A Hundred Summers

  We drive in silence, the way we drove into town, unable to put the sensations between us into words. But it’s an easier silence this time, and when we stop briefly at a signal, Nick picks up my hand and gives it a squeeze.

  He pulls to the curb with my dormitory just in view ahead. Like me, he doesn’t want the eyes of a hundred girls pressed against the windows, watching us.

  “Does it hurt?” I ask, nodding at his leg.

  “It’s all right. I took some aspirin.”

  “How do you move the clutch?”

  He shakes his injured leg. “Very carefully. Don’t tell the doctor on me.”

  “You were crazy to come. I hope it heals all right.”

  “It’s fine.”

  Again the silence between us, the car rumbling under our legs. Nick fingers the keys in the ignition, as if weighing whether to cut the motor. “I hate this,” he says, staring through the windshield. “There’s too much to say. I want to hear everything. I want to know all about you.”

  “And I you.” My voice is fragile.

  “Do you, Lily?” He turns and looks at me. “Do you really? You’re not just playing along, humoring me?”

  “No, I’m not. I . . .” My heart is beating too fast; I can’t keep up with myself. I shake my head. “I can’t believe you’re here. I was hoping I’d get the chance to see you Saturday. Budgie said I could return your jacket then, that it would be my excuse for coming up.”

  “Budgie.” He shakes his head and takes both my hands. “Why are you friends, anyway? You couldn’t be further apart.”

  “Our families summer together. I’ve known her all my life.”

  “That’s it, I guess. Don’t listen to her, do you hear me, Lily? Be yourself, be your own sweet self.”

  “All right.”

  He lets go of one hand to brush at the hair on my temple. “Lily, I want to see you again. May I see you again?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “When?”

  I laugh. “Tomorrow?”

  “Done,” he says swiftly.

  I laugh again. The coffee is racing in my veins, making me giddy, or maybe it’s just this, the sight of Nick, handsomer by the second, gazing at me so earnestly. How could I ever have thought that Graham Pendleton’s face was more beautiful than his? “Don’t be ridiculous. How are you going to be an architect if you don’t go to your classes?”

  “I’m not going to be an architect.”

  “Yes, you are. You must. Promise me that, Nick.”

  He brushes my hair again and cups my cheek. “My God, Lily. Yes, I promise. I promise you anything.”

  We sit there, looking at each other, breathing each other in. I lean my cheek against the back of the seat; against Nick’s jacket, slung across it.

  “I don’t know what to say,” says Nick. “I don’t want to go.”

  “I don’t want you to go.”

  “I feel like Columbus, catching sight of land at last, and having to turn right back home to Spain.”

  “Columbus was Italian.”

  He pinches me. “Oh, that’s how it is with you?”

  “And New Hampshire’s much closer than Spain. And you have a lovely fast car instead of a leaky old caravel.”

  “Well, that’s the last time I say something sentimental to you, college girl.”

  “No, don’t say that.” I reach up and graze my fingers against his cheekbone, smooth the hair above his ear, dizzy with the freedom of touching him. “I’m sorry. If I don’t laugh right now, I might cry instead.”

  “I don’t mind. I’d like to know what you look like when you’re crying. Not that I want to see you crying,” he adds hastily, “or sad in any way. Just . . . you know what I mean. Don’t you?”

  I smile. “I look horrible. All puffed up and blotchy. Just so you know.”

  “Then I’ll do whatever it takes to keep your tears away.”

  The look in his eyes, when he says this, is so massive with meaning that I feel myself crack open, right down the center of me, in a long and uneven line. “It’s grotesque. Budgie, now, Budgie’s an elegant crier. A few tears trickling down her cheeks, like Garbo . . .”

  “Enough about her. I’ll be whimpering like a baby myself, in a moment. From sheer exhaustion, if nothing else.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It was worth it.” He turns his head and touches his lips against my fingertips. The slight contact passes through me like a charge of electricity.

  “I’ll drive up on Saturday with Budgie,” I say.

  “Yes. Do. I’ll be down on the bench with my rotten crutches, but I’ll look for you. We’ll have dinner afterward, like yesterday.”

  “We’ll still have Budgie and Graham with us.”

  “So I’ll drive down by myself Sunday morning, after the team meeting. I can spend the day here, if you like. And I’ll write.” He smiles. “Lay out my prospects for you.”

  “Your prospects look pretty good so far.”

  “You must write back. Tell me all about yourself. I want to know what you’re reading, whether you play tennis.” He laughs. “What am I saying? Of course you play tennis. I want the history of your life. I want to know why this hair of yours curls around your ear, just like that, and not the other way.” His head tilts closer. “I want to . . .”

  “To what?” I breathe.

  “Nothing.” He straightens again. “All in good time. We have plenty of time now, don’t we? I was in such a panic, driving down. I have to remind myself that the emergency is over.”

  The idling engine coughs, catches itself, resumes again. Like a chaperone, warning us discreetly.

  “I’ll walk you in,” Nick says, with a last caress to the side of my face.

  We move slowly down the pavement, using Nick’s crutches as an excuse to stretch out the last remaining minutes. “This is awful, leaving you,” he says, “and yet I’ve never felt better. Don’t you feel it?”

  “Yes. Like being a child, when Christm— When the summer holidays were coming up.”

  “You were going to say Christmas.”

  “Yes, I . . .” I pause in confusion.

  He chuckles and nudges my arm with his elbow. We are nearing the walkway up to the dormitory door. “My mother keeps a tree every year. We go to services together.”

  “Oh. Well, Christmas, then. Or summer. Both rolled into one.”

  We turn up the walkway and stop under the spreading branches of a hundred-year-old oak, still thick with the glossy burnt orange of turning leaves. Nick glances up at the obscured rows of windows looming above.

  My blood turns to air. I’ve been kissed before, but never a real kiss, never one that meant something.

  Nick bends downward, and the brim of his woolen cap bumps against my forehead. He laughs, removes the cap, and bends down again.

  His lips are soft. He presses them against mine for a second or two, just long enough so I can taste his maple-syrup breath, and pulls back, mindful of the windows above us.

  “Drive carefully,” I say, or rather whisper, because my throat refuses to move.

  He replaces the cap. “I will. I’ll write tonight.”

  “And get some sleep.”

  “Like a baby.” He picks up my hand, kisses it swiftly, and props himself back on his crutches. “Until Saturday, then.”

  “Until Saturday.”

  We stand, staring at each other.

  “You go first,” says Nick.

  I turn and walk up the steps into the warmth of the common room. Outside, Nick is hobbling back down the sidewalk, back to his dashing Packard, back to New Hampshire. His large hands will wrap around the steering wheel, his plaster-cast leg will work the clutch awkwardly, his warm caramel-hazel eyes will follow the road ahead. I hope three cups of coffee are enough to keep them open.

  Nick Greenwald. Nicholson Greenwald.

  Nick.

  I cross the lounge and climb the worn wooden steps to my small single room on the second floor. Th
e door is ajar. I push it open, and behold Budgie Byrne, still in her nightgown, with her cashmere robe belted about her tiny waist. She’s draped across my narrow bed, next to the window.

  “Well, well,” she says, smiling, swinging her slippered foot. “Who’s been a naughty girl?”

  6.

  SEAVIEW, RHODE ISLAND

  May 1938

  Nobody knew for certain when the first house was built on Seaview Neck, but I had witnessed cordial arguments on the club veranda gallop on long past midnight trying to settle the dispute. New Englanders are like that: everyone wants to descend in direct line from a founding father.

  Whoever did settle Seaview first had an excellent eye for location. The land curved around the rim of Rhode Island in a long and tapering finger, guarded at the end by a rocky outcropping and an abandoned stone battery that had fired its last shot during the Civil War. On one side of the Neck lay the Atlantic Ocean, flat and immense, and on the other lay Seaview Bay, on which most of the households had built docks that poked like a line of toothpicks into the sheltered water. Generation after generation, we children had learned to swim and row and sail in Seaview Bay, and to ride waves and build sand castles along the broad yellow beach girding the ocean.

  With all due modesty (and New Englanders are like that, too), the Danes had as much claim as any to the founders’ crown. Our house lay at the end of the Neck, the last of the forty-three shingled cottages, right up against the old battery and with its own little cove hollowed out from the rocks. According to the deed in Daddy’s library, Jonathan Dane laid claim to the land in 1697, which predated the formation of the Seaview Association and the building of the Seaview Beach Club by about a good hundred and seventy years.

  I had always thought our location the best on Seaview Neck. If I wanted company, I walked out the front door and turned left, down the long line of houses, and I was sure to see a familiar face before I had gone a hundred yards. If I wanted privacy, I turned right and made for the cove. This I did almost every morning. My window faced east, and the old wooden shutters did little to keep out the early summer sunrise, so I would wrap myself in my robe, snatch my towel from the rack, and plunge my naked body into the water before anyone could see me.

  The pleasure varied by the season. By September, the Atlantic had been sunning itself all summer long, drawing up lazily from the tropical south, and my morning swim amounted to a tingling soak in a warm salt bath. In May, a month after the chilling rains of April, the morning after Nick and Budgie drove us back from the Seaview clubhouse, the experience resembled one of the more barbaric forms of medieval torture.

  Worse, Budgie herself sat waiting for me on the rocks when I emerged from the water, in full-body shiver. “Hello there,” she said. “Towel?”

  I flung myself back into the Atlantic. “What are you doing here?”

  “Nick was up at dawn, leaving for the city. Rather than go back to bed, I thought I’d find you here. Industrious of me, wasn’t it? Aren’t you cold?”

  Water sloshed against my bare chest. Cold? I was numb all the way through, trying to banish the image of Nick in bed with Budgie, Nick rising at dawn and Budgie rising with him. Straightening his tie, smoothing his hair. Kissing him good-bye.

  “It’s bracing,” I said.

  She held up my towel and shook it. “Don’t be shy. We were housemates once, weren’t we?”

  I waved my arms, treading water, trying to come up with an excuse.

  “Oh, never mind. I’ll join you.” Budgie rose and pulled off her hat, pulled off her striped blue-and-white sweater and her shirt. I stared in astonishment as her body unwrapped itself before me, exposing her pale skin to the cool morning. She wore a peach silk envelope chemise underneath, edged with lace, without girdle or stockings. She leaned down, grasping the hem, and I whirled around to face the open ocean and the waves rolling along the horizon in long white lines.

  Budgie was laughing behind me. “Look out below!” she called, and I turned my head just in time to see her long, narrow body slice like a knife into the water nearby.

  She came up shrieking. “Oh, it’s murder! Oh, my God!”

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  Budgie tilted her head back, soaking her hair until it emerged dark and shining against her skull. The absence of a hairstyle emphasized the symmetrical arrangement of her features, the high angles and pointed tips; the startling size of her Betty Boop eyes, which lent such an incongruous innocence to her otherwise sharp face. She was always slender, but her slenderness had now reached undreamt-of heights and lengths, an impossible skeletal elegance. Next to her, I felt rounded and overfull, my edges blurry.

  “How do you stand it, every morning?” she asked me, smiling, waving her arms next to her sides. Her small breasts bobbed atop the surface of the water like new apricots.

  “Don’t you remember?” I said. “You used to do it with me, when we were little.”

  “Not every morning. Only when I had to get away or go mad. Let’s race.” Without warning, she spun her body around and began to stroke across the cove, her long arms reaching and plunging through the waves, her pink feet kicking up spouts of water.

  I hesitated, hypnotized for an instant by her rhythmic limbs, and followed her.

  For all her flurry of activity, splashing water in every direction, Budgie wasn’t moving fast. I caught up with her in less than a minute and passed her; I reached the opposite side of the cove and touched off the rocks for the return journey.

  By the time I coasted past our starting point, Budgie was no longer behind me. I looked around and saw her running naked from the rocks on the opposite side, along the narrow spit of beach to where my towel lay folded on a boulder. For a second or two, her body was silhouetted against the stark gray stone of the abandoned battery, while the sunrise cradled her bones in radiance.

  Then the towel covered her. She rubbed herself dry from head to each individual sand-covered toe, finishing with a thorough scrubbing of her hair, and held out the towel in my direction. “Your turn,” she said, giving it a jiggle.

  I had no choice. I found the rocky bottom with my toes and pushed through the surging water, feeling with painful exactitude the inch-by-inch exposure of my skin to the cool air and to Budgie’s gaze, from breasts to waist to legs to feet, traced in foam.

  “Well, well.” She handed me the towel. “You’ve kept your figure well, all things considered. Of course, the cold water helps.”

  I averted my eyes, but there was no missing the pucker of her nipples, or the shocking absence of anything but Budgie between her legs.

  She must have caught my horrified expression. She looked down and laughed. “Oh, that. I picked it up in South America, the winter before last. Everybody sugars there, all over. You do know about sugaring, haven’t you? All that nasty hair?”

  “I’ve heard of it.”

  “You can’t imagine the pain. But the men just love it to death, the little dears.” She laughed again, her bright brittle laugh. “You should have seen Nick’s face.”

  The towel was wet and sandy, but I covered myself anyway, dried myself as best I could, shaking with cold. When I could no longer disguise the distress on my face, I turned away from Budgie, found my robe, and belted it around my waist.

  “You’re such an hourglass, Lily, with your itsy waist and your hips and chest. Just like our mothers in their corsets, before the war. Do you remember?” Behind me, Budgie was putting on her own clothes. I heard the slide of fabric against her skin, the little grunts and sighs she made as she pushed her arms and legs into their slots.

  “I remember.”

  “I can’t think why it’s gone out of fashion. But there it is. There’s no accounting for men’s tastes. Let’s lie in the sand together, like we used to.” She jumped down from the rocks in a thump of displaced sand.

  She looked so curiously alone, lying blue-lipped and shivering on the beach, with the sand sticking to her dark hair and her bones sticking up from he
r pale skin, that for reasons unknown I lay down next to her, a few feet away, and stared up at the lightening sky without speaking. A few lacy clouds streaked across, tinged with gold, the same way they had when we were children, lying on this precise patch of sand.

  Budgie broke the silence first. “You don’t mind me talking about Nick, do you? After all these years?”

  “No, of course not. That was ages ago. He’s your husband.”

  She giggled softly. “I still can’t believe it. Mrs. Nicholson Greenwald. I never thought.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “Oh, you’re remembering what I said before, aren’t you? What a child I was, thinking that was important. Of course it’s a nuisance, the way those old cats treated us last night at the club. I’d forgotten people still thought that way.”

  I pressed my numb fingers against my neck to warm them. “You do read the newspapers, don’t you, Budgie?”

  She flicked away newspapers with her hand. “Oh, that’s just crazy old Hitler. Who takes him seriously, with that mustache? I mean here, at Seaview. People refusing to dine with us.” She turned on her side and faced me. “But you wouldn’t do that, would you, Lily?”

  “No, of course not. You know I never cared about it.”

  She laughed. “Of course you didn’t. Sweet, noble-minded Lily. I still remember you in the football stadium, with that stubborn look on your face. I can count on you, right, Lily? You’ll visit us at the house and join our table at the club, won’t you? Show them all up?”

  “It shouldn’t matter, should it? You shouldn’t care.” If you really loved him.

  “Says the noble-minded Lily. You don’t know what it’s like, though, do you? Having doors slammed in your face.” Her voice thinned out, and she turned onto her back again.

  I rolled my head to look at her. She was staring straight up at the clouds, without blinking. “Have they really?”

  “Nick’s used to it, of course, so he doesn’t say anything. But I used to be invited everywhere, and now . . .” She turned back to me and grasped my hand in the sand. “Come have lunch with me today. Please. Or tennis, or something. I’m so lonely when Nick’s gone.”