The Summer Wives

by Beatriz Williams

  Not to be outdone, I hauled the second suitcase myself, only more awkwardly. Isobel made a few adjustments, satisfied herself to the security of Mrs. Beardsley’s flowers, and turned around at last. “Can you believe we’re sisters?” she said, in that drawly voice of hers, always faintly amused at something or other. She stood back and held me at the shoulders. “Miranda. Little sister. I simply can’t wait to show you Greyfriars. I can’t wait to show you Winthrop and everything in it.”

  But that was two nights ago, and she hadn’t had much time to show me anything yet, because of the wedding and because her fiancé arrived the next afternoon. Clayton Monk. (Yes, those Monks, the department store fortune.) His parents’ house lay at the northeastern end of the Island, four miles away, and we’d all met for dinner at the Winthrop Island Club last night. Sort of a celebration. Mama’s wedding and Isobel’s betrothal, because they’d only just gotten engaged in May, when Clayton graduated from Harvard Law—Hahvahd, the Monks called it, short a, they’re a Boston family—and this was the Club’s first chance to properly congratulate the happy couple.

  Well, it was a grand night, all right. Clay Monk was a clean, handsome, well-tailored fellow, you know the type, and Isobel wore a dress of such shimmery pale yellow satin, it looked gold and matched her hair. If I didn’t know any better, I’d have said she was trying to outshine my mother—the actual bride, you’ll recall—but then you haven’t seen my mother, have you? I mean, not up close. Even at thirty-six she was more beautiful than Isobel. I say that without prejudice. Raven hair clean of even a single gray strand, eyes the color of twilight. Picture Elizabeth Taylor, I guess, and you’re not far off. Isobel didn’t stand a chance, even in her golden dress, and maybe she knew it. She laid low, stealing off with Clayton after dinner, and he must have driven her home afterward because when she walked into the Greyfriars kitchen at twenty minutes past seven o’clock on the morning of Mama’s wedding, wearing her curlers and her yellow dressing gown, that was the first I’d seen of her since Clayton wiped a smear of crème anglaise from her chin the night before and led her out on the terrace, where the orchestra played “Sentimental Me.”

  Joseph greeted her with a smile you might call familiar. “Morning, Isobel. Nothing much. Just old Silva fell in the drink, and I had to haul him back out.”

  “Well, they’re putting him to bed upstairs, awful fuss. I’ve got a terrible hung head. Is that coffee?” She yawned.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She moved to the Welsh dresser that held all the everyday porcelain, planting a kiss on my cheek along the way. “Morning, sister dear. Did he wake you up too?”

  I lifted my hand to return the caress, but she’d already slipped away. “I was already awake.”

  “Too excited to sleep, were you? What about your mother? I hope she got her beauty sleep, all right. Her wedding day!” Another yawn, and a wince. “I’m sure I’ll be able to appreciate all that sunshine in an hour or two. Hit me, will you?”

  She held out her cup to me and smiled. She wasn’t wearing her lipstick yet, but her mouth was still pink. I took the cup and filled it with coffee from the percolator, added cream and sugar from the tin on the counter.

  “Thanks, darling,” Isobel said, taking the cup. “Shouldn’t you be heading back to your boat now, Joseph? I’m sure you have plenty of lobsters left to catch this morning. Or maybe college boys are above that kind of thing?”

  “College?” I said.

  “Joseph’s at Brown.” Isobel looked over the rim of her cup, not at me but at Joseph, who stood before the icebox with his arms crossed. In her drawling, intimate voice, she said, “He’s a rising junior. Isn’t that right, Joseph?”

  “Two years to go.” He returned to her some kind of look, I didn’t know what it was. Something warm and knowledgeable, something that connected the two of them, something that made me feel like an absolute stranger in that room, an intruder, an innocent. Which I was, of course. Still, whatever the frisson between them, it lasted only a second or two. Joseph uncrossed his arms and said cheerfully, “Like you said, best be heading back out on the water now. Nice to meet you, Miss Schuyler. Isobel.”

  He made a little salute with the first two fingers of his right hand and walked out the kitchen door, whistling a snatch of something, taking all the conversation with him inside a swirl of fresh June air. I watched the window until he came into view. Quick, jaunty stride. Sun striking his head. Isobel turned away.

  “Oh, not you too.”

  “Me too what?”

  She angled her head to the window. “That. Joseph. All the girls on the Island are crazy about him. He lives on the Rock, you know. Flood Rock.”

  I turned to her. “The lighthouse? Really? I can see it from my window!”

  “His father’s the lightkeeper. Of course, his wife does the actual work, so he can keep on lobstering. Nice little arrangement.” She nodded again to the window, even though you couldn’t see the lighthouse from this angle, tucked away at the side of the house, and I followed the gesture. Joseph was no bigger than a lobster himself by now, although considerably more graceful and less red, striding down the curve of the lawn toward the dock.

  “It’s nice they can afford the college tuition,” I said.

  “Well, why not? He hasn’t got any siblings. And I guess old Vargas doesn’t think so much of the lobster trade that he wants his son to follow in his footsteps. What about breakfast, do you think? Where’s Esther?”

  “Helping them put Mr. Silva to bed, I think.”

  She joined me at the window, cradling her coffee in her palms. She smelled of some kind of flower, maybe gardenias, and I thought it must be her soap or shampoo, because who wore perfume at this hour? Joseph had reached the dock. The tide had gone out a little, so the boat kicked against the pilings. He reached down and unwound the rope. Leapt nimbly from the dock to the boat and bent over the wheel, on the other side of the deckhouse, so we couldn’t see him.

  I had a thousand questions I wanted to ask Isobel. I wanted to ask about the Island, about her father, about Joseph. About college, about her own mother. Things I’d wanted to ask in the car from the ferry but couldn’t, because Isobel gleamed like sunshine, because Isobel had graduated the year before me at Foxcroft and was therefore so untouchable as to be divine.

  Yet there was something a little softer about Isobel this morning, as if her sleek, athletic edges had blurred with sleep in the night, as if the curlers in her hair had made her mortal. She leaned her elbows on the counter and sipped her coffee, staring, like me, at the lobster boat curving its way westward toward the harbor.

  “Go ahead and look,” she said. “Just don’t touch.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Isobel lifted herself back up and turned to me. She wore a wry little smile on her pink lips. “You and all the other girls. You can look all you like, I don’t care. Just remember one thing, though.” She leaned forward and spoke softly. “He’s mine.”

  “Who’s yours, darling?”

  I spun toward the door, where Hugh Fisher stood in a dressing gown of his own—paisley, satin, blue, immaculate—and a helmet of gold hair the same shade as his daughter’s, just slightly the worse for tarnish. For an instant, just that first flash of impression, I thought he looked a little like Clayton Monk.

  Isobel went to him and set a kiss into the hollow beneath his cheekbone. “You are, Daddy, and you always will be. But thank God you’ve found a dear, lovely woman to marry this morning, and not some gimlet society goddess from the Club.”

  He chuckled and patted her back. “You know I’ve got better sense than that. Has young Vargas left already?”

  “Yes, Daddy.” Isobel moved to the Welsh dresser and rummaged for another cup and saucer. “Some poor fellows do have to work for a living, you know. Coffee?”

  “Yes, please.” He pulled a cigarette case from the pocket of his dressing gown. “Well, that’s a shame. I wanted to shake his hand, after what he did this
morning. He’s a damned fine young man, that Vargas. A credit to the Island.” He lit the cigarette, drew in a long, luxurious breath, and looked at me, smiling vaguely, as if he’d just perceived my existence in the corner by the window. “Ah, there you are, princess. Good morning. I believe you’re wanted upstairs.”

  I started forward. “Mr. Silva?”

  “Silva? What, what? You don’t mean to say you’ve forgotten the main event of the day, have you?” He laughed, took his cup from Isobel, and beckoned me over. He’d already shaved, and his pink skin smelled of that masculine, expensive soap men use for the purpose, a scent that jolted me because it was exactly the same as my father’s.

  I stopped and stared at his left hand, holding the saucer, holding also the cigarette between the first and second fingers. His right hand curled in the air, motioning me closer.

  I leaned my head toward him, trying not to breathe. I told myself it was the nearby smoke from his cigarette that repelled me, because I had always liked Mr. Fisher. He was so kind, always so perfectly courteous. He adored my mother, and he had charmed our lives over the course of the past year.

  I don’t know if he noticed my hesitation. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, in a confidential voice, “A certain blushing bride has need of her bridesmaid.”

  6.

  I remember how Daddy used to describe the Foxcroft commencement ceremony. He liked to play this little game. As each girl’s name was called, and she went forward in her white dress to claim her diploma, he would name the product from which her family had achieved its wealth. Miss Ames walked forward, and he thought, Shovels. Then Miss Kellogg—Corn flakes. Miss Vanderbilt, of course, recalled Railroads.

  Now, no Fisher girls graduated from Foxcroft while my father taught there, so far as I know, but if they had, he would have said to himself, Toilets. It’s true. Look closely at the throne in your bathroom, and you’ll maybe see the Fisher logo, a stylized F bracketed by the word FINE on the left side and FIXTURES on the other. The company had been founded a hundred years earlier by Hugh Fisher’s great-grandfather, expanded into kitchen and bathroom fixtures generally, and soon straddled the entire Western world by taking keen-eyed advantage of the Victorian hygiene craze. Of course, the Fishers themselves gave up management of the company some time ago—on the death of Hugh Fisher’s father, I believe—and to save the blushes of later generations, the Fisher logo had diminished into that single, magnificent F I just mentioned. But still. Never forget where you came from, I always say.

  Anyway, I don’t know if Mama knew much about the source of the Fisher riches. To do her credit, I don’t think she even thought about them, at first. She never did lust for wealth. After all, she’d married my father, hadn’t she, when she could have married for money instead, and you just show me any other woman with her beauty who wasn’t married to a rich man.

  As I told Joseph, I don’t remember exactly which tasteful affair on the commencement week calendar threw her together with Hugh Fisher, but I do remember the look on her face when she arrived home afterward. Dazed, smitten. Nothing came of it right away—summer intruded between them, summer and Winthrop Island—but come September, when school resumed again without Isobel Fisher, and Hugh Fisher should have no possible reason to visit Foxcroft Academy, visit he did. Drove right up to our small, shabby house in his graceful silver roadster, top down to reveal the sunshine of his hair, and off they went on a drive somewhere, laughing and gleaming. He stayed discreetly in a hotel nearby, but he took her out to dinner, and he took us both to lunch, and four months later, New Year’s Eve, he asked her to marry him at some gala party in New York, while I stayed home in Virginia and heated up a can of split pea soup for dinner.

  And now? Now June had arrived, that month of weddings and roses, and I was buttoning the back of Mama’s tea-length lavender tulle dress, fixing the jaunty birdcage veil that just reached the bottom of her jaw. Downstairs, the guests were assembling in the drawing room, where the French doors had been thrown open to the salt breeze so you might almost be outside. There were only thirty of these guests, because Mr. Fisher’s ex-wife apparently belonged to one of the other Families—as Joseph Vargas called them—and while the Island air wasn’t exactly poisoned by ill will, there still persisted a sense of civilized discretion, without which these clubs and islands couldn’t exist from generation to generation. The Dumonts and their allies, who mostly clustered on the northeastern end of the Island, pretended nothing was going on down along the southeastern end, and on the table in the foyer a few dozen wedding announcements lay stamped and addressed in a beautiful copperplate hand, which would, sometime during the course of tomorrow morning, delicately inform the absentees of today’s doings. You see how it works?

  “Dearest Mama,” I said, stepping back. “You’re the most beautiful bride. Mr. Fisher’s just the luckiest fellow in the world.”

  “Oh, don’t.” She glanced in the mirror and hastily away. “I still can’t believe it. I woke up pinching myself. I keep thinking it’s all going to disappear. He’s going to disappear.”

  “He’s not going to disappear. He’s waiting downstairs for you this minute to make you his wife. It’s all real. This is your life, Mama. A whole new wonderful life for you.”

  “For us both, darling.” She laid her hand on my arm, so fiercely I could feel the ridge of her engagement ring as it pressed against my skin. I could smell the powdery, flowery, new-bride smell of her. She whispered, “Do you mind?”

  “Mind? Mind what?”

  “You know what I mean. We were just two, snug as could be, and now suddenly there’s Hugh and—and Isobel, and everything else. Tell me the truth. If you mind at all, even the smallest bit . . .”

  She left the sentence dangling, of course. No possible way she could articulate that terrible alternative.

  I opened my mouth to tell her what I ought to tell her. What I meant to tell her, what I thought I felt, true and deep, bottom of my heart and all that. What a good daughter should say at a moment like this, as her mother stands before a shimmering dreamworld, waiting to enter. What Mama’s violet eyes implored me to say.

  I thought of something, just then, as my mouth hung open and the words formed in my throat. I thought of the moment I crawled into her bed after we learned about Daddy, into her hot, tiny bedroom that stank of July, and how bleak those violet eyes had seemed to me then. How wet and curling the lashes around them. She was hardly more than a child herself then; not just physically young at twenty-nine, but childlike. That’s the word. In those days, Mama was one of God’s childlike people, and I offer that as a compliment. Oh, she was clever, there was nothing diminished about her intellect. I guess I mean she was childlike in spirit, the way we’re supposed to be and never really are, lamblike in her innocence, and my father’s death was probably the first time this faith had betrayed her. I remember thinking I’d heard the cracking of her heart in the way her voice cracked and broke as she whispered to me in that terrible moment, and when I embraced her soft, small body, I embraced her more as a sister than a daughter. When we slept at last, we curled around each other for comfort. So it had gone on for seven more years. We had read each other’s thoughts and dreamed often in each other’s beds. We’d laughed and wept, we’d shared books and clothes. When we went to the seaside for a week each summer, everybody just assumed we were sisters, the especially close kind of sisters, by the way we giggled and ate ice cream and gamboled hand in hand in the surf.

  So as the old lie formed in my throat, I recognized its untruth by the sting of bile, by the stiffness of my vocal cords as they labored and labored to give birth to the words. And then this gust of fury blew through my chest, stealing even the breath I needed to say them. I thought wildly, like a premonition, This is the end, not the beginning. We’ll never stand like this again, we two.

  But my God, I couldn’t actually say such a thing! Not while her enormous violet eyes begged me to say something else. But I couldn’t say those words either, s
o I just placed my two hands on her cheeks, atop the veil, and kissed her, and in that instant the right words came to me.

  I said, “Daddy wouldn’t have wanted you to pine away the rest of your life.”

  She nodded frantically. “He was so good.”

  “Don’t cry, Mama. Here, have some champagne.” I turned for the silver tray on the dresser, loaded down with bucket and champagne coupes of crystal etched in trailing leaves, and I refilled my glass and Mama’s. Before I handed hers over, while I stood there holding them both in my fingers, fizzing sweetly between us, I said, “You really love him, don’t you?”

  “I do, Miranda. I truly love him.”

  I gave her the glass and clinked it with mine. “To true love.”

  Before I could sip, a soft knock sounded on the door, and Isobel slipped inside the room without waiting for an answer. She wore an identical dress to mine, pale blue and full-skirted to just below the knees, off-shoulder sleeves overlaid by sheer organza. Sweet floral cap nestled in her hair. “Everybody ready in here? Your groom awaits impatiently. Oh my! Don’t you both look lovely. And champagne! Wait! Don’t start without me!”

  She rushed to the dresser and poured herself a glass, which finished off the bottle and nearly overflowed the wide, shallow bowl of the coupe. She smelled of cigarettes and flowers and champagne, and when she raised her glass, her eyes glinted with either mischief or wine, I wasn’t sure. “What are we toasting, girls?” she said.

  “To true love,” I said.

  “Oh yes. To love!”

  We clinked and drank, giggling a little, and through the crack in the door came the sound of violins and a dignified cello. Isobel put her arm around Mama’s shoulder and whispered something in her ear, and there was something so intimate about this gesture that I turned my head and stared through the window at the sea, at the Flood Rock lighthouse erupting in the exact center of the frame. A sailboat beat lazily across the channel behind, and in the violent sunshine, the whiteness of its canvas hurt my eyes.