Beatriz Williams

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London, SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by Penguin Group USA 2013

First published in the UK by Harper 2015

Copyright © Beatriz Williams

Cover layout design © HarperCollinPublishers Ltd 2015

Design concept by Sara Woods

Cover photograph © H. Armstrong Roberts/Getty Images

Beatriz Williams asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008134921

Ebook Edition © April 2015 ISBN: 9780008134914

Version: 2017-07-24

Dedication

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 flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

MATTHEW ARNOLD

“Dover Beach” (1867)

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

1. Route 5, Ten Miles South of Hanover, New Hampshire: October 1931

2. Seaview, Rhode Island: May 1938

3. Hanover, New Hampshire: October 1931

4. Seaview, Rhode Island: May 1938

5. Smith College, Massachusetts: October 1931

6. Seaview, Rhode Island: May 1938

7. Smith College, Massachusetts: Mid-December 1931

8. Seaview, Rhode Island: July 4, 1938

9. 725 Park Avenue, New York City: December 1931

10. Seaview, Rhode Island: July 1938

11. 725 Park Avenue, New York City: New Year’s Eve 1931

12. Seaview, Rhode Island: August 1938

13. Manhattan: New Year’s Eve 1931

14. Seaview, Rhode Island: Labor Day 1938

15. Route 9, New York State: New Year’s Day 1932

16. Manhattan: Tuesday, September 20, 1938

17. Lake George, New York: January 2, 1932

18. Manhattan: Tuesday, September 20, 1938

19. Lake George, New York: January 1932

20. Manhattan: Wednesday, September 21, 1938

21. 1932–1938

22. Seaview, Rhode Island: Wednesday, September 21, 1938

23. Seaview, Rhode Island: Wednesday afternoon, September 21, 1938

Epilogue: Seaview Rhode Island - June 1944

Historical Note

Keep Reading The House on Cocoa Beach

Acknowledgments

Readers Guide: A Hundred Summers

About the Author

Also by Beatriz Williams

About the Publisher

1.
ROUTE 5, TEN MILES SOUTH OF HANOVER, NEW HAMPSHIRE October 1931

One 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.

The 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 my hair, 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 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. The car, a nifty new Ford V-8, 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, buttercup, 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.

The 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. The boys get so serious once the game starts.”

Or something like that. The wind carries away two words out of three. I look out the side and watch the leaves hurry by, the height of the season, while Budgie chatters on about boys and football.

As it turns out, we have missed the warm-ups, and most of the first quarter as well. The streets of Hanover are empty, the stadium entrance nearly deserted. A distant roar spills over the brick walls, 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 fingers, sticks them ruthlessly into my hat, and turns me around. “There! 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 stands are packed, pouring over with people, like a concrete 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 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. They aren’t paying much attention to the game. They are festive, laughing, rowdy, throwing nuts at one another and climbing over the rows. In 1931, two years after the stock crash, we are still merry. Panics happen, companies fail, but it’s only a bump in the road, a temporary thing. The 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.

They 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. They take in her snug dark green sweater, with its conspicuous letter D on the left breast, and her shining dark hair, and her Betty Boop face. They 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. “There he is. Number twenty-two. 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 find the number 22 painted in stark white on a broad forest-green 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 his right, half a head taller. Their 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. The 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 brickwork as the stadium itself, and his eyes are narrowed and sharp, overhung by a pair of fiercely gathered eyebrows. There is something so intense, so fulminant, about his expression, like a man from another age.

A vibration crackles 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? The 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 the other.

“I guess they’re looking somewhere else,” says Budgie, and she sits down, frowning. She taps her fingers against her knee and leans close 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 off a square with her long fingers.

“Are they friends?” I ask.

“Who? Nick and Graham? I guess. Good friends. They 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.”

“What look?” I fiddle 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.

“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. The 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. They’re like everyone else, nice and friendly and clever to varying degrees. They 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 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 off the 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 several Jewish 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?” It’s 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 twenty-two. 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 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 fingertips 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.

The 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.

The 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 fires, and the band kicks off with brassy enthusiasm.

“Wasn’t that terrific!” I yell, into Budgie’s ear. The noise around us rings so intensely, I can hardly hear myself.

“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. The 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. That hard profile 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. The huddle parts to accept the white-clothed men, and I catch a glimpse of the fellow lying on the field.

“There he is! I see his number!” shouts the Hershey boy. “Twenty-two, 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.

The stadium is absolutely silent. The band has stopped playing, the public address has gone quiet.

“Well, who’s hurt, then?” demands Budgie.

The 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. “There goes the game.”

2.
SEAVIEW, RHODE ISLAND May 1938

Kiki 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. That’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 not a 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. Thanks, darling. You’re the best.”

“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. The sun shone warm overhead, the first 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 coffin 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. “The 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 ruffles 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. “The 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 best castles,” 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.

“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. The crash hit my ears an instant later. I reached for Aunt Julie’s cigarette and stole a long and furtive drag, then figured What the hell and reached for the pack myself.

“They’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 detect. Mother insisted she dyed it, but no hair dye known to man could replicate that sun-kissed 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. The 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 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 wide 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? There’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.”

“Thought not.”

Kiki staggered back toward us with her pail full of water, sloshing over the sides. Thank 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. That’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 off before 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 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 real moat.

“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 thing you’re wearing, that abomination? Don’t you have a bathing suit?” asked Aunt Julie.

“This is my 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?”

“Ah. So you are holding 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.”

“The child can hear you,” Kiki reminded us. She turned her pail over and withdrew it to reveal a perfect castle turret.

“That’s lovely, darling.” I shoveled sand upward from the moat excavation to form a wall next to the tower. For an instant I paused, wondering if I was 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 flame up to the cigarette. “But you could have hired a nanny.”

“The 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. “That’s not nice, Aunt Julie.”

“Life’s too short for nice, Lily. The 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.”

“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? The Langley sisters?”

“Someone’s bound to have an unmarried fellow down for the weekend.”

“Then you’ll have 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? That’s rich.”

“Lily, darling. Let me do it. I need a project. I’m so desperately bored out here, you can’t imagine.”

“Then why do you come?”

She wrapped her arms around her knees, staring out at the ocean, cigarette dangling ash into the sand. The wind ruffled 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 dare bring a boyfriend to Seaview. Mrs. Hubert still hasn’t forgiven me for my divorce, the old dear.”

“None of 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 crinkling with a smile as electric as Aunt Julie’s. “Darling,” she said, “I don’t remember asking your permission.”

LIFE IN SEAVIEW revolved 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 have you 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 ladies at 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 was.” Mrs. Hubert gave Kiki a last pat and rose up with all the grace of an arthritic giraffe. “But off you 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 flinch, 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. That 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?” The 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 against the weathered wood, the salt spray stung like needles against my bare arms and neck. The 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, that would be splendid. That 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, filling 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. The 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.

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 early-evening veranda, watching the surf come in, with nowhere else to go. I didn’t mind. There were worse places to spend your time. The 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 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?” Kiki accelerated 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. The 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 off my shoes, one by one, hopping on each foot. The sand pooled around my toes; the water foamed up with alluring proximity. The 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, the way I’d hold my ground with an insouciant toss of my head. The way Aunt Julie would have done.

Instead, I had run away.

“Can I take off my shoes and look for more shells in the water?” asked Kiki.

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. There they are. Isn’t it pretty?”

She turned toward the clubhouse, which perched near the beach, lights all ablaze in preparation for sunset. The 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.” The 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. The surf, I’d say, was too fierce for Mother.

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 grandchildren: 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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