Seventeenth Summer

by Maureen Daly

  I felt my heart beat faster. “Really, have you, Jack? Maybe you could come up sometime then!”

  “Sure, I could!” and he made his voice bright and confident, so confident that I knew he didn’t mean it himself.

  “What would your mother and dad say,” I asked, knowing in my heart that he was thinking exactly the same thing.

  “What could they say, Angie? I’m pretty old now. I do mostly what I want.”

  “But they would want to know why you wanted to come back. It’s so far. What could you ever tell them, Jack?”

  “Maybe I could say I want to come back to see Swede and Fitz.” He didn’t laugh as he spoke and I didn’t feel like laughing, either. With the end only two weeks away it was no laughing matter.

  Jack crushed his cigarette out with a thoughtful sigh. “Don’t worry, Angie. I may not make it right away but I’ll get up here again sometime.”

  Kitty and I worked in the garden for a whole day with the sun hot on our backs, pulling up the rows of overgrown vegetables and piling them in a heap in one corner of the garden to dry. The radishes had blossomed with white flowers and gone to seed, the round red radishes grown into long, gnarled roots, coarse and reedy. The leaves were rough and scratchy. Even the onion stems were thick and bulbous, topped with purple flower clusters. In the late afternoon we were finished, hands scratched and legs muddy, and we cleaned ourselves while my mother set out tea for us on the back doorstep. While we sipped at our cups Kitty was lying on the lawn, chewing a bit of grass. “Too bad you have to go away, Angie,” she piped up, “’cause we are really going to have a fine fire when those things are dried.”

  I tried to pretend I hadn’t heard her, but everything I did and saw and heard seemed to bring the days nearer to the end. Along the side of the house, the earlier hollyhocks had dropped their last blossoms and the seeds in the seed pods were like round, green overcoat buttons. The first asters were out, smoky-purple and heavy on the stems.

  Lorraine came home from work early, even before I had set the table for supper. “We didn’t have much to do this afternoon, so they let us out ahead of time,” she explained. “The summer business has slowed up so we aren’t very busy anymore.”

  “I’m glad you came home,” Mom said. “It seems as if I’ve hardly seen you this summer at all—with one thing and another.”

  “I know it,” she answered. “The first part went so fast and this last part is just dragging. At first everything seemed so busy and now it doesn’t seem as if it should be summer anymore at all.” I was busy at the open kitchen window and heard their voices on the back lawn.

  Lorraine spoke again and her tone was cautious. “This afternoon I was thinking, Mom, that if all of you don’t mind … I’d like to go back to Chicago!”

  My mother said something I couldn’t hear but Lorraine objected, “But she won’t have to come. Freshmen don’t have to be there till the tenth of the month, but I just want to go back early. There are some girl friends I would like to visit—a couple of them asked me to stay with them if I ever got to the city. And besides,” she added hastily, “I’ve got a lot of important reading to get finished before I take my English comprehensive exam this year and I would like to get a head start—before the regular homework gets too heavy.”

  At supper my mother told us that Lorraine had decided to go back. “Of course, I think you’re crazy, but if you want to, go ahead,” Margaret shrugged.

  “Your father won’t like it, either,” my mother objected, “but I suppose it’s all right.”

  “I’ll get a lot of reading done and having worked all summer, this will be like a vacation before starting school again,” Lorraine explained. “I’ll just take a few things and you can send the rest with Angie when she comes.”

  “It really seems a little foolish to me…” My mother was still hesitant but it was decided. Lorraine would leave on Sunday.

  That night in bed she nudged me, saying softly, “Asleep, Angie?”

  “No. I’m wide awake,” I whispered. “What do you want?”

  She was lying staring up at the ceiling, her arms behind her head, and she had been silent for so long I had thought she was asleep. “Guess what, Angie—I saw Martin today.”

  I felt myself instinctively grow cautious and eased my voice into casualness. “Did you really? What did he say, Lorraine?” As far as I knew she hadn’t seen him since the Sunday night he had failed to call, and except for the night on the front steps she hadn’t mentioned him once.

  “He didn’t say anything,” she answered. “I just saw him driving by in the car.” She waited a moment.

  “He looked so nice, Angie. He went by quite fast so I just got a quick look but he had on that brown tweed suit of his that I always liked and his hat pushed way back on his head. He looked just like he used to look….”

  “Did he see you, Lorraine?”

  “Well,” and her voice was careful, picking the words thoughtfully, “I was just standing on the corner waiting to cross Park Avenue and he came up a side street and then turned down the Avenue … It was during lunch hour and I think he was hurrying uptown to eat. Angeline, he didn’t see me….”

  Her voice was very quiet now and very empty, tired with lonesomeness. “He didn’t see me,” she repeated. “I’m almost sure.”

  She caught a late afternoon train for Chicago on Sunday. We all went out for a ride right after dinner—so she could say “good-bye” to things for the summer. We took the lake highway out to Pete’s and I noticed that already the swamp grass along the road was turning yellow and the glossy leaves of the willow trees were a fading yellow-green. There were birds everywhere, flying low in the bushes and bending the tall grasses with their weight. Lorraine looked out the car window as we drove, not saying anything.

  We passed fields of wheat, ripe and heavy-headed, honeycolored in the sunshine, and already long yellow feathers of early goldenrod grew in the ditches. There was a lush heat over everything; a slow, simmering heat that made you warm from the inside out. “We’ll go for a turn around the park road. Would you like that, Lorraine?” my father asked and she nodded. I secretly hoped we might see Swede and Jack down by the boats as we passed, but the boat was empty, bobbing quietly by the dock.

  Farther out on the lake sails tipped the skyline, matching the white of the clouds. We pulled up along the bank of the lagoon to give Lorraine a last summer look at the park and the water. It was peacefully quiet and water lilies like white wax floated on broad green pads, rocking on the slow current. “I never knew a summer could go so fast,” she mused. Near the edge of the lagoon floated a dead white fish, its sides shining like mother-of-pearl, almost beautiful in the sunlight. I heard Lorraine sigh a little.

  “Dad, I think it’s almost traintime now. Let’s just drive down Main Street once more before you take me to the station,” she said.

  The shops were all closed and the street was calm with Sunday afternoon quiet, but there were a few ears lining the curbs and Lorraine kept looking from side to side, very casually. We went from one end of the street to the other and then my father turned toward the station saying cheerfully, “Well, Lorraine, there’s your last look at Fond du Lac for a while anyway.”

  “Oh, well,” she said.

  I carried one bag and Kitty lugged the other with both hands, and we waited with Lorraine at the platform until the train came and stood waving after her as it disappeared smaller, smaller down the track.

  Going home we drove down Main Street again and though I looked on both sides of the street, noticing each car, I didn’t see Martin’s long green coupe that time either.

  Fall was coming early that year. There was a queer sadness in the fact that summer should die so quickly, this of all years. Each day the freshness in the garden and the fields faded a little. The morning dews lay chill and frosty and in the evening long, quiet dusks came early, growing dark around the treetops while the birds lingered longer, with a strange melancholy in their songs.


  Jack came over every morning, stopping off on his bakery route, and he called me every afternoon just after lunch. Once he remarked, laughing, “Angie, I never knew being in love took so much time!”

  Every night we went out somewhere. Once when I was rushing through the supper dishes my mother came into the kitchen, the evening paper in her hand, saying, “Angeline, I hardly think it’s …” and she paused. “You shouldn’t really be seeing …”

  “What did you say, Mom?” I asked, my heart pounding.

  She looked at me a moment and smiled an odd, soft smile. “Oh, well …” she said quietly and went back into the living room.

  For the last week she had been mending my clothes, tightening snap fasteners on my skirts and sewing buttons on my pajamas for school. Newspapers were spread in one corner of her bedroom and she laid my clothes in neat, careful piles, ready to be packed. The drapes and spread were ready for my room and she was just knitting the last sleeve on a new pale-pink sweater.

  “We’ll have no last-minute worries at all,” she remarked one afternoon and I realized suddenly that she meant what she said. She knew that Jack would be leaving just a few days after I had gone, but she wasn’t worrying about that at all. And I realized suddenly, too, that she didn’t know that that was the only thing on my mind through those last days. But how could she know? To me every moment passed with an awareness that it had slipped by and that time was coming to an end. But to her these last days really meant nothing.

  When Jack and I were together neither of us talked about it much—it was a refusing to admit and a refusing to believe that September was only a few days away. But without saying a word, we began to do “last things” together. One night out at Pete’s the whole realization swept over me, coming so suddenly, startlingly, that it made my cheeks feel numb. All the same crowd was there that we had seen every night all summer. The air was still full of the damp cool smell of beer and the musty pleasantness of old wood, and the jukebox in the corner was still blaring out its nickel’s worth of music every few minutes. I seemed to see them all separately—the familiar town boys standing at the bar, laughing, and girls with long sweaters pulled over their summer dresses. For them everything was the same. Only one or two of them would be going away. All the rest would be here night after night for nights on end, till outside the lake would be frozen over and the snow white on the ground and the tall bare trees creaking in the wind of winter. This time two weeks from now they would still be here. Two months from now they would still be here when I had counted out my last nights and rationed out my last minutes.

  There were memories in everything. They seemed to hover in the corners and hang wispy in the music that came from the jukebox. They were floating like dust motes everywhere I looked. Swede danced with me once and he said softly, under the music, “Jack’s going to miss you, Angie. You’re a good kid—I’m sorry we didn’t get to know you sooner, that’s all,” and I had to keep my head against his shoulder so he couldn’t see my face just then.

  Later Jack and I sat in a back booth by ourselves in silence, just being glad to be together, and we could hear the sharp voices of the boys in the front room playing cards and the muffle of feet dancing on the wooden floor, mingled with the music and the ring of beer glasses on the table—all the old, familiar sounds that were part of Pete’s. Sitting on its perch, the old parrot was sleeping quietly with its head lolling to one side and its tail feathers drooping.

  Jack gave a little laugh, smiling at his own thoughts, and looking up at me, he said, “Remember that first night, Angie?”

  I nodded and he laughed again, shaking his head. That’s all he said.

  We decided to go sailboating one of those last nights and Swede went with us, but when we got to the lake it was dark and choppy, beating angrily against the boat as it rocked against the pier and sending high foam up over the gravel walk. The sky was dark and threatening and there was no moon. “I’d rather be a dead Chinaman than go out on a night like that,” Swede muttered, shuddering, so we all got back into the car and drove uptown instead.

  The next evening the three of us went out again, going along Willow Road far into the country and then back down the highway that runs along the lake and finally through the rutted roads of the silent, empty fairgrounds with its buildings already shuttered closed, as if they were already asleep for the winter. We even drove out to the narrow gravel road, past the field where the field daisies were still blooming and the thin trees stood still and dark and there was the same breathless mystery; the same strange quiet.

  I remember Jack’s remarking, “To look at it at night you’d never know anything had changed, would you?”

  But it couldn’t end as soundlessly and as painlessly as it had begun—that I knew. All the days and nights and warm weeks of sunshine couldn’t fade away into nothingness like breathy whispers as soon as they were spoken. They were too full for that. There was too much behind it. Even as I counted those last hours I knew that something had to happen. I didn’t know what it would be but I knew it would come—somehow.

  And it did. It was the third night before I left. We went on a wiener roast together, about ten of us, as a sort of farewell party for both Jack and me. Jack had his car and we stopped to pick up Swede and Dollie and then Fitz and Margie, crowding all four of them into the back seat with the kindling wood and a picnic basket, while the others went in another car. We drove out to a wooded ledge about five miles from town where the trees grew thick and the woods were as wild and overgrown as a forest preserve.

  It was barely dark and the trails were easy to find between the trees as we trailed along in Indian file, each carrying something, while Jack came last with his arms heaped with kindling wood, dragging a car robe behind him. There were clearings in the trees along the path, scattered with bits of charred logs and the dark ashes of other picnic fires. As we went in deeper and deeper, the woods seemed filled with a quiet listening, as if it hadn’t heard another human sound for long years.

  Margie led us to a place she knew of where the ground was flat and there was a heap of blackened stones already arranged for a fireplace. Swede pulled some paper from his pockets, bunching it together and placing kindling sticks carefully over the stones, while the rest of us scattered to look for more wood. The trees grew close together here, thick-trunked box elders with occasional slim birches slipped in between, and the dead branches on the ground were tangled with vines and matted with damp leaves. We broke off what smaller branches we could and kicked at rotten stumps till they rooted out of the earth, sending up a damp, mossy smell. Margie was pushing along beside Jack and Fitz who went in another direction. It was the first time I had seen her for almost two weeks—since the night of the fair—and I was anxious to talk with her. Jack was a little distance away between the trees, breaking sticks sharply over his knees. He couldn’t have heard us.

  “Margie,” I whispered cautiously, “I’ve meant to call you for almost a week but didn’t get around to it. I wanted to ask you how things were going with Fitz and you.”

  I couldn’t see her face clearly in the half-darkness but she shrugged. “We’ve been going out as always since two days after that night at the fair. I stayed home for one night and then decided I didn’t like it so I called him up the next day. I guess he knew I would. Anyway, I’m almost glad I did.”

  “So am I,” I told her. “Otherwise maybe you two wouldn’t be here tonight and it wouldn’t be the same at all.”

  “Yeah, you get kind of used to having a boy around,” she answered. Jack returned then and we turned back through the woods toward the fire. It was shining through the trees, licking light around the dark trunks and up into the branches.

  Margie caught up with me and whispered softly in my ear as we walked. “Thanks a lot for not telling, Angie. I could tell by the way he acted that he really didn’t know what went on at all.”

  Back around the fire the others were sharpening green sticks for the wieners and Dollie was butterin
g rolls with the handle of a spoon—Jack had brought them from the bakery, fresh and hot. Fitz and I spread the blankets carefully on the ground, watching out for twigs and sharp stones, and then had to fold them up again to look for a jackknife someone had laid down somewhere. We each cooked for ourselves, putting the wieners on sticks and holding them over the flame, turning slowly, carefully, till the tight skin burst, sending juice sputtering into the fire. The fragrance was tantalizing and Swede jammed his impatiently between a roll and ate it half-roasted.

  “You big, old pig,” Dollie laughed at him across the fire. “No wonder you’re so fat.” The firelight dancing made dimples in her cheeks and a soft, dark fluff of her hair, thick and shiny.

  Someone had brought along some bottles of Coke but no one had remembered to bring a bottle opener, so Jack twisted at the tops with the edge of his jackknife till he had to give up in desperation, muttering under his breath. No one wanted to go into town for an opener so the bottles lay untouched on the grass. “Maybe afterwards,” Jack said.

  At first the fire was so hot that it crackled and snapped, sending twigs sparking out onto the grass till we had to draw our blankets farther back, out of reach. I almost forgot that we were miles from town; miles from anyone else. While we ate, everyone chattered and laughed so loudly that the circle of brightness around the fire seemed to be a room by itself in the middle of the forest darkness, walled with light. I looked furtively behind me once, awed by the silent bushes, dark and lonely, changing shape in the flicker of the firelight. “Something the matter, Angie?” Jack asked, touching my arm. But I shook my head.

  As the fire burned lower we toasted marshmallows over the flames and Dollie pulled off the first toasted skin, retoasting the soft white ball that was left on the stick, licking her sticky fingers like a baby. Margie lay back on the blanket, looking up into the darkness, and Fitz crawled over to sit down beside her. She asked him for a cigarette and held his hand to steady it as he brought a match to the tip. Then he tossed the match away and put his hand back in hers, looking into the firelight. I felt almost sorry for Fitz then, he seemed to want to be liked so badly. The others pulled their blankets closer to the fire and tossed the paper bags and bits of wax paper into it, watching them go up in a quick blaze.