A Hundred Summers

by Beatriz Williams

  Nick stands rigid. His head tilts slightly toward me. “Lily?”

  “Nick,” I whisper, shaking, “please.”

  Nick’s hand drops away.

  “Now, sir,” Daddy says, more quietly, “I ask, once again, that you turn around and leave this family in peace.”

  “Daddy, no! Stop, Nick. Don’t go. He doesn’t mean it. Daddy, you can’t mean it, you’re a good man, you haven’t given him a chance . . .”

  “Lily, I think it’s best I should go. Isn’t that right, sir?”

  “I would be much obliged, Mr. Greenwald.”

  “Daddy! Daddy, don’t say that, I love him, don’t hurt him, don’t do this!” My words stab my throat. Mother, Mother’s animosity I could understand. But Daddy? My kind, fair-minded father, in whose adoration I have basked since childhood? This is a sucker-punch of betrayal.

  Marelda appears in the doorway from the living room. She runs her gaze over the three of us, widens her eyes, and backs out of view.

  Daddy looks at me. His hair sticks out at the temples, where his fingers raked it; his lips are wet and pink and trembling. “Have you no dignity, Lily? Have you no compassion at all?”

  “Your daughter, sir, has more dignity in her little finger than all the other girls put together.” Nick puts his hat on his head. “Good day, Mr. Dane. I hope to see you soon, in better spirits. Lily, good day, and merry Christmas.”

  “Nick, you’re not going!” I reach out my hand to him.

  “Lilybird,” Nick says softly.

  “Lily,” says my father.

  The details of the foyer spin around me, neatly framed Audubon prints and glowing electric sconces, the solid white six-paneled door with its polished brass knob. I whisper: “Nick, I’ll call you. I’ll . . .”

  “You will not telephone that young man, Lily. Not from this house.”

  “Lily, I’d better go.” Nick turns to the door.

  “You know how to reach me,” I say desperately.

  “He will not,” Daddy says. “I forbid it.”

  Nick makes a half-turn, looking back. His face is hard and businesslike, his jaw square above the dark wool of his scarf. “Mr. Dane, with all respect, your daughter is twenty-one years of age, and therefore old enough to conduct herself as she sees fit. Lily, sweetheart, I’ll find you, don’t worry.”

  He walks out the door and closes it with a soft click. I make a move to follow him, but Marelda’s voice breaks through the air before me.

  “Mr. Dane! Oh, Miss Lily!”

  I spin around just in time to catch my father as he totters, puts out one hand to the quiet polish of a demi-lune table, and slides to the floor, weeping.

  10.

  SEAVIEW, RHODE ISLAND

  July 1938

  Mrs. Hubert stopped me on my way out the door to meet Budgie.

  “Why, Mrs. Hubert.” I pressed my lips together to disguise the brightness of my lipstick, held the edges of my cardigan together to disguise the low swoop of my neckline. “I thought you were visiting Mother.”

  “I was. We’ve just finished.” She looked out the window, where Budgie’s car sat in the lane, and Budgie was touching up her own lipstick in the rearview mirror. “You’re going somewhere with Mrs. Greenwald, I take it?”

  I straightened my back and tilted my chin. “We’re going to Newport for dinner. A night out, the two of us.”

  “Do you think that’s wise?”

  I turned away, picked up my hat from the hall stand, and put it on my head. Mrs. Hubert’s face shone back in the mirror, over my shoulder. “I don’t know what you mean. Budgie and I are old friends.”

  “Lily, really.” She shook her head. She wore a long white skirt and old leather shoes and a broad straw hat, the same outfit she’d worn all summer, and the summer before. Mrs. Hubert changed the way Seaview changed: more grayness, more lines, while the upholstery remained the same. “You were taken in by that girl when you were children, and now she’s taken you in again.”

  “She hasn’t taken me in. I know what she is.”

  “Do you? I doubt it. Not that I can blame her, with that father of hers, and God knows what going on behind closed doors. Turn and look at me, Lily Dane, for God’s sake.”

  I turned. The entrance hall, facing east, received no direct sun, and the thunderclouds were already looming to the west. Mrs. Hubert’s face was dim and tired and gray, with two deep lines on either side of her mouth like a set of parentheses. “You do realize she’s playing a game, don’t you?” she said.

  “It’s all she knows.”

  “And you can forgive her for it? You can forgive her marrying that Greenwald, bringing him into our midst, like a . . . like a . . .” Her voice failed.

  “Like a Jew, Mrs. Hubert? Is that what you meant to say?”

  “Of course not.”

  My voice lowered to a hard whisper, because Kiki was in the kitchen with the housekeeper, having her supper, and I didn’t want her to hear this. “Yes, it was. It’s what you’re all thinking. How could Budgie Byrne bring him here? How could Lily Dane allow her little sister to play with that filthy Jew Greenwald?”

  From the driveway, Budgie tooted the horn of her car and called something, something I couldn’t make out.

  “Well, well,” said Mrs. Hubert. “Wise, modern Lily has decided to bring us all into the twentieth century, whether we like it or not. Lipstick and Jews for everybody. How charming. And the experiment worked so well for you before.”

  “Li-ly.” Kiki’s voice floated from the back of the house. “Mrs. Greenwald is honk-ing.”

  “How dare you,” I whispered. I was surprised to find I could say anything at all. I was turned to ice, my ears ringing distantly. The scent of Mrs. Hubert’s rosewater made my stomach churn.

  Mrs. Hubert held out her hands. “I’m sorry, Lily. I was quite wrong.”

  “You were quite wrong.”

  “I’m an ill-bred old woman. Everybody knows you were blameless.”

  “I think, Mrs. Hubert”—my voice was shaking; I cleared my throat—“I think I’ll be going now, if that’s all right with you.”

  I turned to the door. My damp palm slipped on the knob twice. I had to bring my other hand around to wrench it open.

  “Lily Dane,” said Mrs. Hubert, “you have a knack for laying your bet on the wrong horse.”

  I stood there in the open wedge of the door and stared at Budgie’s car and Budgie herself, waving at me from inside with a broad bloodred smile on her face. I said, without turning: “Mrs. Hubert, maybe the fault is with the race, not the horse.”

  THE FIRST FAT DROPS exploded on the windshield just as Budgie pulled off the road, and by the time she parked the car the rain was pouring down as if a giant bucket had been overturned in the sky. I peered through the downpour at the low wooden building with its hand-painted sign, the dull dilapidated cars parked next to ours. “I thought we were going into Newport,” I said.

  Budgie cracked open her window and tipped out her cigarette. “Well, if I’d told you we were going to a roadhouse, you would have said no. Come on, darling, unless you’re planning to spend the evening in the car.”

  She pulled up her cardigan to cover her hair, pushed open the car door, and bolted for the entrance without looking back.

  I sat in my seat for a moment longer, finishing my cigarette. The rain sheeted down the windows, and the warm air inside the car grew thick and moist and smoky. “Hell,” I said aloud, and pulled my cardigan over my head and yanked open the door.

  In the short dash to the roadhouse entrance, my hair and clothes were soaked. So were Budgie’s, but she still looked arresting with her wet curls shining under the dim lights and her dewy skin pale next to her red lipstick. “Shake your head, like this,” she told me, and I did, scattering drops. She nodded. “That’s better.”

  The place wasn’t large. Most of the room was taken up by a long bar along one side, tended by a man in a black button-up vest and white shirtsleeves, while a few worn ro
und wooden tables made up the difference. The floor was dark and stained and smelled yeasty, like stale beer, amid the low notes of sweat and cigarettes. A small band played seedy jazz in the corner, and gradually I became aware of all the eyes fixed on us: male eyes, mostly, some hard and calculating and others amused. Men in overalls, men in flash suits, even a few men in the quiet well-tailored summer flannels I had known all my life.

  Women, too. A floozy or two with the men, a giggling threesome at the bar wearing cheap floral dresses; a blue-haired lady wrapped in a fuchsia cashmere cardigan, huddled over her lowball like it was a brazier in a snowstorm.

  But none of the women were like Budgie, whose sleek glamorous clothes covered her sleek glamorous limbs, and whose enormous silver-blue eyes took in her surroundings with that irresistible mystery of knowing innocence, of wild fragility. The men looked at her and wanted to plunder that mystery, or else to save her from herself, just as I did. Just, perhaps, as Nick Greenwald did; just as Graham Pendleton had not.

  The room was hot, damp. I took off my cardigan, like Budgie had, and hung it over the back of my chair.

  The waitress came, a slaughtered lamb of a twenty-year-old girl, makeup bright and hair brighter, eyes glassy. “Drink?”

  “Two martinis, very dry, with olives. No, make it four.” Budgie winked. “Saves you the trouble, doesn’t it?”

  The girl gave us a look that said the martinis came only one way, sister, take it or leave it, and sauntered back to the bar.

  Budgie pulled out her cigarettes from her pocketbook and lit one for me without asking. “There, isn’t that better?” She let out a long and relieved gust of smoke. “I feel better already. Listen to that music. The saxophone’s a mess, but that trumpet player’s divine, isn’t he? A genius.”

  I looked at the band, and the trumpet player was divine, a medium-skinned Negro with high cheekbones and mellow almond eyes. As for his skill, I couldn’t have said. I didn’t listen to jazz, had only picked it up on rare occasion, on someone else’s radio or record player. I liked the sound of this trumpet, moody and meandering. The musician’s mellow almond eyes had caught Budgie’s admiration, and he was playing for her now. When the set ended, he put his trumpet in its case and wandered over to us.

  The place was beginning to fill up now, crowding with bodies and smoke and laughter. Budgie asked the trumpet player if he wanted a drink, and he said yes and found a chair and sat in it backward, his elbows resting on its round back.

  “Lily here doesn’t know much about jazz,” said Budgie.

  The trumpet player smiled. “I can educate. Did you like what you heard?”

  “Very much.” I took a drink of my martini, which was as warm as bathwater and not very dry.

  “Jazz, Miss Lily, is the bastard child of music, born from the old Negro work song by a whole lot of fine daddies who ain’t about to claim it.” The waitress came by and dropped a glass of whiskey in front of him, almost without stopping. “Thank you,” he said, over his shoulder. “And what brings two such highbred young ladies across the river this evening?”

  “Just a little itch for some music,” said Budgie. “Some jazz, to remind me I’m alive.”

  The trumpet player laughed. “It does that. Is this gentleman yours?”

  I startled up in my chair, heart pounding.

  But the figure looming over us wasn’t that of a disapproving Nicholson Greenwald, come to snatch his wife from the jaws of jazz and iniquity. It was Graham, smiling broadly, putting one hand on each of our shoulders. “Made it,” he said, kissing first my cheek and then Budgie’s, and swinging into a chair next to me. “You give terrible directions, Budgie Greenwald.”

  Budgie met my accusing eyes with a wink and a helpless shrug. “I can never keep the numbers straight. But you found us, didn’t you, you clever thing.”

  “I wasn’t about to give up.” He nodded at the trumpet player. “Friend of yours?”

  “This is . . .” Budgie laughed. “I don’t even know your name, do I?”

  The trumpet player smiled widely and held out his hand. “Basil White, jazz trumpet.”

  Budgie shook his hand. “Budgie Greenwald, bored housewife. And this is my friend Lily, who’s also bored and not even a housewife, and Graham Pendleton, who’s never bored at all.”

  “Only boring,” said Graham, shaking the hand of Basil White.

  The musician’s face brightened. “Say, aren’t you the relief pitcher for the Yankees?”

  Graham spread his hands. “Guilty.”

  “You don’t say! It’s an honor to meet you, sir! That save against the Tigers, why, that was the best game I’ve seen all year. How’s the shoulder?”

  Graham rubbed it. “Coming along, coming along. Operation went all right. Should be throwing a few balls around in a week or two.”

  “Let me buy you a drink.” Basil White turned to the bar and waved his hand.

  “What are you doing here?” I whispered to Graham.

  “Oh, just making sure you girls don’t get into too much trouble.” He laid his arm across the top of my chair and fiddled with the ends of my hair. “You’re all wet.”

  “Caught in the downpour.”

  “What a shame.” He didn’t sound disappointed. I caught the direction of his gaze, and saw that it was just shaving the top of my dress.

  I took a smoke, and chased it down with the rest of my martini.

  “That’s the spirit,” said Graham. The waitress came back with a glass of scotch, no ice, and Graham clinked my second martini. “Cheers. To rain and jazz.”

  We smoked and drank, and talked about jazz and baseball and the miserable weather, and by the time Basil White returned to his trumpet, Graham was on his third scotch, and my head was buzzing with warm gin and tobacco. “Dance?” said Graham, stubbing out his cigarette.

  I looked at Budgie.

  She waved her fingers at us. She wasn’t wearing her engagement ring, just her plain gold wedding band. “Go ahead, kids. I’ll be right here, admiring the scenery.”

  Graham rose and took my hand to the shifting crowd gathered near the bar, some of whom clutched each other in a kind of rhythm, a semblance of dance. The bodies were closely packed, radiating sweat and heat. My right palm stuck to Graham’s, my left curled around his neck. His hand pressed against my back.

  “I don’t know this dance,” I shouted in Graham’s ear.

  “Neither do I,” he shouted back, and we jiggled and moved as best we could, guided by collisions with other bodies, our hips drawing closer and closer together until I could feel every detail of muscular Graham pressed along my length. We were both running with sweat. I thought of Nick and Budgie, stuck together on the veranda at the Fourth of July ball, moving in tandem, her lipstick staining his mouth. I thought of how Nick had taken her home that night, helped her undress, taken her to bed with him. Who could have resisted Budgie, with that bloodred silk shimmering down her body? Nick would certainly have taken her to bed, would certainly have made himself at home between his wife’s glistening limbs. How had Graham put it? Engaged with her in sexual intercourse. Screwed her for mutual satisfaction throughout the humid July night.

  Graham pulled back. “Let’s go outside and get a breath, shall we?”

  I nodded. Graham picked up a couple more drinks at the bar and led me out the front door and around the side of the building, away from the cars and the entrance. The rain had stopped, but a few drops still trickled off the gutters. The air drooped with warmth, not refreshing at all but at least smelling of wet leaves and automobile exhaust instead of cigarettes and perspiration.

  A wooden bench leaned against the wall, both of them peeling with old blue paint. Graham set down the drinks, sat on the bench, and pulled me into his lap. “Lily Dane.” He shook his head and drank down half his whiskey. “What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?”

  “I don’t know. Kissing you, I guess,” I said, and pulled his head down.

  His mouth was strong with w
hiskey, adding to the tipsy spin in my brain, and his right arm draped around my back while his left hand balanced his drink. We kissed for some time, back and forth, a little deeper with each pass, until he pulled back and studied me with hazy eyes. “Well, well,” he said.

  “Well, well,” I said. I lifted myself up and straddled him.

  Graham set down his scotch and reached around my back to unfasten my dress, down to the waist. I held out my arms, and he drew the bodice down over my shoulders and let it drop in a pool of damp crepe de chine around my girdle. I wore a plain ivory silk brassiere underneath, not even edged with lace. “Now, that’s more like it,” he said. “Very practical, very Lily.” He slid his finger speculatively under the edge. When I did not object, his experienced hands ran around my back to unhook the fastenings and lift the brassiere away.

  “Well, well,” he said again. He leaned back against the wooden wall, tipping the bench a bit, and dropped the brassiere by his side. The sun was setting behind the thick rolling clouds, and his face had softened with the beginnings of drunkenness. His heavy-lidded gaze slid over my chest, not missing a detail. “I didn’t count on this for weeks.”

  “But you did count on it.”

  “A man can hope.” He picked up his whiskey and poured a few drops on the curve of my right breast, then bent his head and licked them off. “That’s good. Scotch and Lily. Very good.” He did the same with the other breast, this time allowing the whiskey to trickle all the way to the tip before catching it with his warm tongue. He set the glass down.

  My eyes were closed by now. I was floating, drifting in a warm, wet cloud. Somewhere in the fog of my brain, Nick and Budgie were copulating, over and over, their blurry bodies stuck together and her lipstick on his mouth. Graham’s thumbs rubbed against the tips of my breasts, and then his hands covered them both, strong and large, squeezing gently. I arched my back.