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A HUNDRED
SUMMERS
• u •
Beatriz Williams
g. p. putnam’s sons
New York
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
Publishers Since 1838
Published by the Penguin Group
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Copyright © 2013 by Beatriz Williams
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Th is is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product
of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
To the victims and survivors of the
great New England hurricane of 1938
and, as always, to my husband and children.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain,
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and fl ight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
—Matthew Arnold
“Dover Beach” (1867)
1.
ROUTE 5, 10 MILES SOUTH OF
HANOVER, NEW HAMPSHIRE
October 1931
O
ne hundred and twelve miles of curving pavement lie between the entrance gates of Smith College and the Dartmouth football stadium, and Budgie drives them as she
does everything else: hell for leather.
Th e leaves shimmer gold and orange and crimson against a brilliant blue sky, and the sun burns unobstructed overhead, teasing us
with a false sense of warmth. Budgie has decreed we drive with the
top down, though I am shivering in the draft, huddled inside my
wool cardigan, clutching my hat.
She laughs at me. “You should take your hat off, honey. You remind me of my mother holding on to her hat like that. Like it’s
the end of civilization if someone sees your hair.” She has to shout the
words, with the wind gusting around her.
“It’s not that!” I shout back. It’s because myhair, released from the
enveloping dark wool-felt cloche, will expand into a Western tumbleweed, while Budgie’s sleek little curls only whip about artfully before settling back in their proper places at journey’s end. Even her hair
beatriz williams
• 2•
conforms to Budgie’s will. But this explanation is far too complicated
for the thundering draft to tolerate, so I swallow it all back, pluck the
pins out of my hat, and toss it on the seat beside me.
Budgie reaches forward and fiddles with the radio dials. Th e car,
a nifty new Ford V8, has been equipped with every convenience by
her doting father and presented to her a month ago as an early graduation present. Nine months early, to be exact, because he, in his trust
and blindness, wants her to make use of it during her last year at
Smith.
You should get out and have some fun, poppet,he told her, beaming.
You college girls study too hard. All work and no play.
He dangled the keys before her.
Are you sure, Daddy?Budgie asked, eyes huge and round, like
Betty Boop’s.
No, really. It’s the truth; I was standing right there. We’ve been
friends since we were born, only two months apart, she at the beginning of summer and me at the end. Our families summer together at
the same spot in Rhode Island, and have done so for generations.
She’s dragged me along with her this morning on the basis of that
friendship, that ancient tie, though we don’t really run in the same
circles at college, and though she knows I have no interest in football.
Th e Ford makes a throaty roar as she accelerates into a curve,
swallowing the scratchy voices from the radio. I grasp the door handle
with one hand and the seat with another.
Budgie laughs again. “Come on, honey. I don’t want to miss the
warm-ups. Th e boys get so serious once the game starts.”
Or something like that. Th e wind carries away two words out of
three. I look out the side and watch the leaves shimmer by, the height
of the season, while Budgie chatters on about boys and football.
As it turns out, we havemissed the warm-ups, and most of the
first quarter as well. Th e streets of Hanover are empty, the stadium
A Hundred Summers
• 3•
entrance nearly deserted. A distant roar spills over the edge, atop the
muffled notes of a brass band. Budgie pulls the car up front, on a
grassy verge next to a sign that says no parking, and I struggle with
my hat and pins.
“Here, let me do it.” She takes the pins from my cold fi ngers,
sticks them ruthlessly into my hat, and turns me around. “Th ere!
You’re so pretty, Lily. You know that, don’t you? I don’t know why the
boys don’t notice. Look, your cheeks are so pink. Aren’t you glad
we had the top down?”
I fill my lungs with the clean golden-leaf New Hampshire air and
tell her yes, I’m glad we had the top down.
Inside, the stadium is packed, pouring over with people, like a
granite bowl with too much punch. I pause at the burst of noise and
color as we emerge into the open, into the sudden deluge of humanity,
but there’s no hesitation in Budgie. She slings her arm around mine
and drags me down the concrete steps, across several rows, stepping
over outstretched legs and leather shoes and peanut shells, excusing
herself merrily. She knows exactly where she’s going, as always. She
grips my arm with a confident hand, tugging me in her wake, until a
shouted Budgie! Budgie Byrne!wafts over the infinite mass of checked
caps and cloche hats. Budgie stops, angles her body just so, and raises
her other arm in a dainty wave.
I don’t know these friends of hers. Dartmouth boys, I suppose,
familiar to Budgie through some social channel or another. Th ey
aren’t paying much attention to the game. Th ey are festive, laughing,
rowdy, throwing nuts at one another and climbing over the benches.
In 1931, two years after the stock crash, we are still merry. Panics
happen, companies fail, but it’s only a bump on the road, a temporary
thing. Th e great engine coughs, it sputters, but it doesn’t die. It will
start roaring again soon.
In 1931, we have no idea at all what lies ahead.
beatriz williams
• 4•
Th ey are boys, mostly. Budgie knows a lot of boys. A few of them
have their girls nestled next to them, local girls and visiting girls, and
these girls all cast looks of instinctive suspicion at Budgie. Th ey take
in her snug dark-green sweater, with its conspicuous letter Don the
left breast, and her shining dark hair, and her Betty Boop face. Th ey
don’t pay my pretty pink cheeks much attention at all.
“What’d I miss? How’s he doing?” she demands, settling herself
on the bench. Her eyes scan the field for her current boyfriend—the
reason for our breakneck morning drive from Massachusetts—who
plays back for Dartmouth. She met him over the summer, when he
was staying with friends of ours at Seaview, as if Hollywood central
casting had ordered her up the perfect costar, his eyes a complementary shade of summertime blue to her winter ice. Graham Pendleton
is tall, athletic, charming, glamorously handsome. He excels at all
sports, even the ones he hasn’t tried. I like him; you can’t help but like
Graham. He reminds me of a golden retriever, and who doesn’t love
a golden retriever?
“He’s all right, I guess,” says one of the boys. He seats himself on
the bench next to Budgie, so close his leg touches hers, and offers her
a square of Hershey. “Decent run in the last series. Eleven yards.”
Budgie sucks the chocolate into her mouth and pats the narrow
space on her other side. “Sit next to me, Lily. I want you to see this.
Look down at the field.” She points. “Th ere he is. Number twentytwo. Do you see him? On the sidelines, near the bench. He’s standing, talking to Nick Greenwald.”
I look down at the near sideline. We’re closer to the field than I
thought, perhaps ten rows up, and my vision swarms with Dartmouth
jerseys. I fi nd the number 22 painted in stark white on a broad forestgreen back. Strange, to see Graham in a sober football uniform instead of a bathing costume or tennis whites or a neat flannel suit and
straw boater. He’s deep in conversation with number 9, who stands at
A Hundred Summers
• 5•
his right, half a head taller. Th eir battered leather helmets are tucked
under their arms, and their hair is the same shade of indeterminate
brown, damp and sticky with sweat: one curly, one straight.
“Isn’t he handsome?” Budgie’s shoulders sink under a dreamy
sigh.
Number 9, the taller one, the curly-haired one, looks up at that
exact instant, as if he’s heard her words. Th e two of them are perhaps
fifty yards away, and the bright autumn sun strikes their heads in a
wash of clear gold.
Nick Greenwald,I repeat in my head. Where have I heard that
name before?
His face is hard, etched from the same granite as the stadium itself, and his eyes are narrowed and sharp, overhung by a pair of
fiercely gathered eyebrows. Th ere is something so intense, so fulminant, about his expression, like a man from another age.
A tingle creeps up my spine, a charge of electricity.
“Yes,” I say. “Very handsome.”
“His eyes are so blue, almost like mine. He’s such a darling. Remember how he chased my hat into the water last summer, Lily?”
“Who’s that one? Th e one he’s talking to?”
“Oh, Nick? Just the quarterback.”
“What’s a quarterback?”
“Nothing, really. Stands there and hands the ball to Graham.
Graham’s the star. He’s scored eight touchdowns this year. He can
run through anybody.” Graham looks up, following Nick’s gaze, and
Budgie stands up and waves her arm.
Neither responds. Graham turns to Nick and says something.
Nick is carrying a football, tossing it absently from one enormous
hand to another.
“I guess they’re looking somewhere else,” says Budgie, and she sits
down, frowning. She taps her fingers against her knee and leans close
beatriz williams
• 6•
to the boy next to her. “You couldn’t be a darling and spare a girl another nibble, could you?”
“Have as much as you like,” he says, and holds out the Hershey
bar to her. She breaks offa square with her long fi ngers.
“Are they friends?” I ask.
“Who? Nick and Graham? I guess. Good friends. Th ey room together, I think.” She stops and turns to me. Her breath is sweet from
the chocolate, almost syrupy. “Why, Lily! What are you thinking, you
sly thing?”
“Nothing. Just curious.”
Her hand covers her mouth. “Nick? Nick Greenwald? Really?”
“I just . . . he looks interesting, that’s all. It’s nothing.” My skin
heats, all over.
“Nothing’s nothing with you, honey. I know that look in your eye,
and you can stop right now.”
“Whatlook?” I fi ddle with the belt of my cardigan. “And what do
you mean, stop right now?”
“Oh, Lily, honey. Do I have to spell it out?”
“Spell what out?”
“I know he’s handsome, but . . .” She trails off, in an embarrassed
way, but her eyes glitter in her magnolia face.
“But what?”
“You’re putting me on, right?”
I peer into her face for some clue to her meaning. Budgie has a
knack for that, for savoring nuances that whoosh straight over my
unruly head. Perhaps Nick Greenwald has some unspeakable chronic
disease. Perhaps he has a girl already, not that Budgie would see any
previous engagement as an obstacle.
Not that I care, of course. Not that my mind has jumped ahead
that far. I like his face, that’s all.
“Putting you on?” I say, hedging.
A Hundred Summers
• 7•
“Lily, honey.” Budgie shakes her head, places her hand atop my
knee, and drops her voice to a delighted whisper in my ear: “Honey,
he’s a J-E-W.” She says the last syllable with exaggerated precision,
like ewe.
A cheer passes through the crowd, gaining strength. In front of
us, people are beginning to stand up and holler. Th e bench feels hard
as stone beneath my legs.
I look back down at the two men on the sideline, at Nick Greenwald. He’s turned his eagle eyes to the action on the field, watching
intently, and his profile cuts a clean gold line against a background of
closely shaved grass.
Budgie’s tone, delivering this piece of information, was that of a
parent speaking to a particularly obtuse child. Budgie, hearing the
name Greenwald, knows without thinking that it’s a Jewish name,
that some invisible line separates her future from his. Budgie regards
my ignorance of these important matters with incredulity.
Not that I’m entirely ignorant. I know some Jewish girls at college. Th ey’re like everyone else, nice and friendly and clever to varying
degrees. Th ey tend to keep to themselves, except for one or two who
strain with painful effort to ingratiate themselves with girls like Budgie. I used to wonder what they did on Christmas Day, when everything was closed. Did they mark the occasion at all, or was it just
another day to them? What did they think of all the trees for sale, all
the presents, all the Nativity scenes filling the nooks and crannies?
Did they regard our quaint customs with amusement?
Of course, I never dared to ask.
Budgie, on the other hand, is attuned to every minute vibration in
the universe around her, every wobble of an alien planet. She continues, confidently: “Not that you’d see it at first glance. His mother was
one of the Nicholson girls, such a lovely family, very fair, but her father
lost everything in the panic, not the last one, obviously, the one before
beatriz williams
• 8•
the war, and she ended up marrying Nick’s father. You look mystified, honey. What, didn’t you know all this? You must get out more.”
I remain silent, watching the field, watching the two men on the
sidelines. Some frenzy of activity is taking place, green shirts running
offthe field and green shirts running on. Graham and Nick Greenwald strap on their helmets and dash into the lines of uniforms assembling on the grass. Nick runs with elastic grace, keeps his long legs
under perfect control.
Budgie removes her hand from my knee. “You think I’m horrible,
don’t you?”
“I think you sound like my mother.”
“I don’t mean it like that. You know I don’t. I’m not a bigot, Lily.
I have severalJewish friends.” She sounds a little petulant. I’ve never
seen Budgie petulant.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You’re thinking it.” She tosses her head. “Fine. I’m sure he’ll
come along to dinner tonight. You can meet him for yourself. He’s
nice enough. Have some fun, have a few kicks.”
“What makes you think I’m interested?”
“Well, why not? You’re in desperate need of a few kicks, honey.
I’ll bet he could show you a good time.” She leans in to my ear. “Just
don’t bring him home to your mother, if you know what I mean.”
“What are you girls whispering about?” demands the boy on
Budgie’s right, the Hershey boy, giving her arm a shove.
“We’ll never tell,” says Budgie. She stands up and pulls me with
her. “Now, watch this, Lily. It’s our turn. When the play starts, Nick’s
going to give the ball to Graham. Watch Graham. Number twentytwo. He’ll blast right through them, you’ll see. He’s like a locomotive,
that’s what the papers say.”
Budgie begins to clap her hands, and so do I, sharp slaps like a
metronome. I’m watching the field, all right, but not Graham. My
A Hundred Summers
• 9•
eyes are trained on the white number 9 in the middle of the line of
green jerseys. He stands right behind the fellow in the center, with his
head raised. He’s shouting something, and I can hear his sharp bark
all the way up here, ten rows deep in cheering spectators.
Just like that, the men burst free. Nick Greenwald pedals backward from the line, with the ball in his hands, and I wait for Graham
to run up, wait for Nick to hand the ball to Graham, the way Budgie
said he would.
But Graham doesn’t run up.
Nick hovers there for an instant, examining the territory ahead,
his feet performing a graceful dance on the ragged turf, and then his
arm draws back, snaps forward, and the ball shoots from his fi ngertips to soar in a true and beautiful arc above the heads of the other
players and down the length of the field.
I strain on my toes, lifted by the roar of the crowd around me as
I follow the path of the ball. On and on it goes, a small brown missile,
while the field runs green and white in a river of men, flowing down
to meet it.
Somewhere at the far end of that river, a pair of hands reaches up
and snatches the ball from the sky.
Th e crash of noise is instantaneous.
“He’s got it! He’s got it!” yells the boy on Budgie’s other side,
flinging the rest of his Hershey bar into the air.
“Did you see that!” shouts someone behind me.
Th e Dartmouth man flies forward with the ball tucked under his
arm, into the white-striped rectangle at the end of the field, and we
are hugging one another, screaming, hats coming loose, roasted nuts
spilling from their paper bags. A cannon fi res, and the band kicks off
with brassy enthusiasm.
“Wasn’t that terrific!” I yell, into Budgie’s ear. Th e noise around
us rings so intensely, I can hardly hear myself.
beatriz williams
• 10•
“Terrific!”
My heart smacks against my ribs in rhythm with the band. Every
vessel of my body sings with joy. I turn back to the stadium floor,
holding the brim of my hat against the bright sun, and look for Nick
Greenwald and his astonishing arm.
At first, I can’t find him. Th e urgent flow and eddy of men on the
field has died into stagnation. A group of green jerseys gathers together, one by one, near the original line of play, as if drawn by a
magnet. I search for the white number 9, but in the jumble of digits
it’s nowhere to be seen.
Perhaps he’s already gone back to the benches. Th at hard profi le
does not suggest a celebratory nature.
Someone, there in that crowd of Dartmouth jerseys, lifts his arm
and waves to the sideline.
Two men dash out, dressed in white. One is carrying a black
leather bag.
“Oh, no,” says the boy on Budgie’s right. “Someone’s hurt.”
Budgie wrings her hands together. “Oh, I hope it’s not Graham.
Someone find Graham. Oh, I can’t look.” She turns her face into the
shoulder of my cardigan.
I put my arm around her and stare at the throng of football players. Every head is down, shaking, sorrowful. Th e huddle parts to accept the white-clothed men, and I catch a glimpse of the fellow lying
on the field.
“Th ere he is! I see his number!” shouts the Hershey boy. “Twentytwo, right there next to the man down. He’s all right, Budgie.”
“Oh, thank God,” says Budgie.
I stand on my toes, but I can’t see well enough over the heads
before me. I push away Budgie’s head, climb on the bench, and rise
back onto the balls of my feet.
A Hundred Summers
• 11•
Th e stadium is absolutely silent. Th e band has stopped playing,
the public address has gone quiet.
“Well, who’s hurt, then?” demands Budgie.
Th e boy climbs on the seat next to me and jumps up once, twice.
“I can just see . . . no, wait . . . oh, Jesus.”
“What? What?” I demand. I can’t see anything behind those two
men in white, kneeling over the body on the field, leather bag gaping
open.
“It’s Greenwald,” says the boy, climbing down. He swears under
his breath. “Th ere goes the game.”
2.
SEAVIEW, RHODE ISLAND
May 1938
K
iki was determined to learn to sail that summer, even though
she was not quite six. “You learned when you were my age,”
she pointed out, with the blunt logic of childhood.
“I had Daddy to teach me,” I said. “You only have me. And I
haven’t sailed in years.”
“I’ll bet it’s like riding a bicycle. Th at’s what you told me, remember? You never forget how to ride a bicycle.”
“It’s nothing like riding a bicycle, and ladies don’t bet.”
She opened her mouth to tell me she was nota lady, but Aunt
Julie, with her usual impeccable timing, plopped herself down on the
blanket next to us and sighed at the crashing surf. “Summer at last!
And after such a miserable spring. Lily, darling, you don’t have a cigarette, do you? I’m dying for a cigarette. Your mother’s as strict as goddamned Hitler.”
“You’ve never let it stop you before.” I rummaged in my basket
and tossed a packet of Chesterfields and a silver lighter in her lap.
“I’m growing soft in my old age. Th anks, darling. You’re the best.”
A Hundred Summers
• 13•
“I thought summer started in June,” said Kiki.
“Summer starts when I say it starts, darling. Oh, that’s lovely.”
She inhaled to the limit of her lungs, closed her eyes, and let the smoke
slide from her lips in a thin and endless ribbon. Th e sun shone warm
overhead, the fi rst real stretch of heat since September, and Aunt Julie
was wearing her red swimsuit with its daringly high-cut leg. She
looked fabulous, all tanned from her recent trip to Bermuda (“with
that new fellow of hers,” Mother said, in the disapproving growl of
a sister nearly ten years older) and long-limbed as ever. She leaned
back on her elbows and pointed her breasts at the cloudless sky.
“Mrs. Hubert says cigarettes are coffi n nails,” said Kiki, drawing
in the sand with her toe.
“Mrs. Hubert is an old biddy.” Aunt Julie took another drag. “My
doctor recommends them. You can’t get healthier than that.”
Kiki stood up. “I want to play in the surf. I haven’t played in the
surf in months. Years,possibly.”
“It’s too cold, sweetie,” I said. “Th e water hasn’t had a chance to
warm up yet. You’ll freeze.”
“I want to go anyway.” She put her hands on her hips. She wore
her new beach outfit, all ruffl es and red polka dots, and with her dark
hair and golden-olive skin and fierce expression she looked like a miniature polka-dotted Polynesian.
“Oh, let her play,” said Aunt Julie. “Th e young are sturdy.”
“Why don’t you build a sand castle instead, sweetie? You can go
down to the ocean to collect water.” I picked up her bucket and held
it out to her.
She looked at me, and then the bucket, considering.
“You build the bestcastles,” I said, shaking the bucket invitingly.
“Show me what you’ve got.”
She took the bucket with a worldly sigh and started down the
beach.
beatriz williams
• 14•
“You’re good with her,” said Aunt Julie, smoking luxuriously.
“Better than me.”
“God did not intend you to raise children,” I said. “You have
other uses.”
She laughed. “Ha! You’re right. I can gossip like nobody’s business. Say, speaking of which, did you hear Budgie’s opening up her
parents’ old place this summer?”
A wave rose up from the ocean, stronger than the others. I
watched it build and build, balancing atop itself, until it fell at last in
a foaming white arc, from right to left. Th e crash hit my ears an instant later. I reached for Aunt Julie’s cigarette and took a long and
furtive drag, then thought What the helland reached for the pack
myself.
“Th ey’re arriving next week, your mother says. He’ll come down
on weekends, of course, but she’ll be here all summer.” Aunt Julie
tilted her face upward and gave her hair a shake. It shone golden in
the sun, without a single gray hair that I could see. Mother insisted
she dyed it, but no hair dye known to man could replicate that sunkissed texture. It was as if God himself were abetting Aunt Julie in her
chosen style of life.
Down at the shoreline, Kiki waited for the wave to wash up on
the sand and dipped her bucket. Th e water swirled around her legs,
making her jump and dance. She looked back at me, accusingly, and
I shrugged my told-you-so shoulders.
“Nothing to say?”
“I’m looking forward to seeing her again. It’s been years.”
“Well, she’s got the money now. She might as well spruce up the
old place. You should have seen the wedding, Lily.” She whistled.
Aunt Julie had gone to the wedding, of course. No party of any kind
among a certain segment of society would be considered a success
A Hundred Summers
• 15•
without an appearance by Julie van der Wahl, née Schuyler—known
to the New York dailies simply as “Julie”—and her current plus-one.
“I read all about it in the papers, thanks.” I blew out a long cloud
of smoke.
Aunt Julie nudged me with her toe. “Bygones, darling. Everything works out for the best. Haven’t I been trying to teach you that
for the past six years? Th ere’s nothing in the world you can count on
except yourself and your family, and sometimes not even them. God,
isn’t it a glorious day? I could live forever like this. Just give me sunshine and a sandy beach, and I’m as happy as a clam.” She stubbed out
her cigarette in the sand and lay back on the blanket. “You don’t have
a whiskey or something in that basket of yours, do you?”
“No.”
“Th ought not.”
Kiki staggered back toward us with her pail full of water, sloshing
over the sides. Th ank God for Kiki. Budgie might have had everything in the world, but at least she didn’t have Kiki, all dark hair and
spindly limbs and squinting eyes as she judged the distance back to
the blanket.
Aunt Julie rose back up on her elbows. “Now, what are you thinking about? I can hear the racket in your brain all the way over here.”
“Just watching Kiki.”
“Watching Kiki. Th at’s your trouble.” She lay back down and
crossed her arm over her face. “You’re letting that child do all the living for you. Look at you. It’s disgraceful, the way you’ve let yourself
go. Look at that hair of yours. I’d shave mine offbefore I let it look
like that.”
“Tactful as ever, I see.” I stubbed out my half-finished cigarette
and opened up my arms to receive Kiki, who set her pail down in the
sand and flung herself at me. Her body was sun-warmed, smelling of
beatriz williams
• 16•
the sea, smooth and wriggling. I buried my face in her dark hair and
inhaled her childish scent. Why didn’t adults smell so sweet?
“You have to help me.” Kiki detached herself from me, grabbed
her bucket, and spilled the water thoroughly over the sand. Last summer, we built an archipelago of castles all over this beach, an ambitious program of construction that ended in triumph at the annual
Seaview Labor Day Sand Castle Extravaganza.
I’ll tell you, the things we got up to in Seaview.
I let Kiki pull me up from the blanket and knelt with her on the
sand. She handed me a shovel and told me to start digging, Lily, digging, because this was going to be a realmoat.
“We can’t have a real moat this far from the water,” I said.
Kiki said, “Let the child have her fun.”
“And what is that thingyou’re wearing, that abomination? Don’t
you have a bathing suit?” asked Aunt Julie.
“Th is ismy bathing suit.”
“Lord preserve us. You’re going to let Budgie Byrne see you in
that?”
I dug my shovel ferociously into the moat. “She’s not a Byrne anymore, is she?”
“A h. So you areholding it against her.”
I stopped digging and rested my hands on my knees, which
were covered by the thick cotton of my black bathing suit. “Why
shouldn’t Budgie get married? Why shouldn’t anybody get married, if
she wants to?”
“Oh, I see. We’re back to bygones again. Where are those cigarettes? I could use another cigarette.”
“Th e child can hear you,” Kiki reminded us. She turned over her
pail and withdrew it to reveal a perfect castle turret.
“Th at’s lovely, darling.” I shoveled sand upward from the moat
A Hundred Summers
• 17•
excavation to form a wall next to the tower. For an instant I paused,
wondering if I were angry enough to shape it into battlements.
Aunt Julie rummaged through the basket, looking for the Chesterfields. “Did I tell you to bury yourself with your corpse of a mother
for the past six years? No, I did not. Live a little, I told you. Make
something of yourself.”
“Kiki needed me.”
“Your mother could have looked after her just fine.”
Kiki and I both stared at Aunt Julie. She had found the cigarettes
and held one now between her crimson lips as she fumbled for the
lighter. “What?” she asked, looking first at me and then at Kiki. “All
right, all right,” she conceded, holding the fl ame up to the cigarette.
“But you could have hired a nanny.”
“Th e child does not wish to be raised by a nanny,” said Kiki.
“Mother has enough to do, with all her charity projects,” I said.
“Charity projects,” Aunt Julie said, as if it were an obscenity. “If
you ask me, which you never do, it’s a bad sign when a woman spends
more time looking after orphans than her own family.”
“She looks after Daddy,” I said.
“You don’t see her looking after him now, do you?”
“It’s summer. We always come to Seaview in the summer. It’s how
Daddy would want it.”
Aunt Julie snorted. “Has anybody asked him?”
I thought of my father in his pristine room, staring at the wall of
books that used to give him such pleasure. “Th at’s not nice, Aunt Julie.”
“Life’s too short for nice, Lily. Th e thing is, you’re wasting yourself. Everyone has a little bump in the road when they’re young. God
knows I had a few. You pick yourself up. Move on.” She offered me
the cigarette, and I shook my head. “Let me cut your hair tonight.
Trim it a bit. Put some lipstick on you.”
beatriz williams
• 18•
“Oh, do it, Lily!” Kiki turned to me. “You’d look beautiful! Can
I help, Aunt Julie?”
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “Everyone knows me here. If you put lipstick on me, they won’t let me into the club. Anyway, dress myself up
for whom? Mrs. Hubert? Th e Lockley sisters?”
“Someone’s bound to have an unmarried fellow down for the
weekend.”
“Th en you’llhave him running for your gin and tonic before I can
stick you with my hatpin.”
Aunt Julie waved her hand in dismissal, trailing a coil of smoke.
“Scout’s honor.”
“Oh, you’re a Girl Scout now, are you? Th at’s rich.”
“Lily, darling. Let me do it. I need a project. I’m so desperately
bored out here, you can’t imagine.”
“Th en why do you come?”
She wrapped her arms around her knees, staring out at the ocean,
cigarette dangling ash into the sand. Th e wind ruffl ed her hair, but
only at the tips. “Oh, it keeps the beaus on their toes, you know. Disappearing for a few weeks every year. Even I wouldn’t darebring a
boyfriend to Seaview. Mrs. Hubert still hasn’t forgiven me for my divorce, the old dear.”
“Noneof us have forgiven you for your divorce. Peter was such a
nice fellow.”
“Too nice. He deserved better.” She jumped to her feet and tossed
the cigarette in the sand. “It’s settled, then. I’m taking you in hand
tonight.”
“I don’t remember agreeing to that.”
Aunt Julie’s crimson lips split into a thousand-watt smile, the one
the New York papers loved. She was nearing forty now, and it crinkled up the skin around her eyes, but nobody really noticed the
A Hundred Summers
• 19•
crinkling with a smile as electric as Aunt Julie’s. “Darling,” she said, “I
don’t remember asking your permission.”
u
LIFE IN SEAVIEWrevolved around the club, and the club revolved
around Mrs. Hubert. If you asked any Seaview resident why this
should be so, you’d be met with a blank stare. Mrs. Hubert had been
around so long, no one could remember when her reign began, and
considering her robust state of health (“vulgar, really, the way she
never sits down at parties,” my mother said), no one would hazard a
guess to its end. She was the Queen Victoria of summertime, except
she never wore black and stood as tall and thin as a gray-haired
maypole.
“Why, Lily, my dear,” she said, kissing my cheek. “What haveyou
done with your hair tonight?”
I touched the chignon at the nape of my neck. “Aunt Julie put it
back for me. She wanted to cut it, but I wouldn’t let her.”
“Good girl,” said Mrs. Hubert. “Never take fashion advice from a
divorcée. Now, Kiki, my sweet.” She knelt down. “Do you promise to
be a good girl tonight? I shall have you blackballed if you aren’t. We
are young ladiesat the club, aren’t we?”
Kiki put her arms around Mrs. Hubert’s neck and whispered
something in her ear.
“Very well,” said Mrs. Hubert, “but only when your mother’s not
looking.”
I glanced back at Mother and Aunt Julie, who had been stopped
by an old acquaintance in the foyer. “Are you sitting out on the veranda this evening? It’s so lovely and warm.”
“With this surf? I should think not. My hearing is not what it
beatriz williams
• 20•
was.” Mrs. Hubert gave Kiki a last pat and rose up with all the grace
of an arthritic giraffe. “But offyou go. Oh, no. Wait a moment. I
meant to ask you something.” She placed a hand on my elbow and
drew me close, until I could smell the rose-petal perfume drifting
from her skin, could see the faint white lines of rice powder settling
into the crevasses of her face. “You’ve heard about Budgie Byrne, of
course.”
“I’ve heard she’s opening up her parents’ old place for the summer,” I said coolly.
“What do you think of it?”
“I think it’s high time. It’s a lovely old house. A shame it sat empty
so long.”
Mrs. Hubert’s eyes were china blue, and hadn’t lost a single candlepower since she first spanked my bottom for uprooting her impatiens to decorate my Fourth of July parade float when I was about
Kiki’s age. She examined me now with those bright eyes, and though
I knew better than to fl inch, the effort nearly did me in. “I agree,” she
said at last. “High time. I’ll see she doesn’t give you any trouble, Lily.
Th at girl always did bring trouble trailing behind her like a lapdog.”
“Oh, I can handle Budgie. I’ll see you later, Mrs. Hubert. I’m taking Kiki for her ginger ale.”
“I’m getting ginger ale?” Kiki skipped along behind me to the bar.
“Tonight you are. Gin and tonic,” I told the bartender, “and a
ginger ale for the young lady.”
“But which is which?” Th e bartender winked.
College boy.
He plopped a cherry in Kiki’s ginger ale, and I strolled out on the
veranda with her pink palm in mine, waiting for Mother and Aunt
Julie to join us.
The surf was high, crashing in ungentle rollers into the beach
below us. When I set my drink on the railing and braced my hands
A Hundred Summers
• 21•
against the weathered wood, the salt spray stung like needles against
my bare arms and neck. Th e dress was Aunt Julie’s choice, a concession made necessary to avoid the threatened haircut, and though she’d
clucked with dismay over the sturdy cotton and floral print, she accepted it as the best of a bad lot, and did her damnedest to yank the
neckline down as far as physics allowed. “We’re going to throw out
the whole kit tomorrow,” she’d said. “Burn it all. I don’t want to see a
single flower on you, Lily, unless it’s a great big gerbera daisy, a scarlet
one, pinned to your hair. Just above the ear, I think. Now, thatwould
be splendid. Th at would out-Budgie goddamned Budgie herself.”
Kiki popped up between my arms and leaned back against the
veranda railing, staring up at me, her hand tugging my dress. “Who
is Budgie Byrne,” she asked, “and is she really as much trouble as Mrs.
Hubert says?”
“You shouldn’t listen to grown-up conversations, sweetie.”
She sucked her ginger ale and made a show of looking around. “I
don’t see any other children here, do I?”
She was right, of course. For whatever reason, my generation
hadn’t taken up in our parents’ houses in Seaview, as had every generation past, fi lling the narrow lanes and tennis courts with screaming young children and moody teenagers, with sailboats racing across
the cove and Fourth of July floats festooned in contraband impatiens. I could understand why. Th e things that attracted me back to
Seaview every summer—its old-fashionedness, its never- changingness,
its wicker furniture and the smell of salt water soaked into its
upholstery— were the very things that turned away everyone else. You
couldn’t satisfy your craving for slickness and glamour and high living here at the Seaview Club. During Prohibition, the liquor had been
replaced by lemonade, and now that the gin and tonic were back in
their rightful places, the young people had moved on.
Except me.
beatriz williams
• 22•
So Kiki was the youngest person at the club this evening, and I
was the second-youngest, and the two of us stood there on the earlyevening veranda, watching the surf come in, with nowhere else to go.
I didn’t mind. Th ere were worse places to spend your time. Th e veranda stretched the full length of the club and wrapped around the
sides, with the long drive at one end and the rest of the Seaview Association on the other, cottage after cottage, porch lights winking out
to sea. I knew this scene in my bones. It was safety. It was family. It
was home.
Kiki was saying something else, and another wave thundered
onto the beach below, but somehow through it all I heard, quite distinctly, the sound of a car engine making the final curve before its
approach to the circular drive out front.
I couldn’t say, later, why the noise should have leaped out at me
like that, out of all the cars making their way to the Seaview Club
that evening. I didn’t believe in fate, didn’t hold any truck with foresight or even intuition. I called it coincidence alone that my ear followed the progress of that car around the corner of the club, picked
out the low rumble as it idled outside the entrance, heard with startling precision the sound of Budgie Byrne’s voice, one week early, sliding into a high and tinkling laugh through the clear air, and a deep
male voice answering her.
Of course, she wasn’t Budgie Byrne anymore, I reminded myself.
It was all my numb mind could come up with.
I grabbed my drink, grabbed Kiki’s hand.
“Your hands are cold,” she exclaimed.
I strode toward the blue-painted steps leading down to the beach.
“Let’s go for a walk.”
“But my ginger ale!”
“I’ll order you another.”
I swallowed the rest of my gin and tonic as we walked down the
A Hundred Summers
• 23•
steps, holding up my long skirt so I wouldn’t trip. By the time we
reached the bottom, the glass was empty, and I left it there, balanced
near the edge, where no one would tread on it accidentally.
“Are the others coming, too?” asked Kiki, accelerating into a skip
by my side. Any break from routine made her giddy with excitement.
“No, no. Just a little walk, the two of us. I want . . .” I paused.
Th e gin was rising to my head in a rush. “I want to see how the club
lights look from the end of the beach.”
As an explanation, it suited her six-year-old imagination perfectly.
“Tally-ho, then!” she said, swinging our joined hands. Her flat shoes
skimmed along the sand, while my heeled sandals sank in at every
stride. Within a hundred yards, I was gasping for breath.
“Let’s stop here,” I said.
She tugged at my hand. “But we’re not at the end of the beach
yet!”
“We’re far enough. Besides, we’ve got to go back before Mother
and Aunt Julie start looking for us.”
Kiki made an unsatisfied noise and plopped down in the sand,
stretching her feet toward the water. “Oh, Lily,” she said, “look at this
shell!” She held up a spiral conch, miraculously intact.
“Look at that! May’s a good time for beachcombing, isn’t it?
Nothing’s been picked over yet. Make sure you save that one.” I
reached down and took offmy shoes, one by one, hopping on each
foot. Th e sand pooled around my toes; the water foamed up with alluring proximity. Th e tide had nearly reached its peak. I watched it
undulate, back and forth, until my breathing began to slow and my
heart to steady itself. Something bitter rose in the back of my throat,
and my brain, unleashed and candid with the gin, recognized the
taste of shame.
So, there it was. I had imagined this encounter over and over,
wondered what I should do. Had thought of the clever things I’d say,
beatriz williams
• 24•
the way I’d hold my ground with an insouciant toss of my head. Th e
way Aunt Julie would have done.
Instead, I had run away.
“Can I take offmy shoes and look for more shells in the water?”
asked Lily.
I looked down. She had arranged a circle of small dark clamshells
around the conch, like supplicants before a shrine.
“No, darling. We have to go back.”
“I thought we were going to look at the lights.”
“Well, look. Th ere they are. Isn’t it pretty?”
She turned toward the clubhouse, which perched near the beach,
lights all ablaze in preparation for sunset. Th e weathered gray shingles
camouflaged it perfectly against the sand. Behind the rooftop, the sun
was dipping down into the golden west.
“It’s beautiful. We’re so lucky to live here every summer, aren’t
we?”
“Very lucky.” Th e voices carried across the beach, too far away to
distinguish. I was unbearably conscious of my own cowardice. If Kiki
knew, if she understood, she would be ashamed of me. Kiki never
turned away from a challenge.
I took her hand. “Let’s go back.”
By the time we reached the veranda again, I had planned everything out. I would secure a table on this end, the far end, sheltered,
tucked around the corner from view. I would send Kiki to find Mother
and Aunt Julie, while I let the club manager know where we were eating tonight. Th e surf, I’d say, was too fierce for Mother tonight.
After our meal, we’d pass through the rest of the veranda, greeting acquaintances, and when we reached her table I’d be composed,
settled into the routine of shaking hands and expressing admiration
for new hairstyles and new dresses, of lamenting the loss of elderly
members during the past year, of celebrating the arrival of new grand-
A Hundred Summers
• 25•
children: the same conversation, the same pattern, evening after evening and summer after summer. I knew my lines by heart. A minute,
perhaps two, and we’d be gone.
Kiki skipped up the steps ahead of me, and I leaned down to pick
up my empty glass. My hair spilled away from Aunt Julie’s pristine
chignon, loosened by the sea air and its own waywardness. I pushed it
back over my ear. My cheeks tingled from the spraying surf and the
brisk walk. Should I visit the powder room, return myself to orderliness, or was it too great a risk?
“Why, hello,” said Kiki, from the top of the stairs. “I haven’t seen
you around before.”
I froze, bent over, my hand clutched around the smooth, round
highball glass as if it were a life buoy.
An appalling silence stretched the seconds apart.
“Well, hello, yourself,” said a man’s voice, gently.
BOUND FOR YOUR REVI EWI NG CONVENI ENCE
In quoting from this book for reviews or any other
purpose, please refer to the final printed book,
as the author may make changes on these
proofs before the book goes to press
A HUNDRED
SUMMERS
• u •
Beatriz Williams
g. p. putnam’s sons
New York
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
Publishers Since 1838
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA •
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3,
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Copyright © 2013 by Beatriz Williams
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Published simultaneously in Canada
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Printed in the United States of America
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Th is is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product
of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
To the victims and survivors of the
great New England hurricane of 1938
and, as always, to my husband and children.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain,
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and fl ight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
—Matthew Arnold
“Dover Beach” (1867)
1.
ROUTE 5, 10 MILES SOUTH OF
HANOVER, NEW HAMPSHIRE
October 1931
O
ne hundred and twelve miles of curving pavement lie between the entrance gates of Smith College and the Dartmouth football stadium, and Budgie drives them as she
does everything else: hell for leather.
Th e leaves shimmer gold and orange and crimson against a brilliant blue sky, and the sun burns unobstructed overhead, teasing us
with a false sense of warmth. Budgie has decreed we drive with the
top down, though I am shivering in the draft, huddled inside my
wool cardigan, clutching my hat.
She laughs at me. “You should take your hat off, honey. You remind me of my mother holding on to her hat like that. Like it’s
the end of civilization if someone sees your hair.” She has to shout the
words, with the wind gusting around her.
“It’s not that!” I shout back. It’s because myhair, released from the
enveloping dark wool-felt cloche, will expand into a Western tumbleweed, while Budgie’s sleek little curls only whip about artfully before settling back in their proper places at journey’s end. Even her hair
beatriz williams
• 2•
conforms to Budgie’s will. But this explanation is far too complicated
for the thundering draft to tolerate, so I swallow it all back, pluck the
pins out of my hat, and toss it on the seat beside me.
Budgie reaches forward and fiddles with the radio dials. Th e car,
a nifty new Ford V8, has been equipped with every convenience by
her doting father and presented to her a month ago as an early graduation present. Nine months early, to be exact, because he, in his trust
and blindness, wants her to make use of it during her last year at
Smith.
You should get out and have some fun, poppet,he told her, beaming.
You college girls study too hard. All work and no play.
He dangled the keys before her.
Are you sure, Daddy?Budgie asked, eyes huge and round, like
Betty Boop’s.
No, really. It’s the truth; I was standing right there. We’ve been
friends since we were born, only two months apart, she at the beginning of summer and me at the end. Our families summer together at
the same spot in Rhode Island, and have done so for generations.
She’s dragged me along with her this morning on the basis of that
friendship, that ancient tie, though we don’t really run in the same
circles at college, and though she knows I have no interest in football.
Th e Ford makes a throaty roar as she accelerates into a curve,
swallowing the scratchy voices from the radio. I grasp the door handle
with one hand and the seat with another.
Budgie laughs again. “Come on, honey. I don’t want to miss the
warm-ups. Th e boys get so serious once the game starts.”
Or something like that. Th e wind carries away two words out of
three. I look out the side and watch the leaves shimmer by, the height
of the season, while Budgie chatters on about boys and football.
As it turns out, we havemissed the warm-ups, and most of the
first quarter as well. Th e streets of Hanover are empty, the stadium
A Hundred Summers
• 3•
entrance nearly deserted. A distant roar spills over the edge, atop the
muffled notes of a brass band. Budgie pulls the car up front, on a
grassy verge next to a sign that says no parking, and I struggle with
my hat and pins.
“Here, let me do it.” She takes the pins from my cold fi ngers,
sticks them ruthlessly into my hat, and turns me around. “Th ere!
You’re so pretty, Lily. You know that, don’t you? I don’t know why the
boys don’t notice. Look, your cheeks are so pink. Aren’t you glad
we had the top down?”
I fill my lungs with the clean golden-leaf New Hampshire air and
tell her yes, I’m glad we had the top down.
Inside, the stadium is packed, pouring over with people, like a
granite bowl with too much punch. I pause at the burst of noise and
color as we emerge into the open, into the sudden deluge of humanity,
but there’s no hesitation in Budgie. She slings her arm around mine
and drags me down the concrete steps, across several rows, stepping
over outstretched legs and leather shoes and peanut shells, excusing
herself merrily. She knows exactly where she’s going, as always. She
grips my arm with a confident hand, tugging me in her wake, until a
shouted Budgie! Budgie Byrne!wafts over the infinite mass of checked
caps and cloche hats. Budgie stops, angles her body just so, and raises
her other arm in a dainty wave.
I don’t know these friends of hers. Dartmouth boys, I suppose,
familiar to Budgie through some social channel or another. Th ey
aren’t paying much attention to the game. Th ey are festive, laughing,
rowdy, throwing nuts at one another and climbing over the benches.
In 1931, two years after the stock crash, we are still merry. Panics
happen, companies fail, but it’s only a bump on the road, a temporary
thing. Th e great engine coughs, it sputters, but it doesn’t die. It will
start roaring again soon.
In 1931, we have no idea at all what lies ahead.
beatriz williams
• 4•
Th ey are boys, mostly. Budgie knows a lot of boys. A few of them
have their girls nestled next to them, local girls and visiting girls, and
these girls all cast looks of instinctive suspicion at Budgie. Th ey take
in her snug dark-green sweater, with its conspicuous letter Don the
left breast, and her shining dark hair, and her Betty Boop face. Th ey
don’t pay my pretty pink cheeks much attention at all.
“What’d I miss? How’s he doing?” she demands, settling herself
on the bench. Her eyes scan the field for her current boyfriend—the
reason for our breakneck morning drive from Massachusetts—who
plays back for Dartmouth. She met him over the summer, when he
was staying with friends of ours at Seaview, as if Hollywood central
casting had ordered her up the perfect costar, his eyes a complementary shade of summertime blue to her winter ice. Graham Pendleton
is tall, athletic, charming, glamorously handsome. He excels at all
sports, even the ones he hasn’t tried. I like him; you can’t help but like
Graham. He reminds me of a golden retriever, and who doesn’t love
a golden retriever?
“He’s all right, I guess,” says one of the boys. He seats himself on
the bench next to Budgie, so close his leg touches hers, and offers her
a square of Hershey. “Decent run in the last series. Eleven yards.”
Budgie sucks the chocolate into her mouth and pats the narrow
space on her other side. “Sit next to me, Lily. I want you to see this.
Look down at the field.” She points. “Th ere he is. Number twentytwo. Do you see him? On the sidelines, near the bench. He’s standing, talking to Nick Greenwald.”
I look down at the near sideline. We’re closer to the field than I
thought, perhaps ten rows up, and my vision swarms with Dartmouth
jerseys. I fi nd the number 22 painted in stark white on a broad forestgreen back. Strange, to see Graham in a sober football uniform instead of a bathing costume or tennis whites or a neat flannel suit and
straw boater. He’s deep in conversation with number 9, who stands at
A Hundred Summers
• 5•
his right, half a head taller. Th eir battered leather helmets are tucked
under their arms, and their hair is the same shade of indeterminate
brown, damp and sticky with sweat: one curly, one straight.
“Isn’t he handsome?” Budgie’s shoulders sink under a dreamy
sigh.
Number 9, the taller one, the curly-haired one, looks up at that
exact instant, as if he’s heard her words. Th e two of them are perhaps
fifty yards away, and the bright autumn sun strikes their heads in a
wash of clear gold.
Nick Greenwald,I repeat in my head. Where have I heard that
name before?
His face is hard, etched from the same granite as the stadium itself, and his eyes are narrowed and sharp, overhung by a pair of
fiercely gathered eyebrows. Th ere is something so intense, so fulminant, about his expression, like a man from another age.
A tingle creeps up my spine, a charge of electricity.
“Yes,” I say. “Very handsome.”
“His eyes are so blue, almost like mine. He’s such a darling. Remember how he chased my hat into the water last summer, Lily?”
“Who’s that one? Th e one he’s talking to?”
“Oh, Nick? Just the quarterback.”
“What’s a quarterback?”
“Nothing, really. Stands there and hands the ball to Graham.
Graham’s the star. He’s scored eight touchdowns this year. He can
run through anybody.” Graham looks up, following Nick’s gaze, and
Budgie stands up and waves her arm.
Neither responds. Graham turns to Nick and says something.
Nick is carrying a football, tossing it absently from one enormous
hand to another.
“I guess they’re looking somewhere else,” says Budgie, and she sits
down, frowning. She taps her fingers against her knee and leans close
beatriz williams
• 6•
to the boy next to her. “You couldn’t be a darling and spare a girl another nibble, could you?”
“Have as much as you like,” he says, and holds out the Hershey
bar to her. She breaks offa square with her long fi ngers.
“Are they friends?” I ask.
“Who? Nick and Graham? I guess. Good friends. Th ey room together, I think.” She stops and turns to me. Her breath is sweet from
the chocolate, almost syrupy. “Why, Lily! What are you thinking, you
sly thing?”
“Nothing. Just curious.”
Her hand covers her mouth. “Nick? Nick Greenwald? Really?”
“I just . . . he looks interesting, that’s all. It’s nothing.” My skin
heats, all over.
“Nothing’s nothing with you, honey. I know that look in your eye,
and you can stop right now.”
“Whatlook?” I fi ddle with the belt of my cardigan. “And what do
you mean, stop right now?”
“Oh, Lily, honey. Do I have to spell it out?”
“Spell what out?”
“I know he’s handsome, but . . .” She trails off, in an embarrassed
way, but her eyes glitter in her magnolia face.
“But what?”
“You’re putting me on, right?”
I peer into her face for some clue to her meaning. Budgie has a
knack for that, for savoring nuances that whoosh straight over my
unruly head. Perhaps Nick Greenwald has some unspeakable chronic
disease. Perhaps he has a girl already, not that Budgie would see any
previous engagement as an obstacle.
Not that I care, of course. Not that my mind has jumped ahead
that far. I like his face, that’s all.
“Putting you on?” I say, hedging.
A Hundred Summers
• 7•
“Lily, honey.” Budgie shakes her head, places her hand atop my
knee, and drops her voice to a delighted whisper in my ear: “Honey,
he’s a J-E-W.” She says the last syllable with exaggerated precision,
like ewe.
A cheer passes through the crowd, gaining strength. In front of
us, people are beginning to stand up and holler. Th e bench feels hard
as stone beneath my legs.
I look back down at the two men on the sideline, at Nick Greenwald. He’s turned his eagle eyes to the action on the field, watching
intently, and his profile cuts a clean gold line against a background of
closely shaved grass.
Budgie’s tone, delivering this piece of information, was that of a
parent speaking to a particularly obtuse child. Budgie, hearing the
name Greenwald, knows without thinking that it’s a Jewish name,
that some invisible line separates her future from his. Budgie regards
my ignorance of these important matters with incredulity.
Not that I’m entirely ignorant. I know some Jewish girls at college. Th ey’re like everyone else, nice and friendly and clever to varying
degrees. Th ey tend to keep to themselves, except for one or two who
strain with painful effort to ingratiate themselves with girls like Budgie. I used to wonder what they did on Christmas Day, when everything was closed. Did they mark the occasion at all, or was it just
another day to them? What did they think of all the trees for sale, all
the presents, all the Nativity scenes filling the nooks and crannies?
Did they regard our quaint customs with amusement?
Of course, I never dared to ask.
Budgie, on the other hand, is attuned to every minute vibration in
the universe around her, every wobble of an alien planet. She continues, confidently: “Not that you’d see it at first glance. His mother was
one of the Nicholson girls, such a lovely family, very fair, but her father
lost everything in the panic, not the last one, obviously, the one before
beatriz williams
• 8•
the war, and she ended up marrying Nick’s father. You look mystified, honey. What, didn’t you know all this? You must get out more.”
I remain silent, watching the field, watching the two men on the
sidelines. Some frenzy of activity is taking place, green shirts running
offthe field and green shirts running on. Graham and Nick Greenwald strap on their helmets and dash into the lines of uniforms assembling on the grass. Nick runs with elastic grace, keeps his long legs
under perfect control.
Budgie removes her hand from my knee. “You think I’m horrible,
don’t you?”
“I think you sound like my mother.”
“I don’t mean it like that. You know I don’t. I’m not a bigot, Lily.
I have severalJewish friends.” She sounds a little petulant. I’ve never
seen Budgie petulant.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You’re thinking it.” She tosses her head. “Fine. I’m sure he’ll
come along to dinner tonight. You can meet him for yourself. He’s
nice enough. Have some fun, have a few kicks.”
“What makes you think I’m interested?”
“Well, why not? You’re in desperate need of a few kicks, honey.
I’ll bet he could show you a good time.” She leans in to my ear. “Just
don’t bring him home to your mother, if you know what I mean.”
“What are you girls whispering about?” demands the boy on
Budgie’s right, the Hershey boy, giving her arm a shove.
“We’ll never tell,” says Budgie. She stands up and pulls me with
her. “Now, watch this, Lily. It’s our turn. When the play starts, Nick’s
going to give the ball to Graham. Watch Graham. Number twentytwo. He’ll blast right through them, you’ll see. He’s like a locomotive,
that’s what the papers say.”
Budgie begins to clap her hands, and so do I, sharp slaps like a
metronome. I’m watching the field, all right, but not Graham. My
A Hundred Summers
• 9•
eyes are trained on the white number 9 in the middle of the line of
green jerseys. He stands right behind the fellow in the center, with his
head raised. He’s shouting something, and I can hear his sharp bark
all the way up here, ten rows deep in cheering spectators.
Just like that, the men burst free. Nick Greenwald pedals backward from the line, with the ball in his hands, and I wait for Graham
to run up, wait for Nick to hand the ball to Graham, the way Budgie
said he would.
But Graham doesn’t run up.
Nick hovers there for an instant, examining the territory ahead,
his feet performing a graceful dance on the ragged turf, and then his
arm draws back, snaps forward, and the ball shoots from his fi ngertips to soar in a true and beautiful arc above the heads of the other
players and down the length of the field.
I strain on my toes, lifted by the roar of the crowd around me as
I follow the path of the ball. On and on it goes, a small brown missile,
while the field runs green and white in a river of men, flowing down
to meet it.
Somewhere at the far end of that river, a pair of hands reaches up
and snatches the ball from the sky.
Th e crash of noise is instantaneous.
“He’s got it! He’s got it!” yells the boy on Budgie’s other side,
flinging the rest of his Hershey bar into the air.
“Did you see that!” shouts someone behind me.
Th e Dartmouth man flies forward with the ball tucked under his
arm, into the white-striped rectangle at the end of the field, and we
are hugging one another, screaming, hats coming loose, roasted nuts
spilling from their paper bags. A cannon fi res, and the band kicks off
with brassy enthusiasm.
“Wasn’t that terrific!” I yell, into Budgie’s ear. Th e noise around
us rings so intensely, I can hardly hear myself.
beatriz williams
• 10•
“Terrific!”
My heart smacks against my ribs in rhythm with the band. Every
vessel of my body sings with joy. I turn back to the stadium floor,
holding the brim of my hat against the bright sun, and look for Nick
Greenwald and his astonishing arm.
At first, I can’t find him. Th e urgent flow and eddy of men on the
field has died into stagnation. A group of green jerseys gathers together, one by one, near the original line of play, as if drawn by a
magnet. I search for the white number 9, but in the jumble of digits
it’s nowhere to be seen.
Perhaps he’s already gone back to the benches. Th at hard profi le
does not suggest a celebratory nature.
Someone, there in that crowd of Dartmouth jerseys, lifts his arm
and waves to the sideline.
Two men dash out, dressed in white. One is carrying a black
leather bag.
“Oh, no,” says the boy on Budgie’s right. “Someone’s hurt.”
Budgie wrings her hands together. “Oh, I hope it’s not Graham.
Someone find Graham. Oh, I can’t look.” She turns her face into the
shoulder of my cardigan.
I put my arm around her and stare at the throng of football players. Every head is down, shaking, sorrowful. Th e huddle parts to accept the white-clothed men, and I catch a glimpse of the fellow lying
on the field.
“Th ere he is! I see his number!” shouts the Hershey boy. “Twentytwo, right there next to the man down. He’s all right, Budgie.”
“Oh, thank God,” says Budgie.
I stand on my toes, but I can’t see well enough over the heads
before me. I push away Budgie’s head, climb on the bench, and rise
back onto the balls of my feet.
A Hundred Summers
• 11•
Th e stadium is absolutely silent. Th e band has stopped playing,
the public address has gone quiet.
“Well, who’s hurt, then?” demands Budgie.
Th e boy climbs on the seat next to me and jumps up once, twice.
“I can just see . . . no, wait . . . oh, Jesus.”
“What? What?” I demand. I can’t see anything behind those two
men in white, kneeling over the body on the field, leather bag gaping
open.
“It’s Greenwald,” says the boy, climbing down. He swears under
his breath. “Th ere goes the game.”
2.
SEAVIEW, RHODE ISLAND
May 1938
K
iki was determined to learn to sail that summer, even though
she was not quite six. “You learned when you were my age,”
she pointed out, with the blunt logic of childhood.
“I had Daddy to teach me,” I said. “You only have me. And I
haven’t sailed in years.”
“I’ll bet it’s like riding a bicycle. Th at’s what you told me, remember? You never forget how to ride a bicycle.”
“It’s nothing like riding a bicycle, and ladies don’t bet.”
She opened her mouth to tell me she was nota lady, but Aunt
Julie, with her usual impeccable timing, plopped herself down on the
blanket next to us and sighed at the crashing surf. “Summer at last!
And after such a miserable spring. Lily, darling, you don’t have a cigarette, do you? I’m dying for a cigarette. Your mother’s as strict as goddamned Hitler.”
“You’ve never let it stop you before.” I rummaged in my basket
and tossed a packet of Chesterfields and a silver lighter in her lap.
“I’m growing soft in my old age. Th anks, darling. You’re the best.”
A Hundred Summers
• 13•
“I thought summer started in June,” said Kiki.
“Summer starts when I say it starts, darling. Oh, that’s lovely.”
She inhaled to the limit of her lungs, closed her eyes, and let the smoke
slide from her lips in a thin and endless ribbon. Th e sun shone warm
overhead, the fi rst real stretch of heat since September, and Aunt Julie
was wearing her red swimsuit with its daringly high-cut leg. She
looked fabulous, all tanned from her recent trip to Bermuda (“with
that new fellow of hers,” Mother said, in the disapproving growl of
a sister nearly ten years older) and long-limbed as ever. She leaned
back on her elbows and pointed her breasts at the cloudless sky.
“Mrs. Hubert says cigarettes are coffi n nails,” said Kiki, drawing
in the sand with her toe.
“Mrs. Hubert is an old biddy.” Aunt Julie took another drag. “My
doctor recommends them. You can’t get healthier than that.”
Kiki stood up. “I want to play in the surf. I haven’t played in the
surf in months. Years,possibly.”
“It’s too cold, sweetie,” I said. “Th e water hasn’t had a chance to
warm up yet. You’ll freeze.”
“I want to go anyway.” She put her hands on her hips. She wore
her new beach outfit, all ruffl es and red polka dots, and with her dark
hair and golden-olive skin and fierce expression she looked like a miniature polka-dotted Polynesian.
“Oh, let her play,” said Aunt Julie. “Th e young are sturdy.”
“Why don’t you build a sand castle instead, sweetie? You can go
down to the ocean to collect water.” I picked up her bucket and held
it out to her.
She looked at me, and then the bucket, considering.
“You build the bestcastles,” I said, shaking the bucket invitingly.
“Show me what you’ve got.”
She took the bucket with a worldly sigh and started down the
beach.
beatriz williams
• 14•
“You’re good with her,” said Aunt Julie, smoking luxuriously.
“Better than me.”
“God did not intend you to raise children,” I said. “You have
other uses.”
She laughed. “Ha! You’re right. I can gossip like nobody’s business. Say, speaking of which, did you hear Budgie’s opening up her
parents’ old place this summer?”
A wave rose up from the ocean, stronger than the others. I
watched it build and build, balancing atop itself, until it fell at last in
a foaming white arc, from right to left. Th e crash hit my ears an instant later. I reached for Aunt Julie’s cigarette and took a long and
furtive drag, then thought What the helland reached for the pack
myself.
“Th ey’re arriving next week, your mother says. He’ll come down
on weekends, of course, but she’ll be here all summer.” Aunt Julie
tilted her face upward and gave her hair a shake. It shone golden in
the sun, without a single gray hair that I could see. Mother insisted
she dyed it, but no hair dye known to man could replicate that sunkissed texture. It was as if God himself were abetting Aunt Julie in her
chosen style of life.
Down at the shoreline, Kiki waited for the wave to wash up on
the sand and dipped her bucket. Th e water swirled around her legs,
making her jump and dance. She looked back at me, accusingly, and
I shrugged my told-you-so shoulders.
“Nothing to say?”
“I’m looking forward to seeing her again. It’s been years.”
“Well, she’s got the money now. She might as well spruce up the
old place. You should have seen the wedding, Lily.” She whistled.
Aunt Julie had gone to the wedding, of course. No party of any kind
among a certain segment of society would be considered a success
A Hundred Summers
• 15•
without an appearance by Julie van der Wahl, née Schuyler—known
to the New York dailies simply as “Julie”—and her current plus-one.
“I read all about it in the papers, thanks.” I blew out a long cloud
of smoke.
Aunt Julie nudged me with her toe. “Bygones, darling. Everything works out for the best. Haven’t I been trying to teach you that
for the past six years? Th ere’s nothing in the world you can count on
except yourself and your family, and sometimes not even them. God,
isn’t it a glorious day? I could live forever like this. Just give me sunshine and a sandy beach, and I’m as happy as a clam.” She stubbed out
her cigarette in the sand and lay back on the blanket. “You don’t have
a whiskey or something in that basket of yours, do you?”
“No.”
“Th ought not.”
Kiki staggered back toward us with her pail full of water, sloshing
over the sides. Th ank God for Kiki. Budgie might have had everything in the world, but at least she didn’t have Kiki, all dark hair and
spindly limbs and squinting eyes as she judged the distance back to
the blanket.
Aunt Julie rose back up on her elbows. “Now, what are you thinking about? I can hear the racket in your brain all the way over here.”
“Just watching Kiki.”
“Watching Kiki. Th at’s your trouble.” She lay back down and
crossed her arm over her face. “You’re letting that child do all the living for you. Look at you. It’s disgraceful, the way you’ve let yourself
go. Look at that hair of yours. I’d shave mine offbefore I let it look
like that.”
“Tactful as ever, I see.” I stubbed out my half-finished cigarette
and opened up my arms to receive Kiki, who set her pail down in the
sand and flung herself at me. Her body was sun-warmed, smelling of
beatriz williams
• 16•
the sea, smooth and wriggling. I buried my face in her dark hair and
inhaled her childish scent. Why didn’t adults smell so sweet?
“You have to help me.” Kiki detached herself from me, grabbed
her bucket, and spilled the water thoroughly over the sand. Last summer, we built an archipelago of castles all over this beach, an ambitious program of construction that ended in triumph at the annual
Seaview Labor Day Sand Castle Extravaganza.
I’ll tell you, the things we got up to in Seaview.
I let Kiki pull me up from the blanket and knelt with her on the
sand. She handed me a shovel and told me to start digging, Lily, digging, because this was going to be a realmoat.
“We can’t have a real moat this far from the water,” I said.
Kiki said, “Let the child have her fun.”
“And what is that thingyou’re wearing, that abomination? Don’t
you have a bathing suit?” asked Aunt Julie.
“Th is ismy bathing suit.”
“Lord preserve us. You’re going to let Budgie Byrne see you in
that?”
I dug my shovel ferociously into the moat. “She’s not a Byrne anymore, is she?”
“A h. So you areholding it against her.”
I stopped digging and rested my hands on my knees, which
were covered by the thick cotton of my black bathing suit. “Why
shouldn’t Budgie get married? Why shouldn’t anybody get married, if
she wants to?”
“Oh, I see. We’re back to bygones again. Where are those cigarettes? I could use another cigarette.”
“Th e child can hear you,” Kiki reminded us. She turned over her
pail and withdrew it to reveal a perfect castle turret.
“Th at’s lovely, darling.” I shoveled sand upward from the moat
A Hundred Summers
• 17•
excavation to form a wall next to the tower. For an instant I paused,
wondering if I were angry enough to shape it into battlements.
Aunt Julie rummaged through the basket, looking for the Chesterfields. “Did I tell you to bury yourself with your corpse of a mother
for the past six years? No, I did not. Live a little, I told you. Make
something of yourself.”
“Kiki needed me.”
“Your mother could have looked after her just fine.”
Kiki and I both stared at Aunt Julie. She had found the cigarettes
and held one now between her crimson lips as she fumbled for the
lighter. “What?” she asked, looking first at me and then at Kiki. “All
right, all right,” she conceded, holding the fl ame up to the cigarette.
“But you could have hired a nanny.”
“Th e child does not wish to be raised by a nanny,” said Kiki.
“Mother has enough to do, with all her charity projects,” I said.
“Charity projects,” Aunt Julie said, as if it were an obscenity. “If
you ask me, which you never do, it’s a bad sign when a woman spends
more time looking after orphans than her own family.”
“She looks after Daddy,” I said.
“You don’t see her looking after him now, do you?”
“It’s summer. We always come to Seaview in the summer. It’s how
Daddy would want it.”
Aunt Julie snorted. “Has anybody asked him?”
I thought of my father in his pristine room, staring at the wall of
books that used to give him such pleasure. “Th at’s not nice, Aunt Julie.”
“Life’s too short for nice, Lily. Th e thing is, you’re wasting yourself. Everyone has a little bump in the road when they’re young. God
knows I had a few. You pick yourself up. Move on.” She offered me
the cigarette, and I shook my head. “Let me cut your hair tonight.
Trim it a bit. Put some lipstick on you.”
beatriz williams
• 18•
“Oh, do it, Lily!” Kiki turned to me. “You’d look beautiful! Can
I help, Aunt Julie?”
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “Everyone knows me here. If you put lipstick on me, they won’t let me into the club. Anyway, dress myself up
for whom? Mrs. Hubert? Th e Lockley sisters?”
“Someone’s bound to have an unmarried fellow down for the
weekend.”
“Th en you’llhave him running for your gin and tonic before I can
stick you with my hatpin.”
Aunt Julie waved her hand in dismissal, trailing a coil of smoke.
“Scout’s honor.”
“Oh, you’re a Girl Scout now, are you? Th at’s rich.”
“Lily, darling. Let me do it. I need a project. I’m so desperately
bored out here, you can’t imagine.”
“Th en why do you come?”
She wrapped her arms around her knees, staring out at the ocean,
cigarette dangling ash into the sand. Th e wind ruffl ed her hair, but
only at the tips. “Oh, it keeps the beaus on their toes, you know. Disappearing for a few weeks every year. Even I wouldn’t darebring a
boyfriend to Seaview. Mrs. Hubert still hasn’t forgiven me for my divorce, the old dear.”
“Noneof us have forgiven you for your divorce. Peter was such a
nice fellow.”
“Too nice. He deserved better.” She jumped to her feet and tossed
the cigarette in the sand. “It’s settled, then. I’m taking you in hand
tonight.”
“I don’t remember agreeing to that.”
Aunt Julie’s crimson lips split into a thousand-watt smile, the one
the New York papers loved. She was nearing forty now, and it crinkled up the skin around her eyes, but nobody really noticed the
A Hundred Summers
• 19•
crinkling with a smile as electric as Aunt Julie’s. “Darling,” she said, “I
don’t remember asking your permission.”
u
LIFE IN SEAVIEWrevolved around the club, and the club revolved
around Mrs. Hubert. If you asked any Seaview resident why this
should be so, you’d be met with a blank stare. Mrs. Hubert had been
around so long, no one could remember when her reign began, and
considering her robust state of health (“vulgar, really, the way she
never sits down at parties,” my mother said), no one would hazard a
guess to its end. She was the Queen Victoria of summertime, except
she never wore black and stood as tall and thin as a gray-haired
maypole.
“Why, Lily, my dear,” she said, kissing my cheek. “What haveyou
done with your hair tonight?”
I touched the chignon at the nape of my neck. “Aunt Julie put it
back for me. She wanted to cut it, but I wouldn’t let her.”
“Good girl,” said Mrs. Hubert. “Never take fashion advice from a
divorcée. Now, Kiki, my sweet.” She knelt down. “Do you promise to
be a good girl tonight? I shall have you blackballed if you aren’t. We
are young ladiesat the club, aren’t we?”
Kiki put her arms around Mrs. Hubert’s neck and whispered
something in her ear.
“Very well,” said Mrs. Hubert, “but only when your mother’s not
looking.”
I glanced back at Mother and Aunt Julie, who had been stopped
by an old acquaintance in the foyer. “Are you sitting out on the veranda this evening? It’s so lovely and warm.”
“With this surf? I should think not. My hearing is not what it
beatriz williams
• 20•
was.” Mrs. Hubert gave Kiki a last pat and rose up with all the grace
of an arthritic giraffe. “But offyou go. Oh, no. Wait a moment. I
meant to ask you something.” She placed a hand on my elbow and
drew me close, until I could smell the rose-petal perfume drifting
from her skin, could see the faint white lines of rice powder settling
into the crevasses of her face. “You’ve heard about Budgie Byrne, of
course.”
“I’ve heard she’s opening up her parents’ old place for the summer,” I said coolly.
“What do you think of it?”
“I think it’s high time. It’s a lovely old house. A shame it sat empty
so long.”
Mrs. Hubert’s eyes were china blue, and hadn’t lost a single candlepower since she first spanked my bottom for uprooting her impatiens to decorate my Fourth of July parade float when I was about
Kiki’s age. She examined me now with those bright eyes, and though
I knew better than to fl inch, the effort nearly did me in. “I agree,” she
said at last. “High time. I’ll see she doesn’t give you any trouble, Lily.
Th at girl always did bring trouble trailing behind her like a lapdog.”
“Oh, I can handle Budgie. I’ll see you later, Mrs. Hubert. I’m taking Kiki for her ginger ale.”
“I’m getting ginger ale?” Kiki skipped along behind me to the bar.
“Tonight you are. Gin and tonic,” I told the bartender, “and a
ginger ale for the young lady.”
“But which is which?” Th e bartender winked.
College boy.
He plopped a cherry in Kiki’s ginger ale, and I strolled out on the
veranda with her pink palm in mine, waiting for Mother and Aunt
Julie to join us.
The surf was high, crashing in ungentle rollers into the beach
below us. When I set my drink on the railing and braced my hands
A Hundred Summers
• 21•
against the weathered wood, the salt spray stung like needles against
my bare arms and neck. Th e dress was Aunt Julie’s choice, a concession made necessary to avoid the threatened haircut, and though she’d
clucked with dismay over the sturdy cotton and floral print, she accepted it as the best of a bad lot, and did her damnedest to yank the
neckline down as far as physics allowed. “We’re going to throw out
the whole kit tomorrow,” she’d said. “Burn it all. I don’t want to see a
single flower on you, Lily, unless it’s a great big gerbera daisy, a scarlet
one, pinned to your hair. Just above the ear, I think. Now, thatwould
be splendid. Th at would out-Budgie goddamned Budgie herself.”
Kiki popped up between my arms and leaned back against the
veranda railing, staring up at me, her hand tugging my dress. “Who
is Budgie Byrne,” she asked, “and is she really as much trouble as Mrs.
Hubert says?”
“You shouldn’t listen to grown-up conversations, sweetie.”
She sucked her ginger ale and made a show of looking around. “I
don’t see any other children here, do I?”
She was right, of course. For whatever reason, my generation
hadn’t taken up in our parents’ houses in Seaview, as had every generation past, fi lling the narrow lanes and tennis courts with screaming young children and moody teenagers, with sailboats racing across
the cove and Fourth of July floats festooned in contraband impatiens. I could understand why. Th e things that attracted me back to
Seaview every summer—its old-fashionedness, its never- changingness,
its wicker furniture and the smell of salt water soaked into its
upholstery— were the very things that turned away everyone else. You
couldn’t satisfy your craving for slickness and glamour and high living here at the Seaview Club. During Prohibition, the liquor had been
replaced by lemonade, and now that the gin and tonic were back in
their rightful places, the young people had moved on.
Except me.
beatriz williams
• 22•
So Kiki was the youngest person at the club this evening, and I
was the second-youngest, and the two of us stood there on the earlyevening veranda, watching the surf come in, with nowhere else to go.
I didn’t mind. Th ere were worse places to spend your time. Th e veranda stretched the full length of the club and wrapped around the
sides, with the long drive at one end and the rest of the Seaview Association on the other, cottage after cottage, porch lights winking out
to sea. I knew this scene in my bones. It was safety. It was family. It
was home.
Kiki was saying something else, and another wave thundered
onto the beach below, but somehow through it all I heard, quite distinctly, the sound of a car engine making the final curve before its
approach to the circular drive out front.
I couldn’t say, later, why the noise should have leaped out at me
like that, out of all the cars making their way to the Seaview Club
that evening. I didn’t believe in fate, didn’t hold any truck with foresight or even intuition. I called it coincidence alone that my ear followed the progress of that car around the corner of the club, picked
out the low rumble as it idled outside the entrance, heard with startling precision the sound of Budgie Byrne’s voice, one week early, sliding into a high and tinkling laugh through the clear air, and a deep
male voice answering her.
Of course, she wasn’t Budgie Byrne anymore, I reminded myself.
It was all my numb mind could come up with.
I grabbed my drink, grabbed Kiki’s hand.
“Your hands are cold,” she exclaimed.
I strode toward the blue-painted steps leading down to the beach.
“Let’s go for a walk.”
“But my ginger ale!”
“I’ll order you another.”
I swallowed the rest of my gin and tonic as we walked down the
A Hundred Summers
• 23•
steps, holding up my long skirt so I wouldn’t trip. By the time we
reached the bottom, the glass was empty, and I left it there, balanced
near the edge, where no one would tread on it accidentally.
“Are the others coming, too?” asked Kiki, accelerating into a skip
by my side. Any break from routine made her giddy with excitement.
“No, no. Just a little walk, the two of us. I want . . .” I paused.
Th e gin was rising to my head in a rush. “I want to see how the club
lights look from the end of the beach.”
As an explanation, it suited her six-year-old imagination perfectly.
“Tally-ho, then!” she said, swinging our joined hands. Her flat shoes
skimmed along the sand, while my heeled sandals sank in at every
stride. Within a hundred yards, I was gasping for breath.
“Let’s stop here,” I said.
She tugged at my hand. “But we’re not at the end of the beach
yet!”
“We’re far enough. Besides, we’ve got to go back before Mother
and Aunt Julie start looking for us.”
Kiki made an unsatisfied noise and plopped down in the sand,
stretching her feet toward the water. “Oh, Lily,” she said, “look at this
shell!” She held up a spiral conch, miraculously intact.
“Look at that! May’s a good time for beachcombing, isn’t it?
Nothing’s been picked over yet. Make sure you save that one.” I
reached down and took offmy shoes, one by one, hopping on each
foot. Th e sand pooled around my toes; the water foamed up with alluring proximity. Th e tide had nearly reached its peak. I watched it
undulate, back and forth, until my breathing began to slow and my
heart to steady itself. Something bitter rose in the back of my throat,
and my brain, unleashed and candid with the gin, recognized the
taste of shame.
So, there it was. I had imagined this encounter over and over,
wondered what I should do. Had thought of the clever things I’d say,
beatriz williams
• 24•
the way I’d hold my ground with an insouciant toss of my head. Th e
way Aunt Julie would have done.
Instead, I had run away.
“Can I take offmy shoes and look for more shells in the water?”
asked Lily.
I looked down. She had arranged a circle of small dark clamshells
around the conch, like supplicants before a shrine.
“No, darling. We have to go back.”
“I thought we were going to look at the lights.”
“Well, look. Th ere they are. Isn’t it pretty?”
She turned toward the clubhouse, which perched near the beach,
lights all ablaze in preparation for sunset. Th e weathered gray shingles
camouflaged it perfectly against the sand. Behind the rooftop, the sun
was dipping down into the golden west.
“It’s beautiful. We’re so lucky to live here every summer, aren’t
we?”
“Very lucky.” Th e voices carried across the beach, too far away to
distinguish. I was unbearably conscious of my own cowardice. If Kiki
knew, if she understood, she would be ashamed of me. Kiki never
turned away from a challenge.
I took her hand. “Let’s go back.”
By the time we reached the veranda again, I had planned everything out. I would secure a table on this end, the far end, sheltered,
tucked around the corner from view. I would send Kiki to find Mother
and Aunt Julie, while I let the club manager know where we were eating tonight. Th e surf, I’d say, was too fierce for Mother tonight.
After our meal, we’d pass through the rest of the veranda, greeting acquaintances, and when we reached her table I’d be composed,
settled into the routine of shaking hands and expressing admiration
for new hairstyles and new dresses, of lamenting the loss of elderly
members during the past year, of celebrating the arrival of new grand-
A Hundred Summers
• 25•
children: the same conversation, the same pattern, evening after evening and summer after summer. I knew my lines by heart. A minute,
perhaps two, and we’d be gone.
Kiki skipped up the steps ahead of me, and I leaned down to pick
up my empty glass. My hair spilled away from Aunt Julie’s pristine
chignon, loosened by the sea air and its own waywardness. I pushed it
back over my ear. My cheeks tingled from the spraying surf and the
brisk walk. Should I visit the powder room, return myself to orderliness, or was it too great a risk?
“Why, hello,” said Kiki, from the top of the stairs. “I haven’t seen
you around before.”
I froze, bent over, my hand clutched around the smooth, round
highball glass as if it were a life buoy.
An appalling silence stretched the seconds apart.
“Well, hello, yourself,” said a man’s voice, gently.
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