The Summer Wives_A Novel Read online

  In fact, Bianca’s thinking about that August afternoon right now, as she stacks her cans of soup in the hot, musty interior of the Medeiros’ general store on Hemlock Street, right at the harbor’s edge. She’s remembering how Mr. Fisher took off his linen jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, and how strong his back seemed as he bent himself over the graceful rump of the Buick, how his shoulders formed the broad side of a damp, neat triangle that narrowed and then disappeared down the slim waistband of his trousers. She sets down another can of soup and crosses herself, and at that exact instant, by some arrangement of the universe, she hears none other than Hugh Fisher’s young, enthusiastic, unmistakable voice calling out from the front of the store. The coincidence is so remarkable that at first she thinks she’s imagined it.

  “Hullo!” he calls again. “Anybody there?”

  Bianca waits behind the tall shelf while her heart pounds and pounds, not breathing, waiting for Tia Maria to reply, for one of her cousins to reply. But nobody does.

  “Hullo? Francisca? Anybody?”

  He’s going to leave. She lifts her hand to smooth her hair, but there’s a can of soup stuck between her fingers, and she bumps her head with it instead. She shoves the soup on the shelf and darts out into the open, just as Mr. Fisher’s turning to the open front door.

  “Hello! Mr. Fisher!”

  He swivels back, and all at once he’s looking at her, her, Bianca Medeiro and nobody else, and the whole world lights up under the color of his gaze, the wattage of his smile.

  “Well, hello,” he says. “I was hoping to buy a bottle or two of vinegar.”

  2.

  Another thing she knows about Hugh Fisher: last summer, he fell in love with her cousin Francisca, the third and the oldest of Tia Maria and Tio Manuelo’s children, who’s engaged to marry Pascoal Vargas in the autumn. Francisca, who was perfectly aware of Bianca’s infatuation, tried to keep the affair secret for her sake, but Bianca knew almost from the first, when Francisca made some excuse about taking a walk one night last July, and came back flushed and bright-eyed an hour later, smelling of a particular kind of masculine soap that Tio Manuelo doesn’t stock in his store. In truth, Bianca hadn’t really minded. Francisca going to meet Hugh Fisher at night was almost as close as Bianca herself going to meet Hugh Fisher, and when she heard the back door open and squeakily close, she imagined Francisca running up the slope to the cliffs under the moonlight, Francisca embracing Hugh Fisher while the phosphorescent sea pounded beneath them, in a way she couldn’t imagine Mr. Fisher embracing so distant an object as Miss Dumont. By touching Francisca’s skin the next morning, Bianca felt she was somehow touching Mr. Fisher.

  And another thing. Last summer Francisca was fully grown, nineteen years old, lush and beautiful, and Bianca was only sixteen, her period had just started the previous winter, and her face was round and spotty and childlike. As she lay throughout July and August in the little bedroom she shared with her cousins, listening to their clandestine comings and goings, she was happier imagining making love to Hugh Fisher as beautiful Francisca than she would have been to actually make love to him as herself. It was safer and infinitely more pleasant.

  Then came the end of summer, when the Families all returned to their houses in New York and Boston and Providence and Philadelphia, including the Fishers. Francisca moped to devastating effect. She appeared at the dinner table tearstained and listless, eating nothing, and she completed her chores like one of those machines in a factory, without joy. When she accepted Pascoal Vargas’s proposal at Christmas, everybody thought she finally saw sense, because the color returned to her cheeks, and her hips reacquired their old sway, and she plunged herself into the assembling of her trousseau, the most elaborate and comprehensive trousseau in the history of the Medeiro women, because Pascoal Vargas had made a great deal of money in his lobster boat during the past few years, a great deal, and now he has just received the appointment to keep the Fleet Rock lighthouse come October. Francisca will live in luxury, almost, so what if her devoted husband-to-be is past forty years old and resembles nothing so much as a leathery, dark-haired gnome? Who cares about romance when you’ve got a fiancé with money in the bank and a steady, respectable job?

  But Bianca’s not so sure.

  Bianca hasn’t missed the new brightness of her cousin’s eyes, now that the Fishers have returned to Winthrop Island. She hasn’t missed the way Francisca makes excuses to go walking in the cliffs above the village, or offers to help her brother Manuelo make the rounds throughout the Island in their father’s old Model T delivery truck. And this summer is a whole new summer. Francisca’s engaged, she’s practically a matron, and Bianca has finally achieved that transformation of which young girls dream, from duckling into swan. Over the winter, her spots disappeared and her face became luminous and refined, her hair grew in thick and her small, dainty body rounded out in all those places men admire. As Easter passed and the blossoms came out and the harsh New England air turned soft and warm, as she prepared to graduate from the tiny Winthrop Island School and turn free, Bianca felt her hour had struck. Her blood sang in her veins, she woke restless every morning. She felt that something grand beckoned around the corner, the future for which she was destined.

  All she needed was a sign.

  3.

  Is this the sign? Hugh Fisher standing right there in the front of the store, a foot or two away from the wooden counter with the vinegar-not-vinegar hidden inside, wearing a blue seersucker suit that made his eyes even bluer than she remembered? Already his skin is golden with sunshine and pink with heat, and his shiny blond hair reminds her of the helmet of Apollo. (She will cross herself later.)

  Bianca tucks a loose strand behind her ear. Tia Maria won’t let them bob their hair, she absolutely refuses to let her girls turn fast like all the others, so Bianca arranges hers in a loose knot at the back of her head and then pulls out the dark, curling locks at the sides, so that the silhouette approximates that of Clara Bow.

  “What kind of vinegar do you need, sir?” she asks politely, though her heart knocks like crazy next to her lungs, making speech difficult.

  His smile turns sheepish. “Well, now. I’ve heard you stock a special kind of vinegar here, and I’m all out. Fellow was supposed to make a delivery at the Greyfriars boathouse last night and he never turned up.”

  Bianca glances anxiously at Tio Manuelo’s sacred counter and back to Hugh Fisher’s lips. (She can’t quite meet his gaze, not until her nerves stop jumping like this, not until she can keep her eyes from filling with tears at the perfection of his beauty, so close as to be within reach.) “I’m afraid I don’t know much about vinegar,” she says.

  “No, of course not. A sweet young thing like you. Is your father here?”

  “My uncle,” she says, hot with shame. A sweet young thing! Hasn’t he seen she’s a woman now, a swan? Hasn’t he noticed her luminous skin and her shining hair, the glorious new curves to her breasts and her hips? All the boys are noticing her now, the men too, but she hasn’t looked back at any of them, not one. This blossoming beauty of hers is meant for only one man in the world, and he stands before her now, and he won’t look, he won’t see.

  “Your uncle. If he’s in the back, I can find him.”

  “He’s away.”

  “There’s nobody else here? Just you?”

  “Yes,” Bianca says, though she’s not quite sure on this point. Laura and Tia Maria were both here a moment ago. Where have they gone? Into the back garden to sneak a cigarette or two?

  “I see.” He looks at her kindly, as if she’s a simple child, as if she’s nothing more than the sweet young thing he called her, and reaches into the inside pocket of his seersucker jacket. “Then perhaps you can give him my card. Here, I’ll write my telephone number on the back. Can you give this to him for me?”

  He sticks the pencil stub back in his pocket and holds out the card with his strong, smooth fingers. Bianca reaches out and takes it, and when her
fingertips inevitably brush against his fingertips, the sensation travels all the way up her arm and down her ribs and her stomach to her legs. She breathes in deeply to smell Mr. Fisher’s particular shaving soap, which doesn’t belong to any of the soap Tio Manuelo stocks on his shelves. The scent is like magic to her. She even wavers on her feet, so intoxicating is this flavor.

  “Are you all right?” Mr. Fisher asks, in a voice of true concern.

  “Yes, I’m all right.” Fully drunk now, she opens her eyes, which were closed in appreciation of Mr. Fisher’s soap, and this time she meets his gaze, his dazzling blue eyes, and she watches in triumph as they widen, like the flare of a match.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t believe I know your name.”

  “It’s Bianca. Bianca Medeiro.” She tucks the card into the pocket of her pinafore apron. “And I think I know where to find your vinegar, Mr. Fisher.”

  4.

  Hugh Fisher walks away with two bottles and an order for more, whatever Tio Manuelo’s got, and Bianca promises to deliver this merchandise herself. To the boathouse, he says. There’s a hatch door on the ceiling, you’ll find it. Before he leaves, he takes her hand and kisses it, first on the back and then—turning it reverently over—in the middle of her palm.

  He curls her fist to trap the kiss inside, and he says, in a voice of deep sincerity, “It’s been a pleasure, Miss Medeiro. Until we meet again?”

  “Yes,” she answers breathlessly, and for the rest of the day, at least six inches of air exist between Bianca’s feet and the ground beneath them. When she settles into bed that night, she cannot sleep. She presses her palm to her lips—she hasn’t washed that blessed hand, of course not—and thinks, At last, at last, it’s the sign that my life has truly begun.

  This time, she does not cross herself.

  1951 (Miranda Schuyler)

  1.

  On the morning of my mother’s wedding, I watched a pair of lobster boats crawl across the sea outside my bedroom window, setting their pots while the sun rose. They were some distance apart, one to the east of the Flood Rock lighthouse and one to the west, and I wouldn’t have known they were lobstermen—I knew nothing about fishing in those days—except that I had a pair of binoculars, and I saw them dropping the pots, one by one, from the sterns of their boats. Each pot was attached to a rope, and at the end of the rope was a colored buoy that bobbed cheerfully in the water as the vessel pulled away.

  Behind me, my mother stirred. “Is that you, Miranda?” she asked, in a slurred, sleepy voice.

  “Yes.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Only five thirty. Go back to sleep, Mama.”

  “What”—mumbling—“so early?”

  “Watching the lobster boats.”

  She sighed and grunted, the way you do when you’re still half-asleep, and you settle yourself gratefully back on a pillow and close your eyes. “Strange girl, Miranda,” she muttered.

  I wondered if she remembered she was getting married today. Sometimes when you sleep deeply enough, you forget everything you ever knew, even your own name, and Winthrop Island is possibly the quietest place in the world at night, except for the pulse of the ocean: so black and velvet that sleep comes as easy as that, as closing your eyes. You fall and fall, like an anchor that finds no bottom, and I don’t believe I have ever again slept as I slept throughout that summer of 1951, in my bedroom at my stepfather’s sprawling house on the Island.

  Except, on that morning at the beginning of June, the morning of Mama’s wedding, Hugh Fisher wasn’t quite my stepfather. The fateful summer still lay before me, a reel of film waiting to unspool, and how could I know that I was right now witnessing its first momentous scene? I mean, you never do suspect what inconsequential event will change the course of your life. This particular morning, I only thought about the wedding to come. That was the affair of the day, wasn’t it? The great occasion? Instead of sleeping deeply, I’d woken at dawn after a restless night, and now I knelt by the window, holding the binoculars to my eyes as the lobstermen labored on the water, and the sun climbed drowsily above the ocean.

  I watched the lighthouse change color, from violet to palest pink to gold, and the surrounding rocks emerge from shadow, and the little buoys multiply in long, bobbing lines behind the boats. I watched the lobstermen shift about. In the easternmost boat, there were two of them: one short and broad-shouldered, wearing a striped shirt and a knitted cap; the other taller and leaner and bareheaded, hauling the wooden cages into the water while his shipmate baited them.

  In the second boat, the one to the west, there was only one old man. He moved slowly, dropping maybe one trap for every three from the other boat, and as the light grew I saw the bulge of his tattooed arms, the silvery beard that grizzled around his face. He was nearly bald and chewed a pipe, and in my head I named him Popeye. I thought there was something awful and tragic about the way he baited each pot, attached line and buoy, and dragged it over the edge of the boat. Or maybe I only endowed him with those qualities in retrospect. Memory’s funny that way. At any rate, the eastern boat ran out of pots or something, because it turned around and started back for the harbor, disappearing behind the Flood Rock lighthouse for an instant or two and then reappearing, its white sides brilliant in the glare of the sun. At the same time the boat flashed back into view, Popeye was swinging another lobster pot over the side of his boat, and maybe a wave jogged him, or maybe he lost his footing, I don’t know. I’d returned my gaze to the other boat by then, and the lithe, bareheaded, carefree man who now stood at the wheel—a young man, arms and face richly tanned, curled hair whipping in the draft—so I never knew why Popeye went flying into the sea. I just saw the young man jolt, saw him turn his head and yell at his shipmate, saw him bend and yank off his rubber boots, and the next thing I knew he was diving into the water in a long, clean arc.

  Now, I’ve heard many times that most fishermen don’t know how to swim, as a matter of superstition or something. If that’s true, this particular fisherman wasn’t the superstitious kind. A hundred yards is a long way to swim, especially in the cold northern waters of early June, but he swam them just like he was stroking laps in the YMCA pool, regular and sure of arm, minding not the distance or the chill or the chop of waves. As I knelt there on the floorboards of my bedroom, frozen tight, following his progress through the glass of the binoculars, he made a final surge and dove under the surface, right where Popeye had just ceased to flail and resigned himself to sinking, and I thought, God save us, how is such a skinny fellow going to drag a stocky, solid artifact like Popeye back to fresh air?

  I held my own breath in solidarity with the two of them. My arms began to shake, so I leaned forward and steadied my elbows on the window frame, keeping that patch of water in view, counting the giant thuds of my heart. When I reached too many, I abandoned numbers and started to whimper.

  Please, please, please.

  That carefree boy. That poor old man.

  Please, Lord, please.

  I still remember the silent glitter of the sun on that water. The particular musty-salty-linen smell of that bedroom, newly aired after the winter hibernation, a smell that still recalls the terror of that moment to my mind. And sometimes I think, well, what if they’d never come up again? What if he’d never come up again? What if those two lobstermen had drowned together on the morning of my mother’s wedding, young and old, a terrible tragedy overclouding a day of promise, and I never knew either of them?

  I guess there’s no answer to that question. Because just as I started to panic, to lower the binoculars and rise from my knees and shout for help, they exploded together through the glittering waves like a single breaching whale. The younger man lunged for a rope hanging off near the stern of Popeye’s boat, hauled Popeye over the side, hauled himself. Thwacked Popeye a good one right on the back, so Popeye vomited up a few gallons of cold salt water.

  Then he grabbed the wheel of the boat with his left hand and the thrott
le with his right hand, and he made not for the harbor, a mile away on the sheltered side of the island, but for the nearest dock, Hugh Fisher’s dock, my almost-stepfather’s dock, the dock directly in line from my bedroom window.

  Boy, did I rise then. I jumped straight up and ran for the door, ran down the stairs, ran to the kitchen, shouted at the kitchen maid to call the doctor, call the doctor, boat coming in, a man near drowned. A lobsterman.

  Her pink face went round with amazement. “Who?” she cried.

  “Some old fellow, out by himself!”

  “Golly, that’ll be Mr. Silva!” She spun for the telephone hanging on the wall, and I threw open the kitchen door and ran down the soft green lawn, past the swimming pool, past the big white tents awaiting the wedding, past the boathouse, and down the wooden dock, where the breeze blew on my cheeks and the sun drenched me, and the drone of the lobster boat’s engine filled my ears like the sound of a thousand approaching honeybees.

  2.

  My father named me Miranda. He was a teacher at a pureblood girls’ boarding school in Virginia: not an English teacher, as you might expect from a name like that, but an art teacher. Painting, mostly, although he also taught sculpture, as the traffic allowed.