The Summer Wives_A Novel Read online

  As for the men? I don’t know. I don’t think they cared as much. Even so innocent as I then was, I noticed how they kept slipping impious glances at Isobel and me, young and animal, glowing with perspiration in our shapely pastel suits. That space of ours at the end of the pew had lain empty for a good reason, because it stood square in the path of a block of sunlight, and as Isobel flipped hastily through the hymnal I found myself gasping for air once more. The notes and words swam before me. The hymn ended, the blessing began, the congregational responses, and at last—at last—we lowered ourselves to the hard wooden bench and allowed the service to swallow us.

  12.

  Afterward, the congregation gathered in the churchyard and greeted each other in the hot sun. Everybody was so nice. Said such pleasant, vague things about my mother and the wedding yesterday, how they wished Mr. and Mrs. Fisher all the happiness in the world, such a beautiful couple. I realized I must have been entirely mistaken about those hostile expressions at the beginning of the service.

  Mrs. Monk invited us over for bridge. “Of course,” said Isobel, kissing her cheek. “I’ll drive Miranda.”

  Clay regarded Isobel with a slight frown. “I’d be happy to drive.”

  “But we’ll be all squished in front, and I won’t have Miranda in back all by herself.”

  “She wouldn’t mind. Would you, Miranda?”

  A word or two about Clayton Monk, as he aimed a respectful pair of eyes at me and awaited my reply. At the time, I thought he was too good for Isobel. Not too handsome and dashing and rich, I mean, but too good. She was probably going to ruin him. I thought he had no natural defense against her, no edge at all. I mean, just look at him as he then was, made of pleasant, bland good looks that would inevitably grow red and jowly in middle age, but not before he’d passed them on to a pair of sons, whom he taught to sail. (I could picture them all, father and sons and sailboat.) He wore a double-breasted navy jacket and tan slacks, a white shirt with a crisp collar, a sedate silk tie the color of hydrangeas. Looking at him, you wouldn’t imagine that he’d once spent his days crisscrossing Europe in a B-17 Flying Fortress, dropping bombs all over the place, and that on a nice summer midnight in 1944 he’d crashed said Flying Fortress into a French field, so expertly that only one man was killed, and Clay himself had gotten away with a broken arm and a concussion. Afterward, as I said, he went to Harvard and then Harvard Law School, and he now occupied an office in some blueblood law firm or another, working his way toward the partnership, one dry, passive sentence at a time. Which might sound boring to you and me, but at least he was doing something, wasn’t he? Earning his own living, instead of idling his days atop the Monk department store fortune. Anyway, in the summer of 1951, Clayton Monk was all that was pink and well-scrubbed. Just looking at him made you feel clean, inside and out, like a wholesome breakfast cereal.

  I smiled back and said, “I don’t mind a little squishing. My skirt’s all creased anyway.”

  13.

  On the way to the Monk estate, which was perched near the eastern tip of the Island, right next to the Winthrop Island Club and exactly opposite to Greyfriars, I asked Isobel whether she’d seen Joseph at church, because I hadn’t.

  There was a little silence. “Joseph?” said Clayton, who was driving. “Joseph who?”

  Isobel said quickly, “Don’t be silly, Peaches. Of course not.”

  “Didn’t you say everybody goes to church on the Island?”

  She started to laugh. “Darling, he goes to St. Mary’s, in the village. The Catholic church.”

  “Oh, Joseph Vargas,” said Clayton. “I didn’t realize you’d met the locals yet.”

  “Yesterday morning. He brought in another lobsterman who’d fallen overboard. And then last night—”

  Isobel’s elbow met my ribs.

  “What about last night?” asked Clay.

  “Nothing.” I looked out the window, toward the sea. “Of course, the Catholic church. I didn’t think.”

  Isobel sat between us on the front seat, tilting her long legs at an acute angle to fit them under the dashboard. Clayton, a tall man, had taken down the top, and the draft blew warmly over our hats and ears. Isobel rummaged in her pocketbook for a cigarette and lit it clumsily. “Here’s a funny thing about the Island, Peaches,” she said, as she tried to get the lighter going in the middle of the crosswind. “I think it’s telling. The Episcopal church only opens during the summer season, see, May to September, while the Catholic church runs all year round. Don’t you think that’s telling, Clay?”

  “Telling what, darling?”

  “I mean, the way things work around the Island. Who does what, and where, and when.”

  Clay propped his elbow on the doorframe and tilted his head to one side, so he could rub his left eyebrow. His right hand gripped the wheel at twelve o’clock. “I don’t know what you’re trying to say, Izzy. Sure, most of the fishermen happen to be Portuguese around here. Portuguese folks happen to be mostly Catholic.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well, you’re trying to make out like it’s some kind of crime, that’s all.”

  “It’s not a crime,” she said. She’d finally succeeded in lighting her cigarette, and she now smoked it with a peculiar ferocity.

  “Well, we all get along, don’t we? They’ve got their religion, and we’ve got ours—”

  “And never the twain shall meet,” Isobel said softly.

  “—and everybody respects each other. Nobody’s got a thing against Catholics, around here.”

  I spoke up timidly. “I think what Isobel’s trying to say is that the summer residents, the ones with all the power and the money—”

  “All right,” Clay said. “All right. Fine. Look, it’s a Sunday. Let’s stay away from politics for one day, okay?” He straightened and reached for the radio dial.

  Isobel, looking out the side, past my nose toward the blurry meadows, the occasional house, said, “Have you noticed there aren’t any trees, Peaches? Old, native ones, I mean.”

  “Now that you mention it.”

  “It’s because of some hurricane.” She sucked on her cigarette. “Some hurricane, over a hundred years ago, that flattened everything. Now the Island’s like a Scottish moor or something. Or Ireland. One of those. Isn’t that right, Clay?”

  “I guess so.” He was still working the radio dial.

  “Do you get any stations out here?” I asked.

  “We get a couple out of Providence, when the wind’s right. Sometimes Boston.” He turned the dial millimeter by millimeter, listening carefully to the pattern of static.

  “Oh, why bother?” said Isobel. “Honestly. We’re almost there.”

  I waved away a stream of smoke. “This might be a good time to mention that I don’t play bridge.”

  “What’s that?” said Clay.

  “She doesn’t play bridge!” Isobel shouted in his ear.

  “Not play bridge? But I thought all you girls played bridge.”

  “Miranda doesn’t. She’s an intellectual. Did you know she was named after a girl in Shakespeare?”

  “Is that so? Now that’s grand. Which one? Which play, I mean?”

  Isobel turned to me. “Which one, Peaches?”

  “The Tempest,” I said, just as the car slowed and began its turn down a long, slender, curving drive toward a house plucked right out of the half-timbered Elizabethan countryside and onto a cliff overlooking the entrance to Long Island Sound. At that instant, whether by design or coincidence, a bank of black clouds swallowed up the sun.

  14.

  When it comes to bridge, the punishment for ignorance is apparently banishment, which suited me well enough. For a short while, I hung around the well-appointed drawing room, holding my iced tea, watching the rain shatter violently against the French windows while the Monks, unconcerned, set up the bridge table. Lucky for them—or again, maybe by design—there were two other guests, a mother and daughter, who made up the other sides. They were the H
uxleys, Mrs. Huxley and her daughter, Livy, and Isobel explained that it was Dr. Huxley, husband and father of same, who had come to Popeye’s rescue in the Fisher kitchen yesterday. We exchanged the usual bland pleasantries. Livy and her mother were perfectly nice, perfectly pretty, like two round, full scoops of vanilla ice cream, the younger one wearing a dress like a lemon meringue. I remember thinking, at the time, how utterly harmless they seemed, how absent of tooth and claw. Clay had disappeared somewhere with his father. Isobel had mixed herself a drink from the liquor cabinet and now sat in her bridge chair, next to Mrs. Monk, wearing an expression of sharklike intensity.

  When the rain died away to a drizzle, I called over my shoulder that I was going for a walk to see the cliffs and I slipped through one of the French doors to the bluestone terrace and the lawn beyond. The wet grass soaked my shoes and stockings. When I reached the cliff’s edge, I took them off and laid the stockings to dry across a large, white rock, and then I sat down on a neighboring rock and watched the clouds storm angrily away to the northeast. The cliffs weren’t especially high, maybe forty or fifty feet, but they were steep and rugged, and the path snaked carefully down the least forbidding side to end in a pale beach. Out to sea, a lone sailboat picked its way along the coast, about a hundred yards from shore.

  Now that the sun shone unobstructed, the heat built once more, sinking into my skin and bones and the rough surface of the rock beneath me. I removed my jacket—I’d left my hat and gloves indoors—and thought I should really find some shade, before I burned. But I didn’t want to move. There was just enough breeze to make it bearable. The air was rich and damp with the smell of the sea, and there was something hypnotic about the movements of that lone, brave sailboat, something graceful and eternal. I could just make out the man who sat in the stern, next to the tiller. He had dark hair that flashed from time to time against the white of the triangular sail, and at some point, as I watched, I began to realize that the sailor was Joseph. Or maybe I was only hoping it was Joseph? Maybe it was just longing.

  I straightened and squinted, and as if he felt my scrutiny, the sailor turned his head toward shore.

  Joseph.

  I raised my hand and waved, even though he couldn’t possibly recognize me from there, not sitting as I was on the opposite corner of the Island from the house where I was supposed to be sitting. Up went Joseph’s arm, returning the wave, and then he rose from his seat at the tiller and reached for a rope. A sheet—wasn’t that what they called ropes on boats? Sort of confusing, if you asked me, because something you called a sheet ought logically to be a sail. Whatever it was, Joseph did something to it, adjusting its pitch against the wind. When he turned back, his arm lifted again, in such a way that he seemed to be beckoning me toward the water.

  I stood and glanced at my shoes and stockings, drying on the nearby rock. I glanced at the path, snaking its way to the beach below. My skin was flushed and damp, my skirt creased, my blouse stained with perspiration. The salt breeze tumbled my hair.

  “Miranda. There you are.”

  I pitched forward. Clayton’s arm shot out to catch me.

  “Careful!” he said.

  “Sorry! I didn’t hear you come up.”

  “No need to apologize. Shouldn’t have snuck up like that. Gosh, who’s that crazy fellow out there?”

  “Just some sailboat,” I said.

  “He’s not afraid of a little squall, I guess.” Clay stuck his hands in his trouser pockets. He’d taken off his jacket and stood there in his shirtsleeves, rolled halfway up his forearms. A considerable concession to the heat, for a man like him. He rolled onto his toes and back down again. “Say. Do you have a moment, Miranda?” he asked.

  “Sure I do.”

  “Can we sit?”

  I took the larger rock, next to my shoes and stockings, while Clay propped himself on the smaller one and crossed his legs at the ankles. His feet looked hot and uncomfortable, encased in brown argyle socks and leather shoes. I tucked my bare white toes against the rock and said, “Anything in particular?”

  “Actually,” he said, as if the idea had just occurred to him, “I wanted to ask you about Izzy.”

  “What about Izzy?”

  He uncrossed his ankles and crossed them again, putting the other foot on top. His hands twiddled together against his thighs. “That was some party, yesterday, wasn’t it? A big day for you both. A happy day. We’re all—well, we couldn’t be happier for Mr. Fisher. Your mother’s everything we might have hoped for in a—a new mother for Izzy.”

  “She’s already got a mother, hasn’t she?”

  “Well, of course that depends on whom you ask. I don’t like to speak ill of people. You haven’t met her, have you? The ex Mrs. Fisher?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t suppose there’s any reason you should. She lives in . . . is it Nice? Somewhere in the south of France, I understand. She remarried a few years ago, some old French aristocrat she met during the war. Lost all his dough, I guess, and wanted hers. They say he’s a—well . . .”

  “A what?”

  “Nothing. Nothing you need to know about. Let’s just say they both go their own ways, the two of them. That’s what I hear, anyway.”

  “Then why did they marry?”

  “People marry for all kinds of reasons, Miranda. I don’t know, maybe she wanted the title. She’s a funny old bird. Always was. Restless, you know, wanted to go abroad all the time, spend her time with that international set—you know who I mean—instead of summering on the Island.”

  At the time, I didn’t know whom he meant. Clay pronounced the words international set with distaste, as if it were some disease that had no cure, but to me it sounded exotic and wonderful. So I said innocently, “What’s wrong with that? I’d like to go abroad.”

  “I mean make a habit of it. Socialize with those people, artists and aristocrats and hangers-on, new money, all the time having affairs and divorcing and God knows what else. Anyway, she’s never shown much interest in poor Izzy, even when she was a baby. So I think we were all hoping—when we heard the news—and then we met you and your mother—”

  “Maybe she’d be an improvement?”

  He nodded vigorously. “Oh, she is. I mean, you’ve got to be careful what you say, because Mrs. Fisher—the former Mrs. Fisher, I mean, the Countess whatever she is now—her family still summers here. The Dumonts?” The end of the sentence turned up inquisitively, as if there were some kind of chance I knew the Dumonts personally.

  “I’ve heard about them,” I said. Before us, the sailboat had started another tack. The sun caught the brilliant white of the canvas, so sharp against the dark blue sea that I had to look away.

  “Anyway, that’s all behind us now,” said Clay. “What’s important is that Izzy has someone to look out for her now.”

  “You’re her fiancé. Aren’t you supposed to be doing that?”

  “But we won’t be married until next June.” He sprang from the rock and stepped forward, right to the edge of the cliff. He had a nice trim backside, a narrow waist. A pair of old-fashioned braces held up his trousers. “Last night . . . ,” he said.

  I waited a moment and said, “What about last night?”

  “I don’t know what happened with you two. Maybe I don’t want to know. She had a little too much to drink, didn’t she? She gets carried away, you see.”

  He seemed to be starting another sentence, which he bit off. I had the feeling he was struggling with something, groping, juggling words in his head. He fiddled with his sleeves, took out his handkerchief, wiped away the perspiration on his temples.

  “For what it’s worth, I like that about her,” I said. “I like her high spirits.”

  “Yes. Of course. Look. I don’t know—I don’t usually—Miranda—you don’t mind me calling you that?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Do you mind if I tell you something private? Just between you and me, Miranda, because I can tell you aren’t the gossiping
type.”

  “You can tell me whatever you like, Mr. Monk.”

  “Clay. Look. The truth is, the night before last, the night before the wedding, we’d had a bit of a—a—I don’t know what to call it . . .”

  “Clay, you don’t—”

  “—a lovers’ quarrel.”

  The words burst out almost in a shout—lovers’ quarrel!—followed by a delicate silence, expecting my reply. When I didn’t say anything, Clay looked down and toed the dirt.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I haven’t told anyone, not even Mother.”

  “You’ve got to talk to someone, don’t you? You can’t keep everything bottled inside.”

  Clay made a dry noise. “Can’t I? That’s what we do, Miranda. Keep it all bottled. Don’t burden anybody with your private troubles. We don’t talk, certainly not to strangers. I sometimes wish . . .”

  He let the sentence dangle, the wish unexpressed. I tucked my legs against my chest and wrapped my arms around them. A few feet away, Clayton shifted his feet and noticed the handkerchief in his hand. He shoved it back in his pocket.

  I said, “If there’s anything I can do to help—”

  It was as if I’d pulled the cork from his mouth. Clayton started to burble. “She’s a terrific girl, Izzy. She’s the one, I mean there’s never been anyone else. But she’s got a restless streak, always has, all this bottled-up energy like some kind of Fourth of July firework. Don’t get me wrong, it’s one of the things I love about her. Maybe she gets it from her mother, I don’t know. You just can’t take your eyes off her, wondering what crazy, wonderful thing she’s going to do next.”

  I pressed my thumbs together. I think I was trying not to say something rash, trying to hold back this immense surge of pity I felt for Clayton Monk in that moment. He leaned down and picked up a rock from the dirt near his feet. Turned that rock around again and again between his fingers, examining every last ridge, every facet, each tiny grain that made up the whole.

  He went on in a quiet voice, talking not to me, but to the rock in his hand. “The trouble is, she gets temperamental, she gets in these moods sometimes, and I just can’t—I can’t—I don’t know what to do. Honestly, I don’t know what I said the other night, I mean I don’t have the slightest clue what upset her so much.”