“Lake James, at the moment.” She knew her mother was asking about the rest of the summer. Some marketing people at her former employer, the textbook publisher, had gone in on a summer share on the Jersey Shore, but even if Evelyn had had the money for that, she didn’t know what to say to those people, who made frat-boy jokes about dirty Sanchezes and quoted Caddyshack. On the other hand, staying in New York in summer wasn’t all that appealing, either; last summer had meant lots of Sam Adams Summer Ale by herself on hot weekend days when it seemed like just her and the Dominican Day parade.
“You’re doing that so you can do your website sales. At any rate, you can’t just rely on Preston’s mother’s hospitality every weekend. A single woman is a strain on every hostess. It’s a struggle to find a single man for a dinner partner.”
“Mom. I’m already going to Lake James. Take your victories, okay? And, for the fourteenth time, it’s not website sales.”
“Did you pack the Lilly?”
Evelyn shook her head. “Good-bye, Mother.” She tapped the phone on the bed, then stuffed the Lilly Pulitzer dress into her bag.
Evelyn dragged her duffel to the creaking elevator and through her building’s lobby. She lived on the Upper East Side, in an apartment she could barely afford despite its being in a “troubling” part of the neighborhood, as her mother put it. When Evelyn had rented it, she had never lived in Manhattan before and didn’t realize desirable real estate changed midblock. This had landed Evelyn in a building called the Petit Trianon, on Seventy-fourth Street on the wrong side of Third. When Barbara sent letters to Evelyn, she always addressed them to Evelyn Topfer Beegan, Le Petit Trianon, as though Evelyn resided at a country estate.
She passed the plants fighting for sunlight in the lobby, overcast with a fluorescent-green tinge. The victor these days was an aloe vera whose giant tentacles lay despondently on the tiled floor. Some time ago the plant had spawned, and a young handyman had put the babies in tiny planters, with FREE TO GOOD HOMES signs in front of the makeshift nursery. When Evelyn had returned from the bodega that morning, a homeless person had already peed on them, leaving a dark and stinking puddle around their bases.
*
When Evelyn stepped off the train at the Lake James station seven hours later, the sky was veiled with low gray clouds and held the threat of snow. In May, as the rest of New York bowed to summer, the Adirondacks clasped winter as tightly as they could. Winter was their season, and they weren’t going to let go of it so easily. Evelyn shivered. The train hooted away, and though Evelyn knew the station was close to the road, she couldn’t even hear car engines.
Preston was having a whole crew up this weekend. Nick Geary, Preston’s best friend since middle school who had gone on to Enfield and Dartmouth, for one. He was in the consumer-products group at Morgan Stanley, so Charlotte dealt with him all the time in her private-equity job, where she worked on consumer-products acquisitions. There was also some acquaintance of Nick’s from Morgan Stanley whom Charlotte also knew. Charlotte had decided to come last minute, after nonstop harassment from Evelyn, and then Bing, Bing’s girlfriend, and Bing’s kid were also up. Evelyn thought she could get at least a few of them onto the site, and she wanted to find other recruits at Lake James parties.
Lake James was gorgeous; she had to give it that. Even the train station was. In front of her was a small blue station house, the short concrete length of the platform, and, beyond, green trees in every direction. The wind picked up sharply, then quieted just as suddenly, and the trees rattled their leaves, an imitation of the sound of rain, but then they, too, settled into silence.
Evelyn had dressed for “summer” rather than “mountains” and pulled her cotton cardigan close around her. Looking to her left, to the other end of the platform, she saw a tall black-haired figure in a dark suit. He looked about her age, but his shoulders rolled forward, giving him the stoop of a much-older man. He was staring out at the trees and looked lost.
They both turned toward the station house and got there at the same time. He grabbed for the doorknob, fumbling with it, but managed to open the door for her. He was around six-three, with correspondingly exaggerated features that reminded her of a Croatian basketball player she had once seen when forced to watch a Lakers-Knicks game, and small dark eyes that peered down at her. She stepped in front of him to the small square waiting room, with blue walls and simple brown wooden benches along the sides. She looked at him carefully again, trying to match him with any of the Lake James people she had done research on. Evidently she had been studying his suit too closely.
“I came from work,” he blurted, pulling at his tie.
“I figured,” Evelyn said, smiling. “Either that or Lake James is becoming an important business center.”
He half smiled, but it did nothing to wash away the nervousness on his face. “So, I guess, you’re Evelyn? Nick said you’d be on the same train.”
Nick’s friend, then. Preston hadn’t said anything about him other than he worked at Morgan Stanley, but this guy didn’t strike Evelyn as a Nick cohort—he seemed unpolished, even kind of nice. “Evelyn Beegan. You’re staying at Preston’s?”
He reddened as he shook her hand. “Yeah, he didn’t, ah, mention it? That we’d be on the same train? Sorry. I work with Nick, and he thought it would be fun if I came. Up.”
“Right. Well, I’ll bet it will be. I’m sorry—I didn’t catch your name,” said Evelyn. The guy’s awkwardness made her feel at ease by comparison.
“Oh. Gosh. I’m sorry. Scot. Scot Tannauer.” He held out his hand, then withdrew it just as quickly and shook it out as if he had carpal tunnel syndrome. She couldn’t tell whether he was attracted to her or terrified of humans. He took a look around the station house. “I’ve never been to the Adirondacks before. I read up on them.”
“I didn’t know there was much reading to be had on them.”
“Oh, yes. Yes. The history of the mountains, and the great camps, and the Vanderbilts and the other families who came up here.”
“Bankers came even then,” Evelyn said with a light laugh.
“Oh—yes—I get the joke,” he said, looking down at his suit.
“Oh, no, I didn’t mean—”
“Sorry. Just. No. I’m just—”
“So you were saying? The great camps?”
“The architecture is really something. It’s an interesting style that was replicated in some of the national-park lodges, but really nowhere else.”
Evelyn began to ask about who the architects had been, but the station house door opened and Nick Geary stepped in wearing white tennis shorts and a white polo shirt. His hair was still chocolate brown and perfectly floppy, his eyes the same dark blue, his skin perfect, and his lips a deep red that girls would’ve killed for. His nostrils were the only problem, large and quivering; they had no doubt seen their share of coke, Evelyn thought as she smiled and kissed his cheek. “Nick!”
“Evelyn. It’s been ages. How’s the singing?” he said, not as distantly as Evelyn had expected. “Sir,” he said to Scot. “So I’ve been deputized as your chauffeur for the day. Hop in. Evelyn, how much luggage do you need for a three-day weekend? Jesus Christ.”
“The singing?” Scot asked.
“I was really into musicals when I first met Nick. I’m surprised he remembers.”
“Oh,” Scot said, sounding like a horse neighing.
CHAPTER THREE
Shuh-shuh-gah
The stores of Lake James Village topped out at two stories, crowded together on one mile of the three-mile-circumference pond in town. It looked, comfortingly, exactly as Evelyn had remembered it from her first and only other trip there, the summer after Preston’s Sheffield graduation. Though years had passed, no Walmarts had arrived to suck the specificity out of the village, and there were not even any chain drugstores, as those were relegated to the road leading out of town. Instead, it was Just Bead It and Custard Mustard & Ale and the confusing promise of the Steak Loft.
Even the smell of the air through the rolled-down windows was familiar after all these years, wet leaves and burning wood and muddy grass. Evelyn, who’d decided to sit in the backseat to let Nick handle conversing with Scot, watched as the light green of the trees whirred by. It was quiet but for some chirps of birds and the rumble of the ancient Hacking Jeep along the road.
Though it was late May, the local clothing store, the Sweater Haus, still had thick Irish sweaters and Wellies in the windows. Even the Gap and Bass outlets, part of an aborted attempt on the part of the town elders to make Lake James into a discount-clothing destination, showed what remained of winter gear in their windows: puffy jackets, raincoats, heavy leather hiking boots. The Lakeview Inn’s A-frame chalkboard promised seven-bean soup and grilled cheese sandwiches and weather that was fifty-five and cloudy.
Evelyn looked over James Pond, which the Lakeview sat on, remembering the first time she’d seen it. All that talk about Lake James as a summer playground for the rich and well bred, she remembered thinking, and it was a rinky-dink middle-class vacation town with a tiny lake and wooden bears surrendering with their paws up outside every third store. Then she’d followed the directions Preston had given—the same directions Nick was following now—and taken a right between two stone pillars with a hanging wooden sign that read MT. JOBE ROAD—PRIVATE DRIVE, and perceived her error. Here was an unfinished rough dirt road, and glimpses of an enormous lake to the left, and the suggestion of very nice houses, as implied by the trees in front of them that hid them from view.
“Oh,” Scot said from the front, having the same realization Evelyn had had years earlier. “There’s another lake? I thought the lake was the one in town.”
“That’s the pond,” Evelyn said. “James Pond. All the tourists come here and think it’s Lake James and take a paddleboat out or whatever and then go home thinking all the fuss is about this pond. Lake James is huge. At least ten times the size of the pond. You can’t see it from town.”
“Why can’t you see it from town?”
“Private drives, friend,” Nick said, hurtling up Mt. Jobe. “Get with the program.”
“I’d think the residents would object to that,” Scot said.
“The residents all live on the private drives,” Evelyn said with a laugh. “They’re the ones keeping everyone else out.”
“Such communist ideas, Evelyn,” Nick said.
On Mt. Jobe Road, each house was marked with a modest wood post and slightly madcap letters, naming the places with a mix of homage and play—THE AERIE, CAMP TAMANEND, TOE-HOLD, WEOWNA CAMP.
Preston’s parents had bought their place, Shuh-shuh-gah, in the eighties, after Jean Hacking had a falling-out with her sisters and decided they would henceforth stop going to Osterville. Mrs. Hacking fit soundly into the social scene with her headbands and fleeces and creased pants, her pantryful of good red wine, her patrician East Coast roots, her competitiveness in hearty summer sports such as sailing and rowing, and her pronunciation of “hurricane” as “hurriken.”
Though the Hackings had only been there three decades, a batch of newer arrivals had turned the Hackings into something of the old guard in Lake James. On the hill side of the road, away from the water, were people from Los Angeles and Florida and South Carolina who had bought plots of land without water rights just for the privilege of saying they had Adirondack camps. They had installed gravel drives and granite statues of bears or eagles and were forever fighting with the town’s zoning board over adding satellite dishes to their camps.
Making a screaming left turn, Nick bumped into a wooden ditch and back out again, and Evelyn watched with some alarm as Scot’s dark head nearly hit the roof.
Around the last turn, at the bottom of the hill, Evelyn spotted Shuh-shuh-gah’s welcoming brown-wood boathouse with its green window frames. The Hacking house at Lake James was part of an Adirondack great camp, one of many built by railroad, banking, and timber barons in the late 1800s. It was initially a hunting camp, with separate platform tents for cooking, sleeping, and drinking. Once upper-class women started joining their husbands in the Adirondacks, trading up from the passé getaways of Saratoga Springs and Cape May, the tented buildings were turned into wooden structures, though still with a rustic, unfinished quality that tried to make visitors feel like they were still living in nature.
Only a handful of the camps had been kept in one piece, and the Hackings’ was not among them. What served as their main house had once been stables, and their boathouse was grand, with two covered docks and one open dock and sleeping quarters upstairs. The other parts of the original camp were now cut off from the Hackings’ portion by copses of trees.
The first time Evelyn had come, it was raining when she’d arrived, a silver Adirondack storm, and she’d slipped down to the boathouse porch before joining Preston’s graduation party. Thin pines that were bare for the first sixty feet of their trunks ended in thick daubs of green, like those in a Japanese silk painting. Through the gray, she could see only a few lights of houses across the lake, and the only sound was of the rain hitting the wooden railing and the dock below her. For a moment, Evelyn felt like everything was quiet.
Then she went to the party. Preston’s older brother, Bing, had a bunch of his friends up, and they were drunk and arguing about rugby. The girls were pretty and mean and made jokes that Evelyn couldn’t follow. Nick Geary, whom Evelyn had met several times by then, kept calling her Sarah. There was a regatta that Preston’s mother shanghaied Evelyn into helping with, and Evelyn had rigged one of the boats incorrectly and was publicly chastised by Mrs. Hacking, and then it was one dinner on the lake followed by another dinner on the lake where Evelyn was clearly the dud guest. Everyone had worn embroidered whale belts; everyone but Evelyn.
This time, she had a whale belt—a never-worn birthday gift from Babs—and she was prepared. She could see the edge of the main house down a stone path to her left. Evelyn opened the car door and hopped out, removed her duffel from the back, and set off on the wide stone stairs toward the house’s kitchen entrance.
The Hackings’ Scottish deerhound, Hamilton, after Alexander, who was always having to be fetched from neighbors’ houses after he paddled up to their shores on long and unauthorized swims, nosed open the screen door from the kitchen and greeted Evelyn with a welcoming snout jab. Evelyn followed Hamilton inside, where Preston sat on a stool next to the kitchen’s central island, holding a bunch of grapes up to the light.
“Ah. Greetings to you, Evelyn Beegan,” Preston said, rising. He wore an extremely old pink oxford, dark khakis, and monogrammed velvet driving slippers with a giant moth hole over his left little toe. He shook the cluster of fruit in front of her. “Would you care for a grape?”
“I’m good, thanks.” Evelyn swung herself onto a stool. There wasn’t a dish, clean or dirty, visible in the entire kitchen, just the photo-shoot-ready bowl of fruit.
“Where are your travel companions? And what is happening with your hair?” Preston asked.
“Coming down in a second, I think. And I straightened it. Thanks for letting me crash. The People Like Us recruitment continues.”
“The drama continues here this weekend, too,” Preston said, tossing a grape into his mouth and looking amused. “You remember Bing.”
“Sure.”
“He’s now divorced.”
“You told me. I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be. Better all around. He made the rather ill-advised decision to bring his girlfriend up this weekend. She works at”—Preston stopped and chewed the grape deliberately—“an advertising agency. Promoting canned tomatoes, at the moment. And went to, I’m not sure. DePaul? DePauw? Somewhere decidedly third tier.”
“Doesn’t DePaul have really good soccer?”
Preston fixed her with a look. “Soccer? Evelyn.”
“It’s a sport.”
“Barely. Here, take a grape. They’re very good. Seeds, though. Be careful. She calls herself Chrissie.�
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“Is that because it’s her name?”
Preston smiled. “Perhaps. Perhaps. Chrissie is up for the weekend, and I cannot say it is going swimmingly.”
“How long have they been dating?”
Preston considered this. “Three months. Four. But she’s no spring chicken, clearly eager to reproduce, and currently she’s showing off her maternal skills with Pip—you remember my niece? They’re racing together in the Fruit Stripe on Sunday. Pip is not pleased.”
“The Fruit Stripe? The regatta? That’s this weekend? I don’t have to race, do I?”
“There’s always a chance. If Mother recruits you, you do know you can’t turn her down.”
“Pres, when I was here before, your mother almost deported me because I got a knot wrong on the rigging.”
“You’re from the Eastern Shore. You’re supposed to know these things.”
“Yes. So says my own mother, but I managed to avoid sailing camp summer after summer. So Chrissie sails?”
“Well. The Fruit Stripe switches every year. The founder chooses what sport we’ll do. Sailing, rowing, kayaking, canoeing. All boating, of course. Chrissie is apparently an excellent kayaker—she’s from the West Coast—and Mother thought she’d be a ringer for this year. Then the race was deemed to be sailing again, not kayaking. So here we are.”
“Your mother is not going to take a mediocre placement in a water-sports event very well.”
“No. Nor is Bing. It’s going to break them up. Which is perhaps the point. It should be a fun show, I suppose.”
Hamilton nosed Preston’s thigh as Nick and Scot entered. “Nice to see you again, man,” said Preston to Scot, his tone now all urban masculinity.
A door at the other end of the house banged, and Mrs. Hacking came hurtling through with a sheaf of papers in her hand, her curly gray hair bobby-pinned above her ears. Evelyn had never seen her in anything other than sensible all-weather clothing that could take her from fixing a motorboat to a committee meeting to a brisk walk around the lake with Hamilton, and, in her L.L. Bean Norwegian sweater and ankle-length khakis, she did not disappoint.
Everybody Rise Page 3
