It was easy and familiar, lots of laughter; like one of those years-long friendships that turns romantic, only compressed. In the afternoons, they would hang out on the cliff and talk. If it rained, they would go to Fourwinds, where Gran would leave them alone. At night, they’d go to the beach or Ben’s garage, if neither of his brothers was around.
Skye told him more about herself and life with her hippyish, paint-under-the-fingernails, disorganized art teacher mom—the messy house, the under-planned vacations and inconsistent meal preparation. She stuck to the practiced funny bits and used her doesn’t bother me tone, but he still heard more than she normally shared.
She even told him about her father. A couple of years earlier, Adriene had finally come up with a last name for “Don.”
It was right after Skye’s mom broke up with Elliott, a handsome black accountant, whom Adriene had seen as an excellent prospective stepfather for Skye. Skye had known better than to hope. Her mom always broke up with guys when they got too attached. Adriene was disappointed, though.
They were in the kitchen with Skye’s mom, Adriene grilling her about why she’d ended things, and Anne giving her usual non-answers.
“Adriene, you know my philosophy,” she said finally, pointing at the “woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” refrigerator magnet.
Adriene sighed and was quiet for a minute, but then her eyebrows went together. “But you know, Anne, you did need Skye’s dad for something.”
“Oh God, Adriene.” Skye put her face in her hands. Skye and her mom almost never talked about this.
“What? She did!” Adriene insisted.
“Nothing but his original contribution,” Skye’s mom said drily.
“That’s what I meant.” Adriene nodded, satisfied.
Later, after Anne had left to meet Flora, Adriene said, “Well, now we finally know your dad’s last name.”
“What?”
“Fishbike!”
Skye had not forgotten Ben’s grandmother trying to get this information out of her years before, but she didn’t tell him about that conversation. Somehow, she knew he wouldn’t tell Harriet about theirs.
The only real shyness she felt was when Ben urged her to tell him about the writing contest she had won. The New Yorker “Shouts and Murmurs” column had run it for high school humor writing.
Skye described her submission, a mock treatment of a teen film. She had parodied all the tropes: the klutzy new girl in school who ends up on a road trip with a brooding hero, during which they outsmart evil adults (and vampires), and also discover the heroine’s parents aren’t her real parents, because she’s actually royalty.
“So, it was autobiographical,” Ben said, when she finished.
“Well, obviously. Except the road trip, the brooding hero, outsmarting adults and vampires, and finding out I’m royalty. Other than that, story of my life,” she said. Ben laughed.
Skye told him she hoped the prize would help her get into Northwestern, which had a great creative writing program.
Ben told her about his plans, too. He wanted to play lacrosse in college, hopefully at Williams. He would study history, go to law school, and eventually become a judge like his grandfather.
“Probably sounds boring,” he said.
Skye thought it sounded normal (which worried her a little, since she felt like she wasn’t). But she was never bored with him. She loved his smile, and the way he kissed, and the feel of her fingers in his wavy hair.
Throughout the week, Ben occasionally made comments like “We’ll have to go to a hockey game together,” implying they’d see each other during the school year. On her last night, he was more direct. They were lying on a blanket on the beach, looking up at the stars.
“We can talk on the phone. And write, too,” he said, threading his fingers through hers.
“Definitely,” Skye replied.
“I have an October break. Maybe you could come to Hartford, or I could go down to D.C.”
“That would be awesome,” Skye said.
Part of her even believed it. She felt like a girl in one of those 1950s teen romance novels she had inhaled on her previous visit to Haven Point. It was all so sweet, so simple. Of course we’ll see each other!
Then she got home.
Nothing was particularly unusual. The house was a mess, but that was par for the course. Her mom was irritable and scattered. (Anne had long since given up the post-rehab eager-to-please routine—by this point, they were both too used to Skye being the competent one.) But Skye had seen this version of her mom before. She had seen them all.
Still, in returning to the grim, unfunny reality of her life, she realized what a carefully edited story she had told Ben. She hadn’t lied, but she’d scrubbed out all the pain.
Ben called a few times and suggested getting together, but she put him off and eventually let it fizzle out. She was doing exactly what he would have done if she’d ever let him see the whole story. She knew it wouldn’t really matter to him. Ben was a Haven Point kid, and Haven Point kids were like rubber bands. He had stretched a bit in his fling with Skye, but he would snap right back.
And sure enough, the following summer, Ben started dating Charlotte Spencer, commencing their long reign as the “It Couple” of their generation on Haven Point.
CHAPTER TEN
August 1949
Haven Point
MAREN
Maren did not know what had awakened her, just that it must have been loud. She was so tired these days, she practically gulped down sleep.
There it is again. It was clearer now. It sounded like someone coming up the staircase, accompanied by banging and mumbling. She looked at the clock. 1:00 A.M.
There was no crime on Haven Point, and she knew she had little reason to be frightened. Her heart did not seem to agree, however. It was beating at an alarming rate. She reached over to the bedside table to get the flashlight, wincing as she opened the noisy drawer, which was swollen with salt air like everything else in this house. She got out of bed and opened the door a crack, her anxiety now compounded by the terrible nausea that was her constant companion.
She could just make out the silhouettes of two figures as they reached the landing and headed toward Pauline’s room. Maren cursed Oliver for leaving her here alone. The idea that she could somehow protect Pauline in her sick and ungainly state seemed ludicrous, but she screwed up her courage, turned on the flashlight, and flung her door open.
“Who is that?” She tried to sound firm as she pointed the flashlight at the intruders.
In the center of the circle of light was Georgie, one arm around a semiconscious Pauline. The scene contained echoes of another one four years earlier, when Oliver had found Pauline in the attic.
“Aw, damn. I didn’t want to wake you.” Georgie grimaced.
“What is going on?”
“Pauline’s drunk.”
“I gather that, Georgie. But I don’t understand. She went to bed three hours ago.”
“Give me a minute, Maren.” Georgie continued toward Pauline’s room. “I’ll be right back.”
When Georgie returned, she looked weary.
“I know we need to talk, but can it wait until tomorrow? I have to get back to bed before Cappy wakes up.”
“All right,” Maren reluctantly agreed.
Maren crawled back in bed, but she struggled to sleep. She could not remember ever feeling as lonely as she did at that moment.
She had been violently ill from the very start of her pregnancy. When the expected relief did not come at three months, her doctor explained some women were sick all the way through. Maren had nearly wept.
After the Washington, D.C., summer had set in with its usual vengeance, Oliver suggested she go to Haven Point.
“It’ll be cooler there. Safer,” he’d insisted. The memories from her one visit four years earlier were fresh enough that Maren did not relish the idea, but she had no energy to fight. She had arrived a week earlier
. It was definitely cooler. She wasn’t sure about safer.
* * *
Until now, Maren had only seen Georgie’s house from the outside. It was a large shingle-style home like Fourwinds, though even more rambling and asymmetrical, as additions had been made throughout the years to accommodate family proliferation.
Georgie’s family clearly adhered to the coastal Maine tradition of farming out of one side of the house and fishing out of the other. Off the north side of the porch, she could see down into the kitchen garden, which appeared to thrive, despite the inhospitable soil and weather. The porch was lined with fishing poles, nets, and colorful buoys. These were interspersed with plants and flowers potted in any kind of container, from old lobster pots to a chair with a hole carved in the seat. Maren felt a pang, thinking of her own family in Minnesota, of a simpler life.
Georgie had invited her to come over while her two-year-old daughter Susan took a nap. She appeared at the screen door, and held it open for Maren.
“Come in. I just got Susan down. I’ll go get us some iced tea.”
While she waited, Maren looked over the pictures along the board and batten walls of the entryway. When Georgie returned, two glasses in hand, she nodded toward a large picture, apparently from Haven Point’s earliest days.
“That’s Elizabeth Demarest and Nora Graham, Oliver’s grandmother and mine,” Georgie said.
Maren looked at the photograph: two women in long white dresses, sitting on a blanket on the beach. She did not need to ask which was Georgie’s grandmother. Nora Graham had Georgie’s straight hair, turned-down eyes, and candid, no-nonsense expression.
Elizabeth Demarest was beautiful. Her dark hair was falling out of its loose knot, and she leaned back on her hands and smiled directly at the photographer, in defiance of the nineteenth-century rule that one must look stiff and miserable in photographs.
Georgie led Maren outside and nodded down the porch to two chairs.
“I know Haven Point was built on your land. How did it actually get started?” Maren asked.
“My grandfather, George Graham, wound up at Harvard and somehow fell in with Ambrose Lawrence, Jerome Demarest, Fritz Hyde, and some of the others whose names you’ve heard.”
Maren had indeed heard those names. She had wondered why people on Haven Point referred to Maude and Georgie as “Grahams,” and Harriet Hyde (now Harriet Barrows) as “a Hyde.” Evidently it was a way to acknowledge the early Haven Point families—an informal version of those lineage societies like Colonial Dames and Sons of the American Revolution that Caroline Sturgeon had been so obsessed with.
“My grandfather was no aristocrat, never pretended to be. He was funny as all get-out, though.”
A few years after graduation, Georgie explained, he invited his Harvard friends to hunt and fish on Haven Point.
“It was basically an island back then,” Georgie said. “The connection to the mainland is underwater, except during high tide, and this was before the causeway was built. The steamships were carrying people to all the islands, though, and you could get here by rowboat, too.”
Her great-grandparents were considering selling the land to a speculator, but Ambrose Lawrence had another idea, and a pile of money to go with it.
“Ambrose had seen some of the other summer spots along the coast, which all started with a hotel. Cottage lots and communities came after. Ambrose wanted to skip the hotel and go straight to the community.”
Ambrose bought the land and found a lawyer to work out the legal niceties. Fifteen families, including Oliver’s grandfather, bought parcels and built their houses immediately. The yacht club and beach club were constructed right before the turn of the century, and the causeway and country club soon after.
“It all could have turned out differently. We were lucky, in some ways,” Georgie said.
“How so?”
“Ambrose and Serena Lawrence were fashionable, but fortunately for us, these shingle houses were in fashion. Ambrose was also a terrible snob. The reason he didn’t want a hotel was because he thought they attracted the wrong sort. Needless to say, my grandfather knew you didn’t have to be rich to be the right sort. He managed to convince Ambrose to carve out some smaller, more affordable lots.”
Maren nodded. She’d noticed a wide range in size among the houses and lots on Haven Point. The community had its share of families like the Grahams—comfortable, but without the kind of money that begets more money. On the other hand, while Haven Point frowned on ostentation, Maren knew it also had its share of extraordinary fortunes. The Lawrences, for one, were “smashingly wealthy” according to Dorothy, who knew them from New York.
The Demarests were not in that category, but they had the blithe lack of interest in the subject of money that Maren associated with the very well-off. She rarely heard Oliver talk about finances. Other than the occasional half-hearted grumble about the cost of maintaining Fourwinds, which was an asset on paper, but a liability in practice, William was the same. (Of course, William and Pauline were also proof of the weak correlation between money and happiness.)
“What was that all about with Pauline last night, Georgie?”
“Let me ask first: What do you know about your mother-in-law?”
“I know she had problems with alcohol in the past. I was under the impression it was not a regular occurrence.”
“That’s good,” Georgie said, as if she approved. Seeing Maren’s confusion, she continued. “Oliver gets his information from his father. Sounds like William Demarest is in the dark, which is where we want him.”
“What are you talking about? Who is we?” Maren asked. She was confused and, for some reason, vaguely irritated. “Are you suggesting Pauline is often drunk?”
“Pauline Demarest is as sweet a woman as ever lived. But yes, she is often drunk.”
Maren felt a twinge of shame at her ignorance. She had not seen Pauline drunk since her first visit to Haven Point, but they hardly saw her, period, and Oliver had made it abundantly clear he had no desire to discuss Pauline’s drinking.
“What happened last night?”
“She wandered into a party at the Ballantines’. Before people caught on, Nellie Fitzsimmons steered her into the kitchen and called me. Pauline does this sometimes, but we have a bit of a system worked out.”
“A system?” Maren sat up, her irritation more focused. Who were these people, and why where they making decisions about her mother-in-law?
“Why has no one told Oliver?” Or me? she wondered silently.
“It’s a long story,” Georgie said wearily. She proceeded with the tale of a young Pauline Powell, a petite brunette with a way of unconsciously making men feel like kings. Pauline’s once-fine Virginia family was impoverished after the Civil War. Pauline knew her duty: She was to marry well.
William met Pauline while visiting a college friend and courted her with his usual single-mindedness.
“According to my mother, she didn’t so much fall in love as relent to it,” Georgie said. “At first, she drank for Dutch courage, trying to keep up with his family. It went downhill from there. It was terrible when Daniel and Oliver were little.”
“I can only imagine,” Maren replied. Twelve hours earlier she could not have conceived of anything more miserable than her unrelenting nausea, but it was getting a run for its money now. Half of her ached with pity for all Oliver had endured, and the other half was appalled at her trifling knowledge of his family.
“She was delicate as an orchid,” Georgie went on. “Kind, and bright, too, for all her wide-eyed ways. She used to make up darling poems, right off the top of her head. And she’d stay sober for spells. When Oliver and I were toddlers, Daniel pulled a hot iron onto himself while she was passed out on the couch. She went several years without drinking after that.”
“Did she ever go for treatment?”
“To several institutions, but she always fell off the wagon at some point.”
“Did William send her? It s
ounds like he wanted to help.”
“He did, but never believed it would work. Eventually he refused to spend another dime on ‘those quacks,’ as he called them. Drinks like a fish himself, but he can’t fathom getting sloppy. Oliver’s grandfather, Jerome, was the same. To them, it’s weakness. She should just will herself to drink less. William even keeps alcohol in the house.” Georgie shook her head. “That’s Demarest men for you.”
Maren considered pretending she understood Georgie’s last comment, but more information seemed worth the cost of betraying her ignorance.
“What do you mean by ‘Demarest men’?”
“They’re bulls in china shops. Daniel was pure Demarest, may he rest in peace. My mother says the Demarest bloodline needs tempering from the right women. She believes some qualities can’t be trained out.” In response to Maren’s look of incomprehension, she added, “She sees it in her dogs.”
A few days earlier, Maren had summoned the energy to walk to the beach, where she saw Maude putting two black Labs through their paces. Maude would throw a ball into the ocean, and the dogs would sit stock-still, sleek bodies buzzing with anticipation. When she finally gave the command, they were off like a shot into the water.
“Do you believe that?” Maren asked.
“Demarest women need to be strong. Elizabeth Demarest was wonderful. We all adored her, and she stood up to Jerome.”
Maren nodded, remembering the photograph of Elizabeth Demarest, her level gaze and the casual confidence in her posture.
“Pauline is many things, but she’s not strong,” Georgie continued, her expression hardening. “William’s response to weakness is cruelty.”
“Has anyone talked to Pauline? If treatment was her idea, couldn’t William be convinced?”
“We’ve talked to her until we’re blue in the face. Fruitless. Try it sometime. You’ll see.”
“What about speaking to Oliver?” Maren said.
Georgie didn’t respond for a moment. When she did, she sounded hesitant.
“My mother brought it up with Oliver a few years back.”
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