The Beach at Summerly, page 1
Dedication
To the men and women who quietly gave their lives
in a war of unknown battles
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
I.
May 1946
II.
May 1946
III.
June 1946
IV.
August 1946
V.
August 1946
VI.
August 1946
Epilogue
Author’s Note
About the Author
Also by Beatriz Williams
Copyright
About the Publisher
I.
April 1954
Wellesley, Massachusetts
Aunt Benedita telephones long-distance just as I’m rushing out the door. She’s one of those people who has a knack for it.
“I can’t talk right now,” I tell her. “I’m late for class.”
“You’ll want to hear this. Your father told me that Tom Donnelly and his boys started to work on a new job.”
“Gee, that’s terrific. You know how I love hearing all the little tidbits from back home.”
“Don’t you want to know whose house they’re working on?”
“Look, Auntie, I know you don’t believe it, but a mile away from where I stand at this telephone, there’s a lecture hall filled with undergraduates desperate to hear me speak about the Salem witch trials. Could you put them out of their misery?”
Aunt Benedita disregards my pique. That’s how we’ve remained on speaking terms, all these years.
“They’re fixing up Summerly,” she says.
Lucky for me, an armchair sits next to the table where we keep the telephone. I land on it hard and notice that the telephone cord has somehow gotten twisted around the table leg. I unwind the cord while Aunt Benedita’s voice leaks out of the earpiece, repeating my name. When I put the receiver back to my ear, the darn thing shakes in my hand, all by itself.
“Good for them,” I tell her.
Outside, the air smells green. The temperature is positively balmy. The blossoms are popping out at last in their pinks and whites. Even after all these years on the mainland, I can’t look on a blossoming tree without my throat feeling sore. You simply don’t get blossoming trees on Winthrop Island. It seems so extravagant. The sky has turned an ultramarine shade of blue and the blossoms nod and waft against this exemplary field. I hurry across the quadrangle toward Founders Hall and try not to mind all the beauty, but it hits my gut all the same.
I wasn’t exactly lying to Aunt Benedita about the lecture hall, but you might say I was stretching the truth. I still have time to hurry up the steps, deposit my belongings in the fourth-floor telephone booth known as my office, and drink a cup of muddy coffee before presenting myself in the classroom two minutes before the lecture’s due to begin. It’s the end of April and the air is green and balmy, as I said, and most of my students have given up trying to arrive early, if at all. “Women in Early Colonial America” is a brand-new course in the history department curriculum—a course I designed myself, if you must know—but I’m afraid nobody seems to care much about colonial history in these days of hydrogen bombs and Jackson Pollock, even though I try to present the subject with a certain amount of panache.
Still, a few young ladies have managed to drag themselves through the dreaming blossoms and into the classroom, and that’s all that matters, really. To reach a few fresh minds, to plant some germ of inspiration. That girl in the second row, for example. The light, curling brown hair and the sharp chin; the dark, narrow eyes like a young fox. She sets that inquisitive chin into her palm and loses herself in the parable and I say to myself, in a thought that floats in parallel to my words and my theatrical gestures, That’s it, honey, just sink yourself into the past, so you don’t have to spend so much time in the awful present.
Later, when I retire to my telephone booth office in the fourth-floor attic, there is the newspaper to distract me. Sure, maybe it describes the awful present, but at least it isn’t my awful present. I light a cigarette, pour myself another cup of muddy coffee, and add a splash of cognac from the flask in my desk drawer. If you’re going to drink in your office, I always say, make sure it’s worth the trouble.
The news is even more rotten than usual—same old mess in Indochina, the Red Sox lose another one, that chump McCarthy’s starting in on the Army now—but I read on regardless. If nothing else, I know the trick of mental discipline. Close your mind to the unwanted thought. Throw yourself a nice, noisy party of the head so you don’t hear it knocking.
Still, now that I’m sitting down to read the newspaper instead of lecturing, drinking this miraculous coffee instead of standing cold sober in front of a room full of dewy coeds, that damned word keeps streaking across my mind from wherever it is you hold your memories.
Summerly.
Why in God’s name did Aunt Benedita have to go and telephone me about a thing like that? Long-distance, no less. She might have put it in a letter—she writes plenty of those, too. Always trying to smooth things over, Aunt Benedita, always having the exact opposite effect. I bicycled to Summerly the other day, she might write, and it’s an awful shame how they’ve let it go to seed. The roof shingles are falling out by the dozen and the grass is up to the front window. Do you remember that old rhododendron bush? It’s taking over the hedge.
Does she not understand how these details hurt? Does she think they’ll make me feel better? Now she wants to tell me that Tom Donnelly’s crew is fixing up the place again so the Peabodys can return for the summer season like old times. What am I supposed to think about that? Am I supposed to want to join them?
Well, now I’ve done it. You see what I mean? You open your mind a crack, just a crack to allow a single dumb word like Summerly into the party, and the rest of that thought shoves through uninvited and eats up all the canapés. I lay down the newspaper and open the desk drawer, and this time when I uncork my bottle of cognac, I really let the coffee have it. I do like cognac. It’s like brandy, only . . . more. A professor of mine made the introduction, junior year, and we’ve been friends ever since. The cognac, I mean, not the professor. No, Professor Pete and I had the briefest possible affair before his wife found out and reported him to the department head. He accepted a research position at some progressive-minded college in the Midwest somewhere and I haven’t heard from him since. The cognac was the best part of our friendship, to be perfectly honest. I prop my feet on the corner of the desk and slide the newspaper into my lap. The aqua vitae gives off its perfume inside my skull. I turn the page.
“RED BRAHMIN” PAROLE HEARING CANCELED, SOURCES SAY
And I guess it speaks to the old adage about trouble coming in threes that my phone rings the exact instant I’ve absorbed that headline. The coffee spills in my lap. I swear savagely and reach for the receiver.
Emilia Winthrop, I growl.
The voice on the other end is a courtly Southern baritone. “Miss Winthrop. I hope I haven’t called at a bad time.”
When I arrive home at a quarter past five, Susana’s making dinner. Lizbit sits nearby on the kitchen counter, stirring something inside a large metal mixing bowl.
“Emmie,” she says sternly, “have you been hitting the bottle at work again?” Lizbit calls us both by our first names, to the delight of visitors. They think it’s so amusing and precocious in a seven-year-old.
“Hell, no.” I swoop her into my arms and deliver a boozy kiss to her cheek. “I’ve been a saint. What’s for dinner?”
“Pork chops,” says Susana. “What’s the matter with you?”
“You’ll never guess.”
“Not Cato again.”
“No, not Cato. Believe it or not.”
My kid sister’s a terrific cook. I’m going to miss her terribly when she gets married in June. When I try to picture the aftermath—Susana and Harvey on their honeymoon in Key West, me and Lizbit sitting around the living room in our underwear—I get this sinister feeling of bleakness and hunger. I can only hope Lizbit takes over the cooking.
Susana flips the pork chops in the skillet. “So what gives? Poor Lizbit’s going to get sauced just standing downwind of you.”
“I can hold my breath,” says Lizbit.
I snap my fingers. “Witches. That’s it.”
“Witches?”
“Witches, not Women. ‘Witches of Early Colonial America.’ That’ll turn out the kids next semester.”
“For God’s sake,” says Susana, “just go set the table, will you?”
Now, I don’t mean to impugn the good Harvey. He’s a real prince and I’m grateful he’s taking my sister off my hands. It’s a sad story, really. He’s only twenty-six and a widower. Graduated Harvard Law and married his sweetheart, a girl from Brookline, nice girl by all accounts, then six months later she’s dead of cancer. They didn’t catch the tumor until it was too late. Terrible story. We don’t know the details, actually—just that it was a female type of cancer. Harvey’s too embarrassed to go into the specifics. Harvey’s embarrassed about a lot of things. Honestly, I don’t think they’ve even reached second base, Susana and Harvey. He came into the bookstore the Christmas before last to buy a present for his ex-mother-in-law. The Serenity Bookshop, right here in Wellesley, Mass.—ever heard of it? It’s a nice cozy spot packed with armchairs and atmosphere. We keep some dirty novels in the back for people with real imagination. Susana opened it when she moved up here with me seven and a half years ago. She had to do something, and she didn’t want to start college, like me. So she started a bookstore instead. I usually pitch in on weekends and holidays, but when Harvey Reed, Esquire, walked into the store late that Christmas Eve (well, he’s a man, after all) I happened fatefully to be four streets away in our living room with Lizbit, trimming the tree and skimming the eggnog, and the next thing you know, Susana leads the widower Harvey home for the holidays like a stray puppy. Can we keep him, that was what I saw in her eyes that night, and it turned out we could. He’s a lawyer at some nice Boston firm. Always a good idea to have a lawyer in the family, don’t you think? Just in case? They’ll be happy together, I’m sure.
Anyway, I once asked Harvey sort of a legal question. I asked him why the newspapers insist on making up catchy names for notorious criminals—the so-called Red Brahmin, to take a random example. He said he disapproved of the practice, that it mocked the sacred principle of innocence presumed until guilty proved, without which our democracy could not stand. (All right, so Harvey can be a bit of a prig.) But he conceded that democracy also required the freedom of the press to make asses of themselves, so what could you do?
And it was true that this Red Brahmin, though she had the privilege of belonging to one of Boston’s oldest families, had betrayed our country’s most vital secrets to the Soviet Union. So even if the moniker was a little crude, you couldn’t deny it was apt.
One thing I love about Susana, she can take a hint. She refrains from questioning me about my day at work until after Lizbit is scrubbed clean and passed out cold in her pink canopy bed, so remarkably like an angel it chokes your throat.
Early on, we made a deal in our house, which is Susana shops for groceries and does the cooking, while I do the baking—the doctor says it’s good for my nerves—and the washing up. Accordingly, I yank on the rubber gloves and plunge my arms into the hot water. Susana sits down at the kitchen table and lights a cigarette. Well? she says.
“Sumner Fox rang me up after class today.”
She almost spits out the cigarette. “Fox? Our Sumner Fox?”
“Is there another one?”
“So what for did he call you?”
“He wants me to come to prison and talk to our mutual friend.”
“Our mutual friend?”
“You know.”
“Talk to Mrs. Rainsford? Our Mrs. Rainsford?”
“I wouldn’t exactly call her our Mrs. Rainsford, dear. Not in public. People might get the wrong idea.”
Susana drags thoughtfully on her cigarette. “Why does Fox want you to talk to Olive Rainsford?”
“He wouldn’t say. She wants to speak to me, that’s all. It is apparently of the utmost urgency, according to Fox.”
“Well,” Susana says.
“Well what?”
“Well, it’s about time, I guess.”
“What do you mean, it’s about time?”
“Honey,” she says soothingly, “any shrink could tell you that it would do you a world of good to sit down with that woman and—well, get some answers.”
“You’re absolutely right. Any shrink.”
Susana rises from the kitchen table and snatches a towel from the hook. Susana’s the only person I know who can smoke a cigarette and dry a plate at the same time. “Just because Cato’s a psychologist doesn’t mean the whole science is wrong.”
“It might, though.”
“All right,” she says. “Let me correct myself. First you should end things with Cato, then you should visit that prison and talk to Olive.”
“First, I don’t see any reason to end things with Cato. I think it’s the most satisfactory relationship I’ve ever had. Second, nuts to Olive.”
“Why not, though? Give me one good reason why you can’t just sit down with her for half an hour.”
I hand Susana a water glass. “You didn’t happen to read the papers today, did you?”
“Sort of,” she says. “Not really.”
“You know Olive’s been coming up for her first chance at parole, right? Well, the parole hearing’s been canceled. Right there in the Globe, page four or something. And then—at that exact moment I’m reading about it—Fox rings up.”
“So?”
“So you don’t smell a rat? Because I smell a rat.”
Susana turns to me all round—round face, round mouth, round eyes. “Oh! You don’t think they’ve found out something else she’s done? Or she’s been spying from prison?”
“I just think it’s funny, that’s all. At this particular moment in time, Olive sticks up her hand and says she wants to have a nice friendly chat with the woman who put her in prison. No hard feelings.”
“I would say you’ve got plenty of hard feelings.”
I hand Susana the last fork, pull the plug from the drain, and peel off the gloves. The pipes bubble and gasp. A hint of putrescence drifts up with the bubbles. I make a mental note to call the plumber. “I agree,” I tell her. “Which is why I told Mr. Fox to go to hell.”
When Susana and I moved to Wellesley seven and a half years ago, just in time for the start of term, we got this bungalow for a steal. Maybe the G.I. Bill was sending battalions of young men into college in the autumn of 1946, but you couldn’t say the same for girls—especially the kind of upscale girl who went to Wellesley College to further her education. Those girls were mostly getting married. But not us. We needed a place to live, and this was the first place we saw. It was twenty years old and needed a lick or two of paint, to say nothing of a working icebox, but it had three nice-sized bedrooms and a modern bathroom and plenty of bookshelves left behind by a previous occupant, and it was only a mile from the center of campus. We’ll take it, I said.
Since then, Susana has done wonders to make our place the kind of place you’d want to come home to. By the time Lizbit was born, she’d repainted all the rooms and lined all the drawers and made these nifty patchwork curtains out of fabric ends from the dry goods on Main Street. For mine she selected various patterns in green, because green’s my favorite color. I’m looking at those curtains now, except the room is too dark to tell what color they are. You’ll have to trust me. They’re green. Green, the color of new life, the color of spring, the color of fecundity. I close my eyes and try to throw a party in my head, but nobody comes. Just the past.
Olive Rainsford.
Absolutely not, I told Sumner Fox over the telephone, and by God I meant it. I didn’t want to see Olive again. I didn’t want her treacherous eyes meeting my treacherous eyes, to determine which of us was the greater traitor. I didn’t need to speak to Olive. I speak to her every day! All the time, we have these imaginary conversations.
My goodness, how you’ve changed, she’ll say. You’re nothing like the Emilia I used to know.
I’ll light a mental cigarette and pour myself a mental Scotch. Well, whose fault is that, I’ll tell her. And so on.
Fox was persistent, I’ll give him that. He explained to me how this might be my last-ever chance to sit across the table from Olive Rainsford. How Olive had specially requested the meeting. She’d insisted, in fact.
What do you mean, insisted? I asked.
There was a long silence down the line, the kind you might expect from Sumner Fox while he picks his thoughts. I hadn’t seen him in years, nor heard his voice—not since that final day in the courtroom when I gave my testimony and he thanked me afterward for what he called my courage. But time hadn’t changed him, except to make his throat raspier and his words even more measured. I would almost say weary. I guess espionage is nearly as brutal a business as academics.
She has a request to make of you, he said. I’m afraid I can’t disclose any further information over the telephone. But I urge you to think it over, Miss Winthrop. You’d be doing your country a great service.
That’s when I told him I have already done my country more than enough service, thank you very much, putting her in jail in the first place. I’m not going to waste my time helping you get her out again.
Eventually I fall asleep. I know this because I wake to an immense pressure crushing my chest. This happens to me from time to time. Cato says it’s a response to repressed trauma. He thinks I need analysis, a lot of analysis. I roll my eyes and tell him he would say that, wouldn’t he? Personally, I think he’s just miffed because I won’t tell him about what happened before I moved to Wellesley. Why should I? I don’t speak to anybody about what happened that summer, about what I lost. Even Susana knows better than to speak his name. The pressure grows on my chest, like a booted foot stands on the center of the sternum. My ribs crack under its weight. The room is still black, the color of longing. Tears leak out from the corners of my eyes and run down to the pillowcase, so badly do I want it all back—the summer, the man who loved me, the Emilia that was. In the distance, a telephone rings. I tell myself Pop will get it. He’ll be downstairs by now.
