Guests of August

by Gloria Goldreich

  ‘I think I can fix it,’ Greg says, sliding the drawer back and forth.

  He holds a dart board, its cork surface punctured, a sure sign of authenticity. The darts themselves are lightly feathered and newly sharpened.

  ‘You’re buying that?’ Helene asks.

  ‘Yup. I played a lot of darts when I was hitching through England. I was good at it. We’ll set it up in the rec room at the inn. I’ll play with Jeff.’

  He smiles, certain that he can beat his brother-in-law at the game. Jeff, always goal-oriented, had never wandered with backpack and guitar through the hills of Scotland and small Irish villages with unpronounceable names. He relishes the thought of challenging Jeff to a game, or perhaps setting up a tournament which he will surely win. The thought of that certain small triumph, of doing something, anything, better than his successful brother-in-law, invigorates him. He might also triumph over the other guests at the inn – smug Simon Epstein and Mike Curran, that stock market obsessive. His prowess will surprise them.

  ‘It won’t be dangerous to play darts? With the kids around?’ Helene asks.

  ‘We’ll be careful. That’s a Susan question,’ he replies irritably.

  She turns away and reconsiders the night table. It may be too low, or perhaps too high. It depends on the size of the bed, which, of course, they will not buy until they have a house. This year, maybe next year. She shrugs and wanders out of the shop. The old woman sighs, turns to Greg and, vengefully, asks a higher price for the dart board than the one marked. Greg does not argue.

  ‘We’re going to have fun,’ he assures Helene as they drive away.

  ‘I hope the cast of characters has changed. Do you think the Epsteins will be back? And what about the Templetons? They are so weird.’

  ‘Why should this year be different than any other year? Everyone will be back. It’s sort of reassuring, in a way.’

  He laughs. He is, finally, actually looking forward to their Mount Haven stay. When late-afternoon shadows fall and they stop for dinner at a quaint inn, he orders a double Scotch and a bottle of wine. They drink half of it with their excellent seared halibut and carry the rest of the bottle up to their room because of course they will stay the night. They are briefly indifferent to expense. Their vacation has begun.

  Mark Templeton, his khaki trousers sharply creased, a freshly ironed handkerchief in the pocket of his lemon-yellow broadcloth shirt, waits on the patio while Andrea finishes their packing. Preparing for a long journey always unnerves him and since that business with his heart (‘an episode’, the cardiologist, who is young enough to be his son, called it) he is careful not to become unnerved. Besides, he knows that he can rely on his wife to select the clothing he favors for their usual August holiday in New Hampshire. She will surely remember the lightweight sweaters he ordered from the L.L. Bean catalog, the periwinkle blue V-neck a perfect match for his eyes. Elderly and gray-haired he may be, but he clings to the vanity of his young manhood, oddly proud of the penetrating blue of his eyes. A great color, he thinks dispassionately, remembering how pleased he had been that his son’s eyes had been of the same shade. Even in death, Adam’s face blanched, a ribbon of dried blood across his forehead where his head had impacted against the windshield, his eyes had retained their color, that piercing electric blue. How long, after breath had ceased, did eyes lose their coloring? Mark had thought to ask but of course he had remained silent and turned away when the mortuary attendant gently, almost apologetically, pulled the lids down. The memory saddens him and he veers at once to thoughts of his grandson.

  Donny – clever, lithe Donny – has inherited his mother’s coloring. Like Wendy, he is olive skinned, dark haired and dark eyed. A pity that he did not take after Adam, Mark thinks and has said as much to Andrea, who nodded in agreement but did not reply. His wife does not often mention their dead son’s name, although she keeps a small red leather photo album on her bedside table. It was a gift from Wendy, oddly enough, presented on Adam’s birthday a week before his death, an affectionate offering from a loving wife to her husband’s mother. Andrea has filled it with photographs of Adam and newspaper clippings, reviews of his novel, his obituary. She studies it now and again during the melancholy pre-dawn hours when she thinks that Mark is sleeping or as she sips a glass of vodka, yet another glass of vodka, quietly poured when she thinks that Mark is watching the evening edition of the financial news. Vodka, Mark knows, has long been her drink of choice, because it leaves no odor and can often masquerade as clear water.

  Mark sighs and watches a red-winged blackbird raid the feeder. He will have to remind Carlos, their gardener, to keep it stocked with seed while they are away. Damn it, there is so much to remember before they leave. He wonders irritably if Andrea has stopped the mail, if she has cancelled their newspaper delivery. But, of course, Rosa, Carlos’s wife and their housekeeper, will manage any oversight. Still, he is troubled by trivia, a certain sign that he is getting too old for this annual pilgrimage to Mount Haven Inn.

  He lifts his face to the hazy California sunlight and hopes that Andrea will hang his linen jackets in the garment bag so that they will not crease. He is partial to those jackets, especially tailored so that the silk-lined front pockets are both wide and deep. He will place a packet of spearmint gum and a bag of M&Ms in each pocket as soon as he unpacks at Mount Haven. It is, after all, a vacation ritual. As a child, Adam had delighted in plunging his small hand into the pocket and dashing off, playfully pretending that his father would chase after him and reclaim the treat. And Donny had, in turn, played the same game and plays it still, although he is growing too old for it. He humors his grandfather, with Wendy’s encouragement, Mark supposes.

  ‘Mark, what books do you want to take?’ Andrea calls down to him, leaning over their bedroom balcony.

  He stares up at her, shading his eyes. She is dressed for the journey, her mauve silk pant suit at once sensible and elegant, a white scarf draped over her shoulders, her silver hair coiled into a smooth chignon.

  ‘The Einstein biography, I suppose. And the new Le Carré.’

  He always selects thick volumes for the New Hampshire vacation, insurance policies against hours of idleness and boredom. Unlike Andrea, he has no interest in socializing with the other Mount Haven vacationers. They are not of his generation, all of them at varying stages of overly absorbing parenthood except for those childless pseudo bohemians, Helene and Greg, for whom he feels an inexplicable dislike. It surprises him that he remembers their names from year to year.

  He is, admittedly, not a total hermit during his stay. He has, now and again, given scraps of business advice to young Michael Curran and there have been occasional decent conversations with Simon Epstein who manages to combine his career as an academic economist with corporate work, an achievement that Mark, frozen in place in the corporate world, envies. Still, he draws the line at spending time with Simon’s wife, Nessa, a woman who talks too much and laughs too loudly. She is, Mark thinks, reluctantly, too Jewish. It is not a perception he would share with Andrea or Wendy.

  They think Nessa interesting, a woman whose reading is eclectic and whose opinions are often surprising. They play Scrabble with her and with Susan Edwards, that doctor’s wife, a translator, whose name he was surprised to see on a new Sartre biography. Scrabble is popular as an evening activity at Mount Haven Inn, given the lack of television. It annoys Mark that he must get all his news from the radio and financial updates from the Wall Street Journal which Michael Curran buys each day. Michael drives into the village every morning to purchase it, a journey which Mark supposes he welcomes because it gets him away from Liane, his pushy, whining wife, and Cary, their annoying son, a boy who trails after Donny like a small dog.

  ‘I think young Michael welcomes the chance to get away from the inn,’ Mark observed to Wendy, the previous summer as Michael pulled out of the driveway.

  ‘You don’t really like coming here either, do you?’ Wendy had countered gently and, as always, his
softly spoken daughter-in-law’s perception surprised him.

  The truth is that he is not a great fan of Mount Haven Inn, which prides itself on its rustic simplicity. He would actually prefer some elegance, some luxury. Still, he and Andrea have vacationed there every summer since Adam’s death. It is, after all, so conveniently located, within miles of the Tudor home where Andrea, with occasional assists from him and from Smirnoff, had raised Adam. It was an arrangement that had suited them well enough during those years. It was Andrea’s sanctuary, suited to her solitude and to her secret, their marriage’s safe haven. That house, which Andrea will not enter, is now home to Wendy and Donny – Adam’s widow and his son. Wendy sleeps in Andrea’s bedroom and Donny has his father’s boyhood room, the maple furniture unchanged, although Wendy has replaced the plaid curtains and bedspread with wooden shutters across which she painted fanciful birds and covered the bed with a brilliantly colored serape. She has an eye, he must admit, this odd girl whom his son married so suddenly.

  Another advantage of the inn is that it is but a short drive to the cemetery where Adam is buried. It is also helpful that the same families return to the inn for the same August weeks, so that Donny has playmates and Wendy and Andrea renew casual and non-intrusive friendships.

  So they travel across country each August, the month of Adam’s birth, and of his death, to spend time with his widow and his son, to tend to his grave and to his memory. The limousine that will carry them to the airport pulls up in the driveway. The chauffeur honks lightly, discreetly, and Andrea glides toward him, her huge soft leather carry-on bag dangling from her shoulder, her make-up so smoothly applied that all lines of age and grief are concealed, although her gray eyes shimmer with a nacreous gleam. She is one of those women, always pleasant looking, who blossom into beauty as they age.

  ‘All set?’ she asks him and motions to the driver who obediently enters the house and carries their suitcases and, yes, the garment bag (she has remembered to hang his linen jackets correctly) into the car. It is remarkable, Mark thinks, how liquor never blurs her memory or her efficiency.

  ‘All set,’ he says.

  ‘It will be fine,’ she reassures him. ‘The foliage in New Hampshire will just be beginning. You always love that.’

  ‘Of course it will be fine,’ he agrees.

  They slide into the car and wave goodbye to Carlos and Rosa who stand in the doorway and wave back at them. Their leave- taking is complete; they are on their way.

  Wendy Templeton packs very little for their stay at Mount Haven Inn. Three changes of clothing for herself, three changes of clothing for Donny – including, of course, those shirts and sweaters sent as gifts by Andrea, Donny’s grandmother. Wendy has stopped thinking of Andrea as her mother-in-law – if there is no husband, can there be a mother-in-law? It is the sort of question that irritates her therapist, that very thin, very patient man with thinning corn-colored hair.

  ‘That’s not what you’re really asking,’ he might interject, if he interjected at all. And, of course, he is right, although the question she should be asking eludes her.

  She cuts the tags off the two silk scarves Andrea sent for her birthday and the pale blue cashmere shawl that came at Christmas. Andrea has exquisite taste and her gifts to Wendy are well chosen, but Wendy has had neither the inclination nor the occasion to wear them.

  She places them in her suitcase and wonders if she should add another sweater but decides against it. They will only be a few miles away and she will, of course, drive home now and again to collect additional clothing for herself and for Donny. That is what she has done in years past, welcoming the excuse to leave Mount Haven for a few hours, to escape Andrea’s elegantly controlled sadness, Mark’s carefully phrased questions, rephrased and repeated over and over through the days they spend together.

  ‘Is Donny doing well at school?’ Mark inevitably asks. He is already plotting his grandson’s educational future just as he had plotted Adam’s.

  (‘I was Harvard-bound in the hospital nursery,’ Adam had told her, his voice still edged with bitterness.)

  ‘Does Donny have many friends?’ Andrea will ask, as she does every year, her gray eyes focused on her needlepoint as though she fears to meet Wendy’s gaze.

  Wendy understands the grandmotherly concern that barely masks the unresolved maternal guilt. Andrea worries because Adam was a solitary child, because she did not do enough to relieve his isolation, because it was her choice to live in rural New Hampshire at a remove from a more appropriate environment for her only son. Andrea is a self-accuser, a woman who hugs her guilt both real and imagined. She should have arranged more sleepovers, more after-school activities.

  Friends would have relieved the sadness that haunted her son for so much of his life. She has said all this to Wendy but never has she mentioned the real reason for the choice she and Mark made.

  Wendy wants to assure her that it was not sadness that killed Adam, but she cannot because she and Andrea never talk about Adam. Donny is their focus, the live child who sleeps in his dead father’s boyhood bedroom. Occasionally when Wendy tiptoes into that bedroom at night and looks down at her sleeping son, she imagines she can hear a hint of fading laughter, as though Adam, who so seldom laughed in life, laughs now to comfort her. The recurring thought is irrational, she knows. She has not even shared it with her therapist and she surely will not speak of it to Andrea.

  Each year, as they sit side by side in their Adirondack chairs on the lawn of Mount Haven Inn, she assures Donny’s grandmother that he is a popular child, that she does arrange play dates and sleepovers. There has been a great deal of development in their New Hampshire town since Adam’s childhood and other children live within walking distance. He rides his bicycle with a pack of friends, text messages the two boys who share his passion for Harry Potter, and is always picked first for class teams. Donny is fine, just fine.

  Wendy wanders into Donny’s room now to check on his progress, to remind him that they want to reach Mount Haven Inn and settle into their rooms before his grandparents arrive from the Concord airport. She has already packed his clothing in the new khaki duffle bag (a gift from Andrea, of course) and he is filling his oversized backpack with the things he will bring with him to the inn. There is his current Harry Potter book, which he has already read twice despite the chapters that he did not understand. Paul Epstein will explain them to him as he has explained the other books in the series in summers past, his voice grave as he turned the pages and found the passages that confirmed his interpretations. Donny thinks Paul Epstein is the smartest person he knows, smarter than his English teacher, smarter than Peter and Denis, his best friends, the smartest kids in his class who, with Donny, have formed a club called the Potterites.

  Donny is sorry that he only sees Paul during August, although this year he and his mother might accept Paul’s mother’s invitation to spend Thanksgiving with them in New York.

  ‘We’ll see,’ Wendy had said softly, which sometimes means yes.

  Donny stuffs his collection of action figures, the superheroes he used to call his ‘guys’, into his backpack. He is too old for them now, although he still plays with them occasionally. He will give some of them to Cary Curran and some to Matt Edwards, the two younger boys who trail after him, just as he trails after Paul. But he will give more to Cary than to Matt because Cary’s mother is such a bitch. Donny will not say the word aloud (except to Paul who taught it to him) but he relishes thinking it.

  ‘I need a rubber band for my Uno cards and a box for my markers,’ he tells Wendy, who remains in the doorway watching him. He is not surprised when his mother hands him both items. He knows that he can rely on her to anticipate his needs.

  ‘Put everything in your backpack,’ she says. ‘I’m going to start loading the car.’ She carries her valise and Donny’s duffle bag downstairs and goes to her studio to collect her collapsible easel, watercolor box, brush container and two oversized pads. She shoves everything into the tr
unk beside the large canvas bag which contains an anthology of modern poetry, the most recent ‘Best American Short Stories’ and two novels. It occurs to her that, like Donny, she has built a small arsenal against the onslaught of boredom.

  The thought depresses her. Perhaps it is time to rethink this annual August odyssey. Adam has been dead for a decade. Time enough for Andrea and Mark to have come to terms with the loss; time enough for her to battle their insistence on this melancholy ritual of birthday and deathday observance. She did not need her therapist to point this out in his kindly, non-committal voice. Her sister and her friends have said as much and she knows them all to be right. It was generous of Mark and Andrea to offer her and Donny their home after Adam’s death. She had not wanted to return to the Cambridge apartment she and Adam had shared, a nursery for Donny carved out of the room he called his studio, and she was not sure she could afford the rent. In turn, Andrea and Mark could not bear to live in the house that their son had called home. His voice lingered in every room, his shadow darkened every stairwell, every doorway.

  And although Mark spent most of his time in New York, his short stays in New Hampshire during the fall and winters were difficult, especially ‘the episode’, as Andrea insists on calling his rather serious heart attack. California beckoned with its days of golden light, its orange trees heavy with sun-brushed fruit. They chose a house not far from the ocean, its rooms spacious, its garden a riot of color that receded into pools of shade cast by low-branched palms. They furnished it anew, all vestiges of the past banished. There is no memory of Adam in the sharply angled, white-walled home. Andrea selected Danish furniture in the palest of woods, upholstered in gay batik. Sheer draperies flutter at shimmering windows, and they awaken each morning to sea-scented air. They placed the silver-framed photo of Adam, his arm around Wendy who held Donny in her arms, on a low table in a recess of the living room. It is not in their field of vision when they sit in the living room or when they pass through on their way to the garden.