A Hundred Summers

by Beatriz Williams

  “If you want me to, Lily. If you’ll allow me another chance to make you happy.”

  “I will.”

  “Good. Now, I want you to relax. I want you not to worry at all. I’ll fix this, one way or another.” His voice was dark with resolve. I could see his face, his piratical eyes, staring at the walls of the telephone booth as if he could burn through them. I thought of Budgie lying on the beach at Seaview, her ripening body open to the sun, cigarette dangling from her fingertips, her Thermos of gin deadening her nerves, unaware of his approach. “Lily, are you there?” Nick said. “Say something. Let me hear your voice.”

  “Here I am. I’m sorry. Yes. Be careful with her, Nick. I don’t want her to be unhappy. She’s already so miserable.”

  “Lily, I don’t give a damn anymore whether Budgie Byrne is happy or unhappy. The only happiness I’m concerned with is yours. Now go outside, enjoy the nice weather, and let me take care of this.”

  “Nick, I mean it. Don’t hurt her.”

  “I’ll do my best. Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye, Nick. Drive safely.”

  “I will. I love you, Lilybird.”

  Before I could say it back, he hung up the receiver.

  I sat in the chair, staring at the telephone, while the radio chirped on behind me: an advertisement for Ivory soap flakes, 99 and 44/100 percent pure. I rose and switched it off.

  In the bedroom, I found the ring, which had rolled under the bureau. I put it back in the box, and put the box back in the drawer underneath the handkerchiefs. I took one from the top of the stack, pressed to stiffness by some invisible laundress.

  The window was still cracked open. I closed and latched it, picked up my hat and pocketbook from the hall, and left Nick’s apartment.

  EVERY WEEKDAY MORNING, Peter van der Wahl arrived punctually at eight-thirty to his Broad Street offices. His secretary recognized me at once and smiled widely. “Why, Miss Dane!” she said. “You’re up early. Are you back from Seaview now?”

  “Not quite, Maggie, I’m afraid,” I said. “Just some business to attend to before we pack up. Is he in?”

  “Yes, he is. Going over some briefs. Shall I tell him you’re here?”

  “Yes, please.”

  I sat down in an armchair while Maggie went into Peter’s office. The law firm of Scarborough and van der Wahl occupied a single floor of the Broad Street building, and no one had thought of renovating it in twenty years. It stood as a monument to venerable shabbiness. The armchairs had worn down in comfortable patterns, the rug was clean and threadbare, the pictures on the wall were of comfortable Hudson River landscapes, framed in gilt. Maggie’s reception desk was a claw-footed wonder, polished in beeswax once a year and chipped in all the right places. In the left front drawer, she kept a bag of sweets that she used to hand out to me, on the sly, when I was little.

  “Lily!”

  I looked up, and my onetime uncle-in-law stood in the doorway with both hands extended, his hair newly clipped and his reading glasses stuck on top of his head.

  “Uncle Peter!” I jumped up and grasped both his hands. “You’re looking well. How was your summer?”

  “Pretty well, pretty well. A hot one, wasn’t it? I was out on Long Island most of the time. And you? Seaview, of course? How are your mother and Julie?”

  “Covered in suntans and brimming with gin and tonic. Do you have a moment for me?”

  “Always. Maggie. Would you mind holding my calls for a bit? Coffee?” He ushered me through the doorway.

  “No, thank you. I’ve had some already.”

  Uncle Peter’s office had a pleasing view of New York Harbor. When I was younger, and my parents were meeting with him to go over estate papers and things, I would cram myself into the far-right corner, next to the window, where I could just glimpse the raised green arm of the Statue of Liberty around the edge of a neighboring building.

  Now, of course, I was twenty-eight years old, and I settled myself decorously in the armchair before his desk, crossed my legs, and accepted his offer of a cigarette.

  It was typical of Peter van der Wahl that he kept cigarettes and an ashtray in his office, though he didn’t smoke himself. He leaned back in his chair, smiling pleasantly, while I fiddled with the lighter. “You’re out and about early, in this part of town,” he said.

  “As I said, I’m here on errands. I have to go back and pack everybody up in a day or two.”

  He dribbled his fingers on the edge of the desk. It was stacked on either side with legal briefs and law books, and one pen was missing from the set at the front. But the stacks were neat, and the pen lay next to the papers on the desk blotter, all squared with care. “And how high do I rank on your list of errands?” he asked, still smiling.

  “You’re at the very top, Uncle Peter, as always,” I said, returning his smile, marveling as ever that my Aunt Julie had once been married to this man. He wasn’t unattractive, not at all. But his face was pleasant rather than handsome, laid in quiet plateaus, eyes a mild gray and hair sifting gently from pepper to salt. He reached perhaps five-foot-eight when he wore his thick-soled winter shoes, and his shoulders suggested tennis rather than football. Every line of him spoke kindness and humor, mild-mannered Episcopalian good breeding, and yet Aunt Julie, in one of her more gin-soaked moments a few summers ago, had confided that he was a tiger between the sheets, that the first year of their marriage had been the most exhausting of her life, that she’d spent half of it in bed and the other half in the hair salon, repairing her coiffure. Another month of it would have killed her, she said.

  It had been two years before I could look Uncle Peter in the eye again.

  “And what can I do for you today, Lily?” he asked now.

  I raised my cigarette to cover my hesitation. I had woken up this morning with Nick’s words burning in my brain, with conjectures and questions I hadn’t thought to ask him last night fitting together in haphazard pieces. I knew Nick had left out nearly as much as he’d told me, and I knew there was only one person who knew the affairs of my family—and Manhattan generally—so well as Peter van der Wahl, who handled them for a living.

  On the other hand, he wasn’t supposed to reveal them.

  “Uncle Peter,” I said, “what do you remember about the winter of 1932?”

  He removed the glasses from his head, folded them on the desk, and picked up his pen. “Why do you ask?”

  “It was a busy winter, wasn’t it? There was Daddy’s stroke, and my spectacularly unsuccessful elopement with Nick Greenwald. Everybody was going out of business. Budgie Byrne’s father killed himself, do you remember?”

  “I do. Shocking. One of the more dramatic bank failures that year, and I believe he had a number of lawsuits directed at him. There was some question of personal ethics.” Uncle Peter watched me keenly. He was not a lawyer for nothing.

  “And Nick’s father’s firm was in trouble, too, wasn’t it?”

  “I recall something like that. You may be right. Lily, my dear, what are you asking me?”

  I leaned forward, putting my hand on my crossed knee, letting the cigarette dangle above Uncle Peter’s old and priceless rug. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m asking you. I don’t even know what to ask you. Look, may I speak to you in confidence?”

  “Of course.”

  “You know Nick Greenwald married Budgie Byrne last spring.”

  His eyes softened with sympathy. “I’d heard that, yes. Julie went to the wedding, didn’t she?”

  “Of course she did. They’ve been summering in Seaview with us, the old Byrne house, fixing it up. And I know now—don’t ask me how, Uncle Peter—I know he didn’t marry her because he loves her. So I’m trying to find out why. What hold she might have over him.” In my agitation, I reached across to prop the cigarette in the ashtray on the desk, and stayed there with my hands knit together on the wooden edge.

  Uncle Peter put his hand on his forehead and rubbed it. “Lily, Lily. What are you up to?”
>
  “We made a terrible mistake seven years ago. You know that. You know what happened.”

  “I know that.” His hand still rubbed his temple. “Is he proposing to divorce her?”

  “Yes. The marriage—I speak in confidence, remember—it was never even consummated. And all this time, Uncle Peter, all of it . . .” My voice broke down. I sat back in the chair and stared at my knees. “I was so stupid. I pushed him away after Daddy’s stroke, I couldn’t even bear to see him. I was so full of guilt, because I had done that to my father, poor Daddy. You remember how he was, those first few months. We didn’t even think he’d live. Every day was pure torture.”

  Uncle Peter handed me his handkerchief, but I pushed it away. I was gaining strength now.

  “I remember,” Uncle Peter said.

  “I sent Nick back the ring. I told him I could never see him again. I think I was hoping he wouldn’t accept it, that he would come back and storm through the front door and tell me everything would be all right, that it wasn’t my fault, that he couldn’t live without me. But instead he left for Paris.”

  “I understand his father’s firm . . .” said Uncle Peter.

  “I know, I know. But I was twenty-one and in despair, and I suppose, like a child, I thought he should sit around New York and pine. When he left for Paris, I thought I’d die. I would have died, except for Kiki. And by springtime I was hearing stories about what he was doing over there, and I thought I hated him.”

  Uncle Peter turned in his chair and looked at the window, at the twitching water of New York Harbor. “But you don’t hate him now.”

  “No. I think he was hurt, as I was. He thought I didn’t care, as I thought he didn’t. We were young and stupid and proud. And Budgie found him.”

  Uncle Peter said nothing, only stared at the window, the pen still flipping among his fingers. The sunlight glinted on the gray hair around his temples.

  “We aren’t having an affair, if that’s what you’re thinking,” I said. “Nick’s an honorable man. He wants to settle things with her first.”

  “What a god-awful mess.”

  “Yes. It’s why I’ve come to you. He’s gone up there today. He’s going to ask her for a divorce, and I don’t think she’ll give it to him. She’s very . . .” My cigarette was nearly burned out in the ashtray. I picked it up and finished it. “She’s not happy. Drinking all day, and . . . other things. Whatever it is she used to get him to marry her, she’ll use it now, and I’m worried. I don’t know what she’ll do. I think Nick’s at the end of his rope. He said some things on the phone this morning. I don’t want this to end badly. So I came to you.”

  “What can I do?”

  “You know everything, Uncle Peter. Everything that happens in our little world makes its way to that discreet brain of yours. You know all our secrets. I thought you might know this one.”

  He sighed and turned back to me. His face looked a little pale, or perhaps it was the abundant light from the window. “Lily, I’m not in Mrs. Greenwald’s confidence. I hardly know the woman. I certainly don’t know her reasons for marrying her husband, still less why he married her.”

  “Did you know she was having an affair with Nick’s father, that last winter?”

  If I hoped to shock him into an admission, I was disappointed. His eyebrows lifted; he placed his pen back on the desk. “I did not,” he said. He steepled his fingers and stared at the tips. “But I would be surprised if that were the case.”

  A pulse of sensation went through my veins, awakening my nerves. Uncle Peter’s words repeated in my head, calm and heavy with significance. I leaned forward and put my elbows on the desk. “Why is that, Uncle Peter? Why is that?”

  He shrugged. “Because I would, that’s all. Mrs. Greenwald isn’t known for her strict adherence to the truth.”

  “But Nick looked at his father’s accounts. He was paying her off all those years, two hundred dollars a month.”

  “He might have been paying her for any number of reasons.”

  “Such as?”

  Uncle Peter shook his head and rose. For a moment I thought he meant to usher me out, but instead he picked up a chair from the corner of the room, brought it before me, and sat down. He lifted my hands and held them between us. “Lily, my dear. Of all the unhappy consequences of that winter, yours has always given me the most distress. You kept everything together, didn’t you, when everyone else went to pieces. And yet you were the one who lost the most.”

  “It doesn’t matter now, Uncle Peter. What I want is the truth. I want to know how a woman like Budgie could convince a man like Nick to marry her. I want to know how to release him.”

  Uncle Peter shook his head. “Lily, you’re not asking the right questions. You’re not thinking of the bigger picture.”

  “What bigger picture?”

  “All these years, my dear, you’ve burdened yourself with the guilt of your father’s illness.”

  “How could I not? He had a stroke, Uncle Peter. When he learned about the elopement, he had a stroke, he nearly died. He’s sitting right now in front of a window, staring out at Central Park, the way he’s done for years. He’s never even held Kiki in his arms. His own daughter.”

  Uncle Peter’s hands pressed mine. “You’re certain that was how it happened?”

  “That’s what they said. He got my note, he raced down to Gramercy Park to stop us. My mother and Mr. Greenwald told him he was too late.”

  “And you’ve never wondered how your mother came to know this? About the two of you?”

  “Well, it was Budgie, wasn’t it? She saw my mother at the party and told her. How else would Mother have found out? My mother found Mr. Greenwald and went down to the apartment to find us. We saw it happen, from the window.” I shook my head. “I couldn’t even hear Budgie’s name for years after that. I still don’t know why she would have betrayed us like that.”

  Uncle Peter laid my hands on top of each other, between his, and patted the upper one. He gazed into my eyes with concentrated strength, soft gray turned to iron. “Lily, you’re still not looking at it the right way. Think, Lily. Think very carefully. Think about what you saw that night. Think about what came after.”

  I sat there, staring into Uncle Peter’s eyes, my hands sandwiched within his. I examined the picture in my head, turned it around, shook it, held it upside down, added a few speculative brushstrokes.

  “No,” I whispered. “It doesn’t make sense. They would have told me.”

  “Would they? When you have always willingly taken the burden from their shoulders?”

  Uncle Peter took one hand from mine and stroked the side of my head, smoothing the springy curls, his forehead pulled into a triangle of sympathy.

  “And you think Budgie knows?”

  “I have no idea. But she was paid for something, wasn’t she?”

  I pulled my hands away and picked up my pocketbook.

  “Uncle Peter,” I said, “would you mind terribly if I borrowed your car?”

  21.

  1932–1938

  I remember very little of the next twenty-four hours. I remember how Nick demanded to travel with us down to New York, but Aunt Julie pointed out that he couldn’t simply leave the Packard in Lake George, and I was too distressed to argue. Looking back, I think perhaps he interpreted this as ambivalence.

  I remember saying good-bye to Nick at the station, through my stinging throat, while Aunt Julie waited impatiently behind me. I remember the way he held me in his big arms, and how comforting I found the solid wall of his chest and the steady heartbeat beneath. I remember wondering how I could survive the next day or two until I would feel them all again.

  I remember his voice in my ear, though not the exact words. How he loved me, how everything would be fine, how he prayed for my father’s recovery, how he would do whatever he could to help. I wasn’t to think of him or worry about him, he would find me when he reached the city. I meant everything to him, did I know that? He would never
forget last night. I had bound him to me forever. I was his whole life, his wife before God, his Lilybird. We were as good as married, he would wait patiently, as long as it took.

  Things like that.

  I remember I didn’t have the voice, or the composure, to answer much in return.

  I remember the scent of steam and coal smoke, hanging dank and sultry in the air, and to this day I feel a little ill when I stand on a train platform and breathe it in too deeply.

  I remember looking out the window of the train as we pulled away, and seeing Nick’s figure standing alone on the platform, and yet not seeing it, because my mind was already too consumed with disaster.

  I wish I could remember more. I wish I had taken down every detail of Nick’s appearance, his expression, his outline against the gray buildings of the station, because I was not to see him again until the summer of 1938, the summer the hurricane came and washed the world away.

  22.

  SEAVIEW, RHODE ISLAND

  Wednesday, September 21, 1938

  There is a point, as you approach Seaview from the mainland, where the road turns around the edge of a sharp hillside and the whole of Seaview Neck spreads out before you. The view is so dramatic, it’s easy to miss the turnoff onto Neck Road. People do it all the time, blowing right through the stop sign, heads craned to catch the roll of the Atlantic onto the pristine cream-colored stretch of the Seaview beach, or else the virgin white sails dipping through the waters of the bay. My God, they think. Who lives there? I’d kill to have a place along that beach, one of those pretty houses with the shingles and the bay windows and the gables and the summerhouses out back. I’d love to have one of those docks with a sailboat or two moored to the pilings.

  But I was used to Seaview’s beauty. I had driven along that road a thousand times.

  I reached the turnoff at about two o’clock in the afternoon, having raced up the gleaming new Merritt Parkway as far as Milford, and then wended my way up the Boston Post Road as fast as Peter van der Wahl’s ten-year-old Studebaker could stretch its engine. I would have arrived earlier, except I stopped to see Daddy before leaving the city.