Jennifer Haigh (3 page)

"Dear, I know you're very busy. You don't have to come if it's too difficult. I shouldn't have pressured you."

"That's okay. I want to." He lowered his voice. "I'm not good at sleeping alone."

More typing, a bell sounding; he had reached the end of a line.

Endless day. The blond expanse of the National Seashore: the sand fine as sugar; coarse tails of sea grass undulating in the wind. The days were cut along a template. Each morning sandwiches were made, a basket packed. Damp swimsuits were retrieved from the line. For the rest of her life, Paulette would remember these summers. Would long to return there, to the quiet richness of those days, the life of her family unfolding like a flower, ripening as it was meant to, all things in their proper time.

One morning, the car loaded, she noticed a child missing.

"Gwen!" she called."Where's Gwen?"

"Out back," Scotty said.

Paulette found her curled up on a chaise longue on the porch, still in her nightgown. Paulette hadn't seen her since breakfast. With three adults and five children in the house, Gwen had gotten lost in the shuffle.

"Gwen? Get dressed, darling. We're going to the beach."

"I'm not going." Her cheeks were red, her mouth set. Paulette had seen this look before, after an altercation with her brothers, an unfair reprimand. It was a look that meant trouble.

"Gwen, don't be silly. Everybody's waiting. Mimi, and Charlotte."

"I don't want to go."

"What's the matter?" She laid a hand on her daughter's forehead to check for a fever, only half joking. Gwen was crazy about the beach.

At the end of the day, shivering, sunburned, she clamored for an extra half hour. Paulette often resorted to blackmail—strawberry ice cream at the general store in town—to get her to leave.

Gwen shrugged her mother's hand away. "I hate the beach. It's no fun anymore."

Paulette frowned. Gwen had a sunny disposition: more extroverted than Billy, who was prone to moody silences; less rambunctious than Scotty. She had always been the easy one.

"I hate Charlotte," she said vehemently. "She won't even go in the water."

"Well, you can swim with your brothers. And Aunt Martine."

"I hate my bathing suit," she said, her chin trembling.

Paulette sat next to her. "What happened? You liked it a week ago." They had shopped for the suit together, making a day of it, lunch and shopping at Filene's downtown. Charmed by the little ruffle, Gwen had chosen the suit herself.

"I hate the stupid ruffle," she said now."I look like a big baby."

"Sweetheart." Paulette chose her words carefully. She'd known this conversation was coming; she just hadn't imagined it would happen so soon. "Are you upset because Charlotte looks so different all of a sudden?"

Gwen would not answer.

"It's strange for you," she said gently. "To see Charlotte growing up."

"But I'm
older
. Her birthday isn't until
December.
" Gwen's face reddened."It isn't fair."

"I know. It isn't." Paulette brushed the hair back from Gwen's forehead. "When I was your age, I was the smallest girl in my class.

I came back to school in the fall and it seemed that all my friends were entirely different people. They were taller, and their figures were changing. And I hadn't changed at all. I was exactly the same."

Gwen stared up at her, her eyes rimmed with red.

"Back then they called it being a late bloomer. It took me a little longer, but it all happened eventually. And when it did I was very glad." Paulette drew her close and Gwen settled in. She was a cuddly child, more affectionate than her brothers. The difference, Paulette supposed, between boys and girls.

"I know what we can do. Let's get you a new bathing suit. A twopiece, like Charlotte's. We can drive into Provincetown tonight."

"Okay," Gwen said grudgingly.

Paulette stood and held out her hand. "Come on. Everybody's waiting."
Thank God that's over
, she thought.

For girls it was never simple. Later, riding in the car, shading her eyes against the morning glare, Paulette thought of her own puberty.

All these years later, the memory still pained her: the interminable months of waiting, her failure so conspicuous, displayed for all to see.

In her long, sunny childhood she'd never felt envy, but at puberty it filled her every waking hour. She envied ceaselessly, obsessively, the few classmates who, heaven knew why, seemed to transform overnight. She'd hated them blindly, indiscriminately; hated even Marjorie Tuttle, her dear good friend. Now, as a mother, she remembered those girls with compassion, knowing they'd faced their own difficulties: attention from older boys, grown men even; foolish adults like Frank who couldn't distinguish between a woman and a child. Once, twice, she'd caught him ogling girls barely out of grammar school.
I'm not a pervert
, he insisted when she brought this to his attention.
How am I supposed to know?
She had to admit, it was a fair question. The girls had adult-looking bodies, and dressed to show them: miniskirts, tight T-shirts, sometimes with nothing underneath. She'd been lucky—hadn't she?—to come of age in more modest times. She recalled how, at Wellesley, they'd worn raincoats over their whites as they crossed campus to the tennis court. Those rules had existed to keep girls safe and comfortable. And, it seemed to her, to make things more equitable.

Proper clothing kept the buxom from feeling conspicuous, and preserved the vanity of the shapeless and the plump. How cruel to be a girl now, with no such safeguards in place. To be exposed to adult reactions no child was equipped to handle, the lust and ridicule and pity, the creeping shame.

God help Gwen, she thought. God help us all.

The ferry was crowded with people: the young in college sweatshirts and denim cutoffs, showing suntanned legs; the old in windbreakers and clip-on sunglasses, comfortable shoes and Bermuda shorts. There were a few windblown men, like Frank McKotch, in business attire; but most wore chinos and golf shirts. They toted bicycles and fishing tackle, suitcases, duffel bags. A group of longhairs carried tents in backpacks. The whole crowd inhaled the ferry smell—a potent blend of fish and diesel—and shouted to be heard over the engines. On every face, in every voice, a palpable elation:
We're almost there! We're going to the Cape!

Frank watched them in mute puzzlement. He witnessed the same phenomenon each summer in his wife and children, his decrepit in-laws. Even his sour sister-in-law displayed a brief burst of enthusiasm. The Drews considered Cape Cod their birthright. Summer after godblessed summer, they did not tire of strolling its beaches, sailing its shores, guzzling its chowder. For heaven's sake, what else was summer
for
?

He could think of a hundred answers to this question. To him the Cape meant crowds and traffic, glacial waters, unreliable weather that often as not left you marooned indoors with a crew of whiny, disappointed children and restless, irritable adults. What, exactly, was the attraction? For once, he was stumped.

It was a sensation he had seldom felt. Frank read widely in all the sciences, in English and in German; he followed the latest developments in theoretical physics, the emerging field of string theory, with rapt interest. He believed, fundamentally, that all things were knowable, that the world could be understood. But when it came to the Cape, he simply
didn't get it.
Summer after summer, he landed at Provincetown with the same deflated feeling:
Okay, now what?

He supposed it came down to upbringing. Didn't everything?

His wife had spent half her childhood on the water, or near it. She could swim, sail, dive like a porpoise. Frank was twenty before he caught his first glimpse of the ocean, on a road trip to Atlantic City with some buddies from Penn State. His recollections were vague, clouded by alcohol: White Castle hamburgers, girls in bathing suits, cans of beer smuggled onto the beach.

The ocean wasn't the point, Paulette reminded him each summer. What mattered was getting The Family together. But Frank had never gotten too excited about anybody's relatives, his own included.

Since his marriage, he'd made exactly three trips back to the Pennsylvania town where his father still lived. The place paralyzed him with sadness. The company houses, the black smoke of the steel mills. His mother had died early and horribly, a metastatic breast cancer. Grief had turned his father stern and silent, or perhaps that was simply his nature. A dour old man, fatalistically pious, plodding through the years in mute patience, waiting for his life to be over. Frank couldn't imagine him any other way.

The family he'd married into seemed glamorous by comparison.

They had attended the best schools, traveled widely; in youth they'd been cherished and guided and subsidized in ways Frank had not.

He didn't resent these distinctions. On the contrary: he wanted to be absorbed by the Drews, to become like them. He was prepared to love Roy and Martine, old Everett and Mamie, the army of blue-eyed cousins converging in Truro every summer (Drew cousins only: no one invited or even spoke of Mamie's tribe, the ragtag Broussards).

But Frank—from a part of the world where people pronounced their
r
's—wasn't a Drew and never would be; if he'd had any illusions on that score, they'd been shattered long ago. Now Frank counted himself lucky to be free of the family neuroses, which seemed congenital: Paulette's prudery, Martine's bitterness, Roy's laziness and self-importance; their unconscious sense of entitlement and absurd reverence for the Drew name, which no longer meant a thing to the rest of the world, if it ever had. To Frank, who was smarter and more industrious, who'd busted his ass for every break he'd ever gotten, the success of a guy like Roy Drew was insulting.

The horn sounded. Dieseling loudly, the boat approached the dock. Frank rose and waited; there was no sense in fighting the disorderly mass of humanity scrambling to disembark. Finally he stepped onto the gangplank and spotted Paulette waving from the crowd.

"Frank! Over here!" She wore a navy blue dress that fit close at her waist. Her bare arms were white as milk. Several heads turned to look at her. This happened often, and still excited him.
My wife
, he thought proudly.
My wife.

"Hi," he said, scooping her into his arms. She smelled of the outdoors, sea air and Coppertone."Where are the offspring?"

"I told Martine we'd meet them at the beach."

"I have a better idea." Frank kissed her long on the mouth."Let's go somewhere."

"Don't be silly." She stepped back, smoothing the dress over her hips. "Everybody's waiting for us. Scotty's out of his mind. Daddy, Daddy. It's all I've been hearing for days."

She handed him the keys to the wagon. Frank always drove when they were together; he hadn't been her passenger in years, not since the hair-raising spring when he'd taught her to drive. It was an arrangement they both preferred. Sitting in the passenger seat, he made Paulette nervous, and the feeling was mutual. Her style was to roar down the highway like an ambulance driver, slamming on the brakes at every yellow light. A year before, to his horror, she had totaled his brand-new Saab 97, a car Frank loved in a way he would never love another. He forgave her immediately, grateful she wasn't hurt; but the car's demise still haunted him. He would drive it occasionally for the rest of his life, in dreams.

On the road to Truro she filled him in on the week's events. Martine had taken the children fishing; next week, winds permitting, Roy had promised a sail to the Vineyard in the
Mamie Broussard.
There had been a few squabbles between Charlotte and Scotty, who'd been even more rambunctious than he was at home. It was a complaint Frank was tired of hearing.
What do you expect?
he wanted to say.
For God's sake, he's a boy.

"What about his diet?" he asked instead. "Are you watching his sugar intake?"

They turned down the dusty lane that led to the Captain's House—an outstanding example of shingle-style architecture and, in Frank's mind, a monument to the financial ineptitude of his father-in-law. A century ago, the Drews had been one of the wealthiest families in America, thanks to one ancestor who'd amassed a whaling fortune. The old captain had helped build the railroad from Taunton to Providence and had owned property—waterfront acreage on Martha's Vineyard, a grand house on Beacon Hill—that was now worth millions. A small fortune for each of them, if his descendants had simply hung on to it; but Paulette's father, born into money, seemed constitutionally unable to earn any himself. Everett Drew had sold off the family assets one by one, pissing away the proceeds with a series of disastrous investments. Now that Ev had retired to Florida, his law firm was in the hands of Paulette's brother, Roy, a guy less principled than his father and, in Frank's opinion, even less competent. The house in Truro was the last significant Drew asset. Within a few years, Frank imagined, it would slip through Roy's fingers.

They got out of the car and climbed the stairs to the front porch, where Roy Drew sat smoking a cigarette. He was a tall, spindly fellow with a receding hairline and a long, aquiline nose. An aristocratic nose, Frank thought, suitable for looking down.