The Summer Wives: Epic page-turning romance perfect for the beach

1951 (MIRANDA SCHUYLER)

1.

ON THE MORNING of my mother’s wedding, I watched a pair of lobster boats crawl across the sea outside my bedroom window, setting their pots while the sun rose. They were some distance apart, one to the east of the Flood Rock lighthouse and one to the west, and I wouldn’t have known they were lobstermen—I knew nothing about fishing in those days—except that I had a pair of binoculars, and I saw them dropping the pots, one by one, from the sterns of their boats. Each pot was attached to a rope, and at the end of the rope was a colored buoy that bobbed cheerfully in the water as the vessel pulled away.

Behind me, my mother stirred. “Is that you, Miranda?” she asked, in a slurred, sleepy voice.

“Yes.”

“What time is it?”

“Only five thirty. Go back to sleep, Mama.”

“What”—mumbling—“so early?”

“Watching the lobster boats.”

She sighed and grunted, the way you do when you’re still half-asleep, and you settle yourself gratefully back on a pillow and close your eyes. “Strange girl, Miranda,” she muttered.

I wondered if she remembered she was getting married today. Sometimes when you sleep deeply enough, you forget everything you ever knew, even your own name, and Winthrop Island is possibly the quietest place in the world at night, except for the pulse of the ocean: so black and velvet that sleep comes as easy as that, as closing your eyes. You fall and fall, like an anchor that finds no bottom, and I don’t believe I have ever again slept as I slept throughout that summer of 1951, in my bedroom at my stepfather’s sprawling house on the Island.

Except, on that morning at the beginning of June, the morning of Mama’s wedding, Hugh Fisher wasn’t quite my stepfather. The fateful summer still lay before me, a reel of film waiting to unspool, and how could I know that I was right now witnessing its first momentous scene? I mean, you never do suspect what inconsequential event will change the course of your life. This particular morning, I only thought about the wedding to come. That was the affair of the day, wasn’t it? The great occasion? Instead of sleeping deeply, I’d woken at dawn after a restless night, and now I knelt by the window, holding the binoculars to my eyes as the lobstermen labored on the water, and the sun climbed drowsily above the ocean.

I watched the lighthouse change color, from violet to palest pink to gold, and the surrounding rocks emerge from shadow, and the little buoys multiply in long, bobbing lines behind the boats. I watched the lobstermen shift about. In the easternmost boat, there were two of them: one short and broad-shouldered, wearing a striped shirt and a knitted cap; the other taller and leaner and bareheaded, hauling the wooden cages into the water while his shipmate baited them.

In the second boat, the one to the west, there was only one old man. He moved slowly, dropping maybe one trap for every three from the other boat, and as the light grew I saw the bulge of his tattooed arms, the silvery beard that grizzled around his face. He was nearly bald and chewed a pipe, and in my head I named him Popeye. I thought there was something awful and tragic about the way he baited each pot, attached line and buoy, and dragged it over the edge of the boat. Or maybe I only endowed him with those qualities in retrospect. Memory’s funny that way. At any rate, the eastern boat ran out of pots or something, because it turned around and started back for the harbor, disappearing behind the Flood Rock lighthouse for an instant or two and then reappearing, its white sides brilliant in the glare of the sun. At the same time the boat flashed back into view, Popeye was swinging another lobster pot over the side of his boat, and maybe a wave jogged him, or maybe he lost his footing, I don’t know. I’d returned my gaze to the other boat by then, and the lithe, bareheaded, carefree man who now stood at the wheel—a young man, arms and face richly tanned, curled hair whipping in the draft—so I never knew why Popeye went flying into the sea. I just saw the young man jolt, saw him turn his head and yell at his shipmate, saw him bend and yank off his rubber boots, and the next thing I knew he was diving into the water in a long, clean arc.

Now, I’ve heard many times that most fishermen don’t know how to swim, as a matter of superstition or something. If that’s true, this particular fisherman wasn’t the superstitious kind. A hundred yards is a long way to swim, especially in the cold northern waters of early June, but he swam them just like he was stroking laps in the YMCA pool, regular and sure of arm, minding not the distance or the chill or the chop of waves. As I knelt there on the floorboards of my bedroom, frozen tight, following his progress through the glass of the binoculars, he made a final surge and dove under the surface, right where Popeye had just ceased to flail and resigned himself to sinking, and I thought, God save us, how is such a skinny fellow going to drag a stocky, solid artifact like Popeye back to fresh air?

I held my own breath in solidarity with the two of them. My arms began to shake, so I leaned forward and steadied my elbows on the window frame, keeping that patch of water in view, counting the giant thuds of my heart. When I reached too many, I abandoned numbers and started to whimper.

Please, please, please.

That carefree boy. That poor old man.

Please, Lord, please.

I still remember the silent glitter of the sun on that water. The particular musty-salty-linen smell of that bedroom, newly aired after the winter hibernation, a smell that still recalls the terror of that moment to my mind. And sometimes I think, well, what if they’d never come up again? What if he’d never come up again? What if those two lobstermen had drowned together on the morning of my mother’s wedding, young and old, a terrible tragedy overclouding a day of promise, and I never knew either of them?

I guess there’s no answer to that question. Because just as I started to panic, to lower the binoculars and rise from my knees and shout for help, they exploded together through the glittering waves like a single breaching whale. The younger man lunged for a rope hanging off near the stern of Popeye’s boat, hauled Popeye over the side, hauled himself. Thwacked Popeye a good one right on the back, so Popeye vomited up a few gallons of cold salt water.

Then he grabbed the wheel of the boat with his left hand and the throttle with his right hand, and he made not for the harbor, a mile away on the sheltered side of the island, but for the nearest dock, Hugh Fisher’s dock, my almost-stepfather’s dock, the dock directly in line from my bedroom window.

Boy, did I rise then. I jumped straight up and ran for the door, ran down the stairs, ran to the kitchen, shouted at the kitchen maid to call the doctor, call the doctor, boat coming in, a man near drowned. A lobsterman.

Her pink face went round with amazement. “Who?” she cried.

“Some old fellow, out by himself!”

“Golly, that’ll be Mr. Silva!” She spun for the telephone hanging on the wall, and I threw open the kitchen door and ran down the soft green lawn, past the swimming pool, past the big white tents awaiting the wedding, past the boathouse, and down the wooden dock, where the breeze blew on my cheeks and the sun drenched me, and the drone of the lobster boat’s engine filled my ears like the sound of a thousand approaching honeybees.

2.

MY FATHER NAMED me Miranda. He was a teacher at a pureblood girls’ boarding school in Virginia: not an English teacher, as you might expect from a name like that, but an art teacher. Painting, mostly, although he also taught sculpture, as the traffic allowed.

Still, he loved books, especially old ones. He taught me to read when I was very small, two or three years old, and by the time I was five we were decanting Shakespeare aloud to each other, each of us taking parts. We sat in his study, a fusty, tiny, comfortable room with large windows. I took the leather chesterfield sofa while he filled the armchair nearby. We drank cocoa and the air smelled of chocolate and leather and especially books—you know the smell I mean—I don’t know if it’s the ink or the paper or the glue in the bindings, but it’s a very particular odor. I still smell it, somewhere in my memory, and it carries me back to that room and the sound of my father’s voice as he began John of Gaunt’s dying speech—

Methinks I am a prophet new inspired

And thus expiring do foretell of him …

He had a beautiful round baritone, and as he sat there in his armchair and spoke, one leg crossed over the other, wearing his soft shirt and tweed jacket and woolen vest while his blue eyes fixed not on the page—he knew the words—but upon or rather through the opposite wall of the study, I might have thought he really was the Duke of Lancaster, the great Plantagenet prince, splendid in his despair. To my mind, there was no man more heroic than my father.

This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,

Dear for her reputation throughout the world,

Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it

(here his voice shook with agony)

Like to a tenement or pelting farm:

England, bound in with the triumphant sea

Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege

Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame …

And he named me Miranda. Prospero’s daughter, raised alone by her magician father on an uncharted island of fairies and strange creatures. I used to wonder why he chose that particular character, that particular daughter, that particular play. I think it had something to do with the sea, which he always loved, and with tempests, which also fascinated him. There may be more than that, but I’ll never know. He embarked for England—“This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, this precious stone set in the silver sea”—on the second day of November 1943, when I was ten years old, and I last glimpsed him waving at the rail of a gray-painted troop ship, before it dissolved like a ghost into the dark mist of New York Harbor. That was all.

Still, I don’t think I’ve ever forgiven the sea for swallowing up my father like that. As I stood there at the end of the Greyfriars dock, watching the lobster boat tear toward me, the drone of its engine filled me with an unnamable thrill. Terror or joy, I couldn’t tell. It just seemed to me that watery Neptune, having swallowed my father, was now spitting something back eight years later.

Something in the shape of a stripling boy with dark, curling hair and tanned skin, who could rescue a man from drowning.

3.

NOW, I DIDN’T know much about boats in those days, but I knew enough to grab the rope the young man tossed me and loop it tight around one of the bollards. The tide was high and slack, and the boat rode only a foot or two beneath the wooden planks. Inside the boat lay Popeye, coughing and wheezing, bleeding all over the place from I don’t know where.

The young man lifted Popeye in his arms and hoisted him up toward the dock, where I hooked my arms around his shoulders and dragged him away from the edge. He was heavier than I thought, made of wet, compact bone and muscle, and my bare feet slipped against the wood. “Careful!” exclaimed the young man, leaping up beside me, and he tore open Popeye’s shirt and checked his heart, his breath, because he’d stopped wheezing and now lay limp in my arms.

“The doctor’s on his way!” I gasped out. “I saw you from the window.”

“Ah, Jesus Mary. His arm.”

I looked at Popeye’s left arm, which was bent horribly, leaking blood.

“Here,” said the youth, “hold it steady while I lift him. Can you do that? One, two, three.”

I scrambled to my feet and bent to cradle Popeye’s elbow while the young man scooped him carefully upward, lifting that weathered old fellow like—I don’t know—like a knight would lift a damsel. Now I could see the bone sticking through the skin, through the wet plaid shirt, but I wasn’t going to be sick, oh no. I thought, the nurses in the war saw far worse, didn’t they? Some nurse maybe tended my father. They hadn’t flinched, and neither would I. I laid Popeye’s arm across his middle as best I could, and we started down the dock to the lawn. Popeye remained still. I prayed he wasn’t dead. The sun hit the side of my face as we loped up the slope of the lawn, past the boathouse and the tents, up the steps of the terrace and around back to the kitchen, where the maid was waving for us.

“Put him right here, Joseph! I cleared the kitchen table. Doctor’ll be a minute. Oh Jesus Mary!” she cried. “Look at him! What happened?”

Down he went on the table. Joseph checked his chest again and swore. Bent over his face and pinched his nose and laid his mouth on Popeye’s mouth, breathed the air of his own lungs into Popeye’s lungs while the maid ran for kitchen towels or something. I just stood there, holding Popeye’s arm together, not knowing what else to do. After a breath or two, Popeye started to heave, and Joseph rolled him quick on his side. Out came another quart or so of water, more sputtering, a groan of misery, and the doctor burst through the door right that second, dressing gown flapping around his legs, thank God.

4.

THERE HAS NEVER been any such thing as a hospital on Winthrop Island, as I later learned. Either you were sick enough to head for the hospital on the mainland, or you made do in your bed at home. This doctor—Dr. Huxley—didn’t have a regular practice here. He was a summer resident who made himself available for emergencies on the understanding that he wasn’t to be disturbed during cocktail hour or golf.

Lucky for Popeye, the good doctor was an early riser who just happened to live half a mile up Winthrop Road from Greyfriars. He set Popeye’s broken arm and stitched up the holes in his hide, and Mr. Fisher had him put up in one of the guest bedrooms with strict instructions to watch for signs of pneumonia.

“What about his family?” I said. “Shouldn’t we telephone them or something?”

Joseph looked down at me kindly. “He hasn’t got any family. Wife died two years ago. Kids moved to the mainland.”

“Oh, that’s a shame.”

“That’s the way it is on the Island, I guess. Kids move away.”

He was blushing a little, looking down at me, and I realized I still wore my old green flannel nightgown, which was wet with seawater and blood and stuck to my skin. I crossed my arms over my chest. Mr. Fisher and Dr. Huxley were upstairs with the maid, settling the patient in some spare bedroom or other. The kitchen was growing warm as the sun penetrated the window glass, and I noticed the smell of something baking, something sugary and vanilla-scented, something for the wedding, so I supposed the oven was on, too, adding to the general heat. I stared at the kitchen table, which Joseph had helped me clean up just now, dishcloths and hot water and vinegar that still stained the air. All immaculate, erased, you’d never know what happened. Just any old big kitchen on any old big summer estate. Two people standing in awkward proximity, like a pair of actors who’ve lost their place in the script.

Joseph started to turn away, toward the door.

“Want some coffee?” I said.

“Have you got any made? I mean you needn’t make fresh.”

“I think so.” I went to the electric percolator on the counter and lifted it. Heavy. Behind me, there was a faint scrape of a chair leg on the linoleum. I opened up a few cabinets, looking for coffee cups.

Joseph cleared his throat. “You must be the daughter, then. Mrs. Schuyler’s daughter.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Well, I’m sure sorry I ruined the big day for you.”

“Oh gosh, that’s nothing. I mean, he’s alive, isn’t he? That’s got to be good luck. Thanks to you. The day’s not ruined at all. Do you want cream or anything?”

“I’ll get it.”

The chair scraped again, and from the corner of my eye I saw him step to the icebox and open the door. He stood about an inch under six feet, and he still wore his yellow oilskin overalls atop his wet shirt, though his hair was beginning to dry in soft little waves around his ears. I turned toward him and offered the coffee cup.