Summer House (4 page)

“Liberty Ships.” A slight breeze carried the smoke into the sky.

“Right. And Gail, my best friend, is working for the
Boston Globe
,
so I moved in with her. We’re having a grand time.”

“You like the East Coast?”

“I do. Well, I can’t say I’ve actually seen the
East Coast.
I mean, I’ve mostly just been in Boston, and of course I’ve taken the train down to New York a lot to see the sights.” Anne considered. “How about you? Where are you from? No, let me guess. Say something so I can hear your accent.”

He said: “I think you’re beautiful.”

She knew he was only flirting, but the way he looked at her when he said those words made her blush. “Well”—she took a sip of her gin—“I think you’re from Boston.”

“You’re right.”

A group of soldiers with their arms around a gaggle of what Anne’s mother would have called “fancy women” staggered up the sidewalk toward Hilyard’s house. As they climbed the stairs, one of the soldiers pinched a woman’s fanny and she shrieked with
laughter. Some of the men saluted Herb Wheelwright as they wedged themselves, two or three at a time, through the open doorway and into the party, which had spilled out into the front hall. Explosions of laughter rolled through the air, followed by Cab Calloway singing, “Hi-De-Ho!”

Herb asked, “Could I take you out for a cup of coffee before we both go deaf?”

Anne laughed and agreed. She set her gin glass just inside the door, on a long rectory table laden with other empty glasses. She considered telling Gail she was leaving the party, but one look at the mass of singing, drinking, laughing, shouting people made her change her mind.

The night air was fresh against her skin. The silence of the streets, broken by the occasional honking of a taxi horn or the slamming of a door, seemed like peace. They walked through the Public Gardens and Boston Common, admiring the lush green trees and flower beds, and up and down the rather European-looking residential streets leading away from the Common, past the private clubs and the stately town house residences with their elaborate architectural features in marble and stone. Past Trinity Church and the public library. Past the Arlington Street Church and up Beacon Hill to the State House.

“So much history here,” Anne murmured, looking up at the golden dome.

“But we’re here
now,”
Herb told her. “And I wouldn’t be anywhere else.”

He took her hand.

They walked and talked, and sometime after midnight they stopped at an all-night diner for coffee and apple pie. Anne took Herb back to her room that night—that morning, the sun was coming up. They didn’t make love. They just lay down, fully clothed, on her narrow bed, and snuggled together and fell asleep. They were tired, but they didn’t want to go their separate ways. They felt at home with each other. And when they did wake up, they made love, and it was Anne’s first time, and it felt just right.

But she had certainly not set her cap for Herb Wheelwright. She’d had no idea that he was so wealthy or that his family owned a bank in Boston, and when she did find out she didn’t care. Why should she?
Her
family owned half the stockyards in Kansas City. She knew, if she married him, she’d have to move to Boston after the war, but while that didn’t bother her, it didn’t excite her either. She didn’t care whether they had ten children or none, whether he went into politics like his parents were hoping or not, whether they lived on Beacon Hill or in a tent in the middle of the Public Garden. She just wanted to be with him, and he wanted to be with her.

After two weeks, Herb asked her to marry him. She threw her arms around him and kissed the word yes all over his face. They wanted to marry right away.

Anne telephoned her parents, who gave her their preoccupied blessing and said they’d try to come east for the wedding, but they couldn’t promise. Anne wasn’t surprised. Her father had turned executive control of the stockyards over to his wife so that he could direct his attention to the management of a factory producing and packaging meat “products” that were compressed in twelve-ounce gold-tone tin cans and shipped to the overseas troops. Augustus—Gus—Anderson was everywhere at once in the factory, working day and night, scrutinizing the quality of production like an eagle—this food was going to the boys fighting overseas. Even on the telephone, Anne could hear the exhaustion in her parents’ voices.

“Darling girl,” her mother said, “we’re so happy to hear good news during this horrible time. I’m glad you’ve found this man, and I hope you’ll both be very happy.”

“And we will all meet up as soon as possible, God willing,” her father added.

Herb also phoned his parents, who were ensconced in their summer home on the island of Nantucket, and today he and Anne had taken the stately old steamer from Woods Hole to Nantucket
so that Anne could meet his family. They’ll be aloof, Herb warned Anne. Judgmental. But it was important for the future that Herb and Anne do this, now. It was the right thing to do.

So here she stood, at the top of the stairs, eavesdropping.

Not for the first time, Anne missed her own father. If he were with her now, he’d take her arm in his and tap beneath her chin until she lifted her head proudly. He’d sweep into the living room with Anne beside him, and he’d beam his welcoming, expansive, generous, Midwestern smile, and even Herb’s mother would gawk, because Anne’s handsome father, Gus, radiated the natural-born charm of an optimist. Herb’s father would like him, too. Gus would shake Herb’s father’s hand with his own large, muscular work-toughened paw, and Herb would know at once that Gus was an ally.

Anne had once exuded a similar relaxed and easy charm, but she quickly discovered that here in the East, because she was young and untried, she appeared to people as simply naïve and even a little silly, more like a girl than the woman she was. So here at the Wheelwrights’ summer home, she had to monitor her own wide smile. She had to tamp down her natural enthusiasm. She had to summon up some kind of dignity. She had to act, for heaven’s sake, with
decorum
,
and if Gail knew, she’d fall out of her chair laughing.

But this was important. Herb’s family was important to him. Anne’s family was important to her too, but they’d recognized her as an adult long ago. They’d turned her loose. She knew that after the war she would be living in Boston with Herb and coming here to this very house in the summers, where Wheelwrights had come every year since the 1800s.

“You going to turn and run, honey?”

Anne squeaked with shock as a soft voice sounded just at her shoulder. Herb’s sister Holly stood there with a big grin and one eloquently arched eyebrow. She wore a red wool suit with a Christmas wreath of diamonds, rubies, and emeralds on the lapel.

“I was straightening my seams,” Anne insisted, striving for dignity
even though, the one time she’d met Holly, she’d liked her immediately.

Holly’s glance whisked up and down Anne’s figure. “They’re straight as rulers, Anne. But let me warn you, my mother is a rat terrier disguised as a human. If she can get you by the throat, she’ll shake you till you’re dead, so don’t let her take hold. And don’t look so shocked. I’ve had to live with the woman all my life, remember.” Holly linked her arm through Anne’s. “You’re the first woman my brother has dared to bring home, did you know that? I can tell he loves you, so I would be hugely disappointed if you let the old battle-ax beat you down.”

“I love Herb, too,” Anne whispered as they descended the stairs.

“Chin up, then,” Holly ordered.

The living room swept across the entire side of the house, with a fireplace at one end and, at the other end, windows full of sky and sea in daytime but draped with heavy velvet now. Enthroned in a wing chair by the fire sat Herb’s mother, in a white wool dress and pearls. She looked like she was chewing nails.

Anne smiled tremulously. “Hello.”

“Would you like
a cup of tea, Mrs. Wheelwright?”

“What?” It was with effort that Nona abandoned her memories. Where was she?

She was still in the living room of the Nantucket house, but in the present, or what other people thought of as the present. After the war, Holly had married and moved to Montana, where she and her husband raised cattle, horses, and several unruly children. Holly had happily given up all claims to the Nantucket property long ago. She and her family never enjoyed coming east. Nona and Herb had visited them several times over the years, impressed by the spacious, bustling, western life Holly had chosen for herself.

Now Holly was dead. She’d died—my goodness—fifteen years ago. Holly’s husband had died not long after, and their children remained
in the area where they’d grown up. Nona seldom saw them, but they were dutiful in sending cards on her birthday. Nona kept a birthday book and always remembered to send them birthday cards, too.

And Nona’s beloved husband, Herb, was dead. He had passed away five years ago.

But Nona wouldn’t allow herself to brood. She was reasonably fit, active, and lucid, and she was not alone. She had Charlotte’s engaging company, and Glorious to brighten her life and take care of her.

Any moment now her family—
her
family—her children and their children and all their noise and turbulence and demands and excitements—would scatter into this house like a flock of gabbling geese, and she would have no more time for little voyages into the past.

Nona had to think of her family, had to think of their comfort and appetites and emotions. She had
to focus.

“Yes.” Her voice, not so often used these days, was dry and croaking. To her Jamaican housekeeper, she said, “Yes, please, Glorious.”

At that moment the telephone rang and, as Glorious hurried off to answer, Nona heard the first automobile pull into the drive.

Three

H
elen decided
she wouldn’t make coffee. She was trying to figure out, without resorting to a visit to her doctor, what was causing her headaches. They troubled her almost daily now, sometimes operating with a fierce viselike action, squeezing her temples, but usually they were mild, weighing down her skull with a kind of bovine heaviness. Today she would go without caffeine and see if that helped.

Slipping a silk wrapper over her nightgown, she padded barefoot down the hall, down the stairs, and through the quiet house into the kitchen. She poured herself a glass of orange juice and sipped it standing at the kitchen sink, gazing out at their long backyard rolling down to the Charles River.

Today she and Worth were flying down to the island for the weekend, to celebrate Nona’s birthday. Nona was going to be
ninety!

It would be a grand celebration. All spring Worth had plotted with his sister Grace. They rented the yacht club for a party, made out a guest list, sent out handsome invitations. Helen had phoned her
sister-in-law twice to assure her she would like to help.
We’ll let you know when we need you
, Grace had replied. Helen felt more relieved than rejected. Grace and her husband, Kellogg, were methodical and organized. And bossy Grace loved to nitpick and criticize.

Helen’s headache began its bass note hum. She set her glass in the sink and went into the den. Pulling out her office chair, she settled at her desk and opened her engagement calendar. This small act centered her, smoothed down the ruffled fur of the flustered little beast of her mind.