Endless Summer, page 9
“I tried his cell phone,” Leon says. “But he’s not answering.”
Barbie can’t believe this. She spoke to Glenn at noon, and he’d sounded happy, even joyful.
Allegra and Hope close in.
Hope says, “Auntie Barbie, what’s wrong?”
Barbie opens her mouth to explain, to tell them sometimes in life, lots of times, in fact, things don’t turn out the way they’re supposed to. Barbie should never have lied. She could have told Glenn about everything, she realizes now, and he would have loved her anyway.
But before Barbie can figure out how to explain the inevitable disappointments of the world to her nieces, Allegra shrieks. There is a car barreling down the dirt road toward the beach.
“Daddy!” Allegra says. “I swear, I see Daddy!”
Barbie squints. The car, she sees, is Glenn’s Escalade, and in the passenger seat is… is…
Barbie cries out, “It’s Eddie!”
Glenn screeches to a stop in a cloud of dust and sand. He hops out of the car and so does Eddie. A third man climbs out of the back seat. He’s wearing a uniform, and there’s a gun in his hip holster.
Glenn waves at Barbie. “Get-out-of-jail-free card,” he says. “For twenty-four hours!” He gives Barbie a big grin. “What do you get the woman who has everything?”
Barbie’s vision is blurred with tears. She and Hope and Allegra run to give Eddie a hug.
“You look just beautiful, Barb,” Eddie says.
“Doesn’t she?” Glenn says. He kisses Barbie and wipes away one of her tears with his thumb, then he turns to Allegra and Hope. “I’m going up now. You two follow behind me, just like we practiced.”
“Okay,” Hope says.
“Okay,” Allegra says.
The girls line up with their bouquets in front of them, then process up and over the dunes.
Eddie offers Barbie his arm. “It’s our turn,” he says.
The Country Club
(Read with The Identicals)
This short story, “The Country Club,” is a prequel to The Identicals. I wrote it in November of 2016 after I had turned The Identicals in to my editor and was waiting for her revisions. Revisions are the trickiest part of writing a novel. The first draft is complete, the characters and plot and “world” have been established, but there are often significant changes to be made. I have described it as a puzzle, taking the novel apart and putting it back together differently. Because the work is so challenging, I rent an apartment in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston for six weeks (for maximum concentration, it’s important to be away from home). I wrote this story during a weekend of exceptional weather; temperatures were in the high sixties, and I took long walks through Beacon Hill, admiring the town houses, especially the grand homes surrounding Louisburg Square. It also happened that I had just gotten back from a short trip to Dubai and was horribly jet-lagged. The owners of my rental apartment had a wonderful book about the history of the homes in Beacon Hill and I would read it at two and three in the morning as I lay awake. It was around this time that I learned that the country club in Brookline was referred to as simply “the Country Club,” and I thought, I must set a story there.
In The Identicals, much is made of the fact that Billy Frost and Eleanor Roxie Frost come from different backgrounds—one quite fancy, one modest. I wanted to delve into the 1960s Boston that created both Eleanor and Billy; I wanted to describe the night they met; I wanted to establish Eleanor as a bit of a rule breaker, a woman who longed for a career. I wanted to discuss the effect of the Vietnam War on the characters (I would get into this in more depth in Summer of ’69). But most of all, I wanted Eleanor and Billy to fall deeply and genuinely in love.
The result was “The Country Club,” set at Eleanor’s parents’ Christmas party in 1968. I hope you enjoy it!
Because her mother is the most unreasonable of WASPs, Eleanor is required to stand in the foyer of the Country Club and greet every last one of the guests attending her parents’ Christmas party, held each year on December 22. This receiving-line duty—or “doody,” as Eleanor’s younger sister, Flossie, calls it—can last up to an hour. Eleanor’s parents invite three hundred people to the party, and few dare to decline. The Roxies’ Christmas party is known throughout Boston and its suburbs as simply “the Christmas Party,” the same way that the country club in Brookline is “the Country Club.” Are there other Christmas parties, other country clubs? If so, it hardly matters.
Eleanor is twenty-one years old, a senior at Pine Manor, where nearly all of Eleanor’s classmates are engaged to be married, many of them to boys at Babson, many of them in June, right after graduation. The mere concept of marriage is nauseating to Eleanor. Her parents have set a miserable example. Eleanor can count on one hand the number of times she has heard her mother, Vivian Harper Roxie, laugh. Eleanor’s father, Edgar Winford Roxie, “Win” for short, is the president of Boston’s oldest bank. He flirts with whatever woman is in front of him, an attempt, Eleanor supposes, to find validation of his masculine charms. He teases waitresses, jokes with coat-check girls. Has he ever been unfaithful? Ever taken one of the sweet young tellers or his secretary—whom he always refers to as Miss Pitch, though, as Eleanor knows, her name is Jennifer—to lunch at the Marliave? It’s not impossible.
Eleanor herself has been dating a boy named Glendon Bingham; he attends Harvard Business School. When Eleanor’s mother met Glen, she awarded him a genuine smile, as rarely seen as the California condor. Glen is appropriate in every way—handsome, pedigreed, from a suitably but not ostentatiously wealthy family. However, he is also a terrific bore. When Eleanor looks at Glen, she sees in his dull brown eyes a center-entrance colonial in Wellesley or Weston, summers spent by the pool at the Country Club, dutiful attendance at this very party every year, two children (a boy and a girl), a golden retriever, a woody wagon, and the missionary position. Eleanor will be expected to serve on committees, bring a fruited Jell-O mold to potlucks, and organize the carpool.
She has no interest. She wants to work. She wants not only a job but a career. In fashion design. Her idol is Priscilla Comins Kidder, otherwise known as Priscilla of Boston, the woman who designed the wedding gowns of Princess Grace and President Johnson’s daughter Luci.
Eleanor’s parents know nothing of her ambitions. She is an art history major at Pine Manor, specializing in Rembrandt and Rubens—two vastly different artists. She brings home respectable A minuses and B pluses even though her notebooks are filled with sketches of dresses, skirts, blouses, pantsuits, even shoes.
In fact, Eleanor has designed the dress she is wearing this evening, a strapless black velvet sheath. It’s probably snugger than her mother cares for, but it does hit below the knee, an anachronism in this, the age of miniskirts. Vivian doesn’t know the dress is her daughter’s design and creation, sewn on a turquoise Singer sewing machine that Eleanor bought in Chinatown and keeps in her dorm room; Eleanor told Vivian that she bought the dress at Filene’s. She is wearing it with black slingback heels and—her nod to the holiday—a crimson velvet ribbon tied around her neck as a choker. Her mother cast a jaundiced eye at the ribbon, saying, “Pearls would have been better.”
Eleanor had merely rolled her eyes. Pearls—how unimaginative.
Flossie, who is thirteen but, because she has a baby complex, acts eight, takes advantage of the lull after greeting the Dennis Paiges, the Thomas M. J. Kingslands, and the Paul Henry Koglers. “I’m thirsty,” she says. “And my feet hurt.”
“Your shoes are too small,” Eleanor points out. Here is one example of Flossie’s childishness—her insistence on wearing last year’s Mary Janes instead of the black silk ballet flats that their mother had bought for her in Paris last fall. (What had Eleanor received from Paris? An umbrella.)
Flossie ignores Eleanor. “Daddy, may I please get a Shirley Temple?”
“Go on, then,” Win says.
“I’d like a drink as well,” Eleanor says. “Something stronger.”
“All in good time,” her father says. He gives a skyward glance that lets her know he, too, is dying for a drink. Since Eleanor has been home on holiday break from college, Win Roxie has been educating her in the world of spirits, a paternal duty he seems to particularly relish. Each night before they watch Bewitched (Eleanor’s favorite) or The Red Skelton Hour or That Girl (her father’s favorite; he likes looking at Marlo Thomas’s legs, Eleanor suspects), Win pours himself a drink and brings a scant finger in a highball glass for Eleanor as well. Mount Gay rum is her favorite so far, especially after her father added tonic and a wedge of lime.
Vivian doesn’t know about these tastings. She would not approve. She believes that ladies drink wine and, on special occasions, champagne.
“Where is Glen this evening?” her father asks. His voice contains a hint of playfulness. The evening that Win Roxie introduced Eleanor to bourbon—or truth serum, as Eleanor now thinks of it—she confessed to her father that she was more than ready to break things off with Glen. She doesn’t want to spoil his holiday, however, so she has decided to wait until the new year to drop the ax, which her father agreed was the politic thing to do.
“He’s working on a project about franchises,” Eleanor says now.
“And he couldn’t leave it just for one night?” Win asks.
“Alas, no,” Eleanor says. Harvard’s semester doesn’t end until after the holiday break, a brutal cruelty if ever there was one. Eleanor is secretly thrilled that Glen can’t make it. She plans on drinking as much as she wants—it will have to be champagne; her mother is watching—and dancing to the Philip Becker Orchestra.
Who will she dance with? None of her parents’ friends; the men are all hands. Maybe her childhood friend Topher. His girlfriend, Liesl, is here tonight, although she has a sprained ankle.
“Are we done?” Eleanor asks her mother as they stand on the receiving line.
“A roast is done,” her mother says.
“Are we finished?” Eleanor asks impatiently. She wants a flute of champagne and a chance at a canapé or two. The shrimp will be gone, as they are every year, but she might get salmon mousse on a Ritz cracker or a stick of celery stuffed with pimento cheese if they end this pointless formality right now.
“We still have more guests, darling,” Eleanor’s mother says, turning the word darling into a pitchfork and offering her phony smile, her lips tight across her teeth.
The Nutcracker Suite, which her mother insists on, ends and the Philip Becker Orchestra launches into “Mistletoe and Holly.” Eleanor is certain that Mr. and Mrs. Charles Eaton, Mr. and Mrs. Richmond Collier, and Aunt Lizbet and Uncle Myles have started dancing. That’s one good thing about WASPs, Eleanor thinks. The instant the band starts playing, they get up to dance. Probably it’s their frugality surfacing; they can’t stand to think of the money their parents spent on years of ballroom-dancing lessons going to waste.
“Daddy?” Eleanor implores.
Win Roxie straightens up—shoulders back, hands clasped in front of himself, eyes resolutely forward. “Look,” he says. “Your cousin is arriving.”
Her cousin? Eleanor raises her eyes to see Rhonda Fiorello slink through the door with a young man at her side.
What? Eleanor thinks.
Her mother exhibits a rare failure of composure; her gasp is audible, but probably only to Eleanor. Then a whispered “Good God.”
“Now, now,” Win Roxie murmurs.
It’s approximately twelve steps from the front door of the club to the receiving line, and in the time it takes Rhonda Fiorello and her date to cover those twelve steps, Eleanor has the following thoughts:
1. Rhonda has come to the Christmas party wearing a floor-length lavender (out-of-season) dress that is (basically) see-through and a pair of leather thong sandals. Over the top of the dress is a threadbare white “wrap”—honestly, for all Eleanor knows, it might be a towel stolen from the Holiday Inn, but she is grateful for its presence because Eleanor fears her cousin isn’t wearing a bra. Rhonda has not seen fit to wash her hair; it hangs in dark strings around her sallow, pinched face.
2. Rhonda has never been a pretty girl, but this evening she looks particularly ghastly.
3. Eleanor is not supposed to have uncharitable thoughts about her cousin. Rhonda’s mother, Cressida Roxie Fiorello, Win’s younger sister, got pregnant at nineteen, endured a shotgun marriage at Eleanor’s grandfather’s insistence, gave birth to Rhonda, then promptly left the city of Boston, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the East Coast altogether. She became an activist for a Sioux Indian tribe in South Dakota, leaving Rhonda to be raised by her father, Sal Fiorello, a car salesman on Route 1 in Revere.
Win Roxie tried to intervene. He offered to pay to send Rhonda to Winsor with Eleanor; he offered to let Rhonda move into the house on Pinckney Street. She could stay in the fourth bedroom, he said, the one with the best view of their hidden garden out back. She’ll be like another sister! Win had said to Eleanor as if this were something she might have wanted. Rhonda was only two years younger than Eleanor, far too close in age to remain uncompetitive. Eleanor enjoys being her father’s favorite and resents the soft spot he seems to have for Rhonda. Eleanor realizes it is merely hand-me-down affection—his younger sister, Cressida, was his favorite of his four siblings for reasons Eleanor doesn’t understand—and now that Cressida is effectively gone, he has transferred his tender feelings to Rhonda.
Thankfully, Sal insisted on keeping Rhonda in Revere to attend Immaculate Conception; however, Rhonda got expelled by the nuns for smoking marijuana. That was in her junior year, and although it had been possible for her to finish up at the public school, she chose to drop out. She took a job as a chambermaid at the Sheraton Commander and started dating a boy who worked as a bellhop. The boy’s name was Frank Paley. Rhonda had brought Frank Paley to the previous year’s Christmas party and he had presented himself well, which is to say better than anyone thought a special friend of ne’er-do-well Rhonda’s might. He had held his liquor and ended the evening sitting in the men’s bar with Win, teaching him magic tricks—he took a dollar bill from Win, then produced the same dollar bill from inside a lemon, a trick that had confounded Win.
The boy’s going to be famous! Win said.
But shortly after the new year, Frank Paley enlisted and was deployed to Vietnam. He was killed in July during Operation Buffalo—and that was when Rhonda went from being a black sheep to a full-blown off-the-rails lunatic. She became a war protester, the tenacious, unruly kind. She was photographed marching outside the Massachusetts State House, and the photo was published on the front page of the Boston Globe—Rhonda with her mouth open, fist in the air, sign thrust in front of her: CHILDREN ARE NOT FOR BURNING. Vivian, who believed that a lady should appear in the newspaper only three times in her life—her birth, her marriage, and her death—was fit to be tied. She was relieved there was no common last name linking the angry young woman in the photograph to the Roxie family of Pinckney Street.
No time for further thoughts; Rhonda and her date are upon them.
“Hello, Rhonda,” Eleanor’s mother says. “Welcome to the Christmas party.”
“Happiest of holidays, Rhonda,” Win says. “Would you care to introduce your guest?”
Rhonda stares at Win and Vivian with glassy eyes, then starts to cackle. She’s on drugs, Eleanor thinks. She wonders if her parents are going to let Rhonda stay or if they will ask Frederick, the club’s social director, to find someone to discreetly escort her out.
The young man speaks up for himself. “I’m William Frost, sir,” he says, offering a hand. “But please, call me Billy.”
Win shakes Billy Frost’s hand, clearly relieved that the young man is upright and coherent and speaks English. “How do you do, Billy Frost. Welcome to the Country Club. Is this your first time?”
“Yes, sir,” Billy Frost says. “However, I have long dreamed of playing the Primrose course.”
“A fellow golf enthusiast!” Win says. “How marvelous!”
Eleanor takes a look at this fellow, Billy Frost. He’s tall and well built with sandy hair, recently barbered. He’s wearing a navy blazer and a standard red-and-blue rep tie, a webbed belt, penny loafers. The outfit, at least, passes muster. Where did Rhonda find this fellow? Surely not at one of her protests or sit-ins. Possibly she stationed herself outside the Hasty Pudding Club and waited for a suitable escort to emerge.
At that moment, Billy Frost turns to Eleanor, and her heart swells enough that she is aware of it there, in her chest, beneath the black velvet. Billy Frost’s eyes are so intensely blue that Eleanor feels as if she has never seen blue eyes before. As she is noticing this, he appears to be noticing her. His eyes flick to her décolletage—Rude? she wonders, even as she knows that the entire point of décolletage is to be noticed—then back to her face, and he gives her a prizewinning smile.
“Oh, hello,” he says, and the rest of the world—her parents, her mousy cousin, the orchestra, the canapés, the evergreen garland spiraling down the banister of the main staircase emitting the scent of Fraser fir, the entire Country Club—evaporates. Eleanor is suspended in a silvery mist. Billy Frost extends his hand. “I’m Billy Frost. And who might you be?”
“I’m Eleanor Roxie,” she says. She nearly adds Rhonda’s cousin, but she stops. She will not define herself in terms of Rhonda. Rhonda, Eleanor decides at that moment, is irrelevant.
She takes Billy’s hand.
Rhonda, perhaps realizing she is about to be cast aside, snaps to attention, but her focus is not on the thrum of energy between her date and her cousin; her focus is on her uncle.
“How dare you!” Rhonda says to Win. She swallows, and her eyes blaze like trash fires. “How dare you throw a party, a party as sparkling and frivolous as this one, when our boys are dying in the rice paddies! How dare you, Uncle Win! Tell me, is President Johnson in attendance tonight? He is a war criminal. A murderer.”
