The Summer Wives

by Beatriz Williams

  “So you married Livy Huxley,” I said. “I hadn’t heard.”

  “Yes, I did. Sixteen years now, can you believe it?”

  “No, I can’t. I really can’t.”

  There was a terrible pause. Livy’s giggle carried across the grass, Hugh’s patient murmur.

  Clay said, “Well, a fellow’s got to marry somebody.” He paused lengthily, while we both digested the meaning in that sentence, and whether it required further explanation, and whether I had a right to hear that explanation. Apparently he decided I did, because when he spoke again, his voice had lowered to a burr. “I waited a year for Izzy to come around, but she didn’t. She wouldn’t. Then Livy—I don’t know. After a while, it just seemed right. We’ve been happy. She’s been a good wife, a good mother.”

  “You have two other daughters, isn’t that right? I think that’s what she said.”

  “Yep. Jacqueline and Barbara. They’re back home with the nanny. Livy doesn’t want them having dinner at the Club until they’re ready.”

  “That’s sensible. We can’t have kids running amok at cocktail hour.”

  He laughed briefly. “No, we can’t. Anyway, the old guard’s had enough excitement for one evening. Can you believe Dick Huxley? He’s always been a damn sissy. That wife of his.”

  “It wasn’t just Dick. They were all against us. Me, I should say.”

  “Not all of them. Maybe not even most of them. They’re good people, you know, but when a few people set their minds against you—well.” He lifted his cigarette. “Anyway, like I said, you’re welcome at our table. Hugh’s a solid young man. We’ve always liked him around here.”

  I looked across the ten or fifteen yards to the green, where Hugh was shaking his head, laughing, taking the club from Lucy’s inept hands. I said, “He’s a terrific kid. I wish I’d had the chance to know him sooner.”

  “You know, Miranda, I’ve looked on him like a son. I’ve tried to treat him like one. It’s a bum hand he was dealt, and only the women to raise him. They sent him to the local school for years, until a few of us got up the nerve to—well, the thing is, we took up a collection. Don’t tell your mother. She thinks it was a scholarship, that St. Paul’s thought he showed a lot of promise—well, he did, he’s a smart kid—but that wasn’t it. We just didn’t want him to fall through, you know? So he could go to the right school, meet the right people.”

  “Of course. The right people are so important.”

  “Don’t, Miranda. Don’t be like that. They’re decent people. You never got to know them, that’s all. Livy’s dad, you know what he did? He was forty-five when the war started, and he convinced the army board to give him a commission. He spent two years in Europe, Miranda, two years. First as a battlefield medic, then a base hospital surgeon. Forty-five years old with a wife and kids, and he landed on the beaches on D-Day and spent the next forty-eight hours amputating arms and legs and whatever else. For two days he didn’t sleep. He won’t talk about it, but it’s true.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “You have to understand how shook up people were, when it happened. What happened to your stepfather, I mean. And there you were, giving interviews, talking publicly about the whole thing. Defending Vargas.”

  “I was only telling the truth. I only wanted justice.”

  “You don’t think he killed Mr. Fisher?”

  “I didn’t say that. I just think—whatever happened, it wasn’t Joseph’s fault. It couldn’t have been.”

  “Whatever happened.” Clay finished his cigarette and crushed it out carefully on the bench, dropped the stub in the empty glass. Bad form to leave cigarette butts on the sacred course, I supposed. “I always thought you were the one who could answer that, Miranda.”

  “I already have. I told the police everything I knew.”

  He placed his hands on the edge of the bench and leaned back a little. “It divided the whole Island. The locals thought one thing, the summer families thought another thing. I don’t think anyone’s gotten over it. We come here to relax, you know, to escape things like that. Murders and what have you. To live quietly. And the whole thing happens, and you’re in the middle of it. And maybe they could have forgiven you for that—I mean, it wasn’t your fault, you were just a kid—but when you talked, Miranda, when you spoke to the newspapers, that was the real crime. You know, murdering someone is one thing, but talking to the newspapers?” He made a cutting motion to his throat.

  “I didn’t want to. But nobody would listen, everybody just wanted the whole thing to go away, Joseph to go away—”

  “And now he’s escaped from prison. Christ. He’s got some nerve, I’ll say that.”

  “Nobody knows where he is?”

  “I don’t know, Miranda. Maybe you can tell me the answer to that.”

  I spread my hands. “I’m afraid I can’t.”

  There was a fractional pause, and then Clay leaned his head back and chuckled. “Damn it all, Miranda, listen to you! Anybody’d think you were an Islander now. Well, maybe you were right to stay away. It’s done wonders for you. Our Miranda, a movie star! Say, where’s that husband of yours? I’d like to meet that fellow. He’s a genius.”

  “Back in London, I’m afraid.”

  “Is he going to pay us a visit? Or maybe you’re not staying that long.”

  I turned to face him. The lights from the Club just reached his face, and for a moment it seemed I was facing him eighteen years ago, and we were both still kids, in love with other people. “Can you do me a favor, Clay?”

  “Anything.”

  “Let’s not mention my husband. In fact, let’s not mention anything. I’d rather the whole world didn’t know I was here this summer, if you know what I mean.”

  “Something wrong?”

  I put my hand around his elbow. “Just spread the word for me, please? I know they don’t like me, but—”

  Clay shook his head and laughed. “Nobody’s going to rat on you, trust me. This is the Island we’re talking about.”

  I considered the expression on his face, and I turned my head to consider Livy, who had finished her cigarette and set her empty glass on the edge of the green, and now stood between Hugh’s arms in her short, dark cocktail dress, nested together like two spoons, his hands wrapped around her hands wrapped around the handle of the club. Livy was giggling, and so was Lucy, standing at Hugh’s left elbow, and Hugh was imploring them both to be serious. A delicate business, putting a golf ball. You couldn’t laugh and putt at the same time, not if you wanted to sink the ball in the hole.

  “Yes, I know,” I said. “That’s why I came here.”

  Clay reached into his pocket and lit another cigarette, rather slowly, because his attention lay also on the scene before us. I smelled the warm, pungent smoke, the comfortable bite of whisky that clung to him. The wind blew in cool Canadian gusts from the northwest, making me shiver a little, and Clay must have noticed because he took off his jacket without a word and laid it over my shoulders. “Anyway,” he said, returning to his old position, flicking the ash from the tip of his cigarette, “you know the last thing anyone wants around here is a bunch of newspapermen pitching tents on the grass again. Brings down the tone.”

  “I’ll say. Almost as bad as a United States Marshal.”

  We sat there without speaking. Livy sank her putt at last, and it was Lucy’s turn. Clay’s hand crept under the hem of the jacket and clasped my hand.

  “How is she? Izzy?”

  “She’s fine. At first I thought she’d changed completely—you wouldn’t recognize her—and then I thought maybe she’s just who she always was. Who she always wanted to be. But maybe I’m wrong.”

  “You’ll tell her hello for me?”

  I gave Clay’s hand a last squeeze, stood up, and removed his jacket from my shoulders. As I turned to hand it back to him—he was rising too, Clayton Monk would never remain seated in a woman’s presence—I saw how bereft he looked, how vulnerable in the indigo twi
light. So I kissed his cheek and spoke softly.

  “I think maybe you should tell her yourself, sometime.”

  9.

  We drove home an hour later, Hugh and I, under a watchful moon. As we passed the sentry gate that marked the private eastern end of the Island—there was never a sentry, it was just for show—I turned to Hugh and said, “So Clay Monk married Livy Huxley. You know he was engaged to Isobel once.”

  “No way. Are you serious? Mr. Monk and Isobel?”

  “He was desperately in love with her that summer. She was such a minx, she kept breaking it off and then taking him back.”

  “Really?” He laughed. “Old Isobel was a manslayer, huh? You wouldn’t guess now.”

  “Well, she’s changed a great deal since those days.”

  “I’ll say. Man, oh man. Isobel and Mr. Monk.”

  “Don’t tell her I told you. I think she’s put all of those things behind her. The things that used to belong to her.”

  “Yeah, she’s good at that.”

  Without warning, he slammed on the brakes and veered off the road, into one of the giant meadows adjoining the sea. I braced myself on the dashboard and screamed. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Sorry.” He threw the car into park and switched off the engine. “C’mon. I want to show you something.”

  “You might have warned me.”

  Poor boy, he was still so young, he didn’t know what I meant. What it was like to have brakes squeal and wheels swerve so soon after experiencing a terrible smashup like I had experienced. The papers had kept it quiet, of course. My husband had seen to that. He’d made sure that the nurses in the hospital hadn’t talked, and the doctors hadn’t talked, and the police hadn’t talked. Not one detail had crept out into that vast, teeming, insatiable public curiosity, such that I sometimes wondered if it had really happened at all. Whether I’d dreamt the whole evening.

  Then I looked down at my flat stomach, the way my dress hung from my hips, and I knew it wasn’t a dream.

  I sat in the passenger seat of Hugh’s Ford convertible, catching my breath and my nerves, while Hugh got out and went around to open my door.

  “Say, you’re all right, aren’t you? I didn’t stop too fast?”

  I took his hand and lifted myself out of the car. “Quite all right. Just what did you have in mind?”

  “You’ll see.”

  He stuffed his hands in his trouser pockets and started off to the east, toward the sea. The field had been recently mowed, the hay gathered up and baled, and the smell of dry, warm grass lay everywhere. I couldn’t remember who owned it. Some local farmer, I thought, not one of the Families. But maybe it had changed hands since then, maybe I was mistaken. The stubble scratched my shoes and my delicate stockings. I called out to Hugh to wait a minute while I took everything off, stuffed stockings into shoes, and he obeyed me, though I could see he was impatient, animated, all covered in silver by the moon. Hands twitching in his pockets.

  My feet were too tender, and the rough grass hurt the soles as I walked, but I welcomed the pain. It was good to feel things again, to experience a pain that you had inflicted on yourself with conscious intent. In any case, it didn’t last long. The field was narrow, maybe two hundred yards from road to sea, and the end came abruptly. My toes encountered pebbles among the grass, then rocks. Hugh stopped, and I stopped, and when I looked up there it was, dark and still except for a long, white path cast by the moon. The sea.

  We stood on a little ridge, about fifteen feet up. Below us, the waves washed gently along a small, U-shaped beach. “The Islanders call it Horseshoe Beach,” said Hugh. “Want to climb down?”

  “Why not?”

  He clambered down the rocks a bit and turned, hand outstretched, to help me. I grasped his fingers for balance, because the rocks were damp, but my bare feet gripped the surface pretty well. I curled my toes into the granite and felt rather strong. The last jump into the sand, I released my brother’s hand and let fly, dropped my shoes, ran straight into the edge of the surf and splashed around while he stripped off his own shoes and socks and rolled up his trousers to wade in beside me.

  “Now I know you’re my sister,” he said.

  “I always was.”

  “Don’t you love this place? Nobody ever comes here. You can’t get in so easy from the road, and you can’t just walk over from the other beaches. You’d have to sail in. Or row.”

  I looked from side to side and saw the curve of the inlet, the two opposite points covered in rocks, and a chill passed over me. “I see what you mean. You’d have to know it was there.”

  Hugh was kicking around at an incoming wave. “I like to come here to be alone, you know? Sit and think. Sometimes I take my boat out at night and sail right in, and it’s like I’m the only person in the world.”

  “I like that feeling, too.” I smiled at him. “What do you think about?”

  “Oh, you know.”

  “No, I don’t know. I wish I did. What do you like to think about, Hugh? What kind of books do you read? What do you like to study at school?”

  “Me? Everything, sis. I want to read it all, I want to play it all, see it all. That world out there.” He waved his hand. “What’s it like?”

  “It’s pretty grand, sometimes. But sometimes it disappoints you too. People disappoint you.”

  “Who’s disappointed you?”

  “Not you, that’s for sure,” I said. “I liked the way you stood up to Dick Huxley. Not a lot of boys your age would stick up for their sisters like that.”

  He shrugged. “What else was I going to do? Anyway, we had a good time with the Monks, didn’t we?”

  I nearly opened my mouth to say what I really thought—that the Monks, while decent to invite us back into the pale, were also about as scintillating in their dinner conversation as a lump of tapioca pudding—before I remembered that my brother was, after all, only seventeen. “I’m sure we did,” I said. “One Monk in particular seemed to be enjoying your company. Lucy?”

  “Aw.” He kicked again, ducked his head. “She’s a good sport.”

  “She’s very pretty.”

  “She’s all right.”

  “She’s how old? Fifteen?”

  “I guess so. Fifteen last February.”

  “She certainly enjoyed her golf lesson,” I said, and I added silently, As her mother did.

  Hugh bent to pick up a stone and send it skidding across the surface of the water, which was placid this evening, more lake than sea. “She’s nice,” he said, “but she’s a little dull. You know. Not much curiosity.”

  “She’s young.”

  “No excuse. Anyone can read a book, you know? I don’t get it. All these people who just want to stay on the Island, summer after summer. Don’t they want to see the world? Do new things? Meet new people?”

  “Is that what you want to do?”

  He picked up another stone and turned it over, hefted it, bent sideways to send it skidding forcefully out to sea. He had an easy swing to his arm, like a boy who played baseball or football. “Feel like I’m going to explode sometimes,” he said. “Just . . . kerpow. You know what I thought last night, standing there on the ferry? I thought I might want to just dive overboard and swim to shore and—I don’t know—get in a car and drive west. South, north. Anything but Greyfriars. Mom with her paints and Isobel with her fucking knitting—aw, geez, I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, I’ve heard worse, believe me.”

  “I love them. I do. They mean the world to me. But I used to watch you up there on that movie screen and think, how did she do it? How did she escape?”

  “I had help from a friend, for one thing. Isobel’s mother helped me. When the papers came out and nobody else would speak to me, not even Isobel and Mama, she picked me up in her car and took me straight to New York. We sailed to Paris the next day, on the old Ile de France.”

  “But only because you dared. You took a stand. Against them.” He nodded to the left, in the d
irection of the Club. “You know how the Fishers got in, don’t you? The founders wouldn’t let them buy one of the original plots in the development, the ones around the Club, so my grandfather picked up that whole section on the southern end, overlooking the lighthouse—used to be a farm—and built Greyfriars. And they ignored him for a couple of years, until the Crash hit, and Peter Dumont nearly went under. He’d invested in some risky securities, it turned out. And nobody had the bread—liquid, I mean—to bail him out. Nobody but good old August Fisher.”

  I started to laugh. “Is that so? I never knew. Poor Peter, how humiliating.”

  “That’s what Mr. Monk told me once.”

  “So you really can buy your way into the Winthrop Island Club.”

  “And once you’re in, you’re in. You couldn’t get out if you tried.” He held up his arms to the sky. “One more year. One more year of school, and I’m free.”

  “What about college?”

  “What about college?”

  “Aren’t you going to Harvard, like your father?”

  “Not me. Another four years of all this? No way, Jose. I’m not going to college, Miranda. I’ll be eighteen years old by then. I’ve got plans.”

  “What kind of plans?”

  “I’ve been saving up, caddying every summer. Going to sell my old ragtop and buy myself a sailboat and take off for a whole year.” He picked up another stone and examined it for seaworthiness. “Promise you won’t tell Mom, though. She’s got her heart set on— I don’t know. Me following in Dad’s footsteps. Being the fellow he was supposed to be, winning back all the dough he lost, so she and Isobel can—you know, all that.” He waved his hand once more in the direction of the Club.

  “And you don’t want that?”

  “Heck no. I want to see the world. I want to do what you did.”

  “Acting? Well, you’ve got the looks for it, I suppose.”

  He dropped the stone in his hand and picked up another. “Shucks, sis. I don’t want to act. I want to be. I want to do. I want to—well, like I said, you’ll find out. Next spring, just watch. What?”