A Hundred Summers

by Beatriz Williams

  She slumped back in her chair, long body slack, like a wilted grasshopper. The door swung open, and Mr. Hubert came through, holding a hammer in one gnarled hand and an ancient oil lantern in the other. “Upstairs windows all battened. I . . .” He stopped and looked between the two of us. “What’s going on?”

  Mrs. Hubert straightened. “Nothing, Asa. Nothing at all. Lily, are you sure the three of you wouldn’t rather weather it out here? We do have a stone foundation.”

  “Thick walls,” added Mr. Hubert.

  I scrambled to my feet and looked out the window. I could see nothing: the rain sheeted by in horizontal slices, filled with debris. “Do you think it’s that bad?”

  “Red sky three mornings in a row,” said Mr. Hubert. “Could be a humdinger.”

  “I can’t stay,” I said. “My mother’s alone in the house, with no lights or telephone. We’ve got to leave now.”

  “Leave her to rot, I say,” muttered Mrs. Hubert.

  I rushed through the doorway to the living room, where Kiki was pressed against the window, screeching with astonished glee. “Look at the surf, Lily! I’ve never seen it that high!”

  I looked past her and saw a towering wave break onto the beach, roiling right up to the middle of Neck Lane. “My God! We’ve got to get home!”

  We sloshed to the car and turned over the engine. It coughed heroically and died.

  “Flooded,” said Aunt Julie. “We’ll have to walk.”

  “We’ll get soaked!” Kiki said joyfully.

  “There’s no other way,” I said. “Quickly, now!”

  The wind hit us like a wall, flying with surf, nearly knocking me to the ground as I left the shelter of the car. My hat shot from my head and disappeared. I grabbed Kiki’s hand. “Stay next to me!” I shouted into her ear, but I couldn’t even hear my own words. The air was crashing, vibrating, singing. A wave poured over Neck Lane, soaking my shoes.

  Aunt Julie grabbed Kiki’s other hand, and we staggered down the lane, sometimes shin-deep in foaming water. I had to turn away to breathe, to catch even a single gasp of air into my lungs. Kiki’s feet flew out from beneath her, and I snatched at her arm with my other hand, anchoring her down. Step by step we went on, bent double, rain pouring on our backs through our hair and into our ears and noses, an infinity of rain.

  I thought, We’re not going to make it.

  A dark shape loomed up next to me: a car, a large station car. Something dashed around the front and took me by the shoulders. I looked up into Nick’s shocked face. “Lily!” he screamed. “Get in the car!”

  “Nick!” I staggered with relief. He opened the back door of the Oldsmobile and threw the three of us inside.

  Nick ducked into the front and slammed the door. “I won’t ask what you’re doing here,” he shouted, over the thunder of the rain. The car inched forward, wipers swinging furiously and making no difference at all. I hugged Kiki into my chest. She was wet through, shaking, no longer laughing.

  We had been driving almost a minute before I remembered. “Budgie! Where is she?”

  “Here, darling,” came a murmur from the front, and I peered over the seat to see her curled up in a coat, bare feet pressing Nick’s legs, hair a disorder of dark curls covering her face. A thick white bandage surrounded her left forearm.

  “She’s been sedated,” Nick said.

  The car slipped and floated down the lane. I couldn’t speak. I hardly noticed when we stopped moving; the driving rain surrounded all the windows like a curtain. “You’ll have to come inside,” shouted Nick. “I can’t leave her alone in the house.”

  “All right!” I shouted back.

  Nick jumped out of the car. An instant later he opened Budgie’s door, dragged her out, and disappeared with her up the path to the house.

  “We’ll get out on your side,” I said to Aunt Julie, and she pushed at the door until it flew open, caught by the wind.

  We spilled out, clinging to Kiki, and bundled her up the steps. Nick opened the door and dragged us inside.

  “Why did you come home?” I demanded. “You should have stayed at the hospital!”

  “She insisted,” he said shortly. “Help me with the towels. I don’t know where the hell the housekeeper’s gone.”

  “Where’s Budgie?”

  “I put her to bed.”

  I ran upstairs and found the linen closet and handed out towels. Nick went to the attic; Aunt Julie and Kiki went downstairs to light the hurricane lamps. I bustled around the bedrooms, wadding up the towels and stuffing them in the windowsills. Water was already leaking through. From Budgie’s bedroom window, I could see the enormous waves breaking against the beach, one after another, walls of white foam and soaring water.

  “A hell of a storm,” Budgie murmured.

  I turned around. She lay on the bed, propped into the pillows, eyes hollow and bleary.

  I shifted the remaining towels on my arm. “How are you, Budgie?”

  “Dreadful. I lost the baby right after you left, and now you want my husband from me.”

  I stepped forward.

  “I never could keep a baby going,” said Budgie. “They don’t seem to like me.”

  “Lily!” called Nick. “Are there any more towels?”

  “Go.” Budgie turned into her pillows. “Go.”

  I rushed from the room, ran downstairs, and handed Nick the towels. “It’s not going to be enough,” he said. “It’s too late to batten the windows. We’ll have to replace all the rugs, probably. At least we’re on high ground.” He turned to me. An oil lamp already put out a steady light from the table. Aunt Julie and Kiki were in the kitchen. “What are you doing here, Lily?” he asked softly.

  “I had to come. I went to see Uncle Peter.” I put my hand on his arm. “Nick, I know. About my mother and your father, about Kiki. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  He shook his head. He was soaked, dripping with water, his shirt stuck to his chest and his arms. “How could I? She’s your mother.”

  “She said there was a note. What note, Nick?”

  “Oh, the goddamned note!” He pushed his hands through his sodden hair. “I’ll tell you later, Lily. After the storm’s over, when we’re alone. It doesn’t matter now.”

  “It does matter! Everyone’s been hiding everything from me all these years, as if I were a child, as if I were too fragile to be told the truth! Me! When I’ve held everything and everybody together with my bare hands!” I stood there, panting, my palms fisted at my sides. I was dripping water all over Budgie’s white rug; my hair was plastered about my head. I knew I looked like a madwoman, and I didn’t care.

  “Yes, you have,” said Nick. “You’ve borne everything, damn it. That mother of yours. Do you know how much, all summer, I wanted to just . . .” He turned away and hit the wall with his fist. His voice, however, remained steady. “The note. The goddamned note. I was in Paris, trying to rescue the office, calling in capital from wherever I could find it. I sent you a letter every week, never had a reply . . .”

  “I never got them!”

  “I know that now. I half suspected you wouldn’t; that was why I kept writing, hoping one would get through eventually. I even tried to reach you through Budgie, but she never answered. Then around Christmas, some busybody told me that you’d had a baby in late summer, and the family was trying to pass it off as your mother’s. Scandal of the season. He was dead sure of his information. I went frantic. The timing was about right. I hadn’t seen or heard from you since, and I knew there was no possibility that your father and mother might have conceived between them. So I thought maybe there’d been some sort of miracle, a chance in a hundred, torn rubber or God knows what. I sent a desperate cable, addressed to you, marked private. I don’t think I slept after that.”

  In the thundering rain, in the high-pitched whine of the storm outside, his words were nearly drowned. I stepped closer, straining to hear him.

  “I never got the cable, Nick. I swear I didn’t.”
/>   “Of course you didn’t. Two weeks later, I received a package at my apartment. All my letters were enclosed, unopened. A note attached, very simple, just a few words.” His voice went flat. “‘The child isn’t yours,’ it said. Then your initials.”

  “What? Who sent it?”

  Nick turned and crossed his arms. “Your mother, presumably. Of course, I didn’t know that at the time. Up until then, I’d been faithful to you. Faithful! I’d been your loyal old hound, thinking only of you, craving just a word from you. One word, and I’d have taken the next ship, I’d have swum across the ocean if I had to, and told my father and his lousy firm to go to hell.”

  “Nick, I didn’t know. You left for Paris, I heard nothing, I thought you’d given up on me. I was miserable. And I deserved it. I’d told you it was over. I’d sent back your ring.”

  He looked past me, at the rain flooding the windows. “‘The child isn’t yours,’ it said. It knocked me to the ground.”

  “You didn’t think I’d . . . oh, Nick! How could you think that, knowing me? You knew my handwriting, you knew I couldn’t possibly have written it.”

  “It was that, on top of everything. It all made sense: your silence, your returning the ring. I’d been so damned careful to keep you out of trouble that night, and now there were the words, right there in my hand, confirming that the baby wasn’t mine, or at least that you weren’t about to let me claim it. I didn’t stop to think about logic or handwriting. I went crazy. I went out and drank myself unconscious. When I sobered up the next day, I went to visit that old friend of my mother’s, the one who lived in Paris, the one from the summer before I met you. It was maybe eleven o’clock in the morning. She let me right in. She was still in her dressing gown. It didn’t take long.”

  “Oh, no, Nick.” I was filled not with jealousy but compassion.

  “I was sick afterward, physically sick in the bathroom. I got dressed and left without saying good-bye, without even looking at her. I went home and scrubbed myself in the shower for an hour, and then I must have smoked two or three packs of cigarettes without stopping.”

  I sank into the chair and put my head in my hands. “Don’t say it. I can’t hear any more.”

  “What? You, Lily? I thought you needed to know these things. Every salacious detail, so you don’t have to wonder anymore. So here you are, I’ll lay it all out. Where was I? Yes, right, the first time I betrayed you. The first time, as I said, it was awful. It was unspeakably sordid. I couldn’t believe what I’d done, I despised myself. But it’s like they say, you know. The first time’s always the hardest.”

  His fist slammed on the mantel, rattling Budgie’s collection of delftware.

  “The second time, on the other hand. It was a week or so later. I’d planned it all out, filled my pockets with rubbers and smokes, bathed and dressed in my finest. Premeditation in the first degree. There was a woman I’d remembered seeing at a few parties, a woman who flirted more than the rest, a restless little dark-haired mistress of someone or other. I sought her out, bought her drinks, went back to her natty little second-floor apartment in the fashionable Seizième. We got straight to business. I found out that it hurt less if I’d had a few drinks first, if I didn’t look at her face. If I kept my cigarette lit and spoke in French, if I had to speak at all. I found, in fact, I was able to take her twice, in quick succession. Once right there in the hallway, once in the bedroom. Dressed and home by one o’clock. A vast improvement. By the third time . . .” He was panting, nearly breathless with anger.

  “Stop it, Nick.”

  “By the third time . . . which I’m afraid I can’t recall specifically . . . by the third time . . .”

  I looked up just in time to see Nick pick up a curving vase from the mantel, heft it in his hand, and fling it against the opposite wall. It exploded into a shellburst of minute white-and-blue shrapnel.

  “By the third time,” he said, “I could carry on fucking all night if I needed to.”

  “Nick!” I cried in anguish.

  The door from the kitchen banged open. Aunt Julie and Kiki stood there in shock, staring at the broken vase, at Nick’s heaving body in front of the mantel.

  “Aunt Julie,” I said, in a whisper, but I knew at once my voice couldn’t be heard over the storm. I went over to them and leaned into my aunt’s ear. “Aunt Julie, take Kiki back into the kitchen. Nick’s had a difficult day. We’ll go home in a moment. Just let me speak to him.”

  “Not alone, you’re not,” said Aunt Julie, with a baleful look in Nick’s direction.

  I took her arm. “Yes, alone. We’re fine. Take Kiki into the kitchen. Give her a cookie. I’m sure there’s a cookie jar somewhere.”

  Kiki tried to slip under my arm, to run to Nick. “Stop, honey,” I said. “He needs a moment alone. Give him a moment.”

  “Lily, look at him!”

  “I know.” I pushed her through the door, into Aunt Julie’s arms. “I’ll be right there, sweetheart.”

  The door closed behind them. I turned. Nick was standing before the mantel, hands braced against it, head bowed. I went to him and put my arms around his waist and laid my head against his rain-soaked back. “I forgive you. It doesn’t matter. It’s forgotten. You didn’t know the truth. You were playing a part, it wasn’t even you. Not the Nick I know.”

  Another gust of wind slammed against the front of the house, making the remaining vases totter, making the clock jump next to Nick’s head. He didn’t even flinch.

  I said: “I let them use me. I should have known, I should have fought for you. I should have known how much you were hurt. Your gentle and loyal heart. You were so hurt, we hurt you so much. How can I blame you?”

  He said nothing. His body shuddered against mine, straining for breath. I could feel his heartbeat slamming into my cheek.

  “Please stop torturing yourself,” I said. “We’ll never speak of it again. We’ll start over, as if it’s the second of January.”

  “Lily, you know that’s impossible. How in God’s name do I make love to you again, how do I even touch you again, with these hands? Always, it’s going to stand between us. What I’ve done.”

  “Only if we let it. Only if I let it.”

  He said nothing.

  “Besides,” I said, “there was Graham.”

  Nick made a short bark of a laugh. “Yes, there was. Good old Pendleton, evening up the score.”

  “Short and very unsatisfactory.”

  “Lily, unlike you, I don’t feel the need to hear about your other conquests, let alone contemplate the details.” He turned around in my arms and touched my hair. “You’re going to stay here tonight, of course. You’re not going back out in that storm.”

  “We can’t. My mother’s still at the house. She’s all alone. We have to get back to her.”

  “Oh no you’re not. Your mother can sit there by herself and listen to the wind howl.”

  The door from the kitchen opened again, and Kiki flew through. She stopped in the middle of the living room rug and stared at us. Her hands flew to her mouth to absorb her gasp.

  I jumped away from Nick. Nick leaned back against the mantel.

  “Kiki, darling, it’s time to go back. Mother’s waiting for us.”

  “You’re not going,” said Nick. “It’s far too dangerous for you, let alone Kiki.”

  “I can’t just leave her there, Nick!”

  “Then I’ll go.” He straightened. “I’ve got my sou’wester. I’ll be back in a few minutes. I’ll bring her with me, carry her if I have to.”

  “Nick, you can’t!”

  “Why not? We’re on higher ground here than at your place. It’s safer if we all stick together. I should be the one to go, anyway. I can plow through the storm better than any of you.”

  “No, Nick!” Kiki flung herself around his legs. “Don’t go!”

  He bent and put his arms around her shoulders. “I’ll be just fine, sweetheart. Don’t worry.”

  “You can’t go,�
� said Kiki. “You have to stay here and marry my sister. You were hugging her. That means you love her.”

  Nick started and looked at me guiltily.

  “Out of the mouths of babes.” Aunt Julie folded her arms.

  Nick gave Kiki a pat and gently set her away. “All right, then. If I’m going to go, I’ve got to go now. I’ve got my rain things in the back.”

  I followed him through the kitchen to the mudroom. “You don’t have to do this. Please stay. Or let me go with you.”

  “Someone’s got to stay with Budgie,” he said, putting on his coat, toeing off his shoes. “I’ll be all right. Just a September blow. I’ve seen worse.”

  “And all for my mother.”

  “I’ll throttle her afterward.”

  “I’ll help you.”

  He yanked the second boot on. I handed him his hat.

  “Be careful out there,” I said.

  Nick looked even larger than usual with the sou’wester piled on his shoulders and the sturdy boots lifting him up another unneeded inch or two. He looked down at me, and his hazel-brown eyes filled right up. “Oh, my God, Lilybird,” he said suddenly. “I love you so much.” His hands surrounded my face. He kissed me, hard, right on the lips. “We’ll figure this out. Somehow I’ll find a way to make it up to you. I’m not going to let anyone hold us hostage any longer. There’s seven years wasted already. Think what we might have done with them.”

  “Go bring back my mother.” My voice was hoarse. “I’ll see if I can talk to Budgie.”

  He kissed me again and left through the back, disappearing almost immediately in the bang of the door and the howl of wind. I ran around front and peered through the living room window. I thought I could see a blur of yellow through the rain, but it was gone almost at once.

  I looked at the clock ticking above the mantel.

  It was three twenty-two in the afternoon.

  TO MY SURPRISE, Budgie was awake when I went upstairs, right after Nick left.

  “Well, well,” she said, a little dreamily. “Was that a lovers’ spat I heard below? I hope you weren’t smashing my mother’s delftware. She brought that back from her honeymoon.”