The Summer Wives_A Novel Page 23

  Still she finds the strength to turn on the damp sheets and ask him if he’s awake.

  “Yes,” he says. “What’s the matter, little one? Have I been too rough?”

  “You know that’s not true. You know you can do whatever you like with me.”

  “Lusty little angel, you.” He strokes her hip and stretches luxuriously. “I’m about done for, though, even if you’re not. I’ve got a ten o’clock tee time tomorrow morning and I don’t know how I’m going to find the strength to lift a club, let alone survive through eighteen holes.”

  “Then maybe you should have been more careful just now.”

  “Ah, but I couldn’t. I can’t hold back with you, little one, you know that. All I have to do is look at you and I’m lost.”

  “Yes, I know. But it was different tonight,” she suggests gently, making the declaration a little like a question.

  He hesitates. His hand involves itself in her hair while he considers how to answer her. He looks not into her eyes but her forehead, as if he’s trying to read some sentence, some line in a script that’s written on the smooth skin that meets her hair.

  “A little different, yes,” he says. “Bianca, I have to tell you something. This may be our last time together for a while. A short while.”

  She swallows. “Because Tia Maria and Francisca are coming back from Providence?”

  “No. Because I’m getting married next week.”

  And there it is, the thing causing her mind to spin, the portent hanging in the air in the midst of all that frantic copulation. For an instant, she lies rigid, and then she bolts upright in the bed.

  “Married?” she howls.

  Hugh sits up too and takes her by the elbows. “Sweetheart, you know that. I told you already.”

  “Who? Who?”

  “You know whom. Bianca, don’t. You knew this already. I told you, the first time we met, how it was.”

  “I thought—but I thought—” She’s crying now, hiccupping, beating his chest while he holds her arms.

  “We talked about postponing the service because of Father, but in the end—it’s what he wanted so much—”

  “But you hate your father!”

  “Bianca, stop. What’s wrong? You know this has nothing to do with us. You and I, we’re sacred, I can’t live without you, but you know a man in my position—”

  “A man in your position? We are bound together in God’s eyes, you and me. We are made from the same soul, we’re linked forever. You said it yourself. Not you and that stupid girl, that—”

  “Bianca! She’s not stupid, she’s a nice girl, you don’t understand how it is—what I meant by bound—”

  “Oh, I understand, all right.”

  Bianca jumps from the bed and grabs her dress from the floor.

  “My God! What’s the matter with you? I thought you understood, I thought we understood each other—”

  “It seems I did not understand you at all, Hugh Fisher. It seems I thought you were a man of honor.”

  He startles as if she’s slapped him. His eyes open wide. He leaps from the bed and takes her by the shoulders, and she pushes him away, so hard he falls backward on the floor.

  “You thought I would be your mistress, is that it? That’s what you meant? This is our wonderful fate together? Mistress, do they even do that anymore? I guess they do. You and your damned Families. You can afford anything, can’t you? One wife for the summer, and another wife for the rest of the year. My God, I am an idiot!”

  Hugh scrambles to his feet and stands before her, panting, while she puts on her clothes, her dress first and then her knickers, everything out of order. He lowers his voice and speaks with forced calm.

  “Bianca, stop for just a moment. Stop and listen to me. When I told you these things, when my father died, when we first—you know, what we did by the pool, I meant what I said then, what I’ve said to you every day since. I love you, little one, I can’t live without you. You know that. I want you here with me, always. We don’t need to live apart, not ever.”

  She stops and stares in horror at his face, which is absolutely sincere and wracked with misery. His immaculate hair flops all over his forehead, and his beautiful features are transfigured into some grotesque of longing.

  “I can’t believe it,” she whispers. “You thought—you thought that I—that we would just—”

  “Bianca, don’t,” he whispers.

  “Because I am just a nobody girl from the village. A nice Portuguese girl for good times in the summer.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Now you have covered me in sin. You have covered me in shame.”

  “In love, Bianca.”

  “It’s a mortal sin, what we’ve done. You just remember that, Hugh Fisher. You just remember that when you stand on your altar and say your vows to that Abigail. You just remember that when God empties his vengeance on your head and my head.”

  “Bianca, don’t. Don’t leave.”

  But she does. Turns away and runs out the door and across the wet grass, thinking it must be a dream.

  2.

  Bianca doesn’t remember anything about her parents, but she does remember the day she came to live with Tia Maria and Tio Manuelo, who welcomed her with tears and great love, and at night tucked her into the dark, queer-smelling room she was to share with her cousins Francisca and Laura.

  Laura went right to sleep, snoring peacefully, but Bianca lay awake in misery and knew that Francisca was awake too. Sure enough, a hiss came from the bed nearby.

  “Psst! Bianca! You awake?”

  Bianca must have said Yes, because Francisca continued.

  “Mama says Tia and Tio died and that’s why you’re living here now.”

  For a moment, Bianca was confused, and then she remembered that her mother and father had been Francisca’s aunt and uncle.

  “Yes,” she said again.

  “Mama says we have to be nice to you, because you’re an orphan now.”

  Bianca just stared at the ceiling. The word orphan seemed very strange to her, and also lonely and sort of bleak. Not a word that belonged to her, surely?

  “Just remember,” says Francisca, “they’re not your real parents, okay? You are a charity child, Bianca. You don’t belong to anybody. I’m sorry.”

  Bianca stared at a small black spider, making its way along the edge of the window by some dim light outdoors, the moon or maybe a streetlight, and felt a kind of kinship with him, small and alone like that, trudging along a precipice.

  “I’ll tell you what. If you’re very good and obedient, then when I’m married, you can come and live with me and help me with the housework and take care of my kids,” Francisca said generously. “How does that sound?”

  “Okay,” Bianca said, and for some time she listened to the creaks and groans of the strange house, the bedsprings of Tia Maria and Tio Manuelo making music in the room next door, until eventually she must have gone to sleep.

  To this day, it’s the only distinct memory she has of Portugal, perhaps because it is so raw and painful, because it turns her heart cold, because each time she remembers that night she is made to endure its misery anew. She once recalled the conversation to Francisca—not long ago, in fact—but Francisca just laughed and said she didn’t remember saying any such thing.

  But she did remember what a funny, skinny, grave child Bianca was, how scrawny and unlikable, and how it was some time before anyone thought of her as part of the family.

  3.

  For some reason, Bianca’s mind returns to that night, to Francisca’s words—If you’re good, if you’re good, when I’m married, when I’m married, don’t belong, don’t belong—as she races across the garden to the small door she keeps unlatched. When she reaches her room, she finds Laura sitting on Francisca’s bed in her dressing gown, arms crossed, taking in Bianca’s crumpled dress and bare legs.

  “Why are you here?” Bianca asks stupidly.

  “A little birdie whisp
ered in my ear. Jesus Mary, you silly girl. What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

  Laura throws herself back on the bed. “What are we going to do, huh? What are we going to do?”

  “We’re not going to do anything.”

  “It’s Hugh Fisher, isn’t it? Merciful God. That pig. Not again.”

  Bianca goes to the washstand and peers at her face in the mirror. The lamp’s off, but the sun has already begun to crest the horizon, and the room contains just enough gray, humid light to reveal how haggard she looks, how guilty. She looks upon this face as a stranger’s face, belonging to somebody else. Inside, she feels nothing like Bianca. She is cold, and hard, and frozen, and entirely foreign. Her mind hears the echo of Laura’s words from a distance, and at first she’s confused by the word Again. Then she remembers.

  “You mean Francisca? Last summer?” She turns away from the mirror and stares at her cousin, flat on her back in Francisca’s bed. “She seems to have made out all right.”

  “Made out all right. Don’t you know? She had an operation last October. He got her in trouble, the pig, and Francisca was too scared to tell Mama and Papa, so we went to the mainland together—you remember—and went to this place in Providence and got rid of it.”

  Bianca hears these words as a whooshing in her ears, as the sound of a different language. Laura crosses herself, sits up again, and braces her hands on either side of her legs at the edge of Francisca’s bed.

  “And we got lucky, because that dumb cluck Pascoal Vargas was so sweet on her, and thank God she’s going to be married and have a nice life. He’s going to give up the bootlegging and they’re going to keep the lighthouse together and raise a nice family. But she’s paid for her sins, Bianca, and so will you if you don’t watch out, and dumb clucks like Pascoal don’t grow on the trees around here. Even if you don’t get in trouble, sooner or later word gets around, and no nice Catholic boy is going to touch you, that’s for sure.”

  Bianca stands straight in the middle of the room, listening, arms rigid against her waist and hips and thighs. So hard and frozen as she is, she imagines she is really an icicle, hanging from somebody’s roof, and at some proximate instant she will drop and shatter all over the place, what a terrible mess, too bad about that poor fool Bianca, but she got what she deserved, didn’t she? The wages of sin.

  “Bianca? Are you listening to me? What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing’s wrong.” Bianca turns and wriggles out of her dress and her wet knickers, wet with Hugh’s vile sperm that leaked from her womb as she ran. She knows Laura’s staring enviously at her nakedness, at Bianca’s astonishing, voluptuous beauty, and she doesn’t care. Her body is a hateful thing to her now, obscene, unclean, it doesn’t even belong to her. She pulls her thin summer nightgown from the drawer and drops it over her head. “I’m going to sleep, that’s all.”

  4.

  The next afternoon, when the fishing boats come into the harbor, Bianca picks out Pascoal Vargas and just so happens to be walking the same direction. She’s wearing a dress from last year, too small, and her woman’s body nearly bursts its seams. Pascoal, flushed to his ears, nervously offers her a cool drink when they reach his house at the end of Primrose Lane. She accepts.

  It takes less than a quarter of an hour before he succumbs, even though she lets him think it was all his idea, that he’s seduced her, she has surrendered her virtue to the force of some unstoppable attraction that binds her fate to his. Men are all alike in their vanity, she realizes as he climbs aboard, bedsprings creaking, absolutely identical in their propensity to carnal weakness. Pascoal shoves and sweats and slobbers gratefully atop her, rolls and twists her breasts like the dials of a goddamned radio while the skies open up outside the window in a typical August downpour. She remembers to scream in pain when he first prods his thing inside her, in that wicked place where the Devil lives, and to weep when he lets out a long, ecstatic howl and collapses on her belly like a wet sack. Then he cries too and tells her he’s sorry, he doesn’t know what came over him, and he begs her not to tell her cousin. He tells her this cannot happen again, they must stay away from each other and never, ever speak of it.

  On the following afternoon, she waits inside his cottage and makes him tea, and when he arrives home she cries and throws herself on his barrel chest and tells him she cannot sleep or eat, she cannot think of anything but him. Overpowered by her weakness, he takes her on the kitchen table, finishing within seconds because—as he tells her, gasping—he has been thinking shamefully of her all day on his boat, thinking all day of what occurred the previous afternoon, thinking of her beautiful virgin’s body yielding to his. Then he slides to the floor and shuts his eyes, muttering some prayer in Portuguese. Bianca brings him his tea, which he drinks in large, desperate gulps. He yells at her to go, to leave him alone, and Bianca crumples and sobs on the kitchen floor in her too-small petticoat, her bare feet and arms, sobs and shivers until her ripe, vulnerable beauty sends him mad once more, until he hurls the teacup against the wall and tears away her petticoat and mounts her, right there on the linoleum, calling her a witch and an angel as he pumps his hips wildly against hers. She closes her eyes and curls her fists, she makes herself ride this grunting, heaving friction into release, as Hugh taught her to do, because she wants that too, because she wants to take back that gift from Hugh as well. She wants to take back everything. Without pity she uses Pascoal’s anatomy, until—drained at last—he buries his weeping, exhausted face between her breasts and implores mercy from God, from his mother’s soul, from Bianca herself.

  For the next three days, she and Pascoal meet like this in dirty secrecy, until Pascoal is a mere husk of a man, his will worn down and stripped away by an endless cycle of temptation and copulation and remorse. For her part, Bianca is both disgusted and fascinated by Pascoal, by the difference between her beautiful first lover and her gnomish second, by the expression of abject, ugly rapture on his face as he humps away between her legs, and by the feeling of power with which this drenches her.

  When Tia Maria and Francisca arrive home at last on the Thursday afternoon ferry, Pascoal—his trousers buttoned only minutes before—bursts into tears at the sight of them, and everybody is amazed except Bianca.

  1951 (Miranda Schuyler)

  1.

  At five o’clock in the morning, the whole world was deserted. I walked down West Cliff Road into the harbor almost by memory, because the sun still lay below the horizon, still and gray, and the moon was just a tiny sliver of a thing hidden behind the fog. My footsteps crunched softly in the gravel, the only noise except for the wash of water against the bottom of the cliffs, which was so faint I had to strain my ears for it. A calm, auspicious sea for a lobsterman.

  I wasn’t sure how early the fishing boats set out from the harbor. I hoped I wasn’t too late. I thought surely they couldn’t set out until sunrise, especially in this fog, but what did I know? As long as the Fleet Rock light guided them away from the rocks and the channel, they ought to take advantage of the peace and quiet and haul up all the lobsters they could before lunchtime. Before the cooks and the housekeepers went down to the market for supplies, before the delivery vans started up their engines and trundled down the Island’s dignified lanes to its waiting kitchens.

  So I quickened my steps, until the white dust settled on the straps of my sandals and my breath and my heartbeat churned in my chest. The road curled downhill, but when your legs are moving that rapidly, your circulation has to keep up. Alongside, the grass thickened into brush, but there were no trees, not until the road met Hemlock Lane and the elms planted there by human hands.

  Down in the village, the fog was even thicker, and a feeling of disorientation came upon me, like I had walked into a dream. I stopped in the middle of Hemlock Street, unable to see even the trees that lined the road, and luckily I caught the faint sound of somebody shouting a command, some lobsterman in the harbor, that drew me back to
this earth. I followed the noise and the heavy brine smell and the road—what I could see of it—and a moment later the harbor rushed up to meet me, my feet found the wood of the docks, the sound of my name carried through the fog.

  “Joseph?” I said, turning my head.

  “Miranda. What’re you doing here? You didn’t walk down in this pea-souper, did you? The sun’s not even up.”

  I couldn’t understand how he saw me, but he did. I saw his hair first, dark against the pale fog, and then his hand found my shoulder. “Note from Isobel,” I said, quietly so the other lobstermen wouldn’t hear, because of course they were listening, all of them, their eardrums strained mightily as they readied their boats for the day’s work. Nobody more curious than a fisherman.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked, snatching the note.

  “No. She left for the mainland yesterday with her mother, that’s all. A shopping trip to Providence, I think. She wanted you to have this early.”

  “And you listened to her? You might’ve walked off a cliff!”

  “I wasn’t going to walk off a cliff. I’m not blind.”

  He stuck the note in his pocket. “So why didn’t you go shopping in Providence?”

  “I don’t like shopping much. Anyway . . .”