A Hundred Summers

by Beatriz Williams

  The voice called out, stronger now. “Lily?”

  “Aunt Julie?”

  “Here I am! It’s Lily!”

  She crashed noisily through the vines somewhere to my left. I searched the murky twilight for her shape.

  “Oh, thank God!” she was saying. “You were here all along? I was screaming for you! Oh, darling. Where are you?”

  “Here!” I called. “I have Budgie!”

  Aunt Julie appeared from behind a tree, her clothes in wet shreds. I was still kneeling, holding the limp Budgie. She fell down and threw her arms around us.

  “Oh, darling. There you are.”

  Her arms squeezed me, and then dropped away. “Lily . . . Budgie. She’s . . .”

  “She’s fainted. She was so tired.”

  “Darling, she’s dead.”

  I pushed Aunt Julie away with my elbow. “She’s not dead! She’s sleeping, she was so tired. She’s sleeping.”

  “Darling, darling.” Aunt Julie put her hands on my arms, but I wouldn’t let Budgie go. She pried at my fingers, one by one, until they loosened. She took hold of Budgie and drew her away from me and laid her on the wet ground. The hair fell away from Budgie’s temple, exposing a gash that ran into her hairline, turning back the skin in a thick white flap. “Poor thing,” Aunt Julie whispered.

  “She’s not dead, she’s not dead,” I said, over and over, into Aunt Julie’s shirt.

  “Poor thing.” She stroked my back with her long, broken-nailed fingers. “Poor thing.”

  WE SPENT THE NIGHT in the shelter of an old stone barn, huddled against each other in the cold, after hours spent in turns, wandering and calling for Nick and Kiki and my mother. We found Mrs. Hubert, who had ridden the right-front quarter of her attic roof across Seaview Bay and into the same landing place. Mr. Hubert, she said, with stony New England stoicism, had slipped off halfway through and disappeared beneath the waves.

  We laid out Budgie’s body by the wall. There was nothing to cover her with. She lay there in her peach silk nightgown and peach silk robe, stained dark with blood, and her bandaged left arm across her chest. Her hair spread out on the dirt in mats and tangles. I thought how she would have hated for us to see her like this.

  After a while, a pair of men came by, who had been putting the Langleys’ garden to rest for the winter when the storm struck. They had drifted across the bay on a section of sturdy white picket fence and landed not far away. No, they hadn’t seen a man with a little girl, not on the bay or on shore. They would carry on walking to town, would let people know we were here, would send out someone for Budgie’s body.

  The sky cleared, the stars came out. A glow filled the horizon, as bright as dawn. “Fires,” said Mrs. Hubert, nodding sagely.

  I tried to look across the bay to Seaview Neck, but the trees obscured my view and all I saw were shadows where Nick and Kiki ought to be. I stared without comprehension, as if my brain had split into two disconnected halves, the one taking in sensory information and the other blocking it out, refusing to accept what I saw and heard and smelled into the higher processes of thought. In my mind, I drew a picture of Nick’s crinkled hazel eyes, his heart beating with steady assurance beneath my hand; I sketched in Kiki’s soft dark curls and flat bronzed limbs. But the lines disappeared even as I formed them. I could not hold on to the image. I could not remember his face or hers.

  I turned instead to Budgie. I smoothed her hair as best I could and arranged it over the raw pink-white gash on her temple. I lay down beside her, because she so disliked to be alone, and studied the way the lambent glow of the New London fires outlined the fine profile of her nose. Such a straight, proud nose, the famous Byrne nose.

  For some reason, the sight seemed to ease the cold weight pressing on my heart.

  WHEN WE WOKE AT DAWN, shivering and damp, Mrs. Hubert volunteered to stay with Budgie while Aunt Julie and I went for help. “I’ve got to find Nick and Kiki,” I said. “I’m sure they’re desperately worried about us.”

  Aunt Julie didn’t say anything.

  We had landed on the opposite side of Seaview Bay, a little to the east. We made our way barefoot through the woods, stepping on brambles and stones, our progress slow. Everything was wet and clogged with debris. I stepped on something hard, and found it was a gelatin mold.

  The day gained in beauty every moment, calm and clear, the tender rays of sunshine spreading warmth through the air. I didn’t have my watch, but it could have been no later than seven o’clock. The ground began to rise, as we climbed the hillside overlooking Seaview. We reached the road, which was almost invisible beneath the fallen trees and telephone wires, the leaves and branches and sections of roofs. A few cars sat abandoned, battered, smothered in foliage.

  As we approached the turnoff, I began to run. Aunt Julie stopped me. “We should go into town first,” she said. “They’ll have news. We can get some food, get someone to help us with Budgie. I don’t think Mrs. Hubert can make her way through those woods without help.”

  I shook my head, dizzy with hunger, dizzy with fatigue, dizzy with grief. “We need to find Nick and Kiki first. They might be hurt.”

  “You need to eat.”

  “I need to find them.”

  We reached the curve in the road. Aunt Julie found my hand and held it tightly.

  Another step, and another, and Seaview Neck unfurled before me from behind the hillside.

  Or what had once been Seaview, in another world.

  The sea had breached the Neck in several places, where the ground was low. Everywhere lay wreckage: wood and furniture, clothing, a green-and-white striped awning from the club. The water lapped innocently over Neck Lane.

  There were no buildings at all.

  Not a house, not a dock, not a fence. Not the Seaview clubhouse, not the Greenwalds’ gazebo, where Budgie and Graham had met like animals in the night and possibly conceived a child on the cushioned benches.

  Not the Palmers’ house, not the Greenwalds’ house, not the old Dane cottage at the end of the lane. Not one of the forty-three homes in the Seaview Association remained standing. The crumbling rectangle of the Huberts’ stone foundation gaped open to the morning air, filled with water like a swimming pool.

  The sun, fully risen now, illuminated it all.

  The bones disintegrated in my legs. I crumpled to my knees in the tough sea grass beside the road.

  “Gone,” I whispered.

  Aunt Julie knelt beside me. “Darling. My God. I’m sorry. Oh, darling.”

  A slight riffle of a breeze moved the edges of my hair. I plucked at the grass next to my knees and watched the sea pulse in and out, in and out of the cove where I used to swim naked in the morning. The sun cast a diagonal line across the side of the old battery. Under its shadow, a few gulls picked at the rocks. I inhaled the mixture of salt and vegetation in the air, the newly washed freshness of it.

  Aunt Julie tugged at my arm. “Let’s go, darling. We’ll go into town and get something to eat. Maybe they’re already there, maybe they made it out.”

  “They didn’t make it out, Aunt Julie.”

  She stood quietly. The edge of her dress brushed against my cheek, stiff with dried salt.

  “Come along, Lily. We must.”

  A minute passed. Another.

  “Lily?”

  “Wait,” I whispered. “Wait.”

  “Come along.”

  I rose, but I didn’t head back to the turnoff, didn’t head into town for food and news. Instead I stood there in the battered grass at the crest, my hand to my brow, because I thought I had caught a glimpse of something yellow amid the flotsam of Seaview Neck.

  “What is it?” asked Aunt Julie.

  I didn’t move, didn’t flicker. I thought I could feel each individual hair of my body rise up at attention.

  The yellow was gone.

  I narrowed my eyes and waited. A seagull screamed above me and dove, down and down, right to the edge of the tattered beach, where the birds we
re gathering to fight over the pieces of dead creatures washing up in the tide.

  Around the corner of a fallen chimney, the yellow scrap reappeared.

  I burst into a run, down the long angle of the approach, my bare and bloody feet slapping on the pavement and leaping over the debris. Aunt Julie called after me, but her voice belonged to a different universe.

  Adrenaline.

  It wrung every last spark of energy from my muscles, every last breath of oxygen from my lungs. I ran for my life.

  The ocean had breached the hollow at the base of Seaview Neck. I splashed through the rippling water, up to my knees, pushing through driftwood and broken furniture, through a crate of intact highball glasses from the clubhouse bar. I passed a bureau, canted at an acute angle, the water lapping at the handle of the third drawer.

  I reached hard sand and accelerated.

  There was no more Neck Lane, no graveled grooves to guide me. Everything had been overrun with sand. But I knew the way. I had walked down this lane since I was a toddler: had run and skipped and jumped rope, had learned to ride a bicycle and drive a car, had eaten my first ice cream cone with Budgie, and been screwed on a car seat by Graham Pendleton, all at various places along its length. I had walked here once with Nick Greenwald, and felt my heart begin to beat again.

  It beat again now, pounding blood through my body, so that when the yellow scrap again resolved in my sight I had still the strength to let out a single howl from my chest.

  For I could see now that the yellow scrap was Nick Greenwald’s sou’wester, and that it was wrapped around a small dark-haired figure whose head was raised and moving and most certainly alive. The figure was being carried by a tall and broad-shouldered man, whose chest and feet were bare, whose brown hair curled wildly in the sun, and whose arm lifted high into the blue sky and waved at me.

  The old gray stones of the battery shifted into view behind them, thick and high and disdainful of Atlantic hurricanes.

  My strength left me then. I took a few more running steps and stumbled to a walk, and then a halt. I tried to keep standing but could not. I sank to my knees in the dirty sand and waited.

  It seemed as if hours passed before Nick’s hand touched my shoulder, before he staggered into the sand next to me, Kiki still curled in his arms. “Thank God,” he said, in a rough voice.

  I couldn’t say anything. I put my arm around the back of Kiki’s head and wiped my wet cheeks against Nick’s bare shoulder.

  “My arm hurts,” said Kiki. “Nick thinks it might be broken. He wrapped it with his shirt. He said he knows all about broken bones.”

  “Oh, darling,” I said. “Oh, darling.”

  She chirped on. “Have you seen Mother? She wouldn’t come to the battery with us. We tried and tried, but she wouldn’t come. Nick had to carry me on his back, the wind was so strong.”

  “But Nick was stronger, wasn’t he?” I whispered.

  She nodded. “Nick says Mother probably rode on top of the house, all the way to shore. He says she’ll be waiting for us in town.”

  “I’ll bet she did just that. That’s what we did. Except we used the old doors in the Greenwalds’ attic.”

  Nick’s back gave a little heave. His arm was locked around me like a vise, his face was in my hair. I could feel his tears drip onto my skin.

  Kiki said: “Nick was going to go back for you, but the water was already up around the battery by then. But he said you’d find a way out. He was sure of it. He kept telling me that, so I wouldn’t worry.”

  “Yes, darling. Nick was right. We found a way. I wasn’t going to give up.”

  Kiki fell silent, and we sat wrapped together amid the ruins of Seaview for some time, without speaking. The tide was climbing back up, laden with clothing, as if somebody had dumped out an entire wardrobe from the jetty, except that the jetty itself had disappeared into the ocean and there were no other human beings left on Seaview Neck. A pair of men’s tennis shorts washed up toward us, closer at every wave, naked white in the bright morning sun.

  “I’m hungry,” said Kiki. “Let’s go find breakfast.”

  Epilogue

  SEAVIEW, RHODE ISLAND

  June 1944

  I married Nicholson Greenwald on Valentine’s Day 1939, in front of forty or so guests in the chapel of the Church of the Heavenly Rest on Fifth Avenue and Ninetieth Street, with Kiki as my bridesmaid. She and I wore simple matching white dresses, mine trimmed at the neck and sleeves in winter fur and hers short and without any frills whatsoever. A rabbi, brought in by the two handsome Greenwald cousins who served as Nick’s ushers, also blessed the union. My father sat in his wheelchair up front, next to Nick’s mother, and though I couldn’t keep my eyes away from Nick’s face, I knew Daddy was smiling as we repeated our vows.

  We had originally planned for an outdoor wedding in late spring, allowing a more dignified period to elapse between the sensational death of Nick Greenwald’s first wife in the great hurricane and his marriage to the woman he had seduced and abandoned seven years earlier, but by the turn of the new year I was expecting a baby (“Careless of me,” Nick said, looking the opposite of contrite) and Kiki had begun to ask why Nick kept a toothbrush in the jar by the bathroom sink if he wasn’t allowed to live with us yet. Nick’s nightly departures had become impractical for him and unbearable for all of us.

  The scandal blew over quickly, as scandals did when the principals acted with discretion. After the wedding, we left Kiki with Aunt Julie and drove down to Florida for two weeks, which we spent largely naked and in bed, making love and ordering room service and discussing names for the baby, each one more ridiculous than the last.

  When we returned, pale and blissful, Kiki’s toenails were painted scarlet and her ears had been pierced. The ears we insisted on closing up until her eighteenth birthday, though the scarlet lacquer we reluctantly allowed to remain. Aunt Julie usually freshened it up for her once a week, while Nick and I went out to dinner.

  We never did go to Paris. After the honeymoon, we sold both Nick’s grand apartment on the Upper West Side and ours on Park Avenue, and moved into Gramercy Park with a delighted Kiki. When the roomy three-bedroom apartment next to us became available we snatched it up, and managed to complete the consolidation and renovation just in time for the baby’s arrival in September, not quite a year since the Great Hurricane of 1938 and seven days after Great Britain declared war on Germany.

  With our new family thriving, Nick sold his controlling stake in Greenwald and Company to his junior partners and started working on plans to rebuild the house on Seaview Neck. The locals and remaining Seaview Association members—Mrs. Hubert among them—thought we were crazy and said so, but as our new foundation grew, and the solid New England fieldstone walls above it, many approached Nick and asked him to design houses for them, too. Meanwhile, after endless badgering from Nick, I began to submit stories to the local gazette during the summer, mostly to do with regional rebuilding efforts, and before long my articles were being picked up by papers all over the Northeast.

  By December 1941, more than three years after the storm, I was several months along with our second child, writing regular newspaper features and collecting material with Nick’s help for a book on the hurricane and its aftermath. At least ten stone cottages had reappeared on Seaview Neck, and we were idly discussing the possibility of a new clubhouse.

  ON THIS PARTICULAR DAY, however, the sixth of June, 1944, the thought of a Seaview clubhouse is the furthest thing from my mind.

  At dawn, Aunt Julie knocked on my door with news of the invasion of Normandy, and we are now sitting on the rocks beneath the battery, looking out to sea and praying for Daddy and all the soldiers.

  Nick, of course, is Daddy now. Even Kiki started calling him that, once Little Nick could pronounce the word, though my father lives with us in Gramercy Park and sits at the moment in his own room at Seaview, overlooking the bay. The endearment seems natural to all of us. We haven’t yet told her the compli
cated story of her parentage, though she is nearly twelve now and possibly wondering why she looks so much like the man her sister married. Regardless, she loves Nick like a father; she wept for days when he left for England in his neat well-pressed lieutenant’s uniform; she follows the progress of Nick’s unit with religious zeal.

  As have I. As the sun rises above the eastern horizon, I imagine I can hear the great guns pounding into the sand of the landing beaches, that I can hear Nick’s commanding shout pierce the chaos from across the ocean. I remember him during the football game on the beach, his piratical eyes and his fierce will, leading and teaching as we went along. Is that what he’s doing now, in the thick of the battle? Or is he still in England, waiting his turn on the invasion ships?

  Is he still alive?

  Surely I would know if he weren’t. Surely, if Nicholson Greenwald’s heart stopped beating, mine would have felt a concurrent jolt, a cessation of momentum, like a stream cut off from its source.

  I sit on the rocks and inhale the familiar Atlantic brine. I watch our two young sons play in the cove under Kiki’s supervision, laughing and splashing and entirely oblivious to their sister’s red eyes and anxious face. I place my hand on the enormous curve of my nine-months’ belly, Nick’s parting gift to me, and try very hard not to wish that Nick weren’t Nick, that he hadn’t felt compelled to go about obtaining an Army commission from the moment the news of Pearl Harbor first crackled over the radio in President Roosevelt’s measured Hyde Park drawl.

  But Nick is Nick, and not only did he complete his officers’ training with extraordinary commendation, he used every influence he possessed to gain an assignment to a combat unit. He told me, as I lay in bed weeping before he left, that he had been expecting this fight, preparing for this fight since he traveled through Europe with his parents as a college boy. That it was his duty to take arms against Hitler. That he would be thinking of me and the children every moment, and that he would keep himself alive and whole for us.