All Our Summers

by Holly Chamberlin

  Julie nodded.

  “Forgiveness is not a lazy person’s option,” Judith went on. “It takes courage and hard work. But once it’s achieved, it’s forever.”

  “Even if the person commits the same crime again?” Julie asked.

  Judith laughed. “Forgiveness isn’t a free pass for future bad behavior!”

  “Scott thinks he needs to be forgiven. I mean, he knows he’s guilty.”

  “He is guilty,” Judith said firmly. “End of story.”

  “But don’t you think—”

  “No,” Judith interrupted. “I don’t think that the wife or the other woman is to blame for the man’s decision to cheat. Ever. Look, the guy doesn’t have to be a total shit to cheat on his wife. Maybe he’s genuinely miserable with her and maybe she really is a harridan. But there are better ways of dealing with a bad relationship than committing adultery.” Judith reached across the table and patted Julie’s hand. “And you, my dear, are no harridan.”

  Julie smiled. “I think I’ll have some more,” she said, taking hold of the serving spoon in the bowl of curried chicken salad.

  “You’re not being scrutinized while under my roof. It’s against my policy.”

  “Thanks. You know, my father would have been so disappointed in Scott. But I can’t imagine Dad confronting him about the affair. He was so protective of me, but . . . Would he have wanted me to get a divorce? Would he have understood if I didn’t want that? Would he have forgiven Scott?”

  “Ken is gone, Julie,” Judith said firmly. “It doesn’t matter what he would or would not have done about Scott’s infidelity. All that matters is what you feel, what you want to salvage or preserve, and what you want to let go of.”

  “What I feel is overwhelmed,” Julie admitted. “I don’t know what to do five minutes from now, let alone tomorrow or the day after that.” Suddenly, Julie made a decision. “Don’t tell anyone, because I’m not sure I’ll be able to go through with it, but my principal is urging me to apply for a scholarship awarded by the Ackroyd Institute. There’s a week-long intensive course next spring for early childhood educators. The focus is on religious tolerance and understanding.”

  “That’s fantastic,” Judith said with genuine enthusiasm. “But I can understand why you don’t want people to know. You don’t need the pressure.”

  Julie wondered. Maybe pressure was exactly what she needed. But pressure from within.

  “What would be the downside of applying?” Judith asked.

  “Not being chosen.”

  “That doesn’t have anything to do with the process of applying, though,” Judith pointed out. “Just doing the work of completing the application can only be a positive. A challenge. That’s how I see it. But it’s your call.”

  “Yes,” Julie said. “It is.” And that, she realized, felt empowering.

  “Coffee?” Judith offered.

  Julie accepted. She was in no rush to leave.

  Chapter 89

  Bonnie was sitting at the kitchen table, going through the want ads in the Yorktide Chronicle. It was a disheartening enterprise.

  Such and such a skill required.

  Knowledge of so and so necessary.

  Familiarity with blah blah a plus.

  College diploma a must.

  Bonnie sighed and pushed the newspaper away. Well, she hadn’t gone to college; she hadn’t even considered it, though she had liked school well enough. Maybe it wasn’t too late for her to enroll in a course or two at the community college, but to what end?

  Maybe, Bonnie thought, instead of reading the want ads she should be looking for a class designed for people reentering the workforce after the age of sixty. What would such a class teach you? How to dress so that you didn’t look your age? How to speak so that you didn’t sound your age? Interview protocol in the world of e-mail and text and FaceTime and drones, whatever they were?

  Bonnie took a sip of her tea. Experience had taught her that one didn’t necessarily need a college education to succeed in life. Carol had gone to college for only a year and look at all she had achieved. But Carol was different. She had ambition. She was restless and could be, Bonnie assumed, ruthless. She was all the things Bonnie was not.

  Ken, too, had been a successful man and there had been no question of his ever going to college. From the day he was born, he was destined to inherit the family’s auto repair business. As a little boy, he spent endless hours at the garage with his father and uncle, absorbing the atmosphere, becoming familiar with the smells of paint and grease, learning how to perform an oil change and identify every bit of an engine. At the age of twelve, he began to work part-time as an apprentice. After high school, he took on a full-time position and by the age of twenty-six, he had taken over a great many of his father’s responsibilities and a few of his uncle’s as well. Ken’s father, Ken Elgort, Sr., didn’t officially retire for another ten years, and his uncle for twelve, but everyone knew that increasingly Ken was in charge.

  And though Ken had brought his family’s business to new heights of financial soundness, he and Bonnie had still had to scrimp and save so that Julie could continue her education after high school. It was clear from early on that she wanted to work with small children in a capacity that required a college education and Bonnie and Ken had done all they were capable of doing to make that degree possible for their daughter.

  It had been well worth their every effort.

  Bonnie finished her tea and brought the cup to the sink to rinse. Nicola’s schooling hadn’t been a hardship for Carol, she remembered, but on her own initiative, Nicola had insisted on working through each semester to help defray costs. If Nicola had been born with a silver spoon in her mouth, no one meeting the humble and hardworking twenty-five-year-old would know it. Bonnie would be lying to herself if she said that she had had nothing to do with her niece’s good character.

  She would also be lying to herself if she failed to admit that Nicola was already a fundamentally decent human being when she arrived in Maine. Yes, she had fallen in with a bad crowd in New York and caused her fair share of trouble, but both Bonnie and Ken had seen right from the start that the real Nicola was kind and loving—and wanting to be loved.

  Carol Ascher had not done a bad job at parenting. She had probably made mistakes. All parents did. But she had not ruined her daughter’s chances for a happy, healthy life—in spite of what Bonnie had pretended for so long. In spite of what she had needed to believe, that Carol’s success was somehow unearned, mere luck.

  Bonnie squirmed. Had her need for attention been so rabid? Had she really let jealousy have an unregulated upper hand? What would it have cost her to give credit where credit was due? Carol had earned her success. And showing appropriate respect for Carol’s accomplishments in Nicola’s hearing would have been the right thing to do. Nicola should admire her mother.

  She should.

  The landline rang, startling Bonnie. Caller ID told her it was Nicola. Bonnie had seen her niece hug her mother after dinner at Judith’s house. She had felt ever so slightly jealous, not enough to feel guilty about. Not really. It was good for a mother and child to be close.

  It was.

  “Nicola,” Bonnie said into the receiver. “I’m so glad you called. I was just thinking about you and your mother.”

  Chapter 90

  The tenderness Carol had felt in Nicola’s brief hug after dinner at Judith’s had left her feeling rather melancholy. Nicola’s touch had emphasized the fact that for so long Carol had been a stranger to the love and affection of her family, isolated from the day-to-day interactions that allowed people to be truly close and forgiving of each other.

  But there had been no other path open to Carol all those summers ago. She had been compelled to leave Yorktide. And she would do the same again.

  Carol settled in her father’s armchair—was she imagining that it now felt more comfortable than it had at the start of the summer?—and within moments she was transported to that fat
eful summer of 1974.

  Stepping off the bus at Port Authority had been like stepping into an alien universe. She had been immediately overwhelmed but as equally determined not to dash across the station to a bus that would take her back to Yorktide. Her neighbors would see her return as proof of failure. Failure was not an option.

  For the first years of her new life, Carol lived in a women’s hotel on Third Avenue in midtown called The Atlanta. It was at best a descendant of a nineteenth-century boardinghouse, or a faded version of the Barbizon residential hotel for women in which so many famous and infamous women had lived—Lauren Bacall, Joan Didion, Grace Kelly, Sylvia Plath . . .

  Rent was cheap. There was one meal provided per day, in the evening. It was usually tasteless though filling; only occasionally was it inedible for all but the least discriminating of the girls. Men were not allowed beyond the lobby. Alcohol was not permitted. Carol’s room was barely larger than a closet. The heat either worked or it didn’t. She shared a bathroom in the hall with five other girls, none of whom were in the habit of tidying up after herself.

  New York City in the seventies was not a nice place. There were frequent sanitation strikes. The subways were filthy. Drugs were rampant. Times Square was not the Disney-fied family playground it eventually became. Muggings were common. Racial tensions were high.

  The first job Carol landed was as a waitress in a diner. Tips were generally bad, but she was allowed one meal per seven-hour shift (the food was much better than what was served at The Atlanta) and the other waitresses were all right, mostly leaving one another alone, occasionally lending one another a hand when the lunch rush was on. It was the owner who became a problem, with his wandering hands and habit of leering with his watery pale-blue eyes. After three weeks of dodging his disgusting attempts at seduction Carol lost her temper, loudly told him never to come near her again, and was promptly fired. There was no one to whom Carol felt she could complain and be heard.

  Next, she worked at a five-and-dime. That was bearable if boring, and she only left when the store closed its doors due to lack of business. One of the girls at The Atlanta suggested Carol look for work as a nanny. Carol ignored the suggestion; she had no interest in children.

  Office work was not a possibility at first. She had no suitable clothes and few secretarial skills; she didn’t even bother to sign up with a temp agency, not until she could afford something smart to wear and until she had practiced on the typewriter one of the staff at The Atlanta rented out for such purposes.

  Within a few weeks of her arrival at The Atlanta, Carol found herself chums with three other girls who had come to New York City with the dream of a life nothing like the one they had left behind. Years later, Carol was to realize that each of these girls had been very much a “type”; no doubt she had appeared to them as another “type.”

  Annie hailed from a small town in Colorado. She was a self-proclaimed wild child, a dope smoker, a dabbler in hard drugs, into the downtown music and art scene, a believer in free love. She was also sweet, and Carol liked Annie enough to go with her one night to a club on the Lower East Side. The club wasn’t Carol’s scene. The music was too loud and half of the revelers were zoned out. Carol didn’t like to be out of control, or to be around people who were.

  Annie died of a drug overdose about four months later. Her body, lying crumpled in an alley between two buildings, had not been found for several days after her death.

  Betty, who had the room to the right of Carol’s, had been in the city for about eight months when she became engaged to a very rich, older man. Betty was smug about her success; it was what she had come to New York from a small town in Ohio to achieve. She wasn’t naïve. She knew—or claimed she knew—just what sort of situation she was signing on for. The day she moved out of The Atlanta, fetched by one of her fiancé’s staff in a big black limousine, she was wearing a fur wrap and a large diamond and emerald ring, both gifts from her soon-to-be husband.

  For several years after, Carol noted her former housemate in the society pages, smiling and magnificently decked out, until one day she realized she hadn’t seen any tidbit about Mrs. Giles Treehorn for some time. A little asking around unearthed the information that Mr. Treehorn had divorced her for wife number four, an in-génue originally from Kansas City. Carol never knew what happened to the former Mrs. Giles Treehorn, nee Betty Murphy, but she had a pretty good idea of what might have become of her.

  Andrea, the third girl Carol had gotten to know at The Atlanta, had moved on about the time Carol had done. Carol had not seen or heard from Andrea for twenty-five years when she ran into her one evening in the ladies’ room of a swanky hotel bar. Andrea was a partner in a law firm that specialized in corporate real-estate deals. She had come to New York City to pursue a career in the art gallery scene; that had not worked out, so she had cut her losses and gone to law school. Carol admired her old chum’s practicality. She told Andrea that she had her own interior design firm. “You were one of the lucky ones,” Andrea commented. “You found what you came to the city to find.” They exchanged business cards. One said something about getting together for a drink one evening. It might have been Carol. They never did.

  Back in those early years, Carol remembered, she had lied to her family in her letters, told them her life was just fine, and had actively discouraged them from visiting. She couldn’t stand them to be witness to her tiny room at The Atlanta or, later, to the crappy little hovel on the Lower East Side to which she retired each evening; she didn’t want them to know that she cleaned toilets for a living, when she wasn’t waiting tables in a shabby diner.

  And she hadn’t wanted to give Bonnie the chance to smirk at what was so obviously not the glamourous life her big sister had left home to find.

  But maybe Bonnie wouldn’t have smirked. Maybe she would have offered a genuine word of comfort.

  It was too late to know.

  Carol sighed. What a true success Bonnie had made of her life. She was loved and admired by family, friends, and the community. If that wasn’t a triumph, then nothing was.

  Suddenly, Carol was struck by a frightening thought. Maybe all those years in New York, fighting to survive on her own, had ruined her for a simple life with her family. Maybe she was no longer capable of learning how to truly connect with them in a way that would prove beneficial to them all.

  The thought was heartbreaking.

  Abruptly, Carol stood from her father’s armchair and strode toward the front door. She would go for a drive. She needed to get away from Ferndean.

  Chapter 91

  “I love this view,” Nicola said. “That big, old white pine is just magical.”

  “Your aunt used to spend hours under that tree reading,” Carol replied. “She was at the library almost every day of summer break. I imagine she belongs to a book group today.”

  “Actually,” Nicola told her mother, “when Uncle Ken got sick he needed an awful lot of care and Aunt Bonnie quit everything, her book group, her quilting circle. She even had to stop doing the accounting for the garage. Luckily, she had been training one of the Elgort cousins to take over one day.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Carol said. “Poor Bonnie. Always sacrificing herself for others.”

  “I don’t think she’d want our pity,” Nicola said. “She made her choices freely.” Still, Nicola thought, gazing out over the expanse of green behind Ferndean House. Who had ever taken care of Bonnie? Besides Ken, that is. But now he was gone....

  Suddenly, Nicola remembered what Judith had told her, that Bonnie had never made peace with the fact that Carol and Ken had dated. If that was true, and Judith didn’t lie, then her aunt had in some ways been her own worst enemy all these years.

  Sitting side by side with her mother this mid-summer afternoon, Nicola believed they had reached enough of a state of détente for her to mention this interesting bit of the family’s past without causing a blowup.

  “I only recently found out that you and Ken
dated before you left for New York,” she said evenly. “I was at Julie’s and I came across on old picture. Ken’s arm was around your waist. Julie explained. And then I talked to Bonnie.”

  Her mother’s eyes widened. “It never occurred to me that you might not know. I figured that living in Yorktide these past ten years you would have heard the gossip. I’m rather amazed that you didn’t.”

  “Would people have tried to keep it a secret from me?” Nicola asked.

  “I don’t know why. Ken and I were totally unsuited, as I’m sure you can believe.”

  “So, what attracted you to him?” Nicola asked.

  Her mother smiled. “He was very handsome.”

  “Just physical attraction?” Nicola pressed.

  “No, Ken was a good guy, one of the best. I don’t have to tell you that.”

  “He was. He . . .” Nicola took a steadying breath. “He really became a father to me. I didn’t understand until I came here to live with Bonnie and Ken just what I had been missing.”

  “I’m very glad you had Ken in your life,” her mother replied softly. “And I’m so very sorry I didn’t visit Yorktide when I got back from India. I should have.”

  Nicola felt a wave of gratitude. “Thank you,” she said. “Your apology means a lot.”

  “And thank you for talking to me about your uncle. About it all. The past is always with us. We can’t ever outrun it.” Her mother smiled. “Your aunt would be shocked to hear me say that. She thinks I have no respect for what’s gone before. But I do.”

  Nicola knew that her mother had respect for the past; why else would she have kept Nicola’s childhood bedroom exactly as it had been the last day Nicola had slept there?

  “Do you miss New York?” Nicola asked. The question hadn’t occurred to her before now. It was an important one.

  “Yes,” her mother said promptly. “It’s been—it was—my home for the majority of my life.”