The Summer Wives: Epic page-turning romance perfect for the beach
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“It’s been a while,” I said. “Since he left for the war.”
“Say, you don’t have to if you don’t want to. I mean, if it hurts too much or something.”
“No. It doesn’t hurt anymore.”
“All right. Whatever you want. I’m listening, that’s all.”
I lowered my voice and said,
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,
Or close the wall up with our English dead!
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility,
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the actions of the tiger:
Stiffen the sinews, conjure up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage.
“Go on,” said Joseph softly, from the sand.
I scrambled to my feet and shook out the grit from my dress. I had told Joseph the truth; I hadn’t spoken those words since childhood, and yet—in the way of certain memories—they rose passionately from my throat. They burst from my mouth in my father’s hard, warlike delivery. The blood hurtled into my fingers to grip an imaginary sword.
On, on, you noblest English,
Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof,
Fathers that, like so many Alexanders,
Have in these parts from morn till even fought
And sheathed their swords for lack of argument:
Dishonor not your mothers. Now attest
That those whom you called fathers did beget you.
Be copy now to men of grosser blood,
And teach them how to war …
I didn’t recognize myself. I was not Miranda but someone else, a man, a king, a warrior, a voice roaring. I heard its faint echo from the rocks.
The game’s afoot.
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry “God for Harry, England, and Saint George!”
And there was silence, and my original soul sank back into my skin. Miranda resumed herself. My arm dropped to my side. I went down on my knees, one by one, shaking a little. Against my hot skin, the sand felt cool. Each grain made its individual impression on my nerves.
“That was something,” said Joseph.
I shook my head and laughed.
“I mean it. You’re something, you know that? You’re something else.”
I felt as if I’d just stepped off some boardwalk roller coaster. Been spat back ashore by some monstrous wave. Shaken and changed, muscles stiffened from the shock of metamorphosis. Joseph’s gaze lay on my shoulders, on the back of my neck. I thought, If I turn, if I look at him looking at me, I’ll die.
“Here, lie down,” he said. “You can see the stars real good from here.”
So I settled myself back in the sand, rigid, arms straight against my sides. Wanting and not wanting to come into contact with Joseph’s shoulder, Joseph’s arm, bare above the elbow in his white T-shirt. From this small distance, I could smell his soap. He must have been getting ready for bed when he saw our signal. That would explain the toothpaste, the soap, the T-shirt. I should have felt overdressed in my blue tulle, but I didn’t. Maybe it was my stocking feet, crusted with sand, or the democratizing effect of moonlight and salt water.
“How well do you know your constellations?” Joseph asked.
“Pretty well.” I was surprised to hear that my voice had returned to its ordinary timbre, not quivering at all. “But you must be an expert.”
“Why’s that?”
“Aren’t sailors supposed to be experts on the stars?”
“Not anymore. The old explorers were, I guess. Back before we had clocks and instruments, and you only had the sky to tell you where you were. Skies and lighthouses. The old days.” He made some movement with his hand, sliding it out from beneath his head to rub his brow. “Anyway, lobstermen fish by day, mostly.”
“So what does that mean? Are you an astronomer, or not?”
“The answer to that, Peaches, is yes. I can map the night sky pretty well.”
“Peaches,” I said.
“It’s your Island name. Don’t you like it?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t decided yet. It’s too new.”
“Well, let me know what you decide.” He lifted his hand and pointed. “There’s Hercules. I’ve always liked him. Had to earn his place there in the sky. He wasn’t just born with it, like the others.”
“Me too. Makes me feel safer, somehow, knowing he’s hanging there with his sword raised. Why don’t you have an Island nickname?”
“Me? I don’t know. Nobody ever gave me one.”
“Maybe nobody ever dared.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I turned on my side to face his profile. His nose was too big, his brow too ridged. His lips were full, though, which softened him a little. I wondered if the moonlight gilded my skin in the same way; whether his cheeks, if I were so unfathomably brave as to touch them, would feel as cool and smooth as they looked from here, a foot or two away. “That was something, this morning,” I said. “What you did. Diving into the water and saving Popeye. You might have been killed.”
He didn’t turn toward me or anything. Just shrugged his shoulders a little, against the sand. “Popeye?” he said.
“That’s what I called him, in my head. Watching you from the window. He had that shirt on, and he was chewing on a pipe—”
“Wait a second.” He turned his head and squinted at me. “You saw his pipe?”
“I—well—”
“You were watching us with binoculars, weren’t you?”
“Well—”
“Miranda! For how long?”
I rolled back to face the sky. “Just a minute or two. I was curious. Never saw anybody fishing for lobsters before.”
“Aw, you’re blushing.”
“No I’m not. Anyway, how could you tell if I was?”
“I just can. I can feel your cheeks getting warm.”
“No you can’t. Not from over there.”
“Yes I can.”
I made to rise, and he caught my hand, and for a second or two we didn’t move. The air grew heavy between us. His hand was calloused and hot, larger than I thought, so rough it seemed to scratch my skin. The hand of a lobsterman. I looked away, because I didn’t know what was happening, because I’d never held a boy’s hand before, certainly not a tough hand like that. The sea slapped against the rocks, the lighthouse beam swept above our heads. A fierce voice called out.
“Joseph! What’s going on out there?”
Joseph turned toward the sound, but he didn’t drop my hand. Instead his grip tightened, not uncomfortable, just snug. I looked, too, and saw a dark silhouette in the middle of a glowing rectangle, painted on the side of a squat, square building attached to the lighthouse.
Joseph called back to this apparition. “Nothing much, Mama. Izzy rowed over with a friend.”
She said something back, something I couldn’t understand, and Joseph replied in the same language, which I figured was Portuguese. Sounded a little like Spanish, but it went by too fast for me to pick out any words. The exchange ended with a noise of exasperation from the other side, the maternal kind of noise that means the same thing in any language, I guess, and the silhouette stepped forward from the doorway and became a woman, monochrome in the moonlight. She was small and sharp and graceful, and her dark hair was gathered in an old-fashioned bun at the nape of her neck. She made me think of a ballerina, only shorter. She was examining me, I knew. I felt the impact of her dislike like a blow. I shifted my feet and straightened my back, and when I realized Joseph still held my hand, I pulled it free and tucked my fingers deep into the folds of tulle that hung around my legs.
She turned her head to Joseph and said something in Portuguese.
He answered in English. “Don’t worry. I’ll row them back myself.”
“You don’t need to do that,” I said. “I can row.”
“Not on your life. That current’s a killer when the tide’s going out, and you’ll be rowing against it.” He bent over Isobel and shook her shoulder. “Izzy! Izzy, wake up!”
She moved her head, groaned, and went still.
“She’s drunk,” said Mrs. Vargas.
Joseph didn’t reply to that. He didn’t even sigh, as he might have done, annoyed as he must have been. Just lifted Isobel in his arms and said to me, “Can you make it across the rocks all right?”
“Sure I can.”
He went ahead of me, carrying Isobel, and I followed his white T-shirt, phosphorescent as the ocean in the moonlight. My feet were steadier now. I wrapped my toes around the sharp, wet edges of the rocks and didn’t slip once. When we reached the dock, I held the boat steady while Joseph bore Isobel aboard. “You better hold her while I row,” he said, so I stepped inside and made my way to the bow seat and took Isobel’s slack body against mine.
I don’t think we said a word, the two of us, the entire distance from Flood Rock to the Fisher dock. I sat on the bench and held Isobel between my legs while she slumped against my left side. Joseph just rowed, steady and efficient, like a fellow who’d been rowing boats since he could walk, which was probably the case. He wasn’t lying about the current. I watched as he fought the strength of the outgoing tide, hurtling through the narrow channel and out into the broad Atlantic; I watched the strain of his muscles, the movement of his shoulders, the pop of his biceps, and my bones filled with terror as I realized I couldn’t have done this by myself, Isobel unconscious at my feet, however hard I pulled. The boat would have borne out past the Island to the open sea.
At one point, near the dock and the shelter of the small Fisher cove, our eyes met. I’d been looking over his shoulder and so had he, judging the distance to shore, and when he turned back his gaze made right for my face and stayed there, so that I couldn’t help but succumb to its human gravitation. Instead of looking away, he smiled, as if we’d just shared a secret, the nature of which I couldn’t have guessed, so young as I was in the early days of that summer. I only thought that he had a warm, beautiful smile, the most beautiful smile I’d ever seen, and in the instant before I ducked my head, I knew I was in love with him. Just imagine. As innocent, as uncomplicated as that. I still remember that moment, that sweet, shy revelation, remember it fondly, because it only comes once in your life, and then it’s gone. You can’t have it back. And it’s only a second! Isn’t that capricious? One measly instant of clarity, tucked inside the reach of your livelong days. And then the boat touches the shore, and the moment flies, and your life—your real, murky, messy, incalculable life—your life resumes.
10.
AT EIGHT O’CLOCK the next morning, the morning after our parents’ wedding, Isobel came into my room, dressed and fragrant, and told me we were going to church.
I hadn’t exactly expected her, as you might imagine. I lay curled on the armchair in my dressing gown, comfortable as could be, staring through the window at the young, watery sunshine that drenched the Flood Rock lighthouse. A book spread open in my lap, unread. Last night, I’d fallen into bed, slept a sound, soundless six hours, and woken more refreshed than I ought, filled with an anticipation I couldn’t yet name, and unable to concentrate on any words written on any page. I blinked at the shadows under Isobel’s eyes and said, “Church?”
“Darling, it’s Sunday,” she said, as if the two ideas couldn’t possibly exist without each other.
My father came from an old, intellectual family, and Mama from a young bohemian one. Neither viewed organized religion with uncritical awe; it was one of the few common territories between them. After my birth, nobody thought of baptizing me. When I asked about God—aged eight, mind you—Daddy told me solemnly that I should believe whatever my conscience held to be true. I asked him, what was a conscience? He said it was my inner voice that told me right from wrong, and from then on, when I thought of God at all, I thought of old Grandmama Schuyler, because for some reason her voice shrilled inside my head whenever I faced any kind of moral crisis. Don’t you take that second cookie! or Let the adults speak for a change! and that kind of thing.
At the moment, and in her present condition, Isobel Fisher did bear an uncommon resemblance to Grandmama Schuyler, who was also longboned and lean, and whose hair had been blond before it turned a rusty, streaked silver. I hadn’t seen my stepsister since the previous night, when she’d stumbled onto dry land, vomited over the grass, and staggered into the house under Joseph’s protection. His arm had held her shoulder, and his face wore an expression of stern pity, mixed with maybe a little remorse. He must have cleaned her up and put her to bed, but you could still read the history of the night before in that wan, tanned skin, in that dull hair, in those lavender half-moons beneath her eyes, which squinted against the sunshine. She wore an immaculate suit of dandelion yellow and a pair of matching shoes, and one hand rested against the doorframe to hold the whole act upright. The other hand contained her white gloves and pocketbook.
“What time does it start?” I asked feebly.
“Eight thirty.” She glanced at her watch. “You’d better hurry. I’ll get the car.”
11.
“THE THING IS, everybody goes,” Isobel called, above the roar of the engine, as we hurtled down the road toward St. Ann’s Episcopal Church at the eastern end of the Island. “If you don’t turn up, they’ll wonder why.”
“I don’t care about that!” I called back.
“You will, believe me.”
She drove wantonly, wastefully, rushing down the straight stretches and then slamming the brakes into the curves, so that the tires of her father’s sleek Plymouth convertible whined and slid against the faded asphalt. All the while, she clutched a cigarette between the first two fingers of her right hand, and along the straightaways she sucked long currents of smoke between her clenched, red lips.
I kept my hands fixed in my lap. The sun packed its heat into the car’s interior—Isobel had put the top up, in order to save our good hats from the draft—and my flesh still glowed from the haste of getting dressed. Underneath the suit and blouse, a trickle of perspiration ran down my left armpit and along my side. The smell of hot leather and cigarettes made me want to vomit. By the time we reached the neat white church, sitting against a field of green and surrounded by cars, I’d begun to feel faint for the first time since that terrible flu in my freshman year at Foxcroft. Isobel slammed to a stop in the grass and I threw open the door to inhale the clean, green-smelling air. The swollen chords of an organ billowed past.
“Damn it all to hell and back again.” Isobel threw her cigarette into the grass and stomped it with her toe. “We’re late.”
We ran across the meadow, holding hands, weaving between cars until we reached the wooden steps of the church and slowed to a reverent pace. Isobel turned in the vestibule and ripped off her glove to fix my hat. By some strange trick of the sunlight, her engagement ring threw a shower of glitter on the wall just above the altar, and all the inhabitants of the packed pews started and turned, searching for the source of this otherworldly fireworks. They found us soon enough.
I don’t know if you’ve ever had that experience, a churchful of well-dressed strangers all staring at you in astonished disapproval. I don’t recommend it. Sometimes, in my nightmares, the image of those faces still returns to me, except I’m naked and grossly pregnant, and Isobel’s left me to face them all alone, instead of clutching my hand in a firm grip—as she did then—and leading me to a pew in the last row, wedged up against the side aisle. The organ tootled on from above, oblivious, and the faces turned away, one by one, because the singing was about to start and none of those great ladies wanted to miss her cue. On Winthrop Island, as I learned, the singing of hymns was a competitive exercise, preferably in a high, godly soprano to reach Heaven itself and—coincidentally—drown out the efforts of both your neighbor and the choir in the small balcony above. (The choir, you understand, had room for just ten members, filled by a ritual of cordial, bitterly contested auditions at the beginning of each summer season.)
As for the men? I don’t know. I don’t think they cared as much. Even so innocent as I then was, I noticed how they kept slipping impious glances at Isobel and me, young and animal, glowing with perspiration in our shapely pastel suits. That space of ours at the end of the pew had lain empty for a good reason, because it stood square in the path of a block of sunlight, and as Isobel flipped hastily through the hymnal I found myself gasping for air once more. The notes and words swam before me. The hymn ended, the blessing began, the congregational responses, and at last—at last—we lowered ourselves to the hard wooden bench and allowed the service to swallow us.
12.
AFTERWARD, THE CONGREGATION gathered in the churchyard and greeted each other in the hot sun. Everybody was so nice. Said such pleasant, vague things about my mother and the wedding yesterday, how they wished Mr. and Mrs. Fisher all the happiness in the world, such a beautiful couple. I realized I must have been entirely mistaken about those hostile expressions at the beginning of the service.
Mrs. Monk invited us over for bridge. “Of course,” said Isobel, kissing her cheek. “I’ll drive Miranda.”
Clay regarded Isobel with a slight frown. “I’d be happy to drive.”
“But we’ll be all squished in front, and I won’t have Miranda in back all by herself.”
“She wouldn’t mind. Would you, Miranda?”
A word or two about Clayton Monk, as he aimed a respectful pair of eyes at me and awaited my reply. At the time, I thought he was too good for Isobel. Not too handsome and dashing and rich, I mean, but too good. She was probably going to ruin him. I thought he had no natural defense against her, no edge at all. I mean, just look at him as he then was, made of pleasant, bland good looks that would inevitably grow red and jowly in middle age, but not before he’d passed them on to a pair of sons, whom he taught to sail. (I could picture them all, father and sons and sailboat.) He wore a double-breasted navy jacket and tan slacks, a white shirt with a crisp collar, a sedate silk tie the color of hydrangeas. Looking at him, you wouldn’t imagine that he’d once spent his days crisscrossing Europe in a B-17 Flying Fortress, dropping bombs all over the place, and that on a nice summer midnight in 1944 he’d crashed said Flying Fortress into a French field, so expertly that only one man was killed, and Clay himself had gotten away with a broken arm and a concussion. Afterward, as I said, he went to Harvard and then Harvard Law School, and he now occupied an office in some blueblood law firm or another, working his way toward the partnership, one dry, passive sentence at a time. Which might sound boring to you and me, but at least he was doing something, wasn’t he? Earning his own living, instead of idling his days atop the Monk department store fortune. Anyway, in the summer of 1951, Clayton Monk was all that was pink and well-scrubbed. Just looking at him made you feel clean, inside and out, like a wholesome breakfast cereal.
I smiled back and said, “I don’t mind a little squishing. My skirt’s all creased anyway.”
13.
ON THE WAY to the Monk estate, which was perched near the eastern tip of the Island, right next to the Winthrop Island Club and exactly opposite to Greyfriars, I asked Isobel whether she’d seen Joseph at church, because I hadn’t.
There was a little silence. “Joseph?” said Clayton, who was driving. “Joseph who?”
Isobel said quickly, “Don’t be silly, Peaches. Of course not.”
“Didn’t you say everybody goes to church on the Island?”
She started to laugh. “Darling, he goes to St. Mary’s, in the village. The Catholic church.”
“Oh, Joseph Vargas,” said Clayton. “I didn’t realize you’d met the locals yet.”
“Yesterday morning. He brought in another lobsterman who’d fallen overboard. And then last night—”
Isobel’s elbow met my ribs.
“What about last night?” asked Clay.
“Nothing.” I looked out the window, toward the sea. “Of course, the Catholic church. I didn’t think.”
Isobel sat between us on the front seat, tilting her long legs at an acute angle to fit them under the dashboard. Clayton, a tall man, had taken down the top, and the draft blew warmly over our hats and ears. Isobel rummaged in her pocketbook for a cigarette and lit it clumsily. “Here’s a funny thing about the Island, Peaches,” she said, as she tried to get the lighter going in the middle of the crosswind. “I think it’s telling. The Episcopal church only opens during the summer season, see, May to September, while the Catholic church runs all year round. Don’t you think that’s telling, Clay?”
“Telling what, darling?”
“I mean, the way things work around the Island. Who does what, and where, and when.”
Clay propped his elbow on the doorframe and tilted his head to one side, so he could rub his left eyebrow. His right hand gripped the wheel at twelve o’clock. “I don’t know what you’re trying to say, Izzy. Sure, most of the fishermen happen to be Portuguese around here. Portuguese folks happen to be mostly Catholic.”
“Exactly.”
“Well, you’re trying to make out like it’s some kind of crime, that’s all.”
“It’s not a crime,” she said. She’d finally succeeded in lighting her cigarette, and she now smoked it with a peculiar ferocity.
“Well, we all get along, don’t we? They’ve got their religion, and we’ve got ours—”
“And never the twain shall meet,” Isobel said softly.
“—and everybody respects each other. Nobody’s got a thing against Catholics, around here.”
I spoke up timidly. “I think what Isobel’s trying to say is that the summer residents, the ones with all the power and the money—”
“All right,” Clay said. “All right. Fine. Look, it’s a Sunday. Let’s stay away from politics for one day, okay?” He straightened and reached for the radio dial.
Isobel, looking out the side, past my nose toward the blurry meadows, the occasional house, said, “Have you noticed there aren’t any trees, Peaches? Old, native ones, I mean.”
“Now that you mention it.”
“It’s because of some hurricane.” She sucked on her cigarette. “Some hurricane, over a hundred years ago, that flattened everything. Now the Island’s like a Scottish moor or something. Or Ireland. One of those. Isn’t that right, Clay?”
“I guess so.” He was still working the radio dial.
“Do you get any stations out here?” I asked.
“We get a couple out of Providence, when the wind’s right. Sometimes Boston.” He turned the dial millimeter by millimeter, listening carefully to the pattern of static.
“Oh, why bother?” said Isobel. “Honestly. We’re almost there.”
I waved away a stream of smoke. “This might be a good time to mention that I don’t play bridge.”
“What’s that?” said Clay.
“She doesn’t play bridge!” Isobel shouted in his ear.
“Not play bridge? But I thought all you girls played bridge.”