The Summerhouse

  Ellie gave a glance to Leslie, then took the licenses back to Ira. At least he didn’t pretend to be sorry for the mistake he’d made. “I guess you three will just have to wait a little bit longer, won’t you?” he said with a smile. “Right there on that bench. And you better not leave the building in case I need to ask any of you any questions.”

  Ellie opened her mouth to tell him what she thought of him, maybe even to demand to see his supervisor, but then her vanity got the best of her. To be singled out to sit with two women like Leslie and Madison, to be a sort of living photograph, well . . . It didn’t exactly make her feel bad. In fact, when she walked back to the bench, she was walking a little straighter than before.

  She took her place between the two women. “So,” she said, then turned to Leslie, “tell us all about the boy you jilted.”

  Leslie laughed. “Are all New Yorkers as blunt as you are?”

  “I have no idea. I’m from Richmond, Virginia.”

  “Then we’re all newcomers,” Leslie said. “And are we all here to try to make our fortune?”

  “Not try,” Ellie said. “We’re going to do it, right?”

  “Yes!” Leslie said firmly, but Madison didn’t say anything.

  Ellie turned to Madison. “What about you? How many devastated young men did you leave behind?”

  “None. Actually, I was dumped by my boyfriend.”

  Madison didn’t say anything else, so Ellie stared at her in silence. She was too shocked to speak. After a moment she looked at Leslie and saw that she, too, was shocked. “No offense, Leslie,” Ellie said, “but I need to hear this story first.”

  For a moment Madison was silent; then she said, “Oh, what the heck? Everyone in Erskine knows what happened, so it isn’t exactly a secret.”

  Ellie bit her tongue to keep from remarking that everyone in Erskine could probably be told the secret of life, but it would still remain a mystery to the world.

  “It was a case of high school love,” Madison said. “Roger went to a high school about fifty miles from mine, but I was a cheerleader and—”

  “Me too!” Leslie said; then they both looked down at Ellie in question.

  “Not quite,” Ellie said. “Debating team. Latin club.”

  “Mmmm,” Madison said. “So anyway, Roger and I met and were a couple all through high school. I never dated anybody but Roger. Our plan was that after we graduated, we would go to college together, then get married and live happily ever after. We even had the names of our kids picked out.”

  For a moment, Madison looked away, and when she turned back, her face was as composed as before, but there was pain in her eyes. She’s used to hiding her emotions, Ellie thought, and for a moment she could see past Madison’s beautiful face to see the real person inside.

  “I should have known that there would be problems. You see, Roger’s family is rich and my mom and I weren’t.”

  “What about your father?” Ellie asked, heedless of manners and her mother’s constant admonitions to not snoop into people’s private affairs.

  Madison shrugged one shoulder in a beautiful way. She should be on the movie screen, Ellie thought.

  “Married man,” Madison said. “He walked away—well, ran actually—the moment my mother told him she was pregnant. All I know about him is that his last name is Madison. My first name is my mother’s revenge. She couldn’t have his name, so she gave it to me. She said he couldn’t deny her that small part of him.”

  For a moment the air was heavy with the anger that was in Madison’s voice.

  “Beats ‘Ellie,’” Ellie said cheerfully. “My mother said she was sick of big, husky boys and she wanted a little girl, so she gave me a girly little name.”

  “Your real name isn’t Eleanor?” Leslie asked.

  “Nope. Plain ol’ Ellie. I think I’ll change it to Anastasia. So what happened to Roger?” Ellie asked Madison.

  Madison let out the breath she’d been holding. Ellie’s light remarks had broken the tension. “Two weeks before my high school graduation my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.”

  “Yeow!” Ellie said.

  Leslie put her arm across the back of the bench and gave Madison’s arm a squeeze.

  “Along with Roger, my mother was my life,” Madison said. “She and I were a team. She’d raised me herself, working two jobs to make ends meet. At night she worked as a checker in a grocery and since she couldn’t afford an evening baby-sitter, I used to go with her and hide in the back storage room. I can tell you lots about how a grocery is run.” She had meant this as a joke, but neither Ellie nor Leslie was smiling.

  “Anyway,” Madison continued, “after Mother became ill, college had to be postponed.” Again, Madison looked away for a moment. “To make a long story short, my mother died, but it took her four years to do it. By that time my college money had been spent on doctors and hospitals.”

  There was nothing Ellie could say, and judging from Leslie’s silence, she felt the same way. “And Roger?” Ellie asked softly.

  “Good ol’ Roger, the love of my life, returned from college—where he’d gone on a full football scholarship, I might add. His parents are rich, but they have to be the cheapest people on the planet—and he had a fiancée on his arm.”

  “A what!?” Ellie said. “Why would any man marry someone other than you?” She didn’t realize that she’d said this quite loudly until an entire line of people turned to look at them in interest.

  “Beauty isn’t everything,” Madison said with a little smile.

  “I’m not talking about beauty. You gave up your education to stay home and nurse your mother. That’s beauty on the inside!”

  Madison looked at Ellie in surprise; then she smiled until her whole face lit up. “I think I like you,” she said, and Ellie smiled back.

  “Go on,” Leslie urged. “What did you do? And I agree with Ellie; why would he want someone else?”

  Madison took a deep breath. “He said that since he’d graduated from college, he needed someone he could talk to. Someone educated.”

  At that, Ellie turned to look at Leslie, then back at Madison. “Castration would have been too good for him,” she said softly.

  Madison made a little face of agreement. “I thought so too at the time. Especially considering that all through high school I did most of his homework for him. He used to drive to my house three times a week and he’d always have a box full of schoolwork I was to ‘help’ him with. The truth was that he’d watch football on TV while I worked. Our dates often consisted of my doing his homework while Roger tossed a ball with somebody. And in college if he had a paper to write, he usually sent me the assignment and I wrote it.”

  “Could he get away with that?” Leslie asked. “Surely he would have been caught when he took his exams. You couldn’t very well do those for him.”

  “No?” Madison asked, an eyebrow arched. “Roger was the best football player his high school had ever seen. He pretty much single-handedly won each and every game. The principal told the teachers that if Roger didn’t get grades good enough to get him into college, then that teacher would stand a chance of losing his or her job, with or without tenure. I wasn’t there, but I think the attitude at college wasn’t much different.”

  “Well, that’s fair,” Ellie said, turning to Leslie. “Don’t you agree?”

  Leslie laughed. “So you got him into college, then helped him stay there, and all the while you were a saint.”

  At that Madison laughed. “A saint for nursing my mother? You know something, I enjoyed it.” When the other two started to speak, Madison put up her hand. “No, no, I didn’t enjoy my mother’s suffering. But I was interested in the medical side of her illness. I even took a part-time job at the hospital. I had to drive seventy-five miles to get there, but—”

  “Every day?” Ellie asked.

  “Only three days a week. But Montana isn’t like Virginia,” Madison said, smiling. “You can put your foot on the gas peda
l and go to sleep. More or less, anyway. During those four years Roger was away, I learned a lot. In fact, one of the doctors suggested that I go into nursing as a career, but later he . . .”

  “Let me guess,” Ellie said with a grimace. “He chased you around the desk.”

  Madison looked down at her hands. “Around the bed of a patient in a coma. But he really should have noticed that I had a full bedpan in my hands. I ‘accidentally’ spilled the contents all over the front of him.”

  At that Ellie exploded with laughter, causing the people to again turn and look at them. Leslie put her hand over her mouth as she laughed too.

  “So if you liked nursing, why didn’t you pursue it?” Leslie asked.

  “Because . . .” Madison trailed off. How could she tell them what her life had been like? Maybe it was vain of her to think that she was beautiful, but all her life people had loved to look at her. Her mother said that even as a newborn she’d been extraordinary and people had noticed her. In school Madison had always been chosen to be the princess in the play. In the fifth grade she had begged to be allowed to be the witch, and she was thrilled when her teacher said yes, she could be the witch and wear the pointed hat and cackle. Madison had always loved to cackle. But then her teacher had gone home and rewritten the play so that at the end the witch turned out to be a beautiful princess in disguise. When Madison had protested, she was told that her face would sell tickets, so she had to stop complaining.

  As Madison grew older, her beauty stayed with her and she grew to her present five feet eleven and a half inches tall. “I am not six feet tall!” she often said. Her mother had said that half of Madison’s attraction to Roger was that he was taller than she was.

  How could Madison tell these two women what it was like being a tourist attraction in her small town? Because during her teen years, that’s what she had been—or at least that’s what the girls who had graduated with her from high school had called her. There wasn’t much going on in Erskine, just a few stores lining the main street. But Erskine’s main street also happened to be part of the route to a major tourist area: winter skiing and summer outdoor sports. About six of the town’s businesses had formed a council to try and come up with a way to get those cars that sped through their town to stop and buy. The council came up with several ideas of how to achieve this. One was to build a big jail and give lots of speeding tickets. They could put the driver in the jail, then, while his family waited for his release, they could shop in Erskine. That idea was discarded because it would probably make the tourists too angry to shop. “Not to mention that it’s probably illegal,” one of the council members had added.

  There were more ideas tossed about, such as a couple of carnivals, and a film festival. “Spielberg doesn’t show up just because you invite him,” someone said. “Who wants to come to Erskine?” “We don’t want them to come; we just need them to stop.” At that someone had mumbled, “Too bad we can’t get Madison to stand in the middle of the street. That would stop them.”

  From there the idea had taken hold, and the next thing Madison knew, she was being offered the job of handing out advertising brochures to passing motorists. “All I have to do is pass out brochures?” she’d asked. “That’s it,” had been the reply.

  So the local businessmen had put up a red light smack in the middle of Erskine’s one major street, and next to it they had erected a little shelter, rather like an old-fashioned bus stop, and when the cars stopped at the red light, Madison was to hand them the brochures.

  It had all seemed simple enough and the work was only on weekends, when the traffic was heaviest, so she’d taken the job. But it had all nearly backfired when so many cars stopped in Erskine and so many men, on their way to a weekend of merrymaking, had hit on Madison that the local sheriff had had to assign two deputies to sit near her. In the end, Erskine decided that it was safer to put up a billboard with a picture of Madison on it. She was wearing cutoff denims, a red shirt tied around her waist, and she was inviting people to stop in Erskine and look around.

  To Madison, the whole thing had been a great embarrassment, but she needed the money for her mother’s medical bills and what with Roger in college, she was lonely, and it had been nice to talk to the people who were driving through on their way to somewhere else.

  “So what happened?” Ellie urged. “What made you come here to New York?”

  “The town council thought that they owed me for something.” Madison waved her hand when Ellie started to speak. “It doesn’t matter now for what, but after Roger dumped me, they decided to send me here to New York so I could become a model.”

  Madison didn’t tell them what her pastor’s daughter had spat at her in an angry fit one day. The girl had always been jealous of Madison, because not only was Madison beautiful, but she was smart, and when people could get past her beauty, they liked Madison a lot. It was too much for the spiteful girl to stand, so she told Madison a secret she wasn’t supposed to know. It was true that the town council had put up the money to send Madison to New York. “If she becomes famous, it will put us on the map,” they’d reasoned. But the girl’s father, the pastor of the church that Madison and her mother had always attended, said that the money they had gathered wasn’t enough. The girl just “happened” to have picked up the telephone one day when her father was dialing and she’d heard a child’s voice say, “Madison residence.” Her father the pastor had said, “I’d like to speak to your father, please.” A moment later a man came on the line. “Yes?” he said. “Your daughter needs ten thousand dollars. Now. Send it to me here at the church. You remember my name and address?” There had been a pause on the line, then, “Yes, I remember.” After that there was a click and the phone went dead.

  But Madison didn’t tell this part of the story about her father sending money. That was private and not to be told. Instead, she summed up by saying that the town council had sent her to New York to become a model, and left it at that.

  Ellie sensed that Madison was leaving out some information, so she’d fired off lots of questions. But Madison had smiled in a Mona Lisa way and not answered them.

  “What about you, Leslie?” Madison had asked in a way that made Ellie know that no amount of coaxing was going to get her to reveal more. “What about the man you left behind?”

  “Alan,” Leslie said, and tried to look sad, but there was such a gleam of happiness and anticipation in her eyes that Ellie didn’t think anything could make her sad. “We were going to get married, but I chickened out. I know I’m already twenty-one and quite old enough to settle down and start producing babies but, . . .”

  “You want to see life,” Ellie said enthusiastically.

  “Oh, yes!”

  “So you ditched the boy and came to New York,” Ellie said, smiling.

  “More or less. Although, Alan was pretty angry about it. He said he could have done some things in college if he’d had any idea that I was going to turn out to be a—” Leslie looked down at her hands. “It wasn’t a pretty scene.”

  For a moment the three of them were silent; then Madison said, “You have his address? Maybe Alan and I could get together.”

  It was what was needed to lighten their mood, and the three of them laughed hard. “What about you?” Leslie asked, looking at Ellie. “So far we have one jilter and one jiltee. What are you?”

  “Nothing,” she said, then quickly added, “I mean, nothing one would associate with romance, that is. I’ve wanted to be an artist since I was a child. All I ever wanted for any Christmas or birthday was paints and crayons and colored pencils, anything that I could draw with. In high school I think I went on three dates. I had four big brothers, all of whom have rocks for brains, I mean, I love them and all and they’re good guys, but—”

  “Stupid,” Madison said.

  “Yes,” Ellie said with a sigh. “Big, good-looking, great at all sports, but my mother had to use a whip over them to get them to open a book. Like your Roger, they—”
br />   “Please,” Madison said, “not my Roger.”

  “Right. Sorry. Anyway, like you, their girl friends did their homework for them. And I mean that as two words: ‘girl’ and ‘friend.’ They had girlfriends to date, pretty girls who could fill out a strapless dress, but they also had some mousy little thing to do their work for them. That’s why when I first saw you, I . . .” Ellie trailed off and looked away from Madison.

  “Why you assumed that I was as dumb as the girls your brothers dated. Don’t worry about it; it happens all the time.”

  “But you didn’t have a boyfriend?” Leslie asked Ellie. “But you’re—”

  “I know, so cute,” Ellie said with a sigh. “I guess I had more testosterone than I could handle in my house, so I didn’t want any more. I just wanted to draw, so that’s what I did in college. I graduated with a degree in fine arts in May, and this summer I lived at home and worked in an art gallery in Richmond. There was an old shed in back of our house that my mother used to call her ‘summerhouse’ because she planned to nag my father enough to get him to add some doors and windows and make it a place where she could sit and read. But, so far, she’s been nagging for nearly thirty years and hasn’t made any headway.” Ellie said this with a smile, as it was a great family joke. At least it was a joke to everyone in her family except her mother.

  “She should remodel it herself,” Leslie said firmly. “My father is a building contractor and sometimes he would take me to work with him. I can use a hammer and a screwdriver as well as any man.”

  Both Ellie and Madison smiled at Leslie, because the way she said this was so very defiant.

  “I am woooooomman, hear me roar,” Ellie sang under her breath, and the three of them laughed.

  “Anyway,” Ellie said, “I used the old shed as a studio this summer and worked every minute that I wasn’t at the gallery. And in the end . . .” She trailed off and looked down at her hands.

  “Someone here in New York saw your work,” Madison said softly.