Dressed at last, pleased with her image in the mirror, she glides out to the lawn where Nessa and Simon are setting out their usual array of summer drinks and snacks. Michael Curran is, as always, hunched over his spreadsheets and across the lawn Andrea and Mark Templeton recline in their Adirondack chairs, each desultorily turning the pages of the very large books they seem to carry with them everywhere. Susan wonders uncharitably if they choose their reading matter for its heft.
‘You look fantastic, Susan,’ Nessa says.
‘Well, I thought we might go into Portsmouth for dinner tonight. Don’t you and Simon ever feel like just getting away?’ she asks.
‘Not really. This is our getaway, I suppose. Simon’s always off to some academic dinner or some board cocktail party and sometimes it’s sort of necessary that I go with him. Not my scene as you can probably tell.’
She threads her fingers through her unruly mass of auburn hair, tied back with a strip of tie-dyed fabric in tones of purple and blue that do not match her loose orange and yellow mumu. She kicks at the newly mown grass with bare feet, her toes painted green, the lacquer dotted with pinpoints of pink.
‘So being up here, where I don’t have to bother with that sort of thing, is my getaway.’
‘I can understand that,’ Susan says and helps Nessa arrange a cluster of grapes around a brick of brie.
They all look up as cars make their way up the inn’s driveway. Richie’s roadster pulls in first and Annette jumps out of the driver’s seat flushed with excitement. ‘Richie let me drive,’ she shouts. ‘I even passed another car.’
Tracy has driven the inn’s van, Jeremy beside her, Paul straddling the rear seat. Paul presents his mother with a bouquet of wildflowers and Susan wishes that Jeremy had thought to do the same for her. But Jeremy, she acknowledges, is simply not that sort of boy. Wendy and Liane arrive with their sons in tow. The boys have slept during the ride and they wipe their eyes and squint against the early evening light. And then at last Susan sees Jeff’s car and she runs toward it, aware of the silken fabric that flares about her legs, aware of the way the breeze ruffles her hair.
Matt opens the back door and hurtles toward her.
‘Mommy, guess what happened,’ he shouts, eager to share the dangers of his day with his mother, eager to hear her re-assurances, to see the lines of love glide across her face.
But she barely looks at him. Her gaze is fixed on Jeff, who emerges from his car and then holds the passenger-side door open for Polly. Polly, who wears his sweatshirt, whom he gingerly supports, his arm around her waist.
Susan feels the blood rush to her face. Her fists clench.
‘What’s going on, Jeff?’ she asks.
Helene, who walks up the driveway just then, recognizes the icy edge in her sister’s question. Susan has spoken in their mother’s voice, the voice of the maternal inquisitor whose every accusatory question was born of her own unrelenting and frozen anger.
Susan has not, after all, escaped their childhood unscarred.
‘Why is Polly wearing your sweatshirt? Why is she with you? Why are you holding her that way?’ Susan’s voice rises dangerously.
Polly pales, trembles and rushes into the inn. Jeff stares at his wife, his eyes narrowed, his face fiery with a fury he can barely control.
‘She’s wearing my sweatshirt because she got soaked to the skin diving into dangerous waters to save our son. I was supporting her because she strained her back in the process. What the hell is wrong with you, damn it!’
He strides past her and she stands very still, shamed and angered. She knows herself to be ridiculous in her pale-blue silk finery. She realizes that the other guests have moved away from her and are clustered about the redwood table where Simon Epstein carefully measures out drinks and Nessa, sensible, sensitive Nessa, perhaps to divert attention away from Susan, points skyward where a flock of geese is already scissoring their way south. Only Helene remains beside her, placing a comforting arm on her sister’s shoulder. Angrily, Susan shakes it off and Helene too walks away.
With a great effort, Susan turns her attention to Matt. Frightened by the sharp exchange between his parents, he nervously prattles on, telling her how he almost drowned, how Polly had saved him. Cary and Donny chime in to report that they had thought he was dead, that a blond man had breathed into his mouth, that they were all scared.
‘Really scared,’ they shout in unison and then, because they are boys bred to resilience, they laugh wildly at their own unfounded terror and run up to their rooms, to find their quarters which they pump with ferocious optimism into the pinball machines.
In bed that night, Jeff lies rigid, staring up at the ceiling while Susan curls up, facing the wall, clutching a corner of the light blanket which provides little warmth against the encroaching nocturnal chill. Summer is drifting to a close, the cool days of autumn approaching too rapidly.
TEN
As though exhausted by the complications of their excursion into the White Mountains, a new and surprisingly pleasant lassitude overtakes the guests of August. They stake out sovereign territories beneath the wide-branched trees and place their chairs on discrete islands of shade.
Andrea Templeton chooses a seat near the playground area where Matt, Donny and Cary are constructing a waterfall, piling rock upon rock and pouring streams of water from juice bottles down into a pool they carefully dug. Their game defies the danger of the previous day, neutralizes their fear. They are in complete control of the elements. It is Donny whom Andrea watches closely. She searches her grandson’s face, straining to see her son in the set of his mouth, the sharpness of his features, but Donny is his mother’s son. It is Wendy’s coloring he has inherited, her sharp features, her olive skin and dark eyes. Adam is not restored to her through this grandson she hardly knows. But then, she thinks sadly, had she really known Adam? She sighs, opens her book and struggles to remember where she stopped reading the previous day.
Simon Epstein, Mark Templeton and Michael Curran commandeer a redwood table on a far corner of the lawn and set up a command center, laptops and spreadsheets, their cell phones and Blackberries near to hand, as though at any moment a crisis may arise and be averted. Michael holds a pen and as Simon directs, he corrects numbers on his printouts. Mark Templeton looks on, his hands loosely clasped, his lips pursed, indifferent and powerful, a financial regent in his impeccably ironed oxford blue shirt and chino trousers, sharply creased, because Andrea hung them so carefully in his garment bag. He is grateful to Andrea for such small attentions and he frowns as his grandson, Donny, runs past him in dirt-spattered jeans and an oversized T-shirt. Wendy should dress her son more carefully. Andrea, he is certain, never allowed Adam to run about like a ragamuffin, but then he cannot really be sure about that. He cannot really remember Adam as a small boy. Nor as an adolescent for that matter.
Helene and Greg Ames spread a blanket beneath an elm tree and Greg lazily plucks at his guitar. Louise has suggested a sing-along for the after-dinner hour and he is trying to decide what songs to play. Helene lies on the blanket, her head resting on his thigh, an unopened book in her outstretched hand. She stares at the inn, worried about Susan who did not come down to breakfast. Jeff himself ate little, drank too much coffee and offered monosyllabic replies to his children’s strangely awkward chatter, erupting with uncharacteristic anger when Jeremy and Annette bickered over the last piece of coffee cake.
‘Is Susan all right?’ Helene had asked tentatively.
‘Fine. She’s fine.’ His reply was terse, his face tense. He turned away from Matt, who stared at him anxiously.
It strikes Helene as odd that she should be worried about the sister who had always worried about her. She averts her eyes from the inn. Susan will come down when she is ready. It is a good sign that Jeff has placed two chairs together. He sits in one, piles his medical journals on the other. He will, of course, move them when Susan joins him. She closes her eyes as Paul Epstein, his own guitar in hand, settles down be
side Greg. Annette approaches with her mandolin in hand.
‘Want to learn those chords?’ Greg asks.
Paul nods and Helene drifts into a light sleep as they softly sing a chorus of ‘On Top of Old Smokey’.
Nessa and Wendy carry their pads and drawing pencils down to the lake. Two swans have mysteriously arrived and they are eager to sketch them. Nessa will do a whimsical drawing geared to her child readers. She will, she thinks, turn the fairy tale upside down and write of a majestic swan transformed into a mischievous duckling. Compassionate humor will triumph over beauty. Wendy, so accomplished in landscapes, will work in the style she has been studying in her Audubon text.
Intent on their project, they are surprised to discover Daniel seated on the sanded log smoking his first pipe of the day. The fragrance of his tobacco mingles sweetly with the pungent odor of damp earth and waterlogged flora.
‘I’ll share the bench with you,’ he offers.
‘No thanks. I want to get the shadows at the far shore,’ Nessa says, and she walks across the lake front, settling down on a boulder near the dock.
‘Not too subtle, is she?’ Wendy asks. ‘Determined to leave us alone together.’
‘Nothing subtle about Nessa,’ he agrees. ‘That’s what Simon loves about her. She’s big-breasted, big-hearted, open, honest, comfortable in her own skin, at peace with her own eccentricities. Everything that Simon’s first wife, Charlotte, wasn’t.’
The swans glide closer to them, their long necks held high, their coal-black eyes regally surveying their aquatic kingdom as they continue their tandem sail across the sun-bright waters of the lake.
‘Swans mate for life, I think,’ Wendy says. ‘No first marriages for them.’
‘Lucky, or maybe not so lucky,’ Daniel replies and she begins to draw, fearful that she has gone too far, that her words have hurt him.
‘Simon has a theory,’ he continues. ‘He sees life as a series of chapters. One chapter ends, another begins. He talks about his own life – “the Simon and Charlotte chapter” – followed by “the Simon and Nessa chapter”. He assures me that I’m just at the end of one chapter – the “Laura and Daniel chapter” – and I’ll soon tumble into an entirely new chapter.’
‘One with a happy ending?’ Wendy asks and smiles. She begins to draw the swans who are now very still, only their wings ruffling the lake waters, creating gentle wavelets.
‘Happier at least than the Daniel and Laura chapter. My wife – she is, I suppose still my wife – is a dancer; I think I told you that. And very beautiful. I may not have told you that. It’s no longer very important to me.’ He puffs deeply on his pipe and Wendy concentrates on her drawing, unwilling to look up and see the sorrow on his face. ‘Tall, taller than me,’ he goes on. ‘Her hair is the color of honey.’
Wendy thinks of the blonde hairs that had clung to the motorcycle helmet he had placed on her head. Tendrils the color of honey. She selects a drawing pencil of deep orange and draws the swan’s beak.
‘Yes. Almost that color,’ Daniel says, looking down at her work, and she blushes.
He tells her then about the night in the Hamptons, of his anger and aching sadness, of his fury and his sense of loss, and even as he speaks he wonders why he is revealing so much of himself to this lovely young woman whom he scarcely knows, but whose body had melted toward him in the shadows of bushes heavy with berries the color of the sky.
She listens calmly, as calmly as he himself had listened to her own story, to her bittersweet memories of the young writer whom she had loved and who had morphed into the alcoholic husband she could no longer love. She had spoken oh-so-softly of the father of her son, killed in an accident on a cool August afternoon on a roadway not far from the lake where they now sit staring out at the beautiful white birds who mate for life.
He sighs, his narrative done.
‘I suppose my story isn’t all that unusual. Infidelity is the norm for some people. Women claiming absolute freedom is something that’s happening. Laura and Daniel – an ordinary tale, a very ordinary chapter …’
His voice trails off. He is embarrassed, suddenly, to have said so much – too much, he is sure. Wendy no longer looks at the swans. She looks at him.
‘Ordinary isn’t the word I’d use,’ she says.
‘Oh. What word would you use?’
‘Sad,’ she replied. ‘What happened to you was sad. Being betrayed is sad and dealing with that betrayal is sad.’
He recognizes the very words he had spoken to her in the café, the solace he had offered, now in turn, offered to him. He turns to her, no longer embarrassed, no longer ashamed, and sees that her dark eyes are bright with tears. Gently, he pulls her toward him, gently his lips find hers, gently his hands crown her head, his fingers thread their way through her silk smooth hair. She leans into him and he welcomes the soft compliance of her flesh against his own. They remain in a sweet embrace as the swans stretch their long white necks and, with measured grace, glide to the opposite shore.
Polly arrives on time the next day, but Louise looks at her sharply and sees at once that she is pale, that there are dark circles beneath her eyes.
‘Are you feeling all right, Polly?’ she asks.
‘Fine. I’m just worried about my mother. And I had a little trouble sleeping. I think I might have strained my back but it’s fine now.’
‘Why don’t you take the morning off? Sit in the sun for a few hours.’
‘Are you sure? Can you manage alone?’ Polly is surprised. Louise is not often solicitous of those who work for her.
‘Of course I’m sure.’ Louise’s reply is abrupt. She is uneasy with gratitude.
‘All right.’
Polly retrieves her physiology textbook. She is grateful for these bonus hours, pleased to be able to sit outside on this sunlit morning, glad that she wore the sleeveless pale-green dress that exposes her arms and shoulders to the golden warmth. She heads outside toward a secluded area of the lawn but Jeff Edwards calls to her.
‘Polly, do you have a minute?’
She hesitates and then walks toward him. He sweeps his journals off the chair beside him and motions her to sit.
‘I wanted to ask you how you were feeling today. And I wanted to explain my wife’s behavior yesterday. She’s been working too hard. She’s very stressed out. She didn’t mean anything by what she said.’
His own words, so patently false, embarrass him but how else to account for Susan’s wildly accusatory questions? Polly is owed some explanation, some apology. He cannot, of course, speak to her of the true origins of Susan’s words, of the tensions that haunt their marriage, the exhausting routine of their days, the incessant demands of their children, Jeremy and Annette’s constant bickering, Matt’s watchful uneasiness. Jeff acknowledges that the dreams of their courtship, of the early years of their marriage, are tarnished, that age has diminished their energy, narrowed their horizons. He flinches from the memory of his wife’s words whispered into the darkness last night. I was frightened. He too is frightened but he cannot put a face to his fear.
Polly, innocent, hard-working Polly, radiant with youth and hope, her future charted but still unrealized, would be unable to understand that inexplicable fear that crushes reason. It is triggered by the sadness of middle age, moods that darken with the encroachment of evening. In truth he does not understand it himself. He knows only that he and Susan are adrift in a season of uncertainty. Their phone rings with news of death and divorce. They attend more funerals than weddings and shudder with fear when minor pains and illnesses ambush them. They frown into the mirror when they notice the new laugh lines that crinkle about their eyes, the new strands of silver that shimmer in their hair. They are newly aware of their own mortality, of tomorrows fringed with uncertainty. None of this can he share with young Polly who smiles shyly at him now.
‘That’s OK,’ she says. ‘Everyone gets upset when they’re tired.’
She opens her textbook and searches for her
place.
He glances down at it. ‘There’s an easy mnemonic for that stuff. I’ll help you with it. But it’s too gorgeous a day to worry about bone structure. How about a walk? If you’re not too tired?’
‘I’m not too tired,’ she replies, and with those words the weariness she had felt since waking falls away. He strides forward and she rises from the chair, leaves her textbook forgotten, and follows after him, trailing in his shadow and then, quickening her pace, she walks beside him.
Helene turns her attention from Greg and Paul, who continue to strum their guitars. She shades her eyes and watches as her brother-in-law helps Polly over a stile. They walk, as though jointly balanced on ribs of sunlight, toward the meadow. Helene sighs and goes over to their abandoned chairs. She straightens Jeff’s journals and moves Polly’s textbook to a bench a few feet away from the chair that is too close to his.
‘Poor Susan,’ she thinks for the second time that day.
Jeff and Polly progress in silence, their arms swinging but not touching, a slight breeze brushing their sunlit faces. They pause and look up as a red-winged blackbird soars with heart-stopping grace and disappears behind a drifting cloud. Jeff plucks a long blade of grass.
‘It almost matches your dress,’ he tells Polly.
She does not reply but her hands tremble and her cheeks grow hot. Impulsively she removes her sandals and dances barefoot through the wild meadow and he, without thinking, races after her. He is infused with her energy. He feels himself a young man again, dashing through the bright fields of summer, in pursuit of a barefoot, golden-limbed girl whose hair falls in loose swaths about her laughing face. Susan’s angry words, still sour in memory, have ignited a desire he never acknowledged. He will resist it. Of course he will resist it. Polly is only a few years older than his daughter and he is a man who loves his wife.
But his body betrays him. He races after her, catches her, touches her shoulder, inhales a familiar scent. Jean Nate again, the toilet water favored by Susan during their courtship. It is, he knows, the young girl’s gateway aroma, so light and sweet, its black-capped green bottle holding out a promise of sophistication, of romance, of sex, tentative and tender. The aroma dizzies him with its reminder of Polly’s age and his own.
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