Guests of August

by Gloria Goldreich

  ‘Hey, Susan. Hey, Jeff. Hey, you kids!’

  There is a rush of hugs, a trading of kisses, exclamations of pleasure and excitement.

  ‘Gee, you guys have really grown.’

  Helene, ever the adoring aunt, hugs her niece and nephews who remain indifferently rigid.

  ‘Jeff, how the hell are you?’

  Greg claps Jeff on the back, shows him a dart board, its cork surface fraying, the targets brightly and unevenly painted.

  ‘Helene, I love that skirt.’ As Susan Edwards’ fingers pluck at the gauzy fabric, her sister’s blush mounts.

  Helene’s crimson lipstick kisses streak Matt’s cheeks and Jeremy winces as Greg pumps his hand up and down and up and down.

  Polly disappears into the inn and races up the stairs to deposit the jackets, avoiding Louise Abbot who has pasted her welcoming smile on to her face and is on her way out carrying a tray loaded with the lemonade and clear plastic cups.

  ‘Welcome to Mount Haven.’ The familiar words fall from her lips in the accent learned from her mother-in-law. They all turn and greet her. Obediently, each guest fills a glass.

  ‘So glad to be here,’ Jeff Edwards says, the quasi toast of appreciation which he repeats each year at the onset of their holiday.

  And then the Edwards’ and Ames’ luggage is carried inside just as car after car pulls up. The Templetons’ limo cruises to a dignified halt. Nessa Epstein grinds the brakes of her ancient station wagon and Paul emerges and playfully directs traffic. Michael Curran sounds his horn and Cary tumbles out and he and Matt rush toward each other with yelps of delight. The women embrace, offer their cheeks for butterfly kisses as the men thump each other’s backs. The air is electric with excitement and anticipation. The rituals of vacation are in place.

  Louise refills her pitcher and circles the new arrivals as Polly and two other waitresses pressed into reluctant service scoop up suitcases and trail after Hank, the handyman who effortlessly heaves up the largest cartons, cursing under his breath, and carries them upstairs to the bedrooms. The children tumble over each other in their eagerness to help, plucking up backpacks and books and dropping them, their laughter rising, their voices tremulous with joy.

  It is the chauffeur who drove Andrea and Mark Templeton from Concord airport who carries their matching luggage to their room, returning for their two garment bags and grunting when Mark Templeton curtly asks him to be careful of them.

  ‘My linen jackets crease easily,’ the elderly silver-haired man says.

  In his room, Mark supervises the placement of the luggage, gives a ten-dollar bill to the chauffeur who lingers until a five-dollar bill is added. He does not say thank you when he leaves, slamming the door behind him. Mark Templeton has never been a man who endears himself to service staff but neither can he be accused of stinginess. He makes no move to unpack but goes to the window and looks down at his fellow guests as though he is an indifferent theatregoer observing an uninteresting performance. The cast of characters thins out as he watches. The children have vanished, probably clustered around the pinball machines. Jeff Edwards and his brother-in-law, Greg Ames, are striding toward the lake, practicing their unaccustomed roles of men newly at ease.

  Jeff pauses and lights a pipe. Mark finds this interesting. He cannot remember Jeff smoking in previous years. After all he is a doctor, a surgeon, aware of the hazards of tobacco. ‘Mid-life crisis,’ Mark thinks and wonders if he should not resume smoking himself. Late-life crisis, he might call it, but of course Andrea would never tolerate it.

  He spots Andrea now, seated on the lawn in an Adirondack chair, the plastic glass of that undrinkable lemonade perched on an arm rest. He has no doubt that she has laced it with vodka from the small bottle she purchased on the plane. He marvels at his wife. Although she has been traveling for hours, her mauve silk pant suit is without a crease, the white scarf is still elegantly looped about her neck, and not a single strand of silver hair has escaped her chignon. She leans slightly forward, her eyes never leaving the driveway. She is waiting for Wendy and Donny, he knows, and he feels a surge of anger at his daughter-in-law’s thoughtlessness. She should have been at the inn when they arrived. She must know how unnerved Andrea will be. Wendy is driving down the very road where Adam’s car crashed and became a coffin of twisted metal and soft leather. But Adam of course was driving in the opposite direction, speeding from Cambridge toward his mother’s home, the house Mark deeded to his widow.

  Mark closes his eyes against the memory of the fat state trooper who had described his son’s death to him, telling him how Adam’s body had been wedged so tightly between the driver’s seat and the steering wheel that even with the jaws of life he had been extricated only with difficulty.

  ‘He was speeding. They clocked him at ninety a couple of miles back. And probably drinking. I could tell by the smell, but I’ll leave that out of the report. I don’t want to mess up his insurance claim. Not when he’s leaving a wife and kid. The insurance companies are a bunch of bastards, you know. I’m still trying to collect from a kitchen fire. But where the hell was he rushing to, a young fellow like that?’ the officer had wondered as he licked his pen.

  And Mark, who knew the answer, had remained silent. There was no need to tell the trooper about his last conversation with his son. Adam was dead but he would protect Andrea, as he always had, as he always would. He had explained the accident to Andrea and Wendy, creating a scenario that he almost came to believe.

  ‘The sun was in his eyes. The troopers think that a deer may have skittered across the road. There’s a “deer crossing” sign right where he crashed. You know how Adam felt about animals.’

  With a few well-chosen words he transformed his son from a reckless drunken driver into a martyred lover of wildlife. Numb with grief, they had accepted his explanation.

  He banishes the memory, opens his eyes and sees that Andrea has risen from her seat and is walking toward the newly arrived Wendy and Donny. Her arms are outstretched and the mauve silk sleeves of her jacket flutter in the gentle wind, beneficent wings of welcome. Wendy waves her cherry-red straw hat and urges Donny forward. The dark-haired, dark-eyed boy hesitates and then lopes clumsily into his grandmother’s embrace. Mark knows that Andrea’s eyes are bright with unshed tears and his own eyes burn. As always, he is relieved that Donny does not look like Adam. That would have been too much to bear.

  He turns away from the window as Simon Epstein’s shiny yellow sports car pulls up and Simon uncoils his long, lean body, shades his eyes from the sun which has become dazzlingly bright, waves to Wendy, Andrea and Donny, calls his wife’s name and strides into the inn.

  ‘Nessa! Nessa!’

  Simon’s voice reverberates down the corridors as doors open and close and conversations drift through the hallways. Mount Haven Inn throbs with chatter and noise, a din of pleasure now and again tinged with annoyance.

  The door to the Currans’ room is open and Liane Curran’s complaints are audible.

  ‘This room is so damn small. Why do we always get the smallest room?’ she asks angrily. Michael closes the door.

  There is the musical sound of coins falling on the hard wood floor. Matt Edwards has dropped a cache of quarters and they all rush to retrieve them, laughing and chattering.

  Outside a motorcycle brakes noisily. The rider dismounts, removes his helmet and turns to Louise Abbot who has hurried down the path to greet him. Mark recognizes Daniel Goldner, the writer, a very occasional Mount Haven guest. Adam had appeared on a panel with him and spoken admiringly of his short-story collection, published a few months after Adam’s own well-received novel. Goldner’s second book, also a novel, appeared about a year ago, Mark recalls. A splashy debut, a handsome jacket, dark blue with the title and the author’s name imprinted in spiraling silver. Andrea read it because Wendy sent it to her as a Christmas gift, but Mark, who has read no fiction since Adam’s death, ignored it.

  ‘Daniel, I was beginning to worry,’ Louise says, her
pale cheeks flushed as she leans toward him, touches the black leather of his jacket and lifts her face toward him. He kisses her cheek with casual affection.

  ‘Why would you worry?’ he asks.

  Their words drift up to Mark, who closes the window. Andrea favors this room because it adjoins the rooms she reserves for Wendy and Donny each year and because its French doors open on to a wrap-around balcony that offers a view of the verdant mountains and a shining sliver of the lake. Mark dislikes it because every utterance in the hallway and on the lawn below travels upward and passers-by can easily see into their room. It is enough that he must vacation with these people. He does not want to overhear their conversations or endure their glances into the privacy of his own room.

  He sighs and unzips his garment bag, carefully removing the pale blue linen jacket he will wear to dinner that evening, waiting all the while for the door to open. He turns when it does, his smile in place. Wendy and Donny, framed in a patch of fading sunlight, stand very still for the briefest of moments. Mark registers that Donny has grown taller, that Wendy has grown thinner and that she allows her dark hair, once worn short, to frame her oval face in a cluster of curls. Donny’s own hair, a match for his mother’s, is too long for Mark’s taste, almost brushing his narrow shoulders. Wendy wears a sleeveless white sun dress that emphasizes her deeply tanned skin. Donny’s T-shirt is pale yellow, ripped at the neck, and his shorts are cut-off jeans, ragged at the hems. His sneakers are brand new but unlaced and he does not wear socks. They move toward him, the lithe mother and son who look so like each other. They place their hands in his and brush their lips across his cool cheek.

  ‘Isn’t it wonderful to be here together again?’ Andrea asks.

  There is neither wonder nor welcome in her cool voice and her question remains unanswered as they all move toward the window and gaze down at the lawn where Annette and Jeremy Edwards, studiously ignoring each other, are carefully setting up the croquet hoops.

  ‘Dinner in two hours,’ Andrea reminds them.

  As always, she is their hostess, reminding them of schedules, calmly and coolly guiding them through these weeks of forced togetherness.

  ‘I’ll unpack,’ Wendy says. ‘Donny, go and see if you can find your friends. I saw Matt and Cary going down to the game room.’

  ‘And Paul? Paul Epstein?’

  ‘He’s probably with them,’ Wendy answers and smiles at her in-laws. If my husband is dead, are they still my in-laws? The recurring thought teases her even as Donny dashes out of the room.

  ‘Be back to change before the dinner bell rings,’ she calls after him.

  The dinner bell is sounded before each meal by a different child, a schedule meticulously choreographed by Louise and consulted on arrival by each family. Tonight it will be Matt Edwards who proudly marches up and down the inn’s corridors, energetically jangling the huge brass bell Prudence Abbot purchased decades earlier from a bankrupt farmer.

  THREE

  Evan and Louise Abbot, who prefer to think of themselves as the gracious hosts of a country house rather than innkeepers, stand side by side at the entrance to the dining room and greet their guests. Although the seating rarely varies from year to year Louise, who now wears a wide-skirted dress of floral design, holds a seating chart and refers to it with officious concern, waving each family to their set places.

  Evan, his chestnut-colored hair still thick, his face ruddied by the mountain sunlight, wears a V-necked pale blue cotton knit sweater, a soft collared shirt and khaki slacks, the outfits of his adolescence unchanged. He has many such sweaters, all in pastel colors, and he alternates them carefully. Louise remembers still the lime-green sweater he placed beneath her head when she lay beside him, all those years ago, on the swaying, sweet meadow grass, but she does not dwell on that memory. She watches as he greets the men with a handshake. He bends to pat Cary Curran’s head, indifferent to the fact that Cary, now eleven years old, is too old for such a gesture. He flashes his charming smile at the women, all of whom tell him how well he looks, how pleased they are to be back at the inn, as they glide past him to their tables.

  Each year Helene tells her sister Susan that she cannot understand how a woman as dowdy and uninteresting as Louise managed to marry a man as attractive and intelligent as Evan. It is a thought that recurs as she and Greg follow her sister’s family into the dining room.

  The wide-windowed dining room is split into two sections, the dividing doors long since removed. Transient guests, those who have booked for the first time having discovered the inn on the internet or reserved their rooms through a travel agent, or are simply passing through, are relegated to the smaller section which has no view of the lawn and opens on to the kitchen. The long tables in that area are covered with unmatched plastic cloths of odd geometric design and the seats are steel folding chairs. The regular guests of August share the larger room and sit on ladder-backed wooden chairs around oval tables covered with carefully mended snow-white cloths and set with heavy cutlery and thick white china plates. A slender glass vase filled with the late pink and yellow full-petaled roses of summer, cut from the bushes that border the garden of the inn, is placed at the center of each table. Louise herself arranges the flowers in the vases which she purchased when a hotel in a distant town closed its doors. She thinks that they lend the dining room a touch of class.

  Jeff Edwards supervises the seating of their children, careful to place himself between the twins, Jeremy and Annette, whose constant bickering unnerves him. Once inseparable, a small boy and girl who played sweetly with each other, inventing games, sharing secrets, they have rocketed into an adolescence of caustic enmity. Their evening quarrels erupt without cause, a spontaneous combustion of latent anger.

  ‘Nerd,’ Annette hisses at her brother.

  ‘Slut,’ Jeremy shouts.

  Matt races from the room, frightened by their fury. Susan attempts mediation, Jeff shouts. On such evenings he closes his study door, sits at his desk, his head in his hands. He wonders when his children changed. He wonders when his own marriage changed, why Susan sometimes seems to be a stranger at a remove from his life, uninterested in his work, perhaps even repelled by it.

  ‘We stink of death,’ a surgical nurse once told him as she tossed away her sweat-stained mask and bloodied gloves.

  Does Susan think he stinks of death? Is that why she retreats into the book-lined corner of the bedroom and sits hunched over her manuscripts and dictionaries, vanishing into another world, now whispering in French, now in English? The slender girl he married is now a woman who makes endless lists, often in a language he cannot understand. The twins, those gentle children in whom they delighted, now spew anger at each other.

  He comforts himself with rationalizations. Everything changes. He of all people should know that. He is a doctor, charged with monitoring changes within the human body. The beat of the heart changes, the intake of air changes and relationships change. And of course he and Susan both are exhausted, unnerved by the demands of their daily schedules. He is hopeful that the peace of these weeks at Mount Haven will vanquish their fatigue, will resuscitate their family. That hope soars as his children take their seats at his direction without protest, as Matt waves happily to his friends. He smiles at his wife, whose cap of golden hair glistens in the weak light of the dining room.

  Greg produces a bottle of very good wine and asks Polly for four wine glasses.

  ‘The good ones,’ he says and grins because they all know that Louise Abbot hoards what she calls her ‘good’ glassware.

  Susan and Helene, seated next to each other, glance around the room and exchange the secret judgmental smiles of sisters who anticipate each other’s thoughts. Helene’s many bracelets jangle as she reaches for the bread.

  The Epsteins are at a window table, seated opposite Liane and Michael Curran, an arrangement that annoys Liane. She has nothing, absolutely nothing in common with Nessa. Liane is freshly showered, her rose-gold curls lacquered into place,
the turquoise eyeshadow that matches her new watered silk dress, smoothly layered across the lids of her narrow eyes. She has dressed carefully, unlike Nessa, who wears orange plastic flip-flops, and whose toenails are painted in outrageous colors. Nessa’s lack of makeup, her un-ironed tie-dyed halter dress, the mass of auburn hair that tumbles to her shoulders, annoys Liane.

  Resentfully, she observes that Michael and Simon are pleased to sit opposite each other and to effortlessly continue a conversation that began a full year ago. Is a recession imminent? Might small businesses like Michael’s actually benefit from such a reverse? Simon talks theory. Michael talks experience, explaining that the new software he is developing has the potential to predict economic trends. They agree that this is an idea that will surely interest Mark Templeton who spent his career monitoring and predicting market upswings and downswings. Michael, very hesitantly, asks Simon if he might take a look at the initial program, still in a pilot stage.

  ‘Sure. Why not?’ Simon’s reply is both shrewd and generous. Michael is a hardworking, bright guy and he may be on to something.

  He smiles encouragingly and rests his hand on his wife’s head. Michael feels a flutter of optimism. Simon’s input and suggestions could be invaluable and if he tells Mark Templeton that Michael’s concept is workable there may well be an injection of venture capital. All is not lost. All is far from lost. Michael wipes his thick glasses energetically with a linen napkin.

  Nessa asks Liane how Cary is doing in school and Liane shrugs. Paul and Cary engage in an avid discussion of Harry Potter. Liane glares at Paul who barely notices her, so intent is he on discussing Hogwarts.

  Daniel Goldner, the Templeton family and Louise and Evan Abbot share the table that affords the best view of the lawn. It is, Louise knows, a temporary arrangement. Before the first week is over Mark Templeton will ask, very politely, if his family could possibly have their own table. They have matters of some privacy to discuss and Louise will graciously acquiesce and conceal her disappointment. Mark and Andrea Templeton always maintain a pleasant aloofness from the other guests although they smile and nod politely. Their replies to Louise’s questions this evening are monosyllabic. Yes, their room is fine. The plane ride was pleasant enough. The weather in California is lovely.