Still Summer

  When Michel tied up the boat, he insisted on lifting Cammie onto the ladder. He gave her a final kiss. All three women saw it. When they walked up to her aunts, Cammie said, “I was just horsing around. In the boat.”

  “So I see,” Holly said, punching Tracy, whose lips were pressed tightly together.

  “Mom, come on,” Cammie said. Olivia, like a shadow among shadows, got up and slipped silently into her cabin.

  “You could leave, too, Holly,” Tracy suggested.

  “I’m enjoying this, though,” Holly said. “I’m drunk and in pain, and I deserve a good laugh.”

  “Tracy, I should explain,” Michel began, ignoring Holly. “It’s not what it seems. . . .” Camille reached for Michel’s hand.

  “I don’t think that’s any of our business,” Tracy said, and Cammie shot her a blazing look of gratitude.

  Lenny returned, took in the scene with a single beleaguered glance, and drew himself up, as if to glower. All he could finally muster was little more than a shrug.

  “It’s all fine here,” Holly said.

  “It’s fine here,” Tracy repeated.

  Lenny took off his hat and ran a hand over his head. “Well, there are no storms anywhere,” he said.

  “Good,” Michel answered, as eager to be out of his partner’s sight as he was to stay beside Cammie. “I’ll say good night now.”

  “Good night,” Cammie said.

  Michel woke in the middle of the night remembering that Lenny would choke him to death for leaving the radio and the GPS in the tender. Fucking simpleton, he thought. Well, he would wake up before Lenny and recover them. Tonight, he would dream.

  Cammie got ready for bed, slipping into her pajamas and doing pas de chats on the floorboards. Power radiated from her like an aura.

  “Are you drunk, Cammie?” Tracy asked.

  “Not so much now. I was earlier. It’s legal here,” Cammie answered. “We just had fun, is all. It’s so beautiful here. Thanks for bringing me.”

  Tracy sat up in her berth, nearly grazing her head. “Now I know you’re drunk.”

  “Okay, okay. But I talked a lot with Michel. He’s really interesting.”

  “I can see that.”

  “It isn’t just that, Mom. Although, it is that. We didn’t do anything.”

  “Cammie, you don’t know him. . . .”

  “And that is why I just said we didn’t do anything. And as you so nicely put it up there, it’s nobody’s business. Even yours.”

  “Well . . .”

  “Mom, you don’t have to grow up on the same street, like you and Dad and Aunt Janis, and go to the same school, and have Thanksgiving dinner together your whole life and play cards on Friday night. You can just know someone you meet wouldn’t ever hurt you on purpose.”

  Tracy smiled. “It’s theoretically possible.”

  “And that even if they made mistakes, you’d forgive them?”

  “That’s absolutely possible.”

  “Well, I had a great night, and now I’m going to have the best night’s sleep I ever had, okay? I’m not even going to wash my face.” She threw herself down, her long hair tumbling, to give Tracy a kiss. “I can’t wait until morning,” she said.

  Tracy lay quietly in the dark, surrendering to the soft roll of the boat. There were worse things than a shipboard flirtation. She punched her pillow and snuggled into it. Much worse, she thought. And she knew they’d done something. No one did a few ballet steps before bed over nothing. But if it had been just around the edges, Tracy thought, well, there were worse things than that, too.

  A few miles off the coast of Africa, from the direction opposite that from which tropical storms come, the wind did not know that what was forecast were partly cloudy skies and perhaps a thunderstorm later in the week. So a wave traveled across the North Atlantic and crossed the warm water of the Gulf of Mexico. And then the admixture of warm and cold water generated a vortex, a depression, that began to spin. Energy was created. The summer had been warm and the water was warm and the wave became a tropical storm that had no name and no one’s eyes upon it. But Lenny felt it on the back of his neck. And so did the three men setting off in the yola from Santo Domingo; and each of them thought of the reefs behind which they had crouched while water swept over their heads, on the last trip; and the wind had seemed to turn personal, directly upon them. All of them hoped the wind would change its mind.

  Day Five

  Now, I’ll run in and top off the fuel tank,” Lenny told them as they finished their Caribbean eggs Benedict, with horseradish, arugula, and, except for Tracy, chorizo sausage. “Anyone need anything?”

  “I’m going to pop in, too, after you get back. I need a few things, and I can get groceries if you want,” Michel said, smiling quietly at Cammie, who looked down at her breakfast and promptly lost the will to eat it.

  “No need to do that until tomorrow morning. Everything will be fresh on a Tuesday. It’s market day. All I really need is bread. I’m getting some fish and meat from another boat. Tomorrow, it’s going to be a bit of a tedious day in terms of diving and so forth,” Lenny said. “You have to watch for structure. . . .”

  “That’s . . . what?” Holly asked.

  “Reefs, rocks. It’s sort of a narrow passage. But once we’re out, we’re out, and out there, you’re in deep water really quick. Don’t let it scare you. It doesn’t feel any different from thirty feet. And you can look down forever and see amazing things. We’ll moor tonight off Skull Island; but it’s just a little piece of scrubland, nothing on it. Then, we’ll hopefully pick up some breeze and do some real sailing. We’ll rendezvous with my friends Sharon and Reg, because they have food for us from their last charter. So get out your cards and a good book. . . .”

  Olivia said, “I need a book. I couldn’t find one in there. I didn’t have room in my luggage, and I like mysteries. I’ve been reading everything by P. D. James. Can you possibly get me one?”

  “I’ll try,” Lenny told her. Olivia wore a sleeveless beige silk shirt and wide-legged capri pants, and Cammie thought, Who’s she trying to fashion model for? Not that I can’t guess. . . .

  “Livy, you can read anywhere,” Holly said. “Let’s sit in the sun and catch up.” She’d put on her bathing suit and a huge straw hat.

  “Okay,” said Olivia, bored already by the thought. “Tracy?”

  When they’d clambered up the swim ladder and spread out their towels, they all noticed that in addition to wearing a scarf over her hair, Olivia wore a hat with wings that tied under her chin.

  “How do you stand having all that on, Liv?” Tracy asked.

  “I have to protect my face,” Livy said. “And I have to protect my hair. It probably looks ridiculous. But the result is not having sun damage. In fact, I use a serum that actually isn’t a sunblock, but keeps the sun’s rays from ever reaching your skin. As far as my hair, if you color . . .”

  “I don’t,” Tracy said.

  “I do,” Holly said.

  “Mine’s still naturally this color. I just touch up one corner,” Olivia said. “Once you dye it, it seems to get more porous.”

  Holly smeared a palm filled with a fat dab of cream on her face and neck and lay back to allow the sun to embrace her. “Sounds like a hell of a lot of work.”

  “It is, but it’s worth it.”

  “I guess. You look great. I personally think it’s all genetics. My legs are like Norwegian firs. Meant for the plow.”

  “Well,” Olivia replied, honestly puzzled, “then I don’t know what mine were meant for.”

  Holly’s laughter was gusty. “The plow, too. Only the other way, Livy.”

  “Oh, Holly,” Olivia said, preening secretly. “How are your children? How old are they now?”

  “They’re twelve, and they just about have me worn to the nub,” Holly said. “Evan’s a good student. It’s effortless for him. Ian’s like I was, slow and steady, always a little bit below the curve. He asked me last week what the book w
as they were supposed to read over summer for seventh-grade English. It’s the beginning of summer break. Evan read it over a weekend in May, to get it out of the way.”

  “Sounds like a hell of a lot of work,” Olivia said.

  “Touché,” Holly admitted.

  “But I’ll bet Ian’s more popular,” Olivia said. “You were.”

  “He is, and it kills me,” Holly said. “And Ev, he’s glad Ian has so much fun. If we went to church enough, he’d end up a priest. He’ll come into his own after they’re in high school and I’m dead from worrying.”

  “You worry about them too much, Holly,” Olivia said. “Do you remember our parents being like that?”

  “Hey, mine weren’t. As long as I was perfect. My brothers, too. Only three siblings ever to be named Student of the Year at St. Ursula’s and Fenton. I remember senior year. Homecoming court wasn’t good enough. I had to be queen! Heidi wouldn’t speak to me for the whole weekend!” Holly said.

  Silently, then, Holly forgave her mother. She had only wanted the American dream for her girl. And being queen was what Heidi understood as requisite to the dream. It was like the old show Queen for a Day that Heidi had watched with her own mother. Grandma Haldaag learned English from Monty Hall and Bob Barker. They all sat back in the thrall of memory. Their parents hadn’t worried about them! Their lives were so censored from their parents’ reckoning that their elders would have been lunatics to worry. As far as anyone knew, the girls wore their uniforms to school with white knee-high socks (the fishnets didn’t come out until they hit the girls’ bathroom before class) and went to dances with boys whose hair was still marked by the comb. No one went to “rehab.” There was no “date rape” drug. Their parents assumed their children would grow up to be just like them and have martinis before dinner every night. Drinking wasn’t a sin. Even priests drank. And though Tracy never got the hang of smoking, all the rest of them did, just as their parents had. Not one of the others had quit until she became a mother. Olivia still smoked.

  The few girls who wanted to go all the way did, and the rest of them petted their way to aching ovaries and kissing chins. When Carol Klostoff got “in trouble,” she became Mrs. O’Sheridan and graduated with a big belly under her pleated maroon gown. Everyone thought it was cool. Carol would get to go to Germany with her husband, who was in the navy. None of the girls’ parents knew about the nights Janis climbed down the drainpipe and met Olivia on the corner. None of them knew how the two of them then drove off in a car with two older boys they’d met only once—both of them “making out” lying down for the first time at the vacated house of one guy’s parents. No one wondered whether those guys would murder Janis and Olivia. Kids, in the Godmothers’ era, paid more attention to their parents than their parents paid to them. And they paid more attention to each other, or so it seemed to Tracy, than she and Jim did—each of them consumed, week to week, with one child’s success or distress.

  Tracy couldn’t remember a Friday and Saturday night in sequence, not ever, that her parents stayed home with them. Either her father and mother worked at the restaurant or, if they could trust the current manager not to dip into the till, they went to a dinner dance at the club (Polish night was a special favorite). Everyone turned up for mass on Sunday morning and then went swimming in the summer at Janis’s pool. The parents drank and drank. They weaved their way home, somehow always without incident.

  What they got away with was almost anything.

  She and Janis baby-sat by scaring their younger siblings silly with tales of callers who turned out to have tapped into telephone wires in the basement, slaughtering everyone on the first floor before the police could arrive. Their little brothers didn’t come downstairs after that. And once the kids were asleep, they had boys over and divided up the rooms. They didn’t “do” anything, not any more than Cammie had, but that same Mikey Battaglia once had to climb out a second-story window and, holding his pants, jump for it when Tracy’s parents arrived home early.

  The knowledge that Cammie had quite probably taken even more awful risks than she had, though not in her house, gave Tracy palpitations. Why the risks she had taken seemed somehow more innocent than what Cam and Ted faced, she didn’t know. The world was crueler, for one thing, the consequences of chances not legal but lethal. Her parents’ ignorance was rightly described as bliss. At the end of the last great era—when college was still a possible dream for every kid, when restaurants and retail stores didn’t go belly up after eighteen months, when a man might spend his life under his own shingle and a woman work part-time only if she wanted to set aside money for a cottage or a cruise—less seemed to happen. Serial killers didn’t cruise the Internet. The only kids who smoked “pot” were poets, headed to Bennington on scholarship.

  For her part, Olivia, the only childless one among them, was hard-pressed to keep herself from nodding off. She found her pals’ chatter not dull, but meaningless. She had shopped at Chanel, they at Marshall Field’s. She had re-created herself. They had only grown into the bodies puberty had given them. Jolly Holly was still cowlike and complacent. Tracy—whom everyone called the Tree behind her back—was still the rock, the only thing approaching a true friend Olivia supposed she had on earth. Janis was still pretty, but pedestrian in her Eileen-Fisher-from- consignment, the dutiful hausfrau staying home to bring puddings to her husband’s sickbed, toying with her event-planning business. Did they not crave adventure? Olivia’s life was only half-over. She craved antithesis. The unexpected. It was the only thing that made life bearable.

  “I’m surprised we weren’t all expelled by then,” Tracy was saying. “Listen to this: I was in the chemistry lab for something, to bring a note to a kid who got injured on the uneven bars? And I remembered the glue on the Bunsen burner valves?”

  “But that was one they never nailed us for!” Holly crowed. “Poor Mary Brownell got it. And she didn’t dare rat us out. . . .”

  “She was an associate Godmother, like a utility infielder. If we had a party before homecoming, she got to come,” Olivia said. “She had to make some contribution.” She said this matter-of-factly, without any special remorse.

  “But we were so mean,” Tracy recalled. “You know, Mary Brownell is a professor at Smith now? She’s written poetry that has won these big prizes? And look at me. I’m a gym teacher at my own high school. My daughter thinks my shorts make me look like Eddie Albert.”

  “Your shorts do make you look like Eddie Albert,” said Holly.

  “Well, why do they put them in the catalog if they’re not fashionable?” Tracy complained. “I thought they were, you know, preppy.”

  “They’re, you know, ugly,” said Holly.

  “Oh, shut up. Like I care.”

  “You don’t, do you?” Olivia asked wistfully. “You really don’t care what you look like. I mean, your hair has a good cut; you have a killer smile; but the rest of it is just, take me as I am or leave me. You have freckles, Tracy! If I had eyes like yours—green eyes, without contacts!—I would have line cream under them all night and half the day! You were always like that. And I was moving the scale around in the bathroom and putting my hand on the windowsill before I stepped on to make it read one hundred and two instead of one hundred and five. I still am.”

  “Now, that sounds like a hell of a lot of work!” Tracy said. “What are you going to do now, Liv?”

  “Spend months with my mother and remember why I thought it was okay that she only came to Montespertoli once a year. Maybe go to see friends we have in Switzerland, perhaps spend the winter there and ski. Do some writing. I do a little writing. I thought perhaps some essays, or maybe even a novel, about our life on the vineyard. I had a few little things published in Italy. . . .”

  “You never told me!” Tracy scolded her.

  “I said little. It wasn’t worth telling.”

  But it was, and Olivia deflated when Tracy slipped back into reminiscence, as if her achievement had been, well, what Olivia had preten
ded it to be. If they knew, she thought. If they only knew.

  “Guess who left the convent? Mother Bernard,” Tracy told them, apropos of nothing. “She was a college president by then. Where was it? Mount Mary in Milwaukee? She’s got to be sixty, no, more like seventy! She called me a couple of years ago.”

  “We thought she was as old as Methuselah when she was principal of St. U. She was probably forty,” Holly said.

  “Why would you quit if you were already . . . ,” Olivia began.

  “Too old to get a man?” Tracy asked. “Uh, no. Actually, she has one. But she said it was political. Now, her name is Sylvia Venito. I used to think of her like Rosalind Russell in The Trouble with Angels,” said Tracy.

  “I was obsessed with The Trouble with Angels,” said Holly. “I didn’t even care that their clothes were out of style, even then.”

  “I was obsessed with The Nun’s Story,” Tracy went on, “but Mother Bernard told me it was just like that movie. She said, ‘Call me Sylvia.’ It was like God saying, ‘Call me Big G.’ They make you go into a room and give up your wimple and rosary and that whole deal. . . .”

  “She was still wearing the habit?” Olivia asked.

  “Maybe she saw The Trouble with Angels, too.”

  “She was a good woman,” said Holly. “We aged her.”

  “No, she liked us,” Tracy said. “She said we had spirit. But she was worried you’d marry into the Mob, Livy. . . .”

  Olivia laughed. “I’d have been a great Mob wife. All that cash. All those mirrors with gold etchings on them and tight capri pants . . . just like Italy! Remember the ushers with guns under their coats at Jodie Camorini’s wedding?”

  “It’s another world,” Tracy said. “The mobs now are poor kids who sell drugs and sing about shooting cops. It’s not like organized crime anymore. It’s unorganized crime.”