The Goodbye Summer

by Patricia Gaffney

  Luckily for me—not you—you were lonely and felt the same. I didn’t know what to expect when I came to Wake House. I’ll just go home, I thought—not much beyond that. I can truly say I never expected to make a friend of a woman a good deal less than half my age. We aren’t quite mother and daughter, are we? But not just friends, either. Something in between, I think. Whatever we are, you’ve made this twilight time of mine much brighter than I ever imagined it could be. You’ll be sad that I’ve gone, but cheer yourself up knowing how much unexpected joy and pleasure you’ve brought me. You pluck on every maternal heartstring I’ve ever had. And I can play “Maple Leaf Rag”! If you’d given me nothing else, I’d be grateful, but of course you have. You’ve made this childless old lady content. I thank you.

  I’m moved to write this letter now because tonight you asked me to be your baby’s godmother. I tried to hide what that meant, but I don’t think I did a very good job. Everything, Caddie. It meant the world. If only I could’ve said yes! But under the circumstances…well, you know. I’m not allowed to make promises anymore. But I want you to know I would be the best godmother, I would love that little girl to distraction, and she would love me back, she wouldn’t be able to resist. I still have the little tea service my grandmother gave to me when I was five—I’ll give that to you anyway, one way or the other, but how I wish I could give it to her myself. Well, who knows, maybe a miracle will happen. You know me, I never rule miracles out.

  Now it’s time to reveal my other secret. This one’s not important at all. Ancient history. Why do I keep it a secret, then? Oh, I guess I’m afraid the truth will muddy those waters again, and you know I’m all for clarity. And this secret is truly irrelevant, a mere detail, an accident of birth—but I’m afraid people will make something of it, and in this case, this one case, I’m in agreement with you on the advantages of invisibility.

  I know—I’ll write down my life story (briefly! don’t worry), and you’ll be kind enough to adapt it for me for the memory book. You’re so good at it, Caddie, truly, you have a real knack, and it’s part of what makes you you. I’ll trust you to take out the personal stuff, make it suitable for public viewing. But now don’t get your hopes up, my life story is not all that interesting, I don’t mean to build it up, it’s not as if I’ve accomplished a great deal or changed the world or anything. I’ve loved and been loved, which seems to be what it all comes down to. If I have regrets, they’re of the “Why didn’t I do that sooner?” variety. That’s why I have so much tiresome advice for you—I don’t want you to make the same old mistakes I did.

  I was born Dorothea Elizabeth Alexandra Wake, in this house on November 2, 1934. Not this room—this was my grandparents’ tower suite—but in the large corner bedroom on the second floor, the one currently occupied by Maxine Harris. My father was Alexander Pankhurst Wake Jr.; he worked for his father, my grandfather, in the Bank of Michaelstown, and he was a tall, dramatically handsome man who used to put me on his shoulders and run along Calvert Street while I pretended he was my horse. My mother, the former Julia Grace McGregor of Philadelphia, loved parties and dancing and flirting and playing tennis before I was born, and after I was born she loved me. She was beautiful and gay, with white-gold hair and a laugh like music, and I adored her. I had a childhood I can only call blissful, filled with loving parents, aunts and uncles, cousins, grandparents, dozens of friends, and it often seemed they were all in this house at the same time. I was an only child, but never lonely, never. I was spoiled rotten, I’m sure, but it didn’t feel that way to me. It felt like love.

  And then in 1943, after a numberless succession of miscarriages, my mother died in childbirth. She was thirty years old. A light went out of my life, and out of my father’s, too, who left me with his sister’s family and went away. One year later, my grandfather lost everything from bad investments. To cover some of his debts he sold the bank and this house, and he and my grandmother spent the rest of their years (only two more for him, four for her) in a small house on what’s now called Clarendon Street on the west side.

  Over the years the Wakes scattered, and since the early fifties (as far as I know) none of them have lived in Michaelstown. Until now. I’ve come home, so there’s one.

  When I was twelve, I moved to Washington, D.C., with my aunt and uncle, Sarah and Geoffrey Townsend, and their three sons, my cousins Geoff, Teddy, and Blake. We started over, living more modestly than we had in Michaelstown, but still quite comfortably and happily. My uncle, who was an attorney, eventually started the firm Townsend and Magaffin, and it still has offices on K Street. I graduated from high school in 1951—and am ashamed to say that was the last of my schooling. No college, and to this day I regret it. My passion was ballet, I was wild for it, I wanted desperately to go to New York and study to be a ballerina.

  But my cousin Teddy brought his roommate home from Princeton for spring break, and that was the end of that dream. Carlton Spencer and I married eleven months later, and instead of a ballerina I became the wife of a junior investment banker.

  We were together for seventeen years, separated for two, reunited briefly, and divorced once and for all in 1976. If we could have had children, if we’d had anything meaningful in common, if I’d had the courage to take my life into my own hands and make something of it, maybe we’d have worked it out. I blame Carl for nothing; we simply didn’t suit. He married again and lives today in splendid retirement in Taos, New Mexico. Good for him.

  So there I was, forty-two years old, and not exactly a gay divorcée. I thought I was over the hill, I thought my life was over! Oh, if we could come back again, knowing what we know in our old age. I spent the rest of the seventies doing good deeds, Caddie, volunteering for causes and charities, committees and foundations, maintaining the social style of life to which my husband’s money and my grandfather’s name had accustomed me.

  The only thing I did for myself was start dancing again—it was as if I’d started living again! Why, why did I abandon the thing that had always given me the most pleasure? For security, I’m afraid. I saw Carl as a chance to regain something I’d lost, and I was too besotted with that prospect to notice what I’d have to give up in exchange. But when I began to dance again, I felt true to myself for the first time in years and years.

  Eventually I left Washington and moved to the house on Heron Creek Carl had kindly left me in the settlement. It had always been a summer place, it wasn’t even insulated, so I had my hands full making it habitable year-round. As soon as I did, I started my little dance school for children, a very modest enterprise from which I derived an enormous and wholly disproportionate amount of satisfaction. I suppose that’s when I found myself—before I met Will, I’m glad to say, which means I didn’t need a man to make me whole or happy. I just needed to find my work.

  The rest is happily ever after, and that’s never the interesting part of the story. I met Will, and all the places left in me that were still sleeping finally woke up. I think that’s what love does, nudges us out of the light doze we go through our lives in. Will and I were sorry we hadn’t met sooner, that we’d spent so long looking for each other, but other than that we made it a rule to keep regrets out of the house. He truly lived in the moment, and I did the best I could to copy him. I must’ve succeeded a little, because even though we only had nine years together, it feels much longer to me. It feels like a life.

  I love what Charlie Lorton wrote (or you wrote, rather) at the end of his life story—“Here’s the part where I’m supposed to say something wise.” I’m sorry to say I’m as wisdom-challenged as Charlie. Wrap this up in some elegant, dignified way for me, Caddie. I’ve had the nicest life. I wish it could’ve lasted longer, that’s all. And everybody else’s, too. Do you believe in God? If he exists, I’ve got to say he’s arranged things very peculiarly. Why did he make it so hard at the end? I can’t even bear to say goodbye at the end of an evening! So I won’t say it now. I don’t want to. I’ll go back to thank you.

&nb
sp; Thank you, and please, please be happy. It’s the least you can do for an infirm old lady. Who loves you very much. My last request: for the love of God, don’t name that poor, innocent child Dorothea.

  I love you,

  Thea

  23

  Some early start. Parked in front of Wake House, Caddie drummed her nails on the steering wheel, taking note that her watch and the Pontiac’s broken clock happened to say the same thing: twenty after ten. Finney stopped crossing from one window to the other in the backseat and jumped into the front. Her window was open; he climbed into her lap and stuck his head out to sniff the air.

  The angle of the sun picked out every white or shiny black or doe-brown hair on his lithe body. She watched idly as his face changed with each sensation he took in. His nostrils flared, his almond eyes blinked and stared, his whiskers twitched. A car honked, and he twisted his head, cocking one brown ear. She loved to pet him, stroke his rough fur, scratch under his collar until he fell over on his side in ecstasy. She even liked his smell, a sort of doggy-manly, devil-may-care musk.

  Finney could take her out of herself for a few minutes, the perfection of his body, his thoughtless affection. So could a certain piece of music or the wild sound of wind at night, somebody’s unexpected smile. This is what we get, she would think, these hedges against the knowledge of our fast-approaching ends. With nothing else to occupy them, her thoughts started down a familiar track. What was the best way to get through this? She needed a philosophy, a better religion. How should we live? Aging and dying: what a strange combination of commonplace and extraordinary. Everybody got old and died, it was as simple as—peeing, and yet still the biggest mystery, top secret, dreadful and alien, more wrenching than birth. And so sad, so sad, it broke your heart. Goodbye. Never again. The stinging pain of you are gone and I am left. How could you reconcile with that and still find peace?

  She was glad when she saw Cornel, finally, lugging an old Samsonite suitcase, scuffed white and hard as a coffin, down the porch steps. She got out to open the trunk and move her small bag and Finney’s fleece bed and his cardboard box of supplies out of the way, but she knew better than to ask Cornel if he needed any help. “I thought this was a two-day trip,” she had to say, though, as he flung his giant suitcase into the trunk with a grunt.

  “It’s not full,” he said, which she thought missed the point. “You’re not bringing that dog, are you?”

  “I have to. Nana won’t let me leave him in a kennel. He’ll be all right, he loves to ride in the car. He’ll probably just sleep. You look very nice, Cornel.”

  He had on the same dark brown suit he’d worn to Thea’s funeral, but with an old green army sweater instead of a shirt and tie. “It’s going to get windy on that ferry,” he warned, “you better have a coat. I got this plus a coat.”

  “So are we about ready?”

  “I’m ready. Except I can’t find my damn glasses, I gotta go back in.”

  “They’re on your head.”

  He looked startled, then disgusted. “These are my reading glasses, I need my long-distance glasses. What do you think, I’m crazy?”

  Watching him trudge back up the steps, she started to get back in the car, then changed her mind. “I’ll be right back,” she said to Finney through the window. “Stay put and no barking.” She’d already told everybody goodbye, including Nana, but she was restless out here with nothing to do but contemplate the meaning of life.

  “Back already?” Bea joked from her blue rocker on the porch. She had her fringed plaid shawl tucked to the chin against the morning chill, and Edgie, in the green rocker, was wrapped in a trench coat and a pink scarf. Caddie had fussed at them half an hour ago for coming out too early, they could take cold in this wind, but Edgie said she was so sick of being cooped up she’d risk it.

  “You two sure are a sight for sore eyes,” Caddie said impulsively. “I’m so happy you’re back.” She meant Edgie, who’d moved out of rehab and back to Wake House a week ago, but in a way she meant Bea, too. “This porch was lopsided without you.”

  “Isn’t that the truth?” said Bea. She reached over to adjust the pillow on the arm of Edgie’s chair; Edgie had to keep her elbow on it or she had a hard time staying upright, not slumping over sideways. “We’re like two old bookends, take one away and the whole shelf collapses.”

  “How come you’re still here?” Edgie’s speech was much clearer than before, but for some reason she’d lost an octave; she spoke in a breathy, gravelly rasp everybody told her was sexy. She loved that.

  “Oh, you know. Men. And Cornel forgot his glasses.”

  Bea said, “Well, I think it’s mighty nice of you to drop everything you’ve got to do and drive all the way out to Cape May for that man.”

  “I’m not really dropping that much.” Tomorrow was Sunday, no lessons; she’d only had to cancel today’s. “And it’s not just for Cornel, it’s for me, too.”

  Cornel wanted to go to Cape May in October, bird migration time, because of Thea. It had been the last thing on her life’s to-do list, he said, and since she couldn’t go, he was doing it for her. Going in her place. “Really, it’s no sacrifice,” Caddie told the sisters. “If it doesn’t rain it’ll be beautiful, and it’s only for one night.”

  “Don’t forget what I said,” Edgie grated.

  “I won’t.”

  She wanted Caddie to say a prayer for Thea when they got to Cape May. “I mean it. I don’t expect I’d be here right now if it wasn’t for her.”

  That was the rumor. Caddie didn’t know if it was true, but people were saying Thea had left money in her will to Wake House. How much, nobody knew, but Edgie wasn’t the only one who thought Brenda’s turnaround about taking her back had something to do with a sudden windfall.

  “You all be careful driving,” Bea told Caddie again. “And make sure to rest whenever you feel like it.” A delicate reference to her condition. “Too bad neither one of those men can help you with the driving if you get tired.”

  “Oh, I’ll be fine.” Her back hurt, though. Just enough to be annoying.

  Inside, she cruised the two parlors and the dining room, even asked in the kitchen, but nobody had seen Cornel’s glasses. She said hi to Bernie and Mr. Lorton, who were reading the papers in the Red Room. Susan Cohen had moved out, gone to live with her boyfriend. Nobody had taken Thea’s tower suite yet, but last week a woman called Mrs. Shallcroft had moved into Susan’s old room. She seemed nice enough.

  Caddie stopped in the foyer, drawn to the framed photographs on the wall. She’d always liked looking at them, but now that Thea’s secret was out, they had a stronger fascination; she couldn’t walk through the hall anymore without stopping to look. The grand old man, the white-haired, potbellied paterfamilias standing on the front steps or under a thick-trunked, long-gone oak tree in the front yard, surrounded by wife, siblings, sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters—old man Wake, town father and founder of the venerable Bank of Michaelstown, amasser and loser of the vast Wake fortune, was Thea’s grandfather.

  And she was the little girl in the white dress at the family lawn party. The date at the bottom said July 15, 1939. The picture was crowded with Wakes of all ages, but that was Thea, could only be Thea, not just because she’d have been five in 1939, but because that lovely, pale-gowned, pregnant lady holding her hand couldn’t be anyone but her mother. And the man sitting on his heels beside her, dark-haired, roguishly handsome in striped shirtsleeves and suspenders, must be her father.

  Little Thea had ringlets, shiny as gold—maybe they were the same reddish-blonde she’d dyed her hair last summer—and a pixie face with a shy smile. She looked well loved and contented; she looked as if she knew she was lucky. “Blissful,” she’d called her childhood. It wouldn’t last long enough—a few years after this picture was taken her mother would die and her father would “move west”—but she’d had a fine start. Nine years to learn lessons for life about trust and optimism, and faith that the world
was a safe place. In the end, they’d make her who she’d turned out to be.

  When she’d read Thea’s letter, Caddie hadn’t known at first what to think or feel. Why didn’t you tell me? her first reaction, had given way very quickly to acceptance, even an intimation that in some oblique corner of her mind she’d already known. Thea had never lied to her, only sidestepped. “So this isn’t really where you grew up?” Caddie had asked, that day in front of the aunt and uncle’s house. “It’s where I moved after my mother died,” she’d answered. Eager to hear that story, Caddie hadn’t noticed the blurring of details. Eventually she’d come to see that Thea’s reasons for not telling who she was were so inseparable from her reason for coming home—which was, simply, to die (although she’d have put that another way; to live to the end, or something else positive)—that she couldn’t have revealed one without the other. Not even to Caddie.

  “Are you still here?” Brenda bustled down the corridor from her office. “I thought you’d be gone by now.”

  “I did, too,” Caddie said, wide-eyed with surprise. Half an hour ago she’d told Brenda she couldn’t stop in her office and talk about Nana because she didn’t have time, oh no, she was on her way out the door. An exaggeration, obviously, and now Brenda had caught her. “And they say women are always late,” Caddie joked for a diversion. She wasn’t ready for a showdown over Nana this morning.

  “Well, we’ll talk when you get back, because it’s definitely—oh, here’s Cornel.”

  “I can’t find ’em,” he grumped before the elevator doors were all the way open. “Somebody took ’em, and it wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “What?”

  “My goddamn glasses.” He stalked over to Brenda like an irritable goose. “What we need is a lost and found, I keep telling you.”