boathouses, but most of the big places were out of sight, beyond the pine headlands and the open waters of the bay.

I would see them arrive for the sailboat races, or with their tennis racquets and golf clubs. The boys wore Bass Weejuns, faded madras shirts, and Bermuda shorts of pale cotton. The girls — long-limbed, tanned, and clear-skinned — wore polo shirts or men’s oxford shirts and sweater-coats from prep schools whose names I didn’t know. Downy blond hair on their arms.

I mentioned at dinner that I thought I might take up golf.

My aunt snorted. “What you need is a summer job. I’ll ask around.”

It did not take her long. Mrs. Applewood, for whom my father had done a little legal work around the time of her husband’s death, telephoned a week later. She was working on Providence Island, helping the French-Canadian girls in the kitchen (she was an excellent cook, famous in Merrick Bay for her church suppers) and looking after old J.D. Miller, who had suffered a stroke and needed help making his way around the island. The Millers were celebrating seventy-five years on Providence Island and there was to be a big party. Mrs. Applewood said they were looking for extra staff.

She told me more about the place; I had the impression that Mrs. Applewood knew quite a lot about Providence Island. Behind the latticework and screening of one of the side verandahs of the big house, she told me, there was a games room for rainy days (Ping-Pong, billiards, darts), a barbershop, and laundry facilities big enough to serve a small hotel. The houses on the mainland that the Millers used to provide for the chauffeur and the butler were larger than the houses most people lived in year-round. There had at one time been a housekeeper, a cook, an assistant cook, two maids, a full-time gardener, a garden helper, and two men to polish and tend to the fleet of boats.

Now the only people who worked there were a couple of shy girls from rural Quebec, a gardener-handyman, a couple of boys from the village who worked around the boathouses in return just for being near the boats, and Mrs. Applewood.

And now, seventy-five years later, Mrs. Applewood and others still sometimes talked of how it used to be: parties under the stars, the long mahogany launches, thin women in diaphanous dresses, romance, the sheen of money. I was enchanted, but not my father.

“You know how they make their money, don’t you?” he said. “They own warehouses, and these shopping place things — what d’you call them? — plazas.”

From the way he spoke, it was hard to imagine anything more vile.

“Before that they were in liquor,” said Aunt Beth. She was a teetotaller.

“They don’t want people around here to sell their land because it might spoil the view from their docks,” said my father. Some of the people who wanted to sell were clients of his. “Yet they made their own money in real estate,” he said. “They use the money down there —” he meant the cities where they lived year-round “— to buy politicians. Greasing palms. Up here they try to prevent plain people from selling their land.”

My father liked the idea of living in a place where the farmers were descendants of the original settlers — he had shown me old titles, land grants from Queen Victoria — and he hated the Bellisle Club. He had been to boarding school as a boy, an experience he loathed, and had been affected by the son of one of the schoolmasters who fell in with rich boys. “Ruined his life. He couldn’t understand where it came from, all that money, and why he couldn’t have it. Ended up in jail.”

“I won’t end up in jail,” I said.

“Don’t be a smarty pants,” said Aunt Beth. “Perhaps we could find you something else to do. Something more suitable.”

“I’ve already taken the job,” I said.

“I predict disaster,” said my father. “Pass the salt.”

Jack Miller met us at the Bellisle landing the day before the party. He was wearing white trousers and a straw hat and was accompanied by a lame Irish setter called Beau. The dog smelled.

There were six of us who had been hired to help out at the anniversary party. I noticed that I was the only one from the summer community; the others were all local people from Merrick Bay.

Jack asked us our names.

“Carrier?” he asked, as if it were perhaps a local name he ought to recognize. “Where do you live?”

“The old river road,” I mumbled. We lived on a county road that didn’t have a proper name.

“Don’t know it,” he said.

We crossed the channel in Jack’s inboard. I had seen boats like it, but never actually been in one. The seats were red leather. The fittings were polished to a high sheen. I was familiar, too, with what they called the back of Providence Island from fishing the black waters there in our little outboard, but I had never been to the south end, where the buildings were, and where we were now headed.

Every June the Millers, relatives, and friends, began gathering for their summer on Providence Island. The house had cedar shingle-clad towers, and wide verandahs with wicker furniture. There were supposed to be twenty-seven bedrooms, including those for the staff. In the attic there was a doll’s house that was larger than the one owned by the royal family, pictures of which had been in the weekend Star colour supplement. Beneath the water tower, on a flat hill high in the middle of the island, there was supposed to be a cache of liquor, hidden there by the Millers during Prohibition. I wondered what kind of homes there were in New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Palm Beach, and the other places where the Millers lived the rest of the year.

The ones nearest my age were Jack and Quentin. I came to think of them as brother and sister, as I discovered they did themselves, but the relationship was actually more complicated: Jack’s grandfather, J.D., was Quentin’s father; she was the product of a short marriage to an actress in a film that he had financed. (These complicated marital arrangements were the sort of thing to which my father would never allude.) The actress — long-gone by the time I knew the Millers, bought off, it was said, to avoid newspaper stories — remained famous locally for having exposed her breasts on Regatta Day. Quentin was raised by Jack’s mother.

As we approached, I saw the glint of more mahogany and chrome through the boathouse doors. We docked at the largest boathouse, which had four slips and a long pier. Workmen were attaching additional floating docks for the party. A couple of us would be here throughout the evening, Jack explained, helping people dock and moving boats when the guests were leaving.

Jack led us along the broad gravel paths through the lawns and woods, which had been groomed to allow views of the water. We passed a red clay tennis court, other boathouses, and swimming docks (we weren’t to park boats there in case people wanted to bathe during the party). We went upstairs to an immense room with balconies cantilevered over the water. The dance pavilion, Jack called it.

At the tip of the island, an expansive T-shaped dock gave long views to the south and west. The flags on the mast snapped in the wind. This is where we would deliver the guests who were arriving by car at the Bellisle Club.

“Which of you is going to help up at the house?”

Nobody answered.

“Ray, is it? Come with me.”

A gravel walk led up to the house, through a lawn groomed like a golf green. A dance floor had been set up on the lawn, as well, and workmen were putting up a blue-striped canopy and strings of coloured lights. A small orchestra would play there for the older generation.

Jack led me through the front hall and living room, smelling of old wood and leather, to the verandah, dazzling white with sunlight. Mrs. Miller and Quentin — I recognized her at once — both wore tennis clothes. Quentin’s hair was tied loosely with a bandana. She was slim, eighteen, and to me she looked like a movie star — somehow familiar. Mrs. Miller sat in a white wicker armchair. Her gold hair was pulled back in a chignon. Quentin leaned against one of the pillars, her arm languid atop the letter M ensconced in the patterned diamonds of the verandah railing. Between them was a glass table piled with magazines and an oversize ashtray, blue smoke curling up. A white drinks trolley was at the ready with chunky glasses and bottles of vermouth, gin, rum, and vodka.

Jack said, “This is where the main bar will be.” Then he introduced me.

“Ray Carrier?” asked Mrs. Miller. “Is your father the lawyer who bought the old farmhouse on Sucker Creek?”

I nodded.

“Heavens, shouldn’t you be coming to the party, not picking up the dirty glasses?”

I mumbled something about being glad to have the work, but it had been a rhetorical question. She ran a hand through her hair, turned away, took a sip of her gin and tonic.

Quentin leaned against the column, watching. She seemed flushed; her lips were dry. She must have just finished playing tennis. She nodded when we were introduced. Nothing more.

Jack said, “I’ll show you the kitchen.”

When I told them at home about my visit to Providence Island, my aunt changed her mind about the job. “They want you to wear dark pants and a white shirt? Do they think you are one of the servants? I would tell them to pick up their own glasses, if I were you. Talk to the municipality. You could get a job helping tar the roads. I know they take on summer help. Surely that would be better than serving hard liquor to silly people.”

But it was too late. I was listening to my aunt, but I was thinking about Quentin Miller, leaning against the porch post. Her tanned legs.

The evening of the party I circulated through the rooms of the big house, picking up glasses. Voices and laughter, music from the orchestra, and the thudding base from the pavilion filled the evening air. Caterers who had come up from the city carried drinks on silver trays and served cold salmon, lobster, and pink beef tenderloin from behind tables draped with linen. The waiters wore stiff white jackets and called everyone sir or madam.

Several of the guests arrived by seaplane. One group came from New York City in a private jet that landed at the airport at Iron Falls. The Millers provided a car and driver to pick them up.

“Where did all the money come from, anyway?” I heard someone ask.

“Liquor.”

“But this place was built years before Prohibition.”

“Railroads,” said someone else.

“Real estate,” said another. “They’re nothing but developers.”

“The old man was in movies,” said a woman of about thirty-five in a gauzy see-through blue top. “You remember — his second wife was it — an actress? He brought her up here once, years ago.”

“Did he actually marry her?” asked the other.

At seven thirty, two hours after most of the guests had arrived, Jack appeared in the pantry. He said, “You play tennis, don’t you?”

I nodded.

“We need a fourth. I’ll lend you some shoes, a pair of shorts.”

“What about the dirty glasses?”

“Forget the glasses.”

He led me to a wing of the house with several bedrooms and bathrooms and with a separate dressing room with floor-to-ceiling shelves and drawers. This was where he and his brothers Stephen and Robert stayed, along with various visiting friends and male cousins. He opened a wardrobe; one cedar shelf was filled with laundered tennis shirts, another with perhaps twenty pairs of shorts.

“You pick something. There are running shoes in the cupboard. I’ll see you on the court.”

Quentin, Jack, and the person called Radley Smith were hitting the ball when I arrived. We played for an hour, finishing under the lights. Afterward, we sat by the dock. There was a Coca-Cola cooler, like in a store, just inside the door of the boathouse, and we helped ourselves.

“Where did you learn to play?” Quentin asked. These were the first words she addressed to me.

“At school. They’re big on hockey and football. If you’re no good, they ship you off to the community tennis club.”

“Hmm,” she turned away, gazing out toward the water and the orange sky to the west.

“You don’t play hockey?” asked Jack. “Or football?”

“I guess I’m too refined,” I said. No one laughed. The conversation turned to other matters.

“Where’s your date, Jack?” Radley Smith asked.

“He doesn’t have one,” said Quentin. “Jack’s got his eye on some farm girl he met in Merrick Bay.”

“Local talent,” said Radley Smith. “When do we meet her?”

“Never, if I can help it,” said Jack.

“You sneaking off again tonight?” asked Quentin.

“Really, what’s she like?” asked Smith.

Jack shrugged.

“Maybe Ray knows her,” said Quentin. “Maybe he can tell you all about her, Radley.”

Quentin strolled to the end of the dock, stripped off her tennis clothes, and dived into the lake. It was dusk, but I saw her skin flash against the water, and I saw the pale hollows of her body. By the time we followed her into the water, she had headed up to the house in a towel to change. I didn’t see her again until the end of the evening when I was ferrying my last load of guests back to the mainland. She had changed into a white sleeveless sundress. She was supervising the guest book, set up on the dock on a kind of lectern. When the people I was to drive across the channel finished signing, she held out the pen to me. “You might as well sign. You played tennis with us.”