The Summer Wives_A Novel Read online

  5.

  Afterward, Hugh walks Bianca almost to her doorstep and kisses her softly, lingeringly, behind the shelter of a young elm. She slips through the garden door and into the back of Tio Manuelo’s shop, thinking not that she is engaged to marry Hugh Fisher, but that they are now actually man and wife before God, who hears the secret vows between lovers, who witnesses the ritual of their consummation and who blesses them with the fruits of sacred union.

  This she believes with all her heart.

  1951 (Miranda Schuyler)

  1.

  Over breakfast on the terrace, Isobel decided we should go to the festival. It was Sunday, the twenty-second of July. I remember the date well.

  “What festival?” I naturally asked.

  She looked at me, eyebrows raised, as if I’d committed some act of unforgivable ignorance. The Countess answered for her.

  “The Festival of the Holy Spirit, my dear. Down in the village. The church puts it on each year. St. Mary’s, I mean.”

  “Are you sure we’ll be welcome?”

  “I doubt it,” said the Countess. “It’s the last thing in the world they’d welcome, us turning up like tourists to gawp at them.”

  Isobel buttered her toast from a pot buried in a bowl of ice. “Oh, they won’t care. It’s not some kind of religious ritual, in case you’re afraid of being made to kiss the pope’s ring or something. Just the part about the blessing of the fleet, but the rest is all fun and games.”

  “Blessing of the fleet? Do you mean the fishing fleet? They bless the boats?”

  Isobel shrugged and looked out to sea. With her right hand she reached for the cigarette case, and her gold bracelets clinked against the wrought iron table. “Fishermen are superstitious.”

  We had breakfast on the terrace most mornings, when it wasn’t raining, which it usually wasn’t. The weather through June continued warm and fair except for the occasional drenching cloudburst, each day melting into the next, and when I think of those placid weeks between the wedding and the Festival of the Holy Spirit, I remember it as a rhythm, the beats of which consisted of breakfast and lunch and dinner, of morning tennis and afternoon swimming, of evening cocktails, of sunshine and moonshine, repeated at the same pace, the same speed, sunrise to sunrise. On weekends, the rhythm altered slightly, as new instruments joined us and the whole piece moved into a different key, but—well, you get the idea. That was the Island’s appeal. Human beings love rhythm, they love a beat to which they can tap their toes and dance sedately.

  So we danced, and we danced, and we drank, my God. As if the effects of rhythm were not stupefying enough, we pickled ourselves too, in careful, steady doses that maintained a certain desirable state of just-lucid intoxication throughout the day. Maybe you couldn’t have one without the other, I don’t know. Maybe the rhythm would drive you crazy without the drink, and vice versa. At first, I tried to resist the allure of a fresh, zinging Bloody Mary to move your blood in the morning, followed by regular injections of gin and tonic to keep you thriving throughout the day, followed by champagne cocktails, followed by wine at dinner, followed by some kind of nightcap, but it was like trying to resist the phases of the moon. They happened without your trying, half the time without your even noticing, carried along by the unceasing beat of mealtimes. The only thing I ever managed to resist that summer was bridge. Oh, and cigarettes. That was because of loyalty to my father, who had always hated the smell of tobacco smoke.

  Isobel had no such loyalties. She plucked a cigarette from its case—her fourth already this morning—and lit it swiftly with a gold lighter that matched her bracelet. The air was heavy and still, and she had to wave away a cloud of smoke in order to find me again. “Well?” she asked.

  “It’s a silly idea,” said the Countess. “In this heat. We could go sailing instead. Clay will take us out in his yacht, I’m sure.”

  “I wasn’t asking you, Abigail. I was asking Peaches.”

  Her blue eyes contained a familiar energy, which I tried to ignore. I poured myself another Bloody Mary from the glass pitcher. “I think your mother’s right. It’s too hot. Let’s going sailing or swimming instead.”

  Isobel tossed down her toast and rose. The skin beneath her eyes was tired and bruised, and her mouth seemed to strain for words. “Then I guess I’ll just have to go on my own, won’t I?”

  “Sit down,” said the Countess. “We’re going sailing with the Monks.”

  “Not me. Not unless you’re planning to kidnap me.”

  The Countess tapped each corner of her mouth with a napkin, sipped her coffee, and lit a cigarette. She liked a full breakfast, even in this heat, porridge followed by eggs and toast and fried ham, whereas Isobel ate only fruit in the morning. Fruit and coffee, that was all. Her mother frowned briefly at the end of her cigarette and looked across the water, toward the Fleet Rock lighthouse, sticking up from the still, blue sea as if to anchor the water to the sky.

  “Very well,” she said at last. “If you’re so determined to make a fool of yourself. I’ll just ring up the Monks and see if Clay doesn’t mind joining us there.”

  2.

  So that was how we came to put on our sundresses and our straw hats and our espadrille sandals and head down to the harbor that day. It was because of Isobel, who had probably made some arrangement with Joseph in the note I’d carried to him the day before, or during their clandestine meeting sometime past midnight at the swimming pool, which was shielded by boxwoods and therefore suitable for such rendezvous. I only knew because I’d kept my window open, such was the heat, and heard the tell-tale splashing, the suppressed giggles, the deep voice imploring quiet.

  At the time, I wondered how the Countess could possibly have remained ignorant. Maybe she wasn’t, but she was also wise enough not to say anything. Isobel might have been in love with Joseph, but she was also addicted to the thrill of disobedience. She sent me as go-between because it enhanced this thrill, and I obeyed her because I couldn’t say no. I told myself that this was for Isobel’s sake—better for me to remain inside this secret than out of it, the one sensible person to check their recklessness—but in truth I was selfish. Joseph and I might spend only a few minutes talking when I delivered Isobel’s notes, fragrant with her peculiar scent, but those few minutes were the truest minutes I spent all week. The instance of clarity amid the slumberous haze of an Island summer, the moment I was truly awake, possibly even alive.

  And though I might have begged off this expedition to the Blessing of the Fleet, remaining at Greyfriars on principle, I did not. I chose to go too. I told myself that the Countess would need all the help she could get.

  When I arrived at the car, Isobel was already inside, applying her scarlet lipstick in confident strokes by the reflection of the rearview mirror. She caught my approach over her shoulder and smiled.

  “Well, jump in,” she said. “Don’t want to miss all the fun, do we?”

  “Where’s your mother?”

  “Here.” The Countess came up behind me, dressed in a tangerine caftan and a hat so broad-brimmed and floppy, I had to peer underneath to see her face, which was tense and resigned. “I’ll sit in the back, dear ones. I’m feeling a trifle malade.”

  How lithe we were, how tanned as we sped down the pale, curving road toward the village and the main harbor. The wind tumbling our hair, the sun striking the chrome points of Hugh Fisher’s silver convertible. Isobel parked in the grass outside somebody’s house and reached for her pocketbook and hat in the back seat—the Countess handed them to her—and I noticed as she fumbled to pluck another cigarette from its case, to light and to stick it in her mouth, that her fingers were unsteady. I opened the car door and pushed up the seat so the Countess could extract herself from the tiny space behind. I don’t know how she fit to begin with. She had put on a pair of tinted glasses so I couldn’t see the expression in her eyes, but I felt she was looking at me as she grabbed my hand to lever herself free from all the white leather and polished wood. S
he kept her grip as we started down the sidewalk, in the direction of the noise and the music nearer the water’s edge, while Isobel walked slightly in front of us, in a quick, eager stride. The hot air rose in waves from the ground; I think it might have been the hottest day of the year, and the marina had taken on a faintly rotten, salty odor, overcome now by the reek of frying fish. I saw the first clusters of men and women, the first stalls, and my pulse thumped in my neck. Isobel’s stride lengthened, and I hurried to catch up with her. The Countess made a noise of exasperation. Somebody turned and saw us, a woman wearing a strange, colorful dress and headscarf, and she started and took the elbow of the man standing next to her, who wore a billowing white shirt and black knee breeches and a scarlet sash around his waist. So he looked too, and pretty soon the whole group of them had fallen silent and staring, while Isobel and I made our way down the street toward the tendrils of smoke and the small brass band playing a tune I didn’t recognize.

  As we passed the knot of men and women, Isobel raised her hand. “Hello, there! Scorching day, isn’t it?”

  There were answering nods and waves. We turned the corner of Hemlock Street, which ran along the scattered docks and shops that made up the marina of West Harbor, and everything had transformed from when I had seen it last, just a couple of days ago. Picnic tables covered the green, and stalls rose up alongside the road selling refreshments and wares, and everybody milled around in what I supposed to be some kind of Portuguese national costume. At the other end of the street, the docks and moorings were crammed with fishing boats, with fishermen laughing and talking and drinking. Now I felt the full weight of our intrusion, the hot shame of it. I walked bravely onward next to Isobel, weaving my way between knots of astonished people, children in ruffled clothes, elaborately embroidered, women radiant in red. And the men, baggy and vibrant, who nodded and smiled.

  Isobel greeted everybody by name, like they were old pals, like they came over daily for tennis or bridge. She hurried us toward a stall selling wine from wooden barrels and also homemade ice cream, and she bought two strawberry cones—her mother refused one, the first time I had ever seen the Countess turn down something edible—which we ate on the bench outside the tackle shop. The awning overhead cast us partly in shade, and Isobel stretched out her golden legs to catch the sun. I licked the ice cream and asked her how she knew everybody so well.

  “Let me see.” She ran her tongue around the edge of the cone, where the ice cream melted away in long, pink trickles. “There’s Mrs. Menzies, who runs the post office. Her husband’s that drunk fellow climbing into the boat, off the dock to the left. She’s got a couple of sons, I don’t know where they are. And that’s old Santana with him, he runs the ferry on this side, his wife sells the tickets in summer. They had seven or eight children and the last one moved to the mainland last year, I think. Becky Santana. Nice girl. Met a fellow working on the Island for the summer and married him. That’s Mrs. Costa and Mrs. Sweeney, gossiping together as usual. Their husbands are lobstermen. Frank Costa, that’s her son, he gets seasick, so he’s a groundskeeper over at the Club. You get to know everybody, that’s all. When you’ve lived here long enough.”

  The ice cream was melting all over my hand, faster than I could lap it up, requiring a certain amount of strategic concentration. I lost the train of names and made some kind of assenting noise to cover the lapse.

  “Why, what do you think, Peaches? You think we just lounge about in our pretty houses and ignore everybody else? We’re all family here on the Island, you know. We’re all in this together. If a hurricane strikes, why, you’d better hope you’ve got friends among the fishing fleet, because nobody at the Club has the least idea how to survive without electricity for a month, let alone rescue some poor soul washed out to sea.”

  “Like Vargas,” I said, under my breath, but she heard me anyway.

  “Yes, like Joseph.”

  She said his name in such a way that I forgot my ice cream and glanced to my side. Isobel slouched back against the bench, red-striped sundress hanging from her long, straight legs, while her narrowed eyes peered over the curve of her pink ice cream scoop to some point in the distance. I followed the line of her vision to its object, all the way down the wide wooden dock directly opposite, in the center of the harbor, where a group of men stood in resplendent costume, and the most resplendent of all was a slim, wiry, long-legged man who stood just to the side, wiping the wooden trim of his lobster boat with a white kerchief. His hat and his short black jacket were lavishly embroidered in gold, and the scarlet sash dangled from his waist like a spill of blood. As I watched—as we both watched, Isobel and I, while the ice cream melted down our hands and made them sticky—he straightened and turned to the man nearest him and made some joke to which they both laughed. I thought how hot he must feel, under the blazing sun in that black woolen jacket. All of them, those men wearing their quaint, breathtaking costumes. They must have been sweating through their shirts. In the middle of their laughter, a woman started down the dock and approached them, dressed in black and scarlet like the others, gold embroidery, looking like she meant to scold them for irreverence. I couldn’t see her face; I thought it must be Vargas’s wife, Joseph’s mother.

  “And that old woman over there,” Isobel continued, reading my mind, “the one coming up to Joseph right now, that’s his grandmother.”

  “His grandmother! He never mentioned a grandmother,” I said, without thinking.

  The Countess, who’d sat quietly throughout all this, looking extraordinarily ill-placed in her bright, flowing florals, put down her cigarette and drawled, “Oh, he didn’t, did he?”

  “I mean—”

  “In all those times you snuck down to the harbor to see him?” She stuck the cigarette back in her mouth, sucked briefly, and said, “Don’t think I didn’t see you, sweetheart. I see everything.”

  “How very naughty of you, Peaches. I’m shocked to the core.”

  “Tell me about this grandmother,” I said. “She looks formidable.”

  “She is. Why, she’s the one who started this little affair, nine or ten years ago. Isn’t that right, Abigail?”

  “I don’t remember. I was too busy divorcing your father, at the time.”

  “No, it was before that. It was the summer after the war started. Started for America, I mean. And all the young men had joined up, and only the fathers and grandfathers were left on the boats. Her own son was in basic training somewhere, as I remember. So she thought this would lift everybody’s spirits, and also bring good luck, you know, God’s blessing upon us all and that kind of thing.”

  “It was a dark time,” said the Countess. “A very dark time.”

  “Did it work?” I asked.

  “No. We lost two boats in a storm that summer. And then her son was killed on some Pacific island or another, I don’t remember which one. He must have been too old to join up but he went anyway. They all want to get off the Island, you know, all the boys, most of the girls, and I guess he thought this was his chance. And then the Japs blew him apart on an island on the other side of the world. So you can’t say God doesn’t have a sense of irony, can you?”

  The woman was kissing Joseph’s cheek. He had to stoop a little so she could reach, and he put his hand at her back to hold her steady, while she touched his face with her fingers. “How terrible for her,” I said.

  “She runs the general store. Her husband had a heart attack a few years ago. He’s been laid up ever since. Old Medeiro. Her daughter helps her.”

  “Mrs. Vargas?”

  “Oh no. The older one. I can’t remember her name. Do you know her name, Abigail?”

  “I can’t recall,” the Countess said.

  “Well, whatever her name is. There was another daughter, too, but she killed herself.”

  “Killed herself! Why? When?”

  “Oh, a long time ago. Around the time I was born, I guess. Do you remember, Abigail?”

  “Not really.”

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nbsp; “Well, I heard it was for love. She and her sister were both in love with Joseph’s father, old Vargas—impossible to believe, I know, but it was twenty years ago—and when Vargas married the other one, she drowned herself. Jumped off the cliff, not far from Greyfriars.”

  “Now where did you hear that nonsense?” the Countess said scornfully.

  “From Livy. She heard it from her mother. Livy says the girl was pregnant, too. Pregnant with Vargas’s baby, and that’s why she did it.” Isobel shuddered. “Look at him. Can you imagine making a baby with that?”

  “She did, however. Mrs. Vargas made a beautiful son with him,” said the Countess.

  I glanced at her in surprise. “Do you mean Joseph? Beautiful?”

  “Don’t you think? A little rough-edged, maybe, but that’s to be expected.”

  “I just don’t think beautiful is the word I’d use.”

  “I think he’s beautiful,” Isobel said.

  “You’re an idiot,” said the Countess. “Anyway, she didn’t jump off the damned cliff. My God, out of the mouths of silly young girls. It was a boat. A boating accident in the Fleet Rock channel. You know the currents there. She was on her way to the lighthouse, because her sister was having the baby—Joseph, it was—and there was an accident.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t remember anything,” said Isobel.

  “I remember that much. Now be quiet. Here comes the bishop.”

  As she spoke, the band stopped playing, the conversation and the horseplay went still. One by one, everybody turned in the direction of the western end of the harbor, where St. Mary’s Church stood on the corner of Hemlock Street and Grace Street. Everybody except me. I went on staring at Joseph, as I turned over this new information in my mind, the terrible story of his birth, and maybe Isobel was looking at him, too. I think she must have been. In the dry, nerve-wracking silence, Joseph felt our observation and tilted his still-grinning face toward the tackle shop and the bench outside, and the smile dropped away. His head turned hastily back. Isobel tossed the remainder of her ice cream cone on the grass and stood up.