A Hundred Summers

by Beatriz Williams

  “Yes. She’s got some sort of crush on him, I think, because he’s the only adult around here who takes her seriously, other than me.”

  “And Budgie doesn’t mind?” asked Graham, in a quiet voice.

  “No. I think she thinks it’s good practice for him.”

  He seemed surprised. “What, she’s not expecting, is she?”

  “Not yet. At least, she hasn’t told me so. But they’re desperate for children. It’s only a matter of time, isn’t it?”

  Graham didn’t answer, only shook his head and lifted his hand to the brim of his hat. “Good old Nick,” he said, under his breath, and then: “Oh, look! There they are.”

  I followed his gaze and saw them, far down the beach, dark heads bent downward at exactly the same angle. Nick looked especially tall next to her, almost gaunt, his long limbs reined in so Kiki could keep up. “Looking for shells again, I think. I hope she’s not imposing on him.”

  “I don’t know. He looks happy enough to me,” said Graham. He let his hand drop, nearly brushing mine, and all at once I was conscious of how close he stood, how solid was the shoulder near my ear, dressed for the heat in a white shirt and no jacket, smelling of cigarettes and laundry starch and a faint trace of male sweat. The air around us sat motionless, turgid with July warmth.

  “Now, now, my darlings,” said Aunt Julie, “you’re taking up all the sun.”

  Graham laughed and turned and took off his hat with a flourish. “I beg your pardon, Mrs. van der Wahl.”

  “My friends call me Julie.”

  “You can call her Aunt Julie, if you like,” I said. “She loves that.”

  Aunt Julie extended her leg until the toes teetered off the edge of the blanket and into the sand, just like Budgie’s. “Don’t you dare, Graham. You should see the carcass of the last man who tried that one.”

  Graham saluted smartly. “Julie it is, ma’am.”

  “No ma’am, either. And certainly not when you’re twinkling at me like that. I’m sure that sort of thing is against the Association bylaws.”

  Graham turned the full force of his twinkle on me. “Lily, much as I’d prefer to stay, my cousin Emily will have my head if I’m not back for bridge in a moment. But you’re coming to the dance tonight, aren’t you?”

  The cigarette burned out against my fingers. I dropped the stub in the sand and crossed my arms. “Yes, of course. We’ve been planning for weeks.”

  “I’m sure you have.” He grinned, displaying a fine set of even white teeth, straight from a Pepsodent advertisement. His entire face, carved out in perfect symmetry, tanned from the hazy sun, seemed to radiate with good health and good spirits. “But your dance card isn’t full yet, is it? You’ll save one for your old pal Graham?”

  “Of course I will.”

  He leaned forward and kissed my cheek and replaced his hat on his head. “Good, then. I’ll be looking for you. Julie? A pleasure meeting you. I’ll be saving my last dance for you.” He winked his sky-blue eye and turned to walk back up the beach to the clubhouse, his muscles flexing with the effort of climbing through the soft upper dunes.

  “Well, well,” said Aunt Julie, watching him go. The magazine slid unnoticed from her lap.

  Next to her, the sleeping form of Mrs. Hubert gave a snort and a start. She raised her head and looked about in confusion. Her nose wrinkled. “Has someone been smoking?” she asked, a little querulous.

  “All of us, I’m afraid.” I plopped down at the bottom of the blanket and began to put the picnic things away in the basket.

  “Coffin nails,” said Mrs. Hubert. She stopped her head in mid-shake and peered at me closely, and then at Aunt Julie, and back at me. “All right, ladies. Did I miss something?”

  Aunt Julie took another cigarette out of her pack and placed it between her lips.

  “I’ll say.”

  THE ORCHESTRA WAS ABYSMAL, the singer even worse, but nobody at the Seaview Beach Club minded this time-honored tradition, since the alternative was to spend money on better musicians.

  Nobody, that is, except Aunt Julie.

  “What next? Jazz?” she said, tossing back her champagne cocktail in frustration. “Who can dance to this? Lily, you ought to have chosen a darker lipstick. What happened to the tube I sent you?”

  “Kiki took it to make up her dolls.”

  “That child. I’m going to find another drink. I’d ask if I could get you something else, but you’ve hardly wet your lips yet.” She left with breathtaking abruptness, leaving only a trace of Chanel behind her.

  I sipped my cocktail and scanned the veranda. The sun hadn’t yet begun to set, and in the hazy late-afternoon glow everyone looked beautiful, even the old ladies, lines flattened and skin softened, dresses glittering subtly. The men were wearing white dinner jackets and matching crisp red-white-and-blue bow ties (dictated by Mrs. Hubert to support this year’s theme, “You’re a Grand Old Flag”) and the effect was rather dazzling, amid the swirl of Gershwin and the shine of hair pomade and the bubble of champagne cocktails. The Palmers had just arrived, with Graham Pendleton’s sun-streaked hair bobbing among them. His laugh reached across the room, above the buzz of conversation.

  As if aware of my observation, Graham’s head turned, and I lost my nerve and bolted for the edge of the veranda, where I held my drink up to the horizon and stared through the glass at the ocean beyond. The sailboats wavered in a murky pattern behind the bubbles and sunshine of Seaview’s famous champagne cocktail, a secret recipe written down and locked in a bank safe-deposit box when Prohibition began. Luckily Mrs. Hubert still had the key when the amendment was repealed.

  I returned the glass to my lips and finished it off. No sense wasting good fizz.

  A pair of hands closed over my eyes, one holding a cigarette and the other an ice-cold highball glass. “Guess who?” whispered Budgie.

  “Somebody smoking Parliaments and wearing far too much perfume.” I set down my empty glass on the railing. “It could only be Budgie Greenwald.”

  “Oh, rats! You’re too clever.” She spun me around. “And look at you! Where on earth did you find that dress? It should be outlawed.”

  “Aunt Julie took me shopping in Newport last week. Do you like it?”

  “Like it? I adore it. I’d wear it myself if I had any tits.” Budgie’s breath smelled like a bathtub of gin, and her lips were painted precisely in shining blood red. “Will you look at these people? I haven’t seen so much gray hair since . . . ha, since this afternoon at the picnic, I guess! Oh, there’s that damned Mrs. Hubert, come to rescue you from my clutches. Quick.” She looped her arm through mine and dragged me into the jiggling crowd. The orchestra had switched to a lively fox-trot. Budgie grasped my hand and twirled me to face her. “Let’s dance, darling. That should shake them up a bit.”

  I laughed and put my hand around her waist. We started dancing an awkward fox-trot, as Budgie’s cigarette burned between our clasped hands and her gin splashed over my shoulder. “Oh, that’s it!” she exclaimed. Her glossy dark curls bounced in perfect time, and her red lips parted. She leaned to my ear. “Everybody’s watching. Imagine their faces if I told them how I spent eight months in South America sleeping only with women.”

  The fox-trot ended and smoothed out into a waltz, and Budgie waltzed me to the other side of the veranda, where we collapsed, panting and laughing, against the railing. “Oh, that was such fun. I haven’t had such fun in ages, Lily. Let’s go to Newport next week, or Providence, just the two of us, while the men are all gone. We’ll have such a good time. I know the naughtiest clubs around.”

  I took her cigarette, drew deep, and handed it back to her. “I can’t leave Kiki.”

  “Oh yes you can. Your mother can watch her for once, or the housekeeper. I’ll send over Mrs. Ridge if I have to. Who’s watching her tonight?”

  “Mother. She hates dancing.”

  “Well, there you are. She’ll live until morning, you’ll see.” Budgie stubbed out the cigarette and tosse
d it off the veranda and into the sand. “Tell me, how did you like my little surprise this afternoon?”

  “What surprise?”

  She nudged me with her foot and leaned back against the railing. Her body stretched against its drapery of bloodred silk, matching her lips. “Lily. As if the entire Seaview Association didn’t see the two of you flirting together on your blanket.”

  “Graham? But he said he was staying with the Palmers!”

  “Of course he’s staying with the Palmers, darling. He can’t stay with us, when Nick’s gone all week in New York. What a scandal that would be.” She laughed and finished off her gin and tossed the glass over her shoulder into the sand to join her cigarette stub. “But who do you think called up Emily Palmer and told her to invite him?”

  “You did?”

  “Of course I did. She owed me a favor, from way back. Hasn’t he grown delicious? I want you two to have the best time this summer, and I want to hear every detail the next morning, do you hear me?” She turned around to face me and leaned into the railing, overlapping her sleek red body on mine. She said, into my ear: “Every detail. Now, don’t look, but he’s on his way. I’ll just slip away down the stairs and onto the beach, and leave you two crazy kids to have at it.”

  Budgie kissed my cheek and left, and when she was gone in a shimmer of bloodredness, there was Graham Pendleton in his white dinner jacket and regulation red-white-and-blue bow tie, grinning at me like a dog to its master. He handed me a champagne cocktail. “You look like you could use a drink,” he said.

  “Thanks.” I took the glass and clinked it against his. “Cheers.”

  Graham took his handkerchief from his breast pocket. “Hold on. She’s left a bit of lipstick on you.”

  He wiped away the lipstick while I drank from my glass. By the time he was finished, so was I. I set the glass on the railing, and he grinned at me again. “Slow down, champ. We’ve got all night. Cigarette?”

  “One of your brand?”

  “God, no.”

  “Then yes.” I put the cigarette between my lips and let him light me. His broad knuckles tickled my chin. He lit his own and we turned away from the party and stood there, staring at the incessant roll of the ocean onto the beach. The tide was climbing, straining toward the line of seaweed and debris from the last high point. There was no sign of Budgie.

  “Lovely dress,” said Graham.

  “Thank you.”

  He leaned forward on his elbows, letting the ash from his cigarette dangle and drop into the sand. “You know, you’re a funny one, Lily Dane. You go about your business, all serene and don’t-touch-me, and then once in a while you break out in a dress like that, looking like that, and I’ll be damned if we aren’t all sitting around scratching our heads, trying to figure you out.”

  I laughed. “And how long has this been going on?”

  “About five minutes, I’d say.”

  I turned toward him, leaning my hip against the railing, blood racing pleasantly along my limbs. “Tell me something, Graham. What happened between you and Budgie all those years ago? We all thought it was love and marriage and the baby carriage.”

  He shook his head. “What, marry Budgie? Never in the cards. We were having a little fun, that’s all.”

  “It looked awfully serious from my end. The Grand Canyon, remember?”

  “Everything looks serious from your end, Lily. It’s part of your charm.” Graham rose and turned to me and placed his hand against the railing, less than an inch from my hip. He stood so close I had to crane my neck to meet his eyes. A curl of smoke drifted past his face. “Yes, we talked about the future, but I’ll tell you how it works, sweet Lily, in case you didn’t know. When two carefree young unmarried people—say, Graham Pendleton and Budgie Byrne, to take an example—when they start engaging together in sexual intercourse, they talk about love, they talk about the future, sometimes seriously and sometimes not, because otherwise they’re disturbing the convenient little fiction that they aren’t just screwing in the backseat of an automobile for mutual satisfaction. Is that clear enough for you?”

  He spoke in a low and convivial voice, set against the backdrop of lilting music and rolling waves. His eyes fixed on mine, examining my reaction, as if he weren’t absolutely certain I knew my birds from my bees.

  I lifted the cigarette to my lips and held his gaze. “So that’s it. You were just screwing in the backseat of Budgie’s car?”

  “She was happy with it. I was for goddamned sure happy about it. Look, do you want to hear the lurid details? We hit it off over the summer, hit it off even better over the fall. Fun all around, no harm done. About Christmas or so, she suddenly starts talking about getting married, and not just joking, like we did before. Out of the blue, she wants a ring and a spring wedding.” He stopped to smoke, picked a fleck of tobacco from his lower lip. “Then I hear through the grapevine that her father’s in trouble, going down the old drain like everyone else. I told her I knew what she was up to. We parted ways.”

  “That’s the short story.”

  “All you need to know. But she landed on her feet, as you can see.” He nodded into the crowd. I followed the direction of his gesture, and there was Budgie, magically reappeared, dancing in a snug clinch with her husband, a fresh highball glass balanced in her left hand. The other dancers gave them a wide berth. Nick’s curling brown hair and white back turned toward me, and I could just see the upper half of Budgie’s round eyes around his shoulder. She winked at me and tilted her head for a drink. Her ring caught the light in a dazzling optical explosion.

  I turned back to Graham. He was staring down at me with a curious expression, mouth half raised in a quizzical smile. “Does it bother you?” he asked.

  “Not at all. At least they’re not just screwing in the backseat of the car.”

  He flicked his spent cigarette over the side. “Greenwald’s car doesn’t have a backseat.”

  “Does yours?”

  Graham took the cigarette from my fingers and stubbed it out. He picked up my empty hand and kissed the palm with his warm lips. “It does, as a matter of fact. Wide seat, springy cushion, very comfortable. But you’re not the kind of girl a man takes into his backseat, are you?”

  The sun was beginning to drop, and Graham’s eyes were more gray than blue, enveloping me with a seriousness I’d never seen in them before. The champagne cocktail tingled merrily in my brain.

  “Oh, I’m not, am I? And what exactly does that mean?”

  Graham brushed back my hair around my ear and gave the lobe a little tug. “I don’t know what it means. I’m a little off my head at the moment. But I do know one thing: if a fellow can’t at least get a dance out of you, he’ll be howling at the moon by the end of the night.”

  I lifted myself away from the railing, right up next to his chest. “We can’t have that.”

  Graham led me into the dance, past Aunt Julie with her second cocktail, past winking Budgie with her third or fourth; past the narrowed gaze of Nick Greenwald, whose large hand wrapped around his wife’s red silk waist, and whose mouth bore the traces of her red silk lipstick.

  9.

  725 PARK AVENUE, NEW YORK CITY

  December 1931

  To my relief, Daddy is having one of his good days. He’s already up and eating breakfast in the dining room when I stumble through on Sunday morning, still in my dressing gown, bleary-eyed from some distressing half-remembered dream.

  “Good morning, poppet,” he says, looking up with a smile, and I press a kiss on his fading hair.

  “Good morning, Daddy.” I lay my arm around his shoulders. “I wanted to say hello when I came in last night, but it was so late. You and Mother were already in bed. I didn’t want to disturb you.”

  “You can wake me up anytime,” he says, squeezing my hand. “Sit down. Have some breakfast.”

  I drop into the chair to his right. The watery winter sunlight floods the windows, drenching the table, which is already laid out for thre
e with butter and jam in abundance and a pitcher of juice in the middle, glowing with the preternaturally bright orange of an egg yolk. “Where’s Mother?” I ask.

  “Oh, still in bed. I’m the early riser this morning. How was your drive from college?”

  “Perilous. You know Budgie.” The door from the kitchen swings open, and Marelda, our housekeeper, enters with a large pot of coffee. The pristine white of her apron catches the sun with such force, it hurts my eyes. “Good morning, Marelda. Oh, holy blessed coffee. Thank you.”

  She pours. “Good morning, Miss Lily. How was college?”

  “College was wonderful, Marelda. Wonderful.”

  “Any young men?” She winks.

  I glance at Daddy, who has returned his attention to the towering sheets of The New York Times, and wink back. “Maybe. You never know.”

  “That’s good, Miss Lily. That’s good.”

  Daddy is studying the Times with his brow knit in concentration. He has a handsome profile, straight and firm, his collar crisp and white at his neck, and his blond hair is only just beginning to tarnish with gray at the temples. Looking at him this way, you would never know anything was wrong at all. You might perhaps notice the tiny shake of his hand, rattling the newspaper. If he turned his face, you might be distracted by the way his clear blue eyes keep shifting away from yours, as if he can’t quite bear to connect with you. But that’s all. Today is a good day, certainly.

  “Daddy,” I say, “do you know the firm Greenwald and Company?”

  “What’s that, poppet?” He turns.

  “Greenwald and Company. Do you know it?”

  “Of course I do. Good man, Greenwald. Corporate bonds, isn’t it? Done extremely well for himself, I understand.” He folds the newspaper with great attention to its original creases.

  “Have they had any trouble recently, do you know?”

  “Well, everyone’s had trouble, Lily.”

  “I mean more than usual. They are a . . .” I search for the words. “A going concern, aren’t they?”