The Summer Hideaway

by Susan Wiggs

  “Fabio. His name was Fabio?”

  He nodded glumly. “Try explaining that to your family. And may I just say, Miss Turner, how much I’m enjoying the expression on your face right now?”

  “Sorry. It’s just…this is quite a story.”

  “I have many more of them, of every sort—happy, tragic, funny, or simply inane. Life is long, Claire. There’s room for everything to happen to you, if you let it. I can’t quite bring myself to regret my marriage. Jacqueline was the mother of my children and I would never speak ill of her.”

  “As for your children—you have three sons,” she said, switching gears.

  “I had four boys,” he said. “One died.”

  Claire touched his hand, brushing her fingers over the cool, dry skin. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

  “I’m never really far from Pierce,” he said. “Yet losing a child is one of those horrors from which the heart will not mend. Ever. It’s actually the one thing that brings me a perverse sense of peace about reaching the end. To not have to face every single day with a sense of grief and loss is a comfort to me.”

  “I’d like to hear about him one day,” she said.

  “I would be pleased to tell you. Better yet, Ross could tell you.”

  Her heart skipped a beat. “Pierce was Ross’s father.”

  He took out the last framed photo and sat it next to the others. “He was killed while serving in the military, during operation Desert Storm.”

  She had only the vaguest recollection of the conflict. She had been in grade school when it was going on, and the conflict had been as remote as a space shuttle launch. Seeing the man in the picture, with his hauntingly familiar smile, suddenly made it real to her. “I’m terribly sorry.”

  “Pierce was the best of them,” George said. “I know it’s wrong to compare one’s children, but it’s true. He was the best. And Ross is like him in many ways.”

  Claire’s throat heated with tears. “He was lucky to have you, then.”

  “I hope he thinks so.” George took out the last framed photo, this one showing a large group. “I have a dozen grandchildren in all. Ross is the eldest, and Micah, who’s twelve now, is the youngest. And somehow, I fear this will be the hardest on the two of them, for different reasons. I suspect you’ll find out more about that as you get to know Ross better.”

  You are my client, not Ross, she thought, but didn’t say. “Now that he’s here, you can see about contacting your brother.”

  George looked away. “Suppose he refuses to see me.”

  “Then at least you’ll know you tried. And honestly, that seems unlikely.” She gestured at the oldest photo of George and his brother with their parents. “There’s a foundation of love. That’s how it looks to me.”

  “Oh, there was love, for certain.” George’s eyes were glazed with memories as he turned toward the lake. “But that didn’t stop us from fighting like cats and dogs.”

  Eight

  New York en route to Camp Kioga,

  Avalon, Ulster County

  Summer 1944

  “Mama, George won’t share with me!” Ten-year-old Charles Bellamy’s voice piped from his window seat on the hot, creaky train. “He’s hogging Superman all to himself.”

  “Am not.” George peevishly hugged the comic book to his chest.

  “Are so.”

  “Am not.”

  “Give it here,” whined Charles, his voice climbing to a crescendo.

  “You don’t even like Superman,” George grumbled.

  “Do so.”

  “Do not.”

  “Do—”

  “George Parkhurst Bellamy. Let your brother read the comic book.”

  “But—”

  “George.” When Mother took that tone, she meant business.

  With a decided lack of grace, he slapped the book against his brother’s chest. “Here, baby. And don’t ask me to read any of the big words for you.”

  Charles stuck out his tongue, reeling it back in when their mother leaned over the seat to check on them. She was always exhorting them to be on their best behavior on account of their father was Overseas, where the fighting was.

  George didn’t understand how his best behavior was going to help Father, though. Gone was gone, and acting like a perfect angel even when Charles was being a pest was not going to bring him back. Not this summer.

  Maybe not ever.

  Mother said he was in the diplomatic corps, working for the Office of Strategic Services, which was not as dangerous as being a soldier. Father had been a soldier at the very start of the war, and he’d lost an arm in battle. He could have returned to his family after that, but Parkhurst Bellamy claimed he had a duty to serve his country, and if that meant being a diplomat, then that was what he would do. You didn’t need two arms to be a diplomat. You needed to speak several languages and know which wine to pick and which gifts to give.

  Yet even being in the diplomatic corps was risky. Most kids didn’t watch the newsreels before a Saturday matinee, but George paid close attention. There had been a very bad Nazi bombing in Tunis, in North Africa. George knew for a fact that his father had worked in Tunisia, and it was just pure dumb luck he hadn’t been there in the explosion that had blasted several people to smithereens.

  Usually Mother wasn’t told where Father was, as a security measure. Father was always doing Top Secret things. And anyway, grown-ups tended to think “Overseas” was enough of an explanation for kids. Now that he was thirteen, George considered himself in between a kid and an adult and he wished they would tell him more. He was like Clark Kent. He wanted the real story.

  Most kids, including his little brother, Charles, professed their devotion to Superman. George had even caught Charles paging ahead in the latest comic book, skipping whole chunks of the story.

  “Looking for the exciting parts,” Charles had explained with a goofball grin.

  Here was the thing about George. When every other kid idolized Superman, paging through the comics to find the caped crusader in action, George tended to linger over the parts that appealed to him much more—pages that featured Clark Kent in the newsroom of the Daily Planet, or Clark Kent in pursuit of a story. In George’s opinion, Clark Kent was lots more interesting than Superman. You always knew what would happen when Superman came into the picture. With Clark, things were more uncertain.

  Now, there was excitement, George would think. A regular fellow, rooting out the truth. To George, that was more intriguing than some guy from outer space, swooping around in a cape. That storyline was out of the realm of possibility. But Clark Kent on a hot news tip? Now, there was something that might really happen.

  George was a boy who liked writing things down. He took notes about everything from the big stuff like D-Day, which had taken place two weeks earlier, to small details about his life, like the vendor at Grand Central Station who had just sold him a batch of homemade saltwater taffy. Ever since having his tonsils out last spring, he’d craved things like taffy or horehound candies to soothe his throat. The vendor had been gaunt and clad in rags, around the same age as Charles. The sight of a boy with nothing made George feel guilty.

  “Mother!” shouted Charles. “He’s got candy! I want some!”

  “George Bellamy, you give me that.” She grabbed the candy by its torn wax-paper wrapping.

  “Hey,” George protested. “I bought that fair and square, with my own money. There was a kid at Grand Central—”

  “You bought candy from a street beggar?” His mother rushed to throw the taffy out the window, then spritzed her hands with rosewater from her carpetbag. “Honestly, what were you thinking? You could get a disease.”

  “Aw, he was just trying to make some spare change,” protested George.

  “Never you mind that. You know better than to take food from strangers.” His mother shuddered, then turned her attention to the rotogravure she’d been reading.

  Charles fidgeted, s
lamming the heels of his Buster Browns against the footrest as he pretended to read the comic book. Sometimes George got sick of having a little brother tagging after him. Especially a kid like Charles who assumed he was George’s equal. He was nearly four years younger than George, yet he insisted on doing everything his big brother did.

  Scowling with ill humor, George decided to write in his journal. He was pretty sure Clark would have kept a journal when he was George’s age. You didn’t get to be a crack reporter overnight. You had to practice for years, so George was giving himself a head start.

  It was challenging, writing on the train, using the small table mounted under the window. His penmanship wobbled with the motion of the railcar, but he kept doggedly at it.

  “En route to Camp Kioga, in Avalon, Ulster County, New York, United States of America, Planet Earth,” he wrote. He felt very grown-up because his mother had allowed him to use his good pen, the one he had been given as a prize for winning the school spelling bee.

  He had a vial of Skrip Spillproof Ink in the best color, which was peacock-blue. He reckoned Clark Kent used peacock-blue ink.

  George focused on his task with total absorption. He wrote a very good article about street vendors in New York City, making sure all his punctuation was perfect. The story was so good he could imagine it being published in the New York Times. Everybody knew the New York Times published all the news that was fit to print. It said so right on the masthead.

  George decided to make his own masthead. He needed a slogan. He wrote,

  “All the News That’s Fit to Print.”

  Maybe he should think up something of his own:

  “The Printed News, All the Time.”

  No, that wasn’t right. Maybe:

  “If It Fits, Print It.”

  “What’re you doing?” asked Charles.

  “None of your beeswax,” said George.

  “Let me see.” Charles reached for the notebook. His hand bumped the unspillable ink bottle, and the vial toppled over. Unfortunately, unspillable did not mean unbreakable. The neck of the bottle snapped off and ink spilled across George’s story, obliterating two pages of painstaking work.

  “Uh-oh,” said Charles.

  “You little pest,” said George. “I ought to knock your block off.”

  “Go ahead and try it,” Charles said. “See what it gets you. It was a…an accident, you big bully.” His face reddened, and his chin trembled.

  George was completely disdainful of his brother’s show of emotion. “Go on with you,” he said. “Go away, baby.”

  “Sure I’ll go away,” Charles declared. “I don’t care if I never see you again. Ever ever ever.”

  Charles’s threat proved to be impossible to carry out, since the lakeside bungalow that would be theirs for the summer required them to share a room with a bunk bed. They fought over who would sleep on the top or bottom. They fought over having the lamp on or off at bedtime. They fought over everything, bickering until their mother threatened to send them to Reform School.

  Neither boy knew precisely what Reform School actually was. But it sounded like nothing good, and the threat of it stopped them from fighting for whole minutes at a time.

  Eventually, however, the magic of Camp Kioga took over. The mothers would play bridge and smoke cigarettes and paint fake stocking seams on each other’s legs as they talked about the war. The kids would go on expeditions deep in the forest. They would climb mountains to find the source of a spring, or take turns jumping off the high dive into the cold, clear lake. In the evenings there would be shows, sometimes an act from the city, or a sing-along led by Mrs. Gordon herself, the wife of the camp’s owner.

  The kids would stay awake late into the night, huddled around a campfire, telling ghost stories. George’s favorites were the ones that were so scary they made his younger brother cry.

  Meals were served family-style in a big dining room in the timber main lodge, which also had a loggia and deck overlooking the lake, a library and music room, and a billiard room. The food was delicious, because in this part of the world, food rationing didn’t matter so much. Right on camp premises there was a victory garden, and a dairy and chicken farm. It was considered patriotic to grow one’s own food. Every day, the tables were laden with big bowls of mashed potatoes with butter and cream, and cobblers made with stone fruit gathered from trees on the property.

  Outward signs of war were subtle here, for the most part. Both George and Charles came to some understanding that they were meant to be America’s elite. Princes of society, they were called by a reporter from the Washington Post, who was at Camp Kioga doing a piece on the War at Home.

  Maybe he was just doing the assignment so he could rusticate at a glamorous resort, but George didn’t care. He was more interested in the reporter—Mr. McClatchy—than he was in the topic. Mr. McClatchy took notes and asked questions. He was old and kind of fat, and wore thick glasses. He was no Clark Kent but he clearly had a passion for what he did.

  Journalism, he declared, shone a light in the darkest places of the world.

  “But what’s the story here?” asked George. “Princes of society? Who cares?”

  “People who buy advertisements in the paper, that’s who. They want to read about folks who aren’t like them, folks who live a different way.”

  “How does that shine a light?”

  “You never know. Sometimes it doesn’t. And sometimes you’re John Steinbeck.”

  George had read The Grapes of Wrath on the sly, because it was considered shocking and scandalous. He had devoured page after page, with a sense of complete fascination. And he wasn’t scandalized by the ending, which had caused the book to be banned all over the place on account of some lady kept a guy from starving by feeding him her mother’s milk. He thought it was heroic and beautiful in a weird way, like the rest of the book. It wasn’t the kind of thing George aspired to write, though.

  “Mr. Steinbeck writes fiction,” he pointed out.

  “He’s a war correspondent now, for the New York Herald Tribune.”

  “I keep a journal,” George offered.

  “It’s a good habit to get into,” Mr. McClatchy said. “Organizes your thoughts. Just make sure it never falls into the wrong hands.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  George behaved like the prince he’d been dubbed. He was the best in sports, winning all the races, leading expeditions, basking in the admiration of the other kids. It all came naturally to him, and always had. Even in winter, the Bellamys spent several weeks in Killington, Vermont, at a ski resort. It was there that George had decided to join the elite Tenth Mountain Division of the U.S. Army. He’d be a ranger on skis, like some kind of superhero—except he would be for real.

  Figuring out what his superpower would be this summer was a challenge. The ability to see long distances, maybe, he thought one day as they were returning from a woodcraft expedition to the summit of Watch Hill. He shaded his eyes and surveyed the area, fancying he could see beyond the vast lake and ridge of mountains, clear across the Atlantic Ocean to the secret place where his father was.

  “Who are those people?” asked Charles, pausing to point at a group in a clearing much closer at hand. It appeared to be a family in the yard of a boxy clapboard house. Some kind of celebration was taking place.

  “Let’s go see,” said George. “Say, Warren, are you coming?”

  They’d made friends with a boy from Larchmont named Warren Byrne, who thought he was important because he had attended camp every summer from the beginning of time, to hear him tell it.

  “We’re behind enemy lines,” George said, signaling Charles and Warren to drop low and fall into one of their favorite fantasies. They were getting pretty good at not making a sound while skulking through the forest.

  As they drew closer, the thin, scratchy sound of a Victrola could be heard, along with laughter and conversation. There was a banner strung up over the front porch that read Farewell, Stuart. We Love You. />
  “This is where the Gordons live,” explained Warren Byrne. The Gordons owned and ran the camp.

  George had never thought of them as a family, just as workers who kept the dining room going and made sure the sheets were changed and the garbage taken out, the cabins cleaned and swept, the lawns mowed. And here, tucked away on a forgotten acre of the camp’s premises, they had a whole separate life.

  Stuart, it appeared, was a soldier.

  “He’s a marine,” George told the others. “You can tell by his sage-green uniform. And he’s wearing an overseas cover, so I betcha he’s shipping out. Marines call that kind of cap a pisscutter,” he added, eliciting snickers from the younger boys.

  “Stuart’s my big brother,” said a voice behind them.

  George’s stomach dropped. They’d been caught, behind enemy lines. Should they make a run for it? Fight their way free? Surrender immediately?

  Warren Byrne scampered off, like a coward.

  “Jeez, it’s only some girl,” Charles said, grabbing George’s sleeve and pointing out the intruder.

  “I ain’t some girl,” she said. “I got a name. It’s Jane. Jane Gordon. And Stuart’s my big brother and what are you doing spying on us?”

  “We were just exploring,” George said peevishly. He didn’t know why he was peeved. Maybe because she’d caught them, or maybe because she was just a dumb girl. She was about Charles’s size, maybe a little bigger, with frizzy reddish hair and big teeth and one skinny arm threaded through a wire basket. She wore overalls of faded blue denim, the cuffs rolled up above scabby knees. The shins were bruised and the feet were bare.

  “Stuart’s going to the Specific Ocean,” she announced with lofty authority.

  “You mean the Pacific Ocean.”

  “I mean what I mean.” She sniffed. “He’s gonna be fighting in New Guinea. You know, like a guinea hen. And I have to go. Just because there is a celebration going on doesn’t mean I can put off my chores.”

  “What kind of chores?” asked Charles.

  “Come on,” said Jane. “I’ll show you.” Without looking to see if they followed, she marched along a beaten path, her dirty feet kicking up puffs of dust.