Everybody Loves Somebody (2 page)

Hugo could have told his errant brother what would have been different. If Tom had taken Carol with him, Hugo wouldn’t have
had the chance to raise Gwen and escort her down the aisle on her wedding day. After all they’d been through together, from
Gwen’s scarlet fever, her childish tantrums and joys, her engagement to Clive, the war, Clive’s disappearance in France, his
blindness and slow recovery in a military hospital in Nyons, their reunion, their marriage, Hugo could only be glad that Carol
had stayed when Tom left, and that he’d kept his love for her a secret until the end, and beyond. He never had to ask her
what she felt for him—he understood that he was like a brother to her. If she’d known he wanted to be more than that, she
would have left Madison Point. He would have lost not just her but Gwen and everything that followed, and his life wouldn’t
be culminating now, despite his brother’s absence, or perhaps because of it, in this record-breaking kiss on a perfect July
day in 1919, with the guests mesmerized, the seagulls floating like angels overhead, a boy splashing in the water down at
the beach, a baby lifting the shell of a cicada to her mouth, and one lone honeybee diving into the roses of the bride’s bouquet.

The scene being exactly what Tom was trying not to imagine in the bathroom of the Tuckett Beach Inn. He didn’t have to be
a genius to guess that his daughter’s wedding would include equal parts of beauty and guilelessness, acceptance, risk, ferocity,
and resistance. All in the name of love. The daughter of crackerjack Carol wouldn’t marry a man she didn’t love. Right, Carol?
Carol? It was only out of boredom that Tom called Carol—first in a whisper, then with a murmur, then with a shout. But don’t
think that Tom Martin believed in ghosts. He didn’t need metaphysics to be certain that death is the end of life, period.
Still, Carol, you could do Tom a little favor and unlock this door, or, short of that, talk to him. He could use the company.
Carol, are you there? Carol!

Hugo could have told Tom that it was useless to call Carol, since even if she did exist as a singular entity in the spirit
realm—a possibility that Hugo, like his brother, didn’t entertain for a moment—surely she wouldn’t have left her daughter’s
wedding just to open the door for a man who had abandoned her twenty-three years ago. Tom was stuck, and Carol was the last
person on earth—or elsewhere—who would help him come unstuck.

Yet Hugo knew that it would be just like Tom to lay the fault of his absence with Carol. Go ahead, blame a dead woman for
the fact that Tom was missing this kiss of all kisses, love making the burden of expiation as light as a feather, with the
guests restored to their primeval nobility by the advantage of their presence here at Madison Point. What? Simply put, Hugo
was thinking that this must be similar to Paradise—layers and layers of pure happiness, like pages in a book.

Given the transfixing quality of the scene, it wasn’t surprising that no one noticed when the baby, balanced on her pudgy
rump between the forest of legs, put the shell of the cicada in her mouth. No one noticed that the seagulls abruptly flew
away, one after the other, in the direction of a fishing boat on the horizon. And no one noticed when the boy, who had waded
up to his thighs after the Newfoundland, slipped off the edge of a sandy shelf and disappeared into the deep water.

What the guests did notice was the bee. While Gwen and Clive kissed, the bee that had been exploring the bouquet rose from
the flowers slowly, like a spider on a thread, hovering for a moment near the bride’s shoulders, and then rising toward the
buttery sheen of her cheek. Its thorax vibrating hungrily, the bee seemed to search Gwen’s skin for a good place to pierce
it. Gwen and Clive continued kissing, oblivious, but the guests, along with Uncle Hugo, watched with concern.

Someone had to stop the bee from stinging the bride, Hugo thought, leaning forward, privately trying to reason his way free
of his reluctance to intrude. Wasn’t there anyone who could help, someone who could intervene without being noticed?

Neither Tom nor Hugo would ever know that they were similar in one essential way: when they needed help, they thought of Carol.
Watching the bee buzzing near Gwen, Hugo thought of Carol. Stuck in the bathroom of the Tuckett Beach Inn, Tom thought of
Carol.

“Who’s Carol?” asked the maid after opening the bathroom door with her skeleton key. She addressed Tom with the frankness
of a child half her age. He noticed that her brown eyes slipped off center as she stared. Her unkempt hair was more orange
than red. There was a canker scab on her chin, and her cotton dress fell loosely over her hips.

She was too pretty to look so awful, Tom thought. And she was too forward with a strange man standing before her wrapped only
in a white bath towel.

“You were calling for Carol,” she persisted. She squatted to take a better look at the lock.

“She was my wife,” Tom lied.

“Was?”

He answered with an impatient snort.

“Bless you,” she said, as though he’d sneezed. She turned the lever of the bolt back and forth until it jammed again. “Not
a day goes by when something doesn’t go wrong,” she announced, without exasperation. “I need a screwdriver.” When she stood,
her odd gaze alighted on one side of Tom’s face. Without thinking, he moved his hand through the air as if to bat away a mosquito.
She started visibly, teetered as if she’d been struck in the face. For a moment Tom thought he had hit her inadvertently,
and he was seized by terrible, feverish guilt. He wanted to fall down on his knees and apologize. But she smiled at him as
if to indicate that an apology really wasn’t necessary, especially from a man dressed in a bath towel. Go on, she seemed to
tell him, lifting her chin and looking toward the room where he’d left his suitcase. You’re free.

While he gathered his clothes, the girl warned him not to shut the bathroom door, and she set off to find a screwdriver. Tom
scrambled into his suit, combed his mustache, snapped the buckle of his suitcase, and left in such a hurry that he forgot
to pay his bill.

Out on the road in front of the inn, he waved down a dairy cart being pulled by a round-bellied mule. When the dairyman heard
that Tom wanted to go to Hugo Martin’s estate at Madison Point, he said he’d take him there himself. Coincidentally, he had
a wheel of cheddar in back to deliver to the wedding reception.

“Does that ol’ mule go any faster?” Tom asked.

The dairyman looked at him askance, not unlike the way the maid had looked at him.

“You want my Rascal to go faster?”

“Yes, please.”

“Real fast?”

“Sure.”

The dairyman tipped back his cap, revealing the youthfulness of his face. He couldn’t have been older than seventeen, Tom
thought. Leaning toward the mule as though he meant to grab its tail between his teeth, the dairyman gave a short laugh, warned
Tom to hold on, and cracked his whip in the air. The mule flattened its ears against its head and took off, trotting faster
than Tom had ever known a mule to trot.

Tom Martin was somewhere between Tuckett Beach and Hugo’s estate when the wedding guests first noticed the bee rising from
the bride’s bouquet. Their attention couldn’t have been any more intense at this point; what changed with the bee was the
unity of their responses. One man coughed into his hand in warning. A woman whispered audibly enough for her husband to hear,
“Oh no.” And the mother who had set her baby on the grass glanced down and noticed the shiny tip of an insect shell sticking
out from between the baby’s grinning lips.

A mere few yards offshore from the narrow stretch of beach, the boy, submerged in the murky salt water, was holding his breath.
Though he didn’t know how to swim, he’d taught himself to hold his breath during bath time. Once he’d even held his breath
for as long as it had taken him to count in his head from one to twenty-five.

He began counting silently. As he counted, he wondered if it was possible to learn to breathe underwater. He tried to propel
himself by pulling at the water in the same way that he’d pull himself up to the next branch when he was climbing a tree.
Five, one thousand, six. When he relaxed his arms and legs, he felt himself turning a somersault, and when he stretched out
again he couldn’t tell which direction was up. Nine, one thousand, ten. It was strange that he couldn’t see the sky. He was
glad, though, to have the chance to feel brave. Feeling brave was the best feeling in the world, better even than the sleepy
feeling when his mother kissed him good night on the tip of his nose. She would think him very brave when he told her what
had happened, though she’d be angry that he’d gotten his clothes wet. Twelve, one thousand. Or had he reached thirteen? It
was frustrating to forget how far he’d counted. He’d been hoping to make it past twenty-seven. If he’d been counting straight,
he might have already reached twenty.

He felt his shirt suddenly tighten around his chest. In the next moment a tugging force caused him to turn on his back, and
his face broke through the surface of the dark water. It was good to see the sky just where he’d left it. And it felt good
to loosen his collar with two fingers and take a deep breath. He felt a little disappointed that he hadn’t been given the
chance to count to thirty underwater, but he was glad to be floating on his back, with that big black friendly dog dragging
him toward shore by his shirt as though he were one of the sticks thrown into the water for the dog to fetch.

In their chairs around the hillock, the guests couldn’t have said reliably how much time had passed since Father Gaffner had
declared Gwen and Clive husband and wife. Some believed, in hindsight, that the kiss hadn’t lasted longer than a minute. Others
were sure that at least half an hour had passed. But to Hugo Martin it was as long as he could have wished, for just as the
bee dove through the narrow opening below the chins of the bride and groom, a mule pulling a dairy cart came trotting along
the sandy track leading to the gazebo. Even before the cart stopped, Tom Martin jumped off.

“Was that fast enough?” the young dairyman asked.

“That was plenty fast,” Tom assured him as his gaze turned toward the mound where the bride and groom were standing and kissing.
Despite his nearsightedness, Tom could see the couple clearly enough to tell that there was something willfully permanent
about them as they kissed, as if they were trying to turn themselves into statues.

It took Father Gaffner to finally break the spell. Father Gaffner, who had once nearly died in an anaphylactic response to
a sting, noticed the bee for the first time when it passed to his side of the bride and groom.

In the seventh row of guests, the mother pulled what was left of the cicada shell from her baby’s mouth. Down at the beach,
the boy climbed up on the Newfoundland’s back and rode the dog through the few remaining yards of shallow water. At the base
of the gazebo, Tom suddenly remembered that the name of his daughter’s husband was Clive. And since Hugo had swiveled around
to watch Tom, he didn’t see Father Gaffner frantically shake a hand to wave away the bee, his gesture causing the bride and
groom to separate with a sucking sound that one man would later describe as like water going down a drain—evidence that tongues
were involved, he would insist in a conversation similar to others that would go on through the banquet. What actually happened?
How long had the kiss really lasted? The guests weren’t sure, and their uncertainty would only increase, every new exchange
adding details that confused them more until there was nothing left to do but drink too much champagne and dance.

F
rank’s sister Ruth wasn’t exactly beautiful, nor was she ever deliberately coy. She wasn’t stupid or desperate or even naturally
sweet. She was simply the one girl in town mysteriously identified as easy. And if she gave up trying to keep her willingness
from bluntly announcing itself, it was only because curiosity got the better of her. She wanted to understand why the value
of her affection was considered necessary and why necessity was always only temporary. Week by week, with every new invitation,
she understood a little more.

It was only a matter of time before she understood enough to know that she’d gone too far. Her mother had been right to warn
her that a reputation couldn’t be washed away with soap and water. By the age of sixteen she’d become the kind of girl
nice
girls avoided, and though she felt that her ruin was a mean trick played on her while she’d been having fun, she decided
she had no option left but to make a clean break.

It was late summer in 1927 when, with her parents’ blessing, she moved to Brooklyn to claim space on the floor of her brother’s
cold-water flat. This was her first mistake—not asking dear Frank to take her in but timing her arrival to coincide with his
departure. She managed to show up at his door just as he was leaving for the weekend. Frank was sorry, but he had to go to
his friend’s wedding in New Haven—which left Ruth alone with Frank’s roommate, Boylston Simms.

Ruth should have known he’d be a problem. After plying her all day long with highballs, he kissed her. She let him kiss her.
And then she remembered who she was trying not to be and pulled away, smoothed her skirt, tucked her hair behind her ears,
and looked around for diversion. She asked about the birds in the cage across the room—a pair of finches, Boylston said, and
explained that they belonged to his grandmother, who was in the hospital. Ruth asked if she could pet their pretty feathers.
He shrugged. She sashayed in her usual inadvertently lusty fashion across the room, unlatched the cage door, and poked a finger
at one of the birds, trying to scratch its soft throat as she liked to do with her cat at home. The bird hopped away from
her and then fluttered forward onto her finger. Unprepared for the shock of rough talons against her skin, Ruth jerked back
her hand, carrying the bird with her. The second bird darted out and veered as though ricocheting across the room. The bird
on Ruth’s finger flew in pursuit of its mate. One after the other, the finches escaped through the open window and disappeared
into the dusky Brooklyn sky.